Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul
Excerpt

Translations
by Julia Klatt Singer, Hamline Midway Branch

My father says the difference between Cambodia and America is like the difference between the ground and the sky. He knew the ground in Cambodia. Farming rice, he was as much a part of the ground as were the rice paddies he worked. Sometimes my dreams are about Cambodia: dense like the jungle, green and fragrant, filled with the smell of heat, flowers, fire, and blood. Sometimes I dream I am a boy again, and I'm watching my father walk the ox, harvesting the rice. I wake up tired after those dreams, as if I was the one swinging the scythe, planting and harvesting the rice, trying to keep my family alive.

America is like the sky. So big and so visible. It's there in front of us, but impossible to get our hands on. We all reach for things. My father struggles to learn the English words that would make his life easier. My wife Saqui is studying, once again, to be a nurse. She was one of the best in Phnom Penh, and now, at forty-five, she must compete with the young nursing students, she who nursed injuries that these young men and women could never fathom. My son Kor, now eighteen, just wants to be accepted, to blend in, to be American. His friends all call him Kory. Sokka at sixteen wants to stand out, and her twin brother Hauly reminds me the most of myself, wanting to set his own course, to make his own way.

We live in the Bluebird Apartments, above the Double Happiness Noodle Shop on Rice Street. We have the top floor, so we don't hear the neighbors below us very often. We have large, airy rooms, and a bedroom for my father, one for the boys, one for Sokka, and one for Saqui and me-a great improvement over public housing. Plus we have windows on all four sides. We can feel the wind, winter and summer, but it is worth it. In the projects, you have windows on two sides, neighbors on the other two. You can hear every argument, smell every meal being cooked. I slept with one eye open, waiting for trouble.

My father doesn't understand why anyone would name this street Rice Street. There is no rice, except in the Asian grocery stores that dot it now. He shakes his head slowly from side to side, certain there is something he is missing, something he doesn't understand. I tell him it was named after a man named Rice, but again he shakes his head. A man named Rice? A man made of rice, perhaps, but named rice? No. And where are the bluebirds that are supposed to live in this apartment, he asks. There are only ratbirds-pigeons-and they are gray, not blue.

Not understanding is hard for my father. He respects learning, knowledge, and age. In Cambodia, as an elder, he would be sought out for advice, considered wise. He is always telling the children stories, and becomes sullen and resentful when they don't fully listen. Like this morning, over breakfast he told them the story about the mouse and the sparrow. A story I have heard many times:
It was a hot, dry summer. A sparrow flew across a river to find a mouse lying thirsty and hungry under a dead tree. She then went to find a cucumber and tied a string to it. She bit the string, flying and pulling the cucumber across the stream. When she got to the other side, she yelled to the mouse to crawl to the cucumber and hold on to it. She warned the mouse not to eat the cucumber because it was the only means to get him across to the other side and to get more food. By the time the mouse had floated to the middle of the river, he was very, very hungry. He forgot what the sparrow had warned. He started to eat the cucumber. One bite, then another . . . suddenly he found himself sinking into the water and the sparrow could not save him.

Sokka asked, while chewing her toast, why the sparrow had brought a cucumber. "Why not a stick to something else that floats that wouldn't tempt the mouse?" Sokka is the most thoughtful of my children. She can think her way around any question.

Hauly chimed in, "At least the sparrow could have chosen a food the mouse might not have liked."

My father pushed his chair away from the table loudly and said, "You children are like the mouse. Unwilling to take advice." Kor glanced up from his bowl of cereal, aware for the first time that anyone else was even at the table, with a startled look on his face.

Saqui glanced my way. She stood by the counter packing lunches, and she made it clear from her look that she was too busy to intervene. At home, I am in the middle of every conversation, the one trying to explain what someone else meant to say.

My father thinks Hauly should become a doctor. Kor would not make a good doctor. That we can all see. He is a daydreamer, hot-tempered and easily frustrated. His grades in school are average, at best. Besides, all he wants to do is play soccer. That and chase girls. Sokka would make an excellent doctor, and I keep telling her so, but my father doesn't think girls should be more ambitious than boys. It is hard for him that Saqui will become a nurse again, and make good money, whereas I will only be a translator. I do not have the memory or the means to get through medical school again. My work as a translator is important, even if the pay is low. I can bridge the gaps the elders in the community can't. I can help. I can make life better and easier for my people, for my community. So Hauly is to be the doctor. Problem is, Hauly wants only to paint.

He is pretty good with color. He has painted a series of watercolors of the animals at Como Zoo that are lovely and playful. He won an award at school for them. And he is now working on a series of oil paintings of the neighborhood. He has one of the Rice Street Grocery-the store itself no bigger than a grain of rice, paintings of our neighbors, their houses, their cars, their dogs, the bar across the street at closing time, all the people spilling together into the night. I take him to the art store on University to buy paints and canvas.

After the children had left for school, I found my father in his room, standing and staring out the window. He heard me come in. Facing the window he said in Cambodian, "I am like that elm out there. My limbs are dying. Too heavy to hold up. I am of no use to anyone. Not even the birds want to build a nest in me."

"Father. Don't you remember how I used to question you? The children ask questions because they know you know the answer. They are still trying to find it. The answer that is right for them."

"You are probably right. I am a silly old man, with silly old stories and sillier ideas about how children should listen."

"Only a wise man calls himself foolish." My father turned and smiled.
"And only a foolish man calls himself wise."

When we first arrived in St. Paul, Kor wanted nothing more than a television. Someone from the church gave us a small black-and-white one that Kor watched religiously. Cartoons and breakfast cereals, toys and slang he ingested, always wanting more. Sokka wanted a library card. Then she wanted to read every book in it. That was ten years ago, and she still spends all her free time there. She reads almost a book a day. Hauly roamed around the project picking up bits of treasure. Rocks and pinecones, dandelions and bird feathers. The feathers he kept in his pocket, in case someday he needed to fly. His world was full of fantasy, dense and impenetrable for the first couple years, but he too has found his way through. He draws what he can't explain, paints the world as he sees it.

I began work right away, quite unexpectedly. With the wave of Cambodians that filled the project we lived in, I found myself interpreting mail and forms for many of them, often accompanying them to various agencies. My education as a doctor taught me English as well, at least well enough to communicate what was needed. Pastor Olson came by a few weeks after we arrived and told me about the translator position through Lutheran Social Services. I jumped at it. Paid to listen, paid to talk. It was nothing like what I could have earned as a doctor, but that life, I already knew, was buried in Cambodia.

Saqui cried for the old me. We had met as students in medical school. She didn't think I should take the work. It was below me. All my education, wasted. She said Pol Pot had beat us after all. I tried to tell her that like the work, I too was a translation. That I still meant the things I did in Cambodia, but now I was understood differently. She argued that I wasn't a Christian, that this was a Christian organization. I tried to tell her that in America that didn't matter. What you believed and where you worked were separate things, unlike in Cambodia where your beliefs and your work were like your left and right hand. And it was something I could do, something to do. Even though I have never seen this Christian god with my own eyes, nobody at LSS asks or cares. It also meant money we could set aside to pay for her schooling.

I was lucky as a boy. My father set aside money, no matter how poor the crop, so that I could go to school. He said that he could see that there was no farmer in me. Even as a young boy, I found sitting and thinking more interesting than playing in the rice paddies. I studied hard and went on to college, then medical school. In 1972, I graduated from medical school, ready to work, and ready to marry Saqui. My mother said no. She wanted me to marry the neighbor girl, a kind but dull girl who was, according to my mother, a good cook-thus a good wife. We fought fiercely, my mother and I. Arranged marriages might have been fine for her generation, but they weren't part of mine. My father said marry Saqui, that if she was worth all this fighting, she was worth marrying. My mother came to the wedding but didn't speak to anyone. Which was not an easy feat for her. She loved to talk and brag about me, and I hate to admit it, but I kind of enjoyed her silence. By the time Pol Pot's regime destroyed all my papers and ended my career as a doctor, my mother had forgiven me and found Saqui's cooking to her liking too.

My mother died in Cambodia, right before we left for Thailand. And it is with sadness that I think of Cambodia and my mother buried there, alone. She had been sick for a while, but I'll always believe she knew what was coming, and couldn't bring herself to keep us from going. Father almost stayed when it came time for us to flee. I am grateful he made the trip-survived the trip-despite all the hardships it's brought him. For me, having him here makes my work as a translator more important. I can help him now. I can be his words. I can take care of him, like a good son should.

My favorite painting of Hauly's is of our next-door neighbors, the Larrsens, an elderly couple who have been in their house since 1945. We don't see them much in the winter. I worry about them. They seem so old, so fragile. Hauly watches their house from his bedroom window for signs of life. A light on at night, off by 9 P.M., a curtain opened in the morning, smoke from the chimney, exhaust from the furnace. We shovel their sidewalk for them after it snows, and Mrs. Larrsen bangs on the front door, motioning for us to come to the house. We stand just inside the door, careful not to bring snow in with us. She gives me a cup of black coffee, and Hauly a cup of cocoa. The kind with the tiny marshmallows in it.

He has painted a picture of the Larrsens in springtime, hanging their laundry on the line, their pale skin like sheets, wrinkled and threadbare. There is new green grass in the picture, trees with buds about to burst, the wicker basket of wet laundry, the sagging clothesline and the weathered wooden pins holding Mr. Larrsen's undershirts, their towels and underwear on the line. The sky takes up half of the picture, blue as a blue jay, with cotton-ball clouds dotting it. In the midst of all this is the Larrsens, looking like a wind could blow them away. They lean on each other. She in her housedress, he in his chinos and crisp white undershirt.

Saqui's favorite painting is the one he did of the library. In the picture it is built of books, solid and sure. Bricks made of books, and the window frames are words of advice-some my father has given him. And standing on top, like a statue, is Sokka.

He just finished a picture of the house around the corner, on Front Street. It is a duplex. Nobody stays there very long. The last people to move out left their couch sitting on the front lawn near the sidewalk. I thought the new renters would put it out with the trash, but no. They sit on it in the evenings watching the cars drive down the street. He has painted them at dusk, five bodies draped on that rain-soaked old couch, lit by their cigarettes and passing headlights.

This evening, Kor couldn't find his soccer cleats and I was helping him look. Of course the closet is the last place they'd be, but I thought maybe on an off chance, he had actually put them away. Tucked behind the shirts and jeans was a canvas, a painting Hauly had never shown any of us, of my father. In the painting, Father stands in a forest of greens-leaves and vines, mahogany trunks, and an indigo sky. He is surrounded by jungle animals, with a bluebird on his shoulder that is eating rice from his hand. In the jungle, the sky and the ground share the same space. Patches of color, patches of light. The horizon is difficult to see. Father's tongue is made of words. His eyes are clear and wise. I slipped the picture back behind the clothes, feeling like I had seen a human heart again, for the first time. It is an amazing organ, pumping, pumping, holding life in its grasp. Following its own course.

The Fat-Brush Painter
Diego Vázquez, Jr., Skyway Branch

The murder took place downstairs from my apartment on Prior Avenue North. This is the first time I have lived anywhere close to the "nice" parts of St. Paul, just a few blocks away from Summit Avenue. I just moved into the building the day before yesterday; today I was questioned by the cops. I heard nothing. I saw nothing. I know that my downstairs neighbor was a pretty blonde from Floodwood, Minnesota and that she played Tejano music loudly during the afternoon. In two days prior to the alleged murder the only thing I noticed was loud music playing between the hours of 3:30 and 5:00 P.M. If she had not met her sad destiny, I was going to ask her to play some requests.

The apartment downstairs was sealed in yellow tape and the window shades were shut. The rumor was that the killing resulted from a love triangle. The newspaper reported that witnesses saw two men drive up and that the passenger entered the apartment while the driver waited in the car. The Minneapolis paper would not say what color the suspects were, but the St. Paul paper said that it appeared to have been an Asian driver and a white passenger, and that the killer ran outside in a frenzy but the car did not immediately speed away. The police thought it odd that the car drove away so slowly. The two suspects were still at large.

I miss the music. And I wanted the new vacancy to turn into a job.

I work as a painter in St. Paul. I am known as the Fat-Brush Painter. Through the years I have become well-known both for my artistry and for my grumpiness. I no longer paint houses in Minneapolis. This intrigues many of my St. Paul clients. A few have even commented that they hired me for a particular job because they had heard of my painting ban on Minneapolis houses. I have recently been doing quite a lot of work on the remodeling of the downtown St. Paul Library.

There is a long trail of bad dreams and broken bottles and scattered pieces of my heart on the road to my having landed this wonderful job. Let me tell you how a painter like me gets to paint inside this temple of books.

Let me tell you what it has taken me a lifetime to know about painting. Start young with no direction in your life. Find a part-time job in the summer. Work for any number of oddball thieves, liars, ex-cons, and soon-to-be corporate execs, but only work for the guys who will treat you right. Early on you'll learn not to take shit from anybody. Your boss has all the right in the world to tell you what to do on the job, but he cannot tell you what to do about your soul. Early on I was big on learning about my soul.

I am now the best painter in the world. It was a spectacular decision for me to only take on paint jobs for people that I like. I must like them. It's very simple. The final question my soul asks my heart is "would these people ever hurt a living thing deliberately?" Spiders count, but their webs don't. I must clear the webs for the paint job to be done properly. Wasps don't count, just because I don't like the hurts that they put on me. And all of their nests must be pushed off the eaves. And if I have to work in a cold, scary basement there better not be any critters in the dark waiting to bite me. They will become the color I am painting.

This spring I hired an assistant, like I do almost every spring to help out over the busy summer season. I always hire either high school or college kids. But none are ever going to be as well-known as the most recent kid. Orlando Vang. Yeah, I know Hmong names do not include Orlando. Orlando was the first one to give me this piece of information. He also told me that his real first name only had consonants and that I should forget about asking him for it because there was no way in hell that I would get to the tonal place where I could pronounce it right. I liked him immediately.

Then I added my painter's wisdom to the conversation. "So, Orlando. Who gave you the name? Were your parents trying to give one up for America or what?"

Orlando Vang gave me a look like he was from Texas. It was a look Mexican cowboys give each other when they hear Anglos talking about cowboys only being from the United States. Then he drawled like a Tex-Mex singer, "Well, no. My parents did not give me the name. I just took it last year and most of my family is still in shock. Some of them even have started to call me Orlando, but for the most part when I am at home I am still all of those consonants with the special tone."

I stood in silence and recognition. I have always felt an affinity for rebellion. "Oh," I said.

Orlando continued, "Do you know that Total gas station on Seventh before you head out to the Airport? The one across from Taco Bell and that tittie bar that has a name that I can never remember? A bunch of years ago, when I was about five or six . . ."

I interrupted the young Vang. "A bunch of years ago. Shit, man, that was like last year for you. For me that would truly be a bunch of years. I wish I could remember being five or six. Yeah, sorry. Go on."

"Why all you old timers always got to get all goofy with your memory? Man, get over it. You guys just old and too bad! And don't forget you get uglier too!"

"Thanks, spring chicken."

"Well, so when I was about five or six, no, I was still five. Anyway, at that time my older cousin Lou Vang, well, 'Lou' is the closest to American that we got with his real name. Lou was nineteen. He told me a story about when he was five years old and when he first came to America. He wanted me to hear it because he said then I would always understand his heart. He said we had the same eyes for the world and that maybe someday we would both be kings in America. He meant kings of our own destiny.

"The sponsors who brought his family over here were from Orlando, Florida. And for my cousin Lou the very first thing he remembers about being in America is living in a town called Orlando and having been taken to a magic kingdom. He thought that the entire America was going to be exactly like Disney World. All he remembers is that for his first few weeks in this country he was inside the Magic Kingdom almost daily. I don't remember the details about why he got to go there so often. Something to do with the church people who were his sponsors also had great connections with the Disney empire. And when cousin Lou started going to school he learned that Orlando can be a person's name. He told his parents that he wanted to change his name to Orlando, that when he becomes king of his destiny he wants to be known as the great king Orlando. His parents ignored him and did not change his name. I wish they could have changed his destiny.

"Lou at nineteen had become a thug, a young criminal who sought glory and pride within a gang that he wanted to lead. Lou and four other young thugs walked into that Total on a bright sunny day for cigarettes and candy and executed three people. They shot the clerks and one customer simply because they wanted to become murderous thugs. They killed three innocent people and to this day my cousin does not have an answer for me. He was put away for life because Minnesota does not have the death penalty. I am probably the only member in my family that stays in touch with him. Last year I sent him a letter that explained to him that I wanted to honor the good part of his life and that I was changing my name to Orlando because I believe to this day that if he could have followed his dream and changed his name then he would not be where he is right now. I want to make certain that I become the king of my destiny and so now I am Orlando. I am another creation for the good from the Magic Kingdom."

It was the first time I ever had to put my brush down while talking and painting. I am expert with the brush, skinny or fat. But I had to stop and stare and look deep into the paint can. I would not tear up. I would do that later alone at home with a beer and the Twins on television. I would remember that my real name is Jimmy Enriquez. That long before I became the "Fat-Brush" I was simply Texas Jimmy. Long ago I too had a cousin who got sour on the fine side of life and got gunned down without his shoes, wearing only his white boxers, while scrambling outside his shack to get the morning paper. The most important details are that the shots came from the underbelly of the kingdom and that I have never owned a gun. I had to learn to shoot and use weapons while in the Army but that does not matter.

"Sorry to hear about your cousin, kid. It must be tough on the entire family. Especially since he was the bad guy."

Orlando and I entered a self-imposed silence and in the distant sky the rumble of thunder announced that we would have a short day of outside painting.

Ten years ago, after my divorce, I told myself that I would forevermore only paint when the potential for the job felt good. This meant that it would be difficult to work on crews such as Lamar's because painting was simply business for most painters. I got my start in this city with old Lamar. But after my divorce I had to become more than just a painter. I had to become a painter with a soul. I still bid on any jobs that were available but if the people I would be spending the next few weeks with were not likable to me, I refused to take the job. This was a crazy attitude in the beginning, but after a while I got to like it more and more. I am not that picky. I get along with the world. I am peaceful. I am mostly just a speck of dust. Not a great leader, not a great follower, not a believer in any religion that comes between me and God. This eliminates all known religions, so that God and I are pretty much alone out here.

The message from Lamar was frantic. "Jimmy. Wake up, you lazy painter. I bet it is only two in the morning. Here is the deal. I need some help for two, maybe three days this week. This is a job I am squeezing in, but if things work out, hell, you can take the rest of the project for yourself. It could be a year of work. I think you will like this building. It is the renovation of the St. Paul Central Library. They forgot to include the bathrooms and the hallways and some other out-of-the-way walls when the original bid was awarded to Fresh Coat crew. So I got this little emergency side deal with them. And the money is good. By the way, I still can't believe you turned down that Viking football player's house. Just because the son of a bitch is a spoiled brat athlete with a gorgeous wife, hell, you would have seen more of her than him. Anyway, call me, and let's meet at you-know-where."

I think every important business deal that Lamar ever concluded took place at Arnellia's around six. When I walked in the door he started fast and black, "You know, Texas J, I was starting to give up on you. I still can't believe you walked away from that Vikings job. They were going to pay you top dollar. And how do you know he beats the wife? And how do you know he fools around on her? And how do you know what they do in private? You think the worst, well you get the worst. Besides, they weren't paying you for family counseling, they were paying you to paint the goddamn house. Oh, Texas Jimmy the Tease. How have you made it this far?"

I laughed with him. "Yeah, well this painter is still un zero a la izquierda sin huevos."

Lamar grunted, "OK, what did you just say? And stop pretending like you can still speak Spanish. I only hear you swear in your old tongue. I've never heard you talk to a woman in Spanish."

"I said that this painter is a zero to the left with no balls. Yeah, I am losing my old language. I wonder what it would be like to make love in Spanish again. It's been so long I forget what it sounds like."

Lamar is a historian. "A loser like you and you can't remember doing it is Spanish?"

Lamar insisted that the library job would last at least a year. "There is so goddamn much touch-up that was not in the contract that you will be living under stairways and sleeping in bathrooms while painting your fat-brush heart out." Lamar and I worked out the details because he was simply getting a long-term finders fee from me. His crews were too stretched out and beside, he and I were still friends. At times he would remind me that he was probably the only friend I had, and often times I did not want to admit that he was right.

I told Orlando Vang that when he finished his summer Artswork apprentice program that I could still use his help as much as possible. I also let him know that if all worked out during the coming school year that I could give him quite a lot of after school and weekend work. Orlando was nervous and answered with a sense of urgency. "I will work as much as you want, boss. I just hope I can be around to help. Off the books or on the books. Just let me know and believe me I will keep you out of trouble. If you want to do a cash deal with me I won't let anyone know. Either way. I am here. But I think some trouble is coming my way."

"Orlando, I think I better keep everything straight on the library project. And it doesn't make any difference for you, it is my ass that gets in trouble. But what do you mean that some trouble is coming your way? What did you do? Were you late for a class or something? I know. You were late with a library book. I just can't imagine you in any sort of big trouble. We will just paint away on weeknights and weekends when there are no other painters in the building. There is a goofy arrangement with Lamar that his crew cannot do any work there while Fresh Coat is working. Good thing for us that that crew is all eight-to-five. Hell, if I was the lead crew I would have my guys working from six to three. I love those hours.

"Hey kid, by the way, where you going to college next year?" We were both underneath a stairway at the library on a Saturday morning in November.

Orlando stopped painting in order to expound. "Well, Texas Jimmy, if I don't get sent to prison I am going to attend a school that I bet you have never heard of. I won't take your money, though, because I know you have never heard of it. Nobody has heard of it." He resumed painting and continued to talk nervously. My parents want me to go to either Stanford or Harvard. Both schools have already accepted me, but I am not going to either one. Those schools would be too damn boring for me. I need the magnificent stimulation that something like painting walls does for me. I just cannot imagine any course offered at either school that could give me the knowledge that I have gotten from working with you these past few months. Damn, Texas, I think I'll start calling you Professor Texas. But I might need a lawyer pretty soon."

"Hey Orlando. What's up? Why do you keep talking about being in trouble? Something happened, eh? You didn't get her in trouble, did you? I thought you didn't have a girlfriend. You ready to talk about it? And no way I want to be called professor anything. I am not a teacher, goddamnit. I am not a follower . . . ."

Orlando interrupted my litany, "Yeah, yeah. I have heard it a thousand times, 'I am not a teacher. I am not a follower. I am not a leader. Although I do want to be a benevolent despot for my selected harem.'"

I told him that I lived in Orlando for a short time before I went on a clandestine venture with the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba. I also told him the story of my first visit to the not-yet-opened Disney World. Orlando listened intently to each detail, this being the first story of mine that the young Vang had visibly paid attention to. He mumbled a wish to go there someday.

"So, Orlando, you've never been to Orlando and the Magic Kingdom?"

"No. And what was the Venceremos Brigade?"

"It was a leftist radical bunch who secretly went to Cuba to help with the sugarcane harvest during the late part of the sixties. I never really went with them to Cuba; it is such a long-ass story. The short version is that I was trying to get laid and this gorgeous woman that had me by los huevos made me chase her all over the country. I ended up in Orlando because a bunch of these radical cane pickers were working on the opening of Disney World. They were damn good with their fronts. Anyway, her connection to Disney was through theater. She did stuff with the original Disneyland in Anaheim. 'Trained a bunch of Mickeys and Minnies how to act Goofy,' she would say. And they had sent her as a consultant for the opening of the new Magic Kingdom. She was there waiting for the signal to leave for Canada. Complicated, huh? These guys had to board ships in Canada in order to get to Cuba. Well, Orlando is as far as I went with her. Once her secret signal came to leave I followed my chicken-ass heart and said goodbye. I just could not cross that line and she left me without my ever getting to be her lover. Damn, I still think I should have gone with her. Here I am painting walls and she teaches American Government courses at Berserkly . . . Berkeley."

Orlando listened and laughed and continued to paint. "So, what is the Magic Kingdom like? I hope I get a chance to see it."

I noticed that Orlando was nervous but I continued talking. "The first time I went it was twenty-six degrees. I was there during a hundred-year record cold spell. It was disastrous for all of the oranges and was very memorable at Disney World. The place was not yet fully opened and I got to go in during a run-through . . . where everyone practices for the opening. Man, all I remember is my teeth chattering. No one was prepared for that cold day. It was miserable. I would like to go back there in the heat. Besides, when I went many of the attractions were not yet built. So, for the most part all I recall is that I was forced to decide on chasing pussy to the sugarcane fields of Cuba or staying put in America. You know, maybe if I had made the other choice I too could be teaching at a highbrow American university. I would have settled down and disciplined myself to study diligently and to complete all of my studies toward professorship. Nah, first off I hate reading. Second, I hate discipline. Not a good combo for the scholarly."

Orlando laughed. "The school I am going to go to is called DigiPen. It is the only school in the country for games programmers. Nothing but fat, lonely nerds who love computer games." He stopped talking about school and in the voice of someone who has been terrorized he confessed, "But, Texas, I need to tell you what happened. I wish it was a girlfriend and that I got her pregnant. That would be heavenly compared to what happened. Remember that wacko buddy of mine? The one I call Cousin It? The wild man who drinks too much and takes too many drugs? He killed his girlfriend and I drove him there. I didn't know what he was going to do. I never would have taken him. He had promised to buy me a full tank of gas if I gave him a ride and waited for him. He said he just had to give her something and it would only take a few minutes. I waited in the car while he walked inside."

I am stunned and curious. "What the hell?"

"The school is in Washington state and I toured it last summer and decided then and there that I wanted to go there. They have already accepted me. No scholarships, though, so it is going to cost me every nickel that I have saved."

I yell at Orlando, "Stop bullshiting! Listen kid, I don't care about the damn school right now. Are you being real about this murder? Are you that driver who came to my building? What the hell, are you nuts? Stupid? How can you possibly get involved in a goddamn murder?"

Orlando continued the confession. "I dropped him off at his house and when he got out of the car he spoke very fast and low, telling me that something had gone wrong in her apartment and that he had pushed her a little too hard. That he would keep me out of it but that I would hear about it in the news. Then he walked away. On the drive home I heard a news flash that an apparent murder had taken place. I walked into my room and fell asleep, but woke up pretty fast because I had this dream: a woman, tall, about twenty years old, dark hair, is terrifying me because of what she is doing to a bird. I am on the second floor of a big house that has windows open and no screens. I peek into her room and watch her bashing a pillow against a wall. It is an awful bashing of a pillow. But the noise is louder than a pillow. The noise is reaching underneath the door of the woman's room. I push lightly against the door and the door moves quietly open so that I am witness to the terror of her rage. She is ripping apart a bird as if it were a piece of cotton. I am about to leave and she catches sight of me watching her. Then I woke up with a cold sweat and I knew that I had been screaming. So I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and drove to the police station. Cousin It is in custody right now and I am being considered a material witness and a suspect. But they let me go because I came to them and they say that will be in my good graces if they press charges against me. Man, I am so scared."

The only thing I knew to do was to offer the kid some hope. "Orlando. I tell you what. You will get out of this clean. You did right by going to the cops. You could have driven over there a little sooner. But hell kid, you knew nothing about his plans, did you?" Orlando shook his head and held back the tears. "This summer, when we finish this library project, let's go to Disney World. My treat, kid. You deserve it."

"What?"

"Disney World. The Magic Kingdom. My treat, kid."

"Really?"

"Yes. That is if I can ever get you to finish painting. You have got to learn how to talk and paint at the same time."

"I'll work on that." Orlando dipped his brush back into the bucket of paint.

The light on the walls was pouring the color of a future into our eyes and the brightness of hope was mixed into each new brush stroke.

Miini-Giizi
by Norah Murphy, Arlington Branch

Lisa and I were cleaning up when someone knocked urgently at the door. We had been hoping to get home early and pack for the powwow down at Prairie Island. My niece looked up at me from the sink full of combs and waited to see what I would do.

"It's only four o'clock. If it's a customer, I'll take her," I said, leaning my wide-brush broom against the cash register.

When I opened the door, the sounds from the cars on Payne Avenue surprised me. So did the woman. She looked familiar-almost like I could see her dancing in the Grand Entry the next day. Her hair was long, straight, and brown. Her nose stood out from her face like my Aunt Delores's-proud and powerful. She wasn't Native, but I couldn't quite place her. Nor did I get a chance to. She started right in.

"I planned my funeral yesterday, I wrote my will this afternoon, and now it's time to get my hair cut. I take my grandbaby to Great Clips in Maplewood but my car's busted and I don't have change for the bus. Thought I'd walk up here and see if you ladies could help me out. I've got four cartons of blueberries. You can have half of them."

We just stared at her. She continued.

"I'd give you all of them but my grandbaby wants blueberry muffins and it might be the last time I get to bake them. Plus I just read a web site that says blueberries fight cancer."

I pointed to the first stall. The woman placed her tan plastic bag-the blueberries?-on the counter and sat down. Like me, she had to wiggle a bit to fit into the chair. I laughed.

I liked this troublemaker.

"Lisa, you finish up and go on home. Don't forget to take my dress out of the closet and you might as well put the sleeping bags on the front porch. Jerry will pick us up around seven."

I inherited the Silhouette Beauty Salon from my mom's sister, my Aunt Delores. It's a funny career for an Indian-so many of us wear our hair long or cut it off only when a family member passes over. But I love the challenge of helping people find their beauty. Some people say I'm good at it, too.

I got into styling hair because I used to work at the salon like my niece Lisa does now-only I used to help my aunt around the shop. My parents had had mixed success with their mixed marriage. I was half Anishinaabe and half Dakota. After Mom died, I decided to come up to St. Paul to live with my Aunt Delores.

I liked St. Paul, I liked my Aunt Delores, and I liked the Silhouette Beauty Shop. Eventually I got my cosmetology license at St. Paul Tech. Auntie and I thought we'd work together for years. But then she got sick and went home to the Rez.

Before Aunt Delores passed, she taught me her secret of beauty. "When you cut someone's hair," Auntie whispered, "You have to listen to their stories and find the part of their heart that each story holds. Then you need to match the movement of your tools with the secrets in their heart."

I know she was right. Beauty comes when you get the balance just right-the balance between the person's heart and the scissors in your hand. And when the beauty emerges from a person's face, it feels like you didn't even do the work-the customer and the scissors cut you right out of the scene.

I could tell that the blueberry woman had many more stories than I'd heard in a long time. I wondered if my scissors would know what to do.

"Are you from around here?" she asked as I wrapped the maroon plastic apron around her shoulders.

I liked this woman too much to get mad. Most Americans forget that Native people still exist. They would prefer to restore the prairies than actually talk to us. Last year, for example, the DNR planted native grasses on the south shore of Lake Phalen. You see, if they plant the seeds, they think they're still in control. Despite the popular record, Indian people are hard to keep down. We've always been here. We always will.

"I am-from around here," the woman continued. "The Barillas have been here for four generations-that's counting my grandbaby. My grandparents came here from Italy in 1920.

"Nona Barilla and his brother Marco worked at the Hamm's brewery. They also made their own wine for Sunday mass, feast days, and Nana's cooking. When Prohibition came, Hamm's had to switch to sweet syrups and near-beer, but the Barilla brothers kept on making wine and opened Barilla's Market. Do you ever shop there?"

"Nope, don't drink."

"Best discount liquors on the East Side."

"So how much do you want taken off-is this a trim or do you want to go short?" I interrupt.

"Real short. Real, real short. Then it won't be such a surprise when it falls out."

"All right then, real, real short," I repeated, combing her hair.

"Back then there was a code in this neighborhood. People stuck together. When the federal agents came around nobody told on anybody. But every once in a while the government discovered the bigger bootleg operations.

"My father remembers the time some agents split open Joe Vescio's supply. Rivers of moonshine ran all down Payne Avenue and into the creek.

"Back to the source, eh?" I asked.

"Yeah, ashes to ashes."

"Quite a family history," I said.

"My mother was Irish. She didn't want to marry an Italian because she knew they drank as much as the Irish. So when she was seventeen, she fell in love with a Swedish boy named Ricky Anderson. Every morning Ricky bought a sugar raised donut at the bakery where my mother worked. He'd watch her pluck the donut out from under the glass and bag it with a tenderness that he longed for.

"Every Friday morning Ricky would ask her out. And every Friday morning she agreed. He'd promise to take her to Phalen-to hear the community singings, to canoe around Monkey Island, or to picnic by the pavilion. But when Friday evening came around, Ricky never showed up. Instead, Ricky's friend Johnny Barilla appeared with a rose in hand. Johnny escorted Ricky's date to the concerts, the boats, the pavilion. When Johnny asked my mother to marry him at the Winter Carnival races the following year, she agreed.

"After they were married, my father finally confessed. On Fridays, the young men used to buy cases of dented beer for cheap. My father would goad Ricky into drinking more than half a case. He would pour his own beer right into Phalen Creek. Then Daddy would dragged Ricky to the back of Barilla's Market and head up Payne to meet my mother at the lake."

I had just finished cutting off the first layer of her long hair. The woman's head-capped with a jagged edge-looked a little like a blueberry still on the bush. We had just begun. To know what to do next, I leaned in to feel the shape of her head and to listen to the sound of her heart echo through her roots.

"Before you know it, I was the first Irish-Italian girl baptized at St. Ambrose. I remember my First Communion. It was on July 16th-the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. They still did the walks through the neighborhood back then. The men carried the Virgin Mother on a platform and the communicants walked behind the statue and the priests. Boys in black, girls in white.

"I remember how itchy my starched dress was. But I was proud. People taped money on the statue and they smiled at us as we paraded through the streets. I remember Mr. Vescio, the moonshine man-the one who lost his liquor down Payne Avenue-he was old then, but he waved at me with his cane.

"Mother didn't approve of all the wine that the men drank at the bazaar after the parade, but by then she'd become an honorary Barilla woman and didn't have much to say about it.

"I'll never forget the mix of joy and sorrow in her eyes that day. The joy I understood-she was proud of me-but her sorrow didn't register until years later when I rebelled. You see, I did marry a Swede. I thought he'd be dry. Well, he wasn't. There I was with a baby of my own and no money to pay the rent. That was in the seventies and a woman could get divorced by then. Which is exactly what I did. I had had enough of men and their spirits controlling my destiny.

She paused for the first time, tapping her fingers on the armrest.

Then she said, "Sometimes I wonder if it's possible to outrun fate.

"What if Phalen Creek didn't run over the sandstone cliffs? Or if Theodore Hamm hadn't won the brewery in a bet against a bad businessman? What if my father hadn't gotten Ricky Anderson dead drunk and hid him behind Barilla's Market? Would I be sitting here getting my hair cut and facing death now?

"I know one thing. My funeral will be a simple affair at Bradshaw's. No holy rollers up at the altar pretending they knew me. No hotdish suppers in a dark basement with Jesus staring from the cross. No caravan of people driving with a sense of duty over to Forest Lawn Cemetery. I will not be buried with my parents at Calvary. Not where Theodore Hamm's bones sit. He's had enough control over my life. Bradshaw's will cremate me. My son can take me home in a pot and do whatever he likes with my ashes."

A sweetness filled the air-released from the fruit hiding inside her bag on the counter.

"Where did you get the blueberries? Grow them yourself?" I asked as I feathered the crown of her head.

"Farmer's market. Hmong farmer. Funny thing, how they're taking over the area."

"They?" I asked.

"The Hmongs."

"Funny like when the Italians got here in the 1920s or when the English got here a few centuries before that?"

She ignored my history lesson and went back to the blueberries.

"I tried growing them myself. The soil's not acidic enough."
"My Auntie said they used to grow wild under the pines near Phalen. But they disappeared when the city started messing with the water. I heard almost half of the lake disappeared."

"That's right. When I was a teenager, Phalen started to shrink. They built a retaining wall across the middle of the lake. Used to walk across it with my girlfriends. The lake was dry on one side and full of water on the other. Strangest thing. Sometimes you'd find things on the dry side-old wedding bands, pocket watches. Once . . ."

The woman wriggled in her seat and tilted her head back to continue talking. I gently pushed her head forward so I could finish up. We stayed quiet.

When I was done, I tipped her head back to center. We gazed in to the mirror.
The woman looked more alive than she had when she walked in. Her proud nose still took center stage, but the shorter haircut showed off her high cheekbones. You could see the shiny flecks of green in her brown eyes.

She smiled for the first time.

"Well, isn't that something? Mr. Bradshaw's not going to recognize me when he throws me into his oven."

The woman picked up her brown bag and started to dig out the fruit.

"Do you remember the old Hamm's commercials on TV?" I asked as she set her blueberries next to the cash register.

"You mean the old Hamm's bear? Course I do. Why?"

"Do you know who painted that bear?"

"No. No, I don't."

"An artist by the name of Patrick DesJarlait."

"I see."

"Yeah, DesJarlait was Anishinaabe, from Red Lake, like my Auntie who used to run this place. I've got a copy of one of his paintings here."

I pointed to the Ojibwe language calendar on the back wall of the salon. Above the squares marked for July, an Anishinaabe woman wrapped in an orange scarf poured blueberries into a birchbark makuk.

The woman stared at the calendar. I looked into her eyes. Blueberries sparkled in her shining green flecks.

"Miini-Giizi," I said.

"Pardon me?" the woman asked.

"Miini-Giizi. Blueberry Moon. July."

A week later, the woman returned to the salon. She still had a full head of hair. She carried another bag. I could tell she was dying to talk. Lisa and I were both busy with customers.

"Looking for a trim?" I asked, looking at her from the mirror.

"No, I have a little something for you."

"Thanks, but can you come back at about two o'clock this afternoon-we're pretty booked up."

"Can't. Doctor's appointment. Well, I'll just leave this here. I found it when I was cleaning out the attic. I'm trying to get the house in order, you know, for my son and grandbaby. This must have belonged to the old Indian man who used to own my house."

I nodded and watched the woman leave. I couldn't tell which left a greater stillness in the store once she closed the door-her or the traffic outside.

It was one of those days. We didn't stop until after six o'clock. When we were cleaning up, Lisa asked me about the bag.

"God, I forgot all about it. Where is it?"

I leaned my wide-brush broom against the chair. The bag was on the shelf beneath the cash register. It was an old tan plastic bag from Cub Foods. I pulled out a small parcel wrapped in string. There was a piece of paper tucked into the package. It looked bulky-like someone hadn't lined up the edges right when they folded it back up.

"There's a note."

I read silently and then pushed at the string to open the package. What I found inside was a handful of hard corn seeds. I scooped them up and studied the colors. Mostly they were dark blue. A few were orange.

"Old corn seeds."

"Say what?" doubted Lisa as she stood up from her tub of combs.

"Look, it's old Indian corn."

"How do you suppose that woman got them?"

"I don't know. What did she say? She was cleaning out her attic, right?"

"An old Indian man used to own her house."

"But this note is dated July 1975. Signed by a man. I don't recognize his name. It says he wants to pass the seeds on to the next generation."

"Why did they get stuck in the attic?"

"Who knows. Maybe he was forced out of his home."

I ran my fingers through the seeds. The note said the corn was from around here. Dakota corn, I figured. The seeds were hard, puckered. The blue ones reminded me of what Auntie said dried blueberries looked like in the winter before her mother soaked them in water. The deep orange ones looked like the Ojibwe woman's scarf on my calendar-folded and tucked with care. They were beautiful.

"My father's family would have planted corn like this. It's our turn now."

I didn't know the planting song for this corn. Not yet, anyway. I would ask the elders at Prairie Island next time I went down there. Yet I already understood one thing. The corn had its own story and my job was to listen.

A Working History of the Alley
Joanna Rawson, Hayden Heights Branch

Begin with the alley at twilight.

Say it's high summer. The heat-dull air is shot through with pollen. Strays interrupt the heaving down of the air into evening-a chorus of their kind rising to a distant siren.

Southward: the river, still wild. Upward: ancient light sprung from a trap of exploding stars that's finally arrived.

And all around: the city, doing what machines and music do.

Along this block-length stretch of alley, crickets pulse in the ribongrass that insists its way up through cracks. The patch of blowzy cosmos camouflages a snack-chip wrapper it snagged from yesterday's storm, both oranges caught in the shadow of a moth-spattered back porch light like tatters of fire. One garage door is riddled with bulletmarks. The next, behind a small eatery, with graffiti and the traces of last fall's crazy hail. Down by the corner, the rust-ripe chassis of a scrapped truck thirsts for another fix of rain. Its sunburnt iron perfumes the undulating air.

Begin here, in this story's one-night stand. Imagine it an inscribable surface. An invitation to doings. A convergence, say.

Believe this could be about anywhere, until the figure of a child furiously pedaling a royal blue bike turns from the street and into the alley, specifying it by this sudden presence, hurrying toward us and in so doing setting off each motion-detector floodlight in passing, like a succession of emergency flares, so that the contraption of rubber and chrome appears to be flying in parallel with a speeding blaze. From here at the other end, the child appears no bigger than a crow, illuminated in silhouette by the fires.

A man sits on his back stoop, twenty feet from the alley. His shoulders are bowed and crooked, as if most of his body's career has favored the left. We see that his chest is thin under a sweat-soiled undershirt, that his posture suggests calcification and the accumulation of grief. Liver spots mottle his hands' parchment-thin skin. The knuckles have been seized by arthritis and his left hand holds the fixed shape of a claw. He leans in, this elderly and ill-lit man, closer to the precarious metal tabletop perched on a stump by the cement step and taps his spectacles into the rut that time has carved from his nose.

Notice the shaking in his wrist as he cocks a whittled pencil between forefinger and thumb and begins to write, whispering lead into the surface of a sheet of very white paper. His lips move as he reads along with his writing, and so appear to be giving his hand dictation.

"Greetings, Jozef Rozwidowski," he writes, in his native Polish. "After such a long while (six years, is it?), to receive your letter yesterday was indeed a welcome moment! I'll have you know that I have not forgotten that particular meadow of golden blooms you mention, and yes, how we boys used to run through them until we were gilded with pollen from tip to toe at about this time of year. Little did I imagine that on the other side of that idyll lay a killing field, and now there is an ocean and nearly sixty years between me and that paradise.

"Because you have amused me with this memory, I enclose for your delight this Agence France-Presse photograph I have clipped from our local newspaper here in St. Paul. You see that Baska the Horse, after thirteen years of hard labor in the Wieliczka salt mine-426 underground, no less!-has finally been hauled up to the light and retired to a fine green pasture. A well-deserved rest, I would say.

"To which I must add, my dearest Jozef, that I too am coming to my own rest. It will be tonight, and done by the time you receive this reply. It is true that I have known my mind has been going for several months now-softening! melting!-and it is a relief to me, an old gray horse myself, to have the presence to take my own life while I am still sound.

"Why this decision? Let me simply say, although it is not a simple thing: I do not wish to be alive after I have forgotten the ordeal you and I and all the others suffered together in the camps. What with the lapses and blurs and lengthening fugues of late, it could be only tomorrow that this forgetting occurs.

"To have lost in memory that smell of mortal smoke or the cold heaps of shit or the weak rattle of our skeletons bickering about bread and God-well, should these stories vanish from my skull, it would be as if those years had never occurred at all. I exist in terror of this. I tell you, sometimes the fear that I will utterly neglect to remember these events makes me wonder if perhaps one's history is even more ephemeral than I have so far suspected.

"What if I should pass the moment when I become unable to save myself from this oblivion? Capable only of reporting what it was I had for breakfast or how many moths flickered above my porch light, as they do here tonight (by my count, six)?

"Or consider: being too far gone to shuffle through my cerebral cortex and locate the story of these faded numbers along my forearm the next time a stranger at the corner grocery should touch them and ask. Can you imagine? The answers are too bleak to countenance for yet another day, my old comrade."

At this, the man's scribbling ceases. He lifts his gnarled left hand from the page and begins to knead it with his right, working blood back into the tips. Because the future is as unpredictable as the past, he mutters, because it may or may not be that luck or grace or the authorities intervene, the wind kicks up and turns the wildfire from its fatal course, the squall dies down and spares the capsized boat its fate against the palisade reef, the bullet lodges in the hostage's irrelevant appendix, the airborne car lands upside down in a swimming pool, unscathed, because even now, after all this time, the ashes to the east blow and feed a meadow of perennial goldenrod their daily sustenance-because we can not say with any assurance how the story will go . . .

When the first true pain hits, Pepita, as they call her, is tending to the thriving patch of serrano chiles she's installed in one of the twelve bald car tires that have found new life as planters in the hardscrabble yard behind her uncle Felix's taquería. She's brought the seeds from her hometown of Ciudad Alvarez. The odor of the ripening foliage and the stings of the little fruits' incendiary pips on her fingertips make her homesick for the old streets. When the next contraction seizes her belly, Pepita tucks her scissors into an apron pocket, crosses herself in the waning twilight, and doubles over against the chain-link fence bounding the alley. Sí, she whispers to the baby who last Sunday fiddled itself into launch position in her pelvis and since then has been hiccuping and sparring with her spine. Yo estoy esperando que tú entres des reviento al mundo. Ven mi pequeño coete.

She sucks in shallow breaths just as the manual that she and her husband Ernesto got at the nearby clinic instructed, and pictures the effect as that of scooping crescents of cool melon from a rind. Pepita can hear the radio playing banda in the kitchen where just an hour ago she'd helped her uncle scour the grill after the last dinner plate had been served. A patina of grease and sweet onions still slicks the stagnant evening air. The useless fan her aunt Inez propped against the screen door clicks out a steady cadence to which Pepita hitches her breathing, in counterpoint to the crickets' pulsing in the alley.

Her uncle glances out the window just then and catches a glimpse of her raven hair twisted into a bright yellow scarf and her thick body sagging against the mesh fence. This is how the women in this family labor, Felix thinks-their ample butts slumped over their bent knees and sweat running in rivulets along the fine down of their necks. Qué bonita. He'd accompanied his wife through it five times in a bedroom upstairs. The midwife and the other women had tried to shoo him out with Carlos, the first, some twenty-six years ago, but he'd insisted on staying put with the boiled water (shouldn't someone always boil water for a birth?) he'd hauled up in the pozole pot. He'd stationed himself in a straight chair in the corner all night and smoked-two full packs, sharing a cigarette with his wife when she wanted the nicotine to soothe her-until the baby's vernix-streaked head crowned into the pool of lamplight and the rest of the room's population yelped and wept. Later, each time Inez discovered she was pregnant, she would announce the news to her husband by placing an ashtray on the bedroom chair.

Felix nods and turns from the window. "Inez!" he calls into the dining room, where a few dinner stragglers are still visiting over crumbs. "It's time."

Sweet bitter corridor, constitution of quartz and lime: history hurries down the alley. Bits of its residue stick to the juts like the silks proud poor old men wear to tatters. Sucker birches woven up through the cyclone fence list and quiver. In the pursuit of happiness a crippled squirrel plucks at a crib mattress atilt by the dumpster. Bats circulate among the strung live wires.

The child, a boy (we can tell now, by his cropped hair, as he approaches), could not care less what goes on around his frantic expedition. He's in a state of propulsion. If you knew where he is going, if you knew what he is going for, believe me, if someone were to tell you the entire truth of what put this boy on this mechanism and wound them up into motion, if this terribly small person were to suddenly brake and skid to within reach, lean in to whisper I've been waiting for this night my whole life . . . and it spilled from his mouth into the dark like a deliquescent shadow, you might not be able to exist in exactly the same life again.

So as not to overdose, let us, his audience, his authors, bring him down the alley in slow-motion, the spokes spinning in rhythm with the crickets' insistence and flashing silver glints where the detection floods catch. Let's switch him to a track that takes a measure different from real time to arrive-like the death-light of stars-and feed his hot tires and his very heavenly body through the thickened urban firmament gradually, so as not to hurry the story beyond its native capabilities.

In the meanwhile, a common spider continues her colossal web that stretches from the phone pole across the alley to a busted gutter. See how it clots with the ephemeral wisps of spindrift this heat strips from the spent cottonwoods and uses to shroud the slaughtered flies strung there, in midair.

Night has fallen so far with the old man inside it, what's left to locate him is only the sound of his pencil gathering speed against the rough page. That, and the weak porch bulb strung naked on a cord and mottled with the perishing wishes of moths. Picture him crouched within the hush. The breeze is picking up. Its rising undercurrent carries now the whiff of honey, which reminds him.

"My old comrade Jozef, tonight it takes the odor of this sweet air to grant some levity in my situation. Leave it to the bees to spread cheer around with such abandon! As I have written in previous letters, the gorgeous perfume of new honey (almost sickening in its intensity) can turn any place, no matter how humble, into an arcadia. Above any other sensation, it is the one that remains supreme in my recollections of childhood there in Pelow.

"Perhaps when I began my little hive of Carniolans here behind the lilac hedges I believed it was simply to resurrect my long-lost beekeeping skills and to get enough harvest for an autumn's worth of sweetened toast. (Their stings also proved to be quite the panacea for my arthritis.) I consider now that it may have been for no other purpose than to manufacture this redolence of propolis and honey, by the industry of these insects, from flowers translated at the height of blooming.

"For the first time since coming to St. Paul so many years ago and setting up this backyard operation, I let the colony fall into neglect this spring, which means, I suppose, that I allowed the bees to revert to their true nature, without any human intervention to thwart their desires. They swarmed, as I knew they would. They threw off their winter torpor. The workers laid siege to the crocuses and hellebores like a band of frenzied muggers! I found the budding virgin queens all plumped up on their royal diets by the time the apple blossoms were out, eight of them in all, and I simply left them to their own devices. In the days before the colony divided, I could hear rumors of supersedure in the change of their collective vibrato emanating from the hive at daybreak. The disturbance was unmistakable, even though I hadn't heard such a thing since I was a boy.

"They swarmed on a Thursday. I witnessed the exodus from my kitchen window, as the black cloud lifted from under the lilac and funneled up to the route their scouts had determined. I could understand their elation, of course. They were gone in an instant, off to stake their claim elsewhere in the free world. Their chronicles are not so unlike our own, my friend-of the glorious mapping of that wilderness beyond the known hive, swollen with sustenance and hazard, and then its conquering and taming down into a livable dwelling. How like us these myopic bees are, after all, constructing cities from elemental glue and dreams, sustaining them on civics and need. What empire! What intrigue!

"Elka used to cluck at such notions. Many times as we sat on this stoop together, growing old and brittle as two sticks, I would while away the evening with my grand theories of the divine order ruling this social world of humans and Apis melliferas, of the unified field of entropic inevitability which began in a garden and will end, again, in one of eternal verdant delights, and so word by word and image by image, as if climbing a ladder of rhapsodic utterance, would reach the moment in my waxing when she would lean in and pinch me hard on the shoulder blade, right where she surmised my wing would be attached had I one, and cluck. "Stasio," she'd say, "you are like a bee drunk on nectar. Stop your waggle-dancing. Stop this foolishness. Come back to earth!"

"Seven months now since my Elka passed. The bruise on my shoulder remains. It appears to be permanent, after all those years of pinching. I may well be cursed with a tattoo on my forearm, telling a tale of horror, and blessed with a tattoo on my wingblade, telling one of love."

By the time Inez has cleared the last of the dishes and gone out to fetch her inside, Pepita has pitched to the ground and crawled on all fours to the trunk of the mulberry tree by the gate. There she arches and begins a signal of low moans that rise and fall as she alters her squat. How gorged she feels, like a sated tick. A sudden spurt of liquid trickles down her thigh.

In the lull between waves, Pepita attempts to convince her plural body to let go its firm hold on her mind and allow it to drift up to a more aloof position from which to marshall the pain. At the next contraction she vomits into the understory of milkweed, rousing a nest of monarchs to flurry up into the evening's last shaft of blue light casting through the canopy of leaves. The expulsion seems to do the trick, and the young woman's mind, too, hikes through the wing-stirred air and perches on a low branch.

It is from this spectral vantage that Pepita watches Inez exit the kitchen and hurry toward her body crouched in the weeds. Around her the tree teems with starlings flocked to the rotting fruits. She pivots and peers across the alley at an old man sitting on his back stoop, rocking gently with his eyes closed. His bearing reminds Pepita of her grandfather, who'd first hatched the notion of crossing into the United States to have her baby, and so deliver it into citizenship on its first day on earth, as her cousin and another young woman from her town had done.

The evocation sends Pepita into a reverie, free as she is from all aching up there on her limb in the summer ethers. She trains her gaze toward the end of the block, out the blind alley, past White Bear Avenue, and into the distant heat-warped skyline of downtown St. Paul. And then, with an apparition's spectacular acuity, she finds herself able to spy across the sweeps of sweet corn and clover ribboning along the Mississippi River, southward over the sunflowered plains and sienna flats and alluvial swamps and then into the baked broken earth where the Texas-Mexico border runs like a badly stitched seam. She sails into the mountain-bounded plateau of Zacatecas, moving back, back through time into each successive horizon that in her delirium vanishes in a chimera of steam, and brakes her flight above her native Michoacán state, where her feverish vision alights at last in a remote village nestled between arroyos, which tonight appears to be dreaming in a like-minded heat.

Pepita watches as a young couple emerges from one of the dwellings, a man and a woman, he toting two satchels, she obviously pregnant and off-kilter at the hips. They walk to the road where a black pickup idles. The open palm stuck out the window takes their folded bills and signals them into the back. The pair climbs in, the driver revs the engine and shifts, and the truck lurches once, catches, and commences the trek north. From there time doubles back, and Pepita's hallucination traces the forward chronology along the Sierra Madre to the borderlands around Ciudad Juarez where a coyote shuttles the undocumented immigrants across by night to the bus station at Albuquerque. It is another several days to the terminal in St. Paul, where her cousin greets them with a bag of tamales in one hand and a Polaroid camera in the other.

In the snapshot Pepita appears bewildered, as if she's just been spirited through some freak rip in the space-time continuum, squinting against the glare, laden with child, an instance of starlight escaped from its original detonation.

To venture through. To exit the main commotion and find passage. To turn a corner and enter into the inner reaches of the city's gridwork, into the determination of this order stamped onto wilderness, and be given access to the flipside-the houses and shops and eateries with their public faces fixed elsewhere-through which this alley snakes and straightens, pocked by ice cycles and heat spells, trafficked, hollyhocked, an archive of trysts, truants, quarks. The alley does not shine its boots. It does not shave or cope or oblige. Its panic is not the dreamed-up kind of the highway. It is an evacuation track, at the end of which, for the boy, the end of time ticks.

He wheels past the third house in, the empty lot across from it. He is making progress-a point of view advancing into the crux. His breathing narrates a plotline. Inside the house a woman is scanning an online auction's list of 45s for that old song-how did it go? something about what?-she wakes up to sweating every few nights remembering it as the soundtrack playing at the exact moment the telegram arrived, thirty-seven years ago tomorrow. In the rubbled-up vacancy across the way, a pitched-out scorched couch with a curse of corroded springs for cushions turns itself into shelter for the couple of teens knotted together in a lust they can't even pronounce, though its motions creak and hum. You could shake a story loose from every building and every absence along the way. He doesn't mind any of them, desperate as he is to arrive home.

We see in the triggered glare of a safety light that the pedaling boy is barefoot and dressed only in a pair of denim cut-offs too large to properly ride his hips. A smear of mud decorates his chest above one nipple, and the grass stain across his ribs looks like sheer green gauze stretched over a toy washboard. He has been playing, which on his body looks as much like violence as joy, and lost track of time.

Here, I'll let you in on a secret: The boy is flying home to meet his father.

His father, the boy's father, and the boy-they've never met. Why?

It's a long story, as they say, and what they mean is that truly saying it would take the time the story itself took-real time-to occur. For now, just imagine: A summer night not unlike ours. A man, two months from becoming a father at age nineteen, just off the late shift at the plant. A bar-call it Lucky's, family-owned like most around here, two beers on tap, regulars by first name. There couldn't've been more than a dozen men in there that night, the overhead fan going but the air in there beyond hot, stifling. Even by last call it hadn't cooled to reasonable, which had turned everyone's nerves on edge. August 29, 1993. Two days before payday. Some wiseacre backs up from the pool table to line up a shot and jabs the man, who is perched on a bar stool facing the game, in the ribs with his stick. It could be a mistake. The two had traded words earlier over some owed money, but it could well be. Even so, the man, with his son in the making, takes it as provocation and hurls himself onto the player's back. The fight takes less than ten minutes to finish. Later, in court, the exhibits included the pool cue, two teeth, a series of photographs shot at the hospital and the medical examiner's office, a recording of the 911 call, and the murder weapon. The father, which he was by the time of the trial, forbid his new wife from bringing the baby to the courtroom. So as not to see him like that, he said, shackled there to the table or under guard in the visiting room at Stillwater during the nine years afterward. He attended the anger-management sessions, during which the killing worked its way out of his gut like a shag of shrapnel. He paid reparation. He planned his release into the outside. He called home to talk to his wife but couldn't brook hearing the voice of his son, whom he called Tiger, which sounded in his ear too much like chiming on the moon. So he wrote to the boy, who as he grew up began to write back.

"Dear Daddy, tonight I went with mom to her work and we vacuumed the hallways and waxed the cafeteria floor and then took a break on the roof to see Mars."

"Dear Daddy, Uncle Stephen told me that during the Viet war you got a little monkey for a pet and trained it to open the fridge and drink beer and one day it got too drunk and croaked, is that true?"

"Dear Daddy, I will be home to meet you when the parolers let you out on Sunday and have a cake party in the kitchen. Here is my school picture so you will know me."

"Jozef, the hour is late. I have run nearly to the end of this sheet of paper. God willing, you will be able to decipher the script of an old and tired man-chicken scratches, as they say here in my adopted Midwest, scribblings in the abyss, hieroglyphics. I must close, as I have other, final work to do.

"But bear with me a last moment (with the price of postage these days, I hate to leave any white space unmarked). What I told you about memory-the failing of mine, and the fear-is true, yes, but there is a bit more to it. I recalled the other day the small bottle my grandfather filled with his mourning tears in the days after he was widowed. It was a blue glass, brilliant in the light. On the day of her funeral, he corked it with a dab of wax, placed it in the casket (between her breasts, I recall) and buried it with her.

"Why do I remember such things? That is a mystery. Why do I tell such things to you, to my own dead wife, to strangers at the corner store, to this sheet of paper, to the wind? I suppose it is in order to let my words deliver the memories from their private hiding places and out into the world. Perhaps to charge the grunts and melodies that come off my tongue with meaning, and to launch these into the ears and eyes of another-for no other reason than safekeeping.

"My decision that this be my life's last day came when I realized that with Elka gone (she must be glad to have at last escaped my frivolous musings, and will be somewhat annoyed when I arrive to pester her with them in the beyond!) I have no one left to deposit my stories with. I have lived in this neighborhood for how many years? It seemed I used to know everyone by name and among them there were intimate friends, more than one of whom considered me a hero for fighting with the resistance, once they heard the tale. True, that sort of familiarity is not always pleasant-in fact it grows tedious to hear for the hundreth time about Mr. X's kidney stone operation (twelve he pissed out, one the size of a robin's egg) or Mrs. Y's secret for prize roses (strands of chest hair she'd plucked from her sleeping husband, sown around the roots). Still, we traded these stories in a world of stories, and because of it I was someone.

"Now I am no one. This is a lonely affair. My city block has changed into a place of strangers who rarely stop to speak as they pass down the sidewalk, or cross the alley for a visit. For instance, who can I tell this little story I stumbled across yesterday in my reading? In 1810, Lorenzo Langstrothborn, an aspiring seminarian and inventor of the modern hive was struck with hysterical voicelessness before giving his first sermon. He turned, in desperation, to beekeeping. This saved his life, but it did not free him from sorrows. For the balance of his days, despite the delights of his vocation, Langstrothborn suffered from spells of melancholia, during which he could not bear to be within sight of his hives or even to look at the letter B!

"I ask you, who? And who might care to surrender an anecdote from their own singular drama in exchange for one of mine? This is the commerce that binds us together, friend, and without it I am afraid that we are all-"

And as the old man stops his pencil and fine-tunes his feeble wrist to scribble the next word onto the page, he lifts ever so slightly the index finger of his right hand which has been anchoring his suicide note to the makeshift table, and the breeze, steadily rising since dusk and promising a thunderstruck midnight and rain by dawn, reaches in under the page and raises it into the air where just beyond the author's fingertips a honey-edged current snags it and spins it upward and across the yard, airborne, twirling in a dervish of wind toward the threshold between the low-watt light and the darkness, into which, in another instant, it vanishes.

The old man, swatting his stiff hands about and stirring up a storm of moths, stands and shuffles over to his cane leaning against the rail. Oh, to hell with these aching knees! To hell with this wind! Merciful God, won't you allow a tired soul one last night of peace?

His muttering, as he hobbles toward the alley, sounds like the hum of bees.

"Pepita? Pepita?"

Her aunt kneels down beside her in the yard and loosens the buttons along the back of her dress. This is no time to be proper, she says. Your foolish uncle has seen it all before, bendicido sea, ha ido a hervir agua y a buscar su asiento.

Inez had come from the kitchen to find Pepita down on all fours with her eyes glazed over and wearing a vacant expression. She was growling like a guard dog, as was the habit of Diaz women in labor, with diluted blood smeared over her legs and feet like a pair of sheer stockings. Inez recalls The Birth Plan (a three-page document) that Pepita and Ernesto devised in the month since they arrived, after studying too many library books with titles like "Special Delivery: How to Guarantee the Birth Experience You Want" and "It's Your Baby: A Postmodern Couple's Guide to the Miracle of Labor." They intended to produce an all-American baby according to correct methodology-a well-adjusted newborn and, most crucially, a U.S. citizen. Pepita's husband still has but a limited command of English, so Inez figured that perhaps the key concept regarding reproduction-that God laughs at our plans-had been lost in translation.

Felix parks the chair on the back walk. For Ernesto, he says to his wife, heir to the throne. Ernesto and Carlos had driven off in the family car that morning because on Sunday's the bus doesn't run to the job site. They aren't expected home until well after dark. Felix unwraps a fresh pack of cigarettes and lights one. He appraises the two women for a moment-a stranger might easily mistake what is going on in their hot little huddle for some sort of violence, a mugging or an assault-then shifts his attentions to the mulberry tree above them, a gnarled, weathered thing that erupts cacophonous birdsong at each rustle of rising wind and in the dark seems as mysterious a phenomenon as what is in the works below.

Old man, Inez calls over her shoulder, get your head out of the clouds and be useful! This girl is about to bust open. We must get to her out of these weeds and into the hospital. Go call the ambulance.

Felix nods and goes inside, past the cauldron of lukewarm water on the burner. Bueno pues, he murmers, alo mejor después puedo hervir un poco de pollo to the telephone. Good evening, he says when the dispatcher answers, and gives the address. My niece is having a baby in the backyard. Please, por favor, come through the alley.

The boy is close enough now for us to hear his winded breathing. His chin cocks as he registers the nearing siren, which has set the neighborhood strays into a keening chorus. Even before it turns into the alley he can place the ambulance by its emergency lights streaking the sky above the rooflines and erasing the low-slung stars. Is it about my father? Has something happened to my father?

Still cursing, Stasio shuffles to the corner of his garage and ducks his head out. His wayward letter, a pure white stamp on the dark, rustles and darts on a spiral of wind, eluding his reach as it careens past, flattens against the fence, then gambols away as if drawn by the banda music playing on a radio across the way until it is drowned from his hearing.

At the first shriek of the siren Pepita remembers herself and leaps from her perch in the tree back into her convulsing body below. She feels wildly disoriented, as if the red flashing atmosphere were some sort of bloody and contracting womb giving birth to her. Inez takes shape beside her and then Felix, unlatching the gate for the paramedics as he announces that he'll follow them to the hospital in the car with Ernesto when he gets home. The foliage beneath her cheek is cool and smells like the iron in rain. As the emergency vehicle pulls up and parks in the alley the baby presses against her spine, with its fontanel at the threshold of the world.

The boy looks up suddenly to see the ambulance door swing open into his path. He skids and swerves left, colliding with the airborne letter. It snags in the spokes of the bicycle's front wheel just as the old man lunges for it, his limbs akimbo and a grunt fired from his chest, so that all he sees in the midst of his precarious waltz is a blur of chrome and wheeling legs before the door hits him and he clutches it to halt his fall as his final dispatch spins off into the dark. Pepita tips over onto the stretcher as directed and feels herself rise in a nest of I.V. tubes and sensors and levitate toward the portal of the ambulance that the old man she recognizes from across the way seems to be holding open for the occasion. "Thank you," she murmers. "Gracias."

Then, the sudden drama suddenly over, Felix and Stasio, left alone together in the still wake, watch the taillights proceed down the alley, turn, and disappear. The two glance over at one another and nod by way of greeting. Good evening, the younger man says. Good evening. The moment, and another, ticks past. Then, My name is Felix Diaz. Thank you for your assistance. In all of this commotion I seem to have forgotten to eat dinner. Would you care to join me?

The old man acknowledges the offer with silence, until, with a barely perceptible uprising in his shoulders, he turns toward this stranger, clears his throat, and says, My name is Stasio Kolyszko. Yes, yes I would like that, and allows himself to be guided by the elbow toward the lit kitchen of the taquería.

And later, after the reunion, as the boy lies in bed with his nerves jacked up on sugar from three pieces of cake and the free lilt of his father's strange voice in the yard outside, he will turn on his flashlight under the sheet and study the beat-up letter handwritten on very white paper that he has retrieved from where it stuck to the spokes of his bike, and its indecipherable script, thick with jammed vowels and odd accents, will seem to him a sort of mystic communication from the beyond, saying what he can't yet divine, though in time he will suspect it of being true confirmation that the last words he whispered tonight into his father's ear were right.