Death’s head moon—spook talk I first heard from an Irish Gunnery Sergeant in Nietzsche’s War at a place called Belleau Wood during the battle of the Marne. Looking more porcine than human with his hog jowls, tiny and hard hog eyes, bristle-cut gray hair, and large mouth curled at the corners to a hog sneer, Sergeant Seamus Doyle clung to me from the first day we arrived in that breakneck terrain. He found me during the artillery bombardment when we got blown up. The day was brilliant. It mocked our misery. Golden shafts slanted through green cascades of the Bois de Belleau while shells whined overhead and burst around us, tossing dirt and smoke into the cloudless blue. Shrapnel whistled in the spring air, sizzled through the forest canopy, and thudded among the tree trunks. The force of the high-impact explosions knocked us out of our bodies. More than once, I thought I was dead. The earth shook, the concussion came down heavy as an elephant’s foot, mashed me into trench mud, crushed the breath out of me, and I was gone. Deaf, I soared through windswept smoke, sunlight fizzing around me like champagne. I flew serenely beyond earth’s blue day into velvet darkness. Each time, before the dark could undo me, the elephant’s foot lifted, breath wrenched into my lungs, and I was back, chewing mud. “Mourny morning, lad! And a boomin’ huff of a mourny morning it is at that. You’ve a classicoal peat boggy mug ever I cast eyes upon a son o’ Diarmuid. What’s your name, boyo?” Filthy with trench muck, the hog face that pressed close to me was an authentic hog face, nothing even vaguely human about it. I couldn’t hear a thing except the roar of blood in my ears. The lilting insanity of that Irish voice somehow bypassed my stunned ears and pierced my brain direct. “Richard!” I shouted and heard nothing of my own voice. “Richard Malone!” One corner of the hog mouth hooked to a smile, and those tight swine eyes tightened merrier. “Fah! A Malone! I shoulda been forewarned by them cross-knit eyebrows, the bane o’ your breed. The folklord has it the Malones did some severe philosoflying with the Druidiots—and the strain on the Malone brains got ‘em so flummoxed they cannot ever hope again to unknit their brows! Haw!” Doyle heaved himself over me, and I felt us go up in the air. We came down under a massive wave of earth and were buried so deep that if he hadn’t been there to know I was under him and to grope down and yank me up by the scruff, I’d never again have seen daylight. It was worse at night. The explosions in the woods cast stark shadows. Debris came hissing out of the dark. I saw Jesus walking through the broken trees. Doyle pressed his hog jowls to my face. “You google-eye him there in the blasty light, don’t ya? There! That bearded bugger in the shroudy robe! ‘Tis Finn McCool.” All that night, he yammered about the Son of McCool, champion of the Fianna, the Celtic warriors of legend, and their defeat at the Battle of Gabhra and McCool’s journey to the Otherworld where he sleeps and will one day wake and return. I tried not to listen. I wanted Jesus. But in the numb deafness between explosions, Doyle’s hog mouth spewed endless fantasies about the bombardment digging up the Hallows where the Tuatha de Danaan—the fairy lords—dwelled, for all of France was once Celtic terrain, and McCool was on the march to prophesy doom and salvation among our Gaelic brethren. I just wanted Jesus. I prayed a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each shell that struck close enough to shake the ground under us to pudding. But it didn’t shut him up. He said McCool could foresee the future by chewing his thumb. And, sure enough, in the strobe flashes going off beyond the trees where men in their holes were being torn into chunks of meat and their prayers brusquely silenced, Jesus strolled, his long hair flying in the blast wind, his radiant robe pressed tight against his narrow body—and a hand to his mouth! Was he sucking his thumb? No—no—it was some kind of rabbinic benediction, kissing his hand, and blessing the departing souls. In the abrupt flashes and percussive silence, I saw them flying, a squad of souls like tattered smoke. “King Alfred’s lads and der Amerikaners be flyin’ to the heavendor in the sky who sells their souls a penny an eye. But we’ve naught to fear, boyo. Finn McCool is twixt us and the banshee.” McCool’s prophetic power came to him by accident, when he was an apprentice to Eire’s great Druid, Finegas. McCool was roasting a salmon for Finegas—a salmon that had inadvertently eaten a magic hazelnut—and when McCool tried to turn the seared fish, he burnt his thumb, instantly stuck it in his mouth and so indirectly acquired some of the clairvoyance of the supernatural nut. I go on about this, because if you were there, with the artillery bombardment in its second day, and blood crawling out of your ears, and the night brighter than day with phosphor explosions, and the pummeling shocks interfering with your prayers, and your head filled with cottony nothing, and a mad Irishman with a hog’s face screaming about Druids and magic hazelnuts, you would want it to mean something. It should mean something. I wanted Jesus. I was eighteen, and I wanted everything my mother had told me about Jesus. But I’m from Boston. Seamus Doyle was out of Tralee. During the bombardment, his battalion in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers had been almost annihilated: 500 men slain from a total strength of 670. Chaos had tossed him in among the American Expeditionary Forces. Irish luck brought him to me and the Marine brigade of the Second Division, and he filled my head with spook talk. At

What is a warrior angel? A defender of the human spirit. Over the years, I have encountered demons and angels. The demons always say the same thing: “You are a factory for the manufacture of excrement. You are a pylorus of endless hunger. I know you, you world of multiplying bacteria. Awe of maggots.” The warrior angels are more simpatico, and I have collected here some of what they’ve told me when we occasionally crossed paths: What is life’s meaning? Truth answers in sorrow—beauty with wonder. Joy’s secret? Never go back in memory without a bigger heart. Soul is what we have because we cannot have it. Words are the loneliest thoughts in the human heart. Words want to be real. So, they lie. We can spend time, but we must earn eternity. Ink is the darkness that illuminates. With art, we feel the many lesser fates that have fragmented our lives join for an incandescent moment. Truth cannot echo from afar. For this reason, there is beauty. Beauty is how we see, not what we see. Memory is creative forgetting. All happiness is discovery. How quickly and finally everything that we are becomes what we are not. Art is the scaffold of desire. Only violent beauty creates. All else is imitation. Art is more original than the world. Dreams are not a lack of reality, but rather all of it. Destiny is earned. Fate is owed. The soul wanders, vanishes, returns, a stranger, evasive, at one moment sure, the next unsure of its existence, while the body never doubts. Art is not the rain that comes uncalled. Art requires will, a personal truth as resistant to the vagaries of the day as a star to the wind. Hope is skeptical beauty. Everything that unnerves reveals. Truth fractures into wholes – justice – God – self. To the extent that it fails, it is true. Story remembers to forget. Soul is everything written in us that can only be read by the light of another. Our lonely gift among all of Earth’s creatures is to accept the truth that we will never know the truth. Beauty is something within and yet beyond this world and so never quite fits. Writer and reader meet in the same nothing as the mirror of a lake, where sky and water each see one beautiful world moving through another. Love is the roof of the soul, the floor of the spirit, the house of the heart.

You are deep in a northern forest covenanting with spirits that lift into mist from an ancient tarn. They show you a treasure. Buried in the rock-flour milled by a Pleistocene glacier, a duck egg fossilized black fits your sling perfectly. (It’s a dream; you have a sling!) You spin and release, and the egg flies through the forest gleaming like a mystic gem. The erratic boulder it strikes, orphan of the glacier that mothered the fossil, hatches it. Inside is an inch of secret life, intact, hibernating the silence of the unborn, sealed up from the ambition of the weasel for 11,000 years, hushed and helpless in the abortive Lilith dark – exposed for your eyes alone. Bright moment!

[My fan fic about Pearl Prynne, a fey character from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.] 1650 – 1662 Rain furled in gray auroras through the afternoon sky when Pearl, in her eighth year, first arrived at Derring-on-the-Wolds. Mist ran like young colts across toiled fields, and sheep huddled against the wet wind on the green, cropped hills. The young girl peered at this mossy landscape through the leather blinds of a swaying coach, wide-eyed – for this was all hers. On the long ocean crossing, she had scrutinized the property maps that came with the bequest-packet handed to her personally by Governor Bellingham of the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts. She only now appreciated what she had received in the governor’s mansion at the reading of old Roger Prynne’s will … or, rather, the last will and testament of old Roger Chillingworth, as he had disguised himself for a season, to burrow into the intimacy of his wife’s minister and lover and plot as Satan’s emissary against the adulterous reverend’s soul. Child Pearl compared her memory of the map to the rainy shadow-realm veering past. Among distant wooded sea-slopes, the downpour’s deepening haze moiled to fog that flowed along stony shelves and pooled in dells and meadows as if materializing this terrain directly from her mind. She chirped with glee to recognize a cartographer’s squiggle as the village brook. Its gray willows flared out of the low pall. And there, deep in a coomb where a rutted road’s crooked mile ended, she spied the estate’s town, a hamlet of turf roofs, soggy gardens and a brindle cow sheltering under an oak. Her mother, Hester, seemed less pleased at the bounty trundling by. For her daughter’s sake, she had fled the hypocrisy of the Puritan colony in the New World with an avid hope of removing Pearl from the petty and provincial gossip that had tainted the child’s first years. Might Chillingworth’s wealth offer not only sanctuary from the past but elevation to a new and more nourishing life? With that high-minded aim, Hester returned to the country of her youth, far from the village austerity of her lowly and pious origins, and came to a haughty place: Derring Manor, a bluestone castle that crowned the countryside with crenelled towers and turrets atop a bluff of red gritrock and yew terraces. Beyond a lofty gate of foliate iron and a great lawn feathered with mist, the household staff received them in the vault of a porte-cochère attended by graven, rampant lions. Owen Wilton, all of twelve yet tall as a man, stood with the household steward and the head gamekeeper. He was first to greet them. Long hair bedraggled, breeches splattered with mud from his long ride out of his estate, he offered his hand as Hester descended from the coach. He had come to Derring Manor thinking to appeal to his new neighbors’ Christian charity: As Puritans, they might have sway with Parliament and could move the local magistrate to issue the ratables writ that his father, Viscount Amberly, needed to retain title of his ancestral land. But before the lad could begin his urgent entreaty, he laid eyes on Okwari. Pearl’s Indian escort exited the coach directly behind Hester. Attired in bearskin mantle, black cloth skullwrap, spangled buckskins and moccasins, the painted aboriginal loomed immensely in the coach door. With one stride, he shouldered between Hester and Owen and forcefully butted the boy to his haunches. This was the closest contact Owen would ever have with the Indian, and it stamped him with a violent recognition of loyalty as an animal state that, in his parlous years to come as a highwayman, he would strive to emulate. For days afterward, he smelled the stupefying scent of bear grease and incense grass that would not wash off. Hester quickly helped the lad to his feet, apologizing copiously. She had wanted nothing to do with the aborigine but could not refuse his service. He had appeared at Chillingworth’s deathbed and had mercifully and skillfully tended her dying husband in his last days. With his fateful, final breaths, the husband she had passionately betrayed insisted she accept Okwari as Pearl’s protector. The brave’s name meant ‘Bear,’ for he belonged to the Bear Clan of the Kaniengehaga, the ‘People of the Flint,’ known to the English as the Mohawk. Roger Prynne had lived among them in a physician’s capacity, studying their medicinal secrets. It was his long sojourn in the deep woods with the Mohawk away from his young wife that had tragically tested her fidelity. Okwari came as tribal recompense for the shameful cuckoldry the old physician had suffered during his stay among the Mohawk. The Englishman’s formidable healing art had won such prodigious respect that the tribe honored his death wish for a bodyguard to protect his namesake child in the dangerous world of men. Pearl had fancied the formidable tribesman at once, embracing his language – their secret language, which she quickly acquired during their ocean crossing. His way with the spirits fascinated her. He had earned an accomplished reputation as an archpriest of the god Aireskoi, ‘Master of War,’ and Okwari was not his name. No one but the priests of his clan knew his real name. He believed what the elders of Pearl’s Puritan kin swore about her, “In giving her existence, a great law had been broken, and she lived as a plaything of the angels, an elf-child, a demon offspring.” He revered her as a supernatural creature and observed with acute attention and ineffable understanding all that she did. She was for him a pure vision, a being of spirit. Hester felt relief when he established his abode in the woodlands far from the manor. Around a small fire pit, he erected a conical construction of sapling poles covered in animal hides. Initially, she forbade Pearl going there, but from the first the child successfully argued that the Indian’s companionship had been ordained by

Through our tears, we see rainbows. — Mescalero Apache saying See the scrawny kid with gimpy leg and cross-eyes shoveling bull manure into that rusty wheelbarrow? His name is Billy Roto. Other kids have mercilessly ridiculed his deformity since kindergarten. And early on, some classroom clown called him Billy the Kidded and it stuck. Billy’s fifteen-years-old, and every one of those years he’s lived here in the desert town of Dog Creek, New Mexico, a dusty trailer camp no bigger than a junkyard under the shadow of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He’s never traveled more than fifty miles from this eyesore. And since the age of twelve, he’s been working at this rodeo pen, feeding the animals and shoveling manure. Look at him, all crookbacked and spastic. He can barely hold that shovel straight. You’d never guess that he could be responsible for preventing the deaths of countless people or have anything to do with fighting enemies who want to bring America to her knees and crush the free world. Who knew? Well, nobody at all – except Billy and me. My name’s Roy Dobbins. I own Dobbins Used Cars-and-Trucks just outside Dog Creek at the juncture of Route 64 and Medicine Hat Road. (Fall by if you’re in the area, mention this here short tall tale and I’ll cut you an Adam’s-apple-bobbing deal on the vehicle of your choice. For real.) Now, I look like a bowlegged, straw-haired, flinty-eyed, leather-faced cowboy. But that’s just a disguise. I’m really a coyote – and my true name has many variations among the tribes: Q-nick, Missa Booz, Wena Bozho, Nih Haw Thaw. In English, of course, it’s Trickster. I met Billy long before he was born. He’s in disguise, too. But he doesn’t know it. How could he? He had to forget who he really is so that he could protect himself. But I’ll get to that later. First, let me fill you in on the miserable history of Billy the Kidded. Billy never knew his daddy. His mother didn’t, either. Usually drunk by noon, Wyome Roto didn’t remember half the men she entertained for drinking money. I know, because the only place for fifty miles around to buy liquor is Dobbins Fire Water Hole. I also own the rodeo, which employs just about all of Dog Creek, and I’d see Wyome stumbling around the pens with visiting bull riders or behind the stands in the arms of the enlisted men from the nearby airbase. After she delivered Billy, Wyome disappeared. Chenoa, Wyome’s robust older sister, and Chenoa’s rawboned husband, Rhett Hudson, took Billy into their trailer home and brought him up with a lot of tough love and self-sacrifice. Good, hard-working people. Rhett is my rodeo’s best bullfighter – and don’t you call him a rodeo clown unless you want your nose bent. Like his step-parents, Billy’s a hard worker – except during flybys of the fighter jets from that airbase previously mentioned. Billy will lean on his shovel, cross-eyes gazing dreamily skyward during the roaring flyby and for fifteen minutes after if someone doesn’t smack him back of the head and get him shoveling again. He daydreams about his heroic life as a fighter pilot, defending America from her enemies. “That’s a loco fantasy,” Rhett Hudson has told him time and again. “Your mama is full-blooded Mescalero Apache.” “S-so?” Billy would likely reply in his electrocuted stutter. “Th-this is our cu-country, too.” “Wise up, little brother.” Rhett’s got a long, hangdog face with the most woeful eyes, sad as Jesus in the Garden, and when he levels a disapproving look even a cactus will curl thorns with pity. “This is the same brutal country that broke your people’s greatest warriors, Cochise and Geronimo.” “Ancient hi-history, uncle.” Cactus might curl its thorns but not Billy. A lifetime of tripping over his own tongue while the world laughed has made him more stubborn than a tree stump in concrete. “Th-this is th-the twenty-first century. We’re all Americans nu-now.” Even gimps need dreams, and so Uncle Rhett never much pressed his historical argument beyond this point. But he regretted that sorely the day three F-16 fighter jets shrieked low over the desert and spooked Dancin’ Satan, three thousand pounds of stamping hooves, slashing horns and snorting ferocity. The massive bull, black as tar at midnight, had lumbered from the grooming pen into the main corral when the jets ripped the sky open with their sonic booms. The black beast fired up a kick-and-spin that threw his handlers like hot popcorn. Billy the Kidded, in his imaginary cockpit tearing after North Korean MiG-29s, leaned heavy on his shovel and heavier yet on his dream and never heard that enraged bull hurtling toward him, head lowered to gore. And Dancin’ Satan surely would have gouged and tossed that spindly fool half way to the moon if Darlene Appleyard hadn’t waved him back to reality with her pink felt Stetson. Darlene and a half dozen other classmates had come by bus to Dog Creek from Thundercloud High School in Buford, fifty miles down Route 64. They sat in the stands buckling chaps, strapping on spurs and working rosin into their gloves for their weekly lessons in trick roping and bronc riding. When the F-16s screamed overhead, they had ringside seats for Dancin’ Satan’s furious charge. Darlene’s pink hat flagged Billy’s attention, but it was Darlene’s boyfriend, Trace Trumble, blond as sawdust and handsome as a puma, whose leer of expectant joy alerted Billy. Billy’s crossed eyes widened, because he had seen that crazed glee in Trace’s face too many times before as prelude to a collapsing chair or toads bouncing out of his lunchbox. He flung a concerned frown over his shoulder, a frown that dissolved like a fevered snowflake when he saw Dancin’ Satan bearing down. Whimpering with fright, Billy staggered for the fence. He staggered, because he couldn’t decide whether to spring for the left fence by the bronco stalls or

We will know what humankind was when the last person has spoken. – Wm James In the end, humanity became a sack of crickets emptied into a reptile cage. That’s how Jazzbo Barbosa summed up the Rupture, which had cut electrical power across the entire planet. Tawnee preferred to look on the bright side, adamant as a sunflower. Fifty-seven years on the street, a restless soul, a moveable body roaming the city, sheltering in public, she found everywhere questions for all her answers. A: The world is full up with marvels, folk-made marvels. Like heaven’s umbrellas and the skyladder. Q: Why is this sorry ass life worth living? A night soul, a dark spirit, on the street at the hinges of each day, when the sky’s horizon sparkled with jewel dust, Tawnee witnessed miracles, one marvel after another that solved big world problems. The skyladder was the most dramatic. Though it wasn’t visible from the city’s latitude, Tawnee had seen it numerous times on the plaza plasma. The Quaker Clinic, where she went twice a week for her meds, set up their pavilion in the park facing the plaza, and while waiting in line she followed current events on the big screen. The skyladder on the plaza screen looked unbelievably thin, a taut vertical line, a cable rising from gargantuan anchor pylons in mid-ocean. Tawnee lost her place in the queue when she stepped out to gawk at a view of the elevator seen from satellite cameras. The lift-modules and cargo-platforms moved up and down at varying speeds and in odd groupings to keep the elevator cable from wobbling. The skyladder connected to factories in orbit refining minerals from the moon. Now in her late fifties with her health failing, Tawnee considered fab food even more of a marvel than the skyladder. Fabricated meat and vegetables, which had begun to appear in the drop-in kitchens a few years ago, had restored her health in recent years. Fab food offered a much larger variety of dishes and more nutrients than the bologna sandwiches and noodle casseroles she had become accustomed to. Twice a day, weather permitting, she enjoyed staring up at the marvel everyone agreed was the greatest. Collapsing her sleeping tent at dawn or setting up at night, she stood under a sky of jewel dust. These were the solar parasols launched into orbit by a consortium of energy companies. The huge umbrellas, tiny with distance, shaded Earth by day, cooling the atmosphere, while beaming energy to the surface for use everywhere. The small self-driving bubble-dome cars zipping along elevated byways got their power from on high. Even the tiny wi-fi modules people wore as earrings used those transmissions to tune into music or voice messages. Though she couldn’t wear them without provoking the soft voices in her head that her meds quelled, she still was deeply impressed at how tiny devices had become since her childhood when people had to hold comms. At the thrift stores where she rummaged for orange and blue garments, the only two colors that kept her calm, she delighted in the new materials that had begun appearing in the op shops a few years ago. Soft and durable as silk, textek fiber repaired itself when torn or frayed. Her body was gradually coming apart, teeth disappearing, hair thinning, but she had never dressed better. With so many wonders everywhere, Tawnee’s usual anxiety didn’t flare up when the Rupture occurred and power cut out all over the planet. She figured this was a glitch with the solar parasols and another wonder would come along soon enough to set things right. Even when civil defense trucks rumbled through the city on antiquated diesel engines, bullhorns urging calm, she didn’t fret. Strong on her medications, confident beyond reason or experience that she could take care of herself, she chose to stay in the city when the social service people offered sanctuary on the coast at a campsite with kerosene generators and emergency rations. She didn’t want to be hemmed in. From a flat embankment above the marina, she watched ferries conveying people downriver. “Why leave?” a small voice in her wanted to know. Churches and community centers still provided fab food and canteen refills. “Why live in a camp, contained and constrained?” That changed after the people she needed began vanishing. She had originally heard about the disappearances from other houseless people setting up their tents in the shelter zones. Friends and family had gone missing. Fewer tents set up each evening. Crowds thinned. When the Quaker Clinic no longer arrived in the plaza park, Tawnee’s life turned upside-down. The soft voices grew louder without her meds. She began to suspect that the infant she had lost to SIDS thirty-five years ago had survived. Social services had taken her little girl from her. Nala was grown up now, and Tawnee resolved to find her. That night, she left her tent pack behind and began the trek across the city to the projects where she had lived when Nala was born. All this time, she had never returned once, but the voices assured her with declarative urgency that they would show her the way. They did. By midnight, she reached the Ezzard Towers where she had grown up and birthed Nala. Bonfires blazed in the courtyards. Their fluttering light helped her find her way to North End, the high rise where she had once lived. No one was in the lightless stairwell as she lumbered up, stopping at each flight to sit on the steps, close her eyes, and catch her breath. A stink of urine overlaid with the grape odor of disinfectant shot her memory back decades. “Up. Up. Up!” one inner voice insisted while another urged, “Quick! Come on! Quick!” She swam to her feet, dropping her memories down the stairs. Two more flights up and the beam of a swiveling flashlight swiped sight from her wincing eyes. A big voice, a real voice, grabbed