ISSUES | fall 1981

He had to turn wide to avoid hitting the large empty cardboard box they’d left in the driveway. Marsha’s new refrigerator must have been delivered, which meant that her latest adventure in redecoration was nearly complete.

His dog had bitten a child. It was very late in the afternoon when Ted Landy stepped into the kitchen, closed the back door, and took off his gloves. “I’ve seen the boy,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”

The first dead dog of the day was a shepherd that had been given a nosebleed by the car that knocked it into the weeds. The breed of the next one, thirty miles or so further on, was impossible to determine; it had been run over so often that it was flat and dry as a pelt.

When I was six I loved my father passionately; hearts flew, as they say, whenever I saw him, and we were as chaste as teenage lovers in a forties movie. At six p.m. he veered to the curb in his sky-blue Ford roadster: he wore a green bow-tie; he stepped off the running board with a heart shaped box of chocolate kisses and a bunch of violets in his hand; he gave them to me.

With a name like Emory he should never have left the South. Growing up in Mobile had almost been enough. The summer he was seventeen he decided to see it all before he left it.

Lieberman had his eyes on his chicken salad and so at first didn’t see the woman. She stopped short at his table and stood, swaying a little this way and that, looking like a person who had just bumped into something and is wondering if she hurt herself. To the people at the next table it was clear what she’d bumped into was Lieberman.

One way to see it. Flashing before his eyes.

It is early when we go into my room, seven maybe, or eight. In February it’s already dark. I have turned the lights off in the kitchen, the front room. China Blue is standing by my bed, dropping his shoes.

That summer, he did not know–until he drove up to the summer house on the island and there was no one to come to the door and embrace and welcome him, no old man to surprise, first with the bark of his dog, Pal, then the scurrying of Shasta and the Whore of Babylon and the half-dozen other cats, no old man to bend over the kitchen table, his crippled fingers around the bowl he drank tea from, who would turn his quivering albino eyes up and squint, “Is it you? You?” with the abrupt cough of his laughter and the joyful cackle in his throat–no, he did not know that it would be the summer of his pursuit.

I had to move into town when Augie died of the heart attack. Couldn’t keep that house up on the hill all by myself and with Dade and Bobby grown and gone their separate ways.

At fourteen, Sebastion Blessing has already decided to be a porno movie maker when he grows up. But he doesn’t tell people that. Instead, he tells them he would like to play bassoon in the philharmonic orchestra.

For weeks, it seemed–since her thirtieth birthday–the crows had been noisy around the house. Karen watched them through the kitchen windows after Michael left for the office.

Kill me, man, you shitting?
Whistler leaves his desk and sits near Chan Lai Washington. It is late in an August afternoon, and both of the boys are being kept after their 8th grad summer school class because of a prank, but now the prospect of big business temporarily cuts through the humid tedium.

A thick mist obscures the road, and there is a black sedan with the headlights burning. It is impossible to tell the time of day: whether it is afternoon or evening or if the night has only just surrendered to the dawn. The road is straight and flat and with only two lanes. The heavy fog hides billboards, even utility poles and the other road marks that might give the car’s occupants a sense of motion. Only the regular clump-clump of the car’s tires over the pavement divisions suggests they are going somewhere.

It’s strange, the things you find yourself doing. Right now I’m a spotter for a repossessor. I drive through the streets at three or four in the morning, and when I spot a car that’s on my order list I call it in on my two-way radio. Then in minute the pros come along in the van. One of them breaks in while the other one opens the back of the van and puts down a metal ramp. They drive the car up the ramp. They pull the ramp in. They pull the doors shut behind them. And they drive away. The whole thing takes less than two minutes.