Big Lie. Little Lie., and: Nowhere: A Study, and: At the Seaside Cemetery in Blue Hill, Maine, and: The Last Happy Hour

Big Lie. Little Lie

All summer long, outside Duke’s Pony Keg, at the chili parlor and mall, I listened, half in envy, half in awe, each time a kid came back from Hayseed, Indiana, or the beach, New Hampshire or some faraway lake in Podunk, Arkansas. All hot Ohio summer long at Putt-Putt Kingdom and the zoo, and in the mildewed, humid locker room at our public pool, I heard about farm girls and college girls, the easy, the insatiable, and the fast. All boring, hot Ohio summer long, I never doubted—not once— things I couldn’t contradict myself about redheads and brunettes, or the proven scientific facts about green eyes and hazel eyes, gymnasts and ballerinas. Or what Jack Barton told us once at Dairy Queen. Shit, ladies, listen up!I’ve done it with a housewife. In her car. It was a Cadillac. Goddamn, one of us said. Jack was two years ahead of us in school. Goddamn! Sometimes I can still smell the heavy, sweet, almost vanilla air of fresh-cut Cincinnati grass. I can still see the blue-green evening cast the moment I, before I even knew I was about to lie, had lied. In West Virginia. At my cousin’s house. This older girl. You wouldn’t know her. I can still hear that ratchet-ratchet song of katydids and the insistent spank and rubber echo of the basketball. Goddamn! Even if they didn’t believe me, they let me live that lie. But it was five years later, actually, in March of 1983. By then two of those friends had moved. By then the third had died. I was skinny and a little shy with lots of feathered, soft brown hair. Rain rattled on the corrugated roof of her stepfather’s cabin in the woods. Candles in old wine jugs. Candles in jelly jars and ashtrays blown from amber glass and green glass. Candles fragrant with cinnamon and pine. The whole room bloomed. A dusty sofa. The shotgun on the wall. Bookcases and a hi-fi stereo. Our faces and our naked bodies bloomed in nervous, pale gold candlelight. Why lie? Whatever happened then was brief. A sudden shudder into bliss. Then gratitude. Then something close to guilt. Sometimes, I can still see her blonde hair rinsing down on me. She wore a slim, delicate chain that fell in silver twists and wrinkles like the rain. Why lie? Whatever happened then was nothing like it should have been. Whatever really is? I haven’t told this to a soul, and even now, in telling you, I’m not sure what I make of it. But something has troubled me for years. Our whole time in that candle-driven light she had an almost angry look, some inward rage or bothered kind of fire. It flashed across her face. For just a little while that night it darkened Paradise, and glittered in her blue unblinking eyes.

Nowhere: A Study

If anywhere is nowhere then this is truly it, a Texaco in Kansas where interstate and county road have crossed.

A metal fan blows lukewarm air against the sun-toasted face of Gus whose desk looks out

on fields of platinum and tasseled wheat. Out in the garage the grease-gun pops and sighs. A fumbled monkey wrench

smacks on the concrete floor. You pissant son-of-a-bitch! And then another falls. Gus rolls his Holstein eyes.

The office smells of burned coffee, rubber, and old coins. How long has it been, how many presidents

since anything in here was new? The once-white phone on the wall, a Coke machine and water cooler, Gus’s Daily Telegram,

everything seems thumbed and blessed with smears of motor-oil blue, that same deep thunder-colored hue gathering over grain crops in the west

where savage lightning maps the charcoal and unstable atmosphere. A man on Gus’s radio says the inner-city poor

aren’t...