Michael Collier

The shape of it bending like an eel or disfigured quarter moon, pink and green and brown, like a rainbow trout. The wall along my bed covered with the map I cut from the newspaper, and next to it the fishing calendar from Abonauder’s Texaco. The square cages of days with their numerals and effigies of moon and fish shaded to indicate the shape of the moon, the hunger of the fish. The white bread stripped of its crust, dampened, then dusted with flour, compressed into a tight ball, wrapped in foil and chilled all night. A piece of it pressed and shaped on the tip of an Eagle Claw hook, then lowered into the nesting holes of blue gill. The plastic bobber floating on the surface like a silent doorbell. A whole world of cause and effect, framed day-by-day and week-by-week. The passage of time as a kind of game in which I transferred numbers from the newspaper to the calendar. The body counts and their categories of NVRA, Marines, Montagnards. And each morning I put a bold X through the previous day not to erase or forget it but to connect the corners, make four triangles of the square. And it was rare if not impossible to catch the blue gill that swam and swam around the tidy pebble craters of their nests, or coax them out except in hostile swerves and feints toward the bait that hung like a balloon of gravity over their homes, a suspicious egg pouch or cocoon, something a storm might have dislodged from the bank and blown like a feared gift into the water, a thing swallowed whole then run with until the line played out and the hook set fast.

All that has tamed me I have learned to love and lost that wildness that was once beloved. All that was loved I’ve learned to tame and lost the beloved that once was wild. All that is wild is tamed by love— and the beloved (wildness) that once was loved.

This dog standing in the middle of the street, tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit, its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws, might have been forgiven or simply taken away and shot under different circumstances and no one would have said much, except his owner who’d gone out into the yard at the start of the commotion, having been involved at other times with the dog’s truancies, and yelled, “Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!” but unavailing, and everyone understanding that once more Bosco had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature. But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man Who’d raised the rabbit shouldn’t husband something so rare and beautiful he couldn’t keep it from the likes of Bosco.

When the fire bell rang its two short, one long electric signal, the boys closest to the wall of windows had to raise the blinds and close the sashes, and then join the last of our line as it snaked out the classroom onto the field of asphalt where we stood, grade-by-grade, until the principal appeared with her gold Timex. We learned early that catastrophe must always be attended in silence, that death prefers us orderly and ordered, and that rules will save us from the chaos of our fear, so that even if we die, we die together, which was the calm almost consoling thought I had each time the yellow C.D. siren wailed and we would tuck ourselves beneath our sturdy desktops. Eyes averted from the windows, we’d wait for the drill to pass or until the nun’s rosary no longer clicked and we could hear her struggling to free herself from the leg-well of her desk, and then her call for us to rise and, like herself, brush off the dust gathered on our clothes. And then the lessons resumed. No thought of how easily we interred ourselves, though at home each would dream the mushroom cloud, the white cap of apocalypse whose funnel stem sucked glass from windows, air from lungs, and made all these rehearsals the sad and hollow gestures that they were, for we knew it in our bones that we would die, curled in a last defense— head on knees, arms locked around legs— the way I’ve seen it since in nursing homes and hospices: forms bedsheets can’t hide, as if in death the body takes on the soul’s compact shape, acrobatic, posed to tumble free of the desktop or bed and join the expanse and wide scatter of debris.

The lump on his neck that no collar could hide, and the charity of his presence there in the neighborhood each fall, door-to-door, standing in the swept porches, waiting for the housewives to answer. The ugly, pitiable treeman, reddish and leathery from the sun. His baseball cap pulled tight over his head, the visor stiff as a beaver’s tail. Year after year, the bowsaw with its wide teeth and the long-handled toppers were all that announced his trade. And standing on the porch he advised nothing, though he coughed and hacked, covering his mouth with his sap-blackened fist and waited for the infrequent yes that sent him up the trunk and into the solid lap of the branches, where he clipped and sawed the bony leafless rigging until the tree, all torso—lung and heart, ribs and hips and shoulders—, stood like a knotted goblet in the yard, a figure, as in allegory, of his own stunted self, rooted, alive. My mother tried hard to convince us we were all children of God and that the sick and maimed, the poor, were creatures born to special destinies so unique we could not understand. But who could understand pain’s redemptiveness and how it rarely seemed to translate into grace. The poor were always poor, the sick, sick—just as the treeman’s goiter did not respond to treatment, inscrutable, part of God’s plan, part of the unlovely element of love: the humbling, the pity, the scar of violence— a craving too frightening to name, or too tender, the way the treeman bundled the trimmings in twine and hauled them to the alley. And as if he counted it his real work, leaned against the fence and with his fingers picked the dogged sap from the blade and with a file sharpened the teeth.

When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and then a wind stirred in the room as if she’d placed those words in his mouth.

A few of us—Hillary Clinton, Vlad Dracula, Oprah Winfrey, and Trotsky—peer through the kitchen window at a raccoon perched outside on a picnic table where it picks over chips, veggies, olives, and a chunk of pâte. Behind us others crowd the hallway, many more dance in the living room. Trotsky fusses with the bloody screwdriver puttied to her forehead. Hillary Clinton, whose voice is the rumble of a bowling ball, whose hands are hairy to the third knuckle, lifts his rubber chin to announce, “What a perfect mask it has!” While the Count whistling through his plastic fangs says, “Oh, and a nose like a chef.” Then one by one the other masks join in: “Tail of a gambler,” “a swashbuckler’s hips,” “feet of a cat burglar.” Trotsky scratches herself beneath her skirt and Hillary, whose lederhosen are so tight they form a codpiece, wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog. Dracula and Oprah, the married hosts, hold hands and then let go. Meanwhile the raccoon squats on the gherkins, extracts pimentos from olives, and sniffs abandoned cups of beer. A ghoul in the living room turns the music up and the house becomes a drum. The windows buzz. “Who do you love? Who do you love?” the singer sings. Our feathered arms, our stockinged legs. The intricate paws, the filleting tongue. We love what we are; we love what we’ve become.