Border

When Old Grandmother was a child she was taken by her lala (mother) and kalka (father) to the edge place where the steppes turned to stone. Old Grandmother spoke of this: her bewilderment, her fear, her lala and kalka explaining that to be grown one day she would need to prove she could walk alone as a person. In the village place she had heard other children mention it. She had believed what they’d told her were merely stories. That the morning of a child’s tenth year they would be brought to the edge place to learn how to walk again. “Learn how to walk again”—how they told it. 

We are lucky, Old Grandmother says. No longer do any people honor such a tradition. Too many mothers were set to grief; too many children sent to walk beyond the limit where grass became troubled by stones. They went alone. Their parents and other elders stood shoulder to shoulder watching. The tradition was a cruel one, Old Grandmother tells us. Whether it was kleua-mi (a high distinction) she was one of the last to walk, walk and return, she still didn’t know. She was glad none of us would be brought there. For that, forever grateful. 

Why afraid? we ask her. 

What about it left mothers so sorrowful? 

All children were sent walking, she tells us, only most came back. 

In what way? How so? 

To tell of it, she would have to speak of her own morning. 

Three dawns before her tenth birthday her lala had woken her. She heard her father calling from outside the yurt. With shaky hands her mother helped dress her. In the dark outside were many people gathered, most of Ttytye (her birth village). Horses were dressed and ready for mount, three wagons were arranged for travel. A woman who appeared old from a distance approached looking on her with a mother’s face. Her kalka held her shoulders while the woman tied a band of cloth over her eyes. Darkness, blinded by cloth: hands she recognized, her kalka’s and lala’s, bound her arms and legs with leathers and rope, gently. Don’t cry, she’d been told. And because it was the voices of people who’d birthed her, who’d raised her, she didn’t fight or flinch in terror. 

By many hands she was lifted and carried, laid on softness, animal furs mounded in the back of a wagon. The wagon began to move and from all directions, nowhere she could see them, a whole village’s worth of people began singing. 

The singing at first was loud then faded. The wagon drew her away from it, shrank the singing to the sound of her own breath. 

In silence they rode for days. When she was thirsty someone brought a ladle of water to her lips, when hungry a hand held for her jerky or biscuit to be eaten. The wagon would pull to stop and she would be carried to her feet, tall grasses wispy against her calves. Among tall grasses she couldn’t see she’d pass waste from her nethers. Light and dark she tracked by the rate in which crickets sang—slower, sparser by dark. 

Blinded she kept calm by reference to her knowledge. Years she had wondered and asked others out of curiosity: where did they go, these envoys that left before dark? Always she heard from ones her age, slightly older or younger, never from children who’d passed into their tenth year and so had ceased to be children. The chosen had been stolen from their home, bound and blinded. They had been transported across the flatlands to the border, the walking-off place. As a people for generations they had been doing so, and for generations their children had returned from the edge-lands with silence as parcel of their covenant. A requirement of honored aging: to keep mum about what had occurred to them. 

Three days they travelled. Among her unseen company not a word was spoken. 

On the third day the horses and wagons stopped. There was a rustling and talking and she overheard: here was the place, help the others.

In the dark among her fur-place she heard hammers and ropes pulling taut. She heard horses and voices somewhat familiar, her lala muttering to her kalka. She spoke up, asked the dark, Where? What? No answers came but whole time she laid there she felt someone watching. 

Soon the hammers and ropes and horses and voices stopped. There was a quiet and from the quiet, the faint return of crickets. By intervals measured by hours or minutes, couldn’t tell, she slept, slept or woke. Morningtime she woke to a hollow, metal clangor: a bell struck by a stick or so she guessed. Hands set upon her and lifted her from the wagon. On her feet she was set, held while knots were loosened from her blindfold. Shock of soft blue early dawn light: eyes blinking then coming to. Her lala, her kalka. Faces of both distant or solemn. Between them the woman, last person she had seen before the blindfold. The cloth taken away was in her hands. The woman was neither young nor old, of an age where aging seemingly didn’t matter. She lifted the cloth and with slow then sharp movements tied it about her eyes, hard tight knots behind the head. Blind she had been for three days and now this woman, this stranger to her, had chosen to take on the blindness. 

This woman, children’s rumors had described. She was the See. The Guide, the Holy Spur. 

Who was that? Old Grandmother in her youth had asked.

Some had spied her, mornings their elder roquwa (siblings) had been led from tents to be bound and blinded. 

A tall woman, but only in spirit. 

Actually neither short nor tall. 

A shamaness who arrived by travel party through the dark of each child’s birthday week, having been called again for her purpose. A day’s ride away to the east the See lived in a village of her own. Men elected by custom attended to her protection. From every direction the steppe peoples came to visit her, to consult her about some fate or concern. She read people’s futures in the smoking bowels of goats, in the powders of dried and ground feces. She advised barren women on days when they might conceive. Hunters and warriors received her blessing before a campaign or sojourn. She carried the souls of many witches in her mouth, legend said. She heard nit-nits (ghosts) sing grass shanties to the moon, eves before a new autumn slaughter of livestock. 

A virgin, rumors said of her. Unmarried. 

      Never ate nor slept.

A woman who had never herself once been a child. 

Every parent I’d ever known, Old Grandmother tells us, had once been freshly born, had grown into some smaller version of their future, a young one. Each had shared this same past. Each had heard tales of the walking place. They grew older and noted the silence of yulti (returned children) on the matter. For each the story was the same. Days before their tenth birthdays a woman had arrived on behest of village elders. Each were stolen from loving company, by loving company, to a place where they might be made to stand, bindings untied, so this woman might take their blindfold, bind it over her eyes, assume their own portion of darkness. None who returned to the village after spoke of it. None would dare tell, out of concern they might be banished. Now that the tradition is dead and with nothing to fear, Old Grandmother says, she can sit us down to tell us: blindfolded, the See that day turned and faced away from her. Her lala and kalka each took her by the arm and led her past the woman. Beyond there was nothing but grass and stone, stone here and there colored by reddish lichens. 

This was the walking place, the edge-lands. 

Lala’s hand on her left shoulder, kalka’s on her right, she followed the signal of their silence and waited. Something was being called upon by their standing there. Something was following the dictates of common preparation. 

She had never seen a movement of land such as that. 

Her whole years she’d known ground to be even, constant. Never was there danger one might lose one’s balance, running or walking. Here ground lifted and lowered. It swelled and sank, just so. Stones jutted out and worried a shorn, ugly grass.  

She would walk there, her lala told her. 

She would take this, she said, holding out a whittled figure the size of a finger, to a place over those rocky swells where others had left many of its kind, just like it. 

The figure had arms and legs and head and tiny features of a face. It looked a crude version like her. 

Her kalka wrapped it in a tear of rough dun-colored cloth, handed it to her. 

Leave this where you find the others then come back, he told her. This much is important, so listen: no matter how much you may wish, don’t run. Walk. Walk to the place, leave this there, come back but come back walking. 

If you feel lost, listen. 

Her kalka looked past her shoulder, direction of the See. It was then she noticed singing and drumming coming from behind her, from the encampment. To this day she couldn’t mention who had accompanied her, the elected of her departure party. She heard them singing, women and men’s voices. A language she didn’t know, melodies odd and jagged. 

Follow our voices, he said. 

We won’t stop until you’re with us.

Her lala kissed her forehead, kalka gripped her shoulder. Then each sent her off on her first step with a push. 

She was barefoot. The grass was sharp. High summer but early in the morning yet, so wet with dew. 

Don’t turn, her father said, as she made to turn. 

Go. 

She was wearing a cloth smock, long about the legs. The wind was strong, pulled looseness of her dress every direction. 

The stones scattered about weren’t buried so much as seemed to surface from a depth. Stepping on her first, she lifted a foot as if bitten. It was cold. Thereafter scanned the grass for more of its like, avoided them. 

Have you ever walked a hill? Old Grandmother asks us. We hadn’t. 

When ground rises, it’s called a hill. When it sinks, it’s called a valley. You’re young yet, you’ve not seen one of either. Imagine being first to see one while sent alone to walk one. To cross ground that lifts, that carries you down, it's no soft encounter. Where will a hill take you, once it has lifted you from level? Where will a valley drag you, once it pulls you below?

Frightened she crossed the grassy stony place. In her hands a fetish wrapped in cloth, across the distance a lilt of singing and drums. She imagined her lala and kalka standing either side of the blindfolded priestess, singing loud as custom allowed. From the angle of sun she measured time as it passed—still morning yet. When it reached top of the sky it would be noon. Once it crossed beyond the top and descended, afternoon would edge toward dusk, then it would be evening. She began ascent of a tall climb, hill broad about its base but flat along its level. Last step bringing her to summit, sun was almost directly above, warning her: was she halfway there? What would it mean to leave her cloth-figure hidden among rocks, having not found its kindred? Would they know? If she turned then and headed back before sundown, what way would they have of knowing? 

The See, she thought. The See would be aware. Shame on her family and herself. 

Atop the large hill there was only wind, wind and grass-sounds and something akin to hush. It was noon. Somewhere along the way the singing and drums had lost her. 

On the other side of the hill unfurling from its slope was a flatness of land, glint of a stream carving a meander several miles out. Grass and more grass, stones and more stones. Quick scan showed her nothing besides, but a squint brought something else: a wall of sorts, a line on the wander. What was it she couldn’t tell. A wall, she decided. A kind of demarcation or boundary.

It took hours of careful walking to reach it. Thistles scattered along the slope. 

The way down was a bother, hem of her walking shirt catching thorns every few steps. Daylight wasted in portions as she stopped to unknit the cloth. Eventually she gathered the cloth into a bunch about her waist to weave the snags barelegged. Light in her eyes, jags underfoot. Brittle rattles as breezes threshed through bushes. The path she cut had to be solved by careful selection of one step and another, no opportunity to hurry. When she finally cleared thorns and reached the bottom she paused before dropping her hem, to survey the wages of walking: knees and ankles and calves speckled with pricks and scratches. Little blood daubs leeching through after she dropped it.

Before her stretched a field, grass and not much else. Beyond that, in the middle distance, a wrinkle of what appeared mounded stones.

First steps beyond the hill brought a swelling in her middle. Tight and hard and heavy—a concentration of innards she had not felt before. Dygdr (fear). This was dygdr, as others had long described. Telling of fatal tangles with accident or conflict, elders had spoken of the weight of life retracting from threat, how such weight was often felt and consciously, so one might be carried free of dangers. It was natural, always with a person, elders had explained. Each was born with a portion of dygdr in their belly and in keen moments it made itself known. Crossing ground beyond largeness of a hill, she felt it, her first of such moments. Weighing her down, slowing her. 

There was no wind nor breeze, she remembered.

There seemed a stillness about the place welcoming her. 

She thought of other children who had walked there before. Who had descended the hill as she had, held a whittled figure as she had; who had felt fear gather in their bellies and carried it along. Some had been sent walking, she knew, and before sundown had not returned. Some had been left to wander and perish, lost among mazy hills and stones. Having failed to find their way back, were abandoned, as old law required. Their mother and father ordered to return to their home village at day’s end, soon as sun left and earth darkened. She had seen the stricken faces of mothers after their return. She had watched the silence of grieving fathers. She had watched her own lala and kalka move to comfort them. Where had they gone, she would ask. Where was their son, their daughter? Don’t speak of it, they would tell her. Honor these wounds with gentleness, not words. The children there and not there: their absence vivid, wretched on the faces of such parents. To leave a child for dead; to uphold a custom that would ask such a thing. This See, she felt, was a terrible orphaner. Casting children into wilderness, leaving for dead any who didn’t find their way back by twilight. 

Were they here she wondered. 

Hundreds or dozens, lost still but watching? 

Children and parents, embarkment and abandonment, souls stranded and waiting to be taken home, she crossed the field, her shadow a slight lag behind her. It didn’t take long. A quiet string of paces. Having solved it without difficulty, she found herself at walking’s end standing before a wall.

Have you ever met one? Old Grandmother asks. 

A wall?

We had not. We were children of open space, land in every direction. 

Let me tell of it then.

It begins with one stone. One stone laid along the ground. Take another, place it atop that. Lay others alongside these, brother and sister stones to stack atop them. Repeat. From the ground build a height and shape then follow its path either way for the remainder of one’s days. When one’s body fails and there’s death, bury oneself other side of the wall, bequeath the building of it to one’s children and children’s children. There: such is the practice and demands of wall-building. 

        That afternoon, her tenth birthday, in the hinterlands she met her first and only wall and it was a strange confrontation. Toes touched old stone and felt a coolness. Coolness of lower stones, near ground and grass, warmth of the upper stones, hands laid upon them.

        The stones were flat, stacked without mortar. 

        Many gaps among them where one might kneel and look through. 

        In many of these were stuffed bits of cloth, keepsakes. Walk-gifts, tributes from others who’d been sent walking lifetimes and years before. Some brighter and so younger. Others scummy, ragged, aged by weather. Was one of these left by her kalka, her lala? All or none of them, no way of telling. Dotting a winding gray continuum either direction, fits of white and off-white, fizzles of cloth frayed and windblown. 

       White mostly, she noticed—why? The cloth she'd been gifted was rough and brown.

       In hindsight a sign maybe the tradition was coming to an end, outworn.

She knelt, sought around for a cleft. Every few steps she noticed a figure had gotten loose and fallen to ground. These she picked off the grass, wedged them into the wall. It took a long while to find spots that were free to fill. To the south, or was it north, east, or was it west, an admixture of any or all between, she’d followed along the wall testing gaps with first her fingers then with the cloth-wrapping itself: no, too small, or no, too large, surely here too loose a fit so a wall-gift would drop at the slightest breeze. Much daylight was wasted finding the strongest fit for each and especially the one she carried. A gap she could look through with one eye and one only—what was needed. At last she found one. Before working her tribute into the wall, she unwrapped it, held it, turned it to observe the whittle-marks and carved details. Her double in miniature, it seemed, unblinking. She had half a mind to cast it over the wall but caught herself. No--if thrown, she'd have to climb and follow after, hunt through forbidden grass for it. And how did she know that--the other side was forbidden? The land itself maybe, habit. Generations of other such children, the See and her ceremony. Here walking had brought her and here a wall had grown from the earth to halt her. To climb it would violate the strictures of assigned duty. This she confirmed, standing there, figure in hand. Rewrapping it she cinched the cloth in two tight knots, hammered the parcel home with a flat palm.

There, she felt, stepping back. 

Another birthday for the wall. 

        Now she could turn, find her way to her people before sundown.

*

Did we believe her? 

Strange she would ask. This she’d never asked before.

That she was a girl once and that their people once brought children to the boundary-lands. That there were such a thing as boundary-lands. That there was such an officiant as a See. That parents accepted the call of tradition in such a manner: binding their children’s hands and feet and granting a foreigner, no matter her authority, rights to blinding, no matter how briefly, their child on transport to the ritual testing ground. 

She could be scaring us after all. As she was an old woman with death ahead of her and the power to instill fear in children. 

Was this story more about the future than the past? More about the end of adulthood than its beginning? 

Swear, she said. Looking from face to face. 

Swear we believe she’s a liar.

None of us were bold enough to break quiet. The dare itself enough to convince us. To call Old Grandmother, mother to us all by parentage or clan-ship, a fabricator, a perverter of a people’s common past—she would strangely like that. Disbelief strengthens the far-fetched, she was often fond of telling. 

No? she smiled, wrinkles coming alive across her face. 

None then? No takers?

Very well. To the rest of it then. 

Some summer day several lifetimes ago (the old woman so long near death, it seemed, she’d extended her life, by contrast, many times over). Several lifetimes ago she carried a wooden doll wrapped in raggy cloth to a stone wall, stuffed it into a gap and left it. She was alone among grass and sunlight but felt all about her the spirits of orphaned children. There was a creek beyond the wall, she was thirsty. She had been tempted to climb the wall, run to where the creek was sounding, sup a few handfuls of water. She considered it then felt nerves in the considering. What harm in it? To judge the distance, had pulled herself to a height, standing on the wall—no eye on the water though the sounding of it louder. She could have died a girl that day, she is convinced, if she’d let herself drop and wander off. How many children before her had done the same? Spared. Saved that day, she said. Swear now again, if you like, you don’t believe. Swear before I relate: a line of birds I saw, came flying low, an arm’s reach from height of where she stood on the wall. 

Never before or since has she seen such a thing. Smallish birds, perhaps swift or wren or sparrow, passing over land in a thin stream. 

She hadn’t seen them traveling until they were on her. A few steps along the wall, she could stand beneath their line of flight, and did. Quiet except for wing-sounds and chatter. What would make a flock carry in such a way? Where’d they come from, why arrive then, where going? She turned to watch them trickle off in the direction of hills behind her. An odd living rope that rose with the rise of the land and lowered once it’d crested its swell. She thought to stand and watch them pass all as a piece. Miles long it seemed and calming to observe. Their shadow though. Their shadow and hers…the sun at a dangerous afternoon angle. Back before sundown, she remembered. No one had told her yet she knew. She leapt off the wall and walked at half-bird’s-speed, following the trail cast by their ongoing shadow on the ground.

That living trail, believe it. 

Led her unimpeded through briars and thistles. Over one hill and another.

Heels caught not a single stone the way back. 

This way, she said. You’re children, so maybe you doubt. The birds offered words of encouragement, of comfort. This way, they told me. I’m tired, I told them; let me stop a while, catch breath, rest. Not yet, they told me: your flock’s ahead, waiting. We’re holding them up but can’t keep them beyond dusk. Plenty of time to rest when you find them.

None among us had heard birds speak our language. 

None dared challenge the old woman, serious as she was. 

I am a bird, you too are birds, she could have said and we would’ve accepted her. 

Not long after she heard voices, people singing and drums. And not long after she heard them, she saw them: silhouettes of people standing on level ground, shadow-shapes of her mother and father and the old See standing between them. What did they see walking their way? What had they made of these birds flying from the edge-place, passing directly over them? Was it a sign? Was it preordained? When she arrived, her kalka and lala crouched and reached from where they stood, disallowed by tradition, she learned later, from running to greet her. Exhausted she walked free of tradition into their arms, mother and father weeping into her shoulders. Between their heads she could see the last of the birds trailing off in the direction where they’d travel themselves the next three days. Did you see? she’d ask other, younger children, once they returned. A line of birds flying over the land in direction of the village—surely they’d noticed. No, they said. Nothing of the like. Maybe they’d passed over while they slept, under dark? 

A vision, she told us. 

Being Old Grandmother, she could make such claims. Being children, we’d be fools to doubt her. 

What did they make of it, she asked her parents the wagon ride home. Make of what? they asked. Of birds making such a shape and low as they were, near the ground? What birds, what shape? they asked. She was blindfolded between them, her mother brushing her hair bare with fingers. So couldn’t see: did their faces tell the truth or were they playing? Their voices though. Since eyes were null, ears were sharper in discernment. No, they told. They believe what they say; in their version they only saw her walking, no birds accompanying. The birds were hers, she came to believe. Helpmates sent to guide her to safety and to calm her. 

The See, old woman that she was, stayed a day after return to Ttytye. A feast held in her honor. Meat and drink and dancing and lore-telling and celebration of this new child changed by walking. The old woman, not an old woman by age but by role, by station, sat in a chair of wicker and smiled for the people without smiling. Perhaps she was happy as they to return with a child and not parents newly grieving. Perhaps it was nothing she wished for, even for herself: the cruelty required of her, to uphold a people through authority. Perhaps she did not ask to be See though birthright demanded it, her mother having been See before her, and before then her mother’s mother. 

Before retiring to her tent the old, non-old woman called for the girl through her relations. She would like a word, her lala told her, before ending the evening. She was frightened of the woman. This solemn figure who would have ordered her parents to leave, abandon her had she not come walking before the sun was gone. Her mother took her arm firmly, led her to the chair, the woman with firelight playing about her face, embers like savage insects stirring air. Her mother stood back to give them conference. The woman lifted a hand, laid it on the girl’s forehead. 

Uqi (Hello), she said. There you are. 

The girl blinking said nothing. 

What did you think of the gift? The gift I sent?

The girl’s brow furrowing, confused. 

Oh, you don’t know? Birds I sent out to find you—they brought you back well, didn’t they? 

Girl’s eyes something different then. 

You’re welcome, the See said, laughing with eyes but little else. 

You may find they’ll make an appearance again, when needed. Never discount a bird alone, a flock soon follows. 

Hand removed from the girl’s forehead, the See sent her off with a nod. The old woman worked to stand, her attendants gathering her under arms. Old Grandmother watched the woman leave the light and people, duck to vanish in a tent. Next morning she left before dawn, gone before anyone might bother her again thanking her. 

Soft is the world, Old Grandmother said. Because far as you know, world is hands and faces and bellies and warm places below and shoulders and feet. But hard is the world as well: you of all should know, being young. Look around you. Look at me. Remember when I asked: do you believe? If you don’t, even a little bit, doesn’t that promise some bit of hardness in the future? If you do, isn’t there hardness there, in our past? My past, it’s yours as well. Take it, do with it what you will.

And the See? we asked. 

We were curious, wanted to know: what became of her? 

She was the last of her kind, Old Grandmother said.

She was like me in that way. Time came for her and she had grace enough to go with it. Wherever they went, I imagine there’s a place for us all. Have I scared you now? Oh go on. Look around. 

River and Town and River

 

This is the summer before I died. The summer came all at once, three months together, heat unrelenting, one continuous rainless month. Five, six mornings a week I arrived on site at the granary downtown. The construction crew I worked for was run by two brothers and the younger was a stickler for early starts. Before sunup there we’d be waiting for our last man to show, an hour before the shift change at the granary. They had night people there, a skeleton crew, a portly security officer who drank on the job. The security officer would fill a styrofoam cup with bourbon and Cokes thinking it passed for coffee in our eyes. No one was fooled. One of the brothers we worked for, Tommy, a tea-totaler, would threaten to report him. But who in their right mind puts a night drinker out of work, thinking he won’t eventually suffer for it? 

Ten minutes waiting in a parking lot. Me and four other men, one of the brothers, either Tommy or Robert, sipping gas station coffee, sweating in pre-dawn heat waiting for the last of us to arrive. Always that was Phee, tall skinny Paul Pheagans. He’d come walking without pace off the street into the parking lot and it was enough to make us each think to ourselves and make Red, the senior among us, think aloud, “Is it me or did he walk all the way here?” 

Phee wouldn’t smile or laugh, wouldn’t accept Red’s joking nor reject it. He’d stand there smoking and blowing smoke before that emotionless face of his as if the words hadn’t reached him or all the ribbing was owed to someone else. Malice in Red’s pokes and a challenge in Phee’s speechlessness. 

We were building an office or utility room among the grain silos. A half dozen times at least I’d asked one of the brothers or Red what exactly it was we were building. It was money, was what I was made to understand. It was a job and if we did good work and completed the thing under budget it might lead to more work. More work was good. We built the structures and they made of them what they wished. There were three major jobs that summer: a new Bellevue Baptist church, a new Jack-in-the-Box off Frederica, and this mystery structure. All three made from cinderblocks, bricks, and cement. Don’t ask, build. Build what they ask and payment will come. 

We hardly talked while we worked. Talk was discouraged. Tommy was one of those crew leaders who led by example, so we followed suit and worked at a fair clip, half-breathless so not much in the mood for talking. Though he walked slow, Phee worked fast and never shared a word when silence would do. He and I were the new hires, the youngest, laborers for the bricklayers. Cinderblocks in wheelbarrows, pushed up planks, balanced just so. Lengths of red brick lifted with hand-held clamps, one each in hand, up those same planks. On scaffolds the bricklayers Tommy and Red worked wet cement off mortar boards, pressed bricks into place, layering them. They had the easier half of the work, we had the crueler half. “The wiry ones,” Red explained once, “The wiry ones make for best laborers. They never tire. They’ll fool you first sight. But they’re like ants: lift fifty times their weight.” 

Lunchtimes we took in the shade of a building or flatbed or pickup. Usually Phee took his lunch alone, sat with his back to the rest of us. The granary was built along the river and the view around noon was calming enough. Coal barges on the Ohio and trees fluttering greenly across the way, other side of the river in Indiana. The downtown bridge crossing from Kentucky to Indiana, birds fighting for specs of grain. Phee sat on an overturned plastic bucket chewing a gnarled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, watching the afternoon do very little of nothing. 

I was curious about him. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place it. Or maybe he was just familiar: I came from a long line of people who disparaged verbosity with their own jagged brand of stoicism. If he was quiet he had something to say or so I thought. 

“Whatever.” The first few months that’s the only words he said to me. “How’re you doing this morning?” “What’d you get into this past weekend?” Always and forever the same hard dead answer: “Whatever.” He did everything to discourage me but once a few weeks in I had caught him smirking at something I’d said, spied him out the corner of my eye shaking his head with appreciation, so took that as an early breakthrough. One day. One day I’d catch him in the mood and he’d talk to me. 

It came eventually. Lunch break in the middle of a one-month summer. I spilled a bucket of water onto the ground and carried it to where Phee was sitting. Flipped the bucket, sat, and offered a cigarette. To my surprise he acknowledged me, nodded, fished a cigarette from the pack offered. There was a technique to smoking cigarettes in hundred-plus-degree heat. Sweaty fingers, sweaty lips, sweat dripping off the nose…had to take a drag quick and snatch the cigarette away to set on a pylon or stack of bricks, ash end dangling off the edge. Phee adhered to a different ritual. He’d let the cigarette dangle between lips and dampen. There it’d bend and droop. The filter absorbed the sweat, sure. But wouldn’t the lit end peeter out, I asked, once it began burning wet tobacco?

This he didn’t answer, but he did one better, withholding his usual “Whatever”. 

What’d he do over the weekend, I asked. Something I’d asked dozens of times before, each time to no effect. Surprisingly, he’d had a weekend this time and could answer. 

“I had my birthday.”

“Oh yeah? What’d you turn?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You do anything?”

“My cousins came over. We went down to a boat ramp with some beers.”

“Any gifts?”

“Sure.”

“What’d they get?”

“—“

“Were the beers the gift?”

“Beers and some rock.”

“Rock? Like what—gemstones you mean?”

“No.” Here he snuffed, a close-mouthed one-breath laugh. “Coke. Crack.” 

“Oh shit. You smoke that before?”

“I hadn’t.”

“What’d you think?”

“It was nice enough.”

The boat ramp. He didn’t say which. There were boat ramps every mile or so either side of the river, up and down Owensboro and the county beyond. A couple of summers before, I remembered, there’d been a police raid on a people who’d been meeting regularly down on a ramp south of town, no working streetlights around the place. Seven men arrested, one a lawyer, five married. Cruising—a decade or so this had been a gathering spot where people could trade favors, or so that’s how it’d been described to me by the youngest son of one of the men who’d been caught and charged. I didn’t ask if he’d known about his father. I assumed he did but had to pretend he didn’t. How did his mother feel? That I also didn’t ask. 

“Sounds like a good birthday to me.” 

“Good enough,” he said. His cigarette was bent like a baby’s finger, sweat was dripping off it. 

“Happy belated birthday.” 

“Whatever.” 

Lunch breaks were a half-hour, roughly the time it took to smoke three cigarettes. We smoked the rest of our break on our buckets watching without admiration the massive sluggish forward roll of muddy water before us, the shineless and indifferent Ohio. 

Thereafter one, two days a week we’d meet at the edge of the lot, share a smoke, talk. The others were amazed: somehow I’d gotten the mute to speak. What’d we talk about, Red or one of the others would ask. Not much, I’d say, not far from the truth. Once out of curiosity or even envy Red stepped over during the break to ask if he could join us. “Nope,” Phee said, eyes staring down gravel between his boots. Not a look up to catch sight of Red’s face screwed into a sour pantomime “well-fuck-you-too”. Off Red walked never to return. On the job later that day on the scaffold Red complained to Tommy about the man’s quality of work, his attitude. Tommy had none of it. Fast, he said and they both knew. Fast and a hard worker. He’d sooner let go of Red than lose a solid laborer such as that one. 

The true events that summer were small ones. Count that as a true event: a man that kept himself a stranger began talking. 

Another came not long after, when one of the county sheriffs drove onto the lot. Mere sight of the police cruiser caused a stir. Who would it be? Tommy walked out to meet him. Edge of the construction site, stepping in and out of shadows, nodding and spitting to the ground. Tommy turned and pointed our direction, stayed put while the sheriff broke away, walked up the planks onto the scaffold. Past me, past Miguel, papers in hand. When he stopped next to Red, Red didn’t turn to acknowledge, kept chopping and smearing cement off his mortar board. “Beck Buford? I’m here to serve you divorce papers.” The hand held the papers to be taken but Red didn’t take them. The sheriff set them on the cinderblocks Red had just laid then left in a lazy, matter-of-fact way, as if serving divorce papers was a chore and he wanted through with it. When the sheriff came down the planks, Phee, who had been away for the whole interaction, tearing bags of dried cement to empty into the mixer, mixer loud enough to deafen a person a good while after he stood next to it, turned and pushed a wheelbarrow of fresh cement the opposite direction, back towards the mixer. No one else seemed to notice, seeing as their eyes were busy traveling from the sheriff to Red, but I did. Phee hid behind the mixer, pretending to shovel more sand, pour more buckets of water into its catch. After the sheriff drove away he returned pushing that same wheelbarrow, a few looks over his shoulder to make sure the man wasn’t coming back. 

“Red slapped cement right onto it,” Miguel told me later. “You can see a corner of it dangling out the wall. Go ahead—check yourself.” 

Right where the sheriff had laid the papers, Red had patted and smoothed his cement, lifted and pressed into place another cinderblock. Kept building the wall as if nothing happened. Whether the symbolism in the gesture was intentional or not, it was evocative enough. Red caught sight of me pinching the corner of paper sticking from the wall, to apply a light tug. “Leave it,” he said. Not a request but a warning. “It belongs to Taggart Granary now.” 

Among other goings-on, that summer, in hindsight my last, yielded at least one separation and divorce. True events, though—what else? The truest occurrences were ones that could have come to pass but didn’t. We didn’t get raises, a dollar and fifty an hour more for each of us. It didn’t rain one or two or even three days in a row. None of us suddenly woke one morning twice as handsome as we’d been the day before. None of us were granted futures any different than the ones we’d been born into: Red would drive home to a trailer, Tommy to a house, Miguel to a trailer. None of us, even the ones who asked, meaning me, me and no one else, none gained any clarity on the matter of where Phee went each afternoon when he walked off the granary lot and turned left on Patterson. He might have lived in a straggle of bushes beneath the bridge for all we knew. We could imagine it. It was feasible. And if we could imagine it, maybe in doing so we made it truer than it needed to be. The man never returned in the morning wearing a change of clothes. Previous day’s sweat had dried, that’s all.

He had cousins, I might tell them. I knew because he’d once told me. He was mortal like the rest of us—recently celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. They didn’t ask, though. It wasn’t their business, why wonder, and moreover, what was with this yen for speculation and info-gathering? He could carry more than his weight and he never tired, what else was there to know? 

I suppose I was bored. Bored when I arrived with fresh morning energy then less so by afternoons when exhausted. 

One lunch break, sitting on my bucket, I asked Phee as much. Was he bored? 

“What do you think?” 

“No offense but often you seem pretty bored.”

“How tell?”

“You don’t talk much. You don’t cut up. Don’t interact much with anybody.”

“I’m here to work.” 

“Right. So you’re bored?”

“—“

“Would you say?”

“—“

“Do you mind my asking?”

“Suppose I do.”

“Why be so guarded, I guess is my point, if you’re bored and I’ve already said I feel the same?” 

“—“

No answer. Keep at arm’s length a man who pries. A few minutes of birdsong and clear view of the coffee-colored river flowing along without knowledge of where it might arrive, then: “I suppose this is less so.”

“What’s that?”

“This, less so.”

The cigarette between his lips wept and smoked, animated by exhalation and sweat. Break was almost over so we took together one last portion of silence. He was twenty-six, it’s true, and not once, I realized, had he asked me my age. It didn’t matter. I was maybe just someone to bum smokes off of and listen to. 

Forty-five days. Forty-five days, start to finish. Miguel jackhammered concrete and by hand we removed it in chunks. A fresh foundation, a shallow one, was poured and we began building from the ground up a structure between two grain elevators, and in doing so time was marked morning by afternoon, forty-five weekdays through one summer. When the job was done, we were surprised to be told this was the final form: a moderately-sized cinderblock building with a corrugated roof. Tommy informed us in the parking lot at the end of the forty-fifth day, “Job’s finished. Tomorrow come around to Bellevue Baptist and pick up where we left off with that crew.” I imagine I was the only one who felt cheated. What was it for? This concrete block made of smaller concrete blocks, what would the granary people do with it? Everyone walking to their trucks and Phee ambling off the lot, I hung back and asked Tommy. Not a man touched much by the gods of humor, he picked dried cement from beneath his fingernails and without hint of irony told me, “I don’t think they know yet. It’s built and they have the invoice. Far as I’m concerned, if they want they can tear it down soon as they’ve paid for it.” That was a Thursday. I remember because the next day, first day of work on the church, the night watchman from the granary drove into the parking lot mid-morning, Phee riding in the bed of his pickup. 

“Got an extra for you,” he yelled. Phee leapt out, tugged the bill of his ball cap, strode slow as fog towards us. The night watchman did the explaining for him.

“Showed at your old spot. Think maybe he needed the ride but wasn’t keen asking any of you.” The watchman was drunk, Tommy told us, coming back from the rolled down driver’s side window. Tommy instructed he stay put, nap off his liquor. Through morning and the midday break and halfway through the afternoon he laid in the shade, slumped against a tree, red bandana untied from his neck and draped across his face. From a distance it could’ve been mistaken for a gaping head wound. 

“Need a ride?” 

“Nope,” Phee told me over lunch. A nod sent me looking toward the night watchman: “He’ll do.” 

Come four-thirty, Phee crossed the lot back the way he came, stood a while over the watchman, kicked a thigh with his boot. The watchman needed help to his feet. The way Phee lifted him off the ground, no need for a backwards lean as counterweight against the man’s heft, illustrated to anyone casting curiosity their direction Phee had more strength in his left arm than the watchman had in his body total. There was a familiarity, I remember thinking, the way they interacted. Deference from the older man toward the younger. Despite that, Phee climbed into the rear of the pickup. 

“Call it a Kentucky limousine,” Red said to anyone listening. The sobered watchman accepting the truck keys from Tommy, who’d kept them for the day; Phee’s scarecrow frame dropping down into the pickup’s bed, knees akimbo, back against the cab. When they drove off we couldn’t have known it’d be near the last time we’d see either of them. 

First Monday after, no sight of Phee. Two or so days passed before Tommy called the number he had for him. He let the number ring for minutes, no answer, no voicemail to take a message. He called the granary, asked for the night watchman. He’d called in, they said, took off a few weeks on short notice. Something about his mother or his sister or his mother-or-sister-in-law sick with congestive heart failure, or was it cancer? No one asked after Phee nor seemed to care. Why would they? A person intent as Phee on keeping quiet hadn’t given anyone much in the first place to justify missing him properly. He was gone, off to better things or worse. Like many on the crew before him, maybe he’d show one morning weeks or months later asking for his job back. If they’d proven their worth work-wise, the brothers would take them, no questions. This had happened with Paul Pheagans before, apparently. Partying with his people, Red speculated. His cousins were genuine troublemakers and frequent squatters in the county jail. Involved in a certain trade that had already left a few of them strung out, on the dole, or killed. 

“Save your money,” Phee once told me. 

“Save it you had only one way to spend it.” 

Cryptic but in keeping how he usually framed things. 

After he left, it was noticeable, there was more talking among the crew. I never heard mention that conversation seemed to come more easily nor the mix of people on site were a better fit overall. Phee uninvited himself from the work and brought that reticence with him. One less man, much less silence. 

For a while I took breaks by myself until Miguel started joining me. We’d both flip over buckets, eat sandwiches and complain about the work ahead or just finished. 

This was a larger project, the church. Not quite a megachurch but close. The remainder of my time on the crew I entertained myself on the sly taking a piecemeal poll, gathered here and there through small talk people’s word on a certain matter. Miguel, Parker, Bill, the electrician Grazey, Tommy’s brother Robert, other peons such as I carrying bricks and cement into the building so they could become, bit by bit, the building itself, supposedly yet another house of divine worship: did they attend service themselves, were they believers? Only two admitted so, our bosses, the brothers. The rest, in their way, told me they preferred to spend their precious Sunday mornings sleeping off their Saturdays. It was assumed the brothers were Baptist, given their stance on horseplay and drinking. Come in hungover once, they’d send you home. Come that way twice, get home and stay there. 

A month passed or was it a week? A month's worth of days in fragile intricate construction blown apart on a breeze or a breath: the heavy air absorbed them. Off they went, carried across the parking lot as we arrived or left. Five days on, two days off. On weekends I crisscrossed town from house to house and the occasional bar and shared time with people of a certain age. We thought of ourselves as friends but the friendships tended to last a week or so. Acquaintances. We recognized faces, said hello to them. 

Outside a tiny bar with plastic deck chairs, west end of town, someone introduced me to a kid younger than me named Wesley. Red’s nephew, the friend told me. He had heard my complaints about Red often and thought it’d be amusing to watch me talk around my real estimation of the uncle. The kid, Wes, had more tattoos than years on him. A stick-and-poke on the side of his neck, dangerously close to his carotid artery, I told him. What was that? There were no working streetlights along the parking lot, the bar was a solid four walls without windows. The kid tipped his head left, leaned forward so I could make out his neck-art in the flame-glow of my lighter. A pizza slice in black ink, with cartoon eyes and smile and hands and feet. One of the hands held a dagger and the dagger had wiggle-lines around it suggesting a repeated stabbing motion. From a slit in the center of this happy slice tiny flowers were bursting out opposite the dagger. The kid tugged the neckline of his t-shirt down so I could read the caption: ITS PIZZA TIME!!!

Interesting choice, I said. His first and still only job, he told me, delivering pizzas. The neck-tat a badge of the profession. 

Talk soon turned to his uncle. 

“Oh man. That’s a whole thing.”

“How so?”

“He and my aunt Pam are going through it.”

I told about the divorce papers, the sheriff, Red’s angry non-reaction. Halfway up a wall north side of the smallest building at Taggart Granary, could probably still catch site of something paper sticking out from between cinderblocks, flicking in the breeze. 

He didn’t believe me, wanted to drive there, point where. Buy me a beer, I told him, I’d be happy to. 

“Thirty years they’ve been going at it,” the nephew said. “My mom’s sick of it. So sick he’s not allowed at the house no more.” 

Somewhere early in the marriage, Red had cheated, so his aunt Pam had cheated in turn. He cheated back. If they’d been born a different place or time, people of a certain education, it might’ve occurred to one or both of them what they really wanted was an open marriage. The wounding was part of the appeal, his uncle’s sister, his mother concluded. Like a song off the radio, she said. “Look here, someone else wants a piece of this, look how quickly you come running.”

“Last year he went full crazy,” the nephew said. “My aunt kept threatening divorce, went so far as put a lawyer on retainer. What’d he do? He withdrew everything from their savings and checking, don’t know how much, couldn’t have been much, took it to Ellis Park and placed it all on a single bet. Picked a horse at random with full intention of losing. Damned if he’d let any their shared savings line the pockets of a lawyer. And just guess what happened? He won. Tripled his money or more. Even his good luck is bad luck, he said.”

Time to make good, he told me. Let’s see that wall. 

The drive from the bar took us along the river. My friend Lonzel in the passenger’s seat, Wes and his friend Cory in the back. Cricket-song radiating from the trees and passing glints of broken glass along the shoulder. Lights to the right that gathered into a paved slope down into the water: yet another boat ramp, drinkers and smokers in shadow sitting on a low wall. Downtown we parked two blocks from the granary. At the front gate, Lonzel elected to hang back. He caught at DUI earlier in the summer, didn’t want to risk adding to the damage. Three of us climbed the fence, walked along the dark of a wall. The place looked empty. Poorly lit except for an office window on the far side of the lot. 

“There it is.”

The building looked much the way we’d left it, abandoned before ever inhabited. A little bit of contrast, to render silos around it taller. 

I shined a keychain flashlight along the upper wall. Was it this side? Maybe not this wall but the other one. 

In my mind I retraced my steps that afternoon, day the sheriff came. The planks, the scaffold, where Red stood on the scaffold. Three-quarters the way up an odd cast to the light, a smallish shadow. Corner of something paper sticking from the wall. There, I said, genuinely excited and surprised as much by the genuineness as the excitement. “See?”

“I'm convinced,” the nephew said. “Of course though it could be anything.” 

“Why lie?”

“True. But also why wouldn’t you?”

Out of the dark a flashlight came walking our way. A security guard. Wes’s friend ran but we didn’t bother. 

“What’s this,” the guard asked. “What you boys getting into?” 

It was the night watchman, the lush who greeted the crew every morning earlier that summer. Who’d driven Phee to work then took a leave of absence not long after. He was back and from the looks of it friendly but sober. 

“Sorry,” Wes said. “Just looking around.”

“Can’t be having you do that,” the guard said. He eyed me sidelong, troubled by vague recognition. 

“Sorry we didn't know.”

“Right. Tell you what. You boys leave peaceably, promise to not come back, it's not a problem.”

“Thanks mister.”

The night watchman unlocked the gates, pushed open a crack large enough for two of us to slip through sideways. “I know you,” the guard said as he locked the gate. “Don’t know where to place you, but know you.” 

“Me?”

“Oh. Now I remember.” 

“Is this trouble?”

“No, I’m by my word. Get along now.” 

The drive back to the bar, Wes leaned forward between driver and passenger’s seats to holler over music and the rush of rolled-down windows. “I knew that guy, the security guy. ‘L.V.’—Levon Pettiplung. What a name. My mom knew him back in the day. Actually proposed to her when she graduated high school. He’d dropped out a couple years before. Showed up at the house, knocked on the front door, asked for granddad, talked with him on the front porch. Asked his blessing. If you knew my granddad, you could just imagine what he said to that. ‘We’re gonna stop right there,’ he said he told him. ‘No chance I’m giving my daughter over to that kind of name.’”

“What would it’ve been?”

“What?”

“Her name if she married him.”

“Her name’s Leslie but everyone calls her Peechee. So Leslie ‘Peechee’ Pettiplung.”

“I kind of like it.” 

One day later I was back on site at the church. “Met your nephew,” I told Red. Which one, he asked. I told him and he winced. “There’s a troublemaker if there ever was one.” Rest of the day now and then I caught him looking over, watching me. All rest of the week he kept his distance. Welcome change of power dynamics, Red who was usually on me and the others about little things. Hose out the mixer before the end of the day. Hand him bricks just so, lengthwise not endwise. I felt bad for it, which was strange. The divorce papers, us seeing that, and now this nephew airing the details of his marriage, surely. 

I tried talking through it. Did he happen to know that guard, the one at the granary, one that came by with Phee, had once tried proposing to his sister? His nephew mentioned it, I explained. “You remember that, when you were a kid? Coming to your family’s door asking your father for his blessing?” Sure, he said. He remembered. Wasn’t present for that mess but heard about it days and years after. Embarrassed the man so hard, Red said, word is he never took up with a woman after, stuck to bachelorhood. His father could have that kind of effect on people. 

“That reminds me.”

“What?”

“Paul Pheagans. Saw him the other day.”

“Really? The man’s about. Where at?”

Red and some friends had taken their boat out for fishing. Down at the Patterson ramp a mile or two from the bridge. Backing the boat on its trailer to the water, saw two men drinking beers squatting on concrete watching. It was not long after dawn and the two seemed fixed in their places, gargoyles without a ledge. He recognized the taller of the two. Recognized him soon as he lifted out of his crouch to stand. It was Pheagans. He walked over. Didn’t know why he did that, given the man was never much for a hello. Nostalgia maybe. Enough time passes you can miss almost anybody, quasi-enemies included. 

“Tried talking to him but he made no damn sense. Out of it. Looked like he hadn’t slept since we’d last saw him.”

“Asked him to come back to work. Not sure that connected. He’d off and left without warning once before, came back some time after. Who knows, maybe he’ll show when he tires of what else he’s doing.”

That day he caught a thirty-pound flathead. Brought it to shore, too big for a cooler, tossed it to the weeds by the ramp. Let it rot, he said. Give something for flies and bums to feed on. I pictured Red at a ticket counter, pushing banded stacks of cash to a bookmaker. Shock and misery pulling his guts out before him, to lay them in his hands—a winner when he wanted nothing more than loss full and total, on an abject scale. I thought about driving out to Patterson ramp, hunting the weeds for the remains, fish too big to bring home. Picked clean, downsized. Maybe now manageable enough. 

“He’s alright,” I told Miguel later sitting on our buckets. “If he’s got meanness to him, he’s got his reasons.” 

The church was almost finished. Carpenters and welders and electricians had begun filling out the shell of the building, wood and steelwork and drywall. Miguel and I swept the ground floor with push brooms, mounds of sawdust and bent stray nails. Within a year’s time there’d be pews where we were standing, a minister taking a podium to riff on a bit of scripture, rummage around old cosmology for something hardbitten or consoling or shiny. “If only,” Miguel said. “If only they knew who built it.” 

We were scheduled for a site near the McDonald’s on Payne the following Monday. The drive to work would take some of us through downtown along the river. “A left on Cross Street past the granary,” Tommy explained. I nodded as if I needed directions. What this time? A new Quik-Mart right behind the old one. Planned to keep the old open until the new was finished before tearing it down. Miguel next to me, wheelbarrow before me, sawdust and useless wedges of wood, broom laid over top. A Saturday and Sunday in our near future, a Monday. We said goodbyes to the church without waving. 

The weekend passed like most. A ten beer weekend. 

Outside Mousetrap Lounge, same windowless spot we’d met before, I ran into Red’s nephew. He seemed in a hurry but hung around. Took me a bit to figure must’ve been some drug he was on. 

“My uncle.”

“Yeah?”

“Maaaan, got another for you.” 

There’d been a fight between Red and one of his wife’s hook-ups. His wife had taken the keys, locked him out the trailer. The hook-up, large guy from the looks of the silhouette walking across windows. Wife’s guy in the house and Red locked out, banging on the door. Whose truck was that parked in the grass? U.S. Marines sticker on the back bumper—seen it before somewhere. What happened was Red broke the driver’s side window, hot-wired the truck, stole off with it. Next morning came walking along the road, innocent as anyone else on the matter. "No evidence no police could hold over him. All we know he drove it into the river.”

When his wife came out onto the porch with her paramour the next afternoon, they found Red slumped against a tree in the yard, sleeping. Said he woke to screaming and cursing. It was Bird Ortt. A man much bigger than his silhouette, angry and hungry to get his hands on Red, wring his truck’s whereabouts out of him. His wife stood between them. The scene ended with neighbors on their porches watching bad television in the raw, another installment in a dying marriage; must have lasted all of six loud minutes before Red walked down the road towards his sister’s, Wes’ mother’s house. She lived across town, near Statin’s BBQ on Hausley. It must’ve taken him better part of a day to get there. 

“He fucked my wife, I fucked him”—all he said about it when he walked through the door. The nephew thought it funny, me less so. I felt guilty, really, having witnessed my own portion of the man’s troubles and made not much more of it than gossip. 

“He’s doing it to himself,” Wes said. “Remember.” 

Drive home that night, I pictured phantom Reds walking here and there beneath streetlights, down side streets. I pictured him walking back and forth across the bridge, Indiana to Kentucky, alone through deader-than-dead downtown, storefronts closed for the evening or for good. I pictured him scramble a chainlink fence to take a shortcut through a yard. Red was always the first on site each morning. It was something people mentioned, an unlikely observation. Even before go-getter types like Tommy. Red dozing atop that blue tarp we laid over the sandpile before leaving the worksite each day, waking each morning in the guts of a half-finished church—I could picture it. It was plausible. Would answer a lot of questions. 

The following Monday, at the new site, there he was. 

“Spent time your nephew again,” I said. 

“Up to no good huh?”

Hard to tell if he was awake. He always looked tired. 

“He said you were staying with him a while?”

“Visiting.” 

We were standing in the parking lot of the Quik-Mart, waiting for one or two stragglers. We were still talking when over one of his shoulders I caught sight of a familiar walk, the walk registering with me before the person: lanky Paul Pheagans. He loped over without looking our way, larger over Red’s shoulder until Red turned to find Phee standing next to him. 

“Morning.” 

“Look who’s here.”

“He’s alive.” 

“What’ve you been into?”

Miguel and the others each said their piece and each took a shrug for an answer. 

Tommy stepped over and put us to work. We jackhammered concrete into slabs, lifted slabs onto a trailer with a backhoe. With stakes and strings we marked the perimeter. At break-time I took a bucket beneath a shade tree and Phee joined me. 

“Want a smoke?”

“Sure.”

“I know we asked before but I gotta ask again: what’ve you been up to?”

“—“

He took a lighter from me, cigarette wet between his lips. 

“About.” 

“About?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“—“

Smoke slipped from his mouth, thinned into faint swirls. 

“Guess you say I was bored.”

“Oh, you too huh?”

“Yep.”

“Finally decided on that.”

“I did.” 

“And why you come back.”

“Same reason.” 

The resemblance reached me then, long time in formulation, whole summer in formulation: in profile he looked not a little unlike a longhaired youngish Clint Eastwood. 

“You were bored so you left, then you got bored and came back.” 

“Yep, but not really.” 

“Some people said they saw you.” 

“Might’ve.”

“Down by the river. You live near there?”

Realized until then I’d never actually asked him where he lived. 

“Thereabouts.” 

“Seemed like you’d made buddies with the guard down at the granary.”

“For a bit.” 

“Had a run-in with him not long after.” 

I told him about the bar, Red’s nephew, the wager for beers, trespassing after-hours to spy Red’s divorce papers sealed three-quarters up a wall. The guard had been decent enough to let us go. L.V., his name, what he went by. Know what his real name was though? 

A cough, a sniff, no interest. 

“Another and I’ll tell you why I left.”

“Fair.” Handed him the lighter and cigarette.

This I remember: he took the cigarette from his lips to tell me, words sounding through smoke. 

“Churches. I don’t like them. Rather go broke than help build one.”

“Very principled of you.” 

“—“

“I was joking.”

“—“

From where we sat we could see people come and go from the Quik-Mart, the one we were hired to tear down, one we were replacing. It was quiet work watching. I was twenty-three, in a week I’d be twenty-four or thirty. I thought about telling him: in a week I’d be instantly a year older. I pictured a cake with lit cigarettes for candles. Crack rocks and a six pack and cousins by the river. “Whatever,” I could imagine him saying. I was dead already and he was acknowledging that, having died himself many times before.