BOAR’S NEST

           Summer was a week in a dam builder’s cabin south of Power House One. Gray gloss fir floors and nude hewn walls. Poor-man’s hardwood. Shower heads spit grit and ran red. Outside green under irony dust. Porch peeling on the sun-side. 30 amp breaker. Unplug the auto-drip to run the radio. All that juice headed downstate. Year after year the same. The river warnings. Subject to sudden fluctuations in flow. You could disappear in that canyon. A boy did. Swept downstream. Search party on the Joe Flat trail, fanning out through TMUs. Let that be a lesson. Day after day. Horseshoes, tetherball, in-ground pool. Chlorine turned our hair green. Ringer after ringer clanging the stakes. Magazines. Breakfast meats. We sat around happy as a family in molded plastic chairs. On the seventh day dad showed us. Check-out. The Datsun packed. One last thing to do. He hung those chairs by slots on nails in the studs. Driven halfway up the wall. He swept and he mopped while we stood on the porch keeping clean. He worked himself into a corner. We thought he’d have to soil it coming back. But he straddled a window sill, picked up bucket and mop and dropped out of sight. Left us gaping at the gleaming floor. It was nineteen-eighty-something. And men were stepping out back windows up and down the state. Didn’t care who saw them. What else were open windows for? Let the air in? They still did that. It just wasn’t air we could breathe.


OREGON BOOT

           My first trip was cold on the rainy banks of the Eel. Not another baptized soul in sight. Loose sand shelves shearing off and disappearing in the cream-and-coffee brown culled sediment load. Live baits and dead fingers. I took one baby steelhead hard as a bullet. I had a yellow slicker and a runny nose.

           You got to stand in your sandals in the sun. Watch the tanker roll the skyway trailing a caravan of locals looking for an easy limit. Ever caught a carsick fish? Rusty rooster tails. No fight in the ragged caudal.

            
            My dad had the cancer. There’s no good place to get it, but there’s better. Said he stood at the window in his robe, the U-bag taped to his shaved leg. It was like a rainy day on the glass. His neighbor had polio back in ’45, big hitch in his getalong. Had to lock his bad leg back the way a knee won’t bend, swing the good one to cover ground. Big muscle hump on his ass from doing that all his life. But there he was on the sidewalk ripping the mower cord. Took him an hour to cut a postage stamp. Painstaking is the word. Around the apple tree, locking that leg. Never once glanced at the window. He knew dad was watching. Maybe he knew dad was weeping.

            
            Your dad was part of one skyline with a view of another. Worked his way up from branch manager. Married a teller. Two kids and a dog. He knows about bailout money.

            You ever hear of the Oregon Boot? Called it the man killer. Ran twenty, twenty-five pounds. Worn on one leg. Last used to transport a crazyman killed a crew of Chinese building on the penstocks. Used rocks like bible times. I thought about you being born with a clubfoot. The surgeries, the braces, the special shoes. The compensations. Must have been some kind of pain to drown. But drowning is a pain to itself.


LADY JUSTICE

           They had a gal posing as Justice. Green facepaint and robe, brass scales and a plastic sword. It was spring but hot already. Paint ran like candle wax, collected at her collar. I skipped the arraignment to grub a free bite before going down the road. What’s this about? Our Lady Justice. Used to stand atop the county dome. Brought her down by copter to the courthouse lawn where she took a beating. Vandals broke her fingers, stole the sword and scales. Fundraiser. Gotta fixer up. Care to make a donation for that dog you wolfed? I went down French Alley and Justice followed. She came eating white cake off a paper plate. They’d cut the hanging tree years ago. It grew back in threes. Braided. How’d you get roped into this? It was part of her sentence. Better than pinching litter in an orange vest. She had a bull’s-eye back tat. Her panty-band read “Life’s Not A Bitch I’m A Bitch.” It was quiet. A gray jay with a black hood watched from a branch. Shat. She tasted like cake.

            
            Later it was just my luck. Cop was a guy I knew in high school. Left- handed hurler. Wasn’t too bright. Passed up a signing bonus for the college experience. Lime on one nipple, salt on the other. Said if it wasn’t for me teaching him to cheat he would’ve flunked out. No college, no running to the bump on three days rest, no bone spurs, no mouth herpes. On the wrong side of the radar gun now.

           I said that made two of us, and I raised my green hands off the wheel.