No idealist, I:
My eye deals with images
in flickering light and sun light
that just might
mean much more.

I have been taught
to find the forest by
tearing down trees
and when we’re done
we’ll see the
nothing left standing . . .

So when it’s done right
it is bloody and warm in the center,
despite the dissenter who enters into
cultural criticism.

Foster Dickson teaches Creative Writing at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery, AL.

George Mostoller is an illustrator, poet, and songwriter (under the name Hawk Tubley). His illustrations and poems have appeared in previous issues of Steel Toe Review.

Donald Illich’s work has been published in The Iowa Review, Nimrod, Cream City Review, and several other journals.

Still I like finding out that stereotypes are true, another character’s box I can seal and add to the dusty pile I am storing up for nothing, for later.

“I hate driving,” you say. “It really scares me. You’re so close to death, but in the worst, most mundane way.” I remember that about you, actually, even though I choose to believe you are not afraid of anything because that is how you appear. You’re a good driver, too. How do you always manage to master the things that scare you?

“What about alcohol poisoning?”

“At least I would die doing something I love.”

“Well I hate going out for ice cream.” I say. “Have you ever noticed that everyone who works at an ice cream store is OUR AGE, and there’s always at least one attractive girl and one attractive boy who flirt with each other when they’re scooping the ice cream?” You laugh, I love that laugh, you are the scientist, the one who memorizes statistics about teenage drivers, your laugh the only thing in the world that can ignore my existential concerns and leave them for dead. “Yeah, and then you look around and see all the girls who have nothing to do on Friday night but go out for ice cream, and then I have to worry about their self esteem, watching those two flirt, but I’m actually really only worried about myself.”

“Well then why are we doing everything we hate tonight?”

“Because if we died while we were eating ice cream, with our backs to the hot ice cream scoopers, we would die doing something we loved.”

“Yeah, dying,” you say, serious suddenly in the dark car. “Would you ever get an abortion?” My heart skips a few beats and goes back to normal. You love to talk about birth defects, autism, you want to be that kind of doctor that looks at fetuses, the kind of doctor who puts together perfect babies. You want to engineer other perfect people like you, but the difference is that you were always random, and they will always be contrived. We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times, never seriously. I swallow, the dark makes it easier. I miss Neil Armstrong, who died this year. Around 4:30 PM. I wonder if the dark was easy, all those miles away. There is a syndrome where you feel like crap if you see the Earth from space, where you’ve been all your life and you’re suddenly gone. In a few weeks you’ll be at Emory, away from your wacko mother, we are so excited, and yet.

“No.” We make our left turn, supposedly towards the best ice cream I will ever have, although we’re not even halfway there. I touch my stomach. I have read that when men touch their stomachs it’s a sign of insecurity. I wonder what it means for women. “I’ve thought it about it a lot. But I would never be able to, unless I guess the baby was endangering both of our lives, like that woman with no legs. ”

“But if you had your whole life ahead of you, say.” I know where this whole thing is going, how many times did I tell you to get on birth control? My brother told me a story about helping your dad move your sister’s bed and she had all those boxes of Plan B. We thought maybe it was the eating disorder, that she took them to throw up, maybe. You’re not supposed to use Plan B as birth control, she should know that. But if they were only to lose weight why did she keep them? All those babies lined up under her bed, how could she throw the boxes away?

“For me? I would never. For someone else, well, it depends what the meaning of life is, I guess. If we’re all just random, shots in the dark, then sure, of course, do whatever you want. If we were put here to reproduce, which was the popular meaning of life theory for a while, then no. If we were put here to help sustain the planet, then yes, everyone should stop having babies. If we were put here to make the world a better place for people, that’s really the hard one. Like, which kid’s going to be better, the one you have in a year or the one you have in twenty years. And which you is going to be better, the one who goes to med school or the single mother who worked at McDonald’s all her life to take care of the next Michael Phelps, the next Einstein.”

But the idea of all your talents wasted makes me feel slightly weak. We don’t need this kid, me and my high hopes for you. You’re supposed to laugh at me when I tell you I’m scared of the dark and the future. You’re supposed to tell me the scientific reason I believe in God. You’re supposed to be the one telling me not to keep the baby. You’re supposed to be the one who knows to use birth control.

“But we don’t know why we’re here,” your voice is small, how it used to be before you became so hardy. Was the new red-cheeked gruffness a side effect of being pregnant?

“That’s the problem.” I wonder if the baby, like me, will learn to finish your sentences. “It’s all a gamble, how the world will be different with or without the kid. Chances are, neither of you can change anything. But then, there’s always that other chance, too.”

“What do you think I will feel like when I see my kid in fifteen years?” So exact, you always are with your plans. Already in the way you speak the baby is gone. “Will I think, ‘that’s the same kid I lost when I was eighteen’? Or will I think, ‘I am finally able to give my child the life she deserves’? But worse, what if I regret forever not having this baby, this one specifically? What if every little girl I see for the rest of my life I think, ‘You could have been mine’?”

“I want you to think, ‘I made the right decision.’ But don’t you always?”

I don’t think you said yes, but I wish you had. I wished for you to laugh away my existentialism once more, to make it obsolete, to explain to me, lovingly, once again, that you didn’t believe in all of that. I wanted you to explain to me that you couldn’t bring a baby to college, that your plans for med school didn’t include paying for daycare.

But then, what if I could have your attention for just one night, what if you would sit down with me and sketch out all the possibilities, wait patiently while I tried every possible method of skirting around the universe’s no-previews policy. What if, in all your certainty, you were missing something? The universe seemed to be telling us, Just Guess. I wanted to scream back that, how could you expect me to just keep taking shots in the dark? You wanted to roll the dice, follow the apparent. I wanted see in the ether what was best for all of us.

The Friday night girls were still there when we pulled into the parking lot. The lights were still fluorescent, still flattering on the tanned skin of the two attractive, ethnically-ambiguous ice cream scoopers, a boy and a girl. The store’s employees still giggled as the boy attempted to swat a fly trapped inside the screen door. My stomach still hurt as I walked up to the window, I still thought about the Friday Night Girls. But behind all of this, sweep back the veil, bring out the x-ray, maybe we had seen none of it before, maybe we hadn’t expected any of it.

Allegra Armstrong lives outside of Philadelphia. In her free time she enjoys drinking coffee and exploring the natural world.

The next summer, expecting Daddy’s Yankee family,
Mama waxed that floor to a glossy shine. Fed up
by extra work, she grumbled. I parroted. She slid
across the floor then, bare feet skidding, begging him
to stop slapping her. My brother stood on the floor
near Thanksgiving that year, naked to the waist
while she salved belt buckle cuts on his back.
That floor held us all once or twice, eight people
walking, skidding, falling accidentally or by design,
along with blackeyed peas, dropped chicken bones,
cornbread crumbs, and greasy French fries.
Its chocolate colluded with my childhood
confusion, made pictures I still wake to see.

Born in Texas, Colleen Powderly lived in Louisiana before moving to Rochester with her family when she was 12. After receiving her MA in 1997, she worked at a number of full and part-time jobs, finishing with a three-year stint as a prison counselor. Her work reflects her Southern childhood as well as the struggle she experienced and witnessed while trying to make a living. Her work has appeared in HazMat Review, Fox Cry Review, The Palo Alto Review, RiverSedge, Sea Stories, MG2Datura, The Weekly Avocet, and The Centrifugal Eye.

Down a couple of spaces from me, one of the guys from shipping was playing Billy Joel’s “Goodbye Saigon.” He had it turned up loud like you’re supposed to listen to that song, the anger of it shearing the hum of the factory in the distance. The song finished and he played it again, louder yet, the choppers, always the choppers in Vietnam, the fucking chopper war, blasting their rotors loud and obnoxious, the anger of the song blending with the arriving blackness of my mood, and it was 1966 again, us high school kids standing in the hallway looking at a picture of a guy who had graduated in the spring, just four months earlier. There on the bulletin board in the hallway was Tom Lane, a little guy, not athletic, not artistic or musical, not handsome, not anything that I could ever remember about him. But he was patriotic and dead. He had joined the Army and gone straight to Vietnam where he got blown the fuck up. So the school put his picture on the bulletin board in the main hallway, him kneeling in his fatigues holding his rifle and wearing his helmet, with a caption that read, “Tom Lane, killed in Vietnam last week.” That day in the hallway was the first I had ever heard of Vietnam.

I sat there in the parking lot thinking of Tom Lane and the next year of 1967 when Vietnam was plastered all over the TV screen every evening, guys getting fucked up in front of us, and a great big What the Fuck was forming in my high school brain. I pictured my dad, the Army Infantry grunt from the Battle of the Bulge who got through the rest of his life by consuming a hundred thousand dollars worth of alcohol, watching the news, eyes fixed on the little black and white screen but flitting over to me every once in awhile like he wondered what the fuck I thought about it, or if I even understood what it was going to mean to me. He never talked to me about Vietnam—what I should do—join up, run, get a deferment, not a fucking thing.

The next year I was a student at Ohio State University. That winter I got a phone call that a friend in my class from high school had been killed in Nam. He had been there a week and stepped on a land mine. His wife was one month pregnant when he died.

I sat thinking these things and seeing these images, thinking too of the day of the Kent State killings when my dad and I came to blows, and a fierce dark anger covered me completely, the Vietnam War upon me again, a sickness that haunted every citizen in America those years—Johnson and Nixon and McNamara sending nearly three million American kids to a fucking worthless jungle just because they could, like the kings of old. Pick a country and make war. The darkness of all things settled over me that day at lunch in the parking lot of the GM plant and I didn’t go back in the place.

I sat in the parking lot with nowhere to go now that I was back in the middle of the Vietnam War a half decade after the war’s end. Back in the darkness, not going down together in Vietnam with my classmates and 58,200 others who got blown up, got sold out by the government, for the glory of nothing. For Nothing.

A whole country with PTSD—the American Legion guys hating the hippies, and the hippies hating the government, the government killing us all, and moms and dads and kids at every crossroad and in every corner of the nation in constant sorrow for the lost or soon to be lost children, and the governor of Ohio ordering the murder of kids at Kent State University.

I was plenty drunk, me and several of the regulars, by the time John sat down on the bar stool beside me that evening. I could see that he was half in the bag too. “Hey. How’s it going?” I asked.

He just nodded.

“I got this,” I told the bartender.

John nodded again.

We drank our beers. I had heard he was getting a divorce. Him and most of the other Vietnam guys. Treating their PTSD with alcohol like soldiers have done since alcohol was invented. But so was I getting a divorce. So was I sitting here.

“Where you working?” I asked him.

He tilted his head to look at me without turning his neck. “Nowhere man. There aren’t any jobs.” After a minute he added, “I think you got the last fucking job in America over at General Motors.”

“Not much around,” I said. I was past the darkness and way into the numbness and wanted everyone everywhere to be forgiven for everything and all get on with America and our lives.

“Your dad said he would get me in the plant. I can’t even take care of my family.”

“I’m sure he did what he could.”

“He promised me. He said it was a sure thing he could get me in.”

I imagined my dad sitting on a bar stool beside John up at the American Legion Hall, late in the evening and drunk, treating his own PTSD from 35 years ago and World War II.

“He said us vets got to stick together.”

I nodded, starting to lapse back into the darkness from the numbness. “Man, it’s hard to get anyone in that place.”

“He got you in.”

I glanced over at John, watched him rotate the beer bottle and pick at the label, the condensation dripping onto the bar.

“Yeah,” I said. The darkness was back on top of the numbness and the anger of Vietnam was returning. I wanted to say I knew what he was feeling, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. I wanted to say that I was sorry I didn’t go to Vietnam, but I wasn’t.

“You got my fucking job.”

“He did the best he could,” I said, thinking of my old man, a bottom rung accountant who had gotten fired in 1956 for standing up for vets where he worked then, when the company was firing them to beat them out of their retirement.

“Your old man‘s a fucking liar,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

“A fucking liar.”

“Fuck you. Fucking Vietnam vet,” I scoffed, all the anger and the darkness and numbness all rolled into one big ball of ugliness now.

He was to my right, so when I saw the first movement of his bar stool toward mine, I nailed him with a big roundhouse left hook and knocked him clean off his seat. He got up fast and I was ready, blind to everything except the enemy, and got him another good one. He socked me one hard punch in the eye, then the bartender pulled him off and another guy grabbed me. He held up his hands, palms out to indicate he was done, the dark sadness of the day on him too, and turned and headed for the door.

“What was that all about?” one of the guys asked.

“Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam.”

William Trent Pancoast’s novels include Wildcat (2010) and Crashing (1983). His short stories, essays, and editorials have appeared in MONKEYBICYCLE, Night Train, The Mountain Call, Solidarity magazine, and US News & World Report. Pancoast recently retired from the auto industry after thirty years as a die maker and union newspaper editor. Born in 1949, the author lives in Ontario, Ohio. He has a BA in English from the Ohio State University.

1.
Trains, trains, trains chew the night with steel teeth.
Cattle trains crowded with names:
Maria, Ioana, Stefana, Gheorghe, Ion, Constantin.
Trains loaded with souls, some moaning, some silent,
taking them to the end of the world.

What is the train conductor thinking, looking ahead in the dark?
Can he see in the headlights the tracks leading into an unfamiliar land?
Does he feel the heaviness of his train carrying the shame of the world?
Or does he feel lucky he’s not one in the cars?
He squints and lights a cigarette.
For a moment, his face flares up, then darkness eats it again.

2.
Maria, Ioana, Stefana, Gheorghe, Ion, Constantin
came back as fall crocuses:
a field of names trembling in the sun.
Step lightly, dear. Watch out for the numb bee
that lands on their tongues and sips their songs.

She Was Born Old and Waiting

In summer, the tears not yet spilled pool inside her chest.

In fall, she fingers a rosary of rain.

In winter, all her tears dry and the empty riverbeds freeze. Her soul is a cave
with a stalagmite at its center. One drop keeps falling, and her sadness builds up
but never reaches the surface.

The surface breaks in spring when the river bursts free. As waters carry her tears
into the sea, her body becomes smaller and smaller.

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in 5 a.m., Meridian, Harpur Palate, Word Riot, The Red Wheelbarrow, Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, and many others. She was nominated two times for the 2012 Pushcart Prize and for 2012 Best of the Net. She is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), and A Dirt Road Hangs from the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada). She also published the chapbooks The System (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, 2012), With the Strike of a Match (White Knuckles Press, 2011), and Eternity’s Orthography (Finishing Line Press, 2007). She co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman Publishing, 2011). She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012). Visit her blog at http://cserea.tumblr.com/.

Jack Kerouac

Hunter Thompson

Charles Bukowski

Loren Kantor is a Los Angeles-based Woodcut Artist and writer.  He worked in the film industry for 20 years as a screenwriter and assistant director.  He is a huge fan of Classic Cinema and iconoclastic American Writers. He’s been carving woodcut images for the past five years. See his website Woodcutting Fool for more info.

Memorized conversations,
laughing in all
the right places;
pretending
that the faces you see
are what
you’ve been looking for.

Another night of
treading time and water,
drowning in the clink
of beer bottles and cheap whiskey;
in the far corner
fists are swinging. . .
be hearing the sirens soon.

With a nod at no one
and a wave at the band,
I leave as quietly
as a moon-rise.

Outside, flashing lights
burn the air,
and I can’t help but gaze
at my reflection
in a car window;
staring back is some stranger
that once was me.

And as I cross the street,
something between the beats of my heart
calls out to me like a memory
or a voice I’ve never heard;
but I can’t make out the words,
nor tell what direction
it is begging me to go.

The Final Song

I hope Death is a smiling woman
in a sun-colored dress;
who wants to stop
and mess-around
as we travel through
that forest of stars.

I hope She brings
a couple of guitars
and a bottle of wine. . .
I’ll teach her the old songs
and she’ll sing for me
the ones the birds love in spring,
And the bears dream in winter.

And then she’ll sing the one
for all those souls like me,
who were happy just to
walk down this road;
trying to learn
the secrets written in
the water, the trees,
and the clouds riding the wind.

Charlie Burttram is a retired writer/editor for the Birmingham News.

“What’s all this racket for?” Henry asked Fred.

Fred whispered as though his trip was a conspiracy, “Southeastern division! Delia beat the whole goddamn South. They’re having a victory party at the river. Word is our Reds have that place taken over.” Fred grinned. “Look in the back, Henry.”

Henry lifted a flap of canvas to reveal several cases of beer. He quickly pulled the flap back, hoping the neighbors didn’t see. His was a good Methodist neighborhood.

Ula Mae, Fred’s sister, leaned over from the passenger side and said, “I heard they have champagne and a full band. You will dance, won’t you, Henry?”

“What, in the water?” Fred asked, cocking his hat back on his head. “It’s a pool, not some joint.”

“They’re wild, they might. Remember when they started that big fight in Americus halfway through the eighth inning? The radio said it was utter chaos. You were listening, weren’t you, Henry?” Ula Mae said.

Henry had been listening to the Carter Family on the Opry all evening.

“Come on Henry, let’s go. You don’t get out enough.”

Henry got his clothes. On his way back way out, his mother asked, “Who is making such a racket in the drive?”

“Just an acquaintance. I shall not be long.”

“Do not stay out too late, the bishop will be at service tomorrow.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Fred slapped the steering wheel when Henry squeezed in between him and Ula Mae. Soon the wide streets and well-kept lawns faded to woods and shotgun houses west of town.

“Feel around, under the seat, Henry, see if you find anything,” Fred said.

Henry bent and reached under the seat. There was a half-full half-pint jar. “That’s the good stuff,” Fred said, “some of Pappy Marlowe’s. Go on, try a sip.” Henry flushed. He imagined his Mother’s and the bishop’s scowls, foregrounded against the church’s white doorway.

“Well let me try it, if you won’t,” said Ula Mae, taking the jar. She took a dainty sip and then a longer one. Fred chuckled. “Old Marlowe’s whiskey will come up on you about like he would—sweet and smooth, but before you know it, you’re face to face with an old swamp runner. And he don’t let go easy.”

“Oh Fred, hush,” Ula Mae said, turning to Henry. “He always gets like that, every time I drink any little thing! He starts all this seduction talk.”

“Just trying to protect your innocence, Uly,” Fred said.

Ula Mae took another sip. “I don’t know what innocence you think you have, what with that letter you sent to Gladys and all this whiskey in Daddy’s new truck—which you borrowed without asking—and I don’t even need to mention that woman on Coney road—”

“Woman, be silent!”

They hit a pothole and lurched, coming down in a flurry of elbows, shoulders and half of old Marlowe’s liquor. Fred started to explain, “It was just a sappy old love letter Gladys held on to for no damn reason.”

“She always was sentimental,” Henry said.

“And Pa said I could take it out; I’ll have to haul cotton in it anyway.”

“It does take some practice to learn the gears,” Henry said.

“Oh Henry, don’t take up for him like that,” Ula Mae said.

“Do you want to swim across the river?” Fred asked.

“You wouldn’t kick me out of a borrowed truck.”

Fred and Ula Mae kept going until they came to the landing. Bubba Evans came out of his shack. “One dollar, mister,” he said, and Fred handed him a silver dollar. Bubba dragged the cable to pull them across the river.

Over the slosh of water, Henry heard dance music, shouting. Electric lights reflected in the ripples of the river. The pool was a beacon, bounded by shadowed water. “There is music, I told you there would be!” said Ula Mae.

The ferry slid up the bank and Fred drove off and parked by a bus. “The Reds’ own bus, Henry!” he said, slapping the side of it.

They walked through the gate of the pool into a gold-lit world of noise. The water seethed with hairy-chested men and suited women. Arms lifted brown bottles of beer. A handful of musicians played ragtime—Henry recognized Bissett on trombone and Leon on trumpet. Beyond them, he did not recognize half the people there. For all he knew, and it seemed so, half of Georgia was in that pool.

“Suit up, Henry,” called Fred.

“I could not find mine,” Henry said. In truth, he did not own one.

“Just jump in in your underwear.” Many of the men and even a few of the women had done so. Henry felt out of place in his shirtsleeves and hat. A man in shorts bumped into him. “Have some hooch,” the man said through a red forest of beard. Henry took the pint jar and sipped, thinking liquor might help him loosen up. Finding himself among such a rowdy crowd and already so much sin, he might as well drink. Fire with fire, sin with sin. The liquor burned but he made himself drink two good swigs before he handed it back to the man and thanked him.

Henry stripped to his shorts. He folded his clothes and placed them on a bench in a far corner, his hat set atop them. The pool was packed; man against woman, skin against skin. There was an unopened beer on the bench. Henry took it and slid into the pool.

Pushing through the wet mass of bodies, Henry searched for Fred and Ula Mae, or anybody he might know. Finding no one, he turned to a group of four men, one of them in a Reds baseball cap, and introduced himself. He told them he was from Delia and asked where they were from. They were all quite drunk, but Henry could not leave just after he had made introductions. One man said “From Valdosta, all the way up here to celebrate.”

“That ain’t nothing, I came from Athens.”

“The hell with Athens, I came from Ocala.”

“What the hell you here from Ocala for?”

“To watch baseball, dumbass, why else?”

Henry was not sure if they were joking or about to fight.

Henry grabbed a passing liquor jar and took a deep few swigs. He left the baseball group and looked for women to talk to. Three of them stood sipping beer and he pushed through warm bodies to get to them.

Breaking into their circle, Henry saw that Ula Mae. “Isn’t it wild?” she said.

“Yes, it is,” he said, but he was not sure if she heard him since they were adjacent to the band and Bissett had played a loud gliss. Ula Mae made swift introductions, of which Henry remembered none. Then Ula Mae filled any possible silence with gossip about Fred and Gladys: how she jilted him or he jilted her. Henry was not sure which. He turned to one of the other girls and said, “Did you travel far to be here tonight?”

“What?”

“Where are you from?”

“My girlfriend and I came down from Vienna.”

“I am from—“ Henry began, but a trombone slide stuck into the space between them. The girl’s eyes crossed looking at it, before it disappeared back the way it came.

“I need to find my friend,” the girl said. “She always does something wild at parties like this. I have to keep an eye on her. It was good to meet you.” And she pushed through bodies and was gone. Ula Mae still talked.

Henry tried vaguely to follow the girl. Hands clapped him on the back. He saw things terribly clearly, when he looked directly at them. Everybody was golden in the electric lights. Others laughed and it made Henry laugh. His ideas against drink and debauchery were changing rapidly. Still, he wanted to talk to a woman. Talk, and bring her over and sit by the fire, listening to the Opry. More than anything, he wanted some girl to call on, to take out. Henry had the handicap of shyness and the constraint of a zealous mother, not that those things should really be stopping him. Then and there, he vowed to relax his strenuous life and live like he imagined one of these revelers lived. At least in part. He took another drink.

By now he was used to the noise, sweat, men yelling and girls giggling, and him pushing his way among them, looking for that first girl he had talked to, or another one whom he could talk to. He heard a laugh like back-porch chimes, and turned. There was a woman laughing, her hair curled and untouched by the water, her skin the color of honey in the lights. Her eyes were dark, were as comfortable in this place, probably in any place, as Henry was apprehensive. She was happy here only because it was here. He pushed towards her, focusing his failing concentration on her, until Fred grabbed him by the arm.

Fred leaned against the pool edge, smoking a cigar. “Did you hear what she said?” Fred asked.

“She only laughed, I was trying to—”

“Ula Mae’s told everyone from here to Carolina about Gladys, inventing half of it and blowing the other half up big as the moon. She’s even spilling out every terrible rumor that’s gone around about . . . Coney Road . . . you didn’t hear her?”

“She was,” Henry belched, “talking.”

Fred colored violently and struck the water and called Ula Mae a name that Henry would never repeat.

“She can walk back to town then—swim! I’ll pay Bubba not to let her back on the ferry. She can’t just go and tell all about that—Hell, she’s Gladys’ friend too, they go to goddamn Sunday school together,” Fred said. He grabbed his hat, shoving it into Henry’s chest as he spoke. “This is the way they are, these women, Henry: nothing but mouths with pretty legs. She’s jealous of Gladys, I’ll tell you, she can’t stand a girl with pretty blond hair like that. She’d tear it all out if she could and laugh about it afterward. What do you think, can’t you see it? Can’t you tell it about her?”

Henry took a jar from beside Fred and drank a long swallow of whiskey. Fred stopped him, his eyed wide and focused toward the diving board. Henry turned. The woman he saw before stood there, nude, bathed in the dull light. All the water stilled and all the rowdy cries ceased. She stood like a goddess carved in honey-colored stone, as though polished marble held all the delicate curves along her hips, or else she was a tongue of flame solidified, swelling and tapering. Her face was unashamed, bearing a small smile not of drunk wildness but of quiet uncruel mischief. In that gleaming sliver of time, she looked at Henry in a way that bathed light into every part of him; not desire, nor lust, but a warmth that would remain forever, smoldering, wakened to flame every now and then or dying down, but never extinguished. Henry watched every sinew in her frame shift as she dove, disappearing without a splash into the water, her feet kicking up like a last burst of fire. He barely heard the hoots and jeers as she swam the length of the pool and rose on the other side, where the woman from Vienna covered her with a towel. She blew a kiss and faded beyond the water and people and debauchery and extinguished from sight.

Fred didn’t speak. Henry pushed through the bodies. Shoved through them, he realized, but it was not from anger so he did not say “Pardon me” as he had the whole night.

He passed Ula Mae, who said “Henry have you seen Fred?”

Henry said, “Yes, and you should avoid it.”

Bissett’s slide blocked him for a moment and he pushed it back, making an off-key slur that Bissett worked into the song anyhow.

Henry passed the baseball men from Valdosta and Athens and Ocala. They yelled gibberish. Henry gently pushed one aside like a door and pushed him back after he had passed through.

Finally, Henry climbed out of the pool. The red-bearded man was still sitting on the bench with a jar of whiskey. Henry said, “Where did that girl go?”

“Girl?”

“The one from the diving board.”

“How’d she dive with so many people?”

“Sheer beauty. You didn’t see her? She swam through and came out right here.”

“Have some hooch.”

Around the edge of the pool there were only couples, or drunks sleeping, or the shining brass of the band.

Outside the sounds were muted. A large moon hung and flickered in the sloshing of the river. No one was out there. Henry would have called out, but he never learned either of their names.

On the ride home, Fred said through clenched teeth, “Uly, I told you not to talk any more about me and Gladys. It ain’t nothing to talk about.”

“Who told you that? I didn’t say a single word, except the bald facts of it.”

“Bullshit. You were blabbing about it to everybody! What’s going to happen when she hears about it?”

“For one thing, she’ll be glad she didn’t end up with a bastard like you.”

“Woman! Take that back, or God so help me—”

“Fred, shut your damned mouth,” said Henry. Ula Mae and Fred stared at him, jaws slack. Henry continued, “I’m sick of hearing you two. All this hatefulness turns my stomach.”

Fred mumbled. Ula Mae sighed. They didn’t speak any more on the way to take Henry home.

The next day, Henry woke up late and told his mother he would not be attending services that day.

“But Henry, the bishop will be there.”

“A bishop isn’t that special. I’ll go next time he stops by.”

He drove out to the river and went to get his hat from where he’d forgotten it on the bench. Henry tried to picture the woman on the diving board again, and he felt, lighter within him, that same warmth he felt when she looked at him. But by then she wasn’t a thing for picturing. He crossed the ferry and headed towards Vienna.

Jackson Culpepper grew up in south Georgia and now lives in east Tennessee with his wife Margaret, two dogs, and two horses. His work has appeared in Armchair/Shotgun, Rock & Sling, The Drum Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Real South Magazine.