Molto Miscellaneous.

     I’m in the kitchen washing dishes when I get the call. It’s my father. I’ve been expecting it, dreading it.
     “I don’t know where she is,” he says. I haven’t heard his voice like this before, ever. This is panic. This is total loss of control. He says my mother escaped out of the house. He has no idea where she is.
     “How long ago, Dad?” I clamp the phone between my ear and shoulder, dry my hands on a dish towel. I’ll have to get dressed fast.
     “Ten or twenty minutes,” he says.
     “I’m coming,” I say. At least it’s not cold. She’s ninety. If it were winter, she’d be dead. With a little luck we can find her before it gets too hot, before she falls and hurts herself.
     “She was talking about going home last night,” he says. “I couldn’t get her to go to bed.”
     The clock on the oven says 9:48. “I can be to your house by noon,” I say. “I want you to hang up and call 911.”
     He starts calling out, “Honey? Alice?”
     “Dad?” I run up the stairs two steps at time. “Dad!”
     He’s set the phone down. I can hear him calling to her in the background. He must be walking through the house looking for her. I throw on a pair of pants, pull on a t-shirt, and run down the stairs, trying to remember if I have enough gas in the car.
     I don’t.
     I’m standing beside the car at the Mobil station, counting lost minutes, when my phone rings again.
     “I found her,” he says.
     I stop the pump, then decide I might as well fill the car. In fact, I decide to keep it full or at least full enough to get to my parents if I need to.
     “Is she all right?”
     He chuckles. “She’s all right. She got all the way down to River Road. Almost to Burmeisters’.”
     That’s a half mile on uneven paved country road. I can see her unsteady walk, little more than a stumble, pickup trucks flying past her at fifty miles per hour. I can just see her pitching over into a weedy ditch.
     “We better talk about this, Dad,” I say. I grab my receipt from the pump and get in the car.
     “Listen,” he says, “if you’re in the car, why don’t we just meet for lunch? Have you had lunch?

This escape act is new, but my mother has been disappearing for a few years now. Four years ago, when she was eighty-six, she had by-pass surgery. She only came back up part of the way from the deep anesthetic. She and my dad were avid card players. After the operation, he says, she could no longer play a game. She forgot her cards, she disremembered the rules. Sometime after that, she could no longer connect names and faces. My brother’s wife became “that woman.” She was cordial to my wife, but cordial and polite the way she would be to a stranger. Then her sense of place started to go. The one-story home she had lived in for forty-five years became strange. Where’s the bathroom? she’d say. She would stand at the basement door and say, I guess I’ll go upstairs and go to bed. Along with this disintegration of spatial orientation came a state of fidgety agitation. Every few minutes she would get up and look out the window, walk into the next room to look around; back and forth she walked, not knowing what she was looking for, and not finding it. At my brother’s sixtieth birthday party a year ago, she sat with us out on the patio, a congenial smile on her face. People with Alzheimer’s can become belligerent, even violent. Throughout this period, she has remained more or less serene. That day on the patio, after a few minutes, she pointed at the sliding glass door into the empty house and said, “I’m going inside to talk to those people.”

     We meet at the Bob Evans in Flint. In the restaurant foyer, she sits next to him on a bench, looking small and frail.
     “Well look who’s here,” she says when she sees me. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
     I bend down to give her a hug. Her hands and cheeks are cold. She’s down to eighty pounds. She’s stopped wearing her glasses.
     “Do you know who this is?” he asks her.
     “This is Rick,” she says. “Of course.”
     Once we’re seated, he looks at the menu for her. He suggests a hot turkey sandwich. When she says she’s never had one of those before, he glances over at me and winks.
     “I’ve got alarms on all the doors,” he says.
     I know you do, I say.
     He cuts up his dish of spaghetti with his knife and fork. He tells me, “She puts on her coat and hat when I’m in the bathroom. She says she has to meet her mother and dad. I’ve told her they’re gone. We’ve talked about this. We even went to the cemetery, and I said, ‘See, honey, both your mother and dad died a long time ago.’” He takes a bite of food and chews slowly. He won’t admit he’s tired. He won’t give up. He won’t say he can’t take care of her. “Sometimes,” he says, “it will go on for hours. ‘Call dad. I’m supposed to meet dad.’”
     The waitress tops our water, offering my mother more coffee.
     “She’ll only drink the one cup,” my dad says.
     My mother drags her fork through the mashed potatoes on her plate. She’s only eaten a few bites.
     “Do you want to try this?” he says. He pushes his dish over in front of her.
     She takes a forkful, eats it, and smiles up at him. “I’ll only have half,” she says.
     “The other night,” he says, “she walked out into the garage. I brought her inside and said, ‘I have two jobs: to take care of you and to keep you safe.’”
     We eat in silence for a few minutes. After a few bites of spaghetti, she pushes the plate back and says she’s cold. It’s cold in the restaurant. All the old ladies are wearing sweaters. I’m cold too.
     “I’m just going to have to be more careful,” my dad says. We agree on this. Then he says, “I think mother will want ice cream.”
    We each have a scoop of vanilla. It’s creamy and delicious. My mother eats all of hers. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s really good.”

     My wife looks across the table and says, "Just promise me."
     "Done," I say. We're having breakfast at the Egg and I. I stir a sugar into my coffee, the granulated brown sugar that fools me into thinking I'm not really eating sugar, then point at the half piece of toast on her plate. "You going to eat that?"
     "It's not done." She's referring to the dead air conditioning unit in her studio, the heat wave that's crashed down on us, and the work she wants to do. "Promise me you'll get a new one this week."
     I tell her I promise.
     I pick up her toast, whole grain, no butter. Now I'll need marmalade. There's nothing on the table but mixed fruit, which might as well be called faux fruit.
     My wife takes a sip of coffee. "So you take the kids to the pool," she says, "I'll have some work time."
     "I'll take the kids to the pool." I motion to Donna, the waitress. "But that's work. Isn't that work?"
     "If you're in the water," she says, "if you're anywhere near the water, it's not work."
     Donna cruises by, a steaming coffee pot in her right hand. She lowers it to my wife's cup, fills it, then aims at mine. I get my hand over it in time.
     "Got any marmalade?"
     "He's going to the pool today," my wife says.
     Donna sets the pot down on the table. "Well lucky you."
     "He thinks it's work," my wife says, "because the kids are there."
     Donna, our old pal, smiles at me. "Where are your little cheezits this morning?"
     "My mother had them last night," I say.
     "Lucky youse." She reaches in her pocket, pulls out a couple marmalades, and tosses them on the table in front of me. She asks my wife if she's painting today.
     "When I get him to the pool," she says.
     Donna clicks her tongue. "It's supposed to be a nice day," she says to me. "Lucky."

     Conrad is waiting at the pool. He's grabbed a chaise in the shade for me. I wouldn't call him my friend exactly. Like me, he's a pool dad. We wait out mornings and afternoons while our kids are in the water. Conrad's out of work, a graphic designer with two boys five and seven who can terrorize the pool. He's separated from his wife, permanently, he says with satisfaction. He makes suggestive remarks about the pool moms.
     "Wifey painting today?" he says. His bill cap is pulled down low, shading his eyes. He reminds me of that Yankee pitcher, inscrutable, potentially dangerous. I tell him she is. I pull wings on Casey's arms while his sister Abigail hits the water. She's seven. She does not like Conrad's boys. I tell her to stay in the shallow end with Casey.
     Conrad says, "So when am I going to see her work? I'm an artist. What kind of work does she do, anyway?"
     "Color field," I say. When she first used the term, I thought about real fields like where I grew up, with beans and corn growing in them. Then she showed me her work, which is mostly rectangles. Her canvases are big. I didn't see much, but I told her I could relate to her greens, which were a deep, throbbing background upon which her red and yellow rectangles floated. I'm a math teacher. I like rectangles.
     When he asks, I tell Conrad yes, she's sold some stuff.
     "We should come for dinner one night," he says. The "we" catches me. Then he says, "Kids can play. I can see her work. I know some people." He raises the bill on his cap and looks over at me. "It's all about networking."
     Conrad's boys are doing cannonballs. Up on her platform the lifeguard rises from her seat and tells them to knock it off. She wears the pool's official suit for lifeguards, white with red stripes. It's modest. She has a lot of natural talent.
     "I could smoke on her all night long," Conrad says.
     The bigger one, Tyler, ignores her completely, launches into the pool on the shallow end, close to Casey, who does not like to be splashed. I see Abigail pulling him out of the way.
     "Little fucker," Conrad says. The lifeguard has climbed down. She motions Tyler out of the water. Conrad pulls himself up and does a slow athletic trot over to the edge of the pool. This discussion happens almost every day. I'm beginning to think Conrad's got Tyler working with him on this hustle.
     During adult swim Conrad's boys eat colored tape.
     "It's fruit," he says. "It's the only way I can get them to eat it."
     I pull out plastic bags of nuts and apple slices. He rolls his eyes. I tell him the fruit tape might be good on toast.
     We're watching a couple moms do laps, taking long purposeful strokes with gentle rolls, when a couple bees start to dive-bomb us. Conrad ducks and swears.
     "It hate those things," he says. He pulls off his cap and swats at them.
     "You're only making them mad," I say. Casey is corralling earwigs with a couple pair of flip-flops.
     "I'm allergic," Conrad says. "I could die if one of those things stung me. I got a nest at my house. All day long, in and out." He tugs his hat on. "Gives me the creeps."
     "You can get rid those," I say. "You got a vacuum cleaner?"
     "They're in the wall, next to a window. They're nesting right inside the walls of my house."
     "A big vacuum," I say, even though I'm pretty sure he doesn't. "Like carpenters use. A wet vac."
     "All I got's a dustbuster."
     We're coming into the hot time of day, no shade. I tell him let's pack up the kids and I'll meet him at his house with my tools.

     Conrad's house is a two-story colonial with central air and no furniture. The family room in back has hardwood floor, a big screen TV, some sheets and bed pillows on the floor. He says he's been cleaned out, his ex raped him and ran off. He tries to make the place comfortable for his kids. He turns on Back to the Future and closes the blinds on the glass door in the back. My kids sit in the glow of a TV so big it makes theirs look like a postcard. The air in the room is cool and dry. Outside, I know the bees will be moving. I tell Conrad to show me the nest.
     It's in the front of the house, right next to the front door. The bees come and go, arriving three and four at a time. I get my vac and duct tape.
     "I think they must be wasps or hornets," Conrad says.
     "Honeybees," I say. "They're endangered."
     "Little fuckers. Too bad."
     "An important link in the food chain."
     "Not in my house, they're not." He looks at me in disbelief. "What, are you Dr. Science or something?"
     "I'm just saying, it's too bad."
     There's an electric outlet by the front door. I plug in the vac. "Hose?" I pop the lid off my vac and pull out the bag. Evidently Conrad's ex took the garden hose too, if he ever had one. He goes in the house and comes back with a beer pitcher full of water. One more of these and we have a few inches of water in the bottom of the vac.
     "They have one thing on their mind," I say, "and it's not stinging you. It's going home. They leave the nest, they come back to the nest. It's what they do. And that's how we kill them."
     "I thought I heard them this morning," he says, backing away. "I was having coffee. I thought they were in the house."
     "Unlikely."
     "It was a chain saw down the street."
     I rip off a few pieces of duct tape, fasten the tip of the vacuum hose right next to the entrance to the nest. "They power down when they come back to the nest," I say, turning on the vacuum. "And in they go."
     One by one, coming and going, the bees disappear into the hose.
     Conrad nods and smiles. "Shut up."
     "It's hot," I say. "I'm ready for some AC."
     "What about the ones in there?" he says, pointing at the vacuum.
     I shake my head. "That's a hurricane in there. A wet, windy storm that never ends."
     Conrad opens the front door a crack. I can feel cold air pouring out, and I think about my wife painting at home. "You guys okay?" he says. "Anyone hungry?"
     He holds the door open, I walk inside. "Let it run all afternoon," I say. "Then run it all morning tomorrow."
     In the family room, Michael J. Fox is traveling through space and time in a Delorean. The kids have juice boxes, Doritos, and more of that fruit tape. I follow Conrad into the kitchen. There's no table, no chairs. A couple nails on the walls where there used to be shelves, a calendar, possibly some art. Beside the breakfast bar are a couple stools. He pulls one out for me and opens the fridge. I hear tinkling glass, and he hands me a bottle of beer.
     "It's kinda cold in this house," I say.
     "Wonderful invention," he says. "You got air?"
     "Not like this," I say.
     He takes a long drink of beer. The kids are laughing in the next room. "End of the year," he says, "I'll be out of here."
     "Selling?"
     "You might say that," he says. He takes off his cap and tosses it on the counter. "All my life I been lucky. I worked, don't get me wrong, but I got lucky, too. Now this," he looks at me and give me a rueful smile. "I'm going down in flames."
     I can hear the vacuum running outside. It's good that it's hot. The bees move when it's hot. They'll be disappearing all afternoon.
     I tell him we should go.
     "When I was in college," Conrad says, "some of the art students would just strip down to work on hot days. Down to basics, you know?"
     On the counter, in curlicue script, is a hand-written note. "Dear Con," it begins.
    Yes, I know exactly what he means. "By tomorrow," I say, "you'll have killed most of them."
     "Lucky," he says, shaking his head. "Those were the days."
     "To finish the job," I say, "we'll mix up a little door prize." A cotton swab, dredged in poison, pushed through the front door. A straggler coming home late will have to pass through it, pulling the poison right inside the nest. It works.

I get the kids in the car and blast the AC. It's an oven in there. They're crabby and tired, hopped up on sugar, mad that we couldn't stay for the end of the movie. I can't wait to get home, to see my wife, to see what's growing in her color fields. She'll be wondering about the new window unit. I'll tell her, This week. Definitely this week. One project at a time.

      "What you do," the tree man says, "is get some Great Stuff. Fill the tree up with it to keep the water out of it."
     It's an apple tree. Now it's half an apple tree. We have three of them left, all senior citizens feeling their years. Our house sits on property that was part of a large orchard in the nineteenth century. Gradually most of our neighbors have cut down their apple trees. The one now reduced to half its former self has looked haggard and dry for some time now, part of it, anyway. This year I was going to lop off a dead chunk of it. Then a storm came through the area. There were enough leaves in the tree for it to resist, but it lost its worse half. When I got up Father's Day morning, there it was, broken, half the tree bowing to the grass, and where it broke, a deep hollow in the trunk, a void four inches in diameter and twenty some inches deep. Before starting lunch that Sunday, I cut the dead wood into pieces with my chain saw and hauled them to the road.
     "Don't worry about this guy," the tree man says. "Keep the water out, it'll last a while." He looks up at the tree, nods, and says, "Great Stuff."

     I do not love an apple tree. We had one in our yard when I was growing up. One was enough. Every fall my brother and I picked up rotten apples and hauled them to the garden in a wheel barrow. Our parents grew a big vegetable garden. They also had rows of backbreaking strawberries and a long stand of thorny, obstreperous raspberry bushes that grew rampant and were frightfully prolific. Relatives would come, townspeople would stop by for a visit. Our mother would hand us a bowl. "Go pick Vernon and Matty a couple quarts." When the misery of nature's bounty had passed into fall, there remained the apple tree. It was tall, craggy, and usually loaded. The grass under the tree with thin and sickly. All my hatred of the garden could be invested in that beast. Eventually the tree came down and a basketball rim went up.

     Great Stuff is a Dow Chemical product. It comes in a yellow can. It's under pressure. You screw a six inch tube onto a tip in the top of the can, bend the tip, and stuff the color of a pastry chef's egg cream comes squirting out. The active ingredient in Great Stuff is Great Stuff, plus air. And it is lively. I emptied a can into the tree and saw I would need reinforcements. I went back to ACE for two more cans, emptying both of them into the cavern. Then I went in the house. When I looked out the kitchen window, I saw the tree vomiting Great Stuff in slow-mo. Stuff stuck to the side of the tree. Stuff puddling on the ground.
     There should be a sign on the can. In large letters, don't touch Great Stuff.
     I grabbed what I could find, a paper bag, some newspapers, a piece of cardboard, thinking I would just trowel a nice finish on Great Stuff. It is not a friend to the trowel.
     By accident, I touched it. I think it touched me purpose.
     It's sticky.
     Forget soap and water. Only gas would take it off, which I poured over my hands at the edge of the driveway, cursing Great Stuff stuck to my hands, to my flipflops and shorts.

     That day a headline caught my attention, about the oceans being near death. The oceans, too infinite for the mind to contain, a symbol of infinity. How do we succeed in exhausting and murdering infinity? Fished out, polluted, their ecosystem destabilized by temperature change and increased carbon dioxide levels, the oceans, it is said, could be dead within a generation.
     Lake Erie came to mind. The dead lake. And the Tittabawassee River came to mind, its stench, its spectral clouds of steam rising from it in sub-zero temperatures, its hideous population of grimy carp we dragged up on the banks as kids, monstrous fish we recoiled from and kicked with disgust back in the water.
     I've sailed on Lake Erie and eaten its perch. It's made a comeback.
     The Tittibawassee has experienced a rebirth. Walleye run up the river to spawn. I can't quite take it in, the walleye, the river's rebirth without birth defects. My brother said not long ago he put a boat in the river north of town and by accident (any physical contact with the river was, would be, and must always be an accident), stepped in the water. His foot broke the surface tension of the muck in the bottom, he said, and what came up was a dark smoky cloud of disturbed sediment, and the smell. The smell of dead river, the smell of Dow.

     We were ten years in this house when we lost the first apple tree. It was the biggest of the four, and it was beautiful, the color and texture of its bark alternating between slate and coal, its Herculean branches rising gracefully and powerfully above the yard. Mowing the lawn one day, I noticed business around the base of the tree, ant business. When a big branch later dropped off the tree, I saw in the hollow of the tree more than business. It was business and industry, hunting and gathering, a diverse thriving economy predicated on the destruction of the tree.
     We'd had ants in the house, big fellows; long-bodied, lusty black carpenter ants that crunched when you stepped on them. Every spring and summer, we'd find them in that jolt of surprise, on the floor behind a door, on the kitchen counter. Sitting on the couch, you'd feel a tickle across your arm as one jogged over it, heading for a sofa cushion.
     When I told my wife the big apple was full of ants, she was resolute.
     Within a week, we had a crew in the yard. The guys came out at the end of the day. They must have figured: one tree.
     The top branches came down, then the lower branches. All of them full.
     When they cut the base of the tree four feet above ground, a crater was opened, and from it black ants poured, a geyser of ants, clouds of them fuming down the sides of the tree. Even the tree guys were shaken.

I grew to tolerate the apple trees. Come fall, I had to clean up after them, filling plastic grocery bags with apples, bags I then lugged to the road to be carried away on Thursdays. Apple waste. Every year my mother-in-law would look up into the trees and ask why we didn't eat them. Because they're wormy, I said. She would point way up in the tree. That one, she'd say, looks good. Yes, it was red. But no, I'd say, they're all full of worms. We would have to spray. Our neighbor sprayed his peach trees, valiantly trying to keep away the bugs, trusting the poison to do its work, and eventually he gave up on growing perfect, bug-free, poisoned fruit.
But they had become beautiful, these old infested trees. Some summer evenings, late into dusk, I'd walk the yard, enjoying the deep liquid green, and stand among the trees, silent dark hulks that seemed more than present. They seemed to give off something. I liked to think of them as possessed by spirits. They were receptacles in which wandering spirits could reside. Maybe the spirits of our loved ones, being near us. Maybe just the spirits of other trees. There was a vibration. You were with them, the trees and their occupants, you did not feel alone.

      The day after I inject my apple tree with foam, I awaken to a tree with a goiter. Great Stuff has continued to boil over, though the rate has slowed and the pressure has subsided, causing it to form a protuberance the size of a volley ball on the side of the tree. It looks like a giant meringue. Or a tumor. At first I'm horrified and sickened, then excited by the possibilities this thing offers. I could paint a face on it and call it the spirit of the tree. Or I could just leave it as it is, see what happens to it over time. Judging from the efficacy of Dow engineering, I might have to wait a few thousand years to detect any change, as I'm sure it's heat-, cold-, rain-, snow-, bird-, and squirrel resistant. The only thing to do is cut it off.
     The ideal tool for this blobectomy is a drywall saw, which makes a clean excision. There is some blobdust.
     I'm left with part tree, part canoli. To discolor the foam, I spare it with gray Krylon Primer. "No drips, no runs, no errrors," it says on the can. I spray, Great Stuff begins to tick, I'm afraid that Dow and Krylon do not make nice, but in the end, nothing happens. That's my goal, to hold the tree in chemical neutral, give it a chance to live and die a modern death.

     "This salad I'm making tonight will be a ripoff," I say to the woman counting kiwi. It's Thursday morning at the grocery store. The kiwi in her hand looks scratchy and soft, more brown than green, obviously ready to eat. She's wearing a red tank top, black capri pants, flat shoes. She has muscles and tattoos. She's buff, but tired buff. Like she's met her match a few times. When she doesn't answer, I continue. "Sunday I went to a birthday party, a party for a two-year-old, and his mother made this delicious salad, with field greens and some crunchy lettuces, corn, and vinegrette."
     She puts six kiwi in a clear plastic bag.
     "Those look delicious," I say. "Especially that last one. Juicy. Delicious."
     "Lettuce," she says.
     I nod in agreement
     "No," she says, "you said lettuces. It's lettuce."
     Obviously she hasn't read her Beatrix Potter. I tell her this as she moves away from me, edging in the direction of avocado.
     "Grandchild?" she says.
     "Somebody's," I say, looking around for corn, "but not mine."
     This store, in the fruit and vegetable section, has big doors they can throw open, like garage doors, letting the harvest spill onto the sidewalk, which they do all summer long. Melon, cantaloupe, peaches, apples. Foison. I want to use this word, but having shown off my knowledge of Beatrix Potter, I know I should hold back. Today is the first warm day of May. The cherry trees are heavy in blossom. Before coming in to shop, I sat in my car, taking in the trees, the parking lot, the day. If it were my store, I would open those doors.
     Corn comes in packs of four ears, shucked, cleaned of their silk, ready to eat. Miraculous, I think. Fresh corn in May. I ask the fruit man if I can have just one ear.
     From avocado the woman moves to exotics—pomegranate, mango, rambutan. I walk past her with my one ear, feeling vaguely ashamed.
     "Good luck with your counterfeit salad," she says.
     "Enjoy your kiwi," I say.
     I take my time leaving. It's still a beautiful day. She pushes a cart out of the store, loads her bags into the back of a white SUV with a bumper sticker that says, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned." She slams the door, the engine roars to life, and she drives away in her white heaven wagon.
     I put down my windows, close my eyes, and ponder the miracle of corn, hoping to make my salad before the world ends.

     Get me out of here.
     When Nadine said, Hey, come with me to the opera, I said, Hey, sure. Now I'm not so sure. Or I'm totally sure. This is a fate worse than death, a death no one I know would want to sing about.
     To my left, Nadine is all aglow. She's giving off light. The singers sing and Nadine turns my way and says, Wasn't that just wonderful? To my right is a bowtie and Italian loafers. Bravo he says when the tenor sings. Brava when it's the soprano. It's all bravo to me, or rather none of it is.
     "Are you enjoying it?" Nadine says at intermission. We're in the grand lobby, standing at the grand bar.
     "Water, sparkling," I say to the lady bartender. She holds up two fingers, I say no. "And a beer."
     I hand Nadine her glass and tell her I like the chorus all right.
     She looks over her glasses at me. That was the look that got me. I'm a plumber. She had a plugged-up laundry tub in her basement, which I came on the scene to fix. When I was writing up her bill in the kitchen, I told her she had gorgeous plumbing. She gave me her over-the-glasses look and smiled. Then we talked. In a week we talked again. Then in a day, again. I went over for dinner a few times. Then came some this and that, which we both knew we liked.
     Now this, which I don't.
     The bartender hands me my beer, I'm tempted to say Brava.
     Nadine sips. "So you're following it okay?"
     "Okay." Not okay. Not much at all.
     "Because we can leave if you want to."
     "At halftime?" I take a long drink. Normally I have it from the can. "That would be egregious."
     She smiles. I've discovered she says egregious more than anyone I know. It's catchy.
     "Important arias coming." She sets her drink on the bar. "Shall we?"
     I drain my beer, thinking about Bowtie, the hard seat, and what comes after this and that.

     Nadine and I have an agreement. I do not refer to "the fat lady." I come to the opera, and when the second half starts I do not say, When's the fat lady sing? I don't say it, even though there she is up there right now, the size of a bulldozer rolling across the stage, dragging purple drapery behind her, singing her head off.
     Nadine lays a hand on my knee.
     "Is this it?" I say. I know someone has to die before we can go home, but I'm going to keep my end of the bargain and sit quiet.
     "Let's go," she says.
     "But." I point at the stage.
     "It's all right," she says She rolls up her program, motions me toward the aisle, gets a pinch of my jacket and gives it a pull.
     And it's a good thing. We're parked on the sixth level of a parking structure. Any later, we'd be half an hour getting out. We start down, corkscrewing through the lot toward the street below. We meet fans returning to their cars.
     "Like water down the drain," I say.
     She's talking about the composer, how he wrote and wrote and wrote, then up and quit. Never wrote another opera. And what do I think of that? Amazing, I say. I'm thinking about the cars lining up behind me, how we're going down clockwise, like a flow of water down the drain. We stop and start. Here's an old dame in a fur supporting her old dude gentleman, there's a crowd of shawls and high heels.
     "What's your music, then?" Nadine says.
     "Old," I say. "You know, Monkees?"
     "What?"
     "Take the last train to Clarksville," I sing, "And I'll meet you at the station."
     Oh that, she says. "There must be a lot of music in your life. Must have been. What did your wife like?"
     Here we go. "We had the same taste," I say. "Radio." And dischord.
     Two levels to go. We're stopped dead now.
     "You can add to that," she says. "What you liked then, the life you lived then, you can add to that. There can be more of you."
     "Not this," I say. Hey, there's bowtie and Italian loafers. Not so bravo getting away. "Water drains clockwise," I say. "Parking lots, too."
     The brakelights on the car in front of us are giving Nadine a red face.
     "Is it over?" she says. She means my wife. Totally, I'm about to say, but Nadine is making this funny face. It's not her over-the-glasses look. It's full at me, boring into me, and there's this deep crease in her brow. It bothers me to think I've put that crease there. I reach out and sort of pat her forehead. Except it's a stronger than a pat. It's almost a slap. She jerks back in surprise, astonished by what I've done. I laugh to show her it's nothing, and it is. But then for some reason I don't understand, I reach out and I do it again, full on the forehead, this playful swat.
     "Don't hit me," she says.
     Traffic is moving. We'll spill on the street. I'll have to pull over and explain. She's pulled back into herself so far, I don't know if there will be any explaining.

     I wake up a little after midnight to the phone ringing. It's Nadine. I pull open a window in the front room, then sit at the kitchen table in the dark while we talk. Or she talks. She wants to know what happened with my wife, why we split. She wants to know if there was ever any violence in our marriage. I seem like a normal man, she says, but there's no telling. So I will have to tell her the truth about everything, or this thing we have will be all over. While she talks I can hear a dog barking down the street, and beyond that the sound of semi trucks accelerating on the main road, hauling hard through the gears. I watch the digital display on the kitchen clock, waiting for the exact second the next minute arrives, then the next, and the next.
     "So that's how it's going to be," she says. "You'll have to talk."
     I told her already I thought it was nothing, what I did. Just a little love tap, nothing more. But to her, it's not nothing. It's something big. The first one, she was ready to let it go. But the second time, when I saw she was upset (why didn't I see she was upset?) that was not normal. That was just mean. And the fact is, I just did it. The fact that I didn't think, that's what bothers her.
     “All right,” I say, “let's talk it out.” What I did, I tell her, that’s really not me. I ask if we can meet in the morning.
     She goes silent. The dog has gone silent too. I close my eyes and listen to the inside of her house.
     "What is that?" I ask. "What're you listening to?"
     "Radio," she says.
     "But what are you listening to?"
     "Satellite. All baroque," she says. "It calms me."
     “All broke?”
     “Bah-roque,” she says.
     We agree to meet next morning. I hang up, sit in the dark, and close my eyes. Where is she? Is she in her bed? Is she sitting on her blue davenport? Does she have her glasses on? Does that white wine she drinks calm her down?
     What the hell is bah-roque?
     The truth is, I don't really like music. My living room is full of LP's, old vinyl disks from high school and the years after, and if I listen to one of them, it usually takes me back to a time I don't mind forgetting. I don't play the radio in the car. If I'm somewhere and hear "Yesterday," the original one or the musak, I head for the door. I can't get away fast enough.
     I get up from my chair and walk into the front room. A sheet of moonlight lies on the floor. Boxes everywhere. It's what happens when you start a new life. You can’t bring yourself to toss your old life in the dumpster, so you lug it along with you, mostly in boxes. In one corner is a box of records. I reach in, pull one out, and hold it up to the moonlight. Three Dog Night. "One is the loneliest number." I pull the disk out of the jacket, step up to the window, and frisbee the record across the yard. It smacks into a tree. I grab another, Men at Work, "Business as Usual." My wife loved that one, she was so infatuated with all that "land down under" crap. For a few months we switched to Fosters beer and listened to that LP. We had us some wild nights, I’ll tell you. I whip this one out the window too. Led Zepellin, "Whole Lotta Love," out you go like a UFO. John Cougar Mellancamp “Hurt So Good,” I launch it. It feels good busting things up. I’m not just getting rid of the past, I’m destroying it.
     The Beatles take a long time. My truck is down there, parked under that tree. I aim for the bed of my truck and crack up as many Beatles as I can. “The request lines are open,” I say. More golden oldies. Turtles, Beach Boys, Dave Clark Five.
     I want to wipe the slate clean, I really do. But there’s too much. I decide to save some 80’s and 90’s for the gun range.
     I’m meeting Nadine in the morning.

     Recently the sliding glass doors at Kroger have developed a laugh. Something's amiss with the rollers in one door. It's a female laugh that reminds me of an old aunt. I like to linger in the doorway, clutching my grocery bags, and wait for people to come and go. "You hear that?" I say, inviting strangers into the aura of Aunt Betty's presence. Most people will at least give a door the time of day. We stand and listen. There's embarrassed mirth. If I were Kroger, I'd have a laughing door at every store.
     Today I'm saving the doors for the end of the day. It's 9:00 a.m., and I'm going into the office for a conference with a student. He's been over-exercising the copy-and-paste function on his computer. He's got stubby, transparent chin whiskers and red, allergic eyes. He misses class on account of car trouble and dying grandmas. When he writes he sounds like the Atlantic Monthly. Except, of course, when he doesn't, which is most of the time.
      I tell students up front, three strikes and you know what. I like him, but it's Richie's third strike. Today he gets an F, for the semester. I feel duty-bound to hand down this verdict in person. "Make this a teachable moment," my colleague Lillian says. "Kick him in the balls." He says he's coming in at noon. If he does, I'll lay out my case--his work, the publications he copied from, the syllabus--then wait for him to see what he's done, and what I have to do.

      On the way into the office, I stop and pick up this hitchhiker. It's raining a little. He's at 7 Mile and Telegraph, not a great area, and he's in a wheelchair, a late middle-aged guy, kind of like me, with long gray once-I-was-a-hippy hair, kind of not like me. He's sitting on the side of the road, a suitcase in his lap, facing traffic. The look on his face is determined and pissed off. Go ahead, the face says, pick me up. I pull over and give my horn a tap. I pop the trunk and jump out.
     "Where you going?" I ask. I toss his suitcase in the trunk.
    "Airport."
     "No kidding?" I say.
     He rolls over, jerks the passenger door open, starts to climb in. "What, you think I can't fly?"
     This isn't the first time I've seen this guy by the side of the road. A few years ago, same guy, same place, different car. I drove past and sort of did a doubletake. All right, I gaped. He saw me and flipped me the bird. I could see words forming on his lips.
     "Where you going?" he says now.
     "Airport," I say. No eye contact.
     "No kidding," he says.
     I tell him I'll take him there; it's a crappy day, and I have time. As we merge with traffic, he passes a hand over his hair, which is wet from the rain, then taps his jacket pocket and takes out a cigarette pack. I'm happy to see it's empty. He shakes his head and says, "You probably wouldn't let me smoke anyway."
     "Hard being a smoker these days," I say.

      Down Telegraph there's one machine shop after another, relieved by fastfood joints and, past a strip of grass on the shoulder, chain link fences and the backs of garages. A sleety, sooty rain pecks at the windshield.
     "This car," he says without looking at me, "has an insipid horn." It's a snotty remark, but I'm pleased he says "insipid." And he's right. I've given up on having an adult car with one of those symphonic horns.
     Without asking, he pokes at the radio dial, and the chorus of Madonna's "Material Girl" comes on, loud.
     "What's your name?" I yell over the music.
     He's nodding time to the music and doing this thing with his hands, like dancing with his hands, very
graceful. "Delbert," he says.
     "That's good," I say to him, nodding at his hands. "That's cool."
     He tells me he used to crew for Meatloaf. "In the 'Bat out of Hell' days."
     "He lived in my hometown for a while," I say. I want to tell him I was in a wheelchair once, too, after getting creamed in a car accident, but I'm afraid he'll find it patronizing. Delbert's doing his hand dance.
    "You see him on TV?" he says, "Meatloaf with Gary Busey? What a nut case."
    Which one? I say. Delbert likes this.
     "This song reminds me of my kids," I say.
     "Madonna is a bitch." Stabbing the radio button again, shutting off the music, he says, "That Malawi thing?"
     We stop at a light. "My daughter was just in Malawi," I say.
     He turns and squints at me. "What the fuck," he says.
     So now we've got Meatloaf and Malawi to talk about. And wheelchairs.
     "Doing what?"
     Sightseeing, I'm sure, is the wrong answer. "A friend of hers," I say, "works for this CBO."
     "Orphanage?"
     Not exactly, I say.
     "Probably the same goddam place. Millions of dollars Madonna drops in Africa. Why doesn't she sprinkle some cash on Detroit?" He taps his cigarette pocket again. "I'll tell you why," he says. "It's not sexy. Who gives a damn about starving kids in Detroit? You wanna be on the cover of People magazine?"
     I'm picturing my daughter's jpegs of little Malawi kids. I tell him the kids are cute.
     "They're cute in Detroit," he says.
     Then: "Turn right at the Petco. You mind?"
     I kind of mind.

     "Time's your flight?" I ask.
     "We got time," he says. We swing into a residential area, past two- and three-bedroom ranches, a couple with colored Easter eggs hanging from trees "I need to stop at my mother's," he says. "Another couple blocks on the left."
    The house we stop at is a clone of all the rest. Brown brick ranch, detached garage around the side. This one has a blue Mercury parked out front. "I knew it," Delbert says. There's ramp access to the front porch. To the right of the front door a blue recycling bin is tipped over; to the left a white plastic bag of potting soil is torn open, a dead rose bush sticking out of it. I get his chair, set the brakes just like I used to. He flops into it. "I'll just be a minute," he says.

     I was nineteen when I rode the chair; four months, two broken legs. It was fall. To get me out of the house, my parents did a road trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway, a color tour, where we stayed in one Holiday Inn after another. This was before wheelchair access was invented. My father had moved a lot of furnaces and refrigerators. He knew how to bounce me in and out of hotels, restaurants, visitor centers. Wherever we went I got the look, poor kid in a wheel chair, to which I wanted to say, This is only temporary. This is not me.

     I've waited ten minutes in the car and figure that's enough. I hop out of the car, jog up the ramp, and bang on the door a couple times. I can hear yelling. A little man opens the door. He must be eighty or so, balding with saggy cheeks, kind of a potato nose, and sad eyes. I step inside and see Delbert in the living room, his back to the door, leaning forward in his wheelchair, his shirt pulled up exposing his back and shoulders. His skin is the color of oatmeal. He has a burning cigarette clamped between his teeth. The woman who must be his mother is fumbling in her lap with a cardboard package.
     "I want him outta here, ma."
     "I know you do," she says, "and I just don't care." She's wearing a blue house dress and reminds me of one of those eggs hanging from her neighbors' trees. She picks up her own cigarette, takes a long drag on it, inhales, and blows smoke at the ceiling. "Gracious," she says. Then to me: "You must be Smitty," she says. "Delbert thinks Warren is a smoothy."
     Warren shrugs and gives me a regretful smile, as if to say it's hard being a playboy.
     "I'm warning you, Warren," Delbert says.
     His mother shushes him and applies a patch to each of his shoulders. "You think two'll be enough?" she says.
     Delbert squirms back into his shirt, then pulls on his jacket. She hands him the package, which he jams in a bag on the side of his chair. "I want him out of here," he says. "I'm going to have Smitty come by and check. And I don't mean once." He glares at Warren. "Trust me, Warren. You do not want to have Smitty come down on you."
     Warren shoots me an alarmed look, tells Delbert to take it easy, he was just leaving.
     "You are a good son," the mother says. "If you could just lighten up a little," she adds. She leans forward and Delbert loops his arms around her neck. They hold on that way for longer than I expect.

     Warren leaves, then us. Back on Telegraph I say, "Did you tell them I was Smitty?"
    "I did not tell them that. I told them about Smitty."
    "Did you see Warren? He thought I was Smitty."
    "Warren has been sniffing around for months, doing little odd jobs for my mother. For pay. He's stealing from her is what he's doing, and I'm supposed to just let him?" He taps his pocket, pulls out a fresh pack of cigarettes. "Til I got hurt, I did the work. Then I fell off the roof putting up her radar dish. Broke my back."
     "You were right," I say.
     "Goddam right I was right."
     "No, you were right about my not wanting you to smoke in my car."
      He shakes his head and says, "I got a long flight ahead of me. All the way to Amsterdam, and I got little faith in patches to get me through it."
     "I'm asking," I say.
     "Nice."
     "Yes, I'm asking, nicely. Your choice. Another mile I can drop you off at I-94."
     He turns the pack over in his hands. "You wouldn't."
     "You can have a cigarette while you thumb another ride." He's got one in his mouth. "Or you can wait ten minutes and smoke at the airport."
     "There's no smoking at the airport."
     "And there's no smoking in my car."
     "You'd seriously put me out of your car, in the rain" he says, "just because of a cigarette?"
     Would I? "It quit raining," I say.
     He tucks the cigarette above his ear. "Fuck, man, I could get a ride in two minutes. People are nice."

     Out on I-94, I ask him what's in Amsterdam. Friends, he says. Hash. A change of scenery. A long Delta carrier passes over us, low; first it's quiet, then comes the roar. Delbert gazes up at it. "I figure I'm probably not coming back," he says. Which explains the visit. Which explains the long goodbye hug. "Maybe I can get an operation over there."
     At departures drop-off, he thanks for me for the ride. I roll his chair around, lock the wheels. He executes the awkward hang-and-slide maneuver, settles in his chair, retrieves the cigarette from above his ear and lights up. I hand him his suitcase, which he hugs to his lap with his free arm. I tell him to have a good trip and not to worry.
     "Warren looks like a nice guy," I say.
     "Smitty'll take care Warren," he says. "Trust me, he'll put the fear of death in him." He gives the door a shove and swings his chair around, pointed toward the terminal.
     "Hey," he says, looking around, exhaling a puff of smoke, "somebody wanna give me a shove?"

     I call in for messages as I'm pulling away from the airport. There's one from Richie. "Um, I can't come in today," he says. "But I know what I done." There's a pause. He turns away from the phone and says something, probably to one of his grandmas. "I know what I DID," he says, "and I know that you have to fail me for it, but I just wanted you to know I learned a ton in your class, and I was wondering if I could come in tomorrow and talk to you anyway." He says he's learned his lesson. He asks me for just one more chance and leaves me his number. I suppose Lillian would kick him in the balls over the phone.
     When I stop at the Kroger that afternoon, there's a woman standing outside with her back to the laughing doors. She's all dressed up in black pants and jacket, with her silver hair elegantly done. It looks like she's waiting for a limo.
     "Are they laughing tonight?" I ask her.
     She looks at me, draws herself up, and says, "Do I know you?"
     "No, but..."
     "I have nothing to say to you," she says. Just then the doors slide open, and a gentleman, also dressed in black, walks out, takes her arm, and walks her toward their car. I
     The doors roll shut with Aunt Betty's laugh sounding better than ever. I know it won't last. Kroger will eventually fix the doors. I wait for a few more laughs, a sound I figure I can use almost as much as the occasional fear of death.

     Aside from the parties, which usually featured lots of appetizers and white wine, I've always hated Tupperware. I think of this because my wife and I are preparing to go on a little vacation. In a few days we will go to the airport, and, for reasons of economy and bonhomie, we will invite friends to ride with us. Four of them, two of us, all six with luggage holding enough stuff for seven days. My wife is convinced we can get all of that in our van.
     “No problem,” she says, all Chryslery, all Vanbundant. “Don’t forget, I’m in packaging.”
     Technically she is not. You think packaging, you think of guys putting the refrigerator you bought into a big box in Iowa, with some wood and wire, lots of sytrofoam, probably a couple bushels of that synthetic popcorn that packaging people love so much. Not that kind of packaging. Technically she draws pictures of engine parts, figures out how to maximize the flow of fuel and air through tubes, usually before that mixtures explodes, though I’ve heard her talk about exhaust and emissions, too, and cam lobes, pistons, rods, compressors, jackets, and pumps. Sometimes in the middle of the night she has waking dreams about flow. She talks to herself about gromets and tolerances and mils.
     She's in packaging in the sense that those engine parts have to fit in a very tight space. The days of the straight six are long gone. Under the hood of the Ford Maverick she drove when I met her there was enough space for a six-cylinder engine, and for a picnic lunch and a sleepover. Under the hood of whatever she’s working on now (top secret, not yet in production), space is at a premium. Dipsticks the diameter of toothpicks. Everything crammed in a space roughly the size of a large suitcase. She helps the auto industry put a refrigerator in an envelope.
     "We can all fit," she says.
     "There’s not enough room for us and all that luggage,” I say.
     We had a Tupperware party shortly after we were married. My wife invited a few pals from work. My friend Ludlow came. He and I swilled chablis and ate cheese thingies while the Tupperwoman made her presentation. Ludlow bought a green plastic device that enabled him to do something with olives. My wife and I loaded up on containers, lots of sky blue and mustard yellow containers, most of them round, with the signature Tupperware seal that ensured your leftovers and steel-cut oats would remain fresh until the apocalypse. These cursed things are still with us, in the basement, in the kitchen pantry, in the mudroom pantry (we keep our mud in Tupperware), in the garage. Most of them are empty. Tupperware, anyone who has the stuff has probably discovered, is best used to store Tupperware.
     The problem is that they are round. Since classical times the circle has been regarded as a symbol of perfection, a representation of God, no beginning, no end.

Leonardo’s Vitruvian man brings the circle and square together. “The square,” he writes in The Magical Proportions of Man, “symbolizes the solid physical world and the circle the spiritual and eternal. Man bridges the gap between these two worlds.” I wonder what Leonardo would have made of Tupperware. Circular, it participates in the divine, while gobbing up physical space in the square confines we call cupboards. Plastic, it lasts forever. If he'd had the stuff, I bet Leonardo's credenzas would have been full of Tupperware full of Tupperware.
     I could get rid of it, but I feel it is not really mine. Were we to separate, which seems less and less likely all the time, my wife would definitely get the Tupperware. It seems less and less likely we will separate because I’ve learned in thirty-three years of marriage not to get rid of her stuff.
     I’ve also learned that when it comes to matters involving spatial relations and visual thinking, she’s way smarter than I am. When we moved our son to Atlanta, he and I started throwing stuff helter skelter in the van. Then I thought, Wait, maybe there’s a better way to do this. Where is our packaging expert?
    Six people, luggage packed for seven days, one van. We’ll see. At least luggage designers know enough not to make suitcases round.
     For riding with us, we could gift our friends with Tupperware. Hand them round packages. Just a little something for you. I can just see curiosity getting the best of them. They shake their packages. Hmmm, something inside. Pull apart the wrapping, crack open the trademark Tupperware hermetic seal. Peek inside. What's inside yours?

      If you haven't done so already, check out the ketchup dispensers at McDonalds. Macs is blazing trails in ketchup technology. For those who dine in, next to the drink dispenser you'll find ketchup taps, probably two of them, along with an array of those delightful paper ketchup shot glasses. Hold your shot glass under the spigot, pull up the black lever, and the stainless steel tap emits a jet of ketchup. The shot glasses are small. If you lose your grip, don't worry. In the countertop, directly beneath the tap, there is a catch five inches in diameter for dropped shots and other ketchup accidents.
     We've gone way beyond Wendy's, whose ketchup tech, by comparison, is primitive. At Wendy's, you'll find kettles of ketchup with a pump mechanism on top. While pumping is pleasurable (it is satisfying to have to work for your ketchup), if the kettle is empty, the mechanism burps and rattles around and disappoints. Macs' ketchup is pressurized. Remember cheese in a can? Just like shaving cream: press the button on top to express contents onto your cracker. That's what we have here, on a sublime scale. You have to figure, under that counter, there are 10-20 gallon vats of McDonald's blend. Next to those paltry gallon kettles at Wendy's, the Mac vats are in a league of the own. Think 80 gig hard drives and floppy disks.
     About the blend. When I was drawing a couple shots at the McDonalds in Clare on Friday at noon, I couldn't help but notice separation. Around the perimeter of the shot glass, the ketchup was irridescent orange, in the center, rich tomato red. The orange was disturbing. Was this a bad batch of ketchup? (I may be the first person in the English language to bring those words together.) To test this hypothesis, I drew off a shot from the other tap. Same result. Same source? Could it be, deep in the bowels of the restaurant, there was one magesterial source, a 250, even a 500 gallon tank of ketchup? It was thrilling to consider.
     I joined my dad in our booth, unwrapped my double cheeseburger without the cheese, and showed him the ketchup. Huh, he said. I stirred the ketchup with a crisp fry, then tasted. Good.
     You know, my dad says, that ketchup is what they call a pseudoplastic.
     I dunk a fry. You don't say.
     Yes, he says. Force causes changes in its viscosity. Lava, whipped cream, blood, paint, and nail polish: these are other examples of pseudoplastics.
     So what I'm seeing in this ketchup, I say, munching on fries...
     Exactly, he says. I would not be alarmed.
     We pop the lids on our milkshakes, mine chocolate, his strawberry, and take to the contents with black plastic spoons. The milkshake too seems like a pseudo substance, miles, perhaps lightyears from cows grazing in the fields, giving us their milk. I don't want to think about it.
     I should have gotten a large order of fries, I say.
     Ketchup is central to American cuisine. It ought to be a food group unto itself. Yet, like many things American, it is foreign in origin. The term probably comes to the English language from Chinese, the Amoy dialect, "koechiap," meaning "brine of fish." Yum. The British, a poetic people, call it "tomato sauce," while the Australian slang term for it is "dead horse." Ketchup both brings us together and divides us. We can't agree, for example, on its spelling. When I started composing this rumination, I used the admittedly highbrow "catsup." After a survey of the literature on the subject, I searched my document and replaced catsup with ketchup, but I'm still in a dither. On March 11, 2009, on answerbag.com, a male named "Skel1977" said with total confidence, "Catsup is the correct way." In 1755, in his Panegyrick on the Dean Wks (IV. I. 142), Jonathon Swift wrote "catsup." Merriam-Webster reports that Del Monte uses catsup, while Heinz and Hunts insist on ketchup; J.D. Salinger, catsup; Eudora Welty and Norman Mailer ketchup; Hemingway and Faulkner catchup.
     Joy has many names, and variant spellings.
     Ten years or so ago, my wife and I redid our kitchen. This was before Macs' technological breakthrough. Had we waited, our house could have been the first on the block to have a ketchup tap in the counter, right there next to the soap dispenser. Godliness next to cleanliness Could have, but wouldn't have. To my wife, ketchup, whatever the spelling, is a vile substance, an untouchable comestible. The look of it, the smell of it (brine of fish!) is more than she can take.
     She has a co-worker who brings her to reason at work. Deadlines, incompetent engineers, indecisive supervisors, pressure: Faced with like challenges, Kevin says to her, "Remember the important things in life. Three things are important to me: my wife, my kids, and ketchup." He is a philosopher. My wife, given to frequent bouts of agitation, says Kevin now uses the short form to calm her down. "What did I tell you?" he says. "Ketchup."
     For all of its potential to give pleasure, so much madness has been associated with ketchup. They fixed the bottle, finally. No more idiot bashing to force a goolup of ketchup onto your hashbrowns or burger. Next the best food packaging minds need to fix the ketchup pouch, a fiendish invention. Try the tap. You'll be lovin' it. It's ketchup.

     I'm gassing up the van at Costco the day after Christmas. My wife's in the car, with the kids. We're on our way to Christmas Cheer, Part Deux. It's gray and damp, Michigan cold. Usually I'll huddle between the pump and the car, watching the dollar digits fly. Today I sneak around to the passenger side of the car and plant a kiss on the window for my wife's benefit. This is no Christmas peck, no holiday bus. I give her a wet, open-mouth, tongue mashing, soap opera quality smooch, with plenty of swivel.
     She frowns and turns her back to me.
     The pump goes Ka-chunk. I pull a paper towel from my hip pocket and erase all evidence of winter passion.
     You are a fool, she says as I climb back in the car.
     I don't guess you'd like to hear about the dream I had last night, I say.
     Not a chance, she says.
     What do dreams mean? In this one, I'm sitting on the toilet. The toilet is on the driveway. It's broad daylight. The cottonwood is in full leaf, so it is a warm weather dream. My neighbor comes walking across the lawn. Ever modest, I ask, Could you see me? That's not why he's come over. There's a man chasing him. The man is carrying a double-barrel shotgun and a knife. Not a kitchen knife. A big bloody knife up to the task of eviscerating. I may be on the toilet, but I'm a good neighbor. I jump up and grab the shotgun from this marauder, who's beginning to look a lot like a pirate, or maybe a viking. I wrestle the gun from him, thinking, This might not be a good idea.
     Freud doesn't help much, but he's available. I have recurring toilet dreams. I find myself sitting on the toilet in the most unlikely places. Perhaps this means my mental development was arrested in the anal stage. I have unresolved issues, though I thought I worked through them on a daily basis, usually in the morning. Most of the human mind, Freud says in so many words, is a sinkhole. I think of mine as a garbage disposal, though if Freud is right, nothing is lost. What goes in does not come out. It stays there, causing you to obsessively organize your sock drawer, to avoid refried beans, to reveal secret desires through slips of the tongue. Maybe. Freud famously noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
     I'm pretty sure this dream is about buttons. My shirts have been coming back from the cleaners with broken buttons. I noticed a lapel button broken in half. A few months passed. Then came a spate of broken buttons. They're not missing. They're smashed. Half a broken button remains stitched to the shirt, no longer up to its job, unable to let go. I picture a robot ironing my shirts with large hot metal fists. It is an angry robot, not angry at me, just generally pissed off about its station in life. The button situation has gotten so bad, I'll have to talk to the Korean lady who takes my money at the cleaners.
     I'm pretty sure she's the man with the shotgun.
     A few months ago I took shirts back to her, still with the plastic slips over them. I said the shirts weren't mine. She looked at me over her glasses and smiled.
     No, she said.
     Right, no. Not my shirts.
     No, your shirts, she says. We don't make mistakes.
     It's not the cleaning fee I mind, I'm thinking. I just don't want to store someone else's shirts. No, not my shirts, I say again. She's still smiling. It's a smile that makes me feel five years old.
     I've been shopping around for other cleaners. I saw one the other day that advertises odor-free cleaning. What's that? Tired of your shirts coming home smelling like socks? Don't they just smell like clean shirts?
     My mother-in-law used to do my shirts for me. On my way to work in the morning, I'd drop off a dozen shirts. We'd swap a few words in English and Italian, she'd give me a cup of coffee; I'd ask about, smell, and poke whatever she had on the stove. My mother-in-law was trained as a tailor in Italy. When she fixed pants for me, she knew exactly how long they should be, exactly where there would be a break in the fall. When I put on those pants, tied my shoes, and looked in the mirror, I felt special. I felt dressed well enough to make an appearance in the piazza that night. Shirts she could do in her sleep. A day or two after I dropped them off, they would be ready, hanging in the front closet a inch a apart, perfectly ironed. Son-in-law, she would say to me in Italian, I did these with so much love. Mother-in-law, I would answer, you are an angel. Now show me how you made those rivoltini. Thinking: I am living a charmed life. When I got in the car, whatever was on the stove that morning, she gave me some to take home. My shirts hung behind me; fragrant, perfect shirts.
     The Korean lady smiled at me when I told her. It turns out they weren't my shirts. They were my son's shirts. She nodded and smiled. We don't make mistakes.
     Now we were going to talk about buttons.

Dear Family and Friends,
Last week at Kroger I saw something almost too grotesque for words. It was like a gift from heaven, a holiday gift to you: a life-size cake ham. Yes, a cake made to look like a real-life baked ham. I gazed upon it in awe. How could I not? I went home, grabbed my camera, and drove back to the store to take its picture. No need to hurry. It was still there. Who would buy such a thing? Who, indeed. I decided it had to be me.
     The Kroger baker, seeing me snapping photos, drew near and seemed genuinely suspicious of my appreciation.   Did they always have cake ham, I wondered. No, not always.
     Could I order a cake ham for a holiday celebration, and would it look just like the one in front of me? Yes, I could order one, but she could not guarantee it would be identical. No two hams, I had to understand, are exactly alike.
     But I could order one, yes.

     And it would be dotted with those chocolate specks (cloves), and glazed with that shiny red (ghastly) frosting to look barbecued or glazed with whatever one uses to anoint a ham? Yes, yes. And the faux greenery, frosting made to look like a goodly bed of lettuce for celebration ham? Again, yes.
     A project began to take shape in my mind.
   Take your standard issue celebration. Wouldn’t a cake ham transform it? Christmas, New Year’s, Abe Lincoln’s birthday, Flag Day; a dinner party, birthday party, wedding shower, a coming home party (Lisa and Danny), a gainful employment party (David): all of these mirthful events would be improved immeasurably by cake ham. In fact, we might want to invent solemnities to celebrate all the above and the cake ham—a rite of the ham, an invocation of the cake.
Unfortunately, the cake ham project, as we might call it, may be a covert operation. A formidable obstacle stands in the way of cake ham consummation—Tizi. She is quick to laugh and endowed with prodigious sweet tooth. She loves rites and solemnities. But she is serious about food. Also, she is no lover of ham. Prosciutto, yes. Ham, no. Would you eat it? she asks. No, of course not. Because to eat it would be to mar it. I love the art of cake ham. Would you eat a Picasso? If you don’t eat it, she says, why buy it? But we buy flowers and do not eat them. We buy candles, we dangle holly and plant matter around the house and do not eat them. Cake ham is decorative, festive. Chameleon-like, it fits any celebration.
   There will be no persuading Tizi. She’ll have nothing to do with it. I’ll need an unmarked box.
Few things last in this life. Shouldn’t we seize upon those things that do? By the look of it, cake ham could last for years. It looks petrified. I don’t know its internal architecture, we’d have to actually eat one to be sure, but I think I’ve stumbled upon a colorful reminder of life’s substance, its sweetness, its potential to surprise and delight, one that can stand the test of time. Simply return cake ham to its unmarked box and store in a cool place. On your day of celebration, open and enjoy.
     Find your ham. That’s my new motto. Tizi has multiple hams. In that I am lucky. On a daily basis, she reminds me of substance, sweetness, surprise, and delight. We just can’t agree on cake ham. One of her hams is gourds. Every year in October, we pile gourds, squashes, and pumpkins on the porch, where they sit until cold smites them and they begin to deliquesce. We do not eat them. Like my cake ham, they are to be admired. They are Tizi’s ham. Now I’ve found mine.
     If you see us coming and I have an unmarked box under my arm, prepare to sing the cake ham anthem. We will not slice and eat it. We will regard with awe and appreciation.
     Until we see you, good tidings. Find your ham.

     We are a three-car family again, both of us. David's home, gone to NY, not coming back. Take that thing, he says, pointing to the 2000 Neon, aka Dodge Sports Car, and sell it.
     Maybe.
     In the weeks after he leaves, it sits on the driveway, gets covered up with snow, the doors frozen shut, the battery going going gone. The week before Lisa comes home, I get in it, slip the key in the ignition. The engine goes click. We do not have ignition. A few days pass. Shopping for pears at Meijer one day, I ask where automotive is. Duh, in back, next to bath and linens. I love this country. Pears, bath towels, and car batteries under the same roof.
     Since I drove it last, the DSC has accumulated dust. The gray interior is grayer, the floorboards grimier. There is a general crumminess about the car, on the seats front and back, crumbs from burger buns and chick filets, crusty bits of fallen French fries. Around the molded plastic cupholders, some kind of grubby mold is growing, so robust it thrives in freezing temps. A zombie should drive this car. If it weren't winter, I'd take it through the car wash with the windows down.
     On the road, I remember how much I like it.
     In another 5000 miles, its exhaust system will be exhausted. That means rumble. You take it through the gears and its four insipid pistons bang away like big dudes. The car is so low to the ground, it's almost subterranean.
     Sunday morning, I can take any car in the fleet. I take the DSC to the grocery store across town to buy artichokes and cardone we'll need on Christmas day. I get to check-out and realize my pockets are empty. We were at a slacks-and-jacket event the night before. Jeeves forgot to put my cash and credit cards back in my jeans. All I have is my innocent face. Then I realize I've neglected to wear my tooth this morning.
     The bill is $30 and some. Can I just take this stuff and call in a credit card pay from home? The checkout lady regards me, thinking, Hmm, toothless. And you drive a go-cart.
     I wouldn't trust me either. So home I go, taking the DSC through the gears. There's an occasional clunk between me and the road. The car will need shocks and struts. As for now, it shocks and struts, makes me feel youthful and almost penniless. And that feels good why?

     It's a big sucker. On the corner post of the back porch, there's this thing with wings, like a grasshopper, only four inches long. "Come look at this," I say to my wife. It's burger night, I've got the grill lit, but I'm thinking maybe we should just run. What if there are more?
     "Creepy," she says.
     "In a world man has destroyed," I say in movie preview voice, "nature gets its revenge."
     "You okay?"
     I say yes. She knows I'm not.
     "Maybe it'll turn into a butterfly," she says.
     "In a cacoon the size of a football."
     I grill the burgers. It's still there. We eat, then wash dishes. Still there. Later on, I go out with a flashlight. Still there, by itself. Big. My wife says, "I'll call Joann."

      That afternoon I'm at Red Cross giving blood. Kandice does the Q and A. She comes in with a flourish of her synthetic gown. "Did you eat today?" she asks.
     I tell her no, but I promise to eat tonight. "Kandice with a K," I say. "You've been saying that your whole life."
     She rolls her eyes. "How come you don't eat?"
     "I just got back from Atlanta," I say. "I'm outta whack."
     She wraps the blood pressure cuff around my arm, pumps me up. "Drive?"
     "I saw a hundred dead deer." I feel the blood bumping in my arm.
     Kandice loosens the screw on the bulb and the cuff exhales. She says, "You're kinda high today."
     "How high?"
     "High normal."
     "That better than low high?"
     She frowns. "Do you drink alcohol?"
     "Of course."
     "How much?"
     Just enough. She asks, I tell about my coffee consumption. When I do the math, the number of espressos surprises me.
     "You probably ought to cut back," she says.
     "Wine or coffee?
     She smiles, for the first time. "I'd cut back on coffee first."

     I get almost home, I notice this car behind me, up close and personal, a guy driving. I turn down my street, he turns too. Not a car I've seen in the sub. I pull in my driveway, go halfway up the drive, and stop. This car, a white sports sedan, looks like a fang on wheels, it's parked at the bottom of the driveway. The guy has his window down, an arm dangling out of it. He might be looking for someone, I think. He might be lost.
     I get out. "Help you?"
     "You sonovabitch," he says, "you cut me off."
     "What?" I say. "When? Where?" I think back a block, a mile, a day; nothing.
     "Don't bullshit me." He raises that arm, levels his index finger at me. "You know you did," he says. "I oughta kick your ass."
     "If I did," I say. "I'm really sorry."
     "Sonovabitch." He says again he should kick my ass, then steps on the gas and roars away. I stand there, baffled, and realize I'm shaking. I look up and down the street. No one outside. Just me and Badass.
     Inside the house, I set a bag of groceries on the counter.
     "Got any blood left?" my wife says.
     "My blood pressure was high." I reach in the bag and pull out a bottle of wine. "High normal," I say.
     "You gonna light the grill?"
     "You'll never guess what happened." I can still feel the adrenalin rush. I don't like it.

     Our friend Joann the naturalist comes to the door in her pajamas. Bug books under her arm. There's a gleam in her eye that comes with the thrill of pursuit. Ask her, she'll tell you forty years ago she was a hippie. It's not difficult picturing her in jeans, beads, tie-die, feathers in her hair. Now she works the school nature center, which means she talks to you like you're a sixth grader. We walk through the house, out the back door onto the porch. She sets her books down on the table.
     I hand her the flashlight. She puts on her glasses and looks.
     "Oh my," she says. "Thank you so much for calling me."
     I tell her it doesn't seem like a good idea, her driving around in her pajamas. My wife rolls her eyes. "You never know," I say.
     "I was in bed," she says. "But I had to come. She'll be gone in the morning."
     Both of us: "She?"
     "She, yes. Notice the antenae. And notice her slightly distended abdomen." She tilts her head, draws close to the thing, a few inches away. "I'd say this is a polyphemus moth. She's sending out a powerful scent right now. Males of the species will detect it and come to her. They'll mate. In the morning she'll be gone."
     This scent she sends out, I picture it, for some reason, as searchlights or laser beams boring into the night. "It's not going to eat the wood on the house," I say.
     "It doesn't eat," she says. "The caterpillar eats. This moth procreates, then it dies."

     "I think I know what happened," I say to my wife. We're lying in bed. She's reading a book about Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped by the Comanche in 1836. "I know where I cut him off."
     "These guys were brutal," she says.
     "On the corner of Franklin and Walnut Lake." I wait for a response. She's reading.
     "Remember that TV commercial," she says finally, "the piles of garbage and the Native American with a tear dropping from the corner of his eye?"
     "Except I didn't cut him off."
     "Pure revisionist history. A romanticized view of the Native American," she says. "They raped, they murdered, they tortured people." She taps a page with her index finger and shakes her head. "Mutilation. Babies, slaughtered."
     "There's that temporary right lane as you go through the light, north on Franklin?"
     "The Comanche," she says, "were terrible."
     "He was in that lane. I was in the main lane."
     "Sometimes you drive too fast," she says. "You don't pay attention."
     "I had the right of way. He's supposed to yield to me."
     She reads for minute, then says, with genuine sadness, "So much for the noble savage."
     "Maybe he wasn't paying attention." I stare up at the ceiling, playing back the driveway encounter. He sat there, waiting for me to get out of my car. "He probably was waiting to see how big I was."
     "What?"
     "That guy this afternoon. What if I was big?"
     "Let it go," she says.
     "He sat there waiting. Because what if I was linebacker size? What if I was Del Durfee size?"
     "Who's Del Durfee?"
     "He'd've shut his trap and drove away."
     We lie there a minute. I'm pretty sure I won't be able to sleep. And now I got blood pressure. She closes her book and shuts off her light. "They'd take women who looked like they could work, and a couple kids," she says. "Kill everyone else."
     He was the sonovabitch.

     Next morning on the way to work I stop at my coffee spot. I ask Taha what kind of tea they have.
     "Tea?" He's already working on my double espresso.
     "Something herbal."
     He starts down the list, I'm listening for something I know, like Lipton. "Sweet cranberry fruit melange, Rooibos chai, Assan Mangalam..."
     "Green tea," I say at last. "Plain."
     Taha is a little Egyptian, with a voice so soft you have to lean over the counter to hear him. His manner is nothing if not cherubic. He also has a black belt in some variety of martial arts. He's told me what. To me it's all karate. Some Monday mornings his arms are red and bruised. Once he told me his jaw was dislocated. This morning I'm picturing Taha pulling a big guy out of a car, educating him, then throwing him in the ditch.
     "Green tea," he whispers, handing me my drink.
     "I'm like to see you fight sometime, Taha."
     "I don't fight," he says. "I compete."
     This thing of tea is big and hot. I hate it already. "But you could fight," I say.
     He gives me a gentle smile. "I would do anything not to fight."

     I stop in to see Sheldon at work, to tell him about the polyphemous moth. I know it will make his day. Sheldon is sixty, balding, an avid bridge player. Also a nature hog. He's walked the Appalachian trail a few times. He plans to retire soon so he can devote himself to playing cards and hiking. There must be outward bound bridge tournaments somewhere. While we're talking, I begin to notice, for the third or fourth time, this little hallucination thing I've got going. Things are walking into and out of my peripheral vision, little bug-like things; there and gone. I suppose it's blood pressure.
     I wonder out loud if I should see a doctor.
     "Eat right," he says. "Nuts, celery. How's your omega 3’s?"
     How should I know?
     "Get your fish oils going. Limit your industrial foods. There is a pestilence upon the land."
     I tell him I appreciate both his advice and his Biblical utterances. I've seen two doctors in the past ten years, a big one and a little one. The big one is your standard issue internal medicine man, an affable guy forty pounds overweight, with a ready prescription pad. The little one is the holistic guy. My wife calls him Speedy. He doesn't have an ounce of fat on him. He says to eat the way people ate in the 1700's. If you can't eat right, he can get the 18th century into you through the miracle of dietary supplements. Either way, you end up with artificial pills or natural pills. I don't like pills.
    I ask Sheldon about his daughter, he shakes his head. "They rob her blind." Meaning her employees. She and her husband have orchards, cider, donuts, a specialty shop. "Last weekend," he says, "there were a couple men in the shop for over an hour." He looks out the window and shakes his head. "In security films, you can see guns in their pockets. People will do anything these days. They're so desperate."
     They certainly seem crazy, I say.
     "They'll kill and not even blink an eye."
     I start to say it will be all right, but I’m not so sure. When I turn to go, then tell him I had green tea today.
     "Polyphenols," he says. "Out with the free radicals."

     "You know she wanted to go back," my wife says. We're lying in bed. She's reading about Cynthia Ann Parker and her daughter recaptured and repatriated to civilized life. I'm reading about hypertension. The story starts slow, then rises to a predictable and awful denouement. I'm also watching for phantom insects in my peripheral vision.
     "Back to the Comanche?"
     "Is that from the Internet?" she says, pointing to my reading. "You should talk to Speedy."
     "Maybe I will."
     "Yes, the Comanche."
     "Life was good," I say.
     "It was the life she knew. She tried to escape from the white people. She ran away countless times. She cut her breasts with a knife, not to kill herself, but out of grief. Then her daughter died. Then she died."
     I tell her I liked it better when she was reading about the Persians. "They made you laugh," I say.
     "I can't believe you're giving up coffee."
     "I'll be an herbal gerbil."
     "I don't think you'll be able to give it up."
     I tell her about Sheldon's daughter, men with guns.
      "What about your friend?" I ask. "Did he get a gun?" Unstable employee, let go. Stalks the boss. Parks outside the house. One imagines a predictable and terrifying denouement.
     "I think he did."
     We shut off the lights and lie there. I don't ask for it, the image just pops into my head, of those patches of road between here and Atlanta where the deer were struck by cars, smears of red on the pavement, huge and obscene, some of them across two or three lanes. So many as to be almost ordinary.

     I hear this thumping behind me. I'm driving home from work the next day. Traffic is slow from months of road repair. In every car you can see the strain; people's expressions range from despair to berserk. Now this noise. In my mirror I see a fluorescent purple Firebird with odd bluish headlights that remind me of zombie eyes. The driver muscles into the left lane, pulls along side me. He looks over at me, stabbing the air with scissor fingers. He singing, he's having a helluva good time, and my whole car vibrating. I hate this. While I watch, he guns his engine, surges ahead, then stops.
     We sit like this for a full minute. I can see his shoulders bouncing up and down. The music throbs. I'll bet anything he's turned the volume up. From the car in front of me, I see an arm extend through an open window, the driver's palm raised in supplication. The guy must be asking him to please turn the goddam music down. Scissor fingers reach through the passenger window of the Firebird, form a fist, then the middle finger unfolds in response. The driver in front of me responds in kind.
     The next thing I know, the Firebird driver hops out of his car. He's wearing camouflage pants and a sleeveless t-shirt that reveal long tattooed arms. He stomps around the front of his car, reaches inside the car in front of me with his left hand, pulls back and smashes the driver with his right fist. Firebird holds him like that, yelling and swaying to the concussion of bass and drum. It's like he thinks he's in a video. He's enjoying himself. I'm waiting for traffic to move, thinking he'll have to get back in his car. I'm also waiting for someone to do something, when he pulls back his right first again.
     What the hell. I'll do what I can.
     I honk my horn.
     I don't beep it. I lay my forearm across it and mash it.
     The Firebird driver pulls his punch, turns to give me a look. You want some of this? He releases the other guy and smiles. I know I'm in trouble, but I'm not giving in. I lay on my horn. Then the car beside me honks. Then the one on the other side of that guy honks. In a few seconds, seven, maybe ten drivers are blasting this guy. He stands there. The dance has gone out of him. More cars honk as he stomps back around the front of his car, gets in, and slams the door.
     Traffic begins to inch forward. We're still honking. Everyone has had enough. The drivers in front of him seem to hold back, blocking him. More horns. We're letting him have it, and he can't get away. We all go a little faster, pressing on him.
     I realize, wherever this is going, it won't be good. I let up on my horn. I don't want any more. I'd like to get away, but I'm trapped in traffic just the same as he is. We begin to accelerate, a convoy of rage, speeding toward a resolution that we don't deserve and that will solve nothing.

     The day is too gorgeous for something like this to happen. At 11:00 a.m. I'm northbound on a suburban thoroughfare. Ahead of me on the left, in a rush of brown, a dog runs onto the road and is hit by a silver Lexus. The animal goes airborne and comes down in the middle of the road. It tries to get up. Its rear legs peddle, driving the creature around in circles, as if it's pinned to the road. I see it's not a dog. It's a fawn.
     From the next car, a woman gapes at me, as if to say: Do something. What should we do? I pull to the shoulder and get out of my car. It's a warm October day, golden. The animal spins, frantic, its wide black eyes terrified. The stream of traffic begins to flow around the deer. The Lexus is long gone. Another driver stops. He gets out of his car. "We can't help," he says. "It would be dangerous to try to move it."
     I take out my phone and call 911.

     "So you just left?" my wife says. We're lying in bed that night.
     "An injured deer is dangerous," I say.
     "A fawn? How you could just leave?"
     "There was nothing to do." I wonder who 911 sent. A cop. He secured the scene. He assessed the deer from afar, how close to death, how much danger to traffic. He approached, took out his service weapon. Would that happen?
     "I wonder where the mother was," she says.
     Maybe there's a kit, like an AED, that they take with them in these emergencies, with directions. How to decease the deer.
     "Where were you going," she says, "that you couldn't wait?"
     "It was really terrible," I say.
     She turns a page in her book, shakes her head in disgust. From the attic, over our heads, comes a ticking sound we've heard for a few days. I'll have to go up there, but not tonight.
     "To the gym," I say.

     Three days a week I go to the senior center. Upstairs is Scrabble, jigsaw puzzles, the launchpad for meals on wheels. Downstairs is a gym. The major seniors prefer the pneumatic weight machines; chat-friendly, sitting required. Minor seniors walk the treadmills and the indoor track. I think of myself as a junior senior. I run. I rev up the elliptical. On a good day I inspire shock and awe.
     The day after the deer incident I'm on a treadmill watching two TV's, Good Morning America and The Today Show. There are three stories. Chilean miners emerging from that rescue canister, Dancing with the Stars, and celebrity cougars jilted by young studs. The major seniors ignore all this. A minor senior taps me on the shoulder. "You mind if I change channel?" Ashton Kutcher is explaining himself.
     The minor senior is wearing khaki shorts and University of Arizona t-shirt.
     "Fine," I say.
     He thumbs the remote to a financial channel on one TV. Graphs of stock futures appear on screen. On the other screen I see Courtney Cox, with whatshisname, also unfaithful. I'm wondering what happened to the fawn. I'm also thinking about the sound in the attic. Years ago, a friend's attic was full of bats.
     That afternoon I call a pest service. I talk to Amanda. "Ticking?" she says.
     "Louder than that," I say.
     "Fluttering?" I tell her I can't be sure, but something's up there. She wonders if I hear the sound during the day. "I'm not sure. Do you think it's bats?"
     "Go listen."
     "Right now?" She says it would help, before she sends someone out, to have a more detailed sonic profile. A service call is $100.

     "Does that sound like a flutter?" I ask my wife that night. She's reading a novel about the grandson of Zoroaster. The thing in the attic is acting up. My wife is still upset about the deer. "Fawn," she says. "Stop saying deer."
     When I was in high school, I tell her, there was a local monster myth, a thing called deer man. We went looking for it, or him, on weekend nights.
     "It's not a flutter," she says. "Whatever it is, It better not die up there."

     The next morning, minor senior in khakis asks me again about changing channel. His program is called The Squawk Box. When it's been on a few minutes, I pull out my earbuds and tell him one of the talking heads looks like Dos Equis man. He gives me an impatient look, then takes off his headset. "The Dos Equis man," I say, "the most interesting man in the world?" He shakes his head, perturbed. So do I. It's not worth it. If he can't mix money and mirth, he'll be in trouble some day. I press my earbuds back in and step on it.
     My first time on the elliptical, the trainer tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I was going backwards. "It's okay," she said. "I just thought you'd like to know."
     Backwards. Half the music on my IPod is forty years old. The major seniors in front of me remind me of what lies ahead. In this game, progress is remembering your former self, forestalling what's next.

     On a Saturday night when there was nothing to do, we went looking for Deer Man. We always went to the same place, across the river, a few miles southwest of town, on Thomas Road. As if that's where Deer Man hung out. There were never any sightings in LaPorte, on Orr Road, or up by Mapleton. It never occurred to us that Deer Man might cross the river, that we could look for him on Kochville Road.
     There was only one sighting we knew of. One summer night, cruising down Thomas Road, three guys reported that Deer Man ran out of the corn field and leaped over the road. They were tough guys, Johnny Rubio, Carl Mathy, Jerry Cody. "He was big," Johnny Rubio said. Head of a deer, antlers, teeth. Did he walk upright? on all fours? It all happened so fast, they didn't notice. What mattered most was what Johnny Rubio said next. Jerry Cody had cried.
     Growing up in a small town, you learn to do without murder. It happens somewhere else. That was true where I grew up, except for Mrs. Trace, an old woman strangled in her bed. They never found her killer, only bits of his hair under her fingernails. Riding by her empty two-story house, I felt terrified and thrilled. The house was on Curve Road, two miles from Thomas Road. In my mind, Deer Man and her killer were one.

     One night we went looking for Deer Man in Tim Rames's car. It was a red Mercury station wagon, stick shift on the steering column. He and Mike Ortega and I cruised out on a moonless summer night, turned down Thomas Road, went a quarter mile or so, then stopped by the side of the road. Tim shut off the engine. We put our windows down and smoked Kools, waiting. The a.m. radio pulled in WLS in Chicago, playing CCR's "Suzie Q."
     To the right, across a shallow ditch, was high corn. A light breeze carried the smell of cow manure. John Fogarty was singing "Say that you'll be mine" when Mike, sitting in the back, said, "Lower it." Tim put the volume down. "...baby all the time, oh Suzie Q." "Lower." Tim cut the radio. We sat straining to hear, puffing nervously on our cigarettes. I was thinking about murdered Mrs. Trace when a rustling sound came from the ditch. Mike screamed.
     Tim started the engine, dropped it in first, and tore up the dirt road. "Chicken," Mike yelled, laughing uncontrollably. "Fuck," Tim said, toward me. "Huh?" "Duck!" I lunged forward as Tim went to toss his cigarette out my window, crushing it against my face. I howled, ash sprayed everywhere, landing on my pants and on the seat. Tim jammed on the breaks, swung around to yell at Mike, not minding the steering wheel. The car dropped into the shallow ditch and jerked to a stop.
     "Fucker!" I said.
     "I told you to DUCK."
     "You fucker."
     Mike rolled in the back seat, in hysterics. There was a rattling sound under the hood, grass or sticks in the fan. Tim put the car in reverse, let out the clutch. The engine revved out of control.
     "Our ass is in the air," he said. "You guys'll have to get out and push," he said.
     "Push?" Mike said. "We're in the ditch."
     Tim was patting out burning ashes on the car seat. "Just get out," he said.
     We all three got out, stood behind the car in the red glow of tail lights. Just ahead, the road dog-legged left, then right, through oaks, tall black, scary hulks. Tim climbed back in the car, shut it off, and locked it. If we went straight, we walked through that long stretch of oaks. If we went back, we passed the area where Jerry Cody saw Deer Man. "Quicker catching a ride if we go back," Tim said.
     He was right. But it was dark.
     We covered the half mile back to River Road in less than ten minutes, singing "Suzie Q" at the top of our lungs. If Deer Man didn't like that song, he'd stay away. Or if he didn't like it, he'd kill us for singing it.
     We were walking north on River Road, back toward town, when Del Durfee came along in a pickup. The hinges shrieked when we yanked the door open. His truck smelled like cigarette butts and farts. Tim sat next to Del, Mike by the door. I sat on Tim's lap.
     "What're you guys doing out here?" he said. No one said we were looking for Deer Man. It didn't seem manly.
     "Hey where's your radio?" Tim said. There was a big hole in the dash.
     Del Durfee spit out the window, then turned and gave Tim a murderous look. "Maybe it got stole."
     The burn on my face was hurting bad. After I touched it a few times, Del Durfee looked at me and said, "What happened to you, junior?"

     "When you think about western civilization," my wife says, "you always think ancient Greeks." I set a frothy cappuccino down next to her book. "But the Persians were way ahead of the Greeks."
     I do think about all that, until Deer Man comes jumping out at me. He makes the Persians seem trivial. Or at least distant.
     She stirs and sips her coffee. "Did you call someone about our friend up there?"
     I tell I'll handle it. She shakes her head.

     If it's bats, I figure I'll need protection. I heard somewhere that bats, if they attack, go for your eyes. Or maybe it was your hair. I go out to the garage, try on my son's old catcher's mask. No, a determined bat could easily penetrate that defense. I go back in the house, open a cupboard, and take out his swim goggles. I get them on and catch my reflection in a window. Foolish. In the end, I settle on a tennis racket.
     In the upstairs hallway, I open the step ladder, climb up, and take out the four screws holding the attic fan in place. Then I lift the fan, rotate it, and slide it out of the way, leaving space to crawl up there. I climb back down, get my tennis racket, and ascend into that stuffy, shadowy space. Up there I can I hear kids across the street yelling. I half expect to find bats hanging from the rafters, grinning at me with their upside-down faces. I stand there a few minutes looking, listening. Somewhere, the former owner of the house is wondering what happened to the family board games. Sorry, Monopoly, Risk, Stratego, they lie there on a bed of insulation.
     I'm looking for floor joists to walk on when the tapping sound starts up, only it's not tapping, it's flapping, quick and close, so close to my head I step back and almost fall on the fan. It's a grackle, doing laps around the attic now that I've startled it.
     I wonder if there's a nonviolent way to stop a bird in flight with a tennis racket. The bird has to come to me. It has to, because if I go to it and step wrong, I'll put my foot through the ceiling of my house. Just then the bird stops on the chimney, right next to me, clutching the bricks with its bird claws, its whole body heaving.
     I backhand it, gently smashing it against the brick with the racquet.

     It's alive, terrified with its whole body, which I hold in my hand. I feel it trembling as I climb down the ladder. I'm afraid it will pee on me. Frogs, I know, pee. So I'm in a hurry to get outside and let it go. In my hand, right up my arm, I feel its terrible fear, its crushing sense of doom, and it's so awful, I can't wait to get rid of it. It's like holding a bomb.
     I push through the front door and set the grackle down at the edge of the driveway. Nothing. I nudge it with my foot. It doesn't move. I wonder if it died of fright, if its heart exploded. "Go on," I say to it. Rolled on its side, it looks pretty dead.
     I go back in the house, climb up in the attic to retrieve my tennis racquet. The games I decide to just leave up there, for the next owner. After replacing the attic fan and folding the ladder shut, I come down the stairs and walk out through the garage. I check the edge of the drive. No grackle.

     Next day, before going to the senior center, I stop at the township offices. I ask for the dispatcher and am directed down the hall, where I meet Officer Kane. I ask about the fawn called in a few days ago, does she know what happened. She clicks her computer mouse. Data flows across her face. "It was gone," she says, "by the time we got there." Half the time they make a deer run, she explains, the animal is already picked up. "Deer guys," she says, "in pickups."
     "What if it was still alive?" I ask.
     She shrugs. "Deer guys know what to do."
     I'm thinking about the fawn, tossed in the back of a truck, when I check in at the senior center. It's a light day. My minor friend is watching The Squawk Box. He looks full of hope. A few majors are seated, preparing to exert themselves. The woman hands me my tag. "You're nineteen today," she says.
    "Yes I am," I say. And I'm pretty sure I always will be.

     My wife says, "You're going to ruin every picture you're in." We're talking about Molly's wedding, which is in two weeks. Molly is our daughter's friend. She's getting married in Chicago.
     "No one's going to take my picture," I say. We're also talking about my missing tooth, which until now was replaced by substitute tooth, in dental parlance "a flipper." There has been an unfortunate incident. My wife is not happy.
     "Or," I say, "I can just keep my mouth closed."
     "Difficult for you," she says. "Have you ever looked at family pictures? You smile with your mouth open. You're just like your mother." She's right. For some time now, roughly since the invention of the digital camera, which provides instant, if dubious, gratification of seeing yourself, I've noticed my open-mouth smile. In groups and solo, large mouth bass.
     When I was a kid, I practiced smiling in the mirror, turning left and right, trying to calibrate the set of my jaw, lip and cheek elevation, calculating how much tooth was enough. My face was a jigsaw puzzle.
     "It's more than pictures," my wife says. "It's so..."
     "...Jethro?" I say.
     "And it's a wedding," she says. "We'll be all dressed up."
     I tell her no one will notice.
     "I can't believe you did this," she says.
     The crunching sound I heard, I thought it was ice cubes. I was at Wendy's eating lunch. My tooth, good only for smiling with, was resting on my tray. Business guy next to me chows and checks his phone. Bite the burger, read the phone. Sip some soda, fondle the phone. He's huge. When finished, he stands up, lifting my tray with his phone holster. Everything slides off. My flipper is crushed under his size 13 wingtip.
     "At Wendy's," she says, about how she'd say "at a whorehouse."
     I tell her I was living large.
     We take turns brushing our teeth before bed. I can't look at the little blue plastic dish, former resting place of my flipper, and not feel disgusted.
     She spits. "Psychologists say adults who eat fast food are still children." That would be me. "You're getting a new one, right?" I'm brushing my gap. She nudges me. "In time for the wedding?"

     Next morning I call Dr. Franz's office. "No kidding," the receptionist says. Then, "At Wendy's?"
     I tell her about the wedding, my smile problem. "The camera points at me, I open wide and say Ahhhh." When she sets the phone down to talk to the doctor, I go to the stove for coffee. Used to be, a guy on the phone was a dog on a leash.
     She picks up. "Dr. Franz says maybe."
     "Maybe?"
     "There's maybe time to make a new one. When can you come in?"
     There's banging on my door when I hang up the phone. It's my friend Wintson. "Come on," he says, "let's go take pictures." Black t-shirt, black jeans, black shoes. Black camera. Divorced laid-off Winston has morphed into an artist. He sells work to a website that's all about anger. "We take something everyone loves," he says, "and say, 'Hey, maybe you shouldn't.'"
     In the car I ask what he's shooting today.
     "Ugly houses." Winston drives fast. From the dash of his car a female voice says Turn left. "The story is 'The New Ugly.'"
     "Who cares about ugly houses?" I say.
     "That's the point," he says. "Nobody cares. You drive past monstrosities. Because they're big, you don't really see them." Go straight two miles, she says. Wintson pokes the keyboard to quiet her. "Like that guy who wrote that scathing book about Mother Teresa."
     That monstrosity of generosity.
     "The thing today is to be scathing," he says. When I ask, he says he's doing all right. "The money's almost good enough."
     No, I say, the other all right.
     "It wasn't my idea," he says, meaning the divorce. "I guess it was partly my fault, but not my idea." Winston slows. We're coming up on a doozy. "Turrets," he says, shaking his head. "Everyone house should have a missile silo." We stop, he gets his camera. "Is it a Rapunzel thing?" he says. Then, "What's with your tooth?"
     We drive past four houses. Winston gets busy with the camera. "What about old ugly?" I say. We're parked in front of red thing with faux balconies, lots of twisted, tortured ironwork. "I love this scab-colored brick," Wintston says. "It's like a sore on the side of the road." We pull away. He jabs the GPS on the dashboard. She says Turn right in a mile. "New ugly's worse. There's so much of it." Adding, "We're supposed to learn something."

     "What does Winston know?" my wife says. We're reading in bed. "If you asked him a year ago, he'd say a house is a box with people in it." My wife and Jean, Winston's ex, are pals.
     I tell her we saw some really ugly houses, a few of them criminally ugly. That's Winston's term.
     "He was not a good husband."
     He lost his job, I say. "He's a lost person," I say.
     She turns a page, shakes her head. "That red house is hideous, isn't it?"

     Next day Dr Franz is in my mouth. She taps, pokes, scrapes. "So you lose the tooth, get a temporary, and someone steps on it." What can I say? Before I lost it, she wanted to bleach that tooth. I wouldn't let her. Didn't I notice the discolor? I told her I didn't mind. In every Persian rug, the weaver leaves a flaw. Only he knows where.
     "Well everyone knows where your flaw is," she said. "You're sure about the bleaching."
     I tell her I'm sure.
     "It's your mouth."
     She's had water lilies painted on the ceiling of her office. As if you can think Cezanne while you get the drill.
     "When's the wedding?" She stuffs my mouth full of putty, I bite down. "Can't guarantee you'll have the new temp in time," she says. I picture the bridal party, Molly Mary Jenny Kerry Britni Lisa Andrea, all with perfect teeth.
     "This is the Nice Age," I say. "Everyone's teeth straightened, whitened, smileable."
     "Before the Nice Age," Dr. Franz said, "your crooked teeth rotted and fell out."

     On the way home I turn off my usual route. I'm thinking about a house Winston might scathe. I plan a drive-by, but at the edge of the lawn, something catches my eye--a sign I've wanted to design and market, a genial reminder for dog owners to be good neighbors. It's a grinning cartoon dog, haunches lowered. A gentleman on crutches is standing at the end of his driveway. I stop and put down my window.
     "Is this your house?" I ask.
     He gives me a wary look. "Wanna take a picture?" he says. Judging from the drag of his left leg,
the swing of his shoulders, he's been disabled a long time.
     No picture, I say. Not me. I point, "I wondered where you got that sign."
     He reaches up and touches his gray beard. "Someone's been driving around photographing homes."
     Homes, right.
     "Guys who cut the grass put it there," he says.
     The house is red brick. It's got a two-story portico, a turret, lots of chimneys. All it needs is lions. "Been here six months," he says, "and I'm leaving."
     I search for something to say. I tell him it's certainly big. "I'm moving out to the desert," he says, then adds, without irony, "to die." He clamps the mail between his arm and one crutch. "Would you like a drink?" he says. My first thought is, I'm going home to chop cabbage.
     There's an echo in the house, a big echo. There's nothing in the great room but heads of beasts. "Those," he says, "are my wife's."
     "She on safari?"
     He turns and walks toward the kitchen, motioning for me to follow. "Yes," he says. "The big one in the sky." He tosses the mail on the kitchen table, where there's already a month of mail. "I've got gin," he says, "and I've got gin."
     I tell him I take mine with tonic, no gin.
     "Here's Lillian," he says, shoving a picture frame at me. It looks like Machu Pichu. "Two years ago," he says, "she was in Peru, in Nepal, Borneo, Malawi, Yemen." He sips. "She was ferocious. Adventure all the way. She birthed our son underwater. She walked around Antarctica. Started up Everest and turned around." He pokes at his ice cubes and smiles. "An outbreak of good sense." He sips. "Christ, Yemen."
     I ask if there son is in the desert.
     "Our son drowned." He gazes across his drink at me. "In a kayak accident." He drains his drink, pours another. "I'd go off on an ice floe," he laughs, "but I don't like the cold."
     "Anyway, global warming," I say. "Hard to find a good flow these days."
     He nods for me to look out the front window. A real dog on the lawn is lowering its real haunches. "That sign doesn't work," he says. "You need something fierce."

     End of the week Dr. Franz calls. She did her best. I'll be toothless in Chicago.
     On the way there I practice faces in the car. There's perspicacious face: Pinch your lips shut with thumb and forefinger. Wry appreciative face: raise your fist to your mouth and smile, lips sealed. In case of emergency, hide your gaffaw face: Clap an open hand to your open mouth.
     "What are you doing?" My wife says. I give her rumination face. "Cows ruminate," she says.

     At the reception we sit with pink tie, green tie, jungle tie, and their wives. The men have powerful slicked-back hair that stays put. Jungle Tie is on my left. After salad, he reaches in his pocket and pulls out a phone. "This thing got me here," he says. The screen lights up, displaying a map that's reflected in both lenses of his glasses. It's pretty dark in the room, but just in case, I put on perspicacious face.
     I could use one of those, I tell him, but what I'm thinking about is the women sitting in front of us at the ceremony, both pushing seventy, one with a spill of gorgeous silver curls, the other wearing a chemo scarf, how they pressed together, long fingers fluttering and twining as they giggled like school girls planning a sleepover.
     "She'll tell me how to get home, too," Jungle Tie says. "Just put her in reverse."
     The ceremony? I turn to answer Pink Tie's wife. Loved it. The bride? Celestial. The groom? A handsome fidget. Hurry up before she runs away. During the eternal "Jauchzet Gott in allen landen," the bride and groom gabbed. Soon the minister joined in, calling an audible when the music died. They'll go straight to vows, nix the "Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee." The two kids practically ran up the aisle and out of the church.
     Of course it's chicken. I keep my head down. Eating is a covert operation. Jungle tie's phone blinks. "She'll tell me how to get home" reminds me of Winston, the GPS in his car guiding him. I'd bet anything it's programmed to take him home, back to Jean. I wonder if he photographed the old guy's house. I wonder what happened to Lillian.
    "What did you like," Pink Tie's wife asks me.
     I tell her I liked the Song of Solomon, "Love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave."
     The photographer is making his way around the room. When he's at the next table, I start composing a face. "Be good," my wife says. Across the room, I see a gorilla-size guy bend over his little wife, kissing her. I work up a new face. I'm going to need it. Everyone is laughing, smiling. There's the two ladies from church, together laughing and smiling. I put my arm around my wife and kiss her hard on the cheek. I look straight into the camera and produce a fierce smile.

     The human mouth, my neighbor says, is capable of great violence. We're standing on the front lawn. He's come to ask me about the yellow streaks in my grass, swirls like you see in marble cake. He's also come to remind me I'm taking him to the hospital tomorrow. He's dying. I'm participating.
     "Dog bite and human bite are roughly equal," he says. "Let's see that again," he says.
     I show him my missing tooth.
     I like talking to Harry. He's an affable old guy. He tells acceptably dirty jokes, most of them about Bill Clinton. At Harry's club, Bill Clinton is both an object of abuse and a source of joy. I take Harry for radiation treatments on Thursdays because Bertie, his wife, had her cataracts out. She wears those massive, wrap-around dark glasses.
     "You should call your lawn service," Harry says. "It's their fault."
     This is health care summer. I lost a front row tooth. I'm taking Harry to radiation. I'm also refreshing my first aid so I can rejoin ski patrol. "We make a difference," the CPR trainer says. Yeah yeah, I think. I want the skiing discount. I'll be the reluctant responder, skiing past crashes. Be right back! One day the trainer wears a pin that says "I saved a life." Reminds me of a pin my kids got when they were little, "I milked a cow."
     Sundays are dedicated to first aid. I drive forty minutes to a high school, where we practice doing patient assessment, wraps, splints, rolls, carries. My worst nightmare is a sucking chest wound. I like awake at night wondering what it would sound like. When I ask the trainer one day how many sucking chest wounds she's encountered, she smiles and says what matters is I know what to do if I get one. Get one?

     I noticed the streaks in my lawn a week ago. I shut the mower off, knelt down to look, and saw Bertie coming across the lawn. When I see her outside, I wave and keep right on mowing. This time there was no escape.
     "Have you noticed those Chaldeans?" She crooked her thumb hitchhiker style. I know the house. "Their dog has been dumping on your lawn."
     Bertie's a DAR. She doesn't discriminate. She hates everyone.
    "The things that woman says." My wife is reading about the Founding Fathers and religion. We're lying in bed. She says, "Patrick Henry was so religious, Jefferson and Adams prayed for his early death."
     I bet they did.
     Next day I'm taking Harry for a treatment, and I'm hoping Bertie doesn't come. I'm hoping she has bridge or golf. Blind bridge, blind golf. One summer she got a hole in one. "The brat," Harry said.
     On the way to the hospital Harry looks out the window. The two of us go in his Caddy. He says we get better service. I don't mind. He lets me drive.
     He says, "Your body is like a house." I thought he'd say temple, an ensouled temple. He leans slightly to pass gas, apologizes. "Strangers come in your house, you feel violated. It happens over and over, you used to it. What the hell, just come on in." He shakes his head. "That's what it's like being sick."
     In the waiting room, I sit with an older gentleman. When he reads the newspaper, I notice his right index finger missing down to the second knuckle. Part of his middle finger also is gone. Without being too obvious, I watch him turn pages. He licks his middle finger. I picture him cutting porkchops. I picture him running an electric saw. I picture him cup his hands, splash water on his face.
     "It's my little girl's got the cancer," he says.

     At CPR we take turns giving dummies the kiss of life. There's a lady dummy named Annie and an unnamed baby dummy. I work with a young guy who wears a Flogging Molly t-shirt. "It's a band," he says, assuming, correctly, that I don't know. I nickname him FM, which he seems to like.
     FM says, "Wouldn't it be cool to be in a restaurant and, you know, have to do the Heimlich maneuver." We're doing two-finger chest compressions on unnamed baby.
     "I would hate to do the Heimlich maneuver," I say.
     "But you'd do it, right?"
     "Only if no one else did."
     "The patient can't wait forever." I can't bring myself to say patient, I feel like an imposter. "You have to think fast, man."
     I say, "I'd look for someone else who was up to the job." To reassure him, I say I'd look fast. He's demonstrating how he'd clear unnamed baby patient's clogged airway in a restaurant. He's a little rough, but her imagined danger requires it.
     I tell him one of my kids' friends is going to med school. He'll be a radiologist. He said he chose that because he didn't want to touch people. That's how I feel about first aid. I'm all for the mask, a barrier between me and the patient's mouth. When I go to the movies and see people kissing on screen, I look away. Even TV. All the hungry gobbling love, it's revolting.

     Next week Bertie comes with us to radiation. She sits in back, behind Harry, still wearing her dark glasses. I go slow. Harry's sick, and it's not my car. In back Bertie says I drive like an old man. "I'd think you would want to enjoy the zip."
     This would be a disparaging remark about my car, which is not out of zip, it never had it to begin with it.
     "Goose it, why don't you," she says. Harry shrugs.
      At the clinic, the man with the missing finger is waiting, reading the paper. Bertie and I sit across from him. It seems like she stares right at him. I wonder if she might wear the glasses after she needs them, as they give her the freedom to stare, but then it occurs to me, she would not question that right.
     "How's she doing?" I ask him.
     He nods hello to Bertie, which she does not acknowledge.
     "Your little girl," I say.
     He licks his middle finger and turns a page. "They burning her up," he says. "She got the dry cough." He inhales deeply and looks away. I wish I hadn't asked. "She getting real tired." Harry's said much the same. I'm waiting for Bertie to pitch in. She looks straight on through her glasses.
     A door at the end of the room clicks and a big woman walks out. She's wearing a pair of supersize jeans, a Cedar Point t-shirt, and a jacket. "Okay," she says.
     She's big like the ones we worry about carrying in first aid; five, maybe six men big. The man folds his newspaper shut and crosses the room to his daughter, waiting by the door, when Bertie makes her first sound. I want to think hiccough, but it's a strangled laugh. Her mouth opens slightly, I see her teeth, and she goes, "Lord!"
     The man turns and looks over his glasses at us before putting a hand under his little girl's elbow. "Time to go," he says.

     "I bought tandoori bread today," my wife says. We're lying in bed. "The lady at the store said, 'It's faaaantastic.' I tasted it. She was right."
     "Bertie insulted a man today," I tell her.
     "The bread was warm and cut into bites. She was handing out samples. 'Faaantastic.' I bought it because of the way she said that."
     That afternoon, when we got back from his therapy, Harry said to me, getting of the car, "Take care of my wife."
     "Bertie insults everyone," my wife says. "She can't help it. But I think deep down, she's not a terrible person."
     How deep? I wonder.
     "Harry's almost done," I say.
     "How many more treatments?"
     "No," I say. "Done."
     We lie there in the dark. She touches my hand. "Don't you think she's afraid?" she says. "She goes to bed at night thinking, Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, I'll be alone." Off somewhere, a dog barks.
     "Faaaantastic."

     The phone rings, I've been asleep for a few minutes, in one of those threshold dreams, sudden, vivid, bizarre. In this dream I'm in the yard, walking around those swirls in the grass, only this one swirl is turning into a spiral staircase going down, and I'm descending into an underground space I recognize from other dreams. Lights hang from the ceiling. There's a clanging sound I realize, with regret, is the phone. It's Harry.
     "Come quick," he says.
     I'd like to get back to the dream, but I know it's gone, and Harry sounds panicked.
     I hang up, pull on a pair of pants, and run down the stairs and out the front door. The air is damp. When my feet touch the wet grass, I realize I'm barefoot. In the street is a man with a flashlight walking his dog. I run across the lawn, down into the shallow ditch to get to Harry's, and, coming up, slip and fall in freshly mowed grass. The dog lets go a warning bark.
     "My neighbor," I say, also panicked. Then, stupidly, "I'm helping."
     Harry comes to the door in blue pajamas. "Are you all right?"
     "Bertie," he says, then turns and shuffles down a hallway. I follow him into a bedroom and find Bertie on the bed, eyes shut, mouth open, not asleep.
     "She just jerked," Harry says, "violently jerked. And stopped breathing."
     I jab at her neck, looking for a pulse. "How long?" He flops on the foot of the bed. "Harry, how long?"
     "Little bit," he says.
     "In minutes, Harry."
     He's crying. "Three or four."
     When I ask him if he called 911, he says he called me. Great idea, Harry. "Call now, Harry," I say. I know it may take them eight to ten minutes.
     I can't find a pulse. I lower my ear to her mouth and listen. She has some of her teeth out. The corners of her mouth are kind of foamy. Harry's stammering on the phone. I can't wait.
     I can't do it on the bed.
     She's wearing a salmon-colored nightgown much too young for her. "Come on, Bertie," I say. "You're still here." I hook my hands under her armpits, drag her torso to the side of the bed, revealing veiny legs and swollen feet. Her head hangs over the edge, and I'm looking down into her nostrils. Her mouth drops open. I see she's got no teeth at all. God, she's heavy, a lot heavier than Annie and unnamed baby, and deader.
     I get her on the floor, I hear Harry snuffling behind me. "She's gone," he says.
     I lower my ear to her mouth, listening for breath. I lay one hand on top of the other, lock my fingers together, and lower my palm to the spot above her breast bone. I give her a trial compression. Where the hell is EMS? I give her six compressions, pause a second, then six more. "Damn it, Bertie, breathe," I yell at her.
     She won't breathe. I tilt her head back, pull her mouth open. I press my mouth on hers and exhale slowly, watching her diaphragm. She tastes like mouthwash. Third breath, I'm thinking she's really gone. Then there's a tremor down her frame. Another breath, another tremor. Just as I'm pulling away, she shudders, lurches, and vomits right in my mouth. It's hot and acidic. I roll her on her side, coughing and spitting.
     "Damn," I say. I kind of want to slug her. She's groaning on the floor, but breathing. I lunge for a tissue on the nightstand and knock over a lamp.
     Then EMS is there. They go to work.
     A young fireman who reminds me of FM hands me a cup of water. "Good job," he says, "You saved her."
     Harry's still crying. She'll have to go the hospital. I know I'm supposed to feel good, but it's too horrible for words.
     "My teeth," I hear Bertie insisting. "Gimme my teeth."
     The young fireman says, "You save someone, there's a special bond."
     Right. And he thinks that's a good thing.

     I find a flier on my mailbox for La Poo Perfect. In quotation marks, their tagline: "Don't stoop. We'll scoop." They got daily, weekly, monthly plans. The woman who answers the phone is named Sam. "Kinda dog?" she says. Her voice is deep, cigarette husky. I tell her I don't have a dog, and no, I'm not calling for a friend or neighbor. Long pause, Sam breathing.
     "I wanted to ask," I say, "do you deliver?"
     Sam lets go a gooey laugh. She has a sense of humor--she answers the phone "La Poo." But I'm not joking. For weeks I've been flinging turds into the street. I find them when I mow. I put a couple sticks together and chopstick the poo onto the road. The other day I had to get a shovel. We're talking kielbasas. Then I find La Poo's flier. It got me thinking.
     "Deliver?" Sam says, "Lemme get Eddie."
     Eddie gets on the phone. "You want what?"
     "Poo," I tell him. "I want poo. Delivered." I hear Sam's phlegmy laugh in the background.
     "We don't usually deliver," Eddie says. "We take it off people's hands." And their feet. Of course, I say, you get rid of the stuff. "Mind if I ask why you want it?"
     I tell him, yes, I do mind. Why is it important?
     "From a business perspective," he says, "I should know what you're doing with our product."

     "When you toss it in the street like that," my wife says one night, "the wrong people might step in it. Have you thought about that? What about Madelen?"
    She's right. I would hate for Madelen's adorable foot to be soiled, Madelen with such extraordinary grace and equipoise, she should be in paintings. No, that wouldn't do. But there’s neighbors, and then there’s neighbors. I ask my wife what I should do with it then.
     "Deal with it."
     I tell her that's glib and dismissive.
     "When you were a kid," she says, "you had a dog. Where did it go?"
     I'm not sure. What I think is: Mrs. Compton's yard. What I say is: Down by the river. "It was a small town," I say. "We had wilderness."
     She says I'm making a big deal over nothing.
     "Obviously," I tell her, "you have not danced the dog poop pas de deux."
     "That's two dancers," she says, smartassy.
     "Me and the lawnmower," I smartass back.

Dogs were domesticated 15000 years ago. I figure for 10000-20000 years before that, humans and dogs were on again, off again. During that time, a visceral disgust with the sight and smell of dog poo became part of our evolutionary history. "Um, Gloog, don't forget to put the dog out. He crapped on my new shoes last night and really stunk up the cave." "But Blumf, he's so cute."

     Eddie puts me on hold, presumably so he and Sam can discuss the niceties of their product. The term makes it sound like a commodity that's packaged and stored. I picture warehouses full of cooling devices to keep the product stable. Eddie clicks back on the line. "How much you need?"
   What's the unit of measurement? "Five gallons?" I say.
   "Gallons," he says.
     "Yeah, you know, like ice cream?"

I wonder if they feel a twinge of regret when they drive past my house. Thinking: that's where Bruno dumped. I hope he didn't step in it. Meaning me. Or do they lie awake at night, examining their wrongdoing, their flouting of common courtesy. I don't think they do. Probably they think, Tonight we will visit the other street. So many streets, so many guilt-free deposits. No twinge of regret. This emboldens me.

I shop Amazon.com, Cheaperthandirt.com, and find something called Eyeclops, Infrared Stealth. I have all the evidence I need. I can't cut my grass without stepping it in. I need to see the perp in the action. I have suspicions. I need certainty. Night goggles are expensive.

     How do you know it happens at night? my wife asks. We're lying in bed. I'm staring at the front window. Right now the nightwalkers are out there. She sets down her book. "Maybe they do it early in the morning," she says.
     "Vandals," I say, "do not get up early."
     "Night goggles?" she says. "You're turning into a nutcase vigilante."
     I can't walk in my yard barefoot. It's time to draw a line in the grass.

A neighbor has a lawn sign, Ryan for probate judge, "Protecting our families." What does that mean? "Guarding our lawns" I might vote for. It's specific. One night my wife and I come home late. The woman who put the sign out is standing by our mailbox. She's walking a black dog the size of pony. If I roll down the window and say, "You're bagging it, right?" I'm a bad neighbor. I don't. I'm pretty sure she doesn't.

     Tonight I'm standing by the front door. It's almost dark. I look down toward the street. What's this but a golden retriever assuming the position. This is it. I elbow the door open, step off the porch. A girl holding the leash watches me come. The closer I get, the clearer it becomes, she doesn't get it. She's smiling. The dog finishes, does his little clean-up scratch, and assumes a regal sit next to the girl. "Well?" I say.
     "Hello," she says, very breezy. "Watch out or the mosquitos will bite." She sounds foreign.
     "What are you doing?" I say.
    "Tonight I walk the dog."
     "I can see that," I say. "But this?" I point.
     "Oh, that," she plugs her nose and laughs, then holds out her hand. "Justine," she says. "I'm from France." She says Fronce. I shake her hand.
     "Don't people in Fronce clean up a mess like this?"
     "In the city, yes," she says, then adds with a guilty laugh, "But only sometimes."
     "Here we always do," I say. It's a lie, but I'd like to set a high standard. "Always," I say again, almost ready to give her toujours. She shakes her head no.
     "Here is the country, no?"
     No, I say. We have lots of trees and grass, but no, this is not the country. The dog nudges my leg, then sniffs my crotch. I know this dog. It's the Buckleys'. And this Justine must be an au pair.
     "We pick up," I say again.
     Justine tenses. She looks at me, eyes narrowing. Then: "I see."
     She’s got the hauteur, and I’ve got the poo. It's sort of a stand off. I'm not enjoying it. It's not what I imagined. I'm thinking it will pass, and then Justine does something terrible. She squares her shoulders, draws in her lower lip, whispers, "Okay." She reaches behind her, I see a flash of white as she produces a tissue. When she whips it open, I see it's a handkerchief.
     A little French handkerchief, clean and white, with a colored border.
     "It's all right," I say.
     But it's too late. Justine bends down, reaches out, and picks up the dropping with her hankie. She straightens, sniffs, and I realize she's crying. The thought of that dreadful thing in her hand, warm as a croissant, makes me so sick that I now want to cry, or throw up, or both. She clicks her tongue at the dog. They go.

      I'm cutting the grass next morning when I see a vehicle crawl down the street. Twice it noses to a stop in front of a house, then starts up. The driver's looking for someone. I watch as it pulls in my driveway. It's an rusty old Mazda, half van, half car, kind of a dusty hippo gray. I shut my mower down as the driver's door screeches open. A little guy in army fatigues gets out. He's got a mess of blue tattoos up and down his arms.
    "Help you?" I say.
     He nods and smiles, smoothing his long black moustache with a forefinger. He could be thirty or fifty. He walks across the lawn in army boots, holds out his hand to shake. "Eddie," he says. "Eddie Swit from Poo Perfect?" I shake his hand. "Got your order," he says.
     My order.
     You know, I want to say, that idea I had, my heart is no longer in it. But he's already swung around, walking back to his car.
     He opens the Mazda hatch, reaches in, and lifts out a white bucket. There's a lid on the bucket. A yellow invoice is taped to the side of it. I'd like him to put it right back, shut the hatch, and forget about the whole thing. Eddie crosses his tattooed arms and smiles.
     "Look, Eddie," I say.
     "Five gallons," he says, "is what you ordered." He nudges the pail with his boot. "Just like ice cream." It occurs to me we didn't talk price.
     When I tell him I don't want it, he pulls on his mustache again and says, "You know what I had to do to get this? Do you have any idea?" I tell him yes, I know what he had to do. "No, you don't," he says. "You just bag it and toss it. This was collection and consolidation." He nudges the bucket with his boot. "Consolidation." A neighbor goes walking by. I'm glad Eddie has an unmarked truck.
     "I expect to be paid," he says.
     I have a pretty good idea what will happen if I don't pay. I'll come out one morning and find a pile on my lawn, a big pile, like five gallons. And maybe not just once. Maybe repeatedly. Until he feels like I've learned a lesson. He seems like that kind of guy who would teach someone a lesson.
     I point at the bucket. "Is it sealed?"
    "Tight," he says.
     "How about I pay and you just take it back."
     Eddie shakes his head no. I pay for the bucket of product. Eddie can't make change, so he ends up with a tip. I carry the bucket into the garage, put it in a corner, and watch Eddie drive away.

That night I lie awake, picturing unimpeded nightwalkers stopping by out front, remembering the terrible Justine episode. Mostly I think about the bucket down in the garage, the contents hermetically sealed, deliquescing. It's pure evil.

I've felt phlegmy for a few days now. Not phlegmatic (apathetic, sluggish--I had to look it up). It's more like onset of sinus headache phlegmy. There must be a bug going around, and this bug has crawled, flown, or swum into my head, gone on vacation next to the straits and seas flowing inside my skull.
Damn him.
My first memory of sinus headache is 1972, when I was still a student at Delta College. I was laid low by headaches, to a point that I followed my father's lead.

He'd had sinus headaches years before. This topic came up when my brother and I were trying to get him to tell us what he did during the war. He was on Guam. He was a radio operator. He slept 10-12 hours a day for relief from profound boredom. He'd never been away from home. It was hot. The tea had sugar and lemon in it. He didn't like that. He ate mutton, a lot of it, way too much for a chicken, pork chop, roast beef and potatoes farm kid from Michigan. He hated mutton so much we never ate lamb when I was growing up. I saw sheep. I knew they existed, but I didn't think of them as food. Johnny Vasold raised sheep in Freeland, what for I'm not sure. I can't imagine Pat's Food Center having a mutton department.
     My father had headaches during the war. Also an appendectomy. Also a broken arm. For kids whose ideas about war were shaped by John Wayne movies, none of this was very exciting. For a long time, I thought that's why he didn't talk about it. Then a few years ago, we were in Marquette at my aunt's funeral. The night after the funeral, we gathered at my uncle's house. He was very talkative. His boys, my cousins, brought out single malt Scotch, a lot of it, which my uncle, who was a Methodist minister, helped himself to. He referred to it as "despair remover." The drinking was a signal for my father and mother, accomplished tee-totallers, to escape to their hotel. They left, we drank, and my Uncle talked at length about many things, including the war. In basic training, a man had crawled under the barracks and killed himself. A soldier from rural Georgia knew only that he was from Georgia; no town, no village, no hamlet. "I'm from Jawjaw," he would announce with pride. Somehow he had been delivered to the military; no one knew how they would return him to his home.
     While my dad was eating mutton on Guam, my uncle flew supplies over Europe. He flew planes at night, heavy with cargo and full of fuel. "Flying in formation," he said, "the flack would be thick, and you'd look out and see, in the distance, a plane just explode in flames when it was hit."
     At some point, the conversation landed on Guam. "Your dad," my uncle said, "was walking across a field in the dark one night, and he fell in freshly dug latrine hole." Empty, but deep. That's how he broke his arm.
     That's the kind of thing that would have happened to me.
     My wife and I were staying the night in my parents' house trailer shortly after we were married. I stepped outside to walk to the bathroom. It was black night, no moon, no stars. I pulled my jacket collar up, turned, and walked right into a tree. It remained standing. I did not.
     My dad had a foot locker with stuff he brought back from the war. My brother and I looked in it from time to time, curious about that time in his life, wondering if the stuff in there would reveal anything.
     He kept the broken arm details to himself, but dilated on the subject of headaches. An Air Force doc had prescribed irrigation. You put warm salt water in a hot water bottle, the object being to get the water in the bottle flowing through the offending sinuses. The doc said, "You think you're going to drown. If the pain gets bad enough, you'll try it."
     It did, and my father tried it. He swore by it.
     When headache got me, I tried it, too. I did the irrigation thing, a college sophomore, regarding myself in the mirror, with that tube shoved up my nose and water guttering from my mouth. I swore by it, too.
     Then, as suddenly as they arrived, the headaches were gone. I didn't get another one for twenty-five years.
     I was married, had kids and a house full of stuff, much of it not mine. Headache was back and it was monolithic. One afternoon I could stand it no longer. I looked for a hot water bottle and found one in an upstairs bathroom, in a box, with the hose. Above my eyes, my frontal sinuses felt like they might explode. Irrigation was nothing next to that pain. I yanked the hot water bottle out of the box, opened it, sprinkled salt inside, and ran warm water into it. I was wild to get relief. I screwed the hose into the top of the bottle, inspected the tip of the hose and paused briefly. Where had that thing been? I washed it, inserted the tip in my right nostril, opened my mouth and raised the bag. Water rushed through the hose into my head. Oh God, I thought, I don't remember it being this bad.
     Warm salt water coursed through my terrible sinuses. Warm salt water--and powdery red rubber residue from an ancient hot water bottle--flowed into my terrible sinuses. It was like inhaling wet sand. It was like walking into a tree in the middle of the night, a self-inflicted smackdown

The idea that we can maintain a barrier between us the the natural world is folly. But we try. We try so hard that when you open a drawer and see an earwig, it's both a shock and an insult. What are you doing there? This is my house. A mouse? Pure horror. A cause for outrage. Burn down the house to kill the mouse.
I've had birds in the house, twice. Not birds I wanted. They didn't like it any better than I did. I didn't go all Visigoth on the birds. One, I recall, I was able to capture using a tennis racquet. That sounds violent. Trust me, it wasn't. (I have a weak backhand.) I was able to get my hands on this thing and hold it while I headed for the back door. I stepped outside and flung it up in the air. Cue the violins. It was very St. Francis of Assisi.
There's something mysterious and frightening about holding a wild bird in your hands. It's like holding a flame. They have a metabolism that's so crazy, and the animal is so terrified, you think it's going to explode in your hands. I was walking last summer near the house and found a bird all tangled up in string. It was nesting time. This thing had string wrapped around its foot, and the string was wrapped around a fence, too, so the bird was flying around in a circle on a length of string two or three feet long. I was able to reel the string in and get my hands on the bird. Once again, bird in the palm of my hand. Terror, both its and mine. This time, when I flung it, the bird just plopped to the ground. It lay on its side, blinking, hyperventilating. I thought I had scared it to death. I nudged it with my toe. I nudged it again and managed to get it up in the air. Get out here, will ya? I know what flying drunk looks like. It yawed around in the air, smashed through some bushes, and disappeared.

It's hard to keep nature outside. Like it or not, we are a nature. Our bodies are full of bugs. Our guts are slithering swamps of organisms living there, living in and off us, or just passing through. My mind is an ant hill. Inside, like a queen bee, is the king ant, the unholy uncle, my inner Visigoth, and swarming around him, all the other bugs in my brain, working, horsing around, scratching themselves, procreating , defecating, driving me crazy.

We appear to be winning the battle. While I swapped email with Howard the Bugman, I was employing the machine that breathes dust. I was also reading the label on a bugbomb I used last summer. We had pests last summer. Not the worst I've seen. But bad. Twice now we have had invasions that could reasonably be called a plague of flies. The first time it felt almost Biblical. And then it came to pass that we wiped them out. I had more of that stuff in the garage.
     The label said: "Depending on dosage, insects will respond gradually to this medicine. They will experience dizziness, blurred vision, and joint pain." Really, now. Why would they write something like this on a spray bottle of poison? Joint pain. Their poor little knees. "Gradually," I read on, "the insect will suffer shortness of breath and great lethargy." I've seen lethargy in bugs. I thought it was boredom or over-eating or too much mating. "Finally, bug will collapse under the weight of its own body..." I had to stop reading. I had to stop because I was carrying the bottle into the kitchen, planning to douse the window, which I did.
   One or two days, the body count began to show. Carrion on the window sill, on the panes, right behind my chair at the kitchen table. I'd be tucking into a plate of pasta, peeling a pear, munching a chocolate; behind me, death and destruction. And so it is, was, and shall be. "Scrumptious chicken leg, my love," I'd say to my wife, while the wasps, the micro variety Howard the Bugman identified by jpeg, dropped in their tracks, wheezing, their sightless eyes tearing up.
     Here's the sill. And below it, the pane of window glass, a plain of suffering and surcease. Those streaks must be wasp tears.

	Are there any pinecones nearby? Howard the Bugman asked. Um, no.
Can't wash this window just yet. The active ingredient is still annihilating uninvited residents.

Feb 1, 2010: I got a little rough with an avocado this morning. My wife mutters, "Visigoth." This makes me mad. The Visigoths are a much maligned people. They were good conversationalists. They could eviscerate a small animal or lop off an enemy's arm and carry on civil conversation. Unlike those effete Romans, with their sewage systems and vomitoria. Pass the bay leaf, Flavius, whilst I flog myself. Ugh. Visigoths, unite.

A few years ago we had a bee problem outside. We had an old bay window on the back of the house. Right next to it is a screened-in porch. When I sat outside on the porch, I saw a steady stream of bees coming and going. There was a gap underneath the bay window. The bees were in the wall of my house. My house was their hive. You can't watch something like that and not think bad thoughts.
     I have a friend who is a very good Christian and very good at killing things. When I told him about the bee situation, he smiled and said he knew what to do. "Take the bag out of your shop vacuum," he said, "and put about two inches of water in the can."
     He smiled diabolically. "Then you add a cup or so of vinegar."
     I followed his directions, which involved taping the end of the vacuum hose directly beneath the bees' front door to my house.
     "You turn on the vac and walk away," he said. "Two hours later, you'll be bee-free."
     That's what happened. Except I couldn't walk away.
     I sat on the porch and watched. A bee would approach the house, power down for landing/entry, and just as he reached the critical point of powerlessness, he would be sucked into the vacuum's maelstrom of air, water, and vinegar. It was better than TV. It was better than a good book. Just me and R2D2, killing them bees. I told my friend we should start a business.
     Praise the Lord Exterminators. Our motto: We Kill Everything.

I've been swapping email with Howard the Bugman at Michigan State University. I thought I'd found an angel of death. It turns out he's a lover of truth. How do I kill them? I ask. Send me some specimens, he answers. Specimens. These things are so small I'd need to pick them up with tweezers. Put them in a bottle,... he tells me, add a little alcolhol to keep them fresh, and mail them to me in East Lansing. Somehow it seems like according them more respect than they deserve. Just tell me what poison to use, I want to say. Hand me the liquid flyswatter. I send him a jpeg, telling him I feel a little impatient. Can we get on with it? To which he responds: They look like wasps. Are there any pinecones nearby? My confidence is shaken. Howard, are you kidding? Wasps? Wasps probably eat these guys for lunch, for antipasto. Finally it occurs to me that Howard the Bugman isn't in the business of recommending poisons. MSU probably discourages that. I'll need to find a much more unsavory character than Howard the Bugman. I turn to my next line of defense: the vacuum cleaner. My old Italian mother-in-law's term for it was, "the machine that breathes dust." In this household it's "the machine that sucks bugs." Eureka.

This little guy makes his appearance in my house one day. He's on the kitchen window, gazing outside. I know what he's thinking: Too damn cold to go outside. Another day, same window, he's brought his friends. They're on the glass, on the sill, on the wall under the window.

Whyn't you go out and play? I wonder. Whe...never I find a spider in the house, my wife forbids killing it. It can be 11:30 at night. She'll want me to gently gather it, which is never easy, and put it outside. Spiders are good, she says. I love her. Not them. I love her, so I gently gather them, usually with a tissue, walk downstairs, open the front door, and throw them out of the house. Did you kill it? she'll ask. No no, I reassure her. What I don't tell her is the fall probably knocks them silly, perhaps kills them. You can see them sprawled on the cement slab. And stay out, I think. These new houseguests are too little to toss out, and there's too many of them. It's a job for the vacuum cleaner. This is man against nature.

I bought reading glasses at the airport. They were blue. Wearing them, I thought I made a statement. Urban guy, stylish; unafraid. It was a long flight. I was in the little person's room in the back of the plane. When I looked down, the glasses slid off my face and fell in the toilet. I walked back to my seat. Statement: Total Bozo.

Once or twice a year I go to Wendy's. I like to pump ketchup.
This little guy, as you might guess, doesn't do his job--foodwise. Yesterday, after I pumped the ketchup and set to work on my fries, rather than gnashing and tearing, he just got mixed up with lunch, rolling around in the half-masticated mash. So I took him out and set him on the tray. Don't do that. Don't. Put him in your po...cket, tie him around your neck, never lay him on the tray.

I was half way to my car when I realized I'd dumped him in the Wendy bin. Which required my return to the "dining room." Which required pawing through the trash, in search of my "flipper," dental-speak for my maddening artificial device. I dug. Nothing. I dug deeper. Nothing. No one seemed to notice, or much care, this being Detroit.

I opened the gate on the side of the trash receptacle, pulled out the plastic trash can, lowered my head into the abyss of fastfood detritus, and dug down deeper, determined to find my buddy. Fries, bun, ice. Pickle, lettuce. Partially chewed chicken. I thought I might have to take everything out of the trash can. Would I need permission? Were universal precautions in order? Finally, there he was, a tiny flesh-colored horseshoe, with a little ketchup on it. Like someone had bitten off and spit out their tongue. For thirty minutes or so, it tasted like ketchup.

So this guy drills a hole in my jaw, in my jaw! from inside my mouth, and inserts this titanium thingie he likens to a self-tapping screw. I've worked with sheet metal enough to know what that is. Once the device is in place he starts cranking on it with his miniature Home Depot ratchet.

It ticks on the return revolutions just like the half-inch-drive ratchet in my garage. On the clockwise turn, it drives the device in. I can feel torque as it bites into bone, rooting deeper in my person. "Feel okay?" he asks. "Blhmfff hrwlss," I say. And I mean it. Finally he caps it off with a little screw top, like he's putting the lid on a thermos, and sews gum tissue over the top of it. "Now we wait," he says. I feel like I have an improvised exploding device in my mouth.