Matthew James Babcock lives in Rexburg, Idaho with his wife and five children. He holds a PhD in Literature and Criticism
from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 2008, he received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg Poetry Award. His book
Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press. His poems,
stories and essays have appeared in various print and online journals, including Spoon River Poetry Review, Bateau,
Alehouse and The Rejected Quarterly.
from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In 2008, he received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg Poetry Award. His book
Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis is forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press. His poems,
stories and essays have appeared in various print and online journals, including Spoon River Poetry Review, Bateau,
Alehouse and The Rejected Quarterly.
Matthew James Babcock
We Value Your Feedback
The night of the election, my ex-wife Jaeda called from Hawaii to ask me — I thought — what the Sugar City Mayor's next
brainchild for civic nirvana was going to be. Instead, she dredged up the subject of Rufus, our fidgety Lakeland terrier she
had put to sleep three weeks before we divorced. In some ways, it was Rufus's Monday afternoon euthanization that drove
us to separate residences. The final act of petty callousness. The spark that torched our house of matchsticks. The day
after we split, I dumped my underwear and spelunking gear in my old Snow College footlocker and found a third floor room
in some renovated apartments called Hillview Manor on Gemini Drive across from a recently opened organic food store; she
found Oahu.
As I spoke to her, I could see Rufus in my mind, in grainy black and white, as if he'd been resurrected from archived film
shot at the gas chambers of Treblinka. His eyes and nose shone like nubs of black licorice. I saw the bran-colored shag as
thick as a welcome mat that stretched from crown to muzzle, the jaunty artery of his pink tongue.
"He was a biter," she said.
"Beat a dog long enough, he starts to snap," I said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
When she said this, I was reminded of her dominant trait: a foolproof sonar for subtext. I saw that instead of chucking our
twenty years together on the junk pile we had shackled our ankles to a life sentence of long-distance blowback. The
morning she stalked out the door in her navy blue overcoat, her Mary Kay valise swinging in her fist like a wrecking ball, she
put the blame on my "hot temper" — her phrase for describing my reactions to her hair-trigger jags. She spat the
judgment over her shoulder, without breaking stride, like a woman spewing watermelon seeds on her way to the beach. In
the wake of her departure, I leaned on the bar and stared at two fondue forks that gleamed like a tarnished coat of arms in
a slurry of artichoke dip on a serving plate.
"It means what it means," I said.
"Meaning you."
"You grabbed his legs, slammed him on his back, and shouted, 'Bad boy!'"
"You're supposed to do that. Shows who's boss."
"It made him violent."
"He was a biter."
"You conditioned him to bite. Then killed him because he became what you made him."
"I didn't call to bicker."
"Why did you call?"
"For the votes."
"They aren't in yet," I lied. "It was close."
With the phone to my ear, I wandered to the kitchen window and pried the Venetian blinds apart. The swinging blinds
knocked a Baby Ruth wrapper from the sill to the floor. Box elder bug carcasses peppered the sill like spilled buckshot. In
the parking lot, west of the organic food store — its Tuscan archway read "Nature's Nook" — a group of teenage boys in
hooded sweatshirts formed a huddle. The asphalt, wet from the recent rainstorm, shimmered under their ragged high-top
sneakers. From my elevated viewpoint, they looked as if they were crouching on a runway sugared with shattered glass.
One boy in a red sweatshirt dropped something on the ground. The huddle contracted.
"Call me when they're in," she said in a hurried tone.
"Why?"
"I deserve to know — technically."
While talking to Jaeda, I heard and smelled impossible things, as if Rufus's ghost had given me a sensory transplant. I
heard ice diluting two Bloody Maries in highball glasses in her hotel room; I smelled the musky cologne and after-dinner-
mint breath of the corporate law clerk she'd shacked up with; I heard air molecules rush from the mattress that bucked like
a mechanical bull under their most recent bout of lovemaking. In the parking lot, the clot of boys scattered. In the space
where they had gathered, a pinpoint of fire skittered like a moth of white sparks.
"We'll see," I said, stepping away and turning my back.
An explosion thumped the wall. The windows rattled.
"What was that?" she said.
"Kids. Aloha."
When I first told Jaeda I wanted to run for Mayor, she reacted with words of encouragement. But not long after I broke
the news, I started to catch her talking on the phone with people and subtly ridiculing my ambitions. Even though she
frosted these conversations in sunny solicitude, I could tell the bitter half of her personality resented my desires to enter
local government. At times, she hinted that she would become a dreary sidecar to our lives, that the city would become my
mistress. Then she would call me at work, take me for steak and shrimp at Chiz's Cougar Cave, and shower me with
campaign slogans and strategies. She would sit across the booth — flapping her lashes, reeling off ideas like blackjack
cards, repositioning the napkin dispenser — and channel the personality of a bloodthirsty fairy godmother, all cheerleader
eyes and guillotine smiles, a kind of chipper Jacqueline the Ripper. She didn't say it, but it was clear. She felt I had chosen
an impossible task: get elected and stay married.
To me, though, a bid for Mayor didn't feel like a stretch, nor did it automatically signal the dissolution of our love. Previous
to my campaign, I had served as secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, expanded my ranch outfitter's outlet, and
assumed the post of deputy director of zoning and planning when Roy Lookabaugh, Jaeda's uncle, vacated the job after
occupying it for a decade. Through all this, she and I had remained a relatively happy couple. I wouldn't have thought it
then, but later I became a big believer in that fact that in many cases love is another word for sabotage.
I don't know why I became convinced that my life had primed me for something greater than civilian commerce. But once
the dream took hold, I believed in it more firmly than I believed in gravity. I felt stunned, but no less delivered, the day I
rocked back in my office chair — with the oracle of a steaming "Red Reuben" sandwich from Haenckel's Deli staring at me
from my hand — and saw in the zodiac of my background, not a rusted bucket of résumé ballast, but a mixed bag of
prayer bones plotting my ascent to a higher summit. I wanted to jump from my office chair and shout. But I didn't. The
type of people I worked with — let's just say it would have been hard to explain to them the experience of receiving a
personal vision. I may have also been trying on the more dignified demeanor I was going to need as the town's chief
officer. Around this same time, perhaps because I was feeling my age and grasping for some splinter of noble heritage that
would legitimize my campaign, I had become increasingly interested in my family roots and had begun calling my
grandmother Sylvie in Wisconsin to see if she could remember any stories about my grandfather Doyle.
Getting information from Sylvie was difficult. The nursing home staff was always getting testy and snatching the phone
away so they could pump her with painkillers and sedatives. And there were times when her gravel voice and leapfrog
tangents made me doubt her memory. Still, from a series of scattered phone conversations, I learned that my great-
grandfather Doyle William fought as a volunteer in the Spanish-American War and provided Gatling gun fire at El Caney and
San Juan. Somewhere in an attic, my grandmother insisted, a steamer trunk contained a glove and a frayed loop of
uniform trim that had belonged to Roosevelt.
She told me that Doyle, Jr. — my grandfather, one of five sons — slogged through the Depression by working on the
family potato farm in Inkom. At night, he showed movies on an old Kodascope projector in the family barn and charged a
penny for admission: Pickford and Fairbanks, The General, and various B-grade romance and swashbuckling features.
Apparently, he acquired a bootleg copy of The Phantom of the Opera. During a Sunday afternoon showing, the girl he
wanted to marry, Cassie Blanchette, became so unhinged at the unmasking scene that she screamed and bolted through
the barn door into an August dust storm. Doyle's father, rumbling past on a tractor and harrow, didn't see her, ran her
over, and lacerated her face and arms. When my grandfather visited Cassie in the hospital, he met Sylvie, the nurse who
was overseeing Cassie's recovery. Three days before Thanksgiving, Doyle, Jr. and Sylvie were married.
I also uncovered a family anecdote so quirky and captivating that, near the close of my first term, I started using it as part
of my re-election campaign — a move against which Jaeda, then my campaign manager, fought ferociously. As my
grandmother told it, the story began with my grandfather getting a job as a conductor on the Union Pacific passenger line
that ran through Inkom. One night, during a routine stop in Shoshone, he jumped off for coffee and pie at a place called
The Wayside Diner on South Rail Street. Inside, the waitress approached his table and asked for his order. He said, "What
kind of pie do you have?" And she said, "Apple, peach, and raisin. Apple, peach all gone. What'll ya have?" When I asked
my grandmother why this story had been preserved, she said she didn't know. I came away from my talks with Sylvie
concluding that over time the story's circulation among my relatives must have granted it immortality in our oral repertoire
of family lore.
The story gave me a boost. With helpless glee, I began to weave it into my meet-and-greet speeches at library bond
forums, Optimist Club canned good drives and PTO luncheons. I don't know why the story made me chuckle and stare into
space the way it did when I first heard it, but whenever I got a chance — at a public podium, or in private conversation with
a potential voter — I would lob it in as a way of establishing my folksy, working-class roots, my personal charm and savvy.
After a speech at a rally to save the Idlewood Theatre from demolition, Jaeda confronted me. We walked arm-in-arm into
the post-Thanksgiving chill on Main Street and waited for the crowds to disperse through the traffic. The night air smelled
of sewage and uncollected trash (I made a mental note), mingled with curried pumpkin and coconut milk from Original Thai,
the restaurant where we'd eaten dinner.
"Stop telling that god-awful story," she said, poking my shoulder. A maniac on a Kawasaki crotch-rocket bike roared past
us and revved his engine. The driver wore a blue bandanna but no helmet. I squinted and craned my neck, trying to get
the license number.
"Why?" I asked.
"It's depressing. People hate it."
"Depressing?"
"People want happy stories. Hope and prosperity."
"It is happy."
"The only choice is raisin. Nobody eats raisin pie."
"It's about life," I said, folding my arms. "Happiness in hard times."
"Nobody wants hard times," she said, bugging her eyes. "People think you're saying there's no choice in life. People want
choices."
"Sometimes you don't have a lot of choice."
"No choice means no votes," she said, poking my shoulder again.
~
Exhausted under the weight of memory, I slumped on the couch and watched the local newscast detail the slaughter. The
Channel 8 anchor, his ratty toupée askew, cheerfully announced the demolition of my political career. On a cobalt blue
background, my picture hovered next to the yellow word "incumbent" and a figure: eight percent. I recognized my
snapshot from some old city P. R. materials. I cringed. A snarl of ash-white chest hair sprouted from my open shirt collar.
My throat's sunburned turkey flesh was the color of raspberries. My tobacco-stained mustache and Kris Kringle grin
conveyed all the charm of a mad prospector. To secure my second term, I had spearheaded a city-wide "We Value Your
Feedback" program — a grass-roots civic outreach initiative designed to forge community solidarity by increasing
communication. My opponent won by pushing for better sidewalks and by endorsing the construction of a kiddie splash
park that, two weeks after it opened, caused a massive E. coli outbreak.
I stood and snapped off the TV. I glanced through the blinds. The pack of hooded hooligans had returned. The slick
asphalt bore a charred eclipse, as if a rocket had scorched the ground at takeoff. In chorus, they shuffled toward this dark
star. In the violet stutter of a streetlamp, they resembled vultures converging on a heap of carrion, a quorum of occultists
trysting at a pentagram.
I turned my back to the window and called my daughter at Oregon State. After two rings, she answered.
"Hi, sweetie," I said.
"Hey, Dad," she said. "What's up?"
She sounded upbeat. In the background, I could hear the baritone punch and counter-punch of male voices, the pneumatic
grunt and shriek of rock music I didn't recognize.
"Nothing spectacular," I said. "Just sitting here, thinking — about where we went wrong."
"I'm sure you tried, Dad." Her voice brimmed with empathy, but also impatience. "I'm sure people really came out to help."
I paused and scratched my head.
"I mean your mom. You, me. There were — "
"Oh," she said, her voice flattening. "Dad, look — "
"Right. Not a good time for one of those conversations."
"It is — I don't — " Her voice shrank into a muffled cloud. "Don't you guys have anywhere to go?"
"I'll call back," I said. I listened to her bawl out two unidentified derelicts — one of whom huffed, "Okay, chill!" — as I
watched the far wall of my apartment change colors. Turbulent gashes of blue and red, like a collision of rainbows,
swarmed the wall that led from the hall to my bedroom. I blinked as the strained pitch of my daughter's voice
choreographed the laser show on my wall.
I turned back to the window and glanced through the blinds. A patrol car, its door propped open, idled in the Nature's
Nook parking lot. Its headlight beams illuminated the spot of scarred asphalt. Its whirling lights sliced the night into electric
rotors of white and blue and red. The officer, hands on hips, surveyed the scene. Then he looked up at my window.
Instinctively, I flipped the blinds closed and flicked off the lights.
"Another time would be great, Dad," my daughter sighed. "Right now — "
"Got it," I said. "School okay? You got enough money?"
"Yes. And no — but neither do you."
"I'll call you when I get some."
"Save the call and just send it to me."
"I'll check the couch. Watch the mail for an envelope of pennies."
"Okay, Dad. Bye."
"Bye, sweet."
I clicked the phone off and sat in the darkness. The banter with my daughter reminded me of the time she tried to
intervene in my campaign, but failed, mostly because it was too late and because I hadn't opened my eyes to the obvious.
Back then, as blind as I was to my daughter's feelings, I was devoting more energy to heeding Jaeda's campaign
strategies, despite our crumbling marriage. Success in public and private must have seemed impossible at that point, so I
must have resolved to secure my political future and repair the home front, one shingle at a time, when we could secure
enough breathing room to act like a civilized family. I began to cut back on my use of the "apple-peach-and-raisin story"
and would only tack it to the end of more obscure public meetings that Jaeda didn't attend. In preparation for re-election,
though, and with Jaeda's cautious approval, I concocted the "We Value Your Feedback" crusade — adapted, rather than
concocted, because my scheme was nothing more than the customer "comment card" expanded to its broadest civic
dimensions. Basically, I wanted to energize and improve local schools, churches, businesses, families, and charitable
organizations by encouraging them to seek feedback from others.
At first, my office team and I siphoned off modest amounts from our re-election budget to pay for T-shirts, commercial
spots on local TV, posters, a float in the Whoopie Days Parade — things like that. But soon, our approach became more
aggressive. We designed a digital "Suggestion Box," complete with smiley-face "We Value Your Feedback" logo, linked to
the city website. We increased recreational funding to school districts that hosted annual "Feedback Chili Feeds" and
communication workshops for all grade levels. We dished out tax breaks to merchants who displayed feedback cards and
drop-boxes at their places of business. Churches that slipped comment cards in their hymnals and reserved ten minutes at
the end of sermons for congregational input qualified to receive surplus building supplies and second-hand machinery,
tools, and vehicles from the city. Families and couples that enrolled in three consecutive months of professional counseling
became eligible to skip their utilities payment during Christmas. Stray cats, seatbelts on school busses, the temperature of
the semolina at North Ridge Retirement Center — we waved the banner of feedback from every unswept corner of the city.
A cavalier, if not reckless, energy fueled our early efforts. Some days, the mood at city hall approached the euphoric.
Almost immediately, however, logistics crippled our caravan to the promised land. As the weeks progressed, the influx of
feedback overwhelmed our staff. We simply couldn't process and respond to the tsunami of emails, phone calls, letters,
and fruit baskets left on the front steps of police headquarters. When we countered by creating internships and paid
positions that allowed stay-at-home moms and disabled veterans to work from their personal computers (the online link
featured a "Feedback in Black!" banner and AC/DC sound-byte guitar riff), we watched our budget vaporize and our
management infrastructure crumble. It was a difficult moment. There were weeks when I disappeared on Wednesday,
drove to Jackpot, and didn't return until Monday, my passenger's seat awash with cheeseburger wrappers, my hatchback
clattering with souvenir ashtrays and Keystone empties.
The turning point came swiftly. Over Memorial Day weekend, a group of local teachers, parents, and business owners,
having investigated our movement's expenditures, rallied at the fairgrounds and staged a "Freed Back" protest. The
brouhaha was featured on the local news. A few of the outspoken individuals — all people I had known for years and with
whom I had worked on countless community projects — demanded that I resign and that their tax dollars be used for
more tangible projects. Many of the people at the rally knew my daughter, had taught her, hired her, and watched her run
the hurdles and play saxophone in the Huskies Pep Band. I suppose it was the surreal hoopla of the mob's appearance on
television, as well as the cracked lenses of idealism through which I was viewing my situation, that prevented me from
seeing that my longtime friends had morphed into bullhorn-wielding rabble rousers lusting for my blood.
Early June delivered the final shockwaves of sobriety. My daughter was finishing her senior year. One Saturday, the third
and last day of the annual Classic Car Cruise-in, she and I sat side-by-side on barstools in Casita Burrita. At a street-side
window, we watched the parade of cars and ate in silence — seafood tostadas, chips, salsa verde, and ironport with cherry.
As a prelude to our volatile split, Jaeda had fled to her mother's home in McCammon to spend a few weeks. For days, I had
sensed that my daughter wanted to say something to me. But at the time, I was too preoccupied with salvaging my job to
acknowledge that my political blunders had contributed to her gloominess.
She had stopped jogging in the morning, wearing makeup, and showering regularly. Microwave pizza pockets and cupcakes
had replaced her breakfasts of granola, yogurt, and grapefruit. She had traded her skirts and jewelry for workboots,
tattered overalls, and a Detroit Pistons sweatshirt. That day, she slumped next to me in a sullen heap, avoiding my
glances. Gold barrettes clipped streaks of fuchsia hair from her eyes. Unwilling to invoke a storm, I sat and watched the
motorized pageant of Edsels, glitzy Commodore Eights, and Coronet Woodies rumble up and down Main Street.
To fill the awkward silence, I plucked a pen from my shirt pocket and began to fill out a "Feed Us Back" customer response
card from a stack on our table. I looked around and noticed similar stacks of cards on all the tables. The first question
asked, Is there anything else you would like us to offer? I considered my reply and rested my pen in my lips. I thought
about macadamia nut and chocolate-chip cookie dough burritos for dessert, peanut butter and jelly burritos for kids, dog
food burritos in little plastic bowls, served curbside. Outside, the sidewalks brimmed with people of all ages — waving
balloons, slurping lime snow cones, chomping fried elephant ears lacquered with honey butter. The traffic paused. The
parade had become jammed. The drivers waited to roll forward. Closest to us, partly obscured by spectators and parked
cars, a flamingo Imperial Coupe idled, followed by a two-tone Nash Rambler with whitewalls, and a candy-apple Corvette
Stingray.
I watched to see if the Imperial's driver — a scruffy bodybuilder in World Gym cap and aviator sunglasses, a single gray
braid like a rope — would reach out and take a cruise-in feedback form while he waited. That morning, I had deployed Boy
and Girl Scout volunteers to set up tripods and hanging wicker baskets filled with American-flag feedback forms. I
instructed the kids to set the tripods close enough to the lanes so that the drivers could reach them without getting out. I
asked our secretarial staff to compose a thumbnail version of our standard form, something that could be filled out and
mailed from any location: What did you like this year? What didn't you like? Any suggestions for next time? In the white
sunlight, the Imperial's paint job gleamed like a pink gumball. A toy hula dancer dangled from its rearview mirror, swaying
her hips and shoulders to the rhythm of the rest of my life.
But the driver didn't reach for a form. He didn't even glance at the hanging basket within inches of his open window.
Instead, he cocked his head back, smooched the air, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of a song I
couldn't hear. In fact, none of the drivers were taking forms. All along Main Street, hundreds of ticker tape slips littered the
world in a freakish bicentennial autumn. On car windshields, in baby strollers, in the beaks of crows and paws of squirrels
— the patriotic colors of my desire to communicate flashed like good old American trash that somebody with a giant broom
and dustpan was going to have to sweep up the next day.
Unwilling to face the truth, I sipped ironport and smiled at the fluttering papers that, once the cars started rolling again,
transformed Main Street into a mobile used car lot, a time-traveling circus on wheels. Even then, it didn't strike me as odd
that for the past three months no news outlets had called me for interviews or policy clarifications. Except for calls from my
staff, my phone had ceased to ring.
"Look around," my daughter said.
A Volkswagen van toddled by like a lame caboose. The owner had painted the exterior to look like a watermelon. The van's
name — "Vern the Van O' Peace" — was stenciled across the side door. Tie-dyed "Woodstock!" curtains covered the
windows.
"Cool, huh?" I said. I pointed at a Gremlin and Pinto crawling like charger and chariot. "Somebody should have told those
guys the invitation said classic."
"Dad," she said.
"Yeah." I turned to her. For the first time, I saw she was crying.
"Nobody will talk to me."
"Sweetie, what — "
"Teachers, the team — "
"What's going on?"
She looked at me. Her cheeks blazed with tears.
"They think you're crazy!"
"Who?"
"The whole town!"
"Why, I — "
"All this feedback crap! Everyone's saying it's the stupidest thing. I haven't been on a date in six weeks!"
A crusty knot of crabmeat and tortilla shell clogged my throat. I took a swig of ironport, which suddenly tasted like glass
cleaner. I watched a Shriner in a Willys Jeep skid to a stop and nearly clip the rear bumper of a canary Chevy Nomad.
"It's a principle of government," I said. "What does it have to do — "
"They laugh at me."
"Not everyone's liked it," I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. "Some have, though. A few businesses have told us that
things have picked up."
"Dad," she pleaded, her voice husky. "Nobody wants to pay for — talking. Not taxes. People pay for what they can see."
Outside, a stout redheaded woman in a teal head scarf coasted her Picadilly Roadster to a stop near one of the feedback
tripods. On seeing the hanging basket, she puckered her lips and forehead. As if drawing for a lottery, she dipped her
hand in and plucked out a form. With a look of mild bewilderment, she scrutinized the paper, crushed it into a ball, and
flipped it into the gutter.
~
I was so absorbed in replaying in my mind the day my daughter and I ate lunch together during the cruise-in that I didn't
realize someone was knocking on my apartment door. A second brisk knock shook me from my reverie.
When I opened the door, the officer from the Nature's Nook parking lot stepped back and raised his hand as if to give me
a high five. He was a gigantic pale man with an orange walrus mustache that drooped over his mouth.
"Hi, Gavin," I said.
"Oh," he apologized. "Howdy, Mayor. I didn't — "
"Ex. C'mon in."
"Oo," he said, stepping inside. "I didn't know. You got my vote."
"I appreciate it. What's going on?"
"Any idea what happened?" he said, pointing at my window.
"Pyros," I said, shrugging.
"Get a look at anyone?"
"Nothing — remarkable. Sweatshirts. Jeans. Basketball shoes."
"Any colors? Markings?"
"They had their hoods up. Covered their faces."
"It's dark — "
"Yeah."
" — tough to see — "
"Nothing your average kid wouldn't wear."
"Awrighty," he said, grinning. "Won't keep you then." He backed into the hallway and smacked his gloves into his hands.
"Thanks for your time. Sorry about the election."
"We all have our time."
"Well, have a good night."
"You too, Gav."
At the window, I watched Gavin reverse his patrol car in a long half arc and swerve out of the parking lot. With my evening
free, and feeling detached and directionless, I threw on my pheasant-hunting jacket and a purple ski hat. I lumbered
downstairs and strolled across the parking lot to examine the scene of the crime.
The night was surprisingly warm. The traffic shuttling north and south on Pembroke Boulevard shushed across the wet
pavement, a sound that made me think of all the places I would never visit: castles, archeological digs, seal-crowded
beaches and historical battlefields. In vain, I searched among the electrified streams of custom body jobs and headlights
for a Corvair, Depot Hack or Cadillac Club Coupe. A stretched film of clouds coasted across the star-speckled sky. The
scent of gasoline and cedar chips saturated the moist air. From a used car lot near the highway, a searchlight brandished
its drunken lance at the planets. A Ford pickup with monster-truck tires roared down Gemini Drive, the stereo blaring
George Strait. The driver goosed his engine. A striped cat shot from a line of landscaped spireas and vanished behind
Hillview Manor's three dumpsters.
At the detonation site, I squatted and grazed my fingertips across the blacktop. I inhaled the rotten egg stench of
gunpowder. I flicked away a scrap of melted duct tape, gathered a handful of bolts and thumbtacks and jingled them in my
palm. I couldn't divine the gang's intentions, but I knew that they had performed a mere trial run — the overture to the
drama of smoke and blood they would stage elsewhere.
Having satisfied my curiosity, I stood and walked back. In a better world, I told myself, there would have been someone to
talk to these kids. Someone would have listened to what they had to say. In the place of this night of rain and stinking
storm drains, there would have been someone who believed in dialogue as a substitute for destruction. This commonplace
humanist would have possessed a bottomless well of empathy, street smarts and problem-solving instincts. He would have
been willing to risk public humiliation and to defy the scornful labels of critics for a chance to change the future facing these
small-town vandals. Surrounded by unsympathetic skeptics, he would have improvised the grand social blueprint that
would have raised a shining city from the back-alley world of grocery pallets and sodden magazines where these kids
patched their dreams with rotten cabbage and bailing twine.
The sound of sneakers slapping the pavement spooked me. I jogged to the apartment building and ducked behind a
dumpster. Safely out of sight, I shrank to my haunches and put a hand to the ground in a relaxed football stance. I
peeked out. Soggy trash circled the dumpsters: baby food labels, globs of toilet paper, collapsed detergent boxes of pink
and yellow and blue. A magazine lay open to an ad featuring two models, a man and woman, in skimpy swimming suits.
The models wore exercise belts designed to shock their abdominals into six-pack form. Ab-Electric! Ab-solutely Your Ab-
solution! the photo exulted, under the stamp of a greasy boot print. A rank potpourri of garbage odors filled my nostrils:
dirty diapers, coffee grounds, melon rinds. To ease the tension in my back, I dropped to my knees and rested my shoulder
against the cool steel.
From out of a side alley, the boy in the red sweatshirt loped like an emaciated dog and stopped at the explosion site. His
shoulders deflated as he gazed at the ground. Then he fired glances in all directions and returned to staring downward. I
couldn't tell his age, but based on his height and his scarecrow frame, I guessed fourteen or fifteen.
He shivered. Then I saw that he was dancing. His shoulders swayed with an odd musical hitch, his nerves misfiring, his
skeleton jerking in marionette spasms. I was about to stand when his body arched in a rigid column like a warped rocket
anchored to its launch pad. In quick succession, he beat his fist against his chest, as if trying to pound his heart to life or
smash it to death. Though I heard his fist thump his sternum, he didn't utter a sound. Then he darted down Gemini Drive,
cut a quick right around a yellow fire hydrant, and disappeared into a vacant lot.
I followed. Hesitant at first, I soon trotted with military energy. With a triple jumper's spring, he bounded through the
darkness behind the largest building in the plaza, which was Kmart. Kmart's rear security lights illuminated ranks of
battered loading docks and dumpsters, but my steps plunged into a hovering void of blackness. I had the vague sense
that I was traversing the dark side of the moon, that with each weightless stride my shins would be crunched in bear
traps. The bitter scent of sagebrush tainted the air, as did the yeasty reek of beer, piss and the parched acid of skunk
spray.
The lot through which he ran had been owned for years, I remembered, by a conglomerate of various railway and
construction companies, some local, some out-of-state. As I ambled through the obstacle course of scrub brush, bed
springs, car batteries, and milk crates — afraid at every step of snapping my ankle or tripping an imaginary landmine — I
recalled the years I had spent working with volunteer groups to clean up the lot and build a nature park, year-round
skating complex, and swimming pool. After all that effort, the most we had been able to manage was an asphalt trail
parallel to a ragged screen of willows and aspen that ascended along the trashy banks of a wide but shallow creek that
locals referred to as "Rocky River."
At the far corner of Kmart's lot, I scrambled up an embankment and followed the boy down this meandering blacktop trail
the city had constructed. I pressed a hand to my side and shuffled forward, tasting the slick salt of blood in my windpipe
and remembering how proud and despondent I felt the day we dubbed the path "The Sugar City Greenway." The rush of
water over rocks muted the sound of my footsteps as I tailed him toward the point where the "greenway" doglegged left at
a railroad bridge near the highway.
To my right, through the trees, the neon lights of the Grandview Cineplex and drive-thru restaurants in the Gateway Plaza
cast a marbled glow on the river's banks. Both sides were strewn with exploded heaps of loose garbage, shopping carts,
decayed tires — even a sofa in the middle of the shallow current, huge gouges in its cushions, twisted springs poking
through gold foam like severed tendons. On the far bank, a washing machine with one of its side panels ripped away sat
nestled in a hive of weeds, its spin drum exposed like a reject cathedral bell. The wind had impaled bundles of plastic on the
limbs of dead trees. In the shifting glow of streetlights and marquees, they looked like Halloween ghosts trapped in gibbets.
A quarter mile down the path, I lost the boy and stopped to catch my breath. I bent at the waist, hands on my knees, and
gasped. From a secluded eddy, a pair of mallards shot skyward, wings whistling toward the moon. Across the river, vacant
lots filled with shattered wooden pallets, junkyard cars, cinderblock walls and industrial-sized cable spools sprawled in the
blue half-light. The psychedelic splatter of colors on these objects indicated it was a favorite haunt for paintball
enthusiasts. As I started forward, I made a mental note to have the parks and recreation office investigate the area. Then I
shook my head and slumped my shoulders. But — and I perked up at this thought — even though I was no longer running
city hall, I knew nothing could stop me from sending a letter to the new Mayor's office under the name "Concerned Citizen."
I was about to abandon my pursuit when I caught sight of the boy on a railroad bridge that spanned the river. He was
tiptoeing his way across, waggling his arms and torso like a tightrope walker. At the point the trail veered south, the
railroad tracks and bridge ran parallel to the highway. The highway was blockaded by an endless stretch of wire fence
clogged with tumbleweeds. I could hear the rush of interstate traffic. Headlight beams from speeding cars and trucks
ignited the tumbleweeds. They pulsed like rails of strobe lights on a carnival ride.
The secondhand glow from one of the city's most prominent billboards — Visit Sugar City's Historic Air Museum! — cast
down enough light to make the boy's erratic movements visible. At the base of the billboard, on an elevated knoll of brush
and lava rocks sat a sculpted slab of granite, also lit by a small floodlight. It said, Sugar City: Where Sweet Things Grow.
When I saw it, I remembered that a retired welder named Jerv Quillian had donated the materials for the sign and
completed it with his grandson, as an Eagle Scout project. It was a strange image — the daredevil antics of a teenage boy,
and above him, a Boeing Stearman and Supermarine Spitfire streaking down as if to mince him with gunfire, all in the name
of sweetness and growth. Perhaps it was the picture of these two dive-bombing warplanes roaring to earth with a boy in
the crosshairs of certain death — but I understood then, with a gulp of fear and shame for not having seen it sooner, that
he intended to do harm to himself. This inner alarm set me running toward the bridge.
At the bend in the path, I encountered a chain-link fence. I scrambled up and flopped over the top. On the way down, my
pant leg snagged a barb of wire and ripped. My tailbone struck pea gravel. Grunting with pain, I staggered to my feet and
limped to the bridge, where I was close enough to see details: the boy wore shabby gold corduroy jeans with frayed cuffs;
custard-colored Vans hightops; and, to my surprise, a red hooded Sugar City Huskies sweatshirt whose ratty sleeve bore
the white logo We Value Your TEEN Feedback — a relic from one of our school district initiatives.
"Hey, son!" I shouted, waving my arms. "Get off there!"
He appeared to be deaf. I looked for something to throw.
"What are you doing?"
Instead of turning to me, he shimmied his knees and shoulders as if succumbing to an epileptic seizure. I was afraid his
violent movements would send him tumbling into the rocky ravine. The fall was high enough to inflict serious injury,
perhaps death. Far below his feet, gray barricades of lodgepole pine limbs swarmed the bridge's supports. It looked as if
the glacial flood had wrapped the struts in skinned tree bones. The boy raised a relaxed fist to the sky, a toast to the
night. Then he began to pound himself, lashing the spastic flipper of his arm against his chest. With each strike, his fist
hammered his heart, as if he were resuscitating himself. Then his hand flailed outward, tearing an invisible talking-doll
string from his breastbone. This vicious action angled his body toward me. I blinked and squinted. Somehow, he had
knotted a hangman's noose around his neck. The other end of the rope was tied to the bridge.
"Hey!" I barked. "Get off there, dammit!"
Yelling and waving my arms, I picked my way across the bridge. Twice, my foot slipped between ties, dropping me nearly to
my crotch. Both times, I pulled my leg up, knowing that blood bathed my shin and ankle. Once I was close enough, I
crouched. I gritted my teeth and launched a flying tackle. The force of my body knocked him sideways, and I wrapped him
in my arms. He ejected a puff of air — ooph — and landed underneath me. His body stiffened like a canvas bag of steel
rods then softened to rain-soaked clay.
Sick with fury and fear, I wrestled us both to a sitting position. I grabbed his shoulders and throttled him.
"What the hell are you doing?" I demanded.
Choking on adrenalin, I yanked away his hood and shrank in horror. Instead of viewing a human face, I gaped at the visage
of my dead dog, Rufus. My stomach clenched as I stared at the fuzzy head of the werewolf-boy in my grasp. A glossy mat
of fur was stitched across his countenance, from forehead to chin. Then, recovering, I realized the boy had grown his
bangs extra long and dyed them a brassy auburn, an outlandish style I had never seen before.
Though he wouldn't look at me, his hands, independent of his body, fiddled madly with the knot in the rope around his
neck. As if drugged, he stared through his bushy bangs at the river, his eyes dull as pebbles, while his fingers attacked the
knots. The shucked hood revealed pearly headphones plugged in his ears. Headphone cords trailed into the neck of his
sweatshirt. I reached over and yanked the headphones out. Unearthly music emanated from them, a sound that reminded
me of chainsaws and air-raid sirens.
"You gave me a scare," I said.
He didn't respond. With remarkable dexterity, he untied the knot around his neck and then loosened the one tied to the
bridge. The rope flipped into the river, spiraling into oblivion like a bleached coil of DNA. Having banished the evidence, he
remained in a crouched sitting position on the bridge, Tom Sawyer fishing for darkness, his glazed stare locked on a point
in space.
"You wanna tell me what's going on?" I said.
Then I understood. Somehow, he recognized me — didn't know my name, but he knew I was somebody important,
somebody who knew his parents and could get him in trouble. Then I realized I knew him, too. I didn't know his name, but
I recognized his face, despite his bushy overgrowth. From an outdated office file in my mind, I recalled that his mother
taught math at the junior high, and that she had assisted us in hosting feedback seminars in some of the schools. In the
air between us, a wire of tacit knowledge hummed with sub-atomic life. The unspoken said everything: I was in a position
to straighten him out, to turn him in, to turn him inside out if I wanted to. He was in no position at all. My mouth delivered
the only words in my head.
"Might not matter," I said, speaking to the river. "I know hard times. Like in my family, with my grandfather? When he was
going through the Depression — "
The boy inched away from me. My narration accelerated.
" — he, uh, stopped at this diner, you know? In a town like ours, west of here. He worked on the train lines. And this
waitress in this diner asks what kind of pie he wants — no, my grandfather asked her — he says, 'What pies do you have?'
And she says, 'Apple, peach, and raisin. Apple, peach all gone. What'll ya have?' So, my grandfather sits there and — "
Then the boy on the bridge laughed.
"What?" I said.
"That's funny," he said. His hoarse laughter chattered in his windpipe. The drugs he had taken shone through his skin. His
hands shook like pennants of trash.
"Why's it funny?" I asked.
"It's like," he said, quivering, "nobody ever gives you what you want."
"Yeah," I said. "Or we never tell people what they don't want to hear."
The night of the election, my ex-wife Jaeda called from Hawaii to ask me — I thought — what the Sugar City Mayor's next
brainchild for civic nirvana was going to be. Instead, she dredged up the subject of Rufus, our fidgety Lakeland terrier she
had put to sleep three weeks before we divorced. In some ways, it was Rufus's Monday afternoon euthanization that drove
us to separate residences. The final act of petty callousness. The spark that torched our house of matchsticks. The day
after we split, I dumped my underwear and spelunking gear in my old Snow College footlocker and found a third floor room
in some renovated apartments called Hillview Manor on Gemini Drive across from a recently opened organic food store; she
found Oahu.
As I spoke to her, I could see Rufus in my mind, in grainy black and white, as if he'd been resurrected from archived film
shot at the gas chambers of Treblinka. His eyes and nose shone like nubs of black licorice. I saw the bran-colored shag as
thick as a welcome mat that stretched from crown to muzzle, the jaunty artery of his pink tongue.
"He was a biter," she said.
"Beat a dog long enough, he starts to snap," I said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
When she said this, I was reminded of her dominant trait: a foolproof sonar for subtext. I saw that instead of chucking our
twenty years together on the junk pile we had shackled our ankles to a life sentence of long-distance blowback. The
morning she stalked out the door in her navy blue overcoat, her Mary Kay valise swinging in her fist like a wrecking ball, she
put the blame on my "hot temper" — her phrase for describing my reactions to her hair-trigger jags. She spat the
judgment over her shoulder, without breaking stride, like a woman spewing watermelon seeds on her way to the beach. In
the wake of her departure, I leaned on the bar and stared at two fondue forks that gleamed like a tarnished coat of arms in
a slurry of artichoke dip on a serving plate.
"It means what it means," I said.
"Meaning you."
"You grabbed his legs, slammed him on his back, and shouted, 'Bad boy!'"
"You're supposed to do that. Shows who's boss."
"It made him violent."
"He was a biter."
"You conditioned him to bite. Then killed him because he became what you made him."
"I didn't call to bicker."
"Why did you call?"
"For the votes."
"They aren't in yet," I lied. "It was close."
With the phone to my ear, I wandered to the kitchen window and pried the Venetian blinds apart. The swinging blinds
knocked a Baby Ruth wrapper from the sill to the floor. Box elder bug carcasses peppered the sill like spilled buckshot. In
the parking lot, west of the organic food store — its Tuscan archway read "Nature's Nook" — a group of teenage boys in
hooded sweatshirts formed a huddle. The asphalt, wet from the recent rainstorm, shimmered under their ragged high-top
sneakers. From my elevated viewpoint, they looked as if they were crouching on a runway sugared with shattered glass.
One boy in a red sweatshirt dropped something on the ground. The huddle contracted.
"Call me when they're in," she said in a hurried tone.
"Why?"
"I deserve to know — technically."
While talking to Jaeda, I heard and smelled impossible things, as if Rufus's ghost had given me a sensory transplant. I
heard ice diluting two Bloody Maries in highball glasses in her hotel room; I smelled the musky cologne and after-dinner-
mint breath of the corporate law clerk she'd shacked up with; I heard air molecules rush from the mattress that bucked like
a mechanical bull under their most recent bout of lovemaking. In the parking lot, the clot of boys scattered. In the space
where they had gathered, a pinpoint of fire skittered like a moth of white sparks.
"We'll see," I said, stepping away and turning my back.
An explosion thumped the wall. The windows rattled.
"What was that?" she said.
"Kids. Aloha."
When I first told Jaeda I wanted to run for Mayor, she reacted with words of encouragement. But not long after I broke
the news, I started to catch her talking on the phone with people and subtly ridiculing my ambitions. Even though she
frosted these conversations in sunny solicitude, I could tell the bitter half of her personality resented my desires to enter
local government. At times, she hinted that she would become a dreary sidecar to our lives, that the city would become my
mistress. Then she would call me at work, take me for steak and shrimp at Chiz's Cougar Cave, and shower me with
campaign slogans and strategies. She would sit across the booth — flapping her lashes, reeling off ideas like blackjack
cards, repositioning the napkin dispenser — and channel the personality of a bloodthirsty fairy godmother, all cheerleader
eyes and guillotine smiles, a kind of chipper Jacqueline the Ripper. She didn't say it, but it was clear. She felt I had chosen
an impossible task: get elected and stay married.
To me, though, a bid for Mayor didn't feel like a stretch, nor did it automatically signal the dissolution of our love. Previous
to my campaign, I had served as secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, expanded my ranch outfitter's outlet, and
assumed the post of deputy director of zoning and planning when Roy Lookabaugh, Jaeda's uncle, vacated the job after
occupying it for a decade. Through all this, she and I had remained a relatively happy couple. I wouldn't have thought it
then, but later I became a big believer in that fact that in many cases love is another word for sabotage.
I don't know why I became convinced that my life had primed me for something greater than civilian commerce. But once
the dream took hold, I believed in it more firmly than I believed in gravity. I felt stunned, but no less delivered, the day I
rocked back in my office chair — with the oracle of a steaming "Red Reuben" sandwich from Haenckel's Deli staring at me
from my hand — and saw in the zodiac of my background, not a rusted bucket of résumé ballast, but a mixed bag of
prayer bones plotting my ascent to a higher summit. I wanted to jump from my office chair and shout. But I didn't. The
type of people I worked with — let's just say it would have been hard to explain to them the experience of receiving a
personal vision. I may have also been trying on the more dignified demeanor I was going to need as the town's chief
officer. Around this same time, perhaps because I was feeling my age and grasping for some splinter of noble heritage that
would legitimize my campaign, I had become increasingly interested in my family roots and had begun calling my
grandmother Sylvie in Wisconsin to see if she could remember any stories about my grandfather Doyle.
Getting information from Sylvie was difficult. The nursing home staff was always getting testy and snatching the phone
away so they could pump her with painkillers and sedatives. And there were times when her gravel voice and leapfrog
tangents made me doubt her memory. Still, from a series of scattered phone conversations, I learned that my great-
grandfather Doyle William fought as a volunteer in the Spanish-American War and provided Gatling gun fire at El Caney and
San Juan. Somewhere in an attic, my grandmother insisted, a steamer trunk contained a glove and a frayed loop of
uniform trim that had belonged to Roosevelt.
She told me that Doyle, Jr. — my grandfather, one of five sons — slogged through the Depression by working on the
family potato farm in Inkom. At night, he showed movies on an old Kodascope projector in the family barn and charged a
penny for admission: Pickford and Fairbanks, The General, and various B-grade romance and swashbuckling features.
Apparently, he acquired a bootleg copy of The Phantom of the Opera. During a Sunday afternoon showing, the girl he
wanted to marry, Cassie Blanchette, became so unhinged at the unmasking scene that she screamed and bolted through
the barn door into an August dust storm. Doyle's father, rumbling past on a tractor and harrow, didn't see her, ran her
over, and lacerated her face and arms. When my grandfather visited Cassie in the hospital, he met Sylvie, the nurse who
was overseeing Cassie's recovery. Three days before Thanksgiving, Doyle, Jr. and Sylvie were married.
I also uncovered a family anecdote so quirky and captivating that, near the close of my first term, I started using it as part
of my re-election campaign — a move against which Jaeda, then my campaign manager, fought ferociously. As my
grandmother told it, the story began with my grandfather getting a job as a conductor on the Union Pacific passenger line
that ran through Inkom. One night, during a routine stop in Shoshone, he jumped off for coffee and pie at a place called
The Wayside Diner on South Rail Street. Inside, the waitress approached his table and asked for his order. He said, "What
kind of pie do you have?" And she said, "Apple, peach, and raisin. Apple, peach all gone. What'll ya have?" When I asked
my grandmother why this story had been preserved, she said she didn't know. I came away from my talks with Sylvie
concluding that over time the story's circulation among my relatives must have granted it immortality in our oral repertoire
of family lore.
The story gave me a boost. With helpless glee, I began to weave it into my meet-and-greet speeches at library bond
forums, Optimist Club canned good drives and PTO luncheons. I don't know why the story made me chuckle and stare into
space the way it did when I first heard it, but whenever I got a chance — at a public podium, or in private conversation with
a potential voter — I would lob it in as a way of establishing my folksy, working-class roots, my personal charm and savvy.
After a speech at a rally to save the Idlewood Theatre from demolition, Jaeda confronted me. We walked arm-in-arm into
the post-Thanksgiving chill on Main Street and waited for the crowds to disperse through the traffic. The night air smelled
of sewage and uncollected trash (I made a mental note), mingled with curried pumpkin and coconut milk from Original Thai,
the restaurant where we'd eaten dinner.
"Stop telling that god-awful story," she said, poking my shoulder. A maniac on a Kawasaki crotch-rocket bike roared past
us and revved his engine. The driver wore a blue bandanna but no helmet. I squinted and craned my neck, trying to get
the license number.
"Why?" I asked.
"It's depressing. People hate it."
"Depressing?"
"People want happy stories. Hope and prosperity."
"It is happy."
"The only choice is raisin. Nobody eats raisin pie."
"It's about life," I said, folding my arms. "Happiness in hard times."
"Nobody wants hard times," she said, bugging her eyes. "People think you're saying there's no choice in life. People want
choices."
"Sometimes you don't have a lot of choice."
"No choice means no votes," she said, poking my shoulder again.
~
Exhausted under the weight of memory, I slumped on the couch and watched the local newscast detail the slaughter. The
Channel 8 anchor, his ratty toupée askew, cheerfully announced the demolition of my political career. On a cobalt blue
background, my picture hovered next to the yellow word "incumbent" and a figure: eight percent. I recognized my
snapshot from some old city P. R. materials. I cringed. A snarl of ash-white chest hair sprouted from my open shirt collar.
My throat's sunburned turkey flesh was the color of raspberries. My tobacco-stained mustache and Kris Kringle grin
conveyed all the charm of a mad prospector. To secure my second term, I had spearheaded a city-wide "We Value Your
Feedback" program — a grass-roots civic outreach initiative designed to forge community solidarity by increasing
communication. My opponent won by pushing for better sidewalks and by endorsing the construction of a kiddie splash
park that, two weeks after it opened, caused a massive E. coli outbreak.
I stood and snapped off the TV. I glanced through the blinds. The pack of hooded hooligans had returned. The slick
asphalt bore a charred eclipse, as if a rocket had scorched the ground at takeoff. In chorus, they shuffled toward this dark
star. In the violet stutter of a streetlamp, they resembled vultures converging on a heap of carrion, a quorum of occultists
trysting at a pentagram.
I turned my back to the window and called my daughter at Oregon State. After two rings, she answered.
"Hi, sweetie," I said.
"Hey, Dad," she said. "What's up?"
She sounded upbeat. In the background, I could hear the baritone punch and counter-punch of male voices, the pneumatic
grunt and shriek of rock music I didn't recognize.
"Nothing spectacular," I said. "Just sitting here, thinking — about where we went wrong."
"I'm sure you tried, Dad." Her voice brimmed with empathy, but also impatience. "I'm sure people really came out to help."
I paused and scratched my head.
"I mean your mom. You, me. There were — "
"Oh," she said, her voice flattening. "Dad, look — "
"Right. Not a good time for one of those conversations."
"It is — I don't — " Her voice shrank into a muffled cloud. "Don't you guys have anywhere to go?"
"I'll call back," I said. I listened to her bawl out two unidentified derelicts — one of whom huffed, "Okay, chill!" — as I
watched the far wall of my apartment change colors. Turbulent gashes of blue and red, like a collision of rainbows,
swarmed the wall that led from the hall to my bedroom. I blinked as the strained pitch of my daughter's voice
choreographed the laser show on my wall.
I turned back to the window and glanced through the blinds. A patrol car, its door propped open, idled in the Nature's
Nook parking lot. Its headlight beams illuminated the spot of scarred asphalt. Its whirling lights sliced the night into electric
rotors of white and blue and red. The officer, hands on hips, surveyed the scene. Then he looked up at my window.
Instinctively, I flipped the blinds closed and flicked off the lights.
"Another time would be great, Dad," my daughter sighed. "Right now — "
"Got it," I said. "School okay? You got enough money?"
"Yes. And no — but neither do you."
"I'll call you when I get some."
"Save the call and just send it to me."
"I'll check the couch. Watch the mail for an envelope of pennies."
"Okay, Dad. Bye."
"Bye, sweet."
I clicked the phone off and sat in the darkness. The banter with my daughter reminded me of the time she tried to
intervene in my campaign, but failed, mostly because it was too late and because I hadn't opened my eyes to the obvious.
Back then, as blind as I was to my daughter's feelings, I was devoting more energy to heeding Jaeda's campaign
strategies, despite our crumbling marriage. Success in public and private must have seemed impossible at that point, so I
must have resolved to secure my political future and repair the home front, one shingle at a time, when we could secure
enough breathing room to act like a civilized family. I began to cut back on my use of the "apple-peach-and-raisin story"
and would only tack it to the end of more obscure public meetings that Jaeda didn't attend. In preparation for re-election,
though, and with Jaeda's cautious approval, I concocted the "We Value Your Feedback" crusade — adapted, rather than
concocted, because my scheme was nothing more than the customer "comment card" expanded to its broadest civic
dimensions. Basically, I wanted to energize and improve local schools, churches, businesses, families, and charitable
organizations by encouraging them to seek feedback from others.
At first, my office team and I siphoned off modest amounts from our re-election budget to pay for T-shirts, commercial
spots on local TV, posters, a float in the Whoopie Days Parade — things like that. But soon, our approach became more
aggressive. We designed a digital "Suggestion Box," complete with smiley-face "We Value Your Feedback" logo, linked to
the city website. We increased recreational funding to school districts that hosted annual "Feedback Chili Feeds" and
communication workshops for all grade levels. We dished out tax breaks to merchants who displayed feedback cards and
drop-boxes at their places of business. Churches that slipped comment cards in their hymnals and reserved ten minutes at
the end of sermons for congregational input qualified to receive surplus building supplies and second-hand machinery,
tools, and vehicles from the city. Families and couples that enrolled in three consecutive months of professional counseling
became eligible to skip their utilities payment during Christmas. Stray cats, seatbelts on school busses, the temperature of
the semolina at North Ridge Retirement Center — we waved the banner of feedback from every unswept corner of the city.
A cavalier, if not reckless, energy fueled our early efforts. Some days, the mood at city hall approached the euphoric.
Almost immediately, however, logistics crippled our caravan to the promised land. As the weeks progressed, the influx of
feedback overwhelmed our staff. We simply couldn't process and respond to the tsunami of emails, phone calls, letters,
and fruit baskets left on the front steps of police headquarters. When we countered by creating internships and paid
positions that allowed stay-at-home moms and disabled veterans to work from their personal computers (the online link
featured a "Feedback in Black!" banner and AC/DC sound-byte guitar riff), we watched our budget vaporize and our
management infrastructure crumble. It was a difficult moment. There were weeks when I disappeared on Wednesday,
drove to Jackpot, and didn't return until Monday, my passenger's seat awash with cheeseburger wrappers, my hatchback
clattering with souvenir ashtrays and Keystone empties.
The turning point came swiftly. Over Memorial Day weekend, a group of local teachers, parents, and business owners,
having investigated our movement's expenditures, rallied at the fairgrounds and staged a "Freed Back" protest. The
brouhaha was featured on the local news. A few of the outspoken individuals — all people I had known for years and with
whom I had worked on countless community projects — demanded that I resign and that their tax dollars be used for
more tangible projects. Many of the people at the rally knew my daughter, had taught her, hired her, and watched her run
the hurdles and play saxophone in the Huskies Pep Band. I suppose it was the surreal hoopla of the mob's appearance on
television, as well as the cracked lenses of idealism through which I was viewing my situation, that prevented me from
seeing that my longtime friends had morphed into bullhorn-wielding rabble rousers lusting for my blood.
Early June delivered the final shockwaves of sobriety. My daughter was finishing her senior year. One Saturday, the third
and last day of the annual Classic Car Cruise-in, she and I sat side-by-side on barstools in Casita Burrita. At a street-side
window, we watched the parade of cars and ate in silence — seafood tostadas, chips, salsa verde, and ironport with cherry.
As a prelude to our volatile split, Jaeda had fled to her mother's home in McCammon to spend a few weeks. For days, I had
sensed that my daughter wanted to say something to me. But at the time, I was too preoccupied with salvaging my job to
acknowledge that my political blunders had contributed to her gloominess.
She had stopped jogging in the morning, wearing makeup, and showering regularly. Microwave pizza pockets and cupcakes
had replaced her breakfasts of granola, yogurt, and grapefruit. She had traded her skirts and jewelry for workboots,
tattered overalls, and a Detroit Pistons sweatshirt. That day, she slumped next to me in a sullen heap, avoiding my
glances. Gold barrettes clipped streaks of fuchsia hair from her eyes. Unwilling to invoke a storm, I sat and watched the
motorized pageant of Edsels, glitzy Commodore Eights, and Coronet Woodies rumble up and down Main Street.
To fill the awkward silence, I plucked a pen from my shirt pocket and began to fill out a "Feed Us Back" customer response
card from a stack on our table. I looked around and noticed similar stacks of cards on all the tables. The first question
asked, Is there anything else you would like us to offer? I considered my reply and rested my pen in my lips. I thought
about macadamia nut and chocolate-chip cookie dough burritos for dessert, peanut butter and jelly burritos for kids, dog
food burritos in little plastic bowls, served curbside. Outside, the sidewalks brimmed with people of all ages — waving
balloons, slurping lime snow cones, chomping fried elephant ears lacquered with honey butter. The traffic paused. The
parade had become jammed. The drivers waited to roll forward. Closest to us, partly obscured by spectators and parked
cars, a flamingo Imperial Coupe idled, followed by a two-tone Nash Rambler with whitewalls, and a candy-apple Corvette
Stingray.
I watched to see if the Imperial's driver — a scruffy bodybuilder in World Gym cap and aviator sunglasses, a single gray
braid like a rope — would reach out and take a cruise-in feedback form while he waited. That morning, I had deployed Boy
and Girl Scout volunteers to set up tripods and hanging wicker baskets filled with American-flag feedback forms. I
instructed the kids to set the tripods close enough to the lanes so that the drivers could reach them without getting out. I
asked our secretarial staff to compose a thumbnail version of our standard form, something that could be filled out and
mailed from any location: What did you like this year? What didn't you like? Any suggestions for next time? In the white
sunlight, the Imperial's paint job gleamed like a pink gumball. A toy hula dancer dangled from its rearview mirror, swaying
her hips and shoulders to the rhythm of the rest of my life.
But the driver didn't reach for a form. He didn't even glance at the hanging basket within inches of his open window.
Instead, he cocked his head back, smooched the air, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of a song I
couldn't hear. In fact, none of the drivers were taking forms. All along Main Street, hundreds of ticker tape slips littered the
world in a freakish bicentennial autumn. On car windshields, in baby strollers, in the beaks of crows and paws of squirrels
— the patriotic colors of my desire to communicate flashed like good old American trash that somebody with a giant broom
and dustpan was going to have to sweep up the next day.
Unwilling to face the truth, I sipped ironport and smiled at the fluttering papers that, once the cars started rolling again,
transformed Main Street into a mobile used car lot, a time-traveling circus on wheels. Even then, it didn't strike me as odd
that for the past three months no news outlets had called me for interviews or policy clarifications. Except for calls from my
staff, my phone had ceased to ring.
"Look around," my daughter said.
A Volkswagen van toddled by like a lame caboose. The owner had painted the exterior to look like a watermelon. The van's
name — "Vern the Van O' Peace" — was stenciled across the side door. Tie-dyed "Woodstock!" curtains covered the
windows.
"Cool, huh?" I said. I pointed at a Gremlin and Pinto crawling like charger and chariot. "Somebody should have told those
guys the invitation said classic."
"Dad," she said.
"Yeah." I turned to her. For the first time, I saw she was crying.
"Nobody will talk to me."
"Sweetie, what — "
"Teachers, the team — "
"What's going on?"
She looked at me. Her cheeks blazed with tears.
"They think you're crazy!"
"Who?"
"The whole town!"
"Why, I — "
"All this feedback crap! Everyone's saying it's the stupidest thing. I haven't been on a date in six weeks!"
A crusty knot of crabmeat and tortilla shell clogged my throat. I took a swig of ironport, which suddenly tasted like glass
cleaner. I watched a Shriner in a Willys Jeep skid to a stop and nearly clip the rear bumper of a canary Chevy Nomad.
"It's a principle of government," I said. "What does it have to do — "
"They laugh at me."
"Not everyone's liked it," I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. "Some have, though. A few businesses have told us that
things have picked up."
"Dad," she pleaded, her voice husky. "Nobody wants to pay for — talking. Not taxes. People pay for what they can see."
Outside, a stout redheaded woman in a teal head scarf coasted her Picadilly Roadster to a stop near one of the feedback
tripods. On seeing the hanging basket, she puckered her lips and forehead. As if drawing for a lottery, she dipped her
hand in and plucked out a form. With a look of mild bewilderment, she scrutinized the paper, crushed it into a ball, and
flipped it into the gutter.
~
I was so absorbed in replaying in my mind the day my daughter and I ate lunch together during the cruise-in that I didn't
realize someone was knocking on my apartment door. A second brisk knock shook me from my reverie.
When I opened the door, the officer from the Nature's Nook parking lot stepped back and raised his hand as if to give me
a high five. He was a gigantic pale man with an orange walrus mustache that drooped over his mouth.
"Hi, Gavin," I said.
"Oh," he apologized. "Howdy, Mayor. I didn't — "
"Ex. C'mon in."
"Oo," he said, stepping inside. "I didn't know. You got my vote."
"I appreciate it. What's going on?"
"Any idea what happened?" he said, pointing at my window.
"Pyros," I said, shrugging.
"Get a look at anyone?"
"Nothing — remarkable. Sweatshirts. Jeans. Basketball shoes."
"Any colors? Markings?"
"They had their hoods up. Covered their faces."
"It's dark — "
"Yeah."
" — tough to see — "
"Nothing your average kid wouldn't wear."
"Awrighty," he said, grinning. "Won't keep you then." He backed into the hallway and smacked his gloves into his hands.
"Thanks for your time. Sorry about the election."
"We all have our time."
"Well, have a good night."
"You too, Gav."
At the window, I watched Gavin reverse his patrol car in a long half arc and swerve out of the parking lot. With my evening
free, and feeling detached and directionless, I threw on my pheasant-hunting jacket and a purple ski hat. I lumbered
downstairs and strolled across the parking lot to examine the scene of the crime.
The night was surprisingly warm. The traffic shuttling north and south on Pembroke Boulevard shushed across the wet
pavement, a sound that made me think of all the places I would never visit: castles, archeological digs, seal-crowded
beaches and historical battlefields. In vain, I searched among the electrified streams of custom body jobs and headlights
for a Corvair, Depot Hack or Cadillac Club Coupe. A stretched film of clouds coasted across the star-speckled sky. The
scent of gasoline and cedar chips saturated the moist air. From a used car lot near the highway, a searchlight brandished
its drunken lance at the planets. A Ford pickup with monster-truck tires roared down Gemini Drive, the stereo blaring
George Strait. The driver goosed his engine. A striped cat shot from a line of landscaped spireas and vanished behind
Hillview Manor's three dumpsters.
At the detonation site, I squatted and grazed my fingertips across the blacktop. I inhaled the rotten egg stench of
gunpowder. I flicked away a scrap of melted duct tape, gathered a handful of bolts and thumbtacks and jingled them in my
palm. I couldn't divine the gang's intentions, but I knew that they had performed a mere trial run — the overture to the
drama of smoke and blood they would stage elsewhere.
Having satisfied my curiosity, I stood and walked back. In a better world, I told myself, there would have been someone to
talk to these kids. Someone would have listened to what they had to say. In the place of this night of rain and stinking
storm drains, there would have been someone who believed in dialogue as a substitute for destruction. This commonplace
humanist would have possessed a bottomless well of empathy, street smarts and problem-solving instincts. He would have
been willing to risk public humiliation and to defy the scornful labels of critics for a chance to change the future facing these
small-town vandals. Surrounded by unsympathetic skeptics, he would have improvised the grand social blueprint that
would have raised a shining city from the back-alley world of grocery pallets and sodden magazines where these kids
patched their dreams with rotten cabbage and bailing twine.
The sound of sneakers slapping the pavement spooked me. I jogged to the apartment building and ducked behind a
dumpster. Safely out of sight, I shrank to my haunches and put a hand to the ground in a relaxed football stance. I
peeked out. Soggy trash circled the dumpsters: baby food labels, globs of toilet paper, collapsed detergent boxes of pink
and yellow and blue. A magazine lay open to an ad featuring two models, a man and woman, in skimpy swimming suits.
The models wore exercise belts designed to shock their abdominals into six-pack form. Ab-Electric! Ab-solutely Your Ab-
solution! the photo exulted, under the stamp of a greasy boot print. A rank potpourri of garbage odors filled my nostrils:
dirty diapers, coffee grounds, melon rinds. To ease the tension in my back, I dropped to my knees and rested my shoulder
against the cool steel.
From out of a side alley, the boy in the red sweatshirt loped like an emaciated dog and stopped at the explosion site. His
shoulders deflated as he gazed at the ground. Then he fired glances in all directions and returned to staring downward. I
couldn't tell his age, but based on his height and his scarecrow frame, I guessed fourteen or fifteen.
He shivered. Then I saw that he was dancing. His shoulders swayed with an odd musical hitch, his nerves misfiring, his
skeleton jerking in marionette spasms. I was about to stand when his body arched in a rigid column like a warped rocket
anchored to its launch pad. In quick succession, he beat his fist against his chest, as if trying to pound his heart to life or
smash it to death. Though I heard his fist thump his sternum, he didn't utter a sound. Then he darted down Gemini Drive,
cut a quick right around a yellow fire hydrant, and disappeared into a vacant lot.
I followed. Hesitant at first, I soon trotted with military energy. With a triple jumper's spring, he bounded through the
darkness behind the largest building in the plaza, which was Kmart. Kmart's rear security lights illuminated ranks of
battered loading docks and dumpsters, but my steps plunged into a hovering void of blackness. I had the vague sense
that I was traversing the dark side of the moon, that with each weightless stride my shins would be crunched in bear
traps. The bitter scent of sagebrush tainted the air, as did the yeasty reek of beer, piss and the parched acid of skunk
spray.
The lot through which he ran had been owned for years, I remembered, by a conglomerate of various railway and
construction companies, some local, some out-of-state. As I ambled through the obstacle course of scrub brush, bed
springs, car batteries, and milk crates — afraid at every step of snapping my ankle or tripping an imaginary landmine — I
recalled the years I had spent working with volunteer groups to clean up the lot and build a nature park, year-round
skating complex, and swimming pool. After all that effort, the most we had been able to manage was an asphalt trail
parallel to a ragged screen of willows and aspen that ascended along the trashy banks of a wide but shallow creek that
locals referred to as "Rocky River."
At the far corner of Kmart's lot, I scrambled up an embankment and followed the boy down this meandering blacktop trail
the city had constructed. I pressed a hand to my side and shuffled forward, tasting the slick salt of blood in my windpipe
and remembering how proud and despondent I felt the day we dubbed the path "The Sugar City Greenway." The rush of
water over rocks muted the sound of my footsteps as I tailed him toward the point where the "greenway" doglegged left at
a railroad bridge near the highway.
To my right, through the trees, the neon lights of the Grandview Cineplex and drive-thru restaurants in the Gateway Plaza
cast a marbled glow on the river's banks. Both sides were strewn with exploded heaps of loose garbage, shopping carts,
decayed tires — even a sofa in the middle of the shallow current, huge gouges in its cushions, twisted springs poking
through gold foam like severed tendons. On the far bank, a washing machine with one of its side panels ripped away sat
nestled in a hive of weeds, its spin drum exposed like a reject cathedral bell. The wind had impaled bundles of plastic on the
limbs of dead trees. In the shifting glow of streetlights and marquees, they looked like Halloween ghosts trapped in gibbets.
A quarter mile down the path, I lost the boy and stopped to catch my breath. I bent at the waist, hands on my knees, and
gasped. From a secluded eddy, a pair of mallards shot skyward, wings whistling toward the moon. Across the river, vacant
lots filled with shattered wooden pallets, junkyard cars, cinderblock walls and industrial-sized cable spools sprawled in the
blue half-light. The psychedelic splatter of colors on these objects indicated it was a favorite haunt for paintball
enthusiasts. As I started forward, I made a mental note to have the parks and recreation office investigate the area. Then I
shook my head and slumped my shoulders. But — and I perked up at this thought — even though I was no longer running
city hall, I knew nothing could stop me from sending a letter to the new Mayor's office under the name "Concerned Citizen."
I was about to abandon my pursuit when I caught sight of the boy on a railroad bridge that spanned the river. He was
tiptoeing his way across, waggling his arms and torso like a tightrope walker. At the point the trail veered south, the
railroad tracks and bridge ran parallel to the highway. The highway was blockaded by an endless stretch of wire fence
clogged with tumbleweeds. I could hear the rush of interstate traffic. Headlight beams from speeding cars and trucks
ignited the tumbleweeds. They pulsed like rails of strobe lights on a carnival ride.
The secondhand glow from one of the city's most prominent billboards — Visit Sugar City's Historic Air Museum! — cast
down enough light to make the boy's erratic movements visible. At the base of the billboard, on an elevated knoll of brush
and lava rocks sat a sculpted slab of granite, also lit by a small floodlight. It said, Sugar City: Where Sweet Things Grow.
When I saw it, I remembered that a retired welder named Jerv Quillian had donated the materials for the sign and
completed it with his grandson, as an Eagle Scout project. It was a strange image — the daredevil antics of a teenage boy,
and above him, a Boeing Stearman and Supermarine Spitfire streaking down as if to mince him with gunfire, all in the name
of sweetness and growth. Perhaps it was the picture of these two dive-bombing warplanes roaring to earth with a boy in
the crosshairs of certain death — but I understood then, with a gulp of fear and shame for not having seen it sooner, that
he intended to do harm to himself. This inner alarm set me running toward the bridge.
At the bend in the path, I encountered a chain-link fence. I scrambled up and flopped over the top. On the way down, my
pant leg snagged a barb of wire and ripped. My tailbone struck pea gravel. Grunting with pain, I staggered to my feet and
limped to the bridge, where I was close enough to see details: the boy wore shabby gold corduroy jeans with frayed cuffs;
custard-colored Vans hightops; and, to my surprise, a red hooded Sugar City Huskies sweatshirt whose ratty sleeve bore
the white logo We Value Your TEEN Feedback — a relic from one of our school district initiatives.
"Hey, son!" I shouted, waving my arms. "Get off there!"
He appeared to be deaf. I looked for something to throw.
"What are you doing?"
Instead of turning to me, he shimmied his knees and shoulders as if succumbing to an epileptic seizure. I was afraid his
violent movements would send him tumbling into the rocky ravine. The fall was high enough to inflict serious injury,
perhaps death. Far below his feet, gray barricades of lodgepole pine limbs swarmed the bridge's supports. It looked as if
the glacial flood had wrapped the struts in skinned tree bones. The boy raised a relaxed fist to the sky, a toast to the
night. Then he began to pound himself, lashing the spastic flipper of his arm against his chest. With each strike, his fist
hammered his heart, as if he were resuscitating himself. Then his hand flailed outward, tearing an invisible talking-doll
string from his breastbone. This vicious action angled his body toward me. I blinked and squinted. Somehow, he had
knotted a hangman's noose around his neck. The other end of the rope was tied to the bridge.
"Hey!" I barked. "Get off there, dammit!"
Yelling and waving my arms, I picked my way across the bridge. Twice, my foot slipped between ties, dropping me nearly to
my crotch. Both times, I pulled my leg up, knowing that blood bathed my shin and ankle. Once I was close enough, I
crouched. I gritted my teeth and launched a flying tackle. The force of my body knocked him sideways, and I wrapped him
in my arms. He ejected a puff of air — ooph — and landed underneath me. His body stiffened like a canvas bag of steel
rods then softened to rain-soaked clay.
Sick with fury and fear, I wrestled us both to a sitting position. I grabbed his shoulders and throttled him.
"What the hell are you doing?" I demanded.
Choking on adrenalin, I yanked away his hood and shrank in horror. Instead of viewing a human face, I gaped at the visage
of my dead dog, Rufus. My stomach clenched as I stared at the fuzzy head of the werewolf-boy in my grasp. A glossy mat
of fur was stitched across his countenance, from forehead to chin. Then, recovering, I realized the boy had grown his
bangs extra long and dyed them a brassy auburn, an outlandish style I had never seen before.
Though he wouldn't look at me, his hands, independent of his body, fiddled madly with the knot in the rope around his
neck. As if drugged, he stared through his bushy bangs at the river, his eyes dull as pebbles, while his fingers attacked the
knots. The shucked hood revealed pearly headphones plugged in his ears. Headphone cords trailed into the neck of his
sweatshirt. I reached over and yanked the headphones out. Unearthly music emanated from them, a sound that reminded
me of chainsaws and air-raid sirens.
"You gave me a scare," I said.
He didn't respond. With remarkable dexterity, he untied the knot around his neck and then loosened the one tied to the
bridge. The rope flipped into the river, spiraling into oblivion like a bleached coil of DNA. Having banished the evidence, he
remained in a crouched sitting position on the bridge, Tom Sawyer fishing for darkness, his glazed stare locked on a point
in space.
"You wanna tell me what's going on?" I said.
Then I understood. Somehow, he recognized me — didn't know my name, but he knew I was somebody important,
somebody who knew his parents and could get him in trouble. Then I realized I knew him, too. I didn't know his name, but
I recognized his face, despite his bushy overgrowth. From an outdated office file in my mind, I recalled that his mother
taught math at the junior high, and that she had assisted us in hosting feedback seminars in some of the schools. In the
air between us, a wire of tacit knowledge hummed with sub-atomic life. The unspoken said everything: I was in a position
to straighten him out, to turn him in, to turn him inside out if I wanted to. He was in no position at all. My mouth delivered
the only words in my head.
"Might not matter," I said, speaking to the river. "I know hard times. Like in my family, with my grandfather? When he was
going through the Depression — "
The boy inched away from me. My narration accelerated.
" — he, uh, stopped at this diner, you know? In a town like ours, west of here. He worked on the train lines. And this
waitress in this diner asks what kind of pie he wants — no, my grandfather asked her — he says, 'What pies do you have?'
And she says, 'Apple, peach, and raisin. Apple, peach all gone. What'll ya have?' So, my grandfather sits there and — "
Then the boy on the bridge laughed.
"What?" I said.
"That's funny," he said. His hoarse laughter chattered in his windpipe. The drugs he had taken shone through his skin. His
hands shook like pennants of trash.
"Why's it funny?" I asked.
"It's like," he said, quivering, "nobody ever gives you what you want."
"Yeah," I said. "Or we never tell people what they don't want to hear."