Finding Henry Miller

by Cathy Roy

“Honey, Clark’s here,” my mother yelled from the kitchen. The white curtains blew gently over the avocado countertop. 

“You didn’t tell me he had a van,” she said with a concerned voice. My father had just shuffled into the living room. “You know what boys do in vans,” my mother said to my father. I wanted to pop up and tell them that Clark and I had sex everyplace in the world but the back of van, but I didn’t think they’d appreciate this coming from their 17-year-old daughter.  It was disgusting in the back of that van.  Too many parties combined with a leaky sunroof left it dank and moldy.  At one point, there were so many pot seeds on the floor, some actually started to sprout. The plants never got too big, though, because someone always picked them and tried to smoke them.  I never tried it. They gave everyone a headache. 

My mother opened the door.  “Clark, how’s Stanford going?” she said and winked at me.  I think the wink meant he was a keeper.  Clark was tall with long blond hair.  He looked like a surfer, but he played lacrosse. “The only true American Sport,” he would constantly tell everyone, since it originated with the American Indians.  I wondered what the American Indians would think of the Stanford team.  He definitely had muscles and a tendency to make girls swoon.  I couldn’t believe he was having this effect on my mother.  I was ready to go away to college next year.  “Hey, Mom Roy,” Clark smiled with his perfectly white teeth. He really belonged with some model in Vogue, not with me.  I was cute, but completely insecure.  My school was full of beautiful California blondes. I was brunette and curvy. 

“There’s coffee in the kitchen – you kids be careful driving over to the coast.”  She and my dad, who mumbled hello to Clark, went out the door. 

Clark promptly sat down and pulled open a magazine.  He dumped a large amount of green stuff onto the magazine and started rolling joints.

“Can’t you use an album cover from my room?” I asked. “My parents read that magazine.”

            “It’s a long trip.  We need a few for the road.  What did you tell your parents by the way?” He widened his beautiful green eyes. 

“I told them we were watching some of your friends surf.”  I wasn’t about to tell my parents we were driving a few hours down the coast to see some author named Henry Miller. Clark was an English/Drama Major at Stanford and had read about the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Rumor had it, if you just showed up you could hang out with Henry.  I was too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t read anything by Henry Miller. At the time, I was struggling with Shakespeare and Homer. But Clark was crazy about meeting Henry Miller, so I just nodded and pretended I knew what he was talking about.  I didn’t want him to think I was some stupid high-school girl, even though that’s what I was.  I was completely out of my league dating a Stanford student. What was I thinking?

“You might want to grab a jacket,” he told me as we started to leave. “There’s a bunch of fog on the coast and the heater is broken again.” 

“Big surprise,” I mumbled under my breath.  Maybe I was more like my father than I thought.

Clark had a loud stereo system, so I just sat back and listened to Steve Miller play “Keep on Rockin’ Me.” 

It was only a few months earlier that I had met Clark at the Stanford radio station. I was still in high-school but was a deejay there. We had a station meeting in the new Business School. The room sat 100 people and looked pretty plush compared to any classroom I had ever been in. It smelled new and was filled with loud college students and a few adults in their twenties. A gorgeous blond youth dressed in a three-piece suit with a fedora hat was at the end of one row.   

   “Who’s that?” I asked Barbara in a casual, I’m-not-really-interested way. Barbara was a teacher’s aide and one of the few women, besides me, at the radio station. 

“That’s Clark,” Barbara said.  “I’ll introduce you to him. You guys would get along.”  Barbara was always trying to fix me up with someone.  Her nickname was “the Burnout,” so I wasn’t really sure I trusted her decision-making skills.  Apparently she was a leftover Stanford student who had taken a lot of acid during the Summer of Love.  

After the meeting, everyone piled out into the quad for a beer party. Roses were in bloom.  Barbara waved me over to where she was standing with Clark.  For a fall night, it felt like summer. We perched on a stone bench talking about school, religion, music and travel. The smell of roses combined with beer wafted through the air. It was obvious he was flirting with me. After a couple of hours I confessed I was still in high-school, but he didn’t seem to mind.  I was supposed to be home at midnight, but I got home at 2:00 a.m.  Trouble. The next day he showed up at the end of my radio show with a few roses and asked me out to coffee. I was hooked.  No one had ever brought me flowers or asked me out for coffee. (Years later a friend would tell me he always stole roses for me in the middle of the night from the Stanford Rose Garden). Before I knew it, we were spending all of our time together.  Every day he waited in the high-school parking lot for me to get out of class.  My friends thought this was cool. 

The first time I got a love letter from Clark, he wrote, I think we’re still young, you know? It’s exciting to be young and in love too.  It’s a feeling I want to explore with you – and I want to bathe in it with you and play with it and stretch it and then one day look at it and the next let it go like a wound up rubber band and then sing it – and dance too and laugh, of course laugh and smile , smile a sweet smile and it’s just love – the name of a feeling we all want to feel. What?  I couldn’t imagine anything lasting for a long time – except maybe my youth. I was going to college soon and would probably leave the Bay Area. Clark was too good-looking and too smart.  It was just a fluke that I got him as a boyfriend.

Now here I was in his van, going only Clark-knows-where down the coast.

Clark had an uncanny sense of knowing when my mind was wandering. He snapped his fingers in front of me “Where are you at?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” I replied. “I’m with you.”  I widened my eyes at him, which I knew had an effect on him.

Usually when I was this stoned, I was paranoid, but something about this day seemed right.

About an hour later, we were deep in the redwoods. We appeared to be the only car on the road for miles. I had no idea what time it was or even where we were.  I stopped smoking and rolled down the window. We continued to drive out of the redwoods when I noticed the ocean view on one side of the car and pointed it out to Clark.

We pulled over and stared at the big expanse of blue. Clark pulled me slowly to him and kissed me with his tongue. I braced myself. Clark kissed liked my neighbor’s Saint Bernard. It wasn’t like I was expecting Robert Redford, but it seemed like he was a human tongue.  Was this is how it was supposed to be? I’d ask my girlfriends, but they were all so envious over Clark, I couldn’t tell them he wasn’t nearly as perfect as they thought he was. The first time he had kissed me, a few months earlier, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I looked for the sponge he had just used on me. Then, when we had sex, I discovered that sex with him was less messy than kissing.  He was great at sex. The problem was how to have sex without the kissing part?  I hadn’t figured it out yet, so I had learned to let my imagination go wild during the kissing part or try to pretend slobber didn’t bother me.

I pulled away, demurely wiped my mouth and chin, and told Clark if we started anything we’d miss Henry Miller. He started up the car and focused his high-IQ lacrosse-playing mind back on finding the library. 

Clark had aspirations to be a writer.  “Maybe one day I’ll write a story about this,” he said. “I’ll call it Finding Henry Miller.”  Back in the redwoods I spotted a shack and as we drove past I read the sign in front of it: “Henry Miller Library.”  Clark hit the brakes and pulled in. There were no other cars in the lot.  Some books had gone flying from the back to the front seat, so I picked up a copy of The Tropic of Cancer that Clark had brought with us so that Henry Miller could sign it.  I looked at the black-and-white book-jacket photo and a young bald man with glasses stared back at me.  “He looks studious,” I told Clark.

We got out of the van.  Redwoods towered over us as sunlight poured through the openings.  It reminded me of church.  All we could hear were chimes and birds.  It felt peaceful.  We reeked of smoke. What was Henry Miller going to think?  I tried to smooth out my hair and halter dress so that I looked somewhat presentable.  I’d smoked way too much and could barely walk.  As we came up the stairs, an older gentleman came out the door. 

“Hello,” he said, and seemed to look me up and down.

“Mr. Miller, such a hon-hon-honor to meet you,” Clark said.  I must have been really out of it and paranoid, because it appeared that Henry Miller was staring at my breasts. I stuck out my hand for a shake, but instead he gave me a hug. I could have sworn his hand touched my butt.  From everything Clark told me, he was a distinguished writer, but I was beginning to think he was a dirty old man.  He wore old jeans and a very crumpled shirt.  It looked like he wore the same glasses that were in the picture.  He had been years ahead of the John Lennon look, I guess. 

I looked at Clark to see if he had noticed anything, but Clark just looked happy. Okay, I must have been imagining things.

“I’m just about to close,” Henry said, “but I have a few minutes for you two.” Then he winked at me. Why was everyone winking at me today? The face that stared back at me was nothing like the picture on the book.  I wondered what had happened to that young fellow. Was I too going to get all old and wrinkled-looking – just a ghost of my youthful self?  Realistically, how could I avoid it? Unless I died young.

I decided I was pretty out of it by then, so I let Clark take the lead as they talked about authors I didn’t know. I let my mind wander out the window and thought about an essay I had due on Shakespeare. I don’t remember any of the conversation between Henry and Clark, but Clark did get his book signed.

            Fifteen minutes later we were back in the van, and Clark was bouncing up and down, pounding his fists on the van roof. “Cool.  We met Henry Miller. Everyone in class is going to be SO jealous.  And you know what? He said I could come back anytime and bring you too!” He was smiling ear to ear. 

This time we drove up the coast listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The sun was setting in hues of orange and pink. 

“We should have brought a camera,” I blurted out, thinking we should have somehow captured this day, this moment, this time. Clark smiled at me and told me to remember to bring one next time. I just looked out the window at the deep blue ocean.

There would never be a next time. Clark would take a semester in England in another month and then run off to join a religious cult. He wrote me a few letters about his life in Europe, but we lost touch. I fell in love with another Stanford student and never got around to writing back. In college when I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it confirmed my impression of him– he was a dirty old man. 

Over the years I became everything I thought was uncool when I was seventeen. I have a house, a large mortgage and a job in the corporate world. I’ve travelled to the places Henry Miller wrote about – New York, Los Angeles and Europe. My world, which seemed so limited over thirty years ago, expanded like the opening of an old book. Now I leaf through The Colossus of Maroussi, as if trying to divine the spirit of Henry Miller into my writing. The feel of the book works like a time machine. I write obsessively about California, Stanford boys and rock and roll. With all the sex and drugs going on back then, maybe Clark and I were more like Henry Miller’s characters than we imagined.

Cathy Roy grew up in Northern California and now resides in Colorado.  Her first novel Tasty Girl, about the mythical San Francisco radio station KTST (a.k.a. - Tasty), came out in the summer of 2010.  She writes humor, paranormal, and food reviews.

Motif

by Cherri Randall

            In 1966, my mother works in a wallet factory and my father and I drive around in his Chevy Apache truck.  He always has a plan to make some money for us.  We go to Lake Murray and have bonfires.  He will burn motors to extract the copper wires to sell at a salvage yard.  He will always have some kind of junk to take there, and I love prowling through the maze of hulls and remnants and castoffs.  I am never afraid of being lost, because I can hear my father’s voice carried on the air as he tells stories at the junkyard gate. 

            I have a Snoopy rod and reel for the lake and we fish from the banks sometimes.  Some of his stories are bragging to his friends about how he can’t fish because I’m reeling perch in faster than he can keep my hook baited.  I like eating fish with ketchup.  He has other stories about me, how once while we were home and the phone rang, I told some woman my daddy couldn’t talk because he was pottying, and once I decided the pot of soup on the stove didn’t look full enough for me and him and Momma, so I added a sliced banana to make it fuller.  That night we got to have hamburgers and my favorite food in the world, Dilly Bars. 

He has a trotline at the lake, and while it is an ocean to me, it is not so far nor so deep that he cannot walk from one side to the other and check his lines.  Because he has had back surgery, he does not like a waistband digging into his scars, so he wears overalls.  For checking trotlines, he has an old pair with cut-off legs, and that is how we do it, check the trotlines, him wearing cut-off overalls and me wearing my swimsuit and life vest, clinging to the straps over his shoulders.

We take in the catch going across and bait the lines coming back.  A stringer is tied onto his overall’s hammer loop.  He gives the carp away to old black people who are around the banks fishing and he does this so often that anytime his Apache is parked at the lake, someone black is fishing close by.  I love the way they all fuss over my coppery hair in the sunlight, prettier than the wires in old motors they say.

Daddy has six big carp one day and two people wanting them, so they get three each.

            “Mr. Owens,” (nobody said Owen ever) “I am sho glad you don’t like carp,” the man says.

            “I never could eat ‘em,” he answers. 

            “Well you just don’t know how to cook ‘em,” the woman says.  “You ever try my carp made in the pressure cooker, you wouldn’t be out here giving none of them away no more.”

            The man laughs.  He has a gold tooth and the sun hits it and I wish I had one it is so pretty.  “Don’t be telling him or he’s liable to start keeping them,” he warns the woman.

            “Nah,” my daddy says.  “I just like getting them out of the lake.  They make the water turbid and uproot the vegetation.  Makes it harder on all the fish.”

            I am listening to this like I listen to all my daddy’s conversations and stories, but something is pinching me on the back of my neck and I have to start jerking and crying and I am a little embarrassed because I am peeing myself, but it is only in my swimsuit.

            I fling my head around and the woman starts screaming too, because what flings off is a little bitty snake and it hits the rocky bank and starts slithering.  My father is right there beside it instantly.  I have never seen him move so fast in my life, but he is there stomping the head of the snake and part of its body and still it wriggles senselessly in the sun for a few moments.

            The man is over there looking at it.

            “Mr. Owens, that’s a copperhead.  You better check that girl for a bite after it done been tangled up in her hair since you left the water.”

            “How would I see a bite on her head?” he asks, and the woman comes over, going the long way around the smashed snake on the ground, maybe nine inches long.  

            “You okay, little darlin’?” she asks me, and I can’t help it.  My stomach lurches and I vomit but she sidesteps and misses it.  When I’m done she cradles my head, smoothing out my hair.

            “She got two little fang marks on the back of her neck,” the woman says. 

            “Lord have mercy,” the man says.  “You better get her home.”

            My dad tells them to take all the fish, and they throw my life vest and the rest of our stuff in the back of the truck and we take off.  When we get home, I get to use all the Mr. Bubble I want in my bath and he stays right there with me to make sure I don’t fall asleep and drown in the tub which is kind of funny because it’s the middle of the day but I do feel tired and I love the taste of baby aspirin and he lets me chew up about five of them with a Nehi Strawberry soda and then I have a long nap.  He tells me over and over not to tell my mother there was a snake in my hair or she will be mean to us and tell us we can’t go to the lake anymore.

Cherri Randall is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.  She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Arkansas where she also holds an MFA in Creative Writing.  Her work has appeared in Mid-America Poetry Review, Lake Effect, So to Speak, Paper Street Press, Permafrost Review, Paddlefish, The Potomac Review, storySouth, Blue Earth Review,  and Sojourn.  An essay will be published in the anthology Impact, (Telling Our Stories Press) and a novel, The Memory of Orchids, (Cyber Wit) in winter 2011.  She has green eyes, fiery red hair, and arms spattered with freckles.  She lives with two daughters, a Chihuahua named Zora (for Zora Neale Hurston), and high hopes for the future.

When a Wife Just Isn't a Wife

by Julie Whitlow

I will happily celebrate my seventh wedding anniversary next summer.  My problem as a married lesbian is the lack of a good all-occasion word to refer to my beloved. 

I struggle with the best term to call the person-for-whom-I-live-and-breathe-and-share-my-life-love-joys-sorrows-triumphs-mistakes-hopes-dreams-health care proxy-and-retirement savings.   Is she my wife?  That term works with an ironic twist among close friends.  My wife will pour me that glass of Pinot Noir.  Otherwise, the word wife just does not naturally flow from brain to tongue.   

Of course, my familiarity with the dictionary tells me that a wife is a married woman.  But the historical baggage of my foremothers who were forced into marriage for reasons of political alliance, inheritance, servitude, and depth of dowry also permeates my psyche. 

My own mother gave up a successful career in 1958 to become….a wife.  She was a darn good one, too.  She was lovely and loyal, determined, and divine.  Dinner was always on the table at 6, cookies were hot out of the oven, and her devotion to home and hearth is eternal.  

And my gal?    She can pick up a snake in the woods, use power tools like a pro, raise a bumper crop of arugula, embroider a placemat, and whip up a soufflé in a jiffy.  She’s just not a wife. 

Partner?  That’s a fine choice.   It worked before we were married but ambiguities abound.  Man or woman?  Business partner?  Law partner?  Tennis partner?  Clarity depends on context and there is plenty of room for confusion.  

Spouse?  That works for an equity line or a blood transfusion, but just seems too legalistic for daily use.   Lover?   Not in front of mom.  Friend?  Cop out.  Significant other?  Spare me.

My love and I were together 11 years before we could legally wed, and our relationship progressed from a crackling attraction to a few blissful years of adventurous travel and eating at trendy restaurants.  We went to graduate school, established careers, and made the decision to adopt two beautiful children and sign on for a hefty mortgage.  Marriage protected us legally and financially.    

By marrying, we could also demonstrate to society’s skeptics that my love and I were equally capable as straight couples of changing diapers, mowing the grass, and dashing from the schoolyard to the commuter rail.     

             So, why can’t she just be my wife?  The reality is that feminism has influenced my generation, too young to have really been pioneers, too old to not to have benefitted from the dismantling of the notion that a wife is there to obey her husband.

But, another reality is that, despite progress, gays and lesbians routinely face rejection from family members, discrimination in the workplace, and denunciation from the pulpit.  We trust others based on specific situations.  Using the terms wife and husband forces us to always be out, vulnerable.

There are occasions such as a fundraiser for a favorite liberal candidate where my wedding ring has an aura of clout.  Introductions are seamless, easy.   There are other times, though, where I have to make a snap decision about the mindset of a stranger and I don’t ask or tell about my marital status.     

  A few weeks ago, I bought a car form a dealer on the Lynnway.  Ronnie, the salesman, and I had to wait around for the usual approvals and reams of paperwork.  During that time, Ronnie showed me pictures of his own lovely wife and daughter.  I learned a lot about their trip to Aruba, and how tough it was to pay the college tuition bills. 

At noon Ronnie broke his sandwich in half, a fresh mozzarella and prosciutto sub from Bianchi’s in Revere.   I told Ronnie about my girls, how they love spaghetti Bolognese.   He said, “That’s my favorite, too.  Your husband’s a lucky guy.”  I produced a fake chuckle.  Ronnie was kind, funny.  Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was my wife that was the lucky one.  I just can’t use that word.  Any gender-neutral alternate would have been all wrong.  So, I changed the subject.  My language had failed me.

Or was it me that had failed Ronnie? 

Would the easy banter between Ronnie and me have evaporated had I mentioned my wife?   Would he have been supportive?  Did he prescribe to mean spirited talk radio?   Given the chance, would he vote to take away my right to marry?   I’ll never know.   I hedged.   

After almost seven years of marriage and 18 years together, my commitment to the love of my life is strong.   Maybe someday, I will be able to make her my wife.

Julie Whitlow is a professor in the English Department at Salem State University.  She was raised in New Orleans and now lives in Salem, MA with her partner, Olga, and their two daughters.  Her academic specialty is ESL/Applied Linguistics and she has been working on research about how gays and lesbians refer to and introduce themselves in a variety of social situations.

Practical Joke

by Murray Edwards

It was the era when swallowing goldfish and sitting atop flagpoles made you a big man on campus. At the height of the Depression, college students struggled to pay for their education and living expenses, leaving little additional cash for extracurricular entertainment.  Ever resourceful, the young men and women, who later gained fame as “The Greatest Generation,” developed their own inexpensive diversions - dancing in all-night marathons, listening to network radio shows, and playing harmless pranks on one another. 

My father, Weldon Edwards, and his best friend, Les Stephenson, learned to swallow goldfish at McMurry College, a tiny Methodist school in West Texas.  As famous as that made them around campus, they acquired an even bigger name by mastering the art of the practical joke.  Honing their skills on naïve freshmen and should-have-known-better sophomores, these aw-shucks farm boys tested the patience of college faculty and administrators, themselves the victims of periodic tomfoolery.  

On one occasion, Weldon and Les borrowed a Holstein cow from a local dairy farmer and stashed her in the backyard of a friend’s house near campus.  Around midnight, they haltered the compliant bovine and sneaked her into the darkened Administration Building, leading her up the columned stairs and into the college president’s office.  When the straight-laced administrator opened his oak-paneled door the next morning, he was greeted by a cud-chewing Holstein heeding nature’s call on the polished marble floor.  Having a good idea who was responsible for the stunt, the president immediately summoned the two farm boys into his office.  Without admitting their roles in the caper, they helped clean up the mess and led the Holstein back down the stairs.

Employing animals in an altogether different fashion, incoming freshmen were targets for the pair’s signature stunt.  Les, the set-up man, warned newly arriving students about the “crazy” senior living upstairs in the dormitory.  It was possible the upperclassman had contracted rabies and hydrophobia as the result of a recent skunk bite.  Should there be an incident, Les gravely noted, it would be every man for himself.  Later in the week, Weldon appeared on the freshmen floor of the dormitory dressed only in his undershorts, with toothpaste foaming from his mouth.  Yelling gibberish and brandishing a starter’s pistol he liberated from the track team, the “rabid” senior chased the gullible underclassmen down the hallways and out the front door.  Presumably, most of them returned to finish the semester.

Female students also endured their fair share of collegiate high jinks.  The farm boys purchased a damaged coffin from a local undertaker and stashed their pine box in the trunk of Les’ car.  Double dating with two wide-eyed and unsuspecting freshmen, Weldon and Les began the evening by acting the part of sophisticated seniors promising to show the girls around town.  Gradually, the boys’ All-American demeanor changed into something much more sinister.  Over the course of the night, they talked cryptically of “needing to dispose of a problem” and “finding a suitable location.”  Eventually parking on a secluded country road, Weldon and Les excused themselves to the back of the car, where they dramatically unloaded the coffin and dumped it into the roadside ditch.  When the terrified coeds demanded an explanation, the pair reluctantly admitted they worked for gangsters and were disposing of “someone who had double-crossed the boss.”  It’s a safe guess the girls refused a second date with the pseudo hit men.

Somehow amidst the jokes the pair completed  their educations, and after graduating with a degree in education, Les became the superintendent of a small country school in Denton Valley, an unincorporated settlement about twenty miles southeast of Abilene.  Weldon returned to his family’s ranch, also near Denton Valley, and assumed the life of a college-educated rancher, an unusual credential for those days.  Although the two remained close friends, their girthy repertoire of practical jokes slimmed down to occasional stunts involving unsuspecting church friends and ranch hands.

In January of 1941, with the country shuffling and mobilizing for war, the Denton Valley School found itself in need of a new English teacher.  In those last painful days of the Great Depression, as jobs remained scarce, the local school board limited teacher employment to “heads of households,” defined as  unmarried women or married men.  According to the unenlightened policy of that time, if a single woman chose to marry, her employment immediately terminated in favor of someone deemed “more necessitous” of the position. 

As superintendent, Les asked Weldon to accompany him to interview teacher candidates at Howard Payne College, a small liberal arts school about 60 miles away in Brownwood.  Aside from being Les’s best friend, Weldon’s qualifications as an interviewer aren’t entirely clear.  He wasn’t a school board member or an administrator, and his expertise extended to Herefords, not Shakespeare.   

In respecting the Denton Valley School Board’s policy, the two college buddies exclusively interviewed unmarried female graduates, with Les introducing Weldon as his “special advisor.”  One English major in particular caught the attention of both men—Dorothy Jean Soules, an attractive, enthusiastic nineteen-year-old senior from a small community in Central Texas.  Decades later, she would remember the handsome interviewers, only five years older than herself, seemed less interested in her transcript and resume, and more focused on how well she filled out her sweater and skirt. 

After consulting with his special advisor, Les offered Miss Soules the teaching position on the spot.  Her employment was subject to the approval of the school board, he explained, and would require a contract provision that should she marry, her job would immediately terminate. 

Before accepting his offer, the senior coed questioned Les about the school, her duties, and responsibilities.  Worried that she might seem inconsiderate by leaving Weldon out of the conversation, she asked whether there would be a room or an apartment to rent somewhere in town. 

The cowboy-turned-education-expert immediately suggested the president of the school board and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Barton.  They boarded teachers on occasion and, coincidentally, lived directly across the road from his family’s ranch.  Trying his best not to sound too eager, he offered to introduce Miss Soules to his neighbors.  Hesitating for a moment, he added that Denton Valley was not really a town, since it no longer had a post office, but was more of a settlement.  Weldon hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed in living in a rural area.  

The prospective teacher knew all about country life, she said, from growing up on a ranch and graduating from a school about the size of Denton Valley.  Unfortunately, she didn’t own an automobile and would need transportation to and from work.  Would she be able to ride the school bus? 

After receiving a positive response regarding her transportation, and with no other job prospects in sight, the young lady accepted Les’ offer of employment.  After all, a paycheck was a paycheck.

A week later, even though she’d never seen her new school, Dorothy Jean Soules packed her bags and moved to West Texas.  Delivered by her parents to the intersection of two lonesome gravel roads, and spotting the neglected, weather-beaten signpost that read “Denton Valley,” she surely must have second-guessed her career decision.  Besides the cream-colored flagstone school, then comprised of only eleven grades, the settlement consisted of an exhausted cotton gin; two paint-peeled, clap-boarded churches; a long-abandoned blacksmith shop, and a barn-like country store which sold fresh eggs, ammunition, and gasoline.  Sadly, the most attractive feature of Denton Valley seemed to be its cemetery, a postcard-worthy patch of land with native post-oak trees randomly interspersed among the uncrowded rows of tombstones.

After the new teacher settled into the Barton family’s spare bedroom, Les and Weldon immediately competed for her attention.  Both quickly decided against swallowing goldfish or performing other stunts to impress her, because unlike the flighty freshmen of their college days, this woman was different—confident and poised, and although possessing a playful sense of humor, she displayed little regard for sophomoric pranks. 

Despite being only a few years older than most of her charges, Miss Soules demanded hard work and exceptional performance.  She encouraged the students to broaden their horizons and consider careers that seemed beyond reach.  Decades later, these same students—now doctors, lawyers, and prominent business people—would continue to communicate with their favorite teacher, often commenting on her influence on their lives.

During the day at school, Les pressed his advantage of working with the new teacher, but Weldon’s proximity to her boarding house gave him the upper hand in the evenings.  The courting rivalry, always good-natured, continued throughout early 1941, with the young men agreeing that no matter who won her heart, they would remain close friends.  Both admitted it would be a difficult promise to keep. 

Gradually, the young teacher’s affections favored Weldon; but since Les employed her, she hesitated to suggest he was losing the battle, for fear he would not extend her contract. 

Just before the end of the spring semester, the superintendent gathered all the teachers into the school lunchroom and presented them with renewal contracts for the 1941-42 school term.  Consistent with prior agreements, it retained the prejudicial clause regarding teachers remaining single.  On April 23, 1941, Miss Soules signed her contract, which was approved and counter-signed by the school board president, Mr. Barton, as well as her superintendent, Les. 



Dorothy Jean and Weldon Edwards



Then, two days later and barely four months after arriving in Denton Valley, Miss Soules and Weldon eloped to Breckenridge, some 60 miles away, in what must have been the most dangerous and exhilarating weekend of their lives.  Secretly married by the justice of the peace, they kept their nuptials quiet until the end of the school year.  Dorothy Jean continued to work for the superintendent and live in the school board president’s spare room, as if nothing had happened, but rendezvousing with Weldon whenever possible.  Les must have wondered why his favorite teacher’s affections toward him suddenly cooled and why she was no longer available for courting.

After the school term ended, the newlyweds revealed their marriage to the flabbergasted superintendent.  Hoping Les would honor their commitment to remain buddies, Weldon explained it as a “practical” joke—practical in the sense that Les would have been forced to fire his best friend’s bride had he known the facts.  Les, heartbroken over losing out to Weldon, was nevertheless a good sport and wished the couple well.  He immediately set about recruiting a replacement English teacher—this time without his special advisor.

That fall, Dorothy Jean managed to secure a position at Eula, another country school nearby, but one without the antiquated requirement of teachers having to be the “head of the household.”  In time, she would retire from education to concentrate on raising three sons, including this writer, and helping Weldon on their cattle ranch.  Eventually, the community of Denton Valley, as well as its school, would dissolve into a distant but pleasant memory, memorialized only by a roadside marker at the picturesque country cemetery.

Pearl Harbor would change the Greatest Generation’s focus from sitting atop flagpoles and swallowing goldfish to more weighty matters—building thousands of bombers and tanks, retaking the shores of Normandy, and defending obscure Pacific islands. 

Shortly after the United States declared war, Les left Denton Valley for service to his country.  After the war ended, he settled in Dallas and pursued a career in the natural gas business.  He found and married a love of his own, but continued his special relationship with Weldon and Dorothy Jean for the next 60 years.  Maintaining an active friendship through those years, the now-mature farm boys continued to play jokes on their friends, and occasionally, even their wives.  But none would ever surpass the “practical” joke Weldon and Dorothy Jean played on Les in the spring of 1941.

Murray Edwards pretends to be an agricultural commodity trader when he's not pretending to be a West Texas rancher.  His first book of short fiction, Looking for Lucy Gilligan, won a silver quill award and was named one of the ten best Texas books for 2009.

Night Mare

by Kimberly Hamilton

In the interval between wakefulness and sleep, the lavishly embellished animals of my youth go round and round. They are proud and perfect and pristine, treasured for their inspired detail and spirit. There are real animals in my life, but it is the intricate counterfeits that animate my dreams. The ghosts of these charlatans leap and bow before me, begging me to set them free.

The carousel animals haunt me because I know them. When they began their procession through my childhood home, I had known no other animals. My father, intolerant to the messes that came with typical household pets, had declared a moratorium on all things beast before I’d even existed. That is, until he discovered the carousel horse.

As the story goes, he was driving home from work one rainy evening when he stopped to offer assistance to a broken-down tractor-trailer. Tucked beneath a blanket of blue tarps, he saw a tangle of knobby limbs, thick necks, and flowing manes. And thus, the parade began—my father the grand marshal, and the truck driver, a staggeringly talented carver named Daniel, bringing up the rear.

Overnight, our formerly furless home became a menagerie. Elaborately ornamented horses, camels, pigs, giraffes, and even an ostrich or two gilded every room. There was a fierce beauty and a quiet dignity to the creatures; their enviable qualities enchanted the hordes of guests who came to see, and often to buy. With the exception of a few special pieces, the carousel figures came and went.

The house evolved. What had once been a simple roof overhead was now a cross between a ghoulish zoo and a museum. Glassy, unseeing eyes. Legs bent in motion, carrying lean bodies to nowhere. Gaping mouths, gasping for breaths that never came.

They were everything my father wanted out of his animals—beauty and perfection and rigid obedience. They could be repositioned. Admired. Proudly purchased. Easily sold. And as they took up residence in every room in our home, so, too, did my dad’s expectations.  
     

When I turned five, the loft was converted into my very own room, the decorative scheme inspired by a white horse with a deep pink ribbon flowing from its sinewy neck. No one seemed to notice how that pink ribbon angrily clashed with the blood-red shag carpeting.

Every night, my father would slowly climb the stairs to my loft. As horse with the pink ribbons looked on with unseeing eyes, my father would scrutinize the sanguine floors and the furniture and the closets for anything out of place. No matter how hard I would try, I was never quite as immaculate, as utopian, as that horse. And there, throughout my childhood, she stood. The sterile sentinel.
  

So many years from horses and blood beneath my feet and daddy’s expectations, I am just a dream away from a time when I wished so desperately to be another carousel in his collection. I think, in truth, he wished it too.

Some nights, I allow myself to look closely at those carefully crafted forgeries, and I see my own wild desperation mirrored in their icy eyes. They long to break free of the fetters of familial expectations, and I long to help them. But who am I to lead this parade of wooden souls, I wonder, as I neatly fold my clothes into the drawer and check to see, before I close my eyes, that everything is in its place.

Kimberly Hamilton lives in the beautiful Gunnison Valley of Colorado. When her dogs and husband aren’t vying for her attention (food), she does laundry. And writes, from time to time.  She is a student in the mainstream and genre fiction graduate program at Western State College.

Handguns and Healing:

After twelve years and one bullet to the heart, a friendship attempts renewal

by Jona Jacobson

         As there are guns for making war, guns for keeping peace, and guns for unleashing havoc, there are friends with whom you are frequently at war, friends with whom life is peaceful, and friends who join you for a drive to a reservoir in the dark predawn hours of a high school day, sunroof open and cigarettes blazing.

         For a long while I knew little of such distinctions and complexities.  I had few friends. I was gloomy, put myself down often, and glared my way through whole days to keep others at bay.  Through my Junior and Senior High school years, I practiced that glare in the mirror. Few had heard of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) in the 1980s, so the only explanation I could come up with for why I was so terrified of people was that I was a misfit and unworthy of friendship. So I decided, as the teen mind is so uniquely qualified to do, that it would be easier if I scared people away proactively.

         But in high school, one person saw through my glare and befriended me. We met our sophomore year. Quickly we became close friends: I was fat, she was slightly plump and we bonded over talks on the front steps of Poky High. Discussions of our fat oozing out to fill cracks in the cement created unification as only two thick girls can achieve. She meant the world to me—which in later years I realized was an unfair position to put someone in—and I happily embraced her as a sister. Neither of us knew I had SAD. I only knew I needed her. She only knew I clung to her like a drunk grasps a bottle.

         Over the next few years she lost weight and gained a social life while I clung desperately to a friendship I could feel slipping away. She’d have unsafe sex with someone I disapproved of and my anger resulted in months of not talking. Possessive? A bit. Then we’d start talking again, slipping smoothly back into our routine: me at her house with her family, or in her bedroom, sitting in the open window even in the freezing winter months, smoking. We’d talk.  We’d laugh.

         We’d go to parties. But my social anxiety would rear up and I’d prop in a corner, glaring, while she laughed and mingled. I hated myself for going. I hated her for being able to do what I could not. I suspect she hated me. Friendship with me cost too much.

         At Idaho State University this pattern of hanging out and not talking would continue for a few years. Then, years later, over one summer break, the month of our ten-year high school reunion, she headed off for vacation with her husband. The day before she left she told me, “I’ll call when we get back.” This may have been her way of communicating the Hollywood-esque blow-off: “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

         In the meantime, I went to Seattle for my own mini-vacation. A terrible thing happened there that left me bruised and broken. I wanted nothing more than to cry on the shoulder of the friend I had counted on for so long. When we were both back in Pocatello, however, instead of a friendly shoulder, I had the door to her house closed in my face by her husband with a gruff, “She’s not home.” A cold shoulder reception if ever there was one.

         Silence reigned. I am not proud to admit I called repeatedly and I stopped by repeatedly and I left copious numbers of notes. I was desperate and I stopped just shy of stalking her. Or not, I suppose. Over the next few years of not knowing what had happened, I did what came naturally: I blamed myself. And what blame is complete without punishment? So I cut myself with scalpels and knives and bits of broken mirror. I burned myself with curling irons and sugar caramelized on the stove top.

         The more I tried to cling to remnants of our friendship, I suppose the more she may have backed into her home and into the corners of her life, hoping I would go away. Physically, I am intimidating to many, though I never thought I was to her. Perhaps I was wrong. Clearly, I’ve been mistaken about a number of things. Perhaps with each letter she received, she felt a chill of foreboding.

         What could drive a friend to hound another friend so? Desperation. But why? Days before I stood in her entryway and had the door and the friendship shut on me, I was bent over a car on a dark quiet street near Volunteer park in Seattle and raped. And when I came home, I needed my friend.

         I survived. Both the rape and the loss of friendship. But the two events became entwined. No longer can I think of one without thinking of the other. And the blame I heaped on myself for both situations was nearly intolerable.

         Eventually I stopped. Stopped the stalking, stopped the self-blame and the punishment. I went so far as to major in anything but English (writing having been my chosen path as a teen), because she was first a student then a lecturer in the English Department. I wandered from Occupational Therapy to Sociology to Art to Accounting. And the years passed on.

         More years passed, some twelve years since that day I knocked on the door looking for support. And then I was shot.

         My 17-year-old nephew stood beside me in my mother’s home on what would have been my parents’ 50th Anniversary had my father not died four months earlier. He was eager to look at his grandfather’s handguns. I began checking the weapons for ammunition; something I ought to have done already. But with dinner to be cooked and a symphony to attend after, I was rushed and didn’t feel I had a few minutes to spare.

         He watched me clear a gun, and picked one up in imitation. When he removed the magazine, I said, “Better be careful, in case Gramps left a round chambered.”

         He remembers silence. It’s possible speech formed in my mind, but the two puffs of air that hit me prevented it from passing my lips. Instead, I fell back and my world became a thing of fuzzy cold and distant words. Words like, “You’ve been shot!” and “Does she have a Living will?” And cold like you can not believe unless you have been “in extremis”—near death.

         Then silence. Just as I had not heard the gunshot that rang out in a small room, I stopped hearing the doctors and nurses and family members present in the Critical Care Unit. Silence replaced the disjointed words as shadows moved in the periphery. Silence that reminded me of the silent streets I walked after I was raped. When I pushed myself off the hood of the car I’d been bent over and I walked back to where I’d been staying, not a single dog barked. No tires crunched stones on pavement. No birds tweeted. No cats in romantic interlude yowled. Not even the wind whispered through the myriad drooping rhododendrons and bloom-less magnolias lining the sidewalks I walked without my booted feet making any sound. Silence and cold in Seattle. Silence and cold in the hospital. And a few ghosts wandering about in the shadows.

         The first words to come from the silent darkness were two days later, “I’m going to remove this tube now.”

         And I was alive again.

         Seven days after my fortieth birthday, a .38 hollow point entered my body and split, passing through my left lung. A fragment stayed there, one in my liver, two in my myocardium and the largest plowed in to settle in my interatrial septum. A gun misfiring led to miraculous events: the cross-top hollow point didn’t mushroom out as it should have; the bullet fragmented prior to entering my heart (which wouldn’t have survived a whole or exploding missile); and a one-time friend returned to my life.

         Out of the depths of darkness that was two days of drug induced amnesia, I awoke to the beeps and bright lights of a Critical Care Unit. I was browsing Facebook in a slight morphine and freshly-infused blood fog, surprised to read a message from my former friend, who wrote, “Good god, woman--I'm astonished by the grit that allows you to (1) survive a bullet wound) and (2) take a self portrait IN THE ICU and post it on FB—you're an Internet superhero.”

         She added, “Scary rumors were flying Friday night--I'm glad, very glad, you're still among the living.” She asked if she could visit.

         Could she come visit? I was in shock, not just from the five bullet fragments lodged in three of my major organs, but from the message and its apparent import. Three fragments in my heart, and there I was in a hospital bed, getting what felt like another shot to the heart. I couldn’t tell if this one was good or bad.  A cardiologist tells me, “The heart doesn’t feel pain.” But if you believe you’ve lost a friend, the hurt is real enough.

         Aside from a few passing greetings at the local coffee shop (“Jona,” from her; “Morning,” from me) since I returned to Idaho in January 2009, we haven’t spoken much for a dozen years.

         My shooting made top spot on TV news and front page headlines, but perhaps a mutual friend told her.  Despite my years of thinking about this potential reunion with prepared responses such as, “Why don’t you continue to do what you do best and leave me alone,” I typed, “Yes” and hit send.

The next day she stood beside my bed with latte in hand and a mutual friend in tow (could she not face me alone?), saying, “We’ve only just started talking again and you nearly die on me.” We spoke only a few minutes because, well, I was recovering from a gunshot wound and hadn’t even sat up on my own yet. We hugged awkwardly when I was too tired to visit longer.

When she left I knew we’d be on shaky ground—and indeed since then our conversations have been stiff and cumbersome—but I was thankful for surviving the bullet that entered my heart, giving me another chance at friendship. One not tainted by clinging neediness.

         A few days more passed and I received another Facebook message, this one accompanied by a friend request. In the message she basically said friending me would be fair, because then I’d have as much access to information about her as she had to me (presumably through mutual acquaintances) but if I didn’t want to friend her, that was okay too. She wouldn’t be hurt. She’s a tough cookie, this one. That, or she just didn’t care. But then, why initiate contact after all these years?

         Although the pain of the loss of her friendship had faded, it was like a deep bruise that, if I moved just so, would flare up and hurt again. Hoping this would mend the hurt, hoping this would make the rape not have happened, and despite my fear that it would only make things worse, I hit “friend.”

         That was in April of 2009. We got together once in September of the same year. Other than that, our interactions have been limited to Facebook comments and occasional in-passing greetings at the coffee shop. I invited her to a few functions—not too many, I didn’t want her to feel suffocated by me or my friendship. Friendship should not be something one feels is a burden or feels obligated to attend to. So I didn’t press.

         Over the last several months, however, I admitted to myself that with every status update or comment she made on a mutual friend’s wall, but not on my own, I hurt. Each icon and “like” eroded my self worth just a teensy bit and pained me slightly more than the last. Finally the realization came that Facebook would not be the place our friendship might have a chance.

         Why did I react in such a hurt manner to this common Facebook activity? With each Facebook post the self-blame returned: My fault I was raped. My fault I lost my friend. My fault. Is it fair to be angry with her because I was raped? No.

         Is it fair to be cut off from a friendship without even a “Go Away!”? No. The rapist’s parting words  were cruel. My friend’s lack of parting words, though, somehow cut more deeply. In a moment of determination, I did what in real life is so hard to do, but on Facebook, so easy. I defriended her.

         Then she started a knitting group. She sent me a message wondering if I’d defreinded her because she’d noticed she couldn’t include me directly on the invite list, and if I didn’t mind her prying, “Why?” She wondered if she’d done something to hurt me—unintentional as it may be—because she often felt she was hurting me. She commented that our conversations, short and infrequent as they were, always seemed off kilter.

         Through Facebook messaging I explained that I felt I was walking on eggshells whenever I saw her, not knowing if it was okay to engage her in conversation or if the standard greeting was the maximum I should employ. As gently and unobtrusively as I am capable of doing, I intimated that perhaps knowing what I’d done—or what she thought I’d done, years ago would help our interactions now.

         I had defriended with hope. Within the social, spatial, and temporal confines (boundaries set by her, for her comfort) of a knitting group, we spent one evening together.  Other attendees were shocked to discover we’d known one another well over thirty years. She sat facing forward, I sat slightly twisted away from her—partly to protect myself, partly as an attempt to keep from crowding her. I’d done enough crowding over the years. But I’ve also done enough evasion.

         Within days of this knitting group meeting came a message in response to my delicate probing into what had happened fourteen years ago, my inquiry about what may have brought an end to our friendship. She was not ready, she wrote, to delve into the past. In fact, and in no uncertain terms, I was told that day would probably not come. Ever. Furthermore, Facebook, she wrote, was not the place to discuss such issues. Not that she could think of a place or time such things should or could be discussed. But, she wrote, the relative safe parameters of the knitting group, surrounded by several intelligent women knitting, would be the best I could hope for, as far as interacting with her might go.

         Intentionally or not, she hurt my feelings; I’d known it would happen. Heartache had prepared me.  But I am not a girl practicing my glare in the mirror anymore.  Friendship is more complicated than Facebook allows and defriending isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Perhaps if we can get past this awkwardness, a knitting group filled with ‘neutral’ knitters will indeed be a better place to (re)start.

A substitute teacher in Blackfoot, Idaho, Jona is known at one school as "Avatar" and at another as "The Teacher Formerly Known to Have Tattoos." Due to one parental protest ("She'll recruit our children into tattooed legions!") she has to cover up from head to toe and now teaches in "WhiteFace." When she isn't dealing with cosmetics or children, Jona lives with her NonHusband of fifteen years, their two cats, and hordes of tree-eating elk and deer.