Juan Camilo’s Dream

by Rolaine Hochstein

We were leaving Colombia. The driver was waiting. Dennis, my husband, a man of action, was downstairs with our baggage. I, just a woman, was still upstairs. Tooth brush and toothpaste zip-locked in my shoulder bag. Drawers empty (except for the Bible in Spanish). Hangers bare in a bare closet. Pesos for the chambermaid left on the writing desk. My hand was on the door knob when the room phone rang. I ran for it. The caller was Juan Camilo.

“I had the most interesting dream,” he said.

I sat down on the edge of the double bed.

We were traveling in Colombia, Juanca began. You and Dennis and me and another person—Norteamericano. This other person was suffering from a toothache and I had to take him to a dentist. We were all sitting around a small round table outside some café and someone came out from the bar next door. I could see him so vividly. Another Gringo—old, with wrinkles, wearing khakis and a khaki hat with the kind of hemisphere top and the big brim.

“An explorer’s hat,” I said.

Juan continued with a characteristic change of tense.

I see him so vividly. He comes directly to our table.

Before he gets there he says, Betty! He stands behind the man with the bad tooth. He says, Betty! Is it really you? I don’t remember his name in the dream so I’ll call him Larry. You squeal, Larry! And he is an old friend from high school. Maybe college. And Dennis is looking not at all happy and you are saying, Larry it’s wonderful to see you.

I could see Juan’s delight, his smile almost a perfect circle because his mouth was wide open in amazement at the doings in his dream. But Dennis was waiting.
C’mon Juan, I wished, let me go. But Juan was, as always, swept up in his tornado of enthusiasm. His café-con-leche skin was puckered with devilment,

And I am saying, We can’t stay here. We have to go to the dentist. And Larry is saying, But Betty, I have so many stories to tell you. And you say, Look, Larry. Stay right here. Don’t move. I’ll come back to you straight from the dentist. And that was the end of the dream.

“Good,” I said. “Because Dennis is waiting downstairs. The taxi is here.”

“Whoops,” Juan said. “I’ll put on clothes and be down in three minutes, no more than five.”

The lobby was open-air like so many places in Cali and already blanched in morning light. Dennis was standing among our check-ins and carry-ons amid tongues and fingers and fists of green protuberances, bushes and trees and shrubs growing out of the ground, hanging from the walls, rising from ancient Inca pots. He gave me his adorable look of feigned admiration at how late I can manage to be. I dropped into a bamboo chair beside a gushing waterfall. “Juan will be right down,” I told him. “He had a dream he wanted to tell me.” Dennis was spreading sun protection over his nose and forehead and bald spot. “It must have been an all-nighter,” he commented without rancor. I love my husband for good reason. It was his idea to take a vacation in Colombia. He wanted to be high in the Andes (high altitude-wise, I mean. Dennis is a down-to-earth guy with no bad habits). Besides, in Cali, now that the city was on the rise, nobody seemed to mention drugs.

The day was starting to get hot, and the driver had come inside, swabbing his face with an extra-large, extra-colorful handkerchief and talking to me in Spanish, which I couldn’t understand. Then, like a fanfare, Juan was there, to hell with the elevator, jumping the last four steps, zooming in with armloads of baggage and his shirttails flying. “I hope I’m not too late,” he said with a face you’d have to forgive for anything.

The ride to the airport took us climbing up the sides of the bowl of the city, on newly-paved roads that cut between fat, curious trees leaning in, looking at us, just a little bit menacing, leaves like giant paws and claws, and pushy bushes, variously green—for Go, for envy, for being new at the game or in one’s salad days, as green as green gets—and splintered with pokes of HD flowers—wine-drunk purple, showbird yellow, bloody red, orange gone mad. The mountains served as neutral background, solid greens with a bright sky topping. These mountains, though steep and hulking, were cozier than our mountains up North. They stayed green all the way up and the tops were scalloped and smooth as lollipops. We were speeding in ascending circles so that all that landscape became spectators and we were the show. The car was compact and Japanese. The driver was a white guy. The air conditioner was pitched on high and his handkerchief was now a neckerchief. Aside from being a speed freak, he seemed to be a friendly guy with comic strip good looks. Anything to say, he addressed it to Juan, who would have understood if he could have heard it. Juan was in back with me and the bags that didn’t fit into the trunk. He was leaning forward to tell his dream to Dennis, who was in front with a seat belt on and phantom-braking, I knew. Dennis kept his eyes on the road while he was leaned back to listen. I was listening, too. The dream had filled out since the first telling. Juan’s English, of course, was impeccable.

The American with the bad tooth was bellyaching all the way. He was complaining about everything. The hotel wasn’t good enough. He didn’t like the guard at the gate. Why does he sit there holding a rifle? he kept asking. Inside the hotel, the air conditioning was too weak. The bed was too soft. Outside, the taxis were too small. The food was too spicy. He was a real complainer.

“Who was he?” I asked.

Juan thought. “Maybe he was your friend Tom.”

“Tom!” I howled. “No way!”

But he could have been. Maybe he was. Tom had planned to come down from Texas and meet us in Cartagena. Tom and his wife and sometimes not his wife often joined us on vacations. This time, at the last minute, he had canceled the trip because of illness—real or feigned we hadn’t found out yet. Maybe it was a toothache. But Tom was usually an A-one travel companion. It took some effort to imagine him being a pain-in-the-neck. And yet…

Juan Camilo has worked with Dennis’s firm for a long time. He had met Tom once or twice when we’d all gone out in New York. Tom, though Juan didn’t know this, happens to be a bit phobic—heights, tight spots. He had reason to bow out of our trip as Dennis penciled it out with his mind on the Andes. Tom was a stocky six-foot-three. He might have found ample grounds for dissatisfaction—dinky cars on steep slopes, dirt roads like the downswing of a roller coaster. A couple of no-star lodging establishments. Spicy food. If he had a sore tooth he would probably not have been able to eat the fruit—the luscious mangos and scrumptious papaya, the slurpy tangy guanabana, naranjilla with fat beads of juice, the chontaduro and the guava, and purple passion fruit that we rolled in our mouths and pressed with our tongues and sighed over like after-sex bliss.

Deprived of fruit, Tom would have been testier than his usual benign self. The man in the dream needed to see a dentist. That made sense. Juan Camilo’s father was a dentist, though many years ago he had sold his practice to devote himself to playing polo.

And you were so happy to see Larry, Juan was saying to me. He was sitting back now, addressing me over two of the suitcases. Dennis was…he made a face that smelled something faintly rancid. “Disgruntled?” I said. “Yes. Disgruntled,” Juan said.

“So who’s Larry?” he asked me with his misbehaving smile.

I thought. I asked Dennis. “Could it be Larry who comes with the fish soup?” Larry is a graphic artist who lives in our building in New York. He makes a soupe de poisson, really French, with much garlic and a little Pernod.

“No.” Juan said firmly. (Juan loves Larry’s fish soup). “I only gave him that name for the dream.”

I thought again. Deeply.

“Maybe he’s Manny Valente from high school. I Googled him a couple of months ago. We’ve been emailing. He stayed in our home town and married some local girl—I mean, woman. He’s got arthritis now and says he doesn’t get out much.”

Juan wasn’t sure. “He was old and wrinkled but he was wearing the clothes of an adventurer. He wanted to connect with you. You’re an adventurer, Betty.”

“Adventuress,” I corrected him.

Juan is the most heterosexual man I know. Put him in a bar or dance hall and he immediately becomes the center of a daisy with all the petals hanging around him and not a single loves-me-not. He likes the Heterosexual title. “I have to keep at it,” he said recently with a shadow of worry. “I will soon be almost fifty years old.”

I wasn’t overcome with sympathy. Juan is at least a dozen years younger than my husband. More, if I wanted to be frank. Juan’s girlfriend in New York is Viki. His girlfriend in Medellin is another Viki. Coincidence. Everyone from Colombia has emailed the New York Viki, who has prior claim, about the new Viki (Juan, too–he keeps no secrets) but New York Viki isn’t jealous. Correction: only a little bit of residual jealousy, because she and Juan are in the process of dissolving from lovers to old friends and it is to be expected–encouraged, really—that he should see other women while she sees other men. Many other men, in her case, even though she’s no spring chicken.

My Dennis still finds it hard to look at Viki, the New York one. He says he is blinded by the sun of her beauty. (I’m not jealous). The Medellin Viki is by no means bad-looking, not as blinding, but just as sexy and athletic, as hot a dresser, almost as cheerful, and in addition she’s a highly-placed executive at Colombia’s second to richest oil company. She, too, is close to fifty but both Vikis in clothes look like the lean and nubile young women who go naked in the locker room of my gym, where I keep a towel wrapped around me, even though I have nothing to be ashamed of. Colombians all look younger. No surprise. Medellin–once best–known for epic drug activity–is now at least equally famous for cosmetic surgery. Everybody does it (cosmetic surgery) and all the while they’re eating that fortifying fruit and going out dancing every night. Juan looks younger, too.

Neither Viki shows up in his dream. Here is cause for wonder. Why is he dreaming of Dennis and me and a cranky friend with a dental problem? To say nothing of my tie-in with a high-school sweetheart who is single again?

You can’t go far in the Cali area without coming upon the eponymous river, an energetic worm of a river—chugging through a curly crevice between the jungle and the mountainside or streaking headlong at eye-level behind an innocent pineapple field. I always thought pineapples grew on bushes in Hawaii but here they were in Colombia—lined up in squat platoons, acres of them, growing right out of the sloping ground. Even everyday fruit like pineapples–there isn’t a way to describe them that’s rich enough, juicy enough, tasty enough, radiant enough. Manny, when he saw me, was a little like that, even though his posture was not as straight as it used to be and the skin on his face—once so smooth and tight–was now rough and saggy. CocaCola eyes that used to send out sparks of dazzlement …they were chocolate now, deep set, but… Betty, he sang out in his undiminished baritone, arms wide (with his cane like a baton), smile wide with the small indented teeth (now varnished with age) that I remembered from his invitation to dance on the gym floor while the chaperones kept an eye out. Betty, as if I were the pot of gold.

Dennis is not at all happy to see him, Juan says, relishing the words, taking his usual delight in awkward situations. And I am delighted. Delighted that Juan’s dream features me as the object of erotic jealousy. Larry, our affable, soup-making neighbor, has made a Faustian exchange with my teen-age love interest. And what about poor Tom? Poor pain-struck Tom sits sourly over his coffee—Juan ordered it iced to assuage Tom’s toothache. Tom is chewing on the ice. “A lousy three cubes,” he grouses. “And besides that, they’re skinny.” We were on a terrace overlooking the sidewalk of a nice residential section of this ambitious Colombian city. But this scenario improves upon Juan’s dream. Juan allows Tom to fade into the background. In Juan’s dream Tom becomes nothing but a toothache. How like Juanca, I have to notice, to bring someone to a party, promise him a good time, great food, sparkling beverages and sparkling company (and perhaps a little goody bag)–getting his hopes high and then just leaving him in some vacant corner, hunched over a not-very-strong aguardiente…

Maybe Tom is yin to Juan’s yang. Or maybe Juan found out that pre-toothache Tom, in genial Texas mode, had once invited New York Viki to come out West for a barbecue on his ranch, expenses paid. Or that Tom on another occasion had failed to respond to our neighbor Larry’s fish soup despite Juan’s rave review. These possibilities are impossible to penetrate. Juanca, by the way, is what Colombian intimates call Juan Camilo to distinguish him from Juan Fernando, called Juanfer, and Juan Luis and Juan Martin and Juan Patricio, etc.

We were on the tree-defined terrace beside the café, making a centripetal circle around the little table. I pushed my chair back to make room for Manny. Juanca called for another cup of strong black Colombian coffee (ha-ha, it was from Ecuador because all the Colombian is exported) but Manny stopped the waiter and told him descafeinado. We all moved our cups and saucers to give Manny some table space and I was happy thinking how he and I would soon be regaling an audience with home-town gossip and scandals, Manny filling me in on what was new since I bolted so many years ago.

But before Manny could sit, Juan Camilo rose from his chair and reminded us that we had to go to the dentist. Commanded us. With a smile, of course. Poor Tom, we remembered. Juanca, for all his mischief, was often able to put the needs of others before his own.

I couldn’t say No. (Ask my therapist). I wanted to stay in the cafe. (Therapists never tell). I wanted to stay with Manny and hear his stories. Dennis had his eye on me. I could tell he was thinking I’d gone to bed with Manny, a youthful escapade filled with guilt and ecstasy. (Maybe he thought I’d gone to bed with Larry, too, in love with his fish soup). He thought I’d been in love with Manny and never gotten that first love out of my system, as Juanca might have said in his fondness for Gringo clichés. Dennis had never asked about my private life, assuming—I assumed–that he was my private life. Had he asked, I would have assured him that Manny as a youth was only a fantasy lover, or would have been if my fantasies had dared to venture that far. Still, it pleased me to imagine Dennis imagining me in the heat of an affair. If in the dream he was a little bit aroused, a little bit curious or even ferociously worried, I might have savored his discomfort—not wanting to hurt him, of course. I would not want his discomfort to dig into him like the cutting aroma of Colombian garden herbs, their rosemary, their basil. But I might have liked him to be, let’s say, piqued by the more delicately suggestive scent, to put a finger on it, of their digitalis flower, so subtly sensual as well as medicinal.

So of course I went to the dentist with my suspicious husband and suffering Tom (whose toothache now joined Juan Camilo at center stage). There was no way out, especially as the dentist was Javier, Juan’s father the polo player, and I needed to say hello. Juan’s mother Estella would be the handsomely coiffed, elegantly poised wife-hygienist, who was not much older than I claimed to be. I must chat with her, too. Buenos dias, Senora.

I said to Manny, “Stay here and wait for me.”

And Manny stayed, of course. He lowered himself into one of our deserted chairs and pulled up to the tiny, glass-topped table strewn with variously-emptied coffee cups and coffee-stained saucers and pink paper sugar wrappers and crumpled little paper napkins, a disarray of spoons like bodies after an explosive drug raid, and a crushed paid check. Manny rubbed his pants belly, spread his legs wide, leaned against the caned chair-back and looked into the setting sun. The brim of his explorer’s hat protected his eyes, I hope. As our little group descended from the terrace, I turned to wave to him once more and to tell him once more that I would be back.

The horizon: a swollen orange sun easing down into the mountaintop. The far distance: eerily tall wax palm trees stabbing the sky like spooky, spaced-out solar units. Middle distance: elephantine ceiba trees with enormous lumbering roots, canopy trees with white-washed leaf-tops, strangler figs, eucalyptus, marmalade bushes, fuchsia and bougainvillea vines. Closer in: verbena shrubs with fading colors and then the dear, tiny-flowered border plants and mosses. In the foreground Manny waited, closing his eyes in the cooling breeze.

The Change

by Kathleen Hellen

Mitzi wasn’t her name; it was the name Dad had given her because it sounded like a movie star’s—more exotic—a nickname he had given her after they married, when she started working for him at the bar. A photograph of Margaret Ella Simmons posing on a beach resembles one of those 1950’s Hollywood studio publicity shots. At the corner of her mouth she had penciled in a beauty mark like Marilyn Monroe’s. She drew her eyes round and stupid-looking like a cow’s, glued a fringe of mink as eyelashes. Another photograph: Summer, 1956, my mother in a sleeveless turtleneck brandishing a cigarette like Bette Davis. In her eyes, what was it? Hatred? The affect of boredom? Despair?

Seven days a week Dad was at the Carousel, the bar he had bought when he came back from Japan after the war. Mornings he mopped the linoleum floors, switched kegs and cleaned the beer lines; scrubbed glasses at the sink, and hauled up cases—Jim Beam, Four Roses, Old Grand-Dad—from the dirt cellar; evenings he played bouncer and supervised the barmaids, including Mitzi who worked the shift from 7 to closing. In the few hours he wasn’t at the Carousel he was snoring on the couch in front of the black-and-white Motorola. He only stirred if I changed the channel to cartoons. Meanwhile, the Eva Gabor wigs were coming in the mail like party invitations. Short wigs, long. Blonde and black. A fiery copper-red. Whenever she put one on, Mitzi assumed the character: The Sex Kitten. The Mysterious Dragon Lady. The Blonde Bubble Head who waltzed around the house, singing “Que sera sera” with Doris Day on the record player, a duo of whatever will be, will be…..

By now Mitzi was having an affair with Uncle Al. We started calling him that after he showed up one Sunday with a brand-new Singer sewing machine. She’d been asking Dad to buy her one for years but he always made some excuse: the till was short three months in a row or another barmaid had quit after “stealing him blind.” The Singer hummed constantly when Mitzi wasn’t working at the bar; she hemmed Dad’s pants, made curtains for the front room that looked out like a storefront on to Main Street, she made our dresses for school she called “shifts.” The next thing we knew, Uncle Al was stopping by the apartment every weekend in his beat-up truck to take us to the farm or Spillway Lake. It got so obvious my Dad put his fist through the wall, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate.

That was only the beginning. Mitzi started sleeping with a baseball bat under the bed. She started taking pills for weight loss my sister called “robin’s eggs.” From 120 to 100 pounds, Mitzi lost her “baby fat” Dad called it, but she was also always agitated and prone to crying jags that locked her in the bathroom for hours and from which she emerged, all red and puffy, her eyes swelled up like golf balls. My sister took over the cooking, toasting hot dogs for dinner over the burner, the way you toast a marshmallow over a camp fire. She washed the dishes, washed the clothes, kept an eye on me. “Maybe if they kill each other, I’ll get some sleep,” she’d say, and stab a sizzling hot dog with a fork.

The bar had become everything. Not only did we live in its apartment—dark rooms, dark paneling, cold linoleum floors—it had insinuated itself into our lives, exacerbating Mitzi’s drug-induced behavior. Sometimes she got so drunk she fell off her silver stilettos. Or she slept all afternoon, her bedroom reeking of cigarettes and Harvey’s Bristol Cream—the booze Dad had suggested she drink because it would be easier on her stomach. Once she tried to stab him with a kitchen knife. Another photograph: the two of us girls in halter-tops and boxy shorts. I was squinting, shaking my fist—at what? The camera? Whoever was taking the picture? “Do you think they’ll get a divorce?” I asked. But my sister was changing too. She started sneaking out at night to meet boys in the dug-out. I made my escape in movies.

The Blob was the second in a series of sci-fi features that had hit the Anton Theater on Third and Main. I thrilled to it. How else to explain why these people called my parents had become so strange? An alien life had consumed them. Run…the trailer warned—against that oozing, creeping thing that slid into the rows of darkened seats, through the agitated shadows of the projectionist’s booth, into the movie of a movie, a red, pulpy slime that would transform us. It was everywhere. Near Whiskey Point, at the hairpin turn, so many unexplained accidents. In October two men in a car were approaching the bridge when they saw an egg-shaped craft floating above them. They were burned when the object lifted, flying away.

If only I had known its power, so insidious—not human, not animal. A growing jelly-mass of alien life-form that had slipped into the bar that August night to grab a Yoo-Hoo from the cooler. I don’t know what had awakened me. The train? A rumbling like some living thing trapped inside the walls. The shaking. A long low whining in my sleep. I slipped out of bed, tiptoed down the hallway, the cramped rooms on one side. The narrow kitchen overlooked the pony-league field and dug-outs, the tracks that stretched from here to someplace in Ohio. B&O. The P&LE. The door to the adjoining bar was shut. If the movie had a score, it would have been that finger-snapping, toe-tapping song that was the prelude to The Blob oozing toward us. On the screen, suddenly: The house lights had gone down, the curtain had drawn back, and now there was Mitzi. She had climbed up on the bar with a sledge hammer. She looked huge, feral in her leopard-print capris, Amazonian; the copper-colored wig she was wearing seemed to have burst into flame. She let out a grunt. Her target was Dad’s new National cash register.

The first blow popped out the drawer; it sent metal like shrapnel flying everywhere. Money flew—paper bills shot out helter-skelter, swirling, floating, falling to the floor like ticker-tape in a parade; coins skittered across the linoleum, rolled, spun, collided into each other, into the metal legs of bar stools. At the second blow chunks of flying metal careened into the whiskey bottles lined up on the shelves; the bottles exploding like grenades. A piece of metal hit the neon in the “Mabel, Black Label” sign. It popped, sparked, went out in a fizzle, permanently black. Another piece of metal crippled the potato chip rack, toppling bags into the sink, under which I had crawled and was hiding. “For Christ’s sake, Mitzi,” I heard my Dad wail.

The Carousel closed that weekend for the first time. We never really talked about what happened after that. On weekends, just like he always did, Dad counted up his fives and tens; in paper wrappers, he rolled up the nickels and dimes, the quarters marked red for the jukebox. Dad got a new cash register. Dr. Golomb diagnosed the episode as “Change of Life,” but I knew better. Sometimes I would come home after school to find Mitzi in black leotards and fishnet, wigged like Abbe Lane, twisting, rolling her hips, snapping her fingers to Cugie’s Cocktails on the record player. Sometimes we danced the “Daiquiri” together. The “One Mint Julep.” “The Singapore Sling.” From room to room we did the Latin mambo, the cha-cha-cha, down the narrow hallway, back again, Mitzi leading as I followed, my sister too, sometimes—neither of us knowing where we were going, where Mitzi was taking us, into what dark alien world.

Zeros and Ones

by Michael Don

Our bellies are full of Easter, mine for the first time. I wonder what Neal is thinking. He likes to start and finish his thoughts with silence. I do the opposite. Neither of us is eager to be alone together even though a week has passed and what happened could have happened to any two housemates, any two best friends, any two men in their late twenties. Just by chance, just that one time, just for the sake of not being all or nothing.

Neal’s mom, Beverly she has us call her, is driving us back to Boston. We don’t have a car and Beverly says buses are dangerous these days, too many have flipped over or caught on fire. But I think it’s that she wants to spend more time with Neal. There are four of us in the front of her slim pickup truck. I’m folded up into three quarters of a man.

“Who do you like better, short people or tall people?” Adrian, Neal’s little brother, wants to know. Neal is talking even less these days, so I answer, “Short people,” though I’m the tall one.

Beverly glances beyond Adrian and sees two male figures who for many years have not been boys but who also don’t live like men. She glances a second time in search of a clue, because these days Neal will only offer one or two words at a time. Maybe she notices the physical space between us, an inch we’ve managed to create out of nothing, but what could that possibly let on? She looks again and rests her eyes on Neal’s emerging beard, a length of facial hair he has never attempted. “Makes you look distinguished,” Beverly says, letting the car drift across a lane of traffic.

The blaring horn of an eighteen-wheeler jolts us out of our private thoughts. I pop out of my seat, my head stopped by the ceiling. Beverly yanks the wheel and swerves back into our original lane. Adrian squeals then pushes out a string of staccato breaths. I find my hand clutching Adrian’s knee and quickly pull it back hoping it wasn’t there too long. Neal stares blankly at the road in front of us. He has no reason to react to a near accident. What’s done is done, and what will happen will happen. What’s avoided is avoided.

We pass a sign that reads “Worcester 25, Boston 68” and our vehicle starts going much faster. Beverly seems of no particular age. She went to college on a swimming scholarship but dropped out and married when Neal started growing inside her.

“Do you like brown grass or green grass better?” Adrian is only nine but weighs as much as Neal. His flesh flattens against my left side.

Beverly’s frizzy hair blows into her mouth then she sighs and rolls up the window for a quarter of a song on the radio before she can’t take it anymore, rolls it back down, then lights up a Merit.

“Brown grass or green grass?” Adrian demands an answer.

I want to take back some of what I said at Easter dinner, but I also want to say more. “Brown grass,” I finally say.

Adrian looks satisfied with me then turns to Neal. “What about you, Neal?”

Neal only shrugs.

I wonder if Adrian is testing us – his questions could easily be metaphors. Now I worry I chose wrong. I was just trying to have fun, right? Go against the grain, to see what happens. “Actually, I like green grass better,” I say, but no one seems to hear me.

The road curves right, and now I’m pressed against Neal. His oblique holds its ground and digs into my side. I wish he were softer.

“Brown or green? Green or brown?” Adrian shifts in his seat pushing me further into Neal and Neal further into the window.

“Yeah, yeah,” Neal finally says, “I prefer concrete.”

“The guest makes the toast,” Neal’s dad said. “That’s how it works at the Caraker house.”

I used simple words like “Grateful, wonderful, together, special, family, delicious, feast,” but without knowing it, I left out a few words everyone was expecting to hear. Neal’s dad popped up, thanked me, and finished what I started. I should have been silent and grateful, but that’s not the way I work when there is more to say, so I jumped up and resumed center stage to the clinking of glasses. “I want to thank you all again for having me.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Neal’s clenched jaw telling me to wrap it up and sit down before I let on too much, before I made Easter about something it’s not, but I needed to admit to something. “And what else can I say other than” – I looked to Neal ’s dad’s girlfriend for empathy, a short Guatemalan woman who during the kid’s egg hunt had politely answered a series of questions about Mexico from Neal’s grandma, but she was looking down at her plate of ham and green bean casserole and scalloped potatoes. “This is my first Easter,” I announced. Blank faces turned into jumpy eyes and gentle smiles. “And it’s even better than Passover!” A couple of chuckles. “And I have a hole in my sock.” Roars of laughter. “And once I peed in a Gatorade bottle because I was too lazy to walk all the way to the bathroom.” One pity laugh. “Just one room away,” I added. A collective sigh. And I masturbated in my grandma’s living room. And the Synagogue bathroom. And I thought about people way younger than me and some way older and some in this very room. And I’ve never physically harmed anyone, well, not a human being, but sometimes I imagine a situation in which I do. And sometimes I consider stepping in front of a bus so I can face the inevitable on my own terms. And I cheated on every single assignment in my college computer science class. The only concept I bothered to learn was binary. The simplest of them all.

There are four urinals at the rest stop bathroom but Adrian pulls up next to me. Neal hangs back by the sinks. Adrian finishes first. While I shake off those lingering drops, Neal whispers to Adrian. I turn my head slightly but can only make out a phrase here and there, “not polite…too crowded…that guy.”

On the way back to the truck, Adrian asks Neal, “Who do you like better, Mom or Dad?”

“Beverly,” Neal answers automatically.

Adrian frowns and waits for an explanation.

Our legs are stiff, our upper bodies sore, so we zigzag back to the truck delaying things as much as possible. We pass a group of three men and two women, wearing UCONN sweatshirts and hats, leaning against a blue Escort missing a couple of hubcaps. They share one cigarette and flirt with each other in all sorts of different combinations.

“I like them both,” Neal says forcefully. He then softens his tone, “For different reasons.”

Back on the highway the blue Escort flies by us, smoke billowing from its tailpipe, arms dangling out the windows, indie rock blasting. I think of our trip to Montreal back when we were in college. A bunch of us went up in our friend’s mini-van with only our wallets and winter coats. We popped in and out of shops, flipping through racks of shirts we found intriguing but would never buy. We drank dozens of Labatt Blue and finished the night at the casino hemorrhaging what little money we had. We kept saying stupid things like, What happens in Canadia stays in Canadia and Spring Break 1997, woot woot, even though it was November of 2001. At the casino I lent Neal fifty bucks because his parents still received his bank statement, and he didn’t want them after the fact to learn he’d been in Montreal. Neal had been talking to his parents less and less as it was becoming clear they were talking to each other less and less. He wasn’t trying to keep secrets, but he wasn’t going out of his way to keep them updated. He didn’t want them to keep him updated. On the way home we pulled off the road and slept in the van, using each other’s shoulders as pillows, our breaths musty, our clothes sweaty and stuck to our backs. We were drunk and exhausted and a bit dejected from losing all of our money at roulette. But we woke up in good moods, content to be heading back to our little bubble where together we ate and slept and wrote papers and made love to our girlfriends, not realizing that one day in the near future many of us would drift to different corners of the country, buying houses and making families with people whom we’d yet to meet.

Adrian grins at the speeding Escort and says, “What do you like better, going fast or going slow?”

“It depends,” I say.

Adrian nods. He does not care what it depends on. He just wants both of us to answer his question.

“Neal?”

“It depends,” Neal agrees.

Adrian continues to grin. He is amused by our answers.

Beverly eases up on the accelerator, and the back of the blue Escort disappears around the bend.

Back in our college days, Neal and I lived in one of the smallest doubles on campus. I dated Rachel and he dated Cynthia, roommates who lived in one of the largest rooms on campus. They pushed their beds together to create separate quarters for sleeping and studying. Neal and I figured doing the same might open up our space, so we did and it did.

Later that day we played Wiffle ball on the quad. After a couple of games, the other boys gulped down Gatorade in the student union while Neal and I lay in the grass. I revealed my recently acquired fear of death as if I was the first person to recognize our non-permanence. “You’re no different from anyone else,” Neal assured me. I laughed, then said, “That’s not even close to true.” The sun in his eyes, Neal only squinted. “We’re full of disparity!” I declared, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right word or if I was even responding to him. The brewing of the clipped grass, damp soil and our sweaty backs emanated a rich earthy odor that reminded me of what I had recently discovered under Rachel’s jeans. Neal patted my thigh and forced a smile. I must have amused him. But he in his coolness, in the way he never bothered to worry about the things that make us or don’t make us, filled me with an urge to do something I’d never done. I waited for a pack of off-balanced frat boys to pass, then rolled onto Neal’s stomach, pinning his hands above his head with my hands and his thighs down with my thigh, elbows with elbows. A bead of sweat rolled off my cheek onto his lip. “You’re so goddamn calm,” I avoided shouting, not wanting to draw any extra attention. Neal only breathed. I shifted so our bodies aligned with each other in a way that felt both pleasant and painful. I kept him there. I occasionally shifted to feel more friction, but ultimately the lack of movement, with all that potential, became too much, as if holding your breath. The others emerged onto the quad, refreshed and ready to start up again. We let our bodies untangle and pretended we were just boys being boys, but later in his steadiest, coolest voice, he said, “You better sleep with one eye open tonight.”

We left the beds together. To move them we would have had to acknowledge certain things. But when Rachel and Cynthia finally saw the arrangement, Rachel forced out a throaty laugh and Cynthia said, “Very funny, guys.” And then, before we headed out to dinner, Rachel insisted we separate the beds, “In case we get back late and you’re too tired.”

“What’s Jewish?” Adrian looks to Neal.

Beverly’s phone rings. She checks her screen, smiles and then leans on the accelerator. Neal clamps his mouth shut and nods. I think of the woman who showed up during dessert and hung back from the adults, haphazardly watching the kids hunt for eggs between short intense glances at Beverly. We blaze through Framingham. Not a single car passes us. My left side tingles. My right side aches.

“Are you Jewish, Neal?”

Beverly shakes her head as though she’s made some terrible mistakes and they’re finally affecting the well being of others. “It’s not good to ask so many questions, hon.”

These questions are nothing, I think. They’re not metaphors. They fill time and space and that’s it. They spew from a nine-year-old’s mouth – a little boy who eats too much junk food and plays too many video games – who arrived eighteen years after his brother – who has every right to be curious until –

“Am I Jewish?” Adrian interrupts my thought.

The gentle curve of the exit ramp is enough to send Adrian into me and me into Neal. I now remember the way Neal’s hipbone dug into my thigh and how mine must have dug into his. I can’t blame him for what happened. We were free, between girlfriends, had enough money, an entire city to run around, yet we’d been this way for years with no one to obsess over, no one to make decisions for or with. All it took was a late night in the living room, a few beers, another round of our perpetual argument over which city had the best baseball fans, followed by a particular silence; me pinning him down like that day on the quad, excited and frustrated, not knowing which feeling to follow. “I could really stand to hurt you,” I said. Neal’s silence was inviting and assured me we could try something new and never have to talk about it.

“Short people,” Neal says. “I like short people better than tall people.” The question was asked back on I-95 over an hour ago, but I’m the only one who recognizes how this answer could matter.

We hurry through the narrow, winding streets of Boston, just barely avoiding other cars and pedestrians. Beverly speeds past our split-family house before she uses her entire body to brake and flip the truck around. Neal and I untangle and drop out of the vehicle. Neal limps around the driver’s side and hugs Beverly with one arm. She mostly talks and he mostly nods. Finally Neal says, “Keep an eye on that one,” pointing the crown of his head at Adrian.

Beverly looks at Adrian and must wonder when exactly she’ll start to know him less. She then looks at Neal and must wonder when he became a stranger. If only she could pinpoint the moment. “You look tired,” she says, then waits for Neal to respond, but he just tugs on his beard. “I hope you’re having some fun, not working too much. Letting yourself live.” She waits again, but Neal only nods. “Take good care of yourself.” Beverly’s statements are more posed as questions. Are you tired? Are you having fun? Are you taking care of yourself? What the heck are you up to? Neal continues to nod, sending Beverly back to the truck, unsatisfied, empty-handed. As she opens the door, I blurt out, “We’re taking good care of each other.”

Beverly hovers over the truck. Her face is relieved and curious. She must want to know, How exactly do you take care of each other?

I slap my hand onto the back of Neal’s neck. I can’t see his face because I’m intent on looking Beverly in the eye, but I can feel his body tighten up, holding his breath, waiting for this moment to pass. “We go out on weekends and cook during the week. Plenty of veggies,” I say. Beverly gives me a grateful smile. “We introduce each other to all kinds of new people.” Beverly shuffles closer to us, her eyebrows raised. “Sometimes we have a drink or two and there’s some horsing around.” Neal exhales and I find myself squeezing his shoulder. “Sometimes we get a little rowdy,” I add.

I bite my tongue and squeeze Neal’s shoulder harder, as if wringing out a wet towel. I feel my fingers digging into muscle, not wanting to stop at bone.

Beverly’s smile fades.

Neal doesn’t move. To react would be to reveal. Still I wonder what his silence means. I wonder if he himself knows.

Beverly crosses her arms over her chest and narrows her eyes.

“What’s going on out there?” Adrian shouts from the truck.

This is an excellent question. My hand starts to cramp up, but it’s either this or saying more, so I smile and tighten my grip.

“Are you hurting him?” Beverly says, lighting up a cigarette. Neal’s face must be bright red and contorted. “He’s okay,” Beverly answers her own question.

I wonder if I’m hurting him.

“Beverly,” Neal says softly, but she doesn’t hear him.

He takes a deep breath. My brain clicks back on. He sighs and my hand goes limp and falls from his small shoulder. I frown at Beverly and think to mutter the words “I’m sorry,” but nothing comes out. I’m not sure these are the right words. So I just stand there trying to decide whether to feel proud or guilty. If only one of these options felt true.

“You’re still just boys,” Beverly says, mostly to herself.

“Mom,” Neal says. “He wasn’t hurting me.”

Beverly takes a long drag from her unlit cigarette. “Right,” she says, reaching into her jean pocket and fumbling for a lighter. “He’s practically family.”

Neal won’t reply. He won’t utter another word. He won’t say what we are because words like friend and family and lover bleed into each other. He won’t assure Beverly that they’re still mother and son and always will be, and after many more years of growing apart, they will one day start to grow closer.

Neal and I idle over our unkempt lawn, willing a tree to fall or even a phone to ring. Beverly waits in the truck. She wants to make sure we get in. She wants to see which one of us opens our front door. She wants to peek inside. Neal scratches his beard, how he hates facial hair. I refuse to think what I sometimes think: two men in their late twenties should not live together. Adrian leans over Beverly and waves out the window, his pudgy hand flopping around like a fish washed to shore. Our neighbors are pulled out of their side of the house by a chocolate lab. They seem older than us but younger than most people. They wear jeans and sweatshirts and always seem to be yawning. They keep to themselves, but we know sometimes they fight and sometimes they make love.

Maybe the Best Catcher Dickie Pracht Ever Had

by Paul Dickey

Dickie Pracht, Tommy’s favorite pitcher, admitted he hadn’t actually seen Tommy for twenty-five years. Anyway, at the last minute at the grave site, Tommy’s daughter invited Dickie to the family lunch provided by her church. Tommy had often spoken highly of Dickie and that seemed reason enough.

The Reverend Vance Allen Cauthon, Senior Pastor, presided and opened with a word of prayer. Dickie fumbled with a paper plate of fried chicken and corn to find a seat. He says, “Tommy was the best catcher I ever had.” And he remembers that Ronnie and I were pretty good bat boys. He is trying to be nice, but I protest: “No, Dickie, Ronnie and I also were players.” Dickie says, “Well, maybe we let the little kids play if the score was twenty to nothing.” With a grin as big as Lucifer, he says that Tommy was his best friend and he knows Ronnie is Tommy’s little brother. Dickie says that Tommy always kept him out of trouble, took him bass fishing whenever he always wanted to do something else.

I dropped by the head table. Being a sentimentalist that day, I said to Tommy’s ex-wife that we all wonder now in our own way and our own faith who will keep us out of trouble now that Tommy has been tossed out of the game. “That Ump sure blew the call.” She looked at me as if I were just playing right field. I supposed it was the grief. Rev. Cauthon who was in charge of the table had some suggestions and recited us passages from the rule book. Maybe he is right and Ronnie and I should just take our mothers home any way we can, telling them anything they already believe.

“No way,” Dickie interrupts. “No way.” He’s still the ol’ devil Tommy’s mother always claimed he was. “There still is a ballgame to play. It’s not twenty to nothing. Tommy would have wanted us to finish,” Dickie added sheepishly. So we hung around for hours hanging bat handles through the chain-link fence, cheerleading that all we need is a few good hits and a bit of luck and maybe we can get back into this thing. Maybe Dickie himself even has a few more good innings left in him. Though everyone (even Vance somehow) knows that this ballgame was called hours ago on account of darkness.

Issue 37 – Fiction

The Chill by Richard Burgin

A man walks into a bar and decides that he will tell a joke beginning with those exact words–“A man walks into a bar.”

Maybe the Best Catcher Dickie Pracht Ever Had by Paul Dickey

Zeros and Ones by Michael Don

Our bellies are full of Easter, mine for the first time. I wonder what Neal is thinking. He likes to start and finish his thoughts with silence. I do the opposite.

The Change by Kathleen Hellen

Juan Camilo’s Dream by Rolaine Hochstein

We were leaving Colombia. The driver was waiting. Dennis, my husband, a man of action, was downstairs with our baggage. I, just a woman, was still upstairs.

In the Cooler at Little Macedonia by Sandra Kolankiewicz

For the months I lived in the City, I worked in a small restaurant called Little Macedonia. The neighborhood had dirty brick buildings with little markets on street level, markets without splashes of flowers for sale out their front doors or exotic tropical fruits and vegetables lined up in crates along the sidewalk outside.

Ghost Lines by James McAdams

“Remember Tour of Duty?” Clyde asked. He filled his glass straight from the tap without removing his eyes from the bar’s TV.

Boot Camp by Michael P. McManus

Near midnight it was raining and everyone had left Brian’s going-away party. Brian was gone too, and no one ever knew how long he had been missing in his neighborhood of million-dollar homes.

Solomon by Ryan Napier

From the journal of Solomon Godfrey, captain of the Industrious Cousin, a whaling ship out of New Bedford, Massachusetts:

Sat., Jul. 1. Early this morning, there was fighting below deck.

Apsis by Billy O’Callaghan

After the dreams have come, the mornings feel like glass around me. Everything looks too bright, too well preserved.

Winning Prisoner by June Saraceno

Of the indoor games we played in winter, Prisoner was one of Dare’s favorites. One late afternoon when I had been tied to the small ladder back chair in Dare’s room for what felt like hours, it became my least favorite.

Shiny by Tina Tocco

They were meeting me at school, Dad told her, so Grandma looked for her favorite shoes until she cried. Even if she’d found them, she could never miss what else had gone missing

Stinkman by J. T. Townley

Then Jonathon’s up and over the railing, crimson cape flapping in the September breeze. He falls farther than he expects before hitting the warning track; on impact, he grunts, dropping to a knee.

Per Contra

An international journal of the arts, literature, and ideas.

Category Archives: Fiction