Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 11 of 20)

The fire cast the Jews out,  A miracle had saved the Torah, but the Jews had no longer a home and had no longer any sanctuary but that which others granted temporarily. They asked only for space and peace. One day, it was written, the Jews would have again a home, but for now they would wander through the diaspora.

All the churches and temples and mosques on Rose Street had immediately offered the congregation of Torah, Torah Torah a place to worship, and Rose Street is only about a quarter-mile long, so it wasn’t the farthest the Jews ever had to wander, but still: a diaspora’s a diaspora.

A neighborhood’s got to have its churches and whatnot, Little Aleppians figured, but they ought be avoidable. No worse feeling than getting up a decent head of steam on a night of shoplifting and sex magix and WHAMMO there’s an Episcopalian joint in your face. Put God in one place, tell everyone where that place was, and let adults make their own choices about participating. It was like the zoo or the college: animals and education are great, but no one needs tapirs and chemistry professors on every corner. If people wanted the Lord, or to look at an elephant, or learn about an elephant, then they knew where to go.

The First Church of the Infinite Christ was the oldest on the block, predating the neighborhood itself. The first First Church was a cool, flat rock under the shade of a sequoia a mile to the north of the Pulaski village. Two men who were not Pulaski that the tribe called Stranger Who Hunts and Stranger Who Hunts’ Useless Friend had consecrated the rock over many hours of lying on it getting high and arguing about Jesus.

After the Pulaski were dead, Stranger Who Hunt’s Useless Friend was never called that again, and after a certain amount of years could not even remember his village name to say it. The Whites called him by his family name of Busybody Tyndale, and he used the money he got getting screwed out of his gold claim to buy some land and build a church. First one in Little Aleppo: an eight-bencher (four on each side) with a step-up stage that had a wooden pulpit on it. Tiny apartment in back, private privy out back.

The Reverend Tyndale would preach on Sunday mornings, and Wednesday nights, and any other time more than three people were in the church at the same time. He had built a house for the Lord to dwelleth in, and he was proud of this, but pride was a sin. And he missed his kotcha, and he missed his friend whom the Pulaski called Stranger Who Hunts, and whom he knew as Peter.

Every week or so, Busybody would walk west out of Little Aleppo–which was barely a few streets and a couple dozen buildings–until he hit the lake that smelled funny, and then he would make a left. The Peregrine Maria trees had knobby, ugly bark and stumpy branches that spiraled up the bulgy trunk. The leaves were the size of a child’s hand with thirteen points and the Pulaski would roll them up and chew them. This produced an effect. Mostly in your brain, but your legs felt kinda funny, too. Busybody would pluck the branches.

Sometimes at night, the Reverend would climb out onto the roof. He would chew the leaf, and name the stars, and miss his friend.

During the day, he preached the Infinite Christ. That the Lord was in the killing darkness at the bottom of the mines of the Turnaway Lode, and with the whores upstairs at the Wayside Inn, and in the shitty filth of the Main Drag. He preached the Christ of bedrolls and spoiled meat, and of softness amongst knives. The shooter was the Christ, and so was the poor fuck on the ground. Sheriff would be the Christ, too, if anyone ever got around to hiring one. The gold that brought America to the valley was the Christ, and the calm harbor that began to bustle with trade was the Christ. The plagues that would burn through the neighborhood every few years: the Christ. And the Wayside Fire must surely be the Christ, too, though Busybody Tyndale never could quite understand how. His friend Peter would have known, but he had been gone for such a very long time.

They buried him out back, but his tombstone was stolen and now no one is quite sure of the exact location of his grave. “Out back” is as specific as anyone will get.

The Reverend hadn’t just bought the land under his church: he’d bought the whole damn street, so when the Town Fathers decided to redline all the houses of worship onto Rose Street, it set the First Church of the Infinite Christ up in perpetuity. First to move in were the Catholics, St. Mary’s, and then St. Martin’s and St. Clement’s. One of them was Episcopalian and the other was Presbyterian, but no one could remember which was which. The synagogue, and then the mosque. All of them paid rent to the First Church of the Infinite Christ, which kept the lights on and paid for a preacher.

His name was the Reverend Arcade Jones and he took up a great deal of space in the First Church of the Infinite Christ’s all-purpose room. He was at the head of the rectangular table in an outfield-green suit. The Reverend’s shaved head was the color of overturned soil, and his hands were the size of counties.

“We need to do something about the Jews.”

“Not the best way to say that,” Deacon Blue murmured.

The First Church had a deacon, and his name was Louis Blue. He sat to the right of the Reverend Arcade Jones. His suit was suit-colored; his hair was thick but receding at the temples, and he wore it back in a ponytail. Several silver rings.

“Everyone knows what I mean.”

“Still.”

Shri Swaminarayan Mandir of Little Aleppo was the Hindu temple, and the head priest was named Pramahamsa Nithyananda. He was spiritually evolved to the point where it did not bother him when people mispronounced his name, and he had great white whiskers covering the southern portion of his face. He said,

“My temple has enjoyed hosting the Jewish worshipers this past week. Rabbi Levy and I have led many wonderful discussions introducing our faiths to each others’ congregations. No one could be better guests than our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

Pramahamsa Nithyananda stroked his wild beard.

“But a week is about enough.”

“That’s all I’m saying,” Arcade Jones said to the deacon.

“There’s just not room for two religions in one temple,” Pramahamsa continued. “Plus, you know: they don’t eat pork and we don’t eat beef. It’s chicken every freaking night.”

Muhammad Battuta was the imam of the Al-Alamut mosque, and the youngest man in the room. He was also the only one born in Little Aleppo, which had never stopped anyone from telling him to go back where he came from. He asked,

“What about a vegetarian option?”

“Are you really asking an Indian if there’s a vegetarian option? My people invented the vegetarian option.”

“There’s no need for the attitude.”

“Give back Kashmir and I’ll be nice.”

Imam Battuta was compact and balding with a close-cropped beard and dimples way up high near his eyes that pierced into his face when he smiled. You could not now see his dimples.

“I have absolutely no authority over Kashmir.”

“Your people do.”

“My people own a motorcycle repair shop on Garrick Street.”

“A likely story,” Pramahamsa said, and began muttering darkly in Hindi.

“I can do that, too,” Muhammad said, and began muttering darkly in Arabic.

“Everyone stop muttering darkly at each other!” Reverend Jones announced, and then the two men muttered darkly at him, but only very briefly.

Deacon Blue cleared his throat. He was the president of the Rose Street Interfaith Council and an active promoter of cross-congregational activities. Helped, he thought. Builds dialogue, community, that sort of thing. He’d been to 74 different countries in his former life, and he’d never lost a drummer. Shepherded bands into South American football stadiums and driven the equipment van between Leeds and Chichester at three am in February. Been stuck on the side of the road with a dope-sick guitarist and 200 miles to go. Deacon Blue was the rarest of men: he had seen the world, and still loved it.

Which is not to say it was not deeply annoying.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Obviously, we can’t keep passing the congregation from Torah, Torah, Torah around. Everybody hosting for a week was a good idea at first, but it’s not really working.”

Everyone nodded their heads in agreement.

“So. What we need to do here is not bicker with one another, but come up with some sort of…um,”

Deacon Blue tried to think of a word that was not…

“Solution?” Pramahamsa said.

“No! No, no. Not a solution.” Deacon Blue shook his head and regretted learning to speak as a child.

The Reverends Green and Brown were white, and from the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches, respectively. Or maybe the other way around; nobody was quite sure.

“We do need a solution, Deacon,” one of them said.

“To the Jewish problem,” the other one added.

The deacon loosened his tie and popped open the top button on his collar and said,

“It’s like no one’s listening to themselves.”

“You know,” Imam Battuta said, “there’s an empty building on Madagascar Avenue that might be perfect.”

The Reverend Arcade Jones liked that; he pointed at the imam in agreement and said,

“We should explore the Madagascar option.”

“Wow. Really? Has no one taken a history class?”

Deacon Blue called out to Mrs. Fong. She was still at her desk in the church’s main office because she had forgotten to go home; Mrs. Fong would reply with any number of ages if you asked her how old she was, but none of them were under 80.

“Mrs. Fong?”

“Yes, Deacon?”

“Are there any donuts left?”

“The Jews ate them!”

And Deacon Blue just sat there quietly for a second. He thought about faith, and he thought about the Lord, and about all the left-hand turns that could have been rights. Accidents of genealogy battered by history’s waves, and all those possible realities drowned in the surf until there was just one life struggling for breath on the shore, and staring at the sun on the horizon wondering whether it was coming up or going down. Happenstance monkeys, that’s all we were.

“I have an idea.”

Gladys Alsop was the only woman at the table, and so the men wanted to be respectful, but she was also the Unitarian minister; if there’s one thing that brings religions together, it’s the belief that Unitarians were pussies. At a certain point, inclusion becomes condescending: the Mormons and the Muslims might both be wrong, but they couldn’t both be right.

The Reverend Arcade Jones was still polite, and he said,

“And what is that, Gladys?”

“High school gym.”

Pramahamsa threw his hands up in the air and half-yelled,

“Woman, it’s basketball season!”

Father Declan Ember had been at St. Mary’s for as long as most in the neighborhood could remember, and he had a giant head full of gin with hair as white as his collar. His hands were soft and his fingernails were buffed. Father Ember gave the old Mass, the scary Mass, the Latin Mass that John XXIII and Vatican II had abolished. He faced away from the worshipers, and there was a settled order to the proceedings that had been decided on a thousand years prior. The Lord shouldn’t be addressed in the vernacular. “Hey, how ya doing?” Is that how you’d speak to God? Of course not. God speaks Latin.

“My heathen friend is correct,” Father Ember said.

“Kiss my ass, Papist,” Pramahamsa replied.

“The Jews, having wandered for millennia, now find themselves again bereft. Homeless and needing shelter from the buffeting winds. I am reminded, my friends of the parable of the Good Samaritan.”

The priest’s words surrounded the men and women at the table like warm water, and stupefied them; they lolled and jerked their heads until the sirens. They all heard the sirens closing in. Deacon Blue looked around, and then got up and walked out of the conference room in the First Church of the Infinite Christ; he was followed by the Reverend Arcade Jones and the rest of the holy men, and also the Unitarian.

Rose Street abutted Harper College–the campus was behind the First Church to the south–and all that had been in the meeting now stood on the grass to the side of the building watching a small Victorian house burn. Flames were already bursting from the gabled roof. The pumper and ladder trucks were not yet pulled up to the blaze, and students were gathered: some of them crying and others high. All the holy men and the Unitarian could do was pray; they did not know each others’ prayers, but their shoulders rubbed and they swayed in time and closed their eyes together all at once, and that was the best they could do. We are all capable of the best we can do, and sometimes not even that in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

“How’d you get here? Little Aleppo, I’m talking about, not some general ‘here.’ The neighborhood. You and I both know that KHAY–Hey!–don’t reach no place else, so if you’re tuning in, then I’m talking to a Little Aleppian. Maybe temporary, but temporary has a way of hanging around on the Main Drag.

“How’d you get here?

“Harper College got an archeology department, cats and kittens. You know Doctor Campe. He lets me call him Ezekiel cuz we’re friends. He comes on the Frankie Nickels Show now and then, and he tells us all about what he’s dug up. For a long time, we didn’t know exactly where the Pulaski live, but Ezekiel found it. I’m sure you’ve seen the memorial. It’s nice-looking. Very tasteful.

“Well, now, Ezekiel says that there were folks here before the Pulaski. Remember when the comic book store exploded? Left a crater, and turns out it was full of pottery and bones. Ezekiel Campe and his team, they took that pottery and they took those bones back to their labs, and they ran all sorts of tests on ’em.

“Zapped with all sorts of rays. Carbon dated and whatnot.  Couple hundred years before the Pulaski moved in, he figures. People been living in this valley a long damn time.

“And why not? Weather’s nice, ‘cept when it isn’t.

“But they weren’t from here. No one’s from anywhere ‘cept those that live in the damn Olduvai Gorge. Everyone who ain’t a Kenyan is a damnable interloper, ha ha ha.

“So where’d those first suckers come from? Maybe they came from the north, tired of the rain. Maybe they used to live in the Low Desert and got thirsty. Maybe they came from someplace where there’s winter.

“And where’d they go?

“Doc Ezekial got a theory. He says the Chinese made it here roundabouts the 15th century. He found a silver coin matches what they were making in China at the time. Foreigners bring disease, I’ve been told.

“But that’s just a theory. No evidence but one silver coin. 29 more and you can buy yourself something special, but there ain’t too many hats you can hang on one coin.

“Then came the Pulaski and we know what happened to them. Even though we don’t like to talk about it.

“Spaniards never made it here. No mission to burn down in Little Aleppo, cats and kittens. They named the hills, but didn’t much like crossing them. used to be some real scary things up in the Segovian Hills. Spaniards became the Californios, and they didn’t bother with the valley, either. First White in the area that we know of is a little fellow named Busybody Tyndale. He was a preacher, and a bit crazy. This set a precedent, ha ha ha.

“Used to be a lake where the zoo is now, and it was fed by three streams that ran down from the hills. There were gold nuggets in the stream, and the Pulaski used to trade ’em for rifles and ammo and saddles. Just dinky little nuggets, but that preacher found himself a seam. Pulled a fist-sized chunk of gold off it.

“You ever read Busybody Tyndale’s journals, cats and kittens? They printed ’em up nice and fancy a few years back. Reverend Tyndale? He’d been all over America, north south east and west, and he still believed in that man was good.

“What a maroon.

“He was gonna help the Pulaski. They’d taken him in, right? And now he was gonna help ’em. Reverend took that gold into C—–a City. Gonna buy the Pulaski medicine, pants, Bibles. Bring to them all the benefits of civilized society.

“He sure did! You’ve seen the memorial! Tasteful as hell.

“So: from the east you got Whites walking and riding the overland route. Wagon trains and oxen. But you got folks coming in from the west, too.

“Via the harbor.

“Chinese first. No theory this time, we got proof. 1851. That’s when the Chinese started coming on over. 1840’s were rough for China. Opium wars and drought and famine. Emperor was corrupt, and rebellions were started. By rebels, mostly, I guess. You might say China was being tossed by tempest, if you was some kind of poetical sort.

“1851. First Chinese in Little Aleppo was a fellow you heard of. Probably eaten his egg rolls. Yung Man.

“Yung Man come to work the mines. Gold in these here hills. The Turnaway Lode needed bodies. All the easy gold been dug out of the streams and plucked from the estuary in the lake. Now there was digging to be done. Hard work. Dangerous work. Cave-ins, gas pockets, all sorts of killer nonsense. A White wouldn’t do the job for the wages the mine’s owners wanted to pay. Chinese would.

“Month on the boat. Steerage. Share a room with ten other men, down in the bowels of the ship. You already walked from your hometown to Hong Kong, and now you’re on a boat for a month. There’s rats and vomit and the stink of strangers. Thieves, too. Sharpies waiting to take you for your bankroll in Mah Jongg.

“Yung Man was the first, but not the last. Course, the Chinese weren’t allowed to live with the Whites and that’s why we got Chinatown.

“Gold ran out soon enough, and there weren’t no more miners. Yung Man opened a restaurant on the Downside. Still open. I ate there last week. He brought in his brothers and cousins from back home, at least he did ’til 1882. Ever hear of the Chinese Exclusion Act? It was an act, you see, that excluded the Chinese. Truth in advertising. Does what it says on the label, ha ha ha.

“Periodically, the Whites would get twitchy and go rampaging through Chinatown with knives and erections. Other times, they would pass laws. They would always go back to Yung Man’s place, though. Neighborhood always did love its Chinese food. Used to be a joke: ‘What’s the only problem with Chinese food? The Chinaman it takes to make it.’ Funny stuff, cats and kittens.

“1882. No more Chinese. Japanese were on their way. In the 1840’s, life was chaotic in China, but in the 1860’s and 70’s, Japan was a mess. Little something called the Meiji Restoration. It’s a long story. The Whites needed cheap labor, and the Japanese needed work. The first generation was called the Issei, and they flowed in through the harbor.

“First steps they took on American soil were in Little Aleppo, how about that?

“A few stayed in the neighborhood. They weren’t allowed to buy land, but they could lease it and farm. Their children, the ones born here, they were called the Nisei and they went to their own schools alongside the Chinese children.

“You remember that Chinese Exclusion Act I told you about? Well, in 1924 there was one for the Japanese. Plugged up the spigot. Japanese in the neighborhood lived peaceably. Didn’t bother no one until December of 1941, when everybody got all bothered and by March of ’42 there weren’t no more Japanese in Little Aleppo.

“People do funny things in a war, ha ha ha.

“After we dropped the bomb, we let the Japanese out of their cages. Couldn’t go back to their homes cuz they’d been sold, but freedom was freedom. Laws started changing, too. No more excluding anyone. Chinese could come back and so could the Japanese.

“After the next war, a wave of Koreans hit.

“Vietnamese, the war after that.

“Escaping wherever they was, cats and kittens. Too many bombs and not enough food. They’d been told about somewhere sea-washed. Heard a story about a golden gate. They’d been made a promise, you see. There was a place that was calm and fair. Well-lit and lawful. There was a land, they’d been assured, where work had a direct relationship to wealth. Get up early, work all day, and don’t spend your money at night; maybe you’ll make something of yourself.

“Only thing in your way was an ocean.

“How’d you get here? You ain’t from here cuz no one’s from here, so you got here somehow. You walk 2,000 miles in clunky shoes? Watch your homeland disappear off the stern of a sailing ship? Ride the rails on the Santa Fe or the Chief out from Chicago? Hell, could be you drove your dumb ass here in a Volkswagen Beetle. Maybe you were even warned ahead of time.

“Here now. Maybe you got options or maybe you’re stuck, but you’re here now. Pleased to meet you, one of us.

“Question that remains is this: you came through a door, so whatcha gonna do with it? Leave it open or slam it shut? Hire a surly bouncer and give him a list?

“Who invited you, anyway?

“You up for some rock and roll music? You know Frankie Nickels is always up for some rock and roll music. I’m gonna play you a song about America.

“I bet you know it by heart.”

Big-Dicked Sheila’s hair was the same color as Superman’s thighs and biceps, stupidly blue, and short; messy like she had just finished fucking. She sat with a leg folded under her and one dangling over her chair in the back room of Madame Cazee’s on Sylvester Street. Sheila did not go in for any padding or bras, so her tight black dress clung to her skinny chest. Her arms were bare and hairless and defined. Her eye makeup was a bit much. There were three silver hoops in her left ear, and two gold hoops in her right.

Madame Cazee didn’t tell you your fortune. She told you someone else’s fortune. She had the Gift, the Sight, the Vision, whatever new-agey word you’d like to capitalize: she lived both here and there, but the wires had gotten jumbled somewhere within the pychosophic interrealm and so she was always right, but to the wrong person. Little Aleppians didn’t mind, in fact they preferred it this way. Someone knowing their future was an intolerable invasion of privacy, but someone knowing somebody else’s future was fine. And there were also the Interpretationalists

Madame Cazee had a connection, an inkling of a link–this was known and documented: the things she said came true–and thus her prognostications were coming from Somewhere. She was not guessing. She had the truth. It was seemingly irrelevant, but it was the Truth, and so perhaps it was relevant. Yes, Madame Cazee was telling you someone else’s fortune, but maybe she was telling you someone else’s fortune for a reason. What if it was a metaphor? It could be explained as an allusion. Anything can be explained as an allusion if you’re good enough at bullshitting. Interpretationalists took analogy seriously; reality, less so. Sheila was an Interpretationalist.

“Why would they send you out into such danger?”

“They’re bastards, that’s why,” Sheila answered.

Both of their eyes were closed, but the cat was watching the encounter from a high shelf.

PHWOO.

Sheila held her arm across the table which–Sheila tried not to use words that upset people, and she knew the word “gypsy” upset people, but she couldn’t think of a better descriptor–had a gypsy tablecloth on it underneath a crystal ball. Madame Cazee squinted open her left eye. Took the joint.

PHWOO.

“Christ, Sheel.”

“What?”

“Why do you come in here with death weed?”

“It’s normal pot,” Sheila said.

“I’m lightheaded.”

“You’re supposed to be.”

“No, I feel like my head is made of pure light.”

“I’m not seeing the problem.”

“There’s weather up in the Hills. And blind turns, and 200-pound cats made of muscle and claws and teeth.”

“Okay.”

“Double-check the rifle,” Madame Cazee said. The crystal ball clouded over, cleared, clouded back; she had bought it at a yard sale for two dollars. They wanted five, but she paid two. On a shelf over her left shoulder were four human teeth which had been knocked out by an axe; they were in a glass case that she bought at the same yard sale where she got the crystal ball.

“You need to believe what you’ve been told sometimes. Everyone’s not out to fuck you. Warnings are often sincere.”

“Okay,” Sheila said in a small voice.

“Listen to your elders and trust your gut and double-check your rifle.”

PHWOO.

“Absolutely.”

Sheila did not have a rifle, but she did have several handguns, one of which was in her purse. The fortune was for someone else, but she had received it for a reason. It might have been about expanding her shop–Sheila was thinking about expanding her shop–or it might have been about Gussy, and when Sheila thought about Gussy her cock shifted in her dress and she could feel her armpits get warmer. The only thing Madame Cazee’s fortunes weren’t were random: they might be tangential, digressional, obliquely related, or connected via drug/dream logic, but somedamnhow they were meaningful.

“My head feels strange.”

“How so?”

“Like it’s made of pure light,” Cannot Swim said.

“Keep breathing,” Here And There said.

“I can breathe.”

“What if you couldn’t?”

The fire died and it was dark in Here And There’s kotcha; there was no sound at all, and everything was thick smoke. Cannot Swim’s throat swelled and thickened and bulged, and he clawed at the air and fell over to his left. When his shoulder hit the packed earth, he was sitting up again and the fire was burning and a dog was snoring outside.

“What just happened?”

“Something,” Here And There said. “Definitely something. What do you think just happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me, either. Isn’t it nice to be honest? Look the moment in the eye and say you got no clue what’s going on?”

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Cannot Swim said and the fire was everywhere and all around him; brightness and heat that he could not escape, and he felt his eyeballs blanch, and then bleach, and then pop and melt. He covered his face with his hands and fell to the right, and when his shoulder hit the packed earth he was sitting up again and whole.

“Is that gonna keep happening?”

“You’re asking me like I’m in charge.”

“You’re not?”

“Not as far as I know,” Here And There said. “Maybe I am, but I haven’t been informed.”

“Is anyone in charge?”

“Maybe you.”

“You think?”

“As little as possible.”

“Is there water?”

“Of course.”

The kotcha brightened, and Cannot Swim could see the flood pour in from the small opening up top where the strips of redwood bark formed the vertex of the cone; it was freezing and rising faster than the space was being filled and above his head with force enough to slap open his mouth and water rushed down his esophagus and trachea into his stomach and lungs; his whole torso wracked in convulsions and thrashed back and forth violently enough to snap his spine against the packed earth floor that he was sitting cross-legged on, dry.

Here And There grinned.

“What was in that tea?”

“What you’d assume,” she answered. “Before the Pulaski were the Mi-oh. They lived where we live now. Many generations ago. One day, boats came into the harbor from over the horizon. These were large boats with sails. The sailors had hair like ours. The Mi-oh knew other tribes that traveled by sea, but these men did not smell like men should smell.

“The Mi-oh fed them. Allowed them to bathe and sleep safely. In the morning, the villagers woke to see the strangers standing in one of the streams that feeds the lake. They were picking out the shiny pebbles. The Mi-oh saw that they had turned into demons. Taller than the trees and made of fire and sickness. The heads of rats, slobbering with hunger.

“Just like you’re slobbering.”

Cannot Swim was slumped into his own lap, and drool formed a bridge between his mouth and crotch. He pawed at it.

“Other side.”

“Sorry.”

“Sit up straight,” Here And There said.

“Sorry.”

“The Mi-oh did not understand what was happening, but they knew what needed to happen.”

“They killed the strangers?”

“And ate them.”

“And ate them?”

“This was before the Whites brought rifles. Hunting was tougher. Meat is meat. There were also spiritual aspects.”

“How were they not cursed?”

“Oh, they were. Two weeks go by, and then their skin bubbles and bursts; their flesh heats and cooks; their guts bleed and fail. For every five that live through it, one dies. Survivors are scarred. Some are blind.”

“This is as it should be! Eating people is an abomination. The Turtle Who Was And Will Be Again made it clear.”

“Yes. After the sickness had passed, a Mi-oh made the journey through the hills to ask the neighboring tribe for help, or food, or magic, or medicine. And to tell the story of the demons that had visited. That neighboring tribe was called the Lay. They sent back help, and food, and magic, and medicine. Do you know what happened two weeks later?”

Cannot Swim was not a teenager, but only because the Pulaski did not have that concept. He was over six feet, but he had only been that size for a very short time, and so he was fidgety and did not quite have control of his limbs. He could not stop eating, and his father Shoots With Wrong Hand marveled and raged at how long he could sleep. His dick got hard for no reason, constantly, and he wanted nothing more from his days than to hang out with his cousin Talks To Whites and their friends. Cannot Swim was a teenager, but he was not because the Pulaski do not have that concept, and so he was still a boy until he completed his Assignment.

He would be sent into the hills. This was a common Assignment. All of the boys and girls used to be sent into the hills, but only 70% of them came back. Now only the boys and girls who will survive are sent. The Pulaski name for the Segovian Hills was There are squatch up there; Jesus fucking Christ never, ever go up there. It sounded a lot prettier in Pulaski. Just as the psilocybe cubensis grew on cow shit, the psilocybe cybelinus grew on squatch shit. The villagers brewed it into tea for their Midsummer’s festival.

His father and uncles and aunt and grandparents and assorted other elders who felt like having a say gathered at the Learning Fire after dark, where they chewed the Peregrine leaf. His father brought a basket of huckleberries to pass around, as was the custom. All of the adults around the fire had crept up to eavesdrop when their parents were discussing their Assignments, and they assumed Cannot Swim was on his belly in the darkness outside the light’s radius.

Cannot Swim was sure they had no idea he was there.

He was strong, the adults agreed. He could survive outside on only what the land provided him. He was an excellent shot, and a patient hunter. And he was brave, but not so much that it made him stupid. Cannot Swim felt pride in knowing that the adults believed these qualities present in him, and then he remembered the Pulaski name for the hills and stopped feeling in any way positive towards the adults.

He would be a man soon, if he weren’t eaten or stomped to death, and he was technically a boy, but he was a teenager and so when a grown-up asked him a question, he wanted to get the right answer. Even if the adult was terrifying and had drugged him.

“Did they get sick?’

“Yes. The Lay got sick. Same thing the Mi-oh got. Skin, flesh, guts. Bodies bodies bodies. Now, Cannot Swim, you tell me: should the Lay have been cursed in the same way the Mi-oh were? They did not eat their fellow man. Do you not recognize the sickness I speak of, cousin?”

The Pulaski did not speak of the dead. Prayers were said, songs were sung, and the body was pulled halfway up the slope of the tallest of the hills. Left there. If it was a beloved elder who died, then the communal hearth would be extinguished for one day. But their names were never spoken again.

“My mother’s name was Laughs Too Much. Her family name was Born At First Light. If she learned her secret name, then she did not share it.”

“She died in the last wave of the sickness. Generations separate her from those Mi-oh who ate their fellow man. The Mi-oh left the valley; we are not their ancestors. Nothing binds your mother to them. And yet she was cursed just like they were. Why is this, Cannot Swim? Why did she get someone else’s fortune?”

He was sitting up straight, crying: big hucking sobs that he did not even bother to try to hide.

“Now, cousin,” Here And There said as darkness fogged out from behind her and took everything in the kotcha to black but her eyes and teeth. “Tell me about the Jack of Instance.”

Flower Childs was a motherfucker for maintenance.

“I’m a motherfucker for maintenance,” she’d open up her customary speech to probies with. A person couldn’t fight a fire. You could slap out an itty-bitty one, but the fire department didn’t get called to itty-bitty fires. Fireman wasn’t anything without the truck, the hose, the ladder, the axe, the coat, the air tank. Wasn’t that you were reliant on your tools, it was that you were nothing without them. Job doesn’t exist without the accessories. Fire was primal, but fighting it was technological. Man didn’t stand a chance against nature, Flower thought, but man and machine combined did.

And so the tools had to be maintained. Water is the universal solvent, and it frays a hose from the inside, which means that you check it foot-by-foot every single time you re-roll it. Dirt and grit foul up connections and quicken decay, so the trucks were washed constantly. The oversized wrenches, and the long-handled prybars, and anything else made of exposed metal were rubbed down with a light-grit sandpaper so that they were perfectly dry and would not rust. Flower Child would check through lockers in the middle of the night, and heaven help whoever had a pull or tear in their boots or gloves or mask. Entropy required apathy, she thought.

The LAFD were back in their house in Alfalfa Street. They were filthy and stinking and tired and hungry, and they had lost the building. It was a synagogue called Torah, Torah, Torah. The roof had collapsed. No one had died, and no one had been hurt. By the time the fire was out, the sun was well established in the sky.

She and her men stripped out of their gear, and checked the equipment in their underwear. There were only two showers in the small bathroom upstairs, and so it took a while to get everyone clean. Dwayne McGlory had carried a man and a holy book out of the fire , so he got to bathe first. Flower Childs always showered last. She was a taskmaster, but she was not cruel and so she did not make the probies fully wash the trucks, but they did have to wipe the mud and soot before it had a chance to cake on. She grabbed a rag, too. Ash-Nine, the station’s dalmatian, was already asleep on the couch in the front office.

A flash of white by the garage doors. Flower Childs walked over and saw it was an envelope on the floor, so she picked it up and opened it. A page of typing paper folded in three. Opened that. HOW’S THAT FOR AN OPENER? – J OF I in childish block letters. To the right of the massive garage doors is a human-sized one, and she slammed it open and ran out to the sidewalk in just her underwear and covered in grime and sweat. There was no one on the street at all, but Flower Childs stood there for a while almost naked and wondering how to interpret a fortune in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

There was a concert going on Back East and the Bake had settled over Little Aleppo, and it felt like the Main Drag was on fire. All the brightly-colored teenagers and blue-jeaned drug dealers and halter-topped socialites had left for the New York State mud–the teens had hitchhiked, and the dealers had driven, and the socialites had flown–and the neighborhood was half-empty like a whisper. KSOS and KHAY ran public service announcements reminding everyone that alcohol didn’t actually make you cooler; Little Aleppians countered by saying that they knew that, but alcohol did make the heat bearable. Even the ghosts were sweating, and the giant bronze hand in the Verdance was sizzling and dared anyone to touch it. Americans had walked on the moon, and were losing the war in Vietnam. It was 1969.

Tomorrow was the rain, though. It rained every 18 days in Little Aleppo, and it was Day 17 in the cycle; tomorrow would bring coolness and relief. Dogs could smell the coming weather, and so could humans with bad knees.

But that was tomorrow: now it was four o’clock and as hot as it would get. Local wags were cooking eggs on the sidewalk, and local hungry people were knocking over wags to steal their eggs. As Seen On Teevee Takata was hawking his latest gadget, Chilly Pants, which were unisex underwear with a pouch for an ice pack in the crotch. He did brisk business. (The ice would melt rapidly, leaving you just as hot as before but now you had wet genitals.) Beer Cooler Ethel had to restock a dozen times, and the cops had very little to do because everyone was too hot to commit crime. The LAFD played whack-a-mole with fire hydrants: folks would open them up, and they’d close them down, and then one would start spraying two blocks over, and on and on. The firemen started openly decking grown-ups and slapping children after a while, but locals deemed their actions understandable.

The bell to the bookstore with no title goes TINKadink when it opens, but Mr. Venable was not in his customary spot and he was not wearing his customary suit. He had dragged his desk by the bay window and directly under the creaky window-unit air conditioner.

He had a book open in his lap.

“To Kill A Mockingbird.”

“Truman Capote’s finest work.”

“Didn’t you read that in high school?”

Mr. Venable slid his glasses down the length of his twice-broken nose and looked up.

“Penny. Penny Something-Or-Other. Stacia tackled you, and I saved you. Have you come to thank me? I should be your hero.”

“I was going to thank you, but now I don’t want to. Arrabbiata.”

“It’s too hot for Italian food.”

“My name.”

“Ah.”

“Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Argumentative for no reason.”

“No, not always. Just when I speak. Good God, are you barefoot, woman?”

She was. Penny Arrabbiata’s jeans were rolled up to just below her knee and her still-being-broken-in combat boots were in the red backpack slung over her shoulder. On her first night at work at Harper Observatory high atop Pulaski Peak, she had worn a pair of respectable pumps, only to be informed about the metric shit-ton of rattlesnakes and sidewinders on the mountain. She woke up early the next day–two in the afternoon is early for an astronomer–and drove her Beetle into C—–a City to the Army/Navy store for a pair of boots.

But it was too hot for boots and the thick socks she had to wear because the boots were not-quite-broken-in, so she put them in her backpack, rolled up her jeans, and walked around like the kids on campus. No one looked twice, which was something Penny was noticing about Little Aleppo. What she’d really like is a skirt–get a nice little breeze going on her asshole–but scientists wore pants and she had to be at the Observatory soon.

“It’s too hot for shoes.”

“By that thinking, it should be too hot for trousers. Take them off! Let’s all run about with our bits a-dangling because of a little spike in the temperature. What are you doing?”

Penny was intercepting the chill. She had walked over to where Mr. Venable had moved his desk, and was standing in between him and the air conditioner. Her blue checked shirt was unbuttoned, and she did not have a bra under her white ribbed tank top. She leaned over and peeled the tank away from her sticky chest and let the icy air slide down over her tits and stomach.

“Stealing your air conditioning.”

“I give you no permission to do such.”

“Duh. That’s why I said ‘stealing.’ If you were okay with it, I’d say ‘taking.’ Keep up.”

“Is this your way of thanking me for my heroics? Barefootery and theft?”

“I would not classify your actions as heroic.”

Mr. Venable was outraged by this statement.

“I’m outraged by that statement.”

“You seem outraged by almost every statement.”

“I pulled Stacia off of you. Stacia. Stacia.”

“This is a wonderful argument you’ve developed. Were you on the debate team?”

The air conditioner hummed.

“Stacia!”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“That women has fought taverns before. She broke into the zoo to wrestle Edgar.”

“Who’s Edgar?”

“A bear.”

“A big bear?”

“A bear-sized bear. Edgar is perfectly bear-sized.”

“Who won?”

“It was a draw.”

“Good showing for Stacia.”

“Right?”

“Bit embarrassing for Edgar.”

“He sulked for a month.”

“How can you tell when a bear is sulking?”

“Bears sulk the same as people: get drunk, take their high school yearbooks down, that sort of thing.”

Penny Arrabbiata rolled her eyes and walked over to the Non-Non-Fiction table in the middle of room. She began holding up books.

The Godfather.

“Italian Crap,” Mr. Venable said.

Portnoy’s Complaint.

“Jewish crap.”

Naked Came The Stranger.

“Smut.”

There was a stack of Don Quixote, and she picked up a thick copy.

“That one’s not bad. Ever read it?”

“Yes,” Penny said. “Crazy man and his pet peasant wander around Andalusia causing trouble.”

“Reductive. Reductive and dubious.”

“Did you ever tell me your first name?”

“Quixote is the perfect book. Nothing in this entire shop sums up life like Quixote.”

“It’s about a lunatic and there’s no story!”

“I rest my case.”

Penny took a good look at Mr. Venable: he was not in his customary spot, but he was in his customary seat–a faded green leather chair–and she could not tell if he was tall or short, but his brown hair was messy and uncombed. Fingers like a pianist; ink stain (blue) on the knife-edge of his left palm. He was not wearing one of his customary suits because she had not bought them for him yet. Feet up on the desk, crossed.

She had seen worse.

“I actually did come in to thank you,” Penny said.

“Hah!”

“Really?

“I’m right so occasionally; I celebrate when it happens.”

“And I’m going to buy you dinner.”

And Mr. Venable wanted her to leave. Or to disappear. Either one would be fine, anything to stop the heart in his chest that just started hammering like an idiot, that was charging up hills with a lance, that was facing the invasion all by itself–WHAMPOM WHAMPOM–he could taste it, taste his heart right in his throat, and he swallowed it back down–twice for good measure–and checked in with his face: had he given himself away? Impassivity was the key when it came to the face, Mr. Venable figured. Anything else was just a shitty way to play poker.

So he hoped his face was still in the hand and said,

“What now?”

“Dinner. Least I could do.”

“No. The least you could do would be nothing.”

“Just to get it straight: you’re always like this?”

“Be forewarned.”

“Gotcha. Still: dinner. Are there any good restaurants in the neighborhood?”

“There’s the sushi place.”

“What’s it called?”

“O’Malley’s.”

“Pass.”

“The fondue place burned down.”

“Sounds right.”

“I suppose there’s always Nero’s.”

“What kind of place is that?”

“Steaks. Seafood. Weighty cutlery. The tablecloths are made of actual cloth. Several Town Fathers have had heart attacks there while dining with their mistresses.”

“Sounds swanky.”

“They wrap your leftovers up in tin foil made to look like a swan.”

“Wow.”

“The rawest of elegance.”

Penny Arrabbiata held up the copy of Don Quixote she’d been riffling the pages of and said,

“Done. And I’m buying this.”

“I thought you were buying dinner.”

“I am.”

“Book’s free.”

Penny smiled–she had a toothy smile–and put the crazy man and his pet peasant in her red backpack next to her not-yet-broken-in combat boots.

“Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.”

“It’s going to be raining.”

“Maybe.”

“No. Definitely. It’s going to be raining.”

“And I’m going to be at Nero’s at seven. It’s my only night off for a week, so that’s all there is to it.”

“All right, then.”

And Penny Arrabbiata, who was barefoot, walked out of the bookstore with no title onto the Main Drag. The bell on the door went TINKadink, and before it had stopped dinking, a tortoiseshell cat leapt silently onto Mr. Venable’s desk. She settled in front of Mr. Venable and demanded scritchy-scratches.

He did so.

“Plep.”

“I have a date.”

“Mlaaaargh.”

“You’re right. We should flee the country.”

“Plep.”

“Or commit suicide. Either seems appropriate.”

The rickety air conditioner shot an unnatural breeze at the two of them. Outside, there was swelter and sweat. Men removed their shirts and women went commando under flowing skirts and dresses, and everyone was drunk from the heat and also the beer. Twelve hours from now, there would be rain; now there was just the Bake in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Churches are just buildings, and temples, too. Synagogues are structures just like the sock rental place on the Main Drag, but people have more invested in them. Like sweat equity, but for faith. You took your children there when they were born, and you brought your parents there when they died. You were bored there as a teenager and swore you’d never come back, and then you found yourself there one afternoon with a pint of banana schnapps and a gun and a half-written note. Could be there was a meeting in the basement you liked to attend. Consecration means “to imbue with holiness;” there are special prayers and a ceremony to be said before the church opens, but that is not the end of the dedication: the building is re-consecrated with every prayer, and every tear, and every marriage, and every youth group mixer.

But they’re just buildings, and they’ll burn like any other.

Earnest Hubbs and Kischka lived in Torah, Torah, Torah, the synagogue on Rose Street. He was the handyman, and she was the cat. Earnest had a small bedroom with a smaller bathroom attached in the basement. He was paid in cash at the end of every day, and he would walk down to the Hotel Synod and then walk back to his small bedroom in the basement. Earnest’s hands were rough, but his face was unlined and you could not tell how old he was.

It was 3:58 a.m. when Kischka started screaming, and then clawed Earnest on his bare, snoring chest. The smoke burned his throat and he leapt out of bed and ran out of his small bedroom in only his light-blue boxer shorts with Kischka under his arm. Then he ran back into the small bedroom and grabbed the shaving kit he kept his money, stash, and works in. It was hot in the stairwell, and Earnest Hubbs believed that he was going to die. He remembered the lessons taught to him in childhood about fire, and when he got to the door that led to the shul, he placed his palm on the wood: it was warm, but not hot, and so he barely poked the doorknob with one finger, and then quickly pressed two fingers, and then he grabbed and turned the sucker which was not hot and opened the door.

The walls had caught. Pews, too, but not evenly. There were patches unburnt, but the maroon carpet was smoldering and throwing off tendrils that were not steam but looked like it. Earnest Hubbs was not a Jew, but he had worked for the synagogue for a decade and he was a reader without much money for books, so he had been through all of Rabbi Levy’s library and half-taught himself Hebrew, and he had sat in for services most every week, mostly to hear Cantor Manevich sing. Funny thing about music, Earnest Hubbs thought: it translates itself sometimes. The cantor had no microphone and the room was large with a high ceiling, but she filled it with her joyous alto and Earnest would close his eyes and smell the desert and the diaspora.

And he liked Jewish food. Whatever the opposite of an antisemite was, Earnest was that. He gave some thought to converting–he was a Baptist–but the Rabbi told him that circumcision was a non-negotiable requirement, and that was the end of the thought. He would remain a fan rather than join the team.

“This is the gartel,” Rabbi Levy said as he untied the simple bow knot in the velvet sash.

“Gartel. That’s Hebrew?”

“Yiddish.”

“You told me Yiddish was a modern language.”

“It is. I mean, it’s an almost-dead modern language, but modern enough. Way younger than Hebrew, put it that way. But all this stuff?”

The rabbi had put on his jacket and tie, and Earnest was wearing a tie, as well. The rabbi was a casual man, but he believed the Torah had a dress code and so when he took it out of the covered space behind the bema called the ark, he put on his tie and jacket.

“The mishegos on the Torah? That’s modern, too. Well, you know: past thousand years. Modern for the Jews.”

“Y’all operate on, like, geologic timescales.”

“Heh. Yeah. Lot of history. Luckily, most of it wasn’t written down.”

There was a purple cover folded over the scroll. It was velvet like the sash, and embroidered with gold and solver thread. Two vertical columns of five Hebrew letters; this represented the Commandments. Two lions sat facing each other atop the columns; they represented the cherubim who defended the Ark of the Covenant.

“Cherubim were the warrior angels, right?”

“The cherubim fought for God so the seraphim could worship God. Don’t get me started on powers and principalities; we’ll be here all afternoon. This is the yad.”

There was length of sterling silver hanging on a chain from the scroll’s left handle. It was as long as a pencil, but twice as thick and there were Hebrew letters engraved in the handle and at the other end was a tiny carving of a human hand with its index finger extended. Rabbi Levy handed it to Earnest.

“Yad means pointer.”

“I can dig it.”

“The Torah’s not for skimming. There are 79,847 words. 304,805 letters. Each one is the most important. Torah is not a sprint. It’s not a marathon, either. It’s not a race at all. You read letter by letter, word by word. Best way to do that is to read with your finger as well as your eyes. But you can’t put your hands on the Torah.”

“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.”

“And spitting into the wind is advised against. This is the hoshen,” the rabbi said as he removed a breastplate that hung on a chain just like the yad, but from both handles. Ornate, with more Hebrew letters.

“Same letters from the cover,” Earnest said.

“Excellent. Ten Commandments again. Moses coming down the mountain. Like, the Jews’ primal scene. We can’t get over it. And now the crown.”

There was a bulging silver topping covering both of the upper scroll handles, curlicues and filigree and with a high shine. The rabbi took it off with both hands and exposed the dark walnut grips to the rollers.

“The Torah is written on parchment called gevil. The gevil is attached to the rollers, which are called atzei.”

Rabbi Levy flipped the purple velvet cover back, and then he took off his yarmulke, kissed it, pressed it to the parchment, replaced it on his salt-and-pepper head, and called out to the empty shul,

“Bar’chu et Adonai ham’vo-rach!”

And no one was there, so they could not respond,

“Baruch Adonai ham’vo-rach l’o-lam va-ed
Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech
ha-o-lam, a-sher ba-char banu mi-kol
ha’a-mim, v’na-tan lanu et Torah-to.
Baruch Atah Adonai, no-tein ha-Torah.”

So the rabbi said their lines for them, and Earnest Hubbs prayed along with him, though he did not know what for.

Rabbi Levy unrolled the Torah, and there it was: off-white the color of an old egg with stark black lettering in an alien alphabet that flowed backwards.

“A Torah is written by one man. Called a sofer. He uses a quill that he sharpens with a knife, and the ink is kosher. There are 79,847 words. 304,805 letters. If he makes a mistake on a word that is not the name of God, then he may scrape the ink off the gevil and go about his business. If he makes a mistake while writing the name of God, then the whole megillah is no good. You have to bury it like you would a person. Say the Kaddish, the whole thing.”

“Stressful job.”

“High suicide rate. Takes a year-and-a-half.”

The rabbi was not looking at the Torah, or at Earnest Hubbs, just staring into the empty pews.

“How long can your eyes hold up? Hands, too. 30 years? Say you got 30 years to be a sofer. That’s 20 Torahs. A man’s entire life’s work summed up in 20 things. Things get lost, broken, stolen. Things are flammable. The Torah is the Word of God, but this Torah? This Torah was the work of a man.”

“Is this the official view of the Jews?”

“The Jews don’t have an official view on anything. No one’s in charge. Popes are for papists.”

“I believe that’s what’s called a tautology, Rabbi Levy.”

“Mm. Tautology. Greek word. They slaughtered us. And the Romans and everyone else. While they did, men spent their lives in rooms with not enough light copying Torah over and over. No more Ancient Greeks. No more Romans. Torah remains because it is perfect. The Word of God and the work of man. You need both to do anything worthwhile.”

Earnest Hubbs was closing in on the door to the synagogue when he remembered the Rabbi’s sermon about the Torahs. He had not realized it was a sermon at the time, but now with the building on fire he did, and he ran to the double doors, unlocked them, threw Kischka the cat into a bush by the steps–she shrieked like a demon at this treatment–and Earnest ran back into the shul and up the center aisle in between the pews that were ablaze to the bema and the ark which contained the congregation’s Torah.

The smoke was very thick.

“Can’t we do this outside?”

“No.”

“It’s just that my eyes are burning and it’s tough to breathe,” Cannot Swim said.

“Yes,” Here And There said

She threw green powder onto the small fire burning in the center of her kotcha and it glowed yellow the same color as the nuggets in the stream that fed the lake. She and Cannot Swim were seated cross-legged on the ground on either side. Black Eyes, who was a dog, had refused to come in and was sleeping outside the leather flap that was the door.

Here And There was lit up, face crackling and wavering with flames that produced a strobe and Cannot Swim saw many faces in hers; he recognized some, and feared others. Her corneas and pupils were the same shade of dead black that most of her hair was; it was run through with seven white streaks of varying length. Here And There had a story for each stripe that she would sing to the village on Midsummer’s.

Both of their feet were bare.

“Drink your tea,” she said.

“What tea?’

She pointed to the cup besides him that he noticed for the first time. It was made from a dried coyote gourd, and the size of a shot glass. Cannot Swim picked it up and brought it halfway to his nose.

“Don’t smell it. Drink it.”

And then he altered the cup’s trajectory to his mouth, slammed it back, did not grimace even though the tea tasted a corpse made out of vomit.

Here And There lived two miles to the south of the Pulaski village, on the edge of the wood where the clearing gave way to the wilderness. She kept her own fire. Fish and vegetables were brought to her, and a choice piece of whatever game the hunters brought back. The Pulaski would set her food outside her kotcha and try not to run away. Some did. Here And There was a powerful shaman, and the Pulaski understood the true nature of power: you never wanted to be anywhere near it.

The most powerful thing in the solar system is the sun. In fact, the sun is so powerful that the whole solar system is named for it; it’s like how Elvis lived on Elvis Presley Boulevard. 93 million miles in between us and it, which means it’s eight minutes away if you’re traveling at the speed of light. The trip would take 120 years in a Cadillac. 93 million miles away. Try looking at it. Power that’s not dangerous to bystanders isn’t real power.

So Here And There lived two miles to the south of the village. She smiled to herself and cried out,

“Black Eyes!”

From outside the kotcha, Cannot Swim heard the hundred-pound dog growl low, and then a familiar voice.

“It’s me, jackass.”

“GRRRRR.”

“You want belly rubs?”

“GRRRRR.”

“I should leave?”

And then the sound of a sixteen-year-old jogging away.

“Your cousin is loyal to you,” Here And There said.

“Yes,” Cannot Swim answered.

“And very foolish.”

“Yes.”

“I am your cousin, too. Are you loyal to me? All of the sleeping Pulaski are your cousins. Are you loyal to them?”

There was no air left in the kotcha at all, and Cannot Swim’s head was full of shooting stars. He had the distinct impression that his eyeballs were in his nostrils.

“Yes?”

“You are a child, still. You are as tall as a man, but you are not a man. You have not been given the Assignment.”

“No.”

“You will be sent into the hills.”

“I know, yeah.”

“I know this fact because the Tree Who Will Always Grow told me. How do you know it?”

“Me and Talks To Whites eavesdropped on my dad talking to the elders when they decided.”

“That’s a good way to find stuff out, too.”

Cannot Swim swayed ten degrees to the left, righted himself. He could hear the frogs by the lake, and their heartbeats and the tendons in their froggy little legs tensing, and he could hear his own throat dry up and then there was no kotcha and no village and he and Here And There were sitting in a room made of concrete and machine-cut wood with such noise–such unholy and unfamiliar noise–loud and stabbing his ears that were just filled with frogs and their processes. They were at a bar, and surrounded by Whites wearing pants and hard shoes, and a man with a mustache and neat, white teeth was on the other side.

And now there was nothing but flowers.

And now great and strange beasts that may or may not have been feathered.

And now a room made of rough-hewn wood with a balcony that immodest women hung over. Cannot Swim tried not to look at them. They were White women, and they were soft and fleshy and sad, and he could not understand their eyes so he looked away. He had a cup in front of him that was not made from a dried coyote gourd but glass–the Pulaski did not have glass–and Cannot Swim held it up in the light streaming through the smeared windows and watched the echos of photons that came from 93 million miles away as he twisted the mug this way and that.

And now the kotcha again. Nothing in his hands. Here And There across the fire from him with seven white stripes in her otherwise-black hair.

“Do you know how the dreaming life is different from the waking life?”

“No, how?” Cannot Swim said.

“It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I was really asking.”

The first call came into 911 at four a.m. on the dot, and then there were more, but it was the first one that got the dispatcher to signal the LAFD at their firehouse on Alfalfa Street. Dwayne McGlory was the Captain, and asleep, and Pep Oneida was a probie, and also asleep. Probies watched the desk overnight, but Pedro Sanpedro spelled Pep and let him rack out. Pedro never slept, anyway.

There is a red phone on the desk that is actually off-white, and it rings at 100 decibels. Pedro Sanpedro picked up the receiver while ripping a fresh 302 off of the pad and placing it in a clipboard.

“Company One,” he answered, and wrote FIRE – 18 ROSE STREET down on the first line in careful block lettering, and then he said, “Responding.”

There is a red button on the desk that is actually red, and it is connected to a large metal bell that would startle the ear-less. Dwayne and Pep were down the pole and putting on their turndown gear by 4:01. Ash-Nine was barking and running back-and-forth between the pumper and the ladder trucks.

As the three men were hitching up their suspenders, Dwayne asked Pedro,

“How bad?’

“On fire.”

“The whole thing?”

“Dispatcher said the whole building.”

Dwayne McGlory gave the probie an order just by looking at him, and Pep Oneida ran back into the office to hit the other red button, the one that summoned all the off-duty firemen. Dwayne was driving the pumper truck out of the garage before Pep had finished, and he leapt up onto the running board and held on. The lights were going, but not the sirens. Shouldn’t be anyone out there at this hour.

East on Alfalfa and north up the Main Drag, and then west onto Rose. It was still pitch-black out and the glare from the fire washed out the stars so that there was nothing at all but the blaze. It was going. Oh, it was going like a riot. Torah, Torah, Torah had a roof like an upside-down boat, sloping inwards, and it concentrated the flames that leapt and flew onto the blacktop of the road, the paving stones of the sidewalk. the forced greenery of the lawn. The synagogue had a rose garden out front; there was an angry cat in it.

Attach the truck to the hydrant. Attach the hose to the truck. Repeat as needed.

The imam from the Al-Alamut mosque was waiting in the street. There’s a man who lives in there, he said.

He hasn’t come out, he said.

Please, he said.

A window blew out PRSHT from the synagogue, and there were sirens in the distance converging on the position. Dwayne McGlory pulled an air tank off the truck and hooked it to his mask. The halligan bar is three feet long and metal and has a shim on one end and an axe on the other, and he took that, too. Pedro knew what to do.

Dwayne McGlory threw open the front doors to the synagogue and disappeared inside. Pedro and Pep had the hose trained on the building already, and the billowing steam and smoke were killingly gray. The dalmatian named Ash-Nine was on the other side of the truck, in the street, defending his mobile territory.

Lookyloos and neighbors were on the sidewalk in their nightclothes–some were naked–and the flames rose in the the night that was technically the early morning.

Pedro Sanpedro and Pep Oneida poured as much water as the sewers would allow on the fire. Not enough. The synagogue was done for. At a certain point, you need to think about the surrounding structures.

The ladder truck pulled up. Flower Childs was driving.

The doors to the synagogue slapped open and Dwayne McGlory stormed out with Earnest Hubbs over one shoulder and a Torah over the other. He dumped them both on the grass, and leaned over to put his hands on his knees and breathe deeply once twice three times and then he straightened back up and looked around to see if he was still in charge. Chief Childs was on the scene and shouting orders, so he wasn’t, and he ran up to her to find out his assignment.

Earnest Hubbs was breathing again, and no one was paying attention to him so he picked up the Torah and he picked up his shaving kit that contained his cash, stash, and works. Kischka, who was a cat, was leaning against his left ankle. The building was eating itself as government employees fretted at it, and there was nothing he could do but protect someone else’s life’s work and wait for the rabbi in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The Wayside Inn started out illegal, and now it’s respectable, which is how American stories often go. Teenagers used to sneak in, but now couples bring their babies and children by in the afternoons to meet their Uncle Manny. The Arrow Brewery sponsors Trivia Night on Tuesdays, and credit cards are accepted; obviously, there is now running water and a liquor license. There is a Little League team named the Wayside Inn Innkeepers. (The Innkeepers was not the first name suggested by the Wayside’s patrons: Manfred Pierce had made the mistake of opening the decision up to a vote, and it started out dirty and ended up filthy.) The bar is walnut, with a brass rail to put your foot up on, and the coke dealer in the bathroom is the classiest in the neighborhood.

And it’s not just the bar that’s moved up in society: Manfred Pierce was a Town Father for a few years, and unlike most Town Fathers he ended his term in higher esteem than he entered it, mostly on account of not being indicted, not even a little bit. Town Fathers that don’t get indicted must be either honest or criminal geniuses, and Little Aleppians are fine with both. When people would ask him about his time in office, Manfred Pierce would lean over the bar and say,

“They’re all gay, sweetie.”

The customer would always inquire what he meant, and Manfred would answer,

“Every shitty little stereotype about gay people? Vain and petty and catty and superficial? We got nothing on politicians.”

And if the customer laughed at his joke, Manfred would buy them a drink–two if they were cute–but in between the illegality and the respectability were several decades. Nothing happens overnight except falling in love.

After the Wayside Riot in ’68, the law office of Holly, Wood, and Vine took Manfred on as a pro bono client and they sued everyone in sight. (The firm was trying to buy itself some good publicity after successfully defending the Upside Strangler.) The cops, the liquor authority, the water and power utilities, the fire department, the sanitation workers, KSOS, KHAY, all the schools, and the First Church of the Infinite Christ.

Manfred demanded a meeting with Lawrence Holly.

“Mr. Holly, why are we suing the church?”

“Manfred, this is lawyer stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

“Uh-huh. Why are we suing the church?”

“Honestly?”

“Please.”

“We got carried away.”

“Stop suing the church.”

“What about the temple?”

“Sue no houses of worship in my name, please.”

Little Aleppians are like most people, mostly: time can change their minds, and a solid argument can change their opinions, and an effective appeal to their emotions can change their perspective. But if you want to change someone’s behavior as quickly as possible, then the best tool is a lawsuit. The LAPD (No, Not That One) never raided the bar again. (It took a separate suit a few years later to get them to respond to emergency calls from the Wayside, though.) The power and water got hooked up like the rest of the buildings in the neighborhood, and Manfred Pierce began getting overcharged just like the rest of the neighborhood.

It wasn’t always simple. There was a law on the books requiring Dance Permits–the law had been passed in 1938 to shut down a Negro bar–and the Town Fathers would not issue one. They were letting the homosexuals drink; they wanted to dance, too? No, no, no. That was a gay bridge too far. Men dancing with other men would lead inexorably to Communism. There were men–brave, honorable men–fighting in Vietnam, and we’re just supposed to let homosexuals boogie? That’s what Ho Chi Minh wanted, dammit.

And so back to court they went.

Lawrence Holly was an old man, and had been for some time; he had settled into his age and found weapons within it: people think old people are slow, and so he played dumb until it was time to fuck them, and he enjoyed pretending to be deaf when it suited him. Lawrence Holly had been around long enough to know your father, and his, and to recognize that you were about to make the same mistake that both of them did. He had a thin muff of white hair that wrapped vertically around the back of his skull that he let grow long and did not comb.

Young men have their tricks, and old man have theirs.

Courtroom A in the Valentine Courthouse was packed at nine in the morning when Judge Blanton gaveled the proceedings to order. Lawrence Holly and Manfred Pierce were sitting at the plaintiff’s table. Lawrence was not wearing anything that was not made custom for him, except for his watch, which was a Rolex Oyster. Manfred was wearing his dress uniform from the Navy.

“I didn’t retire from the Navy. You’re only supposed to wear your uniform if you retire.”

“Retire, reshmire,” the attorney told him.

“And I wasn’t an officer. It’s not a suit. It’s a big blouse with a giant collar and a neckerchief.”

“Just wear the damn uniform. We’re trying to play down the gay thing.”

“You think a Navy uniform is playing down the gay thing? Oh, honey.”

He put it on anyway. Spent two hours the night before steaming all the wrinkles out and getting the creases perfect. He took his medals out of the box in his closet he kept them in, and pinned them to the left breast using a wooden ruler to keep the lines straight. Another hour on the shoes. Manfred’s friend Shammy came by and cut his hair in the backyard of the small house on Fantic Street that currently housed two teenage boys that had been kicked out their houses, a teenage girl who had run away from a town in Texas called Cascabel, two dogs, one blind cat, and a turtle named Myrtle.

After Shammy had finished, Manfred slipped the uniform on and went to the mirror. Still fit. Fifteen years a civilian, and it still fit. Took the uniform off, hung it carefully and re-steamed it. Fucked Shammy, sent him home, made sure his kids and animals were safe, went to sleep. In the morning, he shaved with precision and walked up to the courthouse wearing his dress blues. Four old ladies smiled at him, and three old men shook his hand, and two young men cruised him, one of whom was ridiculously cute.

“Your Honor, this case is not about dancing.” Lawrence Holly began his opening statement. “Nor is it about homosexuality. No, sir. This case…this case is about America.”

The courtroom cheered lustily, and Judge Blanton pounded his gavel so hard that the glossy striking board went flying. All the regulars of the Wayside Inn had shown up, most of them having stayed up all night eating acid and fucking. They were in the mood to hear grand pronouncements about America.

The defense argued that a municipality was entitled to regulate businesses within its borders; Lawrence Holly argued free speech. The defense worried about the morality of it all; Lawrence Holly brought up Town Father Samping’s recent arrest for what the Cenotaph would only refer to as “the zoo incident;” the defense brought up the Bible, and Lawrence Holly called a theologian to the stand who put his hand on the Bible, swore to tell the truth, and then lectured about the separation of church and state.

The trial lasted three days. The jury deliberated for three minutes, and found for the plaintiff. (The quick decision may or may not have had something to do with Manfred sitting in on the voir dire and using his gaydar to pick the jurors.)

The Wayside Inn danced all night, and into the next morning and afternoon.

The party continued for years afterward. Manfred Pierce installed a dance floor with lights on it, and a back room that had no lights at all, and the bar was made of cocaine and chittering hi-hats. Vodka on ice, and Seven and Seven, and silver spoons jangling on necklaces while string sections padded under baritones who couldn’t get enough of love, or falsettos that wanted to know how deep your love was. Meet at the bar, or lock eyes on the way to the bathroom, whatever: the men wound up in grasping groups in the backroom, and the women paired up and went home with each other.

Manfred Pierce’s hair started going gray around ’77, but he didn’t care. 45 years old, and still thick as molasses; his hair could turn purple and puce as long as it stayed on his head, he figured. His mustache was an entirely different story. Man with gray hair was distinguished, but a man with a gray mustache was old. The dye came with poorly-written instructions and a little comb. When he was done, the ‘stache was bright orange and he said, “oh, shit.” Tried to wash it out, but just muted the color. This was in October of ’81, and when he walked into the Wayside Inn the next afternoon, he was self-conscious.

Doug Tours was dead. Shammy knew him, cut his hair, came by the bar to tell everyone. Doug had not been in the Wayside Inn for a month or so, and before that he looked pale and skinny and could not shake a cough. Manfred told him to stop smoking so many damn cigarettes, but Doug laughed and lit another unfiltered Camel. And then he hadn’t come in, but Doug was a flight attendant and had a schedule quite unlike normal people, so no one at the bar noticed. Shammy noticed. He had accidentally fallen in love with Doug Tours, and memorized his schedule. Doug was supposed to be home, and so Shammy called him but there was no answer. Nor was there on the next day, or the day after that, so Shammy went over to Doug Tour’s apartment on Mint Avenue and picked the lock. The hallway smelled sweet.

The coroner said he’d been dead for five days. He weighed 115 pounds on a 5’11” frame. Doug Tours was not murdered. That, the coroner would attest to, but nothing else. Cause of death was listed as NATURAL CAUSES. He was 31 years old, and his parents refused to claim his body. A regular at the Wayside named Steppy Alouette paid for his casket and burial in Foole’s Yard.

This life is full of monsters, and sometimes young men die for no reason. It happens.

Then it happened again. December of ’81. Another one in February of ’82, and two in March. Barry Snack and Finster Tabb. Barry was 23, and dumb and beautiful. He had a kind smile and an open heart, and so everyone in the Wayside loved him, and he had a big dick and no standards, so everyone fucked him. Finster had a lovely pension from his 25 years teaching English at Paul Bunyan High, and a house on Simpkins with an extra bedroom that he let Barry Snack live in for free. When Barry got sick, Finster Tabb took him to St. Agatha’s Hospital. They were turned away. Finster got pain pills from the Wayside, and that was all. Barry was hot, and then cold, and then blind, and then dead, and Finster cried so hard his heart gave out.

Manfred Pierce felt that there was a demon in the Wayside Inn. What was happening there was not happening in the other bars in the neighborhood, and in April another regular died and then two more in May; no one came to mourn with them, and the politicians did not make speeches, and the Cenotaph was careful and cowardly in its language.

The doctors and the scientists came up with a name, and then they came up with a test. The Wayside came up with more money for funerals. Manfred Pierce shut down the backroom and opened up the bar in the afternoons to activists and rabble-rousers and the terrified. Direct action. Only way to fly. They shut down Town Hall, Harper College, the churches, and the schools. Manfred was arrested a dozen times, always wearing his dress-blue Navy uniform with the giant collar and the neckerchief. He had served on the USS Dextrous in the Korean War, and his boat had been shelled by Communists. Manfred Pierce had defended his damn country, and he would hold his country to her promises.

The Wayside Inn is on Sylvester Street across from Madame Cazee’s and the Wash-N-Slosh. There are windows now–there did not used to be–and there was a sign above the door, and also a plaque next to the door commemorating a riot that happened a long time ago. Inside, there is an old man tending bar with a gray mustache and a row of neat, white teeth. He will buy you your first drink–and your second, if you’re cute–and if you ask about the pictures of 21 young men that line the wall above the top shelf of liquor, he will tell you each and every story if you’re willing to listen. Or you could dance. You could dance with whoever you wanted to in the Wayside Inn in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Cannot Swim could not sleep. His dreams chased him around his head when he shut his eyes: fire, and squatch, and the Jack of Instance, whatever that was. The Pulaski slept on wooden platforms that raised them off the packed-dirt floors of their kotchas. They had thin mattresses made of tightly-woven grass and did not use pillows. Cannot Swim shared the kotcha with his family: his father, Shoots With Wrong Hand, and his little sister, One Dimple. Sometimes, his grandfather Not One Hair would sleep with them when his grandmother got sick of his bullshit, but he was not there now.

(The Pulaski did not know what alopecia was, and so when Not One Hair was born, the tribe had no idea what to do with him. Some claimed he was a sign from the gods, and others demanded he be drowned in the lake immediately. After much chewing of the Peregrine leaf, the elders came to a decision: let’s give the kid a couple years. Not One Hair turned out to be neither holy, nor a demon; just a bald shit-starter.)

It was cool outside. The moon was in the sky and in the water, full in both locations, and Cannot Swim sneaked from his bed and slowly pulled the embroidered leather flap that was the door to the kotcha back–just enough to ease out of it–and lowered it back. (The door-flaps were rough, thick bear skins; they creaked.) He was barefoot and wearing just his breechcloth, which all the Pulaski wore under their tunics. A belt goes around the waist. A piece of very light leather, four feet long and one foot wide. Drape the leather over the belt in front, pull it under your taint, up over the belt in back. Breechcloth. Many tribes wore them, and each had a slightly different style. The Pulaski wore theirs to the mid-thigh and sewed fearsome beasts into the crotch. This was to dissuade the Fox With Teeth For Eyes from eating their genitals.

The Whites who would murder the Pulaski and settle the area would make a specific gesture–up-and-down and then left-to-right across their chests–to appease their gods. A very small number of the Whites wore a special hat and did not eat certain proteins to keep their gods happy with them, but the other Whites were not quite convinced that these Whites were actually Whites.

But now there were no Whites and just the Pulaski’s gods were in the fields and the fire and the lake and the trees.

Cannot Swim shivered–he was sweaty with nightmares–and his dark-brown nipples were hard, an aureole mountain surrounded by bumpy foothills. His black hair was in a single braid that reached to his shoulder blades. He untied the thin leather cord at the end of it and unlaced the braid until his hair was free, and then he dug his fingers deep in and shook his hair free, and it all fell about his neck and cheeks still bearing a slight curl.

The village was asleep and the only human noise was the crackling of the communal hearth behind him. He was alone in the night, and the hills hooted at him and the lake burbled and owls in the trees asked the same question over and over. The moon was floating on the water and then it was not the moon, but an eye of a creature he only knew by smell, and then it was red and full of melting flesh, and then it was a stage for a tap-dancing Jack of Instance, whatever the fuck that was, and Cannot Swim no longer knew if he had woken up and left his kotcha at all: maybe he was still dreaming, but if he were then why was he so cold, and why was the village so near and true, and why was there a hand on his shoulder?

“Dude.”

Talks With Whites tried to keep his laughter quiet as he fished Cannot Swim from the lake into which he had jumped out of surprise.

“Why sneak up on a person?” Cannot Swim hissed.

“I thought it would be funny.”

“It wasn’t!”

“Dude, it was. You got serious air. And then you got serious water.”

The tribe kept dogs. Watchmen, companions, emergency food source. When the Pulaski hunted bear, the dogs would harry the animals until they were exhausted and chase them up trees. Easy targets, and the dogs would always get an equivalent share of the meat as the hunters at the feast that night. Black Eyes was a hundred pounds, and muscly, and gray except for a dark strip across her eyes like a burglar’s mask. She ran at the cousins barking.

“Shh!”

“It’s us, dumbass,” Talks To Whites whispered as loudly as possible.

When Black Eyes got within ten feet, she saw that it was indeed them. She downshifted into a friendly trot. Black Eyes liked these two. The big one always gave her the tastiest scraps from the weekly communal meal. Sometimes the smaller one would leave for a few days, and when he came back there was an odd and new smell on him that Black Eyes did not like, but mostly he was a decent sort.

Dogs are incapable of blackmail, we are told, but Black Eyes flopped onto her back in between the boys and began making pre-bark noises. Little warm-ups in her throat that came out of muzzle BERF BERF. Cannot Swim had walked a few feet away and removed his breechcloth; he was flapping it in front of him to dry it off.

Talks To Whites looked down at the dog.

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Black Eyes began making a noise like HuuuuuuuUUUURRRRRR, and Cannot Swim yell-whispered,

“Rub her fucking belly!”

Talks To Whites got on a knee, administered scritchy-scratches, looked up at his naked cousin.

“Water’s cold, huh?”

“Dude, you’ve seen me naked a billion times. You know this is an aberration.”

The water was, as a matter of fact, rather cold: Cannot Swim’s cock looked like a sad mushroom, and his balls like a brain sucked-in on itself.

“Maybe those other times were the lie. Maybe this is the real you.”

“Your mother knows the real me.”

“That’s your aunt. You’re talking about your aunt.”

“Why are you awake?”

Cannot Swim redid his breechcloth, and tied his wet hair back.

“I heard you out here. You were, like, moaning for a while.”

This was news to Cannot Swim, who had been certain he had only been outside for moments.

“I thought you were going at yourself, but it was a weird moan.”

“I don’t do that,” Cannot Swim said.

“Why do you insist about lying about this?

“The Turtle Who Was And Will Be Again says that it is wrong.”

“He says a lot of stuff, dude. He was off about this one. If we’re not supposed to jerk off, then why did Great Bear Who Is Pregnant With The Universe put our hands so close to our dicks? They’re so close, dude. It’s meant to be.”

“You’re spending too much time with the Whites, and it’s turning you into a perverted degenerate.”

“They’re not so bad.”

“I know one, and I don’t trust him. Case closed.”

“Stranger Who Hunts’ Useless Friend? Well, yeah: he’s crazy and a nimrod. They’re not all like that. That little fucker is an anomaly. Judging the Whites by that guy is like judging the Pulaski by Yells At Trees.”

“Yells At Trees does not stink. The Whites stink.”

“Oh, yeah, they’re dirty motherfuckers.”

“Do they bathe at all?”

“Mostly just wipe their armpits and crotches with wet cloths.”

“Disgusting.”

“But sometimes they take baths, dude, and they are the shit. You sit in this big tub of hot water, and for one of those shiny rocks from the stream, a women washes you. All of you.”

“Even..?”

“Especially. They pay special and careful attention to it.”

“Like I said: perverted degenerate.”

Talks To Whites laughed and stood up; Cannot Swim knelt down and rubbed Black Eyes’ belly with both hands. He had never had a hot bath. The Pulaski bathed in the lake, and made soap from the meat of the yucca plant and shampoo from ground-up fuchsia leaves. Lake got cold in January.

“How hot? Like mushroom tea? As hot as that?”

“Just about. And the lady that washes you keeps bringing new water straight from the fire.”

“What does that feel like?”

“You know the three days in the summer when the sky bakes the ground?”

“Sure,” Cannot Swim said.

“And your skin is so warm that your breath becomes shallow and it seems that the air is hugging you?”

“Yes.”

“Like that, but wetter. Plus, like I said, the lady uses her hand on you.”

“Why would you let her do that?”

“Let her do it? I paid her to do it!”

Cannot Swim whamped Black Eyes on her side twice with his palm, which in all cultures means “Your belly rub is over, dog.” The dog and the boy stood up, and walked over to Talks To White at the edge of the lake.

“You’re still having those dreams.”

“My dreams are my business.”

“Unless they’re visions. In which case, they’re everyone’s business.”

“They’re not visions.”

“You’re not qualified to make that call,” Talks To Whites said.

“They’re my dreams!”

“Sure, if Here And There says they are.”

“She doesn’t need to know,” Cannot Swim said.

“She already knows, dude.”

“My daddy says that the fire department works for the CIA.”

“What’s your last name, young lady?”

“Monckton.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Flower Childs snorted, and Dwayne McGlory stepped in between her and Miss Wendy’s kindergarten class from Lyndon LaRouche Elementary. The children were tiny and overawed by the firehouse: everything was red and shiny and massive, except for the firemen, who were just massive. Miss Wendy stood behind them in a long denim skirt.

“We work for the neighborhood, sweetheart. We work for you and your family and all your friends and your teacher, Miss Wendy, and your school and your church or temple or whatever, and all the people in boats in the harbor and up at the Observatory way up on Pulaski Peak. And all the animals in the zoo, and the folks at the Hotel Synod that keep lighting mattresses on fire by accident and the students at Harper College who keep lighting mattresses on fire on purpose. We work for everybody.”

“Why are the students lighting mattresses on fire, Fireman McGlory?” asked Miss Wendy.

“In protest.”

“Of what?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“Okay, then.”

A tiny girl with cows and chickens on her dress raised her hand. She was wearing black leather shoes–the kind with the strap across the top of the foot–and white socks. Her left front tooth was missing, and she whistled out her fricatives. Her name was Lillebet.

Dwayne McGlory said,

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“What does a third-degree burn smell like?”

“Overcooked pork.”

“That’s what I hear. How many cases of spontaneous combustion this year?”

“Legally, none. Between you and me? Six.”

“Does fire know love?”

“Fire knows hunger. Fire inspires love.”

Flower Childs did not like children when she was one, and her distaste continued. They were like a landfill or a sewage plant: she understood they were necessary, but didn’t want to be anywhere near them. And she certainly didn’t want to smell them. Curdled milk, dried shit, and that cloyingly sweet kid-stink. Still: she was the Fire Chief, and part of the Fire Chief’s responsibilities was showing children around the firehouse. They had to be taught to call 911, and that the fireman was always your friend (as opposed to the policeman, who was sometimes your friend), and how to stop, drop, and roll. Why they needed to be taught how to stop, drop, and roll was beyond her: she had been with the LAFD for 14 years, and not once had she heard of a single soul stopping, dropping, and rolling. Her opinion on the matter was irrelevant, she figured. Children are taught the Pledge of Allegiance, what seven times six is, and how to stop, drop, and roll.

She didn’t like being young. At first, all the kids ignored her, and then she sprouted up to 6’1″ in seventh grade and no one ignored her any longer. Seventh graders are mean as hell, like puppies with no idea how hard they can bite. They called her Squatch.

Dwayne McGlory loved being a kid: he was handsome with blue eyes he got from his father, and a giant afro he got from his mother. Played running back and inside linebacker for the Paul Bunyan High Blue Oxen in the fall, and shooting guard in the winter, and first base in the spring. His teeth were straight as a razor, and he smiled at cool kids and dweebs alike; his senior year, there were 31 pictures of him in the yearbook.

Harper College after high school. (Dwayne’s cousin Sherry was a Junior his Freshman year, and his Uncle Proinsias was the Chair of the Cryptonumismatics Department. The college had only had three years in its history when a McGlory was not enrolled or employed.) He was taking Business classes, halfheartedly, and playing Left Offset for the varsity Red Rover team. (Harper College only participated in alternative sports.)

One morning, real early, Dwayne was at the track running off a cheap beer hangover. In the infield were four firemen from the LAFD. Flipping tires and wearing big backpacks and one had a sledgehammer for some reason. Whatever was going on, it looked more interesting than running in circles. Dwayne McGlory could strike up a conversation with a tombstone, and so he walked over to the firemen and introduced himself, and then he was working out with them; afterwards, they invited him back to the firehouse for breakfast, and he ditched his classes to hang around firetrucks all day. That was it for the Business degree. He studied science and architecture and city planning on his new friends’ advice, and the day after he graduated with honors, he showed up for his first shift as a probationary officer with the LAFD.

Now he was the Captain , and answered to no one but Fire Chief Childs. And, apparently, a six-year-old named Lillibet.

“Have you ever used your axe on a person?”

“Of course not,” Dwayne answered.

“Have you wanted to?”

“Of course.”

“Did you pull that guy’s body out of the water pipe in March?”

“I was there.”

“Did his skin come off?”

“His skin came off.”

“Did it make a noise?”

“Like an octopus’ leg detaching from an ugly man’s thigh.”

Several of the children were crying at this point.

The communal hearth was in the middle of the village, and a storehouse made from stone and wood, and surrounding that were a few dozen tightly-clustered kotchas. From five to ten feet between each one. All except three.

Stranger Who Hunts and Stranger Who Hunts’ Useless Friend lived half-a-mile to the north. They would argue in the White language all night, so the village banished them outwards a bit. The elders asked Talks To Whites to eavesdrop one night, and report back on what they were yelling about.

“What do they never shut up about in that ugly language of theirs?” the elder named Giant Chin asked.

“The Christ.”

“What is that?”

“He is the god of the Whites.”

“And what do they say about this Christ?”

“Honestly, sir? I have no idea.”

“Do you not talk the White language?”

“I do. Like, at a high conversational level. I can hold my own in everyday encounters, but those two are deep into obscure theology. They’re making up a lot of words, too, I think.”

“Well, what is the gist of it?”

“Trinitarian essentialism and the irresolution of fate and free will.”

“What?”

“I have no idea. I told you this. I have utterly no idea what the hell they’re talking about.”

Tall As The Sun lived a mile to the west, nestled in between two gentle foothills with a sprawling, shaggy garden in the front yard of his kotcha which had many figures carved into the redwood bark that made up the conical walls. He was the village’s medicine man; he dried fungus that clung to wounds and prevented infection on a flat rock outside his door, and stemroot that he simmered for days into a thick paste which Pulaski women who did not want to be pregnant choked down, and vines of lancetberries that he pulped to make a drink that cured stomach ailments.

It all stunk–nostril-burning, high-test stink–and the wind mostly blew in from the west, so Tall As The Sun lived a mile to the east.

Two miles to the south was Here And There. She lived on the edge of the wood, and redwoods loomed behind her kotcha. She had her own hearth, but would wander into the village for the communal meal some weeks; as she ate, she would point at people and tell them the truth.

“She doesn’t love you anymore.”

“The baby will be born wrong.”

“Seven Tuesdays from now.”

Every village needs a shaman, but no village particularly likes having one around. People want to worship the gods, not receive proof they they exist. Here And There was proof of magic, and as the tribe had no access to magic themselves, they hated her just a little bit and feared her openly. When Yells At Trees yelled at trees, everyone laughed at him, but when Here And There yelled at trees, everyone pretended not to notice her.

“I’m not going anywhere near her,” Cannot Swim said to Talks With Whites.

“Not your decision.”

“Course it is. She’s all the way out south. I stay here, she stays there.”

“Here And There goes where she wants, cousin.”

“That’s true,” Here And There said. “I do.”

She did not help either of the boys or the dog out of the lake, into which they had all three jumped out of surprise.

Here And There was not five feet tall, but she had long, wide, flat feet and the backs of her large hands were covered in veins. Her hair was mostly black hair and worn loose, tucked behind her ears and streaming down to her lower back, but there were bright white stripes like a UPC label running across her head. No Pulaski but her had freckles: they covered her nose and forehead.

The moon was full, and the two cousins were wet. They wrung out their hair and exchanged panicked looks. Black Eyes, who was a dog, shook herself dry and walked to Here And There’s left side and sat there. Talks To Whites shivered in the dark chill, but Cannot Swim did not shiver at all.

“You are my second cousin,” Here And There said.

“I think I knew that,” Cannot Swim said.

“Do you have a second, cousin?”

“That’s not really a question, is it?”

“A question one knows the answer to is still a question. I have some tea simmering in my kotcha. Would you like some?”

“You know the answer to that question, too, don’t you?”

“Of course. And so do you. Come.”

Here And There and Cannot Swim walked south, and so did Black Eyes the dog. Talks To Whites was alone by the lake, and still wet, so he took off his breechcloth and shook it like the dog had shook herself; he laid the leather over his shoulder and stood there nude with just the moon and the hills as witnesses; there was no human noise made except the hearth and the occasional snore or fart, and a shaman and a boy walking south along what would one day be called the Main Drag through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Man first walked on the moon on July 20th, 1969, and a woman first walked on a mountain that day, too.

Or at least she was supposed to: it was Penelope Arrabbiata’s first day at Harper Observatory, and she was already an hour late. It wasn’t that she didn’t leave her newly-rented apartment on Bransauer Avenue on time, and it surely wasn’t because she was lost. Harper Observatory was the highest point in Little Aleppo (except for the tall, skinny transmission tower on Mount Lincoln); if you couldn’t see it, it meant you were indoors.

Can’t be lost if you can see your destination, Penny, she said to herself and then she corrected herself. Penelope, Penelope. The sun was setting behind her and the Observatory was shining white through the windshield of her Beetle. Cross the Main Drag, straight for a mile-and-a-half, right on Buchwald for a few blocks, left onto Skyway Drive, boom. It’s not Mt. Doom, she thought, or Everest. Shit, it was barely a mountain. More of an ambitious hill. It was right motherfucking there for fuck’s sake, and had it been the 19th or the 21st of July, 1969, then she would have had no trouble with her commute at all.

But the neighborhood was having itself a Moon Party.

You could already see it in the faded blue sky, over the hills in the east. The moon was in its waxing crescent phase, which means it looked it had escaped from a children’s book, and the points of the crescent were aimed to the left. Just to the inside of the apex of the curve, right on the border between shine and darkness, that was the Sea of Tranquility and it was where the Eagle would land in just a few hours. If nothing went wrong, of course.

Things had started to go wrong back on earth early in Little Aleppo: the place is full of fabulists and fantasists and the fucked-up; the moon landing had captured the neighborhood’s imagination. The Main Drag was overtaken by the sloppy and the wandering by early afternoon, and several spontaneous parades had broken out, died off, reconstituted, gotten into brawls with each other. When the schools let out at three, the children played astronaut in the streets and the teenage boys begged the teenage girls for some space-titty.

The Poet Laureate was drinking plum wine in a rowboat out in the middle of Bell Lake. The moon’s reflection was floating next to the boat, and the Poet Laureate fell into the water trying to embrace it. The Poet Laureate did not drown, but did receive a vicious pecking from the swans.

I just need to get across the Main Drag, Penelope thought. It’s not like there’s police blockades cutting the road off. There’s just, you know, weirdness. This is nothing, Penelope, she bucked herself up. Everyone told you what Little Aleppo was like, and you drove your ass out here anyway, so no use crying over spoiled milk. Her father had always said that instead of the right way. He had always called her Penny, too.

She didn’t have much else of her father, or her mother, either. They were alive, but wealthy. Not rich. Rich people spoil their children; wealthy people send theirs away. One of her first memories is the ride to Newport in her governess’ Chevy. The family summered in Newport. Father ran the family business, and mother was beautiful. He was a philatelist, and she was a philanderer. So she learned to be by herself. Boarding school–don’t worry about which one; you’re almost certainly too poor to have heard of it–and then college (not Yale) and then to California for her doctorate, because California is where the stars are.

Her father bought her a brand-new 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, which was the opposite of what she wanted. It was baby blue and had an engine the size of a hummingbird’s dick. She thanked him with a hug and a kiss, and he smiled. Penelope hadn’t been able to ask him for a pickup truck. She wanted a Chevy C10 in black, but feared that her parents would think she was a lesbian. This was 1969, and these were immeasurably uptight white people, so her thought process made sense. Penelope Arrabbiata wasn’t a lesbian, but she really did want a pickup truck.

Or a muscle car. Or a Caddy. Or an ambulance that was on fire. Anything but this matchbox car. Too friendly-looking, she thought. Eager to please, but that was a lie. Penelope would be pleased to have a bit of power under the hood, but there was no power and the engine wasn’t even under the hood. Foreign crap, she thought, but her father was a fan of German cars. German everything, as a matter of fact. Mother had told her some drunken stories about the family’s business during World War II.

She thanked him with a hug and a kiss, because anything else would be an admission that her father had no clue who she was. It took her six days to drive across America.

An elephant walked in front of the Beetle. It was going south on the Main Drag, and there was a scruffy, blue-tinged dog standing atop the elephant’s head like Hannibal. Their names were Congo and Shep, but Penelope didn’t know that at the time.

She just knew it might take her another six days to get to work, even though she could see her office. She could also see naked young people.

Harper College had decided to take acid for the moon landing, except for the students who decided not to, who had been dosed. The campus overflowed into the surrounding streets; several town-versus-gown fights broke out despite the fact that most of the students had grown up in the neighborhood. All of the art students had taken their clothes off. All of the science students were outwardly contemptuous and secretly envious of the art students. The philosophy students were contemptuous of everyone, but most of all themselves. The business students had stolen everyone’s clothes and were selling them back at twice the price.

“Stranger than usual tonight, Dean Spants.”

“It’s an occasion, Dr. McGlory-Spants. A momentous one. World-changing, perhaps.”

They were on the porch of their small Victorian house on the northern edge of the college’s campus. Carter Spants was tall and lean, and he was balding in a very intellectual way. Molly McGlory-Spants had red hair and blue eyes, and they both had books open on their laps. Students, naked and otherwise, bopped by the house in small clusters. They all waved hi, and Carter and Molly greeted every one by name.

A skinny young man with curly hair walked by and fell into a bush.

“Well, the whole world won’t change.”

“There will always be a Joey the Spaz, Dean.”

He smiled and called out,

“Joseph, are you all right?”

“Fine, good, little scratched up but good. WOO! MOON!”

And he ran off.

“Is he the third one?”

“I think so,” she said. “But don’t quote me.”

“Remarkable genetic stability in that family.

“Not a tree so much as a a tree trunk.”

Molly reached her hand out and took his, just for a beat, and then withdrew it. Carter reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for his pipe, and then searched around for his tobacco. Molly handed it to him after she was finished filling her pipe. She had his lighter, too, and they lit their pipes PWOFF PWOFF and Harper College was quiet, except for the three students making a strange and frightening form of love in the Tyndale Pagoda.

The Cenotaph once quoted an expert as saying that Little Aleppo existed in an “ionospheric inversion that resulted in the introduction of randomized wave-strata in the four-dimensional transmission torus.” (When the expert was asked to explain the phrase, he responded, “I don’t have time; I have a bookshop to run,” and hung up. The paper went with the quote, anyway.) Little Aleppians accepted the explanation immediately, and from then on the reason teevee and radio stations came in so shittily was “ionospheric inversion.”

(As you might expect, there have been several local bands called The Ionospheric Inversions; all terrible.)

But you could pick up KSOS clear and sharp, and so the station was the only game in the neighborhood for coverage of the moon landing, and Trusted Meese was the only man to do it. He had a big shellac of white hair, and thick black glasses, and there was a billboard on top of the studios with a giant picture of his avuncular head with “The Trusted Name In News” written underneath. Everyone in Little Aleppo can remember when Trusted came out against the Vietnam War in a scathing editorial, mostly because he did it in 1983, and everyone could do an impression of his sign-off, “What I just said was the news.”

It was a comfort having one source of information, locals thought. Provided security, and also fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Someone was in charge, Little Aleppians knew, and that someone was almost certainly lying to them. Or at least leaving important things out. Or maybe the people in charge were drunken gasbags like Trusted Meese. Whichever it was, someone was in charge.

“The lunar module, er, lander will come to rest, as it were, on the moon’s surface, which is also called regolith. From, er, the Greek rego meaning blanket, and lith, which of course means stone. It is a fine and, er, talc-like covering on the ground that scientists–moon scientists, of course–think may extend down several meters. A meter is roughly equivalent to a yard.”

Trusted Meese had been going like that for several hours, and had a bit to go. It was seven o’clock and still dusky on the west coast, right at the spot where indigo sticks it in violet, and there was crowd outside Hungry Freddie’s Electronics on the Main Drag. He had stacked his teevees on top of each other in the window, and wired up speakers that he hung from his awning, and then he had made a deal with the local pickpocket guild.

Penelope had crossed the Main Drag, only getting tackled once, and then turned south for a mile. 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing at The Tahitian, and far more people were naked than would be expected on an American sidewalk. Her feet hurt because she was wearing shoes with heels, and she was wearing shoes with heels, black pumps, because she was very young and still gave a shit what men expected of her. Also because she didn’t know there were rattlesnakes on Pulaski Peak. Her hair was very black, and long and flat-ironed. If she kept up this pace, she thought, she could be there in an hour. Just gotta keep up this pace.

Then she was tackled by a six-foot tall naked woman.

“No! No, that won’t do!”

A man with messy hair who was not wearing a suit pulled Stacia off of her.

“Stacia? Stacia, look at me. Look at me.”

Stacia was Nordic and frothing at the mouth. The moon landing had really excited everyone.

“The newsstand. You want to attack the man who owns the newsstand.”

The soles of Stacia’s feet were bloodied, and left prints on the sidewalk as she ran north.

Penelope Arrabbiata was on the ground and regretting every decision she’d ever made, and the man extended his hand and said,

“You shouldn’t be hurt. You don’t want to go to St. Agatha’s. Place is a chop shop.”

She took his hand and got to her feet.

“I’m okay.”

“Vunderbar. Stacia’s violent, but she’s…well, she’s violent. And well-built, I suppose. She’s like an angry sculpture. Are you new?”

“What?”

“To the neighborhood. To Little Aleppo. I’ve seen your expression before.”

“I’ve been here 48 hours.”

“It’s always like this.”

“Is it always like this?”

“I just told you it was.”

Penelope Arrabbiata felt like she’d been punched, possibly because she’d just been tackled. Streets were for calm. Safe passage was guaranteed. A certain respect was paid to those of means. These are the things she had been taught, and now she was being prevented from getting to work by naked people and elephants and violent blondes and men with messy hair.

“You won’t change it. You can’t. I mean, you will just by the observer effect, but nothing you’ll do on purpose. Little Aleppo will muster its chaos and stupidity against you if you marshal any force of change. You need to know this upfront.”

“I don’t want to change it; I just want to get to work.”

“Where is that?”

“Harper Observatory,” Penelope said.

“In those shoes? You’ll never make it.”

Penelope stepped out of her black pumps. She was two inches shorter, and the man smiled and ran his had through his messy hair.

“You won’t make it like that, either. Do you have five dollars?”

“Why?”

“Because I am a destitute beggar. Or perhaps I’m being sarcastic. Do you have five dollars?”

“Does this sarcasm endear you to people?”

“Not at all. Drives virtually all away. Do you have five dollars?”

Penelope did have five dollars. She would wear pumps but not a dress, not even in 1968, because it was cold at night when you were sitting by a telescope, and so she dug a fiver from her grey corduroys and held it up and half-yelled,

“Yes! I have five dollars! Yes, I do.”

“Vunderbar.”

The man with messy hair who was not wearing a suit snatched it from her fingers and walked south down the Main Drag. Penelope followed. He turned left onto Fontaine and flagged down the first car he saw, leaned in the window, argued with the driver a little, withdrew from the window, opened the passenger door, and he said,

“Your chariot.”

Penelope was half-sure she was being set up to be murdered or sold into sexual slavery. On the other hand, she was really, really late for work.

She got in the car and said through the window,

“You have a name?”

“Venable.”

“Is that your first or last name?”

He said,

“And who are you?”

And she said,

“Penny Arrabbiata.”

The car drove off before she could correct herself.

KSOS shone from every window, and the simulcast on KHAY blared from every parked car. Those men up there had left the ground on the 16th at dawn, which is a good time to start an adventure. Twelve minutes to orbit. One-and-a-half times around the planet, and then they fired their secondary rockets and left this gravity well for that one. Took three days to get there. They could see the moon–it was right motherfucking there–and it still took three days. Then they fired their rockets again to put themselves into lunar orbit.

And there they were. Three guys and a moon.

Round and round she goes.

“The lunar lander will detach from the, er, command module and fire its retro-thrusters to push itself out of orbit and down towards the surface of the moon. Mr. Collins will remain with the command module and Misters Armstrong and Aldrin will descend to the moon. This is an American triumph and if John Kennedy were alive, then he wouldn’t have been assassinated.”

Trusted Meese had a microphone and a glass of water on his news desk. The microphone was a prop, and the water was not water.

“And we have, we have, we have separation. The Eagle, as it’s been named, has detached from the command module and is beginning its descent towards the surface. And we shall soon, er, see the moon claimed for America.”

The future was a gimme. The moon! Man had walked on the moon, and even better than that: American men had walked on the moon. It was ours, and so was the future and anything else we could dream of; the neighborhood threw its arms around each other and bought each other drinks. The moon was above the earth, and to command what was above was to rule what was below. America walked on the moon, so America owned the earth. And everything was possible, and only the good things were probable. Industry was good, but technology was better. America had technology and the moon, and the future was a gimme.

The Main Drag held its breath. Five minutes to the surface, and the two men had left the command module too late. They would be long on their approach. The lander had computers, but they were puny and so the men superseded them and guided the ship down with just 25 seconds of fuel left in the tanks. On Sylvester Street, the regulars at the Wayside Inn spilled onto the sidewalk; Manfred Pierce brought a framed photograph of a tall woman, happy with her friends, out to watch with him. Across the street, Madame Cazee looked up and so did the drunken washerwomen of the Wash-N-Slosh.

Arwen Bright had built the hundred-inch telescope that was the point of Harper Observatory in 1938, and in 1968 he was still in the building telling people what to do. He was brilliant, and he wore suspenders and had hair everywhere but the top of his head. Penny Arrabbiata was sweaty and barefoot and late.

“You’re sweaty and barefoot and late,” he said.

“True,” she answered.

And there was no comeback to that, so he took her up to the eyepiece which was focused on the landing site. There was a radio in the Prime Focus, a cylindrical room 80 feet up, and it was tuned to the simulcast; the two could hear the men land on the moon as they watched the men land on the moon, and like good scientists they wrote it all down in carefully legible letters in a notebook.

7:18 pm. The Eagle landed.

The Main Drag leapt. People hoisted the Town Fathers in the air, and sang drunkenly; there were virtually no stabbings. The whores on Eighth Avenue halved their prices, unless you were ugly, and the descendants of Vikings rolled logs in the harbor. American flags were rolled up and whipped WA-PASH at the naked buttocks of lesser countries. We did it, the neighborhood proclaimed, even though they had done nothing at all. All the church bells on Rose Street rang out, first the Calling Judge in the belfry of the First Church of the Infinite Christ, and then the rest roiling upwards and out towards all the Americans, all those goddamned Americans, out on the Main Drag, which is the main route through Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

America was over there. Thataway. America got in here, too, got into Little Aleppo, but most of it was out yonder. Mount Lincoln to the north that sloped into the Pacific and created a natural harbor shaped like a crescent. Mounts Faith and Fortitude and Chastity. The highest of all the Segovian Hills, Pulaski Peak. Then Mount Charity, and then Mount Booth. The hills were the line marking here from there. You could get over them easy enough nowadays, and once you did: America. Highways, and cruelty, and cheeseburgers. All the Americas: the one from the songs, and the bloody one, and the one you’d been promised, and the one you’d settled for, and the one that respectable people pretended didn’t exist, and even the Mormons’ version that had Jesus in it.

Precarious Lee could smell America. Or at least he could smell breakfast, and breakfast is the most American of meals.

Imagine the plenty! Picture the colossal, overwhelming, stupefying surplus of food a society needs to have to demarcate certain dishes–entire protein sources!–as “breakfast.” To have so many carbohydrates available that specific configurations are designated as “breakfast!” And, of course, the most American part: you could have breakfast 24 hours a day. There were places in the world–hell, most of the damn world–where you could only eat the morning meal in the morning. This is abhorrent to a real American. Freedom means being able to eat waffles whenever you damn well please, Precarious thought.

Sure, it happened to be 8 in the morning, but it was the principle of the thing.

Good Morning with Mister Hamburger was playing on the teevee above the counter at the Victory Diner.

“Children, we speak today of time. Were I a sentimentalist, I would say you have a lot of it. Century, maybe. But you know I am not. Stickiness is for stamps, children. If I teach you nothing else: be cruel in your reasoning.

“You have no time, children. It has you. You’re swept along in a river you did not consent to enter.

“Time is a flash flood, children, and you can’t keep your head above the water forever. There are rocks and knives and betrayal along the bed of the river. Waterfalls. You will lose sight of God; waterfall. You will shovel dirt on your parents; waterfall. Ambition will prove empty; waterfall.

“Woody goes over the falls in a barrel. Yay.”

Precarious Lee liked his eggs runny, and he swirled a forkful around in a stain of ketchup on the oversized oval plate.

The Victory Diner was a 48-hour diner, which was just like a 24-hour diner, but double. It did not close for Christmas, nor Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and it had not closed for national tragedies or even for the Blackout of ’87. The enormous grill was gas-powered, and there was a generator in the basement that could run the refrigerator and the coffee machine, but not the lights. Locals brought in candles and flashlights, and ordered pancakes and bacon and eggs sunnyside-up, and got in just as many drunken brawls as usual.

It was on the Main Drag, across from The Tahitian. To the left, there were booths and the counter. Behind the counter was the passthrough window. To the right were rectangular tables with syrup already on them. Louie Bucca was behind the grill, except for when he had to come out and hit people with his metal spatula. It was embarrassing to get thrown out of bars in Little Aleppo, but it was understandable to get thrown out the Victory Diner. Everyone had done it. In the neighborhood’s defense, the coffee was very strong.

The sugar packets had pictures of tall ships on one side, and epigrams on the other.

He who has a thing to sell
And goes and whispers in a well
Is not as apt to make a dollar
As he who climbs a tree and hollers

Precarious didn’t take sugar in his coffee, nor milk from the dented metal creamer with the flip-up top that did not quite fit right anymore. His hair was shorter than it had been in many years, short enough not to need to be pulled back with a band. Big-Dicked Sheila said he looked very handsome, but she was the one who gave him the haircut, so Precarious didn’t trust her opinion. He didn’t mind, though. Took forever to dry, long hair, and he was getting less and less patient as he got older, at least with non-necessities. Some things everybody had to wait for equally, and there wasn’t nothing you could do about it. Love, wisdom, the bus. But your hair didn’t have to take a damn hour to dry.

He had grown a mustache. It was glorious. Thick as the hair on his head, but on the opposite side of his nose. Precarious was just about all gray, but his ‘stache still had generous flecks of the sandy-blond that he used to be. It was not a fu manchu–it did not descend past his lips–nor was it a neat and European styling: it was an eruption of bristles from nostrils to upper lip shaped like a speed bump. It was the kind of mustache that read as “working man” or “gay,” depending on the wearer’s posture.

There was a little bit of egg in it.

“You have egg in your mustache.”

The other side of Precarious’ booth was empty. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and muttered,

“Why are you here?’

“Penny’s asleep,” the empty side of the booth answered.

“Ghosts sleep?”

“She does. I think she’s depressed.”

“She’s not depressed. She’s just miserable. Why are you here?”

“I’m bored.”

Precarious Lee set his fork down on his plate and ran his hand over his face.

Little Aleppo had ghosts. The neighborhood held onto people who had died protecting her. Sometimes, the neighborhood held onto cat burglars and purveyors of shoddy jungle gyms. There was no telling what a neighborhood would do, especially one with so many ghosts.

Romeo Rodriguez had not grown up in Little Aleppo, but he had gotten a job there after coming out of the Marines. The LAPD (No, Not That One) were hiring and he had a sterling service jacket and was tall and strong and likable. Romeo could have been a cop in any town or city in America, but he became a cop in Little Aleppo and was shot in the face halfway through his first shift.

And now he was a ghost cop, but ghost cops are supposed to have missions–they are spirits of vengeance attached via tendrils of death and revenge to a place, and they have enemies and a goal. Officer Romeo Rodriguez supposed his mission was to solve his own murder, but the killer had turned himself in that day, and then he thought his mission was to save Harper Observatory, and he kind of did and he kind of didn’t, which is a terrible resolution for a ghost cop. Romeo figured he would win and go to Heaven, or fail and go to Hell.

But nobody won and nobody lost. Some people died, and some people got paid, and other people got drunk and weren’t aware of the situation. Winning and losing depends on where you’re standing, and ghosts don’t stand so much as float. Officer Romeo Rodriguez had not been welcomed to Heaven, not cast down to Hell. He was still in Little Aleppo.

And he was bored.

“Road trip.”

“Shit, no.”

“Graceland.”

“Seen it,” Precarious said, and sopped up some oozing egg with his white toast. “It’s just a rich hick’s house.”

“Grand Canyon.”

“Hole in the ground.”

“I never saw New York.”

“It’s tall and dirty.”

The waitress walked by and topped off Precarious’ coffee without acknowledging the fact that he was having a conversation with an empty seat. The Victory Diner prides itself on professionalism.

The teevee was over the counter, and most of the restaurant watched it out of the corner of their eye. Mister Hamburger had removed his sport coat, and the sweat stains under his arms reached from his waist to his elbow. During the broadcast, he had picked at a cyst on his neck until it bled; his collar was stained red. Mister Hamburger’s left eye was noticeably larger than his right, and his frizzy brown hair was thin and sweaty.

“Time will not minister to you, children. Does the water stop for the rock? No. The water rips away the rock layer by layer until the rock no longer exists. Do you understand what I’m saying? The river steals the rock’s rockness. What it is made of. Molecule at a time.

“No such thing as an immovable object, children.

“Who you think you are is subject to the current. You say “soul,” and I laugh. HA! I laugh at you, children. Your soul will promenade away from you if the river wills it. You are who the river lets you be, and no more and no less and you have dick-all to say about it.

“Give up and float!

“Float with me, children!”

Mister Hamburger had a puppet on his right hand, a cow named Mister Flibber T. Gibbet, and they did pirouettes together as the cameraman keened and the set behind him collapsed slowly.

Everyone in the Victory Diner, including the waitresses and Louie Bucca behind the grill, was silent and watching the Mister Hamburger show. Then, they went back to their food.

“I don’t get that show, man.”

“Don’t ask me,” Precarious said. “I didn’t grow up here.”

“Off-putting.”

“Downright fucking unsettling.”

Officer Romeo Rodriguez was still invisible. It was a neat trick, and a terrible one. He could go anywhere without being seen, but people are themselves when they think they’re alone. Ghosts see a lot of crying and punching, and only the very occasional miracle.

Precarious was still pretending he was by himself. He had a paperback collection of Westerns in his left hand: Dime Novels from the old days, overwritten and purple and fallacious. He had been stuck on the same line since Romeo showed up.

“Whaddya want?”

“Road trip.”

“Fuck off.”

Romeo Rodriguez vivasperated, but just slightly. He was a suggestion in the air across the table. He stole a piece of Precarious’ bacon and ate it.

“I’m stuck here. I’ve tried going out through the pass. I’ve tried the harbor. I get deposited back in that asshole’s bookstore. Christy Canyon? I walked. I didn’t even fly. I walked. And as I was just about halfway to C—–a City, I blinked and I was back in that asshole’s bookstore. I’m stuck here. I can’t leave Little Aleppo.”

“Huh.”

“Except when I hitched a ride with you on that weirdo fucking road of yours.”

“Yeah, you fucked that up good.”

Officer Romero Rodriguez turned another ten percent visible, and stole another piece of bacon.

“Not good enough, I guess. I’m still here.”

“Good for you. Stop eating my bacon.”

“Road trip.”

“Shit, no.”

A roadie and a ghost cop, having nothing better to do, argued in a 48-hour diner along the Main Drag. The Victory Diner did not close for Christmas, nor for Thanksgiving, and it had remained open through all national tragedies. It was 8 in the morning, and people were working or hiding or floating, and you could order breakfast in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Cannot Swim was a Pulaski boy. We would call him a teenager, but the Pulaski didn’t have that concept in their culture, so they didn’t. The Pulaski were all tall and the same color as the redwood trees they stripped bark from to make their homes, which were shaped like teepees and called kotchas. Several dozen of varying size surrounded a communal hearth and a store-house. To the east of the village were the Segovian Hills, and to the west was the harbor, but right besides the village was a lake fed by three streams.

The Pulaski women fished with nets that they wove from dried dogbane cords. The lake had a gentle slope filled with rushes and littorals and waving cattails, and the women would wade in totally naked and chase the trout and steelhead and kingback into channels made from redwood bark that they’d laid, and they’d go right into the nets. To the northeast, in the oval-shaped plot where everything grows that would later be a park named the Verdance, the Pulaski men were tending to the gardens, also naked.

The tribe wore tunics made from animal hides. The Pulaski were skilled tanners and tailors, and the clothes were soft and comfortable, but still: leather doesn’t breathe. Thus, the naked labor. However, the Pulaski–like every other culture before and since–had all sorts of arbitrary rules about nudity. Men could be naked around men, women could be naked around women, families could be naked around each other. And that was it. The young people of the tribe are taught that these rules were passed down by The Turtle Who Was And Will Be Again. (Pulaski cosmogony is too complicated to get into here.) The elders were mostly sure that no good could come from everyone walking around dangling their bits at one another. Hence, the segregation of labor.

The men gardened because they used to fish, but soon became competitive with one another and started organizing contests and weigh-ins, even though the Pulaski did not have scales. When the men began to build a pontoon boat so they could go after the bigger fish, the women realized that if something were not done, the lake would be empty in months. The men were forced into the garden, where they immediately began growing giant pumpkins and cucumbers at one another.

Hunting was done while clothed, so both men and women participated.

The valley in between the hills and the harbor was temperate, but it was warm enough in the summers to make a dip in the lake a necessary adjunct to a sticky afternoon. The women would go first, then the men. The grown-ups would lounge and chat, but the boys and girls would roughhouse and dare each other into danger. Who’d go out the farthest, down the deepest, hold their breath longest. But not Cannot Swim. He just couldn’t figure it out: he’d manage a jerky dog-paddle for a few strokes, and then he’d sink. It didn’t make sense: Cannot Swim could run the second-fastest of all the boys in the village, and was the best shot with a rifle, and he could do a standing backflip. No one else could do a standing backflip, and yet none of them were named Cannot Do A Standing Backflip.

Every Pulaski had three names. Your parents gave you one when you were born, and that was your family name. It rained every 18 days in valley that would become Little Aleppo, and Cannot Swim was born in the morning  of that 18th day, and so his family name was Morning Waters. It sounds pretty in English, but it was a poem in Pulaski when his mother would say it. She died in the last sickness. His father, Shoots With Wrong Hand, still called him by his family name, but it didn’t sound as nice. Your peers give you your village name, and his peers had named him Cannot Swim.

The third name is your secret name, and you may never learn it. All Pulaski had a secret name, the elders told the children around a campfire well away from the village and towards the Segovian Hills. Every nine days, the elders would bring the children out to the Learning Fire and there they would be allowed to chew the leaf of the Peregrine maria tree. Only adults are permitted to chew the leaf in the village, but the rules did not reach out here. The Learning Fire was in the exact same place as it had been when the oldest elder was a young girl.

Someone else knew your name. Or maybe something else. A bush might have it, or it might be far out in the harbor. The fox-god who is called Sees With His Teeth may know your secret name, or the heat that came unpredictably in the summer and baked the village for three days. It is possible the Whites on the other side of the hills have possession of your secret name. The gods could hold your secret name dear and refuse to turn it loose, or you might trip over it on the way back to the village tonight.

When you learned your secret name–if you did–you could announce it to the tribe. Or you could not. It was up to you.

Cannot Swim’s head was both lighter and heavier than it had ever been, and he laid back under the stars that were wheeling above him and wondered which of them had his name.

WHANGWHANGWHANG went the alarm at the firehouse, a heavy metal bell with a just-as-heavy metal clanger inside that was above the garage doors. Flower Childs was making chili in an ancient and stained ten-gallon pot. Chili was about the beans, she thought. Gotta simmer, sure. And must have the right seasoning, obviously. Ground chuck is ground chuck, but the beans? The beans made the chili. Otherwise, you just got stew. Two parts pink bean to one part navy bean. A fuckload of bay leaves, too, in a little pouch like a teabag. Easier than dicing ’em up, Flower figured.

Pep Oneida was the lowest ranking man on duty, so he was on the desk and he had taken the call from the 911 dispatcher. There was a fresh 312 in front of him and he pressed down with his blue ballpoint pen hard so it would come through on the triplicate form. He wrote down in carefully-legible capital letters MAN STUCK IN PIPE and then the address under that. Then he affixed the 312 to a clipboard and made sure he had two blue ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his white, short-sleeved shirt. Then he readied himself to be yelled at. Then he hit the red button that set off the alarm.

“I’m making chili, you little motherfucker!”

“There’s a guy stuck in a pipe,” Pep called upstairs.

“Fuck him!” Flower Childs had already shut off the stove and was moving towards the pole that connected the second-floor living quarters to the garage and staging area on the first floor. There were stairs, too, and they were to be used for everything other than alarms. The pole was to be respected, Flower thought, and it was only used on calls. It was a perk of the job, and not to be treated lightly. God help the probie found sliding down because it was quicker.

The living quarters were set up like a shotgun shack: all in a row. The kitchen was at the front, and then the dining room, and then the lounge with the teevee and couches, and then the bedroom with two bunk beds and also the bathroom.

“We shoot 10,000 psi of compressed air into the pipe and shoot the fat fuck out past Boone’s Docks,” Dwayne McGlory yelled out as he bounded out of the lower bunk of one of the beds.

The pole was in the lounge, and Flower and Dwayne got there at the same time. Fire Chief went first, and Dwayne followed.

“Shitbag that you are, you do not realize the heating requirements of a proper batch of chili.”

“Which she only makes on occasion,” Dwayne added as all three headed towards the open lockers alongside the garage.

“Constant heat!”

“Can’t be playing around with that shit, probie! Affects the integrity of the chili!”

It was not a fire, so they did not need their full turn-down gear, but they got their hats. Firemen wore hats in Little Aleppo. Flower Childs also put two large tubes of industrial lube into her pack; she had been on man-stuck-in-pipe calls before. A white dog with black spots named Ash-Nine was barking and leaping in excitement.

The ladder truck had two rows of bench seats. Dwayne McGlory slid in behind the wheel as the garage doors opened, and Flower Childs rode shotgun. The dog was between them, and Pep Oneida sat in the back. As they pulled out and turned right onto Alfalfa Street, Flower reached back with her hand open and Pep put the clipboard containing the 312 in it. She checked the time he had written down against her watch.

210 seconds.

“Too fucking slow! Too fucking slow! Too FUCKING slow!”

Dwayne McGlory was the strongest man in the LAFD; he may have been the strongest man in the neighborhood. At parties, he would rip tennis balls in half and shatter wine bottles with one hand and blow up hot-water bottles until they popped. At work, he would rip doors off their hinges and fling king-sized mattresses across the room like they were playing cards. Dwayne McGlory had three medals just for lifting cars off of people. He was still scared of Flower Childs.

Pep Oneida wasn’t scared of anything, because he was young and stupid. He wasn’t a complete moron, though, and so he knew enough to keep his mouth shut.

Ash-Nine was a dog, and so didn’t quite understand what was going on. All she knew was that it was time to do the thing. She also didn’t quite know what the thing was, but she was very excited. The first Ash had slalomed between the legs of fire-horses on the dirt streets that surrounded the Main Drag. She would lunge ahead of the wagon and bite anyone in the way. She was a mean little motherfucker. Nine generations of dalmatians later, Ash-Nine no longer bit anyone, but she was dumb as shit and 80% deaf.

A plumbing supply store on Hopper Street. The dumb fuck had gotten himself stuck in a display model. His ass was sticking out into the air. Jesus fucking Marimba. Flower Childs was professional, and Dwayne McGlory rolled his eyes.

“Sir, we’re the fire department. We’re here to help. How did, uh, how did you get yourself stuck in the pipe?”

“I dropped my sandwich,” came a voice.

Dwayne eased up right next to Flower and said into her ear,

“20,000 psi. We’ll shoot him to Hawaii.”

She quarter-smiled and Pep Oneida had a moment of bravery and said,

“Sir? Sir? What kind of sandwich was it?”

Flower Childs stood up bolt-tall and glared at the probie for a second, but could not help herself and smiled almost halfway, which was a lot for her while she was working, and Pep’s heart shifted down three gears at once.

“Chicken salad,” came a voice from inside the pipe.

Dwayne McGlory grimly shook his head.

“Chicken salad!? You’re stuck because of chicken salad? I can see getting stuck because of a BLT,” Pep said. “But chicken salad?”

“Chicken salad is an outstanding sandwich,” came the voice.

“What kind of bread?”

“White.”

All three firemen, one of whom was a woman, threw up their hands and walked away from the man stuck in the pipe.

There are no teenagers in the Pulaski village. There were boys and girls, and men and women, and the difference was the Assignment. The Pulaski had many static rituals, but the Assignment was a moving target. When a baby was born, there were songs to be sung and an elk to kill; the village would eat the elk, and the antlers would be given to the child who would keep it for life. When a particularly beloved elder died, the communal hearth would be extinguished for one day. They knew the skies and the stars and the seasons, and so marked the equinoxes and the solstices with feasts and music. The Pulaski reset their calendars not in January, but on Midsummer, and they celebrated with a drink brewed from the psilocybin cybelenis mushroom, which only grew on the Segovian Hills; they danced and sang and worshiped the sun and the moon and each other and every god they could think of.

Static rituals.

The Assignment was not that. In each Pulaski child’s fifteenth year, their parents and family and an elder or two would gather to chew the leaf of the Peregrine maria tree and discuss what the proper task should be. Long ago, the tribe had a brutal ceremony that sent boys and girls out into the Low Desert with very little water looking for visions. Maybe 40% made it back. After not too many years, the ritual was changed, and the boys and girls were sent into the Segovian Hills. There was improvement–about 70% came home–but the results were still sub-optimal.

The elders held a council out at the Learning Fire. Out in the darkness, the boys and girls of the village listened in silently. They thought the elders didn’t know they were there.

“We need to stop sending the children off to die,” a woman named Crooked Toes said.

“We are sending them off to become adults,” Seabird Who Dives answered her.

“How can they be adults when they’re dead?”

“One state does not preclude the other,” he said, and looked around in vain for agreement. “Should we be a tribe of cowards?”

“All tribes have cowards, Seabird Who Dives. Some of whom do not know they are cowards until it is too late. Shall we put them to all to death?”

“We do not sentence death, Crooked Toes. The gods do that, or they do not.”

“Do not blame the gods for your attachment to detrimental behavior. Free will is a gift that was given to the Pulaski by The Turtle Who Was And Will Be Again.”

“Don’t bring The Turtle into this.”

“The Turtle ruled once before, and we were his puppets. When he returns, he will once again control us all. For now, we are responsible for our decisions. The ritual must be changed.”

“I cannot believe what I’m hearing. This is blasphemy.”

Kindest Smile was sitting next to Seabird Who Dives, and she put her hand on his forearm and said,

“You know, we did change the ritual once before.”

“That was blasphemous, too!”

And the council of elders all turned away from him so that they could chuckle.

“Seabird Who Dives,” Kindest Smile said, “we all know which boys and girls are not coming back. They are our grandchildren and great-nephews and nieces. They are our blood. We have raised them. Held their hands as they took their first toddling steps. We have taught them how to fish and farm and hunt. They are transparent to us. There is nothing that they do which is a surprise to us, because we made them as they are.”

She kept her hand on his forearm and continued,

“Do you remember the girl called Beautiful Song? Her family name was Night’s Darkest Moment. Do you remember her?”

The Pulaski did not discuss the dead. To do so was to give the spirits of the other world a reason to stop paying attention to the dead, and focus on you. The Pulaski never said the names of the dead. Kindest Smile was a goddamned blasphemer.

“Do you remember her?”

Seabird Who Dives remembered his granddaughter.

“See her arms. Skinny. Listen to her cough. You held her all night. Never quite healthy. Did she complain? Did she spread the sadness that must have filled her heart? No. She sang to us. Hear her sing, Seabird Who Dives.”

She still had her hand on his forearm, and now he put his other hand atop hers.

“She should not have been sent into the hills. Some people are hard and some people are soft, and all people are valuable.”

Seabird Who Dives choked back tears and said,

“Then what should we do? How do we know when a child is an adult? Is there to be no trial at all?”

Crooked Nose cleared her throat and said,

“Well, there’s not that many of us.”

And so the Assignment. Some Pulaski boys and girls were vicious and strong, and thought well under pressure; they were sent to the Low Desert or to the Segovian Hills. Some Pulaski boys and girls were smart and charming; they were sent to learn about the world, or tasked to figure out how to catch more fish with less effort. Some Pulaski boys and girls were misfits and mutants and weirdos who walked into trees; they were given Assignments that they could not fuck up.

“They’re sending me into the hills.”

“Yup.”

“You heard ’em.”

Cannot Swim’s parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and family friends and an elder or two had walked out to the Learning Fire to discuss what his Assignment should be. He laid in the grass outside the radius of the fire’s light listening, next to his cousin that was born in the same month.

“Hills.”

“Seems like it.”

The Pulaski name for the Segovian Hills was There are squatch up there; Jesus fucking Christ never, ever go up there. It sounded a lot prettier in Pulaski.

“I’m gonna fucking die up there.”

“No. Maybe. Yeah, probably.”

Cannot Swim and Talks To Whites had walked around to the far side of the lake and were laying under the early evening stars. They were cousins, born the same month.

“They’re gonna send you to buy some rifles or something.”

“Probably.”

Talks To Whites’ father was also called Talks To Whites. Outside the protection of the hills were Americans and Mexicans and, before that, Spaniards. The Pulaski did not care what the Whites wanted to call themselves, only that they would trade rifles and ammunition for furs and also for the small, shiny nuggets that speckled the streams that fed the lake. The elders picked a well-suited man for the job and sent him to learn the White’s language, and he became known as Talks To Whites. He brought his son with him on his trading missions; the son learned the language, too, was called Little Talks To Whites.

His father did not come back from a trading mission, and the Little was removed from his name.

It was cool out, and there was a slight breeze that flicked lake mist towards them. Shooting stars interrupted the sky, and the boys raced to put up their fingers and say “MINE!” first. They were both chewing the Peregrine leaf, which was waxy and broad as a child’s hand. They rolled it up tight like they had seen their parents do, and smacked down wetly. There was sloppy spitting.

Children were not permitted to chew the leaf, but Talk To Whites got them from Stranger Who Hunts Well. Stranger Who Hunts Well had just shown up one day when Talks To Whites and Cannot Swim were 14. He was an Indian, but not Pulaski, and he had thick wrists and a buckskin suit with the fringes cut off. He walked out of the hills during the weekly feast, and asked to be fed; he was. When the village woke the next morning, the stranger was gone, but he was back before midday with a six-point buck around his shoulders. The elders decided that the stranger should be allowed to stay if he wanted–and if he kept contributing–and told Talks To Whites to show him around. They became friends, partly from necessity. Stranger Who Hunts Well could not speak any Pulaski at all, and had no one to talk to but Talks To Whites until the little White man missing a sleeve from his jacket wandered into the valley.

The Pulaski called the little man Stranger Who Hunts’ Useless Friend, and they knew he was no good.

“What’s up there?”

“Squatch.”

“I know how they smell,” Cannot Swim said. “I can avoid them.”

“Puma.”

“Shit.”

“It’s, like, fuckin’ Puma City up there, cuz,” Talks To Whites said.

“I know!”

“Bears.”

“I’m not worried about bears. They’re as scared of us as we are of them.”

“Pumas aren’t scared of us at all, dude.”

“Stop talking about the pumas,” Cannot Swim said.

“200 pounds of muscle and teeth.”

“You suck, man.”

“And claws. Don’t forget claws.”

Cannot Swim rolled over onto his left side to face Talks To Whites. He could feel the grass dried by the day beneath his shoulder, and a bit of green drool escaped his mouth.

“Could you not?”

Talks To Whites laughed, too loud. He enjoyed chewing the leaf.

“Dude, you’re gonna rock this shit so fucking hard.”

“How?”

“You know how to live out in the wilderness. Night or two outside won’t kill you. You know what plants not touch, and which to eat. Shit, you know what squatch smell like. I don’t.”

A third of the way up the hill that would one day be known as Pulaski Peak. That was as far as Shoots With Wrong Hand would take his son. They stood on a flat clearing that curved around the mountain, and he told Cannot Swim to breathe deeply and notice the scent that was foreign to him. He did. It was like a steak cut from hairy shit. It was a sharp smell even in small increments, and Cannot Swim did not want to experience it any more purely. He could conjure it up whole and fresh in his mind just like he could his mother singing his family name.

He can still remember asking,

“Is that squatch?”

“Yep. Remember it,” his father said.

Talks To Whites’ father had not brought his son up into the hills at all, just told him to never go up there. Talks To Whites’ father had much more dangerous creatures to introduce his son to.

“They’re sending me up there for those fucking mushrooms.”

“Well, you know: someone’s gotta get them.”

“Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“Why can’t you do it?’

“I’d die,” Talks To White said.

“So might I!”

“Might! Right, might. I would die. You might die. Clearly, you should go. Besides, it’s not my Assignment.”

“What if I just refuse?”

“You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can. The Turtle Who Was And Will Be Again is not here right now, and so I make my own decisions,” Cannot Swim said.

“Okay. So you can decide to be an asshole.”

“What?”

“The elders aren’t sending you to die. Those were the old days. Whatever the Assignment is, it’s something they believe you capable of. Are you smarter than your father?”

“No.”

Talks To Whites did not mention Cannot Swim’s mother because the Pulaski did not speak about the dead.

“Your grandparents? And your aunts and uncles? And the elders who killed an elk to honor your birth? Do you know more than all these people? Are you wiser than them?”

“No.”

“They know who you are better than you do. So do I. And I say you’re gonna rock this shit so fucking hard, dude.”

There was a full moon, and they could see the Segovian Hills beyond the lake and beyond the village. They were like teeth in the black-and-white night.

Cannot Swim was taller than Talks To Whites, and wider, too. Stronger and faster and had a better eye. He did not know why he deferred to his cousin, but he did.

“Yeah?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

“I don’t know. Going up into the hills unarmed.”

Talks To Whites sat up and said,

“What?”

Cannot Swim did not sit up, just laid there in pity of himself and sighed,

“Which part did you miss?”

“Unarmed? My wrinkly ballsack, unarmed. You don’t go into the hills unarmed.”

“When the elders send you into the hills, they send you in unarmed.”

Talks To Whites loved his cousin, but sometimes he was a dipshit.

“Uh-huh. They send you in unarmed. You wave goodbye to the village unarmed. And then once you’re out of sight, your fucking cousin hiding behind a fucking tree hands you a fucking rifle!”

There was quiet for a moment, and both Pulaski boys could hear the lake burbling. They chewed their leaves noisily, thoughtfully.

“Is that cheating?”

“Depends,” Talks To Whites said.

“On what?”

“It’s cheating if the puma’s speed is cheating. It’s cheating if the squatch’s strength is cheating. They have their attributes, and humans have rifles and loyal cousins.”

“What you’re saying is that it would be wrong not to take the rifle into the hills.”

“Yeah, sure, why not?”

There were no more shooting stars–perhaps the sky had tired–and the cousins chewed their leaves under a static sky.

“Who is the Jack of Instance?”

“What?”

“I dreamt about it last night,” Cannot Swim said. “And the night before. It’s vivid while I’m asleep, but when I wake up, all I remember is the name. The Jack of Instance. Do you know what that is?”

“No. You know who you should talk to about your dreams.”

“I know.”

The two cousins laid there under the sky, and under the stars, and they chewed the leaf that they were not permitted to chew. They were not teenagers, because the Pulaski culture did not contain that concept, but they were teenagers and thought that they could kick the world in the dick. They still thought the world had fairness in it, and their stomachs were taut and they were hungry all the time. They had met death but not lived with death, and so were still children who clung to each other and the stories that they had been told. Because they were young and stupid, Cannot Swim and Talks To Whites were not scared of anything. They did not know the world enough to fear it, and so the two cousins laid there, and chewed their leaves and watched the stars shine, and made plans.

Where now there is a lake, there will one day be a firehouse, and where there are kotchas would be one day be tamped down and trampled by horses and Whites in hard shoes and bearing currency. The Learning Fire will be replaced by a failing hardware store, and there will be nothing at all left of the Pulaski except one White’s diary, and an ignored treaty moldering in the archives of the bookstore with no title, and a mound in the southwestern corner of the plot where the Pulaski grow their crops which would one day be a park called the Verdance in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.