stuff

“Mary!” he calls, his big, booming voice projecting through their entire Cape Cod.

“MARY!” he holds out a paper, squeezed between beefy thumb and forefinger, both whorreled with pitch black lines of fingerprints and the creases on his hands. His hands are beefy but paper soft.

“MARY!!!!!!” he screams.

She appears, huffing, in the bedroom door, where he sits at a wooden desk just adjacent, the paper jutting out into the doorframe like an evil seagull hovering in midair.

“Just what is it, Lewis?”

Lewis Sinclair, that’s his name, and Goddamn is he an important guy. The most important founding father down at the meat packing factory.

“Read it!”

She snatches the paper away with a quick, birdlike movement. Mary is not rebellious, but she gets in her hits. And Sinclair feels them.

“Read it.”

“Why?”

“BECAUSE!” He says. Now his big, beefy hands are folded across his chest. He’s leaning back in his chair. His tricorn hat is resting on his head, and his powdered wig sprinkles across his back. The tip of the little pony tale is rubbing his upper back with white chalk.

Mary purses her lips in a way that makes her look like an angry duck, and she pulls the paper close to her face. She has always had trouble reading, not because of lack of smarts with her private tutors as a child, but because she is near-sighted and her parents could never afford or at least never seem to get right the right kind of glasses.

Bifocals.

DEAR MARY,

the paper reads…

I WANT A DIVORCE. NOW!

Then below that…

Sincerely,

Lewis Sinclair. Founding Father.

Mary stares at it, her eyes gone all dusky.

“So this is what you’ve been writing all morning, is it?” she asks. “A polemic?!”

He still has his hands crossed. He nods. His flared nostrils, flared with pleasure, are the only indicators that he’s enjoying himself.

“Well, Sinclair, here’s what I think of that.”

And Mary neatly rips the paper down the middle.

In seconds, the front two feet of Sinclair’s chair have slammed back against the ground. “You wouldn’t dare. You shouldn’t have dared. Mary, you ignorant slut!”

She gazes at him, eyes still mellow. “And you’re an officious oversized prick, more lengthwise than ye art long, Lewis Sinclair!”

And with that she sails back to the kitchen.

Sinclair sits, gawping. His paper, his lovely, well-written, morning page lies torn in two upon the flags. He gets up and picks up both sides of the paper, fuming. Then he stuffs them in his pocket.

If only his father hadn’t forced him to marry her. He could be anywhere now. He could be in Timbuktu. He could be in Paris, palling around with Benjamin Franklin. He could be riding a horse.

Fuming and mobilizing his massive thighs Lewis Sinclair begins to rumble through the house. The house shakes with every step.

“Mary you have emasculated me for the last time! Ye have ripped my paper, the very bosom baby of my brain, my very bobbins. Mary! MARY!”

But Mary cannot hear. She’s in the kitchen cooking a poison pie. And she knows just where to stick it.

She’s gonna stick it in his nasty craw and then shove whatever leftovers remain up his founding father ass. And he’s gonna like it.

Mary grins.

Mary wins.

Mary…sins.

Si?

No.

Porque?

Okay.

Parqué?

Go.

Honoré Daumier – *The Past, The Present, The Future* – 1834

The shadowy line of trees, all purples and deep blues, that runs from the driveway of the Farm to the base of the hill going up towards Dylan Beach.

A cloud of birds, flocking in the distance, flying low over the cornfields. Green plants squirting out of holes and crevices and forming dense, little tussocks. Mud.

Nico.

Nico (and Jackson Brown) – These Days – 1967

It is a day, it is one of those days, it is the day before graduation, it is day. Daytime, bright light, white light, and an empty mind. New York took her skirts up and revealed a white underbelly. New York is hot. New York is ready to dribble rain down on the thirsty people, necks craned, tongues outstretched, looking for a little refresher.

I stopped my rambling. I don’t do too much gambling these days. As if I understood this song when I put it on a mix for Megan, my college love, my first (or second?) great love, and thankfully, not the last. See another – highway.

So letting my head go blank to see what happens. The corn shoots from the mud. The birds perch on the stalks. They eat corn, kernel by kernel, caw and chaw until the old farmer comes out of his hut to shoo them away.

His scarecrow hasn’t been working. It’s too small. It’s not commanding enough to scatter the birds, and neither is the farmer. He gives up, leans on his rake, and goes back to his back porch. He sits in a wooden chair and stairs at the eucalyptus trees. Their blue, black, and purple forms a collage that echoes away into the blue sky. He breathes – and falls asleep.

In his dreams, he is flying. He is a crow himself, flying over the low farms, yellow fields, green stalks of the wood, the reeds that surround the river that runs through the wood, he flies away from his low land, over hill and ridge, to the mountains, then flies up, up, up, along the cragged rocks, until he comes to a cave. Landing on a stone, peering in the cave entrance, all within is dark, shadows dispersed by the rising moon. In the back of the cave – a crack. The crack opens and widens and yawning darkness stretches away before the farmer-crow. Deep black – and a glow. At the back of the black – gold.

With a snort, he wakes. Around his feet a rabbit is playing in the dark, a mole peeps its head out of a knothole. The sun has set and the wind blows scudded clouds across the sky in front of a fat, golden moon. Blackness reigns.

The farmer stands up, goes inside, and goes to sleep.

He has no more dreams.

But in the morning he awakens with that cave on his mind. A dark cave, and at the back, gold. And the strange thing is – he knows exactly where he flew in his dreams. He knows the cave was on Mount Shasta, not too far, 200 miles maybe, and halfway up. He thinks he knows exactly where to find that cave. And he has a strange feeling that the crack will be there. And that – somehow – he can induce the crack to open.

The farmer locks up his little house, gets in his small, grey car, and sets out. In the passenger seat a thermos of coffee and two tuna sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. On his lap a folding map. He does not have a cell phone. He reviewed the route before leaving in his Pinto, and follows the highlighted roads now, passing hill, passing dale, over glen, through copse, past Eucalyptus groves and cities, small to large, through Sacramento, and then up highway 80. In the distance, that big, white mountain grows closer and closer.

Trees pile up and the forests encase him. He drives the road to the hiking trail he is sure he saw in his dream. The road leads him to a trailhead, one he knows, from long before. He gets out of the car, pours some coffee into the thermos lid, drinks the smooth, brown, liquid. He eats one of his sandwiches and puts the other in a rucksack he is going to carry with him up the mountain. In addition to the sandwich and thermos he’s brought a bottle of water and two heavy duty trash bags, the kind he uses to bag yard debris. It is three PM in the afternoon.

He hikes. After hiking, he climbs. He passes through forested foothills, then piles of scree, then he’s almost climbing, going vertically up steep, rock steps like a mountain goat.

At a plateau, he is sure he has come to the place where he flew in his dream. There’s no cave.

But he sees a deer trail that twists away from the main path, a thin rock trail with a long drop below that then opens up into a rocky plateau, which leads to the sheer rock face of Shasta, and at the end of the plateau, a cave!

It is here. The dream was prophecy. Pulling a small flashlight out of his pocket, the kind that lights up with a squeeze, he walks to the entrance of the cave and peers in. Shines his light at the back wall.

There is only a smooth rock face, with a couple of stalactites hanging down. He enters the shallow cave – shines his light over the rock surface, runs his hands over it. He starts to cry. He pounds his hands against the rock wall until the heels of his fists are bloody. No crack. There is no deeper cave. When he emerges from the cave, back onto the mountain side, his stinging face is wet with tears.

All down the mountainside runs the light of the setting sun, and the red sets the hills and forests ablaze. He sees the road he drove up to the hiking trail. The hills in the distance. The blue to black patchwork of forests and fields, and way off, a star just beginning to rise behind the mountains of the coast. A crow calls somewhere above. He sits on a rock overlooking the world. Everything goes from red, to blue, to black. He sits all night in the darkness. Around midnight he eats his second sandwich. He empties the coffee thermos into his throat. He drinks some water. He breathes. He thinks about his ex-wife.

And that’s it.

It’s the most beautiful day of his life.

That’s it.

All-

there is.

For now.