Grey #1. 12" x 16"

Rocking to his left and right he tried to gain momentum. Creaking springs sounded particularly coarse in the low, close chamber. Someone could be listening on the other side of the wall. He would be discovered. But then why would someone be inside their apartment? And then he re-remembered: 14 years. Snapping his head into the last rock he half-hoped he was dreaming the bit about the fourteen years as he rolled to her side of the bed to protect her. He fell for what seemed a long time.

He woke to someone grunting nearby. They seemed to be in pain, desperate. Muffled squeals were now on his side of the wall. The high-pitched squeaking was painfully close and made his head ring. And this is a different room, isn’t it? The darkness is flat and mostly black with a sourceless line of white light beginning just above his throbbing left temple and stretching away and behind him.

He cannot move his arms or legs. Someone has restrained

him. He seems to have been rolled on his side and up against a wall. The other person in the room has been detained also. They are gagged and poking him in the shoulders and back, urging him to move. The squeaking sound becomes frenetic; a mouse in its electrified wheel. All the while a low register period bell is clanging and distorting inside his head. The beat of approaching footsteps on the other side of the wall does not build long enough to be identifiable. When the door lock above Rawlings is suddenly engaged it as though train cars have coupled just above him while he is tied to the tracks below. Rawlings jerks and spits.

“Gah! Gahhhhhh! Gahhhhhhhhhh!”

Teresa Huanatoca looks down at Rawlings flailing in her guest linen. The yelling has stopped but he continues twisting himself more tightly into the sheet and comforter. She can’t help but savor this. ‘Just look at the gringo mummy go,’ she thinks. ‘He sure can play the fool.’ When she touches the toe of her sneaker to his shoulder he hops an inch off the ground.

“Gaaaaaa! Ow-gaaafff! Gaaaaaaafff!”

Huanatoca bends down and gives Rawlings a little shove between the shoulders.

“Alright, shut up! Shut up, already!”

Rawlings spits out two more “gawfff”s and goes very still.  Huanatoca carefuls a hand in to try to free his head. The linen is damp and cold. Rawlings’ breathing is heavy. Her fingers plumb for the source. They run into something cold and hard. She pulls out a small plastic white noise machine spilling out static and set to OCEAN. She unplugs it then delves back into the linen. This time her fingers shock cold at what feels like a small, long-haired animal. Not trusting the sense of it she takes a fistful and pulls. She slowly reveals a section then a chunk then a long, flowing spread of Rawlings’ scalp.

“Aaaa!”

“Gaaa!!!”

She shocks at Rawlings’ sound and then at the entire wig she is juggling in her hands.

“Aaaaaaa!”

Rawlings begins flailing again.

“Gaaaaaa! Gaaaaaa! Gaaaaaa!”

She throws the wig across the room and against the wall. Rawlings is wheezing like he is about to hyperventilate.

“Shut up-shut up-shut up! Shut up!!!”

His legs are free and cycling madly in the air. Huanatoca kicks at them, tries to pin one down but this freaks Rawlings out all the more. She cannot get a hold on him much less free him. When she tries to get Rawlings on his back so she can straddle his chest Rawlings bucks her off his hip and she is thrown into the wall. As she rubs her tenderized head Rawlings cycles away in the shussing sheets. Huanatoca stands to leave the room and lock the door behind her.

Fifteen minutes later the door unlocks. Rawlings is shirtless, bald, and shivering in bed. His back is to the wall and his arms are crossed over his chest. A quadrilateral of hall light bisects his ashen and stubbled face. He stares ruefully at Huanatoca.

The woman he knows from Tapatio, who he has only ever seen in a red apron, tan highwaters and a matching shirt, is in what he considers to be aggressively casual ware; a red plush sweatsuit with the fat yellow insignia of the Sir Philip line (so much like a fat Achilles wing) stitched to the chest. Flawlessly white, pneumatic high-tops (with the brand wing stitched in silhouette) glow from the pedestal of this Counter General in Repose. The corded hands he has only ever seen flashing and larden lie loose at her sides, palm out, her long fingers curling in jointed C’s. The counter-kitchen angularity has been lubricated by a hot shower and coordinated into loose cushion. (Rawlings flashes his nostrils in search of Ivory soap.) Also, unbent from the counter, this woman must be close to six feet tall. He’d’ve had Tapatio Huanatoca at 5’6, 5’7 tops.

An elbow-shaped chin is raised to a nearly Mussolini-ishly obtuse angle. She turns on the light and Rawlings wincingly takes in the bare blue room. Huanatoca’s chin traces slow arcs in the air to investigate the room. The linens are heaped in one corner.  Maize-colored vomit is smeared and dripping down the opposite corner and collecting in a pool half-covered by Rawlings balled up shirt. Under the window small fragments of glass are mixed with the parts of what used to be the white noise machine. After processing each of these scenes Huanatoca’s head makes a little calibratory joggle before proceeding. Rawlings thinks her as capable of dispassionate cruelty as any humanoid mantis. Huanatoca bends down and rises holding out Rawlings wig. This does not change his opinion.

“Who needs bars on a third floor window?”

Huanatoca steps into the room and closes the door behind her. She looks him in the face. This is a different woman than the counter jockey. Where her body seems to exist in service of her hands, her head is run by a long, thin nose slightly bent in the middle. Its sculpted point indicates perpetual south to a small pursed mouth. High cheek bones pull the surrounding skin tight and severely to. Olive-brown eyes carry lids who fall less frequently and far more slowly than most. Thick, untended brows arch incongruously above. (They seem too soft, too generous to live among the rest.) A black helmet of jug-shaped hair tapers away from a fluted neck. Eight scissor snips around the perimeter and four straight across the bangs is her sole head-wise vanity. Rawlings fails to not find her arrestingly ugly to the point of beauty. She speaks less quickly and with less of an accent than she does behind the counter.

“Would you like a clean shirt?”

There is an unmistakable regality to the word, a savoring of her grounds and station. Clean.

“Go to Hell, lady.”

Rawlings eases himself to the edge of the bed. His arms swim through the air as he lurches to his feet. The legs are full of jelly and he is ready to puke again.

“Stay in bed.”

Her sentences blur into one word. She may as well be the OCEAN machine.

“Gang way.”

Rawlings takes a few tilting steps towards the door she is blocking. He is waving her aside with one hand and shielding himself from the nuclear sun of the bare bulb above. Huanatoca moves to the side and opens the door. Rawlings steps through.

The hallway and carpet are the same blue. Three more bare bulbs divide the stretch into regular zones of lividity and shadow. A closed door is floodlit by each. Using the wall as a crutch he gentles towards the second bulb. He realizes he is not wearing shoes when a central air vent gives him the hotfoot. When the door behind him snaps into place he does a humiliating little dance on the iron grate. If Huanatoca laughs or sucks up a breath behind him he cannot hear it over the blowing air. He rests against the second door.

“My shoes and coat.”

Huanatoca briskly drafts past him leaving Rawlings shaking. There is a residue of her back-kitchen carriage as she tally not- quite-marches down the hall. Rawlings thinks ‘She really knows how to put the ‘fuck you’ in her stride doesn’t she.’

Huanatoca places the loafers before Rawlings so that he can step into them. She practically dances behind him (‘She’s gleeful, the woman is gleeful!’) and holds his trench open tilting her head like a goddamn complacent matador. Rawlings almost backhands her when he snatches the coat from her and rips it on. He thinks he sees the woman give him an infuriating little deferential bow out of the corner of his eye.

“Go open your front door.”

Huanatoca puts an unmistakably sarcastic right angle to her elbows to double-time it down the hall, through a darkly orange-lit foyer type chamber leading, even more darkly, in three other directions, fairly hops over the threshold into the northerly chamber where her Sir Phils squeak over dark brown linoleum masquerading as brickwork, and into some unseen area that, acoustically, sounds a country away from the bosomy comfort of this warm, local Door Number 2 and the doorknob he clings to as he would a trusted confidant. The terribly distant and small sounds of twisted latches and thrown deadbolts sprouts a bilious pod of quease in the southwest intestines pressed against this now possibly complicit and very cold knob. Such are the shifting loyalties of unknowable lands. Huanatoca’s contralto echoes down the chambers in waves of piercing stabs.

“LEES-to, SANE-your PA-ling!

Straw-sucking from a _____ beneath the eyes of the usual Tapatio woman.
She leans over the counter looking judgmental about the cloud cover in the floor-to-ceiling windows. There is a sarcastic little sneer built into the corners of her mouth that is distinctly un-Troutdalean. But he has tailed this woman and knows she lives alone on the third of a five-floor walk-up just inside the southern border. Like the pulled records of all registered Troutdaleans hers is relentlessly clean; franchise owner registered with the C of C, spotless credit history, no priors, little college, extra-currics in high school; a trail of solid, uneventful citizenry here and elsewhere. Jogs before work, drinks only occasionally, attends a non-denominational twice a month. Bi-lingual and plays it to commercial advantage with the registered seasonal workers hopscotching the kingdom borders when crop yields demand it. She’ll even drive west on SE Stark and cross the border into Gresham to eat some traditional Peruvian with others who largely share her place of birth. When she does so the little sneer loosens into occasional stretches of wide relieved smiling. The only possible angle on such a woman would be her lack of an obvious partner. Not only is this rare in The Kingdom but widely considered to be a status in need of improvement.
And it’s not like she doesn’t have the goods on that front. Bright-faced and youthful in the taut eyes and aforementioned mouth zones to contrast with the roundness of her cheeks and lips to an advanced sexual advantage. Toss in the dual-language facility and it made no sense this woman didn’t have her pick of fellow Troutdalean entrepreneurs in like physical shape, income bracket, and philosophical equanimity. Six years in The Kingdom it was a wonder she had neither a partner nor a beau to paddle the Sandy or run that rehabilitated greyhound of hers with.
The entire profile might not be so intriguing, so possibly useful in this dawn/feeling out period of the cover’s new tack, if not for that anomalous little sneer. Six years in the wind-tunnel regularity of The OK Corral should have smoothed the accumulated wrinkle into cross-hatch by now, or at least trained a little of the complicit dart and sparkle out of her black-brown eyes by now. Yes, Rawlings, this woman was just slightly different enough to be the one. Go ahead and talk to her.
“Hey um, those tamales were saltier than usual. Pretty good.”
The echo of his voice has yanked Rawlings toward the lard-tanned ceiling to watch the moron below talk to someone besides Tiger. The woman, Teresa Huanatoca is her name, Teresa replies with a single, long, deliberate blink.
“The asparagus… much better.”
The little ebony claws of her eyelashes lower, threaten to slash downward again. He looks away and sucks on the _______.
“But you couldn’t help if you’re out.”
Rawlings has only ever shouted at Troutdaleans or grumbled as the library’s Prisonhouse Penitent Pauling. His words come out in stabbing little experiments while Teresa Huanatoca’s sneer deepens down to devilish. She is incongruous to the point of mocking, completely out of whack with that generous spirit of the Peruvian restaurant. She wipes down the counter and shoots the towel over the back of a deep fryer into the trough of the sink. When she fixes Rawlings with her eyes he looks away to suck on the _____.
“ I mean… out is out.”
Rawlings understands he is now inhabiting what is traditionally considered to be the stance of the unpracticed courter. His body is at an angle to the counter her elbow is the sculpted extension of. His apologetic, down-searching eyes flee from her bottomless whites. This, yes, this thoroughly unlikely Troutdalean has him flailing the upper restaurant air for a duct or light fixture to grab hold of. He hadn’t thought to talk to her as Prisonhouse Penitent Pauling or his loony-bomb alter-ego of the proselytizing truck bed. He hadn’t even considered her to be attractive. Yes, unquestionably so. This woman, this unabstract, fleshsome Troutdalean woman had blown any pretense he had of a dropping a cover high into the trade-drafts of Tapatio Franchise 47’s lardened sky. You are this post-concussed Rawlings. You stumble into duty without a cover and allow the slightest of unlikely women to have you flustered. Suspended like this, firmly held in thrall by the guillotine of those lashes you, you Rawlings, are the likely and she is the executioner. Teresa Huanatoca inhales long and deliberate. Rawlings goes cold. When she blinks he shudders. When she sighs he nearly faints. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself. His head is pounding and his stomach is in a blender. He cannot think what likely statement might anchor him. He hears himself snickering toward the floor. Drool has collected at the corner of his mouth. Before he speaks a third and dizziest of all Rawlings appears in the grease smeared backboard to the woman’s deep fryer.
“I mean… how long’ve ya been making tamales anyway, lady?”
Rawlings slumps against the counter and reaches for a napkin dispenser. He dabs one corner of his mouth and then the other before he starts to swoon. The room pulls away from him. The three Rawlings are thrown into a blender. He looks around wildly and desperately reaches for his _____ before crumbling to the floor. Teresa Huanatoca blinks once. She then leans to watch the overturned ______ waterfall over the counter and splash against the back of Rawlings’ head. The fluttering napkin feathers down to settle on his chest.
“You know damn well how long, burracho.”

Rawlings comes to in swirling blue-black darkness.
A loud breathy shooshing surrounds him. It is summer at Cannon Beach. She must have buried him in the sand once he fell asleep. Her little joke. The tide will roll further and further inland until his tows go cold. In a minute or two the water will enter the labyrinthine sand hillock and aqueduct complex she has surrounded him with. Trickling and sloshing sounds spread inward toward his head from every side and collect into one large central channel on an incline. Water collects behind a thin sand barrier until it bursts. his chin. Usually, the initial tow cold will have brought him to and he is prepared to put on a little show when the water cascades down the ladder leading into the drowning arena collaring his head. As he spits and sputters his best horrified panic she will stand behind and above him, backlit by dusk sun, a corona behind her shadowed face, and joke about “leaving you to the crabs this time” or extort some pledge or service from him. He will wait to the very last second to relent and, say, agree to making the drive south to Depoe Bay for crabcakes at Moe’s before hooking through the slow meander home through the Tillamook National Rain Forest. She will look far more convincingly sadistic after she has dug him free than before. He will wonder over this only briefly before distracting into the admittedly sex-ritual end of the thing. Once when he would not agree to oysters in Astoria she had jogged off just as the channel gate had begun to crack. As the water slowly crept up his neck and she melted into the dusk-molten horizon he was forced to cycle through feelings of wry bemusement, growing incredulity and fury, gathering horror, terror mixed with abject hope, desperate hope (given voice in what would later be described as “pretty girlish wailing there, Rawlings”), equanimity towards death, a bitter cynicism vis a vis the overarching absurdity of his situation and, by inference, all human endeavor, the failure of the preceding to console him in the slightest way, foul-mouthed vindictive fury, and, finally, the suspicion he had always badly misunderstood and underestimated the unfathomable woman who, as the water began to tickle his lower lip, could be “drowning (herself) now for all (he) cared!” Her little snortling guffaw from behind had scared him so badly he bucked involuntarily and freed his knees from their heavy wet bondage. As the little engineered city around him crumbled and flooded over and Rawlings coughed and sputtered, all she had said was “Tssk, aw man, Rawlings, look what you’ve done. It was my finest creation yet.”
And sometimes the tow warning doesn’t work and he wakes under an endless shroud of murky water all around and clogging his burning lungs. He does not know where he is or what has happened to him. There is no tow warning or the reminder of the silhouetted woman above squeezing her spasming mouth. He cannot move his arms or legs and is increasingly certain no one but him would be foolish enough to be in the vicinity of such an idiotic and in all likelihood fatal venue. He is just beginning to give up on himself and feeling philosophical about his imminent silty-salty death when her fingernails start ripping into his thighs and knees allowing him to burst up out of the water into the stunning blues and wispy whites of another Oregon summer sky to remember he is in Florence or Seaside or Newport and a long fan of dirty blonde hair is about to be thrown over the pulsingly warm expanse of shoulder bisected by a thin red strap then tucked behind a small round left ear with a thin cur’s notch missing at one o’ clock revealing the hatefully wonderful very real consolation of her red and tear-streaked dearly freckled face. If a child does not run paddingly and laughingly closeby or a seagull does not lower by on the patrol-eyed squawk he will forget himself and explode from the sand to pin the evil, giggling woman to the ground and straddle her with his hands collaring the second striation of her impossibly dry and warm neck. She will remove the sunglasses he has forgotten he is wearing and say “Aw, poor Rawlings. Poor, poor old Rawlings.”

He stands over the ticking coffeemaker.
In the half-kitchen he can see a bit further north down the parkblocks. The bomb site has thinned to three banner-wavers and a lone p.c. all leaning against a tree working on smokes and passing a flask. They abstract into the bare, swaying branches either wistfully or reminiscently. A few yards away the monitors have tied their yellow and pink sleeping bags together to warm themselves under a guano-spattered bronze of Abraham Lincoln. Early Sunday morning’s like this feel less rueful. Maybe the churchliness of the ideaist megaphone jingles summoning their D-town flocks to worship in one of the makeshift nodes of devotion; soapbox lean-to’s crowded round with transient zeitgeist hoppers, competitive pop-rock anthems booming from the floors of the City U Octaquad classrooms, warmly jovial repurposed food carts touting the sustainability jag with savory wafts and teeming free buffets, the full-on ding dong of the faux-baroque Christianity palaces of mossless brick and flawless stainglass, the bustle of the rolling murmur and gentle shoves of the coveted independent bargain hunters and ideological wayfarers unified in their qualmlessness with the old-fashioned charms of a good hard rump-shove of the sexy-smart suggestive power consolidated in the rose perfumed and powder-sugar dusted lower floors of the Pioneer Mall where playing the chin-scratching dabbler’s connoisseur as the competitive chirps and upsmanship of the leaflet touts pierce the green-glassed dome of the atrium heights clear to the We’re All American Food Court Stock Exchange where the lipid-humid air is spiked by the rapidly vascilating and readjusting fortunes of our ideaist doctrines ticking off up-to-the-minute vote/market share on a menu bigboard clotted with value meals and daily specials and the d-town ubiquitous red, white, and blue t-shirted trader-delegates of the Smith, Hales, and Brady campaigns shout bids on ideaisms small, medium, and huge as the espresso machines hiss and the griddles sizzle and we all feel unnaturally hungry to upload a juicy trend-ascendant burger, an underperforming salad that just needs a bit more salad dressing, or an immemorial chain-steak of longstanding supposed virtue into one of the broadly welcoming elective umbrella folds, for, as a Portland Bid-ness Alliance tout (very thinly undercover as a trashcan drumming and rapping street performer) shouts over some damn impressive backbeat and clacketing fury
“Sunday’s ‘Fund-day, yawl!
Duckworth-ian portions*
of buy’n’sell notions
to boost your Mayor Elect Quotients”* (*An early Roy-ist campaign trope re: school meals referencing Kevin Duckworth, the former Portland Trailblazer center who so endearingly managed to combine a gentle demeanor, a panache for low-post scoring, and a supposed dietary apportionment in line with his non-svelte but still highly effective playing shape. The Roy-ist term is also supposed to suggest that Pioneer Mall is a neutral, unbiased, and agendaless jump-ball of a public space where our lame-duck and purportedly not non-re-un-retiring Mayor would have no interest in endorsing someone or tilting a result in their direction. And though the P.B.A. owns Pioneer Mall and a strong majority of D-town real estate, they also claim political neutrality and have hired Roy as a consultant and voice talent for the Rock-The-Rim-Get-Out-The-Vote-Drive meant to emphasize the still highly debatable but impossibly complicated investigative peak into the relentlessly aforementioned neutrality.)

Sunday is a day for taking stock.
It’s not the whiskey, he thinks, but the concussion that has him feeling uncharacteristically sour toward the peaceful, even sweetly romantic little parkblock vignette below. ‘These people,’ he begins, ‘don’t even know my dog.’ He finds himself seized by an image of a long snaking cartoon fuse wrapping around the trunk of a shrapnel-gorged and still-smoking oak, then through the legs of the green-vested arborist from Park and Rec attending it, down the southbound sidewalk fronting the art museum, wrapped round the oblong, Technicolor Calder-lite sculptures in the courtyard, past his beloved shadowy vestibules suggestive of the presence and absence of the district’s lurkers and lovers, and disappearing into his own Dorm Tower G (a.k.a.: The Old Girl) lobby, past Gretchen The Work-Study Concierge, tongue-knuckled and strain-gazing into the glow of her laptop and clutching a sweating glass of Enerjetico, snaking up the elevator shaft, and exiting Rawlings’ floor to crawl under Barry Comm’s door where this not yet drunk Portland State Viking is trying to look philosophical while flipping open and shut that infernal Zippo he says “helps him concentrate” and rubbing his chin in a patently un-ironic way as if he weren’t going to just spark this fuse, cross his ankles and return to his laptop to hack into the c.c.t.v. broadcast of his infamy. But if these were the whiskey vaguenesses Rawlings would have slid out of them by now and landed in his aw-gosh smile of good ole non-professional big-heartedness feeling not just tender-hearted towards Barry Comm and his host of hustle-brained, yet largely life-naïve dormer ilk, but even nostalgic for his own likely dormer days at The Old Parkblocks U. and even impugning himself for letting his professional hyper-imaginativeness bleed into his olde tyme recreational hippydom. ‘To be young again’ he’d retro-enthuse ‘They’re too ass in-experienced to deserve suspicion yet.’ The next morning he’d recalibrate, straighten his tie, and head out for a day election coverage. amend to ‘Don’t be blind to your biases, Old Boy.’ But the truth is he had none. They only soured the nexus of his professional and recreational m.o.’s, which roughly, amounted to knowing little, distrusting everyone, and loving indiscriminately.
But he had none of the old equanimity. It’d been concussed out of him. He was lonely in a drunk dinged apartment while his truest friend suffered in an overlit dungeon full of strangers and strange smells. A maudlin arc stretched from man to beast, 30 odd blocks and back. He missed his goddamned dog! He was taking this bomb personally. There’s nothing ideological about sending a luckless mutt flying. Nuts to me. Everybody d-town knows me. And for those who don’t I’ve got the uniform written all over me. Bocce shoes or not. Plunge down on likely old Rawlings any day. There might be some grudge or politics or good ole fashioned blind animus behind that. But a biteless old cur? This could fuck with the least cynical of us.
Rawlings loved his dog and he loved his ridiculously loud and unresolvable city and some of its eateries and that was it. But the utter confusion and reflexive cross-purposedness of its animating engine; the engine of sheer of belief-holding; the credo that had morphed from “Keep Portland Weird” downgraded to “Keep Portland Interesting” to “Keep Portland In The Conversation” and had chameleoned our stuffed animal mascots from a naïve-nutso Goofy-like Jefferson Smith doll having a string pulled from his back to chuckle a verse from a local alt-country band of darlingbuds, to a bespectacled Eileen Brady wearing a blue bikini and clutching a slight and shriveled carrot in each hand, to a stiff plastic Charlie Hales in suit and tie taking one stride forward and holding a high-wire balancing pole; with all the two-year helpings of each of them, on and off for two decades, with 4 heaping helpfuls of Brandon Roy interspersed with the still legion of Portlanders driving their black-jerseyed number 7 Blazer bobbleheads to nod back agreement at our vague and trafficked thoughts or facing out to simply survey the road ahead; the whole reactionary cycle jumbled up with the economic crest-trough-trough-crest-lesser trough-trough-semi-crest and the massively libertariano-liberal ideaisms shot ineffectually but sincerely through the wave funnel to be dashed on the rocks of a good old fashioned NON-libertariano-liberal but presumptive good guy reformer and mad baller. It was never dull until it gave you a headache. This was the indefatigably optimistic Rawlings’ first bad mood since the divorce.

His right eye was pulled open by a man wearing a yellow helmet.
“Tiger. My dog. Where is he?”
P.C. Patterson had been joined in the huddle above by two firemen whose names he at least couldn’t have forgotten since he’d never known them. Their blurred features were dark but for intermittent green-yellow flashing light. One of them had garlic breath. Patterson stood to give the firemen room to work. He did the talking.
“Taken to Dove Lewis, C.I. Rawlings. Lie still.”
“What happened?”
“No fatalities. Four injuries. Two serious; a woman and your dog.”
“How serious?”
“The woman will live. Your dog…who knows with animals, Sir. Dove Lewis is the best though. My cat Bonzi went there and-”
“Lemme up.”
He tried to swat away the arms of the firemen but was too weak. Looking into the airspace above the firemen he saw the banners pressed tight to Portland Episcopal by a westerly wind. Cold and wet spread down his left hip. The last thing he could remember was buying the curry coconut soup from his Thai local. He worked his hands a little. Neither held a doubled up to-go container of curry coconut soup. He flared his nostrils and sobbed.
“Christ, lemongrass must be the saddest smelling thing in the entire world.”
Patterson rubbed his chin with concern as the firemen attended to the man alternately clutching then patting down their jacket sleeves and sniffling.
“Concussed, boys…must be…forgive me.”
One cradled Rawlings’ head while he mumbled. The other fitted the neck brace.
“Freaking concussed for sure…”
Patterson’s mouth was moving but making no sound. He seemed to be speaking to someone outside the huddle. A now southwesterly wind ripped a banner from Portland Episcopal and buoyed it high into the sparkling and flashing night.
“…who knew it would be such an emotional experience.”

Rawlings’ dorm window is subdivided into 25 glass rectangles. White paint flakes from the water-warped wood between and around. An individual X or O made of blue packing tape occupies each of the bottom twenty rectangles. Rawlings obscures out the top five rectangles into the pre-dawn sky. But for the flashing red beacon lights crowning the civic and university buildings, and the oddfellow lonely glows in the higher floors, this swath of south downtown skyline is ambiently dark. If it were daytime and clear he would see the tip of the snow-tipped East County mountain in spiking through rectangles 4 and 5. He vaguely wonders if, in that cold and distant alpine dark, any likely animals, a fluffy snow-shoe rabbit or snowy fox, say, might be stirring in an anticipation of the dawn as he does. Or are they still burrowed into some warm subterranean clutch? He genuinely hoped for this for them. He wished the rabbit did not have to surface only to suffer the laser-gaze of the blamelessly ruthless predatory hawk. He mumbled a benediction for this hawk. He thought deeply about the fox’s undeservedly sinister reputation…Careful with the sobs again, Rawlings. Dove Lewis said Tiger’d be okay. Still too tender. Inside and out. Duty, Rawlings. Think of your duty.
Below, the dim eco-shimmer of South Parkblock streetlight is reflected back in blue and grey sheen. But for the miniature blue-flashing squad car and the one-man security p.c. detail keeping warm inside, the perimeter would be dark and neglected. Swafford had always been more of a door-to-door man than a clue hoarder. It was another area where budget constraints, in his Major’s brutally smug illogic, vindicated his preferred m.o. “Recycle those specimen jars already, will ya, Rawls. After all: Waste not want not, you derelict asshole, you. Bpff…bpfft buh-Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-harrrr!!! Whooo! ”
He hears gnawing sounds come from Tiger’s corner and before he remembers what happened he turns to look at the empty, fur-weaved mat in the half-kitchen. Must’ve been Barry The Communications Major rolling over in bed, he thinks.

Later…mid-morning…the crows congregated in the swaying oak branches clacking against his window. The first muffled electronic chirps of megaphones start in. Then the bells of Portland Episcopal. Someone pounds on an adjacent wall. Rawlings wakes in his recliner clutching his head. He’d sleep-medicated with whiskey since there’d been no order to the contrary from the e.r. doctor. Concussed or tipsy-doodle, he thought, what’s the freakin’ diff. After all, he’d been a diligent little Patient Rawlings and woken Barry Comm to ask him to pound on the wall on the fifteens ‘til noon to avoid what the e.r. doc had ominously referred to as “Narco-Concussive Syndrome.”
“Here’s some unlicensed to keep ya company, my boy,” Rawlings well into his tipsy by dawn. “I think you’re a big enough boy now to appreciate her…mmm…maturities.” And here Barry was on the dot with a sadistically loud pound-pound-pound and Rawlings’ jelly-armed reply leaving him predictably nauseous. He remembers he hasn’t had a morsel since the few spoonfuls of the bereaved curry-coconut and has to steel himself against another onset of the g-damn Concussive Emotionals.
“Drunk and hungry, Tige. A recipe for…”
But Tiger still isn’t on his mat.
He opens the window a finger and the chants of the dozen or so protesters or electioneers circling the police tape sneak under. The general gist of their call and response neither mourns nor even addresses the explosion or the injuries themselves. Instead, they indict a broad suite of vaguely interconnected abuses, perceived injustices, and zietgeistal happenstances which may as well have forced the bomber to stash and dash in the first place. By inference, it was a substanceless circum-ideology — immanent, viral and ever-advancing — which had crept through the perpetrator’s quiveringly vulnerable and blamelessly passive ear and shanghaied his nervous system into throwing the hapless lad onto the plunger and having him leg it deep into the bowels of Their underground movement.
It was difficult to tell if the protesters (or perhaps electioneers) were upset with the bombing or the hapless p.c. security detail surrounding the, at this point, only symbolically meaningful perimeter. For that matter it was difficult to tell if the sign-wavers were for or against the bombing itself. In fact, there seemed to be factions within the crowd; counter-protesters and affiliated protesters. Electioneering monitors in their pink vests. Police monitors in their yellow vests. All shoving and battling for position. The p.c.’s protecting themselves, the perimeter, and the protesters from each other. They would keep each other warm all morning with barked suggestions, pushing but not quite punching, and brunching on steaming coffees and hyper-vigilance of the p.c.’s nightstick trumpcard. There’s nothing like a little guerilla politics to make the less major concerns just melt away.
Rawlings startles to Barry Comm’s not unzealous pounding. Each impact causes plasmic orange pools to spread over his vision. Comm has the zeal or sadism of a true freshman, Rawlings thinks before lightly knocking his gratitude and shouting at the wall.
“We’re a.o.k. over here, Barry! Cease and desist on the knocking, buddy!”
“You got it Mr. Rawlings, Sir!”
Sincerity or sarcasm: Who could tell anymore and who cares. All that mattered was Young Barry Comm always kept up his end of the conversational bargain. Leave the guesswork in between words to the sensitives, idealists, and trendsetters who have the time to take everything personally. Guessing others’ intentions is about as useful as the traditional slog through the Oaks Bottom fens for the latest Ideaist Suicide. Let it rest, Citizens. They didn’t leap from the Sellwood Bridge to suffer the grappling hook. Their latest and last statement was meant to tangle in the swamp grass and bubble to the surface alongside the methane. The goodbye banner flapping from the bridge ledge is all we need to know. Leave the jumper and the indirect alike to their privacy. All we have each others’ words and actions, Rawlings. Words and actions. On the other hand, when you’re on the job, interpretation is impossible without evidence. You resist drawing conclusions from the banner. For all we know the jumper had overstepped a jealously guarded ideological boundary. We may find the telltale sap dent on the back of the head, provided by one of our city’s homicidally anti-social territorialists unwilling to cede a jot of their carefully fashioned scene to some pretender or poseur. Sure, join our ranks, pal, but leave your banner in the ashcan before knocking. ‘Your retro 99er jersey is quaint in that new-old hippy dippy way and, yeah man, back in the day we were on the same page or at least chapter in terms of agreeing on how broadly things, well, blew, and hey, well, we did a sprinkle of real quantifiable good there, didn’t we, pre-Roy that is, but we had mouths to feed, man, as in the port-side hootenanny may keep the fatcats’ grain elevators dry for a while but, again dude, earnestly need to eat something and so does my wife, best friend, and close neighbor and the only way I could see around was to establish my own brand, man, do a little small business-forward lobbying for myself to the tune of tricked out t-shirts, commie coffee shops, local-produce-only haute cuisine food carts, sustainable distilleries, etc., and co-op and unionize the holy Hell out of them man, let anyone who wants in in, but don’t dilute the brand, man, whatever you do. You’re beautiful, I mean that, but seriously, lose the banner.’ So they spam bomb and hack to protect patents, copyright, domain names, and their overall stylistic m.o. The D-town bombs may not be killing people, may just be a bit of muscle flexing to warn the wannabe’s with Monroe Doctrine egos not to squat too many floors of The Portland Building, not to buy up more food cart space on it’s perimeter, not to funk with our local weekly rag distribution by chaining down your own smear-printed broadside box in competitive perusal range of our own. Stay on your side of the line, man. Don’t think just because you’re getting play on Oregon Public Television’s Art Beat you’re immune from having your ass disappeared until suffering the bite of the grappling hook and coming up all pale and dimpled from the rocks and saps alike, and being unquestionably gill-choked, my man, unquestionably, so, well, you know, lose the jersey is what I’m driving at, yo.

“Said I’m good, Bare! Sober up will ya!”

The South Parkblocks below his dorm are dominated by spiritualists, psychics, drug dealers, vagabonds, P.S.U. students, armageddonists, street performers, low-end distillers, unlicensed speakeasies, nervous soccer tourists trawling for parking, prostitutes, and strolling lovers of every stripe.
“Democracy, Tiger. This is as close as it gets.”
A man dressed like a gondolier rolls by in a bicycle two stories tall. Two young men arm-in-arm point at the Old Portland Episcopal Church covered with new Roy campaign banners.* (*Though he has yet to file nor even rescinded the term limit yet again.) Tiger has fallen behind to leverage the bone with his foot.
“Priorities, Tiger my boy. Pry-OR-a-tees.”
Tonight he is even more big-hearted feeling for his fellow D-towners than usual. The Troutdale cover has been such tepid and watery soup to make meal of. This city night is necessary sustenance. He listens to the megaphone electioneering coming from park pulpits, office towers, and campaign vans. The wood awnings of the food carts clap to and wafts from the simmer pots get to hawking in our noses then guts. Crow caw rains down from the city scavengers droozling in sympathy. What we need, he thinks, is a blanketing of snow to go along with and a double-brandy nightcap from the safety of his licensed local.
Despite the cold he is wearing the slipper-shoes he’d so admired in the summertime bocce ball players. They, shoes and man, had such an air of comfort and ease in the world. No amount of D-town b.s. or eking out of a living could change the cush-assed style those leather downers imparted. Not only had Rawlings gotten the maker, model, and purveyor from the sockless and tanned gentlemen, he had become a semi-regular player during the six halcyonic summer weeks on the D-town Brady security detail. Though they were the same shoes that Swafford (chanced in the Parkblocks either sweet-talking or laying a rap on a Parkblocks girl* *Who could tell which.) had been so overjoyed to hap upon him wearing that after he indulged in a little off-the-clock piling on and called them “pretty frankly Euro-feminate” had said the next morning “You’ve grown fat and tan on that frankly pretty goddamn vacation-like Brady detail, Rawlings. Expect to see yourself in the borderlands early next pay period.” He held no grudge with the shoes. In fact, he wore them tonight hoping to roll a few rounds with the all-weather Bocceists who were at least smilingly tolerant during the a-heavy q & a’s blowing Jeff Smith’s job-creation record to Johnny Appleseed proportions. The cold and wet’d winnow some cracks into the leather but Rawlings could give a toss.
“Man needs to put some leisure on doesn’t he? Duty or no.”
He looked down for Tiger’s seconding or mere tolerance but he wasn’t there. Turning around he saw the dog not chewing on his bone but listening to the air. The last thing he would remember was the dog’s black-brindle hackles slowly climbing his spine, south to north, before he bared his teeth and began to growl.

As Rawlings tumbled through the air for a long two seconds he saw only Seven Foot Slim’s maroon sweater vest. It was so oversized Slim had to bunch about a foot’s worth of excess length up at his waist and tuck it under his St. Paul Rodeo Commemorative Belt Buckle. He saw that belt buckle plain as day: A little bronze bronc rider, knees bent and mid-air off the saddle, brandishing his hat in one hand and still holding the rope with the other. Rawlings, unthinking, had an unbidden insight. ‘Holding his hat makes no sense. That’s not something a bronc rider would do.’ His left hip impacted against cold cement just before his head met the corner of an iron park bench. In the timeless span of a micro-second before he passed out he thought ‘Tiger.’

What obvious clue could anyone provide at a library? Each action so mundane as to be suspicious therefore. Because isn’t the perfect cover the one which most describes necessity? This room fenestrated with dusty shelves surrounded by tables of computer-gaping zombies; humans making magnificently legitimate, frivolous, and desperate sport here; a social service agency/gaming parlor with that old school waft of academe: What could be more nakedly legitimate? And this was the sort of democratically open floor-planned space that defied secret corners or sly displays. There could be no whispers between stacks, no pass-n-cup of notes. All was yolk-and-white aglow with eco-friendly (but firm) halogen. Mothers could entertain their child’s romp and yowl in a pastelly nurturing corner full of wooden toys splayed on plush carpet. Teens had no compunction about horsing around, yelping, and being stunningly sexual for their years. The rest of the unclean, elderly, and otherwise occupied could hope all the racket at least provided little interstical zones of anonymity to creep into and pull the covers over with an oversize on The History of Military Flight – The Graphic Version or the latest headstone-sized large-print romance with 3D illustrations by Bradford Ann Darlingbird. Today’s public library was mustless, lively, and blatant.
No matter how convincing his cover, he was still the most suspicious person around. Not having a Kingdom address he had to register for and “clearly display” a visitor-worker badge. So there he is inside the plastic badge swinging from his chest with a ponytail version of the cover wig he now wears wild to accentuate his raving (but that is not so different from his, as he puts it, “really just unfathomable” radical 99’er days when his (now very ex-) wife was still showing she loved him by combing his hair with her hands at the door each matrimonial dawn before he blew off class and then work to, as he explained to her later, “tune into some pretty heavy peaceful protesting and networking, man.”) So unless he swaps out the wig and takes some pretty advanced milieu-adjustment steps (e.g.: the shorn, pastel-preppy, card-carrying Eastmoreland Golf and Racquet Club cover of Mssr. Kerwin White L.L.P. or Malcolm Luther Jiminez, the coal-faced would-be black man attempting to disguise he is actually a Troutdale Latino by wearing an outsized and blatantly crooked afro and affecting a ludicrous brand of Latin-tinged b-boy cadence; Rawlings’ poor imitation of each stereotype meeting in a serendipitous middle ground of the generic Moron’s Patois that could be tweaked to meet just about any non-Euro cover) dude will be locally unmistakable to the great majority of Troutdalians and shopper visitors who take advantage of the Kingdom Club Card (which doubles as a visitor badge) and its illusory trumping of Portland’s sales taxlessness via cold hard bill’n’coin payouts at the end of each purchase as if you hitting the number’s going out of style. Just stowing the wig in the glove box and shaving out of the rain bowl he keeps in the truck bed to a good crisp ship-shape won’t take the veteran C.I.’s bedraggle off him. On top of the subtle yellowing of his features and the crow scratch at the corner of his eyes, he blames the sheer man-hours he has spent in the surreptitious element, indoors and out. The chameleon cover has seeped under his skin and caked up around his joints. The pantomimic affectations, limps, twitches, accents, drawls, posturings, and limitless idiosyncratic add-ons have recalibrated his entire nervous system. On the rare occasion he listens to himself talking or catches a glimpse of his reflection in a D-town window he will startle at the strange vessel containing the still familiar down deep of his soul and crux.
But when he got fool nostalgic enough in a booze-down last night he shuffled behind the Safeway and entered the Johnny on the Pot with the hand-sized mirror nailed next to the upkeep log and tried to wade through the meadow fogs of fate and happenstance spanning this strange face and its vaguely remembered predecessor. He removed the loon-wig and tried to primp the salt and pepper mccoy into a semblance of bygone form but quickly gave up. Glum-faced, he reminded himself he is just enough of a sensitive to avoid anything in the ballpark of a wifely comb-down or smoothing. Disgusted, he then barely won the battle to not slate-cleaningly shave the stringy remainder clean off and wear the monk’s dome penitent to at least give himself the liar’s impression of having checked off a long-past chapter. Wigs sitting strangely on shorn heads in the same way the sleep-sagged vehicle appears slightly off.
But he will never be boozed to the point of not remembering himself before exiting the john. The joints will re-calibrate and he’ll put a subtle stagger filtered through intact pride into his gait; boozeville lite being an acceptable variation on the loony-bomb shuffle.
“Duty, Rawlings. Duty.”
And though he knows the only person who should be in Cherry Park at 3:14 a.m. is crane-necked Dmitri over at Babushka’s watching his beloved Dynamo Moscow live via satellite beneath the ceiling corner tube. So he wills little invisible (but palpable) smoke-and-stink signals up from his flats and pits that say ‘I’m a heavy in the lightweight division of loons. Go ahead. Look at me closer. I’m as incongruous as it gets out here in Troutdale Kingdom. I’m living out of a pick-up truck with my dog fer crissakes. I restitute at the library. Look how far I’ve fallen from my sweet embezzled high. Look what McMinnville State will do to a man.’
Any half-competant C.I.’d’ve fingered him for a peer from day one. A state or feddy? Half-possible. An agent of Them? Who knows. For all we know they don’t even have one. Moreover, they probably don’t even need one since all Cherry Park, Troutdaleans seem geniuses of the bland and likely cover. Whereever you turn there they are. Seven Foot Slim the over-patient admin or Rosanna In Excelcis the powdery and pious children’s librarian. The parade of diversely unsuspicious and so type they transcend type types. All blasted the cleaner in this brain-scratching eco-lighting.
It had been har-har to Swafford’s hardy to throw him the blandest cover imaginable. Pastel children’s books, earnest how-to’s and histories, overtly sexual knitting and crochet books, technicolor pop-culture winkfests, little plastic boxes full of the thousands of movies not even tangentially about cuisine, sports, or spying; all in the meat hooks of this indelicate man with raccoon eyes, crosshatched skin, Wildman hair, and an Igor limp gifted from the stray bullet set-up-shop in his scrambled right knee.
“Ew, Sarah? … That library dude…He was staring right at you.”
Whispers through the adjacent aisle from the M.H.C.C. girls.
“Yeah, Sarah. I think he’s in luuuuuuv. He’s gonna stalk you.”
A concordance of furtive giggles.
“Shut up! Stalkers don’t work at the library. Way too obvious.”
‘This Sarah’s no fool,’ he thought. ‘I’m way more subtle.’

The library closes at 6 p.m. Saturday evening. His co-workers flash smiles and drop cordialities all around him. He grunts replies and startles at his co-workers’ voices, his ponytail whipping from shoulder to shoulder. ‘McMinnville does this to a man,’ is his slouching apology. The god-given, life-granted raccoon eyes come in handy for this effect. William Walton is skilled at mediating the divide.
“Good work in the shelves tonight, Mr. Pauling. Do you have plans?”
Pauling sticks to gruff, gravel-voiced monosylabs with traces of resignation and cynicism. He is every bit life’s likely loser, all slouches and resignation. Just the type who may need to let loose about his fringe politics in the bed of his oddly shaped truck once in a cathartic while.
“You know…Grande Ronde. Craps. Slots. Cards. You know… the uzge. Loss. Net damn loss.” Then one long mouth sigh.
The Co-workers go still. Rosanna In Excelses appears stricken. Walton is always quick to kibosh the pall.
“Well, good luck to you, Sir, and to all of us,” swiping the alarm card/door lock “a good night.”
The beeping alarm follows their puffs and foot clicks into the Cherry Park cold.

He has no tails or surveillance planned. Cruising the Kingdom’s three main thoroughfares has been a dead dry gulch. Rolling north down 238th to the Troutdale Interstate Truck Stop and changing in into Martin Luther Jiminez to hustle the cashiers, short-haul drivers, and fellow prostitutes for the slightest morsel of intel on comings and goings, delivery addresses, and any Kingdom newcomers has yielded hollow contradictions, unverifiable claims, and meatless bones. And Christ, no one, male prostitute and C.I. alike, should have to work the truck lanes in nothing but pressed tan slacks, a yellow polo, and a baby blue cardigan in the wind tunneling ice of late-September gorge air. Nor would it do any good to roll back up the hill to Olde Towne to hit one of the three bars to hobnob and flirt, extract the smallest crumb of intrigue out of one of the retail and consignment shop owners, antiquarians, hair dressers, salon workers, popular art gallerists, out-on-the- town truckers, local farmers, or seasonal workers from everyl land north of the prime meridian who’d chosen not to California this fall but stick it out for the rumored bumper apple, pear, sassafrass, hay, pumpkin, cranberry, and holiday tree crops. Blood from a stone and whatnot. Law of diminishing returns. An excuse for a decent meal out and a walkabout in the chaos of his beloved D-town.

Rawlings and Tiger are beneath the canopy of the boulevard’s worth of old-growths stretching down The Parkblocks South. Tiger is off-leash and juggling a rawhide bone in his mouth. Rawlings holds a hot pawful of Thai curry-coconut soup in a red-white container decorated with the animals of the Chinese zodiac.* (“Can you double bowl me?” he’d said to the counter jockey. “I’m gonna drink this, not spoon.” The man behind the counter had smiled placidly and obeyed. ‘Such things make a customer loyal,’ Rawlings thought. ‘That and the generous amounts of lemongrass.’ He took a protracted inhalation from the steaming pull-top hole. Tiger looked up with questions and returned to juggling the bone.) The pavement slipped away behind them and the city unfolded before them. To stroll into the bannered and sparkling fall night of an open city at the end of an election year spike in The Bombing Campaign? To have that certain sort of lame duck session joie de vivre. To bask in this interim of oh so heavenly threat! Of romantic redoubt! Of a void violently competed for! Let the threat of blooming fire – rhetorical or actual – color our cloud-pasty faces. Dance down the sidewalks in the un-syncopated tap of the superstitious who would ward off the would-be screaming daemons of pavement clapping debris. Push our bodies in tight in some speakeasy with renegade notions about smoking bans. Would that no one had to suffer to achieve such jet-plummeting closeness. Would that no one had to be unjustly treated in the name of this…happiness. This absolutely un-warlike siege without filed candidates, shadowy proxies, and chameleonic adversaries. And, forgive him, but credit to Them for, however politically expedient, keeping non-combatant casualties impressively low but not so un-lethal as to take the romance out of a good huddling in one of the little safehouses, bunkers, and foxholes of solace and pleasure dotted high and low about D-town, even underground, especially the one’s with like renegade notions about indoor pets. Yes! Let the perfume of catastrophe push D-towners and visitors alike within a plumber’s reach of one another’s pores. Let us be given the chance to have a good down deep whiff of one another again. Stipend and tax-flatter those wanting no part of it to move to Beaverton and The Couv.* (This much Duck-wise Mayor Roy had at least done.) Christ, he’d been in the Kingdom for far too long.