Some mornings when I wake and look at you, I realize you haven’t been having an easy time of it. Hair twists around your ears, your eyes fill with sticky sleep, and your face wrinkles in thick, plastic folds. I only see you after I’ve swatted the brass alarm clock, as I iron my shirt and lower the ironing board as quietly as I can, lightly holding the thin aluminum legs the way I used to circle your wrist. You are almost always asleep, having just come home from the late shift at the Westward Inn Restaurant. You lie dreaming, your hands twisting the tops of the blankets into horns.

I realize that you could just get out of this situation and get on with whatever real life you had planned for yourself before you met me. I hope that something besides the reflex of getting up and going to work, coming home and going to sleep, is holding you near me, something besides habit.

On one of our days off together, I ask you to tell me what you dream about while you sleep next to me. We sit in bed, drinking coffee from old white mugs you stole from work. You lie back against the wall and tell me that you dream of great brown rivers flowing through thick jungles, and rocky mesas with orange lightning crackling through desert air, and rain falling with a hush on plains of long yellow grass. I know you’ve never been to places like these.

When I wake up, you lie next to me. Your slack lips press into the pillows that neither of us ever gets around to washing, so that they are stained gray with weeks’ worth of your makeup and my hair gel. You sometimes mutter things as I lean out of bed, my elbows on my knees and my head propped on my hands as I prepare for another day, at the end of which I will return to this room, drop my clothes, and climb into this empty bed, while you finish with the ironing board and leave for work.

“What’re you thinking?” you asked me on that day off together. And I lied. A person cannot say, “Blank, nothing.” Instead I made something up. The more poetic the better, the more you believed it, not that I think you actually believed it, but you liked the sound of it, the way I like the sound of your dreams. I told you that I was imagining what you were dreaming. I imagined that you dreamed of a grove of sword ferns in the summer when the birds pull moss off the branches of the maple trees. I told you of your plains of long grass with a gentle wind rustling the blades and the undersides turning up so that they are silver. I will tell you anything that takes us away from the noise of traffic on the highway just outside our windows, from the arguing parents next door.

What I was really thinking about was cutting my toenails, and I was playing out the process in my mind. Where are the toenail clippers? In the wicker basket on top of the toilet. I turn the handle of the clippers back into the ready position, lean over the toilet; my belly presses into my pelvis, making it ache slightly, while I cut the nails and let them fall into the porcelain bowl.

I do dream about you. I dream about being awake with you and we are driving in our car, the way it used to be before the wreck. We drive along the freeway for miles and miles, like my family used to do, in and out of nowhere, just you and me and the casual static of the FM dial.

The summer we met, the summer I was fifteen, Mom sent me to live with an old friend she knew from when she grew up in Snoqualmie. Joseph Anderson had sometimes babysat her and some of the other neighborhood kids. Mom said that he had always lived in his house and that he owned a big stretch of old farmland along the swamp where the North and Middle forks of the Snoqualmie met. “He’s a nice man,” she said. “You’ll like him, and it’s just for a couple of months while I find real work and get a real place.”

But already I didn’t like the idea of going back to the Snoqualmie Valley, where we had once lived with Dad and my brother. When I thought of the valley, I always thought of the smell of wood smoke and my unsuccessful chore of making the wood fire in the winter, in the morning before everyone else woke. I would lay the crinkled newspaper down and spread the kindling out over it. Finally I would stuff in the logs I hoped would start burning. On the cast-iron stove, I would flick a match from the book Mom had picked up from the diner where she worked and I would set the paper on fire. I’d watch the paper burn and then the kindling turn white and the slightly blackened logs falling into the ashes. By this time Dad would’ve stumbled into the bathroom. He’d come out grumbling about my incompetence while he reset the fire. He’d squat down in front of the sooty mouth of the stove, holding me in the sweet, sweaty smell between his arms to watch him set the fire. In seconds he’d have a blaze going. “Watch and remember,” he’d say on good mornings. On bad mornings he’d tell me I was just plain dumb and would wait until I got the thing started. Then my hands would shake so badly from thinking he would hit me that I would end up getting hit.

Mr. Anderson’s house sat next to a small lake layered with lily pads and behind his house blackberry tangles and stands of pine trees grew where fields had once been. The house itself barely held up its roof. The moss-covered shingles sagged in the middle of the house like a huge soaked hat. An old man stood on the porch in a pair of overalls, and he smiled and held his arms apart for Mom to put herself between. He laughed, and it sounded like he was saying “Ho ho ho” over and over again. His head had started to lose hair, not like balding but more like molting. Patches of pinkish skin showed through his hair. His wrinkles folded so deep I thought that if I unraveled them he would fold out flat like an uncrumpled ball of paper. He nodded solemnly to me and took my hand and gripped it so hard that I wanted to scream. I also wanted to laugh because I wondered how much effort it was taking him to get this kind of grip working. “Dillon, it is a pleasure to meet you. Your mother has talked all about you.” He looked at Mom and wagged his head. He laughed again. “Ho ho ho.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said. He probably was one of those good-looking guys when he was young—the movie star among his friends—a long angular jaw and light brown hair and his height. But he stood with a crooked stoop now, teetering to one side and then the other as he tried to grab my two suitcases. I stepped in front of him and picked them both up. Before Mom could get a solid grip on hers, he grabbed the plastic handle and nodded at her. He followed us up the stairs. At the top of the stairs his face turned red and a bluish vein like the inside part of a leaf filled up his forehead. He set Mom’s suitcase on the top step and opened the front door. The porch looked like the porches I avoided when I used to trick-or-treat. Spiderwebs clung to the corners. Yellow newspaper, torn grocery bags, and empty plastic milk gallons filled the nook.

The house smelled like bleach and rose petals, smells I now associate with the old man’s voice, an almost-whisper that rose at the end of his sentences and paused to laugh. “Let’s take a load off and get something to drink,” he said. And then he laughed. My eyes started to adjust to the room. I closed the door behind me. A lamp, its shade cracked, let light through in jagged crevices of light. A TV sat in one corner, one of the old ones in a big wooden cabinet and green plastic around the lip of the screen.

While we sat in the living room waiting for Joseph to return, Mom turned to me and squeezed my knee. “Isn’t this great? You’re back in the valley, and you can swim in the river and go hiking any time you want.”

“Yeah, this is just great,” I said.

Joseph returned with two cups of coffee on a tray and a can of a soft drink I had never seen before. It had old-time letters and a green can.

“What is this?” I said.

“A local soda,” Joseph said. “You can still get them in the Deli Mart in Snoqualmie. You’ll like it.”

It tasted like carbonated maple syrup. “I’m going to take the bags to my room, okay?”

“Upstairs,” Joseph said. “I can show you the room.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

I found my bedroom at the top of the stairway, an almost-empty room with wooden floors and old furniture someone had once painted white. The mattress was overstuffed. I slid my suitcases under the bed, hoping I would be able to just pull them out and leave when Mom was finished visiting with the old man.

When I came downstairs, I began to realize just how dusty and messed up this place was. “It’ll be spotless by the end of the summer,” Mom said to Joseph. “And then you can just hire a maid to come in once in a while. Thank you so much for taking him.”

The next morning, Joseph started in with, “How much of the world have you seen, son?”

“Some,” I said. “My Mom and Dad used to drive around a lot.”

“I’ve knocked around a bit. Have you eaten breakfast?” he asked me. He asked me again when I didn’t respond. I was afraid to say no, because I didn’t understand how I should treat this man who I suddenly had to live with and work for. “I haven’t had anything to eat,” I said. Joseph stood like a papier-mâché marionette, brittle and frail, and shuffled into the kitchen.

The kitchen was clean in that rotting food didn’t sit out on the counter. Hundreds of knife gashes tarnished the Formica countertop. In some places, so many scars crossed it that the flecked gold and marbled pattern of the Formica gave way to the plywood underneath. Splattered grease drops hardened behind the range; each drop looked like amber tree pitch. Rust coated the sink handles. Everything looked old, unmaintained, and overused.

“Sit down and don’t touch anything,” Joseph said. I sat at the table in the dining nook. A tangle of blackberry vines pressed against the windows. Once they must have overlooked a pasture, the distant river, and the mountains.

“Quite a view,” I said.

“Smart,” Joseph said. “Your Mom teach you that?”

“I don’t think so.” I smiled because I supposed that she had. I didn’t understand why she had sent me out here to be with this old man who couldn’t take care of himself, much less take care of me. He stood at the counter working a can opener. “Back in my day, we beat a sense of respect, manners, and civility into our children.”

“You mean, back in the day when you could stand up straight?”

“I still have enough of my spine to whip a whelp like you under the table. So you watch your mouth, son.”

“You need help with that can opener?”

“I can manage,” he said.

“Suppose anyone ever cut those vines back?”

“The vines aren’t my fault. They’re a cat’s fault.” Joseph dumped the tuna into a glass bowl and spooned in a jiggling heap of mayonnaise. “When you cut those vines down, you’ve got to watch your back. The cat’s in there.”

“What do you mean, when I cut down?” I asked. “Why would I do that?”

“It needs to be done.”

“When am I going to do that?”

“Soon,” Joseph said. “A woman who used to own the cat a long time ago had a garden next door. The woman was afraid of insects, in particular spiders.”

“Spiders aren’t insects,” I said.

“They’re bugs. That’s enough,” Joseph said. He spread the tuna onto slices of bread. “The cat used to hunt down and kill gardener snakes, leaving their bodies on my porch. They looked like piles of raw bacon.”

Joseph set the sandwich on the table. The tuna paste dripped down the sides of the bread. He sat across from me in the dark recess of the dining nook. Through the window I could faintly see the sky through the thicket of crossing vines. “What’s wrong? You don’t like your food?”

“It’s good,” I said. But I didn’t touch the sandwich, which had been on the Formica counter.

“Eat your sandwich,” Joseph said.

I bit off a hunk of the sandwich and started to chew. “This cat? It’s dead now?”

“No, it’s in there still. As you know, gardener snakes eat spiders. Before the woman brought the cat here, the fields from here to the Snoqualmie were full of snakes. You couldn’t find any spiders. I didn’t see a web in a long time. After the woman found the cat, our windows started to fill with spiderwebs. Spiders draped my roses with webs and in the spring, black blooms of spiders crawled everywhere. I had to stop working in the greenhouse. The woman stopped working in her garden. Her blackberries, which she had kept for making jam, exploded and covered everything. I still have her jam somewhere.”

“They exploded?”

He laughed, “Ho ho ho,” and then said, “No. A figure of speech. It took a few years for the vines to grow.”

I finished choking down my sandwich.

“You want another?”

“Thank you, no.”

“I should have done something about those vines,” Joseph said. “But they covered everything. And now it’s going to take real work to cut them down. I regret I haven’t done anything about those vines. Now it’s too late. Too many years have gone by without me doing anything. If only I had remembered. You, as a young man, shouldn’t let things like that happen.”

Sometimes, after Joseph had stopped reading the paper and had folded it up neatly on the table, he’d say, “It’s all flash and mirrors, son.” But he could have used a mirror and some serious light to see what kind of conditions he lived in. I spent that week cleaning up Joseph’s house. Every night, I would go to my room and read and think that when Mom came this weekend I would make her take me back to Seattle and I would do anything except become a janitor.

I had to clean his bathroom. I told myself I would never have to do it again. I held my mouth open, tasting, instead of smelling, the damp splotches of mold coating his ceiling. His tub, a real ancient model with a suspended belly and large talon claws pressed into the floor, lay under a gray crust that caked the sides like mud. Grit collected between the cast-iron fingers. Where the shower curtain draped into the tub it had pasted to the muck.

The windows were sealed behind dirt, cobwebs, and a light coating of moss. The place smelled like a forgotten port-a-potty. A thick chemical stench rose through the organic odor of decay. The room stunk. Even as I scrubbed out the medicine chest and found such important points of contact between the bathroom and the old man as his toothbrush—a faded plastic stick with a mess of fibers at one end like a miniature mop—I couldn’t believe that he lived there. I couldn’t believe that something human used the room.

I started with the bleach and opened the window. I left the door open, ripped the shower curtain down, and began. In an hour I had found the original white tile. In two hours, the room sparkled. It glowed, except for the sink faucet where the metal had rusted into rough brown knobs.

Joseph looked at the bathroom. I could tell he liked what he saw, but he stood by the window, letting the light and air fall over his wrinkled gray face. He didn’t smile at me, but he nodded his head. His eyes were filmed over like soap bubbles. “This is good, Dillon,” he said to me like a concession: he conceded that his bathroom really had been so bad, and once, he had been able to keep it looking clean without anyone’s help, but now he needed someone to help him.

On Friday, Mom called and said that she wouldn’t be able to drive out that weekend. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. I decided to run away the next day. That is when I ran into you.

Would you have been interested in me then if you knew what you know now?

The night the accident happened, I didn’t mean to drink anything at the Westward Inn. I had been at home all afternoon, drinking a little beer, and I was a little drunk when I came in early to pick you up, and then you were able to give me the beers for free from the lounge so I started drinking them like I was stealing something.

I sat at the table, watching you circle the floor, talking to the customers, and then I had drunk a full glass and another one. When we finally went out to the car I had trouble fitting the key into the lock. You sat next to me and lay your head back on the seat. “I will sleep for a thousand years,” you said. I thought that was so funny that I laughed until my throat hurt.

“Geez,” you said. “It wasn’t that funny.”

When I ran the red light at the first intersection you should have stopped the car. I don’t blame you, but you should have seen that I was having trouble keeping the car in between the yellow line and the white line. Instead you just said, “What was that?”

“A stale yellow.”

“Looked like a red to me.”

“It just turned,” I said. You lay your head back and told me to wake you up when we got home.

And then we began the long drive on the highway and that’s when I started missing seconds. The car suddenly drifted across the white line. One second an exit sign was a mile away and the next instant we were passing it. Things began to speed up that way. I had trouble keeping everything in order and then I was trying to stop us or steer our car out of the way of a blue Toyota. Our car smashed their car into the ditch and we swerved out back into our lane.

“What! What just happened?” You held onto your seat belt and stared into the darkness in front of us.

“I just hit a car,” I said. “I must be more tired than I thought.”

A police car was by the Toyota when we walked back. I had the car keys in my hands. They found me drunk. They found me guilty. Now, instead of working for ourselves, we work to pay off these people.

That summer Saturday, years ago, while Joseph slept on the porch, I walked down the street and then started to run. I came to the bridge over the Snoqualmie. You and two boys about my age were swimming and jumping off the bridge.

Quickly I ran past, but I heard the three of you peel after me; your feet flopped on the pavement and your heels echoed in the trees. A stand of tall firs stood between a row of houses and the river. We ran, and I came to the end of the bridge and slid under the road so that you’d run over the bridge like a Warner Brothers’ cartoon.

But you guys followed me under the bridge and we circled one another, panting. The river slurped behind us. “Hi,” your tall friend said. Blond hair wisped around his ears. His face was angular and his Adam’s apple throbbed up and down. A head shorter, the other kid looked like a construction crew guy, a living Tonka Truck driver; his arms bulged. You slid down the bank and threw the hair out of your eyes and laughed at me.

Mr. Tonka didn’t even breathe hard. “Hi, name is Keith.” He gripped my hand as hard as possible and shook. “Call him Dayle. The girl’s Valerie. Are you running away?”

“Where are you running away to?” you asked. “How’re you going to eat?”

“He can fish,” Keith said.

“It won’t work,” you said. “But I know what we can do. The real plan is that you don’t want to live at home anymore, right? If we can do that, you’ll be happy?” You turned around. Behind you, the cement support of the bridge was covered with graffiti: Alice Cooper, Kiss, Pink Floyd Rocks. An old kitchen chair sat in one corner and a gutted fire pit took up the middle of the space. “You can live here. Keith and I can bring you extra food after dinner. I can bring you cereal in the morning.”

“The underworld lies herein,” Dayle said in a deep voice like he was quoting something, although I couldn’t tell what.

“It’ll be cool,” Keith said. “I can come visit you and we can sit around in our cave and go out, like bandits, and terrorize the countryside.”

We ended up playing together all that day and I returned home and never did spend a night under the bridge.

At the bottom of the stairs in Joseph’s house, the door to the bathroom sometimes swung open, especially if there was a window open in the living room. In the morning, I came down the stairs and stopped on the stairwell because I could see past the bathroom door to the vanity mirror where Joseph’s reflection was. He stood at the sink with his face covered in white foam. He leaned over the sink, grasping the white porcelain rim of the bowl with one hand while he used a straight razor to scrape off the silver specks of his beard. He leaned back and lifted his chin and used one hand to smooth his wrinkles while he drew the sharp blade across the whiskers. A scraping noise filled the hallway. When he had finished, he rinsed the razor and put it away in a leather case and then washed his chin by setting his face in the basin and running steaming water over his head. He lifted his skull up and bumped it against the faucet. He grunted, a noise full of phlegm that came from deep in his throat. And then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He squinted and then smiled, turning his profile just barely to one side and the next. He took a palmful of oil and slicked back his hair and smiled at himself, showing all of his teeth. Then he looked at me sitting on the stairs. “Good morning,” he said.

“Hey,” I said and rushed down the last of the steps and stood in the kitchen. The sight of him caring for himself, as if his appearance mattered, made me wonder how he saw himself. The picture of him in his army uniform by the fireplace was of a young man, a man younger than my brother Milton. I wondered how many years he had been in this house and why he was satisfied to just sit on his porch and read the newspaper.

“Fine morning.” Joseph came into the kitchen. As I watched him open the cupboards and lay out the bowls for the oatmeal, one for him and one for me, I thought that I should help Joseph get his yard back to the way it had been. At that moment I felt sorry for the old man, not just because he had to pull apart his sagging skin to cut his whiskers, but because it seemed everything in his life had gone beyond his control. He couldn’t even fight the easy battle of keeping weeds and blackberries out of his yard. I don’t think he had a chance, in the long run, of keeping the whiskers off his face. One of the things I knew from my Mom’s murder mysteries was how dead men’s toenails and hair kept growing after death.

Over my oatmeal, slathered with butter and milk, I asked Joseph, “So you suppose you can give me a hand cutting down the blackberries behind your house?”

“The weather report says it’s going to be a hot day,” Joseph said.

“So you’ll be able to help me?”

“I don’t know. If it’s hot out there I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“But I’ll be starting in about ten minutes. Help me for an hour, before it gets hot.”

“You want me to help?”

“Yes.”

“Sure,” he said. He smiled then. “I can make my old bones do some work.” He laughed.

The sun had come over Mount Si when we started on the vines behind his house. They rose up in huge heaps. I began by cutting at the wall of berries. I tossed the leaves and thorns behind me while Joseph pulled them into a pile that we would burn later. We had been working for about twenty minutes when I heard Joseph make a noise like he’d just had the wind knocked out of him. I turned around and found him lying on the ground. He kneeled up onto one knee. “Do you need help?” I asked.

“No, I’m fine.” He dusted off his knees. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m done for the day.”

“Don’t you want to help get your yard into shape?”

“It’ll just grow back,” he said.

“No, it won’t.”

“I’ll get you some juice to drink,” he said and started walking back to the house.

Because I felt sorry for him, I let him go back to the house and I started back on the vines. As I got into the rhythm of cutting I forgot about Joseph and started to think about the cat prowling under the thickets of blackberries behind the place. The thought of what lay hidden in the bushes—old things, cast-off washing machines maybe, perhaps an ancient car—made me curious. Something was there, I thought, and I wanted to pull the vines down like a huge curtain to reveal whatever it was.

As I crashed into the thickets, watching for the cat and the spiders, I cut through the green shoots to the brittle gray vines hardened into a stick forest. Animal trails pushed through the underbrush. Hard pellets of rabbit droppings and bits of fur littered the worn paths. Above me, the arch of live vines formed a green roof. I cut at the foundations, making leaves flutter down.

I saw a small building at the edge of Joseph’s yard, and then I heard something snarl. From the darkness a cat jumped onto me; its claws slashed my shirt. Its breath smelled acidic, like rotting lard. I ripped the bottom of my shirt up and captured the cat in the reverse bag it made. The cat struggled in the makeshift net. I tossed the animal away and the vines snapped like bones in its crash descent. I recovered the rags of my T-shirt. The cotton soothed my trickling wounds.

I cut the bushes aside and came to the small greenhouse at the edge of Joseph’s yard. The glass roof pressed against the ceiling of blackberry leaves.

Streaming through the dirty panes, sunlight caught dust in the small space and made the air glow. The smell of fungus and mold hung in the air. Nothing had been touched for as long as it took the thicket outside to grow. I had broken the seal, like an Egyptian tomb, to the old greenhouse. I held my breath when I realized this, afraid, and then laughed at myself as I thought about the mummy’s curse and remembered how all of the explorers who had discovered King Tutankhamen had died bizarre deaths.

An old desk sat on a wooden platform in the far corner of the shed. I pushed through the plants, collapsing them into piles of dirt.

On the desk, a dusty framed picture of a woman stood out among the ancient clutter of empty pots and stacks of birthday cards held together with twine. The photograph was smudged and grainy. The woman—dark hair, black dots of serious eyes—stared at me. Not out of the photograph, but at me—the boy who held the slightly rusted frame in his hand. I had seen girls look at me like this before; in a few weeks I would welcome your look at the bridge when you asked me, “Got a cigarette I could bum off you?”

Under the picture, someone had stuffed another photo of the same woman leaning against a man in an army uniform. I recognized Joseph by his long forehead and sharp nose, even though his hair was full. He wore a pair of tall boots that caught the sunlight in the bright photograph. Everything was almost silver. Behind him, I could see the arc of the mountains down to the water of the slough. But cattle grazed in the field right up to the edge of the water. He didn’t look at the photographer, but over whoever took the picture, up into the sky or the tree line or wherever. He didn’t lean slightly away from Ellen like he did now with me, as if he expected me to knock him over. This man stood on the damp grass—you could see it was mushy, with crabgrass and cattails leaning out of the ditches—with his legs shoulder-width and planted so that no one could knock him over. His head was cocked slightly toward the woman, Ellen Miller. Her body pushed right up next to his, and his arm was around her. Her head was turned like she was drawn to the sound of someone calling from a long way off.

In the desk, I found a stack of papers folded together and tied with a piece of garden twine. The top papers, powdered with a light green dust, puffed onto my hands as I picked up the packet. I untied the string and the papers came loose in my hand, as brittle as a piece of shale unfolding. The top sheets crumbled; the green mold held the bottom sheets together, but their edges cracked and damp paper flitted onto the dusty ground. The handwriting sloped long and slanted, like the writing in the Constitution.

September 26, 1948

Amherst, Massachusetts

Dearest Joseph,

I remember you. I dream about you almost every night, and the nights I don’t, I am falling asleep wishing to dream about you—I don’t sleep at all. I remember you every night.

I often daydream about what we could do next summer. I lie to myself about how long the school year will be—it won’t be long, will it?

I have told my friends about you. I often think about the slough and your house there. You won’t move, will you? I remember the reflection of the moon in the water, and you rolling through the dark water splashing and gurgling and making all of that noise. I dream I’m dipping my tongue in the pitted dimples of the moon. I remember your arms, and I remember what you never said to me. In fact, I remember all the things that were never said. I have things on my mind lately about you and problems about you that have been difficult to solve. But things have happened and maybe I will come home next summer and make you some blackberry pie.

Love Always,

Ellen Miller

R

October 20, 1948

Amherst, Massachusetts

Dearest Joseph,

I don’t know if you received my first letter. I think about you often. Do you think about me?

School is starting to become busy, and I don’t have time to do anything. By the weekends I’m exhausted.

Do you remember when we swam at midnight in the Snoqualmie River? I left my bracelet on the snag near your house. I just remembered this the other night as I was falling asleep and thinking about the smell of the river, that mix of mud and wood smoke. It’ll be winter soon and then spring and the floods will come, so I guess the bracelet will be gone.

Please write.

Yours Truly,

Ellen Miller

R

October 30, 1948

Amherst, Massachusetts

Dearest Joseph,

I wrote my mother and she said that you are very busy. I find that hard to believe, considering. I just wrote to let you know I will always remember what your face looked like under the moon. The term ends soon, and I will be back for Thanksgiving. I hope to see you then.

It’s almost Halloween. I’m trying to carve a pumpkin to look like you. I made the eyes right. It’s the mouth that will be tricky.

Thinking of You,

Ellen Miller

I held the thin, frail paper in my hand and I thought that the letters were older than my mother, older than anyone I knew except the man who I worked for. With the letters, the photograph of the woman became complete. I saw her looking at whomever took the photograph, thinking that she needed to be as persuasive as possible; the photo would be going to Joseph. It would sit on his desk. It was all she had to lure him to her. This was the scenario I believed.

I began to see the girls my age differently. When my brother, Milton, taught me how the parts of a car came together to run, how the engine broke the gasoline down, where the oil flowed, what the pieces did, the mysterious solid body of the car broke down into sections I understood completely. I somehow learned something about one of the parts of women with the photograph, the letters, and a desire for Ellen that was not based on her physical presence or image but on the ghost that I found in these forgotten letters.

I raked leaves into a huge pile in the front of Joseph’s yard, and I watched for the cat to lumber out of the brambles. I watched for anything to make Joseph’s story real. After I had raked the leaves into a pile, I heaped them into my arms, feeling their brittle edges and musty odor rush over my face, and I dumped them into an old oil drum. I burned the leaves. The smoke plume spiraled into the sky.

At dinner that night, while Joseph and I sat at the table, I asked him if he had ever been married. I watched him; I wanted him to think about Ellen, for his face to flush red and smooth.

“How come you didn’t marry Ellen Miller?”

“Who?” Joseph asked, and I could see that he didn’t remember. He nodded his head. His hair was thin and wispy. It looked like the fungus in the earth of the greenhouse, slowly eating away the nutrients in the rotting mass of dead plants. The mold had even reached the pages of Ellen Miller, and she was gone from memory. I would not live like this. I vowed this then, and maybe that’s the reason I think about Joseph now, because in the morning when I think about our isolation, how we are always sleeping when we see each other, I think that his life has become my life.

I threw the letters on the table and the photographs slid out, facedown. Joseph picked up everything, and I saw his forehead tighten like it had when he tried to lug my mother’s heavy suitcase inside. He read the letters, holding the papers in his liver-spotted hands. The edges of the papers shook. He finally said, “These letters are old.” He looked at me and I stared into the blue rims of his eyes. But I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“I have always been embarrassed by myself as a young man,” he said. “I don’t think of that young man as real now. He’s more of a memory, and nothing else. He’s an abstraction, like the word ‘sacred’ or ‘sacrifice,’ or the expression ‘in vain.’ You might recall they called that war I fought in ‘The Good War.’ I haven’t seen anything good or sacred in things that require sacrifice. It’s more like a salmon boat full of steelhead someone just dumps on the pier for the gulls and the flies. A waste of life. There are many words that I can’t stand to hear, ‘youth’ and ‘promise’ and ‘sacrifice’ being some of them. It’s all—just about any word, really—smoke and flash and mirrors. Only the old names of places have dignity—they are the only spoken thing that is not a lie. Abstract words like ‘sacrifice’ or ‘hallow’ are barren beside the concrete names of rivers and mountains like Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Tahoma, and Klickitat.”

“Did you find that in a book?”

“All of life is a book when it’s said and done. And then it’s held in these grotesque words or these ridiculous photographs. You think this is photographic evidence? You think I remember these boots?”

“What about her?”

“This woman? I remember her, I think. I remember all of my women, one way or the other.”

“What about the letters? These mean something, don’t they?”

“These letters sum up how she and I knew each other, like the name of the Snoqualmie tells you that there were once people who lived on the banks of this river and had a way of life that depended on the salmon that once made their way up this river. Time has dragged down the particulars of these people. Time has taken them away and time has taken whoever this girl was away.”

He stood up. “I don’t want to remember her.”

I realized I had felt a sort of pity for this man who lived like an old rat in his falling-down house, but now I saw some of what he must see in the decaying fields and the falling roof. Maybe he wanted everything to be dragged down by the braids of blackberry vines. He wanted the weeds to grow up over the house so that everything would be gone.

I don’t have a table at the Westward Inn, although I always sit in your section with my back to the window. You’ve teased me about my rituals, and this is one that I always hear from you. I come, after the last rerun of M*A*S*H, after the dinner rush has trickled out of the restaurant and the after-movie rush hasn’t started to pour in yet. The floor is still a mess from dinner—fries lie squished in the carpet, shredded napkins under tables, crumbs and water glasses with napkins jammed in the top cover tabletops. I sit down at an unbussed table and if you’re too busy, Rance the busboy drops a cup of coffee at my table with a handful of Equal.

As I watch you work, I think of myself as a stranger, which by now I virtually am, and the tired, erotic cliché of taking you—the waitress—home after her shift and screwing her. The fact is, we are always too tired. I come home and sleep, and you brush your teeth and take a quick shower. I know you’re back in bed because of the fat-fryer-and-smoking-section odor that never leaves your skin.

I want you to know I will see you awake again. I am not Joseph Anderson and I will not let you wander away like Ellen Miller or like some forgotten vocabulary question. You are not just a word or a name. And while this dreadful business of living, working, and sleeping makes us prisoners right now, I want you to know I will see you awake again. I am not Joseph Anderson.

Right now I don’t even see you awake. I just see you sleeping. I imagine sometimes, when I’m looking at you, that we will both wake and walk together through the lands of your dreams, along a trail, say, next to a muddy river in the jungle, and we will come to a small, whitewashed, clapboard house with dirt floors. We will live in the house by the river, falling asleep as the dusk falls like rain into night.

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This is part eleven of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.