[KSC: I originally wrote Bird of Anguish as a novella. I am in the process of adding a couple of essential characters and developing them in several scenes. These additions will flesh the piece out to a complete, short novel.]

Bird of Anguish

And after the earthquake a fire: but the Lord was not
in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. — 1 Kings 19:12

1.

It is an unusually hot and sticky Indian summer. His name is Flint. He walks across a large tract of wasteland rummaging for aluminum soda cans, tin soup cans, any scrap of metal he can sell. His left leg is lame and when he steps his knee buckles backward until it looks as though surely it must fold. His body rolls up and over the leg as though a wave is passing through him. As though he is stepping up and over some obstacle in his path.

Eventually he comes across an area where no weeds are growing.

How could I have never noticed this before?

A large square area covered over with last year’s leaves – blown from who knows where as there are no trees to be seen – and a scattering of worn, shredded litter, newspapers food wrappers and paper bags that have degraded into a flannel.

With the heel of his palm he smears the sweat across his plum-black forehead and rubs the sun’s heat from his eyes. He is smiling as he begins sweeping his side-split boot through the debris. He shrieks a child’s squeal of joy. He has struck it rich. He looks down again in disbelief and smiles a broad crazy smile. He suppresses this shriek so that it will explode from him and he shrieks again a maniacal wail. His voice a mad echo off those structures that surround the wasteland.

He looks around and begins to hobble toward the tool and die shop along the northern edge of the wasteland, the tool and die shop whose owner he knows, whom Flint considers friend, who declares Flint a vagrant and of no earthly use, yet who helps him when he’s hard up.

He works his way through the borders of chain link fences, weaving between worn-out electrical motors, seized engines and black drums, some filled with motor oil others with garbage still others with ashes from a furnace shut down twenty years before. He sneaks along the weedy drive to the back lot where there is the bed of a pickup truck cold-chiseled from its frame. The bed is filled with chains and pinch bars, the heads of wood mauls and splitting wedges, the links of a bulldozer tread. He takes a length of chain checking that it has a towing hook and sneaks back along the drive shaking his head at his fortune.

At the patch of ungrowth he sweeps the debris away from all four edges of the clearing and finds what he is looking for. He threads the towing hook through a hole, turns toward the north side of the wasteland draping the chain over his shoulder and, despite his lame leg, begins to pull across the wasteland a plate of steel a quarter inch thick.

He struggles for several feet noticing a tomb-hollow echo as the steel plate drags over the rubble of the field. Plainchant of the Lord unscrewing the corroded lid from a large jar releasing either the seeds of lilac or a pestilence that will decimate. He looks back and drops the chain and returns to where the steel plate had been.

He looks down and shrieks again a long twisted wail and falls to his right knee, his left leg warped out awkwardly to the side in a mutant genuflection and with his fists clenched and shaking at the skies he praises God.

For a few hours he makes his way across the field with the steel plate in tow, resting every ten feet or so, kneeling on his right knee, his left bowed outward. Eventually he makes the two hundred yards to the chain link fence around Smithson’s Scrapyard, and in a final burst of energy he bucks and rolls over his lame leg dragging the steel to the front gate.

“Smithy, oh Smithy! You got to come here. Mm-hmm, come see!” he shouts to the cloudy windows that wall the front office of the scrapyard. There is no response so he repeats his plea. A short red-haired man in his fifties rubbing the back of his thick neck comes through a glass-paned door with an iron grille and stands just outside, his hand shading his eyes.

“Flint?”

“Yes sir. You got to come here. Come see!”

“I haven’t any time for that. What is it?”

“Oh, won’t you come see?” He bears a child’s proud smile.

“Flint, I got a hangover split three skulls on Rushmore. What the hell do you have?”

“Just a little ol piece of pure steel nigh a thousand pounds!”

“Steel plate?”

“Yes, sir. Blacker’n me, too. Tain’t hardly but a dust of rust such good, pure metal.”

“Drag it on into the yard.” Flint rounds the corner of the chain link fence dragging the steel plate and pulls it onto the gravel in front of the yard.

“Figure that’s a hundred dollar piece there. Mm-hmm, yes sir,” Flint says.

“Aint much use of steel plate as it is. But it’s not a bad piece. I’ll give you twenty.” Flint looks bewildered and searches the gravel for some dropped clue as to the source of his disappointment. Then he realizes they are bartering.

“Fifty.” Flint looks  up and smiles, dipping his head just once in final agreement.

“Thirty.”

“Forty.” Flint nods again.

“Deal.”

“Then that’s the deal.”

“How about that towin chain. Give you five for that.”

“No sir. Not mine to sell. Borrowed ’at from a dear friend. Got to give it back.”

“What friends have you got?”

“Oh, plenty. Course most don’t know they’re my friend nor that I’m theirs.”

Flint cat-prowls his way to the back of the tool and die shop and lays the chain as quietly as he can in the bed of the pickup. He turns from the bed just as there is a crash at the steel door. The lean shopkeeper has kicked the door open and is standing at the top of the staircase. Behind him in the darkness of the doorway stand a giant and a younger man.

The shopkeeper is leveling a WWII Garand he purchased out of the trunk of a Lincoln at the 49ers Flea Market just up the river. Flint freezes though he is not afraid. He notices the shopkeeper’s eyes more than the rifle. The shopkeeper speaks to Flint as though it is polite conversation.

“What the hell’d I tell you Flint?” Flint pauses a moment for searching the correct answer. The shopkeeper racks the bolt but chambers no shell, for the rifle is empty.

“Catch me in your yard again you put a peephole in my forehead so’s ever one can see the worms in my brain.” Flint smiles.

“What the hell you stealin Flint?” Flint does not answer at first but raises both hands and turns them front and back.

“Nothin Cap’n. Wouldn’t steal from you. You’re my friend.” His brows knit. “You guys are like family.”

“Catch you back here again I plug your ass then call the police,” the shopkeeper says.

Flint lowers his hands and what he notices about the shopkeeper’s eyes is that they are both open, that neither is squinted as he would suspect. Flint sees the rifle is aimed directly at his chest and figures the shopkeeper’s off-eye should be shut. But they are both open and focused intently, as though the shopkeeper can only spare the sight of one eye to the execution while the other must continue with his calculations.

“Get on.” The shopkeeper waves the barrel in the direction of the drive. Flint heads back down the weedy drive not looking away from the snake eyes.

In a minute he is hobbling down the street holding his money up proudly before him counting it. He counts it several times before tucking it deep inside his one good boot.

2.

Along the river, separated by a rutted and pot-holed access road, is an embankment of ballast stone rimmed with a pair of shiny railroad tracks and a pair that has lost its shine. The shiny tracks carry the commuter lines to New York. The others, whose tops are smeared with a thin cream of rust, carried freight cars of steel cabling for a bridge being built in Brooklyn. But freighters and reefers no longer come to or from this city of Trenton.

Beyond the tracks, a wide tract of wasteland and beyond the wasteland a row of warehouses and storage facilities, the shell of a garment factory three decades out of business, pocked by the attacks of vandals, all openings on the first two stories cemented over against squatters. Concrete stained gray-black, remnant of autumn rains. Corrugated tin rusted and peeling from rafter and stud like Bible pages curled when left open too long without being turned.

A drone like a strong desert wind carries from the far side of the warehouses and is the only evidence that the highway there is in constant use and that its riders are passing by this forgotten city as quickly as they can without being halted by its unmerciful police.

North of the wasteland several tool and die shops whose back lots and parking areas are surrounded by chain link fence festooned with a fishline tangle of razor wire. There are printing houses, two union headquarters, a cardboard tube factory, the Brave Tiger White Rope company barely in business. There is a junkyard that recycles scrap metals, sells the V8s and transmissions of American cars, and specializes in metal plating. All are buildings of blackened brick sullied from industrial days, the coalsmoke of the ancient days and the diesel smoke of more recent.
Cutting halfway across the wasteland an unfinished bridge four-lanes wide, coming up from south of the warehouses, rising up a high ramp and curving toward the river.

It is unfinished and its last segment hangs out beyond the support columns as if Atlas-retired stands there unseen upholding what should by rights have fallen years ago, a mythical god still bound to his divine orders, yet forgotten, still committed to his duty, though scorned by a flood of newer worshippers seeking not the substantial but the sensational.

The wasteland and its surroundings are bleached, faded to a pale wash of their original color. It is early December, though it has been as achingly cold as January. The sedge and loosestrife, golden rod, mullein and grasses that cover the wasteland have faded into a singular beige. A thick tangle of nettle covers the ground.

Along the river are unearthed occasionally pits of salt deposited when the city was still under the Atlantic. The soil thick with marl, a good clay marl, is dark gray and wreaks of run-off sewage. Closer to the unfinished bridge the soil is good, for the roadcrew imported sand and fill dirt and blended it with the marl to improve drainage.

It was partly the riverbank clay that helped to establish the city. It was used for pottery, some fine porcelain but not much. The clay was better for everyday tableware, tough and lasting without much style. Farther downstream at the confluence of the Delaware and Rancocas Creek is a type of clay found nowhere else on earth. The clay is dried and processed to a fine gritty powder. This powder is rubbed into the hide of hardballs to break the glaze of the new leather before each major-league game.

The city by way of Roebling Steel not only provided the steel for the Brooklyn Bridge, but its structural engineers determined the grades and tensile strength and how it must be joined and structured. That the bridge would not only accommodate, but would endure.

It was for these industries that the city placed along its six-truss bridge over the Delaware the neon sign in ten-foot letters Trenton Makes The World Takes. That they have not repaired the sign for several years is fitting and even its residents find a sad truthful humor at night that the T of Takes no longer lights.

3.

It is just after six in the morning. The night was bitterly cold. It snowed several days before and the thaw of the day and the freezing of the night made a coarse crust of the few inches of snow. It snowed during the night, another inch. It lies like shattered crystal on its frozen bed. There is a strong steady wind. Even when it abates it whips snowdrift like sand-blasting grit across the wasteland and over the abandoned field makes a white haze that obscures the structures on the far side, a haze made brilliant by the sun in a clear blue sky.

Two men emerge from the steel door behind the tool and dye shop. They stretch at the top landing of the small staircase. One is the shopkeeper, a man of average height, but lean and sinewy. His skin is wan. His hands stained black with the powdered carbon of tooled iron and steel. He has gnawed his nails down to mere slivers of their original form and function.

His hair is a matted steelwool and he wears a wool captain’s hat pushed down hard on the crown of his head and flaring the wire of his hair out in tangles. He has worn it every day for years. He is taking deep intentful drags from a cigarette nestled in the nook of his fingers. Its paper is stained black.

The man with him is a giant. Over six-three and 270 pounds. He has a large square head that translates to his A-frame trapezius muscles with little sign of a neck between. His back is broad and straight and he stands in perfect posture. He is nearly twice the width of the lean man, and the muscles around his shoulders are rounded as lawn-bowling balls beneath his tee-shirt. To look at the two no one could tell they are brothers born eight years apart, the lean being the elder.

The Giant does not smoke. He laughs. The shopkeeper is grave as he always is. Preoccupied. Planning. The day’s work schedule and a few secretive, hundred thousand-dollar schemes on the side. The Giant laughs and bites a cupcake in half then sucks the chocolate cream from his top teeth and moans ecstatically.

They are standing at the top of a small concrete staircase that leads down to a gravel parking area. At the top of the staircase they both lean forward over a rail whose careless paint job is flaking away, bare metal not only free of rust but polished to a chrome shine by callused hands as the tool and die workers labor up those steps every morning, to and from their daily site-jobs, and home at day’s end.

A third man emerges through the steel door and takes his place at the second step beside the Giant. He is sipping from an enameled coffee cup, his upper lip and nose lost in a dense steam. He sips the scalding liquid.

“Goddam almighty,” he says. Cap’n smiles though his eyes are still focused and planning.

“What?”

“Bout melted my lip right the hell off my face.” The Giant raises a 48-ounce plastic mug of steaming coffee and pours it down his throat.

“You gotta watch that coffee in there, Gill. It’s too hot. I don’t drink it. I buy mine at the Brake & Break. That convenience store off Latham? You buy one of these mugs then go back and you get it filled for half price. It’s good coffee. It’s too hot in the shop. You gotta watch that, Gill.”

A single nod punctuates the truth he has learned and shared with this newest addition to the tool and dye shop.

“Dammed straight it’s too hot,” the new guy says.

“How bout I take it the hell out, Gill?” Cap’n says. “I don’t need to spend that kind of money. Costs me $27.30 every week to maintain. How bout I take it the hell out you don’t like it so much?”

He shakes his head slowly and his intent eyes turn out toward the wasteland. He bites the nail of the middle finger holding his cigarette. There is no white of a nail to bite, so he drives the nail down onto his lower teeth and gnaws what he can against the upper.

“They’ve got the best cupcakes, too,” the Giant says.

Gill stretches his thin calves on the step. The two brothers refer to him as the New Guy. He has only been at the shop for a few months. They will continue to refer to him as the New Guy until someone else is hired, even if that should be ten years. Gill looks up at the Giant.

“What the hell’re you talking about?”

The Giant looks down at him and laughs in the falsetto laugh of a child for the new guy is brazen and has already thrown his chest out at the Giant once. But the Giant let it slide. He knew it was because Gill was new and shy and somewhat intimidated working a hard job in a rough part of town.
“The convenience store at Latham and Broad. They have the best deal on cupcakes. I eat a dozen a day. Mmmm.” He bites into one and rubs the barrel side of his chest and stomach.
“Never seen anyone eat like this man,” Gill says to Cap’n behind the Giant’s back.
There is a pause in their conversation during which all three lean over the railing and watch the yellow-green sunrise give way to a lavender that is almost pretty. The Giant swigs from his coffee mug and swallows the other half of the cupcake and moans shaking his head slowly.
“Such a splendid morning. Such a fine life.”
The wind blows snowdrift in a horizontal haze as light as smoke and occasionally rises the snow up in dust devils that disappear as quickly as they rise. The near-white weeds are whipping back and forth but never come upright. The hard stones bone-rattle in the papery china lanterns of the winter cherries.
Amid the haze of snowdrift a wall of white rises from the ground. The powdery new snow whips the rising wall and a puff of steam rises. There emerges the tattered remains of some biped beast that has been ravaged, whose skin hangs in torn strips and threads, a shredded skin of dark green wool and flannel worn through. He rises with the steam in the cold wind and powdery cloud whipping around him. He stands with his back to the tool and die workers on the stairs and stretches before the sunrise.
“What in hell is that?” Gill says. “It’s always something in this god-forsaken place, something from a dream. A dream you want to wake from but can’t.”
He dumps his coffee on the stone drive. The Giant laughs his falsetto childish tee-hee-hee and swallows from his coffee mug.
“New Guy’s scared,” he says and laughs tee-hee.
“Well what the hell is it?”
Cap’n is still gnawing at his fingernail, the cigarette beginning to burn into the fiberglass filter. Its toxic smoke curls through the dense, tangled wire of his soot-blackened hair. He is staring at the wasted coffee that is steaming from the gravel along the staircase.
“Flint.” He turns back to the steel door, pulling it open and kicking a block of iron back into the shop. A screaming hiss from the machinery inside cuts all through the wasteland. “Come on. Breaksover.”
“What was that?” Gill asks the Giant as they go back inside.
“Flint. He’s a vagrant.”
“Was he sleeping on the ground?”
“The utility company dug a pit there to put in a transformer for the bridge lights. Since they never finished the bridge, they just left the pit.”
“And this bum Flint lives in that pit?”
The Giant laughs, tee hee hee and nods his head to punctuate. “Yup. He lives in there year-round.”

4.
Flint closes the trapdoor, two-by-fours found along the fence outside the storage facility and planks from a palette and other driftwood along the banks of the river. A riverbed rock used to pound nails from the palette and to assemble them with scraps of tarpaper from a construction site upriver.
He hobbles through the crusted snow. The new powder works its way into the sidesplit of his boot as his lame leg drags.
“Damn if it ain’t cold. Goddam.”
He moves through the field as if by instinct. He cuts between the chain link fences and onto Cuttle Street in a few minutes, gathering the shreds of flannel about him and trying to tuck them in his pants. He turns off Cuttle onto Hendricks and then onto Rosewood Avenue.
It has been a half hour since he left his shelter, a fifteen minute walk for most, when he finds himself in front of the soup kitchen. The building is boarded up with plywood and the glass above the plywood smashed. He continues down Rosewood.
Rummaging. A fork flattened in the road. Bottle caps. Caps from iced-tea bottles. A crushed soda can. The back shell of a combination lock. A bag to put them in. Down where Elson crosses Rosewood a vacant lot. Kicking through the weeds and snow. A license plate. Top half of a carburetor from a Volkswagon bug. He appraises his haul.
“A dollar. Maybe. Lousy metal.” Off to Smithson’s.
Later in the day he is on Terry Street. Vague feeling of discomfort, changing face of the city. No one’s safe if they have money in their pocket, even a vagrant such as he. An hour or so on a bench at the Commons. Later a nap in a nook of the parking garage behind a law firm. Then back to Terry Street. He opens the door to Dapple Dan’s Soul Food. He stands in line.
Several minutes later Gill enters dinging the bell over the door and gets in line. He’s holding a list of orders for the men in the tool and dye shop. As he waits in line, the warm air of the restaurant macerates the chilled crust and oils in Flint’s clothes. Gill steps back from the sour and antiseptic sweetness he recognizes.
“Dan,” Flint says. The owner looks up from the deep-fryer, his hair a dusty rust color and his face dappled with freckles.
“Flint,” Dan says. Dapple Dan helps feed the hungry. They don’t take advantage of him. When they get some money they pay him. The cost is usually a dollar or so less than what they tell him they have on them when he asks.
Flint orders fried catfish, scrapple, and grits with red-eye gravy dusted with cayenne pepper. Dan puts it in a cardboard tray and bags the dinner.
“How much?” Flint asks.
“1.75.” It leaves Flint with one and a quarter. Flint vaguely notices that the price is never the same for the same order.
He walks several blocks to Rosewood Circle. Gill returns to the tool and dye shop but meanders through the streets following Flint. He stands at a bus stop looking at the neighborhood and watching Flint make his way toward an abandoned gas station. Flint sits on the curb at the abandoned gas station.
The Rosewood neighborhood had been a lovely part of town and a good place to raise a family from the oughts to the fifties. The brick houses that line Rosewood Avenue had a middle-class stateliness.
But that has changed. Landlords own all the old houses along Rosewood and the tenants have abused them into ugliness. The shutters gone. Front doors peeling veneer and mismatched. Panes replaced by plastic taped into window frames. What were once lawns of a plush pile are now worn to hardened unfertile dirt. Litter and broken toys are strewn around most of the houses. Driveways cluttered with stripped automobiles on blocks or resting on brakedrums.
Flint holds the cardboard tray in his lap and begins picking at the catfish and smearing it through the red-eye gravy, tilting his head back and slurping each soaked strip of milky fishmeat down his throat.
All the metal that can be stripped by pliers and hammer from the gutted gaspumps on the concrete island has been. But an older model Chrysler sedan pulls in. The driver, a corpulent man in his fifties, sits for a moment and looks about anxiously pretending he needs gas.
Are the pumps open? Doesn’t look like anyone’s here.
From the lavatory of the abandoned gas station emerges a black of undetermined gender, tall and thin, knock-kneed and unnatural in too-tall highheels. If a bird, he or she would be described as awkward on land. Hair or wig pulled up high on the back of the head. Purse slung over the neck and hanging across the chest. Fake-fur jacket cut to the midriff and no garment beneath. The driver sees him or her approaching.
This must be the lady who pumps the gas. Bout time. Let’s see, should I filler up or only get ten dollars’ worth?
He or she walks to the driver’s window, locks the knees and bends forward at the waist, cat-stretches the back while looking at the driver.
Isn’t that strange. She didn’t even ask if I wanted regular or high test or how much I want. Asked about another type of servicing. Isn’t that odd. Isn’t this a gas station? I thought it was. I might as well see what she has to offer.
They exchange some words while the driver checks the sideviews and the rearview. The driver pulls away. In a few minutes he returns but the he or she who keeps an office in the lavatory walks to the passenger’s side of the car, gets in, and the two drive away.
Flint lays the pulpy meat of the catfish on his tongue and sucks its juices and spices and moans. Gill crosses the street back toward the tool and dye shop.

5.
Two days later Flint sits on the edge of his bedding, two planks resting on cinder blocks. He smacks his lips waking up, looking around his room though he can see nothing because it is dark. In the middle of the room an empty cablespool lying on its side serves as his counter top and cooking range, his dining table and a desk where he remains faithful to his journal. Along the wall opposite his bedding is another plank on a cinder block and an upended tomato crate. On the plank several cans and jars and paper cups with lids. A can of sterno for cooking. Rolled rags. There is no food because he stores no food, rather eats only when he is hungry.
He rubs the sleep from his eyes and then smacks his lips thirsty for coffee. There is a rumbling in the walls of the pit. The objects on the cablespool rattle. There is a concussive sound that presses on Flint’s skull. In a few seconds, the commuter train has come and passed.
He pats the cablespool and finds a book of matches then brushes his hand slowly through the air until he grabs a candle whose drippings have welded its base into the mouth of a clear beer bottle. He lights the candle. He takes the top composition book from a pile in a grocery bag and lays it atop the cablespool. He writes in the journal as he does most mornings.
After putting his journal away, he checks his water supply. All but empty. He works his way up the ladder from his pit, stepping up with his good leg and grabbing both rails with his arms and then pulling, raising his left foot up by bucking his hips and swinging his leg. Settling his weight on his lame leg, it bows backward until he steps up and reaches his hands along the rails and pulls.
The men from the tool and die shop are on the back steps. Gill is watching for the trapdoor to open, sipping timidly from his steaming coffee. Though the air is bitterly cold, the three men are again standing in tee-shirts, Cap’n with a flannel shirt unbuttoned, untucked. The Giant rubs a berry on his forearm. The berry is covered with a mat of dark hair.
The white wall of crusted snow opens, shard of a giant shell shattered and tossing in the wind, tattered flannels worn shiny and black hanging from Flint as the decomposed yolk of a stillborn bird.
“Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gill says. The giant laughs his falsetto laugh. Cap’n bites down onto a bit of nail white and tears.
Flint walks down to the river. He swings his lame leg up and to the side to break through the half-inch ice where the river meets the bank and scoops out a paintcan full of gray water. Back in his pit, he takes a paper coffee cup with a lid from the shelf. From the paper cup he pinches out a clump of blackened roots.
In late summer at the edge of the embankment of ballast stone, chicory grows in abundance. When the periwinkle flowers are rayed and bright and pendulous, Flint pulls them from the ground, knocks the clay from the clutches of their roots and washes them in the gray-green algae of the receding summer waters. After letting them dry in the sun, he roasts them in a soup can over the blueflame of sterno then stores the blackened roots for an occasional cup of something akin to coffee.
He pours the water from the paintcan into a decapitated beer can and heats it over the sterno. As the bouillon of riverwater begins to seethe, he sprinkles the roasted chicory roots into the water and waits for it to boil. In a few minutes the gray murky water is boiling and the chicory roots begin to make a mud-black coffee that he lets boil for a few more minutes and then simmer. He strains this bitter coffee broth through a strip of flannel into a paper cup, though the filter can not remove all the rivergrit and rootbits. He sits on the edge of his bedding sipping the brew. Blowing the steam off it, sipping. The extreme heat down his throat and into his stomach. Moaning.
So good. So good.
The trapdoor is open unto a bright blue sky. The wind kicks and blows what is left of the loose snow down into his pit. He likes the sting of the crystals and then the cold and melting and then feeling the breeze that circles the pit cool the melted snow on his face, on the back of his hands. He looks at the tiny droplets of scintillating water, silver beads on the back of dried black hands.
He removes one hand from the coffee cup and looks at his hand. Makes a fist, opens it. Watches the fingers curl when his brain directs them to. Twitters his fingers. Drums them on the air. Makes a fist. Relaxes it and tickles his palm with his fingertips. That he can feel through his hand the snow melt, that he can touch the world, nature, can feel change through his hand.
Wondrous miracle.
He hears a quick ticking sound in his pit. He looks at the wall across from his bedding. There is a concrete duct that sticks out an inch from the wall and traces straight back through the earth. The duct housed electrical wiring, thick cables of small copper strands, each wire coated with brightly-colored plastic. He worked on that wiring for a week until he cut back as much as he could, about five feet of wire. It was good copper and even Smithson paid him a decent price for it.
The ticking grows louder and there appears at the dark mouth of the concrete duct like an insect emerging from a cadaver’s mouthscream the gray face and the beady black eyes, the quick twitching nose and balance-bar leveling of long whiskers. It sniffs the pit for something edible but smells only a foul brew even he would not drink.
Flint watches him test the air for a few seconds and smiles because it is a curious creature. But he knows he cannot play host to vermin and reluctantly dips the beer can in the water pail and throws water up at the duct. Frantic scratching and ticking, quick and fading.
As Flint follows the diurnal route of his enterprise, the Lord reveals to him another untapped reserve of potential wealth. While walking the length of Viceroy Street, he notices several buildings with faded fallout shelter signs.
When Flint recognizes the signs it brings to mind images he thought were buried forever. He recalls a black and white movie they showed to his class in the late forties. A teen-aged boy in bucks, hair parted on the side and cut short walking beside a girl with pigtails in a plaid dress, both carrying their books with one hand, the other hand draped protectively over the tops of the books. So white they were, so perfectly clean and white in the film, walking down the street happily, smiling.
When he saw the two he realized that the movie was of a particular time, that one day the two in the film would be old and it is true, be dead. It touched him profoundly. Their young faces, their uncorrupted smiles.
He wondered if there was something like poetry in him. There was something increasing in his breast, in his heart or blood, that needed to be uttered. He wanted to capture the moment, the feeling, the realization and tell it to the world.
The more he contemplated what should be captured in poetry, the less able he was to decide. He thought it was futile.
May be I’m just not smart enough to be a poet.
There was in the movie the God-awful flash of blinding white and the two children dove to the ground and nestled themselves against a building. They lay that way for a minute and then, shielding their eyes, rose and ran into a building with a fallout shelter sign.
Those in the class who had not fallen asleep breathed their collective sigh when the two emerged from the shelter unharmed. They sensed, however, while they watched the film, that the two would not rise from the ground whether that flash be of the destructiveness of mankind or the wrath of God, but that their skeletal remains would be a sculpture of ash and would be found where they fell as the remnants of Pompeii.
But they practiced the civil-defense drills faithfully. Not so much for survival as for the bonding of a community, the bonding of the frail, of those overwhelmed by the fragility of life. A bond that has been lost in communities, that once was the fabric of such cities as Trenton.
Flint figures there is a fallout shelter every few blocks. If he’s lucky there might be one sign for every two or three disbanded shelters. Twenty-five cents a sign perhaps if they are not too rusted. He feels continually blessed by providence that he is able to find such reserves.
Were he truly enterprising, though, he would take those signs upriver to the 49’ers Flea Market and sell them for twenty-five dollars apiece to young professionals who would hang them on the walls of their condominiums and townhouses.
At night Flint sets out from his pit. He sneaks behind the tool and die shop and borrows a pinch bar from the bed of the pickup truck. He scouts the buildings along Viceroy Street and finds what may have been a library but now serves as the city headquarters for social services. There are no lights on inside the building but the front entrance is brightly lit by the street lights. The building had a grass yard with trees in front of it at one time, but it has been paved.
Flint paces in front of the building, sweating from anxiety. The wetness on his chest chills in the cold air. He walks up the front walk, hobbles up the small staircase. Leaning over a handrail, he slides the pinch bar up under the sign and pries it away from the stone wall. The bottom two fasteners pop like buttons. The top two remain fixed in the wall and the soft sign tears from around them like wet newsprint. Flint catches the sign as it falls and tucks it under his arm then hurries away from the building.
By the end of the night’s gathering, Flint has eleven fallout-shelter signs cradled in the nook of his elbow. He returns the pinch bar and retires to his bed. Sleep does not come easily as he thinks of the signs and the metal and how much Smithson will pay him for the signs. Thinks of the signs themselves and growing up in a time when people actually noted where those signs were. The train rumbles and Flint fades to sleep.

6.
Next day he knocks early on the clouded glass to Smithson’s office. The door opens and Smithson is there in hungover agony, shading his eyes, his red hair a clutch of tangles, five days of reddish gray bear making him look old.
“Flint.”
“Wanted to get here bright an early. Long day head.”
“Too early. Too cold. Get in and close the goddam door. Lettin out all the heat.”
The office is long and narrow along the front of a metal-plating workshop. There’s an old dark desk on one wall near the door. The desk is covered with piles of folders and papers and scraps of metal. On one corner of the desk there’s the uneaten half of an eggsalad sandwich. The egg part has turned green-black and the crust has hardened and curled.
A high window is tilted open and lets in a strip of light. Melting icicles have washed clean streaks that slit light through the clouded glass.
The office smells of oiled wood, of grease and two dozen types of metals and alloys that have been heated and cooled, of the solder melted by a blow torch to free joints in plumbing. In the middle of the floor the domed top of a kerosene heater is cherry red. Heat and exhaust fumes rise in a crazy dancing sway and disappear a foot over the heater. There is little ventilation in this hermit’s cave rank with whisky sweat and acrid human exhalation. Smithson eats four eggs a day though the eggs do not mix well with whisky.
“Never guess what I got here,” Flint says.
“Don’t care to guess.” A cat is sleeping on the wooden chair behind the desk and Smithson smacks it on the back of its head. It lets out a shriek of bitter protest and leaps from the chair. Smithson falls back into the chair leaning his head back and folding an arm over his eyes.
“Good metal.” Flint smiles, nods agreeing with himself.
“I bet.” Flint pulls the signs from under his shredded flannel shroud and stacks them on Smithson’s desk.
“Where the hell’d you get those? Wait. I don’t want to know.”
Smithson rocks forward and grabs them and lifts them. He turns each over inspecting the metal. Flint notices that those who hung the signs wrote notes on the back of some. About sweethearts forever and where Kilroy had been. Flint looks at the back of the signs as Smithson flips through them and notices painted on the back of a sign: Zephaniah 1:18.
Days of signs and symbols. Signs found even in signs. Like a universe folded over, layer upon layer but all one.
“Good steel, ain’t it, Smithy?”
“Ain’t steel. It’s tin. You got these goddam shingles off public buildings, dincha?”
“Can’t divulge my sources.”
“Good God, Flint, you know what kind of trouble I get in I get caught with these?”
“What’s the difference tween these and license plates and hubcaps? They’re all taken from someone else. Nobody owns them.”
“No one can prove who owns the other scrap metal, Flint. Sweet Jesus, everyone knows where these came from. All they gotta do is find these here and one building that’s had one tore off and I’m charged with possession of stolen property. State property.”
“Good steel, though, ain’t it, Smithy?”
“It’s tin. Ain’t steel at all.” Smithson opens a drawer looking for something then tries to close it. But papers and other clutter have come out and he can’t close it all the way. He stands and begins kicking at the drawer and swearing. “Goddam it all to hell with this damn shop and this damn yard. I can’t take it anymore.”
He gets the drawer closed. Screwed inverted on the wall, the bronze talons of an eagle claw taken from a flagpole mast. Hooked on one of the claws a mackinaw jacket. He takes a pint bottle of Jack from the pocket of the mackinaw and swallows a healthy mouthful. He looks at Flint for a moment then reaches the bottle toward him. Flint shakes his head.
“Right early for anything stronger’n coffee for me. That there’s good tin though, ain’t it Smithy?”
“Tin is junk.”
“But that there’s a good three dollars worth, ain’t it?”
“I’ll give you a dollar fifty for the stack.”
“Dollar-fifty?” He looks to the ground. “Two dollars.” A broad, simple smile.
“Dollar-fifty take it or leave it. I don’t even want that junk.”
“Guess I take it.”
Smithson roots through the gritty pocket of his mackinaw and comes out with five quarters a dime and a nickle. Flint counts the money and holds it in his hand then raises his hand toward Smithson smiling respectfully. His fingers angular, long and bony cast a shadow like the talons on the wall.
“Smithy. Must be some mistake.”
“Deduction for wakin me up early widdout a invitation.” A grimace from the acrid taste of the sour mash.
“Man can’t live on this.”
“Flint, for chrissake. It’s tin. You can’t give that junk away. I only bought them cause they’re old. I’ll take them up to the flea market and try to unload them. If I can’t I have to throw them away. I can’t afford to pay high price for tin signs.”
“How’s a man to get by?”
Smithson looks at him and manages to feel a twinge of pity for this vagrant standing before him with his leg warped out to the side, this creature enshrouded in a shredded flannel blanket, blue work pants and threadbare work shirt, boots sidesplit, gray wool socks grimed black.
“You bring me nickel, I’ll give you top dollar.” Flint thinks of something funny.
“Sir, if I’ve got nickels I buy food with em.” Flint smiles, laughter rising in his breast.
“Nickel. Not nickels. It looks like silver. It’s softer than chrome. They use it now restorin antiques and making new antiques. High demand right now.”
“Nickel? Show me what you’re lookin for.”
“Damn it all. Why’s God hate me so.” He walks around the desk and disappears through a doorway to the workshop. He returns with the arm from an antique portable phonograph.
“This here’s nickel. They’re restorin old antiques like this phonograph and need parts welded or plated. I figured out a way to recycle it. Hell of a lot cheaper than buying the beads from the manufacturer.”
He hands the nickel-plated arm to Flint. Flint rolls it in his hands, looking at his reflection warping around the mirrored barrel, stroking the soft metal.
“Soft. Like chrome but soft. Like silver but shinier. Pretty.” Smithson takes the arm back from Flint and wraps it in a piece of plaid flannel torn from one of the scrapdealer’s retired shirts.
“Bring me nickel, I’ll give you top dollar.” He falls back into his chair, leans his head back and drapes an arm across his eyes.
Flint stands for a moment looking at Smithson and is sad for him. There arises in him again something like poetry. He looks at Smithson and the clutter piled over his desk and tries to imagine when the office was new and the desk uncluttered and unstained and when Smithson must have been full of hope and optimism for his new enterprise. Arises in Flint a pity as depthless as time, smoky as its desolate alleys.
A regret rises in him that he had only occasionally known, but which has been a regular visitor lately. He regrets that he never married. That he is not passing through life’s phases with the soulmate with whom he could wander the avenues of experience and wisdom. With whom he could share this burn that is something like poetry. He wishes he were living a life with his soulmate, that he had a family with whom he could share the small reserve of wisdom he’s attained and worries that it may die with him and he leave nothing behind of value. True lonesome sank into his bones, that lonesome cured only by the blood of family.
He turns and heads for the door, rolling and bucking over his lame leg.

7.
As he wanders, the pity dissipates. There mingles in his blood a liquor from the dregs of his heart, a liquor from which is distilled the courage of much rebellion. A new regret begins, that most powerful of all regrets and one that often guides the course of many lives. He begins to regret wasted time, which is a wasted life and a wasted purpose.
He hobbles through the main promenade of the commons. Shoppers walk clutching their bags, glaring into each store.
“Goddam,” he says. Several hear him and make way for this deranged cannibal draped in the shredded skins of his prey.
“Tell me my tin ain’t but junk. Tell me my steel ain’t worth but dimes. Starve this man, working for coins. That was good tin. I know my metal. Keep your whisky. Kick your goddam desk and break your goddam foot for all I care.”
He laughs maniacally bucking and rolling over his lame leg.
“Go on and break your damn foot. Hah! Keepin your dime for calling early. Can’t get by. Damn it all.”
He stops and leans against the brick wall of a shoe shop. He shakes his head looking up and down the commons, the many shoppers moving busily from store to store.
“Possession. To possess is to be possessed. Damn it all. How have I come to such desperation?”
Thus rebelling against his daily rounds and those circumstances that blur the line between necessity and luxury, Flint refuses to scavenge for Smithson. He sets off for the train station.
First he wants a cigarette. He scans the ground. Plenty half-smoked. He collects them in a paper bag he took from the trash. It is nearly noon when he sits on the bench by the entrance. He tears the half-smoked cigarettes apart and sprinkles the burnt-smelling tobacco into the paper bag. He pulls a pack of rolling papers from his pocket
He yanks a rolling paper from its pack and places the crease of the paper between his left forefinger and thumb. Sprinkles tobacco along the crease. Watches his left hand roll the cigarette, the fingers working and rubbing together until the cigarette takes form as if unseen fingers were helping. He is careful as he rolls the cigarette that any tobacco that twirls loose falls back into the bag. After licking the glued edge he sets the cigarette atop his left thigh and looks at it and smiles.
He lights the cigarette and luxuriates in its smoke though he can taste the fires that the tobacco has filtered. He watches the blue smoke curl away.
Each man is a filter of all that he witnesses. He relays his understanding back to the humanity that is his source.
It is a good cigarette and he takes long succulent draughts and blows a stream of smoke into his lap. It gathers there in a pool and as it rises, he breathes it in fanning it to his face as though it is the breath of life arising from the smoldering of what has been, what has left its haunting remembrance for those of each generation. Those that would breathe the breath of its life.
So good. So good.
After the cigarette, Flint watches the off-peak commuters making sales calls and attending meetings and conferences mostly in New York City. Sacrificing the discomfort and time of the commute to provide for their families. They come and go. Hustling. Some are returning from longer business trips and come from the train station with several pieces of luggage.
The day is bitterly cold and Flint begins to catch a chill. He wants to return to the pit and light a fire in the small metal garbage can that serves as his fireplace.
A man and a woman come from the train station, their faces set with trouble.
“I wasn’t flirting with him. He was just a boy,” she says.
“Don’t lie to me you slut. I saw you. I heard you. The groom is my friend. What’ll they think of you now? What’ll they think of me?”
“He was only eighteen. I wasn’t flirting. I was just talking to him.”
Flint sees in the woman’s eye that twisted joy that comes from making her man jealous. Though it is one of the simplest powers a woman comes to possess over a man, yet some wield it with a tyrannical lust that would rival Caligula.
But he sees another evil in the man’s eyes. It is the rage of jealousy, founded perhaps in the instinct to protect one’s mate from procreating with another bloodline, an instinct mutated into an affront to the ego. There is blood in the man’s eyes and Flint senses his danger. The two walk across the street to the parking lot adjacent to Monty’s Cafe, Trenton’s best steak house. Cash only.
Flint watches the two sitting in their car arguing. He shakes his head and starts walking back to the pit.
He walks for fifteen minutes and picks a stoop to sit on and rest. As he rests, he thinks about Smithson and the paltry money he gave him. That he already spent it on a meal and will not eat tonight. That he is cold and he hopes there is enough scrapwood to keep a fire going in the garbage can through the night. He remembers geography class from grammar school, the teacher saying that a single candle can raise the temperature inside an igloo ten degrees. He is thinking about where he can find some food when a car approaches.
He sees it is the couple who was fighting at the train station. He watches them through the windshield as they drive toward him. The driver is pounding his fist into the dashboard then looks at her with hatred and swings the bottom of his fist into her chin. Her head snaps back. It takes a moment for her to realize she has been struck. Her face is twisted with rage and she scratches at the driver’s face.
There is the squeal of locking wheels and smoke plumes from both back tires. The driver skids the car to an angled stop just past the stoop where Flint is resting. The driver reaches over and grabs the woman’s jaw. He shakes her head maniacally, shouting, a foul foam coming to the corners of his mouth, his face twisted with vitriol. As he shakes her head unmercifully, she cries and claws out at him. All in a horrible silence within closed doors and windows.
The man throws the car into park then turns toward the woman. He holds her head almost lovingly in his hands, almost passionately as though he realizes, poetically, the fragility of the moment, the senseless waste of their bitter fight.
Flint watches and there is something in him that believes the fight is over, that the man will kiss the woman and regret the fight and having hit her, those moments now as permanent as those of enlightenment, irretrievable, immutable.
She tries jerking her head out of his hands but he is too strong. The man leans toward her and lowers his face preparing to kiss her. Flint is anxious for the two to stop fighting and resume loving.
Where does all the love go when lovers fight?
But the man does not kiss the woman. He opens his mouth wide. There is a gray pollution in the water of his eyes and they can see nothing but that which he hates. Clamping her head in his large and powerful hands, he bites down on her nose, his lips peeled back. He is twitching his head back and forth as though he is a terrier trying to snap the neck of a rat. The woman shrieks. Flint hears the scream through the closed windows.
He hurries as quickly as he can from the stoop, the tatters of his blanket splayed like the feathers of a gull in a gale. He bucks and rolls toward the car and when he approaches the passenger’s door he can see the froth at the man’s lips and the blood that covers his lips and his bared teeth. The blood from her nose is flowing. He can see the white of the flesh within the incisions.
Flint howls and claws with his long bony fingers at the passenger window. The man’s eyes open and he is frightened for an instant seeing this deranged man in tatters clawing at the window.
The man lets go of his bite and the woman grabs her nose, one hand over the other. The blood pulses from under her hands. She is blind with rage and pain and the tears are so thick they blur her eyes. She is screaming but does not see Flint for she is looking at the wash of blood over her hands and inside her wrists, that has flowed in a stigmata of gules down the front of her frilly white blouse.
“Goddam,” Flint shouts. He grabs the locked doorhandle then claws at the window. He claws at the roof of the car. The driver puts the car in gear and spins the tires in a fury. In a fear that displays itself in tire smoke he races down the street and turns after several intersections.

8.
He could find no scrapwood. The sterno lasts just past one in the morning before the blue smear of flame flickers and puffs out its final breath. The night is a cold one, wind through the two intentional cracks in the trapdoor creeping down the wall and rat-gnawing at Flint’s uncovered parts, through the thin fabric of his shirt and pants. Next morning Flint’s bones ache from the draught, shoulders creak, fingers stiff and sore, back of his head chilled. He has a sore throat and his breath is through a rheumy gurgle. He emerges quickly to scavenge.
Some metal. Some sterno. Hot food would be good. Dapple Dan’s.
Evening comes too soon. Flint knows that the few bits of scrap metal he has found will only bring coin. And he is still annoyed at Smithson for not offering higher pay for the tin signs. He is hungry and has not shaken off the cadaverchill of the previous night. The subterranean dampness soaked well into his talc-dry bones, the skin shriveled tight, a thin wax that melted then cooled, around his hands and wrists, ankles and feet.
Against his wishes and contrary to character, he finds himself outside the train station in the early evening, standing on the curb by the main entrance. Looking down the corridor at a set of doors to stairs that lead down to the platform. Waiting for those doors to explode open. The station is calm.
Inside, two elderly black ladies traversing the various shades of gray to the bluedom of antiquity stand holding newsprint religious magazines, displaying the covers to those who pass. Both turn with the passers-by so that their magazines are toward them as long as possible, turning as a dyad of hitchhikers.
He stands on the curb, in the winter-twigs clutch of meatless fingers, a paper cup. He has never been good at begging. It is not that he is too proud. He has pride enough to be offended when he is mistreated, to feel some life purpose is being wasted. But not so much that he cannot humble himself to beg when he is cold and hungry. He has never been good at begging because he is too sympathetic.
The commuters explode through the pairs of doubledoors, filing through in hasty succession hostile, exhausted, triumphant, or conquered. They are each driven. Regardless of their success and failure, regardless of the eager spirit or of the dimming light of desire, they are all driven by an unseen force whose origin perhaps only a few of them explore. For only a few can perceive, only a few have the time. Of those who have both the perception and time, fewer still sacrifice that time for the profitless meandering through the fog of purpose.
Flint looks upon them mournfully, into the eyes of each, at the haggard gait and the arms that hang almost lifeless at their sides, lifting only high enough to reach the door handle.
He looks upon them as the beaten, and his sympathies go out to them such that he is unable to inflict the guilt upon them that is necessary to fill his cup.
Though he must ask, yet he is distracted. As they pour through the door, he can hear Nat King Cole through the pipemusic. For a moment Flint drifts away from current time and place.
As the commuters pass by he reaches his cup to them. He looks into their eyes. He is at the end of a row of a few other beggars and his throat is suddenly dry. The cold has soaked deeply into the bones of his skull. There is a chill on his forehead and his bloodred eyes have become two hunks of freezing meat. It is a cold he can not brisk away. He wants to ask for charity, but his voice is a weak file against bars that can be neither cut nor bent.
Arises in his breast a word to be uttered, a phrase or song. His breath rasps unable to speak though these words are in him.
You have been hungry. You have slept on the street. You have been without a home. I do not steal. I am neither dope fiend nor drunkard. I simply have no home and no job. I am hungry. I am cold. You, too, have been hungry and you have been on your own, with no place to sleep. With only the stars for shelter. Only the moon your companion.
You have wondered if the aching inside from hunger and lonesome would be enough to kill you. And at times this thought was your only pleasure. You have been this hungry. You have been this alone. Have you forgotten? Your very life, your routine, your brief history – is this not a hunger, a desolation?
Can you deny you have been hungry and alone? How can you divert your eyes from what you have been? That hunger and abandon is already inside you just waiting for a weak moment to vanquish you.
I know I have become estranged but I am not dangerous. That you think a vagrant cannot love, has not loved, you are wrong.
Each step down the ladder of estrangement from the world and all the materials and means it holds dear, to which most cling for security, for safety, for a false sense of purpose, I recognized more and more clearly as the chains that bind us. All a weight and obligation that holds us to the earth, even escape itself a type of confinement if we unwillingly return to that from which we flee.
Each rung I knew that at the end most will look back having never descended and will never know that to have lived without loss is to live with a false appreciation of attainment, is to be deluded by those attainments if they are used to justify your existence. Can there be grace in such hearts? Who knows.
Judge me not. I simply have no home and no job. The Lord says do not judge. I ask only your charity if it is in you.
But his mouth cannot utter these words. As he prepares to speak, something inside him asks whether he is worthy to ask such questions, to make such statements.
The words remain unuttered. Flint merely pushes his paper cup toward the commuters as they file past. As they file past, he sees the scar of ages on their faces, the dread that despite their sacrifices, they may some day become as Flint. It is all but impossible to beg their charity when it is they who are in need of mercy, that mercy of consolation, compassion.
From the mass of commuters a hand drops in Flint’s paper cup a bill rolled tightly. Flint looks for the face of the one so charitable.
The mass moves away and the donor tries to remain anonymous in that mass. But Flint sees a tall and lanky figure looking furtively over his shoulder at him once, then twice. It is a young man that thinks he can hide, but whom he has seen before. He has seen him standing on the steps behind the tool and dye shop with the Giant and Cap’n.
He unscrolls the bill.
A ten. He’s given me a ten. Bless him.
He praises God for his fortune and heads toward Lee’s grocery on the corner of Terry and Humbard for sterno and then to Dapple Dan’s.

9.
The weather has taken a turn for the worse. The temperature in the single digits, overcast locking in a damp chill. Snow falls lightly at night, dusting the bed of hard snow until the first wind whips it into a fury.
Snow outlines the structures of buildings, accentuating the industrial architecture around the wasteland. The long low flat roofs of the warehouses, the many small windows along the sides of the manufactories, the massive sills and flat arches, the smokestacks and railed catwalks around them. The water tower capped with a rimy dome.
And all over the city, as far up and down the Delaware as can be seen, there is a low cloud cover that glows the ambient light of the city, bleeds a sallow ink through the moisture, through the dampness that hovers in the air and settles upon the oily, salted salty roads.
Flint lives off the ten dollars until the dampness over the city is gone, pushed out by a dry, cold and ominous air. The arctic winds have returned. This is the only time of year Flint stores extra food in his pit. At the Corner Oasis general store he buys a can of Carnation evaporated milk, which he adds to a paint can of melted snow for a half gallon of milk. Cans of Vienna sausages, packs of saltines. He buys a bottle of ketchup to add to a cup of hot water to make poor-man’s tomato soup. Packed with oyster crackers, it’s a filling meal. He also buys a small can of segmented tangerines and two cans of chicken noodle soup. These supplies last him for several days. And then they are gone.
Flint grows desperate with cold and hunger. So he swallows his pride and sets out early in the morning to scavenge for metal. He finds himself in the sandlot behind Chin’s Seafood on Coolidge Street. Seafood to-go from what used to be a popular diner in the late fifties and early sixties. Train-style diner wrapped in ribbed stainless steel that is still shiny and smooth but filigreed now with razor wire over its roof, a tangle that in the metallic blue of the mercury street lights shines like tinsel.
The diner had the reputation of for the best pot roast in the state. Huge hunks of potatoes cooked until brown, carrots cooked and glazed with a sweet juice, large pearled onions with outer skins that fell off in the mouth, firm hearts, all these stewed together in a thick dark gravy. The roast itself was seared black in a secret barbecue sauce and was so tender the strands flayed apart between the forktines. The roast was seared until it was blackened and had that savor that can only be found in grilled meat.
Flint pauses from his scavenging and remembers nostalgically the last time he’d eaten there, when he was still working at the steel mill across the river at Fairless Hills. He remembers how he held the roast in his mouth and sucked that succulent flavor from the meat.
So good. So good.
A lug nut. Two keys. Bottle caps. A needle. A rag of old dungarees with the zipper.
I must be desperate.
Crossing the road he sees a calico cat that has been hit. A long string of pink guts has ticker-taped along the center of the road like a lovely red ribbon faded, frozen as hard as ribbon candy in the frigid air. His tongue is sprawled and his crushed head has been pressed flat into the ground. He sparkles with the powder of crushed rock salt. Flint stops and looks down at the flattened animal. It covers three times the area it once did, torn open, ribs a pick-up stick pile of severed bones, broken, twisted.
What makes it not alive? Why can’t we scrape him up and put him back together and put life back into him?
There is a crescent shine of tempered gray peaking from beneath the blood-blackened fur. Flint bends down and sees it is a skid plate that fell from the undercarriage of a truck. He bends down on his right knee in the middle of the road, his left leg warped out to the side and leans over the carcass. Folds of his tattered blanket like the wind-spread feathers of a mantling buzzard.
His arms reach around the carcass and with the bony fingers of one hand he claws what must have been the spine and lifts. The frozen beast sticks to the macadam and there is a tearing sound as Flint lifts it like a shingle from the ground. He reaches under the carrion and removes the skid plate and lets go of the cat. It falls back into place with a wooden sound.
Flint knows that the metal he has gathered won’t bring enough money to last more than a day. He decides to try the embankment along the train tracks between the station and the control tower. It is a long walk and the combing is strenuous, but it usually pays. On the way, he borrows a shopping cart from BJ’s Supermarket, a store of three short aisles and no need of its half dozen carts.
Late in the afternoon Cap’n sends Gill to Smithsons on an errand and gives him leave for some personal business. Gill walks over to the Rosewood Circle and walks down the avenue. This is where his great grandparents raised his grandmother. His grandfather was raised a few blocks over.
He has an old photograph from the late teens in his hand. It is of his grandmother in front of a brick house. She is standing beside a hydrangea that is full and leafy. It is summer and she is squinting against a bright sun. He is walking the avenue searching for that brick house.
The embankment between the train station and the control tower a half mile up the tracks has become the dumping ground for a row of rail houses on Chestnut Street. Trainmen once lived in these small, inexpensive houses, each a replica of the one next to it. They’ve gone to the slum lords.
Three of the backyards are fenced in and occupying the fenced area are above-ground pools, rusting, leaking, desolate in the winter and unable to invoke even a memory of summer’s pleasure. Leaves have fallen into the ice in the pool covers and are frozen there like porcelain flowers encased in lucite. The side of one of the pools has ruptured and there is a tumorous swelling of smooth and voluted ice bulging through the torn seam and shredded rubber lining.
Flint studies the houses and the pools.
Each fenced yard a kind of sanctuary. Yet each bordered tightly, pressed in by the borders around it. How sorry an escape from suffocating summer days.
One of the tenants works for the post office on State Street. Flint went to school with him. He sorts mail all day. Looks forward through the days of August to going home, changing, climbing up the four mossy, redwood steps up, stepping over the side of the pool and four steps down. Dog-paddles to the inner tube. Climbs in and floats. Sun setting. Water trying vainly to cool a throb at his temples. Commuter trains passing by.
Gill has been standing on the sidewalk in front of a brick house for some minutes. The front porch is missing several boards, the steps replaced by cinder blocks. Soiled bed sheets curtain the front windows. There had been a dark green paint on the wooden trim but that has mostly peeled away to a gray and rotted wood beneath. Through patches where the snow has been kicked aside and walked through, he can see the front yard is a pounded patch of dirt, matted here and there with clumps of weeds.
He is holding the photograph up in front of him. The structure of the building matches. But so much else has changed he is not sure if it is the same house. Then he notices that the house numbers are the same as that in the photograph.
The hydrangeas have been torn up to widen the drive. He positioned himself where the cameraman must have been and estimates where his grandmother must have stood in relation to the house.
“You were here once,” he says to her in the photograph. “You stood here. You smiled shyly and squinted against the sun. We are no more than fragile crystals of snow in a blizzard of time.”
The bedsheets wrinkle and a slice of black void spreads along the window. Suspicious eyes are upon him. He tucks the photograph in his pocket and heads for the cross street that will take him to his grandfather’s boyhood home. The biting breeze forces a burning tear from his eye.
Flint works his way through the junk dumped on the embankment of the train tracks. The junk is turned over, picked through, and added to almost daily, partially buried in a bed of broken bottles green and brown and clear. Flint pulls a brake drum and two wheel rims from a child’s bicycle. He throws them out in the middle of the access road along the tracks and continues on.
There is a white building with a crow-stepped front. The crow steps are painted black. The paint is old, has weathered to a tattletale gray so that it barely contrasts with the whitish haze of the overcast beyond. The crow steps seem to come from not in the earth but just over it and leading to somewhere just shy of the heavens.
The embankment in front of this building is covered with broken bottles and insulators for the live wires over the train tracks.
Gill is unable to find his grandfather’s boyhood home. He wanders without direction thinking of the locomotive press of time and is surprised and gives a little laugh when he comes out to the street along the train tracks. He is walking this street back toward his errand for the Cap’n when he sees far across the tracks a familiar form bent, picking through a junk pile. He stops and watches.
Flint hobbles through the broken bottles placing the foot of his lame leg carefully lest the glass cut through the split of his boot. But he is not careful enough and as he slides his foot outward to bend forward a broken bottle cuts the outer blade of his foot. He twitches from the laceration and backs out to the access road holding an insulator.
As the blood soaks into his grime-blackened wool sock, Flint turns the insulator in his hands. It is domed and has a deep dark-brown glaze and is still shiny. He stares at his warped reflection in the glaze. He smiles and sees the whiteness of his teeth stark against the darkness of his skin. The bottom of it is unglazed and concave so that it threads easily over the suspension wire and stacks evenly upon another domed insulator.
Beautiful. And it will long outlast the skin of my bones.
He turns the object in his hands and studies it until it begins to evoke something like poetry in him. He scratches the unglazed underbelly scraping at the ceramic with his fingernail and notices the fine texture, the even consistency of the mixture. He rubs gently the unglazed ceramic with the flesh of his fingertip.
Something of the earth formed by man. Here before me, now in my hands. To view. To hold. To turn. To see my own reflection.
He gathers several of the insulators and puts them in his pockets then heads to Smithson’s with his scavenged metal in the shopping cart. Gill follows him at a distance.
When Flint turns onto Cuttle Street, the arctic wind hits him squarely. He squints his eyes and they glaze over with a liquid shell. The chill of the wind stabs through to his bones, pours down the gap at the neck of his shirt like ice water, presses through the thin fabric of his clothes with a liquescent persistence.
When the wind hits him he becomes light-headed and stops. He leans forward on the shopping cart. For a moment he is faint. He leans on the cart panting. He tries to slow his breathing. There is a gurgling in his breath and a fever in his head. The pangs of extreme hunger shoot through his stomach with paralyzing cramps. He sits on the ground leaning back against the shopping cart, his fingers clamped on the handle, his back to the wind. Gill hurries toward him but before he reaches him, Flint begins to rise. Gill hides in a doorway. It is several minutes before Flint regains enough strength to continue.
He approaches Smithson’s from across the street. There are two patrol cars parked in front of the main office. The red lights are flashing. He stands and waits. He is surprised to see the lanky young man who gave him a ten approaches and talk to one of the officers.
Flint waits across the street with his shopping cart. He turns and heads back to the pit.

10.
It is dusk though not much darker than it has been all day due to the density of threatening overcast and the way it plays with the light. Flint is shivering with paroxysms that start in the pit of his guts like dry heaves. He knows he must eat and should return to the pit. But he wants to find more metal to sell to Smithson and needs scrapwood to burn.
His reasoning is tainted with delirium from hunger, the cold that has soaked into his bones, the fever he is not aware of. He almost believes that he will be comforted in the finding of metal itself.
Night has fallen. Around each streetlight is a halo of blue, crystal mist. Through the cold air the far-off wail of the commuter train. The cold is inescapable, the hunger nagging. He turns on West State Street. It’s a good walk back. Too late to sell his metal to Smithson but his brain cannot focus on this fact. He is seeking and though he is pushing his cart of metal, he is unaware of that which he is seeking, driven, rather, more by the sense of quest than by that which he seeks.
By the once-lovely homes now divided into multiplexes and falling into disrepair. Stranger wandering amid the ruins of tomorrow. Down the side streets houses are still intact because they are owned by those who live in them.
He walks down the side streets pushing the shopping cart. There are lights on inside the houses. A man passes from a dark dining room into the blue glow of a den where a television is turned up bright and flashing its scenes. The man is carrying a plate of food and sets it on a television tray. He sits on the edge of a sofa and begins forking food to his mouth, his face bluish from the glow of the cathode ray tube.
“Who are you?” Flint says. “Where have you been? I know I have seen you before. We have spoken. I remember what you cannot, dare not, for to remember such things would haunt you unto madness.”
He smells food cooking. Bread baking and turnips cooking on a stove, the fragrance of meat broiling in an oven. It reminds him of long ago.
Flint walks back to West State Street and heads up toward the middle of downtown, toward the capital building. It is uphill and the cart has become heavy, hunching his shoulders groundward as he pushes. The loose wheels of the cart rattle and echo down the street and narrow alleys then brake harshly when the greaseless bearings jam in their races.
A fast, light snow has begun, Flint wishes he had a hat to keep the cold from his head. The foot of his lame leg drags as he steps forward and this worries him as he has almost always been able to lift the foot off the ground when he walks.
“Damn leg.” There is a moment of self-pity but he was raised not to wallow in it so the impulse gives way.
He is cresting the hill trying to calculate how much money the scrap metal will bring. He is vaguely heading home and beginning to realize Smithson will not be at the shop when he gets there. Another night without eating. At least there’s enough sterno to last the night.
He decides he’ll stroll past the capital building on his way home. As he nears the crest of the hill, he remembers visiting the capital when he was a child on a class field trip. They went on a bus. He sat by Selma Preston. They talked and he began to like her. She was kind to him despite his leg.
They went through the capital in double file. In one of the great meeting rooms there was a grave discussion. It made the children feel secure. Adults were planning and taking care of things. They went to the cafeteria and had lunch. Salisbury steak, carrots, mashed potatoes and a small apple turnover. He and all his classmates, assembled together, eating together, in the building that, he believed then, oversaw and secured the state.
So good. So good.
By the time he gets to the crest of the hill the snow is finer and faster, a mild grit that stings the flesh. The snow has begun to accumulate and blows whipping along the ground like a white sand over which a thousand invisible sidewinders are dancing demonically toward him.
From the crest of the hill he can see the majestic dome of the capital building. It is stately and imposing and looks exactly as it did those many years ago save for the gray-black backdrop and the spotlights aimed at the dome that make of it a luminescent golden egg.
Flint pushes his wobble-wheeled cart while eyeing the capital and all the white and yellow lights aimed at it, the dome glowing like a golden egg dropped from the clouds, roosted by the downy fleece of crystalline mist and overcast. He is focused on the capital and the gold of its dome and wishes there were some way to take that golden dome. He wonders how much it would bring.
‘Not bad metal,’ Smithson would say. ‘I’ll give you twenty for it.’
He passes by one of the restored, historic buildings that the state has appropriated for one of its many departments. It is set back from the sidewalk with a small, square plot of lawn in front of it. He is so focused on the capital that as he passes this building he does not immediately notice that there is a bright bluish glow from its yard. The light is clear and bright like the sparks that fly from an inferior sword when it is struck by a sword of greater steel. Flint passes the building completely before some small voice in his head speaks to him .
Flint begins to reel the cart around then decides it is too late to be stolen and leaves it behind. He turns back toward the building he passed. As he approaches he notices a bright gleaming light, bluish and cold. If ice could go up in a conflagration of frozen flames, it would fill this plot of land with the same light Flint’s eyes are wide to receive. As he nears the building, an object comes in to view around the corner.
He sees in the middle of the small lawn, the snow melted and revealing a ring of brown grass around a large statue. It is a metal sculpture on a marble base. It is polished stainless steel but shines like nickel. It is bright and clean and there are mercury lights aimed at it from behind and from the sides and the light reflects off the polished metal in a blue glow. The air is chilled by the wind and the fine mist of snow slashes through the blue glow and in the middle of it all, this sculpture that Flint recognizes immediately but the significance of which he cannot at first define.
He continues hobbling until he is directly in front of the sculpture. There is an iron fence nine feet high across the front of the lot and bolted to the neighboring buildings. The top of the iron bars are chiseled to spikes. Flint walks to the iron fence, claws his long fingers through and clamps them around the bars. He presses his face between. He looks at the sculpture but all he sees at first is nickel. That beautiful nickel plating. It is not as shiny as chrome, much softer, but brighter than silver.
There must be some way to break a piece off. Top dollar.
There is no way over or around the fence. He looks at the brass lock in the center of the black iron plate on the front gate and wonders if he could jimmy the lock to get in. Then he takes a step back and looks at the brass lock, the iron fence and wonders at the lavish expense of the forging and locksmithing.
But Flint steps up to the gate gazing at the sculpture trying to determine what it is. And then there is a small flicker of definition. He sees that it could be a man on one knee, rising from the ground, but an oddly shaped man, long and twisted. And that from the waist up he is not a man, but transmogrifies into a twisted bird. That what begins as the man’s arms become long, unfolding wings, twisted, the tips turned toward the ground, the pinion feathers fanned out from the strain of the wings beating desperately.
The man’s neck is long and thin. The creature is straining, trying to lift a tremendous weight from the ground, his face turned toward the sky. Its narrow ridge of a chest arching upward in strained agony. It is as though this half-man, half-bird were chained to the ground and either vainly trying to fly or about to break free of the weight and to launch toward the sky in magnificent flight.
In the face of the sculpture, a face that is not detailed and one that is neither man nor creature but eyes hinted at by two hollows, a rounded skull, and a gaping, distorted hole that would be a mouthscream. A face not detailed but a smear of expression, of torment and determination.
Flint recognizes something in the sculpture that has been in him for as long as he can remember. Not only what the sculpture conveys, but also what was in him who created it, what he must have gone through in order to create it. The voice that speaks a language Flint listened for but only now does he comprehend. These first words of a new language.
By words too difficult to utter because they have never been written or spoken, by a sound too dulcet for music this man is seized. This man is stricken but the lameness is lifted from his body because the spirit is unbound from this shell of bone and flesh. The swelling that is in the breast of the sculptured beast, of this prehistoric bird trying to gain wing from the clutches of all the world is the swelling in this man’s breast, determined and breathing a new breath of life into itself. The tension in the neck struggling to lift itself by itself is the tension in this neck and down through these arms, a strain that tears the thousand tendrils required to curl one finger into a beckoning gesture. The anguish of the bird departing the confines of gravity is the anguish of this soul fleeing the hellbound.

11.
Flint fevers in his sleep. The blue scum of sterno flame smolders, barely a tangible flicker in its tin container. The pit sweetened by the jellied fuel. He sweats against a cold draught.
He dreams of the steel mill where he conducted the hod of ore and helped several men unload it onto a conveyor that dropped to the crusher. There was no glamour or glory in the work. But he did it well and was proud to fulfill his duty.
In the delirium of his dream, he relives the day he was let go from the steel mill, when he realized what was passing that he could never reclaim. His mother had died but a month earlier and the shock and sudden distance of being forced from one cycle to another was nearly the same.
The foreman delivered his last paycheck. He met Flint at the overhead doors through which the hod tracks, dumptrucks, and flatbeds passed. He handed Flint the contents of his locker in a small box, the lock at the bottom cut through with bolt cutters, his paycheck on top. No one looked twice at Flint. They busied themselves, turned their faces to the infernal red of the molten steel.
Among his mother’s possessions was a half-filled diary. Over that last month at the mill, Flint had read through the diary and learned more about his mother than he ever knew, saw a depth he could not have suspected. He cherished the record of her days, of the life that filtered through her mind and soul.
In his fevered sleep he dreamt how on the day he was let go he went for a walk to clear his mind and came back to the mill. He struggled up the curved staircase around a smokestack and sat on a landing and contemplated being and not being.
He began writing a letter in the empty pages of his mother’s diary. There was no family left after her. He tried to write to a friend but couldn’t decide on one. He thought it mildly amusing that he always considered himself as having many friends and being friends to many, but that when he sat to write a letter, he had to admit that he had no one close enough. So he figured by writing to none in particular he was writing to all.

I am writing to you from three quarters of the way to the top of a broad smokestack putting forth a plume of coal-black smoke, at a small landing of the iron steps spiraling around the column of dark brick.
Walking to this smokestack there was a half block where the garbage had not been collected and the air was rank with the sour odor of rotting food. The sky was low and a storm of soot from the mill. A wind off the river made the soot tick against anything harder than flesh, grimaces included.
There was the smell of putrefaction one breath. But on the breeze in the next breath the fragrances of flowers and fruit and May. The wind floated the pale torn blossoms of peach and apple trees from an old Victory Garden gone to seed. On the next block was a woman in a skirt and this and her perfume made me carefree.
Beside me are large patches of fading white paint on the brick that are nothing from here save a moss from the past but from the ground spell the name of the smokestack’s first owner.
To be recalled by thee, a testament to existence beyond which there is no greater, more convincing proof. Not to be recalled, have I existed? I am merely a dull postulate that bears upon no theorem or proof. Now a whistle blows and in two minutes, as dependably as the whistle blows at noon, a storm of ants will rush from the steel mill far below, lunch pails and hard hats, cigarettes, thermoses and jokes both crude and ethnic.
The snow of soot now a malicious secret falling soundlessly around me in the blare of the whistle. We are each a mote of soot settling between the waves in a bay of years. Dust is never independent. There are some rains, dear child, from which there is no shelter. Certain weather seeps through every crevice in the construct of Man, bleeds through the space between protons and neutrons. Our soul is x-rayed by this weather, worn by this unrelenting element. No atom impenetrable.
There is a barbarism in each of us and sometimes a dangerous boredom that leads us to question who we are, what we are doing, whom we serve, may tempt us to give in to abandon, to reckless satisfaction of the instincts, to turn against the security of routine.
We know that to depend on either pleasure or routine is dangerous. We have been taught that all of either is vice or vanity. We know the routine is not what we want, comes between us and what our souls seek. Yet we are too afraid to risk doing without, simply to remove ourselves. Because we fear an ending.
But what I know at this dreadful state, at the threshold of this completion of my former self, a threshold I have long suspected, is that there are no endings. As there are no beginnings. Things change and it’s that simple. What fails to change is our perception. We recognize a sequence of events. We recognize the symbols. Several symbols converge at the same moment and become a form with a multiplicity of meaning. But as these symbols merge each is evolving and continues to move and eventually changes to something we are unable to recognize. It is this phase of evolution we define as the ending. If there is an end to anything, it is the limit of our perception, of our ability to recognize the evolution, the constant change of all things.
I have long sensed that something like this would happen, that I would come to rely upon a routine, a security. I knew I would depend on something and that it would be taken away. But this is necessary. There is a hesitation, naturally, at the gate of phase. That shove we feel we must understand and believe to be a holy pat between the shoulder blades persuading us through. I do not know what tomorrow holds. But then again, neither do you. The comfort of routine is like rose-colored glasses we wear when we stare into the blinding light of the unknown.
Well, there is a dull and low rumbling far in the throat of this smokestack and the smoke is changing from coal-black to ash-gray. It is time I leave the grounds. My last day here and I don’t mind telling you that I am overcome with sorrow. Faith is of cold comfort today. I shall not return to these grounds.
Though I’ve suspected this was inevitable, I only know now that it is more than inevitable, it is as necessary as atomic movement. Each is aware that the change attendant upon the movement of time is inevitable. Yet those now pouring from the foundry with lunch pails in hand cannot or will not admit this. As you cannot take two buckets of water from the same river, you never walk the same ground twice, because you are never the same from one moment to the next.
The smoke has changed to ash-gray.
When we meet again, will you recognize me? If we do not meet again, will you recall me? Will you recognize me in what I leave behind, or is there an end even to recognition? I hope you get my little joke.
What do I know above all else when it seems there is nothing else ahead? That a man is to determine what it is he was put here to do, that which is his passion and the joy of his soul and that is for the edification of his creator and himself and others. That he is to pursue this regardless of all consequences, even if it means living in insecurity and destitution and loneliness.
You must find what it is that moves you – that moves you truly such that you know and believe more than anything that you are doing the creator’s bidding. If it happens to bring you fame or fortune or even just comfort, so much the better. But first you must abandon the desire for such worldly things. Only then can you hear the flapping of the angel’s wings. Only then can you be sure you are fulfilling the creator’s purpose in breathing life into the clay from which he formed you.

12.
Next morning Flint rises to more snow on the ground. The trapdoor is heavy and mousetraps upon him, pinching him face down in the granular snow against the edge of the pit. The snow has crusted over the two cracks between the planks. The pit is humid, the air nearly breathed of all its substance.
Outside, the field is a blinding white. The twitching weeds creaking with arthritic stiffness, dusted daintily with the night’s snow. From the smokestacks beyond the tool and die shop the steam is dense. The air threatening an even heavier snow. The moisture in the air seems crystallized in the nipping cold. A blue-gray glow enshrouds the wasteland and the city. The days are short and the overcast makes them more a thinness of night, rather than days.
On the back steps of the tool and die shop the three men stand drinking coffee. Two are smoking. They watch as Flint emerges again, turns and waves to them.
Gill exhales a stream of cigarette smoke and shakes his head, self conscious lest the others discover that he has befriended the vagrant.
“What?” Cap’n asks.
“It’s a carnival of shadows,” Gill says. “A parody of how life might be lived.”
“New Guy’s got the willies,” the Giant says and laughs tee-hee.
Flint’s face feels strange to him. He reaches up and touches it and notices his lips have swollen. He has lost what little weight he had and the flesh is pulled taut over his cheekbones, his cheeks hollowed and his eyes beginning to bulge as if from tabes.
He retrieves from between the chain link fences the shopping cart with yesterday’s scavenged metal. Across the field, lame leg in-tow, dragging. Snow leaking in through the sidesplit of his left boot. Ice on the walks. By the time he makes it to Smithson’s, extreme hunger returns and cramping pain.
Welcome home, old friend.
No one responds to his knocks on the cloudy glass. From the small window open for ventilation there is no sign of heat or warm air, nor the fumes of burned kerosene. Back to the pit to try and sleep off the hunger pains and sickness.
Late in the day, darkness settling early on the afternoon, he wakes and comes from the pit again. Still no answer at Smithson’s office.
Returning to the pit, Flint sees from the back door of the tool and die shop that some workers are leaving for the day. He hurries across the field. He waits but no one comes through the door. He knocks on it with unpadded bones.
The door cracks open and against the darkness a slit of light along the doorlength and the hiss of machinery in the background. From that light the two glowing beads of the lean shopkeeper’s snake eyes and below them the glowing cherry of his cigarette bouncing as he moves his lips.
“Yeah?” Flint tries to smile but he is weak and the effect is that of a pained grimace.
“I ain’t seen Smithy all day. You know where he’s at?”
“Smithson?”
“Yes sir.”
“You didn’t hear?”
“No sir.”
“He’s in the tank. Arrested yesterday.”
“Oh Lordy.” Flint shakes his head. Searches the ground.
What to do?
“Arrested for what?”
“What’s it matter?”
“He’s my friend. I’m just concerned is all.”
“Your friend.”
Flint tries to smile again and is unable to effect even the pained grimace, rather a look of dread comes over him.
“Possession of stolen property,” Cap’n says.
Panic and guilt wrack Flint in an instant.
“Oh, Lordy. Not the signs. Not the signs, oh please say it wasn’t the signs.” Shaking his head and searching the ground. It seemed an eternity before Cap’n spoke.
“Signs. What the hell are you talkin about? Gill spoke with the police. It was stolen car parts.”
“Oh thank God.”
He looks over the shopkeeper to the inside of the shop he has never seen. The Giant is operating a drill press from the 1940’s that has a thousand-pound offset wheel that cranks and generates force for the punch. The metal cages that were the safety guards around the operating buttons have been pried back to make work faster. The Giant presses a button and the wheel of the drill press swings a punch with 2000 pounds of pressure per square inch behind a die piece the size of a dime. A quarter-inch plate of steel gets itself bored with a clean hole. 1940’s but still does its job just fine.
“Is that it?”
“Well—” Flint’s voice chokes as it does when he is about to ask for charity.
“Well what?”
“Smithy in jail and all. Haven’t been able to collect for my gathering. I could sell it to you. If you need scrap metal. Got some good metal.”
“I don’t use scrap metal.”
“I’m hungry.” The lean shopkeeper sees the desperation in Flint’s eyes. He looks once again to make sure he is not mistaken then opens the door for Flint. The two walk into the middle of the shop. The warmth and the light are strangers to Flint, strangers he welcomes but does not befriend because he knows they will not remain.
Cap’n leads Flint to the Giant at the drill press. The Giant presses a button. Hammer. Another hole die-pressed. The shopkeeper taps the Giant on his shoulder. The Giant looks back at him, face still frowning with intense concentration. He has scraped the severed fingers of his coworkers pressed flat as wet paer from the dye. He smiles when he sees Flint and nods hello.
“You done with those donuts there?” Cap’n asks him.
“Those there?” The Giant points to a workbench against the wall.
“Yeah.”
“They’re from yesterday. Hard as a rock.”
“You don’t want them, do you?”
“No.”
“I’ll give them to Flint. OK?”
“That’s fine. And I’ll give him the number to my dentist, too. Tee-Hee.” Flint notices the narrow gap between the front of the Giant’s teeth. He has never seen these men this close.
Cap’n leads Flint to the workbench. The Giant calls after them.
“That thermos has some pretty good coffee in it too, if you want it. It’s awesome.” He nods with authority.
Capn’ loads Flint’s arms with the stale donuts and pours a large paper cup of the steaming coffee.
In the corner, Gill is stacking bars of polished steel on a handtruck. He looks up and sees Cap’n giving Flint the leftovers. When he sees the cadaver-like face, his stomach turns and he heads over to the icebox. He takes his paper-bag lunch to Flint.
“Here,” he says. “Have something healthy.”
Cap’n eyes him suspiciously until he realizes that the New Guy is being sincere. He sees how grateful Flint is and he fills a paper bag with fruit and the fresh danishes from his office and hands the bag to him. Thin, curved fingers clutch at the bag.
He lets Flint out the back door from whence he had come. Flint hobbles down the steps issuing a flurried ramble of thanks, of blessings, of his indebtedness. He has long felt the shopkeepers were a family of sorts. Despite the oftentimes harsh treatment from Cap’n, this proves that he had not been mistaken.
By dusk snow comes hard. Flint lights a can of sterno and a half dozen candles. The pit seems warmer when it is light. The coffee shocks Flint’s empty system. From the brown bag he takes a sandwich of coldcuts and cheese and lettuce and tomato and eats it and then an apple and banana, a pint of milk and a bag of cookies. He finishes the lunch and Cap’n’s fruit and fresh danishes. Then dunks the stale donuts in the coffee to soften them. The coffee melts away the permafrost that had settled into his skin.
He thought he had never known such profound appreciation. His stomach, which had contracted to a point of agony, restrains a ball of lead though it is still flat. His sides are hollowed. His finger-like ribs press out against a shell of latex. He sits on the bench and every once in a while climbs the ladder and shakes the snow off the trapdoor.
He lays on his plank wishing he could do something for the shop workers, could help them out or provide them with something that would be good for their lives. He drifts in and out of sleep.
From the back steps of the tool and die shop Cap’n, the Giant, and the New Guy are leaving for the day. They pause to look out over the field which is lambent with the eerie sallow glow of a hard, fine snow. A glow that seems to come of the storm itself and from no artificial light. There is barely a glow from the highway lights beyond the warehouses. The streetlights are dim rubs of pearl in the gray-black sky, behind the smog-yellowed snow.
The support column under the bridge is a flickering reddish-orange fireglow. Against it an ogreish shadow moves in a ritualistic dance.
The three men stop and watch the shadowplay. They see through the heavy snow the glow originating in the middle of the field, the dark outline of the trapdoor being opened and closed and the smoke of snowdrift and the light on Flint and his tattered blanket making of him a gargoyle just born of the earth’s womb into the element he would conquer or an angelic form about to descend for their benefit.
“Hell of a way to live,” Gill says, shaking his head. Cap’n says nothing but remembers that pathetic look of desperation in Flint’s face when he could not bring himself to ask for food.
“Tee-Hee,” the Giant laughs. “That one’s crazy’ern shit.”
“No he ain’t,” Cap’n says.
It is after midnight and Flint is wide awake. His belly still swollen, the coffee making him jitter. He sits on the edge of his bedding with a hundred visions and memories rushing through his mind. The way things were and how they became and how he is not all that unhappy. But he is lonely and when he wishes that he would hear a ticking sound in the conduit in the wall he admits that the affliction of loneliness has worsened into the malady of lonesome.
A voice swells in his breast. A voice that has risen for as long as Flint can remember but that arises to a language he has never known. It swells in his breath like a great cry that he contains, a cry of protest, or praise, or vanquish. He strokes his breastbone and when his fingers detect the bony structure he has become it reminds him of the polished metal sculpture he found on West State Street. The voice swelling fantastically within.
From the paintcan he sprinkles water in the corner of the pit, his hands gesturing in a sort of benediction. After the earth absorbs the water, he kneels on his right knee and digs into the earth with the claws of his fingers. He scrapes the marl from the ground and gathers it in a pile on the cablespool. When he has dug a mound of clay, he stands over the worktable and begins kneading the clay, folding and pressing. Pressing it out flat and folding it over and kneading and squeezing the ooze of wet clay through his bony fingers.
He kneads the clay for an hour feeling the earth in his hands and in each oozing the ecstatic forming of the words of a language he had long been unable to speak. That this earth could be formed by his hands.
But to what end? Recognition?
He forms the clay into a large brick about a foot square, still pressing it together and smoothing out the creases and fissures in the surface of the clay. It is red clay, gray while it is wet and being worked but turning red as it dries and black when it is fired.
He sits at the edge of his bedding and stares at the block of clay. How this form could remain as it is and be put together with others to construct buildings. The dun marl caked on the black skin dries as he sits looking at the brick of clay wondering what to do with it. He thinks of the metal sculpture and in it he recognizes many. He recognizes Smithson.
He molds the brick into the shape of a small man on a square base. He forms the man roughly then begins to pinch away the clay and makes the shape bent forward like a hunchback, the head turned toward the ground, the shoulders rounded as if drawing a great weight, the legs bent and failing beneath the weight.
Looking for a scraping and gouging tool in the pit, he breaks off a splinter of wood from the plank of his bedding. He scrapes away the shape of the bent legs, one trudging before the other. The arms pulled by tremendous gravity toward the earth. The entire figure struggling to rise and continue. The feet melting into the foundation.
He carves a face out of the clay trying to capture the agony of the hangover because he knows that pain has a source entirely unrelated to liquor. From the torment and the agony in the face there emerges magically beneath his deft fingers a minor resemblance to Smithson.
Flint takes some of the pinched-away clay and rolls it into tiny threads. His thin fingers form a tiny oblong loop. He threads another piece of clay through and continues until he has a short chain.
When the chain is done he shackles them around each of the tiny wrists he has created of the clay and over the back of the hunched man and around the amorphous ankles. Proportionately the links of the chain are large enough to keep a ship moored to a quay in a strong storm. The chains run around his legs and between his feet and Flint dangles them off the edge of the square pedestal but anchors it to nothing, the weight of the chain itself being enough.
The statuette in the candleflame flickers its shadow long and distorted along the wall of the pit. Flint sits back and examines his work and is happy that his first has come out so well. But it is not complete. He turns the statuette and sitting on the edge of his bedding he bends down and looks into the small face. With the splinter of wood he carves out the features of the face in detail and does not stop until looking at the carved face he feels the pity that he felt when last he saw Smithson.
From one of the paper cups flint takes the bag of tobacco and rolls a cigarette with one hand. He has worked on the statuette through the night and by the small crack in the trapdoor he can see a pale light of morning despite the dense overcast. He has looked at the statuette for so long he can no longer tell if it was a waste of time, nor does he know why he created it. Only that he could not overcome the compulsion.
He sits back smoking the cigarette and looking at the pathetic, struggling figure and in the face he carved out of the clay Flint recognizes something he can not name. He smokes the cigarette and as he searches the small carved face and recognizes the pity he felt, tears come to his eyes and in moments he is weeping. His right foot on the edge of the bedding and his right leg drawn up to his chest. He hugs his one good leg tightly and he weeps into the fold of his arm.
Beyond the pit the wails of his weeping cannot be heard. But in the recognition that brought Flint to tears, he knows he has succeeded, that some only stare angrily ahead or regretfully behind and never have any such breakthrough. He had long suspected something was ahead and now he knows beyond doubt.
A rush comes and dizzies him. For a moment he feels as though he is running hard. He cries until he is exhausted and lies along the plank and falls into a deep sleep.

13.
It is afternoon when Flint awakens. The candles and sterno still burning. He looks at the sculpture and feels again that voice within speaking as it tried to do for so long. The greenware is a pale red, dried from the flames he placed altarwise around it. There are only a few patches of dark moisture on the pedestal.
He prepares a cup of riverbrew coffee stopping occasionally to inspect the sculpture. He sits on the edge of his bedding sipping the brew and looking at the sculpture, how the candle light flickering makes the small face alive with movement, how it makes the arms and legs seem to swagger with the chains draped about.
He remembers Smithson in jail. He is thinking about how he can get money for sterno and food as he lifts the sculpture to place it on the shelf of the far wall.
The sculpture is heavy and cold in his hands and he can feel it has hardened. But as he turns to place it on the shelf, there is a crumbling and his hands are empty. On the ground the tiny unrecognizable shards of the statuette reduced to thumbnail chips and all before him the fine snowing dust of the dry clay. His unfired sculpture lies in a pile of powder at his feet, a few larger pieces of the pedestal still cartwheeling along the ground. Flint stands looking at the rubble.
Surely this comes together again. If it once was, it can never be undone such as this. Can it be undone?
But the rubble sits and the dust settles and it does not come together again. It is a full minute before he realizes the sculpture is ruined, that what he created is gone and will never be again. He drops to his right knee before the pile of rubble and rakes his twiggish fingers through chips and dust.
In a haze of exhaustion exacerbated by the ambivalence of having found the voice and of having lost its first aria, Flint heads toward the train station with an empty coffee cup.
The soft soughing shuffle of two hundred feet coming and going from the station and the buzzing of conversations that are just out of reach. Flint sits on the bench by the main doors. Just inside the doors the two elderly ladies stand patiently, thin and frail, displaying their magazines.
Flint rolls a cigarette, watching with amazement the deft fingers before him. Yet saddened again that the statuette was destroyed and wondering if he should make another like the first or let it go and sculpt one entirely new. He lights his cigarette.
No doing twice what was miraculous once.
He is luxuriating in the cigarette smoke as the commuters file back and forth through the doors. Cars come up to the front entrance. There are two people in the car and they get out and the driver takes the bags from the back seat or trunk and walks them to the sidewalk and the two embrace. Farewell. There are tears.
There is a handshake between two men. One gets back in his car, the other turns toward the station.
A driver pulls up to the main entrance and sits, leaning over to see through the passenger window, looking through the main doors. His face lights up with recognition and he hurries from the car and goes to the main entrance and there is a grand, loving embrace. Flint watches these drivers noting the change of expression from anticipation to recognition.
The two old ladies peddle their wares outside the front doors. They offer them without cost, but none accepts.
Flint is leaning back heavily on the bench smoking the last of the cigarette, his leg twisted outward. After a couple of minutes he realizes that one of the old ladies has been giving a sort of sermon to no one in particular, but Flint senses it is being directed to him. He looks at the one speaking, shorter than the other, colorful pink and gold scarf about her blue hair, long wool overcoat buttoned to the throat, shin bones only a couple of fingers wide from the bottom of the coat to orthopedic shoes.
He bobs his head toward her, breathing heavily through his open mouth, lips chapped and cracked weals sealed with dried blood, his eyes red from sickness. From exhaustion and hunger and now the strong nicotine. There is a loud rumble as an Amtrak speeds through the station without stopping. It whooshes away toward Philadelphia and even the faint rumble and clatter is gone in a moment like a pointless memory.
“Habakkuk is what I’ve been talking about,” she says to none in particular, “3:19 to be exact. Mm-hmm, that’s where you’ll find it all right. Sure will if you just look. ‘The Lord God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds’ feet’, like hinds’ feet, ‘and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.’ Just look yourself you don’t believe me. Got it writ right here.” She raises her Bible before her face, her weak wrist and arm waver upholding the small weight.
Flint listens and looks down at his warped, useless leg. No hinds’ feet are his. He rises from the bench and picks up his empty coffee cup. After a while, another train rumbles to a stop.
Standing beside the curb he lifts his empty cup to the commuters as they file past. He says nothing though the pain in his stomach nags him to try harder. In a minute, the sympathy returns and he wonders why he even bothers coming to the station.
The commuters push past like a retinue of the damned unawares, following an unknown leader and vying for position at the front of the line. The crowd wanes but another train approaches. He waits humbly for them, swiping his foot against the curbside snowbank soiled and black with grit, honeycombed by rock salt.
Watching calmly the snow fall in small avalanches from the ridge along the curb, he imagines were he a ladybug-size man how the boot sweepings would bury him alive, would smother him in what is to him as a grown man a handful of snow. Yet spring would come and the tiny Flint would be a dead crust of what he once was and he would float away on the thawing snow and disappear down the gutter. No one would know or care.
Would any recall?
The blue-haired lady is still reciting passages when a mounted police officer rides up to the curb. The horse is in fine shape, nearly 16 hands and with broad, well-defined shoulders and haunches, each muscle twitching as it walks. A bright white steam from its nostrils blowing as densely as that from the smokestacks over the city.
Flint is swiping his boot over the snow by the curb when the horse steps its front legs forward, arches its back and urinates. Flint steps back and watches the yellow stream melt the snow away.
A gleam of another yellow emerges and that gleam tumbles down the hard snow and catches his prospector’s eye. He freezes before the gleam like a short-haired pointer who sights a pheasant crouched in the soy.
Flint bends down and shoves his hand in the yellowed and gravelly snow. He shakes his hand craps-wise sifting the snow through his thin fingers. The panning pays. In the palm of his hand is a gold wedding band.
Fifty dollars easy.
It is a ring such as Flint has never seen, a mobius band. He examines the ring and notices that by tracing one side you are led to the other, that one side becomes the other without leaving either side. What may have begun as a single strip of metal with two distinct sides is now one continuous movement, two halves brought together to form one whole.
How has this come to be found in a foul snow bank by a vagrant begging charity? Thrown in rage? Accidentally flung shaking the cold from his hands?
An officer on a bicycle approaches the curb and stands his ride beside the mounty.
Flint is turning the ring in his hands and wonders at the implications of this discovery. Whether what is on the inside of the soul is somehow one with that which is on the outside. Whether the present never truly passes as long as there are the living, because each living consciousness brings the past forward and passes it on to others.
As the commuters scurry out of the station, there is the sea-plashing of their leather soles sloshing through the slush and the grinding like shattered diamonds of the rock salt on the sidewalk. Flint is studying the ring when he notices the sound and then looks at the quick feet along the sidewalk. It has been a long time that he has felt that twinge he acknowledges to be envy that he could walk as they, quick, smooth steps, upright posture, sure and symmetrical.
To skip just once. To be airborne if only for the fleet moment of a broad jump.
The lady is preaching curbside to the harried commuters stepping over the small snowbank. He is deciding whether to roll another cigarette. His empty cup on the bench beside him.
A hand throws a dart toward him and he winces. It is not a dart but a rolled bill, its corners tucked in to keep it from unraveling. It knocks the cup over and both fall from the bench to the ground. Flint looks at the two, the rolled bill motionless on a bed of crushed rock salt, the cup rocking back and forth.
“Sorry about that,” a voice says. A young man bends over and puts the bill back into the cup and puts the cup on the bench and turns to leave. Flint recognizes him as the new guy from the tool and dye shop.
“Say there,” Flint says. He looks at the bill in the cup and sees it is a ten. “Just a minute there. You’re the new guy from the shop. Gave me your lunch the other day?”
“That’s right.” The lanky young man stands before him holding a leather bookbag in his hand and bouncing it off his knee. His feet are set apart, sentry stance.
“Thank you. Much obliged.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I ought to.”
Flint reaches out his hand and introduces himself and learns the young man’s name. He looks groundward and pinches his thumb and forefinger across each eye.
“You gave me a ten the other day?”
“I gave you a ten.” Flint’s head rolls back. He smiles.
“Ah, I see. You must be doin all right then.”
Gill shrugs.
“No?”
“I’m always looking.”
“Where you comin from?”
“New York City.”
“What’re you doin up there? Moonlighting?”
“I work at the shop part time. When they need me. I thought it would be good experience. Learn a trade, get to know some different people. And I need the cash. I’ll be moving out west some day.”
“You work up New York?”
“I don’t work in the city.”
“You go up lookin for work?”
“Half looking.”
Gill gazes through the windows of the station toward a dull people huddled over small tables trying to draw some rejuvenation from steaming coffee.
“Just looking around. Seeing what other towns are like. The people in those towns. Not looking for anything in particular.”
“If you’re not looking seriously, why bother?”
“I’ve seen what happens to a man when he’s stuck in a job, in a life he resents. Don’t want to turn out like that, so I keep my eyes open.”
“Well, God bless. You’re a generous man. I wish you all the luck in the world finding what you’re not looking for.”
Gill grins.
“I was wonderin, though, why you give these bills to me and not the others standin round here?”
Gill thumbpoints over his shoulder.
“I should get going.”
“Now wait. Just a moment. That’s all I ask.”
Flint turns away and slides over on the bench. Gill notices that as he does, the one leg does not move with the rest of the body the way it should, that it bends backward so that it is left behind. Flint uses his arm to assist the lagging leg to rejoin the rest of his body and catches Gill looking at his leg, dried blood crusting his boot where it is split.
“Cold weather makes it a little more lazy’ern usual.”
“I see.”
“Now whyn’t you have a seat. Not so cold as you think it might be as there is not a wind.”
“I should get going.”
“Work day is almost over so I guess your not headin to the shop. Isn’t anywhere to go to so important you can’t sit out a minute, is there?”
Gill looks back at the lot where his car is parked as though some signal would tell him whether it is all right to stay a moment. He sits on the end of the bench careful not to knock the cup over again.
From the corner of his eye and with his head tilted away, Flint regards this young man who has twice given him a ten, who has given him his own food. He feels through the thin fabric of his trousers the pouch of tobacco.
“Isn’t usual I have more’n one a day. Don’t want any vice to give over to habit. But I could stand another. Been a long day—” He shakes his head and gazes at the ground, “—long day. I’m goin to roll another. You care for one?”
Gill looks Flint up and down. The tattered blanket, worn clothes, side-split boots. Emaciated and mummified in his own skin. Foul odor of the unbathed and nauseating sweetness of stale urine.
“It’s just tobacco. If you’re going to roll one anyway.” The slightest slit of smile beginning on his lips.
“I’ll teach you how to roll with one hand.” Flint begins the ritual. The young man studies each deft movement of the thin fingers, the orchestrated whole.
The two officers back away from the entrance. The face of the cycle mounty is bloodred from riding against the cold. He has one foot on the pedal and the other pushes scooterwise along the ground and he hops up on the curb. He motions with his gloved hand to the preaching lady until she backs away from the doors.
The mounty clucks his tongue and presses his heels and the rear end of the quarter horse squats and the horse clops along the curb beside the cycle mounty. The horse’s brisket steaming in the cold air, a stream of white smoke from each nostril.
The two officers stand their mounts beside the curb next to the bench where Flint and Gill are seated.
“This cold can’t be good for you,” the mounty says.
“Look who’s talkin.”
“I don’t ride against the cold the way you do.”
“No.” He looks down and wipes a thick rope from his nose onto the back of his black glove. “But then again, you’re at higher altitudes.”
The mounty tilts his head.
“You know at don’t matter.”
“Right there in Habbakuk. I’ll read it if you like. These here are the end days. It’s true. It’s true.” She closes her eyes nodding solemnly.
The young man looks over his shoulder at her. Her mouth hung open for a moment after the words have stopped, purple lip hanging loosely away from the bottom row of her long brown teeth, then the prognathous jaw ruminating sideways some gristly ort. Gill looks at Flint, who shrugs.
“I think it’s good for the heart,” the cycle mounty says.
“Where’d you get that tobacco.”
“Can’t be. You’re working your heart and the cold air’s constricting all your vesicles. Raises the blood pressure. Strains the heart.” He makes a fist with his gloved hand to demonstrate the clinching of the heart.
“Pick up these butts thrown away.” Flint sweeps his hand over the sidewalk. “Course before the snow fell again.”
The doors swing open and a small covey files past, wings of the long khaki trench coats fluttering uselessly.
“Zephaniah says it, too. Look around you. All around.” The preacher lady raises her voice until Flint and Gill look at her. “Oh, maybe not for all the world, but for each of us it’s true. The end is always nigh.”
Gill notices Flint is lost in speculation.
“But there is no need to worry cause of Grace. Unless you haven’t accepted and if you haven’t, best not dally round no more. Die without receivin isn’t nothin I can do.” She shakes her head with authority, ruminating.
The young man watches as Flint rolls each cigarette and then licks the glue and seals each shut. Observing the white tongue and the blood-cracked lips, the hollow cheeks and eyes of the lazarine corpse before him, he wonders if it is such a good idea to put that cigarette Flint has licked into his own mouth. Flint finishes both cigarettes and hands one to Gill and lights it for him then lights his own. Gill takes a small drag testing this smoke of discarded dottle, then a longer drag, a slight puckering as he exhales a stream of smoke. After a few drags he pinches his eyes, the strong, stale leaf burning them. He becomes dizzy.
Flint exhales the smoke in two dense columns from his nose. There is something about the way Flint gets lost in the pleasure of the smoke that reminds Gill of Teddy. And a weariness and sorrow in his eyes. Yet there is no rage. And it is that absence of rage, despite this vagrant having a reasonable excuse to be filled with rage, that has whetted Gill’s curiosity and driven him to get to know the character of the man, the gathering of his days.
Gill looks at the lights reflecting sharp long needles along the rails chromed by friction. A train comes and a few get off and lumber through the lot with the stropping sound of soles along slushed pavement. They drive off to homes and lives as unfamiliar to him as ancient gods.
When the train pulls away he sees people sleeping inside. He thinks for a moment about the great unfamiliarity of so many millions of lives he’ll never know, that are lived with countless millions of others never being aware of them.
Flint watches him.
“It seems people spend more time traveling to and from than living in their homes,” he says.
“It’ll be spring before we know,” the mounty says.
“Not fast enough.”
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Not mindin don’t mean an answer, but you go right on ahead.”
“What do you do?”
Flint angles his head away regarding him and tries to determine if the young man is ridiculing his state of employment.
Diagnosis: Terminal unemployment. Prognosis: Condition irreversible. Prescription: Mug of hemlock.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean with all the hours of the day. What do you do all day, and at night?”
He considers the question for a moment, raising the cigarette to his lips, taking a draught, pulling the cigarette carefully away when the paper sticks to his bloated lower lip. He pinches away the loose tobacco from both lips and his tongue. Puhh. He blows the tobacco from his lip.
“Never really accounted for my hours, all the hours of all the days since the steel mill let me go. After a couple of years looking and finding only the temporary jobs I could perform with my leg and the periods of unemployment between jobs growing longer and longer, I realized I was no less happy not having those jobs. So I decided I’d work for myself.”
“What do you do?”
“I gather metal and sell it to Smithson at the scrapyard. I consider it a valuable service. It cleans up the streets and uses what’s already been smelted.”
Gill nods. Flint sees a slackening of interest and respect.
“Not that how you are obliged to spend your hours is necessarily what you are here to do. I know what it is I am here to do and that is now my first pursuit.”
“What would that be?” The young man is sure he is being conned.
“After so many years wonderin what a burnin in my heart was, I have discovered that I am a sculptor.”
The young man looks at him as though he is being dismissed with a flip answer.
“Of course.” Gill turns toward the steam wafting from the haunches of the mounty’s horse.
“Truly. As much as anything else. That’s what I am. I know this now, after these many years wonderin.”
The young man nods and drags from his cigarette. Tastes the charred remainder of some snuffed menthol.
“How bout you?” Flint asks.
“Work at the shop. Wander in New York. Not much, I suppose.”
“Wander?”
Gill nods.
“Lookin for what?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean what are you?”
“I can sure as hell wait for spring if those goddam bombardiers come back,” the cycle mounty says.
Flint turns toward the officer on the bicycle when he hears the word bombardier.
“What do you mean?” Gill says.
“I’ve seen that look in the eyes before.”
“What look is that?”
“Steely gaze of the cowboy. Seeing everything and everyone and nothing getting by. Always watching.”
His brows twitch and he studies Flint.
“So I’ll ask again. What do you do?”
Flint leans away and tilts his head back, smiles expectantly.
The young man searches the ground. After a couple of drags spent in puffs of ironic laughter, he looks at the lady preaching and then the police. He leans back toward Flint.
“I wander but don’t know what I’m looking for. I convince myself my life is wasting away in pointless journeys and I stop for a while. Then, when I’m still, a restlessness like a scorpion down my shirtback drives me out again.”
Flint studies the boy and puts a hand on his shoulder and smiles and says nothing for some time.
“What makes sense of it, that it is not wasted time?”
The boy kicks some of the crusty snow away from the bench to make room for his feet on the concrete.
“To write poetry from it, even if it’s only a song with no music.”
The mounty packs one fist into the palm of the other and hikes the glove up his hand.
“I really hate those bastards.”
“What I figured. I knew when I saw you you’s either a boxer or a brooder. Poet. That’s hard. I always wished I could be smart enough to be a poet. My thoughts and ideas are in poetry, it just never comes out right. But I know the language. I do. Up here.” He taps his temple with a crooked finger. “Though you may not think it to look at me.”
“It’s the cowardice I hate,” the cycle mounty says.
“Not only that, but the randomness. Like terrorists. Against strangers. Unknowns. No reason. Just anyone.” The mounty half-reins his horse closer to the curb. “You’re right. It’s the cowardice, too.”
“Smart enough?”
“Sure. Got to be clever. You’re concentrating a whole experience and understanding into a few short lines.”
“Never thought of it quite like that.”
“I knew it when I saw your eyes because I know them well. I’ve known that look many years.”
“Where’d you see them before?” Flint stares off toward Monty’s Café. The whites of his eyes are bloodred and watery, the corners rheumy. He gazes a thousand miles passed Monty’s.
“In the eyes of Eleanor.”
The stream of commuters has slowed. The old lady lets herself inside through the pipemusic’s silk curtain of Benny Goodman’s high, plaintive clarinet. She stands beside her cohort in the lobby and brisks away the cold.
“Eleanor?”
“Yes that’s right. Eleanor.” He settles his chin on his chest, his eyes closed but his brows arching steeply trying to control a burn in his eyes. “Didn’t love before Eleanor. Didn’t love after. Thought I’d grow old with Elle. May sound hard to believe. But there’s a lid for every pot.”
The officers stretch their limbs and backs. They stretch their calves on the pedals and stirrups. Stretch their hands back and forth. Roll their heads around like the deranged.
“Course people don’t like to hear of other folks’ romance.” He presses the back of his stick fingers into the front of Gill’s shoulder. Gill turns his attention from the quarter-horse.
“Elle was a poet, too.”
“Elle?”
“That’s right. Everyone called her Elle. Course people can be mean as I’m sure you’re aware. Or do you see people as good and nice?”
“Only when they’re sleeping.”
“Elle was what you would call a plus-size woman.” He pauses and smiles. “Now that’s being nice. She was very large indeed. Nigh three hundred pounds. Her breasts were heavy melons, and when she’d hold me they’d wrap around my sides like a second set of arms. Her teeth were gapped and kinda stuck forward like Mr. Ponyhead’s there.
“But I tell you, she had the prettiest green eyes. Something about a brown woman with bright green eyes. I knew her since school. That’s when all the meanness that is in people comes out. Every one called her by sundry nicknames and none too kind. She didn’t mind if everyone wanted to call her by a nickname. But she did wish they would, if they had to, call her Round-Elle and not the other nicknames. Some did but most didn’t.”
“Round Elle.”
Flint presses the back of his hand into Gill’s arm again to impress his point.
“They wanted to make fun of her size and that nickname would let them. But she told me later that she liked that nickname cause it’s a type of poem. French poem of some sort.”
Gill glances at Flint and diverts his eyes to the source of a sound that is the horse urinating again, the yellow stream boring another gold-lined hole in the curbside bank of snow.
“The roundel.” His voice is faint.
He’d had no picture of the life of a man before he falls into vagrancy, but these details did not sound believable. He wonders if Flint is a lunatic.
“That was a whole lot kinder than what most had begun to call her.”
“What was that?”
“Local-El. She didn’t mind too much cause she was so large and she knew and she had too kind of a heart to be bothered. Except when people made fun of her for not shavin her legs which she couldn’t cause she couldn’t reach all round so just didn’t shave at all. That hurt her feelings cause she wanted to be considered a lady just like any of the other women.”
“You on the force when that lady took it through the windshield?”
“No. I heard about it though. Shame.”
“It was.”
“You went to the call?”
“I got there after it was all cleaned up. But Vic, you know him?”
“Guy from Romania with red hair?”
“That’s him. He told me about it. And I read the report and saw the pictures. What a mess.”
“I really hate those bastards.” The mounty’s head rolls around his shoulders as though partially detached.
“You think it’s a sick mind or a sick heart?”
“I don’t know. Seems you’d have to be able not to feel anything. Sick heart. I don’t know.”
“They just don’t feel?”
“Something like that.”
“Seems true compassion’s dying. So many just don’t feel. Even if they know it’s wrong, they just can’t sympathize what others feel as a consequence of their actions.”
“Does seem that sociopaths are becoming the norm.”
“All are strangers now. If they knew each other and everyone was not a stranger… who knows. I don’t know.”
A shadow passes over Flint’s eyes and he remains transfixed for several moments as Gill studies him, watches him disappear into reclusion. Gill watches him ascend and gently alight upon the observer’s perch. The falcon is fixed upon a recollection, some moment of grave significance.
With the true laureate’s precision of thought and clarity of voice, Flint reflects upon a stranger he knew only briefly.
Not to be recalled by thee, have I existed? To have not recalled thee in these many years, I must apologize, distant acquaintance whom I visit now only in nightmare, forgotten acquaintance among all the lost friendships with whom we are yoked only in dream.
“I have witnessed the bombardiers,” Flint says. His voice lowers, is soft but strained. His words are from a deeper cavern in his chest.
“They come in the springtime, when it begins to warm and thaw the wilding that is natural to people and which is mainly harmless, the seed of romance and late nights, the seed of experience that blooms the flower of memory. But that wilding arises as a pure evil in them. Usually in the morning when people are late for work and their minds preoccupied with the duties of the day. Rushing blindly down the highway that runs through the middle of the city.
“They were standing on the Terry Street overpass and I was below on the shoulder of the highway gathering hubcaps. I saw an object drop and it bounced off the road and along the underbelly of a speeding auto and ricocheted. It shot by me and hit the wall and chipped a divot of concrete. Then a headlight was put out with a pop and the splashing sound of shattering glass, a windshield cracked. Drivers cursing or jumping with the fright but most not even knowing where the stones and rocks and bolts were coming from.”
Gill shifts in his seat, unsettled by the change in Flint’s tone.
“Cars were racing by. I was trying to cross the highway. No easy task for a man with a lame leg and arms full of hubcaps. I was standing and leaning against the wall and as I could not yet cross the highway I was watching the faces of the drivers.
“They were moving so fast I could only catch a fleeting glimpse here and there, a single frame in a moving picture. There was the distressed, the aggressive and determined, the anxious and the dreadful. Occasionally there would be the laughing or the nodding head barely resisting sleep. A sense of weariness or exhaustion in most eyes.
“I looked down the highway and saw you in your little red car fade across the three lanes. No suddenness, just your car speeding along and drifting across the lanes as casual as smoke, passing many others, trying to get to work on time. You looked in the rearview to put on mascara. And because of that carefree drifting over the lanes, I watched and I saw in your bright hopeful face something anxious. The strain that furrowed your brow was not so much tension as sorrow or anguish. I wanted to know what it was exactly you were chasing after or what it was you were running from.
“There was a split second when I thought I knew. There was an expression on your face, as though like Merlin you were not remembering the past but remembering forward, that divine recognition of what is coming that is genius.”
Gill took a drag from the powerful smoke.
“The small stones stopped coming from the overpass for a few seconds. Then all at once the bombardiers released their mother lode. What I saw in you was what you recognized, what we all must come to recognize someday, for you could see what I could not yet see.
“You were speeding along too close to the overpass to stop in time, too fast to maneuver. The bombardiers had begun dropping bricks and rocks and large hunks of metal. When you realized what was happening, your hand was still aloft, holding your mascara pencil delicately. A skinny, boyish hand at the end of a long thin arm reached over the rail on the overpass. God damn! I shouted in vain. The hand waited for the signal from the brain. Timing is everything.
“As you sped toward the overpass you swerved to avoid the raining debris. But it was too late. All of this in fractions of a second, yet each picture a permanent and separate frame of a moving picture.
“And it was all in that moment. The arm and hand received the signal from the brain and gave a little toss as delicate as broadcasting seeds. I saw tumbling end-over-end a railroad spike that must have been gathered from the tracks.
“It was all in the timing. Perfect timing. Perfectly accidental or devious. The spike tumbling and you racing toward the rain of debris trying to maneuver. All in vain. It stove through the windshield and impaled you through your right eye. I suspect you were dead instantly. But your car faded across the lanes as it went under the overpass until it careered into the divider and spun across the lanes. It crashed into the guardrail and stopped. A last few moments of lifeless momentum.
“A figure with hands buried deep in his pockets and shoulders shrugged sauntered away as though he remembered another appointment he should keep but did not care about all that much.”
My old acquaintance, whom I meet occasionally in dream. Were you the beginning of my derangement? How is it a man falls into an eremitic existence and does not see the pitfall before him, does not know what he is becoming?
They sit in silence. Flint realizes that the mounties have been listening to him and remembers that he fled the scene. Gill’s narrowed eyes pierce through the windows of the cars that come to the station, gaze at the faces of the drivers who watch their passengers leave the car and head for a train that will carry them away at a hundred miles an hour. Flint turns toward him quickly and presses the back of his hand against his arm.
“As I was saying, Elle was a poet, too.”
“She read or wrote poetry?”
“Both. She sure could write a beautiful poem and gave me many. They were a bit strange.”
“In what way?”
“Poems are supposed to rhyme. She’d write poems thinking they rhymed but I didn’t have the heart to tell her they didn’t rhyme.”
“She thought they rhymed but they didn’t.”
“You see, night and light rhyme, so do day and gray. You know this and I don’t need to explain, you being a poet and all—”
“I never claimed—”
“I don’t remember the poems exactly. But the lines she wanted to rhyme she’d end with words like test and rust and wrath and death.” He raises his hands and shrugs.
“That’s near rhyme. It’s a subtle—” he begins to explain, but Flint interrupts him.
“She couldn’t help it, though, not knowing they weren’t rhymes.”
“She didn’t know.”
“Elle didn’t hear or speak so good. Her voice often wasn’t much more’n a harsh wheeze. It hurt to hear her laugh and made others stop laughin when she did. But she’d laugh and her pretty green eyes twinklin like jewels melting away.”
“I see.”
“She could read lips though and spoke in sign language. You know what that is?”
“Yes.”
“Her hands were so quick and graceful. Like butterflies on the wing. Like she had a beautiful voice or was singing when you saw her hands moving and she’d tilt her head and look at you curious whether you understood her. At the time I could understand. Now I don’t know any of it. We would have fraps at the Rolling Steel Express Diner and she’d put a book of poetry on the counter and point to a poem for me to read. I remember one began, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. And I remember the name only of another called Ozymandias. Ever hear of them?”
“Know them well.”
“Now don’t that word itself just sound like magic?”
“It does.”
“Thought I’d spend my life with Elle.”
“Where is she?”
Flint’s eyes follow the long silver blades of the train tracks. The recollection of certain horrors mingled with the loss of loved ones forces Flint to restrain that hot liquid burn of tears he had not felt for years before the sculpting. His breathing is hard as he controls himself, wiping his rheumy eyes with the hard, bony palm of his hand recalling those that Time or Destiny has taken.
What of these two, Time and Destiny? Which truly reins? Is all bound to pass in time, or is there some other source, some single source of all cause that determines what happens and when?
“She was walking down Cuttle where it crosses State. She was hurrying for the bus to take out to Cadawalder Park. There’s a museum of the city’s pottery there. Her bus was already sitting there waiting. She comes round the corner and steps to the side out of the way.
“It was like a convergence of moments that cannot be changed for they are bound to happen. Another bus was pulling to a stop behind hers. She was rushin and when she stepped out of the way her foot slipped on the edge of the curb. She fell behind her bus and tried to grab the corner of the bus to keep from fallin but that was no help.
“As she fell the driver of the bus pulling up behind hers slipped off the brake and the bus lurched forward. Elle got caught between the two buses.”
He pressed his palm into his eyes again.
“Convergence of moments,” he says. “Not to be ignored. Those that change the world or only your perception of it.”
“Sounds like a good person,” Gill says. “Doesn’t seem right that such things happen to the good. Hard to believe God gives a damn about the affairs of man.”
They sat in silence for some minutes. Flint realizes he’s spoken too much about himself and not enough about the young man. He remembers the letter he wrote after being let go from the steel mill and it seems the young man needs the breath of wisdom he breathed that afternoon. The young man is wandering perhaps because he has not learned that the only road to true contentment is by not living a contradiction.
“No matter what you know,” he says, “it isn’t wisdom unless you live abiding by it. Just as no matter what you think you are, you are not unless you are doing what you believe you were put here to do. Not abiding either, you’re living a contradiction. Much of the misery we endure is from living a contradiction, usually against the creator.”
“I wrote this letter, just before I started keeping a journal. It was to none in particular, rather to everyone explaining this. It is my philosophy. I wish you’d read it.”
Gill is doubtful but patient.
“I still have it. It’s in my mama’s diary back where I’m staying.” He looks down the steel blades of track. “If I’d ever had a family with Elle I would hope they would cherish and preserve that letter and my journals. They have everything I would want to share with them.”
Flint takes a deep breath and sighs heavily, a phlegmatic gurgle and he is calm. Sorely in need of cauterizing a reopened heart-wound, Flint takes the pouch of tobacco out of his pocket.
The entrance to the train station opens and the pipemusic floods out. The two blue-haired ladies step outside and wait on the curb for a bus to take them home.
“You never know what the day holds. Gill nods while Flint exhales smoke to the side. “None of us knows how much time he has. Don’t you agree?”
“Who could disagree?”
“Then it must also be true that none of us has any time to waste.”
Gill shrugs a shoulder.
“How can I not waste time, not knowing what I am supposed to be doing?”
“I saw you on the platform one morning, looking down the tracks at the thundering express. I’m no prophet, but I see that you have it in you to do great things, to write great poetry, if that’s what’s in you, if only you keep the determination and the dream.”
“I guess everyone does.”
“That’s true. But some more than others. And I see in you something I had in my eyes a long time ago but lost and only recently found again.”
Flint waits until Gill looks over at him.
“Ma’am,” Flint says to one of the blue-haired ladies. “What’s that verse from the preacher about what your hands find to do?”
She looks at Flint and then at the young man beside him and raises her penciled eyebrows in high arches.
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave—” she tilts her head back looking at Gill “—whither thou goest.”
Flint stares hard into Gill’s eyes and waits until he is paying attention.
“Don’t let your wandering become an escape. A waste of time is a waste of life is a waste of purpose.”
Flint smokes his cigarette down until he must pinch the roach, damp, stained, and soggy in his fingertips, sucking every wisp of smoke from the tobacco. Gill rises with his bookbag.
“I’d better be going.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Thanks for the smokes.”
“Thanks for them bills.”
“Is it enough to get by?
“My cup runneth over.” The laugh.
“Everything works out for the best in the end, you know. You don’t believe that, you won’t want to go on. And I’ll tell you something else young man,” Flint leans forward as though he would share with him an incriminating secret. “Sometimes I feel what’s to happen before it happens. And I’m telling you, everything’s going to work out fine for you. Just follow your calling.”
Flint watches him as he steps over the ridge of snow onto the icy macadam and skates along the ice as fast as he can for as long as the ice lasts.
“Careful,” the mounty shouts across the lot at him.
As Flint watches him walk away, he acknowledges that if even a man such as he has a cry that must be uttered, so must every man. To recognize what is common to all, that others may understand the natures of Time and Destiny, that they are a kind of lever that turns a man’s life, rocking on a fulcrum of the free will.
To behold ourselves in the dust from whence we came and to where we are bound. To behold ourselves in dust. In Dust! and in that to understand that our times are a necessary link in the chain of human history. That as the poet seeks in order to bloom the flower of memory, so must he create from what he has observed, what is his understanding.
He may well come to curse Destiny, being one of the scavengers picking through the entrails of Prometheus. For if even the son of a Titan, the champion of Man, is chained to a rock, to a destiny he despises, then what of the scavenger that is bound to him? Can his life rise above his champion?
On judgment day, no man will be found innocent whose motive has been less than love. Does a man know love who pursues only vanities?

14.
Flint steals into the strip of ground beside the tool and die shop. He overturns an oil drum pouring out most of the loose furnace ash but leaves a few inches of the hardened paste in the bottom of the drum. Rolls the drum back to his pit. After throwing the small garbage can out of the pit, he breaks down part of the shelving on the wall across from his bed, drops the drum into the pit and builds a fire in the drum.
The wood burns slowly. The bottom of the drum becomes a red glow of coals, flaring bright when the occasional draught curls down the walls of the pit and spirals inside the drum. When the draught ends, the coals darken.
Another snow is coming and the wind rising. But the pit is warm in minutes.
When the embers are going strong, Flint returns to the river’s edge and follows the shore upstream to the train trestle. He looks for a cargo net he’d seen last summer caught in the briars. He finds the net and it is much as it was and still caught in the webbing are the remains of a red fox.
Flint tramples the brush and pulls the net to the silty oil-glazed shore and dislodges the carcass from the web. There is still some fur left on the skeleton, desiccated fur that falls apart when Flint touches it, that sifts away like chaff in the wind. Flint plucks the fox’s whiskers and pushes several tufts of the fur into his pocket. He pries away the lower jaw with its lipless and vicious teeth. He snaps off one of its forelegs and claws and several of its ribs. These pieces he drops into the drum to harden them by fire and falls fast asleep.
Next morning, he rises early and heads to the Commons to pawn the gold ring at a jewelry shop. Thirty dollars.
It is a busy week of carving the frozen marl from the river bank and gathering it in his pit to thaw. On a late afternoon, he hears the ticking of claws in the duct and stops the opening of the pipe with a thick plug of clay.
When enough of the clay in the corner of the pit has thawed, he begins his work. He works late nights molding it with his meatless hands. His hands ache with the cold and the dampness of the clay. The only relief from the chill sunk deep in his bones is when he takes each sculpture and carefully drops it on the coals in the drum. He warms his hands and watches as the clay changes colors miraculously and becomes as hard as stone in the homemade kiln.
He works late into the early morning carving away at each sculpture with his tools of bone and tooth. The nights are late and he does not sleep until he can step back from his work and see there something recognizable, reflective, or a remembering forward. His technique develops with steady and hurried progress and when he steps back to admire his work, he is pleased.
For a few days he debates whether it is wrong to part with the many pieces he has created for pay.
If these works were to sit on the plank, how could they edify others? And if they do not edify others, then what is their purpose, and what the purpose of the sculptor?
Flint loads the pieces in the shopping cart and heads off to the train station.
“Come and look at my gallery of grotesqueries, my assemblage of the droll,” he barks to the commuters as they file past. “Ten dollars each one. Made right here in Trenton by a local artist and of the finest Trenton clay.”
But those who look into the gallery in his shopping cart see either stolen property or queer figurines they do not understand. No sale.
He pushes the cart to The Commons remembering the frenzy of spending and shopping and gathering on that cobblestone thoroughfare. No sale.
Then to the corner of State and Terry where he barks out to his townsmen the bargain he is offering. Some slow and gaze with a dull viewership usually reserved for television and window shopping and pass on.
Later in the afternoon a police officer on foot patrol approaches, recognizes this vagrant in his shroud of tattered blanket.
“Flint,” the officer says.
“’day Sarge.”
“You know I don’t want to do this.”
“Do what.”
“You gotta have a permit to peddle your wares on public streets.”
“A permit.”
“Permit. Forty dollars. Get it down at the courthourse Monday through Friday nine to four.”
“If I had forty dollars, I wouldn’t need to peddle my wares.”
“Flint—”
“How’s a man to get by?”
“I’m sorry. You’ve gotta move on.”
Returning to his pit he takes the long way. His eyes are hard upon the ground in front of the heavy cart, his shoulders hunched from the burden. He tries to think of a way to sell his statuettes, hobbling along, rolling over his lame leg and gazing at the golden-egg of the capitol such that he nearly does not notice a commotion at the Hill Hotel, once a comfortable hotel for business travelers. Air Conditioning in happy comictrip lettering from the 1960’s. A chain link fence along the sidewalk makes unusable its porte cochere. Sign in the office window hand-painted with a brush, long skinny square letters, Welfare Checks Cashed, Food Stamps Accepted. In the small drive at the end of the carport a black station wagon with its rear gate swung open.
Beneath the porte cochere a frail black woman, hair up in a filthy kerchief, cataleptic with hysterics and face contorted but largely soundless, stricken and trembling, knees buckling at times. When there is a sound from her mouth it is a whimpering mew.
Two police officers, one on each side, hold her up when her knees buckle and restrain her as four other officers emerge from a room on the second floor and struggle on the staircase carrying a bloated body bag sagging heavily and dragging along the edge of the steps. They hoist the bag and toss it in the back of the wagon. It makes a nauseating thump and the wagon dips. When the wagon dips, the woman raises both hands up before her protesting the disgrace, pitying the humility that even the dead must know somehow. She breaks down in wild screaming.
One of the officers steps in front of her as she tries to make a break for the wagon. He holds her there. She fights with him to get by. He is facing away from the street and surely he must have the face of a machine, conditioned to stone by now. But he bends down slightly and wraps both his arms around the woman and he embraces her. She struggles to free herself and when the man wrestles with her he turns with her until Flint can see his face clearly.
There are tears swelling in his eyes and his face is red with restrained sympathy. He holds her until she falls into his arms and allows the officer to envelope her, to compress a rupturing heart, to smother her with this compassion even if she suspects that it is only professional. He holds her and she clings to him and they stand there rocking and swaying as though the music and the Fox Trot had ended and these were the last slow moments before the dance is over.
Flint raps the petrified wood of his knuckles on the steel door of the tool and die shop. The door opens a crack and Cap’n is standing there peering through the crack, the Giant guardianesque behind him and looking over his head.
“Flint.”
“Hey, Cap’n.” Cap’n juts his chin.
“Was wonderin if maybe you got some cans of paint you don’t need.”
“Paint?” Cap’n only mildly curious. No request from Flint could surprise Cap’n. “There’s some old cans in the dumpster that there should be some squirts left in em.”
“Thank you kindly, Cap’n.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Flint says secretively. “But you won’t see the same ol Flint round anymore.”
“No?”
“No, sir. I’m goin to mine high places.”
“Be sure and send a card.” The Giant shakes his head. Tee-hee.
Flint pulls himself up until his waist folds over the edge of the dumpster, his head and trunk inside, his two unmatched legs dangling and squirming serpentwise as he digs through the rubbish. He tosses out the cans of spray paint gold, silver, red, black, and blue over his shoulder onto the stone drive then lets himself down from the dumpster.
Back in his pit he shakes one of the cans. The steel stirring ball rattles.
If it is gold and silver that attracts your eye and if that is what it takes to make you look, then so be it. It is through the gold and silver that I speak to you. Not beholden to them do the true abide.
He inspects his gallery of grotesqueries and chooses the two sculptures that have the highest iron-black glaze from being fired in the kiln and sets them on the cablespool. In the candlelight the small faces seem to twitch with smiles and grimaces, a single moment of the lives they represent, a moment shared by this crippled observer, captured in burnt clay.
He holds the spray paint a foot from one of the sculptures and taps the nozzle coating the surface with a fine mist of metallic color then sits on the edge of his bed to let the paint soak into the clay and dry before adding another coat. He sprays gold, now crimsons, now black onto a twisted tuft of the fox fur and onto the fox’s whiskers and uses them to highlight the finer details.
The late afternoon has passed through evening and into night. The snow has begun when Flint decides the two sculptures are properly painted. When he steps back to admire his work, he reels and only remains standing by leaning against the wall.
The kiln-fire has breathed most of the good air out of the pit and this combined with the fumes from the paint cans nearly overcome him and his head is spinning.
“Whoo-ee!”
The steel door of the tool and die shop opens and neither light nor sound accompanies the Triad. Gill looks out to the field and sees the trapdoor open and in the blue-ice haze of a stinging mist of snow, sees a drunken lunatic swaggering in the infernal glow the bowels of a subterranean smelter has belched, casting Flint’s wiry shadow dancing against the support of the unfinished bridge.
“Whoo-ee! Whoo-ee!” goes the chant to his elfin dance to cast who knows what spell, of portent indecipherable.
“What’s up with that?” the Giant says. “Tee-hee. Flint’s crazier’n shit, ain’t he?”
“No, he’s not,” Cap’n says. “Sure as hell is in some high place tonight though.”
The Giant laughs hee-hee-hee.
After the two sculptures dry and he approves of them, he paints most of the others and lets them dry around the edge of the kiln.

15.
Late night mid December. Flint rouses from a dream in which he is remembering forward. He sets to work feverishly upon an impulse.
It is an extremely cold night, a dry-ice cold. Flint is glad there is a fire in the drum. He carves a statuette of Gill on the train platform leaning against a column and looking down distantly merging tracks, his face stern and focused on some dream. Glad the pit is warm, he takes an occasional break to warm his hands over the fire in the drum. After a while he removes the tattered blanket from around his shoulders.
Before he fires this sculpture he burnishes the figure using the flat side of a rib bone, working the drying clay until it is glass-smooth. When he lowers the greenware into the embers, he stands above it and watches as the heat blackens the outer red surface of the clay and then marbles the outer surface to a black glaze with smoky gray swirls.
He looks at it and is pleased with his work and remembers the first sculpture he created, of Smithson in chains and a wave of sadness rushes over him. He suspects he may never see Smithson again. Then some intuition confirms his suspicion and he knows it as surely as the change of seasons does not depend upon human witness. He comforts himself with the belief that he will at least see him in heaven some day, though a nagging voice belies any surety of whom to expect to see in heaven.
When he thinks of himself in the torment of hell and Smithson happily in heaven with his rye and egg sandwiches he does not mind. But when he thinks of himself in heaven, running along at a brisk pace and jumping over hurdles and tumbling acrobatically and Smithson burning in flames eternal, he pities him.
The fear that a moment may be lost forever in a pile of clay dust and shards already ground into the damp floor of the pit compels him from his bedding and he places another block of clay on the cablespool and begins molding and carving again trying to replicate a miracle.
He is exhausted and lying on his bedding, the blanket now securely tucked around his trunk and legs. His breathing is heavy and he is languorous with the heat from the fire, the paint fumes, the damp heavy air and the late hour.
He lies on his bed and the preview of a dozen dreams flash through his mind. He sees the three men at the tool and die shop and thinks they have been like family to him and he wishes he could do something kind for them. He thinks of Gill and the noon hours they have spent together this past week, how Gill asked about the details of Flint’s life with a child’s curiosity. He wishes he could spend many years with him.
The snow falls with such driving force that it has already covered the trapdoor. Flint can no longer hear it falling and thinks it must have stopped. It is warm and the air closing in but it is quiet and peaceful. Flint nestles into the bedding and laces his fingers and drapes them across his emaciated chest.
Comfort, Flint says in an indolent whisper. Such comfort I could forget everything.

16.
It is a bright July afternoon. The dry heat would be unbearable but for the cooling humidity that presses in from the river. Several children are tormenting a rabbit in the wasteland, trying to whip it with the long withes they tore from a weeping willow along the riverbank. They surround the rabbit and torment it until it finally huddles down next to an oddly placed windrow of leaves and litter.
One boy is on the far side of the support T beneath the unfinished bridge and is shouting Echo! Echo! One of the children runs swinging his stick with a hiss to flush the game from its hiding then becomes still and silent when he notices this debris that has gathered in a square.
He stands swishing his stick through the leaves until his branch rakes against rotting wooden planks. To the reaches of the wasteland boyscreams wild with hunt and conquest and the glee of tormenting a helpless creature.
The boy swishes the leaves and litter away until he uncovers a trapdoor. Muddied leaves and other debris have filled the two cracks. The boy pricks his branch into one of the long fissures gouging out its loose compost caulking.
When he steps a foot onto the trapdoor it has a bellows effect and from the unclogged gap in the boards a fetid odor rises. The boy pinches his nose and steps back. By now the other boys see that something has diverted their comrade’s attention and know instinctively to assemble.
Soon the group of six boys surrounds the trapdoor.
“What’s the big deal,” one asks.
“Step on it,” the boy who discovered it says. A small sneakered foot steps forward.
“Step down on it.” When he does, the stench comes up again and the boys retreat holding their noses and gagging dramatically.
“Let’s flip it over.”
“Not me. Something stinks underneath it.”
“Come on. Someone get on that side. We’ll just lift it up, and start running with it.”
The boy who discovered it has already dug the fingers of one hand under the trapdoor and is beckoning with the other dirty and briar-nicked hand for one of his buddies to help him. After some deliberating, the thinnest and fastest of the group approaches the trapdoor and takes the side across from his buddy.
“On three. One. Two. Three.”
They both peel the trapdoor from the ground and run with it as fast as they can, the gang running ahead of them until the two dragging the trapdoor fall down panting. The others return to the two and they are all either sitting in the field or crouching, their attention back to the spot where the trapdoor had been, expecting demons perhaps or wild animals to issue forth.
“There’s a hole in the ground.”
“You saw?”
“Yeah. I looked back as we ran away.”
“How big?”
“Humongous.”
Their young minds wander.
Hideout? Bomb shelter? Entrance to hell? Abandoned gold mine?
They approach the edge of the pit cautiously, pinching their noses, and peer down from its edges.
To the left, a sort of bed on a raised plank. And on the plank, a wooden man with a skin of thin leather. His head tilted back and his mouth frozen in a strangled horrorshriek. No eyelids and the dry shriveled pouches that were his eyes white and blank and seeming to see through the sky. Surely he must not be real but a cigar store Indian. Totem of some misunderstood religion the ignorant cast aside so as not to worship a mock deity.
They stand back until the air clears and debate what they should do.
“Is he real?”
“Of course not. Don’t you know what a dead man looks like.”
“Sure I do.”
“No you don’t or you wouldn’t ask.”
“Yes I do. They don’t always have to be covered with blood.”
“Should we go down?”
“I don’t know bout the rest of you, but I am. Just going to wait for that stink to clear out.”
The boy who discovered the trapdoor goes to the edge of the pit and descends the ladder to the bottom. They are all in the pit picking through the rags and fondling the candle-plugged bottles and the dried cans of sterno, the coffee cups with roasted roots, a paper bag of sunflower seeds, another of unshelled peanuts, the paint can and several empty soup cans. With their twigs they poke through the ashes in the drum.
One of the boys notices that beneath the wooden man the soil is dark and thick as though molasses had been poured there. Perfect for mudballs. He crouches down and reaches under the leather man and grabs a fistful of the marl, the viscous clay cramming beneath the mica flakes that are his fingernails. The mud has a rank odor and is sticky as he forms it into a ball. He picks out an unsuspecting comrade poking around in the drum ash and he throws it at the boy’s back.
“Cut it out.”
The children play with the fingers of the wooden man, trying to pry them apart, trying to break one off. They push against his arm and the whole mannequin turns it is so light and rigid. They look at the lidless eyes which are dried and crusted like stale meal.
Cap’n and the Giant come out onto the back steps. The Giant stretches into the sun and takes a couple of deep breaths.
“Gorgeous day, ain’t it?”
“Not bad.” He leans forward on the rail scanning the wasteland. “They’re gonna finish that bridge they say this year.”
“Think they will?”
“They say that every year. Be good for business if they did.”
“How?”
“Can’t get much worse. Put a sign on the roof. Who knows.”
The Giant is unwrapping twinkies and sword-swallowing one after another while Cap’n smokes.
“What about those?” One of the boys in the pit points to the pile of sculptures on the other plank.
“Let’s take em home.”
From the steps, Cap’n and the Giant see a tiny bead emerge from the ground.
“I thought he left,” the Giant says.
“He did,” Cap’n says. “Ain’t been around since winter. Left that night I thought. Maybe the pit’s found a new tenant.” Flat smile of small browning teeth.
But then the boy rises on the ladder struggling with an awkward load and emerges from the ground and places something large and solid on the ground and disappears back down in the pit.
“It’s always something in this crazy place,” the Giant says and laughs tee-hee. Cap’n is already down the stairs and between the fences toward the pit. When he reaches the edge of the pit a queasiness overcomes him. He had not expected to find anything but the boy and whatever he was removing.
Below him on a makeshift bed the remains of a man he once knew. Head back and mouth in its distorted cadaver scream. Patches of his face have been gnawed. The twigs of his dark fingers still laced together in some semblance of comfort. Of a final peace. The tattered blanket not much worse than it had been.
There is a large pile of odd sculptures in one corner of the pit, with a sign on a piece of broken plank that reads Gallery of Grotesqueries, Assemblage of the Droll. The drum that Cap’n noticed missing from beside the fence. Half-burnt candles in bottles that could barely be seen for their cloak of wax cooled in mid-ripple. Beneath the bed a large stain where the body liquor had leaked from the corpse and filtered through cracks between the planks.
“You boys get on outta that pit,” Cap’n says down. They look up at him in momentary resistance, questioning his authority. “I said, get on outta there.”
The boys notice Cap’n’s snake eyes and succumb to the innate respect that some creatures compel from others. They scramble for the ladder.
“Go on. Get home.” He steps toward them and raises a backhand and they scatter.
Cap’n reaches down and tests the weight of the one sculpture. He waves the Giant over who jog-marches toward him stomping through the weeds.
“Ho-lee…” the Giant says when he looks into the pit. “Is that Flint?”
“Who the hell else would it be.” The Giant dizzies with the peculiarity, the eeriness of the scene.
“What happened?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“How?”
“How the hell should I know. Just help me get those figures outta the pit and back to the shop.”
The Giant tests the ladder and then descends. He is careful not to touch anything in the pit and tinkerbell steps on tiptoes, his arms and shoulders shrugged and his hands held close to his chest. He hands them up one at a time to Cap’n kneeling overhead. When they are all above ground, Cap’n loads up the Giant’s arms and his own and takes them to the shop. After the last load Cap’n calls the police and tells them to have the morgue send a wagon.

17.
Here is Gillett Halsey Boudre, our hero. He walks along easily for the lost, does he not? Smiles happily for someone whose core at present is hollow. It has been over half a year since he met a stranger he has not thought about more than a few times.
Here he is scouring the 49’ers Flea Market for small antique treasures, for old books that he buys and reads by the drove, fountain pens, watches, old photographs. Things that link him to a past he believes he should have lived. He is yet unaware that what drives him through the flea market and antique stores is a divinely imparted inspiration to capture such things as never pass and from them create poetry. Doesn’t he carry himself with sophistication. Doesn’t he converse intelligently for the damnably ignorant?
He has buried himself in a meaningless but well paying job and that has done wonders to mute that small voice that whispers lines to him. But he makes better money than his father ever did. A pile of folded hundreds in his pocket. When he hears that voice nagging him that he is wasting his time, that his wandering has become an escape, he sets out for the antique stores or, on such a wondrous summer day as this, to the flea market.
He is browsing among the tables, in each hand a grocery bag filled with old books. He comes upon two tables covered with black cloth. Upon the cloth two rows of statuettes. Lying in front of them a sign that reads, Gallery of Grotesqueries, Assemblage of the Droll.
Gill steps near and looks at the strange figurines of glazed, blackened clay, many finished and detailed with glossy paint.
“Well I’ll be damned. If it ain’t the New Guy,” Cap’n says from within the side doors of a van.
Gill smiles and shakes his head. The two shake hands.
“Long time, Cap’n.”
“Guess it has.”
“Shop doing all right?”
“Could always be better.” There is an awkward silence during which Gill realizes that Cap’n feels no need to catch up on the time that has passed.
“Where’d you get them?”
“Inherited them.” Cap’n jams a fingernail edge onto his lower teeth and gnaws. “Can you believe I was going to take ten bucks apiece?”
He is uncharacteristically cheerful.
“Good thing I waited to barter. A couple who owns a gallery upriver stopped by and called them folk art and gave me between eighty and a hundred apiece and now they’re up to a couple hundred each. Go figger.”
One sculpture is of a man on a platform, train rails below. He has one arm raised high and leaning on a post, his eyes fixed with an intent focus down the tracks. The face is familiar. Gill looks closer and sees that it is a young man with a scowl and that he bears a striking resemblance to himself. He looks quickly at some of the other sculptures.
One is of a triad of men on a staircase leaning on the handrail and looking out at the viewer as though they are The Three Fates of a new mythology.
There is another of a woman beautifully buxom in the chest and hips and she has three sets of arms and hands like Shiva but they have no joints, are smooth and flowing and seem to be poetic elements of motion.
There is a man burdened by chains he carries. This statuette is spray-painted silver, the face ruddy and eyes bloodshot.
Another of two men and a woman. One of the men has a hand on the woman’s shoulder and the other is holding her tightly. She is tormented and his face mirrors her pain.
A man and woman appear at first to be sitting on a bench and kissing. It looks as though he is holding her head lovingly, but upon closer inspection Gill sees that the man is eating the woman’s face. For a moment, they could be Teddy and Estelle.
There is a woman holding a steering wheel in her hands and in her face that recognition each dreads.
“That one there could be you,” Cap’n says.
“Could be.”
Cap’n shoots a suspicious glance at him. Gill puffs a few breaths of nervous laughter and looks at the inscription along the base: Boy on the Brink of Manhood.
He looks more closely at it and he notices that his feet in the sculpture are melting into the base. Feet of clay.
“Well, that one there leaning on the rail could be you.”
“It is me.” Gill looks and sees that it is.
“How do you know?”
“I know who carved em.”
“Who might that be?”
“Flint. That vagrant lived in a pit in the ground behind the shop.”
“I know him well. Is he still sculpting? I’d like to talk to him again.”
“Like I said, I inherited these. He’s dead.”
Gills heart drops. He looks over the statuettes closely and sees revealed through them all the life of the man. He sees not each moment, but the most concentrated and significant assemblage the moments that made the most profound impression upon him. Despite his awkward speech, there was perfect poetry in his heart and mind and his poetry is in these sculptures.
He remembers Flint’s lesson that it is not enough simply to be.
I have allowed the flame to gutter and nearly extinguish.
Gill tries to remember the conversation he had with Flint. Nausea rises and he fears he may cry and he thinks of the time lost through escape after Flint had warned him.
“I suppose since it’s of me, I might as well take it. How much?”
“I told you what they were goin for.”
“Cut me a deal. You’d have taken ten. I’ll give you twenty.”
Cap’n looks about. He thinks about how much he could get for it. And he thinks about how the last times he saw Flint he had changed. He had changed from that frightened beggar looking for scraps and handouts to a man of confidence. He commanded respect. By his tone and demeanor he resembled the picture he had of his father, the picture he’d carried in his memory since his teens when his father passed away.
“All right, twenty. Only cause you knew him and he probably would have wanted you to have it.”
The muscles in Cap’n’s jaw bulge as he swallows some profit. Cap’n wraps a paper bag around the sculpture while Gill studies the other figures. At the edge of the table a beaten old diary in front of a grocery bag full of composition books.
“What’s that?”
“Just an old diary from the forties and fifties that was also in the pit. Looks like a woman’s handwriting at the beginning, but I think all the rest of it was Flint’s.”
Gill flips through the many pages of the diary until he finds an entry that looks like a letter. A lump rises in his throat at the prophetic workings of providence that brought this letter to him. He looks through the bag of composition books.
“Give you ten for the diary and bag of journals.” Cap’n nods.
Gill steps back and takes a deep breath.
“Something wrong?”
“How much for all of them?”
“All of them?”
“Name your price. Don’t be greedy.”
Cap’n names a price and Gill peels of several hundreds from the fold.
Gill ferries them across the flea market to the trunk of his car two at a time. He carries the one of himself last.
Our hero huddles the precious figurine to his chest as though it is the only remnant of any promise in his life. He hurries down the aisles of the flea market, the bag of journals banging other browsers. As he leaves the market area and approaches his car he feels his knees begin to wobble. His eyes water and his vision blurs. Regret begins to choke his breath.

 

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance or similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. The author bears no responsibility for any damages that may occur to actual persons based upon this writing.]

© 2013 KS Culbreth.
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