for Burt Bates was in his office at the state capitol when his ex-wife called to say that Donald Ross was dying. She had heard it from Mickey Healy in Vancouver who had been in touch with Hugh Quinn in Eugene. Cancer of the pancreas, she said. Metastasized. The doctors gave him a month. "God,"…
The track favors mudders, but you pick him anyway; he shares your middle name and the form shows he's run a fast mile and a quarter at Louisiana Downs. I point out it was dry in Shreveport, but somehow I know he'll come in as long as I don't put any money on him. The…
Here's the green delivery truck pulling away, here's the black nest of fumes. Hungry, awake before the birds, we crawled out from an abandoned car, from a lean-to or an all-night john, through the hole in a chain link fence or a tunnel burrowed in thicket, just two or three of us, rubbing our bellies,…
Louis Labonte in the fourth grade had a cherub's round smile, Bugs Bunny teeth, and his father owned Lou LaBonte's Inn, perched on a high embankment, three white-shingled stories, facing the snowed Sierra in all seasons for those who cared to look. Behind was the Weimar Sanitorium, which for many years helped victims of tuberculosis…
Better to have three announcers trip over each other's tongues than let silence go out like a lethal gas over the airwaves, as if silence were anything but a figment of our imaginations— when one sound stops another is always right there to take its place, so where would we ever have heard it— even…
Out of a sense of adventure that was rare in him, Dr. Geffen Levy, a short man in a plaid sport jacket, left his family in Detroit in June of 1943 and went by train to a medical convention in Ohio. He had been troubled for some months by his rejection from the draft and…
Times like this, when gnats wheel in light above the magnolia, I believe I'll return to this life, that you will return. I will be the battered woman in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who hobbles to the interstate with a girl child in the rain, who picks up a ride and counts the bells of sage…
You'd think we'd be used to it, but it's an odd party, all of us in one room, the world in the other, language in its white gloves circulating with finger-foods and billets-doux—for you? For you? What to do but take its word for things —our humble servant, our only foreign correspondent, making some kind…
Those were strange days, when we were kids Says the bartender I remember this one kid I met Doing construction down at Huntington Beach Told me he used to work for some drug dealer Like the guy was thirty-five and bald The way I'm getting myself And Mikey was some blond god, Irresistible, so his…
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