test

by test

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  Night has come wholly on when Joe walks in, the Buick left idling in the parking lot, headlights on high beam and thrown directly into the doorway behind

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  hima shadow just a step ahead of his own dustall darkness with a silver skin. He stumbles in, he hesitates. To the bar then, and back with arms full of beer, straight to the table where Luster and Crawford are squandering their lives, he moves without steps. "Hello, lovers," he says and sits and spreads the beers around, and some cash falls and lies heavily on the table like the damp heat.

  Luster looks at Crawford and says, "It's Jesus."

  Crawford says, "He's the savior all right, returned at last."

  They both look across at Joe. His face says ha ha, but his mouth is saying something else. Money. An obscene offer.

  "He wants the farm," Crawford says as if the music might have deafened Luster.

  "I heard him," she says. "What about the cattle?"

  And Crawford turns back to Joe. "What about the cattle?"

  "All of it," Joe says, this time speaking directly to Luster.

  "We don't own it," she says. "We owe it all to the bank, and then some." Suddenly she wishes it weren't gone. She sees the farm again through these new eyesraw with possibility, raw like it was when she and Crawford moved in here eight, nine years ago, anchored their lives to this piece of earth.

  "I know," Joe says, "I've been to the courthouse. And the bank." He nods to Crawford.

  She looks at Crawford. His face is long and eroded, like every inch of Mississippi.

  Next week is banging at the door, and the saxophone keeps up its battered tune.

  "That's not enough," Crawford says. "You pay off the bank and we're still busted." Tonk and Odelia dance lazily around them like evidence of desirethe game of need and want.

  Joe reaches into his jacket and pulls out a wad of money the size of a small cabbage. Crawford thinks of a nightmare he has almost every night but has never told anyone: thousands of hungry hogs line up at an endless trough and Crawford pours an endless stream of slop from a bucket. For a moment he is frightened. Here is the money, like evidence.

  "We need a ride," Luster says. Something has gone wrong here. She repeats the word "need" to herself, silently. She straightens up and looks pretty. She notices her skin against her clothes. The heat is her friend, something she can touch privately. Crawford is her friend, too. This man across the table has happened to them like a tattoo happens: in an hour their lives have changed.

  Crawford follows Joe out the door and into the parking lot, and from where she sits Luster watches their stretched and drunken shadows play in and out of the headlight beam projected through the doorway and against the far wall of the Bull. Tonk and Odelia move their smaller shadows among these, gently like the shadows of small trees.

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  Joe pulls one suitcase from the trunk. He unfolds a quitclaim deed onto the hood of the car. "Here it is," he says.

  When they come back in, Crawford says, "Even the dipstick's broken on that car." He bends forward like a shy dog.

  Luster says, "Let's go, baby," and she gathers up the cabbage wad of money. She has counted, something over eleven hundred dollars. She doesn't look at Joe. Soon she won't look back at all; she tells herself this story A kiss for Odelia. In this moment she wishes it was cabbage leaves she was folding into her pocket.

  Tonk inherits the pickup truck. One night on the slope of the hill before the Bull, a piston will drop down through its oil pan and the truck will stop, resolute and quiet. Tonk will clutch it and roll down into the borrow pit, and there it will rust to nothing. Tonk, too, will remain here, until he falls asleep and Odelia's song can no longer raise him. Luster feels drunken and crazy.

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  Outside, the night has swallowed itself. The Buick rumbles south toward the Gulf of Mexico with deceptive speed, like a large cow. Just a short ways across the country, the widow, Maria, comes to her window, her face as disorganized as the face of a young child awakened suddenly in the middle of the night. For the moment, her whole existence is framed in her window, her self distilled into a single beam of light spilling now out into the barnyard, where her chickens chuckle from their roost in the mimosa tree, the barren yard around them and the hot night spinning with insects. The smell of the seared dog is in the air. Spoons that she has suspended by threads hang in front of the window, and these turn slowly in the air, reflecting but not mirroring. She stares at the window, but not through it. No one watches her.

  She wears a heavy winter blanket around her shoulders, Indian-style, the way a child might play dress-up with a tablecloth or an old fur coat. The blanket is pinned at the neck with a heavy, jeweled broach. She has her hands over her ears now, her mouth is open, her eyes wide and blank. If she sees anything, she sees only the window's reflection of her kitchen and her startling self. When she turns away the blanket trails behind her across the kitchen floor.

  At the far side of the kitchen she reaches up to open the gray circuit box mounted on the wall. She studies the breakers for several minutes, patting the side of her neck, and she reaches up and begins flicking switches until there is no light in the house.

  She dials a number on the phone.

  She waits in the dark. The silence and the darkness fuse. She has unpinned the blanket from around her neck and now she stands naked in the thick darkness, feeling for the finger holes in the phone dial. Even the silver spoons hanging in the windows are invisible in the darkness.

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  She dials another long string of numbers.

  "Betty," she says in a high, child's voice, "the most awful thing. The power is out. I don't know what to do, sweetheart. All the lights are out."

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  Luster watches the hills roll and fade past the open window of the Buicklike the humped shadows of large, gentle dogs; like the warm ocean miles ahead, licking toward her as if to wake her, as if to lift her onto its fat, rolling belly. Crawford imagines the ocean, too, imagines unanchoring himself and floating out. He's been to the barrier islands several miles out beyond the beachesyears ago, on a strange fishing tripand he remembers the brilliant green water that moved into and out of the shell lagoons along the outer coast. He's not afraid of the water in the daylight. Maybe tomorrow they'll spend some of the wad of cash to boat out to the islands. Crawford can see the time ahead of him, clearly and broadly as if it were lying beneath that clear waterthe peaceful monotony of the ocean floor. In time he will be better, he thinks.

  Miles of the earth run under them. They have crossed the river, and Crawford is thinking about their table in the Bull. Their old friends have begun to lean toward the table where they were sitting drinking their beers a few minutes ago. The small empty space they left will close and heal. Crawford speaks quietly into the song of the Buick, something that sounds to Luster like "Hogs lapping at the trough of sorrow."

  No, maybe he said "Hogs laughing . . ." Luster looks across at him; his face points into the nightthe smiling face of the man who kills the cows. More of the road runs under them. She watches him. First chance she gets she will put back a hundred, maybe two, for herself.

  She wants the feel of the soft, steady earth, but the land passes away, and Luster feels herself adrift again in the dark dream-water. She and Crawford together, surrounded but not yet drowning. Union and motion. The hot, wet wind blasts against them, but they hold to the night like shadows. What day is it? she wonders.

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  Howard in the Roses

  by Dev Hathaway

  In the Glow of the Bug Light

  An August night and stars are falling on Alabama, in a song on the high-pitched patio radio, scratchy like an old 45, grating with the deep-fried static of the poolside bug light. Maybe one true shooting star razorcuts the sky over the backyard tree line, then a moon grows round and whiterhyming with bright, and right, all my might. Meanwh
ile beetles dive-bomb the bug light's ultrablue glow, their resistance no match for voluptuous voltage. One bug then another spirals in, turns brilliant, is nerve-wracking, arc welded, and explodes, dropping to the poolside, bouncing twice.

  And there, rising from blue-cast waters, are the two lovers we've imagined. Huffing and spewing. He, then she. Don't they look like a fresh god and goddess, a baby Adam and Eve, like newborns to each other anyway, as lovers briefly do.

  Briefly then, as he scratches on the first try, hoists himself pushup style, stubs his hip on the edge of the pool, and falls back with a seal slap. And she, rising, oh clearly paunchy in her blue-black two-piece, grips the shaky aluminum ladder as though it were a walker and stares at her first firm step, at the popcorn corpses of beetles sprinkled on wet concrete.

  How exhausted she appears, repulsed, irritatedsee the corner of her lip line lengthenhow doggedly refreshed, pulling her short hair back. She pushes away from the ladder, slings herself forward with a heel thump and a crunch, and gives revulsion her full, breaking voice. "Jesus H. Christ, Howard."

  Hopping mad, she's safely reached the lawn, and wipes her foot on the shining grass. "Why in God's green earth did your mother buy that contraption?"

  No answer With all his might, our Howard kicks himself up once more, arms locked straight, still unable to swing a haunch over the poolside. He gazes at his love, his eyelids drooping like a man with diabetes, elbows giving way, and slops back into the pool.

  She sighs, looking away, hugging herself inconsolably.

  The moon has withdrawn a little to the side. The song concludes. The bug

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  light glows seductively on, like an errant runway marker; crackles again, like a drive-in speaker on the fritz.

  Howard in the Roses

  All the love shit. But Howard's heart is strong as a dumpster. Hear the whining grind of the forklift truck, the slam-bam. He can take it.

  He's eaten love's dust. He's been sandblasted by good-byes. It sure stings, he says, but it leaves you clean as hell.

  Howard's seen it all. The rosebud rising darker than lipstick from the tube, smooth and round as a candy kiss. He's been bitten before.

  He told this woman he loved, everything. Dumped out love's steamer trunk right there in her kitchen. The burgers were crackling. She stepped back, reaching behind her for something on the counter.

  He knows about long distance, too, and why the heart grows fonder, on the other side of the fence. When his old lady hit the road, she wrote she loved him with all her heart. Sure that made him smile, it was a first.

  His great-aunt, actually, was very first, and smothered him in her rose perfume. She hugged him tight, in her own image. Oh you're my Howard. It's a wonder he has capacities.

  He has this dream now. The lovers kiss madly then stand apart flustered as scaredy-cats. They start kidding themselves in baby talk.

  In another dream they get good and sore slip-sliding. Strictly last ditch. So they take off their skins like scuba suits, dropping them in the burning sand. Who are you? And who are you?

  Then the jeweler squints through his lens, reading inside the ring. This is you, right? Was, says Howard, and how about my forty bucks.

  In the last dream they're standing apart in their blank, fluorescent bodies, waving bye-bye. Now she lets him have it with all her heart. Sure it stings, but it leaves him clean as hell.

  Saint Howard and the Alligator

  Howard, Howard, he's our man. If he can't do it, nobody can. Sooner or later, boys and girls, he'll fall for everybody. Or at very least come to the rescue. Just you wait, oh best beloved.

  And ye who travail and are heavily parched by love's departures, here's your boy. He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake. That's him at the desert comfort station, his canteen full to the lips with raw honey.

  Moreover, this lap cat, this old sympathy card, wrote the book on country

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  and western warning signs. He's seen the writing on the wall himself: saintliness is next to antsiness, dear husband, dear ex.

  And isn't it so. Five times now he's thrown himself, spread-eagle, on the live grenade of relationship. Five times saved an entire company, and lived to tell. You could say our boy has a calling.

  And he can find an alligator, oh cheating heart, in almost any septic system, one with grenade-like skin, a familiar and friend-like grin. He's been there, he says, he can tell a story or two. You know how the elephant child got his nose, and Pinocchio his.

  Is your house on fire, ladybug? Quick, more honey. Poor alligatorhere's molasses for you. And a baby blanket for your sugar shock, dear hearts.

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  What Comes Next

  by Laura Hendrie

  Sarah is waiting in her car at the drive-up bank, and when she looks up she sees an Indian in her side view mirror He is crossing the parking lot in a slackarmed, sideways sort of way, as if he has traveled a long way on foot, or as if he has been sleeping on the ground and woken up not knowing where he is, or as if he's expecting something to jump out of her trunk. He is coming, she realizes quite suddenly, towards her As she puts down the checkbook, he slides between the drive-up machine and her car and turns to face her, resting his hands on the bottom of her window. ''My truck ran out of gas," he says. "I need to borrow a gas can."

  It does not sound like a question. She has an impression of gray hair, braided, froggy lips, and a ruined face. He is wearing an oversized blue denim jacket that looks new and a brown plaid shirt buttoned wrong. "Let me see if I brought mine," she says. "I don't think I did." She does not want to appear unfriendly. She looks over her shoulder into the back. She does not own a gas can. "Shoot," she says in an easy way. "I guess I don't have it with me." There is a pause while the Indian looks at her and she at him and then he turns, the ends of his braids catching on his jacket, and looks out in the direction her car is pointed. He does not let go of her door. It occurs to her that he has no intention of letting go. Her heart speeds a little. She has never been robbed. From a certain angle, she can find it interesting. She can almost find it funny. There is a sound like a vacuum cleaner and a "thank you" over the loudspeaker behind the Indian, and the canister containing her money thunks home in its socket.

  But instead of turning and helping himself, he remains where he is, staring out at the drive-up lane where she will turn left and then left again at the stop sign back onto the main street when this is over. She looks in the same direction. She has gotten used to Indians since she moved to Taos, standing behind her in the checkout lines or beside her at the laundromat, or sitting in the Arby's where she sometimes stops for breakfast, ordering refills, flipping their braids back to read the paper. But she has never spoken to one. Like actors on break from a Hollywood western, she used to think when she first came. As she sits waiting for him to make the next move, she feels something like guilt creep into the car. Maybe he's not going to rob her. Maybe he's not even planning to panhandle.

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  In the stiff new jacket, he isn't dressed for it. Plus, he's old. He's just an Indian, she thinks. He's probably late for work. Maybe he'll lose his job. Maybe he's already lost it. Maybe his wife is stranded somewhere, wondering why he isn't back yet to pick her up. Whatever it is, she can see he is not planning to tell her. His fingers are hooked over the edge of her window as if they have grown there like roots. He looks as if he is thinking of everything he does not know how to do next.

  "There's a gas station across the street," she says. "Over there. Maybe they have a gas can." He looks at her sitting in her car. Despite what her life has become this last year, she is aware that her face has denied it. Beneath the tightness at the corners, a tightness that makes her mouth look at times almost as if it has been re-sewn with thread pulled too tight, she still has a ridiculously open face. She holds up her hands, palms up. "I'm sorry, but I don't have a gas can. Excuse me." She reaches past him, removes the cash and places the canister b
ack in the machine. "I wish I could help you out," she says. ''But this isn't my mine to give away. I'm picking it up for my mother" This is not a lie, not exactly, but she knows what it must sound like, what she must look like, reaching past him to stuff a wad of twenties into her bag. She closes her bag and looks up, smiling. He is not smiling back. She feels as if he has climbed into the car with her and shut all the windows and vents. He has placed his hands on her window again. "Look," she says. "You've picked the wrong person. That's all I'm saying." She stares out at the street and then looks up again. "I can offer you a ride if you want. You want a ride to the gas station or something?"