A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Part 1

A Brief History of Male Nudes in America.

Dianne Nelson.

Ground Rules.

Lewis Houser and his thirteen-year-old son Nathan were hiding behind a toolshed in the unlucky state of Missouri. They had been like that for over an hour-waiting-ready to salvage their lives and take what was theirs. "Ground rule number one," Lewis had told Nathan earlier, "is no talking, not even a single word because this hot, windless air can take a sound and stretch it and make it last forever." Nathan was small for his age, but he understood perfectly what they were doing, and as he stood there with his father behind the shed he was determined that the sun could bake him and that he could stand forever and a day on a boy's shaky legs, but he would not say a word.

From their secret vantage point, Lewis and Nathan watched the back of the house, specifically the screen door, which had banged open and shut twice since they began their wait. Both times it was Alta who came out of the house, first to empty a white sack into a garbage can and then to hang laundry on the clothesline. Lewis noticed that she was thinner than before, tanned and rather slow, no longer his Snow Queen, no longer the rouged Queen Bee he had married in a six-minute ceremony in Ely, Nevada.

"She's no one that we even know anymore"-that was ground rule number two, and three weeks ago Lewis had bought Nathan a lime snow cone to explain it. "She was your mother once," he told Nathan in a snack shop called Pacific Ice, "but now she's another woman. She made her choices, and they didn't include us. Thirteen is old enough to swallow your teeth and accept that."

And, in fact, Nathan had felt nothing when Alta came out of the house. In the past three years that she had been living another life, Nathan had practiced feeling nothing, had steadily pressed the lead of a pencil into his hand every day of school until his father had seen it, opened the bottle of Merthiolate, and said, "Boys who like to hurt themselves wind up downriver."

When Nathan looked at Alta there in her yard after so much practice, she was just someone reaching up to hang a wet s.h.i.+rt on a line. She was only a tired looking, dark-haired obstacle who separated them from what they had driven eight hundred miles in an oil-guzzling Chrysler to retrieve.

They knew that Todd was inside the house, and they knew that they were in limbo until they had him back-the three of them in the Chrysler heading into a star-topped, million-dollar world where Lewis said their bread would always come b.u.t.tered hot. The windows in the house were open, and soon after they arrived at their point of surveillance Lewis and Nathan had heard the TV from inside, something that sounded like cartoons-a duck talking, a woodp.e.c.k.e.r going crazy on a tree. Lewis had turned to Nathan and pointed at his own ear, and Nathan shook his head yes in response, signaling that he'd heard it, too.

Standing silent as gra.s.s, their cotton s.h.i.+rts sweated through, they waited in their place and became familiar with ground rule number three-invisibility. At first Nathan could not imagine being a ghost, but that's how his father had described it. "No one can see us. Everything has to be done in the blink of a blue eye." They had bulldozed the brown getaway Chrysler into a hearty stand of sumac just down the road so that the car became invisible as well, vinyl top and rust spots lost to the dense Midwestern cover. Now they stood at the very edge of the toolshed in a hairline margin of safety where they could watch the house but still remain unseen. "One careless move, a sneeze or even a cough could ruin everything," Lewis had warned Nathan, but Nathan had sworn he could do it, he could be a ghost, he could swallow a sneeze, he could bite a crouping cough back for hours.

"Know what a felony is?" Lewis had asked Nathan while changing the plugs on the Chrysler weeks ago. Nathan thought his father had said melody, so he answered yes. Lewis nodded and bent back over the engine, which was a place of comfort for him-gaskets and pinpoint metal and the high frequency belts humming when all was right.

There was no such comfort in Alta's yard, behind the toolshed, where the two of them s.h.i.+fted their weight from leg to leg. Lewis had shown Nathan how to stand loose, how to relax and let his arms hang like riffraff, but at the least sound or signal they were to c.o.c.k their heels and get eagle-eyed, quick. "Don't keep time or it'll wind up keeping you," Lewis had warned Nathan. An hour-which they had not tracked-in the midday sun had turned even their hair hot, and when Nathan moved his hand to the top of his head to s.h.i.+eld it for a moment, Lewis shook his head back at Nathan in a hard no.

Shortly after that the back door opened with a dull sc.r.a.ping for the third time, and Todd walked down the limestone steps. Neither Lewis nor Nathan had seen him in three years, but both of them knew the towheaded four-year-old in an instant. They had lived their lives for him, driven across three states, and spent hours rehearsing a plan that was skintight and urgent. They had let go of everything back then-Alta and the house in Durango and the easy constellation that the four of them had once made-except Todd, the baby, whom they could not forget. He had been too tiny then, just honeycomb wrapped in a blanket, but now he was halfway to Lewis's waist and had more than a fighting chance.

Todd lingered on the steps, looking down at his bare feet, and for both Lewis and Nathan that was the most difficult moment, the future flickering but not quite there. Nathan held his breath and looked at his father-the lead man, the ball in the socket of this operation-who crouched now, concentrating, calculating the distance and multiplying it by their adrenalin.

Then slowly, like someone in a wavy dream, Todd took three steps toward the yard. There was a tricycle in the gra.s.s and the bright, plastic pieces of some former toy. Lewis lifted his hand, made a fist, and he and Nathan went running, skimming the ground really, moving in what Lewis had described to Nathan as a "moment's opportunity-sometimes a crack no wider than a jarred window through which the rest of your life might be waiting."

Nathan was at Lewis's side, not a follower now, but a thinking, running, feeling shadow who saw the expanse of gra.s.s between him and his brother Todd as a long, green tunnel, the sky above as a blue corral. And it was then, suddenly, that Nathan thought of himself as a horse-long-legged and filled with lightning. "Don't think about your feet, or you'll monkey-wrench yourself," his father had told him, and now, moving closer and closer to their target, Nathan doubted that he even had feet, except for the presence of his shoes. They were girls' high-top Keds, and it was the only thing in all the world that he resented his father for.

If Alta had looked out the kitchen window then, she might have seen something s.h.i.+mmering, something in a mad hundred-yard dash, white heat waves, or just a man and a boy, but Alta was making beds, struggling with a sheet to make a tight hospital fit.

Outside, Lewis picked the boy up, the towhead, the astonished baby whose face, Lewis could see now, was still sweet and small as an egg. Todd weighed forty pounds, Lewis guessed, as much as a wet shepherd pup, and Lewis pulled him tight to his chest, in love, yes, but also in strategy-no kicking, no chance to get away. He covered Todd's mouth with his hand, not a thing he liked to do, but the windows were open and Alta had three ears and eyes in the back of her head and one time claimed ESP during her period. Lewis had doubted that, but he also knew that Alta was capable of surprises, like the day she had just up and packed two suitcases, some guy with slicked back hair waiting for her out front in a Wagoneer. Lewis had calmly walked out there and told him to get off the property; he could wait for Alta out on the road at the gate.

In all of it-the plan to get their lives back-Lewis and Nathan never stopped running: across the yard, then down for the boy, up and over the back hillside, and finally toward the car. "Fly," Lewis had told Nathan, and he said it just the way Nathan thought the word should be said: spellbound, drawing the sound out into thin air. "Leave a footprint," Lewis had warned in the early stages, "and that's as good as a letter of introduction. Make a leaf fall, and our b.u.t.ts are instantly stewed."

So they were ghosts and birds, not the two of them, but three now, plowing through the Missouri countryside, which was not a landscape made for speed, covered, as it was, with thistles and cottonwood seedlings and brush. Lewis and Nathan were breathing hard, looking ahead for the car, though Lewis knew, every minute, every second, just where they were. For an instant he looked down at Todd in his arms, and the thing about being a father which he had felt before at unexpected times-like electricity, like biting on a hot bare wire-ran through him.

Minutes later, days later-Nathan thought of it as years-they arrived at the car, which Lewis had said only a wisenheimer would see as safety. They hurriedly got in and anch.o.r.ed Todd between them on the front seat, and with his mouth finally uncovered he started his eight hundred miles of whimpering, "Mama, mama, mama"-a cry in triplicate that would seep, eventually, into Nathan's every dream. "Ground rule," Lewis told both boys after an unfriendly Dairy Queen waitress had handed them melting Buster Bars in the bare little town of Sedalia. "Don't look back. Do what's necessary, then barrel like an ox toward Christmas."

"Chryslers, unfortunately, beg to be seen," Lewis told his sons, and so they drove the back roads, viewing the most plug-ugly state Lewis and Nathan had ever witnessed-big, muddy rivers and a played-out sky. Late afternoon came and then twilight, and finally Lewis looked over and saw that both boys were asleep, rag soft and contorted on the seat next to him, boys who could fill up a s.p.a.ce, make it fit their own needs. As he drove, he kept looking over at them, at the blonde baby and the dark, well-lessoned thirteen-year-old, and he imagined everything they would do: ski and rebuild engines, hang a Christmas pinata from the back tree, they would swim and cook eggs with Tabasco, grow some Indian corn. On and on it went in Lewis's mind until he grew tender with the largeness of their lives, until sometime after midnight-the boys still sleeping, the chain link of stars glimmering above-they crossed the line into the sweet, big grainbelt of Kansas.

A Brief History of Male Nudes in America.

They step from behind my mother's shower curtain, pose like acrobats and soldiers, they lie bound in the afternoon light of our downstairs bedroom. There are b.u.t.tons on the floor. Someone's wallet on the dresser. On the back of a chair, a s.h.i.+rt leaves everything to the imagination. The s.h.i.+rt is blue, it is Oxford, it has sweat rings, a pocket, it's a works.h.i.+rt with the smell of hay still in it, it's khaki, short sleeved, long sleeved, on the back Sugarloaf Bowl is machine embroidered with Del Rio below it.

I have my eyes open. I see them strut. I see them scurry from the bathroom back to my mother's bed, their big white b.u.t.ts trailing our household like bad winter colds. My mother is divorced and entertains at odd hours.

I get home from school and on the kitchen counter she has a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich for me or Hostess s...o...b..a.l.l.s, raisins, applesauce, or a Mars Bar. Under her closed bedroom door there is a crack of light that reminds me of the depths to which we all fall, given time, given enough rope and the disposition for making our own sorrow and then lying in it.

Karl Winckelman's truck is parked out front. My mother's Sheffield bedspread is probably folded back, in thirds, to the end of her bed where it is a silky white margin she tells Karl to keep his feet off. He has undoubtedly come here straight from work. As a construction foreman, Karl sometimes has the option of leaving his job early, and on those occasions he is in my mother's arms by two, the bedspread folded cleanly back by three when I get off the Highland Park High School bus. Karl and my mother move with the scheduled certainty of trains. No sound. The light from beneath my mother's door makes a line of chalk that divides our world-on this side the radio drones and on that side all reason is immediately abandoned. By four they're standing in the kitchen asking me about homework.

"Hey, kiddo," Karl says, pointing at my opened math book. "1 have a way of multiplying with my fingers."

For a simple man, Karl confuses me frequently and with great enthusiasm. He goes to work with his fingers, showing seven times six, eight times nine, how you get wild dogs to cross the street, how you get a scaffold to dance down the side of a building.

Karl leans against the refrigerator, and I can see exactly what my mother has had that afternoon: shadow and dark eyes, a square jaw, Noah sleeping with his legs wide apart. In the downstairs bedroom in the afternoon light, Karl stretches out beside my mother and turns white, blank as snow gathering snow, big as a barn, his heart racing on a fool's errand all for my mother.

"I'll tell you one thing," he says, his tanned forehead wrinkling as a prelude to some deep thought. "The day they turn our numbers metric is the day I stop paying union dues. Can you imagine a 2- 3-meter window? Come on!"

Karl is like a feed bag with a little hole in the corner spilling its contents slowly. Twopenny nails drop from his pockets onto our wood floors or behind the couch cus.h.i.+ons. When he walks, his Red Wing boots leave footprints of fine dust picked up from various construction sites.

"Ahhh, look Karl," my mother says, thumbing his tracks caught in sunlight on the newly polished floor.

"What, babe, what?" Karl asks, and there is a real possibility that this man sees nothing, that dust is a given, maybe even the essential ingredient of his world.

"Karl's a darn hard worker," my mother says to me, which is a way of explaining his presence in her bed, though we never talk directly of her bed-a place of sleep and haste and desolation. The expensive Sheffield bedspread cannot change that. Neither can the book she always keeps at her bedside, Egypt in Its Glory, an oversized photojournal she ordered from C. C. Bostwick's. My mother gets lost in that book-the beauty of the pyramids, the secrets of papyrus scrolls.

I imagine on their better afternoons that Karl takes my mother somewhere down the Nile, that the waters are soft, that the melon-colored sand eases them from their real lives. Birds stand on one leg. Marble cows low into the ancient moonlight.

Even with his pants down, Karl is all business. My mother has told me this as she sits with a cup of coffee, maybe picking at a cinnamon bun. I know that in the same way Karl creates a building out of rolled-up blueprints he engineers some deep and mysterious pleasure in my mother. I see her walk out of her bedroom with him, and she is flushed, something has been shaken loose, and for a half hour or more she is truly happy. She sits on the kitchen cabinet and eats Fruit Loops out of the box.

My mother doesn't mind discussing her life with me-an only child, a girl already taller than her mother. She explains s.e.x as biology by candlelight. She describes her need and desire as electric impulses that are strong enough to roll a rock uphill. She characterizes her love of men as something that happened to her in the cradle when her mother's back went bad and it was her daddy who held her against his rock chest and in his warm water hands.

She laughs and tells me that Karl likes her on top where he says she is pretty as a cream puff, though I tend to imagine her at that moment as wild-eyed and breathless-something stunned by headlights in a dark night. I don't know why my mother finds no lasting peace.

"Hey, nothing in this life is perfect," she says more times than I can remember. It's meant as the kind of fleshy advice gained through experience, but, in fact, it's a statement my mother repeats so she will believe it. My mother's voice is strong, deep and a.s.suring, but because I am her daughter-conceived on Chinese New Year, she tells me-I can hear the uncertainty. Sometimes when she's talking, if I close my eyes and drift, all I hear is bathwater running.

Karl is not the only one. I see the legs of men and bulls traipsing around our kitchen, looking for something to eat. They work up appet.i.tes at our house-man-sized. Cans of tuna, a dozen eggs, a raw red onion sliced thick-I've seen them make sandwiches I couldn't get my hands around.

My mother stands off to the side, sweet in a brocade robe or s.e.xy in a yellow lotto T-s.h.i.+rt, and watches them work her kitchen with the sudden dexterity of hungry men. She points to where the crackers are. She shrugs when she's informed that we are out of milk.

In her way, my mother likes them all. It's not for money that she takes them to her bed, but for lack of words, for something gone wrong with my father that she has no way of explaining. He sometimes calls me from Newark to say hi. He asks me if I'm doing O.K.

"Sure," I say. "Great."

Karl asks me if I've finished my homework. Barry Rivers asks me where I got my green eyes; Tim French, if there are any more clean towels; a one-night Cuban musician, if our dog bites.

I want to tell the musician, "Yeah, he'll take your d.a.m.n head off," but I answer, "No, never has before."

It's my mother who asks me to help her with Manny Del Rio. Sometime after eleven or twelve she comes into my bedroom and shakes me hard out of sleep. "April," she says, "April, come help me with Manny. I think he's hurt."

It's a Thursday night. This I am sure of because Manny bowls mixed league on Thursdays at Sugarloaf Bowl, then comes by our house for my mother's three-bean soup. Friday mornings he's usually still here. My mother tiptoes out of her room and signals me with one finger to her lips, a sign that has come to mean that all the men of the world are asleep, that they are dear to us in that state, camped out and heavy on our sheets.

In the bottom of our shower that Thursday night, Manny is all flesh-the torso of a grand duke and the short stocky legs of a pipe fitter. He looks up at us out of too much pain to be embarra.s.sed.

"Where does it hurt?" my mother asks him.

Manny cannot decide. He groans, then curses in Spanish. The bar of soap is still under his right foot, the water still beaded across his chest and on his neck.

There is a way to stare politely, and I know how to do it, I've practiced, and I think it's fair to say I'm an expert with my eyes. I give Manny a slow once-over, and I see it all: the broad chest, the narrow hips, wet hair, the story of his life pink and small and lying to the side. I look up at my mother, who hovers over Manny like a dark angel, and maybe it's because I'm still sleepy, but it seems as if we are moving underwater-our hands slow, almost helpless.

"Is it your leg?" I ask Manny, trying to clarify the middle of this crazy night. "Your back? Your arm?"

There is an unbelieving look on his face as my mother and I attempt to pull him out of the shower and onto the cold linoleum floor. "Don't," he tells us. It's as much as he can get out of his mouth at once. Spread, exhausted, Manny lies still and poses for us in our own bathroom, his hip shattered, though none of us will know this until later, after he is picked up by an ambulance and X-rayed at Stormont Vail.

We cover him with a blanket and wait for the paramedics. It seems like a long wait, the three of us in one small room, Manny's hand squeezing the side of the tub in a sad gesture that I can't forget. He is a sweet old-fas.h.i.+oned guy who blushes at a kiss but loves my mother with the force of a bazooka.

We wait forever, which indicates how time pa.s.ses in this house. My mother flicks her cigarette ashes into the bathroom sink. Realizing that silence is the best alternative here, she stops talking. Her cigarette, then hand, then arm move in one gentle line from knee to mouth and mouth to knee. She exhales with the deepest sigh, one that says life simply cannot be lived this way anymore.

Fat boy cupids, men of stone, athletes, bathers-they kiss and fondle my mother, then give me a sidelong glance. "This is April," she tells them in the way of an introduction. "She's on the honor roll, she's in the choir. You can't slip anything by her, so don't even try. Look at that smile. She's gonna break some hearts in her time, huh?"

Late night or midmorning Judy Garland sings "You made me love you" off one of our old scratchy alb.u.ms. They are mesmerized. Karl leans his head back in the brown easy chair, closes his eyes, and commits himself to that long languorous kind of beauty. "It's only a song," I tell him. Tim French, in his boxer shorts, does a simple little four-step right there in the living room. He doesn't need a partner. He moves unselfconsciously, and everything moves with him-mind and body, dream and daylight.

At the top of the stairs or in the kitchen doorway, I am where I can see it all: Tim dancing in his own arms, Manny searching for his socks bare-a.s.sed, Barry scratching himself as he reads the newspaper. It is a precarious view for a seventeen-year-old. My mother pulls me close to her and says, "You just as well know now." We stand and watch in the doorway together, at the top of the stairs, near the piano, next to her bed, by a chair, by a blanket, by a rug, and in the deepest sense they are beyond us, these men who come visiting.

They step out of their clothes or my mother undresses them, and in the golden light of the Nile they are the bare figures of love and promise. In my mother's care, they see themselves twice their real size, agile, long-limbed, generous, hung like bulls, sweet as new fathers. They are fast to sleep and slow to awaken. She tiptoes out of her room in the mornings and puts her finger to her lips and our world is more quiet than the dark high rafters of a tomb.

I never ask her why, and lately I never ask her who. Karl, Blair, Manny . . . men come and go according to a calendar that only my mother's heart could know.

Laureano, the Cuban musician, drums our coffee table until we have memorized the Latin beat, which he says is the same beat as the heart pumping-da dum, da dum. "That's why you can't ignore Latin music," he tells my mother and me, "because it's the same music as your own body." He taps the left side of his chest where supposedly he has a heart, then winks and stretches out on the couch, dark and suggestive as deep woods. He has grown to love America, he says.

Laureano is a one-nighter, a first and last course all rolled into one. My mother glows for him. She walks across the floor gently, as if it could fall in at any minute. She has filed her fingernails and painted them a soft pastel. She crosses her legs and taps her foot, anxiously pus.h.i.+ng the night forward to the moment when she pulls back the bedspread and the air goes thin. My mother will not be satisfied until she has pulled every star from the sky.

Upstairs, in my own bed, I give ten-to-one odds that Laureano will not even show for breakfast.

Mornings are the worst. Everything from the night before has been used up, and it's like starting over. Our lives begin with bare sunlight creeping over the floor, inch by inch. We drink strong black coffee and keep an edgy silence. We are trying not to wake someone, but I can't remember who. Manny? Blair? Tim? They are mostly versions of the same body that scoot from my mother's bed into the bathroom for an early morning pee.

Laureano strolls, and when he looks up and sees me at the end of the hallway he stops short of the bathroom, leans against the wall, and smiles at me with the quick self-a.s.suredness of a lion tamer. I have eyes and I use them. His body is tall and lean-a pen and ink sketch. He moves his left arm slowly up the wall as if he's reaching for something, but nothing is there. He is casual in his nakedness, confident in this small makes.h.i.+ft love scene. I figure it's my hallway, though, so I stare him down. My trick is to stare at the wall just behind him-try to blister the cool white paint. Laureano finally laughs, snaps the spell, and moves with no hurry to the bathroom.

Evenings I sit at a desk in a corner of the living room that my mother insists on calling the study. I open my books and lose myself in homework, in thick black strings of numbers and in the pages of history where fate is swift and lives are not left to sputter and tumble. The yellow pencil in my hand guides me through the night, through the opening and closing of my mother's bedroom door, and through the dull watery sounds of people in the next room.

It's late when she stands over me and says I'm going to ruin my eyes, but she's wrong. I can see every nail hole and sc.r.a.pe on these walls, I can see the smallest cigarette burn in the sofa, dust in the corner, a finger-length cobweb in the windowsill. I can see the storm that has crossed my mother's face and left it soft and sleepy-obscured as if by the distance of an ocean.

There is a place in me-just under my skin-where everything and everyone from this house is distinctly remembered.

There are the long muscular arms of David, who sprays our house for termites in early spring. Under the eaves and around the baseboards, David has the golden reach of a boxer. He swears we won't smell a thing. My mother stretches the truth, tells David that she's seen the signs of termites: a bleached sawdust leaking where the walls meet. He's standing on a ladder, and she looks up at him, her hair s.h.i.+ning like a new quarter.

I can see Gregory's back and my mother, kissing his vertebrae one by one, careful and removed as a lady-in-waiting. She won't let him turn around. He must endure what he is made of.

I remember the strong Norman legs of my grandfather who visits us from Idaho and lounges all day in his robe, pockets full of Oreos, a milk ring on the table.

I see shoulders without their wings. I remember a bruise as a place to be kissed. I recall Tony Papineau building a birdhouse in our backyard so our winter would be crossed with sparrows. My mother wears a green wool jacket and as his hammer sings she dances for Tony in the cold.

I love the way that pages in a book feel: smooth and cold, the edges sharp enough to draw blood. My mother licks her fingers before she turns the pages of a book. "Easier that way," she says. She reads about the far-away and long-ago, about primitives terrorized by the moon.

When I open a book I want facts, dates, the pure honesty of numbers. I want a paragraph faithful enough to draw me away from what's going on in the next room: my mother dragging herself to the bottom, some man thinking it is love.

Blair makes the sound of a wounded duck, which is the combination of a honk and a wheeze. It is not something I would equate with pa.s.sion, not a sound that I think of in response to my mother's pear-colored skin. In the room next to theirs, I am reading, studying, fighting my way into a book, and that sound goes on forever. The walls of this house aren't thick enough to keep that kind of sadness contained.

I'm sitting at the desk with the English book in my hands, though it just as well be a jellyfish or a brick. The noise goes higher, louder, the duck becomes inconsolable. I strain, but the words on the page are futile hash marks.

Ten steps and I am at the front door, then out into the night, walking as quickly as I can. I live on an old quiet street that's blessed with big trees and where people still use push mowers. The houses are nothing special-bland with red brick, too symmetric with their sidekicker porches. I know some of the names here: Peterson, Barnett, Stanopolous. The only time I've seen the police on this street is the afternoon that Nelda Peterson's eighty-year-old mother fell flat dead in the azaleas and lay there like she was floating until her son-in-law came home that night. That's the only fatality I know of on this street-that is, if you don't count my mother.

When I get to the end of our block, I turn around, and back there is our house-2431-and from this distance my mother's lighted bedroom window is no bigger than a postage stamp. My heart is beating recklessly and my hands would be so much better if they had something to hold. I take a breath-the kind that stings the back of your throat-and then I count to ten or twenty or a hundred thousand. Nothing changes. The lights do not flicker. The moon doesn't dip. The sky does not go dark as oil.

I turn around and continue on to the next block and the next, past a row of stores, beyond Ace Hardware, into other neighborhoods where both rambling houses and rattletraps perch at the edge of great lawns, where porchlights s.h.i.+ne hot as meteors welcoming somebody home. When finally I don't know where I am anymore, I get smart, as my mother would say. I turn and start back, and at last I'm calm on those sidewalks, I'm limp and light. I watch my feet all the way home, step after step-no melody, no rhythm-until all I know is the beauty of my own shoes.

Evolution of words.

I tried to see the city as he must have seen it-a miracle of light, the rain-wet streets opening from Battery to Sansome and finally down to Grant. Judd hadn't slept in four nights, and so, when he left his parents' house on the fifth night and walked downtown, the city must have spun with music for him. He was seventeen and sleepless and that close to what his mother would later call "release."

We cried at that. Release. The idea of Judd walking in Chinatown the fifth night, change in his pockets, the on-and-off rain a pa.s.sage into something we had no knowledge of. He liked it there-Chinatown-the piles of foreign newspapers, the boys with braids, with needletracks dancing up their thin arms. San Francisco was a waking dream that my cousin Judd walked through tirelessly. He didn't want a car. Leslie Prada and Her Topless Love Act was something he had to see on foot, next door to The Condor, across from Dutch Boy Paints, and only a half block down from El Cid's He and She Revue. "Get a job and you can have a car," Judd's parents told him, but he continued to walk from n.o.b Hill to Lands' End in tennis shoes and T-s.h.i.+rt, with the long dark hair that would be cut before he was buried. No one knew where my cousin's spending money came from.

For months afterward I looked for answers by trying to re-create the scene of that shadowy fifth night, the world in rags. Even fish sleep, their bodies like silvery, shot arrows lining the Embarcadero and Baker's Beach and spreading outward on waves to Sausalito. Fridays were open buffet at Song Hay, and Judd could have been there that last night, but the restaurant was so busy that the cas.h.i.+er couldn't remember just one boy. An attendant at the Ginn Wall parking lot may have seen Judd, but there was nothing distinctive about my cousin's face, and in the darkness at the corner of the lot a slouching boy in a denim jacket was the least of things to notice. With a Chamber of Commerce city map, I tried to reinvent his path, tracing the cold hard steps he might have taken past the Greyhound Bus Depot and maybe on to the Flower Terminal where the chrysanthemums must have glowed, to him, like an eerie experiment set in white rain. North or south from there, perhaps unable to hitch a ride to Sonoma, cold and breathless and stinging with enough life to ground three people, my cousin turned, wherever he was, and finally headed for the nailhead lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.

That's where I stopped reimagining the scene-the place where Judd put on his Walkman and stepped into air. No one knew how he got past the attendants at the tollbooths. Magic, determination-my cousin wanted to fly, the music pounding in his ears, the rough wind making its momentary promises.

In the gloomy days before the funeral, no one thought about Judd's hair, about the way he had wanted to be. By the time we gave instructions, we were too late. Hyberland's Mortuary had already used army clippers on him.

Judd's mother, entranced, made endless pots of coffee, and it was not until months later that she said it: "release." Sitting at the kitchen table, our hearts turned liquid and we finally caved in.

Now, years later, there are other words we can't get past: "winter," "midnight." Even "water" hits us like a clap of thunder.

A Map of Kansas.