My first published short story when I was quite young… this story appeared in the January, 1984 issue of Redbook. Mimi Jones was the editor then.

Dear Anne,
I have been aching ever since our fight last night. It’s not that I don’t like Peter or that I have anything against your moving in with him, I just wanted to be sure that he was right, that he was good enough for you.

But you called me jealous, selfish. Well, maybe there is a little of that too — you have to understand that you and I, we’ve been through a lot together. There was a time when you were all I had.

After I left for work today, I felt alone. Of all the days for you to be moving out, I thought, why today, in this weather? The snow was coming down hard. As I walked to work I thought of you putting your clothes and books into boxes, not speaking to me. In the office I couldn’t do anything but stare out the window into the snow. When I came home, Martha suggested I might feel better if I wrote and tried to tell all I was feeling.

Do you remember how you used to have dreams — bad dreams — of a big black bird flying in your room? And when you called I’d come in, turn on the light, open the window and say, “Begone, you bird! Anne has to sleep!” Then I’d tuck you in again, close the window and turn off the light. You’d be asleep before I was out of your room.

You do remember, because I have heard you tell friends the story, and I have heard you laugh. I want to tell you now about Grandpa and the cheesecake because it too should be something to hold in your memory. And maybe it will help you understand how I feel about you.

You were six years old when I brought you to New York. I was desperate. I didn’t have a job and I didn’t know what to do. It was difficult for me to return to my parent’s; without you, I never would have. Without you, I would have missed so much.

You see, Anne, I left home when I was quite young, the age you are now. I wanted to make it on my own, to be strong and brave. Like most people, I wanted adventure. I traveled a lot; I had a few adventures and many misadventures; I discovered that I wasn’t very strong or very brave; and more than anything else, I found that I didn’t want to be alone. I learned that I wasn’t unique, that I needed a place for myself and that I needed others. I stopped traveling when I was nineteen and in Montana.

You were born in Montana, in Missoula. Your mother first saw me when I was working in a cafe as a dishwasher. She told me that she would come in and eat breakfast just to see me, through the window in the kitchen door, washing dishes. It took her quite a few breakfasts before she got up the nerve to speak to me. The rest happened quickly.

It was spring. Snow in the mornings, rain in the afternoon, stars at night. You must see a Montana spring someday. The valleys turn green while the mountains are still white. The rivers become loud with fast water. The blossoming cottonwoods, the wildflowers — all the smells — infect the air with a good madness. You were born out of some of that madness, some of the best of it.

Your mother didn’t leave you. This I have to tell you, this you must know — she left me. I was twenty two, you were two, she was twenty. Maybe she decided that all the numbers were against the number three. Maybe she fell in love with me because of the stories I told her, and maybe she just wanted the adventure of living her own stories. I heard from her only once after she left, about a year later. Just a short letter, a note. I didn’t keep that letter – it hurt too much to even hold it – but I couldn’t help but keep the words: “Sam, I’m sorry. Take care of Anne. Feed her well. Tell her lots of things. Make her laugh, the way you made me laugh. You and Anne, deserve better than me. Love, Maggie.”

If I had had money, perhaps I would have found her, but I never even tried. These things happen, and not just to you and me, so we must never let ourselves feel freakish for them. This I know, though: Your mother loved you.

So we ended up in New York after a sad four years. Even though I tried to keep you laughing, you missed her at least as much as I did.

It had been nine years since I went away. When I left, I thought I’d return only if I was returning proud. A romantic fantasy of coming home rich and wise, of shaking hands with the father who had driven me out, of hugging my mother, of being able to show them both how strong and good I had become – that was the fantasy I had left home with when I was sixteen. Instead, at twenty-six I was hungry, broke, with no fantasies at all. I didn’t return with nothing, though. Not by a long shot. I didn’t fully realize it then, but I had come home with a treasure. You.

It was snowing the night we got in. They didn’t know that we were coming. They didn’t even know that Maggie had left us. You were coughing, and all you had eaten that day were a few candy bars a garage attendant in Pennsylvania had given us. I hadn’t eaten anything in two days. Dad answered the door in his bathrobe, more asleep than awake, and the first thing he said was, “Do you have any idea what time it is?” Of course he let us in, but it was nearly as cold in that kitchen, while we waited for Mom to wake up, as it had been along the side of the highway. You looked at the dolls, made from rags and yarn, sitting on top of the cupboards and fridge. You asked Dad whose they were and he said, “Those are Florie’s.” “Who is Florie?” you asked, and he said nothing, too ashamed of me even to acknowledge a tie to you. Or maybe he was just too tired to answer.

I smile as I write, remembering how you, hungry, sick and exhausted, said to Mom as she came into the kitchen, “Oh, you must be Florie, my grandma,” before she even had a chance to get her glasses on, before she even saw you. You won her over right away, telling her about our adventures and asking her about her handmade dolls and telling her how great a dad I was. I didn’t feel like a great dad then, being too broke even to have bought a bus ticket – no, I felt like a rotten dad – but you won me over too.

And then you turned to Dad again and said, “I don’t know your name. Mine’s Anne. You must be grandpa.” Oh, but he was tough. Do you remember how he answered you? All gruffness and rudeness – “I must be” – and how he got up and went back to bed without another glance at you, Mom or me?

He was a bitter man in many ways. A hard life had made him sullen. I don’t know what tragedies had happened – whether he and Mom had lost children before me (I’m and only child too, Anne) or what.

this is what you must remember: that I told you, when we were cold and waiting for someone to give us a ride, that the best food in the world was hot cheesecake. I told you that most people didn’t know what “good” was and ate their cheesecake cold, but that we, when we got to New York, were going to have hot cheesecake. I told you that your grandpa made the best hot cheesecake in the world, and that he would make a huge pan of it just for you, so much hot cheesecake that you would be in cheesecake heaven. What you didn’t know was this: I remembered my father making cheesecake only once; that cheesecake was the best food I had ever had; and I didn’t think for an instant that my father would make you hot cheesecake or anything else.

I thought about my father’s cheesecake because I had been terribly hungry, as you were. I told you about it because… who knows? Because the thought of hot cheesecake while shivering beside a wintry highway was such a good thought that I needed to share it with you. Maybe.

You were sick during our first week in New York. You slept a lot while you got better, and I was out looking for work and then working long hours, and there are a few times, those first few months, that are hazy. Maybe you remember that time better than I do. I know you and Mom spent a lot of hours together. Dad stayed away from us. He’d come home, covered with cement dust, and take off his clothes in the hallway. It was a routine. While he was in the shower Mom would vacuum his work clothes, and she would vacuum up the trail of white dust to the shower. Maybe you asked him why he was dusty; maybe you asked him about his job. Did he tell you that he worked in a masonry factory where huge machines mixed dry cement and filled hundred pound sacks with the stuff? Did he tell you that he was so big and his arms were so strong because he loaded those heavy sacks all day, year after year, into trucks? You must have asked him something, because I remember the day I came home from my job and saw him tossing you into the air, throwing you nearly to the ceiling, and catching you. He tossed you like a sack of cement but he caught you more gently than he ever would have caught a sack, and you were laughing.

He was still gruff, but I began to notice that he was different. We’d all sit down together and he’d talk a little. Just a few words here and there, about the weather – looks like more snow – or about the meal – good bread – but mostly it was you who talked. You talked about everything., and sometimes when you were catching your breath, he’d tell you to eat more, and damned if I didn’t see the faint lines of a smile on his face.

Even though I had my feet firmly planted soon after we arrived in New York, you were nearly ten before I met Martha and the three of us moved into our own place. You should understand that you and I stayed with your grandparents for so long because we wanted to. It wasn’t because I owed them my presence that we stayed; we stayed because there was love in their apartment. Even as a little girl you always had a way that inspired – that’s the word – everyone around you to want to love you. You made grandpa want to do things for you, and he did, and he discovered that he wasn’t too old or too hopeless to be human again. Anne, it was all your doing. It was you who chased out the bleakness from that small apartment, just as I had chased out the black bird from your room.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came home one evening and you ran up to me and said, “Grandpa is making hot cheesecake!” But I was. For sure enough, there he was, my big father, wearing an apron over his bathrobe, egg cartons, milk bottle and cream cheese wrappers all around him, a mixing bowl in front of him, a large spoon in his hand, making a hot cheesecake.

“Come on Anne,” he said, “We’re going to add eggs now.” You ran to him and hugged his knees, and he lifted you up to let you crack the eggs. I had to go into the shower and turn it on so I could cry.

Martha is asleep now. Outside, the snow has stopped. It looks calm out there, soft and quiet. I’ve been sitting here writing for so long that it has grown late; by now, you’re all moved in with Peter, and from across the city I think I can feel how happy you are.

I’ve never written to you before – never had to, whenever you were away I knew you’d be back with me soon. Can a father stay friends with his only child when she’s grown and left home? Let’s try, Anne.

Your Dad.

By Steve S. Saroff

My Grandfather came to New York in 1917 and got a job. He worked all day and most of the nights, and he never learned English. In Russia he had been a writer who wrote short stories and essays in Yiddish for the Kiev newspapers. But when he died, he had been a laborer in America for more than 30 years.

My father, before he too died, told me that my hands were like my Grandfather’s. I left home when I was 14 and had been gone a long time. When I came to visit my dieing father, he took my hand and held it until I became uncomfortable. I pulled my hand from his grasp. I was 22 then and tough like loneliness; I mean, no one was helping me and I trusted no one. All those years, me working pointless jobs on highway crews or in the western oilfields, or anyplace where the pay would be in cash so I could just keep moving, I never thought about where I may have come from.

So when I get my hand away from my father, he starts talking. It was all chance that I called my father at all – not having talked to him once since leaving home – and finding out how sick he was. And so that is how I found out about my Grandfather, found out that he had been a storyteller, found out how tough he had been. Leaving Russia, leaving his language and words and coming to America with his one-year old child – my father – and raising him alone in the city. Raised him alone because my Grandmother – his wife – had been killed in a Pogrom. Those things in old Russia where the Tsar’s Cossacks, soldiers who wore beautiful uniforms of black wool with red trim; those Cossacks who drank potato vodka and smashed the bottles on the coble stones; those Cossacks who mounted their beautiful horses and drew their beautiful swords and then galloped through the Jewish quarters, killing everyone who was on the streets.

I gasped a bit as my father tells me this story of his father. The story of my Grandfather. I heard all the other details – and I remember all the details – but it hurts my hand now to write about such sadness. It is enough that I tell you this: I have inherited my Grandfather’s hands and his love of telling stories.

But here, in America, in my country, my language is English and I am not so tough as the people I have come from.

I met a woman today. A girl from another country who I know almost nothing about. We were walking together, her and I, in the desert. She was carrying a paper umbrella. I was pushing a bicycle. She told me she worked for a while taking care of a woman who was disabled. The disabled woman could only move one hand, and nothing else. She moved her hand just the amount needed to control a wheelchair. She breathed through a respirator. She needed help for everything. She needed to be lifted to and from the bed, to the chair, to her baths. But she could talk, and she could laugh.

And the person who I met today, the girl from another country, she says to me that the woman in the wheelchair is tough and good and happy.

“She even has a normal sex life,” the girl says, “Imagine, not being able to move, but being able to think clearly and to feel clearly. I am so glad that she has a boyfriend. She is happy.”

The girl from another country, she and I walk past hundreds of people who are just waking up. The night before – last night – I couldn’t sleep so I walked over to where the fires were. A sculpture of a heart was burning. Twenty feet tall, flames going into the sky, the iron of the sculpture glowing hot orange. I walked behind the heart to where a door was open and where a crowd was throwing logs into the fire. I threw a log in and watched the sparks jump.

“I saw that heart,” the girl says, “I too threw wood in there. I too watched the sparks.”

This girl, this young woman, tells me that she has no skills that she feels strong with. But she tells me; she is working on making a film about her ancestors.

“It will be a trilogy,” she says, “Of life in San Francisco, life in South Africa, and life at home where I was born. I don’t know what I am doing, but I am doing it anyway.”

This girl who says she has no skills, she tells me of the four languages she speaks. She tells me about a car that she owns that was impounded because it collected too many parking tickets. She laughs, and says that all her savings were then spent on parking tickets. She says she has no permits to work anywhere, and no permits to be living in any country, no paper to be anywhere. And then she tells me about the woman in the wheelchair, the woman who thinks and feels and who needs to be lifted to and from her bed and her chair.

“I don’t think it is so bad not being allowed to be anywhere, as long as I am helping others. I don’t think it is so bad. I will get along, I will be ok.”

My father – who drove me out of his house because of his own sorrows – has let go of my hand and has started talking about my Grandfather.

“We do what we do to survive,” my father is saying, “We make a lot of mistakes trying to survive.”

He tells me then about the Cossacks. He tells me about being alone all day as a small child when my Grandfather was working. He keeps talking and I reach over and hold his soft, frail hand. And I promise him – though I don’t say the words out loud – I promise that I will be the one in this country who will do more than just survive. I shudder then, feeling the generations of ghosts who seem to be near, and I promise to be tough enough to simply be happy. To go beyond food and water and shelter. To get away from hard labor. To get to a place of laughter.

The girl from the other country says goodbye to me and walks to the left. I walk to the right, away from the crowds and out here where there is just desert, but I stop and look back. The girl has stopped too. We are far away from each other, but still close enough to see each other’s arms as we wave goodbye. I wave goodbye to this tough, skilled girl who will go on and do everything she dreams of. I think this because she already understands pointless things like parking tickets and work without permits and how to get into Burningman by hiding in the trunk of a car. She has reminded me of the tough people I have come from, and, at the same time of the laughter that is now close by.

#

Originally published in Redbook magazine, September 1986. Susan Spano Wells was the editor then.

When Clara and I first came to this part of the country in 1969, land was cheap. We had spent a week driving around up North, and on our way back to Iowa we came through and decided to retire here: Flathead Lake, Montana, the east side. It was the end of summer and the cherry crop had already been picked, but we fell in love with the orchards, the way they go right down to the shore, and the way that the mountains look, so close. “Sam,” Clara said to me, “wouldn’t it be a fine thing to live here, like a vacation all year long?”

We stayed at the state campground for five days, and that was Clara’s base of operations. From there she planned, made notes and used the pay phone to call real estate agents, landowners and, finally, the Jerognsons, who sold us this place — a ramshackle dock, an old wooden house and four acres of cherry trees. It took all our savings, and, of course, we had to sell our house in Des Moines.

The kids didn’t mind. Why should they have? Sue was living in New York then and John in Houston. “It will be a great place for us all to get together in the summer,” Clara said on the phone when we broke the news to them. “You can help your father with the cherry harvest,” she told John. “Sue,” she said when she called New York, “you’ll love the lake. It’s beautifully clear.”

We both knew about winters, but our first one was rough. The cold didn’t bother us — we were prepared for it — but the isolation did. The road was snowed in much of the time, and most of the people we had met in the summer moved away for the winter. Clara and I made big fires in the stove, played a lot of cards and planned what we would do with our four acres of cherries.

That spring, when the blossoms came out and the breezes off of the lake were fresh and warm, I felt like a kid again. Clara and I were only fifty, but we had both worked many hard years; we were happy that spring. I read books on orchard management, built a tool shed, pruned the trees, repaired the dock. Clara made friends with all the neighbors up and down the lake for miles — she wasn’t going to spend another winter alone with me as her only card partner — and she fixed up the house, put in a garden, made herself a home. When the weather started to get hot, we spent the afternoons on the dock sipping lemonade, feeling smug and comfortable. Sometimes, when it was especially hot, we swam in the lake, and the water was so cold that we could only stay in for a few minutes at a time.

The harvest that first summer was a good one. Most aren’t. Usually it rains at the wrong time, just before the harvest; then all the cherries swell and split, and the yellow jackets come out and swarm over the rotting fruit. Or it doesn’t rain enough and the cherries never get full and sweet. Our first harvest, though, was perfect. I got good help, and since four acres is small for an orchard around here, it was all picked quickly while the price was high.

We made money that first season, and Clara canned many, many quarts of cherries and cherry jam. “In February we’ll open one of these jars,” she said, “and turn some chilly, gray morning into summer.” Most of her jars, though, she wrapped in crumpled newspaper. Then she put them in boxes and sent them to New York and Texas. By the end of summer, when most of the neighbors were boarding up their windows and getting ready to leave for their winter homes, the kids still hadn’t visited. “They’re busy, Sam,” she said to me while she put boxes on the counter at the post office, quarts of Montana summer about to be sent thousands of miles. “They’ll make it out next year.”

They came out sooner though, that very winter, the second winter. They came for Clara’s funeral, when the road was icy, the edges of the lake frozen, and the cherry trees bowed with snow. I don’t remember their visit well. I was in a bad way, spending most of my time at the kitchen table. When the kids left, I hardly noticed except that the house was colder. I often forgot to go outside for wood, and the fire died out sometimes.

One cold morning I woke in the dark and felt how alone I was; gone was the warm and familiar sound of Clara breathing next to me. I got out of bed and went to my table and sat down. Shivering there, I watched the stars fade, while out on the lake, dawn came up over Wildhorse Island. It looked out of place, like a ragged tooth. Clara and I had planned many times to make the six-mile trip to the island, but we never went. It was always something we thought the kids would like. Lots of local legends about the place: abandoned mines and homesteads, ghosts haunting certain coves, and the horses. The island had once been the home of a great herd of them. We were going to explore — rent a boat, take a picnic lunch, look for the horses — and then go back again with the kids, but we never did. Things got in the way. Small things, like the weather and the wind that seemed to stir the lake into a rough sea each time we got ready to go — and the large thing, the cancer that first put Clara in bed, and then killed her.

I nearly sold the place after that and moved back to Iowa, but the friends Clara had cultivated in the summer came and visited. “Just checking up on you,” Joe Sandish would say as he stomped the snow off his boots and let himself in. He’d always throw an armload of wood into the stove and exclaim, “It’s a cold one today, sure enough,” and we’d play cards for a spell and I would be glad for his company, for his friendship.

Another orchard owner, my age to the year, and a man whose eyes sparkled when he laughed, Joe helped me through that winter. And there were others besides Joe. George Evers, Patrick Duffy, Sheila Maloney — they all came and visited with me, and even before spring I had stopped thinking about moving out. “This is my home now,” I thought then. I still do.

Clara has been gone for more than fifteen years now. Since then I’ve seen a lot of harvests, good and bad. This season is at its peak now, and it’s one of the rare, good ones. I will make money this year. The cherries are full, bright and sweet. The trees are at the best they’ve been since Clara and I came here. “Careful planning and work always pay off,” she used to say. The pruning I’ve done, the work I’ve seen to, combined with this good weather — yes, I’m glad I stayed. Clara would still be young enough to enjoy it if she were alive to see how the orchard looks today. The only trouble is my help this year, though I didn’t have much choice. With all the orchards doing well, with so much fruit to pick, I was lucky to get the help I did.

They drove off the main road, down to my place, one week ago. I had a sign up, “Pickers Needed.” I told them I paid top wage and that all the ladders were good ones: no broken rungs or wobbly legs. I showed them were they should park and where they could set up their tent.

The girl ruined the first bucket of cherries she picked, pulling the fruit from the stems, opening a hole to let the rot in. I said, “That’s all right, I’ll use those for jam.” And his first bucket was nearly as bad, because he left the twin leaves on each stem, making more work than it was worth to go back and pick them all off. So I said, “Look you two, come here,” and I asked them if they had ever picked fruit before, and of course, they hadn’t. I should have told them then to beat it, that a peak year is not the time to learn about fruit picking, but I didn’t. I let them stay, partly because I wasn’t sure that I could find other help, and partly because I’ve become an old fool living alone out here.

Each year the help is new; the same people never come back. Fruit pickers are like that, I’ve learned. Migrants, mostly poor, mostly young, they aren’t looking for a home. I’ve always worked along with them, and I’ve learned a lot over the years. Most seasons, though, it has taken two days to pick what good fruit there’s been, so before I’ve had time to get to know any of my help, they’ve been paid and are gone, moving on to harvests in Washington and Oregon.

But this year is different. The three of us, Leslie, Ralph — those are their names — and I, have been working together all week and we talk. Ralph, the son of an Army officer, lived in many places growing up. He’s told me stories about packing and moving and how, finally, his mother had enough and went off without explanation, leaving Ralph with his father. “I had to call him ‘sir.’ But it was a good childhood. I was never bored.” Ralph is twenty-one, a year older than Leslie, whom he loves. And Leslie, she loves Ralph. New, fresh, neither of them really knows yet what to do — they’re still shy with each other, unsure. But when I happen to see them talking, when they don’t think I’m listening, I know … I’m not so old that I can’t remember what love sounds like, and I’m glad that I didn’t send them away just because they didn’t know about fruit.

The first night they were here I went up to check on them before going to sleep. I wanted to make sure their camp fire was under control. They had pitched their tent in the old access road between the orchard and the south woods. Their fire was still burning — a small, safe fire — and I smelled its rich, piney smoke as I came up on them. When I got close, I stopped. They hadn’t heard me. They were talking quietly and didn’t need me there. Something, though, kept me from turning and walking away. I listened for maybe a minute. What they were talking about was simple and dear: preserving fruit. Leslie was telling Ralph how it was done, and he was listening. They were sitting together close to the fire, with their backs toward me. Ralph was holding her, his chin resting on her head, and I could tell they were both staring into the embers, letting the dying firelight touch them. I heard Leslie say, “We’ll have to make preserves form some of these. We might get sick of cherries now, but this winter we’ll be glad for them.” Ralph answered her, “You can teach me.” She turned her face up to his and they kissed and I went back to the house.

On my way I remembered how Clara taught me to preserve fruit when we lived in Iowa. It had seemed such an easy skill. Fruit, sugar, pectin. Now though, the cherries and jam I preserve each summer rarely have the flavor that Clara’s did. It’s only those rare batches I send away.

Leslie told me how they met. Only one month ago, in Missoula, she was awakened by a strange sound. She looked out her bedroom window and in the backyard, half hidden under a hedge, was Ralph, wrapped in a green sleeping bag, a pack next to his head, snoring loudly. “He was obviously a bum,” she told me, as she reached clumsily for cherries with one hand, clutching the ladder with the other. So she called the police. “It was a stupid thing to do,” she said, smiling and climbing down the ladder to empty her bucket, “but I didn’t have the nerve to talk to him myself.” She saw from her window how politely her backyard bum apologized to the policeman who woke him up, saying that he didn’t mean any harm, was just passing through and had been tired. The she listened to the policeman telling Ralph how sorry he was to have to ask him to leave, but since someone had complained he had no choice. “Well, I figured if this guy could make a cop feel guilty, then he couldn’t be a bad person, and besides, I felt rotten.” So, as the police car slunk down the alley and as Ralph was just swinging his pack on, Leslie called out to him and took her turn at apologizing. They talked for a while. He was on his way to Seattle to look for work. He had a friend there. Then she invited him inside for breakfast, and that’s as much as she told me.

Later, though, Ralph mentioned that coming up to Flathead Lake for the cherry season had been his idea. He had convinced Leslie to quit her job. “She deserves better,” he said to me, “than to work for next to nothing, inside all day with an idiot for a boss.”

I laughed then and said to Ralph, “At least here she’s not working inside,” and he laughed too. They’ve become good workers, actually. They pick fruit slowly because they’re new at it. Not like the workers who’ve been traveling the harvest line since the time they were born. Leslie and Ralph pick slowly because they are still in awe of the fruit, concerned with each cherry. And, of course, they’re slow because they often stop to look at each other, to laugh, and to take swimming breaks in the lake, rinsing the sweat and the dust away.

At the end of their second day here Ralph knocked on my door and asked if I had tools and lumber. He wanted to build a frame to hold the large cherry boxes off the ground, so the fruit wouldn’t have so far to fall. That way fewer cherries would get bruised. A good idea. He had it built before dark, and I realized then that the boy was no bum. And yesterday he sketched a plan to bring lake water up to the orchard, drawing the details of a small windmill, telling me that I could build it cheaply with mostly salvaged parts. As I listened to him, I remembered how he had watched the sailboats on the lake and asked if they were out often. And I thought he was only thinking of sailing.

But Joe dropped by this evening and noticed how much of my crop still needs to be picked. “Sam, you should hire more workers. The price is going to start dropping soon.” Joe’s orchard is large; I pass it each day as I drive the boxes of cherries to the shipping and canning center just up the shore a few miles. Joe’s orchard is almost picked clean. He has twenty pickers who nearly run up and down the ladders.

I listened to his advice, agreed, but knew that I didn’t want to hire more help, even if I could find it. And Joe, friend that he is, seemed to read my thoughts, because he said, “Maybe there’s no need to rush. Maybe the price will stay high this year.” We stopped talking about the crop then and both of us looked out across the lake. We were standing on the dock and the sun had just gone down behind the mountains. The water was black and smooth. Nighthawks swooped close to us, catching the few mosquitoes that come out at sunset. Joe waved his arm, pointing to Wildhorse Island. “You know, all my years here, I’ve never taken the time to get over there,” he began. “They say there are only three horses left. They say they’re all mares. Sam, you and me should take a boat over someday soon.”

Once on the phone, Clara and I tried to tell the kids about the island. When we told John about the horses, he said, “I saw horses in Iowa.” When we told Sue about the ruins, she said, “There are enough abandoned buildings in New York. I don’t need to see more.” So tonight I answered Joe, “Yes, we should get over to the Island.” And then I described the windmill I am going to build — and he understood that I wasn’t changing the subject — and I talked about my children, how proud of them I have felt, and how disappointed too. In the dark this evening, talking long after the island and even the lake had disappeared, Joe said, “Some places, maybe, are for looking back and remembering; some places aren’t for children.” And I agreed and remembered the winter when Clara died; how the children had come and gone. I spent long hours then staring out the window, across the lake and, when night came, I stared at my own reflection in the window, as if at a stranger, a dim, flat image of a person I though I knew. I felt that I had lost everything, my wife, my children, the familiar places I had known for years, and that what I had instead was a hermitage in old age, a strange place where I was alone. That winter I was bitter, putting blame on anything I could. My sorrow was the sudden disease that killed Clara, the doctors who were unable to stop it, the wintertime with its long nights, my children who seemed unwilling to love me. But tonight, in this cool darkness after a hot day, sitting here instead of sleeping, I can look at a reflection in the same window, and this time it is of a person I know.

It’s my help this year. They hardly know what they’re doing, they’re almost reckless. I listen to what they tell me and most of it is about what’s to come. Even if only a few of their dreams turn out, they’ll still be doing fine. They have plans with each other: plans for long hikes and for good jobs and land and children. The same breathless sort of plans that Clara and I shared — not fruit picking, but looking forward. The same way Sue, with her husband, and John, with his wife, started. And tonight I remember how busy it is planning, how wonderful too. Tonight I forgive my helpers this year who are picking a cherry crop slowly, and I forgive my children who almost never visit. There will be time. Other crops, more visits.

Joe and I are going to the island. It’s our plan. I want to find a bluff on it where I can stand and look back. I want to see how this place looks from a distance, from across the water. I want to imagine that Clara might be seeing me in the same way, looking at all I’ve done, seeing that I still have plans.

#

There was one morning when I was seventeen, and very hungry, when I saw the ocean. It was in Oregon, on that road by the cliffs, and there was snow. The night before it had been fog, and I had been given a ride by someone who was drunk. He was going fast, and we couldn’t see the road. I was asking him to stop, to let me out, but he kept saying, “What’s wrong? I can drive fine.” After a few miles there was a bar alone there with a few cars parked in front. Then he stopped. He wanted me to come inside with him and drink, but I got my pack out from the back seat and started walking away. I remember him yelling at me, “Told you I could drive.”

Even walking, in the dark it was difficult to see, so after I had gone about half a mile, I got off the road, on the side away from the cliffs. There were a lot of bushes and the ground was sandy and hard, but I found a flat place and I got into my sleeping bag. There were no cars on the road, and I fell asleep listening the to soft sounds of waves from the other side of the road, down somewhere beneath me.

When I woke, the ground and all the bushes were covered with snow. I was cold and wet. The fog was still there too, and the snow came out from this cloud and it was beautiful. I got the wet sleeping bag into the pack, and went back onto the road, which was glistening and black, the snow and fog swirling above it. To get warm, I walked fast on the road, but there was no traffic. The cliffs down to the ocean were not as steep as they had seemed in the dark. There were rocky paths, small trails, that went down and disappeared in the mist, and I walked down one of them to the beach.

The snow covered the sand right to where the waves washed against it. I walked along that line, putting my footprints in snow, then in wet sand. Small waves came out from the mist, and the snow swirled about them.

I forgot how hungry I was; I thought that there was nothing that I wanted.

Then, in front of me, I heard laughing, and two children came running out of the snow, chasing each other. They were hitting at each other with some kind of long, green plants. They ran up to me and stopped. They were each wearing rain coats buttoned up to their chins, mittens, and stocking hats. Their eyes were bright and wide. They were both smiling. The older, taller one asked me, “Did you camp here last night?”

Before I could answer, the younger child said, “We live up there!” and pointed up towards the road.

I took off my pack, put it down in the snow, and sat on it. I asked, “What are these?” and touched one of the plants.

“Kelp,” the older child said, “It grows out there,” and she pointed to the ocean.

“Sea otters sleep in it,” the younger one, the boy, said. “They float on their backs and hold onto kelp when they sleep. Sea otters who had bad dreams pulled these out.”

“You are so stupid,” the girl said.

“Am not.”

And then they chased each other, running around me, pushing and pulling at each other. Then again, they both stopped.

The girl asked me, “You don’t know what kelp is?” And she held out the length of sea weed for me to hold. I took it from her and she said, “This is a short one. Some are really long.”

I told her that I had never seen the ocean before, and the little boy clapped his mittened hands together, sending a spray of sand off of them, and he laughed and said, almost yelling, “You never saw the ocean!” Then he leaned his face close to mine and asked, “How come?”

I told them I grew up far away from the ocean, and I pointed to the cliffs, and said, “I grew up way over that way.”

The girl said, “It’s ok. We grew up right here and we have never seen snow on the beach. We don’t know,” and she waved towards the cliffs, “What is ‘way over that way.’”

The little boy had run down towards the waves and was bent over at the waist, his hands on his knees, shuffling slowly and looking intently down. His sister yelled to him, “What are you looking for?” and he answered her by yelling back, “Shut up!” She immediately dropped the kelp she was holding and ran down to where the boy was. Instead of pushing at him, as I had expected her to do, she started searching the sand by her feet the same as he was doing. I watched them for about a minute, and then, rapidly, the little boy knelt down and picked something from the sand, and then ran to me, with his sister running behind him.

“Here,” he said, “This is for you.” He was holding out to me a white, round thing that was hard and thin as a piece of cardboard.

I took it from the boy, and then the girl said, “It is a sand-dollar. It is fragile. He always finds them. I only find broken ones.” As she said this, she leaned her elbow on the boy’s shoulder and he grinned. She said, “He has very good eyes but I can run faster,” and they both then raced away, along the footprints that I had left.

I held the sand-dollar and looked at where the children had disappeared. I could hear them faintly laughing from somewhere in mist. Then, when I was about to give up and keep walking, the laughing grew louder and they came running out from the fog, back to me.

The girl was in front, but the boy was close behind her. They were panting, and they came up to me fast, almost knocking me over from where I was sitting. They were pushing large shell things at me, and they both were talking at once. He said, “I found both of these but she took one.” And she said, “He only saw them first, he finds everything first, but I picked them up first.” And he said, “Did not. You took it.” But they were laughing, not really arguing, just happy.

“What are these?” I asked, holding a dark, dense, shell, turning it over in my hands.

“Oysters,” the girl said. “They wash up with the kelp. These are alive. Grown ups eat them. We hate them.”

The boy said, “If you have a knife, I’ll show you.”

The girl said, “Yuck.”

The boy said, “Yuck.”

I laughed, and then the boy said, “You should try one,” and then he ran up towards the cliffs and came back in a moment holding a big rock with both his hands.

I said I didn’t want to make a fire, but the girl said, “No, you eat oysters cold.” I laughed again, but she said, “really, I see them do it all the time.”

The boy had put the rock down by my feet and he was looking at me and he asked, “Do you have a knife?”

I told him I did, and I unzipped a pocket of the pack and got out a Swiss army knife. When the boy saw it he said, “When I am ten I will get one of those. I already know how to use them.” He then told me to watch. He took off his mittens, and smacked the thin end of one of oysters on the rock, breaking some of the shell away. Both the girl and I were looking carefully, and he held the oyster up to us and said, “See, if you look in there you can see that it is moving.”

The girl said, “This is sad.”

The boy said, “Birds break them too.”

The girl said, “You are a bird.”

The boy ignored her. Then he told me to hold the oyster and he took the knife from me and opened the long blade and he took the broken oyster from me and slid the knife into it.

“I think this hurts it,” he said. “I don’t like doing this.”

The girl said, “Then why do you do it?” But she was leaning close, as I was, watching him.

He said, “Because it is the only way to open them unless you smash them like birds.” He moved the knife around for a moment and then said, “See?” And then handed the knife back to me, gently lifted the two shells apart, and held the shell with the oyster’s body under my nose.

The girl said, “He likes showing off,” and she again leaned her elbow on his shoulder and again he grinned.

I asked them what I should do, and they told me again that “grown ups” eat them. I ate the oyster then, and I made a face and said, “Yuck,” and the children laughed and made faces too and ran around me, and pushed at me, and pulled at my hair. The boy opened the other oyster and held it out for me and I ate it, and again the children laughed and pushed at me, and then, for the first time in more than a year, I was laughing.

Then I heard a woman’s voice call, and the girl said, “That’s our Mom. She’s looking for us.” The girl yelled loud, “We’re over here, Mom!”

The boy said, “Don’t tell her that I used your knife, ok?” I said I wouldn’t tell anyone. I thought the children would leave then, but they stayed next to me, holding the oyster shells, grabbing them from each other’s hands, and arguing about pearls and if the white inside of the shells were the same as pearls. I sat on the pack, and I looked up the beach and saw through the snow, their mother come walking towards us.

I know now that she was young, but when I saw her I felt like a child and thought she was a grown up. She said hello to me and said, “I hope they haven’t been a bother to you.” Then she saw my pack, and I saw her looking at my boots, the raggedness of my clothing. She stepped next to her boy, and she put one arm around him, and she touched the girl’s hat with her other hand. Then she said, “These guys have never seen snow before.”

The boy said, “He has never seen the ocean before.”

The girl reached in front of her mother and pushed her brother, and said, “we showed him how to eat oysters. He ate two of them.”

I remember her, the mother, how she smiled then, her arms around her children. Behind her the waves, the snow. I remember little things the best. The dark sweater she was wearing and the knit pattern of it. Her eyes and the color in them. The way she looked again at me, looked at her children, as if she were weighing who I was by the expressions on her children’s faces. I remember her saying then, to her children, “Come back to the house now. Let’s warm up,” and how she then looked at me, paused, and said, “You can come up there too, have some coffee or something.”

I could hear cars then up on the road. I remember feeling snow on my face, and I remember feeling my throat tighten. The children were smiling at me, but I didn’t know what to do. Instead of going with them, I stood up, swung on the pack. Then I said goodbye, thanking the children, thanking their mother for the offer, and walked back along the snowline, along my tracks.

That night I was in Portland. Gray lines of the homeless waiting for food at a mission, gray lines of us by a labor office looking for work, and then just the early darkness of winter. I went back onto the highway, but couldn’t catch a ride, so I climbed up under a bridge and slept for a while there. The roaring of traffic turned into dreams of waves and water. In the morning I woke up and smiled. The children had laughed and run; the world was not all concrete and steel. It was the moment that I knew I would not always be drifting.

#

At 3 in the morning the phone rang. I let the machine take the call and didn’t listen to the message until the next day. The call had been from  a Japanese woman whom I had met at a crowded party more than two months before. She had told me then that she was an artist and that she had come to Montana to, “become famous.” Now she was calling me because she was in jail. She said to the machine, “This is Yuko. Please. I have no person now. I in the jail. I find your name in my pocket. I wait for you.” Nearly six feet tall with red-tinted, jaw-length black hair, I first noticed her because she was standing by herself with her back to the crowd, looking out a window. And then I noticed her hands, long and thin, her fingers stained with blue paint.

The people I worked with had brought me to the party, but I was weary from listening to technical talk and money stories. When I saw Yuko, I just wanted to stand next to her, next to someone I didn’t know. So I went over to the window next to her. She turned and looked at me for a moment and then returned her gaze to the darkness outside. It was the start of September, and outside it had just started raining. I tried to watch the rain through the darkness, instead, though, all I could see – all I was able to pay attention to – was Yuko’s reflection. Her eyes were large and dark in the paleness of her face, and she too seemed to be looking at my reflection, looking at me. So I spoke to her, speaking to her reflection. “You have paint on your hands,” I said, “what have you been making?” She didn’t answer. She didn’t move. My eyes relaxed, focusing past the window now and into the darkness further out. I was about to turn and leave the window and go back to the kitchen or another crowded room, but suddenly she looked directly at me, her face less than two feet from mine, and said, rapidly and with an awkward accent, “My boy friend, he student. He love me. I come to Montana for him. For him I paint. For him I artist. For him I be famous.”

So I ask her, “Is your boyfriend here?”

She shakes her head, a silent ‘No,’ and then she turns back to the window and says quietly, “No, no. He go. He go.”

“Who do you know here?” I asked.

She answered, “I come here to find my boyfriend, but he go now. He love me, but he forget me.”

I didn’t say anything, and she continued, “I paint all week for him. I finish this morning.” She nodded her face towards her hands, “and I bring painting to house this afternoon, but he no take it.”

“Your painting,” I ask, “what was it of?”

She looked at me quietly, and then asked, “You understand art?”

I nodded, yes.

“How you know art?” She asked. “You study it?”

“No, I do not paint,” I said, “but I think I understand making things, like why we try to show ourselves. But why wouldn’t your boyfriend take your painting?”

“You ask what I paint. I made myself.” and she put a hand up, pulling her hair above her head, “I paint my hair in colors of how I feel for him. I paint rainbow. I paint sad thing like storm. And he not take it. He say he will not look at it. He close door on me. He have other girl friend now. He break my heart.” She was looking out the window again, and continued speaking, but without looking at me, “I come here because this is house of  person he work for. I knew party. I think maybe he come here. But he does not come.” And then she looked at me again, and said to me, “You understand art? So you understand why I trash painting?”

“Trash it?” I asked.

“Yes. Take knife, cut face. Throw painting in can by street.”

It had been too long since I had heard talk like this. I had been in the world of The Lie for the past few years, a place where no one is honest, and where no one shows weakness. In just these few sentences exchanged with Yuko, I knew that I didn’t want to be at the party anymore, didn’t want to talk with anyone else except her. And what I suddenly wanted was to try to save her “trashed” painting.

“Hey,” I said, “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. But will you let me keep that painting for you? Can we find it?”

She didn’t answer right away, and when she did she didn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ instead she said, “You have car? You drive me home now? He not come here. I go home.”

And without saying anything else we left. She lived in an apartment building on Arthur Street, near the University, and when I parked next to it, she turned to me and said, “Thank you for drive home,” and then she added, “My name is Yuko. Painting in can behind building,” she pointed, “I no to see it again.”

She opened the car door and was about to close it, when I said, “Wait. Can I see you again? Can I talk with you sometime?”

“No,” she answered, “I have boyfriend. He no love me anymore, but I have boyfriend.”

“OK,” I said, “but if you do want to talk sometime, or if you want to show me paintings, here, call me.” I had taken scrap of paper and written down my name and phone number and now was handing it towards her. She took the paper, and without looking at it, shoved it in her coat pocket, closed the car door, and walked into the building.

I waited a few minutes, and then I got out of the car and went to the back of the building. In the alley there was a large dumpster with a hinged, metal cover which I lifted up and then I looked inside. In the light from the street lamps it was easy to see, and there, still on the top of the garbage, was an abstract portrait of Yuko. It was about three feet square, painted in blues and reds. Her hair was a sprawling rainbow, and her skin was white with highlights of silver. There were two diagonal cuts through the canvas. One went through an eye, and the other across her cheek and through her mouth. I pulled the painting from the dumpster, held it so that it’s surface was away from the falling rain, and then I took it to my car, and put it in the back seat. It was an oil painting, and some of the paint was still wet. As I drove back to my house, I shook my head and laughed a bit. There was now blue oil paint on my hands.

She didn’t know anything about me. She hadn’t asked. And because I was sick of The Lie, I had written my name and number rather than handing her a business card. I did not think she would call me, and I did not go near the campus or her apartment building, but I kept thinking about her. I had taken the painting and hung it on the wall in my bedroom. The two cuts had not ruined anything; rather, they gave an expression to the face that I had seen in Yuko’s. Some wildness with a hint of desperation.

So I am awake two months later, early November, at seven in the morning listening to the message she left. I boil water and make coffee. I check email and read some news on the computer. I let my two cats in. I listen to the message again. And again. She does not know English well, but she has given me enough words to understand what is happening with her. In the phone book I find the number for the county jail, and I call. Yes, they have a Japanese girl named Yuko. They tell me she is 23. They also tell me that her bail is set at fifteen thousand dollars, she is being held for committing four felonies – breaking and entry and three assaults – and that her scheduled court date is two months away. Over the phone they won’t tell me any details of the assaults. And when I ask for specifics about what bail means – having never bailed anyone out of jail before – they tell me to call a lawyer or a bail bondsman. In the background there is yelling and noise. The person on the other end of the phone abruptly hangs up. I drink my coffee for a while, and then page through the phone book.

These years in The Lie have made me hate lawyers. So I call up a bondsman, the first one listed in the yellow pages. I tell him what I know and he explains that I can go to the jail myself and hand over $15,000 in cash which I might get back if she shows up for her court hearing. Or I can give him $1,500 that I will not get back. I ask him why I might lose the $15,000 even if she makes her court hearing, and he explains the judges often use the posted bail as the fine – in addition to prison time – for people found guilty. “What did she do?” the bondsman asks. I tell him I have no idea, and he says, “A fella’ could hire a lawyer. Find out.” I thank him for the info and tell him I have to think over the options, and we end the call.

I go into work. I read and delete several messages. I spend a few hours on the phone. It is all politics about who gets to control things. O’neill comes into my office and complains about work done by the people in Seattle. He tells me that I should go to Seattle as soon as possible. In the last two weeks I have already been there four times. But I say, “OK”, and I get Suzzy to deal with the ticket and stuff, and I go home to take a shower and get some clothes. I catch the afternoon flight, get into the rental car, deal with the traffic, spend the night in the motel, and at six the next morning – in the dark – go to SLAM and talk with executives most of the day.  There is no discussion of what is broken or impossible, instead everyone is worried about the auditors that their main investor, Gushin Merrill, has on site, and the talking revolves around how we will describe “person-hours” spent on “designated-projects.”  It takes about eight hours to get to the point, and even then I am not sure what I have said nor what they have said. Then I catch the evening flight back to Montana, getting into my house near midnight.

All the concrete, the fractured motel sleep of the night before, the day in the glass-palace rooms with white-boards and assistants, the diagrams and convincing, the talk about money, then the furious freeway traffic in the winter dusk – too many trucks – nothing soft. Ugly machines. Too fast. The airport, the shuttles, into and out of the crowds, back into a jet. Back. Unlocking my door, seeing the blinking lights of the phone messages. It always feels like weeks. I turn around and walk back outside. In the dark, close by, are mountains. I breathe the cold air deep. To be stirring a dying fire someplace up high, counting stars… I go back into my house. There is no welcome home, which means it is no home.

The next morning. It is now a few days since Yuko left her message. I go to work and spend hours with O’neill explaining what went on in Seattle, and then I have to spend hours on the phone with the people in London, and then more phone time with people in Seattle, who asks me if I will come back there the next day. And now it is four in the afternoon and already getting dark. A nothing day. A day in The Lie. All of a sudden I want to know what she has done. I pick up the phone and call the bondsman. He remembers me. “We can do it right now,” he says, “Meet me at the jail in half an hour with fifteen hundred in cash,” and he gives me driving directions. I leave my office and go across the street to the bank and get the money, and then drive down Broadway to the jail. The bondsman is already there. He is dressed like a working cowboy, the boots, the long black coat, and the hat. When he shakes my hand I see a revolver under the coat, just like a cowboy. He asks me for the money. I give it to him, and he says, “Thanks, I like hundreds.”  Then we go into a lobby where, behind thick glass and through a speaker, a cop asks, “Who is it today?” The bondsman explains, and then we sit and wait for half an hour. He tells me again that I don’t get my $1,500 back, and also gets me to sign some paper that says if she doesn’t show up for the court hearing I will have to pay the bondsman more than thirteen thousand dollars.

“You trust this gal of yours?” he asks me.

“I really don’t even know her,” I tell him.

He just stares at me. He seemed impressed when I handed him the $1,500, and from how I dress and what I drive I know he is thinking that I don’t have much money. Which is fine. But now he warns me, actually threatens me, “You just make sure she shows up for the hearing. I don’t want to be coming after you.” He is silent for a while, and then says, “usually I check a bit more to make sure a fella is good for all the cash, but what the hey, right?” But he laughs and slaps his knee. Like he does this sort of thing all the time. Like he hopes he will have to chase somebody for money.

There is a buzzing sound and a steel door opens and a jailer comes out holding Yuko’s elbow. She is wearing blue jeans and the coat she had on that night we met. On her feet she is wearing orange, paper slippers. Her pants and her coat are stained with dark and dried blood. She is looking at the floor, her head bowed, her face hidden by her hair. Both her hands have bandages on them. The right hand has a gauze bandage wrapped about her knuckles, and the left has a large bandage near the wrist. The bondsman has Yuko sign some paper too. Yuko does not say anything and does not look up at any of us. As we are going out, the jailer says to me, “She can keep those slippers. She wasn’t wearing any shoes the night she came in.”

Outside, the bondsman shakes my hand again, this time letting his coat swing open so I get a good look at the holster around his waist and the long-barreled pistol. In his free hand he is holding the papers that Yuko signed. I glance at them and ask if I can get a receipt for the cash I had given him earlier. He laughs, looks at Yuko, looks back at me, and says, “She’s your receipt. You keep your eye on her.”

It is dusk outside. The county jail is on the west side of town, down the street from a pork processing plant. The place smells like bacon, and the knapweed filled fields surrounding the jail are spotted with scraps of newspaper and other wind-blown trash. Yuko and I are standing next to each other, I am looking at her, but she is still looking at the ground. I turn away from the bondsman, I say to Yuko, “This is an ugly place. I’ll drive you home.”

Neither of us says anything as I make the ten-minute drive from the jail to the University district. When I get to her apartment I park and turn off the engine. She is still looking down, and I have not been able to see her face at all. “Here we are,” I say, “you’re home now.” But she doesn’t talk, and she doesn’t look up either. Then she says, quietly, “I wait three days for you. I do not know if you get my message.”

I don’t say something like, hey, I have almost no idea who you are, and no idea of what you have done, so why should I risk who-knows-what to get you out of jail. Instead I say, “It was a lot of money.”

“How much?” She asks. And I tell her, and I also say – and I am not sure why – that I don’t care about the fifteen hundred that I have given to the bondsman, but I do care that she makes it to the court hearing in two months. She nods, says, “I got it.” Then she opens the car door, stands there for a moment, and says to me, “Come inside.”

I get out and follow her in to her ground floor apartment. She takes a small wallet from her pocket and gets her key out, opens the door, turns on the light, and says, “Please, come.” The apartment is one room. There is a kitchen nook in one corner, a bed in the other. The center of the room has a small table with one wooden chair. Next to the table is a large painter’s easel. Leaning against the walls are dozens of paintings, most of the canvases the same size as the one I took from the dumpster. The place stinks bad, the smell of rotting food from the dishes in the sink, mixed with fumes from the paintings. She goes to the window and opens it, then says to me, “Please,” and gestures to the chair. I sit down and she takes out her wallet, asks me how to spell my name, and writes me a check for the money I have just given to the bondsman, and hands it to me. I take the check but then ask her, “Didn’t they tell you that you could have bailed yourself out? Didn’t they explain that if you had money – if this check is good – that you could have called a bondsman yourself?”

She is looking at me. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her lower lip is swollen and cut. Her straight hair is tangled, and wisps of it are curling into one side of her mouth. I look at her. I just look at her. She is crying. Slow, slow tears in the corners of both her eyes, slow, slow tears down her face. She says to me, “If no one want me out, then I do not want come out.”

“But you don’t know me,” I said, “We don’t know each other at all.”

She nods, and says, “You take my painting. In my culture we know without much word.”

I still had no idea of what she had done, or of who she was. But I said to her, “Listen, you need to wash up, change and get some sleep. Is there a shower here?” She nods ‘yes’, and points to a door that I hadn’t noticed. I ask, “Do you want me to leave?” She shakes her head fast, no. Stay, she tells me. She says, “Please, no leave me alone.”

She gets some clothing and a towel from a dresser and goes into her bathroom. I can’t stand the stink anymore so I drain the  water from the sink, which gets rid of most of the smell right away. She comes out of the shower about the same time I am finishing with the dishes, and starts to tell me that I shouldn’t have cleaned, but I shrug. She sits down on her bed and I go back and sit on the chair. “What did you do?” I ask, “What happened?”

“I so sad,” she says, and then she lays down, pulling her blankets over herself. “I tell you in the morning.”

I get up to go, but she sits up and says, rapidly, “No, no, please stay.” I go back to the chair and sit down, and she smiles at me, the first time I have seen her smile, and pulls the blankets up to her face. She has changed the bandages on her hands, replacing the large gauze wraps with band-aids. She doesn’t look like a felon; she just looks like a skinny girl from Japan, living alone with her paintings. I don’t mind just staying there, so I say, “Ok,” and she closes her eyes, sighs several times, shudders, and then seems to be sleeping.

There is a lamp in the apartment’s far corner, near the window, and I turn that on and turn off the overhead light. I pace about the room, looking at the paintings, quietly pulling them from where they lean against each other, one at a time putting them under the lamplight. They aren’t like a student’s work, or from someone’s whose hands and eyes were just trying to play or kill time. There’s a style, a consistency between all the paintings, the same colors, the same mood. Faces with their eyes closed, and figures huddled against walls on the outside of row houses – house after house after house – with tall buildings behind and elevated railroad overhead. It’s Tokyo. The railroad edge of Tokyo, where school children commute four hours a day between their cramped homes and distant schools while their parents work. Same sort of stuff as the rusting oil barrel fringe of Montana and Wyoming towns, the emptiness past the sprawl, but in Tokyo it is a cell-phone, spotless and crowded loneliness.

I spend about two hours with the paintings, and forget about Yuko who is sleeping a few feet away. It’s about 8pm now, and I decide to leave, but when I am opening the door Yuko says, “Don’t go.” I close the door and go and sit down on the floor and lean against the bed.

“Did you sleep?” I ask.

“Yes. But I wake and watch you. You like my art?”

“Very much,” I say. She puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Sleep next to me,” she says, and then says again, “I so sad.”

Maybe because I have been desperate too… I lay down next to her, five hours earlier than I usually try to sleep, and we just hold each other, these two strangers, and our eyes close, and then I am asleep like I am drugged and drunk. Roaring trains turning to soft wind, her breathing on my neck, my mouth against the top of her head, dreamless and still.

I woke up alone in Yuko’s apartment. I put my shoes on, used the bathroom, and then waited. After about a half hour, I left a note asking Yuko to call me, and I left. Instead of going to work, I drove onto the interstate, and then just kept going for a while. I pulled off at the Fish Creek exit, fifty miles west of town, and then drove about ten miles until I started getting worried about getting stuck if it were to start snowing. I turned the car around and parked where the road was wide enough for someone to get by, and then I got out. I walked up a dry, south-facing slope until I was out of the dense lodge-pole and up to where the land was open and high. After an hour of walking I got to the ridgeline, and then I continued up hill for another hour. It was a brilliant autumn day, warm enough that I didn’t need gloves or a hat, and cool enough to be comfortable. I sat down and leaned against a large Ponderosa Pine, waited for my breathing to slow back to normal, and then took my phone out of my jacket pocket and turned it on. There was a clear view down into the Clark Fork valley, so the phone worked fine. I called the office.

“Where have you been?” Suzzy asked, “You’ve got a bunch of messages.”

“I’m having a slow day,” I said, “going to keep working here, from home. Just give me anything you think is important.”

Suzzy read through the messages, the normal stuff, but then she said, “and someone named Tsai called. He said you would know what it was about. He said you had his number.”

I thanked Suzzy, and told her that I would be in the next day, and then I turned the phone off. I sprawled out in the sun, lying on the deep layer of pine needles, the warm smell, like vanilla, making me feel good. It was silent. No breeze, and too early in the season for bugs or birds. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t, so I sat up again and took out a small notebook and pen from my coat pocket, and made a list of things I knew for sure about Yuko. I wrote, “Japanese, tall, artist, sad.” Then I made another list, next to the first, of questions. I wrote a “Get a lawyer? Call the court? Find out where her boyfriend is?” and, ending with, “Did she try to kill him?” Then I turned to a blank page, and at the top I wrote, “What I Know About Tsai,” and I tried to make another list on that page, but could not. Then I closed the notebook, turned the phone on again, and called Tsai. He answered by saying, “Yea, what?” and I could hear traffic noise.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Driving,” he said, “in Manhattan. It sucks.”

“Park,” I said.

“When was the last time you tried to find a parking space in New York at five? And where are you, you’re not in your office.”

I told him and then he said, “Last time we talked you were outside too. I don’t think you ever sit at a machine anymore.”

“Whatever,” I said, “So what’s up? You wanted me to call you.”

“You and I need to meet. You did a good job. I need to see you. Face to face. Like in person. Come to New York tomorrow. Pay for the ticket yourself.”

“I can’t make it,” I said. “You come here.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Personal stuff. I need to stay in town for a while. You just come to Montana tomorrow. Get out of that city.”

He was silent for a while, with just the sound of, slow, congested traffic, horns and wind.

“You driving with your window open, Tommy?” I asked, “Something wrong with you coming here?”

“Yea, the window is open. It’s actually nice here. And, yes, there is something wrong with me coming there. Like, maybe I have some other commitments. And like maybe I don’t want to do the carrying. But you, on the other hand, you have reasons to come to New York, all of which would stand up well under cross-examination. Listen; just meet me tomorrow night at eight. Meet me in that kosher deli we both like. The one where they don’t serve milk. You know the one.”

“Katz’s,” I say, and then ask, “And my personal situation? Do you even want to know why I think I should stay here?”

Tsai laughed, and said, “Bring your ‘situation’ with you, Sam. You are only going to be gone a day or two. You’ll be flying back with what we talked about, and it will be safer traveling with someone.” I was quiet, and then Tsai added, “Bring her with you.”

I realized then that one of the reasons that I liked Tsai was that he was able to guess right most of the time, just by how well he listened to people talk; how he seemed to pay attention to what wasn’t said. I decided then that it would be good to be in New York, and that I might as well try to bring Yuko, and it could help, it could make it easier for me to relax as I checked my bag. Also, Tsai and I were both breaking some serious laws and acting like it was just clean business, so it might be a bit of a reality touch to have someone sitting with us who was fresh out of jail. Maybe to act as a reminder of what we were risking. And so I laughed, told him yes, the personal situation was a girl, and I agreed to come to New York. Then I turned off the phone again and sat and listened to the nothingness of the late winter silence, waiting until dusk. Then I walked back to my car in the dark.

I drove straight to Yuko’s, parked, and went and knocked on her door. She asked who it was, and after I said, “Sam,” she opened the door, but only a few inches.

“Yes?” she asked, as if she didn’t know who I was or why I was there.

“I’m hungry,” I said, “I spent the day out side and haven’t eaten anything. Will you come and eat with me?”

“You funny,” she said. “You act like we friends. You should go away from me. Why should we eat food together?”

“Maybe because you are hungry, or maybe because you called me to get you out of jail. I don’t know, like, remember me? I was here with you last night?” And I laughed, and then asked, “Can I come in?”

Then she said, “OK, I go eat with you, you wait.” She closed the door, and in about a minute came out, carrying a jacket and a large sketchbook and wearing dark sunglasses, even though in the hallway there was almost no light. I didn’t say anything, I just walked out of the building and she followed me, and we got in the car and then she said, “I spend all my time in apartment. I should go out. You help me again, even though I tell you go away.”

I asked her what kind of food she wanted, and she told me it didn’t matter, and then I started the car and was about to drive south on Arthur, when Yuko touched my arm and said, “Please, not go this way. Jim house this way. Turn around. Go other way.”

I said “Sure,” and did a U turn, and then went west on University and then headed for the downtown, towards the restaurants. A day of walking in the hills and sitting in quiet had given me what it always does, some patience. I was in no hurry to ask her who Jim was, and really in no hurry to try to find out why she was in jail. Instead, I was just happy to be feeling hungry and tired but knowing that I would soon be eating good food and would be near this art girl, her with her dark glasses, her sketch book, her hands and her face. I was content to be quiet, but then she asked me, “What you do today?” We were just pulling into the parking lot of a restaurant, and I parked, turned off the engine, and turned and looked at Yuko. “I can’t see your eyes,” I said, and I reached over and slowly took off her glasses. She did not move, did not seem to even blink, and just stared at me. It was dark now, and the light was from the streetlights in the parking lot. “I left your apartment this morning,” I said, “and I drove out of town and up a dirt road and then I walked for a few hours, and thought about you.” I said this, speaking like I had been telling myself I must speak – just saying true things – but feeling, as I looked at her, foolish and thinking that she would start to laugh. But instead she said, “I have liked to go with you. I sit all day in apartment, like jail, and think about Jim and how he hate me, how he bad for me. I should go walk with you.” Then she reached and took the sunglasses from my hand, put them back on, and said, “I no want to see much. Come, we go inside,” and she got out of the car and carrying her sketchpad, walked into the restaurant. And I followed her.

I asked the waiter to just bring out whatever he and the cook thought were good, and then to keep bringing us food until we said to stop. Neither Yuko nor I had really had anything to eat all day, and we both ate a lot, and didn’t talk until we were no longer hungry. We were sitting in a booth, she on one side, I on the other, and she took her sketchpad and started drawing, looking only at the paper and not up at all. “Yuko,” I asked, “is Jim your boyfriend?”

She didn’t look up from her drawing, but she answered, “He was my boyfriend. Today I decided that I no have boyfriend anymore.”

“Where you in jail because of him?”

“Yes. Him and Elizabeth. And police. I attack all. I bite Jim. I hit police.” She kept drawing, wearing the dark glasses, not looking at me, and continued, “It raining. I run out of apartment. I forget shoes. I go to corner store. I call him. He hang up  phone. I call and call. I run to his house. I run in rain.”

“Does he live close to you,” I asked, “When you did not want me to drive down Arthur, is his house near your apartment?”

“Yes,” she said, “It was house of ours. My apartment only for paint. It was my room. It was my bed. It was my window. I stood by window. I in back yard that was my backyard. I could see in window. My candle burning. My bed. My boyfriend. She not right in my bed. She wrong to be on my boyfriend.”

Yuko stopped talking, and concentrated on the drawing, her arm moving fast and smooth. I said, “You do not need to tell me anything. I don’t need to hear anything that you don’t want to say.” But she looked up at me, and said, “Here, you can just see,” and she turned the sketch towards me.

It was a pencil and ink sketch, all dark except for accents in red and blue ink, the fast lines of three blurred figures in motion. A naked woman being pulled by the hair across the floor by another, barefoot woman, whom I recognized as Yuko by the red in her hair. And there is a naked man waving his arms next to the two, his face outlined in blue. Behind them is a large, sliding glass door with the window shattered. Streaks of gray look like rain. Red marks on Yuko’s hands are blood. There is a lit candle next to the bed. There is a bottle of wine, colored blue, next to the candle. She lets me look at the drawing for maybe five seconds, and then yanks the sketch pad back to herself, rips the drawing out, crumples it, and starts on another.

“He was drunk,” she says, “and he call police when I break window.”

“When the police came,” I asked, “What happened?”

“Jim put hand on my face, he pull me. I bite his finger. Police put hand on my shoulder. I hit police. Here,” she touches her own nose, “Police push me. Put cuffs on me. Elizabeth say I say, ‘I kill Elizabeth’. She is liar. Jim drunk. He drink wine. He drunk. Elizabeth was on Jim. That wrong. Jim call police on me. That wrong. It was my window. I pay for big window. It was my big bed. I pay for big bed. I pull Elizabeth to make her leave. Pull out of bed. But she not understand Japanese way. She think I try to kill her. It my blood. It my blood on her hair. It my hand break window. It not her boyfriend. It not her blood. ”

She has told me all this between fast breaths, nearly in a whisper, but still I am left with a feeling that she has been yelling at me. Her English moves back and forth in tense and correctness, but I understand what she has said. I am suddenly afraid of her. Then she is quiet again, and draws in her sketchbook. The waiter comes to our table, and I ask him to bring some wine, whatever he thinks is right. I ask Yuko if she would like some too, and she looks up and asks the waiter, “Do you have Raspberry coolers?” The waiter says yes, they do have wine coolers. Yuko, wearing her dark glasses, says again, “Raspberry,” a word that is difficult for her to pronounce, and she smiles and looks for a moment like a high-school girl, absolutely innocent. The waiter asks her what she is drawing, and she says, “Here, see,” and turns the big sketchbook towards him. I am watching the waiter’s face, wanting to see his reaction to whatever chaos Yuko might be showing him, but he just says, “very nice,” and then goes back to the kitchen.

I ask her, “What are you drawing now?” and she lets me see. It is a sketch of a huge, half-full wine glass in a clearing in a forest. There is a crescent moon in the night sky that is reflected on the surface of the dark wine. Sitting on the base of the glass is a naked woman, her knees up under her chin, her arms wrapped about her legs, and her long hair hanging in front of her face. I am amazed by this drawing, amazed that she has drawn it in less than ten minutes using nothing except a pencil and a sheet of paper. But it is not her technical ability that touches me, instead it is the simple emotion of the drawing which makes me actually shiver for an instant, making me want to hug my own tired legs, the way the ghost-like woman in the sketch is doing. Emotion that comes from a hand, to paper, to my eyes, in a way that no one yet has figured out how to do over wires or through computers.

She rips the drawing from the sketch book, and I think she is going to crumple this one too, but instead she hands it to me and says, “For rescuing me again, this for you.” I take the drawing from her just as the waiter brings us our drinks. She sips from her cup, giggles, and says, “I like sweet purple drink. I like bars where they have pink drinks and cream that floats. I like straws and little hats. Have you been to Karaoke bar? In Tokyo, I sing American song.”

I hear all this, but I just look at the drawing she has given me. I am drinking rain that has fallen from Australian clouds, moved through the earth, up into a vine, and turned into fruit half a world away. I am drinking dark wine that has aged on a ship as it crossed oceans, and mysteriously, is still cheap but delicious. And I am sitting with a girl who has punched a Montana cop in the nose and who is now sipping her sweet purple drink that is spiked with industrial ethanol fermented and distilled from North Dakota corn, but who is also able to show her feelings simply by sketching onto paper. A girl who is able to make me frightened one moment, and foolish the next.

“Yuko,” I say to her, “I have to go to New York City tomorrow morning. Will you come with me?”

“Why you go New York? I never been there,” she says.

“It’s a good place,” I say. “We can stay in a hotel in the middle of the city. Up high, look at the lights at night. Lots of bars there with sweet drinks. I have a meeting with someone tomorrow evening. Work stuff. Then we can go to galleries.”

She takes off her dark glasses and looks at me, and asks, “You have job?”

I start to laugh. “Yes,” I say, “I have job.”

“What kind of job? You don’t dress like you have job. You look like student. You have old car.”

“Oh,” I say, still laughing, “You can’t tell what someone does by how they dress.”

“In Tokyo you have job, you wear tie.”

We look at each other for a while, not speaking. Then I say, “Just come with me to New York. I have money but this isn’t Japan, and I don’t care about the ties or cars. You just keep showing me your drawings. I want to keep seeing what you draw.”

“What do you do?” she asked me then, “Why you go New York?”

“Software,” I say, “Networks. But mostly I just listen and talk. Come to New York with me, talk with me.”

She has finished her wine cooler, and says, “I want another. This,” and she waves for the waiter, and he brings us more to drink. Then she says, “I don’t know computers. But I like talk. What will we talk?”

What do we tell, what stories do we use to show ourselves? Should I tell this girl about leaving home when I was very young? Should I tell this girl who goes to karaoke bars and who wants to be famous, about the Canadian plains at night, thunderheads in the far distance, the silent, flashing lightening? Should I tell her about being so hungry that, waking up, I would cry, no place to go, no one anywhere to talk with? I could tell her stories too about good things, about rivers and sun-warmed rocks, and the way I found Montana, the first summer, trout from the Yellowstone river, big fires at night, big stars in the sky. But I know she doesn’t want these things, so I say to her, “I will tell you stories about going up in buildings and finding stairways to the roof-tops of sky-scrapers, and getting up there where no one is allowed, and you will tell me stories about the buildings in Japan.”

She looks at me and asks, “In New York, we go to the roofs?”

I ask her, “Are you scared of heights?”

“Yes,” she says. “When I walk across the bridges I want to jump off, I am scared of myself much then.”

“Then we will not go to any roofs…”

“No, no, you do not understand. Take me to places. I will not jump when I am with you. In New York, I will buy you tie. You will look so nice.”

None of this makes sense. I am driving Yuko home. She is leaning against my shoulder. She has said, “I am drunk, but I not call police. Jim calls police. I not call police.”

At her apartment, I put her into her bed. “New York tomorrow,” she says, “roof tops of sky scrapers. Bars with sweet drinks,” and she giggles.

“Yes, New York tomorrow. I will be back here early. You sleep now. I have to go home and pack,” and I leave.

Back at my house I lean her sketch against the wall underneath the slashed painting. I then use the machine to buy two tickets to LaGuardia. As I am putting dirty socks into a large suitcase, I think about the cash that Tsai will be giving me, and I get scared, like I am the one needing someone to keep me from jumping.

copyright 2004 by Steve S. Saroff

We met in the eleventh grade of high school, after I had come back from more than half a year on the road. I was wild then, not wanted, and I had surprised and disappointed everyone by coming home. Spending seven months hitchhiking alone — criss-crossing the continent eight times — had given me, as a seventeen year old, too much experience. Nothing as terrible as the tales of Vietnam which friends of my older brother had brought back a few years before, but my wanderings left me emptier than anyone should be. The nights in the cities; always being hungry; sleeping under bridges; being searched again and again by police; being beaten up; shoplifting food; working in fields in Idaho; sleeping on beaches in Oregon; watching thunderheads over the Canadian plains; standing in storms; standing in deserts; spending a week in a drunk-tank in El Paso; and, listening to the stories of drunks, the soldiers, the Christians, and all the strangers who gave me rides.

I came home because I needed something gentle after that.

Before running away, my friends had been the rough ones in our school. Pot smoking football players and guys with slouched shoulders, afternoon jobs and their own cars. They bragged about fights and about screwing and they shared girls. In John Settons “Cabin,” a shack built of stolen plywood in the woods near the interstate, they met and shared a girl named Grace. They did this with Grace every few days, and I was invited but never showed up. Even before leaving home, I was looking — really just hoping — for something much more.

I came back in November. School had already started, and I was only part there. Every few days I would hitch hike to the Blue Ridge Mountains and spend nights in the woods. I would build fires and sit by them, next to their warmth and light. There was early snow in those hardwood forests, and when I would crawl into my sleeping bag I dreamed of how someday I might share these forest places, these secret, beautiful places of the Shenandoah and the Monongahela.

My father had given up on me then, and out of that respect I left him alone too. The school, though, was still trying. But the classes were more boring, and the guidance counselors and school shrink — both of which I had to see to be able to attend any classes at all — were just idiotic. As a habitual truant they wanted to kick me out of school. Most problem kids, though, fit stereotypes either as violent, criminal, or as completely withdrawn. But I was none of these.

There was one meeting after I had been gone for five days, having left on a Friday and coming back on a Thursday, mid morning, when the guidance counselor simply exploded. “You want us to believe that you just spent five nights camping out by yourself?” she yelled.

I nodded ‘Yes.’

“Were you taking drugs?” the shrink asked.

I shook my head, ‘No.’

“Why should we let you keep going to school?” The counselor asked.

I shrugged.

“What do you do by yourself?”

I answered then, quietly, “Read. Think a bit.”

Then one of them began to yell, saying that I could “Damn well,” read and think in school, or at a job, but not in the woods.

But, still, they let me keep attending English, math and physics, the only classes that I would go to at all.

I could have told the truth: that I sat in those oak and hickory forests and thought about the stories that I had listened to, and about all the strange and frightening people I had met, and, mostly, I thought about what I would do next, where I could go.

It was one of those winter fires which helped me find her. In Mr. Bunday’s afternoon physics class, she came in and sat next to me. I had always looked at her. I had always had her in my impossible dreams. She was frail, and I only understood her delicate look as beauty. I knew nothing about her, except that she seemed to belong to group of people whom didn’t cross into the sort of people I spent time with.

As Mr. Bunday scrawled equations on the black board, she said, in a whisper, “You smell like smoke.”

I looked at her, but she wasn’t looking at me, so I didn’t answer. Then she whispered, “You smell good.”

This time when I looked at her she glanced up at me and she smiled. I had absolutely no idea what to say, but we kept looking at each other, and I stammered, “I spent last night outside. Built a fire.”

“Where outside?” She asked, still in a quiet whisper — looking down again into her notebook.

I glanced at Mr. Bunday who was still busy at the blackboard. “I go into Shenandoah park,” I said, “They don’t allow fires there, but I just go into the woods, away from the trails. I hitchhiked back here in the morning.”

Then she asked, “Who did you go with?”

“By myself,” I answered.

“That must be lonely,” She said.

I didn’t answer for a few minutes. We both pretend to be paying close attention to Mr. Bunday. Eight months before I would have answered her with some tough guy “No,” or “Not really.” But I somehow knew that I had been a given a chance to tell the truth. I had been in jail because I wouldn’t give a judge my real name or age. I had blistered my hands in fields while other migrant workers laughed at my not having a pair of gloves. I had gone to sleep hungry and woken up hungry many, many times. So I told the truth.

“It is lonelier here,” I said.

She looked at me and said, this time loud enough so that I could hear the music in her voice, “It is lonely here, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer her.

The next day I am in physics class and she is there and she sits next to me again. We don’t say anything or even look at each other. Mr. Bunday starts lecturing, but I am listening to her sounds more closely — her breathing, the sound of her pencil, the rustling of her notebook. I am feeling outcast again, and more so because I have told her that I slept outside by a fire, and I am thinking that she was teasing me about my smelling good. I am thinking that she will have told her friends about how I am a freak. I am thinking that she will be like the counselors and the shrinks — them not understanding how I could chose to be alone. I am failing every class and will not even come close to graduating, and there is no reason to keep coming to school at all, but I try right then to pay attention to Mr. Bunday, but I have missed so many classes that his explanations are losing me. I give up there and then. I am deciding that I will leave. I am thinking that I will just stand up, walk out of the class, go and fill a pack, and this time not come back.

I am six foot two and I weigh 170 pounds. I can run a mile in five minutes. I have read more books than most college graduates ever will. I have long, curling hair tied back with a bandana. I know about stars and rocks. By listening to people I am able to recognize the good ones from the others. I can sleep well on hard ground. I have eaten Grouse that I have killed with stones, and I have feasted on Brown Trout caught by the banks of Western rivers. But I do not recognize anything good in myself. I think that I am a failure because I am not a track athlete. I think that I am illiterate because I am failing my classes. I think I am ugly because I am so tall, an outcast because I am happiest in the woods, and I feel that I am unlovable because I am only calm when I am alone. I’m seventeen.

But somehow I made it through that class, and then the bell is ringing and then she is standing up.

She hands me a note.

It’s a sheet of notebook paper folded and refolded into a two-inch square. She says, “I wrote to you last night,” and she turns and walks fast into the crowd which is pushing its way out of the room.

I am still sitting. I’ve covered her note with my hand and I am excited but lost. Finally I get up and go into the hallway and outside. There are a few acres of trees next to the school — a place where kids go to smoke cigarettes or dope — and I go into these woods. I sit down out of sight from anyone. Then I unfold the note and read it.

She says that she wants to know me. She says people talk about me and wonder about me. She says that she hopes that I will not laugh at her for writing to me. She apologizes for her spelling. She says I can just tear this note up and she will never bother me again. She says she is writing while in bed and hopes that I don’t mind that she is thinking of me.

I hear the bell ringing for the next class but I stay in the woods. I hug myself, sitting there with the cigarette butts and empty beer cans everywhere. I re-read the note again and again. One page of handwriting from a frail girl, and there is more salvation there than in the combined pages of every book I had ever read.

I stay in those littered woods, sitting against a White Oak, for most of the afternoon, far past the end of the school day, slowly writing her a one-page letter in return. Putting my words down slow. Listening to the sound of every sentence. I wrote to her saying I wanted to know her too. I wrote to her saying that I would not tear her letter up. I wrote to her saying that she was beautiful and that her eyes were gray like clouds.

That evening, I found her house. I looked up her address in the phone book. I ran there. Panting in the shadows and mostly hiding, I finally saw her at a 2nd story window, by herself, in a room which I had guessed correctly was hers. I threw a pebble up there and she opened the window. She was smiling and I could see that she was happy.

“I wrote you a letter,” I said.

“Do you want to come in?” She asked.

I said, “Can you come out?”

She said, “Let me check.” Then she was gone and a minute later she was outside and I had given her my letter, folded like hers, into a small square.

She said, “Can I read this now?”

“Yes,” I said, “But I have to go,” and just like that I turned, and started running back to my father’s house. I had been told stories about how to avoid Claymore mines. I had listened to graphic descriptions of sexual positions and perversions. I had listened to advice about God, advice about how to take drugs, advice about how to make money, and I had paid close attention to everything, but no one had ever told me how to deliver a love letter.

It didn’t matter though. What she had started with her folded note was such a good thing that neither of our inexperience was going to ruin it. Rather, it helped. Instead of talking, or even phone calls, or a “date,” for the next two weeks, every day we traded folded letters in physics class.

Her letters to me were sometimes just a single paragraph. Once, just a word.

A Friday afternoon in April. At the start of the class I had given her what I had written the night before. I had left my father’s house and had run to her house. It was so late that no lights were on; the house was dark. I then walked two blocks away. I sat down on the curb, under a streetlight.

“2:00 a.m.,” my letter started, “I am sitting under a street light on your street, writing to you. I ran to your house. The window of your room is dark. I like knowing that I am sitting here close to you as you sleep. Tomorrow, when you read this, will you laugh at me because I am lonely for you? Will you laugh because I want to hear your voice now? I am here on this street and you are up there, in your room.”

I gave her this folded note, and I saw her read it during class, but she does not look at me. Mr. Bunday lectures, and I hear her pencil taking notes. Then the bell is ringing, and she hands me a folded note, stands up, and walks fast away from me. I unfold her note. A plain sheet of notebook paper. One word, with no capitalization, no adornments. Just the small word, “love.”

Now I am reading her one word letter. Now I am pushing through the crowded hallway. Now I am catching up to her, touching her for the first time, touching her shoulder. She turns to me and she is crying. All around us are clumsy teenagers. Lockers are opening and then being slammed shut.

“What is wrong?” I ask.

“Wrong?” she says, brushing over her eyes with the back of her hand, “Nothing is wrong. I’m just happy.” Then she kisses me quickly, turns again, and nearly runs into her next class just as the bell is ringing.

I go outside. I go to those woods. Two hours sitting there until the final bell. Then I find her as she leaves the building. We walk back to her house together. She touches my hand. I touch hers. Our shoulders brush. Our hands touch again. She takes my hand. She holds it. I hold her hand. She holds my hand. She drops her books, and I don’t understand. Then her arms are around me. My arms are at my sides. Then my arms are around her. We are laughing together.

I remember her bones. The bones under her skin. I remember her blood moving in her veins. I hear her breathing as she sleeps, me next to her. I am hiding with her in her room, waiting until her parents also go to asleep so I can leave her house quietly. I am running in the East Coast springtime along the concrete streets, with more happiness and more sorrow than any child should ever carry. We only had two months together. I have finally been kicked out of school, and she has told me what is wrong with her. By then I understand her frailty. By then I have told her everything about myself, and I have realized that without her I will be like dust.

I wanted to show her the forest places. I wanted to take her with me to the deepest parts of the West. She is sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of her house. It is early summer now, night. I have been working on a construction site. I come to her house every evening. I eat with her family. I am no longer so shy. But this day I did not come by until very late. She has told me things I could not understand, that have frightened me so much that the only thing I know how to do is to try to runaway again.

You see, we were both so alone. That last night, that summer night, I ran to her house at three in the morning and threw small stones at the window. When she woke and looked down at me she smiled, opened the window, and asked, “What are you doing?” I told her that I had to talk, that I could not sleep. She dressed and came outside. We sat on the grass, there next to the house, and I said that I was going to Montana and asked her again to come with me. Dark, with fireflies, and that Maryland humidity that made my shirt stick to my back, we sat together, quiet, and I waited for an answer, but it never came. Instead she said she had to go back inside, and I walked her to the front door. She kissed me suddenly, her hand holding tightly to mine, then slipping away as she turned and opened the door. Inside her father was in the near dark, sitting by a dim lamp. I remember how he looked at me and how he waved, but the door was closed before any of us could say anything.

Were I went was again a hard place. I sent her letters I wrote during lunch-breaks in the string of labor jobs I ended up with. I sent her letters until one came back, a little less than a year after I had left, but it wasn’t from her. It was a short note from her father, folded only once, telling me that I should not keep writing her since she was gone.

These silent years, these moods… I am in the clouds now, writing while on route to another passionless business meeting. Out this small window there is a halo of light, the Glory rainbow that physicists tell us is caused by ice crystals, but which my heart tells me is her bright memory. If I could, I would go back to where we first met – that classroom – and I would hand her a carefully folded, carefully written note, with just these words, “I will stay.”

I left home without finishing school and she tried to finish but also did not make it. “Come with me,” I said that night, “We will find clear rivers and forests and always be with each other.” I said to her, “Come with me and you will be fine again. Doctors know nothing, come with me because we have so little time.” Fool I was, coward too, because I left her alone when she should not have been alone.

I imagine her father holding her. I imagine him crying for all of us; her trapped in this place of rock and air, breathing out one last time, while I swung and sweated on some highway crew, pretending that at eighteen my body could work a magic that would reach two thousand miles back to hers and pull the illness from the bones.

I still look for her everywhere. In the city crowds I sometimes see a face like hers, or, walking in a certain way, a girl with long, thin arms…. But I find her most in solitary places: along the Blackfoot river in Autumn, a place she never saw, where red river rocks sparkle in the low water and dark trout pretend to be shadows.

I write these words with the same hand that wrote for her, the same hand that she held and touched that last moment as I was leaving, a door closing forever. Up here, in these clouds, five miles from anything solid, I beg a forgiveness and wonder who I would have become if I had different strength and had stayed with her to say goodbye. Some mistakes last forever, and we try forever to make up for them. The “success” that becomes our surface is only the thinnest of covers over deep, deep failure.

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(c) 1995 Steve S. Saroff

When I was 19 I was naive.

At 19 I was strong. Able to take care of myself. Able to walk all day through the desert. Able to go without food and sleep. Able to get by. When I was 19 I had been alone, a bum, for two years.

My one time in jail had been in El Paso, in the county drunk tank. When they let me out I decided to walk east and not try to catch a ride. I had no food and no money. that’s how I was though — and there I was, walking into the desert. Summertime too.

I walked along the Rio Grande, through farmland and wasteland. There were fish in the river, yucca grew in clumps, I stole onions from the planted fields. I drank the muddy river water, I swam in it, I watched it flow by as I walked. Sometimes the lights from my fires would shine across the river over to Mexico, and sometimes light from other fires would shine across to me. I would shout then, “helloooo,” and a shout would always come back. It was a good time.

At the farms no one noticed me. I passed by slowly, watching workers bending and swaying in the sun; I passed by cotton and onions; I passed by hay and beans; I climbed fences; I waved to men who wore straw hats; I stood still in the cool spray of irrigation sprinklers, listening to the “Kaatcha, kaatcha,” of metal and water.

In the long stretches between the farms there was little besides sagebrush and red sandstone. The ground was hard and my feet bruised. Beneath the blue of the sky the color of the desert turned to dust. Heat waves moved the air and my eyes became dry and sore. I stopped and swam often. I wasn’t in a rush.

I don’t know how far or for how long I would have walked if I hadn’t met Mr. George. Probably I would have walked until my boots wore out, our until someone else came along and got me drunk. Even in a desert there are people who carry bottles and make sure no one goes too long without a drink.

He came out from the dark, Mr. George did, carrying a shotgun. I had been nearly asleep, watching the last embers of my fire die, when I heard the soft, low sounds of a man walking. He wanted to know who was on his land and why there was a fire. It was his land and his responsibility to look after it. Right off he broke open the shotgun and put the shell in his breast pocket. It was alright I was there, bums didn’t bother him, he said, as long as the closed gates behind themselves and watched their fires. I got up from my blankets then and put more wood on the fire, sappy limbs of mesquite that sputtered as they burnt. Mr. George sat down on the ground next to me and both of us watched the fire. He had a full bottle with him, and he broke that open too.

“You’ve really walked from El Paso?”
“Yes.”
“Taken a long time?”
“Not in a hurry,” and I laughed, holding the fifth — good whiskey — between my face and the fire, making the flames become amber spirits, “I was trying to dry out…”

Mr. George laughed, reached and took the bottle from me, “didn’t mean to interfere with your plans.”

But I took the bottle back from him, took a deep drink, felt the burn warm down into my gut, and then I gave the bottle back. “Can’t interfere with someone if they really don’t care.”

We didn’t finish the bottle, but we both got drunk. Mr. George, as he had first introduced himself, putting out his large, rough hand while the other still had held the shotgun, wanted me to come and work for him. I told him that I was a bum, that I didn’t work. He told me that I was a liar, that if I could walk a hundred and fifty miles through the desert that I could be no bum.

“I’m lazy.”
“Like hell.”
“I’m worthless.”
“We’re all worthless.”
“How much pay?’
“There you go. $30 a day.”
“Not enough.”
“And 3 good meals.”
“OK, for a while at least.”

We talked for two hours. The stars moved, the moon rose, we let the fire die. Mr. George was having trouble with his wife, trouble with his workers, trouble with the weather. He ranch was large, inherited, and his troubles were complicated. He told me that he was 40 years old and had always thought that as you grew older you also grew happier. That’s what I thought too, I told him. Not so, he said.

“We’re both young, Sam,” he said to me, “I’m not really any older than you. What I know now you’ll know soon.” He was right.

I slept that night next to the river for the last time; I was too drunk to go the short mile with Mr. George back to the ranch.

“See you in the morning, George,” I said, and I rolled back into my blankets.

“Hope so,” and Mr. George was gone, walking away from the river with his shotgun and near empty bottle.

At dawn I woke and swam. Shivering while I dressed, I decided to go and work. More for the food than the money, I needed a job, my body looked like it was all ribs.

He was ranch was four thousand acres of deserts. He raised cattle, scrawny animals that looked as dry as the land, and he grew alfalfa, beans and cotton in the irrigated fields.

I was put to work on the fences; I worked with a Mexican restringing the barb wire in the places where it was loss or missing, and straightening leaning fence posts.

There were miles of fences on Mr. George’s ranch. Fence that kept the cattle away from the fields and the river, fence along the dirt roads, and fence that crossed and re-crossed the land.

The we worked well together, the Mexican and I, we didn’t talk. We helped each other — one of us straining to keep the fresh wire taught, the other fastening it into place — but we didn’t care about each other. So, on the morning of my 4th day on the ranch, when Mr. George told me that the Mexican had quit, all I thought of was how would I be able to string fence by myself.

“Guess I will have to help you,” Mr. George said.

Mr. George talked. So did I. Miles of bad fence, most of it didn’t seem to have any purpose. “The old man built this place, “Mr. George said as he drove his pickup looking for bad fence, “and he put up all of this,” he waved out the open window,” don’t know what they’re for, but as long as I’m able I’ll keep it up.”

He stopped his truck next to a place where the wire, rusted and tangled, lay on the ground. No cattle in sight, no tracks, not even old turds, and no reason to repair the fence, but we did. And I thought, what the hell, I’m being paid, I’m eating well, I don’t mind this.

He had a bad wife, Mr. George did. She kept leaving him and she kept coming back. Each time she left he hoped that she would stay away, but she always came back. “She blames me, that’s the rotten part, she blames me.”

“You should leave her.”
“You ever been in love, Sam?”
“No.”
“Well, it could happen. It’s something that happens to people like you, I can tell.”
“Doesn’t matter about me, you should leave her.”
“I can’t. And where to? I’ve got this ranch, and I can’t tell her to stay away.”

She had a lover in Marfa, the nearest town; Mr. George know all about him, though she didn’t know that he knew. “How did you find out?”
“It wasn’t hard.”

She was tired of the desert, tired of the smell of manure and alfalfa. I saw her. Beautiful.. Tall, dark, her cheekbones high and bold, her face lovely. She talked to me once, in front of the bunkhouse, she was wearing a long dress, I can’t remember what color. She told me her husband liked me, that I had a job for as long as I wanted. She called me “Walker” and she made me blush.

On a Sunday Mr George drove to Marfa and I went with him. We got drunk, but it wasn’t like the night we met; it was a bitter drunk with bar smoke and bar mirrors and stale, stinking air.

“I’m going to kill him,” Mr. George said.
“You better not.”
“I know, but I’m going to kill him.”

He didn’t deserve what she did to him. He was a good man. It was her lies that broke him. Mr. George was strong enough to have dealt with everything lese. On the fence lines he told me how he waited for her every time she left. He knew where she went and would imagine what she was doing and it would make him ill. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, he wouldn’t eat. She would leave him for days at a time and then, when she would come back, she would tell him that she had been visiting friends. She would say that she just had to take off, that she was going mad, that she needed the privacy of her own life.

“I asked her once, at the beginning of this, straight out. Almost a year ago. I asked her if she was sleeping with someone else. I already knew that she was,” Mr. George was sweating, rivulets ran down his temples, his hat was stained dark, “and she looked right at me,” he put down the spool of wire. “Sam, she looked right at me, her big eyes, and said, ‘don’t insult me. It’s you I love. I would never sleep with anyone else.’ Damn it all Sam, why does she lie? And why does she keep coming back to me?”

I couldn’t answer him then. I wouldn’t be able to now. He was right though, the years brought me love and the years have taken love from me, but I still do not know what the answer is.

She had blamed him for squeezing her, for keeping her in Texas, for trapping her in his way of life. “I guess she wants more than I could ever give her,” Mr. George said, smiling, even laughing a bit. “I think that what I should do is just walk away from her. Leave you with her and the ranch. What you say Sam? Do you think you could make her happy?” I laughed, wiping sweat off of my face, thinking of walking again, of swimming, of the silence of the desert, a place where the only love was just a dream, as far away, and as constant as the moon.

Mr. George was sentenced to 20 years. I had to go to the trial and tell them that he had been drunk and nearly mad. The defense lawyer asked if Mr. George had acted out of passion. I said yes, he had. The judge agreed and called it a crime of passion, but said, “20 years,” in a passionless voice. I didn’t tell them how I had tried to stop him, or how Mr. George had hit me. I didn’t tell them how hard he had hit me, how he had knocked me sprawling across the ground. I wish I had gotten up faster. He could have hit me again. I was strong when I was 19, and I didn’t know a thing.

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