Moonsong for Bernardo

There is not much to say about this story.  It is my best sasquatch yarn.  Every bit of it is true, I swear.

                                                Moonsong for Bernardo

                                                          by Dick Morgan

                                                       

          Not many people believe in Sasquatch these days, but I do.  Met one back in the sixties.  Of course, I'm not sure that he wasn't a medical hallucination, as I was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic at the time. 'Borderline' is an interesting medical word; it means the doctors don't really know what's going on and are making a guess.   Personally, I think psychiatrists ought to give chance-percentages like weathermen do.  I think we're all a little crazy and agree on things only by accident, but my viewpoint on such issues is understandably biased.

          But all the same, I met this humongous footed, extremely hairy guy who might have been the Sasquatch of folk legend, but he wasn't at all like the one captured on film in 1958 by that amateur movie guy.   At least, I don't think he was.  He was younger, he said.  At least, that's what I thought he said.  He didn't exactly use words.  He was just extraordinarily good at charades, kind of like Bernardo, Don Diego's mute servant on the old Zorro TV show.

          So I started calling him Bernardo, even before I knew he was, you know, different.  Hell, for the first half a day there were just the two of us, and I had already begun thinking that I was the one who was weird.  Did I mention, I was under a doctor's care at the time?

          I really should start at the beginning, which is pretty far back, taking into account all of the relevant details.

          When I reached puberty, I began taking notes in my journal.  It was like everything around me was moving faster than I could really connect with.  Most of the time, I felt like I was driving onto an expressway where all the cars and trucks were moving along at 80 miles an hour, and I was on a Vespa motor scooter with a top speed of 35, flat out.  It was like I was stuck in slow motion.  So I wrote about the things I was seeing in my journal so I could think about them later, when I had more time to sort them out.  But while I was writing, other things would happen that I missed, and so I would have to write more and more often. Eventually, I was writing about everything that ever happened to me, continuously trying to catch up.  In fact, I never stop writing; it's a compulsive thing.  I average about eight inches of notebook paper a year, if you stack books on them so they're squished flat.

          My father thought this was abnormal behavior, as he didn't consider writing to be a productive pastime.  It wasn't football or basketball, so how could he keep score of my progress in it?  "What you gonna do with your life?" he used to say, and I used to answer, "I'm going to write," and he'd say, "Pishh."  When I was fourteen, he jerked me along by the arm into a child psychiatrist's office so I could get fixed up and be normal.

          The doctor's initial theory was that I was an under-achiever who needed to be pushed along more aggressively, so my dad signed me up for basketball after school.  I was completely mystified by this activity, as the ball moved way too fast for me to figure out what to do with it.  So I concluded that as long as I didn't have the ball, everything was okay.  Occasionally, the other kids would throw the ball to me, but I would just dodge it and keep running around the outside of the other players.  Pretty soon, they stopped passing to me, and I was fine with that. I didn't care who won; I wasn't even completely clear about which team I was on. The first time my dad watched me play, he shook his head, and the next day I was back at the doctor's office.

          The doctor prescribed lithium, which was supposed to subdue compulsive behavior, but it just took longer to write things down, so I was actually writing more often. This was unacceptable in my father's eyes, and he demanded that the doctor give me something to make me normal.  In desperation, the doctor gave me a prescription for tetra-hydroxi-cannabinol as a part of a government funded medical experiment.

          Well, it didn't help me become normal, but it certainly spiced up my writing.  I never knew whether what I was looking at was real or not, and so I wasn't in much of a hurry to react with it, in case it wasn't there.

          As it turned out, I was probably the only person in the world that shaggy old Bernardo could have come up and talked with.

          I was sitting at a campfire in Sullivan's gulch, close in on Portland's east side.  How it happened that I could be at a campfire in the middle of an urban sprawl of nearly a million people is that the town's main rail line ran down the middle of a long gully overgrown with ivy and willow trees, and every overpass that crossed the tracks made for a perfect campsite in the shadows of its underside, a dry place for folks like me to roast rats and pigeons on a spit, and eat them between week-old, squished bread slices thrown in the dumpster by the grocery store on the bluff above us.

          I was the youngest hobo in Sullivan's Gulch.  I guess that was because I hadn't been particularly successful at what folks called real life.  After high school, I had tried quite a number of jobs.  I was fired from Burger King for taking love bites out of burgers and desserts that I made for customers.  I just wanted to show people that what I'd fixed them was perfectly okay to eat.  I was like the King's official taster, but the customers didn't seem to appreciate my concern for their royal welfare.  I got fired from my paper route for tossing newspapers onto every porch instead of just the subscriber's porches.  I thought that everybody should know what was going on in the world.  I got fired from the warehouse delivery service at the college for taking too much time talking to the receptionists at the various offices where I was delivering mail and packages.  But heck, they were talking to me, and they didn't get fired.  As I saw it, I'd lost all my jobs for being friendly, generous, and caring for the welfare of others.  I wasn't exactly sure what virtues I was supposed to develop in order to actually keep one.

          My dad whipped me with his belt when he discovered I was using marijuana, which was pretty ironic, when you considered that the doctor he'd taken me to had gotten me started on it to begin with.  By the time I'd figured out that the doctor's prescription was the source of my hallucinations, it was too late; they were permanent.  This did not matter to my father.  One more fault didn't make much difference in a son already too unfashionable for him to show off to normal people.  In my father's eyes, these were people who liked basketball and disliked world peace, God-fearing people who wore ties with little flags on them and got their crew-cuts trimmed every Saturday.

          With my ineptitude at sports, chemically imposed peacefulness, and blond hair which hung down to my shoulders, I was a complete disgrace to my father, who finally issued one of his family ultimatums.  He told me to go to college, get a job, join the military, or get the hell out of the house.  I'd tried college, but it had interrupted the flow of my writing with totally irrelevant tasks such as tests, and I became hopelessly behind by the middle of my first term.  And I'd tried working, as I said.

          And as for military life, I couldn't understand that at all.  I knew that they fed you and gave you clothes, but they trained you to do things that outside of the military most people agreed were wrong.  They trained you to shoot at people, and sent you to places where people shot back.  If that kind of behavior isn't acceptable outside the military, how come it's okay inside the military?  I suppose our various politicians had their answers for this, but I'd noticed that they weren't ever the ones holding the rifles or wearing the helmets.  I didn't understand politics very well.  It was just like astronomy to me; as long as you weren't hit by a meteor, it didn't matter.  And due to my basketball experience, I had gotten pretty good at dodging things; I dodged the military altogether.

          But refusing to join the army had used up the last of my dad's criteria for leading the useful Christian life, so he kicked me out of the house.  I stayed with a college friend who thought I had potential as a writer.  I slept on his sofa, snacked out of his fridge, and smoked his cigarettes while I wrote in my journal.  After a month, my friend kicked me out, too.  No future in journal writing, he said.  That's just writing for the fun of it.  If you're not turning a profit, you're burning up good air for nothing, he said.  I'd replied that I thought the best writing was art, not business-- and breathing was free.  Get out, he'd said. My father would have liked him; his red-faced blustering reminded me of good old Dad, so I stole all his cigarettes.

          I was sure he called the police.  I'd taken almost a full carton of his Camel filters, and they weren't cheap.  I hadn't walked more than three blocks before I heard sirens and saw the flashing blue lights.  I hid behind a dumpster, and the police cruisers sailed right on by.  But I knew they would continue to look for me, felon that I was.  I would have to be careful, wary; I'd have to learn how to lurk from shadow to shadow, to blend into the seamy underworld of the city I'd grown up in.

          I could have gone on food stamps, or applied for some welfare or emergency shelter; but every place you went, they asked for your name, age, and social security number, and made little notes in a ledger.  Now, I may be a little crazy, but I'm not stupid.  I knew that as soon as all those ledgers got downstream to whatever offices kept track of such things, it would come to someone's attention that here was a wanted man, a fugitive from the iron hand of justice. I'd be nabbed like a pigeon in a hobo net.

          I figured that I would have to entirely disappear.  But it was summer, and not too cold at night.  I figured I could lay low and head for the border.  Before the weather turned cold, I could walk all the way to Mexico and be a free man. I decided to follow the railroad tracks south.

          That's how I happened to be sitting at my campfire under the Grand Avenue Bridge, sucking  pigeon meat off its bones and smoking a stolen Camel cigarette that hot August evening in Sullivan's Gulch when old Bernardo just walked out of the trees and sat on a stump about fifty feet away. I saw him out of the corner of my eye long before that, but I thought it was another hallucination-- you know, seeing wavering outlines of stuff as a result of eating too much pigeon meat and squished Wonder Bread.  I didn't react because I was pretty sure what I was seeing wasn't real. And when Bernardo came out from under the tree shadows, I was pretty sure he was real, but that I was just not seeing him properly, that I had some translucent speck in my eye that overlaid things and made them look different.  As Bernardo came closer, I rubbed my eyes, but what I was seeing didn't change much.  I was looking at a very tall and hairy guy, dressed in big khaki pants that were on backwards, and an old, ratty, black sweat shirt with the hood up.

          Even fifty feet away, I could smell him.  It smelled like he had crapped in his pants.  But I tried to be polite and not screw up my nose.  I just told myself to think of Grandma on her bad days, toward the last before she died, and how we all hunkered down at her bedside despite the smell, and loved her anyway.  So I'd begun to like whoever it was I was looking at before I'd even seen him clearly.

          I'd had about enough pigeon for the evening meal, and so I held up the stick it was on and motioned for the stranger to come up and get some, if he wanted.  So old Bernardo lumbered up to the fire and hunkered down on the log across from me, and took my pigeon.  He made a little sign with his hand, a touch to the forehead and a wave, palm up, toward me that I just knew meant thank you, in sign language.  I looked him over to get a better idea of what nationality he might have been, but nothing came to mind. His skin was dark, but his features weren't African or Arabian, nor Asian either.  His nose was wide and flat, kind of like a monkey nose, but much bigger.  His hair was thick, long, reddish brown with coarse black streaks here and there.  But it didn't just hang down out of his hood; it appeared to be growing on his neck and shoulders as well. His face was all covered with little nicks and cuts, as though he'd tried to shave, and hadn't been very good at it. He was barefoot, and his feet stuck out from his ankles at least a foot and a half, I figured.  I tried not to stare, and mostly succeeded too, on account of my not really believing that what I was looking at was real, as I said.  I just thought, here's someone's grandpa, and left it at that. I decided to have another smoke after my pigeon dinner and took out a pack of stolen Camels.  When I'd lit one, old Bernardo held up two fingers, jerking them upwards ever so politely, and I couldn't help knowing that he was asking for a smoke.  I gave him my lit one and lit another; I doubted that those humongous fingers of his would be so adept at the delicate work of lighting a cigarette.  I would find that I'd been wrong about that, but he seemed to appreciate the offering and gestured with his hand to his forehead again.

          "Where you from?" I said, glancing in his general direction, just as though he were a regular guy.  Maybe he was; I hadn't been on the underside of society for very long.  Maybe there were lots of strange and wonderfully bizarre folk out here in the shadows of bridges, hunkered down in the city's brambles.  I decided to keep an open mind.

          The huge figure waved the hand with the cigarette in it eastward, and made a few wave-like motions.

          "Out of town, ay?"

          The figure made more of the same gestures, reaching out further from his body.

          "Way out of town, ay?"

          The figure made a rapid succession of finger and hand motions-- two hands sloped upwards towards a middle peak, fingers forming trees, a wave of the hand, a shake of the head.  It was somehow not strange to me that the huge man had not said a word, yet I had understood him to say, From the mountains, deep in the forest, where there isn't anybody else.  He had said all this with only his hands and head motions.  That was when I named him Bernardo.

          "Must be lonely there," I said.

          Bernardo made a sound then, like a moan, or a cooing, only with a deep bass voice; it was the most woeful sound I'd ever heard.  He held up one finger, and pointed to himself with the other hand.

          "All alone in the world, huh?"  I said.  "Me, too."

          Bernardo nodded, then shook his head.  He pointed at me, and held up two fingers close together, then shrugged his massive shoulders.

          'Yeah, we're here together," I said, vaguely wondering if that were such a good thing.  Here was a guy who stood seven feet tall, probably weighing in at three hundred pounds or more, with feet the size of skateboards, and hands the size of frying pans.  He could probably crush me to death in one hand, my lifeless body suspended nine feet in the air, and throw me into the river, which was more than two blocks away, from right where he stood.  But I wasn't afraid.  Probably because I was too naive, being new to the wilderness, but also because I didn't sense any bad feelings or anger or fear from him at all.  Only a kind of intense loneliness, a feeling to which I could well relate.

          Bernardo held up his two fingers, jabbing them ever so politely in the air again, and cooed, a sound that reminded me a little bit of an old Volkswagon with no muffler and a bad spark plug.

          "Oh, I get it," I said, and gave him another cigarette, which he deftly lit from an ember by the side of the fire, held between his toes.

      "No offense, Bernardo-- do you mind if I call you that? No offense, but I'd like to give you a few hints about hygiene," I said.

           I took Bernardo down to the river's edge and showed him how to wash his pants out.  We dried them by the fire, and then I showed him about putting them on frontward, and the usefulness of zippers.  Bernardo grinned widely, and played with his zipper off and on for at least half an hour. By then, it was pitch dark, except for the firelight.

          I couldn't help but be curious about my new friend. "Where you headed?" I asked.

          Bernardo just shrugged, and sighed.  He looked over his shoulder then, up the gully, toward the east.  The moon had risen just above the mountains, full, large and orange, not yet bright.  He sighed again, pointed at himself, then held up one finger, beat his chest once, and then gestured open-handed at the moon.  He repeated the sound I'd heard earlier, the one that sounded like a Volkswagon.  It was a low, mournful sound, and made me want to cry.  I knew what he was saying:  Here I am in the prime of life, he was saying, under a full moon like this one.  I'm so lonely, it hurts.

          I knew the feeling completely from the inside, and felt a kinship with him from that moment on.  Our meeting was not a random accident of an unfeeling universe; our fates were intertwined.  Maybe we could help each other.

          Bernardo gestured of trees again, and mountains.  I'm a man of the forest, he said by way of his hands. One hand pointed at himself, and then pointed way away, as if over the nearest hills.  And again he pointed, this time in a different direction, but far away.  There are very few forest people, he seemed to be saying.  One here, One there.  He pointed at his groin and made a slow arch-backed body motion and worked his zipper.  It couldn't help remind me of taking a frontwards piss.  All men, he shrugged and moaned.  He hit his chest again, then put down his hood and sat up straight and proud.  Look at me, strong, young, no silver hairs yet.  Bernardo gestured toward the city, and moaned, a slow cooing like a seven foot, three hundred pound pigeon with a voice like Barry White.  He gestured toward the mountains with an open hand.  No mountain women, he seemed to be saying.  Then he pointed toward the city lights across the river and grinned, showing his big yellow teeth, squared off by use.  I've come looking for a city woman.  I found this to be amazingly bold, since I myself had not had much luck, and I was at least the same species.  But I didn't want to be discouraging to him, so I just nodded and wrote it all down in my journal, so I could figure out what it all meant later on.

          Bernardo and I slept by the fire through the warm August night in blissful peace.  Me, because I no longer had to worry about being accosted by weird and predatory monsters of the shadow world, and Bernardo, I supposed, because he had found a friend.  The next morning, after we re-lit the fire and warmed up a bit, I told Bernardo that I thought we needed to work on a plan.  Bernardo just shrugged his shoulders though, and I knew the planning was going to be my responsibility.  It wasn't that Bernardo was dumb; he just didn't plan ahead very far.  It was as if all of his senses were fine-tuned to the present, and he had become amazingly intuitive.  It seemed to me that he became aware of things almost before they actually happened.

          I mean, there we were sitting by our small campfire in the early August morning, discussing our plan.  Actually, I was casting out various options, just to hear how they sounded.  "So, the thing is, I need to lay low, maybe go down to Mexico to avoid the friggin' cops, don't you see. And you want to meet a woman.  Preferably a big woman, and even then, she'll need to be on top," I said.  Bernardo nodded, but then his head snapped up, and he began to look around.  He settled on a line of vision down toward the river, and about a minute later, two guys appeared there, slowly walking toward us along the train tracks.  They were both older, bearded, and had long scraggly hair and deep-tanned faces.  Their clothes were old and faded, and multi-layered.  As the men approached us, they looked all around, as though they half expected to be followed. Bernardo kept his eyes on them, and made one low growl, long, and almost troubled, like a big dog full of pain.

          The two men split up and approached the campfire from different directions.  The first to reach us hailed us from several yards out.  "Hey, neighbors!"  He waved affably, looking all around at us. His eyes lingered on Bernardo, and his right hand disappeared behind his back.  "Got any food?"

          I shook my head.

          "Your clothes look pretty new.  Got any money?"  the man said.

          I shook my head again, slightly uneasy now.  I looked at Bernardo, and he was tight lipped.  Bernardo had begun to stir up the fire with the end of our last small log.

          "How's about we just take a look," the man said.  I heard a small click behind me, and when I glanced up, the second man had a small, thin lock-bladed knife in his hand. When I looked back at the man who had spoken, he held a large hunting knife out toward us.  "You know," he said through a menacing, teeth-clenched smile, "I kind of like your jacket.  Mind if I try it on?"  The man took a step toward me, putting him at last within arm’s length of Bernardo.  It wasn't a regular arm's length, mind you, but Bernardo had incredibly long arms.  From six feet away, Bernardo simply leaned toward the man, grabbed him by the arm that held the knife, and stood up to his full seven feet.  The man dangled like someone with his arm caught in a backhoe, screamed, and dropped the knife.  Bernardo just flicked his wrist, and the man landed a good twenty feet down-slope.  Then Bernardo spread his arms wide and growled, a low, rumbling sound that seemed to vibrate through the ground and freeze your soul through the bottoms of your feet.  It made the hair on my neck stand up, and Bernardo was my friend.  Bernardo was looking at the man behind me, opening and closing his mouth, and licking his lips, as though to say, "Well, at least now we have us something to eat!"  The man behind me dropped his tiny switch blade, and a wet circle spread out from his crotch.   Bernardo roared, and the man took off running so fast that I swear I never saw his feet touch the ground.

          "You wouldn't have really eaten him, would you?" I asked.  Bernardo shook his head, and grimaced, held his nose with his fingers, and spat.  I understood him to say, "No. People taste bad."  I didn't want to ask him how he knew, and decided to leave it at that.

          We pocketed the leftover knives, put out our dying fire, and began walking away from our campsite, which no longer held a pleasant memory.  We walked along the railroad tracks, headed east, slightly uphill, away from the river that ran through the center of the city.  The sound of the cars zooming by on the freeway above our heads drowned out my voice, so we just shuffled along, looking for anything useful or valuable as we headed out of town.  I found a piece of tire tread and a curved suspension spring, but when I showed them to Bernardo, he pulled his lips back tightly and shrugged, which I knew meant something like, What would you do with them?  I threw them back into the gravel along the tracks.

          Bernardo found a Pepsi can, and further along, a beer bottle.  When he showed them to me, they were upside down, dusty, long empty.  He rubbed his throat and sighed.  I said, "I'm thirsty, too."  Bernardo dropped the empty containers, but I remembered that they were worth a nickel apiece, so I picked them up again.  "We can get money for these," I said.  "If we find a lot more, we could buy some food!"

          Bernardo looked at me like I was crazy, which was probably just a psychological projection on my part, because in my experience, everybody looked at me pretty much the same way.  His eyebrow raised a bit, as if to say, You can get money for garbage?  I nodded, and he grinned, showing his irregular yellow teeth.  He sped off up the gully in those long six-foot strides of his that no human could possibly keep up with, and he wasn't even running.  Suddenly he dodged sideways into the scotch broom and blackberries; a moment later, he leapt out with his hands high in the air, holding two Coke cans and a bleach bottle.  I took the cans and put them in my backpack, and tossed the bleach bottle aside.  "Not worth anything," I said.

          Bernardo picked it up again.  He crushed that gallon bleach bottle in one hand until it was the size of a match box, then slipped it into his sweatshirt pocket.  He gestured outward, along the tracks and under the willow trees, and shook his head.  Doesn't belong here, I knew he'd said, wrinkling up his nose.  I can smell it, I understood him to say.  So we walked along the tracks heading eastward, Bernardo ducking into the bushes every so often, and emerging with cans, bottles, boxes, tins, plastic wrap, used condoms and syringes, and occasionally socks, or underwear. I kept the cans and bottles, and Bernardo wadded up the rest ever so carefully into a huge garbage ball he kept underneath his sweatshirt, tidying up the universe.  I didn't have the heart to tell him it was a futile job, even if he was very good at it.  By the time we reached the Thirty-Ninth Street overpass, my backpack was overflowing, and Bernardo looked like a seven-foot Santa that had come upon hard times.

          We crawled up out of the railroad canyon at 42nd Avenue. Two blocks away was a Quickie-Mart, the kind of tiny market with gas pumps out front, that sells cigarettes and Twinkies, magazines and cheap wine.  I showed Bernardo the garbage cans, and he deposited his ball, which was too big to fit inside; it sat on top and made the can look like a huge, garbage-flavored ice cream cone.

          The inside of the store smelled like deep fried chicken, sugar doughnuts, and motor oil.  There were stacks of candy bars and canned goods and potato chips and knickknacks of all kinds.  Bernardo found a little wooden statue of a fat Chinese guy with his hands held high over his head.  He picked it up and smelled it, then held it under my nose before he closed his big hand around it.  The oil on the statue smelled like Grandma's Oriental jewelry box, and for a second, I felt as though I were on the other side of the world from home instead of in the same city. Maybe I could trade a knife for it, and give it to my only friend in the world.       

          The store guy, a tiny Asian man with a bald spot and a Fu Manchu moustache, waved his arms at the bottles and cans, indicating that he didn't want to take them.  "But you sell them.  Don't you have to take them?" I asked.  This put the man into a dialogue dilemma.  He seemed to want us to believe that he didn't understand English, but if he said no or shook his head, he would give himself away.  The dilemma was easily solved for him by Bernardo, who picked the little man up by the front of his Quickie-Mart jacket with one hand, the little Asian's legs franticly swinging back and forth in the air.  Bernardo was very gentle, compared to what I had seen him do with the would-be robbers we had encountered.  He simply held the man in front of his face, smiled with a yellow-toothed grin about ten inches across that reminded me of a Jeep grill, and gave a couple of slight nods of his head.  It seemed to be his way of saying "Please."  At any rate, it translated rather well into any language spoken by people who didn't want to get squished.

          The transaction was quick, on account of the agitated state of the little Asian store guy.  Bernardo and I had a total of six dollars and forty cents.  We bought two pieces of chicken, a box of Twinkies, a quart of beer, and a can of Dinty Moore's Hearty Stew for the road.  And I still had two dollars left.  Bernardo held the little wooden statue up at me, grinned and gave that little nod which said please, so I took it and asked the little Asian guy how much.

          "Ho-Ti, four dollah," he said.

          "What is Ho-Ti?"  I asked.

          "Rub belly, good luck," he said.  "Four dollah."

          I took out my new lock-bladed knife, and the man gasped, and got even paler that he already was.  I knew the little Asian clerk thought that I was some stringy-haired bad guy, hunched-over thin with my pale, oily skin and a week of beard, so I moved very slowly, and set the knife and the Ho-Ti statue side by side on the counter.  "Trade," I said.

          The Asian man was so relieved he wasn't going to be slashed to death that he just nodded and grabbed the knife up quickly, holding it in his hand ready to use.  I smiled my best wide Sasquatch grin, took up my Ho-ti, and rubbed its belly for good luck.  I suspected that the way things were going, we were going to need quite a bit to get out of town without being arrested or shot.

          I handed Ho-Ti to Bernardo.  He took it lightly in his big fingers, rubbed its belly, and handed it back.  He grinned that Jeep-grill grin of his and rubbed his fingers together in the air as though he could feel the luck still clinging to them.  Then he leaned over the glass-top counter and peered in.  After a moment, he pointed and motioned me to come and look.  When I did, I saw that he was pointing at the colorful cardboard squares on a shelf under the counter; they were lottery scratch tickets.

          Bernardo really didn't look very smart what with his protruding brow and flat nose, his thick ears and long stringy hair all around the edges of his cut up face.  But he knew what lottery tickets were, and he also knew that I had two bucks left.  He pointed his big forefinger at a bright blue and yellow ticket in the center of the glass cabinet, then held up a crooked finger at the Asian man, who was cowering against the back wall, trying to look invisible. I could easily tell that Bernardo was saying, Come here, so I said, "Come here," to the little man, who tip-toed slowly to the other side of the counter.

          "I think he wants to buy a lottery ticket," I said. Bernardo tapped the glass top with his finger and pointed straight down at the blue and yellow ticket.  "One of those," I said.

          Bernardo immediately grabbed my shoulder in a manner which would have probably been gentle, had I been another giant mountain ape, but which ground the bones of my shoulder together until my arm went numb.  Bernardo shook his head, and pointed straight down, tapping so hard with his finger I was afraid he'd break the glass.  Not one of those.  That one, I knew him to be saying.

          "That one there," I repeated, although it would be a repeat only to me, since Bernardo had not actually said anything.

          The little Asian man seemed to understand, but shook his head.  "Sell in order," he said.  He tore one of the same color tickets off the end and brought it up to the countertop.

          Bernardo flicked it away with his finger, shook his head, bared his big yellow teeth in a wide scowl, and began tapping on the glass so forcefully, it shattered with his third tap.  Before the Asian man had recovered from his shock, Bernardo reached in and grabbed the second blue and yellow ticket from the end, and ripped it off the roll. With a quick gesture to me and then back to the Asian man, I knew he'd said, Pay the man.  I left my two dollars and pushed Bernardo out the door, which felt like pushing along a car with a flat tire.  But Bernardo did not resist; he just grinned and stared at his lottery ticket as we walked back down into Sullivan's Gulch.

          Under the cover of the Thirty-Ninth Street bridge, Bernardo handed the ticket to me, and I scratched it off while we finished our chicken.  Damned if we didn't win five hundred dollars.  Bernardo just grinned and nodded his head, as though to say, Knew it all along.

          "How'd you do that?"  I was even more incredulous than my usual state of complete disbelief of everything around me.  I looked at the ticket again and again, but it clearly had three little symbols of five hundred dollars around a little circle, which meant we had won that amount.  "How did you know which ticket to buy?"  I said.

          Bernardo laughed out loud at my question, sounding much the same as a big truck engine trying to start but not turning over.  He put a hand onto my shoulder, the one he had nearly crushed inside the Quickie-Mart.  He held his hand on it for a long moment, and I felt a pleasant warmth flowing from his palm into my shoulder, and it seemed not quite as sore any more.  He held out his palm above my head, and then pointed at his heart, a faint smile parting his lips, but not so far that he showed any teeth.  A feeling, I understood him to say.  He held his hand over the lottery ticket, and vibrated it in the air.  Then he moved his hand all round us, toward the trees, the rocks, the sky. Everything gives feeling, he seemed to say.  Everything speaks to you, if you listen.  He deftly reached into my pocket and scooped out my Ho-Ti with one huge finger.  He held the little statue up in the sunlight, rubbed its tummy and then gave it back to me.  This has good feeling, he seemed to say as he rubbed his fingers together.  I laughed to think that here before me was a creature that lived with bears and wolverines, but who could come into town and see and understand more than I ever had in my entire life.  He had saved me from muggers and bought me fried chicken and healed up my shoulder and made me rich, at least for today. I laughed out loud to think of my good fortune and my good friend.  Bernardo laughed with me, and together we sounded like a conveyer belt that badly needed oiling.

          We walked back along the tracks toward the river until we came to a Fred Meyer store on the bluff high above us, and then climbed up the bank through the blackberries.  My coat got a tear in it, and Bernardo's sweats were beginning to smell again.  At the top, behind the store, Bernardo motioned for me to go into the store, then pointed to himself, and at the ground.  I understood him to say, I'll wait for you here.

          "Do you want anything?" I asked.  Bernardo grinned and slid off his hood.  He smoothed the thick auburn hair from his head all the way down the back of his neck, exactly like he was using a comb.  Then he patted his cheeks.  A comb, and some aftershave, I understood him to say.  He'd need a pretty strong brand to mask his own musky stench, which was beginning to curl my nose hairs again. We both needed a place to clean up.

          The Fred Meyer service desk wasn't happy about paying out five hundred dollars, so I took a hundred in store vouchers.  I filled a grocery cart with roast chicken, deli salad, champagne, razors, toothbrushes, toothpaste, aftershave, new underwear, an extra extra large sweat shirt and pants, and a cowboy hat I particularly liked.  It was black and curved upwards on the sides and made me feel like Bart Maverick, successful professional gambler that I was. And I remembered Bernardo's comb, too.

          When I got back to the rear of the store, Bernardo stood up from behind the dumpster.  He seemed happy to see me, not at all concerned that I'd been gone almost an hour. "Weren't you worried?" I asked him, handing over a chunk of roast chicken I'd torn loose for him.  He shook his head and swallowed the chicken leg whole.  "Why not?  Five hundred dollars is a lot of money."

          Bernardo just put his hand on my shoulder and vibrated it a little, then peered into the shopping cart. I knew he had said, You have good energy.  Got any more chicken?  I gave him the rest of the chicken and ate one of the salads I'd bought.  After we'd had our fill, I felt almost sleepy, with all my energy going to my stomach to digest our good fortune.  "We need a place to stay," I said.

          Bernardo pointed down into the gulley, under the overpass, and shrugged.  Good as anyplace, I knew him to say.

          I looked up at the sky, which was slowly filling with clouds that looked like bruises.  It would likely rain tonight.  "Well, we'll be spending lots of nights in places like that, but just once, don't you want to live in style? Anyways, there ain't no women down there."

          One of Bernardo's heavy eyebrows raised up. What did you have in mind?

          "Come on," I said.  I had too much to carry, so I just pushed the shopping cart along in front of me.  There I was, a dirty homeless man pushing along a shopping cart with all the stuff I had in the world.  I'd seen such a sight many times before from the back seat of my dad's Buick, and I always wondered what those peoples' lives must be like. Where did they come from, and where were they going? Sometimes they came from the easy life that parents give their kids and then boot them out of it, like that angel with the fiery sword at the edge of the Garden of Eden. There was never any way to go back, only forward.  I missed my own bed, my own clean toilet, my own desk over which I hunkered down to write.   And then suddenly I knew where I was going.

          The Banfield Motel sat deep in the vee formed by the freeway and Sandy Boulevard, on the bluff overlooking the train tracks.  Reasonable Rates: Free TV, the sign said.  I had almost four hundred dollars left.  Bernardo had to hunker down out of sight while I talked with the manager, who wanted to know where my car was.  Did I plan to stay in Portland long?  No, I explained.  My wife has the car right now, and we were just passing through.  I imagined a blonde woman, a real knockout, driving a '57 T-bird with the top down.  I tried to imagine her being happy to see me, but couldn't manage that, since I'd never experienced it.  I knew I was falling out of the conversation, so I looked at my watch and frowned.  I didn't have a watch, but I had a leather wristband I'd cut from a lady's belt I'd bought at the Value Village secondhand store.  I held my wristband up in front of my face so the guy couldn't see that there wasn't any watch there, and I said, "Shit," just like I'd seen lots of important people do.  My psychiatrist used to do that all the time. "Can I use your phone?" I said in my best urgent manner, flashing a handful of twenty dollar bills.

          The manager smiled, broken, seduced by my ploy. "There's a phone in your room," he smiled.  I fanned out my twenties like a deck of cards; he took five of them, gave me back a ten, three ones, and a key with a big plastic fish on it.  I had rented their best suite, one with a kitchen, a separate bedroom, and a coffee maker.  When I opened up the door and motioned for Bernardo to come in, we both stood just inside the door and gazed in awe at our good fortune.

          There was a big bed in the center of the room, with a picture of some Mediterranean harbor over the headboard. There was a TV and a stove and a fridge and a table and two chairs, and a door into an entire separate room.  My God, we could live here forever, if the checkout time weren't noon tomorrow.  We rolled our shopping cart right into the kitchen and poured ourselves some champagne into little styrofoam coffee cups.  We nodded and grinned at one another, and pointed around the room.  We had drapes!  We had a coffee machine!  We had a bathtub and a flush toilet and a little writing table, salads and sandwiches and champagne!  Dang fine life, if just for the moment.  I showed Bernardo how to hold his cup and make a toast; I said to him, "Here's to Ho-ti," and drained my cup.  Bernardo did the same, and then started to bob his head up and down, and look around the room again.  He seemed to be saying, Now what?  I couldn't help but get an idea.  I never think about whether my ideas are good ones or not.  They're just ideas until you carry them out, and then you find out whether they were any good.  My idea was that here was this creature from deep in the wilderness, hunkered down in a motel room with a bar of soap, a comb, and a full bottle of aftershave.  If Bernardo was ever going to have a chance to get next to a city woman, this was it.  Maybe I could help him find someone.

          I told my plan to Bernardo as best I could, seeing as how I didn't really have one.  I'd had very limited experience with women.  Actually none at all, but I had many times imagined that I did.  That would have to do.  "You stay here and clean up, comb your shoulders," I said.  "I'll try to bring back some women."  Bernardo's eyebrows shot up, and he grinned his widest Jeep-grill grin.  "Use lots of soap," I said.  He nodded and ducked into the bathroom; he actually had to lower his head to go in.  I stepped out of the front door with the fish key in my pocket, along with our big roll of twenties and my Ho-Ti.  It was getting dark, the moon not yet up, but the air was still sultry with the heat of the August day radiating up from the pavement.  A coatless evening; shirtless and pantless too, if I weren't walking down the sidewalk in front of God and everybody.

        Sandy Boulevard was an amazing place to find myself. The sun had just gone down behind the hills in the west, and the clouds in the sky blazed orange and pink straight down the street.  The neon lights had already started to come on, blinking and scurrying around in circles and squares. The white lights, and the reds and greens and yellows and even the blues hurt my eyes, which had started opening to the night.  Cars and trucks drove by a few feet away, gunning their motors and often honking their horns, which always made me apologize in case it was me they were honking at. The air pushed along by the traffic brought smells of car exhaust and grilled hamburgers from several neon signs down the street.  I could smell Chinese food and spilled beer and wet dogs and old piss, and hoped those smells weren't related.  As the car motors idled at a stoplight, I could hear a cat yowling and hissing, and voices shouting and laughing.  People of various sizes and ages and colors were walking by behind me, closer to the buildings on the sidewalk, and I could smell perfume and sweat, and even though some of them wore expensive looking jackets and strapless gowns, I could smell gutter mud on their shoes. The people in plaid shirts and jeans, khakis and sweatshirts smelled the worst, like the locker rooms at school, or an old cheeseburger left in the sun, or spilled beer.  Others smelled like flowers, or suntan lotion-- coconuts and butter-- especially the women in the short skirts and cut-off jeans.  All the smells and sounds and the blinking lights seemed urgent, insistent; they confused me.   The neon continued to brighten as the fiery rimmed clouds faded into the night sky, and the darkness slowly filled with stars in between the clouds.  I stopped in my tracks, overwhelmed; I had no plan, nowhere to go.

          One sign in particular drew my attention.  It was wrapped around a circular tower high above my head which rose up out of a building like a church steeple, except that this one blinked Drink 7-Up in brilliant white and red and green like God's own commandment.   I thought that must be a very important thing to do.  I put my hand in my pocket and rubbed my Ho-Ti, wishing for some 7-Up and staring up at the huge blinking sign in the sky.

          "Hey there, kid," I heard a voice say. A pleasant voice, soft, melodious, but not particularly friendly.  "You playing with yourself?  You wanna play with me instead?"

          I took my hand out of my pocket and looked around.  The woman who had spoken was older than me, but still young enough to look good in a denim skirt which only reached halfway to her knees.  She had lipstick the color of a fire engine, purple eyelids, and enough loose hair to stuff a pillow.  She was a natural redhead, the kind that had pale skin and a million freckles.  Her purple tank top pushed out sharply around her breasts, ending in nipple bumps. Her round, freckled belly pushed out over the tops of her waistband in the front, and on the sides too.  I could see an orange jewel stuck in the side of her belly button.

          She took a drag on a lit cigarette, and blew the smoke sideways, not in my direction, which I took as a personal sign of respect.  I saw her eyes casually roving up and down my body the same as I had seen the Asian store guy do, and the motel guy, too.  I turned around slowly so she could get a good look, and also so she would know I knew she was looking.  Then I looked straight into her face.  That was a bold thing for me to do, but I had learned it from my father, who had always appeared to think he was ever so much better than most folks.  I had always been intimidated when he looked at me that way, sizing me up, not caring how I felt about it.  When I wrote about it later though, I came up with the idea that this could be a useful social tool some day, if I ever found myself actually talking to somebody.

          "You lost, kid?"  she said.

          "Nope," I answered.  "Are you?"

          "Yeah, I'm way lost," she snickered, and short blue smoke puffs blew out her nose, which had a little silver ring in it.  "What's your name?"  she asked.

          "Cody," I answered.  That's what I called myself in my journal, and since I didn't find myself talking to very many people, I actually refer to myself as Cody more often than my real name, which is Timothy.  It even seemed more honest to call myself that, like it was the start of a brand new life.  I'd be Cody, and I'd be bold; I'd be Buffalo Bill himself, and look straight into people's eyes and not be scared.  "What's yours?" I said.

          "I'm Amber," she smiled, a gap-toothed grin that was more like a wild animal showing fangs than it was friendly. "You got any spare change?"

          "Maybe," I said. "Why?  Are you hungry?"

          "Yeah, that's it, kid.  I'm hungry," Amber said.  "How about it, got a buck for a hungry girl?"

          I took out my humongous roll of twenties which had the three ones in the center of it.  When I unrolled it and pealed off a one, her mouth opened so wide her cigarette fell out.  Her eyes were so wide they looked like they hurt. "How hungry are you?" I said, ready to give her another dollar if she thought she would need it.

          "Jesus God, kid!" Amber said as she stepped close and cupped her hands around my roll of money.  "Don't flash all that dough on this street! Put that in your pocket.  How the hell did you get all that, anyway?  Did you rob a store?  I heard the cops went to the Quickie-Mart."

          "I didn't rob a store.  A friend and I won on a scratch ticket, that's all," I said.  "Say, we've got lots of food back at our room if you're hungry.  Some wine, too," I grinned.  "You could help us celebrate our good luck!"  I absentmindedly rubbed my Ho-Ti again.

          Amber seemed to notice the hand in my pocket.  "We could party, and you could make it worth my while," she smiled and hooked my arm with hers.

          "Yeah, we could have a party," I said.  I thought of a birthday party I'd been to once, for a kid down the block. There'd been cake and kool-aid, and games with balloons.  I could introduce her to Bernardo, and we could pretend it was his birthday.  We could pretend the Twinkies were birthday cakes, and the champagne was kool-aid. And Amber could pretend she was a girlfriend who came to our birthday party. Bernardo would like that.

          "You know, I think it might be my friend's birthday," I said.  "You know someone for my friend?" I asked.  "Another girl?"

          "What's your friend like?  He's not real old, is he?" Amber asked.

          "He's big and dark.  Kind of hairy, but no silver hairs yet," I said.

          Amber's arms circled my waist; I could feel her checking out my Ho-Ti; her hand lingered on my big roll of bills.  "Then honey, I'm all the girl you need," she whispered in my ear.

          I frowned at a thought.  "We have cake, but we don't have any balloons," I said.

          "I got balloons, honey, don't you worry," Amber said.

          When Amber and I got back to our motel room, Bernardo was still in the bathroom with the door closed.  "I'm back," I shouted through the door.  "I brought a girl with me.  Her name is Amber, and she wants to have a party." I heard Bernardo's loud cooing, and could feel it vibrate through the floor.

          "What the hell was that?" Amber said, her eyes wide.

          "That's Bernardo," I said.  "He has, um, a sore throat. But it's not contagious," I tried to reassure her.  "He's really nice.  You'll like him, once you get to know him.

          "What's he look like?" Amber said.

          I smiled, "Oh, you know, just a regular really big hairy guy," I shrugged.  "He's really strong.  He, um, lifts things.  Maybe we should have some wine," I suggested.  I thought maybe the more Amber could drink, the blurrier Bernardo would be, and that would be an excellent thing. "Maybe we could turn some of the lights out," I said as I poured Amber a cup full of champagne.

          Amber drained it in one gulp, then eyed the bathroom door.  "Your friend going to be long?  I have to pee," she said.

          I refilled Amber's cup.  "You just have another glass, and I'll go see if I can hurry him up.  I flipped the light switch off and rapped on the bathroom door.  "Bernardo," I whispered.  "You have to come out sometime.  Come out and meet Amber.  You'll like her," I said.

          The bathroom door cracked open, and I could see that Bernardo had turned the lights off in there, too.  When he saw that the main room was dark, he swung the door wide and tip-toed out without a sound.  He slid across the room and into the bedroom so fast, Amber had not put down her champagne cup.

          "Was that your friend?" Amber said.  "He looks almighty big."

          "That's Bernardo, but he's really shy.  I think he's a, you know, a virgin," I said.

          "Oo, big and a virgin, my favorite," Amber said.  "Let me visit the little room, and then...who's first, you or him?"

          "I'll talk to Bernardo," I said.  Amber disappeared into the bathroom, and I could see the light go on underneath the door.  I turned a light on over the table so I could write there, and then went into the bedroom. Bernardo was hunkered down on the other side of the bed; he smelled like soap, musk, and most of a bottle of aftershave. I could see his finger pointing towards the door; he made a curving line with his hand, and then a cooing sound which made the whole bed vibrate.  She's cute, I knew him to be saying in the dim light.

          "She's a redhead," I said with a grin.  "I've heard they're hot."

          Bernardo moaned, his voice breaking in the middle.  He held up a hand and pointed toward the door.  I'm scared. What do I do? he seemed to be saying.

          "I don't know," I shrugged.  "Just, you know, try to make her happy, I guess."

          Bernardo shrugged.  How do you do that?

          "Hell if I know," I said.  "Listen to her, touch her hair, give her a massage.  Feed her things.  Make her feel like she's queen of the universe. That's what the magazines say.  She'll love you.  I have a really good feeling about her. I think our little Ho-ti has really come through for us."

          Bernardo nodded, slowly at first, then more vigorously, shaking the whole bed, and I could see the dim light reflecting off teeth in the center of his wide grin.  I patted his shoulder and then went out into the main room just as Amber came out of the bathroom.

          "Who's first?"  Amber said, smoothing out her denim skirt.

          "Well, I talked with Bernardo, and he's pretty scared. Maybe if you took in some food and a bottle of champagne to sort of break the ice, he'll calm down."  I sat in one of the chairs and slipped off my shoes; a noxious pungency arose from my feet.  "Anyway, I really need a shower, so I'm going to spend some time in there."  I pointed to the bathroom door behind her.  "Help yourself to anything you find.  Make yourself at home here," I added.  "You're our guest."

          "Listen, honey, I know what I am," Amber said.  She was chewing a new piece of gum, and she crackled it a few times, before she spoke again.  "I'm waiting for my incentive," she said.

          "What?"

          "A hundred for the full business, honey."  Amber cracked her gum and rubbed her fingertips together.

          I peeled off five twenties from our money roll and stuck it back into my pants.  I handed her the hundred, then I had a thought.  I dug out another two twenties and the ten.  "Treat him real good," I said.  It's his first time in the city."

          "Sure thing," Amber smiled.  Maybe it was a smile.  Or maybe it was just her taking out her gum, which she stuck in my hand after she took the money.  While she gathered up some of the Twinkies, one of the champagne bottles and two plastic glasses, I took off my shirt.  Amber seemed mildly interested, but didn't stop her gathering.  I stepped into the bathroom just as Amber made her way to the bedroom door. I heard her knock twice, and say, "Peek-a-boo.  Anybody in there?"  I saw her disappear into the bedroom over my shoulder, and before I closed the door, I heard one "Jesus God!"  She didn't come out, though.

          I took a long shower.  It felt good to soap up all over and stand naked in the warm spray.  I was curious what was happening in the other room, but I didn't want to hear any of it.  When Amber's voice started to repeat "OhGodOhGod" and the walls started making bumping noises, I washed my hair and let the water run over my ears.  Then I shaved with a thick lather of soap on my face while the water kept on running down my chest.  The water ran down my front and off the end of my johnson; I tried to imagine that it was Amber's fingers I was feeling there, but just then, I heard Bernardo's deep bass cooing reverberate through the walls, and I lost the image.  Amber was pretty and all, but, well, after Bernardo, I just wasn't interested.

          She'd be Bernardo's girlfriend, of course.  I imagined us as a threesome, hiking down the tracks toward the mountains, and then south to Mexico.  We'd have campfires, we'd roast hotdogs instead of pigeons, we'd have toasted buns and catsup instead of squished moldy Wonderbread. Bernardo and Amber would sleep curled up in a ball. Bernardo and Amber.  I wondered if I would ever sleep like that, curled up in a ball with a redhead.

          When I stepped out of the shower and dried off, I noticed that there weren't any more noises coming from the other room.  I left the bathroom and got dressed in the main room, opening a brand new package of underwear for myself. When I pulled on my pants, I found Ho-Ti in my pocket, but my money roll was gone.

          I quietly peeked into the bedroom to see if maybe Amber had taken the money roll, but she wasn't there.  Bernardo was lying on his back on a tangle of sheets making soft, snuffling noises, smiling in his sleep.   I closed the door as quietly as I could.

          I sighed; Amber had certainly helped herself to all she could find.  Our champagne and Twinkies were gone too. Well, wasn't that the loose shits?  I shrugged it all off and decided to pass the time writing all of it down in my journal.  It was midnight before I was done and turned out the light.

          Bernardo woke me up at first twilight by grabbing the headboard of my bed, lifting the entire bed off the floor and shaking it in the air.  I rubbed my eyes until I could see him in the dim glare from the windows; he was wide eyed and his mouth formed a little O.  He jabbed his finger around the room, waved both hands vertically through the air, then held one palm upwards in front of me.  I knew this question would come, and I had dreaded it.

          "Amber's gone," I said as gently as I could.

          Bernardo held out his hand, palm upward, and swept it sideways back and forth.

          "I don't know where," I said.  "But she took all our money, and I don't think she's coming back."

          Bernardo looked at me like I'd slapped him.  He pointed out the window, and then at himself, and then out the window again, and then at himself again, leaning ever closer into my face.

          "I know it was special for you, but I'm thinking maybe it wasn't so special for her," I said.  Bernardo stared at me for a long time; then he shrugged his shoulders, his eyebrows raising and squinting together as his palms went up.  "I think she just wanted our money," I added.

          Bernardo's hands slowly rotated inward, into a circle about the size of a laundry basket, and he began to rock them back and forth, his lips pursed into a kiss.  Then he looked at me, his sad eyes glinting from moisture in the dim light.  But what about our baby?  I knew him to be saying.

          "There's not going to be any baby," I said.

          Bernardo raised his face to the ceiling and began a voice like a lawn mower with a bad plug, a vibrato rumble that shook the whole room.  The sound rose through the notes of an entire octave of sound as his head shook back and forth.  It was a deep bass keening that stole my breath away and made me cry too, made me want to die for being the same species as Amber, breaking his heart so.

          I wanted to cheer him up if I could.  I arranged our remaining supplies in a circle on the table, a salad tub, a bar of soap, two cans of coke, and our can of Dinty Moore's Hearty Stew.  "Look, we'll be okay," I said.  I took out my little Ho-Ti and held it up in front of his face to distract him.  "And look here, we'll still have our good luck!" I said.     

          Bernardo stopped his keening and swatted our supplies off the table so hard the salad tub flew open and left a gooey spot where it hit the wall.  He turned toward me, and I could barely see his eyes, they were so narrowed down.  He made a couple of deep woofing sounds, as though clearing a bad taste out of his throat.  I could see his teeth clenched tight and his jaw working.  Suddenly he grabbed my shirt and lifted me off the bed high into the air with one hand.  He took my Ho-Ti with the other and popped it between his teeth.  I heard a crunch, and he spat out a piece of my Ho-Ti; a little wooden arm lodged in my shirt pocket.

          Bernardo stared hard into my face as he swallowed the rest of my Ho-ti whole.  Then he flicked his fingers, and I dropped back onto the bed just like an old chicken bone he was done with.  Bernardo gestured with both hands, palms up, then tapped his temple with his open hand as though something hurt him there.  Then he pointed at me and shook his head, and shuddered.  There was no mistaking what he was saying.  What is wrong with people?  Amber lied to us, to me.  Bah!  You can't trust your feelings in the city.  This is a terrible place!  Terrible!   He woofed a couple more times, shook his head, slammed the door open so hard the hinges broke, and strode out into the early sunrise.

          I would have followed, but by the time I got my shoes on and grabbed up my stuff, he was a quarter mile up Sullivan's Gulch, striding fast and furious, not looking back for anything.

          The last I saw of him, he was walking along the railroad tracks, generally east, toward the mountains. Somewhere along the rail lines in the next day or so, my one-armed Ho-Ti would probably show up, standing like a miniature statue of liberty in a pile of fresh Sasquatch shit, and some railroad bum would find it, and maybe would figure out what a lucky sonofa bitch he was.

          I never made it to Mexico.  I only made it to Hood River, where I crossed over the Columbia into Eastern Washington.  I got a job picking apples, and practiced my Spanish with all the Mexicans in the orchard fields.

After the apple season, I got a job pruning the trees back. Went to the community college in Walla Walla, majored in horticulture, started a garden shop, married a redheaded woman with a million freckles, had a son who doesn't like sports and likes to draw pictures of flowers.  I don't care whether he ever plays sports like the other boys.  Being the same as everybody else is highly overrated as a man's measure.  And being different doesn't make you crazy, either.  As it turned out, I probably never was crazy at all.  It's just that my father had asked that psychiatrist if I needed treatment, and what was the good doctor going to say?  He drove a Mercedes, for Christ's sake.  It's like asking an orthodontist if a kid needs braces, and they all drive Cadillacs.

          I never saw Bernardo again, although sometimes I take my son down to the railroad tracks just to walk along them. I never give up looking down the tracks, thinking maybe I'll see my big friend coming back for a hot night in the city. Who knows, maybe Bernardo hasn't given up either.  A couple of days ago, I saw this headline on a tabloid at the quickie-Mart about really hairy babies being born in Montana.

                                      *     *     *     *    *