Oh, yeah, I'll tell you something
I think you'll understand.
Well, I'll say that something -
I want to hold your hand.
- John Lennon & Paul McCartney

The Valiant moved through Des Moines traffic. I squirmed on the front seat, arching my neck to see the tops of the tall buildings rolling by. The city excited me in a way I couldn't articulate. So many people, so many buildings, so many cars. There was an energy level that crawled under my skin and made me want to dance to the music pouring from the large radio in the dash, straight from the studios of KSO to the front seat of the small car.

"Aunt Bev?" I watched her navigate the car through the traffic, swinging the wheel wide of a delivery truck at the corner of Fleur and Grand.

"Yeah, twirp?" She turned and smiled, then took a small hand from the wheel and patted me on the shoulder. "Sit still, huh?" I sank back into the seat from my knees and turned around to look out the front windshield.

"Are we gonna getta ride the Wild Mouse?"

She laughed, her head thrown back. Pulling to a stop at the light, she turned to look at me, her eyes, the deep blue of the gene pool, sparkling in the sun. The smile was wide and the laugh soft and honest. She wrapped a thin arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.

"Probably not, kiddo. I know you're a big boy, now, but I don't think you're tall enough to ride it. We'll still have some fun, though. K?"

"Ok." I felt a gentle push as she moved me back to the passenger side and pulled through the intersection. "Can we eat some corn dogs?"

"Promise."

"As many as I want?"

She laughed again. "As many as you want."

I settled back in the seat, satisfied.

As we passed a small stucco house rolling into a residential area, I noticed an upturned patch of yard inside the low chain-link fence. The dirt was black and coarse, moisture glistening in the sun from its heavy clods.

"Aunt Bev?"

She looked at me from the corner of her eye; a long slow look that said the joy of having her young nephew around was wearing thin from the barrage of questions.

"What, hon?"

"Can corndogs grow in gardens?"

The laughter exploded from her pursed lips like a broken water main. I paid no attention to the swerve onto the shoulder and back, waiting patiently for an answer. She composed herself, then looked in my direction, a smile lighting the front seat.

"You know, I don't know," she laughed, an ornery teasing glint in her eye. "When we're done at Riverview Park, we'll stop at Earl May and see if they have any corndog seeds."

"K," I said. Looking out the window at the passing rows of suburban houses, I knew she was the coolest.

And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share, as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
- Unknown

We sat, the rustle of starched suit pants and pleated skirts nearly as loud as the hymn. I reached to the back of the pew in front of me where the communion cups lined up next to the pencils, in the same built-in holders that held the hymnals and programs. I took a short green pencil, stamped in gold letters with "First Christian Church", and drew a small circle on the back of a guest card.

"There should be no doubt, now, my friends, that we're living in troubled times." The face of Reverend Erickson was stiff and solemn. "The events of this week stand in bright testament to the turbulence, to the disarray, to the chaos that swirls around us."

I drew another small circle and pulled my sleeve along my nose. The wool pants itched at the backs of my knees. I looked up at the small man in the tall pulpit, then connected the circles with a long jagged line.

"It was, after all, the second time this year we've seen a leader, a prominent figure, dropped by the bullets of the wicked. Two men, pumped full of the evil notion that justice lies in their hands, have sent home the hopes of millions. We've watched the images on television, we've read the sad accounts of shattered families in the newspapers, we've heard the descriptions on the radio."

Beside me, my step-dad shifted in his seat at the mention of the radio. No doubt, he hoped that most had heard the descriptions on KCOB, and that the commercial time he'd sold during the newscasts would pay off. Despite the evangelistic tone of the preacher's words, a faint smile crossed his lips.

"But justice cannot lie in the hands of man. In the hands of man, justice is as corrupt and twisted as the words of the serpent in the garden. Those who try to level justice with the sin of man lurking over their shoulder are failures in thought as well as deed. Jesus, my friends, the Son of God who died for those sins, holds the exclusive key to wreak justice on the wicked."

I drew another circle, and another. The song drifted in again - "The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known." I wondered if the garden was Eden. The circles grew tighter, and Reverend Erickson faded out.

Back when Cain was able -
Way before the stable -
Lightning struck right down from the sky.
A mother ship with fangs said let's give it a try.
Conscious was related,
Man, he was created,
But Lady Luck took him by surprise.
A sweet and bitter fruit, it surely opened his eyes.
She ate it.
Lordy it was love at first bite.
She ate it,
Never knowing wrong from right.
- Steven Tyler & Joe Perry

The haze was a palpable purple, it's scent, smelling for all the desperate world like home, lingered in our clothes and hair for days. No one knew how long it might linger in our gene pool.

Across the room, Richie's head lolled from side to side, his hazy blue eyes unfocused and useeing. The rough cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger burned slowly, a dying ember glowing soft at the end. Little brother Danny, thin blonde hair and built like a whipcrack, was flat on his back in the middle of the room, muttering to no one in particular, engrossed with the shadows of the eggshell texture on the ceiling.

I pulled the blanket from over our heads and looked at her. The youngest daughter of an innkeeper, she came with a questioned past, wild-eyed innocence, the patience of Job, and the perfect means to the only ends I understood. With thoughts of resignation and fear, her parents silently blessed the room key she pocketed each evening, hoping only that trouble would stay within their control.

She slept, deep REM sleep twisting her lids, her blonde hair a light Japanese fan surrounding her fair face. I looked at her, trying to summon the feeling I knew should be there. She'd been to hell and back with me, many times, smiled and held my hand through it all. Alone, the kindness might have killed me. But it was the hopeful look in her eye that always forced me to avert my gaze. I let her sleep. Neither of us needed her innocence.

"Dan. Danny Little Bear. Bear. Hey, man. Come back, man ..."

He stirred on the floor, turned his head toward me and scrutinized a point on the wall just beyond my left shoulder. His lips were still moving but I couldn't hear him talking. His eyes floated right, then left, the only sign of his effort to focus the confused crease deepening in his forehead.

"Where's the Jack, Bear?" His lips kept moving.

I scanned the room, looking for the black and white label. Two softly respirating shapes blocked the inside of the door, curled together on the carpeted floor like twin question marks. Barney and his girlfriend Carol. I looked again at Barney, re-checking the rise and fall of his side. He was pretty close, earlier, I thought. I could still see him falling from the chair at the window, looking for all the world like a lifeless 14-year-old, his skin the translucent color of spent candle wax. The cataclysmic look in Carol's eyes as she huddled next to him. The crush of rising anguish in her voice as she pulled her hand from in front of his mouth, and it's culmination in relief as his breath returned with a cough and a gasp. Aw, he'll be alright, I thought.

I found the bottle sitting next to the Big Ben alarm clock on the nightstand next to my head, three swallows and backwash left at the bottom. Clustered around its base, looking at that moment like shivering denizens in the realm of a mad dictator, were fourteen small white pills. Crosses, cheap and powerful. My mom called them diet pills. My stepdad: Goddamn Drugs. I lifted five from the outer edges of the circle and rolled them in my palm like a gambler fondling dice at a craps table. With a single motion, I lifted my palm to my lips and grabbed the slender neck of the Jack Daniel's bottle on the nightstand. I'm gonna need these to get through class.

When the burn in my throat subsided, I looked at the clock, then looked again, certain I'd read it wrong. It read 5:15 both times. I felt the shock rising in the back of my neck. When Barney fell out, it was 9:50 and the party was at a full roar. I'd washed down two Quaaludes at 8:15 from a bottle of Jack that was two-thirds full. A four-finger bag of redbud on the table still held two fingers. And the crosses, then in my pocket, numbered far closer to fifty. I sat up in the bed, cursing under my breath. Seven and a half hours. What the hell did you do?

I shook her, gently at first, then with increasing urgency. She stirred and I watched as her thin lids uncovered the ungodly deep blue of her eyes. She looked at me without so much as a trace of humor or grace.

"What? What are you doing?"

"I just ... did I pass out or what? The last I knew it wasn't even 10:00."

The question brought her fully awake. "You don't remember?" She swiped a long lock of hair from in front of her face. "You know," she said, sitting up, "you're a fucking asshole. How many more times are you gonna black out before it kills you?" Her voice was rising like the swell of a tornado siren. "You're up and around and the life of the party and you don't remember? You just unplug? That's way too close to an OD and way too scary for me." She stopped, the silence filling the room. I could hear the clock wiling away the seconds on the nightstand.

Then her face, one moment before a deepening shade of rage, collapsed like a paper bag on a vacuum hose. Softly, she said, "I can't take it anymore." One hand fluttered to her spilling blue eyes, the other toward the door.

I felt the Jack and crosses rise in my throat. I swallowed hard and pushed them back. I tried to look into her eyes, but she didn't return the gaze, instead wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. I stood, slowly, letting my legs unfold from the bed as her words rolled through my body to my fingertips. They were numb. I knew, the congruence of her words and her face saying it all, that the ships had passed. I pushed my t-shirt into the top of my jeans, yanked at the laces of my boots, pulled my hair back into a strict ponytail, and looked at her again. She was staring at the sheets beneath her, her shoulders softly rising and falling.

I strode to the door, my armor cinched and heavy. In the cool September morning, with the sun an hour beneath the horizon, my steel toes were heavier than they'd ever been. I pushed out my chest, pulled the door closed, and walked away, leaving her with the phrase she'd remember me by.

"Goddamn lightweights."

Bertso berriak jartzera noa
euskara garbi batian
hitz politen bila ez etorri
hortaz gelditu atian
barruak lasaituko ditut
eztarriaren kaltian
nire kantuak idurituko du
zakurren zaunka katian

I am going to sing some new verses
in beautiful Basque.
Don't come looking for beautiful words though.
If you do, please stay outside the door.
I'm going to let out what I carry inside
no matter what it might do to my throat.
My song will seem
like the barking of a chained dog.
- Atxaga - Zaharra/Ordorika

I looked back over my shoulder. Across the rising whitecaps, a mile or two away, the hulking mass of gunboat gray steel stood like a sentry in the harbor. If not for its bulk and sharp angles, it would have faded into the matching cloud cover. But the bulk and angles were everything, as impossible to dismiss as the teeth of a Bengal tiger while admiring its beautiful fur. From either side of the bulkhead it held the capability to engulf, devour, swathe in the anonymity of rubble any challenge to its reign. It's true, after all, that rubble looks the same unless it's yours.

I squinted, looking ahead at the steel pier jutting out into the harbor. The first liberty boat had landed and it's passengers, half in Crackerjacks, half in civilian clothes, poured over the rising and falling gunwhale. They streamed onto the pier and dissipated, congealing in small clusters and assimilating into the crowds in the streets of Palma de Benidorm.

The skilled hands of the boatswain steered us clear of the boat as it first reversed, then turned to the ship on another run. To the left was a beach, the stretch of fine white sand thinly populated by sunbathers bathing without sun, many in the European style Americans find immodest. To the right, a city that had flourished for a thousand years welcomed our arrival, our dollars and our naievete. In the distance, the smell of Sangria mingled with the sound of the Basques at the corner, singing an ageless folk song in their colorful traditional clothes.