“It’s painless,” Luiz said to me. “That’s the best thing about it.” He was standing in the street in front of “Buck’s” tavern at two-thirty in the morning, pressing a Saturday-night special to his right temple. “The bullet’s in your brain before you feel the pain.”

I looked across the street for Ingrid. She was out of sight on the other side of my yellow car by an adult bookstore. She was trying to coax someone’s kitten out from under the car.

I took a step toward Luiz, but he clicked the hammer back and I stopped. “Okay, fine,” I said softly.

He squeezed his eyes shut and stood there. He held the revolver to his ear. “I can hear the gun factory,” he said.

“Please put that away. If Ingrid sees you, her birthday is spoiled.”

Down on her hands and knees now, Ingrid called over to me in a whisper, “Poppy, he keeps getting away.”

“Don’t go away, Luiz,” I told him. I crossed the street and got down and looked under the car. A dim glow came from a streetlight up the block. The kitten kept crawling under whichever tire was furthest from Ingrid.

“It’s hungry,” she cooed. She made kissing sounds at the kitten. “You’re hungry, aren’t you, little guy?”

It wandered over towards me and I got it by the scruff of the neck. “Ow, here, happy birthday.” I gave it to Ingrid. She cradled it in her arms and it purred and fell asleep. Fine droplets of blood welled up from the scratches on my hands. I thought of infection and they instantly started to itch.

A window squeaked open in the apartment above the adult bookstore and a young couple, college kids, stuck their heads out. “What’s going on down there?”

“Is this your cat?” Ingrid asked them. It wasn’t, but they came down to look at it.

“He’s so cute,” the girl said. “Can I hold him.”

There was a dull hammering across the street. The bartender from Buck’s was kicking the door of his Bronco and swearing. A pretty blonde girl with thick ankles he’d been dancing with in the tavern came across the street to us and asked if we’d seen anyone hanging around his truck, because the stereo had been stolen. I noticed Luiz was gone.

“Look, he’s sleeping,” Ingrid said to the girl holding the kitten. “He likes you.”

In that manner, we got rid of the kitten.

***

Ingrid is not as pretty as my wife but she’s four years younger and her body is muscular and powerful and graceful, because she is serious about sprinting. Her greatest regret, I have learned in the three summers I have been meeting her, is that she started training too late to make it onto the U.S. Olympic team.

She teaches German at a high school in Eugene, Oregon. I teach French at one in Renton, south of Seattle. Once a year, in the summer, I see her at a week-long language teaching seminar at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Earlier that day a professor from BYU had spoken for two hours about how he could teach anyone Hokkien dialect in a single day using his “Mnemotic Method”. It was hot in the room and I fell asleep. Afterwards we still had a few hours of August sun left so Ingrid and I went to the beach.

We spread our towels by a big, bleached cedar log where we were out of the wind. Ingrid lay on her stomach and I looked at her perfect body undisturbed for a minute or two. I have never touched her skin.

“You’re such a good listener,” she said from her towel, calling me back to reality. Little muscles danced at the base of her spine when she spoke. “I really like that about you.”

“Same here,” I said. I am careful how I act around Ingrid. I am letting things develop organically. I don’t just want to fuck her. I want her to love me afterwards.

Some people were riding horses on the beach, far away, but trotting in our direction.

“Ingrid, promise me something,” I said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“If aliens should abduct my family, and perhaps the rest of the population of Earth, would you marry me and help me repopulate the planet?”

She rolled over onto her side and looked up at me. “I’d be honored, Poppy.”

The horses came closer. They were a couple of big chestnut brown quarterhorses, with a frisky little foal on a rope behind them. The young horse was afraid of the waves, and shied up onto the dry sand every time foam shot up around its hooves. It seemed to be the first time it had ever seen the ocean.

“We’ll have horses,” I said. “Just like those, only more. We’ll have a barn and stables and a big corral and a pasture with a clear stream where they can drink. A few acres of alfalfa. A county farm house with a big kitchen and wood floors. We’ll train the horses and go on round-ups and teach the kids to barrel race.”

“I would bake pies while you chopped wood outside,” Ingrid said.

***

Luiz told me the other half of his duplex was vacant, but a terrible stench came from it. He had no car but parts were strewn through his half. Grey, stony pit-bull turds lay here and there in house and yard, even though his dog had been destroyed the summer before for biting a child. The whole place smelled like pee because his plumbing didn’t work right. We were prisoners of friendship and I always stayed with him when I was in Bellingham.

I had known him since we were twelve or thirteen, and he hadn’t changed since then — he hadn’t grown physically or emotionally. He had looked like a little old man for as long as I’d known him. He was the crazy kid at school and we all persecuted him. We called him Louise. We pantsed him and gave him brownies. Girls said, Ew, ick, when he walked by.

He has always smelled like pee.

Stories were told about him screwing animals or jacking off in the bleachers and after a certain point was reached, life began imitating legend. People caught him in their garages, sniffing airplane glue and jacking off into their family albums. He began getting arrested for climbing people’s trees at night and looking in their windows.

And I was the kid who didn’t blow up birds’ heads with M-80s or cover live grasshoppers with lugies and sand and leave them to bake into mummies in the sun. Stray dogs followed me and Luiz seemed to think, if twelve people kick you ten times and the thirteenth only kicks you nine times, he must be your friend.

We played in the fields, always, never in our houses. His parents were always drinking and kicking each other out and my mom didn’t like having Luiz around because he was a klepto.

We never did anything that required something like intelligence. We built forts, and Luiz gave me cigarettes or showed me stroke books he stole. He made me dare him to do things, which he always then did. Once he rolled snow tires down the freeway embankment into the northbound lanes and a semi jackknifed. The trailer crushed a passenger car and a lady died. We ran and ran and hid in a hazelnut orchard. We crouched in old snow and Luiz held his nut-brown face up to my ear like he was going to kiss me. His hot breath made clouds around my head in the cold.

“You’re responsible,” he whispered.

The accident was in all the papers.

***

Ingrid was saving a fawn with a broken leg when I first met her. We hiked eight miles with it, uphill, in the sun. I thought it was a sweet trait at first, but she did it every time I was with her: a bloody collie dog crawled to the shoulder of the freeway to die just as we drove past, baby birds fell out of their nests as she walked beneath them. You couldn’t plan anything.

After the scene at the bar, Ingrid and I drove around for a few minutes looking for Luiz. Then I said I’d had enough.

“But how will he get home?”

“On foot.” I put a cassette in my car stereo, something loud. “He’s never had a car, he always walks. I’ve known him since puberty, he’s indestructible.”

“He’s poor. He’s lucky to have you as a friend.”

In the street behind the dorm where she was staying for the seminar I got out of the car and gave her a hug. I held her and kissed her hair quietly so she wouldn’t hear. I told her I’d look for Luiz along the way to his duplex, but when I left I just took a drive along the old highway, over along the water.

It was pitch dark and I was the only car on the road except for a black Camaro parked in the entrance to a State Park with what looked like two people kissing. After an hour of driving I was so tired I parked at a wide spot in the road and slept.

I woke up at six in the morning when a convoy of logging trucks went past. I’d had nearly three hours of sleep. I sat there yawning and rubbing sleep from my eyes and looking out at the young grey water of Bellingham Bay, and Lummi Island. Color crept into things and the mist rose soundlessly as the sun came up behind me. There was a find greyish-blue film of dew on the grass, that had darker spots in the dew where it had been disturbed: footprints where someone had come out of the woods, circled my car closely while I slept, and then gone back into the brush.

***

Before bed, Luiz asked me between bong hits if I had ever tried crack.

“No.”

“There’s a crack house not far away. Dare me to get some? It’s close.”

I shook my head.

“Just say No,” he laughed. “You know what I really like to do?”

“What?”

“Rearrange people’s furnitiure while they’re asleep. Leave a kitchen knife in their baby’s bed, that kind of thing.”

“It’s been done.”

“Helter skelter,” he said in a puff of bong smoke. “You know that smell next door?”

“Was that a real gun you had yesterday at the tavern?”

“You know that smell?”

“Was it loaded?”

“Do you know that smell?”

“What about it?”

“You know what it is? The old lady who lived there died, and no one knows yet. I’ve been taking her mail. Her kids never call. Probably no one will find out until Mother’s Day.”

“Bull.”

“She’s in the bathtub. Naked, only all green. Well, greenish. The water looks like jello, bug jello. Soft bugs. They’re really booking.”

“You lie.” I took another bong hit.

“Whose menthols do you think you’ve been smoking?”

***

The seminar ended the next day and when I got back to my house and pulled into the driveway behind the horse trailer, my two kids ran out and hugged me. Our collie limped over and shook my hand.

For my wife Karen, the horse trailer is just a joke, the visible tipo of my horse dream iceberg. I’d like to get stables somewhere up in Woodinville or Carnation and forget about questions like, “Do they play pool in France, Mr. Barner?” or “Why do they have to say it like that?”. Karen figures a trailer is cheaper than a sports car and safer than a hunting rifle, but she says she is happy with our current house and our current two kids and the current dog.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Okay. A really boring old guy from BYU was there this year.”

“Wasn’t he there last year too?”

I didn’t think so. Outside, the kids were throwing rocks for Lassie to fetch.

“Was whatshername there again?”

“What, Luiz? Luiz is a guy.”

“No, your Aryan, Eva Braun.”

“Can I unpack first?” I carried my stuff into our bedroom.

Ingrid’s name had come up too often in conversation at home after the first workshop three years before, and it ended up being easier to let Karen think that I really had something going with Ingrid and let her forgive me, than to try and explain how it really was.

Dinner was pork chops, lima beans, apple sauce and milk.

***

School resumed. Class went badly, neither I nor the kids were interested. At home, my oldest child brought home a dinosaur collage from kindergarten. It was stuck to the refrigerator door with Smurf-shaped magnets. Karen came out of the bedroom and handed me a carton of menthols. “Change your brand?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“A little guy was here today, he said these were yours.”

“Creepy little guy? He didn’t come into the house, did he?”

“No,” Karen said. “What’s wrong?”

I hefted the carton.

“Is everything okay?”

That night, i dreamed I was sleeping in my car with my family. A man stood near the car, smoking and watching us. I tried to open the seatbelt so I could protect my family, but it was a new French design and I couldn’t figure it out. His cigarette smoke covered everything like dew, and glistened. It came in the window.

I woke up covered with sweat, my heart beating fast.

***

I once sat in on a linguistics course with Ingrid. A man from the Goethe Institute spoke of how languages can be dated. Historically, English is a dialect of German, and there are many cognates, words shared by the common language when the split occurred. If two related languages have similar words for copper, then you know the peple who spoke the mother language had discovered copper before the two languages split. In German, copper is Kupfer, and so we know the language split after copper was discovered.

In German, cat is Katze, summer is Sommer, and friend is Freund. Love is Liebe, fucking is Ficken, dream is Traum, foal is Fohle and dew is Tau.

***

I was in the teacher’s lounge a week after Luiz had paid his visit to my house. I was drinking coffee and trying hard not to smoke in the smoke-filled air. An aide came in to tell me I had a call in the office.

“Hi, Poppy.”

“Luiz, what’s your goddamned problem?” The aide glanced up at me from her typewriter.

“Nice house you have, you insured? Too bad about the dog, what’s it’s name, Lassie? Shit.”

“What do you want?”

“Want to talk to your wife? Well sorry, she’s all tied up at the moment.”

I was on the freeway in two minutes, pounding the dash wishing my car would go faster than sixty for once. I cut off a milk truck at my exit and he gave me a blast of his air horn, but I could barely hear it because the blood was pounding so loud in my ears. I pulled into my driveway and ran up to the house with my car door still open.

The collie limped out to meet me and Karen came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel. The baby was in her highchair at the table, playing Jackson Pollack with her lunch.

Karen looked at me with concern. “Is everything all right?”

I sent Karen and the kids to her mother’s for the weekend and tried to track down Luiz. I called his family for the first time since junior high school and all I got after about an hour of trying was the Bellingham address I already had. so I threw a baseball bat into the back seat of my car and drove back up there.

He wasn’t in his duplex, and none of his neighbors knew anything. I ended up at Buck’s, where some guy at the bar said, “Ask the bartender.”

“In the hospital,” the bartender said. He was the same kid from before.

“How long?”

“About a week. He’ll live. Bad accident, though.”

“What happened?”

“Car accident. It would appear he took a stereo out of a guy’s truck and then accidentally proceeded to get the shit kicked out of himself.”

Luiz was in the ICU at the local hospital. A nurse with white hair and ruddy cheeks led me to his room.

His face was purple and stitched up, tubes ran up his nose, some draining a bloody liquor, and a respirator tube went into a hole in his throat.

“Shouldn’t I be wearing a mask?” I asked the nurse.

“He’s beyond that,” she said.

He was so tiny, strapped down on bleached white sheets.

“He’s dying. He was okay until today, then he fell into a coma. Pressure is building in his brain, and the doctors can’t drain it.” The respirator clicked and rasped. “He’ll be brain-dead in a few days.”

After that it would be just a question of pulling the plug and parting him out. “Can I be alone with him?” She nodded and left without saying anything more.

I stroked his forehead. All his hair had been shaved, eyebrows, everything. “I never knew you were so tiny,” I said. There were big yellow and purple bruises on his arms where needles and tubes were taped. I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the machines click and hum and peep. I pulled back the covers and got in beside him and held his tiny hand. I ran my fingertips over the bandages where his broken ribs had been taped. I cradled him in my arms and he felt hot. It wasn’t until I saw tears falling on my skin that I realized I was crying.

His little ear was all mashed up. “Luiz,” I whispered. “I’m getting you out of here today, Luiz. We’ll fix you up a spot in the bunkhouse, with your own IV drip and the best respirator money can buy. Close to the creek so its trickling can soothe you, and you can hear the ponies nicker when they come to drink.”

I was so close to him that I could feel my own hot breath bouncing back when I whispered. I smelled acrid medicine on his skin. I held him close. He was so light in my arms, like a single breath.

From far away down the hospital corridor came the sound of an awkward young colt’s hooves on the tile floor, and a child laughing.

“The house is big, with cedar shakes on the roof,” I whispered. “I can see Ingrid now, in the soft light of the fireplace. She’s kneading dough at the long kitchen counter. She has white marks on her face from the flour, where she has touched herself.”

The sound of the foal came closer. I looked over towards the door. Ingrid came in and tied the foal to the foot of the bed. She came over and climbed in the other side of the bed. She put her face close and she really did smell like flour. We lay like that for the longest time, holding each other close and Luiz between us.