The Sanctity
for Nick and Arlene de Credico

The men working on the building going up here have got these great,
little motorized wheelbarrows that're supposed to be for lugging bricks and mortar
but that they seem to spend most of their time barrel-assing up the street in,
racing each other or trying to con the local secretaries into taking rides in the bucket.
I used to work on jobs like that and now when i pass by the skeleton of the girders 
and the tangled heaps of translucent brick wrappings, I remember the guys I was with then 
and how hard they were to know.  Some of them would be so good to be with at work,
slamming things around, playing practical jokes, laughing all the time, but they could be miserable,
touchy and sullen, always ready to imagine an insult or get into a fight anywhere else.
If something went wrong, if a compressor blew or a truck backed over somebody,
they'd be the first ones to risk their lives dragging you out
but later you'd see them and they'd be drunk, looking for trouble, almost murderous,
and it would be frightening trying to figure out which person they really were.
Once I went home to dinner with a carpenter who'd taken me under his wing
and was keeping everyone off my back while he helped me.  He was beautiful but at his house, he sulked.
After dinner, he and the kids and I were watching television while his wife washed the dishes
and his mother, who lived with them, sat at the table holding a big cantaloupe in her lap,
fondling it and staring at it with the kind of intensity people usually only look into fires with.
The wife kept trying to take it away from her but the old lady squawked
and my friend said, "Leave her alone, will you?" "But she's doing it on purpose," the wife said.
I was watching.  The mother put both hands on it then, with her thumbs spread,
as though the melon were a head and her thumbs were covering the eyes and she was aiming it like a gun or a camera.
Suddenly the wife muttered, "You bitch!" ran over to the bookshelf, took a book down -
A History of Revolutions - rattled through the pages and triumphantly handed it to her husband.
A photograph: someone who's been garroted and the executioner, standing behind him in a business hat,
has his thumbs just like that over the person's eyes, straightening the head,
so that you thought the thumbs were going to move away because they were only pointing
the person at something they wanted him to see and the one with the hands was going to say, "Look! Right there!"
"I told you," the wife said.  "I swear to god she's trying to drive me crazy."
I didn't know what it all meant but my friend went wild, started breaking things, I went home
and when I saw him the next morning at breakfast he acted as though nothing had happened.
We used to eat at the Westfield truck stop, but I remember Fritz's, The Victory, The Eagle,
and I think I've never had as much contentment as I did then, before work, the light just up,
everyone siping their coffee out of the heavy white cups and teasing the middle-aged waitresses
who always acted vaguely in love with whoever was on jobs around there right then
besides the regular farmers on their way back from the markets and the long-haul truckers.
Listen: sometimes when you go to speak about life it's as though your mouth's full of nails
but other times it's so easy that it's ridiculous to even bother.
The eggs and the toast could fly out of the plates and it wouldn't matter
and the bubbles in the level could blow sky-high and it still wouldn't.
Listen to the back-hoes gearing up and the shouts and somebody cracking his sledge into the mortar pan.
Listen again.  He'll do it all day if you want him to.  Listen again.


Bob

If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit.
Every long-time loser has a history to convince you he isn't living at the end of his own leash
and every kid has some pimple on his psyche he's trying to compensate for with an epic,
but the person with the most unlikely line I'd ever heard - he told me he'd killed, more than a few times,
during the war and then afterwards working for the mob in Philadelphia - I could never make up my mind about.
He was big, bigger than big.  He'd also been drinking hard and wanted to be everyone's friend
and until the bartender called the cops because he wouldn't stop stuffing money in girls' blouses,
he gave me his life: the farm childhood, the army, re-upping, the war - that killing -
coming back and the new job - that killing - then almost being killed himself by another hood and a kind of pension,
a distributorship, incredibly enough, for hairdresser supplies in the ward around Passyunk and Mifflin.
He left before the cops came, and before he left he shook my hand and looked into my eyes.
It's impossible to tell how much that glance weighed: it was like having to lift something,
something so ponderous and unwieldly that you wanted to call for someone to help you
and when he finally turned away, it wouldn't have bothered me at all if I'd never seen him again.

This is going to get a little nutty now, maybe because everything was a little nutty for me back then.
Not a little.  I'd been doing some nice refining.  No work, no woman, hardly any friends left.
The details don't matter.  I was helpless, self-pitying, angry, inert, and right now
I was flying to Detroit to interview for a job I knew I wouldn't get.  Outside,
the clouds were packed against our windows and just as I let my book drop to look out,
we broke through into a sky so brilliant that I had to close my eyes against the glare.
I stayed like that, waiting for the stinging after-light to fade, but it seemed to pulse instead,
then suddenly it washed strangely through me, swelling, powdering,
and when my sight came back, I was facing inwards, into the very center of myself,
a dark, craggy place, and there was a sound that when I blocked the jets,
the hiss of the pressurization valves and the rattling silverware and glasses, I realized was laughter.
The way I was then, I think nothing could have shocked me.  I was a well, I'd fallen in,
someone was there with me, but all I did was drift until I came to him: a figure, arms lifted,
he was moving in a great, cumbersome dance, full of patience, full of time, arms lifted,
a deep, flowing tumult of what seemed to be songs from someone else's life.
Now the strange part.  My ears were ringing, my body felt like water, but I moved again,
farther in, until I saw the face of who it was with me and it was Bob, the drunk,
or if it wasn't him, his image filled the space, the blank, the template, better than anyone else,
and so, however doubtful it seems now, I let it be him: he was there, I let him stay.
Understand, this happened quickly.  By that night, home again, I was broken again,
torn, crushed on the empty halves of my bed, but for that time, from Pittsburgh, say,
until we braked down to the terminal in Detroit, I smiled at that self in myself, 
his heavy dance, his laughter winding through the wrack and detritus of what I thought I was.

Bob, I don't know what happened to.  He probably still makes the circuits of the clubs and corner bars,
and there must be times when strangers listen and he can tell it, the truth or his nightmare of it.
"I killed people," the secret heart opening again, "and Jesus God, I didn't even know them."


Blades

When I was about eight, I once stabbed somebody, another kid, a little girl.
I'd been hanging around in front of the supermarket near our house
and when she walked by, I let her have it, right in the gap between her shirt and her shorts
with a piece of broken-off car antenna I used to carry around in my pocket.
It happened so fast I still don't know how I did it: I was as shocked as she was
except she squealed and started yelling as though I'd plunged a knife in her
and everybody in the neighborhood gathered around us, then they called the cops,
then the girl's mother came running out of the store saying, "What happened? What happened?"
and the girl screamed, "He stabbed me!" and I screamed back, "I did not!" and she you did too
and me I didn't and we were both crying hysterically by that time.
Somebody pulled her shirt up and it was just a scratch but we went on and on
and the mother, standing between us, seemed to be absolutely terrified.
I still remember how she watche first one of us and then the other with a look of complete horror-
You did too!  I did not! - as though we were both strangers, as though it was some natural disaster
she was beholding that was beyond any mode of comprehension so all she could do 
was stare speechlessly at us, and then another expression came over her face,
one that I'd never seen before, that made me think she was going to cry herself
and sweep both of us, the girl and me, into her arms to hold us against her.
The police came just then, though, quieted everyone down, put the girl and the mother
into a squad car to take to the hospital and me in another to take to jail
except they really only took me around the corner and let me go because the mother and daughter were black
and in those days you had to do something pretty terrible to get into trouble that way.

I don't understand how we twist these things or how we get them straight again
but I relived that day I don't know how many times before I realized I had it all wrong.
The boy wasn't me at all, he was another kid: I was just there.
And it wasn't the girl who was black, but him.  The mother was real, though.
I really had thought she was going to embrace them both
and I had dreams about her for years afterwards: that I'd be being born again
and she'd be lifting me with that same wounded sorrow or she would suddenly appear out of nowhere,
blotting out everything but a single, blazing wing of holiness.
Who knows the rest?  I can still remember how it felt that old way.
How I make my little thrust, how she crushes us against her, how I turn and snarl
at the cold circle of faces around us because something's torn in me,
some ancient cloak of terror we keep on ourselves because we'll do anything,
anything, not to know how silently we knell in the mouth of death
and not to obliterate the ofrgiveness and the lies we offer one another and call innocence.
This is innocence.  I touch her, we kiss.
And this.  I'm here or not here.  I can't tell.  I stab her.  I stab her again.  I still can't.