March and the Meadow.

The first week of March was very cold. The snowflakes were huge, they smiled as they fell like loving viruses. We all felt like something was about to happen, so we went to the Bust-O House, so called because it was busted, out on Pond Road, which was where things happened when they did.

Kirby was with us, but we called him Stump. I, for one, hated him, and I probably would now if he were still alive. Then I wouldn’t have gotten into the same swimming pool he was in. But his dad was all right, and they both lived in the woods far away from my basement on Ninth Street. One day we walked into his dad’s shed, strictly off-limits, and immediately saw why: machetes and axes were strung around the room like giant sulking Christmas lights. None had been practical for hundreds of years, and some were appropriate only for fighting polar bears on ice floes, and then only if you were a Viking.

We got to the Bust-O House and Stump picked up a rotting shutter and smelled it.

“Spring’s coming,” he said.

He was right. What the Indians called the Worm Moon hung in the blue air like a watermark. Stump put the shutter through his legs and rode it like he’d seen strippers do.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Oh, baby,” said Stump. “I’m just getting started.”

“You’re a pile of shit.” That was me, and I sort of yelled it.

“I forgot.” This was Ott, who was forgetful.

“What?”

“I have to go to the bank.”

“Yeah, hey. You owe me, like, twenty.” Stump was walking with the shutter still in place and now his pants were around his ankles.

Ott turned around and asked Stump what he’d just said.

Stump just kind of muttered and said something that sounded like “I don’t think.”

I didn’t feel like anything was about to happen anymore. Nothing had happened at the Bust-O House except Stump’s obscene shutter and I didn’t trust my shoes to know the ground I walked on.

We stood on the corner, but I wanted to go into the bank and gawk at the chasm between me and its people. I could do that well enough from the corner, but also I was restless. A small bird—a finch or a chickadee, one of the ones that look like a mouse you can take lovingly into your hand—sang in a tree. I will never understand what is beautiful about these bird songs. To me they share their sonic weave with telephones and vacuum cleaners.

A man came up to the large, empty windows—Squeaky Pink. Squeaky Pink pressed his radiant pink wiper to the broad window for a square foot and then stopped, looking at us. His jacket was big and heavy and glittered like a game show. It looked like he had a third ear hiding behind his jaw, but fantastically ruined: two swollen peapods stuffed with knucklebones. I felt like vomiting when I saw it. It was one of those days.

“Squeaky Pink,” Ott told him. “Do you have my money.”

“Money? I don’t know about your money.”

“Yes you do. The radio. You said you’d have money today.”

Squeaky Pink said, There are no radios in my life at this time. He said that exactly. But the radio hung from his shoulder on a strap, hustling behind him like a guilty child. At least he wasn’t playing it.

“Look, you see me? You see me at this window? You think I have any money in this building?”

I did, and Ott did, and I thought about the huge silver vault cringing needlessly in the rear of the bank. I imagined myself gripping the cold cylinders on its face, turning the giant dial ecstatically.

“OK. OK. Five dollars.”

Ott accepted it, and that was that. I wondered what my face had looked like during my fantasy, and if it had contributed to Squeaky Pink’s surrender.

Stump laughed in his irritating way and said, “Hah, he’s your bank.”

The snow had stopped and I was in bed. The street lamps reached for it on the ground and turned it from its bird-white to a salty color like bonemeal.

I dreamed a lynx or bobcat visited me and I ran away, ravaged by its speech. Its voice had a demented, side-to-side gait and, out of fear, I went into a public bathroom. Moans were coming from one of the stalls—not that, but real pain laughing, burning up the walls in scorched floral patterns. I could hear the slurred mutterings of the cat outside. I opened the stall.

Awake, I looked at my hands. Over the past few months they had turned hard and gotten bleached by the cold. My skin looked like layered tracing paper that had been scored with gentle X-es that tried to say the same thing, over and over, in a failed, ancient language. And the next symbol never came. I hadn’t touched my guitar in a year because after work it just felt like a big hammer. Then I remembered I was married.

Susan. During what people call a “lover’s quarrel” we reached the moment when I knew I would do it, and I did, and now I think about how easily I could have not hit her. I warned me but not her, me but not her—I’ll do it, I will, I swear, I will. I didn’t think to say it aloud. It should have been easy, and instead it was hard. What makes it that way? My parents had smoked dope and renounced their churches, but their sacrilege was not the noble kind. I was born to them with bright Catholic fists, a zoo-bred werewolf. I don’t know who, my mother or my father, was the wolf. But then what do I know.

At night, the light inside the Bust-O House was insane, illogical. It looked like bright plaid laughing out of a bug-eaten sweater. At this point Stump was dead. He had gone out onto the pond, which was thawing and thinning, refreezing only slightly at night, and, importantly for Stump, not enough. Ott was putting his uncle’s camping lantern in the Bust-O House and I was watching him. I just happened to look out over the pond. He was running, his back to us, when suddenly he jumped up and disappeared. He faltered only slightly as he went through. Ott called him an asshole through a frantic, walleyed stare. I saw him fall, as if a trap door had opened on the cold, white stage, and felt my heart whizz around like it was on a drill. My eyes twanged, but it was too cold and instead I sneezed loudly. He never came up. Stump, woundless and sloshing and under the ice, where his penguin ghost would never touch me.

The Bust-O House had, we felt, become incorrect, and we needed a new place to go when we felt like something was about to happen and nothing did. Ott and I walked through the fields towards town, very, very drunk. The moon fondled the evergreen tips and sang lullabies to the waking worms. Not yet, not yet.

“Coca-Cola,” said Ott, “is used to clean up blood on highways.”

He said this, I think, because we were walking on one, and we’d both spilled some blood on it. When I say “spilled some blood,” what I mean is, “spilled our blood.”

Ott burst out with a laughter that sounded like he was spitting out a huge spoon. He bumped my arm a few times with the back of his hand.

“Hey, hey: March Madness.”

We found a place, The Meadow, with a jukebox and curtains that concealed nothing. As I sat at the bar a man talked to the bartender and their talking oozed up around me expectantly. This is something that happens in bars. There was a folded-up newspaper on the bar next to the man, and this, I thought, must have been the source of their conversation, which now included me. I looked around for Ott—I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to shoot some pool—but he didn’t know me anymore. Maybe he had left by then, I don’t remember. If he was there, it didn’t matter. I was as visible and helpless as a birthday cake.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Young people seem to love sarcasm. Do you think that’s true? I think that’s true,” this man said to me.

The bartender nodded, nodded, nodded.

“I don’t get it,” said the man. “Why is sarcasm so wonderful? It’s boring. But then, I’m old, too. And he’s got all the women.”

He indicated a table in the opposite corner of the room, behind us, with his thumb. Yes, this man at the table did have all the women. It didn’t bother me so much. All the women in The Meadow looked like middle-aged men. They all had wet eyes overcast with a dumbness I wanted nothing to do with.

But this man at the table was a Marine. He was wearing his full dress uniform and gleamed like a tuba in the beer-soaked lights of the bar.

“I’m gonna go,” I said, and did. I walked over to the Marine and his harem.

“Hey,” I said. “I feel like pool. You wanna play pool?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

“You got a dollar? In quarters?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

He put the quarters in the slots and pushed the lever in. The pool table thundered and gave us its balls.

I wasn’t sure how he’d be able to do it, but I wanted to see it. That’s probably mainly why I asked him to play, though it was true that I didn’t have any quarters. He still had his right arm, which was probably his dominant arm to begin with, and he steadied the cue with his knee, resting the meat of his thigh against the table. He shot from the hip, and wasn’t very good. No, I was much better than him, and I felt bad playing my best though I did anyway. I bought us beers afterwards with the five dollars I’d stolen from Ott.

“I ain’t been doing much,” said the Marine. “Went last night to see Palgrave Bridge get blowed up.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That was a show. Those were fireworks. Smelled like gunpowder, it drifted all across the river to where we was.”

I liked him. He wasn’t the really cordial kind of military personnel that seemed to be everywhere. These were of the kind that my father appreciated, opening doors and being nice.

Why I went with the Marine: I wanted to be him and not me. I wanted his bitter streets, his plump nurses, his missing member. I wanted women to ask What happened, I wanted men to ask it. I wanted the wailing excuse of his sacrifice, to drag it down the beach, grandfather-clock sized, a charm around my neck. I asked him for it, but he had already lost it.

I fell asleep at the bar for a minute and had another dream. I am at a library and receive news of a strange heavenly event. The blue night sky is ripped lengthwise by hostile lights and we are scared. People run and camcord. Jupiter looms huge in the sky and turns slowly from bright white to black, as if in eclipse. Everyone has interrupted their lives for urgent global newscasts and the anticipation of immense physical change. Will they be affected? Yes: soon the atmosphere glows and the street is demolished by silent meteors. The buildings crumble, the Marine and I take refuge in a hotel basement. Later we emerge, it is safe for now. But Jupiter is still there and no one knows if it is finished.

After the beers we got in his rental car, which had that smell like if flowers were made of vinyl. He drove us to a deserted fairgrounds where he had a malnourished dog chained up. I had a gun and used it. But no one died, it doesn’t matter who died, or that he tried to seduce me, or that the dog was just skin and bones. What matters is that we gave our stolen dollars freely at The Meadow.