Sarah Black's Blog: Book Report, page 8

Saint Sebastian and the Ravioli of Love/A Free Story!

St. Sebastian and the Ravioli of Love

How could Nina be gaining weight when she walked all over the beautiful Isola de la Maddalena every day, Giacomo tucked safely in his back-pack? She eased the straps off her shoulders, then sat down at her usual table at Chocolat Café.

The café was run by Carlos, the oldest son of Nina’s landlord, and from her chair in the sun she had a panoramic view of the piazza. She could see the snow cone maker setting up his cart and dusting off the jewel colored bottles of syrup. She could see teenaged boys with huge trays of coronatos making their way to the cafes, trailing the smells of butter and vanilla-cream filling like pheromones. There was a steady stream of women in staid black cloth coats and gorgeous pastel leather handbags coming out of the panetteria holding pieces of foccacia wrapped in parchment paper, and the ravioli makers had rolled up their sleeves and started rolling dough.

Nina loved watching the ravioli makers. They were such brawny, hairy guys, and they wielded their tiny scoops and curly-edged cutters with the precision of surgeons. She tried to get her ravioli early, because by eleven the crowds waiting for ravioli could get mean and sharp-elbowed.

Nina’s favorite was the Ravioli de Mare, delicate pasta stuffed with calamari and shrimp, drenched in lemon and olive oil. She always thought of it as the Ravioli of Love, because each succulent bite, and she took many, tasted as fleeting and tragically beautiful as love. The men in the ravioli shop treated her as if she were fragile as spun sugar, always gave her an extra ravioli stuffed with sweet pecorino for Giacomo. When she gathered her nerve to speak to them in halting Italian, there were deep murmurs of admiration and approval.

Nina drank her cappuccino and ate the coronato filled with vanilla cream that Carlo’s young son put at her elbow. He put a kiss on his fingertip, touched Giacomo’s foot. After breakfast she tucked the baby up under the blanket on her shoulder and let him nurse. Sitting in the Italian sunshine, with Italian food surrounding her on all points of the compass, Nina closed her eyes and thought she was very close to happy.

Late that evening, Giacomo tucked up in his crib, Nina went out to the balcony to enjoy the sunset. Her neighbor across the street wasn’t on his balcony, but the big lights were on in Franco’s painting studio and … Holy shit! Franco was in trouble again.

Nina bolted down the stairs before she could think, the image from the apartment burned into her brain- a young man tied to a pole, hands roped above his head, rough hemp digging cruelly into his naked flesh. Franco’s head was thrown back, the long, tender line of his throat impossibly vulnerable. She couldn’t find a weapon, no rocks, sticks, nothing. Well, she had her hands and her feet and she would be happy to bite somebody to save her first Italian friend.

She flung open his apartment door and rushed to him, pulling frantically at the ropes digging into his nipples. “Franco, can you breathe? Say something!” She couldn’t get her fingers under the ropes. They were too tight, and his long arms were tied above his head so he couldn’t move.

Franco unclothed had a thick dark pelt of hair across his chest and belly and points south. Nina was really surprised to find him so hairy. She would have guessed him to have a more delicate body. And when he turned his head and stared down at her in shock, she was also surprised to find he wasn’t Franco.


Franco thought the whole thing was utterly comical, after the shouts of laughter and the explanations and the glasses of wine and the unroping.
He wrapped a towel around the man’s waist, tucking in the edges with care before lowering the pulley and rope contraption that had kept his arms confined. “It’s St. Sebastian, Nina! Come look.” Franco pulled her by the wrist around to an easel, where a huge canvas rested, a rough landscape with the scrubby sage green rocks of La Maddalena, fat white Italian clouds in a clear blue sky, and a number of figures sketched out, only beginning to be painted. St. Sebastian was the central figure, cruelly roped to a tree, and Nina could see that Franco had already painted a few arrows piercing the young flesh. “Nina, I have a commission! For the church! What do you think?”

Nina thought she recognized the face of one of the uniformed men poking St. Sebastian violently with a pointed spear. “It’s very Italian, Franco.” Her voice was choked, and he grinned and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

St. Sebastian poured the wine, but Nina couldn’t feel comfortable with his towel coming loose and his hairy thighs quite exposed and the marks of the rope still dug into his chest. She gulped a mouthful of red wine dark enough to stain her teeth and made her escape.
She felt like a fool. After checking on Giacomo, still sleeping in his crib like an Italian angel, she retreated to her balcony to let the night air cool her cheeks.

Franco didn’t have curtains, and his studio lights were bright, so she had an eagle’s eye view as he pushed St. Sebastian gently back to the tree trunk, wrapped the hemp around his chest and belly and pulled it tight. Then his arms were jerked up hard above his head. Franco was standing very close when he pulled St. Sebastian’s towel away, but even from across the street it was evident that neither the artist nor the model was bothered by the bondage. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Franco was leaving smears of oil paint over most of St. Sebastian’s hairy body, his mouth moving slowly down a long column of pale throat that was being painted with an arrow through it, if she remembered correctly. The entire world was having exciting erotic adventures, with the exception of the single mothers of La Maddalena, so she took herself off to her lonely small bed and cried a bit into her pillow.

The next morning found Nina and Giacomo at their usual table at Chocolat Café, waiting for the ravioli shop to open. She was craving something, and it might have been Ravioli de Mare. Possibly.
She watched through the glass window as they rolled out the huge sheets of pasta. Two men held the sheet of dough, lay it tenderly on the marble slab that served as the work station.

What was the filling? The mixture was bright green, chopped herbs, maybe nuts and some kind of cheese, and she could almost smell it through the glass.
When the doors finally opened Nina picked up Giacomo and got into line. The Italian man behind the counter was wearing a beautifully ironed, long sleeve white shirt underneath his clean apron. “Buon giorno, Signore,” she began, and looked up into St. Sebastian’s eyes.

He blinked at her in shock for the second time in twelve hours, his cheeks flushing dark red. He turned his head, and when he looked back at her his dark eyes were shy, pleading for something, and just a tiny bit of- what? Sadness? Defiance? She wasn’t sure, but the last thing Nina wanted was for St. Sebastian’s beautiful eyes to be filled with anything other than erotic longing for Franco or maybe a reflection of her own desperate longing for Ravioli de Mare.

“Signore.” Her own cheeks suddenly felt warm. She held the baby up so he could see. “Mio figlio, Giacomo.”

He reached for Giacomo’s foot, planted a tiny kiss on his toes, and the baby screamed in delight and reached for him. He carried Giacomo behind the counter to the glass, and all the ravioli makers came to the window and made funny Italian faces at him. When St. Sebastian handed the baby back, and then handed over her bag of ravioli, his face was warm and dark and full of laughter. He flicked one long finger down her cheek, grinning, and Nina smiled back, and kept her eyes carefully away from the abrasions peeking out the long sleeves of his dress shirt.

Franco’s painting was finished in another week and hung in the cathedral downtown with great fanfare and congratulations. Nina made her way across the street to check on him. Franco was always gloomy when he finished a painting, before he started the next one, and Nina couldn’t help but wonder if St. Sebastian was still roped to a tree in his studio.

“Rome,” Franco announced, pouring her a glass of wine and drooping into a chair. “He was looking for something else, Nina.” He shrugged. “Not me. Though I tried, I really did.”

“Franco, are you heartbroken?”

“Maybe a little.” He took a sip of wine, held the glass up to the light. “Oh, he left something for you and Giacomo. I’ve got it in the refrigerator. He said something about love and ravioli- let me think. He said tell you to stop looking for love in your ravioli.” Franco shrugged again. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”

Southern Cross, or, Why Do I Love His Cheating Heart?

This story started in Fiji. I was standing on the balcony of the house we were renting. It was close to midnight, and the moon was up and the breeze was warm and sweet. Like any rabid reader of Victoria Holt romantic suspense, I was gazing at the moonlit waters of the south Pacific attired in a gorgeous nightgown, with tiny pintucks and mother of pearl buttons and delicate French lace around the neckline, and down the bodice.



I was letting the warm wind have its way with my beautiful nightgown, staring up at the stars, and I was listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash sing Southern Cross.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuLBhx...

This is one of those songs that means something different to me every time I hear it. And I’ve been listening to this song since 1982! Sometimes I think it’s like one of those magical books.
Whatever you need to hear, when you open the book, the answer you’re looking for is staring up at you.

Listen to this:

Got out of town on a boat
Goin' to Southern islands.
Sailing a reach
Before a followin' sea.
She was makin' for the trades
On the outside,
And the downhill run
To Papeete.
Off the wind on this heading
Lie the Marquesas.
We got eighty feet of the waterline.
Nicely making way

No wonder when I ran away, it was to Fiji! One of the times I ran away. I ran away to Dinetah to be a cowboy, and also I ran off to Italy to be a mother, and even earlier I ran off to London to be with the man I loved. Looking back, I’m starting to see a pattern! But I have always believed, like any proper reader of romance, that you have to throw your heart into the deal. You have to risk it all for love, you have to fly without a safety net, and you should do it with a nightgown that would make a Victorian heroine swoon with jealousy.



So I’ve run away to the southern Islands and they are even more beautiful than they look in pictures, and I’m staring into the sky, studying the stars. The stars are different near the bottom of the world. It was strangely alarming and exciting both, to see different stars in the sky. And these men are singing to me:

When you see the Southern Cross
For the first time
You understand now
Why you came this way
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from
Is so small.
But it's as big as the promise
The promise of a comin' day.

And I’m thinking, oh, shit. Sarah, what have you done? How many times am I going to search the world for something that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist? Or maybe is hidden in my own heart? Of all the mysteries in the universe, this is the one I’m destined not to uncover.

What am I searching for?
This isn’t the first time I have stood in some gorgeous, isolated, exotic locale, sinking into the beauty, and having a conversation with myself that starts, Oh, shit. Sarah, what have you done? So I’m listening to Steven, can I call him Steven? And Graham and David? After all, we’ve been on this journey together. And I can tell by the songs you sing you know exactly what I’m doing. And Steven is singing this:

Think about how many times
I have fallen
Spirits are using me
larger voices callin'.
What heaven brought you and me
Cannot be forgotten.
I have been around the world,
Lookin' for that woman/girl,
Who knows love can endure.
And you know it will.
And you know it will.
So we cheated and we lied
And we tested
And we never failed to fail
It was the easiest thing to do.
You will survive being bested.
Somebody fine
Will come along
Make me forget about loving you.
At the Southern Cross.

I have a bone to pick with you, Steven. Somebody fine will come along? Look to your own heart, sir. That mystery is an ocean as cold and deep and wicked and beautiful as the Pacific.

So, back to Fiji. I am looking at a view I will never match in my lifetime, and I’m thinking, okay, this isn’t going to work. This is not my place. Oh, shit. We need to go home.

So we cheated and we lied
And we tested
And we never failed to fail
It was the easiest thing to do.

I listened to the song a few times. The kid must have thought I was mad, but luckily he is used to me. This was the phrase I kept coming back to. Maybe I am not the only person in the world who likes to fly without a safety net? But how many times can you come crashing down to the ground before the pain in your bones truly grounds you? Who knows? And it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s something I have any control over. It’s just how I’m wired, to leap before I look, or, worse, to take a good hard look, then say, what the hell, and leap anyway? That’s actually my modus operandi, to dive into life with my eyes open, knowing it’s probably not going to end well.

Southern Cross. Those boys are singing the truth. I can feel it in my bones. And it’s a very popular song, and I have a feeling it means something to lots of other people who have conversations with themselves that start, Oh, shit. What have you done? I have a natural affinity for those people who jump off tall buildings, spread their wax and feather wings, and soar straight into the sun. But people like this, people like us, we never fail to fail. Our hearts remain a mystery to us.

So back to Fiji. I decided to write a character who was imperfect. Someone who was searching the world for the love that was hiding in his own heart, and cheating and lying and failing, like we all do. I’m more than half in love with this character I’ve written, Gabriel Sanchez. Because like me, he keeps screwing up, but he never gives up.

I was surprised when some people didn’t like my book, The General and the Horse-Lord. It dawned on my very clearly that the old saw is quite true: A story is never finished until someone reads it. So many people had issues with this character, because he cheated on his wife, that I wanted to talk about this a bit before the next book comes out.

Because I’m not going to punish him. I’m not going to take an eye for an eye. It has been my experience that when people find themselves with a weapon in their hand, they immediately start examining their own hearts, and they turn the weapon on themselves, in punishment.

That’s the human thing to do. It is the job of a novelist to tell a story about real people. To tell a story about what it means to be human. And I was listening to Southern Cross when I started writing this book, thinking about the infinite number of ways people can try, and fail, to be the person they want to be. And thinking about the way we never give up.

Tres Hombres of the High Lonesome/ A Free Story!

Calvin held up an ancient bridle. The leather was cracked and the tan stitching was coming loose. “This is horse-related, right?”

Oscar looked up from a box of dusty saddle blankets. “Yeah, but spurs are really more cowboy-related, if you know what I mean. Did he say if they were still attached to the boots?”

Cal tossed the bridle down. “Oscar, your Great-Uncle Red didn’t say much. Just that he needed his spurs, something about a promise—“Tres Hombres of the High Lonesome.” Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?”

Oscar put the box of saddle blankets down and sat back. “Thanks for being so patient.”

“I’ll just add it to your list. Besides, I love Red, too.”

“He said the spurs were silver—hand-forged silver.”

“Right,” Cal said. “So they should be tarnished after all these years. I bet there’s not many hand-forged silver spurs outside the museums, unless the rest of the sheds and garages in New Mexico look like this one.”

Oscar pulled down a gray box from a high shelf and blew a layer of dust from the top. “Hey, look at this!” He lifted the lid and showed Cal the black felt Stetson inside.

“Come on over here, Hoss,” Cal said, taking the hat out of the box. “Let’s try it out.” They both froze when they heard the clank of metal.

“I think we’ve got a winner,” Oscar said, lifting up the silver spurs. The metal was ancient and beautiful. Oscar ran a finger over the rough edge. “No tarnish. Think the hat box protected them somehow?”

Cal shook his head, took a spur, and weighed it in his hand. “Something’s odd,” he said. “These feel weird, heavy, like they’re too dense or something. But they look like silver. Silver that’s just been polished, I mean. Have you ever seen anything made out of old pewter?”

“No,” Oscar said. “Maybe it’s lead.”

Great Uncle Red pushed open the door of the shed with his aluminum walker, and cool autumn air blew away some of the dust that was hanging in the air. “Any luck, boys?” His voice was thin and reedy, and Oscar felt his heart contract with a familiar sense of impending loss. When he was a boy, he had lived for the times Red had come to take him away. They would go camping, or riding, or off to the city for a movie and a burger. He could still taste the anticipation, excitement like metal on his tongue, as he stared out the window between the ball fringes on his mother’s curtains, waiting and waiting and waiting for Red’s old pick-up truck to come up the long driveway and fetch him away.

He knew it was coming—the long good-bye. He could feel it in the way his heart seemed to stutter with love and the way his tongue tripped over itself when he tried to tell Red how much he had meant to him. Red was over eighty now. What Oscar was remembering was that feeling from when he was a kid, the way his heart had seemed to squeeze itself into a tight little knot as hard as a walnut every time he had watched Red drive away. Oscar couldn’t bear to say good-bye.

The old man was failing fast. That’s why he and Cal had made this trip. Red had told him on the phone that it was almost his time. The handsome, daredevil cowboy that Oscar had worshipped since he was old enough to stand was now so shaky that he needed a walker. The lush red hair that Red had kept in a ponytail his whole life had faded to white and was so thin that his scalp showed through.

Red kept forgetting to put on his hat, and Oscar couldn’t stand to see his head looking so fragile and exposed. Oscar rigged up a little hook on the walker and sewed a loop on the edge of Red’s old straw Bailey so he could keep it close.

Red was all he and Cal had of family, home, and acceptance. He was the only person from either of their families who was happy for them, happy that they found each other and were in love. When Red was gone, he and Cal would be on their own.

“I think we found your spurs, Uncle Red.” He held one up.

“You did it, boys!” Red took a shaky step forward. “So, got any idea what I wanted them fancy spurs for?”

Oscar shrugged. “Nope.”

Cal tipped the black Stetson back on his head. “I think you want to be buried in them.”

Oscar turned and glared at Cal, but Red just cackled. “Relax, kid,” he said. “Don’t get uptight with your man. He’s right, but he’s not right. You’ll see. Bring the spurs over here.”

When Oscar and Cal stood in front of him, he took the spurs in one hand. “Put your hands on these spurs, boys. I think something is gonna happen. If it does, I want you two to go with me for a while. Nothing happens, you strap these beauties on me when you bury me.”

Oscar reached out and held the spurs, covering his uncle’s fragile hand. Cal hesitated, then put his hand on top of Oscar’s. “Now don’t panic, kids,” Red said. “You can always come back. I promise.”

The spurs were colder than they should have been, and the metal had a bit of give, like flesh. Oscar kept his eyes tightly shut, just like when he was a little boy and the thunder scared him under his bed. He heard Red start to laugh. Cal reached over and grabbed Oscar’s belt.

When the spurs went still and felt like metal again Oscar opened his eyes. Cal was still there, holding on to him. Red looked like he was about forty. His hair was like a flame down his back, and red whiskers shaded a strong jaw. He was wearing old leather boots and faded jeans, and his blue eyes were clear.

Red looked down at his hands, then up again at Cal and Oscar. “Goddamn, boys! I knew it—I knew they were telling the truth.”

Red strode off toward his little log cabin. Cal stared at the cabin, then turned slowly in a circle, keeping a firm grip on Oscar’s belt.

“The light pole’s gone,” he said finally. “No electric wires going to the house. No road or driveway. No car.”

“Okay,” Oscar said. “What just happened?”

Red came around the corner of the house leading three horses. They had leather saddlebags and bedrolls behind the saddles.

“Wow. That was fast.”

“He didn’t have time to saddle those horses! Either we went with Red to heaven,” Cal said, “or we’re in the fucking Twilight Zone, man.”

“Calm down,” Oscar said. “Red told us we could go back.”

“Unless he isn’t Red,” Cal hissed under his breath. “What if he’s some alien or something?”

“I’m not an alien, boy,” Red said, tossing him a pair of reins. “I’m just a cowboy, like I’ve always been. But, when I was young, I did meet these three hombres. Strange men from over the border in Mexico. We camped together for a few weeks on the banks of the Pecos River. Before we split up, they gave me the spurs. Told me to use them when it was almost my time.”

He handed Oscar the reins to a pretty, dark gray Appaloosa. “I don’t know what it all means,” he said. “I just wasn’t quite ready to say good-bye to you boys. Don’t be mad. I thought you wouldn’t mind riding with me a little ways, just to say good-bye.”

They rode toward the river. Oscar had a sudden memory of Red, maybe thirty years ago. They had been out riding horses, like today. Oscar could remember the smell of Red’s neck, leather and sweat and horses, and the feel of the denim jacket under his cheek. He must have been four or five. He had fallen asleep in the truck on the way home, and Red had carried him into the house. Red had looked then like he did right now.

The land they were riding through looked like it always did, only more so. The junipers with their waxy blue berries smelled strong and fresh. The sky was wide and clear and crystal blue. There were birds everywhere—mountain jays, painted bunting, and woodpeckers with their brilliant scarlet heads. The scrubby underbrush was full of jackrabbits and prairie dogs. Cal rode up beside him. “It smells different, like there’s no pollution. Maybe we went back in time.”

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

Red got them settled into a campsite by the river. Red had always loved the cowboy way—the company of the horses, cooking cowboy stew over a wood fire, sleeping propped against a bedroll and listening to the night animals, watching the stars spread themselves thick as marmalade against the night sky.

It had been years since Oscar had camped out along the Pecos River with Red. His memories were all tied up in the rhythms of slow autumn afternoons—riding horses across empty, golden land, learning to love solitude, and quiet. Oscar wasn’t freaked out. Red was happy. Whatever was going on, this was okay, just a wonderful, long afternoon good-bye.

Cal pulled the bedroll off his saddle and shook it out. “Can we zip these together?”

Red chuckled. “No zippers, kid.”

“Your Tres Hombres won’t freak if they catch me snuggled up to Oscar, will they? I assume we’re expecting them?”

“I’m not really sure what to expect,” Red said. “But they seemed like adventuresome boys to me, tell you the truth. I don’t think we need to worry about them. You two just go on ahead and be yourselves.”

Oscar let Cal arrange the bedrolls together on one side of the campfire. He walked over and squatted down next to Red. “Uncle Red, are you going to be here in the morning?”

“I expect so,” Red said. “There was coffee in the saddle bag. But if I’m not, then thanks for riding with me, son.”

Tears filled Oscar’s eyes. He ran his hand over Red’s hair, just like he’d done when he was a kid.

“Go on now, boy,” Red said, pushing him gently away. “I’m going to take a walk and say good-bye to the river. You spend some time with your man.”

Oscar walked over to the other side of the fire. He pulled a saddle over to the bedrolls, then lay down and leaned his head up against it. He knew Cal would be able to see his tears, even in the dark.

Cal sat down next to him. “Uranium.”

“Uranium? Are you kidding me? Who cares? Uncle Red is dying and you’re still trying to figure out what those spurs are made of?”

“I care, Oscar. I was planning to have a long life with you. On Earth. Listen, I love Uncle Red, too, but I want to go home after he goes wherever he’s going. I want you to come home with me, so we can keep on living.”

Oscar reached a hand for Cal’s ankle. The brown leather of his boots was soft from careful cleaning with the saddle soap. “Sorry. So, the spurs are uranium. What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

They were quiet for a while, feeling the cool night air flowing in low to the ground, smelling the old golden smells of autumn leaves and smoke from a juniperwood fire. The crickets started their evening songs.

“Red’s having a hard time letting you go, Oscar. He’s spent his whole life loving you and looking after you. These last few years he’s looked after both of us. Hard to walk away from all that love.” Cal pulled another saddle over and leaned back against it. “What if you can’t feel love anymore after you’re gone? I mean really feel it, in your stomach and in your chest? What if we can never feel it again, the way we feel it now when we touch each other?”

“You think Red’s been alone his whole life? Just so he could look after me?”

“Don’t get yourself worked up, Oscar. Red did what he wanted to do. I get it, myself. I mean, I think I’d spend a lifetime with you, if I could.” Cal pulled off his boots and shucked his jeans down his legs. He pulled off his flannel shirt, too, then changed his mind and put it back on. “Let’s get you out of those Wranglers, cowboy. You can’t sleep with your boots on. No, what I mean is you can’t sleep with me with your boots on.”

Night had fallen, and the firelight played across Cal’s skin. He looked like burnished copper, and the hair on his stomach and between his legs was suddenly dark and mysterious. They studied one another in the glow of the campfire, then Oscar moved into his lover’s arms.

Cal slid his big hands down Oscar’s back. They moved together, an lovely dance to a slow cowboy song, watched over by the crickets and the horses and the firelight.

Oscar loved the way their hips fitted so perfectly together. Cal lay to the right, he lay to the left, and their erect cocks touched and danced and slid against each other. When it was time, Oscar lay down on the bedroll and Cal lay over him. Cal opened his mouth, and Oscar put his tongue inside. Cal tasted sweet and complex—like yearning, like something nearly lost, but found. Oscar reached between them and held them together in one hand. He came first, like he always did, with a wallop of passion and need that knocked him flat. Always had, with Cal.

Cal moved against him with that slow rhythm they had come to love, as slow and gentle as the end of an autumn day, like the ripe golden color of a pumpkin, like the taste of a pomegranate pulled apart and spilling its scarlet seeds. Then Cal was breathing again, drowsing against his neck, and Oscar carefully pulled the bedroll up to cover them.

When Oscar woke in the morning, he could smell coffee perking over a juniper wood fire and hear Red and Cal laughing together somewhere near. He closed his eyes, smiling.

Cal walked over and squatted next to him. “Open your eyes, cowboy. I’ve got your coffee.”

He took the cup. Cal was smiling, his dark hair tousled from a night of sleeping outdoors. His blue flannel shirt smelled like sex and wood smoke. “Cal, you look good enough to eat.”

Cal leaned over and kissed him. His tongue tasted like coffee, and his chin was rough with new whiskers. “Speaking of eating,” Cal said, “take a good look around. I think somebody slipped us some peyote in that chili last night.”

Oscar took a long sip of his coffee, then sat up suddenly. Cal looked normal, maybe a little hotter than usual with his scruffy beard. But the sky was a peculiar lemon yellow, and the mountains were cotton-candy pink and lime green. The river running next to their campsite had turned the soft orange of ripe cantaloupe.

“What the hell?”

“We ain’t in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.” Cal stood up and reached a hand down for Oscar.

“How’s Red?”

“He’s a cowboy on a happy trail, man. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“I have,” Oscar said, slipping his arm around Cal’s waist. “This is what he was like when I was a kid. I just lived for the times Red would carry me off. ’Course,” he said, “now I’ve got you for that.”

“Come on, boys,” Red said. “This bacon’s almost done.”

The coffee, bacon, and biscuits tasted so good that Cal wondered if it was some sort of alien food. Red said no, that food cooked outdoors over wood always tasted this good.

Cal stood suddenly, looking toward the horizon. “Tres Hombres of the High Lonesome,” he said. “Look lively, men.”

The three men walking toward them over the bright blue grass looked like Mexican banditos from some old Western movie. Black cowboy hats, dusty boots and jeans, long, shaggy black hair.

“The good, the bad, and the ugly,” Cal muttered under his breath. Oscar looked over at Red. The sun and the moon were rising in his eyes. Red stood up and dusted his hands against his jeans. He reached for his straw Bailey and fitted it carefully on his head. Then he started walking toward the men. When he got close, he started to run.

The man on the end was slender and graceful, with black hair curling past his shoulders and black leather chaps. He started running, too, caught Red around the waist, lifted him up and spun him around. They were both laughing. Then he backed Red up against the trunk of a cottonwood tree and was kissing him with enough passion to set the leaves on fire.

“Holy shit!” Cal said, reaching for Oscar’s belt and pulling him close. “Did you see that? You better stay close to me, Oscar. I don’t want one of these bad alien brothers to lure you over to the dark side.”

Oscar laughed. “Not likely.” He watched his beloved uncle with his lover, feeling peace stealing over his heart. Red’s cowboy hat hit the dirt, and the man had his hands in Red’s hair. It spilled over his shoulders like a river of fire, and the man buried his face in it.

The tallest man was lanky, with a full black beard. He took the horse’s reins, murmuring Spanish words of love into their ears and stroking their soft noses. The third hombre approached Oscar and Cal.

Cal stepped forward, looking tough. He still had a firm grip on Oscar’s belt. The man had a long, black moustache and a black leather eye-patch. A livid red scar extended down his cheek from under the patch. He grinned at them, a flash of white teeth.

“You’re the boy, right?” He gestured toward Red. “We would have taken him a long time ago, but he said he had to stay and watch over a boy he loved.”

Oscar nodded, feeling the tears start down his cheeks. “Yeah, I’m the boy.”

“It’s okay, hermano,” the man said. “He knew it would be waiting for him. The love, I mean.”

The man studied Cal, then looked at him again. Oscar felt a delicate touch in his mind, like a velvet hand stroking his brain. The man’s face was changing, the Easter-egg colors of the landscape flashing across his black eye.

“I guess I can see why Red needed to stay,” he said. He swung himself up into the saddle, and the Appaloosa pranced happily. “Use the spurs. You can wait here for each other when the time comes.” He laughed softly. “Uranium. That’s a good one.”

The lanky bandito took the other two horses and walked over to the cottonwood tree. Red’s handsome lover climbed up first. Then Red threw a leg over the horse, wrapped an arm around the man’s waist. He looked over at Cal and Oscar, his eyes flashing cotton-candy pink, cantaloupe orange, lemon yellow. He tipped his cowboy hat to them. The men turned their horses and rode away toward the quiet mountains.

Cal tugged Oscar closer. “Did you feel something? When that guy…”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Like my brain was a kitten and he was petting me.”

“He wasn’t petting my brain.”

“What?” Oscar looked up into Cal’s face. “What did he do?”

Cal grinned down at him. “It was more like he was measuring me.”

“Are you kidding me? You were felt up by some sort of alien bandito?”

“Relax, cowboy. He was hot, though, with that eye patch.” They started walking. The landscape was changing, the bizarre candy colors fading to red and quiet gold and dusty sage green.

Oscar studied their boots. The old silver spurs looked good.

Eat! Eat! Welcome Back to Idaho, and a New Story

Now we’re settled in Boise, the kid and I have resumed our volunteer jobs at the Idaho Food Bank. Mostly we’re sorters. For a two hour shift, we take bulk food, such as dried peas or instant mashed potatoes, and portion it into person or family sized plastic bags. Sometimes we have barrels of donated food from food drives, and we make up family food boxes. Each box should hold some canned veggies and fruit, some canned meat, rice or pasta, bread, etc. It always seems we run out of canned fruit first, and some boxes don’t have any canned tuna or chicken at all. We also make up backpacks—these backpacks go home with kids on Friday from school and have enough food for the weekends, though the word is the kids usually share with their younger sibs.

I’m obsessed with feeding everyone, have been for years. It seems pretty normal to me. I remember my great aunts and grandmother cooking for hours, in steaming hot kitchens with no AC in south Texas, southern Louisiana, hair frizzing madly in the humidity, but nobody went hungry and nobody went home without some food to hold them over for the trip. Nothing fancy, but beans and cornbread can feed a lot of kids. Food, and feeding people, was something of a holy calling for the women who raised me. The stories from the Dust Bowl, the Depression, when we lost our farm and could no longer feed ourselves from our own land- these stories cast a long shadow over my family. The old men were still talking about what had happened, what they should have done, when I was a kid.

And of course I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was 16, an impressionable age, and this story echoed the family stories I’d heard growing up, about losing the land, being hungry, not having any way to feed the kids. It’s been a long time since anyone in my family went hungry. In fact, I’m writing this with a peanut butter and jelly, Fritos on the side, at my elbow. But I remember the stories I’d heard growing up. And I saw an echo of those stories when I first came to Idaho, back in 2007.

I went to work as a Nurse Practitioner in a clinic that served people experiencing homelessness. That’s the politically correct way to say it. We used to say, poor people. Hungry people. Hungry kids. People with no food, and no way to get food. So this idea of hunger, for me, went from old family stories from 1935, to a person fainting in the lobby of my clinic from hunger, or a kid coming in for shots, telling me he’d had a ketchup sandwich for supper but no breakfast yet, because they were still waiting for the week old muffins at the shelter.

The Idaho Foodbank is a cheerful place. There is usually a waiting list for volunteer jobs, and for the most part the people in these volunteer jobs are not working off their court-mandated community service. I like working there, trying to make a little food stretch a long way. But food is expensive and healthy food is even more expensive.

What I decided to do, to celebrate moving back to Idaho, is to donate a story to support the Foodbank. I published a story of mine called Wild Onions, set in Salmon, Idaho, at the Kindle store on Amazon. This story was originally published in a print anthology called Scared Stiff by MLR Press. The list price is $2.99. For each book sold, I’ll donate a meal to the Foodbank. On November 1, I’ll report back here the number of meals donated and books sold.

I’ve put some pictures up of the Salmon River, and the beautiful Idaho backcountry, and my kid on a camping trip. He and I have put away some hot dogs and marshmallows roasted over a campfire. I will only say, and I have said to him, that I am now officially too old to crawl into that tiny tent and sleep on the ground. But I’m not too old to help out at the Foodbank. I hope you’ll help me buy some healthy food in time for the holidays, to share a little in the land of plenty.

Here’s the link to Wild Onions: WILD ONIONS

THE YEAR was 1882, and the last of the native tribes had dropped to their knees and slipped on their yokes under the boots and guns of the US Cavalry. The Blackfoot were the last, and then the buffalo hunt failed. The vast plains were barren and empty, and the people began to starve. Desperation spread like poison across the land. Evil men, seeing their chance, fed on the hunger, ate the clean hearts of the people. The blood that was spilled in 1882 has not been avenged today. The ghosts are waiting for someone to set them free.

Robert looked over to the corner of the porch. Their old fishing poles were leaning against the screen. He carried them back to his chair, started untangling the nylon fishing line. Val’s pole was for serious fishermen, a supple thin Orvis fly rod with a reel full of braided yellow nylon. His pole was cheap, from Wal-Mart, with a soft cork handle and a reel with a sticky thumb button. Val laughed when he saw it, said it was for little boys fishing at reservoirs.

He put Val’s pole back in the corner, carried his down the slope to the river bank. It took him a little while to find his balance again. He didn’t try to get into the water. That would probably be too much for his shaky leg. But after a few casts he got his rhythm again, let the weight fly out low over the water.

There was a splash a bit upriver, and a moment later a young man appeared, walking down the middle of the shallow river from rock to rock in green hip waders, dressed in the dark green uniform of Fish and Wildlife. He had a fishing pole over his shoulder and a woven oak creel. From the weight of it on his shoulder, Robert could see he’d had some luck. He was Indian, Blackfoot, maybe, and his long hair was tied back at his collar. He raised a hand in greeting.

Robert nodded back. “Evening.” He reeled in his line, and the man watched the red and white bobber bouncing across the water in front of him.

The man’s face was impassive, but he blinked a couple of times when he watched the line come out of the water, bobber, lead weight, no hook. No fish. “I guess I don’t need to ask you if you have a fishing license,” the man said. “Since you aren’t really fishing.”

Robert nodded to the creel over the man’s shoulder. “Looks like you’ve had some luck.”

The man eased the basket off his shoulder, dipped it down into the icy river water. “Yes, I sure did.” He slapped the Fish and Wildlife patch on his uniform shirt. “Course, I don’t need no stinkin’ license! Just another example of the generalized corruption of the Federal Government.”

Robert grinned at him. “Wonder how many times you hear that in the course of a week? We must be in Idaho! I’m Robert Mitchell.”

The man reached for his hand and they shook. “I’m Cody Calling Eagle.

Lewis and Clark in Love/ A Free Story!

Lewis and Clark in Love

David Lee sank into his director’s chair, pushed the ball-cap back on his head, and rubbed his fists over weary eyes. His darling project was a disaster! Sacagawea had demanded, and received, a fifteen minute break every two hours to breastfeed Pomp; York had refused to sing a spiritual written especially for the movie, citing historical inaccuracy, though David had argued that the absence of any reference in the journals did not mean it hadn’t happened; and the young warriors who were supposed to be the friendly Yankton Sioux were muttering about “taking back the Black Hills.” But nothing had prepared him for finding his two stars rolling around together in the underbrush. Lewis and Clark were in love.

Clark had been giving Lewis tender looks for some time, and a couple of days before had started calling him “Meri.” Lewis, always prone to melancholy, had abandoned the dog, his usual sleeping companion, to study maps late into the night with Clark. Charbonneau reported that Clark had drawn a map of the Missouri across Lewis’s chest, with the mighty Continental Divide being the belly button, and Lewis’s fine cock standing in for their first wondrous glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.

Then the actor who played the unfortunate Charles Floyd, the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the trip (ruptured appendix), gleefully reported that Lewis and Clark were butt-naked and screwing underneath an old-growth oak. David and Charbonneau ran to the scene.

“They are in love! You Americans, you are so timid, so weak. The French embrace love! Look at Lewis, do you see the beautiful map drawn on his skin? Tres magnifique!” He threw his arms out, and the smell from under his bearskin coat nearly knocked David to his knees. He did not mention to the exuberant Frenchman that his sixteen year old wife, (one of two wives), was on her breastfeeding break, and might require his company. They still had two long winters at camp to get through together.

It was Charles Floyd, deceased, coming up behind them, who mentioned the obvious. “Isn’t that poison oak?”

Lewis and Clark stood before him like guilty schoolboys before the Headmaster. They were slathered with Calamine Lotion and both a little drowsy from the Benadryl.

“You,” he said, pointing to Lewis, “are supposed to be a naturalist. How did you miss poison oak?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And you,” he pointed at Clark, “are supposed to be the expedition’s mapmaker.” They both turned to look at Lewis, who stared down at his chest. “You don’t know dick about maps. Where’re the tributaries? You made the river look like a hot dog.” They hung their heads, and David closed his eyes, prayed for patience. “Just go,” he said, and watched them walking carefully away over the muddy river bank.

Of course that wasn’t the end of it. Lewis apologized to Clark for missing the poison oak. Clark forgave him with a kiss, which shortly turned French. Next thing the Corps knew, the pirogue they were sleeping in started rocking, waves sloshing over the bow. The small boat began shuddering and thrusting in the water, until with a great cry of release it flipped over, and the captains had to be pulled from the river with stout ropes.

Sacagawea threatened to call her agent, citing an environment inappropriate for a child. Charbonneau called her a frigid twit, and David began to fear that they would never get horses from the Shoshone, never, not after this.

David decided to send Lewis and a small group of men up north to try and find the headwaters to the Missouri. Lewis blushed, glancing at Clark from under his eyelashes, muttered something about swallowing a great mouthful of headwaters. York threw his paddle into the river, said he was going to kick some ass if they didn’t shut up.

The young Sioux warriors tried to raid the weapons cache, but Clark just ignored them, doodling in his journals and trying his hand at writing erotic haiku. David had a long talk with them, and they covered many of the injustices perpetrated on native tribes; he reminded them again that a ghost dance, while visually stunning, would not be historically accurate for this picture. He did promise to let them play the Blackfeet, with a further promise that they could kick Lewis’s butt before he shot them dead.

The next morning, the Corps of Discovery found Clark gone. It was early afternoon before the headwaters party returned sans Lewis. Where were Lewis and Clark?

The Corps held an historic vote, the first time a woman, a Shoshone, and a slave were allowed to vote in America. The vote was 14 to 2 that they replace their captains with someone else. York brought forth DNA data suggesting that both he and Clark had fathered children among the native tribes. Sacagawea reminded them all about the ACLU. She suggested that the issue was not sexual orientation, but sexual harassment. She had a copy of the federal definition of sexual harassment, which she read out loud until one of the Sioux warriors counted coup against her upper arm, at which time the meeting dissolved into shouted insults. Finally Charbonneau and the Sioux broke out the whiskey, which had been kept under lock and key for medical emergencies. Even David Lee took a reviving slug.

When the relations among the members of the Corps of Discovery were once again friendly, David Lee set off in search of his stars. He found them sitting quietly together under a tree. Lewis was drawing a small picture of a prairie dog in one of the journals. He had his foot pressed up against Clark’s thigh, and Clark was holding his ankle, enjoying the warmth of his skin, and the sunshine. Clark smiled at Lewis. “You know, I think this is the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Lewis nodded. “Me, too.”

A Fishing Story and the Social Paradigm

I’m having problems with the new story, and the way I usually deal with this is by reading books on writing. I have two that I keep going back to, because it seems they tell me something different every time I read them, like some sort of magic book that changes its words depending on what I need. I can tell by the different colors of markers and underlinings and stars and exclamation points that I have read these sections before, but the way they set me off walking a new path is different each time. My two favorites are Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House and Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World.

The problem I’m having with fishing is less complicated than the story-problem. I bought a new fishing pole with a good-looking reel at Walmart. I watched a video from Mark the Shark on how to set up your new fishing pole and how to work the new reel. He said three times, “It’s really pretty foolproof.”

My first vigorous cast, and the weighted bobbers flew out and hit the water with a satisfying plop. Unfortunately, the reel also flew off the fishing pole and landed in the lake, where it set about unspooling 500 yards of new fishing line. Luckily there are no manatees in Boise to get tangled up in that line or I would be tugging on a wet suit to try and retrieve it.

So Boswell suggested something that caught in my thinking like a burr. Rather than thinking of a character and story development in the usual way- a character has a conflict to solve, and at the end of the story he is changed and the conflict is resolved, he suggested this: the character lives within a social paradigm. He has formal and informal rules and he has relationships. For instance, he is a son, and he’s also the son who always disappoints his mother. The change he goes through is changing his place in the social paradigm. I decided to think of my new character using this model, and naturally I convinced myself that I needed to be fishing to do it.

Back to Walmart, and I committed a social faux-pas by saying out loud, in the fishing aisle, “ooo, I like the red one!” The men standing around shooting the shit actually winced and turned their backs on me, so they did not have to witness my shame. I didn’t care. The red one is small and it has a reel I recognize, with a thumb button. My son urged me to get an easy reel after the first debacle because he said my fishing pole should not stress me out. I had to agree with him.

So I walk down to the little floating dock that sits on Silver Lake, at my new apartment in Boise. When you step on a floating dock, it gives a bit underfoot. Not enough to throw you off balance, but the feeling of the ground moving under your feet makes you aware of the ground, and your feet, in ways you aren’t in the normal course of your day. I love that feel of standing on a floating dock, having to split my attention between the gentle roll of the dock under my feet and whatever else I’m doing.

So, social paradigm. How would I use that? Who is my character now, and how do I want him to end up? He’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He’s been made to feel he’s an outsider, and he took that feeling in as part of his identity. So what he does now is he makes sure he stays an outsider by not doing the things that he knows will bring social acceptance, and the subtle joys of belonging to a group. But he is getting lonelier and more isolated with time. Where do I want him to end up? I want him to have people, to let people in. I want him to put down the burden of the shoulder-chip he’s carried for so long.

I don’t think of these sorts of abstract ideas while I’m writing. When I write, I’m doing it to find out what happens next, just like when I read. I have to do this abstract thinking before, and hope it percolates down through my brain into the story. So I take the new red fishing pole down to the dock and think this idea through.

Two women about my age paddle by in their kayaks and ask if I’m getting any bites. I need to come up with a socially acceptable line to this gentle question, which is really, hello, are you having fun? How to explain I am not actually fishing, as I have no hook, but casting with my weighted bobbers? Because I don’t want to kill a fish, I just want to hang around on the dock with my fishing pole and cast.

There is a full moon, joy, and the moon is putting down silver-white light on the waters of the lake. I start casting for the moon, and with a little practice, I can throw my weighted bobber right into the middle of a puddle of moonshine on Silver Lake. When the bobber hits, and I start reeling the line back in, the moonlight fractures, scatters, spreads over the surface of the lake, dancing and I swear I can hear it laughing, and then it settles back down again, calm and quiet and smooth, and I cast my bobber into the middle of it again.

Basque Boise/ Pelota! A free story

One of my Changeling stories is now out of print, so I can share it with you here. So happy to be back in Boise I can't even begin...Ate some Basque sausage this weekend and nearly burst into tears.

Pelota! A Basque-Inuit Love Story
Sarah Black

Oliver is obsessed with all things Basque, and Jack is Inuit in his heart. But even the ancient Basque and Inuit managed to fall in love. In the abandoned Basque whaling
camp at Red Bay, off the coast of Labrador, the two young researchers find their common ground in a game of pelota.

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Chapter One

Oliver had dreamed of becoming Basque since his chubby baby hands had first
reached for a black beret. He grew up in Boise, Idaho, home of one of the larger Basque communities in the United States. He ate so much chorizo, even in kindergarten his breath smelled like garlic. Every five years, when Jaialdi came to Boise, he was first in
line to get tickets for the stone-lifting and wood-cutting competitions. A person could ask Oliver anything about Basque traditions, culture, symbols, and he would explain it all, sometimes in much greater detail than anyone was really interested in hearing. He
insisted on calling the home country Euskal Herria, and the Basque language Euskara.

When he was eight, he asked his mother to enroll him in Basque school in Spain
so he could learn to speak and write Euskara. When she refused, beginning to worry his interest was teetering on the brink of obsession, he went underground, collecting books written in Euskara, hoping to let the language seep into his mind. He drew the sacred lamburu on his schoolbooks, a tiny four-leafed clover, which charmed his many Basque
teachers, and when he was eighteen, he had the Ikurrina, the beautiful red and green striped Basque flag, tattooed on his biceps. And naturally, he learned to play pelota, the Basque game of handball.

Oliver’s mother remained worried, especially as she occasionally peeked into his bedroom to see the teenaged Oliver dressed in a black beret, traditional red neckerchief,
and nothing else, his wilted dick in his fist and a smudge on the sheets. However, there did not seem to be any way she could bring up these issues without offending his
strong Basque pride. In fact, he had started muttering some choice words in Euskara around the house, and she suspected these were curse words.

When he went off to Boise State for college, he majored in history, with a minor in Basque Studies. He picked up the language so quickly that his professors remained convinced there was Basque blood somewhere in his lineage.

Oliver was not politically
active, for which his professors were very grateful; the Basques already had plenty of homegrown obsessive hotheads to deal with, and they didn’t need any more. What Oliver was passionate about was the language, about books and printing and writing --
Euskara.

“Mom, don’t you see? I can’t sit around and watch another language become
extinct. It’s a blow to the collective human heart.” He patted her gently on the knee. “This is my life’s work, Mom. Did you get over to the store for some chorizos?”

Thursday was Basque food night at their house, and Oliver insisted on the authentic chorizos from the Basque Market downtown.

But while Oliver’s mother sat with her head bowed over the dinner table,
listening to Oliver recite their mealtime prayer in Basque, and saying her own little prayers for her son, his teachers were a bit more active. “We need to send Oliver into the field,” they agreed. Get him out of Boise. Basque country was out of the question.
Good Lord. They shuddered to think what would happen if Oliver found his feet in the sacred black dirt of Gernika. And that is when one of his professors remembered Labrador.

“Red Bay? You mean the whaling camp?”

“They’ve found a Basque whaling ship sunk in the bay, Oliver. There were logs, journals. We are co-sponsors of the excavation, and we want you on site. Our Euskara point man.”

His professors would never guess the joy that filled Oliver’s heart at these words, Euskara point man. He was packed, with a suitcase full of chorizo and beans, his beret snug on his head, and his mother barely had time to kiss him goodbye before he was out the door and flying north.

Labrador was more than a little shocking to a boy from Boise. Oliver stood on the
deck, looking out over the gray, cold water, turned around and stared out at the gray-green landscape. No trees, a few weathered bare rocks. This, Oliver said to himself, is arctic tundra. What the heck did the Basques come here for?

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They came for whales, of course. He knew that from his reading, but it didn’t
quite sink in until he stood in this place what a hellish trip that must have been. And then, when they got here? Killing fields. They killed as many right whales and bowheads as they could, processed them into oil and baleen and got the heck out of there before the whole place froze up for the winter. Oliver hiked his backpack up on
his shoulder, and walked back up to the dormitory, where he had a bunk waiting with a shared bathroom and kitchenette.

The dorm was grim, faded, gray-white clapboard. He could already imagine the
sounds of the wind off the Labrador coast, whistling through the boards. He
remembered reading Jack London as a boy -- something about padding his clothes with newspaper for insulation? Good Lord.

He closed the door carefully behind him, then walked into the dorm and found
an empty bunk. There were four sets of bunk beds, but only one seemed to be in use.

Oliver took the bottom bunk and threw his backpack on the bedspread, unpacked his precious supply of chorizos and hung them in the kitchen. He was unpacking his clothes when the door blew open.

The guy that walked in must have been about his age, with a native cast to his
eyes and black hair that was standing up every which a way from the wind. He nodded to Oliver. “You the Basquo?”

Oliver nodded, and he walked over and introduced himself. “Jack Brown. I’m
here with the Inuit team from University of BC. You’re from Boise State?”

“Are you Inuit?”

Jack shook his head. “I had a Japanese grandmother. But I am the top graduate
Inuit researcher in the entire department! When this placement came open for a researcher, my professors didn’t even consider anyone else!”

“Hey, me too! I think I got this job because I read and write Euskara. That’s the Basque language. What’s your specialty?”

“Inuit art.”

“Cool.”

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“The Inuit artifacts are below the Basque artifacts. You know what that means, right?”

Oliver frowned at him. “It’s not any great news that the Inuit were here first.”

“Here first and last, brother. You won’t find many Basques in Red Bay today.”

Oliver had been about to share a precious chorizo with this asshole! Well, he could go chew on some whale blubber. Oliver turned away, stretched out on his bed.

“You’re not coming to the site?”

“I’m taking a nap,” Oliver said. “Jet lag.”

When Jack left, stomping harder than he needed to across the bare plank floor,
Oliver sat up and studied the dorm. It looked to him like he and Jack were the sole cowboys. Jack had his bed on the bottom, and was using the top bunk to store his gear.

Oliver took a quick look. It seemed Jack was an artist, carving whales out of pieces of wood. They looked like the animals you would see on totem poles. He had a couple hanging up on the walls around his bed.

Oliver looked closer. Each carving was a circle, and the whale was swimming
inside the circle. The wood was carved and stained to show water, sun, air, and the details of the whales were so exact Oliver could name them: killer whales, right whales, bowheads and humpbacks, blues and fins and sperm whales. He knew the Basque whalers had driven the rights and the bowheads nearly to the brink of extinction in the waters off Labrador. He felt somehow these carvings of whales were a reproach. “They just came looking for cod,” he said, and turned away from the beautiful carvings.

Oliver got out his Ikurrina, hung it from the top bunk so it fell down over his bed like a curtain. The room immediately looked brighter. He unpacked his gauntlets and his pelota ball, unpacked his Euskara grammar text, taped up a map of the beautiful homeland, Euskal Herria. Oliver sighed, lay back down. The place felt warmer, homelike.
He could stand it, he thought, as long as Inuit-boy kept to his side of the dorm.

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Chapter Two

Jack’s mother blamed her mother-in-law for many things, but mostly she blamed
her for Jack’s strange obsession with the Inuit people. When Jack was six, his
grandmother had begun to tell him stories about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. She had been interred in Idaho for six months when she was an infant. It was her dearest hope to have a grandson who would become a powerful attorney, one who would squeeze an appropriate punishment from the United States of
America on behalf of everyone of Japanese-American ancestry. She and Jack were on a tour of the internment camps up in Alaska when Jack first met an Inuit, and first held a hand-carved piece of walrus tusk, and first felt the enormous power of the animal
spirits in a Totem Pole.

He flung himself into the study of the native peoples of the arctic, quickly
consigned the Athabaskans to Arizona, and settled his considerable powers of
concentration on the Inuit people.

Jack liked the way Canada called their native people the First Nations. He felt
that was respectful, and he led a campaign to change the popular usage of the language from “Native American” to “First Nations.” The tribal politics quickly got ugly. The Navajo suggested they could be the First Nation, but the Apache were of a certainty only Second Nations, and everyone disputed the claims of the Athabaskan. The
Cheyenne and Arapahoe renewed their fight over the borders of their shared
reservation, and the Southern Utes wanted to use the title, but with Inc. behind the name. Many of the Eastern tribes complained that they were being ignored in the discussion, and in fact their complaints went unnoticed. But when it became known that Jack was not, in fact, Inuit, but of Japanese-American ancestry, the doors to the hogans and tipis, the pow-wows and tribal council meetings were slammed shut against him.

The Inuit always welcomed him, though. Jack suspected it was because he had
learned their language, but actually the small villages were so isolated, and the people so hungry for visitors, they welcomed everyone. But Jack was their darling. He loved to listen to the stories told by the elders, stories of animal spirits and great hunts, stories of the ferocious magic in the strange arctic landscape. He admired their native handicrafts with such enthusiasm the villagers always felt hopeful that they might at last find a market for goods so fervently admired.

When he went off to the University of British Columbia, he went with a pair of
hand crafted, beaver lined mukluks and a beaver hat, made by hand and sewn with
bone needles and sinew. His muffler was knitted from hand-spun qiviut, and his head was full of stories. His grandmother and mother could only watch helplessly as he hoisted a backpack full of walrus tusk and whalebone, bid them farewell in Inuit, and headed off to school.

Jack fell in love during a class on Inuit culture. The boy was called Amuk, and he told Jack his name meant Father Wolf. His hair was as black as a raven’s wing, and tumbled down his back. Jack sat behind him and breathed his scent, looked at the lines of his neck, like the smooth brown of old, polished ivory.

The instructors were amazed at how quickly Jack picked up Inuit, and he was
encouraged to continue graduate study. One of his instructors gave Jack a gentle suggestion about Amuk. “Jack, just because a boy is Inuit doesn’t mean he embodies all that is fine about the culture. In every community, you will find different sorts of people. I do not want you to be hurt.”

Jack sort of understood what he was saying. Amuk was a lazy student, and
seemed to be looking for an easy ride. Jack’s Inuit was far better than his, even though he was raised a native speaker. Also, Jack noticed that Amuk never kissed him. Their lovemaking mostly involved Amuk shoving Jack’s head down between his legs. Then Jack overheard Amuk talking to another Inuit boy, saying, “Hey, the Jap gives good
head. That’s all it is.” He understood clearly then that assholes could come from every culture, and knew that the elders who held him so dear would have something to say about the lazy boy who had treated him so disrespectfully. He tore up all the poetry he had written about Amuk’s black hair and told his professors he wanted some fieldwork.

The small excavation at Red Bay, Labrador, was a hardship post. There was quite a bit of competition between the Basque Studies and the Inuit Studies departments at the respective universities, but it was the landscape that was most troublesome. The
desolate air, harsh arctic tundra, and the incessant wind withered the academic zeal in many a soul. But his instructors knew Jack was made for arctic tundra. It was imprinted on his soul. So he packed his beaver skin mukluks and his qiviut muffler and his beaver hat, and set off across Canada.

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Chapter Three

After a short nap, Oliver set out to explore. The Basque whaling vessel that had been found in the waters off Red Bay, and brought up in pieces, was called the San Juan.

The majority of work by the anthropologists and archeologists had been done, and several sites on shore had been carefully excavated. This excavation had produced more
fragments and pieces of tools and small scraps of books and pieces of paper and ivory than any ten people could properly inspect and catalogue if they worked nonstop for years. This inspecting and preserving and cataloging was the work Oliver and Jack were being called upon to do.

There was a trailer set upon the shore, and Oliver stuck his head inside. One wall contained shelves with boxes of artifacts, and there were a couple of desks. Jack was at one, looking at pieces of bone under a magnifying glass. He gestured to the other desk.
“That’s yours,” he said. “I put some books on your desk. I think they’re written in the Basque language but I’m not sure. They came from the San Juan.

That metal shed behind us? Full of artifact boxes. I think at last count there were six hundred and twelve
boxes of artifacts still to go.”

“Cool!” The books were in bad shape, with covers warped and twisted with
water, and the pages stained. The ink seemed to be some sort of dark brown, the paper parchment. Oliver pulled out his memo book and started taking notes.

“When you go through boxes, if you find anything that looks like Inuit art, you
pass it to me. If I find anything made of paper, or that looks like a book, or has writing on it, I’ll pass it to you. Will that work?”

Oliver nodded. “That will work.”

* * *

�
Jack touched him on the shoulder, and Oliver looked up to see it was dark
outside. “You haven’t moved for hours. I’m heading back to the dorm. I didn’t want you to get lost in the dark.”

“Oh, thanks.” Oliver blinked a few times, rubbed the tiredness from his eyes.

“So is that Basque?”

“Euskara, yes. Looks like a log of supplies. I need to look up the names, compare them with the names on the contracts back in Euskal Herria. When do they have the Internet up?”

“They put the tower up for four hours in the middle of the day.”

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“I’ve got a pile of baleen to go through. Some of it looks to have been carved into tools, needles, mostly, and I think some buttons. The Inuit made most of their art into something useful, like tools or household goods.”

“What is baleen exactly?”

“Whales have it in place of teeth. Made of keratin, like horn or fingernails. They have plates of it in the mouth, in parallel lines, and use it to filter small fish out of seawater. The Basques hunted whales for oil and baleen.”

“What was it used for?”

“Corset stays.”

“Hmm.”

“The Inuit carved it, made hair combs and small flexible tools. It doesn’t fossilize, but we think it developed in whales about 30 million years ago. So we’re mostly guessing about when…”

Jack took a deep breath, and it looked to Oliver like he was ready to talk about baleen for some time to come. “Hey, how do you want to share the kitchen?”

Jack shrugged. “We can each do our own thing, or we can share cooking and
eating. I’m not a great cook but I can make grilled cheese.”

“Probably a good idea if we share, then. How do we get groceries?”

�
“We can order stuff from Newfoundland and they deliver once a week. If you
don’t have anything, don’t sweat it. I can cover us for this week.”

Oliver felt himself softening toward Jack just a bit. “I did bring some Basque sausages and beans. I’m happy to share them.”

“Cool!”

Over the next week, Oliver and Jack fell into a good working routine. They
traded breakfast and supper cooking duties, and packed lunches so they wouldn’t have to stop in the middle of the day. Jack went on a bit about Inuit art, but Oliver was willing to listen, especially since Jack seemed interested in what he had to say about the
development of Euskara and the history of writing, printing, and book binding in the Basque world. Jack seemed especially impressed to hear about the long history of Basque seamanship, and the presence of a Basque crew with Columbus when he discovered America. Things might have gone well except for pelota.

�
Chapter Four

Oliver mentioned casually that pelota, the Basque handball game, was probably
the original handball game. Jack courteously disagreed, suggesting that Inuit handball had been around for hundreds of years before pelota. He suggested that there was
archeological evidence to support the contention that the Greenland Inuit had handball before the Basques were ever seen in Red Bay. Oliver showed him several artifacts from
the boxes on the walls that could easily have been, when whole, the cupped baskets that some petola players used. Jack blew a raspberry at that.

Oliver challenged Jack to a game of pelota, sure he could end the argument with a sound Basque ass-whipping. To his surprise, Jack agreed, and pulled out a pair of well-worn leather gauntlets from beneath his bunk. “I know where there’s a rock wall we can use,” Jack said. “It’s not quite a fronton, but it should do.”

Jack knew the name of the Basque handball court? Oliver refused to ask him about it, followed him out to the rock wall, afraid he was looking at the backside of a ringer.

And so it proved. Oliver was a decent pelota player, a goer, with a lot of heart. Jack was world class, with an armspan like a chimpanzee and hands that must have been as hard as baleen. He whipped Oliver back and forth across the court, nearly took his head off a couple of times, and when Oliver swayed on his feet, Jack reached a foot out, hooked it around his ankles, and brought him down.

“Admit it,” he said. He sat down on Oliver’s stomach, kept him pinned to the
ground. “The Inuit had handball first.”

Oliver shook his head grimly. “Pelota,” he said. “Not handball. And the Basques
brought it to the New World.”

�
“New World? That Eurocentric bullshit interpretation is so last century, my
friend. The Inuit had it first. Not the Basques. Admit it. Say it: ‘Inuit had handball first’.”

Oliver glared up at him, shook his head grimly, and Jack reached down and
snatched the beret off Oliver’s head and threw it across the court. Then he kissed him, right on his furious, snarling mouth.

“Inuit had handball first.”

Oliver tried to buck him off, but Jack had surprisingly strong thighs, and they
kept Oliver pinned in place. Jack kissed him again. “Say it. I’ll keep you pinned here until you admit it.”

What followed was a surprise to both Oliver and Jack, especially when they
found their anger quickly turning to the sort of passion usually reserved for pelota and Euskara and, in Jack’s case, Inuit art. Jack was lean and soft, his skin as pale as parchment, and Oliver decided that kissing his mouth could not really be seen as a betrayal of his beliefs, not if they both agreed not to mention pelota. Jack wore strange
clothes, hide boots with fur inside, some sort of scarf that was the softest thing Oliver had ever touched. Jack pulled Oliver’s shirt out of his jeans and unbuttoned it, then unsnapped and unzipped him so quickly Oliver wasn’t really sure how it had
happened.

Jack traced down Oliver’s belly with the scarf, wrapped it gently around his
cock. “This is qiviut,” he said, mouth moving over Oliver’s neck. “The down of the musk ox. Seven times softer than cashmere. You can come in it. It’s totally hand-washable.”

Oliver felt his cock give a throb and a jerk, wrapped up in the silky wool. He
imagined Jack jerking off inside his qiviut muffler when he was alone in the dorm. He imagined the muffler was long enough they could use both ends at the same time. “Oh, God, Jack. Kiss me again.”

Oliver was not ready to give up, but he also did not want to miss one moment of
Jack’s hands, wandering down his stomach, or the feel of his warm mouth and spiky hair, following the trail of the qiviut. His cock was dancing against his belly, and Oliver wasn’t sure if he should moan or yelp or even just scream out loud. Jack seemed pleased with the vigor of Oliver’s thighs, toned by years of pelota, the way they locked themselves around him.

Jack took his time nuzzling Oliver’s cock, and then he said a strange thing. “I know how to do this.”

“You do? Well, I don’t. You can show me, though, right? Am I supposed to do it
to you, too?”

“Well, I would say that’s the polite way to go about things,” and he looked so
hopeful that Oliver determined right then and there to develop at least some of Jack’s considerable expertise. There seemed to be nuzzling involved, kissing and licking, then he sucking down and lips moving up and down and careful placement of the teeth and
the whole thing was so extraordinary that Oliver found his voice, raised in Basque song, a beautiful contralto, and he clutched Jack’s hair in both fists until Jack reached up and
gently disentangled his fingers.

Oliver held Jack wrapped up in his arms and legs, and they were both sweaty,
from pelota and from lovemaking, and he liked it. He liked this feeling, another boy in his arms, his smooth, strong back, a crinkle of silky hair against his groin, and the feel of
Jack’s mouth moving across his neck. “This is good,” he said, thinking, I can’t believe I’m kissing a boy who isn’t a Basque, and Jack raised himself to his elbows and smiled down at
him.

“Yeah, it’s good. You want to go in? I think you’re lying in a pile of rocks.”

Oliver would have guessed a pile of baleen, but he didn’t want to mention that and risk Jack getting distracted. Jack climbed off him, reached a hand down to pull him up, and brushed off his back. “So you aren’t going to give, huh?”

Oliver shook his head. “About pelota? Sorry, my friend. No can do.”

“Well,” Jack said, “we must just agree to disagree.”

Back in the dorm Oliver slid into the shower, and Jack was waiting for his turn when he was done. Oliver dried his hair and tied a towel around his waist. When Jack came out of the shower, Oliver took the towel and rubbed his back dry. “Tell me about those carvings by your bed.”

Jack gave him a grateful smile. “I want to capture the spirit of the whales.
They’re nearly extinct now. It’s like a tribute.” He saw Oliver’s face. “I don’t blame the Basques, Oliver. They were just trying to make a living. We didn’t know any better back then. But I want to honor the spirit of the whales anyway.”

This sentiment was so tender and beautiful that Oliver couldn’t help but take Jack into his arms and kiss him sweetly. Towels hit the floor, and hands roamed over warm skin. Jack fell back on his bunk, and Oliver climbed on top of him, nudged his warm cock into his mouth. He had a handful of black pubic hair clutched in his fist, and
when Jack’s cock slid between his lips, against his tongue and slowly along the edge of his teeth, Oliver was so overcome he was ready to renounce his stubborn belief in pelota. But he couldn’t, at the moment, speak.

Jack could, though. He removed Oliver’s fingers from his pubic hair, and when
Oliver clutched his hips with both hands, sucked him down so deep and so soft, made these sweet little noises of pleasure, Jack was moved to ululations, and for a moment the joyous, triumphant sounds of an Inuit hunting party felling a musk ox filled the abandoned village of Red Bay.

�
Chapter Five

After this bout of lovemaking, which seemed to last just a moment or two, but in actuality lasted over two hours, Jack and Oliver went back to work. Jack had his baleen tools to catalogue, and Oliver had a new journal to try and preserve.

Oliver did spend a few moments wondering about the exact definition of
virginity -- was oral sex given and received significant enough sexual activity that it would be defined as loss of virginity? He and Jack had a lively discussion on this point,
and decided that virginity was primarily a heterosexual definition, and thus they could craft a new definition specific to homosexuality. Oliver proposed that a degree of reciprocity was important, and Jack recommended a new terminology, since traditional definitions of virginity involved a loss of something precious, and the new definition
could incorporate the idea of gain. He theorized that true loss of innocence, if that could be a metaphor for loss of virginity, came with betrayal. Oliver disagreed, and suggested
that he would like to choose their earlier lovemaking as his official loss of virginity. Jack was so touched he leaned across the aisle and kissed Oliver for nearly five minutes.

The pages of the journal Oliver was working on were stuck together, and he
wasn’t sure how to get them apart without tearing them. He’d removed the leather covers and boards already, and was thinking he could document how the pages were sewn together, then take the pages apart from the bound edge.

He photographed every step, to preserve the record, and once he had good
documentation about how the paper was sewn, he eased the thread out of the holes with a tiny blade. The thread looked like linen, and it had been waxed. Probably how it had been preserved. He pulled the papers apart, and just as he hoped, the bound edge
separated easily. Even without tearing or cutting the stuck-together edge, he would be able to read and translate the pages. This looked to be a personal journal, too, and those
were always the most valuable for the historical record.

He heard a little gasp from behind him, and Jack reached across and put a small
tool on his desk. “Would you look at that!” It was a piece of walrus tusk carved like a handle, a knife or a fork handle. There was a scene scratched on the surface, an Inuit boy holding a tiny fish on a string. And on the end, a small carving of the lauburu, the
ancient Basque symbol.

Oliver smiled at Jack’s back. He was already bent over his desk again. “Hey,
thanks.”

“Cool, huh?”

“You think it was a Basque knife handle, and someone carved a scene they saw?”

“Could be. Or maybe the Basquo married an Inuit women, and the boy is his son.
We don’t have very much evidence of cross-cultural behavior, marriages or burials. It would be really great to find some. There must have been people falling in love, despite their huge cultural differences.”

“I agree. It would be bound to happen.”

Oliver turned back to his journal. He noticed a flash of color, and opened a
couple of pages to an illustration. The pictures had a paper covering between the facing pages, probably to keep the paint from sticking, but this paper had helped preserve the
picture. He saw the word at the bottom of the page, pilota, and his breath caught in his throat. Oh, my God! He had a picture of early pelota! Jack was going to eat his tongue!

Oh, my God. The picture wasn’t of Basque whalers playing pelota. It was a
drawing of Inuit playing pelota. He double checked his translation several times. The caption said, “An ancient form of pilota played by the native Indians of the Arctic.”

An ancient form of pilota played by the native Indians of the Arctic. Jack had
been right after all! The Inuit did have handball first!

He looked over at Jack, bent over his worktable. Jack had a good light, and a
magnifying glass, and was looking at a small carving on an ivory button. Oliver studied the curve of his neck, the fine bones in his spine. He had a sudden picture of the two of them, sitting in little work trailers all over the world, back to back, Basque artifacts and
Inuit artifacts, and he would be staring at the beautiful bones of Jack’s neck until the black hair on his head turned white as the arctic snow.

“Hey,” he said. Jack looked up, blinked a couple of times to focus his eyes. “Look what I found.”

�

Ghosts From 1968

Ghosts From 1968

Were the things we loved as children, and the things that frightened us, more powerful than what is happening to us today? Or were our brains just more elastic back then, more open to impression? Some memories of childhood remain crystal-clear, and I can trace my scariest memories, and some of my greatest loves, to 1968.

The Bomb and Tet

I wrote the beginning of a story about something that happened in Catholic school, the year I was 7. This would have been 1967:

Second grade, and the gloves come off. “Say you have a bomb shelter, but only room for 10 people.”

I remember like it was yesterday, discussing with my classmates and the nuns why we needed nurses and teachers. We needed healthy young women in our bomb shelter, so they could have babies to repopulate the planet and contribute needed skills, and we gave them a man to run things and make up the laws. The artists all seemed to be fifty and were deemed both too old to contribute and did we really need artists? I mean, we had a limited supply of food in those bomb shelters. They were left to face nuclear winter alone. Was there really any question I was going to be a nurse? I have felt guilty for abandoning those artists for 45 years. Now I think—I’m 52, and a writer of gay romances. Oops, sorry! No room for you, Sarah. Looks like the bomb shelter is full up!

By 1968, though, there was a new demon even more frightening than the bomb, especially for a kid whose father was in the military. My dad was gone most of 1968 on some secret something in his submarine. Naturally, listening to Walter Cronkite’s solemn voice talking about Tet, and watching the pictures on our little TV coming from Vietnam, I thought he was in the middle of it all. I never missed the nightly news. I was looking for him in those horrible pictures, in those news reports.

My son’s father and I were both in the military, and we were in war zones, sometimes together. I never worried about him the way I worried about my dad in 1968, looking for his face on the TV screen. I was busier as an adult, for one thing, and I knew we were both very competent and there were all sorts of fail-safes in place. It was just work, after all. I suspect now I had used up my allotment of worry during Tet.



The Scorpion

And while I was busy worrying about Vietnam, something happened even closer to home. On May 27, 1968, the happy and excited families of the 99 men on board the USS Scorpion waited on the docks in Norfolk for the sub to come back from deployment. The Navy was not surprised the sub never showed up. They had been frantically looking for it for days. The families showed up and stood around and stared out at the horizon and waited for a ship that was not coming home. When it got dark, most of the tired mothers bundled their kids up and took them home. The Navy finally announced the ship was lost at sea on June 5, 1968. This was the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

There have been many theories and much study since the Scorpion went down about what happened. They exceeded crush depth we know for sure, and the theory I heard most, growing up around submariners, is that a torpedo exploded in the tube. Regardless, the remains sit just off the Azores, where the Scorpion was engaged in the business of submarines of the day- observing Soviet naval activities. We were watching them and they were watching us. It was a cold war down at the bottom of the sea, while the world was watching the hot war across another ocean. But what I remember most clearly was the wives talking about what had happened in our kitchen. Their pale drawn faces, the way they pulled each other into corners to quietly ask if there had been any news. It wasn’t my dad’s submarine, but it could have been.



Mexico and Prague and the rest of the screwed-up world

While I was busy listening to Walter Cronkite, waiting for him to announce my father was being hauled out of the mud of Vietnam, I heard lots of other disturbing news. What the heck was going on in Mexico? They lined their student protestors up against a wall and shot them? Because of the Olympics? I knew what Mexico looked like, of course, since we were Clint Eastwood fans and the Spaghetti Westerns showed the world the face of the banditos, with their fierce mustaches and droopy sombreros.

What the heck was going on in Prague? What was the matter with the Soviets, with their big tanks?

And what the heck was happening here? Everybody was rioting, the students, the Panthers, the entire city of Detroit was in flames, and the hippy war protestors were being shot down in the streets by the good guys, the guys in uniform. America was on fire, everybody had a gun, and people were being assassinated. Martin Luther King, then RFK. I can see Cronkite’s face like it was yesterday, announcing that the Reverend MLK was dead, with the knowledge on his face about what was going to happen next.


Barnabas Collins

But I was a kid, and my TV watching was not confined to Uncle Walter and the nightly news. I was a huge fan of the soap Dark Shadows. We all were, everyone, and all the kids in the neighborhood watched Dark Shadows after school, and then we put on plays for the mothers, acting out new story lines. I was in love with Barnabas Collins. My role was to swoon backward into Barnabas’s dark and steely arms while he ravished my neck over and over again. When he was finished sucking my blood, he would lay my insensate body down in the grass. Good St. Augustine grass is very prickly on the back, but then my nerves were especially sensitive after Barnabas had finished with me. I don’t remember anything else about the storylines of the plays we put on. I only remember the joy of swooning, knowing I was going to be caught, and that a vampire was going to bite my neck.


Reader’s Digest Condensed Books

I recently read my old report cards. Mother sent them to me when she was cleaning out the attic. Oddly enough, they seemed to say the same thing year after year. To paraphrase, the nuns did not appreciate my uniform noncompliance, and I would do better in school if I would stop talking so much. But in 1968, the year I was 8, a teacher found a solution to the problem of my talking too much in class. We had these boxes of stories, and each story had a group of questions designed to assess reading comprehension. They were for “reading groups” at different levels. The teacher sent me to the back of the room where all those boxes were stored and said I could read them for as long as I wanted. I had to stay in the back, though. Did I have to answer the questions? No, I could just read. I stayed back there until the end of the school year, reading all day, and when she saw I was working on the last box, she got the boxes from the upper grades, and then she brought in armfuls of Reader’s Digest Condensed books.

I was very happy to see these, as we had them at home, too. In my house, we believed in education and we believed in reading. But the rest of my family was normal about it. I would wait on the day the Reader’s Digest Condensed book was due to arrive and carry it to my room, and no one would see me or the book again until I had read every page. If the book arrived when I was at school, it would be sitting, waiting for me, still in the cardboard box. Only watching the news could pull me from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. But by the end of the year my dad was back home, and he told me not to worry, he was not going to Vietnam in his submarine. It has only recently occurred to me, after forty or so years, that he was not telling me the truth. Mother must have noticed that I was watching the news every night and started to worry.


The Chemistry Set

In between my obsession with Barnabas Collins and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, I fell in love with the chemistry laboratory. Not chemistry itself, just the lab, with all the cool bubbling test tubes and fumes and liquids and mad scientists. I asked for a chemistry set for Christmas, and Santa obliged. It was the coolest present of my entire life, with a Bunsen Burner (real flames!) and a little test tube holder and packets of various chemicals and glass test tubes. I dove right in, doing experiments left and right until my ingredients ran dry. I wasn’t as interested in doing experiments where you knew what was going to happen. I wanted to do experiments where the end result was a question. Most of the chemistry designed for eight year olds is not set up for the random. Now, of course, I completely agree with this safety feature, but at the time I was a bit disappointed nothing would blow up and I could not perform a transformation of any significant nature. Chemistry lab in college was even worse, the rigid nature of doing experiments to prove a point that they already knew!! Was I the only one who saw the futility of this? But I still get a little lightheaded with happiness when I see a Bunsen Burner and test tube rack.

Music

Janis Piece of My Heart (Janis nearly got me kicked out of Catholic School. That story for another time. Mother said she was “not a lady.”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb7cB...

Glen Campbell Galveston (I’ve got a story in the planning stages called The Persian Rose that features this heartbreaking song)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHUgp...

Buffalo Springfield For What It’s Worth (I have listened to Buffalo Springfield Again every year since 1968. It was my first record album)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCr...

Blood Sweat and Tears You Made Me So Very Happy (My mother was a big fan of Blood Sweat and Tears, and also Gordon Lightfoot)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWSOu...

Jefferson Airplane White Rabbit (from the Smothers Brothers!)( I was not allowed to listen to them, as they promoted drugs use. Mother suspected this song had something to do with drugs. )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnP72u...

Writing

It was always my intention to write when I ‘got old’. I wanted to work off enough good karma as a nurse to earn my place in the bomb shelter, and to help repopulate the planet in the event of nuclear winter. But somewhere about age 45, it occurred to me that, if I was going to write when I got old, the time was now. I also was stalling, I think, with the idea that I hadn’t read enough. My obsessive reading behavior had not abated, but there were still so many more books to read! Would I have to choose between reading and writing?

And my first few efforts were, frankly, pornographic. I excused myself by allowing that this was normal human behavior; after all, I wasn’t having sex, most people I knew weren’t having sex, and so naturally we were all thinking about sex. I suspected this obsessive interest in sex was based on some flawed idea that sex was a shortcut to intimacy. Regardless, over time I became more interested in writing about love. As expected my readership went down until I am now at about 20 regular readers, a small but strong cadre of readers I suspect were sitting in the back of their classrooms in third grade with boxes of stories. I love you guys.

1968 was a beautiful rich heartbreaking killer of a year. I hear that music, listen to the voices, watch the newsreels and it feels like I’m home again, in my small safe place, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, watching the world tear itself to pieces. And now, like then, after all of those sorts of years, we wake up and get to work, because we’re the grown-ups, putting the pieces back together again.

Is a Story a Toaster?

I’m greatly disturbed by things I’ve read lately. That’s the point, though, right? Aren’t we supposed to be disturbed? Or changed in some way? Don’t we expect to open our minds and let someone else’s ideas in? And of course, once your mind is open, it’s hard to close it again.

I have been reading the theory of story as commercial product, readers as consumers of a product manufactured for sale, and we buy and sell and this interaction is governed by the rules and behaviors of commercial transactions. I have always thought of fiction as different, not a commercial product. I buy books not for the value of the paper and ink, but for the ideas inside, the potential for those ideas to change me. And while we set a dollar amount on those ideas, their value is not monetary, but in their potential. Their potential to change the world. This is a problematic idea at the moment, in the excitable culture we live in.

I decided to think this idea through to clarify my thinking. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing, and why, and if I’m deluding myself for some reason, what is that reason? It’s quite possible for me to be wrong. It’s happened before, and usually when I’m wrong, the reason rests squarely with myself. So I do not enter this discussion assuming I’m right. I am going to use the toaster for comparison, because I’m thinking about toasters this morning.

Specifically, where is the toaster? I have unpacked all the boxes marked ‘kitchen’ and the toaster has not appeared. And I have bagels! I do not plan, however, to write to the Cuisinart people and accuse them of making a disappearing toaster. My guess is it is in a box marked ‘books’.

Is a story art, or is it a toaster? I think back to the books I read as a teenager. Hundreds of them, of the genre known as Regency Romance. What I remember now, forty years later, is this: A) they took me out of myself when I needed an escape. B) after several years, they started to piss me off because they were not telling the truth, and I was looking to them for some truth. C) Several of them taught me something I remember to this day—Georgette Heyer would write characters that were both smart and incredibly stupid and blind to themselves. I cannot tell you how relieved I was! Even handsome brilliant wealthy Dukes could screw everything up! Victoria Holt taught me that nothing is as painful as betrayal by a close friend. And we can still love that person, even after the betrayal. I still remember the way that understanding bloomed across the heroine’s mind, and mine, at the same time. These books, the two or three I remember out of the two or three hundred, or thousand I read, were not toasters. I don’t know that the others were, either. What I think now is those writers were afraid to write the truth, or they hadn’t yet learned the truth. Maybe what they were writing was the truth for them, at that time. Or maybe they believed they were writing a product, for a consumer market.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Oscar Wilde

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James Whistler

Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

I believe fiction is art. I do not believe there is any difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. The intention is the same, or should be. It’s the IDEA. When we write a story, that’s 50% of the exchange of an idea. When someone reads our story, the other 50% is brought to bear, and the ideas of our mind enter your heads, and maybe they change you. Like those ideas changed us, writing about them. The way ideas resonate across the world is more powerful than any force ever invented or built or constructed in a factory.

So for me, this is not a commercial transaction. You are not the consumers of a product I am selling. I’m on a boat, rocking on the wild seas, and I am inviting you to step onto my boat. Let’s take a ride together. Either one of us could get a face full of cold salt water at any moment, or we could flounder and sink, but we might just figure out how to work that sail. Maybe we will fly across the waves, or fly across the moon. Anything is possible. I think it’s worth that chance or I would not be writing.

I don’t have a money-back policy if the toaster doesn’t work for you. And frankly, I could make more money selling blood than selling books. I have a job that is work-for-money. Writing is something different. It’s something more. And even if I could support my family on the revenues of writing, for me it will always be something more.

It’s a gamble, I admit. A gamble for me, to expose myself to this degree. It’s a gamble for you, to put your money down for an idea, and see if that story, that idea, resonates in your brain in such a way that it makes beautiful music. Maybe the tones will be flat and dull in your lovely brain. Maybe it’s me and maybe it’s you! I’m not selling you a toaster. I am selling you a chance to change the world, one story at a time. That’s what I’m trying to do, when I write a story. Change the world.

Now, where have I packed that toaster?

Pies of God (a flash fiction)

Brother Joseph never told anyone that he heard the voice of God when he was fifteen. He wasn’t really sure if something had gone wrong, or if the first visit was just a prelim, and God was waiting for him to do something extraordinary. He really believed, hoped and believed, that the next time God spoke to him, something would be different. Something would change.

So Brother Joseph was living the contemplative life in a California monastery, waiting for God to finish the conversation he had started many years before. “Joseph,” God had said. He’d been lying in bed, staring at his bedroom ceiling. “Joseph,” God said. “Joseph.”

“What?” But that was it.

He was trying, God knows he was trying. But the contemplative life was difficult for him. What was he supposed to contemplate? He had to stomp down hard on his inner butterfly, his desire to fly through the springtime grass, roll through meadows full of wildflowers, enjoy the smell of Big Sur sea air. The other monks treated him like an overeager puppy, entertaining and lovable, but sort of annoying when they were tired.

The Abbott asked him if he would like to find some work, could he please find some work to do. He was offered a job as apprentice beekeeper and market gardener, but Joseph had been thinking a lot about pies. Could he perhaps train himself in pastry? He had once watched the movie Babette’s Feast, and he imagined his pies helping ease the aches of arthritis that were frequent topics of conversation at dinner. The Abbott agreed to the pastry, but suggested that he read the story, rather than depend on his original impressions of the movie.

Brother Joseph found great joy in his pies, and he made them to taste like the wildflowers, the green grass, the sea air of Big Sur. The other monks began to treat him with a little more respect, but Joseph hardly noticed. Happiness and an idea had taken root in his mind.

He understood that pastry equaled practice. There was no question a certain amount of craft was involved in a fine crust, and craft came from doing it over and over, and paying attention to the results. Certain flavors were easy on the mind, like whipped cream.
Sour cream in a pie required concentration, a suspension of judgment, a leap of faith that in the end he found more rewarding than whipped cream. Joseph was happy contemplating these issues. What he came to believe was that when he was happy, his pies tasted better. And he was happy when he wasn’t thinking about that evening when he was fifteen and God had left a big question mark in his mind.

Spring berries, fresh-picked early in the morning; rolling out buttery pastry crust on cold marble, the smell of coffee drifting through the kitchen. Butter and salt, sugar and tiny green leaves of fresh mint. There came an April morning when Brother Joseph, his heart full to bursting with the beauty and happiness of the day and the goodness of his pies, decided to forget about that long-ago conversation. To give it up, and everything it might mean. To live as a pie maker, and forget about his failure, the lost potential he had never understood, to give it up and just make pies.

Two children came into the kitchen, delivering more berries. They came through every year when the fields got ripe, brown boys and girls, already learning that work was important for the family to survive. The girl had bangs cut straight across her eyebrows and berry-stained fingertips. They both stared at the pie cooling on the counter, purple huckleberry juice bubbling up through lattice crust, sparkling with sugar. They didn’t say a word.

“Joseph,” said God. “Joseph, they’re hungry.”