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Frankenstein on the Cusp of Something

Contents

1. Frankenstein Doesn't Play Ball

2. Frankenstein's Trip

3. Mud

4. Frankenstein Flies

5. Frankenstein Loves Asphalt

6. Life on a Pinkie

7 The Hamsters of Lark

8. Frankenstein at Sea

9. To Whom It May Concern

10. Things Get Worse

11. Frankenstein's Guttersnipe

12. A Little Lam

13. A While in a Willow

14. Hanging on Tight

15. No

16. The Death of Frankenstein

17. Something Ever After

Chapter One

Frankenstein Doesn't Play Ball

Frankenstein sat near you in the fifth grade. You've forgotten him. If he played on your kickball team, he stood so far out in the right field weeds that you couldn't see him. No one in the history of the game ever booted one out that far. He was safe there. He could think his thoughts.

He wasn't safe in the lunch line. You stepped on his foot and didn't notice. You jabbed him with a back swing of your elbows, the punch line of a joke he didn't hear. You left him with no place to sit except with the girls. He remembers that. He remembers you.

He remembers high school worst of all. Same deal but no girls. He still played obscure positions in obligatory ball games. He never sank a basket, never made it to first base, never knew what to do when the center hiked the ball. It didn't seem to matter what he did. Usually he just stood there. Once, in gym, during a basketball scrimmage, the ball came into his hands. You loomed over him, huffing and puffing, preventing any throw or movement. He looked up into the hairy maw of your armpit and said, "You want it that bad? Take it." He handed you the ball. Remember that? Your dash to the basket lacked its prior vigor and self-sure drive. You looked back as you ran, and you ran as if you had water in your shoes. He noticed that as he stood there and everybody else galloped down to the other end of the court.

Somebody might remember the time he puked in the hall between classes. Somebody might remember the time in the cafeteria when he slipped in somebody else's tapioca, fell beneath his own ravioli, green beans, creamed corn, juice. Somebody might remember the empty seat in the SAT exam. Frankenstein forgot to go. At the moment the proctor said, "You may now begin," Frankenstein was lying under a thicket of laurel, wondering if there was a God.

While waiting for the next SAT exam to come around, he held a few jobs . He hosed the dog dew out of kennel cages until somebody told him what he smelled like. He dried cars at a car wash until the skin came off his hands. He was the janitor of a big Catholic church until he applied full-strength Mr. Clean to the grime of an ancient crucifix. The paint wiped right off. He actually had Christ's blood on his hands while a priest blessed him out. He just stood there feeling stupid and guilty. Stuff like that happens to Frankenstein.

Nails bend under Frankenstein's hammer. Toilet paper has never ripped straight for him. Computers crash. Silent crowds give him hiccups. Dirt seeks him out, attaches itself where he can't see it but others can. His father left him before he graduated from kindergarten.

He went to college, barely crawled out. Somehow they let him graduate without a major. Then his diploma didn't have his name on it. Somebody in Registration had thought his name a joke. They get a lot of forms filled out for Mickey Mouse, Al Einstein, Chuck Wagon, Moe Rhon. Nobody's really named Frankenstein, so they left it blank. Before he took the diploma and photo ID to Registration, he lost both. Last he saw of them, they were on his mother's Oldsmobile. Not in. On. Registration, personified by a pasty-faced gum-chewing lady with bright red hair and a New York accent, wouldn't give him a new one. It's kinda like a blank check, she said. Anybody can write their name in there. And it's kinda not like a blank check because you can't cancel it. Somebody out there had a nice new diploma. Frankenstein didn't.

Love? It's not in the cards for Frankenstein. His nose, mashed to a mailbox at an early age, sits off to the left at the top, off to the right at the bottom. One ear definitely sticks out a little too far. It looks like it could flap. His teeth buck out a bit, and there's a dark gap between the incisors. His mustache looked pretty wispy for the its first two years. He grew a beard to hide the lack of meat in his chin, but somehow it got longer without getting thicker. Maybe his eyes are a quarter-inch too close together. He's worn glasses since the fourth grade, which only magnifies the weirdness of his eyes. His pupils are too dark to read. He seems to be hiding behind them. His mother described his hair as the color of a mule looking the other way. She's from West Virginia. She knows these things.

And he's short. Modeled after the common concrete block, he's squareish, open-faced and seemingly just knee-high. He's the kind of person you could practically trip over. But he's quick. He stays out of the way. He knows you won't see him. With your head up there in the rarefied air of conceit and self-concern, you don't notice much of what goes on below your haughty sight line. He's essentially invisible, and he knows it. He sees you coming and keeps to the side. You go by without noticing. Waitresses do the same. Right to his face they say, "Oh, I didn't see you."

Funny how he has the opposite effect when he hitch-hikes. Drivers see him on the side of the road, standing behind his dirty white duffel bag. He doesn't hold out a thumb. He just shows them the palms of his hands. Cars pull right over, at least on good days. He tosses his bag onto the back seat, hops in front and off they go. Sometimes it's a drunk, sometimes a homosexual, sometimes a Jesus freak, a lonely person, a sleepy driver, an angel who can't help but help. Once it was a guy AWOL from the army and just as sad as could be. Once it was some yoga maniacs on their way to a festival. Once it was nine or ten Mexicans in an old Lincoln. Once it was a guy who had a rifle across his lap. One guy had no legs. A lady with a big yellow airplane propeller on the back seat, one end sticking out the window, had no voice. She had to honk through a little hole in her throat, but that didn't stop her. She yakked and yakked and yakked, even laughed, even sort of started to cry. Frankenstein went right along, taking cues when to laugh, look surprised or give a moan of sympathy - empathy even; he found himself beginning to imitate her huffy little honk. But he never knew if she was talking about her yellow propeller, her throat problem, the price of sow bellies, the weather or what. When it came time to leave the car, he kissed her hand. Her honk became a coo. As he pulled his duffel bag from the bag seat, he ran his fingers along the propeller, the only time he'd ever touched one. For the rest of his life he would squint at any low-flying aircraft to see if the propeller is yellow, to see if it's her.

It's the Mexicans who drop him off across the street from a bowling alley. Big red letters across one wall say "Bowling." A flag over the door says "Bowling," too, its letters laden with blue icicles. This is in Arizona. The building is a refrigerator in a vast spill of lava. Frankenstein goes in. High-pitched thunder and bleating pop music fill the place. He hasn't bowled since the eighth grade, when he quickly learned that it was not his sport. It's safe to try again. He's not going to see how well he can bowl. He's going to see how long he can milk one game.

Can he bowl in sandals? A woman doesn't think so. She's just the cleaning lady sweeping up behind the counter, but she takes a look at his feet. They're filthy in their tire-rubber sandals. She hands him a pair of purple bowling shoes with a zippy little yellow lightning bolt across the instep. "You got socks?" she asks.

"Sure do." They're a thousand miles away, in Delaware, at his mother's house, neatly folded in a drawer, just in case.

"Good. You gotta wear socks."

No he doesn't. He sets up camp at Lane 21, stuffs his naked, swollen feet into the shoes. They don't like it in there. It's hot and stuffy. But he knows that if he bowls in his Guatemalan Goodyears, he'll leave tread marks on the hardwood floor. He remembers a bank teller on the outskirts of Chicago. He left tread marks on the linoleum of her bathroom. Until that point, things had been going well.

He relaxes before choosing a ball. He thinks about it before giving it a roll. When he finally develops a satisfying strategy, he prances on up to the line and lets 'er go. The ball walks a tightrope down the middle of the lane, plows straight into the center pin. Everybody topples each other over like clowns.

Frankenstein fills with a scary satisfaction. He really doesn't want to get the knack of this. He doesn't want to be a bowler. He stalls around for a long while, then tries a shot with is right hand. rather than his usual left. The ball sweeps wide, veers in, attacks from the side. The pins fall with a clatter of urgency.

He aims for the gutter but the ball won't go in. He sticks a wad of gum to it. No problem. It just rolls a little funny, a Caribbean two-step, tickwhump/ tickwhump/ tickwhump, all the way. They shouldn't all fall down on a shot like that, but they do as the ball pivots on its sticky little pink spot. He rolls it regular one time, tippy-toeing forward, sliding on his lead foot right up to the line. Even that works. A gathered crowd gasps with amazement, cheers at each strike. One ball to go and it's a perfect game.

The hush presses on him. Knowing he will fail, he refuses to do it right off. No time limit in bowling, right? Time segments. It stops and goes. It stops while Frankenstein goes to the bathroom. With his ball. He goes alone, assumes the solitary stall, a dented, black-enameled room neither clean nor dirty. His belt remains buckled, his zipper zipped. The global weight in his lap almost sparkles - pretends to sparkle - with golden flecks on a field of dusty black. He caresses it for the glory it has given him. It is so round and heavy, a model of the world, of heads, of atoms, the planets and distant suns, blow-fish, helium balloons, cantaloupes, milk-laden breasts, globs burped up in lava lamps, bubbles, cannon ammo, the dots of I's, monkey-fist knots - so much depends on the form of bowling balls. No wonder the pins fall! How could they resist? Who are they to stand when the holy sphere rolls in? Frankenstein uses spit to clean a spot on the ball, then curls his torso forward to set his lips to the cool plastic surface. So much depends.

The bathroom door swings open, swings shut. Feet appear below the stall door. Tutti-frutti bowling shoes, slightly duck-towed. Their owner says, "You all right in there?"

It's a woman. A big one by the sound of her.

Frankenstein says, "No problem."

"You got a ball in there?" The shoes don't move.

Frankenstein pleads guilty.

Big pause. Then, "I'm sorry sir. No balls in the men's room."

Frankenstein refrains from the obvious comment. He holds in his lap the model of the world, the universe and all that's equidistant from a point. A twenty-nine-thirtieth's perfect game awaits his final roll. He cools his forehead on the ball, a slow rock from left temple to right. He says nothing. It's her decision. The ball, so to speak, is in her court.

"Sir?...Sir, I'm afraid I must insist."

It's still in her court. She can't get rid of it unless he talks. He feels his bowels and bladder swell. They know what toilet stalls are for, so, here, atop the round-holed seat, they assume what they've been brought here to do. Like hounds in a cage at the edge of the field, they're ready to cut loose. Frankenstein would love to drop his drawers and accommodate them. He'd like to a lot. But he has a bowling ball in his lap and danger at the door. If he puts the ball down - between his feet is the only space - she might see it and snatch it away. Then he'll have to go out and confront her. On full bowels and bladder, maybe even with his pants down. He doesn't want to confront her. He wants to take a dump, a leak, and be done with it. He wants to go back to Lane 21 and finish his game.

"Really, sir," she says, not unkindly. "Either give me the ball or I call the cops."

Nice try, thinks he. What's the crime? Taking a bowling ball into a men's room? Wouldn't that make a dandy court case. Almost worth getting arrested for. He'd insist on a full jury. He'd call in the TV cameras. He'd represent himself, present charts, diagrams, photographs, the single piece of solid evidence, the gold-flecked ball, plucked from obscurity and raised to legal fame, right up there with O.J.'s gloves and Liz Borden's ax. When the woman again says, "I'm going to call the cops," Frankenstein thinks, good. But when she says, "I really mean it," he knows she won't.

He takes the easy way out. He surrenders. He just rolls the ball under the door and says, "Save it for me, wouldja? Lane 21." He's glad he doesn't have to see her gloat.

She picks it up by the finger holes, strides out the door. Frankenstein does what he had to do. It doesn't take long.

Back at Lane 21, he finds, to utter horror, that his ball is nowhere in sight and that a bowling league team has set up camp. Four flabby people have re-set the pins, done away with Frankenstein's score sheet, rolled a few balls down his lane, busted his kharma like...like.... They've lit cigarettes, shed shoes and jackets, draped their socks over the back of the long, fiberglass bench, dangled a large, stainless steel crucifix, of all things, from the overhead projector. The bowlers' names glow on the overhead screen: Marilynn, Bob, Bill, Debbie. These people are plain vanilla to the core, but they've moved in and taken over. According to a red-on-blue nylon jacket, they are the Cindy's Country Skillet Sharks. They have seized his territory. If bowling alleys had historians and if these invading hordes had left any evidence of him, Frankenstein would be history.

What's he going to do - take on four flabby people? Not only do they fancy themselves sharks, but they have a whole bowling league behind them. Frankenstein's alone, a wimp out of Delaware. The hierarchy of authority here begins with the woman in the tutti-frutti bowling shoes. Above her, he supposes, are the police. Above the police are their grandfathers, the Supreme Court. Above them is God, if any. Given the incident in the bathroom, the embarrassment of police action, and the big, steel cross, Frankenstein has no hope. He has lost his lane, his ball and his last shot at a perfect game. Grounds for murder? He figures it depends whether the judge bowls. He treats himself to the image of a black-clad man billowing up to the lane line like a thundercloud, delivering his shiny black ball like a finely honed legal brief.

So Frankenstein can start a ruckus or just pay up and move on. Paying won't be easy. The lady at the counter is his friend in the tutti-frutti shoes. Now he knows more than her feet and ankles. She has the shoulders and broad back of a heavy-duty bowler. Her hips and thighs show signs of diet grazed at the bowling alley snack bar, fat rendered suet by lackadaisical exercise. Her face shows a certain ingrained sadness, perhaps a touch of shame for reasons he cannot guess. He feels a little sorry for her. Her face, he is sure, has never, at least since childhood, been gazed on as an object of beauty, an object of desire. If a man ever told her she was beautiful, he lied. For reasons that cannot be called reason, men avoid the pointed nose, the concave face, the down-turned lip line, the fatted underchin, the overbite of a suppressed IQ.

Frankenstein walks away from his lane, approaches the flier-and-warning-strewn glass counter. Socks required. No practice frames. Balls waxed: $1.00. He leans into the counter, grips its cold chrome edge, looks up at the lady and says, "Nice eyes."

Taken aback, she shows surprise, then a second thought, the possibility that she might indeed have nice eyes. Frankenstein says, "I like brown," but that pushes it too far. She has indeed been told she's beautiful, it seems. Someone said that, ejaculated, and left. Now she looks at Frankenstein as if it had been him.

"Lane 21?" she says in cold business terms. He knows she really means to say, "You the guy with the ball in the bathroom?" From behind the counter she lifts his sandals and score sheet. "One game," she says. "One shoes. Plus tax. Five fifty-eight." She scans the lanes behind him, her clay-brown eyes unavailable for argument.

"I didn't get to finish," Frankenstein says. "The Sharks took my lane."

She glances at the score sheet, checks a machine that counts the frames of all the lanes. "Says twenty-nine frames here. 'less you were mighty lucky, that's two games. You trying to tell me it was less than one? Come on. Wha'do I look, stupid?"

Eighty-two percent pissed is what she looks. He's sure she's been pursuing the perfect game since she was waist-high to a bowling ball. He walks in out of nowhere and does it - boom, boom, boom - almost. No wonder she wanted his ball so bad. She probably thinks there's something about it. He searches her heavy, concave face for signs of stupidity. It's in there somewhere, he can tell. He wonders how it is possible to see ignorance in the topography of a face. He almost feels like asking, but he knows he'd be barking up the wrong tree. He just wants his sandals back. "Damned near a perfect game," he says. "Look."

She does, giving the score sheet but a flicker of attention. "Yeah, right," she says. "You come in off the street, bowl 29 strikes, then take your ball into the bathroom. A house ball. And house shoes. Sure. I'll let you get away with five fifty-eight if you cough it up now and..." - she drops to a whisper - "...never show your miserable ass in this bowling alley again."

Maybe she is ugly. To the core. Ugliness on the hoof. Ugliness defined, the very essence of the stuff. Right before his eyes and miserable ass. In a way, it's an honor. Why hurry through the experience? Better to linger in her shadow, savor the moment, milk it for all it's worth. He searches for her eyes, but they dodge him. They are beautiful, as all eyes are, and they accent her less palatable parts. They float like little brown lifeboats in sea of bloodshot moonlight. He wants to save those lifeboats. He knows what it's like behind them. "I'm sorry about the ball," he says. "I didn't want anybody to take it."

"Still gotta pay five fifty-eight." She keeps her eyes high in their sockets, pretending to check scores on the bank of screens above the lanes.

What's he supposed to do? Stand there and keep refusing to pay? Abandon his sandals, walk away, out the door in bowling shoes, forcing her to do something painful? Cough up the five-fifty-eight and call it a day? Tough choices all of them, each pitting his ego against hers. He wishes he knew the magic formula that would enlighten her eyes and let her love him just because for a moment he had loved a bowling ball that for 29 frames had done exactly what bowling balls are supposed to do. She runs a bowling alley! She wears bowling shoes to work! She probably knows the names of the ten best bowlers in America and their averages. Can she feel nothing above disdain for the house ball that made good? She says, "Five fifty-eight or I call the cops."

Frankenstein forks it over. Six bucks, keep the change. He pulls off his bowling shoes, tied, and holds them to her low and not quite far enough. Just as her fingers touch them, he retracts them an invisible bit, pulling her an invisible bit closer. He leans in and slides her a whisper audible only because it's on a frequency not reached by the rolling thunder and gentle explosions of bowling games. He says, "Want to know the secret?"

He senses her breath stop short. Their eyes meet. They are just as brown as can be, shot with black radii and glazed with melted glacier ice. The shoes between them conduct a certain juice, a voltage sufficient to make his face buzz hot. "Just roll the ball," he says in a sincere and caressing tone. "Just let it go."

She jerks back as if he he's just nipped her with a hickey. His sandals fly from her hand as if bursting with roaches. "Get the fuck out of here," she says, eyes burning. "Just get the fuck out."

With great relief and no regrets, young Frankenstein steps out of the stale cold air and into the warm humus of a summer's afternoon. The glass door closes on the explosions of devastated pins and the relentless bleating of popular earwash. Frankenstein will never bowl again, of that he is sure, not if he has to do it in a bowling alley. He wonders how far he'd get if he invented cross-country bowling. Would people bowl in the woods if their balls drifted across pine needles and silently toppled logs into a bed of moss? Would they know they were having fun if they weren't awash in pop tunes and parting with cash? Would the lady with the brown eyes and tutti-frutti shoes find happiness in a place that didn't need its rules posted? So many questions for just one bowling alley, but Frankenstein must move on.

Chapter Two

Frankenstein's Trip

In West Virginia, Frankenstein rode four feet from death. To save on gas, the driver of a rusty, yellow Yugo slipstreamed an eighteen-wheeler almost all night long. He tucked his little car into the relative vacuum behind the truck and let it pull him through Appalachia. They rode so close to the bumper that Frankenstein could see individual flecks of grit where the one working headlight shined hard and close. The vast, towering back of the truck filled the little windshield. It seemed to move in slow motion, a surreal, neon monolith cut off from the night that sped by around it. Someone had fingered "Wash Me" in the grit, but no one had. More grit had almost filled in the letters. Frankenstein just stared at the short, time-worn message. He wished he could lower the windshield, lean out and write, "Frankenstein was here." The truck was certainly close enough, and Frankenstein certainly had the time. But he feared he wouldn't need to write that message. If the truck just touched the brakes, Frankenstein's face would have left a graphic impression on its back door, his and the face of the tightwad at the wheel. All night long he nodded off, even in sleep assuming he'd meet his maker with a dirty face and nothing but nubs where his teeth used to be. Each time his head tilted forward, he snapped awake and for a terrifying second forgot that he and the truck were headed in the same direction. This continued until the shaky glow of false dawn, when the Yugo ran out of gas.

In Georgia, on a straight state highway through fields of soy, a black Firebird thundered by. Flames graced its hood and front fenders. As it whooshed past, an eight-foot orange rat snake leaped up out of the pavement, its spine crushed. In its horrific throes, it flitted as lightly as a butterfly and came right at Frankenstein. Aghast, he abandoned his duffel bag and scrambled away. The snake's agonized contortions wrenched it into a flapping, knee-high, upper-case W, a lower-case a, a Q, a g, a frantic S, a diving n, a withering j, a weak u, and finally a tilde draped across Frankenstein's bag. If it spelled something, Frankenstein didn't catch it. He was backing up fast, sucking in air through a constricted throat, screaming inwardly as if it were his own spine, his own ineffable anguish. The mashed nerves did not let the snake die. Its tail twitched and its rust-colored head, as blunt as a bullet, convulsed to the side as if it might lick its wound with its little, red forked tongue. The white, ribbed roof of its mouth was as horrid as the underbelly of a cockroach. When it finally stopped, pale goo oozed out. Frankenstein threw up. For a long, long time he sat twenty feet away, spitting and wiping salt water from his eyes. His duffel bag had snake goo on it. If the bag hadn't contained everything he owned, he would have walked away from it. He could have lived without his dirty underwear, but he had a letter to his sister in there. It was over twenty pages long - pages on paper place mats from diners, segments of paper trash from the side of the road, napkins, even a regular postcard featuring the biggest truck stop in all of Arkansas. He kept meaning to buy a notebook and transcribe it all to a coherent whole, but notebooks never crossed his path, and he kept thinking of stuff to say. Now it all lay under a dead snake from the Peach Tree State. It took a couple of hours to become a reasonably normal situation. Then he crept forward, yanked his bag from under the snake, and wiped the worst of the goo off on a tuft of grass.

In Missouri he kept thinking about home. He imagined his bed with clean sheets smelling of a thunderstorm. He conjured up an impossible trove of chocolate chip cookies. A mockingbird tootles its repertoire as he snoozes in a hammock in the dense shade of a sugar maple. His mother brings him great books and calls him dear and has nothing to complain about. At night he watches hilarious TV shows, and a girlfriend he doesn't quite recognize comes over to stick her tongue in his ear and whisper things in a Swedish accent. Mid-state he crossed the highway and started hitching back the way he'd come. But before long, he thought of the damp, gray sheets of his unmade bed and his mother's high-pitched opinion of this, the dearth of edibles in the kitchen, the brutal noise of the neighbors' lawn mowers, his mother reminding him of certain facts, a girl with cold fingers and a tendency to whine. He crossed the highway again and wondered what it must be like in Utah.

The Swedish girl stayed with him for a long time. In Michigan, early winter, a fat guy asked about her. Was she cute? Did she have long legs? What did she wear in the summer? Was she blonde everywhere? What, exactly, was she like in bed? Frankenstein made up all kinds of stuff. He made up stuff about her sister, too. And her girl cousins who came to visit from the old country. He took the man on America's most erotic canoe ride, across a lake, down a river and over a waterfall. Everyone was killed but him. The man mashed down on the brakes, sending the car swerving and screeching across the road. "Get the fuck outta here," the man said, angry in his disappointment. Frankenstein got right out. He stood there as the car sped away, his duffel bag in the back seat. This was on the Upper Peninsula. They hadn't passed a town in hours. He didn't remember seeing another vehicle. He started walking in the same direction he'd been going in the car. He thought about the Swedish girl all the way. He wished he had a Swedish girl to travel with, a real one. If they got stuck walking across the Upper Peninsula, every couple of miles they could go into the woods and make love on a bed of pine needles. It wouldn't be so bad. But he didn't have a Swedish girl. All he had was sore feet and sense of worsening chill. Still, he couldn't complain. After walking for most of the day, he found his duffel bag on the side of the road. Things tended to balance out like that. Not that he'd trade a Swedish girl for a duffel bag with a snake goo stain, but it certainly could have worked out worse. Frankenstein doesn't complain.

In Texas Frankenstein found a perfect place to sleep - a sloppy pile of hay under a broad, lone tree at the corner of a pasture. It wasn't dark yet, but he wasn't going to pass up sleeping quarters this good. He thought it would be a nice place to do his plastic bag trick. He does this sometimes, lies down in a comfortable, private place and puts his head in a plastic bag. Alone in there, he thinks about home a long time ago. On the wings of a deepening buzz, he can take himself back to the sunny age of five, a time when once his father knocked over a glass of milk at the dinner table. Like fanged slime, the milk lurched from its cave, stretching at his mother, slithering into her lap faster than she could back away. She screamed and leaped up, sputtering fire and crackling with little black lightning bolts. Daddy, silent, fuming, rose from the table, stomped quietly to the back door, slammed it so hard the house boomed. His mother's anger, as wild as wasps, attacked not only daddy but little Frankenstein, his big sister, and all the other vile, useless subspecies of the world. Growling bad words from the top of her throat, she attacked the milk with a dish towel, wrung its neck at the sink, came back for more, rubbed the table beyond all visible milk, rinsed the towel again, wrung it, rinsed it, wrung it, folded it into a tight little wad, dropped it into the trash can under the sink, then removed the white trash bag, twisted its neck, tied it shut, carried it outside like a dead thing, dropped it into a bigger trash bag and tied it shut. Then she went upstairs and took a long, long shower. Daddy didn't come back, not even after dark. Frankenstein snuggled with his sister that night, both of them listening to the dirge of crickets, waiting for the back door to open again and trying not to wrinkle the bedspread. Somehow, next morning, he knew to go look in the shed. That's what he thinks about most when he does his plastic bag trick. It's an old habit now, but he still thinks about how it must have felt to lie there in a dusky shed, stifling among tools and old paint cans. He thinks about the last sound his father heard, the same rhythmic crinkling, so soothing at first, so slow, then faster as he gasps at the humid warmth of his own exhalation. As he breathes more deeply, the moist plastic compresses against his cheeks and forehead, then expands away. He does this until he gets dizzy and desperate for breath. Then he removes the bag, sucks in delicious air and pants himself to sleep. When he did this on the bed of hay in Texas, he emerged from the bag to find a black and white cow standing there looking at him, mulling its cud and breathing through its huge, wet nose in the heavy way of someone slightly short of oxygen.

Up in Canada, he got hit with a bag of garbage - not some little litter sack but a thirty-gallon Glad formerly owned by someone who smoked Craven A's, had a baby and ate lots of fried chicken. The bag had launched from the back of a pick-up truck and scored a bull's-eye. He saw it coming for about two seconds. It hovered beside the little truck, an impossible asteroid with Frankenstein written all over it. It exploded when it hit him, sent him reeling westward and then down to the sandy asphalt. This was in sunflower country, middle of the summer. Frankenstein was just thinking what a wonderful place it was, an infinite sea with waves of sunny faces. If he had known how to paint, he would have set up an easel right there. But Frankenstein couldn't paint the broad side of a barn. Suddenly, that didn't matter. He was covered with household trash. Later, upon reflection, he thought he might have learned something from the experience.

Also up in Canada, coming into Vancouver, he got picked up by a drunk percussionist in a giant Oldsmobile. What a jolly fellow! How he loved his rye. Drank it from a leather-covered flask. He was driving all the way from Moose Jaw just to play the cymbals in a Rossini overture. It didn't pay much, he said, but it was easy and there was nothing more satisfying in the universe. He described it in poetic detail, the swelling excitement, the build-up of tension, the climactic q'tidzsch of the cymbals. Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, for example. Had Frankenstein ever heard it? Not that he could recall, not the cymbals, anyway.

"Not the cymbals," the man gasped with utter incredulity. "Not the cymbals." He gripped his flask between his legs and fished around in the glove compartment until he found the right cassette. "Listen," he said. With broad, drunken sways of his arm, he led an invisible orchestra toward orgasm. As the big moment approached, his eyes teared over and his jaw thrust toward the horizon. As the cymbals clashed in what even Frankenstein recognized as a sword fight, the man punched the air.

"Those cymbals," he said when it was all over. "See what I mean?"

Frankenstein saw it. He knew Rossini and could imagine cymbals in this man's hands as they burst with all the glory of the Italian renaissance. He asked if the man could sneak him into the concert hall, back stage, to watch it close-up. The man said he could do better than that. He'd let Frankenstein play them. Right there in the concert. Q'tidzsch

Frankenstein knows better than to say, "Yeah, right." He's been around. He knows some of the stuff that can happen. But he also has a certain sixth sense for situations where he's likely to screw up. This is one of them. Out of respect for the music, he warns the man. With a wet, flabby-lipped embouchure, the man discounts the danger. He'll be right there. Frankenstein will feel the rhythm. When the man points at him, Frankenstein will hit the cymbals three times in a row. They listen to the overture on a cassette. The man marks the rhythm with bouncy fingers, indicates the big moment coming up. Frankenstein can feel it. Yes, q'tidzsch , q'tidzsch , q'tidzsch . It will be easy.

They walk into the concert hall as if they own the place. The man's pretty well soused, but he finds the rack of white shirts and black pants and has Frankenstein suit up. They practice a couple of time. The man warns him not to hit them dead-on because they'll stick together, locked in suction. Frankenstein works up a big sweat as he loiters just off-stage, two steps away from the percussion section,. The cymbals stand on a special rack. The drunk percussionist does just fine with a series of gongs, raps and clicks. He's almost dancing to the rhythm. Frankenstein can hear the cymbals part coming up. The man nods for him to come forward. The conductor does not notice as Frankenstein takes up the cymbals, but the entire audience has their eyes on him, the only guy in the orchestra with a beard half a yard long. The big moment arrives. The man punches the air at the moment the conductor whips the percussion section with his baton. Frankenstein slams the cymbals with all his might. Q'tidzsch . They don't stick together. Rather, they invert. The man doesn't notice. He punches the air. Frankenstein has no time to think. He slams them again. Klank. He now has everyone's complete attention. The orchestra plays on but with a clear shift in intensity. it isn't the Italian renaissance anymore. It's deepest, darkest Africa. The conductor stands there like a scarecrow, his mouth open, his baton frozen. It takes two seconds for the next downbeat to come around. The conductor whips his baton weakly, experimentally, as if only half hoping to repeat an experience. Klank. And with that, job done, Frankenstein places the cymbals on their special rack. He turns and walks off stage. As the orchestra plays on, he hangs up his white shirt and black pants, pulls on his bibbed overalls, and walks right out of the place. He will always wonder what became of the drunk percussionist. He probably never played in a concert again. He probably crept back to Moose Jaw, where until this day he sits sipping rye and not listening to Rossini.

Coming down the coast of California through a corridor of redwoods, Frankenstein got into the car of a woman who cried and cried and cried. It took him a few minutes to realize this. Though her eyes were brimming when he got in, she was smiling. Frankenstein took it for a warm and loving look. He hoped it wasn't that because she looked about fifty-eight years old. He had a way of attracting post-menopausal women. When he was a little boy, they used to come over to his family's table at restaurants. One lady buttered his corn-on-the-cob for him, right there in public. Another smeared spit on his cowlick. They've been chasing him ever since. So when this one smiled at him with those bleary eyes, he kept his own eyes pointed elsewhere. She didn't say anything for a long time. When she sniffled and mopped up under her left eye, he noticed. He suspected a trap but asked her if she was all right. She gave him the damnedest nod. It tried to say yes but at the same time shook no. Her golden earrings, fancy things that looked like wind chimes, clinked as they bobbled around. She sniffled again, hard, and dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her blouse. Frankenstein offered to drive. She shook her head, choked a bit, kept both hands on the wheel. Increasingly upset, Frankenstein begged her to say something. He tried guessing if the problem was love, sickness, death, age, money. She just shook her head. She moaned through her gritted teeth and sniffled as hard as a tub draining the last of its bath water. She looked like she might bite her lower lip off. Spasms heaved her belly and chest. How could she drive? Frankenstein took a worried glance out the windshield. A logging truck stacked with redwoods came at them but rumbled by with only a warning. When he suggested stopping, for coffee or something, she just huffed uncontrollably through her nose. So then Frankenstein started to cry. He knew exactly what the woman was crying about, but he couldn't put a word to it any better than she. They were crying simply because it was sad - the same "it" as the "it" that rains, the "it" that's hard to say, the "it" that doesn't matter, the little pronoun that means everything except itself. Frankenstein and the woman just cried and cried and cried.

In eastern Tennessee, Frankenstein dallies over a local paper in a little downtown diner. He reads about the most horrific thing he has ever heard of. Somebody was in a one-car accident, got all busted up but not killed. He was stuck in his car, hanging out the open door, held in by his seat belt. Along came another motorist. This was up in the mountains somewhere, on a back road. The other motorist came over and just squatted beside the dying man for a while, watching, not saying anything. After a little while, without a word, he took out a pocket knife and slowly slid it into the driver's eye. Then he squatted there for a while and watched. Then he punctured the other eye. Then he patted the driver on the cheek and left. The image of the bad Samaritan haunted Frankenstein for weeks. He could picture the man's face, not cold exactly but serious and a little sad and a little excited, kind of like the face of an impotent man watching pornography. He always wondered if the man picked up hitch-hikers. He supposed so, and he knew the face to look for. He was sure of it.

Frankenstein slept the breadth of Indiana. In the back seat of a Chevy station wagon, his head in the harsh embrace of his canvas luggage, he swam, stumbled and struggled through three hundred miles of turbulent dream. He lost his voice in a riot of children. He fell into a bottomless hole. Something hot got stuck in his left nostril. He failed at more responsibilities than he could keep track of, something to do with his old job at the dog kennel, something else demanding intense thought at a computer screen from which damp, rancid breath puffed like smoke from a locomotive. A truck ran over him. A nasty-looking woman picked him out in a police line-up and accused him of not caring. He slid down a telephone pole. An asphalter laid pavement over his sandaled feet, pinning him to the sunny side of a dune. Bugs crawled on him. A medium-sized rat with a shiny black nose squeaked at him, but in a nice way that made a certain sense. A cop gave him a ticket for standing there. Somebody put him on hold so long that his skin grafted to the phone. Somebody else beat him up for the pleasure of it. He got gangrene. He woke up in the Land of Lincoln when a big, burly guy with a beard shook his shoulder and asked him if he wanted to get out or go to Chicago. He still doesn't know what a Hoosier is.

In Oregon, looking for a nice place to take a long, drawn-out dump, he stumbled and groped through a jungle of underbrush below a hairpin curve. Down near the bottom, he found an upside-down house trailer. He guessed it had swerved off the road and tumbled down. Now vines grew over it, bushes gushed from its windows, and a mossy substance made the it look like something the Aztecs had left behind. He wrestled open a door and stepped into the topsy-turvy. He was standing on the ceiling. A dinette table hung fastened to the floor above him. The kitchen sink looked like something designed to catch smoke and channel it up through a chimney-drain. In the bathroom, the shower nozzle pointed up like something designed to wash the hinterparts of a person. The toilet, its seat hanging just at head level, reminded him of a hair dryer in a beauty salon. With a faint sense of longing, he reached up and touched the cool, slick porcelain rim. When he had forged off the road in search of a suitable dumping site, he had hoped to find, at best, a log to lean against. He hadn't bothered fantasizing about an official fixture. But here it was, miraculous and ready to go, except it was upside down and barely within reach With increasing urgency, he imagined himself using it somehow. He pictured himself up there, pants pulled up to his ankles as he clung to the rim like a gymnast on a half-bred piece of equipment, a cross between the horse and the rings. But even if he had the strength, he knew, there was one move that no gymnast can perform. It was truly a toilet conceived in Hell. Still, he couldn't just walk away from it. It represented too much. Feeling just a little like Ahab nailing Moby Dick, he unspun the plastic wing nuts that held the seat on. Outside, he rolled a rock to a spot right next to a log, set the seat across them, and, in all the comfort of home, did what he had come to do.

At a truck stop in Iowa (he thinks it was), he drank eighteen cups of coffee. A sky-blue waitress named Tina kept track. Frankenstein barely kept control of his mind. He had a booth to himself during a god-awful sleet-rain-hail-snow storm. Not entirely sure tornadoes couldn't happen in the winter, he kept asking for more coffee and place mats. On the back of the place mats he wrote to his sister. As the caffeine and sleeplessness snaked into his brain, his writing electrified into frantic, illegible scribbles. He kept wishing he could cry or something. He kept saying he was sorry: sorry he had smoked pot before being an usher at her wedding, sorry for the time he lit the leaves on fire under her tree fort, sorry he was such an inadequate uncle, sorry he had told her that Santa Claus had stabbed the Tooth Fairy, suicidally sorry he had shoveled his bit of dirt onto his father's coffin before he was supposed to, sorry he left home without saying good-bye to his mother, sorry he had impinged his filth upon Angelica and (please don't tell her) destroyed her modem for reasons that were merely symbolic and perfectly stupid. He told her which parts of the waitress he desired most, then told her he was sorry he had told his sister such a thing. He told her he wished he could crawl into a dark little hole and just stay there. He listed eight reasons to die (because why not, because it made a certain sense, because he wanted to see what would happen, because he was so sorry for what had happened so far, because he'd forgotten if he was on the westbound or eastbound side and didn't see how it mattered but knew that it did, because absolutely everything went wrong for him, because he didn't know how to have fun and didn't think he'd ever figure it out) and two to live (because he wanted to see what would happen and because he was sure that dying would end up being a mistake). He told her about the lady who kept crying, the snake who got run over, a prissy, middle-aged man who drove with a Raggedy Ann in his lap, a guy who had been eating a Bible for the last three weeks and proved it by chewing on a page of Leviticus for half an hour but then choked on it so bad that Frankenstein had to slam him on the back until he coughed up a gummy wad which he looked at with disgust but said he'd save for later. When a drip of coffee plopped onto a blank space in his letter, Frankenstein doodled it into a face that looked shocked and windblown. He drew a bubble over it and wrote, "Mercy, mercy me!" and let the rest of the letter flow around it.

Chapter Three

Mud

A lady with half a brain dumps Frankenstein at the center of a rat's nest of interstates and ramps off ramps. A viscose rain, atomized by traffic, wraps around him like wet cobwebs. Overpasses soar above him. Underpasses pass below. These death ribbons have no walkways. Safety, a distant clearing of soggy twilight, hunkers beyond a forest of concrete columns. He stands at a bifurcation. Neither road is less traveled than the other. One curls around toward where he just came from. The other peels off toward infinity. Gross death roars all around. He's standing right in front of a giant yellow barrel that's supposed to absorb the vehicles of the sleepy, the stupid, the stoned, the indecisive. An amber light marks his location with a languorous flash. He cowers like a mouse among diesel cats, a fly among a mad flock of swatters, a tiny matador beset by Brobdingnagian bulls. He considers the easy way out: dashing to the guardrail, vaulting over the edge, tumbling into a murkish underworld of homeless Dumpsters, crumpled fencing, petrified car parts, fast-food excrement, flames of graffiti, chilled brimstone and wet litter.

But why risk a sure thing? Better to just start walking, see if he gets hit. With a little luck he'll get a ride in an cushy ambulance, a few days in a nice, clean, warm, dry hospital bed. Nurses will attend to his every need. He won't even get up to pee. He'll just watch TV all day. TV's a little better than hanging out at the big yellow barrel, waiting for a three-ton spear. It tips the balance. He goes for it. Sliding along a left-side guardrail, duffel on his shoulder, leaning away from the swish of traffic, he slouches toward somewhere else. By the time he gets there, his teeth are chattering with cold despondency. This other place is at the frontier of civilization. It's a body shop half buried in the carcasses of automobiles. The window beside the office door is protected by steel mesh and patched with cardboard and duct tape. The only light comes from behind an oily garage window, a dull glow and the sparky throb of a welding torch. The pavement between the curb and the door is slippery with rain and old oil. Frankenstein lifts his cold, naked toes away from the edge of his Goodyear sandals. The balls of his feet squeak against the wet rubber.

He touches the doorknob. In a heartbeat, a ghastly rampage of used lubricants creeps across his fingers, embeds itself beneath his nails, thrusts under his cuff, shoots up his arm, coats his armpits, swirls around his neck and dribbles across his torso to congeal at his crotch. A stalactite forms at the back of his scrotum. He thinks he feels the same stuff clogging the gaps between his toes, too. It is filth that will not leave him soon. It bonds with his coat of perspiration, a three-day build-up he had been hoping to scrape off in the comfort of a hot shower. Now impermeable to water, it has a half-life of at least a week.

He enters. The welding torch crackles just out of sight in the garage. Frankenstein says, "Hello?"

He peers in. A low dim light crouches behind something huge. With a little explosion of lightning, the torch crackles again. For a flicker of an instant, he sees an unearthly giant, a robotic thing, a mechanical cactoid as broad as a tree, a Godzilla of crankshafts, mufflers, axles, tie-rods, radiators, hubcaps, gears and junk he goes on to imagine in the dark. Less sure of himself, he says, "Hello?"

A man with a voice like a welding torch says, "Ain't that door locked?" He's behind the thing he's welding. Frankenstein can't see him.

"It was open," he says. He's never felt this cold, at least not cold this way. "I just wanted to use the phone. If you've got one."

"Be my fucking guest."

Before Frankenstein can decide if that's a yes or a no, the torch crackles and the lightning flickers. Blue orbs swim between him and the thing in the garage. He turns away. The orbs float around to a cast iron telephone, a junkyard dog of a pay unit on the wall. By the touch he can tell it's filthier than the doorknob, a phone that has never known a loving touch, that has tasted spittle tainted with the residue of Bazooka gum, Eldorado cigars, cold Chinese food, coffee sludge, yesterday's plaque, a phone that has transmitted every vulgarity known to men, a phone at one with the world around it.

He's heard better dial tones, too, but when he cranks the dial around for zero and the number of his sister outside of Bethesda, he gets the robot that talks him through the collect call routine. When it asks him to state his name, he hopes it's her, not her husband, who listens on the other end. If it's him - a computer peripheral sales rep with an almost erotic love of professional ball players - he'll say, "Yeah, what is it?" Frankenstein will tell him what it is, and he'll say that she's not home. Frankenstein's brother-in-law doesn't like collect phone calls, and he likes Frankenstein even less. They have opposing philosophies, and there's nothing either of them can do about it.

But it's her. She says, "Fred!"

It's not his name. It's an old joke. Nobody calls him that but her. In a dirty-old-man tone of voice, quivering through his filth, he says, "Sooooozy Kremecheese."

"Where are you?" she asks.

He looks around. He doesn't quite know how to answer. He'd never say to her something as simple as "greater Seattle." If he did, she'd say, "Yes, but where are you?" She's quite a sister for a guy like Frankenstein. He says, "I'm in a dark hole."

"Wow!" she says. "How is it down there?"

With those few words she resurrects him. Now he's glad he's in a dark hole. He remembers that this is where he wants to be. He says, "It's real clammy."

"Dandy?"

"Clammy!" he shouts. The little holes in the mouthpiece of the phone are clotted with somebody else's coagulated breath.

"I hate clammy!" She hollers it as if to someone at the bottom of a well. Her voice clatters out the earphone in metallic shards.

Frankenstein doesn't want to shout. He doesn't want the man in the other room to hear. Not that it matters. He just wouldn't want the guy to come stomping out with his welding torch and growling, "Whatter yew callin' clammy?"

He pictures his sister all in denim, shirt untucked, sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms, her hair in a pony tail tied with a rubber band looped around something she found at the beach. Bare feet. Traces of dried bread dough in the grooves of her knuckles, a smudge of oil paint on her cheek, a Band-aid around her little toe, Little Tom anchoring one foot to the floor. This is how she survives Big Tom. She keeps busy. She pretends he doesn't exist or maybe that he's someone else. She never said this. Frankenstein just knows. She's in a bit of a dark hole herself, but she makes the best of it. Frankenstein admires her spirit. She's always gung-ho. He can picture her in this grubby little auto body shop. Within ten minutes she'd have daisies growing out of the ashtray. She'd paint a sunny, Van Goghesque hayfield on the wall. She'd have ferns in the corner and vines across the window. She'd cook muffins on the coffee maker. She'd paint the steel desk yellow and put her feet up on it while she taught herself to play the accordion. Everyone around her would laugh a lot and keep their language clean. Under similar circumstances, Frankenstein might likely write a poem about the discomfiture of rigor mortis.

"I hate clammy, too," he says to his sister, "but sometimes it's all you've got."

"Sounds like you could use a nice, hot bath."

Somehow she always knows these things. He wishes she'd guess why he called. She's pretty close already. He doesn't want to come right out and ask. In due time he'll drop a hint and, if necessary, segue into a request. He says, "What's your mother up to this week?"

"You won't believe it," she gushes with half a laugh. "She has tilted her lance at the town dump. She says the place is a mess and she wants it cleaned up."

Frankenstein wrinkles his forehead. Clean up the dump. It sounds like the kind of oxymoronic impossibility she'd ask him to do. But he has trouble imagining his mother anywhere near the town dump. He didn't think she even knew such a place existed. He can, however, imagine her raging through town hall, berating, blaming, accusing, threatening, stabbing the long, red nail of her forefinger into state statutes, federal mandates, the mayor's gut, the sanitation department's gut and the guts of all others who look like they could use a little improvement.

"She got an editorial in the paper," his sister says. "She wants everybody to put their trash in white bags, and she wants all the bags laid out in even rows in an even layer so they can be sprayed with deodorant and disinfectant by a crop duster before they're buried."

"A crop duster!" It sounds like something he'd think up. He can see the lady with the yellow propeller swooping over the dump in her biplane, smiling down over the edge of her cockpit and cooing through the hole in her throat. "I wonder if she'll ever be happy," he says, meaning his mother.

"Not till she's got every speck of dirt in the world sealed up in white trash bags."

"That wouldn't leave much of a planet, would it? Where would she stand?" He pictures himself curled up and weightless in one of ten billion white trash bags orbiting the sun in a tidy row. His father's about ten bags ahead of him.

His sister giggles. She always does. "Antarctica!" she says in a tone of gleeful hope. "All alone in the clean-driven snow, queen of all she sees and happy at last."

"If she were there, I'd be happy, too." He lets two heartbeats pass, then says, as casually as he can, "Has she mentioned me?"

Two more heartbeats pass as his sister shifts gears. "Sometimes," she says.

He tilts his forehead to the concrete wall and says, "Like what?"

"Like...I wonder where he is."

He says nothing. He just waits. She adds, "Like...when's he going to come home or get a job or something?"

Yeah, he knows that. He says, "Tell her it's not time yet."

"I'm not going to tell her anything. You tell her. Call her."

"I will." But he knows he won't. It isn't time yet. Besides, he hates talking on the phone. He remembers that now. So he doesn't wait for her to ask. He says, "I'm in greater Seattle."

"Ah, Seattle," she sighs. "Land of...what?"

"Milk and honey, Nothing here but milk and honey."

"Hey...you know who lives in Seattle?"

He sure does. He says, "Who?"

"Angelica Pascapelli! Remember her?"

Frankenstein says, "Hmmmm. Rings a distant bell."

"My next door neighbor in the dorm, at State. Remember? Senior year?"

"Ohhhhh, yeah. Angelica. She used to wear dresses, right? Little matching outfits? Even to class?"

"That's her. Last I heard, she was living in Seattle. She became a stewardess."

"I'll be damned."

Truth is, he's been thinking about Angelica since southern Idaho, and to that thought he has added a nice, warm bath. Now he remembers her last name. Things are fitting together. And then his beloved sister says, "You should call her!"

Beloved and omniscient. She knows why he called. He can tell. But he plays right along. He says, "Have you got her number?"

She says she thinks she can find it. Her phone clunks down. From Seattle he can hear her feet thump lightly across the room. They are indeed bare. A dog barks. He didn't know she had a dog. It's a mutt. He'd bet money on it. Unless it's Big Tom's dog. If Big Tom went nuts and bought a dog, it would be the kind that's worth money. By the sound of the bark, Frankenstein guesses its something between a beagle and a poodle, with a high IQ and very twitchy tail. A good dog for a kid like Little Tom. A pain in the ass for Big Tom. When Frankenstein's sister pads back to the phone and blows her bangs up with a phew, he says, "Did you get a new cat or something?"

She says, "Oh, that's Uncle Sam. You'd like her. Put her out and she wants to come in. Let her in and she wants to go out. You two would get along well. And boy could she use a bath."

"I know how that feels. You don't suppose Angelica's got a bathtub?

"If I know Angelica, she's got two. You ready to write this down?"

Of course he's not ready. Frankenstein hasn't been ready for anything since birth. He wasn't even ready for that. He was still working on a double back gainer with a twist. He assumed that's what life was all about. But then he saw the light at the end of the tunnel. He got curious. It was his first big mistake. He went for a peek, and boom - he's a person. He hasn't done a gainer since, let alone a back gainer. Twists? Forget it. He's lucky if he can keep both feet on the ground.

Wait," he says to his sister. He's got a dusty old Bic in his duffel somewhere, but it could take days to find. He's not about to ask the welder for a writing instrument. The little concrete block office doesn't look like a place to find such a thing. The gunmetal desk no doubt seized up decades ago. There's nothing on top of it except an ashtray dating back to the Mesozoic era. The trash can looks unfit for trash. Frankenstein's going to have to use his memory. He winces at the thought. He has no capacity for arbitrary data. Seven unrelated digits don't stand a chance in his brain. Just in case Angelica has one of those magical numbers like 345-6789, he goes ahead and asks. In a voice bogged with incipient depression, he squeaks, "What is it?"

"Area code two..."

"Fuck the area code."

"Okay, okay. 843-9271. Got it? 8-4-3-9-2-7-1."

He wouldn't talk like that to anybody but his sister. She understands. She knows he's standing there in semi-dark with the top of his forehead against a wall of concrete blocks painted with enamel and tobacco tar. She's just handed him the world's toughest phone number. It makes no sense whatsoever. She knows what he means when he says, with quivery desperation, "Does that spell anything?"

She hums for a while and mumbles combinations of letters. Then she says, "Well, there's no letters on the one, so forget it."

"How could they be so stupid?"

They being the phone company that didn't put letters on the one. But he knows who the stupid one is. If Angelica Pascapelli didn't have big brown eyes and a bathtub, he'd give up right there. She has a one in her phone number. He might as well go back up to the big yellow barrel at the fork in the road and wait for the first Buick with bad tie-rods. "Never mind," he says. "Give it to me one more time. Then I'm going to hang up and dial it quick. Okay?"

"I gotcha. Here it comes. I'm going to sing it. Ready? 843-9271." She makes it sound like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. "Got it?"

He sings it. She says, "Yes." He sings it again. He feels a little pilot light of happiness blip into the darkness of his chest. He sings it again. His merriment means thanks and good-bye. He slams the receiver into the hook.

843-9271.

He paws at his pocket for a coin.

843-9271.

There's something in there!

843-9271. How I wonder what you are.

He scoops them out, squints down close.

843-9271.

It's a puddle of pennies. Not a bit of silver among them. He flings them across the room and slams his forehead to the wall. He's been lugging those damned things around for days.

Now he can't sing the number. He couldn't sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star if his life depended on it. Which it practically does. His belly undulates with the start of a good cry. All he wanted was a bath...

But God's good graces touch the telephone, and it belches Frankenstein's quarter. With a sense of Biblical significance, he extracts it from the little slot. He kisses it as if it were Angelica Pascapelli herself.

843-9271. Like a diamond in the sky.

Whispering the numbers, he spins the black steel dial. The eight takes too long to mosey back around. It messes up the rhythm of the song, but he keeps cranking. He gets it right, he's sure of it. The ring sounds distant but cautiously optimistic. It rings again. It rings again. She's on a jet to Tokyo, he's sure of it. She's serving TV dinners in the stratosphere. Her answering machine is going to eat his last quarter, and he won't even have a message to leave. It rings again, and she answers. It's Angelica, yes, and yes, she remembers him.

* * *

Things move along well after that. She figures out more or less where he is. He walks to a certain intersection, waits on the corner for no more than a minute before a white Cadillac pulls up. It's far from new but remarkably clean and polished. The electric window glides down. A chubby-faced woman he would hardly recognize says, "Frankenstein?"

He's surprised most by her eyebrows. They're as thin and precisely defined as arcs drawn by a fine-point pen. She was working on them when he called, he can tell. She has a towel wrapped around the top of her head, a floppy mound stuffed loosely with hair. Sitting in the passenger seat, his cold fingers gripping each other in his lap, he wonders if she still has great gobs of black curls. She looks different than she used to, back when she lived next door to his sister in the dorm. Her former voluptuousness has rounded out to jolly curves. When he last saw her, he was a senior, he a freshman. Now she looks like a grown up and he feels like a kid.

The Cadillac moves through the washy-gray streets of Seattle like a fluffy cloud. She has the heater on full-blast, but it seems to produce only steam. It fogs the windshield. The wipers squeak as they rub away the misty rain. The bare areas remind him of the angels he and his sister used to make in the snow by waving their arms and legs. Then he notices key ring dangling at the ignition. It's an angel, pure white and as big as a saucer. Angels, he guesses, are her personal motif.

She smells of soap. He's sure he smells of stale sweat. She cranks the defroster to full-blast, but when her fingers touch the window controls, it's his window that opens a crack. She says, "Do you mind?"

He's almost sure it's an oblique reference to the odor he's brought in from Idaho. All he can say is, "A little fresh air should help." It's an oblique confession of stench, an implied apology.

He likes Angelica's face. It reminds him of a pumpkin, but cute. The crowns of her cheeks are a little pink, not with heat or blush but well fed health. She'll be fat someday, he thinks. At her current stage of development, she's at voluptuous-plus but teetering on pudgy. She won't be fat, he decides, just buxom.

She asks about his sister. He tells her what little he knows. Angelica says she's quite a character. Frankenstein whistles softly. "I don't know what she's doing in Bethesda," he says. "I think she lives in an apartment."

"What's wrong with that? I live in an apartment."

"Oh, I didn't mean it that way,. I meant, like, she ought to be on a farm or something. Out in the country."

"Yes," Angelica says drearily. "With chickens or something."

He doesn't like the way she said that. Just by the sound of it, he knows that Angelica has never come, nor will she ever come, within a hundred yards of barnyard fowl. He's not too surprised to hear her ask, "Do you know anything about computers?"

Frankenstein tilts his head. "Computers," he says thoughtfully. "I know a little, but not much."

She says nothing in return. He's glad. He hates computer conversations. Back when he used to use one, he always felt a moment of quiet joy when he turned it off. He really enjoyed seeing the screen die, hearing the hard drive croak and the little fan sigh its last. He wished all his problems could be turned off with a little button.

Eager to change the subject, he says, "Do you still play harp?"

She turns her head to look at him. She looks longer than a Cadillac driver should. Then she turns back and says, "Yes...I do. Not as much as I should. But every once in a while."

"It's a beautiful thing, a harp."

"Sometimes I miss it. I'll be halfway into an all-night flight and all the passengers will be sleeping and I'll imagine sitting back near the galley, playing harp for everybody."

"That's beautiful," Frankenstein says, almost whispering. For the first time he ties together her name and her chosen instrument. He's now fully in love with Angelica Pascapelli - except those eyebrows still scare him. Why does she pluck them to such perfection when she could be playing her harp? Maybe it's in her contract. Would an airline claim that bushy eyebrows are a safety hazard? Frankenstein doesn't doubt it. Sex appeal would have nothing to do with it, of course. Eyebrow growth would have to be tightly controlled to prevent occlusion of the eyes during an emergency. Worse, unrestrained thickets of browhair could burst into flames at the very moment when flight attendants have to remain calm and clear-headed.

Frankenstein doesn't share these thoughts. They go without saying. It's possible she likes to pluck her eyebrows. Some girls do.

And some guys have fantasies about having their back scratched by a harpist. Frankenstein's one of them. He thinks about it, then fully imagines it, all but feels it as his back breaks out in rampant itch. The itches march across him like a ragamuffin army through a salt marsh.

Angelica's apartment building looks like a motel, a two-story horseshoe with a swimming pool in its lap. She leads him up a short, wide flight of outdoor stairs, down a concrete walkway overlooking the pool, around a corner to 14-B. Neither of them speaks along the way. He lugs his duffel bag. She fiddles with her keys, finds the right one and isolates it with a jingly flourish. She opens the door and says, "Well, this is it."

It's an apartment with deep, cream-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, matching couch, love seat and chair, a coffee table with two neat stacks of magazines set at a jaunty angle. The back of the couch marks the border of the dining area, and a counter marks off the kitchen. The other rooms are down a short, dim hall.

Angelica removes her jacket. She's wearing a loose denim shirt unbuttoned to a hint of cleavage. Frankenstein notices this right off. It's a good sign. He lowers his duffel bag to the floor. Just to say something, he goes, "Whew."

Angelica looks back from the coat closet. "No, no," she says, signaling for him to pick it up. "Not there." The wag of her finger makes him feel like a bad boy.

He raises his grungy duffel bag from the cream-colored carpet and follows her down the dim hallway. She's not bad looking from the back. Her hips sway below her waist like a pendulum. She opens the other door at the end of the hall and stands back. There they are: the computer and the harp. Angelica says, "This is where I store junk."

She means his duffel bag. Granted, white though it might once have been, it doesn't exactly match her decor. Still, she could have phrased it better. But it's her apartment, not his, and she seems to have included her computer and harp in the category of junk. So his duffel's in with respectable company. He can't complain.

The computer looks like something dragged out of the sea. She hasn't been using it lately. A tangled glob of wires splays atop a tight crowd of stacked peripherals. Nothing's hooked up. It's waiting for somebody to come along to do it. Frankenstein inhales.

The harp looks even less used. It stands deeper in the room, beyond the computer, behind some file boxes, back among some milk crates and stuff in shopping bags. A dry-cleaned flight attendant's uniform in a plastic bag hangs from the pinnacle of the harp. It looks a little like a skeleton dancing with a ghost. he briefly considers asking her if he can take the plastic bag when he goes. Hoping to prevent mention of the computer, he says, "I thought harps had to stay in some kind of humidor or something." That is absolutely everything he knows about harps.

"Good harps, yes."

"What did it do," Frankenstein chuckles, "bite somebody?"

She smiles with only half her mouth. "I got it at a pawn shop. Cheap. Sounds like shit."

For an instant, Frankenstein wishes she wouldn't talk like that in front of it. "It doesn't want to sound like that," he says.

"Yes it does."

There's no discussing it. If Angelica says the harp wants to sound like shit, that's the way it wants to sound. It's her harp and her apartment. She says, "I suppose you want to take a shower."

"As a matter of fact..."

She points to the bathroom. "Right in there. I suppose you've got laundry."

Laundry would be putting it nicely. Filthy rags is more like it. Biohazardous waste. But not junk. It's all he's got. He says, "Well, yes, if I could borrow the use of a washing machine."

"You wash you, I'll wash the clothes." With a single finger to his shoulder she pokes him into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.

Nice can, thinks Frankenstein, maybe a little too nice. Everything's pink - pink sink and toilet, pink bath mat, seat cover and towels, pinkish wallpaper, pink tiles in the shower stall, pink angel around the light switch, pink silk flowers beside a bowl of pinkish potpourri replete with colossally pink odorizer. Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink. This crapper needs something like Frankenstein, something firmly unpink. His image in the mirror is so gross it's almost good, something salty after an overdose of sweet. He strips. He sits. He moves his bowels. It's a good one. He turns on the shower. The water looks so clean and steamy. Then there's a knock at the door. The door knob turns. Frankenstein thinks, This is it.

But it isn't it. It's only her voice and her hand with its bright red fingernails. She says, "Dirty clothes?" Her fingers snap. Frankenstein rolls them up, hands them over. The hands withdraws. The door closes. Oh, well..

It's a good shower. Even though the water temperature jumps around a bit as the washing machine commandeers the flow, Frankenstein appreciates the luxury as much as the wealthiest emperor might appreciate a trove of gold. He could live in a cave and eat charred rats off the end of a stick as long as he could take a hot shower at the end of the day. Modern technology hasn't developed much else of real import. Hot showers and the polio vaccine, that's about it.

While he's in there letting the wet warmth caress his skull, there's another knock at the door. It opens. He wipes a peephole in the fog on the ripply shower door. She enters. He barely makes out the creamy blur of her flesh as it twirls in. The door closes. He is immediately aroused. He wishes it didn't come on so fast so he could at least pretend not to have been thinking about it. The way things stand now, there's no pretending. It's as plain as the nose on this face. He lathers like crazy and sucks in his gut.

But she just stands there by the door, a smeary phantasm the color of moonlight. Frankenstein peeks again. She doesn't move. Something's wrong. He waits a while. Then he slides the shower door open a bit. It isn't her. It's a robe, hung by the scruff of its neck on a hook on the door.

Oh, well. What did he expect? She wouldn't be interested in someone like him. Maybe if he'd showed up with a couple pounds of roses and a bottle of good wine he might have inspired her. But all he brought was a sack of rancid clothing.

With a clunk of the plumbing, his shower goes cold. Frankenstein hops out, dries off, folds the towel as neatly as he can, hangs it back up nice and perfect-like. He puts on the robe, cinches the belt, looks down at his knobby, white knees. He doesn't recall wearing a robe before. He feels silly - vaguely Roman, slightly gay, very naked underneath. If she didn't mean for him to put it on, he's in big trouble. But what else can he do? She has his clothes.

He steps into an aroma of frying onions and garlic. Angelica's in the kitchen, stirring up some food. She's smooth and slow with her motions, swirling the stuff she's cooking, rapping the wooden spoon on the cast iron pan, peeking into the steam under the lid of big pot, jerking open the refrigerator, snatching something out, spinning off a lid, tilting something into the pan, peering into the jar, dumping the rest in. If he were on TV, he'd come right up behind her, slip his arms around her waist and kiss her neck. She'd lean back and say, "Mmmmm." But something tells him to keep his distance. Feeling quite the soap opera stud, he says, "Smells good!"

"Pasta. I hope you like it." She doesn't sound optimistic.

"I love it. I really hadn't meant to impose..."

"No problem." She rinses her hands at the sink, wipes them on a dish towel. "Your laundry will be dry soon. It sure needed washing."

Frankenstein says, "I've been out there a long time." He likes the way it sounds, as if he's been up in the hills, fighting with the Resistance.

"And what are you doing?"

Standing there in a robe is what he's doing. That is absolutely all he can think to say, but he holds his tongue. She isn't looking for a wisecrack, and he doesn't want to author one. He considers saying that he's been fighting with the Resistance, then seeing if he can make it sound like he means something, something heavy. Resisting capitalism. Resisting American materialism. Resisting the System. But he isn't resisting anything. In fact, he's pretty much following the path of least resistance. Wandering around would sum it up well enough, but he says, "Just traveling."

"Traveling where?"

If she needs to ask, she'll never understand the answer. Trying not to sound too-too mysterious or stupid, he says, "To wherever I end up." He hangs humility across his face and shows her the palms of his hands.

"That's where we're all going," she says. "Do you think you could take a look at my computer?"

That's all she's been thinking about since he called from the body shop. That's why she did his laundry and is making pasta. She thinks he can fix a computer.

With weak hesitance, he says, "I don't know..."

"Guys know. It's a tool. Come on."

She takes him by the hand. He likes that. This is the first female to touch him in weeks. She drags him down the hall, past the bedroom, into the junk room. There's the computer, looking as morose as a teen at the opera. The ghost and skeleton dance behind it. Frankenstein swells with the best idea in the world. In the most seductive tone he can muster, he sings, "I'll fix the computer if you'll play the harp."

He's lying, of course. He can't fix a computer. But he can sure look like he's trying. And who knows...maybe he'll get it all connected and it'll start right up. Sometimes they do that. Like kids with sniffles, they get better. Whether he succeeds or not, he'll get to hear some harp. Live and close-up. It'll be like sitting in heaven while working on the tool from hell.

It takes Angelica a long time to finally say, "I really don't play very well. And this harp..." She shakes her head with something like disgust.

"How bad can a harp sound? You don't have to actually play. Just practice. I promise not to laugh."

She looks at the harp as if not trusting it. Frankenstein resorts to a whine. "Please," he says., "Please?"

Angelica backs up three inches and says, "I can't play harp."

"And I can't fix a computer." He's not lying. She is. He says, "Let's do it anyway." By "it" he means go to the clean sheets of her bed and make love, but he doesn't expect her to guess this, let alone do it. He'll be satisfied to hear her play the harp.

Finally she says, "I'll tune it." Like that's all he's going to get. No more.

"Good," he says. "A harp should be tuned now and then. You tune the harp. I'll tune the computer. This is going to be fun." He steps around the computer, slips a foot between two boxes of books, plucks the dry-cleaned uniform from the harp and hands to it Angelica. Without a word, she whisks it away to a closet. Frankenstein feels gargantuan as he leans here and there to pick up boxes and stack them away from the harp. Moving fast, he collects the stuff from a fold-up table, piles it on top of other stuff. He stacks the computer stuff into a precarious, teetering tower and lifts it all to the table. Now the harp stands in a little clearing. It already looks happier, even stately, a castle in a moat. By the time Angelica returns, he's set a milk crate upside-down beside the harp. With a flourish of his hands he says, "And now, Angelica Pascapelli on the harp."

Angelica Pascapelli says, "Wrong side." Gently, precisely, she kicks the milk crate around to where it should be. "Got that computer hooked up yet?"

The last person to mess with this computer must have really hated it. It took someone a lot of time to form such a convoluted ball of wires. They aren't just bunched together. They're tied in an ugly, senseless macramé of wires knotted around wires and plugs unnaturally inserted into odd sockets. Angelica is opening a little steel toolbox when Frankenstein asks, "Did you do this?"

"That was my ex husband."

He likes the way the emphasis fell on ex, but still, he's a bit shocked, maybe even just a teeny-weeny bit jealous. Some jerk who hates computers and can't appreciate a harpist has already been there and gone. On top of that, Angelica has already done the marriage thing. Frankenstein hasn't even learned to balance a checkbook. Again he feels way out of his league. She's a grown-up; he's a kid. He says, "Didn't like computers much, did he?"

"He didn't like me very much. He loved computers. It's all he did all day. He used to send me e-mail."

"He didn't live here?"

"Oh, he lived here. Right here in this room. He hardly ever came out except to go to work. He sent me e-mail so I'd have to use the computer."

"Not love notes, I take it?"

"Ha! That man couldn't write a love note any more than he could...could, I don't know, play the harp or something. He could download a love note off the internet, assuming of course he ever thought of it, which he wouldn't."

Angelica places a winding key at shortest, lowest string of the harp and gives it a pluck. It sounds good to Frankenstein. He could listen to that note again and again. As long as she didn't pluck any other notes, that first one sounded fine. Without meaning to be funny, he says, "That sounded good."

Angelica's pinkie and thumb reach across an octave. to pluck two strings. They aren't quite right. Now he can tell. He's standing with his back to the table, half sitting on it, grappling with the ball of wires. This is modern life, right here in this room and in his hands. He's in a white robe and quite naked underneath. A chubby little cherub - named for angels, no less - plays harp for him. Wires, however, demand his full attention. He wishes he could hurl them out a window and get on with life.

They are not easy to untie. Since they have big plugs and sockets on their ends, they don't slip through knots easily. The knots have to be loosened at various points along a given wire until finally an end can fit through. They're all the same color, so Frankenstein's fingertips have to feel their way along each wire like plumbers working in the dark. The minute precision of it makes his hands shake. He breathes hard and feels a little faint. He clings to the off-key harp notes as if they floated and he might not. "What did he do this for?" he asks.

Angelica plucks a string repeatedly as she tweaks the key that tightens it. The notes rise by the faintest nuances. She squints at thin air as if she can see the sounds. Only after she gets the string just right does she speak. "He took the computer, to which I said good, take it, go. But then I got made secretary of the Friends of the Goddamn Library so I have to type up minutes and get e-mail and maintain the web page and stuff. So when our court date came up, I said I wanted the computer. The judge said I could have it, so Frank brought it back. Like this. See, the judge didn't say I could have it not tied in a knot, so that's what he did. He was that kind of guy."

Frankenstein doesn't say anything. He's got his fingers worked deeply into the ball of wires. He's trying to picture what it looks like in there, what kind of sub-knot he's working on. Somewhere in there is a knot which, untied, will release all the rest. The ball will come apart into beautiful individual strands. Then he will be able to breathe normally.

Plim-plim-plim, ploom-ploom-ploom, boing-boing-boing - little by little, Angelica brings together the tones of her harp. It doesn't sound like shit. It sounds like droplets of condensed heaven coming down. She starts playing chords, then riffs of chords. Frankenstein gives his loose knot of wires a spastic shake. He's falling behind. She's practically tuned a harp and is moving fast toward Bach. All he's got to show is a three-foot monitor cable with a ball of dead snakes at one end.

Little by little she turns her tuning chords into long strokes of music. When she gets it wrong, she goes tcht and reaches for it again. Not that it sounds wrong to Frankenstein. If he could play the harp as wrong as that, he'd buy one and carry it wherever he went. He'd play it here and there, wherever he got the urge. He'd be a musical Johnny Appleseed. They'd call him Frankenstein Harp. Future generations of kindergartners would sing songs about him. They'd draw crayon illustrations of him strumming a lyre in front of fast-food joints, in bus depots, near funerals, here and there on the interstates, calming the world one spot at a time. He'd become a myth, a legend, a folk hero. Kids wouldn't believe in him. They'd assume he was just more grown-up propaganda. They'd hear about him and think, "So what?"

Be he can't play harp and could never learn. His fingers could not do what Angelica's fingers are doing, and she's just getting warmed up. He watches them while fingering the ball of wires. She isn't just stroking her harp. She's embracing and caressing it. Her fingers crook and stretch to find the right strings, set upon them as lightly as birds, grip them with just the smallest bit of finger-flesh, and pull them just so. Each gentle burst of sound becomes a glorious moment in the universe.

It's a glorious moment in the universe when Frankenstein's wires suddenly loosen and separate. In the time it takes to breathe once, he lifts them apart. They look good lying on the table, limp and roughly parallel. Harp strings they aren't, but he's just a little proud. She gave him chaos; he gives her order. Not that she notices. She's playing harp. Computer wires are as far from her mind as Mars. Frankenstein says not a word. He just sets about the business of figuring out which wire goes where. He kneels at the table, turns the computer around, tries to match up the wires with their outlets and peripherals. With the harp to his back and his nose to the ass-end of an electronic device, he feels like he's reading pornography under a pew in church.

The more she plays, the more futile his efforts feel. So what if he gets it all plugged in and working? Angelica Pascapelli should not be futzing with a web page. She should not be receiving e-mail. She and all other harpists should be banned from the internet. Incoming correspondence should be censured of all but letters on parchment in the cursive handwriting of a fountain pen. Their radios should not receive the trash of the hoi poloi. They should not be called upon to befriend the goddamn library or to rescue wet mutts from the rain, let alone do their laundry. They should live in cultural humidors and just let their eyebrows be.

Her music is too beautiful now. Her practice chords have evolved into Greensleeves. Frankenstein hasn't the faintest idea what greensleeves are, but their music tends to make him cry. He pictures lambs frolicking in a meadow of buttercups and rye. They frolic so well that they soon lose their way, and everyone wonders what happened to them. He vaguely recalls a hymn to the same tune. It's not about lambs but Jesus. What child is this, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, something, something, something. Frolicking in a meadow of buttercups and rye, for all he knows. The image, the music, it's all too beautiful. A wetness swamps his eyes. He can't focus on the little dark sockets in the computer, can't even bring himself to stick in a wire. Something tells him that if he does, he'll short out the harp. Its strings will spit sparks and flames. Sweet Angelica will fall away, her fingers charred and smoking from the knuckles out. The invisible vastness of the internet will not laugh. For all its omniscience, it won't even notice.

Frankenstein's not going to be the one to do it. He won't plug it in. In fact, neither will anyone else. He gets a great idea. His plan unfolds as if by divine inspiration. He never would have thought of this himself. The modem cable has a little transformer on the end, to reduce the power of the incoming electricity. He takes the modem power cord and loops it through the hinge of the leg of the table. Holding the table up with his shoulder, watching Angelica to see if she notices, he folds in the leg just far enough to snap the wire right near the little transformer. With his fingernail he slices between the two wires of the cord, then uses his teeth to pull off an inch of insulation from each. He plugs in the computer and turns it on. He plugs the modem into the back, then sticks the naked wires into the outlet in the wall. A hundred and twenty volts shoot into a unit built for six. He gets a little puff of smoke from the modem and suspects the same has happened within the computer. It's going to be a long time before Angelica Pascapelli goes online.

Angelica sniffs. The last of her harp notes fade. She says, "What's that?"

"Something's wrong here," Frankenstein taps the computer, clicks the mouse, looks as worried as he can. It isn't hard. He's got a lopped-off transformer on the floor and a lopped-off wire stuck in an outlet. Even the most dedicated harpist would recognize a problem.

"Damn Frank. I bet he screwed it up on purpose. I bet he gave it a virus."

"That's what I think it is," Frankenstein says knowingly. "You've got a virus in there. A bad one."

"Can you fix it?"

She's come closer now. She's right behind him, slightly to the side, with one hand on his robed shoulder. He's still on his knees. He clicks the end of his tongue and shakes his head as if he has a sore neck. "For a virus like this," he says, "you need a real expert. A specialist."

"I should throw the damned thing out the window and just play harp for the rest of my life."

"Yes."

"Unfortunately, Mr. Frankenstein, life's not like that." Having spoken her final word, she turns and marches back to the kitchen. Frankenstein hurries after her. She's moving very fast, her spine straight, her head back, her little hands in little fists. He almost runs to keep up. His robe flaps. Fresh air wafts in from below.

"Life should be like that," he says, wanting to grab her by the shoulders and impress her with some sense of the goodness of what he's talking about. "It could be like that."

"It could if you're willing to live out of a duffel bag and beg to have your laundry done. Then you can throw anything you want out the window."

He's about to say that he never begged, but that's not the point. The point is the part about throwing stuff out the window. She's not talking about computers. She's waxed philosophical. Normally he'd like that. But she's talking about him, something he's thrown out his personal window. He's not sure he wants to know what. Whatever it was, the lack of it left him standing filthy in the rain at a fork in the interstate with a bag full of clothes too rancid to wear. That's what she means. So the question isn't about what, if anything, he threw out his personal window but whether it was worth it. It would have been worth it if it had left him playing the harp. But it didn't. It just left him clammy.

How's he going to explain all that? He can't. All he can do is sit and eat fettuccine served with tomato sauce and guilt. He's sorry he let her wash his clothes, but he doesn't say so. He's not sorry he destroyed her computer. He doesn't say that, either. But he remembers he left the little transformer and the sliced wire on the floor in the junk room. He excuses himself for a moment, goes to the room, picks up the evidence, weighs it in his palm. If she finds this stuff, he's dead. All he can think to do with it is throw it out the window. What could be more appropriate? Only trouble is, the window squeaks when he opens it. He lets the peripheral amputations fall into an evergreen bush. The window squeaks as he closes it.

When he returns to the table, Angelica says, "What was that?" Her voice is cold, her jaw clenched. A tad of tomato sauce sticks to her tight lips.

Frankenstein packs fettuccine into his mouth before he says, "Nothing." He knows the lie won't work, but he has to say something.

Angelica resumes chewing. She gets up, clears her throat, walks to her bedroom and closes the door. Soon he can hear her in there talking on the phone. Figuring he has nothing to lose, he hangs around the door, listening. He can't make out much, but he does hear her say, "What I am I supposed to do with him?" He hears her hang up and then dial again. Then her voice murmurs in hushed conspiracy.

Afraid she'll suddenly open the door, he goes into the junk room and turns on the computer. It seems to be working, all but the modem. He goes to the harp, sits on the milk crate and very, very cautiously gives one string a little tug. A clear and perfect note hums forth. He tries another string. Again, the note is perfect and beautiful. Hoping to get an octave, he counts out eight strings, positions his fingers on them as Angelica had, and gives them a little tug. It's a sour combination. This is life, he thinks, right here in a harp.

Angelica opens her door, comes into the junk room. She looks quite relieved. Frankenstein says, "It works. I think I fixed it. See?"

She doesn't look at the computer. She just looks at him. She's smiling, but he'd guess it's against her will. She says, "I have some good news for you, Frankenstein. How'd you like to take a nice little trip on an airplane?"

Chapter Four

Frankenstein Flies

Phoenix, it seems, is as far as she can fling him. With a wink to a buddy at Gate 14, she escorts him and his clean, white duffel bag right into the tunnel that attaches to a 727.

"Seat 27B," she says. Her smile is harsh and professional. "Have a nice flight." Then she turns and walks away.

Frankenstein can't even fly right. As soon as he's tucked in between a couple of over-fed sales-rep types, he wants out. He wants to travel by bike. He'd gladly sacrifice speed for elbow room. Now he knows, but it's too late. A woman with a face painted absurd shades of red, black and blue cranks over the big lever on the door: ka-lunk - locked-in freshness. The reps snap open their newspapers. Their elbows stake claim to the miniature armrests. Frankenstein pulls in his wings. The men have not noticed him. Now he's sorry he bathed at Angelica's. He wishes he stank. He wills bowel gas, but nothing comes. He's a fart manqué wrapped in Self-Esteem After-shave.

He does not believe, has never believed, that this bulking tonnage of plane can actually raise itself from the earth. Nor can he believe it will fail. He remembers, from a science class years ago, a schematic of a wing with fat white arrows flowing over and under it - the miracle of the airfoil. He thought, "Yeah, right," then; he thinks "Yeah, right," now. It cannot fly. At the same time, it cannot fail to fly, not with Frankenstein aboard.

The reps don't think such things. One focuses on an in-depth analysis of a crucial golfing event. The other peruses stock prices. Frankenstein does not wish to disturb them with his concerns. If they thought about the impossibility of flight - they and enough other passengers and, god forbid, the pilot - the plane would just weigh more and more as it sped down the runway. The prayers of the minority would not lift it. The plane would trip at the end of the runway like a marauding brontosaurus, would skid face-first into greenery. Philosophers of aviation would arrive to investigate. They'd swat through the clouds of attorneys, have a look at the corpse with its crumpled, frowning cockpit, its crinkled wings, its broken spine, and they would draw the conclusion which they'd suspected all along: a hundred thousand tons cannot fly.

The plane lumbers around runways, turns left, turns right, gets into line like a sullen kid waiting for cafeteria food. Frankenstein checks for exits. He imagines them clotting up like a toilet drain as ten dozen people forget their manners completely. The plane moves ahead fifty feet and stops again. He yanks out the contents of the little pocket in the seat ahead of him - a catalog of slick gizmos, an in-flight magazine, a barf bag, the emergency instruction card. He can't afford the gizmos. The magazine doesn't offer much hope for anyone not on an expense account. The bag's plastic but too small for his head. The emergency instruction card, however, depicts real-life drama. In simple, primary colors, it tells the tale of a plane wreck. A wingless jet dives at a forty-five degree angle into a rippling sea. Oxygen masks drop down. A lady with a baby knows just what to do. Everybody knows. No one screams. No one fouls their pants. Everyone's seat belt is on. A man puts out his cigarette before the whole plane blows up. A woman vomits between her knees. The flight attendants are nowhere in sight. Suddenly the plane is floating. Everyone stands back from the emergency exit while a lone man activates the slide. Everybody slides down. Whee! It turns out they have not landed in the sea. They are on land. Everyone runs for it. A man and a woman hold hands as they hasten away.

The back of the card bears the small print. If you're sitting near the exit, you must be able to speak English, lift "something like an emergency exit door," follow instructions, read, rotate, open, stand back, assess, use caution, jump feet first, push and, if it comes to this, shove. Frankenstein locates his exit. It's just across the aisle, up one row. It is under the command of an absolute sleazeball, a man who pees with the seat down, a resolute imbecile whose English is a best troglodytic. Will he turn the door crank up and over the way the arrow indicates? Not likely. Can he activate an inflatable slide? No way in hell. Will he think the picture with the cigarette means you should pull a butt out of the tiny ashtray and light it? Sure might.

Frankenstein's concerned. He feels morally obliged to ask the flight attendant to see if the man speaks English. Does he know what he's supposed to do? Isn't there some kind of IQ test for these people? Has he read the small print on the back of the card? Most certainly not. He's looking at the gizmo catalog. By the slick, cracked pout of his lower lip, Frankenstein knows for sure that the man's leering at the photo of the blonde with the red lipstick in the floating beach chair with the built-in waterproof stereo CD player and four cup holders. Frankenstein himself looks at her for a long, long time, thinking, thinking, thinking. Emergency egress is far from his mind.

But hey, what's death? Just a recycling of molecules. It has to happen. Frankenstein leans forward to look out the window. Beyond the sales rep, grass and runway flicker by. The engines give it all they've got. The plane bounces like an overweight albatross getting a running start. Prayer fills the plane. The sleazeball turns his head to the window. The sales reps inhale just enough to get the wheels off the runway. Almost immediately, the plane banks to the starboard, preliminary to the famous cartwheel of death. Frankenstein squeezes his eyes so hard he sees globs of light, and he tells himself there is a God, there is a God. The plane, convinced of same, tucks up its landing gear, levels off, flaps hard for the horizon. The seat belt light goes out. Everything's going to be all right.

"Snack sir?"

It's the winged serving wench with the anaerobic eyelids and burgundy lips. She extends a slender package to Frankenstein's aisle-side neighbor. She holds it as if to imply that it's only a joke, that she really doesn't expect anyone to accept the obligatory offer. One side of the man's face curls up with suspicion and curiosity. He accepts her generosity, smiles at it and sticks it in his shirt pocket.

"Snack sir?"

He wonders what she means by sir. For that matter, it isn't much of a snack, either. It's a delicious, nutritious lo-fat multi-fruit-flavored health bar the size of a turd in a package every bit as slick, the kind of facsimile foodstuff that gives snack a bad name. Shit, snot, crap, snack. The swirly chocolate script of the word "flavored" blends into its background, a tapeworm on a bed of spaghetti, dog-dew on gutter-scum, a camouflaged satisfaction of federal law. Why do they hide it so? Are they afraid their mothers will find out and yell at them? Frankenstein's sure that somewhere on this package a warning in microscopic Swahili says, "Not for Internal Use." He checks the ingredients. He's never heard of any of them besides that old workhorse, high fructose corn syrup, and its underachieving cousin, just plain corn syrup. The rest look like words he'd make up in a Scrabble game. Who dreamed up such a formula? Why don't they just make strawberry-rhubarb pie, sweetened with honey? Who are they, anyway? Motherless manufacturers in New Jersey, that's who. Their factory extracts polysnackivate from the air downwind of a petrochemical plant and condenses it into a thick, orange paste suitable for stuffing into a health bar, and boy does it stink.

The in-flight magazine stinks, too - Discover Orlando! Relive Gettysburg! Eat History in St. Louis! Aloha from the Land of Frangipani! The slick, high-fructose pages offer absolutely nothing of interest until he flips to the story of a North Dakota hamster farmer with a blimp. The guy has seventeen acres of open-air hamster pastures just outside the town of Lark. He's had as many as two million, eight-hundred and fifty thousand hamsters. His philosophy: just give them fresh air, open sky, earth beneath their feet, good food and plenty of elbow room. Cages are a lot of work, expensive, and they lead to disease and unhappy hamsters. He lets them graze and breed in the way of the deer and the antelope. Only one problem: buzzards.

"Nothing a buzzard loves more for lunch than a nice, tender, ranch-raised hamster," the man says. His name is Walter, after his father.

God bless America. You don't find Walter-types in France or Japan. Walter hovers over his ranch in a helium-filled blimp, listening to the radio and blowing buzzards out of the sky with a 12-gauge shotgun. If you've ever bought a hamster from a pet store, odds are eight to one it was raised under Walter's wing and has seen the frazzled remains of carnivores dropping from the sky.

Once Walter's tether came loose in a thunderstorm. He drifted off at an estimated thirty miles per hour. He released helium as fast as he could, but updrafts got hold of him, kept him going.

"All their little heads tilted back as they watched me fly away," he said in the article. "I can't imagine what must of been going through their minds."

Walter's half-deflated blimp floated over the Missouri and halfway into Emmons County before it dropped it into a wheat field. He had to tow it home with his brother-in-law's tractor. At every power line he had to heave a rope over the line and re-tie the blimp before proceeding. Their progress titillated the local press for a week. He could see the buzzards circling his ranch. He had his wife, Margaret, out there with the shotgun, but, as he said, "She couldn't hit the broad side of Bismarck with a stick."

Frankenstein's flabbergasted. A story like this belongs in a tabloid with pictures of aliens and vinegar cures. But it's real. Walter's a real guy. Lark's a real place. The story must have made it into an airplane magazine because it's about flying and cute things. Photos show him in his blimp, an aerial shot of his ranch, and a close-up of a hamster chewing on a strand of wheat. The story makes no reference to Margaret besides the wisecrack about her marksmanship. Frankenstein wonders what she looks like. He pictures her in polyester slacks, button-up blouse, Keds, a seed cap on her golden hair-do, maybe sunglasses when she's buzzard-hunting. He wants to meet her. He wants to eat her biscuits. He wants to slobber over her green beans while Walter expounds on the history of hamsters, how to tell if they have worms, their advantages over white mice - if the medical profession only knew! He's sent letters to Washington, but no one ever answers. He writes to state legislators, asking for hamsters to be declared the state rodent. They don't write back either. None of that's in the article, but Frankenstein knows the type. He knows their wives, too. They look down at their knitting while the TV's on. They don't talk much. It might take her three weeks of thinking about it before she finally gives her yarn a long pull and says, in nasal, North Dakota twang, "I don't see why you don't give those hamsters of yours some shade."

Frankenstein's never fired a shotgun, but how hard can it be? High school dropouts have done it. He wouldn't mind floating over the North Dakota prairie and taking potshots at buzzards. Not that buzzards deserve to die any more than the next guy. But if you're in the business of murdering friendly rodents, he figures, you have to face certain facts. One of those facts just might come floating along in a blimp. If you want to get old and fat, stick to your high fructose snacks. If you want to live off tender, ranch-raised hamsters, you really can't complain about getting blown out of the sky.

So, thirty-five-thousand feet above the earth, zipping along in the wrong direction at damn-near the speed of sound, Frankenstein hatches a plan. He bets Walter needs a vacation. He bets Margaret does, too. He bets they'd be mighty glad if a guy showed up and offered to shoot buzzards for free. Wouldn't that look great on his resume. Room and board are all he'll ask for. He lets himself sink into fantasy. Someday he'll own his own blimp. He'll migrate across the grain belt, performing aerial services for farmers. He'll shoot crows from corn fields, sprinkle fertilizer over oats, seek out lost sheep, advertise chewing tobacco. He'll build up a fleet of dirigibles. It wouldn't take many to be the world's largest. He could become a force to be reckoned with. Who could stop a fleet of blimps? Who could tell them where to go? He supposes they could be shot down, but if enough of them carried, say, a hydrogen bomb, well....he doesn't want to think about it. He wants to think about a thousand dirigibles drifting in the jet stream, their motors shut down, their passengers drinking fine wine, making love, catching up on their reading, hearing lectures on astronomy, listening to a string quartet, eating strawberry-rhubarb pie, looking out the window at Africa and erasing from their minds all memories of new delicious strawberry (flavored) health bars. He supposes no one has yet thought of a law against this. Couldn't a thousand dirigibles constitute a country? If not, well, how about ten thousand? Where does it say you need an solid piece of the planet to declare your independence? Air's part of the planet, isn't it? Couldn't a people lay claim to a bit of it?

It feels like the kind of plan that could lead to trouble, but as long as he keeps it in a closed container, nothing should go wrong. He leans back into the saccharine mist of after-shave. He dreams of blimps floating so high that down looks like up, the earth a shade of blue that looks like sky. Up there, direction makes no difference. Even now, as he shoots through the air toward Arizona, in the space of his mind he knows where he's going. He's going to North Dakota.

Chapter Five

Frankenstein Loves Asphalt

Earth looks bad at an interstate exit in northern Arizona. Road crews have waged war on the place, tearing away a mountain of rock, blocking part of the interstate, shunting traffic into a temporary sluiceway of death, raising up monolithic pylons in a massive federal project to re-tie a cloverleaf. Arriving in an old yellow station wagon piloted by a drunk carpenter, Frankenstein grips the door handle as they barrel between low walls of concrete. The car bounces and sways through craters. The drunk at the wheel - drunk on tequila and stoned on Tijuana weed - steers with the palm of his right hand, punishing the road and the car without prejudice. He's mad at a boss who has committed a discombobulated array of atrocities against this flawless worker who now has express plans to ease his grievances with a blowjob once he gets to a bar where his old lady had better be waiting for him if she knows what's good for her. Frankenstein declines an invitation to come along. He wants to go north, toward Lark, on a state highway that intersects the interstate somewhere in this Department of Transportation War Zone. He knows his inebriated benefactor has forgotten that, so when the alley widens a bit, Frankenstein, gizzard in throat, suggests "You could let me off right up there."

"You sure?'

"Sure!"

The station wagon slides into the wide spot as if into second base. Dust catches up from behind, tumbles over the windshield. Frankenstein steps into the gritty air. The rear seat door grunts as he opens it to retrieve his duffel bag from its nest of scrap wood, forlorn tools, beer cans, the exoskeletons of fast food. As soon as the door grunts shut, the car launches into the roller coaster of traffic. Its tires spin up more dust, bombarding Frankenstein's sandaled feet with hot chunks of busted concrete and asphalt.

So here he stands, bag on shoulder, no idea which way to go. America hasn't created a worse place to hitchhike since Iwo Jima. Jackhammers punch through the air like machine guns. Trucks roar like animals in heat. A sign warns of blasting. The earth is rubble. The Arizona outback, somewhere out of sight, will be Eden compared to this.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens but there's no hitching out of this spot. Frankenstein sees a long hoof ahead. Just to figure out which way to go he'll have to pick and weave his way through hundreds of yards of no-man's land. For this he turned down barfly fellatio.

The haze makes the setting sun look hung-over, exhausted, resigned to gravity. Frankenstein keeps it to his left. He climbs over barriers, skitters through lulls in traffic, almost castrates himself on the rim of a chain link fence. He wanders to the left, to the right, back over the other way. A man in a yellow hard hat points toward a flat black glacier of fresh asphalt lined with bright orange pylons. Frankenstein thanks him kindly.

Alas, it's a highway without traffic. He must trudge. The asphalt seethes beneath his feet. It's still hot, fresh from the oven. His heels dent it. Grains stick to his sandals. He wonders about the chemical composition of smell, in this case the tar fumes wrapping around his face. Are they vaporized asphalt, the same stuff in gaseous form? Do they condense on the walls of the lung, paving them wisp by wisp? It sure feels like it.

A steam roller comes long, backwards, the driver leaning around from under a bright yellow parasol, keeping his rollers along an invisible line parallel to the pylons. It looks like a job Frankenstein could do. It would sure beat lugging a duffel bag around, looking for he doesn't know what. Given a steam roller, he'd know exactly what to do. He'd flatten asphalt. No big decisions. No fuzzy future. No getting lost. No one to persuade or impress. No arguments. He wonders whether he could get the job if he doesn't have hairy knuckles. He wonders if steam rollers have horns or if you just shout, "Hey!"

He trudges on. The bright black roadway, not yet festooned with yellow lines, adorned only with the orange cones so neatly in a row, lies flat and straight. Half a mile ahead, it vanishes in a rippling sheen. How far will he have to walk before he comes to traffic or a glass of water? Off to the west, maybe a mile away, dust rises in a long, horizontal line. Cars flicker behind the distant brush. It's a connector road to the end of the newly paved highway. That's where he should be. Now he knows. Should he walk over there, risk rattlesnakes and an insurmountable fence? Or should he stick to the stinking asphalt? Sweat oozes around the back of his ears and drools to the upper corner of his jaw. Whatever he decides, it will be wrong. The hobnail of that inevitability presses on his brain. It makes him want to walk on hot asphalt. He wants to wrap himself in misery like a horsehair cloak. He deserves this for what he might have done.

What forces work on Frankenstein as he presses through the heat? Gravity holds him to the planet. Centrifugal force tries to throw him into space. Memories tug him backward. Hopes pull him onward. Sloth would have him stop. Habit keeps him going. Thirst figures in. Fears whisper from his dark interior. Guilt. The past motivates him; so does the future. His feet urge him to reconsider, but his imagination leaves them behind. Astrological energy beams down on him, cosmic rays inducing him to avoid business decisions, rethink his travel plans, watch for love from an unexpected source. Newton applies: A body in motion tends to stay in motion, but a body under a duffel bag tends to slow. It doesn't help to have asphalt sticking to your footwear.

Common sense prevails. If he stops, he'll die. He keeps leaning toward the shimmerous vanishing point at the end of the long, black road. He keeps his knees passing each other, his feet planting and uprooting themselves. One foot stands there while the other moves on ahead. Then they change roles. Like the inhale-exhale cycle of the meditating Buddhist, the movement/nonmovement of his feet hypnotizes him. He comes loose from time. His mind flies. He feels like he's got his head in a plastic bag. He becomes a former incarnation, a child of six or seven whizzing down pavement on a bicycle. Beneath him, beneath the cross bar, between the wheels, the macadam blurs to gray. The blur takes form. The pavement's cracks and pebbles and stains meld into a infinite, wriggling, molting ghost. The frame of the bicycle hovers motionless as the blur scurries by like smoke in a rush. Six or seven years old and he's seeing something no other human being has seen, he's sure of it. No one has ever noticed the undulating patterns in asphalt because no one has ever thought to look straight down while riding a bicycle. He understands why, this young philosopher, as the front wheel of his bike meets the curb at the end of the street and the back wheel rises behind him, pitching him overhand into the side of a public mailbox. As it mashes the cartilage of his little nose, the mailbox booms with the full authority of doom and the federal government. Little yellow birds circle his head, tweety-tweet-tweet, and five-pointed pulsars throb with his pain.

He awakens in Arizona on a black cloud below a hovering angel in a yellow helmet. She eclipses the sun, which dazzles around her dark hair in a golden halo. Two broad beaver teeth show just below her upper lip. Wayward strands of hair curl out from under her hard-hat, hang around her face like feelers of kudzu. As she removes her dark aviator glasses, the furrows above her eyes flow inward and down toward her nose. She's so close he can see the dust in her nostrils. The backs of her soft fingers kiss his cheek. With the voice of a distant harp, she sings, " Are you all right?"

When he tries to speak, he finds his lips welded shut. He hasn't the strength to crack them. A moan through his nose, replete with meaning but as basic as a grunt, sears with the heat of chimney fire. He inhales with the shuddering effort of a child at the shore of tears.

Still shading his face with hers, the angel lifts his head from the back, tilts him forward to a plastic canteen. Water, warm but good, dissolves the seal along his lips. It swells his tongue, erodes through his throat, trickles to his desiccated gut. He suckles with desperation. She tips the canteen just so, neither choking him nor denying a gulp. She says, "Easy, now. Eeeeeasy."

Easy it is. He hasn't had it like this since he was three months old. The canteen issues milk and honey, and Frankenstein falls in love with a woman who's but a blur. As he closes his eyes again, the sweat on his eyelids cools. The angel says, "There, there," and nestles him closer. Two fingers lick his temple. He wants to weep with inutterable comfort. He loves this woman more than love should allow. He would suckle from her canteen until death did them part. He'd forget about North Dakota. He'd forget about blimps. That was a stupid idea. He just wants this woman to hold him while he takes a nap, even if on asphalt. Should she dump him here, he would die. Should she take him home, he would float on puffy clouds.

She takes him to a dusty, lime-green dump truck. With one arm around his waist, one hand to his upper arm, she guides and steadies him. He worries that he might fall again, take her down with him, break something. Her weight against him makes him no more steady, but he works an arm up and over her shoulder. She's a solid woman, solid but soft. But even her hard-hat feels soft as it rocks against his cheek. He thinks of kissing it. He would.

She says, "Easy now."

It's a castle of a dump truck. It could hold a house in its dumper. She's stopped it just off the asphalt, its engine running. At a slow, stammering idle, the engine barely flips open the cap atop the vertical exhaust pipe. A thin chain attached to the cap goes chi-ching, chi-ching, chi-ching to the humping rhythm of the diesel.

She says, "Can you make it?"

She means up the six steps up to the cabin on the passenger side. The cabin's so far up, so huge, that it even has a little steel grate balcony at the door. A person could sit there and have a cappuccino at a little round table. A heat-struck person, however, might have a little trouble getting up the steps, which are actually more like a ladder at a steep angle rising across the side of the truck. Can he make it? He will try. If the heat and altitude drain his blood, he'll know what it feels like to fall off a dump truck. His angel will save him again. If he succeeds, she and he can drive their beautiful lime green dump truck into the sunset, or, for that matter, north to Lark. For that, that mere possibility, he will assault these stairs. Also, he wants to see the inside of a dump truck. He's never touched one before, not even a regular-sized one, nothing bigger than the yellow one he used to push around a sand box, supplying his own diesel growl, squeaky brakes, whoosh of cascading coal. That truck seemed as real, in an inverse sort of way, as the one he's about to surmount now.

Her hands steady him at the waist and the elbow as he eases to the first step. As he rises, her hands, soft and solid, cup him at the waist. Then it's only his fingers touching hers for a lingering moment, not a touch of support, just a kiss of hasta luego.

Luego happens up in the cabin. What a place, ten feet wide, first-class seats, a picture window as vast as the great outdoors, air conditioned. It feels like genuine oxygen, mountain air, breath of glacier, vapor of toothpaste. Two nice people could live happily ever after in a place like this.

She rises into view, swings open her door, rolls in his duffel bag, which he'd completely forgotten. As he pulls it out of the way, she climbs in, smiling at him, gazing at him as she comes. He tries to keep his eyes from slurping over her thighs as they tighten her jeans. She's happy to have him here. He feels this. Her face, tan and burnt, exudes warm invitation. Her cheeks puff with gladness. Her two center teeth, divided by a dark gap, peek from between her lips like kids all shy and giggly. She says, "Off we go!" as if into the wild blue yonder. Yes, yes, thinks he. Off we go. Her perfectly cylindrical arms go taut with muscles for the moment it takes to shift into drive. It's an automatic transmission with the shifter coming out of the steering wheel shaft. The steering wheel, a good three feet wide, moves easily under her quick, precise hands. She looks pleased with herself - pleased with her job, pleased with her big green truck, pleased to have Frankenstein looking at her with fawning admiration. He loves everything about this woman, the way she rolls the sleeves of her T-shirt right up to her armpits, the way she checks her mirrors, the quickness of her movements, the hint of smile that varies from just-about-to to just-did. He loves her low leather workboots, her dusty white socks, the way she keeps her shoulders back, the way her breasts don't need size to assert themselves. This is a woman who can make decisions. Off we go.

"Feeling better?" she asks, just glancing over at him, almost smiling.

"God, yes," he moans. "Where're we off to?"

She laughs! She sees the humor of it, the openness, the potential. She knows perfectly well that they're sitting in a truck the size of a cumulonimbus and floating just about as high and cool across the Arizona heat. The truck moves with magical buoyancy, hovering over the land, its engine just a distant hum. They could drive this thing to North Dakota, Guatemala, Patagonia, no one could stop them. It's almost as good as a blimp.

Frankenstein wants to tell her that, but he's afraid. It's a stupid idea and he knows it. But he can't think of anything that's not stupid. He knows that, too. He might as well pursue the stupid idea that appeals to him most. But that's a lot to explain to a beautiful woman who has just plucked him from hot macadam. She might well conclude that he deserved to pass out flat on his face in the middle of an unfinished highway. She might laugh at him.

Stupid Idea #2: Sit there like a dummy and don't say anything. Wait for her to say, "So, where're you coming from?" Wait for the conversation to wend its way to the subject of blimps, then mention casually that maybe North Dakota's where they ought to go, the two of them, to start a new life together, hired hands on a hamster ranch.

But no, he won't bring that up, not unless he can do it as a joke, a disposable test of her reaction. Besides, he's not so sure hamster farming is the right career move. He thinks he might try civil engineering, starting, perhaps, as the guy who paddles traffic along by waving a bright red flag. From there he could move up, become the guy who operates the sign that says "Slow" on one side, "Stop" on the other. From there he could move up to a steam roller and from there to co-pilot of a humongous dump truck.

He knows it won't happen like that. He knows fantasy from reality. He's just not sure what difference it makes what he chooses to let himself think. He'd be happy enough to take the flag-waving position and just dream about the rest.

"Hey," he says, the word bubbling up from a ticklish place, "is there any work around here?"

She looks absolutely delighted to hear the question. She almost giggles.

"Work?" she says through a full-face smile. "You can't work. You're sick!"

He doesn't feel sick, not anymore. But she says it with such glee that he feels obliged to at least feign queasiness. With all possible melodrama, he lays the back his hand against his forehead, emits a thin, weak whine. "I needs lay me down," he sighs. "I need Mexican food and cold beer and a bath."

She laughs with feminine guffaw. "That's the cure," she sings. "We can take care of that."

The big truck swirls into an encampment of trailer offices, pick-ups, highway department vehicles, forests of stacked traffic cones, dull orange signs warning of slow traffic, men working, vehicles on the road, expected delays. The steam roller, its little yellow parasol off balance, looks like an obese, exhausted ice cream cart. Heavy dust leadens everything to a kinship of earthtones. With the alacrity of a sports car, the truck tools around the little settlement. The girl's tan elbows flap as her big green steed homes in on the place it belongs, noses into a parking spot next to a low, black asphalter. She says, "Atta boy," as the truck shudders with exhaustion and settles into silence.

He insists on lugging his duffel bag down to earth himself. It's up on his shoulder when she comes around the front of the truck to wrap her arms around one of his. "Come on," she says and pulls him at a bouncy pace, riding high on the balls of her feet. She tugs him toward a late model black Toyota pick-up. She gives him a little push to carry him the rest of the way. "Hop in," she says. "I've got to punch out."

While she bounces off to a dirty white house trailer, Frankenstein rolls his bag into the back of the truck and wonders if this is really happening. It certainly seems to be. As the screen door at the trailer claps shut behind her, he hopes no one inside will distract her, no one will ask her about the unauthorized tramp who climbed down from the department of transportation dump truck, that no one will invite her to a bar or propose marriage, hypnotize her, slip her a mickey, steal her away.

No one does. The screen door claps again, and the beautiful girl emerges. Half skipping, half trotting, her low, heavy boots kick up puffs of dust as she hurries toward the truck. Yes, yes, it is really happening. They are going to get in the truck and go somewhere.

For almost an hour they drive down the interstate, then down a well paved state highway that ripples with the last of the day's heat. Her name is Wendy. His name is Frankenstein. Wendy blurts, "Frankenstein?'

"Frankenstein." He states it half factually, half apologetically. 'That's my name."

She smiles the smile of someone with a juicy, secret thought, keeps her eyes on the road. "Frankenstein," she says, weighing the sound of it. "That's a nice name."

Wendy drives with one arm straight to the steering wheel, elbow locked. The other arm lolls on the sill of the open window. Sometimes she leans her head to the left to rest it on her shoulder. Frankenstein's stuck for words. He's uncomfortably inactive in the passenger seat He wishes she would give him a job to do, read a map or something. Looking at him more than at the road, she interviews him. Where's he going? Where's he coming from? Why? He tells her he's coming from Seattle, the last place he spent more than a week. He doesn't mention the flight attendant, the one with the black tire marks on her linoleum. He tells her he's going to North Dakota to look for work.

"North Dakota?" she laughs. "Is that still a state?"

"What are they going to do, sell it? Who'd buy North Dakota?"

She laughs more. Frankenstein feels himself in good form. Who'd buy North Dakota? That was a good one.

"There's work there?" she asks, her cheeks high and tight with smile.

"I figure nobody else is looking. Who ever heard of somebody looking for work in North Dakota?"

She laughs again. He wonders how many times he can get away with using North Dakota as a punch line. "What do you do," she asks, "besides sleep on highways?"

This is it. Should he mention Walter's blimp? Should he confess that he really can't do anything? He didn't even get enough credits to qualify as an English major. He can't use a hammer without damaging the nail and the wood around it, can't do much with a computer, never milked a cow, can't speak a foreign language, can't fix a car, has no idea how electricity works. He's a pretty good swimmer; that's about it. Now he hangs his career on a hamster ranch, a long shot so ridiculous he can't bring himself to mention it. It isn't even a long shot. It's just a direction. It's a place so far away that he doesn't have to worry about actually arriving there.

To his amazement, he says, "I travel." It sounds so cool, so perfect. And it's true.

"Wow," she says, her head rocking heavily as if on low waves. "Where to?"

He almost says, nowhere, but that's too easy. He finds himself saying, "Where's not the point." He can hardly believe it. Siddharta himself could not have uttered anything more profound.

She laughs in a whisper through her nose. Frankenstein detects suspicion, but he's not sure. Maybe she thinks he's on parole or something. He backpedals. "I don't know where I'm going," he admits. "I just feel like moving. I thought I'd head toward North Dakota, see what happens. Maybe I can chop wheat or something."

"Chop wheat!" she hoots. She laughs so hard she has to put a hand on his leg to keep from falling over. Frankenstein's hand darts to the steering wheel, saves their lives. As he leans against her arm, he puts his head near hers, laughs, inhales with a jittery stomach. Her hair smells of fresh asphalt.

"Whoa!" she says, drawing out the vowels, sitting up straight, braking hard and wrenching the shift into second gear. For a second, Frankenstein's terrified that he's done something wrong, that he's about to get shoved out the door. But as soon as the truck stops, Wendy slams it into reverse, backs up a hundred feet, swirls the steering wheel around and dives onto a dusty road. A cattle guard fills the truck with thunder. Wendy snaps on the headlights.

Frankenstein loves roads like this, just a couple of ruts among the brush, mile after mile. The end of such roads always offers something interesting, even if nothing more than a gradual closing-in of the vegetation and an evaporation of the ruts. In this case, it looks like the road might dissolve into desert scrub. But as they sweep around to the north side of a little mountain of half-naked boulders, the headlights swing across a sloppy barbed wire fence and then a yard and an adobe house with the proportions of a shoe box. Wendy says, "Be it ever so humble," and kills the motor.

Signs of animals clutter the yard: a rabbit cage, a tire half sliced like a bagel to hold a ring of water, a chicken coop, a beehive, a rope tied to a broad, low tree, buckets old and new. A little dog barks in the twilight, up on the mountain behind the house, working his way among the boulders, finally arriving. With glee and a clap of her hands, Wendy says, "Rascal!" and bends down to receive him. Rascal's a Chihuahua mix with fluffy hair and a fox-like snout. He's missing half his front right leg. As he hobbles and yaps to his beloved Wendy, it looks as if he's coming to shake hands. As he comes into Wendy's arms, she blesses his little head with a thousand kisses. He licks her face. Holding him high on her chest, she lets Frankenstein stroke his head with two fingers. Rascal's cautious, and Frankenstein's ready to snatch his hand away, but the little dog's whippy, hairless tail twitches with tentative acceptance. Frankenstein chances a scratch behind Rascal's ear. Rascal whimpers. Frankenstein takes the stump of Rascal's right leg, shakes it and says, "Pleased to meet you." Rascal licks the butt of his thumb. Wendy beams.

Frankenstein loves Wendy, her dog, and the place where they live. The mountain seems the friend of the house. The yard flows into the desert, across a sea of stolid scrub, lapping up at the indigo horizon and its sleepy, heroic stars. A rabbit crunches something in its cage. Crickets crick. Chickens mutter in their sleep. Dung, dust, smoke, dew, and sage slide around the air, mingling with Wendy's essence of asphalt and her truck's sweet petroleum perspiration. The truck clinks as if falling asleep. Frankenstein could stand there forever, drinking in the sounds and smells, the darkness, the calm. Only one sound would be worth the loss of the near-silence, and Wendy says it: "Let's go inside."

She launches Rascal like a sixteen-ounce bowling ball. Frankenstein lays a hand over her kidney. Her arm reaches around him. Her thumb burrows under his belt. Though they're joined at the hip like Siamese twins, she still walks with that urgent, energetic bounce. He has to fall in step. At the front door, she pirouettes away from him to put her back against the heavy slats of wood. Frankenstein thinks this might be the moment to move in for a kiss, but before he's in position, Wendy's heel has thumped the door three times hard. The third thump nudges it open with a grunt. The walls of this house are two feet thick. Wendy steps backward into the cool darkness. Frankenstein follows, hands on her hips as if dancing. Yes, he thinks, this is really happening.

But a sudden light, as ragged as a cat scratch, rips open the darkness. It's a kitchen match in Wendy's hand. She has just dragged it up across the adobe wall. Until the flame settles down, she looks like the statue of liberty with a tired arm. With a quick, precise movement, she lifts the glass chimney of a kerosene lamp that hangs from the wall. As she touches the flame to the wick, warm light oozes across the room only slightly faster than the spreading of dawn under a thunderstorm. It oozes across a floor of rough pine boards, curls around a coffee table of tangled driftwood and ragged slate, climbs a massive chair of cedar logs, rises around a hammock strung between tree-trunk posts. The light barely washes to the far ends of the house. One end is a wall of books, the other a sparse kitchen with a simple stove, a broad, shallow sink, a counter with open shelves below, a clodhopper of an armoire that is either homemade or a survivor of the Alamo. The kitchen table is a slab of tree trunk roughly the shape of Alabama.

Wendy, her face half shadowed, half in the glow, is more beautiful than beauty. For a long moment she looks expectant, as if inhaling very deeply and slowly, but then she says, "You wanted beer, right?"

Well, he did, but not all that much. It wasn't absolute top priority. It could have waited. It occurs to him to say I don't want beer, I want you, but at this point, she seems to be pushing the beer more than herself. Maybe she's thirsty. In an involuntary tone of statement and question, Frankenstein says, "Beer(?)."

"Sit," she says, pointing to the split-log bench at the dining table. She clumps across the room to a refrigerator, a wide, wooden ice box that might have seen action in the Civil War. With a twist of her wrist, she unlatches one of four little doors. Her other hand pulls out two brown bottles, her knuckles gripping them at the top of their long necks.

"Old Undershirt," she says as she hooks each cap at the edge of the heavy, rustic table and whacks them down with the butt of her hand. "Made it myself."

She pours the beers into the centers of two heavy, slightly conical glasses. The head rises precisely to the lip. She looks pleased, if not outright proud, of having poured such classics. When Frankenstein holds his glass high toward the lamp, an ember-red star wavers in the brew. The reddish-brown of the beer is pretty close to the burnt tan of Wendy's cheeks. As it soaks into his throat, it's not cold but cool. It's tinged with a flavor of chrysanthemums, thick with minuscule fizz. As he exhales through his nose, he's sure he smells sage.

"Exquisite," he murmurs. He hasn't used the word for a long, long time, hasn't needed to. "Exquisite." Everything is exquisite. Exquisite is Wendy, with her tan, taut body, her smiley face, her broad, shy, front teeth. Exquisite is her earthy house, with its hewn furniture, its thick, yellow lamplight. Exquisite is the whole situation. Though his hand grips a moderately cool glass of beer, it sweats.

He's about to reach for her, but she brings her glass to her lips and drinks deeply. Her eyes close with pleasure. Frankenstein does the same. Before he's done, Wendy smacks her half-empty glass to the dining table and says, "Mexican food."

With famished enthusiasm, Frankenstein says, "Yes."

"I've got refrijoles," she says, extracting a pot from deep within her ancient ice box. She digs around more, bending to peer into the dark interior. "I've got some amazing tortillas made by a little old Mexican woman in town. I've got garlic guacamole. I've got shredded rabbit haunch with peppers that were smuggled in from Guatemala, I think." She lifts a ceramic bowl to her nose and gives the rabbit haunch a sniff. "I think it's still good."

"I'll eat it."

He would eat anything Wendy made for him. Her socks would be a sacrament. He sits at the table, watching her from behind as she ignites her gas stove, refries her refrijoles, warms her tortillas, snatches a gulp of Old Undershirt. She is so beautiful in her energy, her gracefully efficient movement. She cooks just as she drives her dump truck, same joy in the doing of it. She slides the bowl of guacamole onto the table, scoops out a fingerfull, puts it between her lips. Her eyes look over toward New Mexico. Frankenstein takes a taste. It resonates with cilantro, mint, chili, cumin, basil, jalapeña, dill. He can hardly untangle the flavors.

Frankenstein says, "Your beer's the best in the world. Your guacamole exceeds my wildest dreams. Your two front teeth drive me crazy. Wendy..." He has to stop. If he gave his feelings words, they'd sound like a lie. He's dumbstruck, but his heart's wide open.

Wendy comes around the table, straddles the bench, scoots in close, curls a denim leg around his waist. He cups her shoulder blades. As her face comes into his, she brings him the smell of asphalt. His lips skate across her bulging cheek, veer around the corner of her smiling eye, home in on her temple. He presses her black hair to his face so hard it seems to leave an indentation. It moistens with his perspiration, then grows wet. It coats his face like beach sand, then drips and cools like a splash of seawater. He sputters in it as if drowning, clings to it the way a sinking swimmer tries to clutch the surface of the water, to grip the ungraspable air. She feels hard, granular, scabrous. In some strange way, she is leaving him, fading into an odd solidity. In a desperate squeak, he whispers her name.

Knuckles, hairy knuckles, tap and massage his cheek. A deep, dry voice says, "Hey...hey..." More water splashes on his face. His eyes crack open. He is lying on something that feels like a highway but smells of Wendy.

"Hey...hey..." The hand shakes his shoulder.

He's conscious now. The voice says, "Can you get up?" It tries to lift him by an armpit, but Frankenstein clings to the asphalt, at least as much as fingers can.

Chapter Six

Life on a Pinkie

Frankenstein and a cricket sit beside Interstate 35 in Kansas. Or maybe it's still Oklahoma. The hazy blue sky, the great plain of corn stalk stubble, the straight-edge of the concrete highway, they haven't changed in days. The boundary between the two states, as he recalls from grade school, is an arbitrary line, a length of latitude, not something logical like a river or ridge. It divides nothing. Neither state has something the other doesn't. Judging by the dearth of traffic, few Oklahomans have reason to go to Kansas. The two states wash together like water in an ocean. No barbed wire fence, no guard towers, no red-striped poles across the road, nobody asking the purpose of your trip or whether you're carrying any crickets.

He's sitting on the shoulder, facing the roadway, his knees raised a bit, his right arm resting on his dingy duffel bag, his shoulder blades hooked over one of the cables that keep cars from diving into the corn. The cricket's behind him, off in the grass but not far away. It's been hounding him for at least three days. He hasn't seen it - for all he knows, it could be a tiny robot from another planet - but it's been bugging him with its slow, humble crick-creck, crick-creck beside at least ten entrance ramps. It has nothing else to say, of course, and it has yet to hear a response from another cricket. Either it's the same cricket hopping aboard each car that stops for him, or Oklahoma and Kansas deploy lone crickets along the interstates to remind hitch-hikers that they're not alone, that insects live here, too. Or maybe they're calling out to lovers who have met their maker on the windshields of cars and trucks. Lonely crickets chirping in the wilderness. If Frankenstein had a pen and paper, he'd write that down.

Bored to the point of desperate wonderment, he thinks it would be nice if the cricket leaped out of the dusty grass to sit on his shoulder. He wouldn't mind a cricket like that. He would talk to it, exchanging nonsense for nonsense. He'd say, "You know what it's like on the side of the road. If you had a Winnebago, would you stop for me?", and the cricket would say, "Crick-creck." That would be good enough. He's had less productive conversations with college graduates.

But this cricket remains out of sight, pitching its repetitious syllables from nowhere. Having heard its same word every three or four seconds for most of three or four days and nights, Frankenstein calculates that he's heard it at least eighty-six thousand times. He does his calculating in the thin layer of sand on the asphalt, tracing numbers with a bent, rusty screw. He calculates that if he spread those chirps out, he'd have 10.709838107 for every day of his life. He doubts he's heard his own name that often. He's heard the chirp so many times that he's not entirely sure whether he's hearing it or remembering it. It's synonymous with monotony. It occurs to him that even with a semi-automatic shotgun, he wouldn't be able to kill that cricket, to shut it up, but then he thinks of lighting the grass on fire. Yes, that would do it. He won't, but he's comforted to know he has a way to escape the relentless reminder that he's not going anywhere, not in any sense.

A tractor-trailer whooshes by. The bow waves hits him like a soft punch. The wake rushing up at the stern whips sand against his face and tilts him slightly to the north. It doesn't matter. He's still alive, and the cricket hasn't missed a beat.

He stands up for each car, holding out the palms of his hands and probing for eye contact. Ten thousand miles ago he theorized that this nonthreatening pose would hook in more cars than the traditional thumb. According to the theory, the image of a man jerking his thumb up and down will only set off subconscious fear. But no matter how he stands, most people drive right on by. All he's figured out is that it feels slightly better to stand there like a drooping crucifix. At least people might remember him, maybe even for days. He'll be a cricket in their minds, making them feel a little guiltier each day. Maybe someday someone will pass him a second time and get a second chance to do the right thing.

After way-too-many hours of truck-woosh and cricket-chirp, a rusty, pale blue van pulls over. Coming up to it from behind, Frankenstein smells trouble. One brake light's out. One back tire is bald, and the other has the clean, generic look of a spare. The engine shudders in a three-beat pulse. The tailpipe wags with the effort of sputtering semi-solids into the atmosphere. Two rusty puckers in the back door look a lot like bullet holes. Frankenstein knows rides like this. They can get very complicated and take a long time. They break down, they get stuck, they need to be push-started. Short excursions to drop something at an in-law's house end up taking hours, even days. That can be good and it can be excruciating. It depends on the in-laws.

Frankenstein slides open the side door to put his duffel bag in. Most of the space is taken up by an old, queen-size mattress stuck in there at an angle, propped against the wall of the van. Beneath its sag, a greasy tool box, a battle-weary chain saw and a tire rim sit as if under a lean-to in the rain. Frankenstein's going to come away from this ride with a dirty duffel bag. He already knows this and resigns himself to it. Worse things have happened.

The man at the wheel needs a new undershirt. But a new undershirt would be wasted on a man like this. Besides, he's not done with the one he's got. It still covers most of his broad, relaxed paunch, except in spots. The spots look to be of the same caliber as the holes in the back door. As the man works the van up through its three gears, the engine goes FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da with exhausted determination.

"So where you going?" Frankenstein asks, hoping it doesn't sound like he means How far do you think you'll get?

"Gawd," the man says with an inflection of utter disgust. "It's mighty hard to say."

Frankenstein knew it would be. It crosses his mind to say he's only going to the next exit. But even though he's known this man for only two or three minutes, doesn't even know his name or anything about him, he already feels in a certain way obliged. Attached. He can't just abandon ship. He's onboard for the nonce. He says, "Hard to say?"

The man wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. He has grease on three knuckles, a smear on the haunch of his thumb. The rest of his hand is neither clean nor permanently be-smudged. Frankenstein's best guess: He's not a mechanic, but he's been working on a machine. He's on his way to Wichita to get a spare part.

But no. It's not that simple.

"It's so complicated," the man says. "It's so complicated."

"I've got time. Tell me about it." Frankenstein prefers to let the other guy do the talking.

The man releases steam, pulls on his left eyebrow, shifts his grip on the steering wheel. He finally locates the crux of his situation. With measured cadence, he says, "I...am the president...of the P.T.A."

"No kidding." He manages to sound intrigued. The man doesn't look the part.

"Yep." The man nods heavily, then turns it into a heavy shaking from side to side. "But it's not that simple."

Frankenstein bides his time in silence. He hopes the explanation comes to involve sex with a kindergarten teacher. He hopes he can keep saying "no kidding" with real interest.

"OK. So look. The other officers of the P.T.A. are an unwed mother who just got her G.E.D. a couple of years ago because her kids were making fun of her. She's the treasurer. She can balance a check book. I'll say that for her. The secretary is my wife. She hates me. She hates the treasurer, too. She hates just about everybody. That's why she's in the P.T.A. It gives her a chance to hate. The vice president's a real winner. A professional educator, right? That's how she likes to present herself. What does she do? She's runs a taxidermy class. Hunters come in and learn how to stuff their kill. And she has a dog obedience school. Education, right? You say 'Heel!' and if the dog doesn't heel, you yank his choke collar. Works great on German shepherds. But it doesn't work real great if you try to apply it to, like, the secretary of the P.T.A., if you catch my drift."

"I catch your drift," Frankenstein says. He catches it completely. The vice president has been yanking the chain of the president's wife. Nothing good can possibly result from this.

"Right. But we're just getting started here. The treasurer's got a kid with a learning disability. He's not retarded or anything. I personally think he's probably over-bright. I mean, the kid's bouncing off the walls at school. Can't sit still. Can't keep his little mouth shut. He's in the fourth grade. So the teacher, who's an absolute idiot, has the kid go run around the soccer field about three or four times a day. To burn off his energy."

Frankenstein lifts an eyebrow, tilts his head. "That sounds like a good idea to me. That's what I'd do if I were a teacher." But he knows he wouldn't. He'd end up lashing the kid to his chair with duct tape. His classroom would rage in insufferable chaos. He wouldn't last three days in a fourth-grade classroom. He remembers himself in the fourth grade. Duct tape wouldn't have been a bad idea.

"It is a good idea," the man says, raising a forefinger to the side of his head. In his ragged T-shirt he looks for a moment like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. "Or it would be a good idea if the kid could just run around the soccer field and come right back without getting distracted."

Of course. Frankenstein hadn't thought of that. It sounds just like the kind of mistake he'd make. He'd send a kid off and then not notice when the kid failed to come back. He identifies with the fourth grade teacher. 'Yeah," he says. "So what happened?" It's as if his own fate depends on the kid's return.

"Well, nothing really bad happened. I mean, it doesn't matter, but, like, once, the kid...see the school's next to a farm that has cows and goats. So the kid climbs under the fence and goes chasing the goats around, comes back with shit on his shoes. Another time he came back with a snake. Once he was out there lying on his back, staring at the sun. Staring at the sun! Said he liked watching it change colors. Nobody ever told him not to stare at the sun, right? So he did it."

Frankenstein vaguely remembers doing that. Only now does it occur to him that that might explain why he's always worn glasses. He never had a father to tell him not to stare into the sun. He wonders if this kid has a broken nose. He'd almost bet on it.

He's already losing track of the man's complicated story. He says, "OK, so, you're married to the secretary, who hates the treasurer and everybody else. The treasurer's got a hyper kid and the fourth-grade teacher's an idiot."

"And the vice president teaches taxidermy."

"Right. I forgot her."

"Don't forget her because look at her brilliant idea. She wanted to bring stuffed animals into the school."

"Hmmm." Frankenstein thinks that might be a good idea, but it might not. He can almost guess what's going to happen.

"'Hmmm' is exactly what I said when I heard about this brainstorm. I smelled trouble. And sure enough, half the stuffed animals she wants to bring in are dead pets. She gets them from the veterinarian. For the hunters to practice on."

Frankenstein smacks himself in the forehead, holds his hand over his eyes. "Jesus," he says.

"You got it. Dead pets. And it's a small town. East Wilma. The kids know these pets. Fido. Bootsy. Jerry the Gerbil. Harry the hamster. I don't know who-all else."

"Hamsters!" Frankenstein gets an inkling of the world making sense. With a glorious burst of inspiration, he imagines himself arriving at Walter's hamster ranch with the idea that will make them both rich: stuffed hamsters. If ever a rage was poised to sweep the nation, stuffed hamsters are it. America needs a pet like this ­ soft and fuzzy yet needing no more attention than a pet rock. No cage to clean, no holes chewed in the wall, no untimely death to deal with. A person could attach one to a sweater, deploy them in cute spots around the house, set one on a desk with its little paws in beg position. Is America ready for the hamster barrette, the hamster brooch, the hamster key fob? Stranger things have happened here. The market's certainly big enough. Frankenstein tucks this nugget away for consideration the next time he's stuck on the side of the road.

The man nods matter-of-factly. "Hamsters. Snakes. Parakeets. And of course half these animals got hit by cars, so they're a real mess...all busted open and stitched back shut. Like furry little Frankensteins."

Frankenstein winces but doesn't let on. "Jesus," he says. "You're not going to let it happen are you?"

"Let it happen? It happened! She brought all these practice trophies in and set them up all over the school. Up on shelves. Behind doors. Sitting at desks. She meant to surprise them. She thought it would bring a fond tear of remembrance to the kids' eyes. Fond remembrance and squeals of joy. That's what she said. And you know something?"

"She was right, right?"

"Half right. Tears and squeals. We got plenty of that. Kids were freaking out all over the place. One little girl saw her neighbor's dog in the lav, holding its little paw up to be shook. A kid heard his cat was in somebody's else's room and he started screaming when they wouldn't let him go see. A kid found a guinea pig in his desk. There was rat snake hanging from the florescent lights."

"Where was the principal?"

"The principal freaked out, too. He's this real prissy guy who keeps washing his hands. You always see him walking down the hall, wiping his hands with a paper towel. So he freaked out. Went right into his office, shut the door and started making phone calls. Called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do without some kind of paper from a judge. But court was in session or something, so no judge. Nobody knew where the vice president was. The teachers wouldn't touch the animals because they were so gross. You know, kind of half-shaved, stapled shut, little glass-bead eyes hanging out by a thread. You can imagine."

He sure can. But he couldn't have imagined the situation if it hadn't happened. How do human beings manage to get themselves into such fixes? Why can't people just go about their business? Even Ann Landers couldn't solve this one. He says, "Why didn't they tell the janitor to do it?"

"The janitor lived next door to the vice president. He knew better than to mess with her. He complained to town hall once about all the dead animals in her back yard - she let them pile up in the winter - so she turned him in for making vodka in his basement. Then he turned her in for building a deck without a building permit, and she turned him in for burning leaves in his backyard, which technically you're not supposed to do in our town, though you can because the fire marshal's a volunteer and really couldn't care less. As a matter of fact, his kid's the one who found the stuffed guinea pig in his desk. As long as we're at it, you might as well know that the guinea pig had once belonged to a girl who left the thing home when she went to college in Massachusetts. Her mother fed it wet lettuce and it died in its sleep at the vet's. Did you know that? You can't feed wet lettuce to a guinea pig or it'll die."

"Well I'll be damned."

Wet lettuce. How did this tale get down to wet lettuce? Frankenstein can't even begin to backtrack. He's completely lost. Does this guinea pig count in the bigger picture, whatever it was? The P.T.A.? He's forgotten the whole thing. But for the rest of his life, he'll remember the part about the wet lettuce. Wet lettuce sounds like the first thing he'd give a guinea pig. In the far-back darkness of his mind, he can almost see a shadow of his little self feeding greens to a domesticated rodent ­ not his own but somebody else's. Was it a guinea pig? Was it lettuce? Was it wet? Did the animal die? He can't quite remember. He searches his mind for other guinea pigs he may have fed. He recalls none, but his imagination conjures up a clear image of a trail of little graves stretching back into his earliest days. He can almost feel the wet, slender leaves of doom in his fingers as he slides them through the chicken wire of a cage. He envisions himself walking away, satisfied that he has helped feed the needy. Behind him he hears the nervous little crunch-crunch-crunch.

The man continues: "Enter the federal government."

"Uh-oh."

"You got it. The day after all this, who shows up but a federal cafeteria inspector out of St. Louis. Any school that accepts federal lunch subsidies has to get inspected by this dope on a quarterly basis. Of course he shows up on the day we've got a stuffed raccoon crammed into a basketball hoop in the cafeteria."

"Basketball hoops in the cafeteria?" For some reason it sounds stranger to have a basketball hoop in a cafeteria than a stuffed raccoon in a basketball hoop.

"You got it," the man says with an emphatic nod. "I should mention that this is a very rinky-dink school. The cafeteria's in the gym. Special ed's in a closet. The library's on a little cart that gets wheeled from room to room. The janitor's a drunk. The art teacher's a drunk but she's got tenure. But at least the kids get lunch every day. Or they did until the federal inspector showed up, by which time that hyper-berserkoid kid I told you about found out that if you toss a lime Jello cube into the basket net, it sticks to the raccoon's fur."

"I never knew that!"

"It's not one of your wider-known facts. And guess what else..."

The man waits for a guess. His hand scoops at the air, trying to coax an answer out of Frankenstein. "I give up," Frankenstein says. "I really do. I just can't imagine." He wonders if he'll ever have kids, whether he'll ever get suckered into joining the P.T.A.

"All right. I'll tell you. It turns out there's a law against having a dead animal in a cafeteria."

"Sounds reasonable, when you think about it."

"A federal law, mind you. Some senator or something thought it up. Had absolutely nothing else to do."

"They think of everything, don't they?"

"Everything except how to feed a hundred and eighty-three kids lunch every day. The state got involved and shut the cafeteria down, pending reapplication for our permit. The kid's are eating bag lunches in the classroom, which is in itself a federal offense because they have a right to a hot lunch. But the bigger problem's the janitor. He's all pissed off because of the peanut butter and Fig Newtons that get mashed into the carpets."

"This is the same guy who wouldn't take the dead raccoon out of the basketball hoop? The drunk? I say get rid of him." For just this moment, Frankenstein feels a glimmer of satisfaction that he has contributed to the situation. He has offered his advice.

But the man says, "Can't get rid of him. He's a Teamster. And a volunteer fireman. You get him mad, the next thing you know, your house is on fire."

"Which means he's a friend of the fire marshal who didn't mind if he burned leaves in his back yard."

"Those were poison ivy leaves. I should have mentioned that."

"Aha!"

"Right! He burned them as an offensive attack against the lady next door."

"The one who stuffed animals. The secretary."

"Nope. The secretary's my wife. The lady with the stuffed animals is vice president."

Out of the blue, Frankenstein says, "Is she married?"

The man looks at him. "She's in her late fifties and built like a walrus. And, in case you haven't guessed, she's a little sick upstairs. Believe me, you wouldn't be interested."

"I wasn't. I meant doesn't she have a husband to stick up for her?"

"I was getting to that. He split a couple years ago. Ditched the bitch. Know why? Same thing as happened at the school. She stuffed his vizsla."

Frankenstein's inner reference librarian goes tearing through the shelves of his mind. Veeshla, veeshla, veeshla...if you can't spell it, you can't look it up.

"It's a hunting dog," the man says. "Hungarian, I think. Not a particularly bright animal. This one stuck his nose in a porcupine, then ran out in the road and got run over."

Frankenstein shakes his head. History will never record these details of humanity. He imagines the poor vizsla bolting in panic, pain and perhaps an enraged sense of stupidity. He darts onto a state highway. Tires screech with the power of a pterodactyl. The dog cowers. Thumpity-thump, and that's the end of him. His master can hardly believe the suddenness of the tragedy. Maybe he takes a pot-shot at the truck as it speeds away. Maybe the driver stops and drives them to the vet. At any rate, it's too late. The dog is dead. Later, the vet calls the wife, says, "Hey, you want to surprise your husband?" Maybe she did it to be nice, maybe to be mean. In a certain sense, the sense of the big picture, it doesn't matter. Unless it's the dog of a king, history will pass this incident by. It's a shame, Frankenstein thinks. Someone should write all this down. It matters.

But history depends on interpretation. You need all the facts, and then you need the stuff that matters, the stuff that doesn't fit into factual form. Such as why she stuffed his vizsla. The Encyclopedia Britannica doesn't have that. Frankenstein can't even imagine what topic to look under. "Dogs, Hungarian hunting"? "Taxidermy, as psychological weapon"? "P.T.A. officers, unusual"? Even if he got the facts straight and figured out the motives and wrote it up in some intelligible way, where would history stick this nugget of human interaction? Miscellaneous? If a history book had an appendix for humanity's miscellany, it wouldn't even fit on the planet. They'd have to store it on Jupiter.

Frankenstein asks, "What kind of car was it? That hit the dog."

"It was a pick-up truck. Belonged to my wife's hairdresser, as a matter of fact. Which figures in."

"Wow! Small world! Did he stop?"

"Oh, he stopped, all right. But look at the complication. He had a mattress in back. He bought it at a yard sale, right? But of course it wasn't just your random yard sale. It was the yard sale of the family of the girl who went to college in Massachusetts and left her guinea pig home under the tender loving care of her mother."

"Who fed it wet lettuce."

"Bingo. And it was her mattress. The daughter's mattress. This guy with the pick-up truck used to go out with her. It was a major scandal. He was twenty-seven. She was nineteen. In faaaaact, that's why they sent her all the way to Massachusetts to go to school."

Frankenstein smacks himself on both cheeks. "He bought his ex-girlfriend's mattress!"

A big, fat smile pushes the man's cheeks up high. "Close but not quite. He stole the mattress. They wouldn't sell it to him. They saw him sniffing it. When he asked them if they'd take five dollars, they told him to get lost. He thought it was a matter of price, so he said OK, ten, which was the price on the tag. They told him to get lost again. He said the hell he would. The price said ten dollars so they had to sell it to him. He threw the money at them and heaved the mattress into the back of the truck and off he went."

And ran over the vizsla of the husband of the taxidermist vice president of the P.T.A., setting in motion the final stages of marital disintegration.

"That's not the end of it," the man says insistently, keeping his eyes on the road but pointing his pinkie at Frankenstein. "That's not the end of it at all. The people still wanted their mattress back. So they got a court order. An injunction or something. The sheriff goes and gets it. And what do you think?"

The man waits. It's guessing time again. Frankenstein thinks hard, imagines the mattress of a lovelorn bachelor. Maybe he framed it and put it on the wall. Maybe he made an altar of it, an altar to the god of panmixia, the almighty Kink.

The man turns and leans in close. He squints hard through one eye. Frankenstein watches the road, the man, the road, the man. In a whispery growl, the man says, "It was smeared with blood."

Frankenstein's aghast. History has taken a turn to the gruesome.  He should have expected it. In the vicious, small-town swirl of human urge, something had to crack. With a crazed taxidermist at the center of things, blood was inevitable. Just as barbers of yore bled patients to relieve fever, blood had to burst from the pressure-cooker of East Wilma, OK.

But then the man reveals that it was only the vizsla's blood. The dog had lain on the mattress as it died in the back of the pick-up. No doubt the taxidermist's husband had sat back there, easing his faithful companion into the afterworld on a fragrant mattress that lovers had left indented. The man probably spoke reassuring words as he plucked porcupine quills from his best friend's snout. "Everything," he surely said, " 'll be all right."

But everything wasn't all right. The poor dog died in pain and humiliation, its master abandoned his wife, the forlorn lover lost his mattress, the family got back something too disgusting to touch, and then their guinea pig died. Frankenstein wonders if they have lawyers in East Wilma. He wonders if he should inform the ASPCA about this place. Animals don't seem to last long there, and a pack of talented attorneys could probably get these people to sue themselves out of existence.

Frankenstein, resorting to his practice of repeating someone's last three words, says, "Smeared with blood!"

'Yep. And who do you think gets held responsible?"

"It should've been the guy who stole the mattress." Frankenstein would have made a great judge. Sometimes he thinks that. Other times he's sure that in that capacity, he would fail most miserably. In a slow flash as surreal as a dream, he imagines an irate jury tossing him out of a courthouse. He rolls down the marble steps and into the street. A bus honks at him. He sees himself slogging out of town, duffel bag on his shoulder, his black robe drooping with the weight of a job done poorly. He's already sorry to have declared the mattress thief guilty of something he didn't really do. It wasn't his blood.

The man overturns Frankenstein's decision. "Nope," he says. "It wasn't him."

"The truck driver, then?" He isn't declaring guilt this time. It's just a suggestion.

The man says, "Nope."

"The taxidermist's husband?"

"Nope."

"Not the dog, I hope."

"Nope. Not the dog."

That's all the suspects Frankenstein can think of. Who else could it be? The girl who went to college? The prissy principal? The drunk custodian? The fire marshal who didn't care? The federal cafeteria inspector?

Just then Frankenstein remembers the funny little holes in the back of the van, and just as he turns to look back at them, he sees the mattress. Of course. Of course.

"Not you," he gasps.

Mouth clamped shut to a cynical slit, the man nods.

"But why you?"

"I...am the president...of the P.T.A."

Frankenstein turns to look out the windshield. The highway goes straight to the vanishing point, a distant ripple of heat waves. He feels himself and the president of the P.T.A. riding a flaming comet toward infinity, destiny hurdling absolutely nowhere. The tires go th-thud, th-thud over the cracks in the concrete.

"You probably didn't know all this was going to happen when you signed up for the presidency," Frankenstein offers. He's hoping to hide the fact that he's still confused.

"Hey, I never signed up for this," the man says. "I am not a responsible individual. Never meant to be one. In faaaact, that's how I ended up with the job. I was fishing when they elected me. I didn't go to the meeting, so at my wife's behest, they elected me. I might add that a) it was not fishing season and b) I don't have a fishing license. I was committing at least two illegal acts. And on top of that, I was out there with the taxidermist lady's husband, which meant of course I was drinking bourbon, which is probably illegal in a row boat. Without a life preserver on. By all of which I mean to say that I'm not a responsible person and never should have been elected to the presidency."

"But it happened."

"It happened, and maybe I deserve it. I don't know. But this mattress..." - he sneers and jerks his thumb toward the back of the van - "it should definitely not be my responsibility."

"But there it is." Following us, Frankenstein thinks.

"There it is. Responsibility. On its way to St. Louis. And me in charge. Goddammit."

In a tone of uncommitted amazement, stretching out the vowels, Frankenstein says, "St. Louis." For the first time in his life, he wonders who Saint Louis was, what he did, why they named a city in Missouri after him. He imagines his kind benefactor, president of the P.T.A., being canonized, patron saint of bedroom furniture, for his martyrdom in East Wilma.

"I caught hell all over town," the man says. "It was me who finally got the stuffed animals out of the school. I just went and did it. I threw them all in the Dumpster, and not gently. Their owner got all pissed off about that. They were her property. These former pets. That's what she kept saying. Her property. My wife went ballistic when we got a bill from the lady for $8,981.52, which I'm sure is just a number she made up. And of course the kids got mad, too, seeing Bootsy and Fido and whoever else getting chucked into the garbage, which means all their parents got mad. About the only kid who didn't give a damn was the treasurer's kid, the hyper kid who threw the Jello on the raccoon. I boosted him up to the basketball hoop so he could get the coon out. Of course I had to hold him up by his little ass, which got the principal all bent out of shape. His mother got all bent out of shape because I made her kid touch a dead animal. And right in the middle of all this, the family with the mattress calls and wants me to come get it."

"You?"

"Sure. Of course. The president of the P.T.A. Who else would they call?"

"Sounds weird to me."

"What it was, was, they wanted to donate it to our annual auction. They just wanted to get rid of it. But they didn't want to throw it away...."

"But wasn't it covered with blood?"

"Naw, not covered. It just had a little on it. And it's a real good mattress. Look..." The man reaches around, slaps it a few times. "Some kind of high-tech whoopty-do titanium coils or something. Practically new."

Frankenstein gives it a feel. It's firm and smooth and not bad looking. He'd sleep on it. He gives it surreptitious sniff, but he's too far away to tell if it smells like her. Or the boyfriend or the vizsla. If anything, it smells like the chain saw and toolbox underneath. He says, "So you're taking it to St. Louis."

"Right. Because my wife hates these people."

"The mattress people."

"Right. She hates them because they organize German beer fests, and she's Polish."

"You mean like from Poland Polish?"

"Hell no. Her grandparents on both sides were Polish. Her father organizes Polkathons in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. So she's vowed to hate Germans all her life. Germans and all things German. Especially German beer fests because they compete directly with Polkathons, which if you ask me are the same damned thing. At the beer fests, they drink beer and dance. At the Polkathons, they dance and drink beer. It's nothing worth starting a goddamn war over."

"She wants to start a war?"

"She would if she could." The man snorts with a sudden amusing thought. "Maybe that's what she's up to. Because you know what she wants me to do with the mattress? Give it to her hairdresser."

Frankenstein knots up one eye, tilts his head. "Her hairdresser," he says, stating the fact, hoping the man will remind him how the hairdresser fits in.

"That's right. And he's all hot to trot. Wants the smell of his sweetie-pie back." Eyes squinted, the man holds the tips of his fingers at his nostrils, French-style.

Frankenstein remembers. The hairdresser ran over the dog. He says, "So you're going to let him have it?"

"You nuts? If he gets ahold of this mattress, I'm puppy chow."

"And if you don't let him have it, your wife kills you."

"In a nutshell, yes. She will grind me down. She will drive me to an early grave. And I'll look forward to it. I'll crawl in and lie down and think, 'Thank God almighty I am dead at last.'"

Frankenstein can see it happening. The van pulls into the cemetery, parks at a nice, new grave. The hole is perfectly rectangular, the proportions of a bathroom door. Beside it stands a classic mound of fresh earth, a pyramid of clay on a bed of topsoil. The engine of the van sputters a low cloud of blue exhaust across the cemetery lawn. The woman at the wheel, shoulders broad and rounded, hair of gold, holds a cigarette between two wrinkled knuckles of her right hand. A man eases himself out of the passenger side. His hairy gut bulges from under his T-shirt, which seems to have more bullet holes in it than before. He doesn't look back. He trudges to the grave, lowers himself to all fours, turns around, climbs in backward. The van pulls away - FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da/ FUD-dud-da - and the grave overflows with a sigh.

"So what are you going to do in St. Louis?" Frankenstein asks.

"I'm going to hand the federal fucking cafeteria inspector the papers which if they're all filled out right will force him to rescind his condemning of our cafeteria. That's step one."

"Yeah?"

"Step two was supposed to be 'Turn around and go back home.' But you know what I say to Step Two? I say fuck it."

"Fuck it," Frankenstein says as if both agreeing and needing to think about it.

"Fuck it. Fuck-it-fuck-it-fuck-it-fuck-it. I'm not going back home. Handing the cafeteria inspector these papers is the last responsible thing I am ever going to do. Then I'm going to sell this mattress for what I can get for it, and then I'm heading for Kentucky."

"Kentucky," Frankenstein says, hitting the second syllable hard.

"Kentucky. Blue Grass State. Land of thoroughbreds. I just want to get a job on a high-class horse farm and shovel high-class horseshit all day long. Because you know why? Because did you ever think how an atom and the solar system are the same thing, just about?"

As a matter of fact Frankenstein has thought of that. He's just never figured out what to do about it. And he never saw the connection with Kentucky. He never even thought to look.

The patron saint of bedroom furniture continues: "They have the same structure, right? So how do we know that Earth isn't just an electron in an atom that's just part of a molecule that to us looks like a galaxy? That the whole universe as we know it is just the tip of a hair on the ass-end of a flea which is huger than anything we could ever conceive of? Huger than the universe. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it."

"Sure does."

"And meanwhile, a'course, some little molecule on the end of my finger..." - he holds up his pinkie, marks the tippy-tip of it with his thumb - "...is a whole nother universe to a bunch of people so teeny-weeny we couldn't possibly imagine them. They're down there looking up through teeny-weeny telescopes and thinking, 'Wow, look how big the universe is' and they can't see halfway across my fingernail."

With fathomless wonderment, Frankenstein shakes his head. The man from East Wilma is stuck between imponderables. He's torn as if by proximate gravities. He's afraid to go home yet unafraid to venture forth on the capital of a used mattress. He's taken on a town's responsibility, yet he's abandoning it. He's in despair; he's charged with hope. He's guilty; he's innocent. He's wrong; he's right. He cares and he doesn't care. He's tethered; he's free. He's aware of what's going on, but what's going on is bigger than he by far. He's doomed...he's doomed.

He shakes the tip of his pinkie at Frankenstein. "There's some tiny-ass East Wilma down there," he says, "and everybody thinks everything is sooooo fucking important. They're all bent out of shape over ...what?" With tight lips he makes a quick, high-pitched spitty-farty noise. "Nothing," he says in a rough hush. "Nothing."

Frankenstein could have told him that, but all he's going to say is that he likes the idea of shoveling manure for a living. He wonders if he should suggest looking for a job in a planetarium. He turns to look out the side window. Oklahoma, or Kansas, rushes by, quite still at the horizon yet a rippling blur at the guard rail. His cricket's still out there, he's sure, still hidden, infinitesimal and alone. He's ready to hear it again. He practically wants to. Crick-creck, crick-creck. It's something to think about.

Chapter Seven

The Hamsters of Lark

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