Helen

I spent last night laughing out loud with my sister about the holes in the kitchen wall of the house where they all lived years before I was born. My sisters, early acclimated to tornado weather and our parents’ fights, used to pretend that the two, fingertip sized holes were made by an outlaw’s bullets—shots gone astray when the saloon girl grabbed the gunman’s arm as he swung his six shooter up from his hip, aimed right at the head of her true love, the intrepidly handsome gambler.  In actuality, those little beady eyes of vandalism had been made by a kitchen fork, the two pronged, sharp as an ice pick kind that my mother had intended for my father’s heart.

I’ve seen my father duck at the last minute. He was agile and still enjoyed a good goad long after the affair with the fork was history.

“A towel?” he roared in laughter when once she threw a damp cup towel across the kitchen, “Is that the best you can do? Oooooh, my knees are a’knockin’ now!” And so she threw a baking dish at him. Corning Ware does, in fact, break, though it cries out its end with more of a clang than a shatter.

As the ringing of breakage subsided, we discovered that she also had a pot lid—more clanging, that—she had a phone book, she had a can of spray paint for some oddball reason, she had an electric mixer, and, finally, a can of creamed corn, which just grazed the bobbing top of his bald head and left a bloody skid mark. I won’t say what came next, but it all ended with a typical Kraft spaghetti dinner and a puzzle on the table afterward. Storm rolled in, storm rolled on and now we laugh about Helen's stories, like one about the three months that we ate nothing but grits because she had a food compulsion and couldn’t have other edibles in the house.

 Or the time, many, many years later, when, after weeks of begging her second husband to get rid of a raggedy fishing shirt given to him by his first wife, she set it on blazing, lighter fluid fueled fire, “Wear the piece of shit now, you old sonofabitch.“

Or the time she drove her huge boat of an Oldsmobile down the wrong side of I-35 for ten miles because, “No one in their right mind would go all the way down to the exit! I only wanna go right there. I can see it from here, and the cars coming this way can dadgumwell see me!”

Once, when I was small and she thought I was too sick to take care of at home, she bundled me up, took me to the emergency room and told them I was having seizures. I wasn’t, but when I said this to her, quietly, secretively because I knew not to contradict her in front of anyone, she simply said, “Well, if you were having seizures, how would you know? You’d be out of your head. So, for all you know, you were.”

Then there was the night she poured a can of gas on our neighbor’s fruit tree because he’d asked her to move our garden hose from along the property line so he could mow. Gas is hell’s water: the tree died.

There was the time she broke into our old apartment to steal back our piano, and the time she pretended to be Navajo so we could shop at the government commissary, and the time she went out for a weekend trip and didn’t call for six weeks. Meanwhile, I was home, alone, with strict orders to ration my food and not to tell a soul.

And the year she moved and threw away every picture of any of us that had ever been taken.

Or the time she showed up at my house a week before my wedding with a car, a big car, full up to the roof with packages of toilet paper and a huge, anchorishly heavy black plastic garbage bag of pennies.  She had decided to leave her fishing shirt husband and move in with me and my intended. “I tried to bring stuff you’d appreciate. I can’t help it if this is what I thought of when I thought of living with you.”

Once, she took up a collection from the old folks at her retirement village for a hardship that was really a whim to drive back to Texas on a revoked license in a car she’d begged us to take care of and then called the police and reported stolen. She got kicked out of the retirement home, wrecked the car, and lived to pawn her diamond rings and accuse the housekeeping staff at her new retirement village of theft.

 Then there was the time she reported her home care aide to immigration and very nearly successfully had him deported even though he was from Utah.

Or the day before she died, when I got in my car, after hours of sitting with her in her room at the last stop group home, and discovered a hornet buzzing around inside with me, slamming itself in a rage against the windows. I pulled over and flung my door open, running to what I imagined a safe distance until it found the way out of its trap.

In life, there was no safe distance from this bottomless drink of radioactivity and vinegar-spiked Everclear that was the woman I would have called mother if it hadn’t felt so much more natural to simply call her by her name—she defied the boundaries of the superficial roles of life. She was all her, for her.

Last fall, I wrote a story about a woman who finds a way to murder her son-in-law by reporting a petty crime to the police as though he were a suicidal terrorist. My grad school advisor worried that the woman was too willing to hate for no reason, too disposed to behavior beyond the normal range of eccentric thought. I worry about writing so many older female characters that are simply batshit crazy. But they are mean in a funny way, from this distance.

Last night, I sat laughing with my sister because we were savoring again the shock of the first time we realized that when she did things like throwing pronged forks at our father’s heart, she meant in that moment to kill him. Her commitment to her actions was whole and in its wholeness elicits a kind of awe.

I would like to be as committed to my actions as she was to any one of the thousand inexplicable violences she perpetrated, any one of the hundreds of thousands of incidental curses she leveled. Laughing at it all is a silver net, and maybe this semester, as I grad-school my way through the year, I will find a way to write about her bad beauty. And it will be funny horror, hilarious gore, a genre for Helen.

Fire-Eating

I had another of my interesting dreams.

After a busy week of creative nonproductivity, buried under screamingly busy surface issues like traffic and work and grading and laundry that came out of the washer tied in mysteriously intricate knots, I fell against my will into a sudden stupor of sleep on Wednesday afternoon. Now, I am not a napper. In a perfect world, my body would love for me to be a late afternoon snooze hound, but in reality my schedule won’t bear it. When I give in to the midday, drowsy undertow, I pay by degrees of soupy headedness for the rest of the afternoon and evening—my work hours. I wind up behind the wheel of the car in the dark, swilling coffee or soda or both by turns, singing loudly to songs I don’t like at all in hopes that the annoyance factor will keep me alert enough to swerve all the texters on my night roads.

But on Wednesday, I sat down to read, and as soon as my ass hit the couch, reality tuned in a new station.

As it unfolded, here is what happened:

Unexpectedly, I find myself hiking, empty handed, through an arid, unpopulated place where the trail is so dusty that as I walk along, I stir up a fine caliche mist. White flies make blurry hurricanes around me. I swat a space for breathing, and realize that the motion of my hand is the only stir in the air. It occurs to me that I will not last long without water.

This is the second time of late I have found myself hiking in a dream without the right supplies.

Ahead of me on the trail, there appears a black rock wall and in that wall I see a small, triangular crevice, just high enough for me to stand up in. Without one question in mind as to why I would go into a cave—my waking self being very disinclined to do such a thing—I gamely walk in, almost hurrying down the rocky tunnel inside its rim. The floor is a narrow channel, splashy wet, tumbled with little round stones. I can see the rippled walls in a growing half-light and I wonder if it’s really a cave or if it’s just a drainage ditch the ground is dressing up in moss and roots and rocks.

Walking in the trickle of cold water, the air cooling down, I half step the graded slope toward some bright point ahead. After miles of tunnel, bending lower, but gently so, I trip on a root or a rock and almost fall out onto a meadow of soft, pale grass topped by a bright blue cirrus swiped sky. There is a breeze, sweet as the scene, little insects milling and chittering so that the country is alive in its empty space. There are low, sloping hills in the distance, some kind of pronghorn deer grazing off a ways. A couple of them look up at me and then go back to eating grass.

Just ahead, there is a campsite. I make for it, feeling at home and unconcerned. I am so chill in dreams. When I get to the clearing, I find it is a wide circle, made of wood chips, pebbles, the charry remains of old campfires all scattered about. My feet crunch over the ground. Here and there are cairns, different sized heaps of stones arranged in some specific way that doesn’t mean a thing to me.  I don’t have anything to do with those, so I walk by. On the far side of the circle, there is a shelf, a kind of dark box that stands about waist high. On that shelf there is a fire burning, smoking. The heat is encouraging though I have not been cold.

Now, as though I had meant to all along, I reach out and take a handful of this fire and begin to eat it. There is a flitting, a flickering in my mouth, a smoky, burned cinnamon flavor, and then a sort of hollow, brickled popping of the burned wood and coals as they crunch between my teeth—as though I were eating a sugar wafer made of spent fuel, a burned-cookie and ash offering. The fire itself is hot, alive, but not injurious. I swallow it all like medicine.

Still chewing, swallowing, cramming the fire in as though I were starving for it, a shadow falls. I feel a…something…behind me. I turn around and there stands on its hind legs the biggest bear I have ever imagined. He is red-brown, and he smells beastly, loamy, his breath all hot juices and spent smoke. His face is longer than a bear’s ought to be. I think. I have never seen this kind of bear before so I don’t really know, but it strikes me as very long, pulled into a considering expression. I wonder why he’s there, since I have never had much to do with bears, but I fail to run even when it occurs to me. We stand there for a bit. He’s my bear, I realize, and when that thought finally sits down inside my head, he holds out his bearish hands. In one there is a huge round river rock. Grey, smooth, cold, heavy. In the other there is a pile of little delicate bones all whitened by the sun. Those are some of my bones, but I am not upset by this. I think, I don’t miss them at all, so that’s fine. The bear is pleased. I turn around again to see the fire still burning. Beside the campfire shelf appears a smaller, black bear, swaying from foot to foot, looking at me. His movement seems to be bringing the night over the hills like a quilt pulled over the foot of a bed.

I start to dance around, too. The thought of staying with my bears begins to spread out in my mind with the stars coming on.

At that moment, a bright light, a flashlight shines in my eyes and a hand, very human, masculine, grips my face. I squint, pissed off, into a face I can’t quite see, but it’s definitely a man’s. He’s wearing a miner’s hat, light blazing, and he’s sooted and dressed for work in the mines.

Without explanation, he throws me over his shoulder, makes for the tunnel. I can see the divide between the bluing evening grass and the black, wet rocks of the tunnel. We go up, the grade steeper than before, seeming to go straight up a mountain. After an uncomfortably long time, during which I have established that struggling is not productive, we emerge, he dumps me on my back in the light of a desert day, bends over me, his face still obliterated only now by sun, and says, without malice but with authority, WAKE UP!

I did.

Generally, I do not understand my dreams. But I know this much—there is something afoot in the inert regions of mind and impulse. I see evidence of this more and more. Whatever genie lives in my heart that loves so much to play and say what it pleases in paint or poetry or prose is not content. There is a revolt under the mountain of my dailies. We are at a stand off, my dreams and my jobs, both a full measure of my whole self. The tides of waving flags muster just at the lip of sleep's deep well. And while I consider the uprising in my dreams and the business that goes without my awareness, there in the deep, I have to wake up and shake it off.

I wake up and shake it off.  And I consider the cofederacy of bears and miners and wonder what fire I've swallowed without caution.