gardencuttings

Cuttings

Now, in the harsh light of day he’s sure of only one thing: he has no memory of what happened to him while he lay in that bed recovering from a disease that purportedly began with a kiss. But whose? And, was she and/or they responsible for the subsequent ‘destruction,’ as witnesses on the scene after the fact described it?

Before they went to bed last night, Siobhan told him that the rather fanciful short stories he wrote for her during the past four months provided her with clues, but nothing that would stand up in court, nothing that would put him back together. Clearly, in her ‘simple old me’ opinion, he had to ponder where his odyssey began and what happened after that.

It began here within the circle of box elders.

Then, as a deck log would describe the movement of a Navy ship, he could say that while ‘maneuvering at various courses and speeds while conducting flight operations’ he subsequently climbed the sacred mountain, found the Garden of Heaven and descended into hell. After that, home was a long way off as the crow flies.

Night was settling down over the hazy first lights of the bars and hourly rate hotels along Magsaysay Drive and the razor-sharp edges of Kalaklan Ridge like an old whore.

David dropped several 25-centavo coins over the railing, heard an explosion of whitewater, heard the laughter and the shouting, ‘Salamat, Joe, Salamat.’

He crossed Perimeter Road, ignored the hopeful greetings of the money changers behind their well-caged windows, then dodged a badly mixed throng of sailors, girls and honking multi-coloured jeepneys that swelled out into the Gordon Avenue intersection. He cut across the street, smiling, waving at imagined friends in the distance, and moved with the deliberate intent of a man who had crossed this street hundreds of times.

‘Casual alertness, that’s the key to surviving Olongapo’s jungle of thieves, gangs, girls, high-strung Marines, bored Shore Patrol and Hard Hats, and drunk boatswain’s mates and snipes,’ Lowell had said.

--Hey Joe, cold beer cold beer cold beer, nice girls.

He bloodied my backside with those switches while I hugged a tall black oak on a hill not far from the house. I never cried. I grabbed onto the grey bark of that old tree and took it. In the fall, my back and legs matched colour of the foliage over my head. Someone or some thing watched from behind the blackhaws, silent and cruel. God or daemon, I know not which. But I prayed it would save me and it responded with laughter outside the range of my father’s hearing.

Jane’s laugh is obscured by the sound of a runner’s feet. A young woman, almost familiar, explodes in a flash of blue and white through a gap in the hedge and careens into me as startled cedar waxwings take flight. Her arms envelope me as we fall. Pinned beneath her, I awaken by degrees to her body rising and falling along the whole of me like incoming waves on a beach—have we not been together like this before, perhaps dreams—to her warm breath, and to the open front of her white poorboy sweater.

(Excerpts).

Home

That’s when she saw Sikimí swimming in the middle of the lake.

His bobbing head looked like a large duck on the water. She heard his breathing change to breathing in sharply and breathing out slowly, in harmony with his trotting legs beneath the surface of the turquoise water. Sensing no other humans in the valley, other than Siobhan, she cast off her clothes and swam out to him. While his relaxed ears and large blue eyes followed her less-than-fluid progress toward the center of the lake, he showed no concern or agitation about her splashing/thrashing style of swimming.

After a while his quiet, welcoming nicker, his exhalations of breath—like a man straining to lift a very heavy weight—became, for her, the only sound in the valley. In the clear water, she could see his powerful legs stretch out to either side with each stroke. She remembered the first time she and her father swam their horses. “Stay forward of his withers and out his legs’ reach,” Wapiti cautioned her over and over.

Sarabande wedged herself between two branches of a floating cottonwood deadfall as the Mni Sose approached a bridge at the western edge of a reservoir. The relative calm she had experienced while passing the high canyons and breaks topped by Ponderosa Pine slipped away as the water eddied into twisted shapes beneath the cloud draped moon.

She felt watched. The tree caught briefly on the bridge pier closest to the center of the river.

Then she saw the silhouette of Danny Jenks’s truck. The velvet drapery of spider webs between the piers transformed into a trot line. When she screamed, one of the hooks caught inside her mouth and was jerked tight, piercing her cheek. She was pulled away from her river and raised up through a tender breeze that carried in its heart the cries of owls and nighthawks. Her thrashing only drove the hook deeper. “I’ve caught you, Squaw bitch, I’ve caught you.”

Truck Driver opened his tackle box on the bridge railing and fetched out a pair of needle-nose pliers from a jumble of knives, sinkers, hooks, leaders, and lures.

He snipped off the barb of the hook where it protruded through her cheek and pulled the shank free. “There you go,” he said, and spat a mouthful of brown juice over the railing. “If a three-oh hook will catch a Pallid sturgeon, it sure as hell will catch me a piece of ass.”

He looked away when he dropped the pliers back into the tackle box. Using both hands, she grabbed the handle and jammed the lid down on his fingers. That’s when she broke free and fell while he cursed the day she was born, adding, “You’re damaged goods, you know that, don’t you?”

Sarabande’s attention was attracted to a dramatic advertisement apparently showing the fires of creation required to create ways of traveling. At the top of the page were the words “1983 Ford Mustang GT” next to the outline of a galloping horse. Below was a sleek red technology object with windows and wheels.

“This is a car?”

“One of many kinds,” said Siobhan. “It’s called a Mustang, in honor of the feral horses called mustangs that once ran free in many parts of our country.”

“The rider of this steel mustang sits inside rather than on top. Is that so?”

“Yes.”

Next came a rectangular box- shaped car called the “1983 Cavalier Station Wagon.”

“What are these objects here?”

“Headlights,” said Siobhan. “They cast a bright light out in front of the car making night driving possible.”

“Amazing, like little suns,” said Sarabande.

After the station wagon, came an advertisement filled with writing such as “Pan Am” and “747’s” and a picture of a huge, man-made object that approximated the look of a soaring bird.

“It flies,” said Siobhan.

“The picture is the almost same size as the as the car picture. Does one person lie prone within the tube with their arms positioned in the wing-like structures on both sides?”

A light wind whispered through the grass, and he leaned on his right elbow and saw from whence it came, the dark forest and beyond that the mountains, darker still. The Guardian loomed above it all, black and substantial and, if Sonny could trust the few dark dreams he was able to remember, then that towering monolith of magnesian limestone was, in fact, the dark soul of the world where far wiser men than he were betrayed, wounded, and killed while seeking treasures the gods were loathe to share. In that direction lay one probable destiny, the completion of Grandfather’s mission, for better or worse.

He rolled over and faced east where the land and the sky were open, and where there was a road leading into the heart of a small town where everyday people lived and loved while Justine killed the innocent with swords and arrows and Dohver killed the innocent by twisting time and space. In that direction lay revenge, and perhaps justice, for better or worse.

“I’m an ignorant Bodach at a fork in the road,” he told Wind as he lay flat on his back and stared straight up into a wide, gray, starless, moonless nothing. If he went into town, some dreams would be forgotten while others would be remembered, some fortunes would rise while others would fall, and some men would live while others would die. If he climbed the mountain, the reverse would be true. In either case he would end up among the living or the dead with one kind of regret or another.

He did not have a coin to flip, but he could flip himself. If he woke facing into the sea of grass, then that way would make all the difference. If he woke facing the Guardian, then that way would make all the difference.

It was hard not to laugh at the simplicity and pointlessness of his choice, for both futures were like dark women who would love him powerfully and kill him dearly, and vice versa.

He heard, or thought he heard, Alice’s voice. “Cat’s got your tongue, cat’s got your tongue.”

The wind or a purring cat brushed against his face and hissed at him when he reached out for it.

His tongue was dry. He must drink from the lake. He crawled in a circle and found a staff. He crawled in a larger circle and found a red rose.

He stood, was standing up—his legs twisted beneath him one way and the other—and when he turned around there was nothing to see, not even himself, and he thought, was thinking, that he did not know who he was.

He knew he should know. He had known moments ago, just, but the sweet name eluded him like the wind and the cat.

He clung to the staff. There had been something else, a goodbye before he heard Alice say, “Cat’s got your tongue, cat’s got your tongue.” A mad confusion of wind and light, yes he remembered that, and elfin words following him, as though through a doorway, and surely, he had heard Robert Adams saying, “Sonny Trout.”

Sonny Trout. Good, he felt anchored now.

He would remember more in time while he searched for Robert Adams, that mysterious elf who could talk to bears, transform himself into a bird, and rearrange the light.

The moon slashed a ragged tear through the curtain of the night and cast away the clouds and the confusion, and the lake itself was liquid light. He drank and the water made him strong.

Coral Snake Smith was sitting in his favorite booth at the Purple Platter when Jock got there at 11:45 AM. Smith, who suffered disfiguring burns as a child, ended up with a ruddy, red and yellow complexion that made him unfit for any career other than crime or psychiatry. He dabbled in psychiatry until the review board questioned why 98.6 percent of his male and female patients were diagnosed with an Electra complex. Subsequently, he practiced crime without conviction.

Now he described himself as a storyteller, an information handler, and an unidentified source. Those who trusted him believed his word was well worth the price of a meal, hash browns scattered and smothered and a Denver omelet.

Others hypothesized that he was a stool pigeon.

Jock sat down on the far side of the duplex table and ordered two usuals when the waitress stopped by after a long vacation on the far side of the near-empty dining room.

“Dawn will turn on her hustle when the church people get here,” said Smith.

“True,” said Jock.

“You could have washed that coffee off your face and put on a clean shirt,” said Smith, “unless you were sent packing out of your own house.”

“Why do you say that?”

Smith picked at an itchy place on his face where the hairs in his beard grew in on themselves along the edge of a yellow band. “Red and yellow kill a fellow,” the guys at the paper always said.

Jock wanted to see Lucinda Trail about as much as a sick granny wanted to see an ice floe. She (Lucinda) was cold to the media, especially Jock, and it was her husband’s fault. If the Honorable Clark Trail hadn’t diligently worked over the years to become Junction City’s most inept mayor since Yorrick Muskrat in 1921, the Star-Gazer wouldn’t have called upon its readers to enjoy so many laughs at Trail’s expense. Trail, whose slogan in the last election was “I’m the Devil You Know,” thrived on imbecility because it gave voters the impression he was too stupid to be blamed for anything that went wrong in the city.

My sweets, while tales of missing horses danced from Maple Avenue to Elm Street, love stalked the annual gala for Star-Gazer staffers and their guests at the civic center last night. While you know I don’t wear Prada, you do know I’m gauche enough to air out everyone’s dirty underwear.

Councilman Billy Purvis arrived early and left early with a blonde who appeared young enough to be his daughter. I hope he gave her a good spanking after they left for coming out in public looking like that.

I don’t know if that pimply faced bartender with the green hair was old enough for a legal pouring license, but he knew how to mix a fine drink as evidenced by the fact just everyone was overindulging.

But darlings, Clark and Lucinda Trail came and left stone-cold sober. Obviously distracted, she wore that tired old burgundy and powdery silk cocktail dress again.

They danced apart more than together. When they were together they hissed at each other with angry whispers about something that is so hush hush nobody will say anything substantive to the press about it. Perhaps a resident on College knows more than we do.

Two councilmen who had not planned to come out of the closet found themselves more tangled together than old coat-hangers when multiple drunks opened the door, thinking they had found a place to pee. What an embarrassing golden shower that was—or so we might imagine if we ever thought of such things.

Marcus and Esther Cash sang five or more encores of “You Are My Sunshine,” sounding just as rough as the old 78 rpm Bluebird Records version from Marvin and Doug. Cash reminded horrified patrons that he was, after all, paying for the booze. On the plus side, it was obvious both Marcus and Esther were still finding love somewhere else after all these years of newspapering.

Jim Exlibris, bless his heart, he finally gets his nose out of a book and struts out on the town with a real looker of a date only to spend the evening with his fly open all night, even before he got the girl back his apartment.

Our city’s finest, looking positively naked in an unpleasant way without their uniforms and guns, staked out the chips and dip rather than the mayor’s house where the unfolding story was likely to be less fattening. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times that I still love a guy with a gun in his pocket, or at least a little enthusiasm for my own Wang.

But sometimes a girl gets her heart broken. Sure, she may have played the field for more years than was right as rain, but there comes a time—assuming some murderous wretch hasn’t mistaken her for a two-dollar hooker and cut her throat behind the hardware store—when she wants a loving husband and a warm home and kids on the way. So, she goes home with a guy and come the next morning when she’s sitting in his kitchen wearing only his old work shirt, he leaves without saying jack squat about tomorrow or happy ever after. It makes a girl wonder if it would have been better if she actually had danced all night or if she shouldn’t have danced at all. Girls, take it from me, a little black dress will bring you a lot of attention but very little respect,

In these excerpts from Sarabande, my title character meets the great black horse in a lake, looks at magazine advertisements and learns about modes of transportation that are very different from her 1870s world, and floats down the Missouri River in a frightening dream squence.

In these excerpts from The Sun Singer, Robert Adams is disoriented after going through a doorway into another universe, and then later feels rather down and out trying to decide which choice of action to take.

The novel is set in Glacier Park. Click on the photograph to learn more.

Paperback and e-book covers. The e-book is available from OmniLit as a PDF.

In these excerpts from Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey, David Ward wonders who tried to kill him with a kiss, why he is strolling into a notorious sailor town, listens to Anne talking about her childhood, and is run into by a jogger blasting through a hedge without looking where she's going.

In these excerpts from Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, Jock talks to chef Coral Snake Smith and wishes he could avoid visiting Lucinda Trail. Meanwhile, Monique writes a gossip column about the company dance.