Read an Excerpt
Getting Out The refugees were nervous, glancing back toward the hills, fearing the sniper with his telescopic sight and sinister nickname. What did these houseless ones care about the history of human displacement? They were changing money and trying to sell their watches. Trucks packed with soldiers— boys really—sped along the dock, firing their rifles into the air. I think the gypsies were the most afraid. Then a truck with a loudspeaker appeared, moving slow among incinerated cars on the boulevard named after the national hero, giving orders in three languages. How many souls, how many dreams of escape, how many nightmare nights could the little ship hold? They took on board as many as could pay. Small groups gathered on deck talking quietly. It was an end and a beginning. Someone had brought a bottle and they needed it. At the Edge As he feeds his chickens, cooks rice, sweeps out his shack, he hears the droning of enemy planes. Dreaming of temples and waterfalls he wakes to the thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades. Comes the thud of a mortar, the man fills a thermos, latches the door of his shack, and creeps up the slope in moon-dark, his dog sticking close. Up near the top of the ridge his dog makes a low sound in her throat, smelling before he does, diesel, the unwashed bodies of soldiers, the stink of hastily dug latrines. His dog sneezes, and he clamps his hand over her nose. I can evade them, he thinks. I can survive out here, I know how to hide. But what of the town-dwellers? What of the scholars, whose knowledge they want to erase, whose books they will burn? What of the women who live alone on farms? The clanking of tank treads, the rising dust of an army on the move. Dawn must be closer than he has allowed himself to understand. Living Near Horses I would wake in the night hearing horses breathe in the field. I neither owned them nor rode them. One of the little herd would whinny in the small hours, and once like Lakota ponies two horses galloped, their hooves striking hard dirt in the moonlight. They knew we were here, we knew they were there. Mine was the paint. But one day she was taken from me, put in a trailer and driven away. She was not young. it was only when I was giving her an apple once, I noticed how chewed down her teeth were. She was my friend, at times I felt she was my darling. I was not a man who wanted to tame her, fasten tack on her and ride her. We met over the fence. I remember how at first she would look at me with flight and terror in those wide-apart eyes. I would stand at the fence, an apple in the pocket of my jacket, and talk to her. In time she would amble over, pausing to crop the coarse grass in her path. I liked how her jaw felt under my hand as she chewed and rubbed her nose against my chest, her jaw molded smooth like the jaw of some long-ago marble horse in a museum, brought into the traffic and alarms of the city from a parthenon on a hill. I liked walking back to my shack with the smell of horse on my shirt. Highway 61 Smoke, and a freight-train whistle blowing in from Arkansas. Night dropping over the big river as we ghost down South Third and off the exit ramp onto the two-lane ribboning south, our talk in the car hushed by the voices of insects, rows of cotton plants running to the horizon where the massacred wilderness stands— creeks filled with the memories of dead men, shagbark hickories, sweetgums, an oak tree with a rope swinging, and the ghosts of old mahoganies watching us. Jungling scuppernong vines hang in the branches up there with the witness of wild canaries. A dog barks as we unlock a gate, our headlights illuminating the glistening skins of magnolia leaves. A mastiff on a chain licks our hands in welcome at the door of the cypress-battened farmhouse, its acres moonlit around it. We’ll sleep here tonight. What dreams will arise to trouble our repose? Persian Journey The country people could hardly fail to notice our caravan, the fineness of our mounts, the polish of our tack. And flying in advance of us our falcons, their eyes incandescent. When we drink with these rustics in their smoky tavernas I lie openly when they ask me why we are traveling. I talk about spices, incense, gold even. And I leave it at that. They comment on the exquisite stitching of our robes, our leopard with her jeweled collar. And seeing I am a man of learning, they ask me about the star. Is there any reason I should answer these questions? Is it always necessary for the eyes of men to penetrate the ways of the most high?
