Poisons

Here is a piece of "flash fiction."

Poisons

“Honey,” she sang from the kitchen, “Don’t forget to take your iodine tablet and your warfarin. I packed your nitroglycerine pills in your briefcase. You left them on the dresser again.”

So much poison for one man to be taking, I thought, as she ate the ground-up glass that I had been putting in her oatmeal each morning.

Mirth Bubbles

Here is a haiku for Spring:

Mirth Bubbles

Mirth bubbles along.
Listen. Taste the fresh water
passing into time.

apple apple apple

apple apple apple

Did you hear your mom

when she left for work?

apple

We’ll have to talk

when she gets home.

apple apple

Let’s sit at the table

and read the news.

apple apple apple

Those racist clowns;

they’ll never learn.

apple apple apple

How can you stand me?

I smell like blecch.

apple apple

Let’s get you one

and touch your hair,

ap-ple

and rue the day

it won’t be sticky.

Lavapiés, ca. 1980

 

Lavapiés, ca. 1980

            “Lavapiés, foot-wash... wash-feet,” mused Roland. He figured it must have to do with some ancient Catholic ritual. Didn’t they have one day during the year when everybody washed their feet?

Lavapiés was a large, sloping plaza, bordered at the top by a loopy grin of a cobblestone thoroughfare, diagonally intersected by another, straighter cobblestone artery, both leading to the bottom of the grade, creating an uneven hourglass.

Roland imagined where there might once have been a cistern for the actual washing of feet. He pegged it for where the low, whitewashed, stone building now stood, where they dried and shredded the tobacco that was then rolled into “Payasos,” the harsh Spanish cigarettes that came in the ridiculous blood-red packet with a cartoon drawing of a clown holding a toy balloon.

The sagging, disenchanted buildings surrounding Lavapiés had stood guard for centuries, over plagues, poverty, and Revolution-era street fighting. It was still a rough neighborhood, earthy and poor.

On Sundays, after church, the arteries and the rest of the plaza were lined with hundreds of canopied tables for el rastro, Madrid’s flea market. Thousands of people clogged the plaza, throbbing past the tables, picking through piles of old clothes, books, kitchenware, clocks, lamps, stamp collections, military ribbons, religious statues, hand tools, vinyl records, bootlegged American cigarettes, anything that a person might buy.

At 4pm, the crowd spilled into the many bars and cafeterias, which lined the streets nearby, laughing and talking boisterously, cheering televised futbol matches, smoking, and drinking wine and beer. They also ordered plate after plate of gambas, grilled, whole prawns, coated with coarse salt. Families and friends ritually tear off the prawns’ heads, peel off the shells and tails, gulp down the flesh, and repeat this process until nightfall, when most of the patrons return to their homes, leaving behind ankle-deep piles of orange-pink carcasses and hundreds of thousands of crustacean heads bearing twice as many gloss black, stunned eyes.

Roland was alone, standing at the bar. The only other customers were two young lovers at a table in the corner, holding hands, their knees touching, their feet swallowed up in pink, translucent, pungent petals.

“Lavapiés,” Roland thought. “Wash your feet.”

He swirled the remainder of what he decided would be his last glass of beer at this locale. Even near the bottom, the beer stayed cold and lively. He looked at his own feet and at the hundreds of beadlike eyes gaping up at him. He tried to think of a philosophical metaphor for the heads and bodies crushed under his shoes, and he laughed out loud when he could not. He drained his beer and said, “Buenas noches, muchachos,” to the bartender and the oblivious couple.

He started his trudge up the cobblestones to a windowless bar that he knew, where they played flamenco music on the phonograph and the waiter would speak to him in a very entertaining version of English. There, he could sit down and have a civilized glass of whiskey.

From somewhere off the side of the plaza, shielded by darkness, a woman shrieked, “¡Puta morro!” followed by the unmistakable sound of a bottle shattering.

“Yes,” thought Roland, “A civilized glass of whiskey.”

Apostrophe

 Happy Valentime's Day, 2014

Apostrophe

She wrote me a note:
do you know what i think?
i think
        your crazy

Dear Crazy,
Do you know what I think?
I think.
       You're Everything

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

By Michael Chandler

            I wrapped up my workday, and I was one of the few left in the office. I could stow away my things and stow away my thoughts at my leisure, because, no matter what management got from me, I was on salary. It didn’t matter how early I got in, or how late I stayed, either at my leisure, or under their gun.

            For the past several months, I would linger evenings to close up the mental office before I left the physical environs, because, at my girlfriend’s behest, I no longer spent time after work at “the bar.” I had taken some ribbing for that, but it was mostly from my bachelor co-workers and lonely, bad pool players, sports connoisseurs, someday-to-be husbands and fathers, who, in their cups, awkwardly, all-too-obviously sought the attentions of young women, while I returned home to “the one for me.”

            Surely, one day they would understand what it means to a wife or to a live-in lover, what a drunken spouse indicates to her notion of stability.

            I drink, it is true. I enjoy it. Often, I drink to isolate, even among other drinkers. Maybe it is the isolation, more than the symbol of the bottle itself, which invites disappointment and scorn from the loved one. I’m quite sure that this is what Ariel didn’t like to see in me. I retracted. I’d go out drinking with the boys, and I’d return, late home and emotionally far away. There is an element of isolated tippling that I require from time to time, but, done consistently, it raises underlying, undermining questions as to its source.

            No man wants to hear her say, “It’s me, isn’t it?”

            I circumvented her female logic by limiting my nights out to various “special occasions,” such as birthday or bachelor parties or playoff games, and by returning home at a very reasonable hour after work, most regularly. We would eat and drink (moderately) together, go out together as a couple or with friends, or spend time at home, whence I would listen to the excitements and travails of her day, somehow, never getting in too much about what I may have been thinking. Many of our conversations had me doing little more than agreeing with her, again and again, but compared with many late-night discussions I’d had while on my own at various bars, Ariel was a far more rewarding companion.

            Instead of going to the bar, I’d sometimes pick up a pint of bourbon on my way home from the office from the smiling, nonjudgmental lady at the liquor store, find a clever spot to stash it at home, belong to my girl, and still get in a little drinking.

            That I did, of this particular Wednesday night. I unlocked our three locks, creaked the metal door inward, poked my upper body in, and called, “Honey? It’s me.”

            She was a copy editor for Marie Claire, so I always pretended to have forgotten my grammar.

            “I mean, ‘It is I.’”

            “I’m in the bathroom!”

            I could hear the water running through the bathroom door, obviously ajar. I took a big slug from the bourbon bottle and slid it behind a dictionary and a thesaurus on a shelf next to the TV and VCR. As she was a copy editor, I knew she would not pull out either of those two books anytime soon.

            I got myself a glass of her white, sanctioned wine from the refrigerator, had a sip of it to clear my breath of the bourbon, and nabbed a garlic cracker, to fully do the job. I pushed my head into the bathroom, where, blessedly, she was brushing her teeth. I kissed her mouthful of suds, she spat, and we laughed together.

            “We gonna eat here, or what do you want to do?” I asked her, as I wiped my foamy lips on my shirtsleeve, teasingly blocking her view of the mirror.

            She gave a manly and fully-throated, “Phwoooitew!” through my elbow, into the running drain. She too, then wiped her lips on my sleeve.

            “I bought some noodles on my way home, and you can have the rest. I think they’re going to have food there.” She rinsed her mouth out and spat again. “You smell like garlic and booze. Are you going to take a shower?”

            “Nnghh,” I answered, and I used my most noncommittal amble toward the living room, to take a hit off the hidden bottle, while she went into the bedroom to put on her underwear and then to invariably parade several outfits, asking my opinion of each.

            “What if I had fucked her right there over the sink?” I thought, sticking the bourbon back into its ironic hiding place.

            I imagined her begging me to wait until she could, please, please, finish brushing her teeth. I wouldn’t relent. I could see myself pushing her right leg back with my knee, the taste of Pepsodent, and her eyes widening and sparkling, becoming softer as they fluttered closed, the towel gently dropping from her waist as I...

            “Did you get those noodles?” she shouted from the bedroom, and I could hear her toes pop-pop the floor, as she pulled herself into her underwear.

            “I wasn’t thinking about the noodles. What else you got?”

I love making a dirty joke that no one will ever get.

The food that was to be served, this night out, with me and my girl, was to be provided in memory of a tangential member of our group, who was now deceased. In our several years in New York City, Ariel and I had, separately and together, weathered more than a few deaths of friends and acquaintances. Most were drug overdoses, but there were shocking shootings and stabbings (three, between us), cancer victims (four), drug- or alcohol-related taxi-squashings (two), an unspeakable commuter train miscalculation, and, in one wildly unforgettable instance, Ariel and I had watched in horror, at a rooftop barbeque, as a “street-punk,” named King Tabloid, in a show of drunken bravado, tried to prove that he could grill a beefsteak on his own ribcage, and had fallen, backwards, off the fifth-floor tenement roof and into New York City legend.

Tonight’s memorial was to honor the life of Garshon Parrish, grandson of Maxfield. Garshon had been a victim of autoerotic asphyxiation. It was to be a gallery show of Garshon’s art, now worth who-knew-how-much? During his life, his art had been, among the critics and, far more critically, his social circle, lowly regarded. It was self-exhibited in art-holes, which, God bless them, offered free booze as both bait and a remedy for the blatherings of one more pretentious, skinny, sallow, brooding downtown artist.

            We didn’t really enjoy his company when he was alive, but, because he had come from a rich family, through him, we met some other pretentious, but influential people. Over time, I started to feel some sympathy for the guy. He was a bad artist, but as a person, he was essentially lonely and wanted attention, like anyone else. I tried to look at what his obstacles were toward fulfillment, compared to mine. I felt somewhat ashamed, now that he was dead, that I couldn’t have made him more likeable to myself. Hell, I thought, how am I any better than he was?

            “What do you think of this?” asked Ariel, skipping into the living room, and smoothing out a short, black cocktail dress.

            I had good-taste carte blanche to critique her possible outfits. As it was, she wanted to try on several, and I had proven to deftly “help” her ultimate choice, by usually knowing what she would have chosen in the first place.

            “Everybody’s going to be wearing black,” I offered. “Memorial or not, put on some color; then just wear a black scarf with it. That’ll be plenty ‘mourny.’”

            “Ooooh, I know...” and she scampered back into the bedroom, calling over her shoulder, “Hey, did you eat those noodles?”

            Knowing that she’d be awhile, I hit my bottle again. I’d have another slug when she started trying on shoes, after she put on her make-up.

            “No, I’ll eat at the gallery.”

            “Over a bunch of wine, I suppose.”

            The bourbon almost came out of my nose.

            “Honey,” she lamented, “Just don’t embarrass me, okay?”

            “Promise, promise.”

            I heard hangers being moved around in the closet.

            I washed my face and did an evening shave. I fixed my hair the way she liked it and which I didn’t, and I got a pressed, favorite shirt out of the hall closet, to which my few articles of clothing were relegated.

            “This?” she came out and asked.

            “Perfect,” I answered, and it was true. “Wear flats, because who knows how long we gotta walk tonight.”

            She drooped her shoulders and sighed. She returned to the bedroom, and I could hear her digging around. I opted to get us each a dram of white wine and let the bourbon sit. She returned, coquettishly swinging a pair of purple Mary Janes from her fingers.

            “These?”

            I handed her the wine and easily kissed her, my arm around a bare shoulder.

            “Do they smell like girl feet?” I whispered.

            We came up from the subway at Broadway and Houston and made our way to the posh gallery, where the memorial was being held. As we got to just a few doors away, we could see a group of people we knew, gathered around the front of the place, drinking wine and cocktails out of plastic cups and smoking.

            “God, he never would have gotten a showing here if he was still alive,” Ariel remarked, and tugged my sleeve.

            “I don’t know how he ever got one anywhere. Well, actually I do,” I said, rubbing my thumb and forefinger together, to indicate “money.”

            As we got to where our friends were, we all said our hellos, and I gave the girls what I knew were no more than symbolic, hollow hugs. There were Ruth and Molly, waitress/actresses, who worked at Pizzaro’s, Courtney, a friend of Ariel’s from college, and Dickie and Paul, friends of friends who hung out at the same nightspots we all did, who had become closer to us over the years. Dickie was an assistant cameraman, and Paul played bass for a punk rock group that was fairly successful, but not enough that he could quit his job at a catering company.

After the hugs, I exaggeratedly peered into Paul’s cup and asked, “Hmmm, what have you got there?”

“Scotch and soda, good Scotch, too,” he smirked. “They’ve got a pretty nice spread in there. We catered the food.”

“Oh, so it can’t be all that, then,” I joked.

“Just stay away from the stuffed mushrooms. They’re left over from last week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Maybe.” He smirked again, in the boyish way that had gotten him laid from coast to coast.

Ariel was already engaged in rapt, superficial conversation with the three other girls and Dickie, so I interrupted briefly and offered to get her a white wine from inside, which she accepted. I went in, and the room was way too dark for any appreciation of even bad art, lit variously by color-gelled klieg lights. I had to strain to make out some of Garshon’s found-art sculptures and garish pastel works. They were mostly black, infused with screeching swaths of decidedly un-matching colors.

“‘Garish-on,’” I thought, and chuckled. “Why didn’t I think of that before he...?”

It was inappropriate.

The music was blaring, and was the kind of lugubrious stuff that was all bass and grinding guitar, with some monk-like voice going on and on about how horrible life is. It had always crossed my mind that life would be that much less horrible without all this gloomily introspective crap. Did they call it, “drudge-rock?”

I had figured that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the bar without running into at least a few people with whom I’d have to make pleasantries, and I was right. There was Garshon’s anorexic sister, Eve, to whom I gave my sympathies, who just shrugged, and whom I couldn’t hear over the music, but who, I swear, said something containing the phrase, “...more for me.” Nearer the bar, I ran into Dominic and his wife, Juniper, a couple that I had been looking forward to seeing. I shook him by his shoulders and gave her a real embrace, and I held up a finger for them to wait for me, as I made my way the few feet to the bar.

I went through my usual m.o. of asking for a double bourbon and, as it is served, asking for two wines, so I can knock back the bourbon while I wait and come away from the bar toting only the innocent stuff. It being an open bar, I tipped generously and then went back to Dominic and Juniper. I was always pleased to see them, and it had been about two weeks. They were genuine, and we all three liked a lot of the same music and movies and books and art. They both had a confidence about them that came from a healthy sense of self-worth, and certainly not from monetary worth, as they both worked hard at their jobs. They were saving their money to open a small literary cafe, so that they could work together every day. They were the type of couple that you want to see succeed, that give you faith in the institution of marriage. I wanted what they had and never felt a twinge of jealousy. They were writing the book.

We had to shout and lean into one another to hear, but that just seemed to fill the room around us with the sweet smell of fresh wine-and-spirit breath. We swapped opinions on a movie we had seen and gave each other tips on some upcoming concerts. I indicated that I had to bring the wine out to Ariel, and Juniper motioned for me to bring her back in, by enthusiastically scooping the air.

Back outside, I gave Ariel her wine and a kiss on the cheek, as she, and then I, got caught up on the latest gossip and tawdry affairs. I sidled away from that and had a cigarette while I chatted with Paul, as Dickie was one of the main perpetrators of the gossip among the girls. He was dishing them the latest about a young starlet with whom he was working, on the set of her current picture. Paul finished his cigarette and rattled the ice in his cup, a welcome signal to me. I touched Ariel’s elbow and told her she should come inside.

“In a minute, in a minute,” she said, not turning her head from the juicy morsels.

Back inside, Paul went to get us drinks, and I sauntered over to the food table. As I was deciding and filling up a small styrofoam plate, two guys were standing next to me. One, in a corduroy blazer with suede elbow patches, was telling his friend all about the cheap ingredients necessary to make such a feeble buffet. He verbally picked apart each dish and explained how little effort had gone into its preparation and what he would have done instead, but how it didn’t matter anyway, because, “By the looks of this crowd, they wouldn’t know steak tartare if it was served alive and bit them.”

Paul came back with our drinks, and I pointed out the opinionated epicurean, who was still, quite wittily, delivering his diatribe. Paul told me that he was a food critic for GQ, and that Paul’s catering firm regularly provided the food for the guy’s parties out in the Hamptons.

“So what does he know?” shrugged Paul.

Just then, the food critic emphatically pointed out to his friend one dish, “which could become habit-forming.” It was the stuffed mushrooms. Paul and I doubled over laughing.

The two of us found a place near the bathrooms, where the music wasn’t so loud, and I asked him a bunch of questions about his band, band news being one of his favorite topics. We were joined, not too long afterwards by Dominic and Juniper and a friend of hers from work, named Mandy, a heavily accented Angolan woman, who could have been an African princess. She was striking in feature and posture, and she seemed to know something about everything that came up in our conversation. We all talked for quite a while, and I offered to fetch us a round of drinks. On my way, I scanned around to see if I noticed Ariel. She was with some couple, knees bent, head and shoulders thrown back, laughing wildly up towards ceiling. I knew what that meant.

For all her remonstrances as to my drinking, all her pre-party cautions and warnings, it was always I who had to carry her home, apologize to friends, waitresses and bartenders, over-tip taxi drivers, undress her for bed, and, on the rare occasions that she dared to ask, remind her of what she had done and said. I always tried to do those things in a warm humor, but her indiscretions, ever duly ignored or forgotten, always piqued me as they were occurring, when I compared them to her inflated notion of my drinking. I think a lot of her complaint had to do with her friends sniping about my copious intake to her. My friends never disparaged her behavior to me. Really, I would have cared nothing about carrying her up three flights of stairs four or five times a year, if she didn’t persistently jab at my behavior.

I got our round of drinks, having one while I waited, and I went back to our group, which had grown to include Ruth and Molly and Dickie. Dickie was retelling the story of the starlet, which four of us present had already heard, and everyone but Mandy was getting fairly well-oiled, our hand gestures and our laughter exaggerated from how we had been an hour before. We all talked on, and Paul started engaging Mandy in private conversation, obviously chatting her up.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ariel near the bar, by herself. She was looking around partly for me, but wondering whether she should get a glass of wine now, or after she found me. She was beginning to confuse her thoughts. I privately called it, her “drunken waffling.” I went over to help her out, somewhat mischievously.

“Honey! I’ve been looking all over for you,” I crowed, with a wide smile. “Come on, let’s get you a glass of wine.”

I led her up to the bar and got her wine and my double bourbon. We both knew that, in spite of the fact that she didn’t want me on the strong spirits, she was at the point where she couldn’t say anything about it. I led her by the hand over to our group, telling her that Dominic and Juniper were looking forward to seeing her. When we got there, we were informed that everyone had decided to go to Two-Shay’s, a bar on Second Street that we all liked and could walk to. We took our drinks with us out onto the street.

There were nine of us altogether, and as we walked, we fragmented into smaller groups, laughing, smoking, bumping and laying arms on each other as we teased and expounded. I was helping keep Ariel going in a straight line. That was one of the reasons I had suggested she wear flat shoes; it would have been far more difficult to do if she had been wearing heels. She asked me no less than three times where her friend Courtney was, looking behind her each time. I lied and told her I had seen Courtney leave before we did. I hadn’t thought to look for her when we were on our way out. Maybe, I offered, she would be at Two-Shay’s.

We got to the bar, and it was late enough not to be too crowded. Ruth, Molly, and Ariel had had enough of walking, so they got a table near the bar, with Dickie as their entertainer. I ordered them a round and brought it to them, and Dominic and Juniper paid for my drink, as we stood at the bar. Paul and Mandy were leaning down over the jukebox, and Paul had his arm around her as they chose their selections.

The three of us at the bar blib-blabbed about anything that struck our fancy, and all ears at the table were turned toward Dickie. After awhile, Dominic nudged me, and the three of us watched for a bit, as Paul and Mandy slow-danced in a corner. After more conversation and another drink, we turned and noticed that they had left. At that moment, the door opened, and two girls we knew came into the bar. One of them, Julie Raines, saw me, and her face lit up, just as Ariel spied her. Julie ran over to me, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. She was that way, but especially with me. I met eyes with Ariel and the two other girls at her table; they were throwing daggers at Julie, in league. Dickie turned to see what was the matter, rolled his eyes, and went back to telling his story.

“Hey! I read your review! I saw it at work,” Julie gushed.

As exuberant and demonstrative as she was, it was hard to believe that Julie Raines was a librarian. Indeed, she worked in the vast periodical section at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

I had, through an odd set of circumstances, read a scathing review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, of a documentary, which I had seen and enjoyed. The reviewer had taken a very superficial view of the film and its subject matter – Cleveland’s criminal underworld – and had gone on and on about how the filmmaker had misrepresented that fair city. I had found the newspaper, left behind at a barbershop in Grand Central Station while I was waiting for a haircut, so it was only a day old. I immediately wrote a long, well-thought, balanced response and faxed it to the paper. Imagine my surprise when a friend in Cleveland called and asked me whether I was the same person who had written a rebuttal of the review for the op-ed section of the Plain Dealer. He sent me a copy, and they hadn’t changed or omitted a word. Not only that, but there had been a flurry of letters to the editor in the days after, taking up sides over the original review and my response.

How Julie Raines ever came across it, in the deluge of periodicals, I did not ask, but she wanted to know all about it, and she expressed that desire in a very enthusiastic and tactile way. Ariel rose from her seat and came over and put her arms around me, wobbling a little, unnecessarily staking her territory. I smiled warmly into her upturned face, and finished telling Julie how the article came to be. Ariel stepped meaningfully on my foot, and I used body language to steer the conversation in the physical direction of Dominic and Juniper. I kept up my side of the chat, long enough to not appear abrupt, gently put my hands on Ariel’s shoulders, and reminded her that I had to get up early for work, and shouldn’t we be going? In truth, Ariel had to be at work an hour before I did.

We said our good-nights and went out onto the sidewalk.

“Why do you even talk to her? You know I can’t stand her,” Ariel scowled, weaving. I held her up with an arm around her waist.

“She’s not a bad person, and besides, you’ve got nothing to be jealous of.”

I tried to kiss her, and she turned her head and lurched away.

“I’m not jealous, and besides, she likes you.” Her eyes were glassy, and her neck was becoming very elastic. “And besides, don’t end a sentence with a preposition.”

She delivered the last sentence with a pronounced slur, and slid down onto the curb, her back against a lamppost. Her head bobbed down onto her knees, and her underwear was showing. The subway was out of the question, and I didn’t see a cab anywhere. We finally got one, and I lifted her into it and tossed her purse onto her lap. All the way home, her head lolled about, and she muttered non-sequiturs about my “utterly disgraceful grammar.” I helped her up the stairs, despite, as she plopped down on each landing, her decrying that she could do it herself. At our door, I chided, “No, no, honey, I’ve got the keys,” whereupon she vainly half-searched for her purse, which I was holding.

Once inside, I asked her if she had to pee. No, she didn’t, she said, and I sat her on the bed, knelt and took off her shoes.

“Oh, so now you’re trying to preposition me,” she mused, with half-closed eyes, awkwardly mussing my hair.

I tossed her legs onto the mattress and undressed her, kissed her lips and forehead, and called her silly.

“I’m not silly,” she murmured, and I shut off the light.

Before I joined her, I finished off the rest of my bourbon from behind the reference books and stuck the bottle in my knapsack, to get rid of on my way to work.

The next morning, I woke up before she did, and started making coffee. I heard her rummaging around in the bathroom, probably looking for the ibuprofin. I decided to test her knowledge of the previous night.

“So, Ariel, honey,” I called. “What did you think of the art last night?”

“What art?” was her response. “I mean, who the hell has a memorial on a Wednesday night? Don’t they know that some of us actually have jobs?”

I dug back into my memory of the night before, a little guiltily, to assess any true respects which we and our friends had paid to the life of a human being, who had passed from this earth. I could not recall any respect paid, but of that to ourselves.

Death, I thought, really is only for the living.

Remember Los Alamos!

Remember Los Alamos!

By Michael Chandler

            Author’s note: In 1978, I was a junior in high school, and I had a part-time job as a parking lot attendant at Maine Medical Center, in Portland. I worked by myself in a booth, mostly nights and weekends, and the radio was my constant companion, yet Sunday morning radio was always a letdown. Those are the hours dedicated to public service programming, to comply with FCC rules; church, community, financial analysis, an Anthropology professor emeritus from the University of Maine, youth outreach programs, care of houseplants, etc.

            One Sunday morning, I came across a public service show, called “Young at Heart.” It was on “Magic,” WMGX, a popular 50,000 Watt FM station that had very high ratings, because the aging hippies were gravitating to “easy listening” music. Somebody on the station’s production staff had decided that “Young at Heart” would be a Sunday morning, one-hour news and interview show conducted by high school students.

            The show started as fifteen minutes of oddball news pieces pulled off the UPI wire service, followed by a forty-five minute interview with someone that the regular news staff thought would hold an audience’s attention for three-quarters of an hour.

            A girl named Sue Sterling conducted the interview that I heard that morning, and, for a sixteen year-old, she was engaging, perceptive, and had an instinct for avoiding lame questions and dead air. As soon as the show was over, I called the station and left my number. I met Sue during the week, and we got along great. They just happened to be replacing someone who had left the show, and Sue asked me if I could start that coming weekend. I did.

We taped the show on Saturday mornings for its Sunday broadcast. There were five of us “reporters,” a teenage engineer, and Tom, our station-appointed chaperone/producer, whom I mostly remember as being red with laughter at our naïve enthusiasm and irreverence. We all read our stories, and Sue and I remained to conduct the interview. That week, we had the actor, Robert Merrill, who lived in Cape Elizabeth. The following week, our guest was Peter White Horse, a Navajo elder and clan leader, from the Navajo Nation, in New Mexico. He was driving across the country to attend a Twenty Nation symposium in Old Town, Maine, and he agreed to stop in and do our show. He was a terrific interview. He had a unique stoicism interwoven with a dry, understated wit. He was both proud and humble at the same time, with the venom of a copperhead occasionally thrown in. Some elements of humiliating, near-genocidal, historical events, he tossed off in the manner of stand-up comedy; describing the low standard of education in the pueblos and reservations of that time, his eyes became knifelike slits.

            As deft a manipulator as Peter White Horse was with conversation, I have met few people more genuine, more honest, in all my years since. When I looked into his eyes as he spoke, I realized that he was not talking to Sue and I. He was talking with us. Even as we awaited our turn in the interview to respond or to pose another question, Sue Sterling and I were being engaged.

            After the interview, Sue and I were thrilled. It was still before noon, and we had had Peter White Horse in the studio for a few hours. The trip to Old Town would be a full day’s drive, so Sue and I offered Peter White Horse a big breakfast to start his trip. He said “yes,” and we were delighted.

            We got into his car and brought him to Sambo’s, back then, a national chain diner. I know that Sue and I, in the presence of Peter White Horse, were somewhat self-conscious of the image that the name, “Sambo’s,” elicited, but they had a great breakfast, unlimited coffee refills, and it was right near the highway. We got our huge breakfasts, and must have drunk two pots of coffee between us, and smoked about ten cigarettes apiece.

            I had brought a small cassette recorder with me, that I used for interviews for my school newspaper, and I left it running on the seat next to me. Now, thirty-five years later, I ran across the cassette, and it still plays. Here it is, transcribed:

(Various table and background restaurant noise)

Peter White Horse: Oh, damn it. I spilled syrup on my matches.

Michael Chandler: That’s okay, Sue has a lighter. (To Sue) Yeah, just leave it on the table. I need one too.

PWH: Hey, you know this place is pretty good. Back out west, we got Stuckey’s.

Sue Sterling: Which is better?

PWH: They’re both good, I mean for truck stops. Stuckey’s got a big breakfast buffet – lots of fresh fruit, ham, bacon, sausage, eggs, pancakes, and it’s all you can eat, one price. Hell, you can sit there all morning if you’re not in a hurry. Lot of times, we’ll just sit around and swap stories until they start serving lunch (laughs).

S.S.: We know you’ve got a long drive today, but maybe you have a story you could tell us?

PWH: You said you kids are buying breakfast?

M.C.: Of course. You’re our guest.

PWH: Okay, well I’ve got a story for you that’s never been told to anyone, at least not by me. I can’t say that some of the other warriors haven’t told it on their own, in private, but it’s not something that we really want to get around too much, and you’ll see why.

            This was around the beginning of World War Two, and the world was changing all around us, so, in New Mexico a bunch of tribes got together in a kind of informal information chain. We wanted to keep up with the strange times happening everywhere and how it might affect our people. We wanted to keep our ears to the ground. They called it, “the moccasin telegraph.” We ran patrols on horseback out in the desert and just kept an eye on the land. There was a lot of military stuff going on down in the southwest, (laughs) and you know the history of the military and the Indians. We listened with extra sensitivity in the stores and diners and the post offices, and anywhere people would meet. Each pueblo or reservation would have an information chief, who would send what he heard to the smaller clans and families, and then on to other communities. Actually, a lot of times, the information chief would be a woman, they seemed to be pretty good at spreading news (laughs).

            My clan was outside of Gallup (New Mexico), and in 1942 it was, we got word from one of our riders in the Tewa pueblo of Santa Clara (New Mexico) that they had closed down the old Los Alamos Ranch School and the government had bought up all the farms and homesteads around the Four Mesas for real cheap. The Four Mesas is what we used to call Los Alamos.

            Now this raised a red flag for many, many reasons. First of all, the nations had great respect for the works of the Ranch School. It wasn’t perfect, but it was one white man’s effort to teach the ways of the land to young rich boys who wouldn’t have learned it otherwise. The writer, Gore Vidal, went there. They taught spirituality and a respect for living truly of the earth and the sky. We were sad to see it go, and it was very sudden. We wanted to know what Uncle Sam wanted with such a place that, as far as the white man saw it, was out in the middle of nowhere.

            Another thing that was of great concern was what they had done to the Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. They had all been put in internment camps, even though a lot of their boys had signed up in the service. There were a few camps in New Mexico, and they had one for Italians and Germans right in Santa Fe, and later they started putting the Japanese there. “Undesirables,” they called them, like they were suspicious characters, because of their nationality or their politics. We didn’t know if we had anything to fear, but there was some paranoia, because our people had been put into internment camps not a hundred years before. And of course some of our boys were code talkers, and we wondered if that might have something to do with the government wanting to clear us out of the reservations and keep all of us in one place. The four mesas at Los Alamos would be the perfect place to do it.

            In early 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers moved in and started surveying all the land around the four mesas. Lo and behold, they got a crew of about six Navajo and Apache to serve as guides to the engineering teams, so we found out that it wasn’t going to be an internment camp, but whatever the Army was doing up in Los Alamos, it was all very hush-hush. Anyway, we were getting reports every couple days about where they were surveying and how they were marking up the territory. One of the guides overheard a couple of the top brass guys talking about the place as “Project Y,” so, among ourselves, we used to call it “Project What?”

            It wasn’t but a month or so that they started fencing the place in, and they started making roads and building barracks and buildings and a bunch of small houses, radio towers, and the like. They had to hire private contractors, because there was so much construction going on, so we made sure we got a bunch of our men got hired onto the crews. There was only one gate in or out, and it was heavily guarded. They put up a big sign that said the name of the place was “The Los Alamos Project,” and they started moving in all kinds of soldiers and civilians to live there. Everybody needed a special I.D. to get in and out. Plus they were patrolling the fence lines night and day.

            We were still getting regular reports from our guys on the construction crews, but there were a lot of rumblings and rumors about exactly what the government was doing up there.

S.S.: Of course, we all know now.

P.W.H.: Well, back then, nobody did, and we were getting mighty curious. So it was about the middle of 1944, there was this Apache elder who was called Gray Owl, and he was descended from a line of great warriors. He was very wise, but many of his ideas of the world, and about our freedom, frightened his people. Grey Owl had earned his tribal name when he was only a boy, and he was a man who lived by the belief of independence for his people. I guess you could have called him a reactionary. He sent a couple of his most trusted men to the various pueblos and reservations, to find him a group of young, intelligent men, who knew how to be true warriors, who held to their tribes and to their teachings and their families, to attend a very important and very secret meeting with him. I happened to be among Grey Owl’s chosen young men.

            We met far out in the desert on horseback, and, as proof of our abilities, we had to make our own way there with only a knife, a rope, a water skin and a bedroll. We came in twos and threes, as we had been picked from our clans and communities. I traveled with a boyhood friend. I can only tell you his code name, because, as we arrived at the meeting place, we were each given a name that we would use for the rest of our mission. I became known as Tree Shadow, and my friend was Still Lake.

            There were thirty-eight of us, not counting Grey Owl, and when we had all gathered, he gave us his blessing, and he anointed each of us with our new names. We took an oath of loyalty, unity, and secrecy. That wasn’t so easy, because Grey Owl had chosen us from many tribes, and we had our disputes. We were mostly Navajo, Apache, Tewa, and Comanche, but there were also some Zunis, and I was surprised to see two brothers from the Manso tribe. There are very few Mansos left.

We all sat and listened to Gray Owl, and he asked us to find a new brotherhood with all the men gathered. He was very persuasive, and every one of us knew he was right. He then told us that we had been selected to perform a mission, which was very bold and very exciting. We were going to infiltrate the Los Alamos Project compound and other military installations in ways that we had not considered. We would also keep an eye on the government men with their machines and headsets that they were hunting around the desert with. We had found out that they were looking for rocks called uranium and plutonium. We sure didn’t now why, and it wasn’t something like silver or copper ore or turquoise, that we knew where we could find it and they couldn’t. One thing was sure; if they found it on the reservation, they were going to steal it from us.

Gray Owl told us that we were going to be the front line for our own territory, kind of like the Indian FBI, and all us young men seemed to get along a lot better after that. Gray Owl was a wise man.

He kept us in our twos and threes, as partners, but he assigned us territory in larger teams, and some of us would have to work far away from our communities. We would be the guests of families in other pueblos and reservations, and we would fit into the clans, and we would share their work, at the new places we were assigned. Still Lake and I were put in with some men and their families from the Tesuque pueblo, among the Tewa people, not too far from the Four Mesas. They were gracious hosts, so we became good friends right away. We were also very happy to maybe meet some new young women.

(A waitress offers us coffee, and serves it.)

M.C.: So what did he want you to do? Go into Los Alamos?

P.W.H.: Well, first, we were supposed to talk to the guys who were going inside to do the carpentry and lay the roads. The place was growing every week, and they were having problems with the rains and the run-off water, so they were having to build wooden sidewalks and were constantly having to fix up the roads. Our guys on the inside weren’t going anywhere for a while, and we got them to draw us pictures of the place. Then, we men from Tesuque and Pojaque, a pueblo which was nearby, had to go out nights and find out the fences and the patrols. After we did that for a time, we were very confident that we could find out anything we wanted.

S.S.: Security must have been really tight.

P.W.H.: We were sending regular reports back to Gray Owl, and we waited for his word. When it came back to us, he told us to use the weakest points, and to go in and get back out, kind of like practice runs, and we developed it as we went along. We would always go at night, and no matter how many times we did it, it was always very exciting. After a while, it was child’s play. We knew how to cover our tracks on the way in and on our way out. Usually, we’d try to keep our entry and our exit a mile or two apart.

            What a laugh. All of our “raids,” we use to call them, were done in silence, and the Army, I guess they figured the more noise they made, the more they’d scare somebody off. When they were patrolling with the jeeps, hell, you could hear them and see them coming from two miles out. They’d have regular rounds with guys on foot with dogs. First of all, dogs are the friends of Navajos for thousands of years, and we know how they think. What we used to do was to bring a Coke bottle full of wolf piss and sprinkle that around. We’d put some on our feet, and those dogs would take that patrol anywhere we weren’t. Someone back at the pueblo was raising llamas, and I used to pour some llama piss on the outside of the fence. I must have been responsible for about fifteen purple hearts, guys getting their arms scraped up trying to keep those dogs from running through the barbed wire.

            There were some patrols that they had that didn’t come around at regular times, and they’d be the soldiers on horseback. We used to carry rattlesnake rattles on us for them. You’d give those things a shake, late at night, and I swear, you could have moved the whole Pojaque pueblo right on past ‘em, livestock and all. We used to use birdcalls to signal each other, but dammit, I never heard a bird laugh out loud like we used to. That was just about the hardest part of not getting caught, was us trying not to laugh at those poor army kids.

M.C.: What did you find out about the laboratory?

P.W.H.: Like I say, those were only test runs; even though we were successful, we had to wait for the word from Gray Owl to find out what we were supposed to do next. The good thing we had going for us, come to find out, was that they were all looking for infiltrators. They were worried about spies who would try to get in the front gate with a forged I.D. card. One of our squad from Tesuque used to say that, if we had asked the night guards politely, we could have opened a roadhouse and sold whiskey. We still didn’t know what we were trying to find out, but we knew we could whenever we needed to.

S.S.: How long were you making your “raids”?

P.W.H: Oh, I guess it was about seven or eight months, because I remember the cold winter and the snows, and the warming of the hills and the new, fresh water, but that was alright with us, because we were happy to be with the Tewas. They fed us and put us up, and it was a comfortable feeling to be among them. Of course, we were young men and new to the community, and there were girls to meet. Still Lake fell in love with a daughter of the family we were staying with, which was good for him, because he was a pretty shy guy. After the war, they got married. He has passed on now, but they raised a large and proud family of beautiful sons and daughters and grandchildren. It is very sad that they don’t know of Still Lake’s silent legend. As far as I know, he never told even his wife. I tell you now, that you may hold that legend within you, but that you should not reveal it until long away. Long away.

(The waitress returns with more coffee; ashtrays clink, and the cassette tape is flipped over.)

P.W.H.: We got the go-ahead from Gray Owl, in the spring of 1945, to make our way further into the compound and to get into the buildings. We knew by then, that many of the civilians working there were scientists and mathematicians, and sometimes they would work all night long. Of course, we had no idea what they were doing, and their late hours made our reconnaissance much more difficult. Still, we crept around like spiders, and we left no trace of ourselves. We saw only that they were doing science and mathematics, but we could not tell Gray Owl what it all meant, why they were doing what they were doing. It was still a big secret, but we knew that in the first place.

            We were told to keep a day-long watch on the place, keep a nighttime eye on the buildings inside, and to report any large transport, coming or going, day or night, troops and vehicles. Something was going to happen, and somehow, Gray Owl knew it. There were eighteen of us assigned to Los Alamos, and we were all on high alert.

            We men began feeling a restlessness of the people we were observing at Los Alamos. We heard it in the tone of their voices, and it was in the air around us. “Project Why?” started to be “Project When?” And it was our job to find out.

             We saw that the army started moving out trucks of everything, men, lumber, food and first-aid, and heavy, covered trucks that you couldn’t see what it was inside. We got many more reports from our other scouts, that they saw a lot of activity in other camps, of the moving of men and equipment, and that it was all headed to the southern central part of New Mexico, down to Alamogordo.

            Well, they started setting up all manner of things around Alamogordo, and security was very tight, but we had our scouts down there, and lots of wide open desert that our teams knew how to navigate without being seen. It was hard to tell what the Army was doing out there in the middle of nowhere, but whatever it was, it was going to be big; we knew that much, so we kept as close an eye on the area as we could, for a few months in the spring.

Then, at the beginning of May, KABOOM! There was an enormous explosion that shook the whole earth and lit up the night sky like it was high noon. Our two Manso tribesmen were about thirty miles away from it, and they thought the world was coming to an end. We had teams fifty, sixty miles away, and they could see the sky light up. We had to wait for several days to get in close enough to see what had happened, and it looked like the Army wasn’t done yet. They were still out there building and rebuilding, so we pulled our men back and kept our eyes on their supply lines. We also kept a sharp eye on what was happening up at Los Alamos, because it was pretty clear to us that that was the center of everything, with all its scientists and technicians and machinery. They kept moving out and moving back and ferrying the trucks out and back, and over the weeks, you could just feel the tension around the place, more people working longer hours, more guards patrolling, officers yelling at sergeants, sergeants yelling at the men...

            We sent out the word for our men to hang back, no closer than fifty miles to Alamogordo, just in case there was another explosion like the first one, and it’s a good thing we did. In the middle of July that year, 1945, they cleared out about half the soldiers from Los Alamos, and the place was nothing but hot and quiet, and we saw fewer patrols.

And then it happened. On a Monday night, July 17^th, you would have thought the whole state of New Mexico had its own sun in the sky, but the light was white... and green and purple. The whole earth rumbled, and windows broke, and a hot wind blew. And then it was quiet, and there was just that unnatural wind, and you knew that something had happened that had never happened before. And for days, the desert was quiet and still, and the people were quiet, and when everyone had come back to Los Alamos, there was no more excitement. It was as though everyone was walking around praying.

            When we were able to get anywhere near the place of the great explosion, we still had to stay a long way off. There were guards and scientists all around the giant crater, like it was an ant colony. Reports came back to us that the crater in the ground was like a great dish of green glass. They even have a name for the melted earth. They call it, trinitite, because the explosion was named, the Trinity Test. I have seen pieces of the stone, but I am afraid to touch it. I have pity for those who value it and use it as jewelry. It only reminds me of shame, and of disrespect for the earth, which gives us life.

            Of course, it was only a few weeks after the Trinity Test, that we learned of the devastation of Hiroshima. The newspapers didn’t give all the details to the people, but we thirty-eight and Gray Owl understood what had happened over there, and then it happened again, in Nagasaki, and we were very relieved for the Japanese when they surrendered. But we were also very angry at the government for using our homeland as a testing ground for their ungodly destruction. Many of our own brothers had volunteered for service, and many had died, because, in the beginning, we had felt that our land was being threatened by the enemy. And now, here was that very same government that swore to protect us, and they were using the place of our birth to test their weapons of unimaginable power, and death as it had never been seen.

            Now that the war was over, Uncle Sam was going to drink up the spoils of war. We wondered, what would we get out of all of this? Would we even be allowed to return to the simple lives that we had known, living as we always had, off the land and commending our bodies and our souls to the earth and sky? Or would we become slaves to this new and destructive fire? How many more atomic bombs would they blow up in the land of our ancestors?

            Gray Owl called us all to our original meeting place in the desert. He had the answer for us. He celebrated us all for our bravery, and he told us that we would be rewarded for our deeds both spiritually and in earthly ways. We had, he reminded us, all profited from the new relations we had forged with our brothers and sisters of other Nations. There was a new unity among the tribes. He then told us we would also profit from the United States government, in a way that our great Uncle Sam could always understand – through his wallet.

            Grey Owl’s plan was simple. We already had easy access to the Los Alamos compound, and we knew its layout and all of its workings. We were to break into one of the buildings which held the files, and we were to remove as many as we could carry. We would then hold the files for ransom. He called upon the eighteen of us who had been in the Four Mesas area for the detail, and sent the other twenty home and told them to wait for his call. Obviously, he didn’t have to tell any of us not to breathe a word.

            A week or so later, in the dead of night, Still Lake and I and three of more of our team went through the fences at Los Alamos. We were brave, but I know I got a little nervous, because it seemed too easy, even though we knew our way around the compound like it was daylight. We got past the guards easy enough, and into the building where we knew they kept most of their records. Many of the filing cabinets weren’t even locked. We filled up our packs, and we dropped some files on the floor, so they’d know there had been a break-in the next morning. We were in and out of the camp in under a half hour.

            We gave the packs to a crew from the Zuni tribe, and they took them to some of their ancient cave dwellings, far away in the desert mesas, where even their own people couldn’t have found them. Then we went back to our pueblos and reservations and waited.

            Naturally, the government people thought it had been foreign agents, and the FBI came in, and they all squinted their beady little eyes around the place, but they couldn’t find any trace of where those files could have gone. I now feel bad for some of the men who must have been suspected and interrogated, but nobody even thought to ask us poor old drunken Indians, as they thought of us, who were busy putting up our corn supply for the winter.

Like I say, and will say again, Gray Owl was very wise and very crafty. He waited a whole week to send his ransom note, and when he did, he sent it on a sealed piece of bison skin. To carry his message, he chose three Apache children from a reservation that was not his own. The children, a very young girl and boy, and a teenage girl to look after them, had found the message at entrance of their adobe, along with bus tickets to Santa Fe, and instructions to meet a certain Army colonel there. They had no idea what the message was or who had sent it. Their parents were advised, through a mystery woman, to let them go alone.

The message told the Army that their files were safe and not in the hands of the enemy; they had not been duplicated, and they would be returned upon the receipt of thirty-eight million American dollars. Gray Owl specified that the money should come in small bills, from the airplane manufacturing companies in California. They had it in their payrolls, and it could be put together quickly. He told them that we Indians had eyes all over those companies, and that the men in charge should do as he asked. I am pretty sure he was lying, but he knew what he was doing. He gave them a very short deadline.

(Laughs) Do you know how embarrassed those men in the government were? Our leaders? (Laughs) They were so smart when it came to enemies of the state, but to have their top-secret papers waved under their noses by two little children and their babysitter? How can you top that?

They had the money for us in a six-ton truck, within twenty-four hours. We watched them fly it in and unload it. Even though every soldier within a hundred miles was keeping their eyes out for suspicious-looking Indians, what the hell did they really expect to find? They were back on their heels, and they couldn’t make a howl, because (laughs heartily and coughs) their faces were so red... (laughs and clears his throat).

Gray Owl had them moving that truck at eleven o’clock that night. Again, he had it thought out ahead of time, because that night there was no moon. At Gray Owl’s instructions, there was to be no escort for the truck, just an army driver and a navigator. He had sent one of our men down to Texas, who called and told them what to do. They drove an old winding dirt road through the desert, and into the mesas. Our men cut down trees and telephone poles and blew a bunch of craters into the road behind the truck, so it couldn’t be followed. We could see the airplanes tracking the truck from the sky, but there wasn’t much any of them could do about it at night.

About twenty miles away, we ambushed the truck, old west-style, as it was coming through a pass in the mesas. We scooped up that money, about two dozen of us, and rode off in four different directions. We transferred the money to some guys who had pick-up trucks, and by the time the sun came up, it looked like nobody had been in the desert. Gray Owl had moved their files to a bus station locker in Tuscon, and we left the key with the poor boys handcuffed to their truck.

Gray Owl made sure we all waited for six months before we ever saw any of the money. By that time, the feds weren’t snooping around anymore. I guess they just gave it up and filed it away, because they were so embarrassed. When we finally got the money, it came out to exactly one million dollars a man. Hell, that was a big box. Do you know what a million dollars in five and tens and twenties looks like?

S.S.: But there were thirty-nine of you. I was going to ask about that.

M.C.: Yeah, I wondered, too.

P.W.H.: Well, Gray Owl had long decided that he didn’t want any of the white man’s money. He told us that, if we were to stay true to our people, we would know what to do with it. He told us that some of it belonged to each of us, but that we had always been working for our people. Our true personal gain was that we had learned to work together. He said that to spread our wealth among our communities was the honorable way to increase our personal wealth and the best and truest way to make a future for our children and our children’s children.

S.S.: So, is that what happened?

P.W.H.: You know, I’d like to tell you that every penny of it went back into our culture, but there is a certain portion of every population that have only themselves in mind. It is true that a few men drank themselves to death, and some men gambled much of their money away. Some took themselves and their families far away and divorced themselves from life on the reservation. But the majority of us gave most of what we had back to our people. We built schools and community centers, roads and new homes, and we helped start new businesses that would be independent of the white man. We bought seed and livestock, and land with flowing water. We set up college funds, for the young and old who wished for higher learning. One man even established a library of Native American history for all tribes and peoples who wanted to participate. A million dollars went a long way, back in those days.

S.S.: Where did you tell people you got the money from?

P.W.H.: (Laughs) We just said we got it from the government.

Now, you kids. I’ve really gotta hit the road. You said you got my breakfast, right? I ran out of my share about ten years ago (laughs).

M.C.: Oh, no, no. I’ve got it.

S.S.: Thank you for everything, Mr. White Horse.

P.W.H.: Sue, please call me Peter, always Peter.

M.C.: Thank you, Peter.

(The tape recorder rustles loudly.)

S.S.: (Whispering to M.C.) Did you get all that?

M.C.: I think I did. I hope so.

(End of recording)