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Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

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Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

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BLUE-COLLAR, WHITE-COLLAR: RAYMOND CARVER’S
AND JOHN CHEEVER’S VERSIONS OF
THE AMERICAN (ANTI) PASTORAL (A CRITICAL STUDY)
AND
BEYOND THE LIGHTS AND
OTHER STORIES (A SHORT STORY COLLECITON)

by
Ryan Shoemaker

_________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2014

Copyright 2014 Ryan Shoemaker
i

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

Years ago, I picked up a collection of short stories at the Tucson Public Library. The
author photo on the dust jacket showed this man with high hair and a multi-colored rayon shirt. I
checked out the collection, expecting to read a bunch of impenetrable, post-modern mumbo-
jumbo. Instead, I discovered a voice I’d never encountered before, fresh and hilarious, yet
imbued with a social and cultural consciousness. I was hooked, and read everything I could find
by T.C. Boyle. Never did I dream that I’d have the opportunity to study with him. He has been
tireless in his encouragement, instilling in me the confidence to be a better writer. Perhaps the
greatest compliment I can pay to the man is this: when I sit down to write, a collection of his
short stories is never far away. When I’m stuck in my own writing, I often turn to his short
stories and ask myself: What would Tom do?
I also owe a large debt to Aimee Bender. Not only is she a gifted writer, but also a
professor who has dedicated herself to teaching students the craft of writing. She often took time
from her busy schedule to meet with me, to encourage and to add her invaluable insights to my
writerly and academic pursuits. She is beloved of her students.
Bill Handley is another professor I must thank. In 2008 he called to welcome me into the
Literature and Creative Writing Program at USC. With his vast knowledge of American
literature, he helped me move beyond the obvious toward what might be unique and thought-
provoking in my dissertation topic. Bill is that perfect mix of tough love and encouragement,
always inspiring me to make an insightful contribution to field of literary studies.
Lastly, I want to thank Tony Kemp and Bill Deverell for adding their insight and encouragement
to my project.
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS i
ABSTRACT iii
INTRODUCTION 1
SECTION 1: CARVER AND CHEEVER: BLUE-COLLAR AND WHITE-
COLLAR PASTORAL 5
1a. CARVER’S BLUE-COLLAR PASTORALS 9
1b. CHEEVER’S WHITE-COLLAR PASTORALS 26

SECTION 2: THE COMPETING PASTORALS OF RAYMOND CARVER’S
HUSBANDS AND WIVES 43
2a. MALE AND FEMALE PASTORALS 45
2b. CARVER’S CONFLICTING GENDERED SPACES 51
2c. PASTORAL HARMONY 64

CONCLUSION 70

ENDNOTES 75

WORKS CITED 78

SECTION 3: BEYOND THE LIGHTS AND OTHER STORIES 82
BEYOND THE LIGHTS 83
THE RIGHTEOUS ROAD 101
OUR STUDENTS 125
THE CROSSING 147
THIS SAME DARKNESS 175
FROM GREAT HEIGHTS 188

iii

ABSTRACT

“Blue-Collar, White-Collar: Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s Version of the
American (Anti) Pastoral” explores, at its broadest, how Raymond Carver and John Cheever
transpose the pastoral mode onto the homes, suburbs, and American wilderness of the late-20
th

century. While acknowledging why the pastoral mode is durable and appealing, Carver and
Cheever ultimately challenge, refute, and expose the fallacies underlying the pastoral mode. In
its first section, this dissertation examines how two cultural and socioeconomic groups—
Carver’s blue-collar workers and Cheever’s white-collar suburbanites—construct and attempt to
achieve their pastoral ideals. Drawing on a number of literary scholars of the pastoral mode, this
section provides close readings of Carver’s “Pastoral” / “The Cabin” and “How About This?”
These readings underscore his unique blue-collar perspective on the pastoral mode with its
emphasis on the high material and physical costs of a life closer to nature and, further, how
environmental responsibility is essential for protecting and preserving the green world. John
Cheever’s “The Country Husband,” on the other hand, reconsiders pastoral by playing it out in
the suburbs rather than in the American wilderness, punctuating instead how the suburb’s
technical orientation, more concerned about means than ends, is antithetical to pastoralism,
which, with its emphasis on simplicity and personal freedom, is an end in itself. The second
section of this dissertation examines domestic conflict in three Raymond Carver short stories
(“So Much Water So Close to Home,” “Distance,” and “The Student’s Wife,” three of Carver’s
early stories) as the result of the encounter of two ostensibly incompatible and opposed gendered
spaces: the home and the wilderness. Marital conflict and personal malaise in these three
iv

stories, then, indicate the encroachment of male pastoral space (i.e., wilderness) on the female-
controlled domestic space, an encroachment for Carver’s female characters that transforms the
domestic sphere from a place of safety which is unequivocally theirs to a place overrun with the
violence, chaos, and primitiveness they associate with the wilderness. The concluding section
asserts that these stories contain a darker subtext that rises to the surface and undermines
pastoral’s aim of a simple life closer to nature. These stories, then, transposing the pastoral
mode onto the home, suburbs, and wilderness of the late-20
th
century, are better classified as
antipastoral than pastoral. In transposing the pastoral mode and representing its continued failure
as ideology, Carver and Cheever, while perhaps providing no solutions to the paradox of our
devotion to pastoral, still contribute in a small yet significant way to a larger public discourse in
post-WW2 America about the value and place of pastoral in a frenetic, technical-oriented world.
One might find possible solutions, however, in the writing of a number of contemporary
environmental historians and critics like Leo Marx, William Cronon, Frederick Turner, Carolyn
Merchant, and Lawrence Buell.

“Beyond the Lights and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories, explores themes of
inner-city public education, environmentalism, and religion as a belief system that can enrich
one’s life, but also, paradoxically, isolate one from the world. One dominant theme in this
collection is that of urban frontiers; that is, the city as a kind of frontier where people of different
cultural and ethnic backgrounds meet for the first time. Often, their encounters are violent, and
full of assumptions and misunderstandings about the “other.”
1

INTRODUCTION

While most often associated with Theocritus and Virgil, the pastoral, as Lawrence Buell
asserts, “is a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia
been unable to do without.”
1
Difficult to define,
2
pastoral, at its most elemental, is characterized
by a desire to disengage from complex, dominant culture (most often associated with the urban)
and seek out a simple, more satisfying life in a realm closer to nature.
3
Still, Annabel Patterson
4

argues that each age reinterprets the pastoral mode in terms of its commentators’ ideological
values, thus allowing pastoral to act as a mode of political, social, and cultural critique. At its
broadest, then, this dissertation will explore how Raymond Carver and John Cheever transpose
the pastoral mode onto the homes, suburbs, and American wilderness of the late-20
th
century.
While acknowledging why the pastoral mode is durable and appealing, Carver and Cheever
ultimately challenge, refute, and expose the fallacies underlying the pastoral mode.
The first section of this dissertation, “Raymond Carver and John Cheever: Blue- and
White-Collar Pastorals,” examines how two cultural and socioeconomic groups—Carver’s blue-
collar workers and Cheever’s white-collar suburbanites—construct and attempt to achieve their
pastoral ideals. Carver’s blue-collar Americans are proletariat, often between jobs or working
low-paying odd jobs, and by necessity are frequently selling off their possessions before the bank
can take them. They are marginalized and struggling to survive, habitually on the move in
search of better lives. Perhaps unfairly, Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, called them squalid, “in
every manifestation of human activity…like hillbillies, but hillbillies of the shopping mall”
(cited in Weber). Still, Carver often grants these down-and-out characters some hopefulness and
optimism, even redemption. Cheever’s white-collar suburbanites, in contrast, feel no desire to
2

move. For them, the manicured green spaces and immaculate Dutch Colonials of the upper-
middle class suburbs is the destination where one can achieve upward mobility and economic
security. They join country clubs. They throw lavish dinner parties, believing they’ve found
social harmony and spiritual uplift. However, beneath this suburban paradise, Cheever’s white-
collar protagonists often discover all the complications of a modern, technocratic world.
Attempting to realize the pastoral ideal, Carver’s blue-collar folks often retreat into the
natural world to seek solace and healing through hunting and fishing, or simply by just being in
nature. Initially, they celebrate the ethos of nature, as pastoral does, because nature is, or so they
believe, a simple world of simple pleasures, far removed from the domestic complexities,
conspicuous consumerism, and ostentatious waste of complex civilization. Carver’s characters,
however, discover that the pastoral fantasy ruptures: the natural world is full of harsh, even
dangerous, realities, and is often overrun and tainted by civilization. While some Carver
scholars have tacitly noted these pastoral elements in some of his short fiction, these elements, I
believe, should receive deeper consideration and study. Moving in that direction, Martin
Scofield’s “Negative Pastoral: The Art of Raymond Carver’s Stories” provides a fuller
examination of Carver’s employment of the pastoral mode, but fails to draw on other scholars
whose work and theories might enrich a pastoral reading of some of Carver’s short fiction.
Coupled with these scholars, my readings of Carver’s “Pastoral” / “The Cabin” and “How About
This?” explore his unique blue-collar perspective on the pastoral mode, one that underscores the
high material and physical costs of a life closer to nature and, further, advocates for
environmental responsibility in protecting and preserving the green world.
In “The Country Husband,” Cheever, on the other hand, reconsiders the pastoral mode by
playing it out in the suburbs rather than in the American wilderness, punctuating how the
3

suburb’s technical orientation, more concerned about means than ends, is antithetical to
pastoralism, which, with its emphasis on simplicity and personal freedom, is an end in itself.
Imagining their lush, manicured neighborhoods and looming homes as a kind of utopian middle
landscape that partakes of the best of nature and the best of civilization, Cheever’s suburbanites
delude themselves into accepting a kind of “modern pastoralism” that attempts to achieve
equally both pastoral fantasy and technological progress, even when the delicate equipoise
required to maintain this modern pastoralism is constantly challenged on one side by an
enervating progressive, technocratic society, and on the other by a Dionysian desire for anarchic
primitiveness. Contradictory and unstable, yet resilient, this suburban world, Cheever suggests,
hangs by a delicate thread in the evening light.
The second section of this dissertation, “The Competing Pastorals of Raymond Carver’s
Husbands and Wives,” examines domestic conflict in three Raymond Carver short stories (“So
Much Water So Close to Home,” “Distance,” and “The Student’s Wife,” three of Carver’s early
stories) as the result of the encounter of two ostensibly incompatible and opposed gendered
spaces: the home and the wilderness. Historically, women have located their pastoral ideal in
the home or the garden, while men orient themselves away from the home, seeking pastoral
fulfillment in the unfettered, self-fulfilling freedom of the natural wilderness, a locus where they,
usually in company with other men, can conquer, master, and, paradoxically, destroy the natural
world. Marital conflict and personal malaise in these three stories, then, indicates the
encroachment of male pastoral space (i.e., wilderness) on the female-controlled domestic space,
an encroachment for Carver’s female characters that transforms the domestic sphere from a place
of safety which is unequivocally theirs to a place overrun with the violence, chaos, and
primitiveness they associate with the wilderness. Consequently, these women are displaced from
4

their pastoral dream, the domestic sphere becoming rife with menace, foreignness, and stifling
enclosure. Carver’s later work, however, suggests the possible compatibility of these two
gendered spaces, the home and the wilderness, the female domestic and the male wild, both with
their pastoral projections, coexisting equally and harmoniously, in an actual, rather than an
idealized or remembered, physical place, a world both wild and domesticated.
The concluding section asserts that these stories contain a darker subtext that rises
to the surface and undermines pastoral’s aim of a simple life closer to nature. These stories,
then, transposing the pastoral mode onto the home, suburbs, and wilderness of the late-20
th

century, are better classified, I assert, as antipastoral than pastoral. In transposing the pastoral
mode and representing its continued failure as ideology, Carver and Cheever, while perhaps
providing no solutions to the paradox of our devotion to pastoral, still contribute in a small yet
significant way to a larger public discourse in post-WW2 America about the value and place of
pastoral in a frenetic, technical-oriented world. For possible solutions, I will draw on the work
of a number of contemporary environmental historians and critics like Leo Marx, William
Cronon, Frederick Turner, Carolyn Merchant, and Lawrence Buell.

5

SECTION 1: CARVER AND CHEEVER: BLUE- AND WHITE-COLLAR PASTORALS

To situate Carver and Cheever within the pastoral tradition, and to understand their
impulse toward and exploration of the pastoral mode, I begin with Theocritus, the putative father
of pastoral poetry, who wrote in the third century B.C. of the life and natural beauty of the
Sicilian countryside, paradoxically, from a thoroughly sophisticated and urbanized Alexandria.
From this populous cultural center, second only in size to Rome, Theocritus captured in verse the
free peasants of his youth: Sicilian shepherds, goatherds, farmers, and fisherman. As John
Heath-Stubbs argues in The Pastoral, Theocritus’s romanticized Idylls, however, portray a way
of life that was in fact passing in Theocritus’s own generation as Sicily’s shepherds were reduced
in status to that of serfs employed on the estates of large-scale landlords (3). With the passing of
country life, historically as well as now, there grows a propensity toward nostalgia and the
idealization of rural life. In On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich Schiller argues that as
nature begins to disappear from human life as experience and subject, replaced by complex
society, it arises in poetry as idea and object (Halperin 43). Consequently, then, Poggioli sees a
historical pattern of renewed interested in the pastoral form

…whenever the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life grows hard to bear and man
tries to evade its pressures at least in thought. As civilization becomes more
complex and sophisticated, it tires man’s heart, although it sharpens his wit. In
the process the artistic and literary mind is made aware of cultural demands and
psychological needs hardly felt before. (4)
5

A milieu ripe for dreams of an escape into the simple, green world, the technical and
political flux of the twentieth century gave rise to the first global-scale wars between multiple
world powers and across continents, as well as a common vernacular of terms such as world war,
6

genocide, and nuclear war. Technologically, while the century began with horses, simple
automobiles, and freight ships, it ended with high-speed rails, cruise ships, commercial air travel,
and space exploration. Bleaky summarizing the milieu of post-WW2 America, Peden offers a
distressing snapshot of the particular historical and cultural moment in which Carver and
Cheever wrote. He writes:

In a generation over which hovered the enormous shadows of suffering, injustice,
the disregard for personal dignity, the waste of resources and life itself, and the
gnawing awareness of the threat of individual destruction along with the
possibility of annihilation of the past as well as the present, the man in the street
or on the farm was beginning to find that in rejecting the medieval devil he was
becoming the victim of his many contemporary equivalents: atavistic tyrannies
and archetypal woes; tensions, drugs, allergies, insomnia; air pollution, the fuel
crisis, inflation, and dwindling or corrupted natural resources; even the presence
of radioactive materials in the water his children drank and cancer-causing agents
in the food they ate. (25)

The fiction of post-WW 2 American, then, Peden continues (and this is especially true of Carver
and Cheever, as I will show), reflects “the fragmentation of the present” in stark contrast to the
“wholeness of the past,” resulting in “loneliness, fright, sadness, or moral fatigue” (27).
Another possible factor in Carver’s and Cheever’s use of the pastoral mode might relate
to their childhoods. In his study on pastoral and anti-pastoral patterns in John Updike’s fiction,
Taylor draws two conclusions from the attitude and authorial position of authors who write in the
pastoral mode, a prototype, he believes, found in Theocritus. Of this prototype, Taylor writes:
“1) either intellectually or environmentally, the author will have experienced alienation from the
innocent, simple, ‘natural,’ rural existence found in the setting and subject of the pastoral; and 2)
he will celebrate, idealize, and mythologize (in Jungian psychological sense, if not in the formal
literary sense) that lost innocence, simplicity, and naturalness” (5).
7

A glimpse into Carver’s childhood corroborates Taylor’s argument. Carol Slenicka’s
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life describes the “sparsely developed” Northwest that Carver’s
parents, Cleve and Ella, discovered on their arrival there in the mid 1930s. However, this “still
rustic” world, even then, showed signs of a burgeoning industrialization encroaching on a
primitive natural world: vast stretches of clear-cutting and soon the construction of the various
Columbia dams. Born in 1938 in Oregon, but raised in Yakima, Washington, “a place of
contradictions…wild beauty [and] unrelenting desolation,” a young Raymond Carver
experienced two worlds: the primeval world of the garden and a growing industrial machine.
These binaries, writes Slenicka, “the salmon and the dams, the forests and the sawmills, the
orchards and the fragile human settlements on the Columbia Basin would shape this boy” (9).
While Yakima was known for its fruit production and had some of the best river and lake fishing
in the world, Carver would later write that his whole frame of reference as a child was the
Cascade logging mill, an industry that brought to Yakima better wages, education, modern
comforts and amenities, as well as a “palpable belief that life was…getting better (20).
However, Carver was well aware of the personal and physical costs of material progress. His
cousin, uncle, and father worked in the mill, where hearing loss, severed fingers, lung problems,
and lead poisoning from inhaled metal particles were accepted occupational hazards (15).
Further, there was a culture of alcohol at the mill, and often Carver’s father would go on drinking
binges with coworkers, leaving very little money to pay bills. While Carver’s neighbors became
solidly middle class, his family struggled financially, and it is this financial struggle that led to
discord between his parents. Hunting and fishing in the outdoors, however, allowed Carver
some freedom from the tension at home (30). Of that time, Carver later said in an interview: “In
those days, I went fishing in this creek that was not too far from our house. A little later, I
8

started hunting ducks and geese and upland game. That’s what excited me in those days, hunting
and fishing. That’s what made a dent in my emotional life, and that’s what I wanted to write
about” (33).
In many ways, John Cheever and Raymond Carver shared similar youths. Though
Cheever spent his youth in Quincy, Massachusetts, no more than eight miles from Boston, he
describes this small town as more rural than suburban, a place he recalls as “quite pleasant” and
“having been extremely sunny,” with clean air and a preponderance of gardens (“JHTWJC”
154). “We used to swim a lot, we used to play hide-and-go-seek, hoist the green sail, croquet,”
Cheever said of his Quincy youth. “It was quite rural, there were woods. […] There were
streams. We used to swim in streams. There was a place called ‘The Meadow,’ quite near the
center of town, which when I was a kid used to have cows” (“JCIAH” 198). With his mother,
he’d spend the summers in New Hampshire, hiking and riding horses. For three summers,
starting when he was twelve, Cheever attended Boy Scout camp in heavily wooded territory
south of Plymouth, living in a tent and having a wonderful time (JC Donaldson 21). Meanor
sees Cheever’s love of nature in how he employs the green world as the backdrop for many of
his stories and novels, perfect nature as “the pristine Edenic condition by which his characters
measure their lives” and play out Cheever’s many recurrent themes. And it is in nature, Meanor
continues, where Cheever’s characters “occasionally experience a sense of oneness with this
natural paradise if they open themselves up to its restorative powers” (JC Donaldson 18-19).
However, Cheever marks the unraveling of his idyllic, though not perfect, childhood with the
beginning of his adolescence, when the family dynamic changed. Due in part to poor financial
investments, Cheever’s father lost his shoe factory and slipped into alcoholism; his mother
opened a gift shop in downtown Quincy and became the family’s breadwinner, a social rarity in
9

those days that often caused Cheever much embarrassment. Further, there was a feeling of
abandonment. Often, Cheever later wrote in his journal, he’d come home from school to find
“the furnace dead, some unwashed dishes on the table in the dining room and at the center of the
table a pot of tulips killed and blackened.”
6
Still, Cheever idealized and mythologized Quincy as
the quaint St. Botolphs in his Wapshot novels, a place that is, much like his suburbs, argues
Ozick, “a willed and altogether self-deluding reconstruction of a dream” (JC Donaldson 64).
Cheever, posits Greene, imbued his fiction “with nostalgia to a past where no one has been, to an
ideal where no one can go,” a self-inverted, unapproachable abstraction of Platonic perfection.
(153). The narrator of “The Death of Justina” expresses this yearning as he pines for the sleigh
that would carry him to grandmother’s house, although he then remembers how grandmother
spent the last years of her life as a hostess on an ocean liner and tragically went down with the
ship. In his interview with John Hersey, Cheever describes nostalgia as “the longing for the
world we all know, or seem to have known, the world we all love, and the people in it we
love…a passion, a longing not only for that which is lost to us, or which has been destroyed or
burned, or which we’ve outgrown…a force of aspiration” (“JHTWJC” 158). And it is this
nostalgia for an innocent past, argues Kendle, that unifies Cheever’s fiction (219).

1a. CARVER’S BLUE-COLLAR PASTORALS

Raymond Carver’s short fiction is most often associated with literary realism,
minimalism, epiphany, a postmodern suspicion of language, and, of course, blue-collar America.
As the de facto chronicler of this particular demographic and its particular cultural and historical
moment in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Carver’s unique brand of literature, with its idiosyncratic
10

world view and thematic treatment of the down-and-out, has gone by any number of
“prescriptive, badly inaccurate, aggressively reductive, or blatantly derivative names: Dirty
Realism, Pop Realism, Neo-Domestic Neo Realism, White Trash Fiction, Coke Fiction, and
Post-Alcoholic Blue-Collar Minimalist Hyperrealism” (Herzinger 8). Carver’s blue-collar folks,
observes Campbell, are “fringe figures” who represent the “commonplace” in the “narrow,
inglorious story of America,” and it is Carver who acts as their mouthpiece, representing their
lives, “however unpalatable the portrayal might be” (xi). These individuals’ lives are
circumscribed, Saltzman asserts, by “odd jobs and compromised aspirations.” In sum, they
“inhabit the world immediately recognizable as proletarian America, a terrain of fast food, used
cars, and garish billboards” (4). Always on the move, Meyers observes, they are constantly
“between jobs or between locations to try to find a new and better way of life,” but ultimately
“struggling to survive” their “marginal lives…filled with failure, deterioration, disenchantment,
and despair” (21).
Faced with the reality of abject despair, crippling depression, and financial insolvency,
Carver’s characters often seek solace and healing through hunting and fishing, or just from being
in nature. And when they cannot physically retreat into the natural world, they at least indulge in
nostalgic recollections of youthful, carefree wilderness excursions, or wish for a future of
untroubled country living. For this reason, Martin Scofield, in “Negative Pastoral: The Art of
Raymond Carver’s Stories,” attempts to analyze a handful of Carver’s stories under the heading
of pastoral.
7
Scofield views Carver’s writing as essentially pastoral because he “takes the lives
of the lowest social classes…and finds in them fundamental forms of human nature and
behavior” (243), which, as William Epson argues, is exactly what pastoral does: through
examining the lives of simple people, pastoral allows the reader see complex things more clearly.
11

Attempting to justify this conclusion, Scofield also employs Wordsworth’s introduction to
Lyrical Ballads in working toward a definition of pastoral. Wordsworth, as Carver does,
searches for the “essential passions of the heart” in “humble people” (Wordsworth cited in
Scofield 244). Further identifying why some of Carver’s stories should be considered pastoral,
Scofield notes the tendency of Carver’s characters to retreat from urban environments into rural
environments to fish and hunt, activities that “provide a kind of escape or keep the characters in
touch with a more natural world (255). However, Scofield notes how Carver’s characters often
reject the natural world while at the same time “evoking it as a kind of standard” (258).
Ultimately, Scofield identifies Carver’s method as negative because his characters are denied the
promise of happiness explicit in the traditional pastoral form. Carver’s negative pastorals, then,
focus on the mundane and trivial, which he twists “by bizarre events into a situation far from
universal,” but which, however, show essential passions, albeit in “strange and contorted images
(248). Through such a reading, Scofield successfully illuminates Carver’s creation of “an idiom
which is entirely of our time, a new kind of realism, a new accent (261-262).
While Scofield’s provocative consideration of Carver’s stories as pastoral suggests the
possibility of new and little-explored ground in Carver studies, I want to advance this
consideration by incorporating into it scholars whose work and theories on pastoral enrich a
reading of those stories in which Carver utilizes the pastoral mode. In considering some of
Carver’s short fiction under the heading of pastoral, I want to examine what the natural world
means to his characters; that is, what magnetic force pulls these blue-collar folks from an urban
or suburban world into nature. While true that Carver’s characters, as Scofield observes, often
escape into wilderness settings “to keep in touch with a more natural world,” these retreats, I
believe, are not solely “an exercise of a primitive ability to survive” or “an experience of power,”
12

as Scofield asserts (255). Rather, Carver’s characters celebrate the ethos of nature, as pastoral
does, because nature is, or so they believe, a simple world of simple pleasures far removed from
the domestic complexities, conspicuous consumerism, and ostentatious waste of complex
civilization—even if ultimately the natural world doesn’t meet their lofty expectations as a locus
of a more wholesome, more meaningful life. Paradoxically, Carver’s characters enter a natural
setting that is as socially constructed as the world of civilization they’ve fled: wilderness, as it
always exists in pastoral, as an ideological theater, where they enact their outdoor fantasies
according to a preconceived and inculcated code of conduct (“APIR” Buell 3-4). Consequently,
the fantasy ruptures. Carver’s characters often find that the natural world is overrun by
civilization, or they sadly discover that the green world and its realities can’t match their lofty
imaginations. The material and physical cost, finally, of carving out a life in this harsh natural
world is too much. This recognition forces Carver’s characters to come to terms with and return
to the established order (“PIA” Marx 45).
This return is part of what Gifford calls “the fundamental pastoral movement,” a retreat
from civilization and then a return, or at least the gesture toward return, with some relevant
insights (1-2).
8
The goal of this retreat gets at the psychological root of pastoral: the double
longing, as Poggioli asserts, for innocence and happiness (1). However, in this retreat, the
importance of nostalgia must also be considered.
In “Pastoral Spaces,” Frederic Garber convincingly elucidates nostalgia’s key role in pastoral
as more than a feeling, but a desire that is the actual creator of the nostos, the act of return or
homecoming that appears in all pastoral and is essential to the form. What initiates the pastoral
performance, then, is the feeling that an individual in the act of searching out the nostos is not
where she wants to be in the present and seeks for a point of origin where she used to be. Thus,
13

the pastoral retreat, this pursuit of the nostos, is a curve tending back to a beginning that might
actually be an original place with historical veracity, but, nonetheless, a place that is elsewhere
and not now at hand, a place one can never reclaim. In the end, pastoral, as Garber eloquently
states:
…is always and everywhere only a perpetual moving toward an uncompleteable
act. That is, the image it describes is not really a returning curve, the shape of
reversion; it is, instead, a parabola, a nonreturning curve which can touch its
tangent only in infinity. (444-446)

Gifford, however, while accepting that the pastoral form perpetually looks to the past, also
asserts that pastoral, because it pursues an idealized past or origin, also has “implications for an
ideal notion of the future,” a tendency that underscores pastoral’s potential to be oppositional by
challenging the status quo of the present. In sum, Gifford claims pastoral, at its best, “will
always imply that its vision of Arcadia has implications for a New Jerusalem” (36). If Carver’s
characters, then, can’t achieve the nostos and reclaim Arcadia, oftentimes he suggests the hope
of a better future for them as they effect a return to complex civilization.
Focusing on and elucidating these diverse aspects of pastoral, as well as underscoring
Carver’s unique perspective on the material and physical cost of a life closer to nature and his
advocacy for environmental responsibility in protecting and preserving the green world, I will
provide a close reading of “Pastoral” / “The Cabin” and “How About This?” In doing so, I hope
to provide a fruitful new perspective on Carver’s opus, augmenting and pushing forward the little
scholarly work considering the pastoral components in his short fiction.
I begin with “Pastoral,” which first appeared in the Western Humanities Review in 1963
and was later republished in Fires in a slightly altered, more hopeful, form as “The Cabin,” a
revision that reflects the growing optimism of Carver’s later career. Apart from the stories’
endings, which I will treat later is this section, the differences in the two texts, as Meyer
14

observes, are merely “substitutions or rearrangements of individual words or phrases” (116).
Both stories begin with Mr. Harrold’s return to a place of personal significance, a wilderness
motel complex called Castlerock with cabins and a restaurant, a place he and his wife, Frances,
would visit “two or three times a year” (RCCS 332). Now it has been three years since their last
visit, and Mr. Harrold has returned alone. Further, though Mr. Harrold did not grow up in the
area, the wilderness setting evokes in him memories of places he spent as a child and the fishing
he did there.
Traveling to Castlerock, Mr. Harrold revels in the wholesome nature that begins to
eclipse the world of civilization he leaves. He breathes in the cold air “he’d swear he could
almost taste” and notes with a sense of the sublime pine branches “heavy with snow” and how
the “clouds mantled the white hills so that it was hard to tell where the hills ended and the sky
began” (332). Reaching Castlerock and feeling “glad to be back,” Mr. Harrold, however, finds
this wilderness locale tainted by the complex world he just left, a locus not on the periphery (i.e.,
the wilderness) of American culture, but one that “reflects the values of the center which is
everywhere” (Lainsbury 38). Entering the lodge, Mr. Harrold sees a mounted Brown trout, a
creature evocative of the beauty and freedom of the natural world, juxtaposed against the
consumer kitsch of the lodge’s gift shop with its “leather purses, wallets, and pairs of
moccasins…Indian bead necklaces and bracelets and pieces of petrified wood.” “They had made
some changes,” Mr. Harrold notices with distaste. Even the fireplace he remembered had been
covered up. Unhappy with the hotel’s remodeling, he walks “past all that stuff without looking”
(RCCS 194). In the restaurant, Mr. Harrold “climbed onto the stool the way somebody might
climb onto a horse” and takes in the imposing Frederic Remington print on the wall, with its
“lurching, frightened buffalo, and the Indians with the drawn bows fixed at their shoulders” (194,
15

333), the mythologized and appropriated remnants of a vanished past. Expecting Eden, or at
least an authentic wilderness experience at Castlerock, Mr. Harrold, Saltzman observes,
discovers “a tacky approximation of the frontier” (93).
Moreover, not only is Mr. Harrold bothered by the cheap, mass-produced artifacts now
adorning the modernized and remodeled lodge, he is also alarmed at those he meets, individuals
whose manners and behavior are out of place in this easygoing, unhurried natural setting. Soon
after arriving, Mr. Harrold is treated rudely by the restaurant waitress, Edith, a niece of Mrs.
Maye, Castlerock’s elderly proprietor, who has, to bad effect, relinquished the hotel’s day-to-day
operations to her family. In stark contrast to Edith’s coldness and impatience, Mrs. Maye greets
Mr. Harrold warmly and then personally escorts him to a cabin, apologizing when they come
across the broken windows of an outbuilding. Mrs. Maye explains the vandalism as the
handiwork of a “pack” of boys from a nearby construction camp, whose fathers are employed
building a dam. “They don’t miss a chance to do us dirt,” Mrs. Maye tells Mr. Harrold. “A
whole pack of them are all the time running wild” (RCCS 334). For Mr. Harrold and Mrs. Maye,
these young men are new and unwelcome interlopers in this natural setting, not like the
fishermen and hunters who enjoy the wilderness’s tranquility and beauty and partake of it
responsibly, but individuals who destroy indiscriminately. While the boys’ delinquency is an
annoyance for someone like Mr. Harrold who is intent on enjoying an unspoiled natural world,
the building of a dam is more alarming and has greater implications, portending the outreach of a
technocratic society whose projects will change the very face of the land and possibly disrupt the
fragile ecosystem Mr. Harrold enjoys.
Still, despite these modern encroachments, Mr. Harrold clings doggedly to a romantic
construct of the wilderness. His subjective illusion of the natural world is apparent in how the
16

snow-laden branches and cloud-mantled hills of his journey “reminded him of those Chinese
landscapes [he and Frances had] looked at that time in the museum in Portland,” and later while
fishing when he thinks the “tall trees and snow-covered mountains” are “as pretty as a picture”
(332, 339). Both Lainsbury and Campbell note Mr. Harrold’s tendency to cloak the American
wilderness in fragments of a European literary tradition, complete with heroic kings and jousting
knights (Lainsbury 37, Campbell 6). Navigating the icy trail to the river, Mr. Harrold recalls
fishing as a boy and the things he did then, how “he held the rod by its big reel, tucked up under
his arm like a lance,” and how he would “imagine himself waiting for his opponent to ride out of
the trees on a horse” (RCCS 338). Part and parcel of Mr. Harrold’s imaginative wilderness
construct, then, is a powerful nostalgia meant to transport him back, as Meyer suggests, to a time
of “positive feelings” (81). Mr. Harrold recalls the “sun and the sky” of his youth, when he
manifested a feeling of mastery over nature by yelling “defiance…at the hawks that circled and
circled over the meadow” (RCCS 338). This nostalgia also extends to Mr. Harrold’s pleasant
reminiscences of his visits to Castlerock with Frances, whose absence suggests the possibility
that all is not well with their marriage. Still, Mr. Harrold recalls another trip when he’d caught
three steelhead and Frances had “whistled and bent down to touch the black spots that ran along
their backs” (340). The present, however, eclipses these nostalgic recollections. Mr. Harrold
wishes Frances were there, but she is not. He wishes for the serene days of his youth, but they
are gone. The language and images in “The Cabin,” Campbell asserts, “expose[s] the general
futility of nostalgia and self-deception as therapy for malaise” (5-6). Nature, in the end, won’t
conform to Mr. Harrold’s nostalgic projection. The “old excitement” he feels while fishing is
fleeting, challenged by the reality of the natural world: the “impossibly cold” water, the ice
forming on the “little pools in the rocks” along the river’s edge, and the frigid wind that stiffens
17

his joints and causes him to hobble over the rocks and through the water (RCCS 338, 340).
Again testing his mastery over this natural world, as he did when he was a boy, Mr. Harrold yells
at a flock of passing crows, but “they didn’t even look” (340). But even beyond the harsh
discomforts of this wilderness setting, Mr. Harrold comes to understand that the wilderness is
treacherous, even deadly. When hiking to the river he steps into a “snowdrift up over his knees
and panicked, clawing up handfuls of snow and vines to get out” (338). Nature, Poggioli
reminds us, hinting at pastoral’s darker subtext, “is not only a provider but also a destroyer,”
generating “from its womb not only life but also death” (20).
While the harshness of the natural world certainly deflates Mr. Harrold’s wilderness
fantasy, his encounter with the malevolent young hunters, the vandals of earlier, effectively
ruptures it. Even before, though, their gunfire interrupts the pleasure of Mr. Harrold’s fishing
excursion, leaving him to recognize the injustice that “deer didn’t have much of a chance in
snow like this” against hunters equipped with high-powered rifles (RCCS 338). When an injured
doe immerges from the woods and crosses the river, pursued by the young boys from the
construction camp, Mr. Harrold can’t contain his anger. After one of the boys asks if he’s seen
the deer, Mr. Harrold responds: “It wasn’t a him, it was a her. And her back leg was almost shot
off, for Christ’s sake.” The encounter moves toward violence, the boys calling Mr. Harrold an
“old son of a bitch” and him calling them “little bastards,” and then the boy with the gun, Earl,
“raised the rifle to his shoulder and pulled back the hammer. The barrel was pointed at Mr.
Harrold’s stomach, or else a littler lower down.” In a state of shock, he falls backward into the
icy water, pleading with the boys not to shoot as they “just stood there looking at him” (341).
They antagonize Mr. Harrold a moment longer, throwing rocks at him, before disappearing into
the woods. What this violent encounter underscores, Lainsbury suggests, is Mr. Harrold’s belief
18

in and inability to communicate to these boys an outdoor code that appears anachronistic in this
“new American wilderness” (42), a code based in a belief that the value of the natural world
resides in its separation from the world of civilization and that the activities one does in nature,
namely fishing and hunting, must be done responsibly. Instead, Mr. Harrold encounters
individuals, as Campbell observes, “ungoverned by ordinances or custom,” who “do not know or
care about the traditional codes” (5). Graham Clarke, unfairly, I believe, situates Carver’s
nature-retreating characters like Mr. Harrold too closely with those interlopers, like Edith and the
boys, whose attitudes and behaviors oppose an “outdoor code.” Clarke, it seems, equates
Carver’s hunting and fishing as nothing more than the pursuit of the weekend warrior escaping
into the wilderness with the “perspective of a suburban America in which male codes exist only
as part of a larger weekend ritual played out amidst family life, credit cards and mortgages.”
Those like Mr. Harrold, Clarke argues, “equip themselves for an archetypal escape” into nature
“not so much à la Thoreau as à la television, film, and advertising: in search of imaginary selves
and an imaginary America” (108). While both the bad-mannered hunters with their “knife
sheaths on their belts” and Mr. Harrold with his “lance” pursue a wilderness experience steeped
in a projection of fantasy and popular myth, Mr. Harrold is shocked and utterly disoriented that
the boys’ nihilism and profligacy have displaced his code of sustainability and reverence toward
nature. Like Mrs. Maye, he is part of the older order, one that cares about and reveres the natural
world. Noting the change as the older generation passes and a new generation occupies the new
American wilderness, Lainsbury observes that:
In the postmodern world of Raymond Carver the wilderness has finally been
hunted down—there is no more West for it to escape into. The values of
civilization have overtaken and infected the wilderness, which is now roamed by
men who lack any real sense of connection to it, and who murder and destroy
indiscriminately. (43)

19

Indeed, Mr. Harrold is so unsettled that he flees the wilderness, forgetting his fishing rod and
having no desire to return for it: “[The rod] didn’t matter to him now” (342). Mr. Harrold, as
Lainsbury asserts, is “unable to find what he is looking for in the wilderness” (44). The fantasy,
finally, has ruptured: “Somehow he had missed it and it was gone. Something heroic. He didn’t
know what he was going to do” (204). Displaced, Mr. Harrold can only think of getting back to
life, back to Frances and the job that awaits him, though still he is resistant. As Meyer notes, his
wilderness excursion did not effect a return to order, but, rather, instilled a feeling that his “sense
of the universe in almost entirely shattered” (81). Arriving back at the newly-modernized
Castlerock after his violent confrontation with the young hunters, Mr. Harrold finds all the lights
on, though it is only midday, a detail whose meaning “seemed mysterious and impenetrable to
him,” and then standing at his cabin, “he stopped on the porch. He didn’t want to go inside. But
he understood he had to open the door and enter the room. He didn’t know if he could do it”
(342).
While “Pastoral” and “The Cabin” are very similar stories to this point, their endings are
tonal opposites. “Pastoral” concludes on a particularly dark note: Mr. Harrold considering the
“something heroic” he’s lost and feeling “he couldn’t very well go home” as he contemplates the
“wordless, distorted things” of this newly-strange wilderness (204). Such a bleak ending
suggests Carver’s knowledge of the pastoral form, which he employs for ironic effect in the
story’s title. Paradoxically in “Pastoral,” Mr. Harrold doesn’t achieve any of the rewards of the
pastoral. Rather, the pastoral is invalidated by nature’s harsh realities and by the rude and
violent individuals from the complex world of civilization who bring into this wilderness setting
a new morality. Mr. Harrold, finally, is tragically caught between two worlds, dispossessed of
the wilderness but unwilling to go home. The ending of “The Cabin,” conversely, emphasizes,
20

as Meyer notes, “the refuge that is to be found indoors, in a cabin that is warmed by human
contact” (116). In this version of the story, Mr. Harrold, emerging from the woods, considers
just getting in his car and driving away rather than entering his cold, dark cabin, perceiving it
possibly as an extension of the uninviting wilderness he’s just fled. Yet opening the door, he
discovers the welcoming warmth of the fire Mrs. Maye has built in the stove. Removing his wet
boots, Mr. Harrold imagines—this time without the gloss of nostalgia and sentiment—“the river
and…the large fish that must even now be moving upriver in the heart-stopping cold water.”
Shaking his head, as if the image is now too painful, he warms his hands and “began to think of
home, of getting back there before dark” (RCCS 343). In this way, Carver completes the three
spatial stages of the pastoral movement as outlined by Leo Marx: Mr. Harrold retreats from a
putative corrupt civilization, passes through a raw wilderness, and then finally comes to terms
with the established order and returns with some relevant personal insight to the civilization from
which he fled (Machine 71, “PIA” 56). While Carver never articulates this insight, the reader
can conjecture that Mr. Harrold returns to Frances thankful to have a place he belongs,
understanding through lived experience that a pastoral retreat is not a cure for his malaise.
“How About This?,” another of Carver’s lesser-known stories, begins with a young
couple attempting to change their lives. Harry, an actor, musician, and writer, “had always lived
in cities” and yearns for country living: “He just knew he wanted to leave the city to try to start
over again. A simpler life was what he had in mind, just the essentials.”
9
Harry’s wife, Emily,
also an artist, suggests, “jokingly at first,” a move to her deserted childhood home, an isolated
farm in northwestern Washington. Harry jumps at the chance to make a change and live “a more
honest life somewhere in the country”: “‘My God,’ Harry said, ‘you wouldn’t mind? Roughing
21

it, I mean? Living in the country like that?’” (WYP 185). However, rather than a new start, the
move actually forces Harry and Emily to confront a mutual discontent in their relationship.
In the oeuvre of critical texts on Carver’s work, “How About This?” has received scant
mention. Nesset, Bethea, and Campbell, in their book-length examinations of Carver, do not
mention the story, and those critics who do, have very little to say. Amir uses one example from
“How About This?” to show Carver’s use of “the glimpse” (85). Meyer states only that “How
About This?” is a variation “on the typical Carver tale” (60), an opinion also supported by those
few critics who devote a little more space to “How About This?” Black argues that the story
corroborates Carver’s two thematic obsessions: “The breakdown of relationships, combined
with and reinforced by the failure of characters to initiate communication.”
10
Saltzman, too,
identifies these themes in how Harry and Emily attempt “to change their lives,” but with
“uncertain results,” both realizing that an examination of their relationship is “more than they
can afford to talk about” (61). Saltzman and Lainsbury, however, identify another salient
dimension of the story that begs further exploration. Saltzman notes how Harry eventually
relinquishes the “pipedream” of his “romantic dash to the country” (62), and Lainsbury
underscores Harry’s belief in the fallacy that a move from the “inessential environment of the
city” will better his life, a belief that quickly ruptures when he confronts the hardships and
isolation of actual country living (18-19). Amplifying and extending these observations, I
believe a thorough reading of “How About This?” must consider Harry’s and Emily’s opposing
perceptions of the story’s country setting: one realistic, tempered by actual lived experience, and
the other a writer’s literary construction of rural life eventually challenged by the harshness and
difficulties of country living.
22

Even as they enter rural western Washington, Harry experiences “a rising sense of
hopelessness and outrage” eclipsing the “optimism that had colored his flight from the city.”
The signs of the simple life he desired, now visible through the car window—the lush pastures
and grazing cows and the isolated farmhouses—instead, “seemed to hold out nothing for him,
nothing he really wanted. He had expected something different.” Harry’s sense of seclusion and
remoteness only increases as the asphalt road ends and he must navigate a rutted dirt road. As
they pass the burned-out foundation of a house, Emily, acting as guide, tells Harry that it once
belonged to her neighbors, the Owens, and then she relates how Mr. Owen kept a still in the attic
and “had a big team of dray horses he used to enter in all the fairs,” two details imbued with a
rough country charm Harry might find inviting (WYP 183). However, Emily undercuts this
charm with the alarming disclosure of Mr. Owens’ premature death from a ruptured appendix
and how, not more than a year later, the Owens’ house burned down on Christmas, necessitating
the family’s relocation to Bremerton. Harry’s laconic response (“Is that so?” he said.
“Christmas.”) implies a burgeoning aberration between expectation and reality, further
exacerbated by the fact that such a tragedy occurred on Christmas (184). Harry and Emily’s
exchange indicates a pattern in “How About This?” While earlier in the chronology of the story,
when they’re still living in San Francisco and mulling over the move from city to country, Emily
tells Harry that she’s “not going to encourage the idea” of returning to Washington (185);
however, not only does she refuse to encourage the idea, she overtly and continually challenges
Harry’s romantic projections of country life with the actualities of her lived rural experience.
When they finally arrive at the house and walk through its dilapidated interior, Harry,
having disregarded Emily’s earlier admonition not to expect too much, is unsettled by what will
be their primitive living conditions: the front door opens at an angle; no plumbing and
23

electricity; a mattress in the kitchen as their bed; and, importantly, no fireplace. Keying in on
Carver’s leitmotif of relationships in peril, Saltzman argues that Harry and Emily’s home
inspection is significant in that it precipitates an inspection of their own relationship (61). While
a valid reading, the run-down home is also essential in grasping how Harry’s romantic construct
and expectations of bucolic living are not in line with what he experiences. Harry is
disappointed when a fireplace, an essential comfort he has placed within his imagining of
country life, is not to be found:
In the living room again, he looked around and said, “I thought it’d have a
fireplace.”
“I never said it had a fireplace.”
“I just had the impression for some reason it would have one.” (187)

Still, Harry attempts to conceal his disappointment with a cloying optimism, admiring the
sturdiness of the walls and foundation, the appealing insularity from annoying neighbors, and the
few quick fixes that will make the house habitable. Sensing Harry’s disappointment, Emily asks
him to be quiet, then quickly turns and exits the house.
Walking to the barn, Harry and Emily stop to examine the withered apple orchard, and
Harry, enamored of this “peaceful, more or less appealing country” and recognizing his desire
that “something permanent…might belong to him,” is “taken by a sudden affection for the little
orchard” he wants to resuscitate and enjoy: “He could see himself coming out of the house with
a wicker basket and pulling down large red apples, still wet with the morning’s dew….” (188).
Almost immediately after this reverie, however, Emily relates a childhood memory the sight and
smell of the barn dredge up, one she hasn’t thought about in years and doesn’t want to think
about. In stark contrast to Harry’s apple fantasy, Emily recalls years ago how one night the
game warden visited the barn to speak with her father about a deer he’d shot out of season:
24

He and the game warden talked a few minutes. The deer was hanging there, but
the game warden didn’t say anything. He offered Dad a chew of tobacco, but Dad
refused—he never liked it and wouldn’t take any even then. Then the game
warden pulled my ear and left. But I don’t want to think about any of that. (188-
189)

Where Harry imagines plentitude, dew-kissed apples ripe for the taking, Emily sees the kind of
desperate scarcity that drove her father to poach a deer to feed his hungry family. Further, this
recollection also reveals, as Lainsbury observes, a “confrontation with authority” at variance
with Harry’s literary notion of himself as the autonomous, Adam-like steward cultivating his
garden, independent of the state apparatus (106). Harry is free to pursue the Epicurean freedom
and independence he couldn’t find in the city, but Emily’s memory highlights the reality that the
country is not beyond the reach of natural and social consequence. Gauging to see if this
memory has injected some reality into Harry’s perception of country living and perhaps spurred
him to get back to civilization, Emily says: “I’m really not meaning to try to influence you one
way or the other. But I don’t think you want to stay. Do you?” Seemingly unconvinced, Harry
only shrugs. So again, Emily attempts to destabilize Harry’s false perception of country life by
relating her childhood attempt to imaginatively escape from the farm by endlessly walking the
barn’s big rafter and becoming “Emily Horner, High-Wire Artist” in the circus (WYP 189). If
not yet grasping the speciousness of his idea of a romanticized country life, Harry at least intuits
the ideological divide that has put his and Emily’s relationship “in kind of a spot.” Emily wants
to return to the city, but she leaves the decision to Harry.
While Emily heads back to the house, Harry walks into the woods until “he could not see
the house or barn,” and there, surrounded by lush greenery, he experiences his first moment of
undisturbed transcendence since arriving in the country. He begins “to feel the silence that lay in
the grass and in the trees and in the shadows farther back in the trees,” and knows this is the
25

feeling he’s longed for (190, 191). However, the moment is fleeting as the culmination of the
day’s events and Emily’s recollections wash over his country idyll, effectively rupturing it.
Ultimately, Harry’s conflict stems from the writer’s habit of making life into fiction. In “On
Writing,” Carver illuminates this creative process, explaining how the writer observes
“something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” and then attempts “to invest the
glimpse with all that is in his power,” bringing “his intelligence and literary skill to bear, his
sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things (CIYNM 92). And if the writer’s rendering
of this glimpse is an “artistic achievement,” argues Tobias Wolff, then the reader will feel he has
“had an encounter with reality” (Lainsbury 12). Harry, though, as a writer, can’t separate life
and fiction. Arthur Brown asserts that Carver often employs “a self-consciousness peculiar to
postmodern fiction” by reminding us that in reading a “text,” “we are creating a reflection of
ourselves,” the world becoming “like the text…a fictional construct.” However, unlike the text,
the world is real (125, 129)
11
. Harry, then, as a writer well-versed in a number of texts, interprets
this new country “text,” as well as his own identity, through a literary lens, imbuing this
“glimpse” with pastoral splendor. This glimpse is not unlike the act of looking at the world
through a window, which Brown sees as a symbol of fiction (129). The consummate writer,
Harry is constantly looking and attempting to interpret “text,” giving the glimpse life. But by the
story’s end, Harry can no longer interpret the country through his literary lens. If the window is
a symbol of fiction, then the mirror, Brown observes, is a sign of postmodern fiction (129). Even
in enjoying peaceful natural surroundings, the wood’s preternatural silence and deep shadows,
Harry can no longer act the writer and look outward at the world; rather, his gaze turns inward.
He remembers a volume of plays by Ghelderode, a French playwright whose characters are
repeatedly and tragically seduced by their illusions. He recalls the filthy mattress in the kitchen
26

and Emily dreaming of escape as she walks the barn rafters, and he is suddenly afraid by this
unvarnished reality. From this glimpse inward, Harry learns something about himself: “He
wasn’t going to stay [in the country]…but it didn’t upset him…. He was pleased he knew
himself so well” (WYP 191). Where once Harry saw this country setting charged with meaning,
a new beginning, a simpler life, essentially a world of his own making, he now sees existential
reality, a discontinuous, banal, mundane, and impersonal world.
12
What Harry understands in
this moment of introspection is that he’ll be all right. While Harry has come to recognize the
fallacy of his country fantasy, “How About This?” ends on a hopeful note: Harry emerges from
the woods free of illusion.

1b. CHEEVER’S WHITE COLLAR PASTORALS

Whereas Carver’s Mr. Harrold and Harry retreat into a natural setting in search of
paradise, Cheever’s white-collar suburbanites feel no desire to retreat. For them, the suburbs are
the paradise, a place, as Donaldson suggests, where the individual can “preserve rural values in
an urbanizing world,” and achieve wealth and prosperity “while retaining the amenities of
country life” (SM 24). In short, the suburbs, imagined and constructed as partaking equally of
the best of civilization and the best of nature, embody a uniquely American pastoralism.
From the beginning, argues Leo Marx, those who came to the New World aspired to
establish a society that realized the pastoral dream of a middle landscape: the best of art
(civilization) and the best of nature. This middle landscape could only be achieved if the frenetic
complexity, repressiveness, and brutality of civilization and “the violent uncertainties” of nature
could be mitigated, tamed, and improved, transformed by “a fusion of work and spontaneous
27

process”: hence, Marx’s central metaphor of the machine—as factories, steamboats, canals,
railroads, telegraph lines—in the garden, a human-constructed landscape that is a locus of both
economic and moral value (Machine 22, 112). In this particular cohabitation, Thomas Jefferson
envisioned the machine “as a token of the human spirit to be realized by the young American
Republic,” expediting the development of this American middle landscape when “removed from
the “dark, crowded, grimy cities of Europe” and “placed in the open countryside” (Machine
150). The New World, then, because of its close proximity with nature, would, in turn, redeem
and purify the machine. Further, the machine offered the promise of democratic egalitarianism
and abundance for the poor and propertyless, according to Marx, on the simple and irresistible
logic that “all other hopes, for peace, equality, freedom, and happiness, are felt to rest upon
technology” (Machine 192). Imbued with this democratic and progressive sentimentality, the
American pastoral ideal sanctioned the conquest of the wilderness for economic and
technological development, enabling “the nation to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of
rural happiness while devoting itself to productivity, wealth, and power” (Machine 226).
Consequently, then, in the last hundred years, Americans have constructed the suburbs as
this idealized middle landscape, a place of imagination offering the best of nature and the best of
civilization, a site of promises and dreams. As Dolores Hayden describes in Building Suburbia,
the suburbs are a landscape where “Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and
economic security, ideals of freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and
spiritual uplift” (3).
13
Mark Baldassare outlines the utopian promise of the suburbs, realized
through “greater technological know-how and increased national wealth,” and mass marketed as
an accessible destination for individuals seeking “new and better lives”: homeownership,
automobiles, and a plethora of leisure activities (1-2). As for nature’s idealized role in the
28

suburban imagination, argues Tom Martinson, the mature trees, sprawling lawns, and parks
reflect a belief in the Yeoman desire for space, creative exploration, and personal freedom, as
well as the enduring nineteenth-century romantic and transcendentalist beliefs in the
interconnection of humanity and the natural world as the ultimate good (24, 208, 17). One
prominent architect of mid-nineteenth century, perhaps unrealistically, believed the suburban city
should “become part of the countryside,” and that “you should not be able to go from home to
work without passing through a forest (Martinson 228).
However, the suburbs’ technical orientation, observes Peter Rowe, creates a certain
asymmetry in the suburban middle landscape. Unlike pastoralism, “with its overwhelming
associations with a particular kind of place” (rusticity, a cultivated landscape, domestication of
the wilderness), the suburbs’ technical orientation (the best of civilization) is “centered on high
capital investment, high division of labor, quantity production, variety within standardization,
and mass marketing,” ends that appear antithetical to Yeoman ideals (227-228).
14
Further, while
pastoralism is a well-defined state of being, an end in itself, modern technical orientation,
conversely, is more interested in “means and doing things than it is about ends” (232). As
embodied in the American suburbs, Rowe calls this asymmetry Modern Pastoralism.
In this critical stance, explains Rowe, pastoralism and technical orientation work ideally
in a reciprocal manner, each keeping the other from falling into extremism. First, pastoralism
establishes the terrain (suburban spaces with homes, lawns, gardens, parks, and green spaces)
and the ideological ends (i.e., peace, innocence, moral superiority, the illusion of an
uncomplicated life closer to nature) of suburban development. Second, modern technical
orientation ensures productivity and prevents pastoralism from denigrating into ineffective
primitivism. Rowe sees this balance embodied in a burgeoning environmental movement and its
29

attempt “to manage and redirect technological developments in…energy and real estate
industries,” and, on the technical side, in the employment of technology to improve “wild and
remote areas.” While the pastoral side of this dualism, as Rowe notes, “holds out so much
promise as the metaphorical context for contemporary metropolitan development,” it has
infinitely more “work” to do to maintain its ideological footing “in this age of sophisticated
technology (238). As a result, modern pastoralism, as manifested “in the symbolic functioning
of the cultural artifacts of the middle landscape,” is rarely achieved in the suburbs. Instead, one
finds there a place of “misrepresentation, vulgarity, and blight” (239). Rowe notes this symbolic
misalignment in the suburbs’ “kitschy period stylings” (241); in the “hodgepodge of different
land uses and building types, bland-looking shopping malls, billboards, and desolate parking
lots” that abound in the suburbs’ peripheries; and in the “the cacophony of signs and other
related visual paraphernalia” that bespeak the “labeling and packaging for mass market
consumption.” Through the thinly veiled industrial and capitalistic apparatus, Rowe concludes,
modern pastoralism is often “skewed all the way over toward a highly rationalized system of
land economics and functional engineering” (243). The attainment of this middle landscape, in
other words, often fails.
While film and television often tout the prosperity of the American suburbs, the anxieties,
failings, and discontents there are legion. Rather than a dream pursued and achieved at the level
of the individual, the realization of the suburbs, Hayden observes, is controlled by “developers
trying to turn a profit through suburban growth.” With increased development pushed by market
forces, open land vanishes under tract housing, and new “communities” that “lack social and
economic centers, parks, schools, and necessary infrastructure” are born (9). Further restricting
the personal freedom and individuality inherent in the ideal of the middle landscape, Martinson
30

notes the preponderance of suburban communities who employ an “authoritarian tone of
governance” to minimize any “rough edges” by instituting “an array of restrictive zoning
overlays and the so-called good-neighbor ordinances,” resulting in communities “that are often
experienced as tightly controlled environments” (6). Rowe, drawing on various mythopoetic
Judeo-Christian metaphors of human settlement,
15
categorizes the suburbs as a kind of
paradisiacal, yet alienated, Babel. Of this suburban Babel, he writes:
Instead of a desolate urban-industrial wilderness or similar wasteland, the setting
has the appearance of a paradise garden. The sun shines; the vegetation is lush,
well watered, and well manicured. However, crisscrossing and winding through
this arcadian landscape, we are all locked in our Tower of Babel, caught up in the
endless pursuit of the constant dictates and imagined necessities emanating from
life’s printed circuit. In effect we are isolated from the arcadia outside. We are
within sight but totally out of reach, and sooner or later we are no longer
conscious of its presence. All the arcadian accoutrements are there, and
yet…there is no engaging human presence; therefore, the pastoral goes
unrealized. (246)

Situated precariously between two opposing poles, civilization and nature, the middle landscape,
then, as Roderick Nash concludes, is an amalgamation that “is unstable and contradictory at
best” (277).
It is the serious literary writer, finally, observes Leo Marx, who identifies and attempts to
discover the inherent meaning in our paradoxical devotion to both rural happiness and to
productivity, wealth, and power (Machine 226). Moving beyond the pastoral ideal’s sentimental
appeal and its “dominant image of an undefiled, green republic,” the writer,
16
whose work might
even begin with sentimental pastoralism, ultimately manages “to qualify, or call into question, or
bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture” (Machine 6,
25). While invoking the symbolic power of the green landscape, this writer acknowledges a
powerful counterforce, usually a machine or some other symbol of mechanized or political
31

power, that undermines the pastoral ideal and “acknowledges the reality of history” (Machine
362-363).
In “John Cheever and the Promise of Pastoral,” Frederick Karl argues that Cheever, much
like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville, “has taken on a major theme, that of
the persistence and, ultimately, the failure of pastoral,” yet at the same time showing how it is
still a powerful force in post WW2 fiction (209). However, in contrast to nineteenth-century
writers who saw in pastoralism “a form of salvation,” Cheever’s treatment of the pastoral “is
wrapped in irony, paradox, [and] irresolvable conflict,” a “complicated, even self-
defeating…idea” (209). If anything, Cheever’s pastorals are flawed, destroyed ultimately by
“the dangers of ego-worship and self-indulgence which so characterizes our postwar era” (210).
Still, though Cheever’s suburbs are not free from sin and evil, and are beset by a pathological
malaise for an untenable fantasy of Eden, Karl notes how Cheever turns his material “into a
comically dispossessed pastoral: life remains appetizing although profoundly disturbed,” a
mixture of American dreams and American nightmares (213). Eventually, the sky will darken in
every one of these suburban pastorals. For Cheever, Karl contends, “the promises of pastoral
exist to be broken” (215).
Far from the balanced middle landscape Jefferson imagined, Cheever’s suburbs, while
constructed and touted as Eden, teeter precariously between pastoral fantasy and the dynamo of
complex, technocratic society, hanging by a thread and ready to topple at any moment. Rather
than peace, innocence, and freedom, Cheever’s suburbanites contend, usually privately, with the
concomitant complications of the modern world. As a palliative against this modern reality,
Donaldson observes, they drink and smoke a great deal at cocktail parties and country club
events; their children wile away their hours in front of the TV (“MICG” 148). Attempting to
32

avoid any unpleasantness, “they do not wish to hear of disasters, much less disasters narrowly
averted; they shut tragedy, especially potential tragedy, out of their consciousness.” Further,
they ignore death and suffering (“MICG” Donaldson 146, 141). Part of this avoidance, argues
Kendle, is a selective remembering of the past, one that suppresses the “elements…that might
threaten their idylls”: war, danger, and trouble, to name a few (226). Yet, the past is not wholly
off limits. As Kendle further notes: “The passionate attempt to retain and foster an image of an
innocent past unifies the rich and varied fictional world in the stories of John Cheever. His
characters obsessively pursue this image of lost innocence, often their own….” (219). To that
end, they “desire not only for the ease and delights of Eden, but also the moral purity of
prelapsarian man” (229). But the world is changing too rapidly, slipping further and further from
Eden toward “urban-suburban sprawl” and “moral-esthetic collapse,” a contemporary existence
“without roots or meaning or values, a quantitative life lacking any qualitative dimension”
(Burhans 117). Cheever’s fiction, then, argues Donaldson, reflects [the writer’s] “yearning after
unspoiled nature and his conviction that mankind can stand only so much technological
progress,” and unless this progress is kept in check, it “will not only kill large numbers of human
beings but will also destroy the quality of life for those who survive” (“MICG” 151, 140).
Ultimately, Karl notes, the ideal of “pastoral purity” for Cheever’s suburbanites “has given way
to belief in the group and faith in technology as the means to achieve a sense of belonging”
(210). However, despite their many social engagements, notes Burhans, “…there is no
community; no one has the time or the inclination for friendship or neighborliness. Absorbed in
their work or turned inward by its oppressive security regulations, they isolate themselves from
all but those who share their particular jobs” (119). Perhaps, Donaldson posits, Cheever raises a
33

warning against a rampant technological progress with the power to sweep away all received
values in its wake” (“MICG” 142).
This failed “modern” pastoralism is very clear in Cheever’s “The Country Husband,” the
longest and best known story from his The Housebreaker of Shady Hill collection, a story that
won the prestigious O. Henry Award for 1956, and one which Vladimir Nabokov called “a
miniature novel beautifully traced” (JCAB Donaldson 141). Depending less on plot and more on
image, “The Country Husband” is a diverse palimpsest that, observes Meanor, employs
“elements of myth; literary, artistic, and geographical allusions; and the old Puritan battleground
between the flesh and the spirit, Dionysus versus Apollo” (81). Francis Weed, the story’s
conflicted narrator, slowly grasps the instability of Shady Hill as a middle landscape promising
domestic content. The dream is beset on one side by his fantasies and on the other by the
attenuating influence of the modern world and its stifling conventions and conformity. For
Francis, his fantasy of seducing and then running off with the babysitter, Anne Murchison, is an
escape, if not to primitive settings, then at least an escape from social conventions to indulge in
primitive longings of sexual desire and personal freedom. Like other Cheever protagonists,
Kazin notes, Francis’s “trying-out of freedom”—that is, his pursuit of fantasy—takes on the
shape “of the extreme” and “unmentionable,” a way for Cheever to give “social shape to the
most insubstantial and private longings” in the form of “a personal drive so urgent and confusing
it comes out as a vice” (Waldenland 65). Opposing that desire, on the other side, is the machine
with all its concomitant, far-reaching parts powering and shaping the world of Shady Hill:
American capitalism; the mass market; large corporations populated by commuting automatons;
and the strict codes of behavior and appearance that squelch human individualism. Francis
Weed, then, experiences the endemic dissatisfaction of the 1950s, a time, Aubury writes, when
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“many people feared that the American economic system, imagined to be the guarantor of
individual liberty and free expression, was in fact suppressing individuality, producing a
homogenous population of passive, emasculated drones” (65). As a result, Francis experiences
his predicament, psychologically and physically, as an “abyss between his fantasy and the
practical world…so wide that he felt it affected the muscles of his heart” (337).
17
In short,
Francis comes to understand that the middle landscape, as embodied in Shady Hill, “hangs,
morally and economically, from a thread,” a thread, though, that’s radiates “in the evening light”
(345). Through an exploration of Francis’s suburban experience, Cheever teaches us, as Aubry
asserts, “precisely how to be dissatisfied” with Shady Hill’s “model of well-mannered
misery….” (79).
The story begins with Francis, the country husband and overseer of the pastoral paradise that
is Shady Hill, experiencing a near-fatal airplane crash, a harrowing occurrence that operates as a
metaphor for Shady Hill’s precipitous moral decline, yet its resilience to exist and endure.
Indeed, as the storm rages beyond the windows and dark clouds envelope the plane, the
confining plane reminds Francis of home: “…the shaded lights, the stuffiness, and the window
curtains gave the cabin an atmosphere of intense and misplaced domesticity.” The man sitting
next to Francis, in a reflective mood as he faces the possibility of his own early demise,
confesses his rural fantasy of how he’d always wanted buy a farm in New Hampshire and raise
beef cattle. Another man, attempting to numb his senses during this harrowing ordeal, “pulled a
flask out of his pocket and took a drink.” Francis smiles at the man, hoping he might be
generous enough to assist him in deadening his own senses; however, “…the man looked away;
he wasn’t sharing his pain killer with anyone.” The plane comes down in a corn field outside
Philadelphia, where the anxious passengers flee the stricken plane, scattering “over the cornfield
35

in all directions, praying that the thread would hold.” It does. Nothing happens. Obliteration
avoided, the shaken passengers file into taxis and make their way to Philadelphia to continue
their journeys. Though unguarded and honest in the face of death, the safe passengers quickly
default to that “suspiciousness with which many Americans regard their fellow travelers” (325-
326). While brief, this scene is indicative of a Shady Hill the reader will soon experience
through the eyes of Francis Weed: an unstable middle landscape that hangs by a thread, yet, at
the collective level, seems to endure.
All of these discontents, then, are hidden behind Shady Hill’s polished surfaces, concealed
wonderfully in the large, sprawling homes where, like Francis’s Dutch Colonial, “nothing…was
neglected; nothing had not been burnished.” Still, while Francis admires the swept hearth and
red roses reflecting in the piano top when he steps through the front door, his description of his
living room “divided like Gaul into three parts” is not without a hint of menace, warfare, and
territorial dispute (326). Expecting to be greeted with affection after his harrowing ordeal,
Francis, instead, walks into a scene of domestic antagonism as his children physically and
verbally upbraid each other, taking little notice of their father. And when Francis’s wife, Julia,
calls the family to the dining table, the response is “like the war cries of the Scottish chieftains
[and] only refreshes the ferocity of the combatants.” Overwhelmed by the fracas, Francis jumps
at Julia’s request to go upstairs and tell their oldest daughter that dinner is ready, feeling as he
happily bounds up the stairs “like getting back to headquarters company” (327). The war
imagery continues as the family argues around the dining table, and when Francis asks Julia why
she can’t feed the children before he gets home, her “guns are loaded” as she explains the burden
of laying two tables before beginning to cry. At this, the family “drift[s] away from the
battlefield….” (328).
36

While in the story this domestic “warfare” is never publicly acknowledged because it
challenges the idea of the suburbs as a kind of paradise, there is the memory of World War 2 that
is also unacknowledged, though its concomitant effects linger in Shady Hill. At a dinner party
the next night at the Farquarsons’, Francis recognizes the new maid as the same young woman
he’d seen at the end of the war shaved, stripped, spit on, and then banished from a French village
for living with a German commandant during the Occupation. At first tempted to recount this
story to the dinner guests, Francis quickly realizes doing so “would have been a social as well as
a human error.” Simply, the Shady Hill residents are not interested in any historical
unpleasantness that would penetrate their insular world. In choosing not to disclose the story,
Francis recognizes that his neighbors “seemed united in their tacit claim that there had been no
past, no war—that there was no danger or trouble in the world” (331). Whilhite notes that the
maid’s presence interrupts the “ahistoricism of Shady Hill’s private geographies” and introduces
a “tension between the external world and Shady Hill’s denial of global history and geography”
(231). Further, Hipkiss argues that: “These are members of the successful upper middle class of
our society, and they have sought and want at all costs to believe that they have found in Shady
Hill an untroubled paradise, the appropriate reward for their labor and intelligence according to
the values of a properly regulated Protestant universe” (578). Francis Weed, however, is
troubled by the emerging realization of Shady Hill’s ahistorical perspective, its confining and
sterile domesticity, and its complex social conventions, all of which stifle individuality and lead
to unrealized dreams. In short, where some see paradise, Francis sees prison.
In contrast to Francis’s confinement, the peripatetic neighborhood dog Jupiter and the
slovenly urchin Gertrude, though both ubiquitous annoyances throughout Shady Hill, enjoy a
freedom that Francis envies. Waldenland, missing Jupiter’s and Gertrude’s significance within
37

Shady Hill’s framework as a paradise disguised as a prison, argues that these characters’
presence, though amusing, “runs the danger of straining the fabric of the story” and “[has] no
function….” (74-75). Rather, I would argue that within the pastoral framework of this story both
characters act as foils for Francis, underscoring his abject stasis.
After retreating from an acrimonious and aborted family meal to unwind in the back garden,
Francis watches Jupiter crash though his tomato plants, Jupiter with his reputation for
“ransacking wastebaskets, clotheslines, garbage pails, and shoe bags”; Jupiter who disrupts the
church processional and steals the Goslins’ steaks from the backyard grill; mischievous Jupiter,
as Francis notes, who’s “an anomaly” in Shady Hill because of “his high spirits” (329). Unlike
Francis, Jupiter moves freely about Shady Hill, unencumbered by stifling mores and social
conventions, free to follow his fancy and indulge his bodily desires. Highlighting Jupiter’s role
in the story, Hipkiss argues that he “enforces the theme of inevitable and enduring romance, of
man’s appetite for adventure, conquest, and love, which will not be suppressed by the
conventions of Shady Hill” (580). However, such freedom and adventure won’t be tolerated in
Shady Hill. Francis knows “Jupiter’s days were numbered,” and that soon a gardener or another
Shady Hill resident will poison the spirited animal.
Like Jupiter, Gertrude displays a mobility Francis is denied. Cheever describes her as “born
with a taste for exploration,” wandering Shady Hill to the beat of her own drum rather than
“center her life with her affectionate parents” (335). Wilhite remarks that Gertrude
“benevolently embodies Shady Hill’s ubiquitous and often invisible trespasses” and should be
read “as the most at-home of Shady Hill’s transgressive inhabitants” (230). While “skinny and
garrulous,” often appearing at the most inopportune times and places, and constantly overstaying
her welcome, what sets Gertrude apart from Shady Hill’s “transgressive inhabitants,” especially
38

someone like Francis Weed who privately desires to seduce Anne Murchison, is her complete
lack of selfishness. Though Francis dislikes Gertrude, even more so after the girl catches him
kissing Anne, he at least acknowledges her attributes that he lacks: helpfulness, honesty, and
loyalty (336).
In an attempt to break free from Shady Hill’s domestic doldrums, Francis becomes intent
on seducing Anne, an endeavor that adds an element of mythic romance to his dull existence, but
one that is socially opposed because it disturbs Shady Hill’s delicate equipoise by tipping it too
far toward the primitive. Francis’s first encounter with Anne Murchison is much like Mr.
Harrold’s initial tendency to see the natural world as he does the Chinese landscape paintings;
that is, as constructed representations without flaw that bear little resemblance to reality. Seeing
Anne for the first time on his porch, Francis envisions Anne as more goddess than mortal: “All
those endearing flaws, moles, birthmarks, and healed wounds were missing, and he experienced
in his consciousness…a pang of recognition as strange, deep, and wonderful as anything in his
life” (331). This feeling is only augmented when in the car Anne begins to cry because of a
disparaging phone call she received earlier from her alcoholic father, and in comforting her with
an embrace, Francis notes how “the layers of their clothing felt thin.” Caught up in the moment,
he pulls her roughly against himself, interpreting her crying as “paroxysm of love” (332). This
deep longing for Anne, then, reveals—as Waldenland notes—Francis’s “need for a fuller
emotional life” beyond the social restrictions imposed by Shady Hill (67).
Francis is reinvigorated by the fantasy of a life with Anne, feeling that “the girl promised
to bring back into his life something like the sound of music” (335). It is the prospect of love for
Francis that changes Shady Hill from a banal place to paradise, transforming him, too, from
suburban automaton into Dionysian seducer (Meanor 81). And it is this act within the story that
39

disrupts the carefully constructed equipoise of the middle landscape, tipping it, as Marx suggests,
precariously toward infantile wish-fulfillment dreams, a diffuse nostalgia, and a naïve, anarchic
primitivism (Machine 11). Further, Poggioli highlights that while the sexual freedom for which
Francis aspires cannot be realized within a fixed social structure like Shady Hill, he might at
least draw closer to the fantasy by couching it in myth. Of this tendency in pastoral works,
Poggioli writes:
When pastoral man becomes aware of the impossibility of realizing here and now
his ideal of an absolute erotic anarchism, his protest has no outlet but the very
dream on which his heart feeds. Thus he projects his yearning after free love, his
longing for sexual freedom and even license, into a state of nature that exists no
where, or only in the realm of myth. (13)

And within this mythic framework, the object of Francis’s desire, Anne, whom he sees without
flaws, is not real, but rather “a sexual archetype, the eternal Eve” (Poggioli 16).
In an effort to realize the myth, Francis buys Anne a bracelet, and on arriving home that
evening miraculously finds her there in his foyer, summoned to babysit while Francis and Julia
attend a dinner party. Francis notes “her smile open and loving,” her perceived perfection “like a
fine day—a day after a thunderstorm,” and quickly and passionately kisses Anne before Gertrude
appears and Francis must bribe the little girl to tell no one what she saw (335). All through
dinner Anne Murchison is like a “golden thread” that runs through the dull evening, and Francis
can only think where he will take her later that evening to consummate his fantasy. With the
“smell of grass in his nose,” Francis considers finally living out this anarchic primitivism in the
few sylvan retreats Shady Hill has to offer: lovers’ lane or the riverbank near Elm Street,
anywhere “he could drive his car deep enough into the brushwoods to be concealed” (336).
However, Francis is torn over the prospects of sleeping with the babysitter and incurring
a charge of statutory rapes, an incident that has never occurred in Shady Hill. In this
40

predicament, Meanor notes, Francis “sees clearly his dilemma in a moral and mythic continuum,
that his unfulfilling marriage and his plan to abduct the innocent Anne could have the severest
consequences within the moral constraints of Shaddy Hill” (84). At this point in the story, myth,
which had been the impetus for Francis’s Dionysian conquest, now foreshadows the difficult
consequences of his proposed actions. At the office, Francis, staring at a framed photograph of
his children, sees reproach in their eyes, and this reproach is intensified by his company’s
letterhead, “a drawing of the Laocoön, and the figure of the priest and his sons in the coils of the
snake,” an image that “appeared to him to have the deepest meaning” (335). Later that day, after
purchasing Anne’s bracelet, Francis, conflicted about seducing the young girl, observes the Atlas
statue on Fifth Avenue bent under the weight of the world on his shoulder, an image that leads
Francis to consider “the strenuousness of containing his physicalness within the patterns he had
chosen” (335). Francis, then, begins to grasp the middle ground he inhabits, one that holds no
promise of happiness. To act on his primitive desires with Anne Murchison would have dire
social ramifications: the loss of family and social standing within Shady Hill, as well as legal
consequences. Though, not to act on desire, Francis realizes, is to maintain Shady Hill’s status
quo, which in itself is the source of his unhappy stasis. For Francis, “the abyss between his
fantasy and the practical world [had] opened so wide that he felt it affected the muscles of his
heart” (337).
In the end, it’s not Francis who will win over Anne Murchison but Clayton Thomas, a
surly college dropout who sees Shady Hill for what it is. “…what seems to me to be really
wrong with Shady Hill is that it doesn’t have any future,” Clayton tells Francis and Julia. “So
much energy is spent in perpetuating the place—in keeping out undesirables, and so forth—that
the only idea of the future anyone has is just more and more commuting trains and more parties.
41

I don’t think that’s healthy. I think people ought to be able to dream big dreams about the future.
I think people ought to be able to dream great dreams” (338). While Francis and Clayton both
see the social confinement and speciousness of Shady Hill, Francis resents the young man for his
boldfaced honesty and the freedom he has to leave Shady Hill’s imposed strictures with Anne on
his arm. Clayton, finally, will dream his big dreams, but Francis’s dreams will remain private
fantasies passionately written on a scrap of paper and then tossed into a wastebasket.
The next day, after Francis mistakes an older woman on the commuter train for Anne, he
concludes that if he can’t distinguish one person for another, “what evidence was there that his
life with Julia and the children had as much reality as his dreams of iniquity” (343). Unable to
distinguish reality, tilting precariously toward an engulfing, yet unrealizable, anarchic
primitiveness, Francis is in need of someone to redirect him back to the reality of Shady Hill.
Francis finds his Virgil in Dr. Herzog, his secretary’s psychiatrist, whose waiting room, though
“a crude token gesture toward the sweets of domestic bliss” with its antiques, coffee tables, and
potted plants, is meant to remind Frances where his heart and mind must dwell. As a remedy for
Francis’s malaise, Dr. Herzog recommends woodwork as therapy, a socially-sanctioned
encounter with the primitive allowing Francis to savor “the holy smell of wood” from the
domestic safety of his basement (344-345).
The concluding section of “The Country Husband” presents a final wide-angled,
omniscient view of Shady Hill in its delicate equipoise between primitive and modern, now
conveyed in the present tense, as if this, now and always, will be Shady Hill’s present. In that
final section, Francis Weed, finally reabsorbed into the community, finds consolation in the
simple arithmetic of carpentry, while his son Toby, the next generation of Shady Hill, puts off
the fringed cowboy jacket, gold-studded belt, and gun holster of a by-gone America past in favor
42

of the space suit that will mark the future. Francis, holed up in the basement and prescribed to
work wood, will not see the alluring primitiveness that still exists in Shady Hill, one that presents
a beguiling alternative to the well-mannered misery of the suburbs capitalistic, industrial, and
social machine. Free as ever, Gertrude and Jupiter still roam the neighborhood. And Mr. and
Mrs. Babcock, seemingly the only happy and enamored couple in Shady Hill, chase each other
naked through their backyard, “as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find
on any wall in Venice” (345). And in this way, Shady Hill “hangs, morally and economically,
from a thread,” though the tenuous thread hangs beautifully “in the evening light” (345). While
at times threatened by divorce, history, and fantasy, Shady Hill’s fragile thread is resilient.
Shady Hill will persist because its residents’ mythic fantasies of anarchic freedom, fantasies of
Venus and nymphs and satyrs and “kings in golden suits rid[ing] elephants over the mountains,”
will remain private longings not fit for the light of day.

43

SECTION 2: THE COMPETING PASTORALS OF RAYMOND CARVER’S HUSBANDS
AND WIVES

It is the exception for a Raymond Carver short story, either explicitly or implicitly, not to
examine the misunderstandings, silences, verbal and physical violence, psychological abuse,
desperation, and isolation of marriage and domesticity. In one story, a wife numbs herself with
drugs, sex, and food to divert herself from the reality of her crumbling marriage (WYP 75). In
another, a husband expresses his love for his wife by trying to kill her (RCCS 310). In another,
one woman, her dreams of prosperity dashed, admits: “For a long time, we had us a life. It had
its ups and downs. But we thought we were working toward something” (C 199). Critics also
note Carver’s preponderant tendency toward marital and domestic dissolution rather than
resolution, and story conclusions that end in isolation rather than inclusion. For critic Adam
Meyer, Carver Country is a place bound up in a “vicious cycle of depression,” where “marriages
and relationships are often in shambles,” a vicissitude from which there “seems to be no escape”
(21). Arthur Saltzman observes that the inhabitants of Carver Country hold their families “dear
to them, but there are inevitable misunderstandings, silences, infidelities—all the standard rifts
and fractures love is pray to” (4). Kirk Nesset, examining Carver’s opus, asserts that: “From the
earliest story to the last, Carver’s characters are unhappily estranged [and] disillusioned
by…meaningless marriages” (2). Further, Nesset notes Carver’s constant examination of love,
“or, more precisely, the issue of love and its absence, and the bearing of love’s absence on
marriage and individual identity” (9).
18

Carver himself was no stranger to the kind of marital and domestic malaise that cripples
lives and sends them spinning into alcoholism, depression, and divorce. In his essay “Fires,”
44

Carver considers the forces and influences on his writing, detailing with a certain resentment and
malevolence the physical and mental demands of raising two children. Providing an example of
the strain and drain of domestic responsibilities, Carver relates the now-famous story of waiting
for a dryer to open up at the laundromat. When one doesn’t, he’s forced to wait even longer,
experiencing an acute bitterness because “real” writers are people “who didn’t spend their
Saturdays at the laundromat and every waking hour subject to the needs and caprices of their
children” (CIYN 99). The kind of gloomy, existential epiphany Carver intuits in that moment is
not so different from what many of his characters experience: “At the moment…” Carver writes,
“I could see nothing ahead but years more of this kind of responsibility and perplexity. Things
would change some, but they were never really going to get better” (CIYN 99).
This chapter, then, examines domestic conflict in three of Raymond Carver’s short stories
as the concomitant result of the encounter of two ostensibly incompatible and opposed gendered
spaces: the home and the wilderness. The first section provides a historical and contemporary
overview of men’s and women’s relationship with the home and the wilderness: in short, how
women view the home and the garden as a locus over which they can assert control, while men
orient themselves away from the home toward the unfettered, self-fulfilling freedom of the
natural wilderness. The next section concentrates on an analysis of Carver’s “So Much Water So
Close to Home,” “Distance,” and “The Student’s Wife,” and how they reflect the encroachment
of male space (i.e., wilderness) on the female-controlled domestic space. What links this
chapter’s various sections is an attempt to see how gendered spaces contribute to a deeper
understanding of domestic violence and domestic malaise in Carver’s short stories. I limit the
theoretical scope of this discussion to the perspectives I deem most valuable and relevant to such
a reading of Carver’s fiction.
45

2a. MALE AND FEMALE PASTORALS

In The Land Before Her, Annette Kolodny demonstrates how nineteenth-century
American women had their own Arcadian dream: “turning wilderness or prairie into a
communal garden of domesticity” (226). That is, not an Arcadian dream of natural paradise but
of nature civilized, a concomitant historical result of nineteenth-century adolescent females being
socialized away from nature and confined to the home, while males enjoyed free mobility and
access to the natural world.
19
Thus, “paradise” signified very different places when used by men
and women. For women, educated in pious domesticity and what was appropriate for the genteel
lady, paradise was not located in a geographical terrain but rather in the home and in the well-
cultivated garden, a paradise built and maintained through strict domestic duties. Conversely, for
men, paradise was constructed through manual labor and intellect, and entailed an invitation to
master and possess the natural world (Kolodny 53-54).
Jerome Tognoli observes that while the home is central to human experience, men feel
uncomfortable relating to it and orient themselves outside the domestic sphere, consequently
giving the home less psychological meaning for them compared to women, whose purview it is
to modify and control the interior domestic landscape. Venturing out of the home and into the
world, then, allows men to assert their masculinity and escape domestic tensions (599-604).
While D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature first popularized and
attempted to explain the male American writer’s deviant pursuit of anti-civilization, it was Leslie
Fiedler who elaborated Lawrence’s thesis to show how the wilderness in American writing
serves as a liminal space for male self-fulfillment apart from the putative trappings associated
46

with female-dominated culture.
20
In Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler asserts that
the archetypal male protagonist is perpetually fleeing “into forest and out to sea, down the river
or into combat” to avoid civilization epitomized in the union of man and woman: marriage (26).
Marriage, then, signifies the ultimate and absolute maturity, “a reconciliation with the divided
self, a truce between head and heart, but also for a compromise with society, an acceptance of
responsibility and drudgery and dullness” (338). Those protagonists who indeed flee the
domestic sphere for the autonomy of nature sometimes do so alone, but pure narcissism, Fiedler
reminds us, fails to provide the tension and dream of fiction. Rather, such escapes from society’s
moral complexity usually occur in pairs or more, the mirror-image of the male self discovered in
the flesh of one’s own sex: the buddy anima (348). In our American mythology, these
homoerotic bonds play out in a paradisal, natural world more make-believe than real, and
because this world is more dream-like than real, Fiedler argues, its subversion of accepted
community mores and standards, “a counter-family that can only flourish in a world without
women, churches, or decency or hard work,” is redeemed by the projection that this world of
male bonding is a fantasy “without final faith”; that is, an entertaining literary construct the male
is unable to fully realize (350-352).
In his famous book on the significance of the frontier in American history, Frederick
Jackson Turner’s thesis, while explaining American development through the “existence of an
area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward”
(1), never seems to acknowledge or realize the deeper psychological impulse of this western
movement as a means for American males to achieve their pastoral ideal in a state of anti-
civilization. In this process, the male leaves civilization and returns to frontier conditions, where
he slowly adopts the primitive. Of this process, Turner writers:
47

The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries,
tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts
him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in
the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee
and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to
planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and
takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, the frontier environment is at
first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or
perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian
trails. (4)

Within the historical reality of American colonization across an ever-retreating frontier,
Annette Kolodny is quick to recognize and articulate the male fantasy of the autonomous Indian-
like hunter of the dark woods or desolate prairie, a figure “adapted to life in the wilderness, but
not in the settlements,” who suggests “the possibility of harmonious intimacy between the human
and the natural, free of the threat of violation” (5). He is epitomized in our collective mythology
as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstockings.
And most importantly, in the components of this wilderness fantasy of a male woodland hero
gratifying his desires, notes Kolodny, is the exclusion of women (5).
Denied the wilderness, women constructed their Arcadias within the domestic sphere. A
discussion of the female pastoral, then, must begin with a historical examination of women’s
relationship to the home. Beverly Gordon’s article, “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual
Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” offers keen insight on the subject in
its assertion that the female body and interior spaces were often treated as the same thing, “so
much so that they become interchangeable; symbolically, one could stand for the other” (281).
While drawing exclusively on American sources and images from the Industrial Age, Gordon’s
assertions saliently apply to women’s relationship with domestic spaces in post World War Two,
middle class America. “Vestiges of this conflationary metaphoric relationship remain today,”
48

Gordon states. “Women are still primarily identified in our culture with the arrangement and
outfitting of both interior and the body” (281). “The woman,” she continues, “was seen as the
embodiment of the home, and in turn, the home was seen as an extension…of both her corporeal
and spiritual self” (282); but even more than as an embodiment of the home, Gordon, citing turn-
of-the-century American paintings, illustrates how women were represented as pieces of the
home, matching and merging with its furnishings. In Childe Hassam’s 1918 painting “Tanagra,”
for example, a woman, holding a small statue of a female figure in her right hand, literally blends
with a round, wooden table and a Japanese screen painted with a natural scene of birds in a blue
sky circling a tree. Further, (and this will take on greater significance in my later discussion of
women’s relationship with the garden) Gordon remarks on how “the woman is shown among
flowering plants, but like her, the plants are tamed, as they are cut or confined to a clay pot”
(283).
21
Male interior spaces, on the other hand, corroborate Fiedler’s argument for males’
predilection for the wilderness (synonymous with the wild and the primitive) as a liminal space
for self-fulfillment. Interestingly, Gordon notes how male interior spaces traditionally reflect
this sense of the wild: primitive materials, rustic furniture made from unfinished logs, animal
heads, and trophies, all referencing “something wild and forbidding that the male had
conquered,” in contrast to the “domestic” and tamed human bodies” of female spaces (293).
But what was the experience of women who were transplanted, either by their own
volition or against their will, outside these tamed domestic spheres, into the wilderness, and how
did they respond to primitive nature? Annette Kolodny cites the 1682 publication of Mary White
Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson as the
first public American record of a woman’s encounter with the wilderness of a New World
landscape (17). Captured by Indians in February 1675, Rowlandson describes her journey
49

through a “vast and desolate Wilderness” with the symbolic significations, as Kolodny suggests,
of a Puritan community that viewed itself “as a suffering and embattled Old Testament Israel
surrounded by enemies” (18). Further, Kolodny notes how the natural landscape in
Rowlandson’s narrative reflects her mental and physical state: a swamp imagined as a deep
dungeon or a hill as “tiresome and wearisome” (18). In sum, Kolodny writes: “Never does
[Rowlandson] suggest that she perceives any beauty in the landscape, and only once does she
record that the landscape provided her sustenance directly—that is, without the Indians’
intercession” (19). Kolodny also cites a 1786 tract in which Daniel Boone’s captivity story, The
Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, one of the first settlers, was printed together alongside “A
Narrative of the Captivity and Escape of Mrs. Francis Scott, an Inhabitant of Washington
County, Virginia.” This juxtaposition of captivity narratives, Kolodny suggests, is indicative of
“those patterns through which Americans were coming to image male and female experience at
the edge of the frontier” (29); that is, in a primitive natural environment. Captured by Indians,
Boone is quickly adopted into the tribe, hunts with them, and earns their admiration for his
shooting prowess; and when he finally escapes, Boone expeditiously negotiates the 160 mile
journey in four days, employing his woodland skills to survive off the fat of the land. Far from
dreary, the captivity experience reflects Boone’s peripatetic longing to “resign my domestic
happiness…to wander through the wilderness of America” (Kolodny 29). Scott’s experience, on
the other hand, lacks the pastoral charm of Boone’s wilderness “Peace” and “sylvan shade.”
Never contemplating adoption by the Indians, Scott continually searches for an opportunity to
escape, and when she does, without any type of woodland knowledge, tools, or weapons, she is
dependent on chance and circumstance as she endures the attenuating journey through a hostile
American wilderness back to civilization (Kolodny 30). From the seventeenth century to the
50

beginning of the nineteenth century, Kolodny notes the popularity of the female captivity
narrative during the steady and persistent westward movement due in great part to how
transplanted women from towns and small cities saw in their own frontier experience the central
drama of the captivity narrative: the woman’s suffering in the wilderness (31, 33). “At the very
least,” Kolodny writes:
…these narratives offered models of the kind of passive forbearance that some
readers were themselves practicing—and on a recognizable terrain. For those
women who did not themselves choose relocation to the frontier…the female
captivity narrative may have offered the only available literary vehicle through
which, whether as readers or as writers, they might safely confront the often
unhappy experiences of their westward migration. (34)

While these captivity narratives provided models of forbearance for women thrust into an
untamed natural environment, American women, barred from the male-constructed myth of the
American wilderness, discovered a way to assert their own paradisal projections onto the new,
uncultivated landscape around them. Unlike men’s, women’s imaginative play, Kolodny writes,
“focused on the spaces that were truly and unequivocally theirs: the home and the small
cultivated gardens of their own making,” a paradise “in which the garden and the home were
one” (6). The result of such a radical reimagining, Kolodny argues, were twofold: first, it
reshaped the American Adam, that roaming, solitary hunter of the deep woods. Second, it
redefined the meaning of the American garden, plucking it from the dark forests and distant
valleys and bringing it within the domestic sphere where it could be tamed and cultivated (5-6).
Through the cultivation of a garden, women could avoid a feeling of psychological captivity by
transforming the landscape through a socially sanctioned and female-oriented activity, one
evading, as Kolodny argues, “the disappointments inherent in the male fantasies” (7).
22
Thus,
Kolodny writes, “That most women did not become so traumatized by the dislocations of
51

pioneering…often appears directly related to their capacity either to create such a garden or at
least to project its possibility onto the forested wilderness” (37).

2b. CARVER’S CONFLICTING GENDERED SPACES

In Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home,” a barrier divides Claire and Stuart:
“Something has come between us though he would like me to believe otherwise” (WICF 160).
23

While not identifying this dividing “something,” Saltzman believes it is “fortified by [Stuart’s]
refusal, or inability, to recognize its profundity” (85). Bethea links this dividing “something” to
Claire’s fragile mental state, yet he blames Carver’s lack of explanation of Claire’s crackup on
the “extraordinary complexity of mental illness and what can be reasonably accomplished in a
short story” (126). Meyer astutely believes this “something” is “gender-related.” However,
while acknowledging gender as vital in a reading of “So Much Water so Close to Home,” Meyer
only considers gender as it relates to Claire’s empathy for and visualization of herself as being
like the story’s female victim (77). Myer’s textual analysis, I believe, would be augmented by a
consideration of gender as it relates to male and female spaces; the gendered, socially prescribed
behaviors exhibited in those spaces; and how conflict arises when one space, or the behaviors
particular of a certain gendered space, encroaches on another. My reading of “So Much Water,”
then, explores Claire and Stuart’s marital rift as relating to gendered spheres. Spatially, Claire’s
gendered sphere includes the home, the town, and the domesticated natural world (orchards,
fields, etc.) around its periphery, while Stuart’s sphere is the wild and untamed wilderness where
he and his friends annually retreat to fish, play cards, and drink whiskey. Claire, I argue, is
52

spatially and morally unhinged as Stuart’s sphere, with its concomitant behavior, impinges on
her safe domestic sphere.
While camping on the Naches River, Stuart and three male friends discover the dead
body of Susan Miller, a teenager from a nearby town, floating in the water. Rather than attend to
the girl and cut their vacation short, they decide to anchor the body to a tree with a piece of rope
and continue their two days of fishing, drinking, and card playing. Only on the third day do they
call the sheriff to report their “grisly find.” Consequently, Stuart’s deliberate indifference to the
victim and his astonishing incomprehension of Claire’s feelings lead her to the edge of nervous
breakdown.
Claire begins to apprehend that these “decent…family men [who are] responsible at their
jobs,” exhibit a coarser, anti-social behavior when outside the domestic sphere and in nature
(161). Stuart’s laziness and apathy are clear as he pleads fatigue and the late hour to rationalize
not immediately notifying authorities of the body. To do so, Stuart callously suggests, would
ruin the opening day of the fishing season. But then there are the more incriminating details that
Stuart would not have shared, details suggesting how Claire creates an imagined narrative of the
event colored by these men’s refusal to “help” the dead girl. Where Stuart only recounts
securing the girl’s body to the tree roots with a nylon cord, Claire’s imagined narrative describes
how the “flashlights of the…men played over the girl’s body” and how later they “told coarse
stories and spoke of vulgar or dishonest escapades out of their past.” And when the men leave
the campsite for home, Claire describes, as if she were there herself, how they “didn’t look at the
girl again before they left” (162).
Though Claire knows it would be easier “not to dwell on this any longer…[to] get over it,
put it out of sight, out of mind…and ‘go on,’” she fears that the wilderness, with its concomitant
53

coarse and anti-social behavior, has overrun the presumed safety of her domestic sphere.
Literally, “Stuart becomes monstrous [to Claire]” (Meyer 76), not only in his manners, the way
he eats with “arms on the table,” but also in the way she perceives his physical body as becoming
animal-like. She fixates on his “heavy arms” and hairy legs,” and the way his fingers, like claws,
“scraped, scraped against his stubble of whiskers” (163, 166). Even more, Claire comes to see in
Stuart a capacity for violence, one she intuited during a particularly bad argument five years
before when Stuart tells her that “someday this affair…will end in violence,” a threat “she files
away somewhere and begins repeating aloud from time to time” (168). Suddenly for Claire, her
world is rife with violence, real and imagined. After returning from Susan Miller’s funeral,
Claire believes Stuart has harmed their son, Dean:
For a wild instant I feel something has happened to Dean, and my heart
turns.
“Where is he?” I say. “Where is Dean?”
“Outside,” he says.
“Stuart, I’m so afraid, so afraid,” I say. (176)

Stuart believes a sexual release will cure Claire’s malaise, but she refuses his advances by
stomping on his toe. Stuart insults Claire, then picks her up and drops her: “I sit on the floor
looking up at him and my neck hurts and my skirt is over my knees” (176). Distancing herself
from Stuart, Claire begins sleeping in the extra bedroom, but Stuart breaks the lock on the door.
“He does it,” believes Claire, “just to show me that he can, I suppose” (177).
Ultimately, Claire recognizes that Stuart’s response to the natural world, to violently
conquer and master it, is indicative of a larger pattern of male treatment of females. Susan
Miller’s fate is not unlike that of the “conquered” fish Stuart takes from the freezer to show
Dean: pulled from the cold water, a “line” securing her body, and later the coroner “examining
it…cutting, weighing, measuring” (167). Claire has come to feel that “a violation of Susan
54

Miller…is a violation of all women” (Campbell 39), and for this reason she naturally identifies
with the murdered girl, imagining herself as a homicide victim: “I look at the creek. I float
toward the pond, eyes open, face down, staring at the rocks and moss on the creek bottom until I
am carried away into the lake where I am pushed by the breeze” (166).
However, preceding the violence enacted on female bodies is the objectifying male gaze,
which is often destructive and portents, in many of Carver’s stories, an imminent violence (Amir
71).
24
Suddenly, Claire is aware of how the male gaze that “played over [Susan’s nude] body” is
now fixed on her. Claire experiences this gaze as she travels the 117 miles to Summit to attend
Susan Miller’s funeral, leaving town’s safe confines and its peripheral domesticated nature of
“fields of oats and sugar beets and apple orchards” and entering a rough country with “stands of
timber” and mountains (173). “Her imagination fill[ed] with corpses and victims of rape”
(Saltzman 88), Claire is unable to discern the motives of the truck driver who stops to help her:
“He looks at my breasts and legs. The skirt has pulled up over my knees. His eyes linger on my
legs…” (174). But adding to Claire’s emotional crisis is the disturbing awareness that this male
gaze has penetrated the domestic sphere. Even the boy delivering a box of roses from Stuart
ogles Claire: “The boy looks at my robe, open at the throat, and touches his cap” (177).
What Claire cannot understand is why men like Stuart must retreat into the wilderness.
Watching the fishermen at a large pond not far from town, Claire wonders and then asks Stuart:
“So much water so close to home, why did he have to go miles away to fish? ‘Why did you have
to go there of all places?’ I say” (165).
If Claire had once felt Stuart’s fishing closer to home were the solution to maintain the
domestic sphere, she no longer feels that way by the story’s end. Not only has a coarse
wilderness ethos intruded upon her insular world, but Claire realizes the domestic world she
55

inhabits is unfulfilling and potentially empty of the promise of happiness. While early in the
marriage Claire struggles with mental health and is institutionalized for a short time, Stuart, an
electrical engineer who has just received a promotion and a substantial raise, promises that
“everything is going to be different and better for them.” With financial struggles no longer an
obstacle, Stuart is able “to relax for the first time in years” (168). As a sign of their burgeoning,
middle-class prosperity, they buy a station wagon for Claire, a vehicle that culturally and
functionally represents the domestic sphere. As Claire travels to Susan Miller’s funeral and
passes through wild country, this vehicle serves as an extension of that domestic sphere, a
hermetic enclosure to protect her from the truck driver she believes might be the girl’s killer.
However, for Claire, the domestic sphere has become a stifling enclosure. When asked why she
won’t roll down the window, Claire confesses: “I want to smother…I am smothering, can’t you
see?” (174). This claustrophobia stems from Stuart’s deliberate indifference and his astonishing
incomprehension, both of which have revealed two certainties to Claire. The first is that people
do not care what happens to other people, and the next, indicating a kind of hopeless fatalism, is
that nothing will change for her and Stuart: “We have made our decisions, our lives have been
set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop” (167). These certainties have
deteriorated Claire’s once-safe domestic sphere, altered her worldview, and displaced here. Like
Susan Miller, Claire feels as if she is floating untethered, carried by forces she cannot control.
Will Claire “get over” Stuart’s apathy and incomprehension, putting it out of sight and out of
mind as she has before, and return to her former life? Or will she refuse Stuart’s sexual
advances?
In the second, minimalized version of “So Much Water so Close to Home” from What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Claire finally yields to Stuart’s sexual advances and
56

allows herself to be “symbolically raped” (Meyer 104). Claire’s comment, “I can’t hear a thing
with so much water going” (RCCS 279), though there is no water actually running, “clearly
recalls the rape and murder of the other girls” (Meyer 104). Claire even takes part in this
violation: “‘That’s right,’ I say, finishing the buttons myself. ‘Before Dean comes in’” (RCCS
279). Though Claire’s yielding in this version seems unexpected, it “might involve less a change
in mind…than the loss of it” (Bethea 126). Or perhaps, as Charles May argues, she “sees sex as
the means of a desperate and futile effort to hang on to life” (Meyer 104), a yielding that
attempts “to reconstruct on an unstable basis a world that has been reduced to chaos” (Campbell
40) and return Claire to the “status quo” of her old life (Meyer 104). However, in the longer
version of the story, Claire will not return to the status quo, “refusing to have anything sexual to
do with Stuart, whose gestures, looks, and actions justify her fear of violence from him”
(Campbell 41). Though untethered and free floating in this longer version, Claire, seeing her
surroundings with new eyes, will not return to her old life as a domestic object.
Carver’s “Distance” is another story best understood in terms of gendered spaces. Unlike
most Carver stories, which focus on strained domestic relationships rapidly moving toward
dissolution, “Distance,” instead, celebrates the good times that existed in a fledgling marriage.
In this framed story, the narrator’s twenty-year-old daughter, Catherine, “a survivor from top to
bottom,” is in Milan over Christmas and asks her father “what it was like when she was a kid”
(WICF 140). While clear from the story’s beginning that the family has broken apart, Catherine
is interested in understanding what went wrong in her parents’ relationship, why her father
moved to Italy. Obliging her, the father tells the story of the first argument he and his wife had,
which happened when Catherine was only three weeks old. The argument comes about when the
wife makes the young father choose between leaving her all day with their sick daughter
57

(Catherine) or going duck hunting with his deceased father’s good friend, Carl Sutherland.
Leaving for the hunting trip, the young father decides to return home, where he and his wife
reconcile, share a big breakfast, and assure themselves they “won’t fight anymore” (147).
However, the marriage doesn’t last. In the story’s final scene, the father looks out over the
snowy Milan rooftops and remembers with nostalgia the time when he and his wife had “leaned
on each other and laughed until the tears had come” (148). Far removed from that point of time,
he is, as the title indicates, “distanced from his wife, from his daughter, even from the physical
setting, as well as from his own past” (Meyer 74). Attempting to identify and understand the
forces that sundered this relationship, Lainsbury places particular importance on a textual
analysis that underscores “the tension between the domestic and wilderness” (45).
In the father’s “sweet and innocent tale,” certainly colored by nostalgia and sentiment, he
and his wife, “kids themselves,” live an “Edenic existence of teenage love” where swearing is a
terrible thing (Bethea 123). “The boy” and “the girl,” as he refers to himself and his wife, are
“crazy in love” and clearly enjoy the newness of “playing house” in their three-room apartment
under a dentist office: “Each night they cleaned the upstairs in exchange for their rent and
utilities. In summer they were expected to maintain the lawn and the flowers, and in winter the
boy shoveled snow from the walks and spread rock salt on the pavement” (RCCS 917).
Catherine’s birth only adds to the charm of this domestic Eden. As the boy bathes her the night
before his hunting trip with Carl, he “marveled again at the infant who had half his features….
He powdered the tiny body and then powdered in between the fingers and toes. He watched the
girl put the baby into its diaper and pajamas” (920). While relishing the small pleasures of the
home and of being a father, the boy is preoccupied with the impending hunt. After the bath, he
58

walks out into the overcast, cold night and lets himself “imagine what it might be like tomorrow,
geese milling in the air over his head, shotgun plunging against his shoulder” (921).
The girl cannot understand the boy’s deep connection with the natural world and his
longing to enter into it. For the girl, the natural world is a place of recreation and fun, an
indulgence the boy earns for his domestic service. “You go [hunting] and have some fun,” she
tells him, “you deserve it” (919). However, with the baby up all night, presumably sick, and the
boy still planning on his expedition with Carl, the act of entering the wild to hunt becomes, for
the young mother, a “form of desertion” (Lainsbury 45). Ultimately, the boy must chose
between hunting and time with Carl or the domestic sphere:
You’re going to have to choose, the girl said. Carl or us, I mean it, you’ve
got to choose.

What do you mean? the boy said slowly.

You heard what I said, the girl answered. If you want a family you’re going to
have to choose. If you go out that door you’re not coming back, I’m serious.
(923)

For the boy, the natural world, in part, is the antidote for an unarticulated, incipient
domestic claustrophobia implied in the way he glances up at the stars as he drives to Carl’s house
and envies their “privileged distance from the tension, the noise and the guilt that he wants to
escape” (Saltzman 80-81). But even more, the natural world, and the hunting done there,
provides “an opportunity to cement relationships and values” (Saltzman 80). Carl Sutherland,
“an old hunting and fishing friend of his father’s” (RCCS 918), represents the iconic American
woodsman, much like Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket, a man “who lived alone and was not
given to casual talk,” with “a toughness about him and a woods knowledge that the boy liked and
admired” (918-919). Further, the boy’s relationship with Carl allows both to “keep open a
connection” (Lainsbury 45) to their past: hunting together as a means to “replace a loss they
59

both felt” (RCCS 918-919). Lastly, for the boy, the natural world, while charged with sublime
beauty, is an untamed space he attempts to master and conquer, even destroy. Searching for a
metaphor for his and the girl’s mutual love and “taking the first comparison that came to mind,”
the boy describes how Canada geese “only marry once,” and how “if one of them dies…the other
one will never remarry.” Concerned that the boy can destroy something he loves and admires,
the girl asks if he’s ever “killed” one of these “marriages,” and if yes, if it bothers him.
Addressing the obvious paradox of his actions, the boy argues: “You can’t think about it when
you’re doing it. I love everything there is about hunting geese. And I love to just watch them
even when I’m not hunting them. But there are all kinds of contradictions in life. You can’t
think about all the contradictions” (920). Because we already know from the story’s frame that
the couple’s love does not last forever, we look at the boy’s metaphor “with a sense of irony and
foreshadowing” (Meyer 108). At the story’s conclusion, the father is ironically “mateless.”
“The story of the geese,” observes Saltzman, “had clearly been designed to serve as an object
lesson, a symbolic confirmation of love’s permanence to aid the couple through tough times;
unfortunately…its final effect is to emphasize the inability to live up to such vows” (82). While
it is true that the relationship doesn’t last, the story of the geese also poignantly highlights a
possibly unbridgeable moral and ideological fissure between the sexes. In the end, the girl, like
Claire in “So Much Water so Close to Home,” cannot understand the male desire to retreat into
the wilderness to bond, conquer, master, and destroy.
Suggesting that this problem is perhaps universally insoluble, Lainsbury notes that
ultimately “the contradictions inherent in the wilderness idyll cannot be resolved in the domestic
sphere” (46). That said, the boy chooses to forgo the hunting expedition and return home, a
decision facilitated by Carl Sutherland, who, stepping out of his role as iconic American
60

woodsman, or at least the iconic role the boy has imposed on him, tells the young man: “…this
hunting business you can take it or leave it. It’s not that important.” The wood-savvy male who
lives alone and doesn’t talk much, tells the young man that what makes him “a lucky boy” is
precisely what he has just fled: home, wife, child, the domestic (RCCS 924). This “hunting
business,” once necessary for survival, has now become a sport pursued outside the sphere of
domestic entanglements and, for the boy, “a way for men to keep in touch with something they
learned from their fathers,” just as he has learned these skills from his father and Carl (Lainsbury
45-46). However, internalizing Carl’s wise words, at least in the immediate, the boy returns
home to be forgiven of his wife and to partake of a hearty breakfast that celebrates “his choice of
domestic responsibility over an illusory wilderness freedom” (ibid.).
When the father finishes this story, Catherine expresses her interest in it, but, not
completely satisfied, asks what happened, why the marriage fractured. “Things change,” the
father says, “...they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.” Then he stays at the
window, gazing out into the snowy night, remembering fondly when he and his wife had “leaned
on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where
he’d go in it—was outside a while anyway” (WICF 148). Not heeding Carl’s counsel, the boy
does eventually go out into “the cold,” choosing that space over the domestic space. In the end,
like Claire, the father inhabits a liminal space. “That life” over, he lives in Milan, cut off “from
Carl Sutherland and what he represents” and from “the permanence of the domestic life he has
shared with his wife” (Lainsbury 46).
Like “Distance,” Carver’s “The Student’s Wife” is a story that ends with the cognizance
of one’s own isolation. Over the course of a sleepless night, Nan, the insomniac titular character,
contemplates the crushing domestic weight of clothing children and paying bills as her husband
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Mike uproots the family every couple years in his peripatetic pursuit of education. Unable to
recapture the carefree days of their early marriage or to experience the intellectual and
imaginative freedom Mike enjoys as a student, Nan, as wife and mother, “comes face-to-face
with her own otherness as an isolated individual” (Campbell 23).
On a physical, psychological, and emotional level, Nan’s sense of entrapment manifests
itself in her dreams. In the story’s opening, Mike reads a Rilke poem, “his rich voice…spill[ing]
[Nan] into a dream of caravans just setting out from walled cities and bearded men in robes”
(WYP 120). The dream’s setting is ancient and exotic, a sharp contrast to the Woodlawn
Apartments, the “enclosed city” Nan feels pressing in on her. In her second dream, Mike and
Nan argue about who will sit in the cramped seat at the back of a boat, both insisting on
sacrificing for the comfort of the other. Finally squeezing into the seat, Nan describes the
confined space as “so narrow it hurt my legs” and how she “was afraid the water was going to
come in over the sides” (122), a narrative that underscores how Nan has sacrificed herself for
Mike and her children” (Bethea 60). Unable to control the boat or even see its direction from
where she sits in the back, Nan’s dream teems with an anxiety and fear “that if something bad
were to happen they would not have the resources to bail themselves out” (Lainsbury 103).
Perhaps able to parse out Nan’s growing discontent in these dreams, Mike is interested more in
sleep than in his wife’s psychological and emotional state, literally turning away from her and
staring at the nightstand as she relates the boat dream. His only response is: “That’s some
dream,” and feeling he “should say something more,” relates how one of their friends dreams in
color (WYP 122).
Caught in the grip of insomnia and unable to escape into the world of dreams, Nan
escapes instead into the memory of a newlywed, overnight camping trip on the Tilton River, a
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recollection that “after scarcely thinking about it these last years…had begun coming back to her
lately” (122). Though the trip hadn’t gone off without a hitch (the burned pan and the coffee that
wouldn’t boil), the memory has a sense of pastoral escapism
25
in its emphasis on the joys of
simple food, the Elizabeth Browning poetry Mike reads out loud, and, above all, in a freedom
associated with the absence of financial and domestic worry.
Still unable to sleep, Nan distracts herself from the insomnia by enumerating to a sleepy
Mike all the things she likes: “I like good foods, steaks and hash-brown potatoes…. I like good
books and magazines, riding on trains at night, and those times I flew in an airplane. […]
There’s a moment as you leave the ground you feel whatever happens is all right” (125).
However, Nan’s reference to flight, in contrast to the reality of her present immobility and the
family’s economic dearth, seems to change her list of likes into a list of wants that “intimate a
craving for a more fulfilling life” (Bethea 61). “I’d like to have nice clothes all the time,” Nan
tells Mike. “I’d like to be able to buy the kids nice clothes every time they need it without
having to wait. […] And I’d like to have a place of our own. I’d like to stop moving around
every year, or every other year” (WYP 122). Nan then urges Mike to share his list of likes. In
contrast to Nan’s specific and abundant list of changes that would better her and the family’s
situation, Mike, either oblivious, lacking ambition, or unwilling to acknowledge Nan’s domestic
burden, asks her to leave him alone before turning over to sleep.
Her life circumscribed by the apartment walls, denied the liberation of flight “when
whatever happens feels all right” (WYP 124), Nan’s aching limbs and shoulders suggest not the
kind of pain she experienced as a growing eleven year old, but the pain associated with being
bound. Envying the ease with which Mike falls asleep, Nan lies next to him and “tried to
regulate her breathing so that she could breathe in and out the same rhythm he did. It was no use”
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(127). This failed attempt to keep pace with Mike’s breathing indicates Nan’s desire to enjoy the
male freedoms denied her by her socially constructed role as homemaker. While nature in “So
Much Water” and “Distance” is literally a wild, unrestricted space where men retreat, the “wild”
of “The Student’s Wife” is not a physical space but rather an unbound intellectual and
imaginative space available firsthand to Mike and only secondhand to Nan. Freed from the
lion’s share of household duties, able to pursue education, Mike reads Rilke, Elizabeth Bowen,
and Rubaiyat while Nan can only passively listen.
Isolated and entrapped, Nan resents Mike. Having passed another night without sleep,
she looks in on her sleeping husband, “knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched
over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his
arm flung out across her side of the bed, his jaw clenched” (WYP 129). Pointing to Mike’s sleep
and the shroud that covers him, Campbell posits that Nan’s emotional response might possibly
be “an intuition of life without Mike,” that “Nan is unprepared for life without her husband if she
is unprepared to pass even a single night alone” (23). However, rather than loss, the language of
this passage suggests Nan’s resentment. His “heavy sleep” and out-flung arms taking up the bed
and his “clenched jaw” (WYP 129) reinforce “the idea of Mike dominating their relationship”
(Bethea 62). As the story’s title suggests, Nan’s revelation after this sleepless night is that she is
“an appendage of her husband” (Saltzman 50). With the sun rising on a new day and this new
knowledge, “by stages things were becoming very visible” (WYP 129). “A sunrise so terrible as
this” (WYP 129) speaks to the “increased clarity with which [Nan] sees her life [and] the sickly
nature of that existence” (Bethea 62). Like Claire and the father, Nan faces the void alone, the
familiar world now unfamiliar and foreign. With no one to listen to her, Nan kneels at her bed
and prays to God: “She put her hands out on the bed. ‘God,’ she said. ‘God, will you help us,
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God?’ she said” (WYP 129), but the enclosed nature of this language (“God…God” and “she
said…she said), argues Bethea, only reinforces Nan’s isolation: “There is no God in the world of
‘The Student’s Wife,’ a fact that only intensifies the poignancy of Nan’s desperate alienation”
(62).
2c. PASTORAL HARMONY

Like most of Carver’s early stories, “So Much Water,” “Distance,” and “The Student’s
Wife” end bleakly and darkly: characters isolated and alone, their protecting, unmovable spaces
suddenly foreign and newly menacing. In short, they find themselves where so many of Carver’s
characters find themselves: stuck in Hopelessville.
26
However, Carver’s later work suggests
there exists a solution to the ostensible incompatibility and elusive promise of these two
gendered spaces: the home and the wilderness.
With the publication of Cathedral, critics proclaimed a striking change in Carver’s style
and structure, especially when compared with the bare-bones, truncated, and indeterminate prose
of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
27
Many critics also noted a change in
Carver’s tone, an increased hopefulness and optimism for his down-and-out characters, even the
possibility of redemption.
28
Stull remarks that Cathedral’s humanism has replaced the spare and
unforgiving existential realism of his early stories.
29
Marc Chenetier sees in Cathedral “…a
working towards hope rather than horror….” (170). Meyer claims Carver’s new stories to be “no
longer so bleak” (125). Campbell notes a “more generous spirit visible in his work” and how
“the voice remains the same, but the vision becomes less grounded is despair.” He writes
further, “Where once the narrative halted in emotional tumult, the story continues and
equilibrium is restored. Despair becomes redemption; the alienated are reconciled” (48). Nesset
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witnesses in Cathedral “rare moments of near self-disenfranchisement, occasional bright
openings in closed-down lives, however temporary those openings may be” (52). And finally,
Kathleen Shute, attributing the tonal change in Cathedral to Carver’s recovery from alcoholism,
sees the author generously granting his characters “some light by which to navigate, the chance
for insight, a greater range of freedom and personal choice,” as well as “a strand of hope” and
“the possibility of salvation” (Campbell 120).
30
Even Carver, while acknowledging that in
Cathedral “things still don’t work out for the characters,” notes that even though “ideas and
ideals and people’s goals and visions” perish, “the people themselves don’t perish. They have to
pull up their socks and go on” (Gentry 161).
While the first story in Cathedral, “Feathers,” examines another marriage on the verge of
dissolution,
31
it is also a rare specimen in Carver’s oeuvre in that it might be the only story in
which he represents a genuinely healthy marriage. The story focuses on Jack and Fran, a couple
whose relationship, perhaps unbeknownst to them in the beginning, shows sighs of tension and
strain. They pass the time watching TV and movies or wishing for the things they don’t have:
“We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could
spend a couple of weeks in Canada (C 5). But something they don’t wish for is children. When
the invitation to dinner comes from Bud and Olla, Fran is annoyed. She doesn’t know or want to
know Bud, Jack’s friend from work, or his wife Olla: “Why do we need other people? she
seemed to be saying. We have each other” (5-6). “[Jake and Fran’s] insistence upon self-
sufficiency,” Saltzman argues, “appears to be a shield against incursions that would expose the
fragility of their relationship, while their routine discussions of things they wish for but never
expect to have…come to suggest more profound deficiencies” (126).
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Though “Feathers” focuses on Jake and Fran’s relationship, Bud and Olla serve as
important foils. In a way, they’re grotesques, allowing their peacock Joey to come into the house
and play with their infant son, Harold. Further, prominently displayed in their front room is “an
old plaster-of-Paris cast of the most crooked, jaggedy teeth in the world” (C 13), Olla’s teeth, a
reminder to herself, she explains, of how much she owes Bud for saving her from her first
husband’s alcoholism and then paying for her orthodontics. Bud recognizes the strangeness of
the peacock and the cast of crooked teeth, but laughs off the potential embarrassment. Later,
Olla brings out their baby, Harold, whom Jake describes as “the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen. It
was so ugly I couldn’t say anything” (20). Moreover, while the consummate hosts, Bud and Olla
also lack refinement. Their ashtray is shaped like a swan; Olla openly discusses her father’s
grisly death in a logging accident, her potentially abusive first marriage, and the couple’s limited
finances from supporting her mother. Meyer observes that:
Despite the grotesqueries…Bud and Olla seem remarkably happy; they enjoy
bantering with each other, and with the bird and child, and represent a completely
well-adjusted family…happy in themselves and largely unconcerned about what
others might think. (126)

Why, then, among Carver’s unhappy couples, are Bud and Olla happy? The answer, I argue, is
the compatibility of two gendered spaces, the female domestic and the male wild, coexisting
equally and harmoniously in an actual, rather than an idealized or remembered, physical space.
As Jake and Fran drive to Bud and Olla’s house, navigating the complicated country
roads with the map Bud has provided, they enter a setting that is foreign to them. Though having
lived in town for three years, they’d never driven out to the country. Taken with the greenery,
Jake adds country living to his list of wants:
It was early evening, nice and warm, and we saw pastures, rail fences, milk cows
moving slowly toward old barns. We saw red-winged blackbirds on the fences,
and pigeons circling around haylofts. There were gardens and such, wildflowers
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in bloom, and little houses set back from the road. I said, “I wish we had us a
place out here.” (C 6)

They see corn growing higher than the car and a garden full of vegetables they can’t identify.
Fran, however, isn’t initially captivated with the “pretty picture.” “It’s the sticks out here,” she
says (7). If Jake and Fran have arrived anywhere, Champion suggests, it is paradise, an “Eden-
like, idyllic” space symbolizing Bud and Olla’s ideal marriage (179). This paradise of domestic
happiness, though, is hard-won and requires human labor. Fran, warming to the agrarian
abundance of the corn fields and ripening tomatoes, compliments Bud on his “nice place,” to
which Bud responds, “A place like this is not all it’s cracked up to be. […] Keeps you going.
Never a dull moment’” (C 10), a reminder that earthly paradise is not immune to life’s
vicissitudes and is ultimately maintained by the sweat of one’s brow.
Essential to Bud and Olla’s earthly paradise is the harmonious cohabitation of the
domestic and the wild. Symbolizing the domestic is Olla, whose physical appearance pulses
with the suggestion of fertility and abundance. Meeting Olla, Jake describes her as “this plump
little woman with her hair done up in a bun…. She had her hands rolled up in her apron. The
cheeks of her face were bright red” (10). But even before Olla meets Jake and Fran, Bud
describes her as “the wife and mother.” Clarifying this statement for the reader, Jake tells us,
“He was talking about Olla, sure. Olla was the only mother around,” a qualification
underscoring the difference between Olla and Fran (9). Olla is a mother, while Fran is
vehemently opposed to having children. Further, Olla acts the perceptive, thoughtful host,
telling Jake and Fran to make themselves at home and then offering them snacks and drinks
before dinner. And then at dinner, a sumptuous feast of baked ham and vegetables presumably
harvested from the garden, Jake and Fran are unaccustomed to Olla’s generous hospitality:
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“Water for me,” Fran said. “But I can get it. I don’t want you waiting on
me. You have enough to do.” She made as if to get up from her chair.
Olla said, “Please. You’re company. Sit still. Let me get it.” She was
blushing again. (16)

If Olla symbolizes the domestic sphere, then the family peacock, Joey, symbolizes the
wild of the story’s country setting. Bethea, in contrast, sees Joey, whose name approximates joy
in spelling and sound, as a symbol of fecundity and joy (148). Such a reading, I believe, while
superficially accurate, precludes the fact that Joey’s significance within the story hinges on the
fact that he is indeed a wild creature with access to the home’s domesticated interior space. It is
Joey’s wildness, in fact, that gives Jake and Fran pause about leaving the car when they finally
arrive at Bud and Olla’s house. Jake notes the peacock’s “bright, wild eyes” and how the bird’s
deafening wail engenders thoughts of “somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous”
(C 8). When Jake asks about Joey over dinner, Olla admits her childhood dream of having a
peacock: “Since I was a girl and found a picture of one in a magazine. I thought it was the most
beautiful thing I ever saw. I cut the picture out and put it over my bed” (19). This bird of
paradise, as the man who sells Bud the peacock calls Joey, is also best friends with the baby
Harold, who, as Olla admits, is “used to having Joey come in and fool around with him a little
before bedtime” (22). Not wanting to disrupt the nightly routine, Jake and Fran tell Bud they
wouldn’t mind if the bird comes in the house. What follows is a tender scene in which Harold
and Joey play together:
The peacock walked quickly around the table and went for the baby. It ran its
long neck across the baby’s legs. It pushed its beak in under the baby’s pajama
top and shook its stiff head back and forth. The baby laughed and kicked its feet.
(24)

The symbolic significance of Harold and Joey’s relationship suggests the source of Bud and
Olla’s happiness. As Harold and Joey play, we witness the harmonious interaction of two
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separate spaces, one embodied in Harold, who is an extension of Olla and inhabits the domestic
world Olla maintains, and Joey, a semi-tamed wild creature permitted to cross the domestic
threshold. This interaction is also suggestive of Bud and Olla’s relationship. Like Joey, it is Bud
whose sphere encompasses the wild world beyond the home, a green world he maintains with
great physical effort, and like Joey, he’s Olla’s protector, having saved her from an abusive
relationship and instilled in her a sense of her own inner beauty.
Jack, watching this affectionate interaction between Harold and Joey, recognizes
something special, the possibility perhaps of an incipient desire for a simple life of gratifying
physical labor amidst pastures and rail fences, where a loving home is center, the kind of life
Bud and Olla have constructed for themselves. At that table, Jack closes his eyes for a moment
and wishes he will “never forget or otherwise let go of that evening,” and this wish comes true,
and Jack reveals that “it was bad luck for me that it did” (25). For Jack, the “bad luck” of never
forgetting that evening becomes a sad reminder that he’s never able to permanently attain any of
the happiness that Bud and Olla have. In the evening’s afterglow, Jack and Fran have a baby, a
step toward Bud and Olla’s life, but for the most part they return to their old lives of isolation
and the anesthesia of TV. Sometimes, for no outward reason Jack notes, Fran will say:
“‘Goddamn those people and their ugly baby…. And that smelly bird…. Who needs them?’”
(25). Like Jack, perhaps Fran, too, made a similar wish at Bud and Olla’s to never forget that
night, and the dim reality of her present life is a painful reminder of a life she wants, but one she
won’t expend the effort to pursue. Jack, too, cannot forget that night. He and Fran’s relationship
deteriorates. There is no communication, “just the TV,” and Jack can’t even share with Fran his
fear that their son has a conniving streak (26). It is a life all the more unsatisfying by the
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enduring memory of Bud and Olla’s world, a world both wild and domesticated, a world they
will never forget and never have.

CONCLUSION

For all of their pastoral longing, few of Carver’s or Cheever’s characters fully realize the
innocence and happiness implicit in pastoral. They certainly experience “essential passions,” but
in the end, having encountered strangeness and danger where they expected paradise and
healing, they return to their mundane, trivial lives.
For Cheever’s suburbanites, the pastoral ideal, at first perceived as a form of salvation
from chaotic modernity, soon becomes wrapped in paradox and irresolvable conflict as
individuals like Francis Weed attempt to balance technical orientation and social convention with
a need for primitive freedom. They soon realize that the pastoral ideal is complicated and self-
defeating (Karl 209). For Carver’s blue-collar folks, the sum total of their outdoor retreats tends
toward the negative, thus Scofield’s appellation of Carver’s negative pastoral. Meyer, too, notes
in Carver a “pastoral ideal [that] has been invalidated” and a naturalism that “always seems to
intrude into the pastoral idyll,” making “any hope for reintegration and regeneration…futile
(116, 82). Instead, what Cheever’s and Carver’s characters find is not pastoral fulfillment, but
“the shadow of its opposite” (Halperin 56).
This shadow of the opposite, argues Garber, has always been part of pastoral’s “energetic
subtext,” giving the mode the potential for “special business.” That is, he continues, this subtext
functions at a subterranean level and promotes a strong counterstatement to statements made on
the text’s surface. “Where the surface promotes the wholeness of the bucolic condition,” Garber
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states, “the subtext speaks for disjunction, lacunae, and breakings away. Where the surface
speaks of plenitude and the fatness of flocks, the subtext shows deprivation and irremediable
loss.” At times even, this anti-pastoral subtext, with its “urgent claims” and uncontainable
energy, has the potential to rise to the surface and undermine pastoral’s assertions (440-441).
Leo Marks also comments on this particular appropriation in pastoral texts, identifying this
subtext as pastoral’s counterforce because it juxtaposes the “real” world with an idyllic vision,
thus qualifying, questioning, or injecting a dose of irony into pastoral’s vision of peace and
harmony (Machine 25). In this way, “The Cabin/Pastoral,” “How About This?,” “Nobody Said
Anything,” “So Much Water So Close to Home,” “Distance,” “The Student’s Wife,” and “The
Country Husband” are very much anti-pastoral texts, challenging, refuting, and exposing, as
Taylor asserts, the fallacies inherent in pastoral myths and traditions. Thus, these stories
function as other putative anti-pastoral texts do, by exposing pastoral’s idealizing literary
tradition and showing the distance between reality and convention (Gifford 123-128).
Carver’s and Cheever’s stories, then, while perhaps offering no solutions to this dilemma,
contribute in a small yet significant way to a larger public discourse in post-WW2 America about
the value and place of the pastoral ideal in a frenetic, technical-oriented world. Some of the
questions this public discourse explores and attempts to answer are: If pastoralism “is a species
of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do
without,” as Buell boldly asserts, might we imagine and construct a new pastoralism, one to
remedy the social realities that make pastoral an untenable fantasy in Carver and Cheever? Or, is
it possible to imagine a post-pastoral world, a world where the dualisms of pastoral—
country/city, art/nature—no longer exist? Is the American mind even capable of thinking
beyond this dualism? Might pastoralism be reimagined as a political force to balance American
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progress and nature? In my exploration of these questions, I will draw on a number of
environmental historians and critics: Leo Marx, William Cronon, Frederick Turner, Carolyn
Merchant, and Lawrence Buell.
Within this discourse, Cronon explorers the ideological dangers of pastoralism, or at least
the pastoral frame embodied in Carver’s wilderness-retreating narrators and in Cheever’s middle
landscape suburbanites. The danger of pastoral is that “by imagining that our true home is in the
wilderness, we forgive ourselves the home we actually inhabit” (81). As a result, Cronon further
asserts, we fail to idealize “the environments in which we actually live, the landscape that for
better or worse we call home” (85). Cronon advocates for thinking beyond pastoralism’s bipolar
moral scales that valorize nature to the exclusion of all else. “Instead,” Cronon suggests, “we
need to embrace the full continuum of natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city,
the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to
celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others (89).
Like Cronon, Turner argues that sublimating nature and vilifying civilization is ultimately
counterproductive, even ethically dangerous. First, Turner seeks to enlarge our notion of nature
to include humans, whose “bodies and brains are a result of evolution, which is a natural process
so paradigmatic that it could almost be said to be synonymous with nature itself” (42). Second,
citing examples of paleobiology and geology, Turner asserts that nature, far from being a perfect
system, is capable of making mistakes and must find its solutions through a process of trial and
error (45). Turner also questions the consequence of our national obsession with the attainment
of solitude to be found in nature, claiming as an empirical fact that we are, historically and now,
social creatures.
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Ultimately, Turner explores a mediating term for culture and nature, one that suggests a
melding of nature and culture. Turner chooses the garden as a place where one can incorporate
the best of nature and the best of technology. Through cultivating this garden, we will create an
idea of nature that encompasses change and death (i.e., realistic, unromanticized nature), and an
idea of culture that employs beneficial technologies, which, as products of our ingenuity, are part
of nature, or so Turner believes.
What Turner advocates for, I believe, is a post-pastoral world, an environmental aesthetic
proposed by Gifford that transcends “the closed circuit of pastoral and anti-pastoral to achieve a
vision of an integrated natural world that includes the human” (148). As Gifford describes it, a
post-pastoral world fosters a sense of awe for the natural world, but tempers that feeling with a
dose of nature’s reality; that is, “the recognition of a creative-destructive universe equally in
balance in continuous momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay,
ecstasy and dissolution.” Further, a post-pastoral world: 1) recognizes “that the inner is also the
workings of the outer, that our inner human nature can be understood in relation to external
nature; 2) Conveys an awareness of both nature as culture and of culture as nature”; 3) believes
that “with consciousness comes conscience”; and, finally, (4) that “the exploitation of the planet
is of the same mindset as the exploitation of women and minorities” (152-165). In short, Gifford
believes a post-pastoral world is only possible when we relinquish our dualistic view that
sublimates nature and denigrates civilization.
Marx’s most current writings seem to support Gifford’s realistic, less exploitive view of
the natural world. While Machine in the Garden has been criticized for overlooking how the
environmental movement has become a political force in American pastoralism, Marx, Cannavò
asserts, rectifies this glaring oversight in later essays by recognizing the important place of
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environmentalism in the pastoral (85). If pastoralism is to offer a radical challenge to late
capitalism, Marx, in “Does Pastoralism Have a Future?,” advocates for a recasting of future
versions of the pastoral to emphasize a relationship with nature that underscores harmony and
accommodation, rather than domination and conquest; sufficiency and sustainability in economic
aspirations instead of maximum production, consumption, and unchecked growth; a preference
for workable ideas applicable to the here and now, rather than absolute, context-free solutions;
and, finally, a pastoral version that will reflect a relationship with nature that lends itself to
achieving a sense of freedom (223).
Carolyn Merchant, too, embraces an approach that underscores the environmental
movement’s emphasis on a sustainable relationship with the natural world, a relationship that
allows humans and nonhumans to thrive. Merchant sees in American pastoralism a declensionist
worldview that valorizes the exploitation of natural beauty and resources under the guise of
American progressivism’s attempt to recover paradise, a notion deeply encoded in Western
culture by the myth of the Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. But, as Merchant
asserts, the consequence of this declensionist plot is the recovery of nature through human labor
to recreate that lost paradise, an endeavor suggesting that nature only has value as an economic
commodity (133). In fact, as Merchant observes, our recovery efforts have created, as is very
clear in Cheever, a Garden of Eden “enclosed shopping mall decorated with trees, flowers, and
fountains,” “engineered spaces and commodity fetishes [that] epitomize consumer capitalism’s
vision of the recovery from the Fall” (153-154). What we must do first, Merchant suggests, is
question the grand patriarchal recovery narrative told by the dominant society of which we are a
part, and, next, to replace it with an environmental approach that sees “history as a slow decline,
not a progressive movement.” Finally, we must work toward, as Marx, Cronon, and Turner
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suggest, “a partnership ethic [that] would bring humans and nonhuman nature into a dynamically
balanced, more nearly equal relationship (155, 157).

1
Buell quoted in Gifford’s Pastoral (4).
2
David Halperin argues that pastoral is difficult to define because: “The expansionist tendency
of pastoral, the dynamic nature of its historical development, its variable subject matter, the
differing attitudes of its practitioners and critics, and, finally, the difficulties surrounding its
literary classification all contribute to the problem of defining it” (Halperin 35).
3
Leo Marx (Machine 54).
4
Patterson’s view is summarized in Gifford’s Pastoral (11).
5
Leo Marx also notes this tendency in how pastoral, from late antiquity to now, has “flourished
within the orbit of world capitals in like situations: times when the pace of change had been
quickening, cities growing, new technologies being introduced, and when (above all) political
regimes or empires were close to the apex of their power” (Machine 62). And corroborating
both Poggioli and Marx, William Howarth argues that, “In a world now driven by ideology and
information, pastoral reminds us of unmediated labor, the pleasure of raking leaves or stacking
firewood,” and how this desire for a simple life closer to nature “preserve[s] our dream of
unfallen Paradise” (28).
6
From Donaldson’s John Cheever: A Biography, 26-31. For more on the Cheever family during
John’s youth, see the chapter “Adolescence.”
7
Scofield, as far as I know, is the first and only literary critic to seriously group some of
Carver’s stories under the heading of pastoral.
8
According to Leo Marx, the retreat is a “symbolic motion,” into a perceived unspoiled terrain
or a cultivated rural setting, a “symbolic landscape” whose opposite is the artificial world of
civilization and art (Machine 10).
9
Carver has a handful of stories whose protagonists are writers or artists: “The Pheasant,” “Put
Yourself in My Shoes,” and “The Augustine Notebooks.”
10
Kirk Nesset also discusses these two thematic obsessions in his essay “‘This Word Love’:
Sexual Politics and Silence in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”
11
Even though Cathedral is more hopeful in its outlook, Brown still argues that Carver, even in
his later career, remained a postmodern writer. Brown asserts that what characterizes
postmodern writing is “its attention to surface detail, its resistance to depth, and its aspect of self-
consciousness, where the medium merges with the subject—the creation of fiction is the subject
of fiction” (125). However, Brown argues that Carver has created his own unique take on
postmodernism by merging it with realism. Of this, he writes: “Carver’s first accomplishment
was to join realism with the resistance to depth and the self-consciousness peculiar to
postmodern fiction. His second accomplishment has been to leave behind the themes of
dissociation and alienation, which postmodern writers inherited from modernists, and show that
reassociation is possible. He has done this because his theory of fiction never lets him leave real
life (126-127).
12
William Stull sees the arc of Carver’s writing as a movement away from the “existential
realism” of his early stories toward a more optimistic “humanist realism.” Existential realism,
according to Stull, “treats reality phenomenologically, agnostically, and objectively. Whether or
in occultation, God…is absent from the world, which is discontinuous, banal, and, by definition,
76

mundane…. This style of existential realism is, therefore, studiously objective, impersonal, and
neutral….” In contrast, humanist realism “takes a more expressive, more ‘painterly’ approach to
its subjects…. Such realism treats reality metaphysically, theologically, and subjectively…. The
artist’s godlike presence illuminates every particle of the world and charges it with meaning” (7-
8).
13
Hayden also notes the embellished religious imagery used in advertising and selling the
suburbs: claims that the Garden of Eden was the first suburb; a new house floating in pink
clouds as a father, mother, and child ascend to it, blueprints in hand; and comparisons of the
suburbs to the Holy Land (6).
14
Donaldson believes that most attacks on the suburbs stem from the myth of Jefferson’s
yeoman farmer, “virtuous and healthy…at once individualistic and altruistic, simultaneously at
one with nature and with his fellow man,” as “unjustifiable expectations” (viii-ix).
15
The three other metaphors Rowe identifies are New Jerusalem, Babylon or Sodom and
Gomorrah, and the Infernal City of Dante. For more on these metaphors, see William Sharp’s
and Leonard Wallock’s Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art and Literature and
James Machor’s Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America.
16
Marx identifies Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, and Hemingway as writers whose
works reflects sentimental pastoralism moving toward complex pastoralism (10).
17
All citations of Cheever stories come from The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf, 1978).
18
For a deeper investigation into the idea of family in Carver’s short fiction, more specifically
relations between children and parents, see chapter 5, “The Function of Family in the Carver
Chronotope,” in G.P. Lainsbury’s The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond
Carver’s Fiction.
19
Buell, Lawrence. “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised.” American Literary History,
Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), p 2.
20
Buell, Lawrence. “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” p. 1.
21
My reader might wonder how this strong conflation of women with the inanimate home came
about at the turn of the twentieth century. Gordon speculates this social phenomenon was “an
outgrowth of women’s ideal role in the culture that was created by industrial capitalism” (283).
In this milieu of new social mobility, one’s status was not ascribed but achieved, making
appearance (the decoration of the body, interior furnishings, and the home) an outward sign of
one’s achievement (283).
22
Kolodny asserts that men came to America with a “fantasied attachment to the primal wild,”
and treated the unspoiled land as an “object of sexual conquest.” Thus, this unrealistic male
fantasy of conquest results in the anguish of “lost Edens” and guilt in the face of a disappearing
wilderness. Conversely, Kolodny argues that the female fantasy of the garden was indeed
attainable because it consisted of “a set of images that limited the very context of imaginative
possibility” (Kolodny, Land Before Her, 7).
23
All references to “So Much Water So Close to Home” come from Where I’m Calling From.
24
Chapter 5 of Ayala Amir’s The Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver explores the visual
aesthetics in some of Carver’s stories, specifically where characters’ eyes fall, what they see and
what they don’t see. She analyzes the thematic import of “looks”: the direct look, the glimpse,
the sidelong look, and eyes shut.
77

25
In Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry, David Halperin
asserts that pastoral supports “an ideal of self sufficiency, simple pleasures without luxury,
freedom from work, want, and pressure” (56).
26
In his review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Donald Newlove writes this
of the collection’s style and subject: “Seventeen tales of Hopelessville, its marriages and
alcoholic wreckage, told in a prose as sparingly clear as a fifth of Smirnoff” (“Fiction Briefs,”
Saturday Review April 1981, p. 77).
27
Of Cathedral’s style, Ewing Campbell writes: “The fictional framework is enlarged and
reinforced by traditional structures. Empty spaces fill with beginnings, middles, ends.
Truncations vanish” (48).
28
However, Saltzman and Bethea argue that Cathedral reflects no shift in Carver’s tone.
Saltzman argues that the “…the majority of the stories [in Cathedral] dispute any claim to a
fundamental break from the tenor of the…preceding collections” (124). Bethea asserts that
Cathedral seems less bleak than What We Talk About because it “provides more physical,
emotional, and psychological details….” (134). Though Bethea sees three stories with positive
endings, for the most part, he argues, “as in earlier stories, the characters fail to communicate
successfully and thus suffer isolation, alienation, and defeat” (135).
29
Stull, William. “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.” Philological
Quarterly, 64:1 (1985: Winter) p. 1.
30
From Kathleen Westfall Shute’s “Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the
Fiction of Raymond Carver,” included in Campbell’s Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short
Fiction.
31
Meyer calls “Feathers” one of the strongest stories in Cathedral, “even if it doesn’t
demonstrate Carver’s new, more hopeful attitude” (125).

78

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______________. Will You Please be Quiet, Please: The Stories of Raymond Carver. New
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___________. “John Hersey Talks with John Cheever.” Interview with John Hersey.
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Donaldson, Scott. “The Machines in Cheever’s Garden.” Critical Essays on John
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______________. The Suburban Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

______________. “Supermarket and Superhighway: John Cheever’s American.”
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Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day,
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Gordon, Beverly. “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women
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Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000.
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Heath-Stubbs, John. The Pastoral. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

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R.G. Collins. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982.

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Marx, Leo. “Does Pastoralism Have a Future?” The Pastoral Landscape. In J. Dixon
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________. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

________. “Pastoralism in America.” Ideology and Classical American Literature. Cambridge:
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Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

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82

BEYOND THE LIGHTS AND OTHER STORIES

By Ryan Shoemaker
83

BEYOND THE LIGHTS

This was when Burger and I were seventeen, before Auburn, Washington had the
Supermall and the amphitheater, when the Muckleshoot Indian Casino was just a big smoky tent
in the middle of a parking lot that went on for a mile. It was our senior year, and everyone
listened to Nirvana, and everyone wanted to be in a band, and everyone could play at least three
guitar chords and the first part of “Stairway to Heaven.” And for a while that year we hung out
with Bingham.
Bing most people called him. Or Asshole when he wasn’t around. He moved from
Bellevue at the beginning of our junior year.
His parents bought the biggest house in Highland Meadows, a palace with a racquetball
court and an indoor swimming pool, and from its glass sunroom that looked out over the Green
Valley, I could see my house through a stand of Cedars, the mossy roof and faded paint, no
bigger than a doll house from that distance.
Before Bellevue, Bing had lived in Hong Kong. And before that in Abu Dhabi. He’d been
other places, too. Rome, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro.
He told us he’d once seen a man stabbed in a Cairo market. There’d been the flash of the
knife right before it went into the chest, the sound of it, something like cutting into a cantaloupe,
and then the wild spread of blood. We were eating when he told us this. Maybe we were at Taco
Bell or Herfy’s. I don’t remember. But what I do remember is the quick jolt I felt in my stomach
and how Burger turned green.
Like us, Bing wrote for the school newspaper, but unlike us, he thought of himself as
subversive. He wanted to shock or piss off as many people as possible. There was what happened
with Coach Sanders at the end of our junior year. Supposedly, Sanders had taken Bing aside and
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told him he needed to change his attitude, to come down from his high horse and let Christ into
his life, and then he’d prayed for Bing’s soul, right there in his classroom. I’m sure Bing was
sitting there, fingers clasped together, head bowed, smiling maniacally while Sanders droned on,
because this would be his story, his next big exposé for the school newspaper.
Later, Bing found six other students who’d also endured Sanders’ preaching and prayers
and religious strong-arming. It came out that he was proselytizing for the small church in Sumner
where he was assistant pastor. Sanders didn’t come back our senior year, and Burger and I really
didn’t mind, because we were in his geometry class and he knew we were Mormon and never let
us forget with his veiled biblical references and long sighs that we were going to hell.
But it just wasn’t what Bing wrote that pissed people off. In class, he always had to
disagree with our teachers on some small point. Our honors American lit teacher, Mrs. Kirby,
hated him. I could see it in the way her jaw clenched and the crepe flesh under her chin quivered
and turned pink every time Bing raised his hand. Mr. Steinburn and Mrs. McNiven wouldn’t let
him in their classrooms. Bing did most of his work in the conference room next to the principal’s
office. That was his punishment. Burger and I would see him there through the large windows,
head bowed over whatever he was doing, maybe some article that would get another teacher
fired. Maybe Mrs. Kirby.
#
On weekend nights, we cruised through Auburn in Fords or Buicks with more
horsepower than we needed, looking for a whiff of something profound and timeless in that
subterranean night, or at least something puerile and memorable. We’d drive Lake Holm Road at
eighty miles an hour to feel the car lift off the ground when we topped a rise. We’d stare at each
other, grinning stupidly, and know we were close to an edge we didn’t want to cross—but one
85

we, at least, wanted to see up close. The windows were down those nights, and we’d scream into
the darkness, turn the car around and do it again. And later we’d settle into a corner booth at
Denny’s to eat onion rings and drink Doctor Pepper. Bing talked. Burger and I listened.
That summer, Bing had spent a weekend in Seattle, living on the streets, research for a
story on what it’s like to be young and homeless, he said. Burger and I listened intently. We
covered sports for the school newspaper. Baseball, football, swimming, and gymnastics. Flag
line if we had to. To venture off into the unknown for a story, to go undercover and risk life and
limb, this was beyond us.
Seattle, he told us, was no place for the inexpert. And we knew he wasn’t talking about
Pike Street or the Space Needle. He was talking about those grimy alleys and dark concrete
crevices we’d seen for years from the safety of a yellow school bus zipping over the Alaska Way
Viaduct toward the Pacific Science Center. Bing paused for like a minute after he said this,
examined the thin lines on his knuckles, and then looked up to see if we understood.
Bing was shorter than us, bigger around the chest and belly, the thick body of a wrestler.
He had these blue eyes, like the color of propane set alight, and you could see a ferociousness
swimming in them. A gun ready to fire or a man standing over a pile of stacked boards with his
arm poised above his head—that’s the impression Bing gave us. He did karate at the Goju Center
in Kent and had even won a few tournaments. He had the trophies on a shelf above his bed to
prove it, and sometimes Burger and I would stare at them, at Bing’s name engraved in the
wooden bases or at the faceless plastic men, gold and shining, caught in the middle of a flying
kick or an upward jab, and we’d look at each other and say, “It’s not too late for us.”
He panhandled on the streets, Bing told us, because that’s what homeless teenagers do
when they reach the bottom, when their parents die and leave them nothing or kick them out.
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“You should have seen the sad looks these people gave me,” Bing said. “These women almost
cried.”
I was leaning forward until the edge of the table felt like a machete pressed across my
sternum. Burger’s hand covered his mouth. With Bing, we didn’t want to miss a word. “They
were giving me five and ten dollar bills,” Bing said. “Fifty bucks an hour.” Burger and I believed
him.
And then he went on, head tipped back, eyes closed, like a traveler who’d just returned to
the place he started from.
Bing stayed in a shelter off First Avenue, slept on the lower bunk and endured a pair of
blackened, sockless feet hanging above his head and the deathly smell they threw out, and
sometime in the night he made his way to the drinking fountain through the 15-watt murk and
found it overflowing with vomit. Bing asked us if we thought it could get any worse. His eyes
snapped open. Burger and I flinched. How could it get any worse?
But it did.
So the next morning Bing finishes his little bowl of oatmeal and a banana the Salvation
Army gave him before opening the shelter doors and throwing everyone out, and then this
middle-aged man in a green corduroy suit and black shoes comes walking down the street, a little
bounce in his step, whistling, and he stops Bing and asks him a lot of questions, and Bing, in
character of course, gives this guy a sob story about how his parents died in fiery car crash on
Highway 18, and how he had to go live with his aunt and ran away because she didn’t feed him
and made him sleep on a mattress in the garage. And this man smiles, puts a hand on Bing’s
shoulder and tells him he’s in the business of helping people, and that Bing can stay with him at
his house near Capitol Hill. They could work out a way for Bing to pay his rent and maybe make
87

a little money. You understand, this guy asked, and winked. And Bing told him he understood
pretty well, and then grabbed this guy by the collar and pushed him into a brick wall, and this
guy starts to snivel and tells Bing there must be some kind of misunderstanding and that they
should just forget the whole thing. And the guy takes out his wallet and offers Bing twenty
dollars, and Burger and I can’t believe it. We’re sitting there with greasy fingers and we can’t
believe it. And Bing tells the guy no. Not twenty, not forty, he wants fifty—just to teach this guy
a lesson. And this guy hands it over and hurries off.
Burger had gone pale. His mouth hung open and a big shard of onion ring balanced on his
tongue. Burger and I could never have done something like that. Our parents wouldn’t let us.
They’d already cultivated in us an abiding fear of the unknown.
I looked out the window at the traffic on Auburn Way. It was one of those warm
Octobers that comes once every four or five years. The leaves had fallen from the trees, but we
were still wearing shorts, still in the tattered T-shirts we’d worn all summer. The air was light to
the touch, like a caress, and in it you could smell smoke and fermentation. Any day it might start
raining, and it wouldn’t stop for five months. But it was all right that year, because all of us were
popular, and all of us were going places, and all of us had some crazy dream out there on the
horizon, and all we had to do was reach out and grab it. And on those nights Bing would stare
across the table, head thrown back, eyes aimed just over our heads and out the window, out
beyond Auburn’s wide streets and quaint homes, and we knew that Bing would be the first of us
to reach that horizon.
#
It was our senior year, our last year before adulthood and that unfamiliar world out there
we’d apprenticed for all our lives, and we felt most alive when we were out with Bing or sitting
88

with him in the halogen glare of the stadium lights on a Saturday night watching the football
team mercilessly charge down the turf as the cheerleaders kicked their tan legs high in the air,
waved their gold pom-poms, and shouted things like, “Go, Donny, go.” Brook Barbasolo,
Kendra Sweeney, Shannon Palfrey, Cindy Conn, Heidi Sandberg, Hailey McGinnis. We slowly
went down the cheerleading line, mentally cataloging the aesthetic strengths and weakness of
each. Kendra was my and Burger’s favorite, and often we talked about what it would be like to
kiss her, to run a hand through her honey-colored hair, to feel her tongue in our mouths. Burger
and I spoke in the hypothetical. We’d never kissed a girl.
Bing was more experienced in these matters. He said he and Brook had been seeing each
other for months, meeting every couple weeks at Game Farm Park to make out in her car in a
dark corner of the parking lot, but the whole thing was secret because she was dating Brian
Schwartz, our second-string quarterback, and if Brian ever found out about it there might be
trouble. Of course, Bing assured us he’d take care of Brian if that happened. He also assured us
that Brook was planning to break things off with Brian when the football season ended. Bing
claimed to have touched her breasts. Burger and I shivered at the thought. He told us this one day
in the locker room. Burger and I sat on the wooden benches a few extra minutes that day, tying
and retying our Nikes before we went out to the basketball courts.
And on those nights Donny Goodin would break through the line and run the ball into the
end zone, and then the band would strike up with something timeless and inspiring like “Iron
Man” or “Smoke on the Water,” and Kendra would kick her left leg above her head and if I
looked closely enough I might see a flash of green bloomers beneath her pleated white skirt.
We’d be on our feet, pumping our arms in the air. We’d look over at Bing and he’d be standing,
too, with his arms crossed over his chest, looking down at Brook, his mouth slightly open, and
89

then we’d look at Brook, her ponytail bouncing, her teeth so white, and we believed she was
looking up at him. We’d clap and make strange hooting noises because Bing was making out
with Brook and because we were in love with Kendra and because we were on our way to an
undefeated season.
Bing’s parents were up in the stands. They told us to call them Larry and Barbara.
Together they seemed to orbit in a space closer to the gods, and we looked up at them with awe,
too, and it seemed a light always shone around them. And then we saw our parents up there and
got depressed. They were forty-something going on fifty-five, bland and pale, our mothers with
their bobbed hair and stone-washed jeans and that roll of fat on their bellies, and our fathers, with
their fleshy jowls and billowing sweat pants they hiked up until the waistband practically
covered their nipples. They chased numbers around spread sheets all day at Boeing and always
feared they might lose their jobs.
Larry was a partner in a Seattle law firm. He smelled like the ocean and had a sailboat
and a speedboat and a cabin on San Juan Island he promised to take us to. And Barbara, tall and
blond, a former actress who Bing said had once been offered the lead role in The Graduate but
turned it down because she wouldn’t sleep with the producer. And Barbara’s friend was always
there. Lydia. She’d been a model at one time, but now she and Barbara owned a clothes boutique
in Bellevue, and she was tall and blond and beautiful, and when she stood with the crowd and
tipped her head back and gave it a little shake that whipped her hair around, I would elbow
Burger and we would look around and see all the fathers looking at her, their mouths slightly
open, and for a moment we’d stop watching the game and be troubled by this. All these married
men lusting after this woman!
90

But then down on the field Donny Goodin would score or Greg Debolt would kick a
forty-yard field goal, and we’d be on our feet shouting, and the band would strike up with one of
those timeless songs, and Shannon and Hailey would throw Kendra into the air and she’d spin
three times before they caught her. And Burger and I felt on those nights that the whole world
had condensed into this one moment—the lights and the cheering and the madness, and we knew
in a year we’d be out there beyond the lights, in a world we couldn’t imagine, wearing the white
shirts and dark suits we’d been raised to wear. Elder Anderson and Elder Burger. Mormon
missionaries. We wanted adventure. “Dear God,” we prayed, “send us to Ghana. Send us to
Manila. Not Boise. Not Indianapolis.”
After the mission there’d be school and marriage and children and the eternities. But we
wouldn’t do it like our parents. Burger and I vowed that. We wouldn’t shrivel up into the tired,
upright shells of ourselves and hope for the world beyond. We’d do it like Bing’s parents. We
promised to never get old.
So after the game we’d drive around Auburn and throw things at people, or we’d spray
them with the fire extinguisher Bing stole from the gym, the old kind you filled with water and
pressurized with an air hose at the BP station until the gauge almost touched the red. And it was
all right because everyone was in on the fun.
That’s how it was on those nights after the games, the scream of victory still ringing our
ears, Burger driving his dad’s Ford Taurus station wagon and Bing in the back seat laughing
hysterically and me hanging out the window, the engine roaring and warm air pulling at my lips
and drying my eyes, and I couldn’t stop laughing either.
These were the stories we’d tell someday.
#
91

“I’m already a millionaire,” Bing told us one night when we were huddled in a booth at
Denny’s. “Maybe a billionaire. I don’t know yet.” He drank coffee and stared at a spot just above
us where the ceiling met the wall. He had a wild look and spoke in a voice so low Burger and I
had to lean in to hear. “Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this,” he said. “You promise not to tell
anyone?” Of course we promised. We licked our lips and felt our eyeballs go dry. Bing
straightened up.
“This was back in the 70’s,” he said. “My dad was just out of law school, doing pro bono
work for this Indian tribe in the Peruvian lowlands, one of these tribes where everyone’s naked
and runs around with a spear. They lived in grass huts. They didn’t even have radios. Well, this
big American oil company shows up and tries to take their land. My dad sued the company and
won. It was all over the papers back then.”
We held our forks, but had forgotten the food in front of us.
“They thought he was a god,” Bing said. “Built a statue of him in the middle of the
village. They wanted to give him something, a reward for saving their land, so a couple days
before he flies home, the chief wakes him up early and they start walking. And they walk all
day, and this guy doesn’t say anything. He won’t even look my dad in the eyes because he thinks
he’ll melt or something. And finally they stop in front of this cave and this little Indian chief
lights this torch and they go in, and my dad says the walls are pure gold from the floor to ceiling
and all he had to do was throw a rock against the wall and enough gold would flake off to buy a
Mercedes. And then the chief tells my dad that he can have the gold and that they’d guard it until
he can come back for it.”
Burger sat there in a trance. “And why”—his voice cracked; he panted.—“and why didn’t
they want the gold?”
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Bing was patient, he spoke slowly. He knew we didn’t understand much outside Auburn.
“These people live in dirt,” he said. “They eat worms and think a bracelet made from crocodile
teeth is high fashion. What would they do with gold?”
And then Bing told us how his dad said he could have it all, every ounce of that gold, and
then Bing said there was a map in a locked metal box under his bed. His dad gave it to him years
ago. Bing looked at me, and then he looked at Burger. “It’ll be back-breaking work,” he said.
“We’ll have to buy donkeys and shovels, and we can’t tell anyone. They’d slit your throats.”
Bing, of course, wasn’t worried about himself. He knew karate. He was worried about us, and
that was touching to hear. He’d pay us a million apiece to help him, maybe more. He wanted to
know if we were up for it, if we could stand the jungle heat and eating bugs and fighting off
anyone who wanted the gold. Of course we could. So it was decided: we’d save and go the week
after graduation, stay a year and then come back so Burger and I could go on missions.
I started running the track after school and doing fifty pushups every night before bed. I
bought a set of dumbbells and did curls until my arms burned. Burger loaded a backpack with
river rock and hiked the narrow trails around Flaming Geyser Park and then did wind sprints on
the lawn until he puked. We rented Bruce Lee movies and practiced kicks and commando rolls
on my front lawn. We stripped the couch of its cushions and punched and kicked at them until
my mom told us we’d ruin the leather. We poured over a Spanish phrase book I found at
Goodwill. Much gusto. Dónde está el baño? Necesito un medico!
Two weeks into our training, Burger called. He’d just done thirty minutes of wind sprints
at Flaming Geyser. “Do you think Bing’s dad is telling the truth?” he asked. There was a
thickness in his voice. He gulped for air. “I mean, do you think there’s really gold down there?”
“There’s a map,” I said. “Bing told us. We just follow the map.”
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#
One Saturday night in early November we were out in the Taurus station wagon. We had
the fire extinguisher, two Super Soakers, and a five gallon bucket filled with water balloons. We
were ready to drench anyone we happened upon: man, woman, child, dog. My fingers were
sticky. I’d just eaten three Hostess fruit pies and felt a dizzying clarity from all the sugar. Burger
drove, seat reclined, hand looped over the steering wheel. Bing was up front with the
extinguisher. I was in the back.
We were at the stoplight at 2
nd
and Auburn Way, and right there in front of the Korean
dry cleaner we saw this woman standing on the sidewalk, talking to a guy in a blue Ford F-150.
This would be hilarious. We knew it. All we had to do was call her over. And then we’d drench
her. So Burger pulled up across the street and then Bing was half out the window, butt planted
on the car door, rapping his knuckles against the car roof and whistling to get the woman’s
attention. The guy in the Ford looked pissed. I could see his face, freckled with a thin blond
mustache. He was telling the woman to get in, but then she was looking at us, and then the guy
looked at us, spit out the window, and sped away. And it was just the woman there.
Bing told us to watch. He told us this would be hilarious.
So she walked over, this woman, slowly, stumbling across the street as if it weren’t
asphalt at all but thick mud she was navigating through. She wasn’t a little thing, not at all, but
kind of full-figured, Boticelli’s Venus emerging from the sea, round cheeks and a pile of red
curly hair falling into her face. She wore bleached jeans and a thick maroon sweater and had no
shoes on, and when she passed in front of the car she stopped and squinted into the bright lights
before walking around to the passenger side.
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By this time Bing was back in his seat, passing the extinguisher’s nozzle from one hand
to the other as if he were doing some kind of exercise.
The woman leaned over and looked at us for about thirty seconds before she said
anything. There was a tattoo on her left hand, just above the thumb, no bigger than a dime, a red
heart with the letters PF written underneath. “You won’t hurt me?” she asked, and the words
dragged out of her mouth, almost incomprehensible, each syllable a trembling thing.
Bing told her we wouldn’t hurt her, and then he looked over at us and told the woman
that Burger and I were Mormon, which was as good as being a pacifist and that we’d never hurt
anyone in our lives and were actually accustomed to being persecuted. In fact, he said we
welcomed persecution. And the woman leaned in a little closer, squinted some more, and told us
that if we were Mormon then we’d better give her a ride to Tacoma because that would be the
Christian thing to do. Her upper lip caught on a crooked tooth, and a burst of wind blew wisps of
that thick red hair in her face and she brushed them behind her ears and went on about some guy
she met at a bar on Main Street and how he’d stolen her shoes and purse and left her in the gravel
parking lot of a junk yard on C Street and how now she needed a ride to Tacoma and how she
didn’t have any money but she was sure some kind of arrangement could be made. And as she
went on, Bing kept looking at Burger and me, kept smiling and winking and nodding his head
and mouthing words I couldn’t quite make out. But I understood that this was hilarious, the
funniest thing in the world, and how later we’d laugh about this at Denny’s and pound the table
with our fists and recount our various perspectives on what had happened. I could see Bing
gripping the silver nozzle, his knuckles white.
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Bing cut the woman off. “We’re not going that way,” he said, “but I’ll give you ten
dollars if you take off your shirt.” He opened his wallet, took the money out, and waved it in the
woman’s face. Her green eyes followed the bill. She swallowed. Bit her lower lip.
And then so quickly, like a jerky splice in a film, she was standing there topless. Breasts,
nipples, pale white skin, and I knew I should be feeling it in the deepest parts of my reproductive
tract, the exposed female form, the endorphins, the quickening of the breath, heart pounding
against my shirt—but I felt nothing like that, only a dull ache in my stomach. She had pale
stretch marks, like the tiny cracks in porcelain, that spread across her stomach, and looking at
them, I couldn’t help think of my mother, how so many years ago we took baths together and
how she washed my small toes and fingers and sang silly songs, and I remembered staring at her
body, at the curve of her stomach and breasts, and the pale lines there. I assumed, at that age,
they were from some kind of injury.
Bing, throwing out a booming cackle that filled the car, doubled over with laughter from
the sheer hilarity of this, and the woman just stood there, her eyes balls rolling back in her head,
eyelids closing and then popping open again, and then Bing reached for the maroon cable-knit
sweater the woman held and began pulling at it, and the woman, suddenly lucid, pulled back
with both hands. Bing raised the nozzle and sprayed her right in the face, and if by magic two
black streams ran from her eyes, down her cheeks, and between her breasts. She screamed and
stumbled backward, dropping the sweater, and Bing was shouting at Burger to go, and the car
jumped forward and the tires screamed, and there was a momentary sensation of moving
sideways, and then I looked back and saw the woman collapsed on the curb, rocking back and
forth, red in the glow of the tail lights. Bing didn’t look back.
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We were moving quickly up D Street, and Bing was still laughing, still holding the
nozzle. He pointed it at two figures who materialized in the glow of the headlights, two men,
heads shaved to the skull, thick black boots and jeans rolled up to their boot tops. They didn’t
turn until the first stream of water lashed across their backs, and when they did turn, Bing hit
them in the face with another volley. There was a muffled curse and the beat of those heavy
black boots, and then we were off again into the night.
#
We ended up at Les Gove Park.
The parking lot was empty, not a soul for miles it seemed. It was late, past eleven, and I
was done for the night, and Burger was done, too. He slouched in the driver’s seat and rested his
head against the steering wheel, and for a moment I thought he was praying.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, so tired and wasted, those eyes, that hair, the
paleness of her skin—and no shoes. I thought if someone gave her a bed she might sleep for
days, maybe weeks, and when she woke up, I wondered who she’d be.
“Who do you think she was?” I asked, and Bing, still in the front seat, his face in
shadows, said, “Who knows?” And then he added quickly, “Who cares?
A song played on the radio, something deliciously catchy from that summer we would
never hear again without thinking of that night. Bing laughed as he replayed the scene with the
woman, giving particular attention to her ringing falsetto as he yanked at the sweater and then
the cold shock of the water as it caught her in the eyes. The windows were down and a sharp
breeze pulled at the leafless alders overhanging the parking lot, and I smelled something in the
air, something wet and earthy that made me shiver. It came from far away, from the north, and I
knew it would be here soon enough.
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It was in that moment that I heard the quick movement of thick rubber soles on asphalt
and then saw a shadow move across the car. I looked up. They were there, the two characters
Bing had hosed, their T-shirts and jeans still wet from the assault. In the weak light, I could see
the swell of pectorals pushing at the thin cotton fabric and the hard veins that ran up their arms.
They were breathing heavily, just staring down at us, and one said, “These the dicks, Mickey?”
There was no response, only the blur of hands reaching through the open windows
grabbing for us. Burger reached for the keys still in the ignition, a futile effort. The bad character
had him by the hair and was slamming his face into the steering wheel. I had my own problems
in the back seat, fending off a pair of thick hands grabbing at my pant legs. I lay on my back and
kicked ferociously, and then I felt those hands cinch around my ankles and pull.
I was going through the window, my shirt pilling up around my nipples, the small knob
that locks the door gouging my right kidney and then the tender spaces between each rib. I was
on the ground, knees curled up to my chest, hands covering my head, looking under the car at the
shocks, at the muffler, at all the grime impacted there. There was no pleading, no quick apology
or cry for mercy. The fall had knocked the air out of my lungs. I could barely breathe. But then
I had a feeling there was no reasoning with these guys. They were men of action, wronged and
here to teach a lesson. They spat out a string of repeated profanities as they wailed on us. It
sounded like a chant, like a war cry.
The passenger door opened and I saw Bing’s Addidas on the other side of the car. Steel-
toed kicks to the ribs, fists as hard as stones pounding at my back, and seeing Bing’s shoes
planted there on the asphalt, I felt relief was only moments away. I waited for something
spectacular, for Bing to vault the hood and lay out the bad characters with a fierce roundhouse.
Instead, those black Addidas beat a quick retreat into the darkness.
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It went on only a minute more, but we were already numb to it. My nose dripped blood. I
could taste it thick and coppery in my mouth. I thought one of my teeth might be chipped.
Burger’s nose dripped blood, too. There was a cut across his forehead and the bridge of his nose
looked swollen. I felt such pity for him in that moment, such brotherly love as we both lay there
panting. The bad characters stood over us, panting, too, blood on their knuckles and pant legs.
Then they turned their attention to the Taurus.
I barely looked. I didn’t want to attract attention, but I heard it, the dull thump of boot-
toes against the car’s metal body, the sharp snap of the windshield wipers. One guy was jumping
up and down on the car roof and the other had found a metal garbage can somewhere and was
throwing it against the rear window. They were grinning wildly, hooting and cheering as the car
shed glass. And then they were gone.
We stood on shaky limbs, wiped at our bloody noses and mouths, and surveyed the
afflicted car. The mirror on the driver’s side door hung loosely by two thin, yellow wires. Bits of
safety glass twinkled against the deep black of the parking lot. Burger, his eyes large dark pools,
had his hand over his mouth and a muffled profanity squeezed through, and that was all right,
because if there was a time for profanity, if it was ever justified, this was the moment. We circled
the car, ran our palms over the cratered body, and said nothing. The shock of what we would tell
Burger’s parents, the lie we’d have to invent, had distracted us from our bruised ribs and aching
heads.
We opened the doors, brushed the glass from the seats and eased in, feeling the scream
and complaint of every muscle and bone in our bodies. Burger started the car and put it in
reverse, whimpering a little as he turned to look out the rear window, half of which was scattered
over the back seat. It was in that moment that Bing emerged from the darkness. We’d almost
99

forgotten him. His sudden return had a bodily affect on me. I felt my teeth grinding together, felt
my right eyelid tremble
Bing ducked into the back seat with a sheepish grin on his face. “I was gonna jump in,”
he said. “The right moment.” He stammered, gaped at the blood on our faces. “It happened so
fast.”
I didn’t say anything. Burger didn’t say anything.
“I was looking for a phone”—his head swiveled between us, his hands beat the air—“to
call the police.” He made a fist and ground it into his palm. “My dad knows some people at the
police department. They’ll find these guys and put them in jail. And the car. You’ll have enough
money in a year to buy three new Cadillacs.”
Burger laughed, a new kind of laughter, deep and bitter and savage, and he said, wiping
at his eyes and fighting for composure, “You’re full of shit. And your dad is too.”
Bing’s lips moved spasmodically, but no sound came out. And then Burger turned and
looked at Bing. Burger wasn’t laughing anymore. His cheeks and eyes were dark with shadows,
and when he spoke I didn’t recognize his voice. “Your Dad’s a cheater. I saw him and Lydia at
Flaming Geyser. They were in his car. She was touching his face. They were kissing.”
And then Burger smiled, just sat there and smiled at Bing. I could see it in Burger’s face,
the pure thrill of those words as they found their target, more forceful and painful than a fist to
the jaw. I felt the thrill, too. I wanted them to be true. I wanted to hurt Bing, and that, even now,
is what shocks me most, not the insincerity and paradox of Larry’s infidelity, but that I wanted to
hurt Bing.
Bing made a little puffing noise. Something caught in his throat and then he was crying,
his cheeks wet and shining. “It’s not true,” he said. He kept repeating the phrase over and over.
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His eyes were sloppy and pleading and fixed on Burger as if all Burger had to do was take it
back and everything would be fine.
We drove back to the high school, and Bing whimpered all the way and wiped at his
nose, and when we pulled up to his car, Burger stopped and we sat there listening to the hum of
the engine. Bing’s eyes bounced between us like he wanted us to say something, but we didn’t,
not until Burger looked in the rearview mirror and told Bing to get out of the car.
He stood there in the road and watched us drive away, and we watched him recede, red in
the glow of the taillights, and we marveled at his transformation, at the belly overhanging his belt
and the flabby skin under his chin, we marveled that we’d ever believed him.
This was back when Auburn had one high school and two junior highs, the year before
Wal-Mart and Lowe’s erected their fortresses off the 167, before Main Street was a row of empty
store fronts with dirty windows. Back then you could ditch your bike anywhere along Lake Holm
Road and hike through the woods without having to worry about getting knocked in the skull by
a golf ball. The football team was undefeated that year and so was the basketball team, and all of
us laughed when that lunatic from Enumclaw dive-bombed our graduation ceremony in a
Cessna, and we couldn’t understand then why our parents were so uptight about it or why the
police arrested him.
Maybe we were too hard on Bing. This was before Burger and I were missionaries,
before we were young husbands and young fathers, employees and breadwinners, before we
understood that most of our lives would be spent living in the dim glow of some distant victory,
pretending we were something we weren’t and knowing that out there beyond the rich glow of
the stadium lights there was, and always would be, a shadow hunting us down.
101

THE RIGHTEOUS ROAD

My mom held her hand over the phone. “It’s Reed,” she whispered.
I took the phone and leaned against the countertop. “Hello,” I said. “Hello.”
“What, Derrick? No call?” Reed asked.
“I didn’t know you were home.” I lied.
In November Reed sent a practically illegible postcard. He was always sending
postcards, from Istanbul, Mumbai, Munich, Hong Kong, all written in a sharp, hurried scrawl.
Let’s get together over Christmas, he wrote. It’ll be like old times. I’d studied the postcard with
its photograph of a cramped and filthy open market in Jerusalem, bins of dried fruit and lentils,
skinless goat and lamb carcasses suspended from steel hooks.
And then there were his letters, as long as novellas, self-aggrandizing rants stuffed in
manila envelopes he’d decorated with intricate and baffling designs. The message was always
the same: the minute details of his service among the impoverished and downtrodden masses,
and his grandiose plans for a future that had us saving the world from tyranny and environmental
annihilation. I couldn’t finish the letters, nor could I respond with equal enthusiasm. The letters
were too rhetorical, trying to persuade me to recapture some embellished memories from our
high school days. Unlike Reed, I’d grown up, moved on, gone to college. I was in my last year
of law school at Brigham Young University. I was engaged.
“I knew you wouldn’t get the postcard,” Reed said. “They were going through my mail.
Israeli secret service. The Mossad. Sometimes they’d follow me. But that’s life.” He said this
as if the inconvenience of wire taps and surveillance were a fact of his workaday world. “What’s
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important is that you’re here,” Reed said. “There’s someone who needs our help. Eight at my
house. You in?”
I could only guess who this somebody might be: the Palestinians, Mexican border
crossers, old growth Douglas firs, the spotted owl, hump-backed whales? I imagined one of
Reed’s windy, vainglorious speeches, a call to action to save the oppressed or right some
ecological wrong, and me sitting there nodding ecstatically as if I still devoutly believed in the
cause. I was ready to tell Reed I had to catch a plane in the morning, which was true. I was
flying to Aspen to spend the weekend with my fiancée, Cassie, and her family. But the thought
of another night playing Scrabble with my parents while my dad grumbled about his irritable
bowels and diminishing retirement seemed unbearable. Worse, I imagined Reed showing up on
our doorstep.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
My mom was on me the second I hung up. Behind her, the Christmas tree winked on and
off in a way that hurt my eyes.
“I never liked Reed,” she said, “even when you were little boys. Always a bad influence.
And all that mischief in high school. I never believed you thought of it yourself. His parents had
a handful. Edna Swenson still calls me. She cries about him. Did you know that? She wonders
where she and Bob went wrong. She blames herself.”
“Boys will be boys.” I said this to get a rise from her, not because I believed it. I was of
the opinion, and had been for years, that Reed needed to move beyond the perpetual adolescent
state he lived in.
“But when do boys grow up?” my mom said. She began rearranging the nativity on the
coffee table. “You grew up. Maybe you can talk some sense into him.” She pointed a shepherd
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figurine at me. “Tell him to go to college and stop giving his parents grief. Tell him to go back
to church. He’s still young enough to serve a mission. It’s Edna’s dream.”
“I’m not going to talk some sense into him,” I said. I didn’t want the responsibility of
steering Reed back into the fold. Besides, Reed worshipped Mother Earth. His congregation
convened in the tops of trees while angry loggers cursed from below or outside third-world sweat
shops where the repressed toiled for a nickel an hour. His sacrament was a thick joint and cheap
wine.
“You just be careful over there,” my mom said.
Her warning annoyed me. As if Reed had any influence on me. He was a vestige from
another life, an adolescent, simple-minded incarnation of myself I would never relive.
#
We grew up in the same wooded subdivision outside Auburn, Washington, had the same
teachers at Lake View Elementary, attended the same ward. The sand box, Sunday school, cub
scouts, T-ball. When didn’t I know Reed?
He always had this deeper ecological and humanitarian consciousness. Our Sunday
school teachers, sweet old ladies who brought us oatmeal cookies, stared incredulously as Reed
decried the cruelty of Mosaic animal sacrifice or questioned the goodness of a God who required
the massacre of every Canaanite living in the Promised Land. At twelve, Reed’s first youth talk
in sacrament meeting was a five minute criticism of God’s command to Adam and Eve to subdue
the earth and have dominion over it. “Why can’t all His creations just have an equal
relationship?” Reed asked. “Why can’t everything just be free and happy without people
messing up the forests and the air?”
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When we were fifteen, Reed’s ecological sense found a focus. It was one of those boring
summer nights, nothing to do but sit in Reed’s living room and flip through channels until we
were catatonic. The only thing on was a Greenpeace paid advertisement asking for donations to
protest the Icelandic seal hunts. I watched in horror as a hulking Nordic in a blue, fur-lined
parka clubbed a pod of yelping harp seals to death. The saliva drained from my mouth and a
nauseating weight bloomed in my lower guts. I wanted to turn the channel. Reed made a
choking sound. His lower lip quivered and a glistening line of snot oozed from both nostrils.
Tears streamed down his cheeks. I pretended not to notice.
And then in the middle of all that slaughter, the death blows and the freshly-skinned
pelts, the camera shifted to four men dragging an activist across the blood-specked ice. Tall,
with a blond beard and fierce blue eyes, the activist chanted something about stopping the
slaughter. Lars Norgard, we later learned, Greenpeace activist and captain of the Sea Shepherd,
a man of mythical proportions who’d made a name for himself by ramming a dozen whaling
ships.
Wiping the snot from his nose, Reed said, as if in a trance, “That’s what I want to be.”
Reed called a toll-free number that flashed on the TV screen, and in a couple weeks some
brochures came in the mail. We poured over each color photograph: the Sea Shepherd slicing
through the glacial, turbulent North Atlantic; hippy kids chaining themselves to the bows of
fishing boats; and Lars Norgard, with his thick blond beard, standing on the Sea Shepherd’s
bridge, barking commands into a CB as he stared down a menacing Russian whaling ship. What
more could two fifteen-year-old boys want? Adventure, danger, heroes and villains, the open
seas. We wrote Lars and volunteered our services. We’d do anything, scrub toilets, cook food,
do laundry, whatever he needed.
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Lars actually wrote back. We sniffed the envelope and thought we could almost smell
the briny sea. While applauding our ecological maturity and commitment to such a noble cause,
Lars said by law we’d have to wait until we were eighteen. Until then, if we really wanted to
stop the bastards, we should send money for fuel. “Keep believing and continue the fight,” he
wrote. “Patience. When the time comes, I’ll have two spots on the Sea Shepherd for my eco-
warriors.” The words thrilled us.
We must have gotten on some mailing list. The pamphlets and newsletters filled Reed’s
mailbox: Animal Liberation Front, Amnesty International, PETA, Earth Liberation Front,
Doctors without Borders, the Sierra Club. Shocked and sickened, we stared at the sharp color
images of clear-cut wastelands and veal calves wallowing in their own feces and skeletal
Somalians with distended bellies. Before, such abject suffering and unchecked destruction had
only existed in the abstract, a brief image on the evening news. My parents had shielded me, I
knew, and now I wanted to do something more than praying for the sick and afflicted or cleaning
out flower vases at Mountain View Cemetery or repainting worn bleachers. All that seemed
ridiculously inconsequential when I considered the dying whales and the vanquished ancient
forests and the starving Somalians.
When we could finally drive, we skipped school one Friday to check out an animal
experimentation protest Reed saw advertised in the Seattle Weekly. There were about a hundred
people there, chanting, waving placards, and marching in front of a towering glass and steel
skyscraper in downtown Bellevue. Someone dressed in a fluffy rabbit suit smeared with red
paint writhed on the sidewalk. One man wore a dog costume and had Vaseline smeared over his
eyes. He howled mournfully as a women led him around by the paw. Truthfully, Reed and I
thought it was a bit much, until we looked at some literature a protester handed us and saw the
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lab photos of the terrified beagles hanging from their paws, the kittens with electrodes protruding
from their skulls, and a chimpanzee in an oxygen mask running on a caged treadmill. All that
suffering so Meyer Chemical could sell us lip balm and antifungal cream. The protesters’
outrage was contagious. Reed and I walked up to a middle-aged man in dreadlocks who seemed
in charge and asked if we could help. Smiling and then giving us both a bro hug, he handed us
signs. For the rest of the afternoon we marched, blocked sidewalk traffic, and loudly upbraided
anyone who dared enter the building.
After that, we were sneaking up to Seattle a couple times a month to march and pass out
literature at anti-fur rallies or knock doors for Amnesty International. At night, we’d go out with
other activists to spraypaint butcher shops and furriers with pithy slogans like Feed it, don’t eat it
or Are clothes to kill for? After, we’d hang out in some grimy apartment in the University
District or near Capitol Hill and listen to rousing environmental and humanitarian escapades
while Phish played in the background and a thick joint and a jug of wine made the rounds. We
partook because these were the fruits of the earth, or so they told us, a shared sacrament for
nature’s children meant to enlighten the mind and strengthen the body. If I experienced any guilt
after that first toke, these assurances certainly mitigated it, as did my budding awareness that as
an only child I felt controlled and smothered. I wanted an identify apart from church and my
parents’ conservative politics. They bored me. No hobbies, no friends they went out with, no
interest in music and art. If that was their righteousness, I didn’t want it.
Soon, Reed and I stopped eating meat and dairy. We refused to wear our black leather
church shoes, refused to wear any brand that exploited its workers in third-world sweat shops.
At home, my parents said little about my new-found activism, probably believing it
would pass. Reed, however, felt morally compelled to win his siblings and parents over to his
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way of thinking. He saw the roots of their ecological and humanitarian apathy in what he called
the naïve and narrow-minded strictures of Mormonism. Suddenly, Reed’s rhetoric burned with
anti-religious sentiments: religion as a social construct, as a mental illness, as the opium of the
masses. He could go on for hours, until even I couldn’t take it anymore. His home became a
den of acrimony, screaming and vague threats from Reed’s parents, a constant tension simmering
just below the surface. Soon, Reed refused to attend church and early morning seminary. This
appealed to me, too, for no other reason than that I longed for more sleep. My parents, probably
sensing Reed’s influence, offered unrestricted use of my dad’s old Plymouth Reliant and a Shell
gas card if I didn’t miss a day of church or seminary. Even Reed liked the idea. Without a car,
how would we get to Seattle?
And then in January of our senior year, Reed didn’t show up for school on Monday. At
lunch, I called his house. No one answered. When I got home that afternoon, my parents sat
solemnly on the living room couch. My mom dabbed at her red, weepy eyes with a crumpled
Kleenex. My dad, who shouldn’t have been home for another two hours, stood and pointed to
the love seat. “Derrick, we need to talk,” he said. My heart pounded.
He said Sister Swenson had called that morning. Reed and two others had been arrested
Sunday afternoon for vandalizing an Albertson’s meat counter in Seattle. But there was more.
Brother and Sister Swenson, no doubt distraught and suspicious after receiving this news, had
gone through Reed’s drawers and discovered a joint and a bag of dried shrooms. “Do you know
anything about those?” my dad asked. “Are you and Reed using drugs?”
Staring at our beige carpet, I denied everything, denied vehemently while suddenly
realizing my parents knew. I was sure.
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Reed was now on a plane to New Mexico, my dad said, where he’d spend the next ten
weeks in a wilderness treatment program for drug addiction and behavioral issues. He insisted,
at least while Reed was gone, that I take a break from the activism and from our little cadre of
hippy friends at school. Now I’d eat lunch with the kids from church. Did I understand? My
dad wanted to know. Or did they need to go upstairs and look through my drawers and closet? I
stared at his polished Wingtips and nodded quickly.
The next day at school, the church kids—all bores and blind followers of the faith, Reed
and I thought—invited me to eat lunch with them, an invitation arranged, I was sure, by my dad
and Bishop McKinley. I accepted their invitation, hoping it might allay some of my parents’
suspicions. And I’ll admit, after two years of fiercely debating the environmental or
humanitarian issue de jour over lunch with Reed and our friends, I actually enjoyed the cheery,
inconsequential conversations about church dances, BYU football, and future mission calls. I sat
with them for a month, though I never told Reed.
His first postcard came two weeks after his abrupt departure. “Living off the fat of the
land,” he wrote. “Stars so pretty. Grateful to the Creator for all good things. Searching for a
heart at peace.” A week later another postcard: “At harmony with the world. Love and respect
for all people.” He’d included an enigmatic postscript, a quote from Edward Albee’s The
Monkeywrench Gang, a book we’d read at least three times. The postscript said: “Because we
like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger.”
It wasn’t a surprise, then, at least to me, when Reed escaped.
After a search of the area around the camp yielded no Reed, the Sheriff’s department got
involved, blazing out into the high desert on motorcycles and ATVs, even in a helicopter flown
up from Albuquerque. Search and rescue volunteers came from Santa Fe. With no sign of Reed
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after three days, his parents flew to New Mexico. The ward fasted and prayed for Reed’s safe
return. My parents, I’m sure assuming Reed was dead, asked if I’d like to meet with a therapist.
Not necessary, I told them, believing Reed was out there living his wilderness dream, holed up in
a warm shelter, feasting on pine nuts and cattails as he meditated the hours away. But as the
days passed, I considered the possibility that Reed might be gone. At night, worried and unable
to sleep, I found myself kneeling at my bedside, something I hadn’t done in a long time, praying
to God for my friend’s safe return. I somehow knew, with an assurance I couldn’t articulate,
more a feeling than anything else, that Reed was all right.
A week later Reed called his parents from Pueblo, Colorado. Incredibly, he’d endured
the freezing, high-desert night and walked fifty miles to the interstate, then hitchhiked the 350
miles to Pueblo. He was staying with some guy who was president of the local clean air
conservation group.
Reed’s parents drove to Pueblo and pleaded with him to finish the treatment program. He
refused. He wanted to go home. His parents wouldn’t hear of it. Reed had strained the family
almost to the point of rupture. They quickly reached a compromise with Reed, one that showed
their desperation. Until the end of the school year, they’d rent a studio apartment for Reed near
Auburn High, pay the utilities, and give him a food allowance. He could come home once a
week for Sunday dinner. Not a bad arrangement, Reed thought.
Every day after school, we smoked weed there, and Reed would often articulate his
vision of our lives after graduation, how we’d travel the world over in search of perilous
humanitarian and ecological causes to throw ourselves into. It was talk, or so I thought, the
impractical, idealistic machinations of a young man on the cusp of the adult world. Realistically,
the next year I saw us at Green River Community College, done with the weed and the booze,
110

hitting the books. And then at nineteen, I’d always assumed Reed and I would do what had been
ingrained in us from birth by cheery primary songs and a thousand talks and Sunday school
lessons. The mission. I’d meant to bring it up with Reed: the mission as an altruistic adventure,
two years serving the indigent gentry of some third-world backwater, learning their language,
teaching them to love one another. What was wrong with that? I also understood the unspoken
stigma we’d bear if we didn’t go.
Though I hadn’t told Reed, I was tired of the Seattle activists and their scene. Loud,
pushy, self-righteousness, they disliked almost everything and would go on and on about anarchy
and environmental destruction as if they knew nothing else. With their ragged clothes and bad
teeth, many looked indistinguishable from the homeless and unemployed begging dollars at
freeway off ramps and downtown intersections. I didn’t want the ascetic’s life, nor did I aspire
for excess and luxury either. I wanted a few comforts, a life equal to or a little better than my
parents’. A decent home for my family. Maybe a nice car.
But if anything, Reed was becoming more extreme, more dedicated to the cause. He had
other plans for us.
It was a Friday at the end of May, two weeks to graduation, when he waved a hand-
written letter in my face and said, “You want out of this hole? Here’s your ticket.” We were at
his apartment, smoking a joint. Kurt Cobain screamed from the stereo. I squinted at the letter
through a pall of smoke.
“Freedom and adventure. Saving the world,” Reed said. “Right? Everything we’ve
talked about for the last three years.”
Reed, always sniffing out the next adventure, had written Lars Norgard to remind him of
his promise, and then, to prove we were ready for a life of activism, he’d detailed our activities
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from the last three years and explained we were eager to take it to the next level. Lars wrote
back. We were in luck. There were two spots on the Sea Shepherd, but we’d have to act quickly.
He’d be docked at the Tacoma Marina for a couple hours on Monday, June 13
th
. And then Lars
warned us that this was the most dangerous work in the world, and for that reason he couldn’t
guarantee our safety. Reed read those words, smiled, and then read them again.
I feigned excitement for the next two weeks as we bought rucksacks from the army
surplus store in Seattle and stuffed them with everything Lars said we needed: wool pants and
sweaters, rain gear, lug-soled boots, waders, sunscreen. I smiled as we concocted our plan to
meet that Monday morning at the bus stop behind JC Penny. I’d park the Reliant on Main Street,
leave a note for our parents on the driver’s seat, and then we’d take the bus to Tacoma. I praised
the soundness of the plan, all while knowing I never intended to go.
That Monday, I lay in bed and listened to the phone ring and ring and then go to the
answering machine. I was alone, my dad at work, my mom gone to a church quilting project.
“Where are you?” Reed’s voice boomed through the house. “Derrick!” He called again and
again. I heard him through the pillow I’d put over my head. Finally, I picked up the phone.
“You sleep in?” he shouted. “Are you sick?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure….” I struggled to finish the sentence. “That life. I’m
not sure I want that life.” I tried to explain: the transient, hand-to-mouth existence, the
pessimism and never-ending activism. “I don’t want to give up being Mormon,” I told Reed. “I
mean, I thought after all this we’d go missions.”
“Missions?” Reed said. He seemed confused. “Why would we go on missions?” And
then he drew in a sharp breath. “You believe,” he said slowly. “You believe everything they
ever taught us.”
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I believed, believed weakly, I knew, perhaps believed through association only, a
subconscious absorption of faith as I slept through church and early morning seminary. I
believed, maybe, because my parents believed, because despite all their buttoned-up,
conservative stuffiness they’d loved me selflessly and unconditionally. I imagined that God, if
anything, might be an extension of them. I wondered if the church would let me go on a mission,
after all the weed and the alcohol and the vandalism done in the name of saving the planet. I’d
have to make amends. Tell my parents everything. Meet weekly with Bishop McKinley.
“I won’t even get into how ridiculous it all is,” Reed said. I could hear the disgust in his
voice. “Angels and gold plates. But that’s not even the worse part. It’s the culture, Derrick.
The Mormon factory. You go on that mission and you walk straight in, and when you come out,
you’re just like them. You’ll dress like them and think like them and talk like them. You’ll live
in your little bubble. You see that, Derrick? Is that what you want?”
“But what if we do it differently?” I said. The idea suddenly came to me. I held the
portable phone tightly to my ear and paced the living room. “Not like our parents. What if we
did it our way and still believed?”
“Do it differently?” Reed said. “It’s not in the program, Derrick.”
I heard the hiss of air breaks and then a monotone voice crackle over a speaker.
“Derrick,” Reed said. His voice trembled. “Come on. There’s still time. You don’t
think we can do some good? There’s other ways to do good.”
I felt a rawness in the back of my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
That night I called Reed’s father. There was no anger or accusations. Brother Swenson
thanked me, and that was it. Reed was eighteen. What could he do? I knew the truth. He was
glad Reed was gone.
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I spent the year at Green River Community College, attended the stake singles’ ward,
made restitution and repented for everything I’d done. I received a mission call to serve in Rio
de Janeiro. After, I enrolled at BYU and earned a degree in political science. And then law
school. I hadn’t seen Reed in seven years, but in that time, a month had never passed without a
letter or postcard from him.
#
At eight, I stood on Reed’s doorstep. Loud Arabic music rattled the windows, strings and
a high androgynous voice locked in a repetitive groove. I knocked hard and waited.
The music stopped, and then a moment later Reed stood in the doorway, smiling. He
wore a Greenpeace T-shirt, faded jeans, and a white knitted beanie. “Seven years,” he said,
taking my arm and pulling me into the house. “Seven years and rarely a letter. And look at you
now: the lawyer in embryo. You gonna stick it to those fat cats in their corporate towers?”
“Sure,” I said. I could only imagine the selfless narrative Reed had conjured up for me,
the rabid environmental lawyer saving the world from greedy land developers and wicked
industrialists intent on melting the ice caps and decimating every forest. Actually, I was leaning
toward corporate law. My dad agreed. The hours were long, but the money was good. The
previous two summers I’d clerked in Latham and Watkin’s Los Angeles office, and I was
optimistic they’d offer me a job after law school. I wanted to provide a comfortable life for my
future family. I wanted to be a partner. But I knew these achievements meant nothing to Reed.
He’d think there was no adventure in it, nothing of the bravado and altruism we’d dreamed about
and discussed years ago while smoking a joint in his apartment. Worse, he’d think I’d become
one of them, sold out for the all-powerful dollar.
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“And you, the world traveler,” I said, because I knew that’s what Reed wanted, a little
opening to gush about his adventures, to sing his environmental consciousness and deep empathy
for other’s suffering.
“I’ve been a few places,” he said, ushering me toward the couch. “But it’s good to be
home, right? The old stomping ground. You want something to eat or drink?” he asked. “Some
juice or cookies?”
“No, I actually just ate. I just came to say hello.”
He insisted. “Come on. What can I get you?”
“Really, I’m fine,” I said.
“You have to try this tamarind nectar I brought back from Gaza,” Reed said.
He was halfway to the kitchen before I could protest.
“How are you parents?” I asked, hoping they’d materialize from somewhere. I was
uncomfortable around Reed. After so many years, he felt like a stranger.
“Still believing their conservative conspiracy theories,” Reed shouted from the kitchen.
“Still praying Reagan will rise from the grave. God help us all. Actually, they took my sister
and her husband to Crystal Mountain for the night. They’re sick of me already.”
Reed returned with a plate of baklava and two glasses brimming with an opaque liquid.
He handed me a glass and then set the plate on the coffee table. He took a long drink, smacking
his lips and looking at me expectantly. The liquid had the sheen of motor oil and smelled
slightly fermented. I took a sip and cringed as the sweetness hit my fillings.
“Delicious, right?” Reed asked. He emptied his glass.
“It’s different,” I said, taking another small drink. I looked around the living room, at the
beige carpet and the black leather Lazyboy. Nothing had changed in ten years. In fact, I was
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sitting on the same brown microfiber sectional where we’d first seen Lars Norgard protesting the
harp seal hunts. “How’s Lars Norgard?” I asked. “What’s he like?”
“A phony,” Reed said quickly and unequivocally. He picked at something under his
thumbnail. “‘Fuel to help us get the bastards,’ my ass. The man’s a gambling addict. And”—
Reed knocked his knuckles together—“he’s a carnivore. An environmental phony. I was done
with him a long time ago.”
“Well, it’s good to see you,” I said. “Really good.” I tried to think of more to say, to
dredge up some nugget from years ago to carry the conversation, some innocuous memory we
could bat around for a minute. I asked about Israel.
“Palestine,” Reed said. “The Zionist propaganda wants to erase history, like no one lived
there before 1948. Gaza and the West Bank are concentration camps. Genocide. People dying
every day and no one hears about it. I wanted to change that.”
I was confused, but not surprised. “I thought you were studying Arabic. Didn’t you
mention that in a letter?”
“Just a cover,” Reed said. He put his hand over his mouth and laughed. “My ticket into
the country. A lowly student at Berzeit University. My mom was thrilled. I didn’t tell her that I
was a human shield with this group called Adalah. And then the Zionist pricks caught wind of
what I was doing. Israeli Secret Service. They think I’m an insurgent. Can you believe that?”
“You were a human shield?” I said. I thought of long-haired, wild-eyed hippies throwing
themselves in front of bulldozers. “Don’t people die doing that?” I could only imagine the
swollen image Reed had of himself.
“It happens,” Reed said stoically. “It’s war and war has its martyrs. Put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” Reed shoved a
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piece of baklava in his mouth. “At Ramallah and Nablus we stopped the Israelis. We built
roadblocks. But that’s not all. Remember I always said I wanted to fight in a revolution?”
Reed was on a roll now, warming to the subject. When he reached for another chunk of
baklava, I glanced at my watch. I thought of letting him go on for another fifteen minutes before
I made my exit.
“None of that passive-aggressive shit,” Reed said. “I wanted the real thing. Tear gas and
Molotov cocktails. I knew these guys in Hamas and sometimes I’d go out with them at night.
Patrol, they called it. What a rush. I even got something to show for it.” He inched up his
sleeve to show me a gauze bandage wrapped tightly around his bicep, and then he unwound it
with a practiced dalliance. As the gauze fell away, I saw a crusted red gash no longer than an
inch. “The kid standing next to me got it in the stomach,” Reed said. “I don’t think he made it.”
“Someone shot you?” I was incredulous. I wanted to laugh.
“An Israeli sniper.” Reed cradled his arm as if it were a badge of honor. “Revolution,
brother, the real thing,” he said. “Twelve-year-old kids blowing themselves to pieces on Israeli
buses. They’re committed. You have to admire that.”
Reed stood up and walked into the kitchen, raising his voice so I could hear.
“Oppression. That’s what it is. People should never be oppressed.” He returned with a full
glass of tamarind nectar. “Bullies,” he went on, staring down at the glass as if reading something
in its black surface. He walked to the window. “Isn’t the world full of them, from the
playground to the corporate office to the White House? Aren’t they everywhere?”
“Everywhere,” I said, not in agreement or denial. His breath came in short bursts. I
looked at my watch and wondered if my parents were in bed yet.
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Reed paced the room, passing the glass from one hand to the other. “When I was in
Venice last summer, I ran into Liz Schuller at this bar near San Marco’s Square. What were the
chances, right? You remember Liz from high school? Carly Cantwell was her best friend. You
remember Carly. Your little crush.”
“Carly Cantwell,” I said, her name strange on my tongue. We’d had some classes
together our junior and senior years. We’d even studied together a few times. She was a shy
girl, a state champion swimmer with curly blond hair and a lean body tempered through long
hours of cutting through water. I had a crush on her, sure, one of those pubescent musings that
never comes to anything. She wanted to be a doctor, I remembered. I wondered about her
sometimes when searching my bookcase and seeing the green and gold binding of my high
school yearbook. “Did Liz mention Carly?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, buddy, she mentioned Carly,” Reed said. “In fact, I think she told me a little
more than she wanted to. In vino veritas, if you know what I mean.”
“What’d she say?” I tried to sound casual, but I suddenly found it difficult to breathe. I
wondered if something had happened to Carly.
Reed stopped his pacing and looked at me. “You really want to know? You ready for
this? Denny Bradshaw raped her the summer after our senior year. It happened at a house party.
He cornered her in a bedroom. Sure, she tried to fight him off tooth and nail, but Denny’s huge.
And in the middle of it some girl walks in and then just turns around and leaves. Doesn’t do a
damn thing. Carly’s crying for help and the girl bolts.”
I stared at my hands. They felt cold. “Did she tell the police?” I asked.
Reed sat on the coffee table and leaned in toward me. “You see, that’s the kicker, my
friend. Right as Denny’s zipping up, he tells Carly he’ll kill her if she ever tells. She’s in shock
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for about a week before Liz convinces her to report what happened. But the police won’t do a
thing. That’s the legal system for you. They’ll give you all the justice you want unless it
interferes with what Daddy Bradshaw’s passing under the table.”
Denny Bradshaw was a grade above us, a high school athlete whose father owned the
largest construction company in Auburn and sat on the school board. I remembered Denny as
the arrogant athlete with his shoulder lowered, pushing through the school hallways as if moving
down the field, shouting at anyone in his way. At least once a week at lunch he’d stop at our
table with a couple jock friends to wave a hamburger in our faces and laugh hysterically. Once
he overturned a garbage can on top of our heads. After high school, he went to Washington State
on a football scholarship, but only lasted a couple years before dropping out and moving back to
Auburn to work in the family business. I’d heard a rumor that his father cut him off for
embezzling money.
“And you know the girl who walks in on the rape,” Reed said, “the only witness who can
put Denny away? She’s a secretary at Bradshaw Construction. Started a few weeks after the
rape. A real coincidence. And what about all the other victims. Liz said there were always
rumors.”
“It’s not right,” I said. I looked down at my fisted hands.
“Of course it’s not right. It’s a travesty.” Reed walked to the window and glowered at
the darkness beyond the glass. “And with guys like Denny the great injustice is that it keeps
happening. I’d bet my life on it. Seven years after high school, you think he’s changed? The
man’s a predator and we’re going to stop him.”
Reed turned and stared at me, as if expecting me to say something.
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“What? You want to blindside him in an alley?” I asked. “Sneak up behind him with a
tire iron? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“Hell no,” Reed said. “I’d never harm a living thing. That’s not what I do. I want to
shame him. I was thinking about a little body work on his car, leave a message he’ll understand,
let him know somebody’s watching.”
“Reed, come on.” I tried to laugh. “This is crazy. Really.”
“He works at that old bar on Main Street,” Reed said. “The Mecca. He parks in the back.
I’ve done some reconnaissance. One or two minutes. In and out. We’ll leave him a nice note.”
“I’m in law school,” I said. “We get caught and I’m ruined. I couldn’t take the bar.”
“Is that all you care about now?” Reed asked. “Come on. If we don’t do it, then who
will?”
“It just doesn’t feel right,” I said.
Reed laughed. “Doesn’t feel right? Isn’t there a higher law? The spirit of the law?
Don’t you believe that? And what about everything we used to believe in? Making the world a
better place? Helping those who can’t help themselves? Don’t you believe that anymore?”
Reed straightened his face. “Okay, think about it this way: what about that rapist running wild
out there? Does that feel right? What about some justice for Carly? Doesn’t she deserve that?”
When I didn’t say anything, Reed kept talking. “Don’t you see this shit every day on the news?
The Denny Bradshaws of the world pushing their way through life, knocking people to the
ground, mouthing off, wanting a free ride? Don’t you remember what he called us in high
school? How he’d push us around? And let me ask you this. Didn’t it always piss you off that
you couldn’t do a damn thing about it? But what if we could? Tell me, Derrick, and be honest,
how would it feel to stick it to Denny? To send him a message?”
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I didn’t say anything, just stared at my hands, but I knew it would be wonderful, sheer
bliss.
“You want to do what’s right by the law,” Reed said. “I respect that. I value that. But
I’m going.”
#
Two weeks later Reed called me in Provo.
“The team’s back together,” he said, “fighting injustice and oppression. Just like old
times.” His voice sounded as if it were percolating up from the bottom of the ocean. “Hey, I’m
in El Salvador until June and then it’s off to Honduras. Maybe you’ve already heard about the
exploitation down here, about the sweatshops. Nike, Reebok, Gap. We’re talking 19th-century
England, children working their fingers to nubs for a nickel an hour. So how about it?”
I felt the weight of the phone on my shoulder, and then the heat building between my ear
and the molded plastic.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Reed said, “but maybe you’re not interested.”
I moved the phone to my other ear.
“I hope,” Reed continued, “that you don’t hold something against me.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said, and then I thought: It’s what you are and what I am now. I
don’t want to be you. I can’t be you. I remembered Denny’s car, not the souped-up muscle car
I’d expected, but a beige Ford Taurus station wagon, clean and well-maintained, the kind of car
my dad would buy. A small photograph in a plastic frame hung from the rearview mirror. A
woman in a white dress holding a smiling baby, and behind her lush trees and lawn.
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There was a momentary roar on the other end of the line—a passing truck or bus. I
imagined the tropical heat, the crowds of perspiring bodies, dark skin, the chatter of a language I
didn’t understand, rot and food permeating the streets.
“Derrick, I know what you’re thinking,” Reed said. “You’re thinking, ‘He made me do
it. He made me smash that car. The sinner made me sin.’ Have you become one of them,
Derrick? You gonna say your prayers tonight and write your tithing check and feel so wonderful
because your God will right every wrong in the life to come? If you believe that then you’re a
bigger sinner than I am.”
I unplugged the phone and walked to my bedroom. It was snowing outside, white flakes
collecting on the bare branches and dead, yellow lawns. A car passed. The apartment was silent,
my roommate gone, shopping or studying in the law library.
From the closet’s top shelf I took down a cardboard box full of Reed’s letters. Each
envelope was decorated with a dizzying arrangement of intricate designs: arabesques, paisleys,
loopy-loops twisting and falling in on themselves in a practically untraceable pattern. I saw in
the elaborate patterns a complex network of roots going back through the years, back to someone
I didn’t want to be or think about, back to Reed.
For the next half hour I fed the letters into the shredder under my desk and listened to its
high-pitched whine as the paper disappeared into the machine. I found myself repeating
something I’d once read, perhaps something I’d taught in Rio’s crumbling favelas. To rid our
lives of sin, we must destroy its roots.
#
I never imagined Reed living a long life. He didn’t either. In high school, he enjoyed
mulling over the possible scenarios of his passing. They were all heroic and horribly violent:
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pulverized by an explosive harpoon as he protected whales in the northern Atlantic; the human
shield ground to a bloody pulp beneath an Israeli tank; hacked to pieces by a crazed band of
Islamic militants as they overran a Red Cross hospital in Sudan. For Reed, anything less would
have been unworthy of his life.
So when I answered the phone one Saturday morning and heard my dad’s voice—
strained, fighting for composure—I knew what he’d say.
“Bob and Edna Swenson called this morning,” he said. “It’s Reed. He’s dead.”
I stood in the living room and watched Cassie at the kitchen table, laptop open, searching
online for the best stroller and crib money could buy. We’d been married about a year and
owned a house in Burbank’s Magnolia Park. I was an associate in Latham and Watkin’s Los
Angeles office.
My dad said the American Embassy in Honduras didn’t tell Bob and Edna much, just that
Reed was there with a human rights group to protest the treatment of workers at a textile mill
outside Tegucigalpa: picket lines, boycotts, even sabotage of some of the looms. The Honduran
police didn’t know if Reed’s death and the protests were connected, but they found him, stabbed
three times in the chest, a block from his hostel, pockets emptied, shoes stolen.
“Do they know anything else?” I asked.
“His knuckles were bruised,” my dad said. “He didn’t go easily.” And that’s what I
wanted to hear, that Reed went out fighting.
And then my dad said: “Bob and Edna asked if you’d speak at the funeral. Will you do
that? It would mean a lot to them.”
Outside, birds chortled in our lemon tree. Down the street someone gunned an engine.
“Sure,” I said. “If that’s what they want.”
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I put the phone down and walked to the window. Parked in the driveway, my silver
BMW glowed in the mid-morning sun. Cassie’s yellow Tea roses and Santa Barbara Daisies
edged the front yard. Later, our gardeners, Miguel and Hector, would come to cut the lawn and
hedge the bushes. Like my pioneer ancestors, I’d prospered, cultivated my garden, sanctified
materialism. I’d served an honorable mission, pursued education, found gainful employment,
married in the temple, paid a generous tithe, would soon be a father. I was second counselor in
my ward’s bishopric. I should have felt like a success.
“Who was that?” Cassie asked.
I turned to look at her. I could already see the small bump pushing at her waistline. “My
dad,” I said. “Somebody I knew from high school died. He called to tell me.”
“A friend?” Cassie asked.
I lifted my laptop and walked to the couch. I’d never told Cassie about Reed, never
mentioned our years in high school, nor did my parents. There was something unspoken
between me and my parents, as if we’d agreed those years never happened. There were other
things I didn’t tell Cassie. I didn’t tell her that twice a year I sent a check to Amnesty
International and Earth First!. I didn’t tell her how with our friends and at church, there were
some opinions I didn’t share.
“Just someone I knew,” I said. “My parents want me at the funeral, as a favor to the
family.”
“Are you all right?” Cassie asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “We weren’t close.”
I needed to buy a plane ticket, pack a bag. In a couple days, I’d be home, sleeping in my
old bed, eating my mom’s food. And then the funeral, the bright chapel and drab organ music,
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and of course Reed, laid out in a dark suit and white shirt, hair trimmed—finally the missionary
his mother had dreamed of. I’d stand at the pulpit and say something kind and comforting,
something about Reed’s love for all living things. But I couldn’t say everything. Looking out at
all those devout, grieving people who believed Reed’s life was a tragedy, how could I say that
maybe he’d died a brave man, a rich man, a righteous man?

125

OUR STUDENTS

On Friday we were expected to ready our classrooms for Monday morning, the first day
of school. I was arranging desks when one of the returning teachers walked in. Miller. He
taught biology across the hall, a tall freckled man older than my father, in stone-washed jeans
and a faded T-shirt. “So you and Stephenson are the new meat,” he said, extending his hand. “I
hope you last longer than the guy you’re replacing. His students smelled the fear on his breath.
They pounced.”
Miller grabbed the class rosters from my desk and looked at the names. “Bad, bad,
pregnant, probation, psychopath, bad. Watch this Angel Rodriguez. He’s an annoying little shit.
Stole money from my desk last year.” Miller threw the rosters back on the desk. “Hey, a few of
us are doing lunch today. Stephenson already turned me down. You in?”
An hour later we were huddled in a booth at Bill Johnson’s Big Apple with Hernandez
and Gaines. I’d noticed them, with Miller, sitting together at orientation, exuding a seasoned
camaraderie—passing notes, rolling their eyes, and yawning loudly—as Mr. Pitts, the principal,
went on about state teaching standards and attendance reports. They’d taught at Pathway to
Success Alternative High School for a few years and had the stories to prove it. They laughed
and giggled and told their stories with a macabre gallows humor, and I was their audience. Were
they trying to impress me or scare me? I didn’t know.
“Remember the fat teacher from a couple years back?” Miller asked.
Gaines lifted a sweaty glass to his lips. “Katz. Yes, enormous. Fat rolls over his belt.”
Miller looked at me. “That’s right. Katz. Big black guy. Taught business classes. His
wife worked in the cafeteria. So one day after school I hear this woman screaming. I run to the
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cafeteria and Katz has his wife in a headlock and he’s pounding her in the face. Boom, boom.
No joke. So I’m wrestling Katz, trying to get his wife out of that headlock, and there’s blood
dripping from her nose and mouth and she’s screaming, and I’m doing a little dance with Katz
and my shoes are smearing the blood all over the floor. And then Gaines and Hernandez show
up, and it’s like we’re all doing this dance with Katz and his screaming wife.”
“His breath,” Hernandez said. “Horrible. Like ammonia. That’s what shocked me
most.”
“Yeah, the guy smelled like a gym locker,” Gaines said.
“The guy was huge,” Miller said, “and you can imagine the three of us swinging from his
back. Well, suddenly he collapses onto the floor. Like somebody flipped a switch on him, and
he starts crying like a little baby.”
“The police came and took him away,” Gaines said. He shook his head. “Sad.”
I chewed my steak. It sat on my plate in a little pool of blood.
“What do you tell your students?” Miller asked me. “What do you say when they ask
what happened to Mr. Katz?”
“You tell them,” Hernandez said quickly, almost panting, grabbing Miller’s shoulder,
“you tell them to tap twice on the bars if they want their grades.”
The three men erupted in titters, and I couldn’t help laughing, too.
I pushed my plate away. Katz. An anomaly, I thought. But Miller went on. Story after
story about incompetent teachers and sociopath students, the teacher fired for hiding a student’s
bag of weed in her file cabinet during a drug sweep, the teacher fired for having sex in her
classroom with the guy who mopped the floors and took out the trash, the riot in the school’s
lobby when Hernandez got wonked across the back with a folding chair, the drunk student who’d
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pissed on the trophy case. These guys reveled in the chaos, accepted whatever absurdity awaited
them and the story it would yield. But from what they told me about their personal lives, their
futures had nothing to do with this run-down charter school. They were biding their time until
their real vocations presented themselves. Even old Miller, not far from retirement, was taking a
night class in real estate. Gaines had a catering business and painted houses in the summer.
Hernandez played bass in a rock band. They were in a holding pattern, weighing their options
and planning their escape.
They were the clowns, the comic relief, and because I’d been the clown, in high school,
in college, and had always hung out with clowns, I liked them. They wanted to know what I was
doing in this shit-hole. I told them: a year teaching and then law school. They smiled, maybe
politely.
“So you want to be a lawyer,” Miller said. “Why?”
I chewed on my straw. Why? Because someday I wanted more than the bland, middle-
class neighborhood I grew up in outside Tucson, the sprawling grid of well-tended lawns and
trampolines and minivans. I had fraternity brothers at Arizona State who grew up in Paradise
Valley or in those modern homes riding the foothills below Camelback Mountain, and
sometimes when their parents were in Vegas or Acapulco for the week, we swam in their pools
and drank Coronas and tequila on stone terraces whose views made me dizzy. Even if you’ve
never wanted for anything, you begin to think differently when you look down on the world like
that.
And why was I there, teaching in that dilapidated charter school? Because some of the
books I’d read on increasing my chances of acceptance to a top-ranked law program suggested
either a stint in the Peace Corps or teaching a year in one of these urban, at-risk charter schools.
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I had no imagination or the fortitude for three years of third-world living, but I liked the idea of
me as a teacher. I liked the idea of standing in front of a classroom, lecturing and fielding
questions. A year teaching in one of Phoenix’s inner-city slum schools—a year seemed doable,
if it meant a shot at a more prestigious law school.
But I didn’t tell them that.
“Why do I want to be a lawyer?” I ran my finger along the edge of the table. “I want to
make a difference.”
Hernandez swirled the ice in his empty glass and then waved to our server. Gaines
sneezed into his hand and said what sounded like a profanity. Miller just stared at me.
“Come on,” he said, rubbing his palms together. “Come on. Cut the crap. Make a
difference. That’s thick. You’re insulting us.” He smiled. “You want to be rich. Right?”
I shrugged. “Sure. I guess. Don’t we all?”
Hernandez slapped me on the back. Miller had his hand on my shoulder. They were all
laughing now, and I was laughing, too. But I could see they didn’t believe me. They’d heard it
before, I was sure, heard it from their own lips maybe. The dreams, the lofty ambitions. But I
was serious. A year and no more.
#
And so the school year began. The chaos was dizzying. A constant chatter bubbled
through the walls.
There was the hyperactive, attention-deficient black kid who couldn’t stand still, who
burst into my classroom in paroxysms of shouts and giggles, mid-lecture, mid-test, like a
performer mounting a stage; the morose guy with the full beard who refused to answer my
questions, who exuded a latent violence I didn’t want to awake; the three girls in my second
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period with their stretch-marked breasts practically spilling from their tight V-neck T-shirts,
mothers already at fifteen, who couldn’t stop smacking their gum and giggling about the boy
across the room with the oily hair and gold necklaces. Some of these kids had spent time in jail.
Grand theft, drug possession, assault. They had probation officers, wore ankle monitors, got out
of school early once a week to go piss in a cup.
At the end of the first week, I already disliked them. They tired me with their bored
vacant eyes and stupid conversations about their dreams of stardom and wealth. Stardom and
wealth! They couldn’t even get up in the morning, couldn’t even get through a chapter of
Arizona history without dozing off. They had adult bodies, but the minds of children.
How could I teach them Arizona history? These kids didn’t even bring pen and paper.
They were absent for days at a time. They showed up high.
I had no training, no certification, no background in pedagogy. But for the first couple
weeks I tried, arriving early in a shirt and tie and smiling until my face felt sore from it. I crafted
the kind of lessons that had interested me at their age: a slide show of Arizona’s geologic past, a
PBS documentary on Geronimo, articles on current events, group work. My students couldn’t
care less. Everything was boring. Copying notes was too much. Reading was too much. They
quit at the first tingle of discomfort.
And then one day after school, sometime at the end of the second week, I looked up from
my lesson plans and Miller was there. He smiled as he ran his nails down the length of the
chalkboard. “Quittin’ time,” he said. “We usually go out for a drink. You coming?”
“Lesson plans,” I said. “You done already?”
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“I’m showing a movie tomorrow. And maybe the next day and the day after.” He
snapped his fingers. “Let them color some pictures, finger paint, weave baskets. Whatever.
Come on. I’ll buy the first round.”
I looked down at my lesson plans, imagined the icy, indifferent faces that would greet me
the next day, the incessant complaints regardless of how much preparation I put in.
I stood and followed Miller.
We drove to a place called McDuffy’s, a dimly-lit decrepit bar off Van Buren with a
western motif, an old swinging saloon door and a corrugated metal awning. Gaines was already
deep into his fourth beer when we got there, and Hernandez was on a raised stage near the back
wall belting out “Hotel California” into a microphone while the song lyrics scrolled across a
large TV screen. A video showed two young lovers with terrified expressions running hand-in-
hand through a maze of dimly-lit hallways.
“We aren’t teachers,” Miller said, when we found a place to sit, and I felt he was talking
to me in some veiled, avuncular way, imparting his wisdom. “Teacher’s a misnomer. We’re the
worn-out attendees at a recreation center. How are we supposed to discipline these kids?” Miller
lifted his beer to his lips without taking his eyes off me. “What leverage do we have? Fifty-five
dollars per student per day. That’s what the State pays us. You tell Pitts we need to get rid of
some bad seed and you see the dollar signs dance in his eyes. These kids know we can’t get rid
of them. They know we can’t afford it.”
Hernandez was still on stage, whipping his head around. The TV screen said
Instrumental: Guitar Solo. The lovers were locked in a passionate embrace on the hood of a
pink convertible Cadillac. Hernandez smiled at us and pumped his fist in the air. We raised our
131

beers and nodded. “He’s a horrible singer, isn’t he?” Miller said from the corner of his mouth.
“God-awful.”
“Such a long song,” Gaines said, his palms covering his face. “Terrible. I can’t listen
anymore.” He stood and walked unsteadily to the bathroom.
Miller put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer. I felt his warm breath on
my cheek. “I know you don’t respect me,” he said. “You think you’re better than me because
you’ll be out in a year and I’ll still be rotting away with these losers.”
I tried to say something, but Miller cut me off. “You’re right. Guilty as charged. I’m the
ship that never left the harbor, the lazy, burned-out teacher. I’ll be the first to admit it.
Teaching’s a gift and I don’t have it. I don’t have the desire or the ambition. Years ago when I
got into this, there was a guy named Driscoll, old and tired, always at his desk with his face in a
newspaper. I vowed never to become Driscoll. Teaching was temporary. My calling was
elsewhere. I was pre-med in college. I’d been accepted to medical school at Temple. But I
knocked this girl up at the end of my senior year. In those days you did the right thing. Today
I’d have paid for her to get an abortion. Marriage. I deferred a year. And then another kid.
Divorce. Child support. Another marriage. No medical school. The years pass quickly, my
friend.”
Gaines returned from the bathroom. He sat down heavily and looked around, eyes half-
closed, his head drooping and then snapping upright. There was a spatter of greenish vomit on
his shirt cuff.
“Watch this,” Miller told me. “Gaines,” he said loudly, cupping his hands over his
mouth. “Gaines, you’re pathetic. Your fattest student wouldn’t sleep with you. Your face looks
like an ass with a nose and lips.” And then Miller slapped him hard across the face. Gaines’
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head rolled onto his left shoulder and then righted itself. His eyes closed. “He won’t remember
that,” Miller said, lowering Gaines’ head slowly onto the oak table. He snored softly.
“Let me tell you something,” Miller said, suddenly serious again. “I mean no disrespect
to anyone. I’m no racist. I love all people. You understand? But we’re not here to send these
kids to college. This is educational triage. Basic skills. Maybe they’ll stay out of jail. Maybe a
few will manage to pay a rent some day, pay their taxes. That’s it. Crossword puzzles. Word
finds. Let them paint and color. Show movies. That’s what these kids want. It’s part of the
social contract. They come to these charter schools because they’re easy.”
“And Pitts is all right with that?” I asked.
“It’s an unspoken understanding.” Miller jabbed at the table with his index finger.
“Busy work. Distraction. Give them A’s. Everyone’s happy. No complaints. Pitts hates
complaints.”
I nodded and then looked at Gaines, still passed out the table. His lips moved, but no
sound came out.
I felt some relief in what Miller said. As a teacher, I didn’t have the desire or ambition
he’d spoken about, and I didn’t care about acquiring these attributes. I just needed to finish the
year.
So the next day at lunch I shut myself away, and then the next day and the day after. I
ignored the chaos simmering outside my door as I studied for the LSAT. During my prep period
and after school I did the same, and then threw together some easy worksheets for class the next
day. At four, suddenly thirsty, I’d close my LSAT study guide and wait for Miller to knock at
the door.
#
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And then there was Stephenson, a new teacher like myself. I’d noticed him at
orientation. He stuck out with his starched white shirt and powder blue tie, intent and earnest on
the front row, hurriedly scribbling in a notebook as Pitts blabbed on about state requirements,
basic pedagogy, and health benefits.
He looked like a minister and acted like a Boy Scout. Miller didn’t like him.
Unbelievably, Stephenson actually wanted to work with this crazed, attention-deficient
demographic, a sentiment all of us had intoned on our applications and in interviews. But
Stephenson meant it.
While we showed up to school in jeans and T-shirts, bleary-eyed and dreading the next
eight hours, Stephenson dressed every day as if he were interviewing for a job or going to
church, shirt and tie and pressed slacks, a toothy smile and a clean-shaven face, a well of energy
and honeyed optimism we couldn’t muster or fake.
He had a bag of tricks. No grating din percolating through the thin sheetrock that
separated our classrooms, no susurrus of discontent and boredom. His classroom had life.
Students’ work decorated the walls—posters with timelines and collages, tests and papers
displayed under a banner that read Wall of Fame, rules and expectations posted above the
chalkboard. Students came to my class continuing debates on immigration or freedom of speech
they’d started in Stephenson’s class. They worried over his tests and quizzed each other
nervously. They spoke about a field trip to the State Capitol. These were students who sat
listless and unresponsive in my class.
With all of Stephenson’s squareness and nerdiness, these students, hardened and
distrusting, adored him. They sought him out before and after school, left endearing messages
on his chalkboard, spoke of him without the brass-knuckled parlance of the street that usually
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colored their speech. They ate lunch in his classroom, stayed there long after school ended. He
seemed to have a reserve of time and patience we didn’t, or were unwilling to give. We disliked
Stephenson in the same way we disliked the overachiever from high school, the class darling for
whom the teacher has a puppy dog affection. Pitts was always deferring to him in staff meetings
when we were discussing school improvement or classroom management. Miller would roll his
eyes. Hernandez would squint and make quiet kissing noises.
I felt uneasy around Stephenson and avoided him. In his presence I felt a knavish guilt,
felt troubled by a reoccurring thought that maybe we could do more than baby-sit these kids. I
told myself that after the LSAT, after my applications were in, I’d spend more time on my lesson
plans, really make an effort.
In the end, I was skeptical of Stephenson. I couldn’t comprehend such magnanimity for
these kids, such devotion. Did he really want to do this, live out his working years in a broken
inner-city school?
“He’s a Mormon, you know,” Miller told me one night at McDuffy’s. He blew into the
top of his bottle. “Oh, yeah, he’ll tell you all about it, how he left college to do a mission in the
projects of Chicago’s South Side, converting the same type of disenfranchised and impoverished
breed who stumbles into his classroom every day. Not a coincidence that he’s teaching here.”
Miller paused. He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “He’s one of these people who’s got
some romantic notion from a dozen inspiring movies about ghetto high schools. I’ve seen it
before. They invest so much and then wake up one day to realize the world doesn’t change.
This isn’t Hollywood. He’ll learn his lesson and get out. These kids will break your heart, even
the good ones.”
I started laughing and couldn’t stop.
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Miller pushed his empty bottle to the middle of the table. “What’s so funny? You
drunk?”
Maybe I was. I suddenly had this image of Stephenson with angel wings and a halo,
strumming a little harp and singing to his students in a high falsetto. He wanted to save these
kids. It all made sense to me. He wanted to save these kids and really believed he could.
#
Pitts scheduled our parent-teacher night for the beginning of December.
All day in slacks and a starched shirt.
I waited in my classroom, pulled at the tie knotted around my neck and anticipated a rush
of eager parents intent on scrutinizing their children’s performances. Miller appeared in the
doorway. He wore a wrinkled, white polo shirt with what looked like a hardened spot of egg
yolk on the breast pocket, tucked into a pair of worn jeans he might have mown the lawn in.
“Nervous? Three years here and I’ve had four parents come in,” he said. “No joke. And
they want out as much as you do. Hablas Español?” He rapped his knuckles against the wall.
“Don’t forget McDuffy’s after. Muy cerveza. And we can still catch the second half of the
Suns’ game.”
By eight-twenty-five, not one parent. I thought of slipping out the back door five minutes
early, have a cold one in my hand when Miller and Hernandez walked into McDuffy’s. I’d ask
what took them so long. They’d get a kick out of that. And then right as I was about to leave, a
woman walked in.
“Mr. McClelland,” she said in a thickly accented voice. She stared at the floor,
practically shaking, a short Hispanic woman with a freckled face. “My son in your first period.
Angel Rodriguez.”
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I forced a smile and pointed to a seat near my desk.
“Angel,” I said, to fill the empty, awkward space between us as I pulled his grade up on
the computer. “He’s failing.” I turned the computer screen toward her and pointed to the long
row of zeroes attached to Angel’s name. I could’ve told her this without the computer. I could
have, perhaps should have, told her how he bounced into class most days, every molecule of his
clothes and body venting the stink of cheap weed, how he sketched in a little black notebook
every day while his assignments sat untouched beside him. I could’ve told her this, but I needed
to go. I needed to free myself of that classroom and get down to McDuffy’s.
She nodded, as if she’d expected this failing grade.
“He failing all classes,” she said. “I don’t know what do with him.” She spoke so
slowly, as if she were dredging the words from the farthest corner of her mind and piecing them
together. “He was at Durango for three months. He wear the bracelet on his leg after.
Probation. He was good boy on probation. He’d be good boy if he on probation every day. And
then after he started trouble again, started the drugs again . . . .start hanging out with bad friends,
starts with gang.” She twined her fingers together. “His father have other family. He never see
Angel . . . .”
I heard the clock ticking. Had three minutes passed? Had five? I wanted to get back on
point. The drugs, the deadbeat father—what did this have to do with me? I wanted to be done
and gone. Miller stood in the hallway, his coat over his shoulder. He pointed to his watch, made
a drinking motion with his hand, and then screwed up his eyes. He flipped me off and walked
on.
“He can do make-up work,” I said, hoping this would cheer the woman, hoping she’d nod
enthusiastically and beat a quick exit. “Tell him to come in after school.”
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She sat solemnly, staring at the floor. “He says you his favorite teacher.” And for the
first time she looked at me with those sad, dark eyes. “He say he like talking with you. Maybe
you . . . .” She stopped. Her thin lips formed a tight smile. “Maybe you help him. Talk with
him. He like you. He listen you. Tell him importance of education. Not to waste time on drugs
and bad friends.”
I couldn’t believe it. His favorite teacher. Liked talking to me. Maybe once or twice
we’d talked about the Diamondbacks’ mediocre season, if Bob Melvin was a better manager than
Bob Brenly. That was it.
What did she expect from me? What talent did I have in dealing with troubled youth?
What training did I have? I didn’t even have a teaching certificate. I, barely a teacher, a teacher
in title only, not a counselor or a friend or a father to these kids.
“I’ll speak with him,” I said, understanding I would never speak with him, understanding
that this is what she wanted to hear and what would get her out of my classroom.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice catching on the words. Her eyes glistened. “Thank
you. God bless.” And then, with bowed head, as if I might change my mind, she left quickly.
#
“Why so quiet?” Hernandez asked me later at McDuffy’s. His eyes darted between me
and the large TV screen above the bar.
“That little mama put the moves on you?” Miller asked. “Wouldn’t be the first time it
happened.”
“Hell no,” I said. “I was putting the moves on her.” Miller slapped my back. Hernandez
giggled. Above me, a series of violent collisions played out on a painted wooden floor. But I
didn’t care about the game.
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#
In early February, Pitts kept hammering away in staff meetings about an increased gang
presence on campus. More graffiti. The colors kids were wearing. Bandanas hanging from their
pockets. What did I know? All these kids looked the same to me, all swimming in oversize
pants and shirts a three hundred pound man could fit comfortably. We had to be vigilant, Pitts
said. Someone suggested school uniforms. Pitts thought uniforms were too constraining, not
enough creativity and personal expression. Parents would pull their kids from the school. We’d
lose money. Someone suggested security guards? Too expensive, Pitts said.
And then it was Valentine’s Day, another one of those interminable days of interruptions
and unbridled merriment, kids strung out on sugar and whatever else and in no mood to learn. I
abandoned my lesson plans halfway through second period and then handed out a photocopy of
the state bird and told them to color it.
Finally, the last bell rang and the school was quiet. I worked at my desk.
Law school applications were due in a week and I had to finish my statement of purpose.
I was still teasing my time at that ghetto school into something meaningful, something that
would lift me heads and shoulders above a thousand other candidates. Pitts, with a wink, had
promised a glowing recommendation.
“Mr. McClelland,” someone said.
Angel stood in the doorway, his twiggy body lost in a pair of saggy jeans and an
oversized baseball jersey. “You think the Diamondbacks’ll go all the way this season?” he
asked. “You hear they’re bringing Johnson back?”
I didn’t look up from the computer screen. I told him I hadn’t, though I had. I regretted
not locking the door.
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“Yeah,” Angel said. “They say he can’t throw that heat anymore, but I don’t believe it.
He’s gonna be like Nolan Ryan. He’ll go on for years.”
I wasn’t in the mood. I didn’t want to talk. Angel wasn’t even my student anymore.
He’d failed my class last semester, never shown up for make-up work. He wasn’t my
responsibility anymore.
Raul, one of Angel’s friends, appeared outside the door. “Angel,” he said, “They’re
waiting. Vamanos!”
Angel didn’t look over his shoulder, just stared at me with those Coca-Cola-colored eyes.
“I failed your class,” he said. “I deserve it. My mom was really pissed about that. But maybe I
can make up the work. Maybe you have something I can do right now.”
Raul was walking away. I could hear his voice down the hall. “Angel, andale,” he said.
I could have done it. Probably. It was in my power. What issue would Pitts have with a
repentant student wanting to rectify a failing grade? He’d tout it as a success story. But I didn’t
do it. I wanted to be rid of Angel. I wanted solitude so I could finish my statement of purpose. I
told him I wouldn’t do it. I told him the opportunity had passed, and in that brief moment, the
two of us facing each other in that classroom, I felt justified in my decision, because wasn’t that
the lesson Angel needed to learn? Wasn’t that the tough love he needed to change his life, that
all these kids needed?
He said nothing, only nodded before leaving.
I closed the door and returned to my desk. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t put words
together. I thought of Angel, lost in those over-sized pants, Angel drawing in that stupid
sketchbook—the face of a child. I thought of his mother, kneading her dry hands together, her
face a worn-out, puzzled mask.
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I opened the door and looked into the hallway. Angel was gone. I walked toward the
lobby, feeling a sense of urgency, but not knowing why.
The PA system crackled and Pitts’s dry voice, more animated than usual, sounded
through the hallway. “I need all teachers down at the bus stop on 27
th
Avenue. All teachers,
immediately.”
We walked quickly, saying nothing. Our eyes met. We smiled stupidly, as if to say,
“What is it now? What insanity awaits us?” As always, we expected the ridiculous, two divas
tearing out clumps of hair, wielding long painted nails like weapons, a giddy shoal of over-
caffeinated teenagers shouting insults or encouragement into the fray. I looked for Miller, but he
wasn’t there. He was where I would have been had I not been in the hallway: held up in my
classroom.
And then we were running. We didn’t know why. Stephenson ran beside me, tie
flapping in his face, Wingtips clapping against the asphalt.
It was a brawl, fifteen or twenty boys grappling in the middle of the street. A group of
students watched, jockeying for position, cell phones raised above their heads. Southbound
traffic on 27
th
Avenue had stopped. Horns blared. People were out of their cars watching.
We pushed through the crowd toward the fight. Someone punched me in the ribs. I felt a
kick to my left calf, then heard laughter. When I looked up to orient myself, I noticed a rusted
Cutlass Sierra that had once been white wheezing around a line of cars in the southbound lane of
27th. It made to pull a U turn, then stopped in the northbound lane, parallel to the brawl. The
windows were streaked and filthy. Two men I didn’t recognize sat in the front seats. Raul and
Angel were in the back. I stopped, wondering what they were doing, waiting for them to jump
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into the fight. Then the passenger window lowered and the man sitting there leaned out. I saw a
thin black barrel and a wooden stock. Three quick shots, and then the scream of tires.
The effect was stunning.
Students fled in every direction, as if they’d choreographed their retreat. I was knocked
to the ground. The pointed tip of a high heel jabbed me in the lower back. I covered my head.
I lay there, my cheek resting against the warm asphalt. I could see tiny bits of broken
glass glittering and dull seams of sun-hardened tar. My palms burned. My left calf throbbed. A
little bruised, but nothing more. I felt giddy, elated. My fingers trembled with the adrenaline. I
thought of what I’d tell Miller and Hernandez, how they’d want every detail of the shooting.
I got up and brushed the grit from my shirt. The street was empty, except for Stephenson
and some other teachers and a couple mechanics from the garage across from the school. They
stood in a circle near the sidewalk, staring sadly down at the pavement. Their presence confused
me. What were they looking at? Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Riding, our English teachers, wept.
Their hands covered their mouths.
I walked over and saw a girl on the ground, Jackie Elzy, elfin with long black hair and
dark eyes, painfully shy. I had her fall semester. Often I saw her in Stephenson’s classroom at
lunch, smiling and chatty with her friends, a side of her I’d never coaxed out. Her legs were
twisted unnaturally beneath her. “It’s so hot,” she whispered. “It burns.” And then her eyes
widened. I could see the terror in those eyes, the consciousness of death.
One of the mechanics, an older Latino man with grease-stained hands, began chest
compressions. At first a trickle of blood ran from Jackie’s mouth and nose, and then it was like a
gushing spout, blood puddling onto the street around that pile of black hair. He stopped, moved
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an oily hand across his forehead, and then said something in Spanish. There was a dark stain
between Jackie’s legs that grew until it soaked her thighs.
A hand covered my mouth, my hand, though I hadn’t remembered raising it.
Cars idled past. Horror-struck passengers stared, their shocked faces absorbing the
lifeless figure, the pooled blood. I knew their faces must look something like mine.
I wanted to run away and never look back, to find my car and drive. I wanted to scour
Jackie from my mind forever, her inert image, those eyes, scour away all the violence and
thoughtlessness I associated with these kids. Let them hurt themselves, kill themselves, just as
they’d always done and would always do. I didn’t want to hear about it.
Stephenson stood by me, looking down at Jackie with eyes that seemed to extrude from
the sockets. He’d gone pale, gasped for breath through parted lips.
I took his arm, feeling a measure of distraction and purpose as I led him toward the
school. He hugged his body and sobbed uncontrollably.
A group of boys had emerged from their hiding place in an alleyway and walked toward
the death scene, their voices animated with the excitement. I squeezed the soft flesh of
Stephenson’s arm just above the elbow and spoke to him in a whisper. “They’ll see you,” I said.
He continued to sob. I pulled at his arm. “Don’t let them see you like this. They’ll laugh at
you.”
I pulled him behind a white Oleander hedge and pushed him against a brick wall. “Stop,”
I said.
His eyes oozed. A streak of clear mucus flowed from his nose and wet his lips. “She
wanted out of this,” he said, practically panting between sobs. “She wanted to go to college.
She wanted to be a nurse.” He laid his weepy face in his palms and sobbed.
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I grabbed at his shirt, tearing off a button just below the collar, suddenly overcome with
anger. “What did you think?” I said. He’d stopped sobbing and stared at me, stunned. He had
the pale face of a child in an old painting. I pushed him against the brick and pressed a knuckle
into his sternum until he winced. “Did you think you could change any of this? Did you think
you could save them?” I felt my open hand rising, moving through the air, moving through the
feeble defense of Stephenson’s raised arms. I slapped his face. “Do you think this will ever
change?”
I left him there, weeping into his palms.
#
That evening in Pitts’ office, there were the statements we had to make for the police, the
questions to answer. What had we seen? The color and make of the car? Could we identify the
passengers? The shooter?
The next night, Angel and Raul were arrested outside a convenience store in south
Phoenix. Both pleaded guilty. As far as I know, Angel never mentioned where he’d been before
the shooting. Neither did I.
The effect of Jackie’s death was immediate and irreparable. Enrollment diminished by
three-quarters. Pathway’s empty hallways and classrooms hinted with their eerie silence that
something horrible and unmentionable had happened. Most teachers quit. They feared
retribution. They feared the fight might come unexpectedly into the school lobby, into their
classrooms. Stephenson never came back.
“Don’t be a fool and quit,” Miller told me. We were sitting in his classroom a week after
the shooting. There was nothing to do, no one to teach. He crushed a sheet of paper into a ball
and threw it across the room. It bounced off the wastebasket and under a desk. “I mean, it’s
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horrible what happened, this dead girl, but we’re on easy street now. By law Pitts has to pay
your contract until the end of the year.” He smiled, hefting a thick book on real estate from his
desk and then dropping it. “Hope you brought something to read.”
“What about next year?” I asked. “You’ll stay here?”
“Ah, my boy,” he said, winking. “Don’t you see? Pathway’s done. Finished.” Miller
slid the brown scuffed loafer from his left foot and massaged the arch. A swatch of scaly yellow
skin showed through his sock’s threadbare heel. “Another failed charter school. No, next year
I’ll be somewhere else. I hope. Who can afford to retire? At least I’ll have a leg up on these
wieners who quit. I’ll be the guy who stuck it out to the end.” He looked up from his foot.
“And you? You’ve recently found your love of teaching, I’m sure.”
“Law school,” I said.
“That’s right. Pitts was really banking on that. He told me so. It means something when
you can tell parents one of your teachers just went off to law school. Adds some prestige to this
dump. So much for that. So much for the school. But you wait and see. Most charter schools
die quietly, like a sinking ship slowly going under. Not this one. When somebody dies, it’s
never quiet.”
Miller was right. There was blame to assign.
Jackie’s family hired a lawyer. They believed the school had been negligent in fostering
a safe environment on and near campus. The school hired a lawyer. Months later there was
some kind of settlement.
I was admitted to Stanford, a school my slightly-above-average GPA and LSAT scores
should have disqualified me from attending. In June, the law school’s dean of admissions, a man
with a deep, commanding voice, a man I would do anything to become, called personally to tell
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me the admissions committee had awarded me a small scholarship. The admissions committee,
he told me, had been impressed with my personal statement. “It sounds like you did a lot of
good at that school,” he said. “Changed a lot of lives. I’m sure they’ll miss you.”
I didn’t tell him that in May the doors closed and Pathway ceased to exist.
#
I’m an associate in a San Francisco law firm. I live in a Spanish Mediterranean home in
the Marina District. From the master bedroom balcony, I look out onto a slice of the San
Francisco Bay. Often with clients, I eat at Acqua and Gary Danko.
Not long after I started with my firm, Jack Farrell, a senior partner, called me to his
office. He said the firm needed a softer image. He wanted people to associate Anders,
Feddersen, and Farrell with a commitment to public responsibility and community service, and
to that end he’d decided the firm would make a yearly donation to Boswell Alternative High
School in Oakland. But more than that, he wanted a few of us to visit the school, handout
pencils and binders, speak with these kids. “You’ve worked with these types,” he said. “You
understand them.” He leaned back in his chair. “This will be your project. You understand?
I’m counting on you. Make us look good.”
So every October a couple associates and I visit Boswell. It’s eerily familiar, the same
poorly-lit classrooms and graffiti-marked desks I remember from Pathway, the same sticky, dark
grime covering the surface of things. The principal of the school, a short woman named Cynthia
Gonzales, always has an assembly when we visit. She sings Anders, Feddersen, and Farrell’s
praises and then invites us to say a few words to the students, something inspiring and
motivating. I always speak on personal responsibility and then quote a few lines from
“Invictus.” Isn’t that what these kids need to hear? I am the master of my fate; I am the captain
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of my soul. Isn’t that what might have saved Angel and Jackie Elzy, what might save all these
kids? I look out over that mass of dark faces and still feel something akin to terror.
And every year from that elevated stage in Boswell’s dim auditorium, I search out the
teachers in the crowd, wondering if by some miracle Miller, Hernandez, or Gaines are out there.
“What a gas!” they’d say, yanking at my tie and grinning madly. “Look at you, counselor.
Moved up in the world. But can’t stay out of the jungle, can you?” For the longest time I looked
for Stephenson, too. That cheesy smile. Those starched shirts. I had no ambition to teach, no
real desire, no gift for it, but knowing Stephenson might be out there somewhere, awing his
adoring students, still believing he could save them, always comforted me. But Stephenson
doesn’t teach anymore.
Walking back to the office from a client lunch not long ago, I saw him get out of a cab on
Howard Street, briefcase in hand, garment bag slung over his shoulder. I followed him into the
Charles Schwab Building and watched him speak with one of the security guards at the
information desk. He’d put on some weight and his hair had receded, but he looked like the
Stephenson I remembered, except for something in the face. No smile. The permanent grin that
annoyed us so much had gone. He had on a nice suit, nice shoes. There was a thin gold band on
his finger. I’m sure he had kids. I’m sure he was a good father. For a moment, I thought of
saying something to him. But what? Tell him he looked well? Make a joke about how we’d
gotten out alive? I said nothing, only turned and left the lobby. But if I could go back, I’d have
asked Stephenson if he, too, even after a decade, still feels the needling guilt. I would never tell
Jack Farrell this. I’d explain to Stephenson how sometimes on Market Street or near the Wharf,
I hear them, voices booming and unabashed, their laughter piercing and annoying. Our students.
I’d tell him that when I see them, I cross the street.
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THE CROSSING

Housing market in the crapper, commercial and residential building at a thirty-year low.
That’s what stared me down each morning from the business section of the Arizona Republic,
and staring back I’d experience that same unease and morbid curiosity I felt when rolling past an
accident on the I-10. All that twisted metal and smashed glass. Nothing good comes from
looking. Nothing good comes from dwelling on gloom. But I’d scan the headlines anyways for
some indication of economic upturn and find nothing, no hope on the horizon, a fiscal mess and
getting worse, and foolishly I’d read on and chew my shredded wheat and fight back a queasy
flutter in my lower guts when I fixed on something particularly disquieting.
Yet, I smiled. I ate with vigor and even listened with interest as my wife Kendra
thumbed through Genteel Baby and droned on about something she thought our unborn Joey
couldn’t live without, a Native American infant carrier or a diaper bag with solar panels. Though
looking closely she’d have seen a damp spot on the newspaper where my hand had been. Kendra
didn’t read the business section, and only the most superficial details of my work entered our
conversations: high-profile clients, office drama, what kind of handbag the secretaries had, their
nail and hair color. The truth: business was bad, the worst it’d been since I depleted our savings
four years ago and took out a monster loan to buy the firm. I never mentioned how bad things
were. Kendra has a fear of poverty, a childhood insecurity I’ve tried to understand but really
can’t. She can get weepy and go on and on about a childhood of hand-me-down shoes and day-
old bread and bland breakfasts of multi-grain cereals cooked for hours in a crock pot. And then
when she was ten, the winds of fortune changed. My father-in-law bought a bankrupt bottling
company. He started a tropical fruit juice line. He became a millionaire overnight. The family
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bought a mansion on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. Kendra drove a Mercedes to high school.
She never wanted to be part of the lower middle class again, not that she’d ever say it quite that
way. But I get it. She doesn’t want a failed, penniless husband. She wants a better life for our
son. I get that, too.
I should mention I own an architecture firm in Phoenix, six architects, two secretaries,
two interns from ASU, a receptionist, and an outrageous lease on the third floor of a modern-
looking glass building that overlooks part of the Biltmore golf course. In the gravy days, we had
so much business we were turning it away. Everyone was building and remodeling then, lured in
by the easy credit, and suddenly, almost overnight, the boom was over. Banks failed. Credit
dried up. Now you can look out from the 60 and see the half-finished wooden skeletons of new
homes browning in the desert sun. Like everyone, I started hoarding pennies.
I dimmed the office lights, set the thermostat to 81, swapped out the incandescent light
bulbs for those compact fluorescent kind, and did away with the glut of free snacks and highly-
caffeinated beverages in the break room refrigerator. And when my accountant told me to cut
more or lay somebody off, I cancelled our cleaning service, EarthMaids, these hippie women
who drove white Priuses and used environmentally-safe products that reeked of vinegar and
patchouli oil. They left sermonizing notes on my computer keyboard if they found even one
empty Coke can in the trash. They weren’t cheap.
I thought I could clean things up myself, at least until work picked up. How hard could it
be? Not that I told my employees this. I didn’t want panic or rumor. It doesn’t inspire
confidence to see your boss in yellow rubber gloves spritzing up the bathroom mirrors. So I
stayed late, scrubbed urinals and toilets, emptied the trash bins and vacuumed floors. I’ll admit
the quality of the work wasn’t great. Usually I was exhausted and in a rush to get home.
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Katrina, one of my interns, complained. “Look at the dust on these lampshades,” she said.
“Have you seen the smudges on the mirror? There’s no soap in the dispensers. Sloppy.” I
didn’t know lampshades needed dusting.
I lasted two weeks. I didn’t have time. I’m a busy man, a business owner, an architect. I
considered asking my interns to clean, hinting at the letter of recommendation I might have to
write them someday, lecturing them on the value of hard work and having pride in one’s
workplace, and then handing over a mop and bucket. There was Katrina, a platinum blond from
Scottsdale with skin meticulously tanned the color of a saddle and lips the size of garden slugs.
She favored denim mini-skirts and Ugg boots and long acrylic nails painted a lurid red. I
doubted she’d ever touched a toilet brush or pushed a vacuum across a floor. And there was
Matt, a chiseled frat boy, a former high school football star from Flagstaff, who spent most of the
day appraising, not very subtly, the curve and sway of Katrina’s butt. They’d refuse. I was sure.
There’d be mutiny.
Over lunch with a friend at the Grand Orange, I complained about the economy and the
plight of the small business owner. Stewart and I were fraternity brothers at ASU. He was a
podiatrist with a growing practice off 24
th
street. I wanted commiseration. I wanted to hear
things would get better. I mentioned—I don’t know why, perhaps for nothing more than
sympathy—that I’d just let my cleaning service go and was now doing their work at nights.
Stewart said nothing, only shot me a grave look and then scratched a phone number on his
napkin.
“God, you’re not a janitor,” he said, clucking his tongue as he pushed the napkin across
the table. “There’s this woman and her son. Yolanda’s her name. Mexicans. Thirteen an hour
150

for the two of them, damn good workers, always on time, and they never say anything, just nose
to the grindstone. You almost forget they’re there.”
I stared at the number. “Mexicans. Mexicans from Mexico?” I imagined the sad, oily
faces of day laborers eyeing me like homeless puppies every time I pulled into Home Depot, the
desperate gaze of pie-faced women selling tamales in the Safeway parking lot. I was skeptical. I
thought of stolen office equipment, long-distance phone calls to remote Mexican villages, a dark-
skinned pigmy sleeping in the storage closet and bathing in the bathroom sink. “Is it safe?” I
asked.
Stewart waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not like they’re real employees. You don’t
like them, you fire them, you call Immigration.” He belched into his hand. “There won’t be a
problem, trust me. These people aim to please. You got their purse strings in your hot little
hands.”
Thirteen an hour. I followed the mechanical up and down of Stewart’s jaw as it
obliterated a slice of French bread. Thirteen an hour, a bargain, a fraction of what the hippy
cleaners charged. I sniffed the tips of my red, raw fingers. They smelled like Pine-Sol.
#
That afternoon, I called Yolanda. Our short conversation reached the very limits of my
high school Spanish. Work, sweep, windows, trash. We understood each other perfectly, and
most important: Trece dólares por hora. I wanted that to be clear. We made arrangements: she
and her son Hector would clean twice a week, Monday and Wednesday mornings. “No clean at
night?” Yolanda asked. “No,” I said without explanation. “Hay algun problema?” Of course
there wasn’t a problem.
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So that was the deal. No contract, no social security number, no W-4, no copy of a
drivers license. They provided a service. And like a good employer, I opened my wallet on
Wednesday and distributed that week’s pay. There was no federal withholding, no state tax, no
Medicare or social security deductions. That was all.
They were efficient, thorough, unobtrusive. And Stewart was right, I hardly noticed
them. When Yolanda walked into my office to empty the trash or if I passed her in the hallway,
she had the uncanny ability to minimize herself, to avoid attention, and when I did say
something, a Buenos dias or Como esta, she stared at the floor and smiled bashfully. Hector also
had that diminutive quality, but less so. He walked around the office in gray Dickies and a
sleeveless undershirt that showed off the swell of his biceps and the chiseled lineaments of his
forearms, backbone ramrod strait, head thrown back, a pair of oil-black sunglasses fused to his
face. He had a phoenix with outstretched, translucent wings and a menacing gaze tattooed in red
on his left bicep. In its sharp talons, the bird held the numbers 602.
Admittedly, the tattoo and baggy clothes and shaved head gave me pause. Gang
affiliation? Was he dangerous? Maybe there’d been some bad decisions in his past. Chalk it up
to youth and inexperience. Maybe he’d seen the error of his ways and now wanted to make an
honest living. That’s what I imagined for Hector. He scrubbed urinals and toilets, pushed a
vacuum across the floors. How dangerous could he be? In my mind, bad characters didn’t clean
offices. They robbed them. And I was the guy offering opportunity and success, the benevolent
human being looking past the sleek machismo and silly tattoo and into the heart. That’s what I
imagined for myself. But that didn’t stop me from circulating a vague inter-office electronic
memo on the importance of securing valuables and other personal items in the workplace.
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Of course Katrina complained. She’d tiptoed into my office on Hector and Yolanda’s
first day. A vacuum hummed in the hallway. She clutched her brown Gucci purse to her chest.
“That kid…” She smacked her gum loudly, something I’d been meaning to talk to her about. I
cut her off.
“What kid?” I reclined my chair and stared up at her. “You mean Hector? He has a
name. You have a concern?”
She leaned over my desk, practically whispering, her blue eyes wide and panicked:
“Whatever. That Mexican kid. He looks like”—her eyes moved over the wall behind me—“he
looks like a criminal.” She intensified her grip on the purse, practically shoving it into her
ample, bronzed cleavage. “What happened to those other people, those women?”
I spoke slowly. “They were getting sloppy? Weren’t you complaining last week about
the smudged windows and empty soap dispensers?”
“I didn’t mean fire them,” Katrina said.
“Does it really matter who cleans the office?” I rubbed by palms together and
contemplated the perfect crescent of Katrina’s eyebrows, her fried platinum hair and enormous
pouty lips. I could only imagine how much all that cost. I felt giddy, like a man who’d stretched
a dollar. I felt generous and world-wise. “Does it matter what they look like? Does it matter
where they come from? Not all of us have the same opportunities in life, Katrina. Or maybe you
wouldn’t mind cleaning up?”
She turned and ran out of my office.
#
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I had no complaints. Hector and Yolanda worked quickly. No dilly-dallying. They
sweat while they worked—that impressed me. I could see the shiny drops beading on their
foreheads and upper lips, darkening their shirts. And I was saving a small fortune.
It went on this way for three months, until it suddenly ended.
I remember it was a Monday. I was late to work, exhausted from having spent half the
night enduring Kendra’s wall-rattling snores—an annoyance of late pregnancy no one ever told
me about—and the other half batting away our stinking, geriatric tabby, Buttons, from the
Lazyboy where I’d curled up in a blanket. A man stopped me outside the building lobby. He
must have been in his early thirties, thick around the chest, thick arms and thighs, the build of a
professional wrestler, with a pale, doggish face and a shaved, freckled head ravaged by the sun.
“Mr. Fenton,” he said in a voice much higher than I’d expected. “David Fenton, the architect,
right?”
My hand rested on the door handle. I was rushing. We had a twelve o’clock deadline on
a condo remodel in Scottsdale. There were still some details to hash out. It goes without saying
how badly we needed the money. “I’m in a bit of a rush,” I said.
I thought he might be a contractor trying to drum up some business, but he seemed too
put together, too clean and manicured. I caught a whiff of his cologne, something sharp and
musky and cheap my grandfather or father might have splashed on in their primes. There was
something overly affected about him that brought to mind the tough guy, the vigilante, the good,
misunderstood protagonist of at least ten TV shows. He wore a black leather jacket with the
collar raised, though it was already pushing ninety, a starched white T-shirt tucked into grayish
stone-washed jeans. And then it hit me: he’s a cop. And as if reading my mind, he flashed a
Maricopa County Sheriff badge. “Detective Sherman,” he said. “I only need a second.”
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My mind whirled. Had somebody died? Had there been a break-in? A stolen car? Were
they investigating a client—or me? I never thought of Yolanda and Hector. I waited. Sherman
said nothing, just looked me up and down, a grin I couldn’t interpret creasing his thin, freckled
lips. He pulled a pair of dark sunglasses from his jacket pocket, breathed on the mirrored lenses,
and then polished them on his shirt. “Got an appointment?” he asked. “Gonna turn over some
money?” His peeled, speckled head swiveled on his thick neck, taking in the building, the sway
of the palms trees, the manicured hibiscus lining the parking lot, as if he had all the time in the
world. “A lot of people turning over money in these parts. Making money and not caring who
they step on.” He smiled, showing a row of small white teeth
I didn’t follow, and I didn’t like his preachy tone. A feeling of dislike slid in behind the
anxiety of a moment ago. “Is there something I can do for you, Detective?” I said it curtly, said
it to convey my annoyance.
“That’s right, you’re a busy man,” Sherman said. “I just need you to do something for
me.” He stepped toward the curb. “Could you look up at the building?” he asked. I did, not
knowing what I was looking for. Lights were on. Silhouettes danced behind the shaded glass.
“And that building across the street,” Sherman said. “And that one.”
I couldn’t hide my irritation any longer. “And what am I looking for?”
“My sister owns a cleaning service,” he said. “They used to clean a lot of these offices.
Cleaned your office, in fact.” A drop of sweat trickled down my back. The sun clawed at my
neck. I suddenly knew where this was going. “And then about three months ago,” he said, “her
clients started letting her go. She took it personally, Mr. Fenton. She works hard, her employees
work hard. She’s honest, bends over backwards for some of these pampered snobs, and they let
her go, without explanation. Do you know why? Illegals, Mr. Fenton. Wet backs, border
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bandits, fence fairies, whatever you want to call them. They come here and take our jobs. They
don’t learn our language. They take the bread right off our plates. And you know who opens the
door and invites them in? People like you, Mr. Fenton.”
My mouth had gone dry.
At that moment, Hector and Yolanda pulled into the parking lot in a sputtering, sun-
baked red Chevy Cavalier, found a space not far from where Sherman and I stood, and then
started unloading the car, pulling out buckets, rags, a vacuum, and a mop. As they walked
toward the building, Sherman and I watched. Yolanda smiled. “Good morning,” she said in an
accent so thick it sounded like each word had a sharp edge.
I looked away. I stared at the concrete curbing bordering the lawn. I said nothing.
Sherman jumped to attention, clicked the heels of his thick black boots and pulled the
door open. “Buenos dias,” he said in a high voice without a trace of gringo accent. “Como
esta?” He made a deep, courtly bow as they passed. Yolanda’s face turned a deep crimson. She
leaned forward and rounded her shoulders. Hector stared at the ground, his black shades
reflecting the travertine tile in the lobby.
Sherman watched their quick progress to the elevator. “Yolanda and Hector Molina.
And I have a feeling in about two minutes I’d find them wiping piss off your toilet seats.
Right?”
I opened my mouth. One guttural syllable belched out and then nothing else. I wanted to
tell Sherman exactly what I thought of him and where to go, tell him to speak with my lawyer (if
I could have afforded one). I wanted to smile, shake my head and grin dumbly, tell him I’d made
a mistake we could rectify without any long, drawn-out legal process.
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“I could suspend your business license,” Sherman said in barely more than a whisper, as
if the phrase itself were an obscenity. “I could storm this place with ten officers to bring them in.
It would be something to see. People always talk about those raids. The newspapers love them.
I could shut you down—for a while at least, long enough to make it hurt.” A black mist hovered
on the edges of my vision. I wanted to sit down. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. . . .” Sherman
stopped. His features—the squint of his eyes, the hard set of his jaw—softened. He looked up at
the sky and sighed. I suddenly felt the ground solidifying under my feet, felt my lungs open up
and catch a full breath of air.
“They’re like parasites, Mr. Fenton. Don’t you see that? They’ll feed until there’s
nothing left. They’re mongrels.” Sherman put his sunglasses on. My expectant, suddenly
eager-to-please face bobbed in their chrome reflection. “Wednesday morning, 9:30, I’ll be back
for them. If they’re not here, I’ll assume a little bird whispered in their ear. If that happens it’ll
be really bad for that ungrateful bird. You understand, Mr. Fenton?” I nodded. Sherman turned
away and then stopped. “Hey, my sister will make you a good deal, Mr. Fenton. I’ll tell her to
expect your call.”
#
When I got to my office, I called a lawyer, this guy named Bereski I met a month ago on
the Biltmore golf course. He’d given me his card.
He didn’t say anything until I finished, just made little puffing noises into the phone as I
narrated the events of the past few months, gasped when I told him about Sherman, as if he were
the devil himself. I wanted to know if I could fight this, if Sherman could shut me down.
“These new laws are clear,” he said. “A business that knowingly hires a worker who’s in
the country illegally will have its business license suspended. But this”—his voice pitched
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higher, vibrated with loyal outrage—“this is coercion, this is a threat, a conflict of interest, a
violation of your rights. This impugns his case. We can fight this.” Bereski cleared his throat.
“And let me say that in this trying economic climate”—I thought I heard fingers punching at a
calculator—“that you’ll find our rates affordable. We understand the challenges of the small
business owner.”
A vacuum hummed down the hall. Grit rattled through its plastic tubes. Feet shuffled by
the door, cleaner hissed from spray bottles, plastic trash liners deployed. Somewhere in the
distance, somewhere in the parking lot below, a weed eater buzzed and then stopped, and then a
voice called out, “No tenemos tiempo.” I didn’t say anything.
“Mr. Fenton,” Bereski said. “Mr. Fenton, are you there?”
I reclined my chair. “Or he can just take them and it’ll be over.”
“Yes,” Berski said, all the outrage gone out of his voice. “Yes, you could do that.”
I told him I’d get back to him.
I sat at my desk and stared at a blue print, trying to lose myself in work. Lines and
numbers floated across the page, danced, came in out of focus.
Someone knocked at the door. Yolanda peeked in. “I sorry,” she said. She looked at the
floor. “Trash. Clean windows.” I stood, yes, stood and waved her in. She went about her work.
I couldn’t help thinking that I’d never really seen her until this moment, really seen her. She
wore her hair in a braided pony tail, wore bleach-spotted jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a
stretched neck. She wasn’t unattractive, the ample swell of her breasts against the shirt, the
curve of strong legs in tight jeans, full lips. Her face and hands were a little spotted. Maybe
she’d worked outdoors at one time, picking fruit or something. She was still pretty, and I
realized, not much older than me.
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What did she want in life? Where did she live? I knew nothing about her. I’d driven
past Phoenix’s tenements, the crumbling cinder block and cracked windows. I’d seen the
disheveled children with sticky mouths and hands, men peering out from stairwells, the parking
lots of afflicted, immobile cars. Places accustomed to the drone of helicopters and the blare of
sirens. Did she live there? And where had she come from?
Two years ago Kendra and I spent a week in Mazatlan, drinking margaritas in the
looming shadows of colonial churches and attentively browning our skin on the beaches,
venturing into the local market to haggle over the price of leather purses and vanilla. It all
seemed so quaint, the smiling, unhurried natives, the peeling church bells, the mariachi music
trilling in the background as if it were the soundtrack of their simple lives. Is that where she
came from? That’s what I wanted to believe.
#
When I got home that night, I was exhausted. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted alcohol. I
wanted to chew food and flip through channels until I fell into a stupor.
But Kendra was energized, practically glowing. She wanted to tell me every detail of her
day. She’d been nesting: vacuuming floors, assembling things, sanitizing bottles and pacifiers.
She was breathing heavily, and the hair around her forehead was dark with sweat. “Do you like
the bedding I ordered?” she asked. We stood in the nursery looking at the crib. “It just came
today.”
I picked up a small square pillow with a pattern of grinning brown monkeys and
squeezed it affectionately between my palms. “Nice,” I said. I took in the room, each stick of
furniture, each soft sanitized surface. The Birchwood crib and changing table came from a
Pennsylvania company that specialized in Amish furnishings. In the garage there was a stroller
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that looked like NASA engineers had designed it, and a breast pump on order that cost more than
my first car, and then there were the tiny pants and shirts hanging in the closet from Scottsdale
boutiques with names like Jacadi-Paris and Dapper Child. I couldn’t help seeing a trail of
receipts extending into the future, more clothes, preschool, swim lessons, summer camp, proms,
and college tuition.
Kendra hovered protectively above the crib. She took the pillow from me and rearranged
it with the others, then ran her hand over the quilted blanket. “It’s organic cotton, twice as much
but you don’t get all those pesticides. They never washout, you know. Could you imagine little
Joey breathing that in?”
I lifted a diaper from the changing table. It was no bigger than a wash cloth. “No,” I
said, “terrible,” though I couldn’t remember what she’d asked. A lawn mower had fired up
across the street, and above the mechanized roar of the engine I heard rushed voices speaking
Spanish. I looked through the open blinds at the two men attending to my neighbor’s yard, skin
like caramel, upper lips with the faintest suggestion of a mustache. One jogged behind the
mower and the other raked furiously at a patch of decorative rock. It was like they were racing,
as if some man with a stopwatch were overseeing their work from behind the oleander.
I thought of Mrs. Lufkin, our neighbor. She’d lived in the beige craftsman two doors
down for the last fifty years, a big-boned Jewish woman who fled Germany after Kristallnacht.
She often brought us apple strudel and big copper pots filled with matzo soup. “You’re too
thin,” she’d tell Kendra, pinching her cheeks. “We need to fatten you up.” She clucked her
tongue if she saw us wearing short sleeves in February and made it sound like we’d instantly
dissolve into puddles of quivering flesh if a cold wind so much as touched an exposed arm or
leg. She was gone now, moved away six months ago to one of those retirement communities in
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Sun City where people cruise around in golf carts and eat dinner at three o’clock in the
afternoon. She left after two men broke into her house.
There’d been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood targeting the elderly. The thieves
were brazen, breaking in at night to steal jewelry or whatever they could get their hands on. We
spoke with the Phoenix Police Department. They assigned more officers to our area. We formed
a neighborhood watch. We hired a retired cop from Mesa to drive the streets at night.
It was two a.m. when Mrs. Lufkin heard voices, she told us later. She got out of bed to
investigate and found two men in the dining room stuffing her wedding silver into a pillow case.
She reached for the phone, but one of the men wrenched it from her and threw it against the wall.
They didn’t say anything, just pushed her aside and continued rummaging through the house for
another five minutes, then jumped the back fence into the alleyway and drove off.
Kendra and I saw the police cruiser’s blue and red lights slashing across our bedroom
walls. We went over and found Mrs. Lufkin sitting on her couch, a crumpled, ashen figure
wrapped in a purple bathrobe. A Phoenix police officer, a short balding man with lardy skin and
crumbs on the collar of his black uniform, inspected the living room.
“Can you give me a description of the men?” he asked, a pen poised above a clipboard.
He looked as if he’d just woken up.
“They were”—Mrs. Lufkin’s voice quivered. She looked at me. She looked at Kendra.
Her spotted hands shook. I knew what she’d say before she said it. Kendra knew. The fat
police officer knew. “Mexicans.” And the way she said it, drawing out of the first syllable,
made the word sound like a slur. “Dirty Mexicans who smelled like beans and sweat.”
Kendra stood there with one hand covering her mouth and the other resting on that small
bump just under her belly button. I put my arm around her. She stared silently at the wall as if
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the whole terrifying scene were playing out again: Mrs. Lufkin sitting helplessly while these
men rifled through her drawers and closets. But I knew it wasn’t Mrs. Lufkin she saw. It was
herself.
In bed later, Kendra tossed and turned, tugged at the duvet, held her breath if a car
passed. She sat up suddenly. “What if they come here?” she said.
“They won’t.” I was tired, not in the mood to ease her fears. “It’s not worth losing sleep
over. They’re gone.”
She started to cry. “You can’t protect us. No one can. No one can stop them. They
don’t care about anyone.”
I reached out to hold her, but she slapped my hand.
“Don’t you see? These people want what we have and they don’t care how they get it.”
She turned and sobbed into the pillow.
The next morning she wouldn’t speak to me. She didn’t look up from her cereal when I
left for work.
That afternoon she called the office.
“You have to come home.” Her voice was a whisper. I didn’t think I’d understood her.
She panted into the phone. Then hung up. I called back. She didn’t answer.
I swore into the phone as it rang and rang and then went to voicemail. I didn’t have time
for this. I had a lunch meeting with a lawyer looking to build a new office off Cactus Road. A
big project. We needed it badly. But what if something had happened? I couldn’t help thinking
that. Kendra. Mrs. Lufkin. Maybe the baby. I told my secretary to cancel lunch.
Kendra was on the couch when I got home. She stared at the closed plantation shutters,
biting at her lower lip. She looked ready to cry.
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I stood above her, out of breath.
“I don’t want him here.” She pointed at the shutters.
I was confused. A hedge trimmer buzzed in the front yard. A rake scratched the
sidewalk. It was Frank and his Latino helper cutting back the yellow hibiscus that edged the
yard. They’d been coming every week for the last two years. “What? Is it Frank?” I said.
“It’s not Frank,” Kendra said. Her eyes were glassy, her face expressionless. “It’s that
man who comes with him. That Mexican.”
I sank into a chair and pressed with my fingertips at a dull pain between my eyes. A
feeling of helplessness washed over me. I knew I wouldn’t be designing a law office off Cactus
Road. I knew my firm would feel it. Maybe I’d have to let someone go. Who would it be? And
looking at Kendra, at the terrible hysteria in her eyes, I knew there was nothing I could say to
calm her, nothing I could say to restore safety. She’d wanted to live in historic Phoenix, wanted
the antique charm of a white-washed home older than our grandparents, the carefully manicured
yard and sprawling porch. What did she expect? This is what happens in a city, I wanted to tell
her. This is urban living. This is the price you pay.
I gripped the armrests. “Fine, I’ll tell Frank.”
For two days she moped around the house. She barely slept. She didn’t get dressed in
the morning. She habitually looked out the window, called me at the office at least half a dozen
times a day to tell me about some suspicious person passing on the street or how she thought we
should move to north Scottsdale or Ahwatuckee. And then when I got home on the third day,
she’d actually showered and gotten dressed. The shutters were open, the table set with china and
wine glasses. The aroma of cooking meat filled the house.
Kendra stood over the table in a yellow sundress.
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“Wow,” I said. “What’s the deal?”
She didn’t say anything, just came up to me with this shy, lopsided smile and kissed me.
Her tongue tasted like mint. “Look at this.” She lifted the local section of the Arizona Republic
from the coffee table and pointed to a headline circled in red.
“Anonymous Tip Helps Police Catch Willo Thieves,” I read.
“The men who broke into Mrs. Lufkin’s house.” She fingered the hem of her dress.
“The police got them in some kind of raid. Illegals. It was a whole network of them. The police
have their fingerprints. People saw their faces. They can identify them. Thank God,” she said.
Her right hand rested on her stomach.
That was six months ago. We hadn’t spoken of Mrs. Lufkin or the burglars since.
I closed the blinds so Kendra couldn’t see out the nursery window. She rubbed my neck.
“Long day?” she asked.
I already knew I wouldn’t tell her about Sherman, not a word about Yolanda and Hector.
What was the point? She’d pace the floor and lecture me if I did. She’d bring up Mrs. Lufkin.
She wouldn’t sleep that night or the next. Give them up. That’s what she’d say, without
equivocation. She was right. There was family. There was a baby coming, a mortgage, food to
put on the table, bills to pay. Really, who were Hector and Yolanda to me? They weren’t
family, they weren’t friends. They really weren’t even my employees.
I closed my eyes. Kendra’s small hands moved over my shoulders. I tried to imagine
Wednesday. The snap of handcuffs, mug shots and fingerprinting, the day or two awaiting
deportation. And after? I wanted to believe Yolanda and Hector would return to their ancestral
village, back to the provincial charm of the small hamlet I’d imagined for them, the mariachi
music and the molasses pace of an unhurried life. I believed it, I hoped it, and that image seemed
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to obscure a nagging question I couldn’t answer as I’d watched Yolanda empty my trash can that
morning. Why had she crossed that border? Why had she come here?
#
Sherman came early.
I’d thought about staying home, a headache, allergies, sour stomach, leprosy, anything
not to be there for Sherman’s vigilante production. When my employees told me what happened,
I’d feign surprise, shake my head and decry the System. A real tragedy. We’d have a moment
of silence, take up a collection to support a Nicaraguan orphan. But I had to go. I feared
Sherman, feared he’d wield his badge and harass my employees. There was Margarita, our
receptionist, who in the right light bore a striking resemblance to Salma Hayek, and Ricardo, one
of my architects. Both were born in the States, as American as Miley Cyrus and Jimmy Stewart.
I was at my desk when I heard the front door of the office open. There was a snatch of
Spanish I couldn’t make out, heavy shoes beating across the carpet, a chair striking the floor,
silence, and then a sad, piercing scream. I was on my feet, moving toward the lobby. Doors
opened and heads peered into the hallway. I told everyone to stay in their offices. Margarita
passed me with a horrified look on her face and then disappeared into the break room.
Hector and I got to the lobby at the same time.
Yolanda sat on the carpet, rocking back and forth and wailing, legs crumpled beneath her,
hands locked behind her back. Long strings of black hair stuck to her wet face. Sherman, in
what looked like a flack vest with Maricopa County Sheriff embroidered across the chest, stood
above her, face flushed, hand resting on the gun at his hip. A faint grin pulled at his thin lips.
He looked up at Hector.
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“On your knees,” he said, raising a thick, dry finger and shaking it at Hector. “You hear
me?”
Hector stood there, arms rigid at his side. He stared at his mother.
“Down,” Sherman repeated, this time with a tinny growl in his voice that came off more
effeminate than forceful. I watched Hector, the rise and fall of his chest, saw the slight bend in
his knees. He looked at Sherman and then at me, a look of complete understanding—the
System, privilege, the haves and the have-nots, the trap we’d set for him and his mother—he
knew everything.
And then, just as I thought Hector would go quietly and I could go back to my office and
forget all this unpleasantness, Yolanda shouted something. I jumped. Sherman flinched. It
sounded like a war cry. I didn’t recognize her. This wasn’t the face of the meek, bashful woman
who dusted blinds and wiped countertops, but the face of woman ripe with anger. And then I
understood. She was telling Hector to run.
Hector dropped his arms. He locked onto the door at the end of the hallway, an
emergency exit that led to a dimly lit stairwell and then to the parking lot below. I was the only
obstacle to his retreat, the man in cahoots with the guy who’d just cuffed his mom and thrown
her to the floor. He came at me, breathing heavily, a row of perfect white teeth framed between
full lips. Sherman shouted something I couldn’t make out, and then I felt Hector’s hands gripped
firmly around my neck, nails cutting into the soft flesh at my hairline, palms compressing my
windpipe, and then the momentary glimpse of Hector’s round brown face come to life in front of
mine like an enormous parade balloon. “I’ll kill you,” he hissed in my ear. And then I was
down on the carpet, shielding my head as Sherman lumbered past, his thick boots beating a slow,
heavy rhythm on the floor. But Hector was already gone.
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Sherman canvassed the parking lot, poked around in the dark crevices of the juniper and
hibiscus, called in three officers to scour the Biltmore’s back nine and the high-end strip mall up
the street. Nothing.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked Sherman. There was a shakiness to my voice. I
couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was demanding, impatient.
Sherman stood with one foot propped up on the bumper of his white Crown Victoria,
carefully picking grass stubble from his pants legs. His bald, sun-battered scalp was the color of
boiled hotdogs.
He didn’t look up. “About what?” he said, clucking his tongue at a stubborn cocklebur in
the lining of his sock. Yolanda sat in the back of the car, head bent forward, a sad form behind
the tinted windows.
My fingers traced the red, inflamed lines on the back of my neck. I didn’t know how I’d
explain them to Kendra. “Didn’t you hear him?” I told Sherman. “He said he’d kill me. That’s
a threat. What are you . . . .” I stopped. Sherman shook his head, threw me a what-do-I-care
look.
“Didn’t think about that when you hired them, did you? Just wanted to save a buck. If
they’re not criminals, then they raise criminals, Mr. Fenton. Maybe now you’re beginning to
see. It’s war out there. Every day I tell my daughter that.”
“And what about Yolanda?”
“Who cares.” Sherman flicked his sunglasses open and put them on. “Back to Mexico.
One less problem. One less drag on the system. You should be happy. All of us should be
happy.” He opened the car door and slid in. “I have to write a report today. Haven’t decided yet
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what I’ll say. I might be feeling generous. Or maybe not.” He ran his thumb under his nose. “I
spoke with my sister last night. She says you haven’t called.”
He slammed the door and accelerated through the parking lot, pulled onto Camelback and
was gone.
#
Two days passed. Hector’s faced loomed in my mind, took root there. I imagined him
crouching in the darkness, seething, biding his time. Or maybe he’d send someone, a henchman
from the gang. I saw him in the dark-skinned men mowing lawns, moving heavy furniture, the
men pushing ice cream carts down the streets or driving through back alleys to pick through our
junk. The raw red lines on my neck burned, in the sun, in the shower, under the slight graze of
my collar (I told Kendra, without much explanation, I’d tripped and fallen backwards into a
hibiscus. She laughed. “Clumsy you,” she said, and kissed my forehead).
Work continued. My employees talked about other things.
EarthMaids, with their scented organic products and moralizing notes, were again under
my employ. Every time I looked at them, I thought I saw a smirk on their pale faces, as if they
knew well the power that had brought them back to me. We got a small project for a set of
Condos in south Scottsdale. We had a deadline. A week passed. My neck was healing.
And then I saw him as I drove home from work. Hector. He was in the middle of
Thomas Road, waiting for a break in the long line of cars moving toward Central Avenue. I
thought he was a mirage, the baggy gray Dickies and long white T-shirt, the shaved head and
that silly bird tattooed on his bicep. I blinked quickly. I kept waiting for his face to turn into
someone else’s, someone I didn’t know and would never meet. I felt panic. He wasn’t far from
our house.
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The traffic moved forward and then stalled. Hector came toward me. I locked the car
doors, leaned forward and grabbed the steering wheel. He kept walking, didn’t look down,
crossed two lanes of traffic at a quick jog and then disappeared into the crowd at the bus stop.
I called Kendra. She didn’t answer. I tried again. Nothing.
The light changed. I worked through the gears, weaved like a maniac around cars, turned
onto our street with tires screaming. I pulled into the driveway and ran for the door, pushed it
open and listened. I didn’t hear anything. And then there was the reassuring hiss of water from
a faucet, a cabinet opening, the clink of small glass containers—makeup remover, face soap,
pimple cream. The bathroom door opened and a swatch of buttery light colored the hallway.
Kendra stood there, a silhouette with an enormous belly. “Home from the wars?” she
said
I laughed nervously. My fingers shook as they worked the deadbolt. “You off to bed?”
“Yes.” She spoke the word in a breathy whisper, as if she were already tucked in for the
night.
“I’m not far behind,” I said, pulling at my tie. I felt I’d overreacted, felt the figure with
the expressionless face crossing Thomas Road had been coincidence, or maybe an apparition, or
maybe someone else—a tattooed gang banger with sagging pants, like a thousand others
wandering Phoenix.
And then Kendra, the handle of the bedroom door twisting in her small, delicate hand,
said something that stopped me cold:
“There’s a manila envelope on your desk. It was strange. Somebody left it on the porch
this afternoon, rang the bell, and when I opened the door, no one. It has your name on it.
Something for work?”
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It felt like a cold hand brushed the tiny hairs on my neck.
“Probably…” I tried to sound unconcerned. A rushing sound filled my ears.
Kendra sighed. She’d already lost interest, was already half asleep. “Good night,” she
said.
I listened to her naked feet pad across the wooden flooring, heard the fluffing of pillows,
the rustle of sheets. And then nothing. I stood in the darkness and took in the streetlamp’s
yellow light streaming through the down-turned slats of the plantation shutters.
He’d walked the flagstone path to the porch, stood at my door, maybe peered into the
picture window and saw Kendra there, painting her nails, gluing pieces of colored paper into a
scrapbook, weeping over Oprah, or doing whatever she did with her afternoons.
Kendra’s parlor palm and yucca threw strange shadows across the walls. The evaporative
kicked on. Air rattled through the vent, and for a moment I thought I heard two low voices
somewhere deep within the ducts.
I went to the kitchen and poured Hennessey over a knot of ice, drank, and then drank
again, and then ten minutes later, somewhat recuperated, I was at my desk turning over the
manila envelope. I opened it, reached in and pulled out a stack of paper—blank letterhead.
Fenton Architecture, David Fenton. My right leg jerked, toppling the wicker garbage basket
under my desk. My letterhead.
I quickly thumbed through the stack. He’d written on the last sheet, something in black
permanent marker, sharp, angry writing not unlike the graffiti that blighted the walls and
billboards downtown. The marker’s odor burned my eyes. I squinted, trying to make out the
words. Soy una voz que grita nel desierto. I spoke the words out loud. Their meaning came to
me suddenly. I am a voice that cries in the desert. The words knocked the breath out of me.
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Was this a joke lost in translation, a veiled threat, the coded brass-knuckled language of the
streets?
Was it time to panic? Was it time to gather my fragile world into itself, build a wall and
dig in? I’d always leaned toward pacifism. As a child, I preferred to fight my battles in the
classroom and, now as an adult, by winning more contracts and turning over more money than
my competition. As far as I was concerned, physical altercations were a non-issue in my circle,
an inner-city phenomenon or a third-world problem about which Kendra and I would shake our
heads and mumble words like “Horrible!” and “Disgraceful!” and “Poor darlings!” as we
munched popcorn and stared at news footage of fat dictators waving to cheering crowds or eight-
year-old kids in Sudan totting Ak-47s. But now after all this, his coming to my home, the
envelope, none of that seemed so distant. The war was here, practically knocking at my door.
I’d never been in a fight. I was a courteous driver, slow to anger when confronted by
others’ stupidities, patient when faced with daunting lines and sub-par customer service. I
avoided talking politics and religion in the office, and played sports with a minimum of contact,
favoring a long fairway and the leather grip of my Callaway driver or the crack of serves and the
dry shuffle of rubber on clay. I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I didn’t know how to make it
stop.
I thought of Kendra asleep in the next room, of our unborn child. I thought of Mrs.
Lufkin. I thought of Hector. What is he capable of? I didn’t know, and that terrified me.
#
Two more days passed. I didn’t sleep. I had no appetite. I couldn’t shut down my
imagination: my desk and office walls splashed with blood, an iron grip around my throat, the
stinging burn of a knife jammed between my ribs. I called Sherman and left a message. He
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never called back. And then another two days and then two more and then a week. Nothing
happened.
Work picked up. We were having a baby. I’d almost forgotten.
Kendra bought a nightgown for the hospital, a purple low-cut silk thing. The sight of it
aroused me. She complained of Braxton-Hicks. She snored viciously at night, a rasping
exhalation like the flatulent discharge from a whoopee cushion. I slept on the couch with
Buttons, breathing in her rank, geriatric stench all night. And thankfully, Hector’s enraged face,
larger than life a week ago, began to diminish into a distant uneasiness.
#
It was the day before Joey was born. I was working late, clearing my desk for the two
weeks I’d planned to take off. I’d just locked the office and was walking to my car when I heard
something: the scrape of shoes on asphalt, the brush of pant legs. I turned and saw a man
approaching me, a stooped figure, shoulders rounded, pants ragged at the knees, a white T-shirt
smeared with grime—a panhandler, a bum looking for a handout. He came closer, stepping into
yellow light the street lamp threw down. And then I saw the face, strangely familiar but beaten
out of shape, the left eye swollen shut and leaking a clear fluid, the upper lip bloody, an open
gash on the left cheek yellow with infection. I barely recognized him without the black
sunglasses, but it his was him. Hector.
My heart accelerated. I gripped my keys like a weapon, lifted my briefcase as if it were a
shield. I thought of jumping the cinder block fence surrounding the parking lot, running down
Camelback and screaming for help. But there was no need for that. Hector limped toward me.
His left arm, blotched with bruises, hung lifeless at his side, and with his right arm he held a
place just under his ribs. Breath rasping in his throat, he sat down heavily on a parking barrier.
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When he looked up at me, his good eye—the one that wasn’t inflamed—took me in at a glance,
the linen slacks and Italian loafers, the calfskin briefcase in my right hand.
“You never paid us for Monday.” He stared at his scuffed black Converse. The fire had
drained out of him, the fight gone. I thought he might pass out right there on the asphalt. “Pay
me and I’ll leave,” he said. “You’ll never see me again. You’ll never hear from me.”
I looked at him, at the stiff bristle of dark fuzz on his head, at the festering sore on his
cheek. He couldn’t touch me. He couldn’t even lift his arms. I knew he was desperate, emptied
of all his shaded, muscled machismo. Why else would he have ventured back here to collect a
few dollars he knew I probably wouldn’t give him? I could’ve made a call. The police would
have arrived in minutes. He wouldn’t get far. Why should I pay him? I touched the back of my
neck. My fingers grazed the scabbed over marks there. He’d laid hands on me, threatened me,
come to my home, terrorized me with his cryptic message. But then knowing I’d never see him
again, near my house, at my work, appealed to me. I wanted to dissolve whatever connection he
thought we had, and if it cost a few bucks, I was fine with that. I wanted to sleep through the
night again, sleep deeply and soundly without a dark shadow clouding my thoughts. I pulled a
hundred dollars from my wallet. His hand trembled as he took the bills. His knuckles were raw
and bleeding.
“That’s twice what I pay you. You understand?” Despite everything, I was being
charitable. I wanted him to see that. But he didn’t look at the money, didn’t thank me, just
stared at those black Converse as he pushed the bills into the front pocket of his billowing pants.
A helicopter passed overhead. A thick shaft of light vented from its belly. We watched it move
over the building and continue west. Hector didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.
“So what happened to you?” I asked.
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“Why do you care?” Hector said fiercely, his head snapping up to look at me. And then:
“What do you think happened to me?”
I took a step toward my car. He’d already guessed my assumption: brawling, turf wars,
brass knuckles and half-inch steel chain, doing whatever tough guys do in his neighborhood.
“You really want to know?” he said. “I was crossing Thomas. Someone hit me. Didn’t
even slow down. That’s what some people do.”
He stared at me accusingly. His right eye looked like a piece of raw meat attached to his
face, but his other eye, the good eye, bore into me. I was the guy in the car who’d run him down.
I’d written the laws to get rid of him and his mother, stormed the stinking tenements with pistols
drawn and slapped around his countrymen. I’d built the wall brick by brick to keep them out.
What did he want from me? Some kind of reparation? An apology? Still, looking down at him,
I couldn’t quash a knavish guilt I’d been trying to tuck away in some nether region of my mind
for the last few weeks.
“I never wanted this to happen,” I said. “I hope you understand that. They put me in a
bad position. They wanted to shut me down. They wanted to make an example of you. It
wasn’t personal. You understand? People could have lost their jobs. I have a family….” I
stopped. Hector stared up at me. I wanted to ask about Yolanda, find out what had become of
her. I wanted to hear she was fine. But I didn’t ask. Hector licked his parched lips and looked
up at the building. There was a sharp sliver of moon in the eastern sky.
“I’ll take you to the hospital,” I said.
“And who would pay for it?” He stood and then limped toward Camelback.
“How would I answer their questions?”
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My mind was grasping for something. I wanted to do something more for him, extend
the olive branch, help in some way.
“Where you going? I can drive you.”
He turned to me. His shadow bled across the parking lot and stopped at my feet. He
laughed. “People like you don’t go where I go.”
#
Joey was born the next night. No complications. A cramp in the lower back, the drive to
the hospital, the blessed relief of the epidural, the pushing that seemed to go on for hours. I fed
Kendra ice chips, and like an awkward cheerleader intoned encouraging words I felt silly saying:
breathe, push, you’re doing great. More pushing, and then I saw him, my son, first nothing
more than a few slick brown curls on the top of his head, and then a face that looked so serene, a
blank slate. I cried. Kendra cried. And later, while she slept, I sat by her bed and drowsily
watched the nurse wheel Joey to the nursery. I was exhausted, floating between consciousness
and sleep, happy and content. I closed by eyes and smiled. I had this pleasant image of my
son’s life spreading outward from this room, filling our house, a classroom, a college dormitory,
filling the whole world. And then I felt a sudden stupor come over me, a shadow spilling over
my thoughts. What came up out of that darkness was an image of Hector, crossing Camelback in
a slow, stiff shuffle. My body jolted, my eyes snapped open. Somewhere down the hall I heard a
vacuum. Someone said something in Spanish. Where you going, Hector? He’d never answered.
Where? I couldn’t even imagine.

175

THIS SAME DARKNESS

Early Saturday morning, a man knocked at Mason’s door.
Tall and heavy, the man looked damp, arms shining, shirt soaked through around the
collar. He wore black orthopedic shoes with thick rubber soles.
“Name’s Osborn,” he said. “My daughter never came home last night. She might’ve
passed this way. Girl on a motorcycle. Had on a bright pink helmet.”
He handed Mason a photograph.
The daughter, her hair as dark as India ink and streaked with cotton candy pink
highlights, wore a black T-shirt imprinted with a bone-white grinning skull and jagged letters
that read: IMAGE COMING SOON!
“Maybe you seen her,” Osborn said.
Mason handed the photo back. “My wife and I rented this house for the summer. We
don’t go out much. I’m sorry.”
Osborn brushed a hand over his eyes. “Do you have children?” he asked.
The question bothered Mason, though he didn’t know why. “A hundred and fifty
September to June,” he said. “I’m a high school teacher in Phoenix.”
Immediately, Mason regretted this admission, that he was a teacher, because Osborn’s
wandering gaze suddenly fixed on him, as if by dumb luck he’d just happened on the solution to
some perplexing problem.
“A teacher,” Osborn said. “Then you know something about my daughter. Probably had
a few just like her. She’s one of those independent types. Won’t listen to anyone once she gets
an idea in her head.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead and the
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back of his neck. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you, but maybe if you had some time this
afternoon you could help me look for her. Country like this, someone goes off the road and
disappears into these blackberry thickets. It’s just I got these two bum knees. Can’t cover much
ground myself.” Osborn spoke haltingly, as if leaving spaces for Mason to interrupt and agree to
help.
The affectation in Osborn’s voice, the long mopey face and the wet puppy dog eyes, all
struck Mason as too dramatic. But they weren’t. Osborn was serious. He reminded Mason of
one of the many neurotic, overly dramatic, overly protective parents he’d known over the years.
If she were missing two days, even a day, that would be something. But hours!
“My wife and I are on vacation,” Mason said again. He thought of his cup of coffee
cooling on the breakfast table. “I’m sure you can understand that, Mr. Osborn. If it were an
emergency, if she were hurt, I . . . ”
“I know,” Osborn said quickly. “It’s too soon. I’m overreacting. The police seem to
think so, too. They told me to wait twenty-four hours.” Osborn looked toward the road.
Overhead, a hawk climbed higher and higher on a thermal. “Let me give you this,” he said,
handing Mason a flier with the girl’s picture on it. “Her name’s Avery. If she don’t show up,
I’ll come by this afternoon. Maybe we can check the road up there past Flaming Geyser Park.
Sure would help me.”
“Sure,” Mason said, knowing he’d make it a point to be somewhere else that afternoon.
Osborn turned and limped down the sidewalk, rounding the corner of the house, out of
sight from Mason.
There was the squeal of a fan belt and then the low popping of a bad muffler. A faded
blue Suburban wheezed down the unpaved lane, gravel crackling under its smooth tires. Beads
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of dew shimmered on the grass. Sparrows squeaked and cut lines through the sky. Osborn’s old
Suburban intruded on this beauty before disappearing behind a grassy embankment. In a
moment or two the sound of the vehicle rumbling down the road was lost, and everything within
Mason’s view, as if the natural world had agreed upon it, settled back into place.
Alone on the porch, staring off into the lush greenery, Mason inhaled deeply before going
back into the house, expecting the heavy morning fragrance of alder and mowed field grass. He
coughed. The Suburban’s exhaust still lingered in the air.
#
“Are you sick?” Cindy asked as Mason passed through the kitchen. She’d been making
strawberry jam for the last two days, a gift for their Phoenix friends she’d told Mason, and now
she was almost finished, pulling the sealed jars from a pot of hot water on the stove.
The jam’s deep crimson color blazed against the beige tile countertop, reminding Mason
of something anatomical. “No. Do I look sick?”
“You look pale. Is it your stomach again? You want some peppermint tea.”
“I don’t want any tea,” Mason said, louder and more sharply than he intended. “I just
want to be left alone.”
The pot of water boiled, and outside, beyond the steamed kitchen windows and beyond
the line of cedars and alders and blackberry thickets lining the road below, a car with a noisy
muffler passed. Cindy, her white apron speckled with red, stood over the stove and stared at
Mason.
A deep blush crept up Mason’s neck and colored his cheeks. Staring at his wife, at her
shocked expression, he felt ashamed for his shortness. He pulled a stool from under the
countertop and sat down heavily.
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“Who was it?” Cindy asked. “A solicitor.”
“I wish,” Mason said. “A solicitor’s easier to get rid of. It was some guy looking for his
daughter.” Mason set the flier on the countertop and then stabbed at it with his index finger for
emphasis. “She hasn’t been gone twenty-four hours and he’s already canvassing the countryside.
He tried to enlist me in the cause. How is it,” Mason asked, “that every psycho parent finds his
way to me?” He ran his fingers through his hair and laughed, hoping Cindy might see the humor
in what he said. “Really, it’s the story of my teaching career. One after another, year after year.”
The temperature in the kitchen was stifling. “God,” Mason said, yanking at his robe, “how can
you stand this heat?”
Mason wanted to hear that this Avery Osborn, without his lifting a finger, without a
single more thought on his part, was safe, would sleep in her bed that night, would embrace her
father in the morning, would go off to college, marry, and live happy ever after.
Cindy’s eyes slid to the bottom of the flier. “Mason, this girl’s missing. The man’s
probably going out of his mind with worry.”
Mason stood and paced the length of the counter. “I understand that.” His robe clung to
his back. He felt dizzy in the humid heat. “But isn’t the whole thing premature? This girl isn’t
missing, Cindy. She probably hasn’t gotten home yet. There’s a difference.”
“She could be one of your students,” Cindy said. “Wouldn’t you be worried if one of
your students didn’t come home? Wouldn’t you go search for one of your students?”
Mason looked down at the flier. Avery Osborn, black and white and grainy, stared back
at him. Her eyes had the strange quality of following him as he paced. “Search for one lost
student?” Mason laughed, a short burst to show the ridiculousness of Cindy’s question. “Who
would pay my overtime? I’m joking.”
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#
For most of the morning, Mason read on the back porch. First the newspaper, but the
glossy back-to-school ads depressed him, a needling reminder that in two weeks he’d return to
Phoenix North High School, back to his cramped, overheated classroom and the narrow, scuffed
hallways vibrating with the roar of two thousand voices that every year seemed louder and more
incomprehensible.
When the newspaper no longer interested him, Mason swung in the backyard hammock
and read Will Durant’s Lessons of History, letting the warm sun wash away any thought of
Osborn and the approaching school year.
At two-thirty, when Cindy took her nap, Mason quietly gathered his wallet and keys and
drove to a sports bar in Auburn called the Big Screen.
There, Mason fell into conversation with a man sitting by him named Harris. Mason told
Harris he was from Arizona, a history teacher in a Phoenix high school, and on vacation. Harris
was on vacation, too, visiting his wife’s family in Algona. He lowered his eyes and sighed
deeply when telling Mason he was a Las Vegas parole officer in juvenile corrections. He took a
pensive sip of beer and shook his head.
“Me and you are fighting the same war,” Harris said. He was about Mason’s age, with
blond wiry hair fading into gray and pale freckled skin on his face and arms. The gold fillings in
his molars glinted dully.
“How’s that?” Mason asked.
“I know what goes on in Phoenix schools,” Harris said, “because it’s the same damn
thing that’s happening in Vegas. You can cut the apathy with a knife. White trash. Cholos in
those silly shades and enormous Dickies. I’ll be the first to admit I’m concerned about the future
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of this country. In our day, we’d get the paddle if we stepped out of line. Now you can’t touch
these kids.” Harris lifted his glass partway to his lips and then lowered it. “And you’re right
there in the thick of it, trying to teach them. Must be exhausting.”
Had they met in a Phoenix bar, Mason would have chastised Harris for his narrow-
mindedness and insensitivity, and then lectured him on the realities of economic disparity and
systemic discrimination. And Mason would have done this because as a teacher, as someone
who worked with kids, that’s what was expected of him. But Mason knew that in his private
mind his and Harris’s views weren’t that different.
Mason rested his elbow on the lacquered bar and listened to the sizzle of carbonation in
his beer bottle. “I have fifteen minutes at the beginning of class,” he told Harris, “and then
they’re good for nothing.” Mason blew into the bottle. He felt the alcohol percolating through
him. “Most are lazy. But I don’t worry about them. They’re harmless. It’s the kids who might
turn on you. You can see it in their eyes. If time and place permitted, they’d shove a knife in
your guts and not give it a second thought.”
“But I imagine you’ve done some good over the years,” Harris said. “At least that’s
something. I just handhold the little shits through the system. Not much of a job. I look at
grades, attendance, their urine tests. At one time I thought I could help these kids. I imagined
getting Christmas cards thanking me for changing their lives. But I know what you mean. These
kids break your heart. They don’t listen. They wear you down. A finger in the dike. We’re that
guy. How much pride can you take when that’s your job?”
“The first ten years weren’t bad,” Mason said. He closed his eyes. “I’m proud of those
years. We took field trips to Tombstone and Bisbee. The state of Arizona gave me a teaching
award. And then the white exodus out to Gilbert and Chandler. Suddenly I was teaching history
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to kids who didn’t care. They wouldn’t take notes or read the textbook. They’d quit the minute
anything got uncomfortable. You want to know something I wouldn’t tell anyone?” Mason
opened his eyes and looked at Harris. “These kids scare me.”
“No chance to get out?” Harris asked. “Transfer schools?”
“Wishful thinking,” Mason said. “I’d retire before a history position opened at a nice
school.” He smiled. “I’m stuck.”
“Well, they’re lucky to have you,” Harris said, putting his hand on Mason’s shoulder. “I
know something about appearances. You’re a man of education and culture. I bet you walk into
that school every day knowing they’re unworthy of you. You wouldn’t admit that to anyone, but
I know. Pearls before swine. Am I right? I respect you.”
Mason smiled at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Harris’s admiration touched
him.
#
Driving home, Mason felt renewed, as if the gloomy stain washing across his day had
dissolved. The air was moist and thick and slightly chilled, and it puddled as fog in the lowest
parts of the fields. In the distance, Mount Rainer’s icy cap peeked into the valley. The world
seemed enchanted and Mason felt under its spell.
He whistled and drummed the steering wheel, feeling generous and untroubled. When he
saw a teenage boy in a red flannel shirt and a pair of saggy jeans, Mason slowed the car. The
boy wasn’t hitchhiking, only plodding along with a collapsible fishing pole in one hand and a
heavy plastic grocery bag in the other, but Mason stopped the car and said, “Son, it seems you
need a ride.”
The boy, not saying a word, peered up the road a ways as if marking the distance in his
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mind and then got in the car. He stared ahead, the fishing pole on his lap, the grocery bag resting
on the floor between his feet. Mason drove.
“Beautiful evening,” Mason said. “The kind you appreciate more as you get older. At
your age, I wouldn’t have given it a second look.”
The boy shot Mason a quick glance and then faced forward again.
“Yes, the kind of evening,” Mason continued, “that speaks peace to the soul, that wipes
away all of life’s ugliness. Wouldn’t you agree? An evening like this makes you feel
everything’s all right in the world.”
“Are you a preacher?” the boy asked. “You talk like a preacher.” He still stared ahead,
his face shadowed, his features like stone.
“Not a preacher,” Mason said, amused at the comment, “but a teacher. I teach history.
What grade you in?”
“I don’t go to school,” the boy said softly. Mason had to tip his head in the boy’s
direction to hear him.
“Don’t go to school?” Mason was shocked. “What do you mean you don’t go to school?
Don’t your parents make you? It’s the law, you know.”
The boy shifted in his seat, leaning slightly against the door. He gripped the handle of
the fishing pole and held it tightly to his stomach. “They don’t care.” His voice sounded
gloomy. “I’m going to be a farmer, just like my dad. He never finished school.”
Mason clicked his tongue. “Do you know how much a high school dropout earns? Most
can’t even support themselves. Have you thought about that? You have an obligation to
society.” Bats darted up and down in the fields. The fence posts ticked past.
The boy folded and then unfolded his arms, shifted in the seat again, and then rested one
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arm on the door. Mason couldn’t judge the boy’s height well, but he looked no bigger than a
jockey, a tiny lost thing for which Mason suddenly felt a deep concern.
“Farming isn’t much of a life,” Mason said, “just a bare existence. At your age, you
could be anything. A doctor. A lawyer.” Mason wanted to say more. He could see a litany of
words and phrases lined up in his mind: social responsibility, self-respect, self-improvement,
persistence, hard work. He had an image of this disheveled boy, as an adult, standing at a
podium before a large crowd, wearing a dark suit, hair trimmed, recounting their conversation as
a turning point in his life, the tough talk he needed to realize his potential.
But before Mason could continue, the boy said: “I’ll get out here.”
Annoyed at the interruption, Mason pulled to the side of the road. “You live here?” he
asked. There wasn’t a home for a mile, only a narrow gravel road blocked by a metal gate and a
field with long even rows of strawberry plants that cut straight lines to the river.
“Me and my friends camp in the woods,” the boy said. He opened the door and stepped
out.
The boy stood for a moment outside the car, adjusted his flannel shirt, then reached down
to grab the plastic grocery bag.
“Think about what I told you,” Mason said.
“Think about what?” The boy was still bent over, winding the grocery bag around his
wrist, his brown hair falling over his face.
“Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? The day of the small farm is over.” Mason looked
out over the strawberry field. “Now it’s all big corporations with a hundred thousand acres.
Education’s where it’s at.”
Something warm and wet struck the tip of Mason’s nose and then oozed onto his lower
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lip. Shocked, Mason turned to the boy, who glared at him. A thin string of saliva hung from the
boy’s sharp chin. The dome light gave his face a ghoulish appearance. Mason recoiled.
“Go to hell!” the boy yelled. “All you do is talk, talk, talk, and never listen. You don’t
know nothing.” And with that, the boy slammed the door with a force that Mason felt in his
chest.
The boy jumped the metal gate, then turned and gave Mason the finger before
disappearing into the darkness.
Mason was so shocked that he sat there for several minutes, his breath coming in short
bursts. The moon had risen, a large yellow skull floating above the trees, grinning dumbly down
on him.
Rubbing his shirt sleeve over his lips, Mason felt that the spell had broken. The air was
thick and stifling. It smelled rotten. Everything smelled rotten. Mason dabbed at his eyes and
drove, hunched forward, the indigo lights on the dash and radio dial blurring.
Suddenly, a pair of flashing blue and red lights appeared in the rearview mirror, faint and
distant at first and then growing brighter, approaching at a great speed.
“Damn it,” Mason said, hearing the piercing scream of a siren. The blue and red lights
scored the night, cut through the car, danced frenetically across the fields. Mason’s heart
pounded. Quickly, he pulled off the road, relieved when a sheriff’s cruiser sped by in a rush of
air and light.
Hands trembling, Mason drove on, squinting past the headlights to a distant spot on the
road where the night seemed to be alive, blue and red lights clustering in a sphere of white light.
Mason slowed. A car accident, he presumed. Able to go no farther, he parked on the shoulder
and walked toward the sheriff’s cruiser.
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The deputy wore a reflective orange vest and paced nervously. A ring of keys jingled on
his belt and his leather boots squeaked. Beyond the sheriff’s cruiser were two fire trucks and an
ambulance, whose lights revolved silently. Two other motorists had stopped, a man in a business
suit shouting into a cell phone and a young woman in shorts and running shoes who hugged her
body with her arms and stared at the lights with large watery eyes. A row of burning flares threw
out a vaporous pall of smoke. Mason could taste sulfur in the back of his throat.
Down a short gravel embankment, a telephone pole rose from a dense patch of blackberry
bushes. Three firefighters and two EMTs were down there, their tall shadows moving over a
screen of cedars and tall alders. Every few minutes voices came over the speakers inside the fire
trucks.
Mason saw Osborn standing near the ambulance’s open doors. A firefighter stood next to
him, a hand on his shoulder, speaking softly. Mason couldn’t make out the words, but could see
that Osborn wasn’t saying anything, only nodding his head as if in agreement.
The sight of Osborn there, his wet hair spilling onto his collar, dug at something deep in
Mason. He gave the deputy his name and asked if the girl was all right.
The deputy was tall, a young man with a blond bristly mustache. He stared down at
Mason. “You family?” he asked.
“Not family,” Mason said. His mouth felt parched, his tongue dry and uncooperative.
He wanted to hear the girl was fine and then be on his way. “I live up the road. This morning I
heard she was missing.”
The deputy looked relieved that Mason wasn’t family. He chewed his bottom lip and
stared down at his boots, grinding the tip of one into the road’s black asphalt. “She never made
it around this corner,” he said. “Slid off the road into those blackberry bushes and hit the
186

telephone pole. Internal injuries, they told me. Her father found her about an hour ago.”
“So she’s fine,” Mason said. “She’ll recover.”
The officer shook his head. “No. She’s dead. Probably died yesterday.”
Mason sensed a cold numbness in his hands and feet. He looked at Osborn and imagined
him limping down the road in those thick-soled shoes, his shirt soaked through, his flashlight
playing over the snarl of blackberry bushes. And then that horrific discovery. To suffer that
alone, Mason thought. And in this awareness he felt a profound gloom settle over him.
Someone shouted, “Lift,” and Mason watched the firefighters and EMTs struggle up the
embankment with a metal gurney, their sweaty faces straining with the effort and shining in the
bright glare of the headlights. A black body bag lay on the gurney. Its contents—the outline of a
chest, a torso, and legs—pushed at the thin plastic.
At that moment Osborn sprang forward, his voice a dreadful howl. “Don’t touch her,” he
screamed, blocking the gurney’s progress to the ambulance. He sobbed and stared down at the
body bag, his lips working mechanically but emitting no sound.
The firefighters and EMTs backed away and gazed off into the darkened trees. Osborn
continued to sob. Why is no one doing anything? Mason thought. Why doesn’t someone help
him?
He went to Osborn and took his arm. “Mr. Osborn,” he said. “Mr. Osborn.”
Osborn turned quickly and said, “Who are you? I don’t know you. What the hell do you
want?” He snatched Mason by the collar. “I don’t know you.” A deep rumble churned in his
throat.
Mason saw the thick fingers clutching his collar, the dirty, callused knuckles, the solid
wrists of a man who toils with his hands. Osborn shook him, pulling him onto the tips of his toes
187

with little effort. Mason felt the humid heat of Osborn’s breath on his cheek, sensed the
profound, mad sadness holding him.
Osborn sent Mason sprawling backward, arms and legs flailing, the world turning in
circles. Mason felt a momentary weightlessness and then hit the asphalt and rolled once. He
crouched on one knee and panted. Osborn was again at the gurney, his broad shoulders shaking
as he sobbed, but the others, the fire fighters and EMTs, the sheriff’s deputy and the young
woman and the man holding the cell phone, stared at Mason. He thought he saw something in
their gazes, not concern for him, but scorn, a silent implication that he had no right to touch
Osborn, had no right to witness this man’s suffering.
Mason ran to his car and drove. His cheeks burned and a rushing filled his ears. He
studied the night beyond the car windows, the dimly lit houses and woody tree trunks, the square
silhouettes of barns and the great impassable blackberry thickets bordering the road. He knew
tonight he couldn’t escape the darkness.
Later, he knew he’d find this same darkness when he stood in the doorway of his home
and heard Cindy call down to him from the top of the stairs. “That man came looking for you,”
she’d say. “Mason, he needed your help.”

188

FROM GREAT HEIGHTS

“How about a quick swim?” Carolyn asked, pointing to a lighted swimming pool
glimmering through the fence of a large apartment complex on North Temple Street. Norman
smiled and continued to drive.
“I’m serious,” Carolyn said. “We did it all the time at BYU. Walk in like you live there
and jump in. It’s fun.”
Norman didn’t feel comfortable sneaking in, treading the chilly water in his Levis, and
then driving home shivering and dripping onto the car seats and floor mats. “You’re not in
college anymore,” he wanted to say. “What if we get caught? It’s against the law.” Instead he
said, “It’s late.”
Carolyn stared at him, her pink lip gloss sparkling in the dim light. “Norman, you’re a
real stick-in-the-mud,” she said.
Though Norman didn’t tell her, the comment angered him.
#
The next evening Norman got a call from Cameron, an old friend who now lived in Salt
Lake City with his wife, Erica.
They’d grown up together outside Portland and had roomed together at BYU before their
missions. A year ago, out of the blue, Cameron had suddenly taken an interest in Norman’s
social life, even setting Norman up with a few interns from the law firm where he worked.
Norman hadn’t liked any of them. And then when Norman started dating Carolyn, Cameron
called weekly to pump him for information.
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“So what’s the deal?” Cameron asked. “Getting serious? Should I make room in my
schedule for a December wedding? Or why not August? I’m joking. No pressure, really.”
“I like Carolyn,” Norman said. “It’s just that we have different ideas of fun.” And then he
told Cameron about the night before, about the swimming pool and Carolyn’s jab. “Something
like that gives me pause,” Norman said. “I mean, you can get in big trouble for doing that. It’s
trespassing.”
“Lighten up,” Cameron said. “Isn’t that what I’m always saying? The poor girl just
wanted to have some fun. Live a little.” There was a burst of static over the line. “So that’s your
big hang-up, you have different ideas of fun?”
“It’s not just that,” Norman said. “I know it’s silly. I shouldn’t even mention this.” He
cleared his throat. “She leaves food out. Perishables like cheese and milk. And she doesn’t hang
her clothes up. She just tosses them over her dresser. And she’s always losing her keys.”
“Cheese and milk and keys? You’re joking,” Cameron said. “Come on, Norman. Be
serious. Tell me you’re joking, so I don’t think you’re a head case. A little spoiled milk and
you’re ready to call it quits. Isn’t that alarming behavior? As a high school guidance counselor,
wouldn’t you agree?”
“It’s an indicator,” Norman said. “It’s not a show stopper, but they’re issues we’ll have to
work out. They’re bad habits.”
“How old are you, Norman?” Cameron asked. “Thirty now?”
“Thirty next month,” Norman said.
“Thirty and you can’t stop thinking about the spoiled milk and the pile of clothes.
Remember when you were looking for an apartment and stayed with us? It took you two months.
Every place had something you didn’t like, roommates too loud or too messy, too far from work,
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too small. And then you end up in your own place because you couldn’t stand living with
anyone. You know what happens to guys who can’t stop thinking about the spoiled milk and the
pile of clothes? They live alone. You see what I mean, Norman? Tell your mom I wash my hands
of you.” And then Cameron shouted into the phone: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’ll call you
next week.”
Sitting on the couch, the phone still cradled between his cheek and shoulder, Norman
pondered the sliver of moon outside the window and the white, wispy clouds shooting past it.
Privately, he valued little of what Cameron said. He remembered Cameron as a floppy-haired,
gangly teenager, leaving the bishop’s office, wiping at his wet nose and weepy eyes with his shirt
sleeve. He remembered when Cameron and Erica were dating, and the way she berated him in
front of his friends, snapping her fingers to get his attention. Who’s Cameron to give relationship
advice? Norman thought. He’d married a piece of work, a bland, materialistic gossip who racked
up a mountain of debt, a downer who constantly scowled at Norman and sighed loudly whenever
he spoke. At least I didn’t and won’t make the same mistakes, Norman thought, and the truth of
those words comforted him.
#
Norman continued to date Carolyn. There were dinners at the Old Spaghetti Factory or
Bucco di Beppo’s, Saturday matinees in Sugarhouse, hiking Millcreek or Big Cottonwood
Canyon. When Carolyn’s parents visited from California, he met them. Over dinner at Biaggi’s,
Norman formed the opinion that both were sensible people, unobtrusive but caring, moderate in
the car they drove and the clothes they wore. Financially, they were secure, and physically and
mentally, there appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, Norman was impressed with
Carolyn’s mother’s physique. At forty-seven, she still ran the Santa Barbara marathon every
191

year. If it’s true that the daughter becomes the mother, then Norman would be satisfied with what
Carolyn would become.
Their relationship was predictable, no surprises. Maybe I love Carolyn, Norman thought.
But he couldn’t forget her sitting across from him in the dimly lit car, arms folded, her lip gloss
sparkling: Norman, you’re a real stick-in-the-mud. There were other images: a chest of drawers
piled with clothes, a forgotten gallon of milk warming on the countertop, Carolyn searching the
couch cushions for her keys.
And then in the beginning of June, Carolyn told Norman she was moving home for the
summer. This revelation was so sudden that Norman, upon hearing her announcement, began
reviewing the past few weeks, the past few months, searching for any premonition of her
decision. He’d suspected something earlier that afternoon when Carolyn called to tell him they
needed to talk.
“My roommate’s sister said she’d take over my lease for the summer,” Carolyn told him
that evening. “And I don’t have to be back to school until the end of August, so why not move
home and save a little money? My brother’s home from his mission in a couple weeks. My
family hasn’t been together in two years. It is sudden, I know.” She sat solemnly on Norman’s
couch, hugging a cushion to her chest. She wore a black, short-sleeved turtleneck sweater with a
raised pattern of lines coursing down its front, cashmere or merino wool, soft and expensive.
Norman wondered how much she’d spent for it and why she hadn’t told him about the purchase.
“It is sudden,” he said.
In the stairwell, a dog barked, a sudden hoarse discharge amplified by the concrete walls
and steps, followed immediately by a woman’s high, scolding voice. Carolyn leaned forward,
squinting into the inky night beyond the window, and Norman, sitting on a worn ottoman in front
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of her, thought he saw in her droopy shoulders and narrow eyes a shudder of emotion, until he
realized she was squinting to read the titles on the bookshelf near the window.
“I don’t want you to feel,” Carolyn said, “that you can’t see other people. We’ll keep in
touch. It’s for the best. Don’t you think?”
A buzzing filled the room: the faint electrical whir of Norman’s laptop on the side table,
the overhead fluorescent lights, a moth batting against the window. And Carolyn’s voice,
blanched of emotion, seemed lost in the room’s sterile banality.
Norman traced the wood grain in the coffee table with his finger, taking in this new
information. He was shocked, not at Carolyn’s summer plan, but at how quickly and
dispassionately she was dispatching him. All evening she’d hardly looked at him, but not out of
embarrassment or uneasiness. She was already gone, already sunning herself on Huntington
Beach, already a thousand miles away from this oppressive apartment. This evening, this tidy
tapering of their relationship into nothing, was just another errand for her, another checked box
on a list under “change oil” and “pay phone bill.”
“I can’t help thinking I’ve done something wrong,” Norman said. “If I did, I hope you’d
tell me.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Carolyn said. “I’m not angry . . .” She let her hands fall to her
thighs. “I never told you this, but before we started dating, I’d just ended a relationship with a
guy from my old ward. He taught snowboarding in Park City. He was twenty, wasn’t thinking
about a mission, had never been to college, didn’t think about anything, really, except
snowboarding. His life was this chaotic mess that sucked me in. He never had enough money to
pay his bills. He was always doing these stupid things to scare me: driving too fast, rock
climbing without a rope, hiding behind doors and jumping out. That’s why I liked you so much.
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You were different. You were cautious. You made me feel safe.” She tugged pensively at a
strand of hair that fell into her face and then tucked it behind her ear. “You’ve been great, and
I’ve had some fun, but you’re too cautious. Maybe this doesn’t make any sense. It’s like you
don’t leave anything to chance. It’s like you’re looking down at everything around you from
some great height, weighing the options, qualifying, planning your next move. Sometimes I feel
you see everything as if it was some algebra problem and you’re solving for X, even with me,
trying to see if I add up. You can’t categorize everything. Everything doesn’t add up, even when
it’s right.”
Suddenly Norman felt angry, the same anger he’d felt after Carolyn’s dig in the car.
“What’s wrong with caution?” he demanded, slamming his open palm down on the coffee table.
An unlit red candle at the table’s center teetered in its black terra cotta saucer, then toppled over.
Carolyn looked at him with wide, shocked eyes.
“I get sick of hearing about how recklessness is this endearing quality”—Norman made a
deliberate effort to lower his voice—”the rebellious charm girls love.” He twined his fingers
together. His hands shook. He glared at Carolyn, feeling a certain pleasure in now having her full
attention. “What kind of world is it where people get by on dumb luck and good graces? Not a
world I want any part of.”
He tried to explain how he could still remember the inattentive, bored faces of a few of
his high school classmates: Andy Dumas, Jimmy Richards, Danny Manetas. He could name
others. They’d done poorly, spent their money on stereo equipment and custom rims for their
cars, smoked weed in the school parking lot, boozed it up, and bedded any girl they could. Blithe
grins smeared across their faces, they sashayed across campus on loose joints, heads thrown
back, squinting through black shades, not a care in the world, a reckless, live-for-today charm the
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girls, and even the teachers, found endearing. And watching them, Norman, for the first time in
his life, had experienced a nascent pleasure he couldn’t articulate then, knowing they’d somehow
reached their zenith, that for them life after high school would forever be a tedious struggle, an
existence of depleting habits and regrets, of trying to recapture a freedom they’d never really
had. How could Norman make Carolyn understand? Caution, vigilance, carefulness. These were
a safeguard against catastrophe. These were the secrets of success.
“I can’t live in that world,” Carolyn said. “I can’t live in a distant place where it’s always
me against everybody else, where I’m constantly on guard, trying to anticipate what’s next.” She
stood and walked to the door, pausing there, one hand resting on the knob, the other fisted on her
hip. “I don’t even want to ask what you really think about me, Norman. I’m only beginning to
see all the ways I don’t measure up. I’m starting to wonder why you even asked me out in the
first place. Seeing you now in your high, moral tower, I’m wondering how you can ask anyone
out. Good-bye, Norman.”
For the rest of the evening, Norman read through a Newsweek article about a shooting at
an Ohio high school, but he understood very little of it. The words floated on the page so that he
had to read sentences and whole paragraphs again. Finally, he closed the magazine and lay on the
couch, replaying their argument and picking through it, rehearsing what he might have said. For
a moment, this image, the image of him bounding down the concrete steps toward the parking
lot, putting his arm around Carolyn’s shoulders, and voicing his defense, satisfied Norman. But
the image quickly soured as he thought of himself standing before her, solidifying the very image
of himself that she disliked.
At 10:00 P.M., not fully understanding why, Norman opened the telephone directory and
wrote on a piece of paper the name and address of a Salt Lake City jeweler.
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#
Norman picked the ring up on Saturday.
Excited and carefree, he drove up Little Cottonwood Canyon, cracking the window to let
the cool air wash over him. He wanted to speak with someone, to pull the polished ring case
from his pocket and confess his plan to drive to California to propose to Carolyn. Calling his
parents wasn’t an option. Norman feared his father’s probing questions: How much did you
spend on the ring? Isn’t this all a bit hasty? Norman could think of no one from the ward to
share his excitement. News of his impending journey and intentions might reach Carolyn before
his arrival. In the end, Norman decided to visit Cameron.
Norman knocked at the door. “Who’s there?” Erica asked. Norman told her and then
heard what he thought was a profanity and then a slamming cupboard door.
Cameron opened the door, squinting through the radiant morning light. “It’s early.”
“It’s almost eleven,” Norman said.
“We were up late,” Cameron said. He stepped out of the doorway to let Norman pass.
“Hurry up before I change my mind.”
The living room was still dark and shaded, but Norman could see the clutter from last
night’s festivities: the coffee table strewn with empty soda cans, an empty pizza box, and a
Monopoly board. Erica, in a blue terrycloth robe, loafed on a naugahyde couch the color of
peanut butter, and Cameron paced the room, tidying things up, chatting nervously.
“New couch,” Norman said.
“I guess we haven’t seen you in a while,” Cameron said, sweeping the Monopoly pieces
and paper money into the box with his palm. “And the 60-inch plasma TV.”
“How much that set you back?”
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“About two grand.”
Norman made a sucking noise. “Two grand,” he repeated, throwing a quick glance at
Erica. Her silence was unnerving. She stared at him, head slightly tipped forward, scrutinizing
him from where she sat.
“Well, unlike you,” Cameron said, “We’re not in a monastic order. We actually spend our
money.”
Still standing near the door, unsure of what do with his hands, Norman wondered why
they hadn’t asked him to sit down.
“So what about you?” asked Cameron. “Still dating that girl? What’s her name? Shannon,
right?”
“Carolyn,” Norman said, “and funny you should ask. We’re getting married.”
“That poor girl,” Erica said, breaking her bored silence. She thumbed through a
Cosmopolitan and yawned.
“She’s always so sarcastic in the morning,” Cameron said, shooting Erica a look Norman
couldn’t interpret. “You know how she is. She never wakes up until noon.”
“This will wake her up.” Norman pulled the ring case from his pant pocket and opened it.
Even in the room’s weak light, the diamonds sparkled.
Erica perked up, rising slightly onto her knee to examine the ring. Cameron nodded his
head.
“Cubic zirconium and white gold,” Erica said. “Or is it sterling silver? I know you,
Norman. You wouldn’t spend more than a few hundred dollars.”
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“Platinum setting and a one carat diamond,” Norman said. “Eight thousand dollars plus
tax and insurance. Monday I drive to California. Ring. Flowers. Down on one knee. Right in
front of her family.”
“Where’s that old Norman Reeves?” Cameron said, grinning. “So unlike you. This from
the guy who wouldn’t go to our senior party because he’d be out too late.”
“Does it have a return policy?” Erica asked flatly.
“Ignore her,” Cameron said. “We’re both happy for you.We really are. Aren’t we,
honey?” He moved toward the door and Norman followed. “Taking the plunge and all, that’s
great, really great. Your mother will be happy. Somebody to clutter your life a little. That’ll be
good for you.” He pointed at his watch. “I don’t mean to hurry you along, but I have some work
friends coming over to watch the game and we need to scour this place.” He opened the door.
“I’ll send an announcement,” Norman said.
“You do that,” Cameron said.
Norman wanted to Cameron if someone in a monastic order would plop down eight grand
for a ring, but the door closed before he could. As he walked to his car, Norman wondered why
Cameron hadn’t invited him to watch the game.
#
Eighty miles into Nevada, a translucent veil of acrid, yellowish smoke began pouring
from beneath Norman’s car, followed almost immediately by a sharp metallic noise. The car
stalled, lurching to a stop on the shoulder. Norman turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t start.
Tracing the faint line of Interstate 80 on his worn atlas, Norman had only a vague memory of the
town he’d just passed: a casino with a flashing billboard, a gas station, a decaying mobile home
park surrounded by a sagging chain link fence. Wells, Nevada.
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Norman tried to get his bearings. Not far up the road, he saw a delipated farmhouse,
almost lost in the blanched landscape. He considered walking there, but then out of the dusty
heat a kid in a green pick up, frayed cowboy hat and no shirt, stopped and offered to send a tow
truck. Norman thanked him and waited by the car, lifting his head and squinting into the fierce
sun whenever a vehicle topped the rise in the interstate and agitated the desert’s vast, ghostly
silence.
After forty-five minutes, a tow truck materialized through the striated heat wafting off the
road, a massive thing with a long flat bed and dual chrome exhaust pipes on each side of the cab.
The towman nodded as he pulled onto the shoulder and then backed up until the truck’s bumper
almost touched Norman’s car. He jumped from the cab and made a business of putting on a pair
of soiled leather gloves, gaping at Norman through dark sunglasses and smirking as if what he
saw amused him. Leaning against the truck cab, he yanked a lever that sent the bed into a
sluggish, grinding tilt, and while waiting, he lifted his glasses and wiped at his forehead with the
back of his gloved hand. “I bet you’re wondering how I’m going to do it,” he said, staring at
Norman with dark, bulging eyes.
“Pardon,” Norman said.
“I bet you’re wondering,” the man said slowly, making a little pantomime with his gloved
hands, one palm rubbing against the other, “how I’m going to get your car here on the bed of this
truck.” He opened a metal box under the truckbed and pulled out four greasy chains. “Everyone
wonders. Last week I had a van load of Japs stop and take pictures of me loading a car. I swear
to God, they took a hundred pictures.”
Not knowing what to say, Norman turned away and said nothing, relieved when the shrill
whine of hydraulics and clattering chains discouraged any conversation. Gazing at the broad sky,
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Norman fingered the ring case in his front pocket. The sun, suspended in the expansive sky like a
child’s ball, had reached its apex and made everything look washed out and muted, dingy browns
and dull greens in every direction. Norman kicked at a faded beer can and sent it skidding down
the gravel embankment.
“Almost there,” the tow man said. He attached a chain to the car’s undercarriage and
slowly hoisted the vehicle up the angled bed. Norman watched the mechanical process, the
pulley motor straining, the car inching forward against the tug of gravity, shuddering slightly—a
fly suspended in a web. And then the bed of the truck came level, and the tow man secured the
chains over the axles and boomed them down. He waved Norman to the passenger door. “I have
to tell you now,” he said, pulling the gloves off and shoving them into his back pocket, “we’re a
good twenty miles from town. Ain’t going to be cheap.”
Wanting to say, “It never is cheap, is it?” Norman, instead, said nothing. Head lowered,
he opened the door on the passenger side of the cab, slightly cheered that his MasterCard
provided a towing reimbursement for such emergencies.
Norman nudged himself into the mess collecting on the worn vinyl seat: fast food
wrappers, loose papers, and a few glossy magazines with women in bikinis bent provocatively
over the hoods and roofs of flashy, souped-up cars. The cab smelled distinctly of motor oil and
dirt, and the air was thick with dust. Norman rifled through the clutter around him searching for
the seatbelt latch, ready to stick his hand into the seat’s dark crevices when the tow man spoke:
“Won’t find it,” he said, slamming the truck into gear, spinning the tires as he pulled onto
the road. “Got rid of them a while ago. Read something once about how many people die from
wearing seat belts. Car rolls into a lake, you can’t get your seat belt off. It happens more than you
think. You know what I mean?”
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Norman made a low, grunting noise. He wanted to collapse into himself, empty his lungs
of air and be gone, close his eyes and wake up a hundred miles from this stifling cab and the
crass figure occupying its foul space.
“My friends call me Curly,” the tow man said, extending a callused, grease-stained hand
Norman reluctantly grasped. His forearms were thick and tanned a deep brown, the muscles like
tight rope pushing against the skin, and Norman couldn’t help thinking how pale and soft his
hand appeared in Curly’s sturdy grip.
Curly wore a gun on his hip, partly concealed under the greasy, threadbare shirt he wore
untucked. And when he saw Norman eyeing it, he said if was for protection. “Last month
alone,” he said, “two of my buddies in Elko almost got robbed. The cops call it attempted
robbery, but you never know what’ll happen. A few years ago, I heard of this tow truck driver
out of Vegas who got shot in the head, murdered for forty bucks, and then dumped in a ditch.
Ask me, I’d say it’s these wetbacks moving their drugs across the border. I can see you’re a Utah
boy by your license plate, and I know you’re getting them over there, too. I have an uncle outside
St. George. Says you can’t turn into Home Depot without almost running one down in the
parking lot. Hell, it’s the same all over I hear: L.A., Vegas, Salt Lake City. And it’s not just the
drugs and the crime. White people are becoming a minority. Excuse me if that sounds bad, but it
keeps me up at night. I have two daughters in Elko. I have to think about them. My family goes
back in this county two hundred and fifty years, and some dark-skinned invader from the south
waltzes in here and wants a free slice of the pie, wants to take food from my babies’ mouths.
Doesn’t that piss you off?”
The question bothered Norman, the man bothered Norman, everything within the grasp of
Norman’s senses bothered him: the abrasive sun, the stifling heat, the dashboard clock, Curly’s
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provincial drawl and crude demeanor. Norman had already conceived his own hard-nosed views
on illegal immigration, views not so different from Curly’s, but he didn’t want to concur. He
didn’t want Curly to think they had anything in common. “It’s a complicated situation,” Norman
said.
“Don’t think I’m racist,” Curly said. “Not at all. But some of these people will steal your
car because because they think you’re the rich white guy. They don’t care about giving, they just
want to take, take, take, and they don’t care from who. And then you see it on the news, the
violence. They’ll shoot you in the head and not blink an eye. They’re monsters.” Curly adjusted
the air vent and cleared his throat. “I hope I haven’t offended you. But you have to understand
my work: dark, deserted roads, strangers. I’m one who hears things in the dark.”
He smiled. Norman could see the yellow glint of his teeth. “Hell, I wish all my customers
were like you, clean-cut and white bread. You know, you look like a guy I knew from high
school, this guy voted Nicest in Class. No joking. Scott Chandler, great guy. You could have
nailed his sister to a tree and skinned her alive, and he wouldn’t have raised his voice. No one
liked him, though. Too nice, too boring.”
Curly, as if suddenly taking notice of the filth surrounding him, threw a few of the
magazines and some of the hamburger wrappers behind the seat. “So tell me,” he said, “a good
boy like you, what’s the worst thing you ever done?”
The heat and the metrical hum of the diesel engine had lulled Norman into semi-
consciousness. He’d listened to little of what Curly had said, but the question—What’s the worst
thing you’ve ever done? —jolted him awake.
Curly smiled, showing his dingy teeth and gray, swollen gums. “The worst thing you’ve
ever done. Just between me and you. Our little secret. The worst thing never told anyone.”
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Norman, not knowing why, suddenly felt panic.
“Forget it,” Curly said. “Forget I asked.” He adjusted the volume on the CB radio near
the gearshift.
Norman wiped at his damp forehead. The question persisted like a noisome, lingering
odor. What was the worst thing he’d done? On a Webelos campout twenty years ago, he’d tested
the blade of his pocketknife on the rain fly on Brother Seegmiller’s tent, and then blamed it on
Cliff Wallace, a smelly welfare case all the boys secretly called Pigpen. In junior high, on a dare,
he phoned Christie Weber’s house when she’d gone to the movies with friends and told her
parents she’d been in a car accident, and then gave them the number of the county morgue. Later,
in high school, he and Cameron left an unkind note on the windshield of an obnoxious,
overweight girl in their European history class. Norman heard she committed suicide a few years
after graduation.
Considering these small cruelties, even after so many years, Norman sometimes still felt
a crippling guilt that enveloped his mind as he tossed in bed at night, unable to sleep, comforted
only by repeating to himself again and again that these mistakes had saved him from larger
mistakes. One’s hold to the Iron Rod is tenuous at best, Norman had always believed. Life could
quickly turn tragic, one small mistake begetting another, and then another, until the unspeakable
occurred. Yet at times, Norman wondered if in his effort to stay on the straight and narrow he’d
missed out on something.
The CB crackled. A distant, twangy voice announced the details of a grisly car accident
south of town: rollover, station wagon, Lifeflight chopper en route, clean-up requested. Curly
whooped loudly. Wide-eyed, licking his lips, he turned to Norman: “That’s a hundred and twenty
dollars in my pocket.”
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#
THREE GUYS AND A GAL AUTOMOTIVE. The faded sign rose above a cinderblock
building with two open bays gaping like dark, toothless mouths. Dust-stained and deteriorating,
the building blended with the barren desert around it. Norman, at first glance, thought it might be
a wrecking yard, an automotive graveyard littered with rows of afflicted cars: flat tires, peeling
paint, and gutted interiors.
Curly swung the truck through the narrow chain-link gate and braked harder than was
necessary, jumped from the cab and loosened the chains mooring the car to the truck bed.
“Help me give her a shove,” Curly said to Norman, and together they pushed the car into
an open bay.
After Curly had returned his credit card, Norman thanked him, and walked toward the
mechanic’s office. Before he reached the door, someone called his name. Norman turned and
saw Curly jump from the truck and run over. “Listen,” he said, panting from the short sprint.
“I’ve been thinking I offended you back there.”
Raising his eyebrows to convey a surprise he didn’t feel, Norman said, “No, not at all.”
And then: “It’s been a long day. I just don’t feel that chatty. That’s all.” Norman, standing in the
wash of Curly’s rank breath, wondered what this man wanted. Some kind of validation of his
worth as a human being? A friendly, sympathetic sounding board? What? A service had been
rendered and paid for, a receipt given. Norman thanked Curly again and turned toward the office.
“I can tell you don’t think much of me. Maybe you think I’m some kind of redneck,”
Curly said, patting the gun on his hip. “Understand, this ain’t Utah. This place is out in the
middle of nowhere. You see strange things. And this business of making money from
accidents”—he looked off toward the interstate and then back to Norman”—it’s not like I’m a
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vulture. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to get their hands dirty to clean things up. Hell, it
puts bread on the table for my babies. Don’t that make it right?”
Norman didn’t like the insinuation that by his living in Utah he was innocent and needed
a lecture on the world’s sad realities. “Really, I’m not offended,” Norman said. “It’s just been a
long day. I’m tired.”
“I get you,” Curly said. “I just don’t want you to have the wrong impression . You’re a
nice guy. I thought I might have said something.”
Stepping toward the mechanic’s office, Norman said, “I’m fine. It was nice to meet you.
Good luck.”
“Hey, I’ll tell you what,” Curly said, slapping his hands together. “I’ll do this job and
when I get back, I’ll take you out for a drink, show you the town.”
Norman felt his jaw drop, felt the dry wind on the tip of his tongue. He looked up and
down the narrow street,Wells’s main thoroughfare. To the west he could see the blinking lights
of the casino and to the east a few bars and a mobile home park. “I appreciate the offer,” Norman
said, “but I’ll be back on the road by then.”
“On the road?” Curly said. “You’re not going anywhere today. Than engine’s toast. I can
smell it from here. So what do you say? My treat.”
“I don’t drink,” Norman said.
“Then a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“That’s right. You’re one of those Mormon boys,” Curly said. “You wear a short leash. I
respect that. How about a soda? Do you drink soda?”
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Norman couldn’t speak. He knew Curly wouldn’t take no for an answer. “All right. A
soda.”
“Good,” Curly said. “About two hours. I’ll be back.” He mounted the truck and, just
before closing the door, said to Norman: “Hey, tonight you can even crash at my place if you
want.”
Norman watched the truck move toward the freeway and knew he would do anything to
be somewhere else when Curly returned.
#
Norman sat on a worn, sun-bleached couch in the office and read a yellowed newspaper
he found between the couch cushions. Through an open door that lead to the garage, he watched
the two mechanics. Both wore navy their blue coveralls unzipped to the waist, exposing their
hairy, distended bellies. One smoked a cigarette near the open bay door and the other was bent
over the engine of a black Ford truck, tapping his heavy black boots to the drone of a radio
blaring “Smoke on theWater.” Norman’s car, its hood up, sat forlornly on the far end of garage.
Norman looked at his watch and drew a long breath.
“Gee, I hope you don’t need to be somewhere,” a woman said. She walked across the
room and sat at a metal desk cluttered with yellow carbon copies and coffee mugs smudged with
oil. She grabbed a bag of potato chips on the desk and started eating. She was about Norman’s
age, tan skin, blond.
“No chance of getting out today?” Norman said, hoping his expectant smile might prompt
her to hurry the mechanics.
“I’ll be honest,” she said. “This is the only garage in town. These guys don’t hurry.” She
tipped the bag of chips in Norman’s directions. “Want some?”
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“No, thanks,” Norman said. “I really don’t have much of an appetite.”
“It’s probably for the best,” she said, throwing the bag on the desk. “Doctors say these
things will kill you. Hydrogenated oil. That’s what does it.”
“Bad stuff,” Norman said. He peered through the dusty window at the sign. Its shadow
now touched the end of the parking lot.
“I’m the gal,” the woman said.
Norman turned from the window. “Pardon me.”
She pointed to the sign. “Three Guys and a Gal. I’m the gal.” She crossed her legs and
smiled, showing a row of straight, radiant teeth so white it seemed that light emanated from
them. Norman wanted to compliment her but decided against it, wondering if she might interpret
his observation as a come-on.
Through the open door came the sound of metal striking concrete. The mechanic working
on the black Ford picked up a long wrench that had fallen to the floor and began fingering it as if
it were a guitar. The other mechanic stood over Norman’s car, peering at the engine, the burning
nub of a cigarette pinched between his black fingers.
“So you’re the gal?” Norman said, cheered at the sight of the mechanic. “Where’s the
third mechanic? He get fired and nobody changed the sign?”
It was meant as a joke, but the woman didn’t smile. “Oh, he’s not around anymore,” she
said. She picked up some papers and stared at them a moment before putting them aside. “I’m
Maggie,” she said, smiling again.
Norman meant for the conversation to stop there, but Maggie asked him a few questions,
and to be polite, he asked her a few. She was born in Wells and had lived there all her life, except
for two years when she lived in Colorado. She was unmarried and had worked at the garage for
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the last three years. “But this isn’t the only thing I do,” Maggie said. “If this job was the only
thing that defined me, I’d go crazy. This is just something steady with benefits, something to pay
the bills. What I really like to do is make these herbal products, soaps and oils, facial scrubs,
lotions. I sell them on them on-line. It’s all about helping people achieve balance, about finding
inner peace.”
“Soaps and oils,” Norman said. “I didn’t realize there was much of a market.”
“Sure,” Maggie said. “I’ve shipped product as far as New Zealand and Norway. It’s all
stuff I make at home. There’s a personalized touch. People like that.”
Norman imagined large bubbling vats and Maggie standing over them in goggles and a
rubber apron, stirring the seething brew with a long metal pole, pouring in beakers of scented
oils. He imagined her body leaning into it, her narrow hips turning in small circles, her bare
arms, a glistening line of sweat on her upper lip. Norman stared at the weave in the brown carpet
and ran his hand quickly across his forehead as if to erase this image of Maggie from his mind.
“So what about you?” Maggie asked. “I’ve been chattering away and I don’t even know
your name.”
“Norman Reeves.”
“Norman Reeves,” Maggie said, repeating the name a few times as if practicing it. “I
can’t say I’ve met many Normans. In fact, you might be the first. The only Norman I know is
Norman Bates from Psycho.” Maggie narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice to an ominous
whisper. “So do you have your dead mother stashed away somewhere? Do you dress in her
clothes and speak in her voice and prey on vulnerable young women searching for a new life?”
“Nothing that exciting,” Norman said, grasping the joke. “It’s a family name. My great-
grandfather—I don’t know how many greats back—pushed a handcart across the plains in the
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dead of winter. I guess it’s supposed to be inspiring. I’ve never liked it. And the diminutive’s
worse. Norm. It makes me think of an obese alcoholic.”
“What? You think you got problems?” Maggie said, her eyes wide and playful. She
leaned forward as if to impart a confidence, and Norman could smell her perfume, something
like vanilla. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered. “Maggie’s my middle name. I’m really named
after my grandma.” She looked around and then spoke. “Her name was Elva. Isn’t that horrible?”
Laughing, his hand covering his mouth, Norman tried to think of something to say. He
felt awkward and disoriented, finding it strange that after all that had happened, he now sat with
a beautiful woman, having nothing to say, unsure if he should even be talking to her.
“So what do you do?” Maggie asked. “For work, I mean.” And when Norman told her,
she said: “It must be nice to help people.”
Norman cleared his throat and stared at the faded floral print on the couch. “It is,”
Norman said.
This admission, that he was a guidance counselor, always got the same response from
those who didn’t know him: It must be nice to help people. This bothered Norman. Those who
knew him, always scratched their heads, confessing they’d pegged him as something else, an
accountant or an engineer, someone who worked with numbers. Privately, Norman felt he was a
poor match for his chosen profession. He thought of the students who’d passed through his
office, most of them slackers, oozing a palpable bravado and indifference he could sense in the
way they shuffled along with no hurry or urgency, sedated, faces as blank as cue balls, slouching
and yawning as he intoned the rhetoric of fear, quoting statistics on drug use, hefting glossy
pictures of doe-eyed meth addicts, painting the stark realities of the adult world as vividly as
possible. Norman’s scalp tingled. The waitingroom was too hot. He felt a dull ache pulsing
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behind his eyes. Who was he to lecture anyone? Who was he to speak with authority? He
couldn’t even get to California. He couldn’t keep a girlfriend. And then there were the more
troubled students Norman met with weekly, kids who emanated a deep hatred for everything
around them. He sensed they heard nothing but white noise when he spoke, saw nothing but a
hypocrite in a shirt and tie reciting facts. Norman often wondered if they saw in him a contempt
for the world and disaffection equal to their own, a pained, lonely cynic as broken and jaded as
themselves.
“I don’t have any formal training, but I think I know when people need help,” Maggie
said. “Like when I walked in here. I saw you were having a bad day. Maybe sometimes it’s
enough just to talk with someone, to have a connection, and that makes a problem seem smaller.
That’s the way I see things. Is that strange?”
“Not at all,” Norman said. He could truthfully say he felt better just talking with Maggie.
She rubbed her right knee and then straightened both legs. “So where you going?”
“California,” Norman said. And then he told her about Carolyn, about the ring in his
pocket and his plan to propose.
“Very romantic,” Maggie said. “And she doesn’t know you’re coming?”
“No idea at all,” Norman said.
At that moment one of the mechanics walked into the office. Norman jumped, suddenly
panicked, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Don’t you need to deposit those checks?” the man asked Maggie.
She pulled an envelope from the top desk drawer and said: “I almost forgot.” She looked
over her shoulder as she walked through door. “It’s been nice, Norman. It really has.”
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“It has,” Norman said, noticing she had the smallest limp, a favoring of the left leg over
the right. She got in a blue pick-up truck and drove toward the interstate.
“Women,” the mechanic said, sitting down heavily behind the desk. “Especially this one.
She’s a dreamer, head in the clouds, always talking about the stars and moon.” He yawned and
scratched at a wiry tuft of dark hair poking through the neck of his coveralls.
Norman cleared his throat. “What’s wrong with my car?”
The mechanic pulled a short section of black rubber hose from his pocket and flopped it
on the desk. “You see that hole? You lost all your radiator fluid. Overheated and shot your
engine to hell. Blown head gasket.”
Norman knew very little about cars, but had a vague notion that a blown head gasket was
a major problem. “How much?” he asked.
“How much?” the mechanic said. “That’s what everyone wants to know.” He took a thick
green book from a dusty shelf above the desk and began flipping through the pages and then
writing columns of numbers on a legal pad. “Parts and labor will cost two thousand,” he said,
“plus or minus a hundred. Might have to replace the water pump.”
The words felt like a kick to the guts. Norman, speechless, stared at the mechanic’s name
embroidered on the breast of his coveralls. Lou. The name was like a stereotype, like a joke
people make about bad mechanics.
“So what do you want to do?” the mechanic asked. He’d found the bag of chips and
shoved a handful in his mouth.
“Are you sure?” Norman said. “That seems high.”
“Positive,” the mechanic said. “It’s straight from the book. Look for yourself if you
want.” He smiled. “I’d tell you to get a second opinion, but what can you do?”
211

Norman knew the cost of repairs wasn’t worth it. The car was old, his grandmother’s car,
her gift when he graduated from college six years earlier. He could get another car. What
bothered him was that he wanted out of this town. He looked around the office, at the faded walls
and furniture, all in various stages of decay, a reflection of the view through the window. People
live in this. The thought baffled Norman.
By now the mechanic was drumming his fingers against the binding of the green book,
waiting.
“I don’t even think the car’s worth two thousand dollars,” Norman said.
“I got a buddy who owns a junk yard across town,” the mechanic said. “He’ll probably
give you fifty bucks for it.” He picked at the grit under his thumbnail with the tip of a pencil. “I
have to charge you a twenty-five dollar diagnostic fee.”
Norman handed the cash over. The mechanic counted the bills and then shoved them in
his pocket. “I don’t mean to hurry you along,” he said, standing up, “but we’re closing. If you
want, there’s a motel near the freeway, about a ten minute walk. I think the Greyhound passes by
there tomorrow afternoon or maybe the day after tomorrow. Good luck.”
#
A hot wind blew through the empty streets. Overhead the streetlights flicked on and
emitted an annoying buzzing sound. Norman, a backpack with a few clothes and toiletries slung
over his shoulder, walked toward a restaurant he’d seen earlier from Curly’s truck, a cinderblock
building with a neon sign broadcasting its name in an obnoxious neon red: The Ranch House.
Norman thought he’d call Cameron for a ride and then have dinner.
The restaurant was locked, though Norman could hear voices inside. He pressed a button
next to the door and waited. A woman in a low-cut red dress and black stiletto heels, blond and
212

heavily made-up, opened the door. “What can I do for you?” she said in a low breathy voice. She
stared at Norman, her lips constricted, as if she were suppressing laughter.
“Is there a phone I can use?” Norman asked.
“Come in,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb and leaving just enough room for
Norman to squeeze by. “Just the phone? That’s it?” She spoke the words slowly.
“I might order something, too,” Norman said, feeling the swell of her soft breasts touch
his shoulder as he slid past. She smelled of lavender, an overpowering scent Norman could taste
in the back of his throat. “Is there a menu?”
The playfulness drained out of the woman’s face. “A menu? You’re serious?”
“Isn’t this a restaurant?” Norman asked.
The woman lauged, head thrown back, eyes glistening. “Honey, you got the wrong place.
I bet you thought I was your waitress, didn’t you? Thought I’d walk you to a table and take your
order.”
Norman could feel the crimson burning in his cheeks, could see the rising color in his
cheeks reflected in an antique mirror near the door, could see himself crumpling, shoulders
falling, arms crossed tightly across his chest.
“You never heard of the Ranch House?” she asked. “Where you from?”
“I just need to make a call,” Norman said, looking around the room. “Just the phone.”
Men, mostly truckers, Norman thought, from the big rigs in the parking lot, slouched
around wooden tables, playing cards. And why hadn’t Norman noticed it before: no plates on the
tables, no crumpled napkins, no food odor, only stale cigarette smoke, alcohol, and perfume. The
room hummed with a palpable tension, a tightness and anticipation permeating the men’s eager
faces, animating their coarse speech. Their eyes darted about, drawn to a pulled black curtain at
213

the back of the room. Norman felt revulsion for all of them. He wanted to run out the door, but
knew this woman would laugh at him. He’d be the amusing story she’d recount later to her
colleagues.
The woman, tiring of Norman, pointed him toward a dim hallway.
He weaved through the tables, avoiding the curious stares. Across the room, the woman
at the door whispered to a co-worker, a short woman in a red strapless dress carrying an empty
drink tray. Both stared at Norman and laughed.
Turning his back to them, Norman lifted the phone and dialed Cameron’s number. On
the fourth ring, Erica answered.
“Erica, I need to speak with Cameron.”
“Who is this?”
Suddenly Norman heard an eruption of sound behind him, a twangy country song with a
sharp steel guitar, clapping, voices shouting over the steady beat of drums. Norman cupped his
hand against the phone. “This is Norman.” He paused. “Norman Reeves.”
“Cameron isn’t here,” she said. “Call back later.”
Her voice began to fade, so Norman had to shout. “Wait, don’t hang up. Erica, please.”
Then he told her about the trip, about the car and the mechanic, and how he wanted a ride. “You
need to come get me,” he said. “As soon as possible.”
“I’m through waiting on you hand and foot,” Erica said. “What gives you the right to
order me around? After all we’ve done for you. And not even the courtesy of a thank you.”
Norman was stunned. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Listen,” Erica said. “When you stayed with us, you never once did the dishes, never
vacuumed the floor, never cleaned the bathroom, or paid a bill. All you ever did was sit around
214

and talk how horrible the world is. Did you know your mom used to call Cameron every month
practically in tears, begging him to help you, to set you up with a nice girl? Too good for
everyone, aren’t you, Norman? Find your own ride home.”
At that moment a hand clamped onto Norman’s shoulder and spun him around.
Immediately he recognized the face, the dark eyes and the yellow teeth.
“Of all the places,” Curly said, his words thick and slurred, his breath sour. “I never
thought I’d find a good boy like you here.” He draped his arm over Norman’s shoulder.
“I need to go,” Norman said. He tried to lift Curly’s arm, but it held him tightly.
Curly waved to a woman across the room. “Marta, bring a Coke for my boy Norm. No, too
strong. Bring a Sprite.”
Three women, all wearing short red dresses that glittered in a false and irritating way,
circled the tables with trays of drinks. Another woman sat on a man’s lap, head thrown back,
laughing, her hand kneading his arm. The black curtain was open. Norman saw a long hallway.
A door was open. There was a bed and a black light.
“Please,” Norman said. He suddenly felt sick. “I need to go.”
Curly put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. “Everyone, this is my friend, Norm, one
of those Utah boys, voted nicest in his high school class. His car broke down and he won’t be
leaving tonight, but while here he’s chosen the finest entertainment in town.”
The room erupted in a chorus of shouts and wolf calls. A few men lifted their glasses.
“Your friend needs to loosen up a little,” one waitress shouted over the music. Norman
could see dark freckles on her chest. They reminded him of constellations. “Maybe I should give
him a freebie just to put a smile on his face.”
215

Again the room erupted in cheers. Norman stared at the smiling faces and felt as if his
mind had shrunk into something no larger than a pebble.
Lifting a sweaty glass of beer to his peeling lips, Curly said, “Well, what do you say?
Ain’t that hospitality?”
“I don’t feel well,” Norman said. He turned for the door. Curly’s arm slackened on his
shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Curly said. “Why’d you come here in the first place?” He set his
glass down and took a step toward Norman. “You don’t have any explaining to do, Norm.
You’re with friends. No one’s going to tell, and no one’s going to care.”
Norman didn’t turn back when he heard a crescendo of laughter and boos. He opened the
door and decided he was doing the right thing.
#
Norman walked toward the motel, passing a bar with a wagon wheel suspended over the
door. Through the window, he watched a dozen couples, hands clasped together, faces touching,
waltzing across the wooden floor. He needed to call someone but knew no one would offer a
ride. They’d make excuses. They wouldn’t answer. They’d delete his message. He touched the
brass door knob and paused. The plaintive notes of a steel guitar drifted through the door, a sad
melody that yanked at something in the back of his throat.
Norman began to cry, and so as not to be heard or seen, he covered his face with his hand
and turned from the window. His body shook as if with convulsions. He’d never felt so alone.
And then, with a stone-cold clarity that razored into him, Norman knew he couldn’t remember
not feeling alone. There had been Carolyn, the girls he dated in high school and college, mission
companions and roommates, his colleagues, friends from home like Cameron. Hadn’t they been
216

friends, conversed together, shared memories? A chill inched up Norman’s spine, passed through
his trembling shoulders, and settled into his jaw, making his teeth chatter. They were his friends,
Norman knew, yet he’d always felt comforted he’d avoided their pitfalls and vices, and evaded
their unhappiness. Norman wiped at his eyes with his palm and shook his head. Then why am I
so unhappy? he thought.
At that moment, Norman saw Maggie walking up the street. A short overweight man with
thinning hair and lardy skin followed her.
“What do you mean you’re waiting for your boyfriend?” the man said. “Just one drink.
It’s not going to hurt anyone. You’re the cutest little thing I ever seen in this town.”
Norman was about to turn away when Maggie waved.
“Play along,” she whispered when he was close enough to hear. She held his hand and
turned on the man. “Get lost,” she said. Norman stood a little taller and glared at the man, who
shrugged and walked the other direction. Norman looked down at their hands, at Maggie’s
fingers intertwined with his. Her hand was soft and warm, and he didn’t want to let it go. Maggie
smiled and brushed a strand of hair out of her face. He gently squeezed. She squeezed back.
What am I doing? Norman thought. He slowly released her hand and stepped back.
“Thanks,” Maggie said.” We get some real creeps passing through.”
“It was a pleasure,” Norman said. He could smell Maggie’s perfume. It came to him in
small bursts. He wanted to close his eyes and breathe it in.
“Hey, tough luck with the car,” she said. “Lou told me what happened.”
“Some things you don’t see coming,” Norman said. “What a place to get stranded.” He
realized what he’d said sounded harsh. “I don’t mean to criticize your town. It just hasn’t been a
good day.”
217

“No need to apologize,” Maggie said. “Sometimes I feel this place is the end of the
world, but it does have its redeeming qualities. And, hey, at least we met. Call it serendipity.
Well, maybe not.” She puffed her cheeks and then let her arms fall to her side. “Okay, I’ll
confess. Lou told me what direction you went, and I started looking. Do you think that’s strange?
I usually don’t do this. Gee, to be stuck in a strange town, not knowing anyone. I felt bad.” She
tapped her bottom teeth with her thumb nail and gazed up at Norman. Her blue eyes seemed to
take him in at a glance, his utter melancholy and loneliness, his helplessness. “Hey, why don’t
you come over for dinner? I just live around the corner. It won’t be anything special. Come on.
What do you say?”
The street lamps buzzed overhead. Norman looked down Main Street toward the blinking
casino lights. Beyond the lights he saw nothing but darkness. The thought of walking in that
direction seemed unbearable. So did the thought of lying in a motel room, surfing channels, and
listening to the rush of cars and trucks on the interstate.
“I am hungry,” Norman said.
#
Maggie’s house was small, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room sparsely furnished
with a blue denim couch and a square slate-top coffee table. Next to the door hung a collage of
photographs in a black wooden frame. Several potted plants, arranged according to size, adorned
the windowsill. “This is it,” Maggie said. “Stand in the middle of the living room, spin once, and
you’ve seen everything. Just give me a second.” She disappeared into the kitchen.
The refrigerator opened and closed. The oven door banged shut. There was the click of a
turning dial and then the hiss of gas. Norman waited by the door, fingering the ring case in his
pocket.
218

“You can set your bag down,” Maggie said, reappearing so suddenly that her voice
startled him. “Make yourself at home.”
Norman set the backpack near the door, loosening and then tightening the shoulder straps
for no reason at all. The evaporative cooler turned on and rattled through a vent above the
bedroom door. On the other side of the room, Maggie stood near the window. She twisted a
yellowed leaf from one of the potted plants and rubbed it between her fingers. “I believe in being
honest,” she said.
Norman waited for some kind of revelation, that Maggie was married or had brought him
here to sell him something. “So do I,” Norman said.
But Maggie said nothing. Instead, she lifted her pant leg, yanked at a leather strap
cinched around her lower thigh, and removed the leg below the knee. She took the leg, with the
shoe still attached, and set it under the coffee table. Then she looked at Norman. “Do you mind?”
“I don’t mind,” Norman said, watching how the empty pant leg swayed slightly in the
blast of air from the vent, surprised, really, that he didn’t mind.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Maggie said. “That’s why I asked. People can
be cruel. You wouldn’t believe what they’ll say and do. Total strangers, too. Some guy in Elko,
right in the middle of Wal-Mart, wanted me to show him how the prosthetic went on. One guy
said he’d pay me fifty dollars if he could rub the end of my leg. I don’t wear shorts anymore.
Even in the middle of summer. You can understand why, I’m sure.”
There was something beautiful in her vulnerability, in the way she stared at the floor,
shaking her head and smiling bemusedly at people’s thoughtlessness and cruelty. Suddenly,
Norman wanted to hold Maggie and comfort her. The unexpectedness of this desire shocked him.
Norman wondered if he should leave. He ran his hands over his eyes, as if that might help him
219

decide, and then he stared out the window. The thought of walking in that darkness terrified
him.
“When I’m home I like to be myself,” Maggie said. She hopped to the couch with one
graceful leap and sat down. “If you’re a floor person, I have pillows. I had the carpets
shampooed a few weeks ago.”
“I’ll just sit by you,” Norman said. As an afterthought, he took his shoes off and set them
near the prosthetic. “That’s better,” he said, and then leaned back.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” Maggie said.
“Really, I don’t,” Norman said, feeling undeserving of Maggie’s admiration. “I’m glad
you’re comfortable.”
“I’ll admit it’s not always easy,” she said. “Sometimes, even after ten years, I still cry
about it. In high school my friend and I were coming back home from Elko when a drunk driver
hit us. That’s how it happened: out of nowhere, two headlights and then silence. My friend
walked away. I didn’t.” Maggie rested her arm on the back of the couch. “My parents didn’t
have any health insurance. The whole town helped. Maybe that’s the reason I stay. On the
outside people here seem rough and uneducated, but on the inside they’re good.”
“It must have been quite the community effort,” Norman said.
“It was,” Maggie said. “For a while I wasn’t doing well. Just imagine, one day I’m
running track, and the next I can’t even stand up. And on top of that there was the price of the
prosthetic and the rehabilitation. That’s when everyone chipped in. After that I always swore I’d
help someone if I had the chance. That’s why I came back.”
With an agility that impressed Norman, Maggie lifted herself from the couch and took the
collage of photographs off the wall. She set it on the coffee table and pointed to a picture of a
220

bearded, heavy-set man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Behind him the flat, monochrome
desert stretched to the mountains. Norman looked at the other pictures: Maggie playing the piano
in a white dress, making a pie, running track. Norman wondered why the bearded man occupied
the center of the collage.
“Your father?” Norman asked.
“No. A friend of the family,” Maggie said. “Bill Mortensen.” She brushed away a speck
of dust on the glass. “He was the third guy at the garage until he got sick. Cancer. Three packs a
day, unfiltered. I saw the X-rays of his lungs. The cancer was like wisps of smoke in there, like
smudges. I was living in Colorado at the time, working, taking classes when I wanted, drifting
really, and then one day my mom called to tell me that Bill was getting worse and how she’d
been trying to take care of him but could only do so much.” Maggie paused. Her lower lip
trembled. “It was one of those moments. It sounds so silly, I know. A moment of clarity, as if the
universe opened itself for a second and I saw a pathway, a purpose. So I followed it and came
home.” Maggie wiped at her eyes and smiled apologetically. “Gosh, I don’t know why I’m
telling you this. You must think I’m so gloomy.”
“I don’t think that at all,” Norman said. “You did something most people wouldn’t do.”
“Maybe,” Maggie said, “but I didn’t know what I was getting into. It was the typical
story of a person dying of cancer. He lived a year beyond the diagnosis. We got into the
chemotherapy routine. They called it ‘daycare’ at the clinic. There was always a wait. Then the
drip in the arm. Then the inevitable nausea. It was the most helpless I’d ever felt, watching him
puke his guts out, a big, powerful man. Then the cancer got to his liver and then to his brain.
There’s a horror in watching someone you’ve known all your life deteriorate like that. Our
conversations became shorter. He forgot things. The last forty-eight hours were the worst. My
221

parents were there. Bill’s brother, too. By that time we had a nurse. And then there was his
breathing, like a squeaky door opening and closing every time he took a breath. It’s like it went
on forever. At one point the nurse wanted us to leave so she could clean him up. That’s when he
passed, when we were standing outside the room. It’s like he knew we were out of the room and
wanted to save us from the final moment. When I was looking at him after, I couldn’t help
thinking that everything else in him worked well. Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this. One fatal
flaw, one bad habit, took him from us.”
“Awful,” Norman muttered, wincing at how trivial and common the word sounded. He
could imagine the shaded room, the raw smell of sickness, the shrunken, waxy figure on the bed,
and Maggie standing there, weeping quietly. Norman remembered a phrase he’d read and
underlined in a college textbook seven years ago. “There is a great sadness pushing at the
world,” it said, “and it only needs a little slipway, a little opening.” The words seemed rife with
meaning, and Norman, for the first time, thought he understood the implication of those words.
“Have you ever read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran?” Maggie asked. “I mention it
because you’re a guidance counselor and help people.”
Norman knew the book, the story of an old sage imparting pearls of wisdom, but he’d
never read more than a page or two, though many people had recommended it. The story seemed
too contrived, too feel-good and saccharine, one of those books that litters thrift stores after its
initial popularity has waned. “I haven’t,” Norman said.
Maggie stood and took a worn blue copy of The Prophet from the book shelf next to the
door. There was a gold hand stamped on the cover, and in the palm of the hand stood human
silhouettes stretching their arms upward. “My English teacher gave me this after the accident,”
Maggie said. “After reading it, I started writing my own poetry. And then when Bill got sick I
222

bought him a copy. Every day we read a chapter and talked about it. I want to read you
something. This was Bill’s favorite.” She cleared her throat and began. The poem was about
pain, how pain breaks a shell that encloses our understanding, how pain, like joy, is one of the
miracles of our lives, how we must accept pain just as we accept the seasons of the year because
pain is the bitter potion the physician uses to heal us. Maggie barely glanced at the page.
Norman tried to smile as she read, knowing that nothing he had ever thought or said had
been as powerful. In all his time as a guidance counselor, he’d never helped anyone the way
Maggie had helped Bill.
“You’re beautiful,” Norman said. “I mean more than just the way you look.”
Maggie touched the gold hand on the book’s cover. “Thanks,” she said.
“You write poetry?” Norman asked. He suddenly wanted to hear her reading something.
“I dabble in it,” Maggie said, “but it’s awful stuff. I’m embarrassed.”
Norman touched her hand. “Read something.”
“Okay,” Maggie said. She took a worn spiral notebook from under the coffee table. “I
read this at Bill’s funeral. It’s called ‘Joy and Sorrow.’ You might think it’s too depressing.
Maybe I’ll read something else.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Norman said.
Taking Norman’s hand, Maggie said, “I love the way you look at me.” And then she
began to read.
Norman closed his eyes and listened. The words were simple and the rhythm somewhat
forced, but he enjoyed the poem and even began to believe what Maggie was saying: that the
deeper we are cut by sorrow, the deeper our joy, and that joy and sorrow are inseparable, and
without them life is empty.
223

When Maggie finished, she closed the notebook. “You keep doing that,” she said,
pointing to Norman’s hand clamped tightly over his pant pocket.
Norman pulled the ring case from the pocket and examined its polished surface.
“California,” Maggie said. She let go of Norman’s hand and fingered the notebook’s
metal spiral.
“I don’t know if I want to go to California,” Norman said. He set the ring case on the
coffee table.
“What do you want?” Maggie asked.
“What do I want?” Norman said, more to himself than to Maggie. He reached for her
hand. “I want you to read another poem,” he said. “I want you to read all of them.”
Maggie stared at their clasped hands and nodded. She opened the notebook to the first
page and read.
Outside, the wind had picked up, and somewhere in the distance Norman heard chimes
ringing, a dreamy melody that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Sitting beside Maggie,
who seemed so beautiful, Norman understood that everything, if examined closely enough, is
beautiful. Norman closed his eyes. My life’s going to change, he thought.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shoemaker, Ryan Craig (author)

Core Title Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/08/2014

Defense Date 05/08/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag John Cheever,OAI-PMH Harvest,pastoralism,Raymond Carver

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Handley, William R. (committee chair), Bender, Aimee (committee member), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Kemp, Anthony (committee member)

Creator Email shoemakerryan@gmail.com,shoemakerryan@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-434077

Unique identifier UC11287832

Identifier etd-ShoemakerR-2631.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-434077 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ShoemakerR-2631.pdf

Dmrecord 434077

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Shoemaker, Ryan Craig

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA