“What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
—from “The Four Loves” by C. S. Lewis
It’s a pleasant summer night, moon shining, owls hooting… baseballs thwanking? “Do you hear that?” Mort says to Sal in her matching Life is Good pajamas, Sal’s pink to Mort’s dark blue, as a dreaming Buster twitches between them in their bed. Thwank.
“What?” asks Sal.
“That thwanking.”
“No. But I hear some owls. Spooky.”
The thwanks Mort hears are in his mind, mind-thwanks coming off a metal mind-bat. Soon, Mort will regret his final words to Sal, who never gave up on him despite his many failures: Hub Capital, a wheel covering dealership; Kitty City, an indoor cat park. Sal didn’t even seem to blame him for the example he had set for their directionless, forty-two-year-old son, Hubert, last heard living in an Ozark Mountain yurt. “I love you, Sal.” “I’m sorry, Sal.” “You mean the world to me.” Anything other than, “That thwanking,” which Mort says now. Thwank.
Little does he know, lying in bed with Sal and Buster—ceiling fan stirring the cotton sheets and Buster’s velvety ears—the sound of baseballs thwanking against a metal bat is mortal Mort’s penultimate thought, final thought being, as he looks up, That fan is getting faster. For so it seems: faster, faster, until Mort feels as if he’s spiraling, too: faster, faster . . .
“Hey, you there,” a voice says as bedroom darkness gives way to glaring daylight and the fan becomes a turkey vulture, circling in cloudless blue sky.
Beneath it, eight, maybe ten feet in the air above a rock-strewn trail, floats a familiar face on a head—the three of them (Mort, the turkey vulture, and the familiar face on a head) surrounded by the striated walls of a cavernous desert canyon. “Schmidt?” Mort asks, just as a paunchy, naked body comes trotting down the trail.
“Over here. Hang a left. Watch out for that—” possibly-Schmidt’s face says to the body as it smacks into a boulder and staggers to a stop beneath the head. “Little help. Grab my ears, man,” possibly-Schmidt’s face says to Mort.
Still in his blue pajamas, Mort reaches up, snags the ears, and places the head atop of pair of hairy shoulders—presumably, possibly-Schmidt’s shoulders, where the head turns two 360’s and settles into place. “Thanks, I owe you,” the man says. “Wait, you’re the guy who killed the rabbit. Jesus, man, where are we? Wish I had some clothes on. This path is full of rocks, and this sun is hot as—hell.
One day that spring, Mort and Sal were at the park with Buster, their old beagle. The sun was shining, birds tweeting, baseballs thwanking off a metal bat. The three of them were walking outside the third base line of a Pee Wee League ball field—a cow pasture sixty years ago when Mort lived on nearby Chestnut Street, when there was still a chestnut tree on Chestnut Street. In Mort’s yard. The last remaining chestnut tree in Southern Indiana.
Thwank.
“Look, Sal,” Mort said, pointing across the outfield toward his childhood home, where each morning young Mort would get out of bed, lift Tennessee Ernie Ford from his cage, and look out the window at the cows. If the cows were standing, Mort would turn to Ernie, perched on a finger, and say, “Looks like it’s gonna be a nice day, Ernie.” But if the cows were lying in the field, he’d say, “Looks like rain today, Ernie.”
“Rain,” Ernie, a blue budgie, would squawk.
“That’s where I grew up,” Mort informed Sal as, plastic sack in hand, she picked up after Buster. Based on the weather that day, if cows had been in the field, they would have been standing. Thwank.
“I know,” said Sal. “You’ve only lived a mile from here your whole life. Your house was third from the corner. There used to be a chestnut tree. And the cows predicted rain.”
“Rain,” Mort squawked, frightening a rabbit from beneath a honeysuckle vine into the outfield, where a little left fielder appeared to be searching for clover.
At thirteen, Buster didn’t run like he used to. But when he saw the rabbit, he shed the years like winter coats, while at sixty-five, Mort—rounding third—did not. Still, as Buster and the rabbit ran up and down the outfield fence, Mort closed in. “Hey, you,” a man’s voice shouted behind Mort. But before Mort could turn, Buster yelped, lunged at the fence, and the rabbit and the left fielder squealed.
“Drop it, Buster,” said Mort. “Good boy.”
“Good boy?” the voice said. “What do you think your dog’s doing?”
Turning, Mort saw a man wearing a purple cap and tight-fitting Panthers jersey lumbering into left field, metal bat in hand—the man responsible for thwanking practice flies and grounders, it would seem. “What’s it look like, coach? He’s dropping the rabbit,” Mort said, stooping to pick up the rabbit.
“That dog tried to eat the bunny, Grandpa,” the left fielder whimpered.
“It’s alright, Ethan. I don’t think the bad dog hurt the bunny,” the coach said, picking up Ethan.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. Looks like Buster here snapped the rabbit’s leg. See?” said Mort as the old Panther pulled Ethan’s cap down over the boy’s eyes, turned, and walked away. Schmidt, his jersey read.
“If I ever see you on this field again . . .” Schmidt said, head cocked over his left shoulder.
“You’ll what? I’ve been walking on this field before it was one,” said Mort, thinking of the ball field as the pasture it once was. Mort imagined several cows grazing on the infield now. “And I don’t plan to stop, Schmidt.”
“Next time, it’ll be your dog’s leg gets broke!” Schmidt yelled, waving his bat as he and Ethan passed through a Guernsey.
Drop dead, thought Mort.
“We’ve died and gone to hell,” Schmidt says as his head revolves again.
After high school, Mort, his brother, Todd, and their dad, Burt, took a trip out West. The idea was to collect as many National Parks as possible. After hiking five miles in a park, they allowed themselves to buy a commemorative patch to add to their collection—Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton—before driving to another park.
Living Mort would have given just about anything to know where those patches went.
Dead Mort could care less. What he would give anything for is to get out of here: the Grand Canyon or, more accurately, a wild burro trail that Burt, Todd, and Mort had deliriously veered onto after running out of water and sucking juice from their final can of peaches. “Hold on, boys,” Burt had said before they stumbled their way to the Colorado River and all the water they could drink.
“I don’t think this is hell, Schmidt,” says Mort. “I got lost here once—or near here. As long as we keep going down this burro trail, we’ll hit the Colorado. Even burros need to drink. Then we’ll see.”
“See what?” asks Schmidt, looking down the trail.
“What comes after. We’re in my afterlife, I think.”
“Your afterlife. What about mine?”
“No idea. Ouch! Damn cactus,” Mort yelps, hopping up and down on his left foot while holding his right heel in his hands.
“Grab hold. Is that a donkey up ahead?” asks Schmidt as Mort, while keeping as far away from Schmidt’s pink, sweaty flesh as possible, grabs a hairy shoulder for support.
“Burro,” says Mort, plucking a spine from his heel. “All we have to do is follow. But watch out for the cactus—and those lizards.”
As the men follow the burro farther down into the canyon, the day grows hotter by the step. Aside from Schmidt’s reddening buttocks bouncing up and down ahead, the only life Mort sees are chattering stellar jays and cawing ravens flitting from cactus to cactus and scores of iridescent lizards flashing across the trail. “So, did you go to bed like this?” asks Mort.
“Like what?”
“Like butt-naked.”
“What’s it to you? What’d you say your name is?”
“Mort.”
“Carl,” says Schmidt, turning, his penis swinging in the merciless non-breeze.
“Glad I wear pajamas,” says Mort, shaking Schmidt’s meaty hand before Schmidt turns and bounces on. A family of jays cackles with laughter.
“Strange thing, Mort,” Schmidt says, farther down the trail. “I’m lying in bed last night with my wife, Peg, and the next thing I know I’m thinking about you and your damn dog killing that rabbit. Now here I am with you.”
“His name is Buster, and he didn’t kill the rabbit. Keep your eyes on that— Where’d he go?”
“Around the bend, I guess.”
But as they round the bend, instead of the burro, Mort sees a thin, bald-headed man wearing green knee socks and voluminous yellow boxers, sucking on the tips of a red Boy Scout’s of America kerchief tied around his neck.
“Am I glad to see you guys!” the man shouts as a knee sock droops from his excitement.
As Mort draws nearer, it occurs to him that he has seen the man before. Had the old Scout bought a hubcap? Had he owned a cat or bought a neon tetra? (Five years ago Mort’s tropical fish store, Something Fishy, tanked.)
“Let me guess, your idea of pajamas,” says Mort, his eyes moving from socks to boxers to kerchief.
“I bet his wife was wearing a sash,” says Schmidt, giving Mort a fist bump. But before the Scout responds, Mort remembers where they met.
Normally, Mort and Buster had had the Boy Scout grounds to themselves. But on that particular Saturday morning—ten years ago, at least—there were pup tents everywhere and not a pup in sight, other than Buster, who was weaving among the tents, scarfing up every hot dog bun in camp, when a man dressed in full Boy Scout regalia shot from a tent and demanded that Mort leave.
“Hold on to your socks,” Mort had said. “Buster’s only cleaning up your mess.”
“Yeah, well, this is Scout property. You have one minute to vacate.”
“Sieg heil,” said Mort, his right arm jutting skyward, when a duet of boy-soprano screams spilled from a nearby tent. “Buster. Here, boy,” Mort called.
With that, Buster ran from the tent, an open pack of marshmallows in his teeth. But before Mort had a chance to say, “Drop it, Buster,” the Scoutmaster yanked a Wolf Pack flagstick from the ground and, with his eyes on Buster, drew the flagstick back.
“Remember the guy who whipped a stick from your hands with a dog leash?” asks Mort now.
“Oh, Jeez,” the Scoutmaster says.
“Say, buddy, how about a drink?” Schmidt pleads, sweat streaming down his limbs—all five—while pointing to the Scoutmaster’s wet kerchief. “Where’d you get the water?”
“You’re standing in it,” says the Scoutmaster. To prove his point, he unties the kerchief, drops it to the ground, and stomps on it with muck-caked socks.
“You expect us to drink that?” asks Mort.
“It’s up to you,” the old Scout says before picking up the kerchief and wringing several muddy drops into his mouth.
“I’ll take some,” says Schmidt, reaching for the kerchief. “Curt Schmidt here.”
“I’m Brad Burgstrom. But you can call me Eagle.”
“As in bald?” asks Mort.
“As in Eagle Scout. And judging by the two of you, you’ll be glad I am. It’s liable to be cold tonight. I saw a burro running down this streambed. If we can find some dung, we’ll build a fire. Now get looking. And grab some yucca leaves.”
If Eagle weren’t dead already, Mort would wish him so—as he had that day with Buster. “Sieg heil,” Mort says now, his right arm angled toward the canyon rim.
With the sun dropping like a Wolf Pack flagstick, Eagle strikes a stone against a stone to spark a pile of dung and yucca. Here, in a dampish streambed, the three men pass a kerchief around a smelly campfire.
Despite the odor, as the night air gets cooler the men scoot closer to the flames: Mort’s right knee touching Schmidt’s left knee, Schmidt’s right knee touching Eagle’s left sock—with a gap between Eagle and Mort. “The last time I heard from my son, he said he cooks his meals like this,” says Mort.
“With donkey crap and cactus?” asks Schmidt.
“Around a campfire. He lives in a yurt. My wife says it’s just a phase he’s going through, but he’ll be forty-three next week. Afraid I didn’t set much of an example for the boy.”
“I made my son Larry’s life a living hell,” says Eagle, staring into the flames. “I locked him in a closet the night he came out.”
“I kept my dog on a chain,” says Schmidt.
Until now, being dead had not been all that different from living. You got hot. You got thirsty. You got angry. You got cold. For more than half his life, Mort had burdened Sal with his failures and laments. But he had kept kept from all others. Maybe it’s the darkness of the night, the meditative pops of burning dung and brittle yucca, or more likely, death itself, for suddenly, “I never took my Sal to Branson,” pops out, too.
Reaching through the gap and grabbing the kerchief from Eagle, Mort thinks death might be different from life after all. In life you tell people how good you are, how happy you are, how you succeed in everything you try. Despite the opposite. Or at least he had. And yet Mort had believed everyone when they said they were good, happy, and successful.
“I had an affair with our vet,” frets Schmidt.
“I ran over Larry’s flute with my truck. On purpose.”
Leaning back from the fire and looking up, it seems to Mort that with each regret or sorrow a spark pops into the air and joins the numberless stars above the canyon.
“Doctor Laura made me wear a collar.” Pop.
“I’ve never met Larry’s husband, Bob.” Pop.
Staring into the regret-filled sky, Mort thinks he wasn’t so different after all—that maybe everyone had kept their failings and embarrassments to themselves. Until now.
“You guys hear that?” asks Mort.
“The pops?” asks Schmidt.
“No, that crunching. Burro, probably. Over there,” Mort says, pointing over somewhere.
“Ouch!” a voice cries from the darkness.
“Burro my ass,” says Eagle, when through the flames—
“Hi, Mort.”
“Henry.”
That spring, after Buster bit the rabbit, Mort, Sal, Buster, and the bunny sped north on I-69, bound for Rabbitat, a rabbit rescue in Indianapolis. “Are you sure they rescue wild rabbits?” Mort had asked, looking in the rearview mirror at Sal. Sitting in the back seat, Sal was cradling the injured rabbit in her lap, its front leg sandwiched in a Popsicle-stick splint she’d fashioned.
“No, but if we drive three hours, they can’t turn us down. And they’ll remember your donation from the last time. Make Buster turn around, Mort. He’s bothering the bunny.”
“Here, boy,” Mort said to Buster in the bucket seat beside him.
This was not Mort’s first visit to Rabbitat. Sal, a volunteer at a spay and neuter clinic, had once volunteered Mort to deliver a post-op Holland Lop, whose scrotum had swollen to the size of its ear. That day, Sal had instructed Mort to donate two hundred dollars to Rabbitat. “They do good work. And they’ll remember you the next time.” Sal had stayed home with Buster.
But this was the next time, and the Rabbitat woman remembered neither Mort nor the Holland Lop. “We see testicles that big every day. Anyways, we don’t take wild rabbits,” the elitist rabbit-woman scoffed.
“Glad I only gave five bucks,” muttered Mort, turning his back on the woman.
“Five?” I told you, two hundred!” said Sal, turning her anger on Mort.
With Buster waiting in a Regal Eight and the rabbit cowering in a crate inside the car, Mort and Sal continued quarreling at The Beautiful Tree, a restaurant the motel clerk had recommended. “If I always did what you said, we couldn’t afford this meal,” said Mort.
“Watch it, pardner,” replied Sal, her way of reminding Mort of his latest failed venture: Frontier Pizza, where thirty thousand dollars bought Mort the exclusive rights to sell buffalo, venison, and antelope-topped pizza in southwest Indiana.
“That looks like a chestnut tree,” Mort said to change the subject, nodding at The Beautiful Tree’s wall-sized mural.
In no mood for dessert, Mort and Sal were revolving out the door onto the sidewalk, bickering still, when a man stepped from his car and said, “Mort? Sally!”
It was Henry Schoenbaum, Sal’s high school boyfriend, who sat beside Mort in Conversational German. “Was ist da los?” said Henry now, his hair the color of his silver Lexus, his tan the color of his suit.
“Nothing’s the los, Henry,” Mort said with contempt, as fifty years vanished in a blinken.
Junior year, Sal had dated both Mort and Henry. “It’s Schoenbaum or me,” Mort said one night at The Home Plate Drive-In, halfway through Bullitt, when Sal slapped his blouse-fumbling hand and Henry poked his head through the window past the speaker.
“Was ist da los?” sixteen-year-old Henry said.
“Das du am leben bist” (that you are alive), said teenage Mort.
If life had taught old Mort anything, it was that people do not change. Take Henry: poking his head where it does not belong again. In German. And in this respect Mort was unchanged, too: wishing Henry dead as though Steve McQueen were speeding through the parking lot behind them.
“What brings you to Indy?” asked Henry.
Mort was not surprised that pinstriped, silver-haired Henry Schoenbaum called Indianapolis, Indy, where he ran a bank or something.
“Yeah, you should have seen old Buster,” Mort chimed in as Sal explained the injured rabbit.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Sally,” beamed Henry, taking Sal into his arms as he once did in Mort’s imagination. “How about some dessert?” Henry asked, revolving arm-in-arm with Sal into The Beautiful Tree as if he owned the—
Schoenbaum, thought Mort. Henry Beautiful Tree.
If someone had told Mort he’d spend eternity with Henry Schoenbaum, he would have considered it the ultimate punishment. Yet here Henry is, pulling a rock up to the fire in his monogrammed HAS silk robe, filling the gap between Eagle and Mort. “Thirsty?” asks Eagle, passing the kerchief to Henry.
“Much appreciated,” says Henry before squeezing out some sludge, gathering his legs beneath his robe, and staring at the words on Mort’s Life is Good pajamas. “You were a lucky man, Mort. Life was good for you.”
“How do you figure?”
“Sally.” You married Sally. I never got over her.” Pop.
“Never?” Mort asks with a smile.
“Never. That night at my restaurant, I looked at you and Sally and thought of all the businesses I started, the traveling I did, awards I won, the women—”
“We get the picture,” says Mort.
“But I would have traded everything to have lived my life with Sally.” Pop.
“Everything?” Mort asks with a grin.
Warming his hands above the flames, Henry says, “You know, Mort, you never did tell me what you wound up doing. That night in Indy, Sally and I did all the talking.”
“I noticed,” Mort says, flinching at the sound of Indy. “What’d I do? Little bit a this. Little bit a that. Sales, mostly.”
“I could have used a guy like you. If there’s one thing I learned, Mort, all of life is sales.”
“Yeah, well, I was never any good at either one. Pop, pop.
“Would you look at all those stars,” says Schmidt.
Looking up, Mort remembers hearing that there are something like a hundred billion stars in the galaxy. And sitting here in the basement of Arizona with no lights aside from a puny campfire to detract, he can see why they call it Milky—one star blending into another as if the sky had curdled.
“Are we gonna sit around and complain all night or try to come up with a plan?” asks Eagle, tossing more dung on the fire.
“A plan for what?” asks Schmidt, scooting his rock toward Eagle.
“Like how to get out of here. Or do we want to get out of here? I mean, we don’t know what happens if we do. Or why are we here in the first place? Although I have a pretty good idea why you’re here,” says Eagle, nodding at Mort.
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“That day you and your damn dog came into our camp, I hoped you’d drop dead. That’s probably why I’m stuck with you now.”
“Could be.”
“Move your damn rock! You’re almost in my lap!” Eagle shouts at Schmidt.
“I’m cold,” Schmidt says, pressing on his gut with both hands. “I can’t even see my—” Pop.
Here Mort is, stuck with people he never liked in a place he doesn’t want to be, only to discover they’re whiny screw-ups just like him—including Mr. Indianapolis. But the more he thinks about it, if everyone’s a whiny screw-up, everyone’s in the same boat. Oh, how he wishes he had known this before. And boy, would he like to tell Sal.
As the night wears on, the fire flickers out, as do Mort, Schmidt, Eagle, and Henry, sleeping like the dead men they are. Now, as the sun rises over the canyon rim, Mort awakens to feel his back spooned against Henry. Sitting up, he sees that in the chill of night Schmidt and Eagle have moved closer to each other, too. Hugging, almost. “Rise and shine!” Mort shouts, startling Eagle to his feet and jarring a four-inch long, brown scorpion from a yellow boxer leg onto the ground.
“Shine, shine,” says the canyon.
Though fifty years have passed since Todd, Mort, and their dad had wandered off the trail, Mort’s best guess is that the Colorado River is about two miles—as a vulture flies—away. Walking without shoes in inevitable heat, it could take all day to get there, assuming this streambed even leads to the river. “We need to go before it’s hot,” says Mort. “Better soak your bandana, Boy Scout.”
“It’s a neckerchief,” says Eagle, stamping the cloth into the ground.
“With your feet?” says Henry.
“I thought the same thing, Henry,” Mort says. “But he gets more water this way.
This gulley could dry up as we go farther down. If he doesn’t use his feet, we could die.”
“Again?” asks Schmidt.
“You know what I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
To Mort, famished, the sun looks like an over-easy egg yolk, risen well above an empty bowl. With Eagle leading the way—followed by Schmidt, his naked body turning the color of surrounding Redwall Limestone; Henry in his robe; then Mort in his pajamas—the men trudge along the gulley, dry for the last few hours, the vast silence broken only by occasional bird squawks, ouches, and complaints. “Hey, Mort, do you think you could, uh, loan me your top for awhile? I’m burning to a crisp,” moans Schmidt.
“No sweat,” Mort says, surprising himself by taking off his dripping top and handing it to Schmidt. Eagle, wearing his kerchief as a sun cap, offers Schmidt his socks and boxers.
“I owe you guys.” With green socks, red thighs, yellow boxers, and a blue pajama top, Schmidt’s a walking replica of the stratified walls leading to the sky.
In another hundred yards or so, Henry gives his robe to Mort. “Danke, Henry.”
“Bitte,” Mort.
Soon, Mort notices a large bird to his left, circling inches above the ground.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Mort sees that it’s a turkey vulture. The same one his fan
had turned into? Who knows? But looking closer, Mort realizes the bird is circling higher
than he thought—a thousand feet or more above the canyon floor. “We’re fucked,” Mort tells the men. “We’re on a plateau. This gulley ends where the plateau drops. We’re a thousand feet above the river.”
Some people say a man is made outta mud. A poor man’s made outta muscle and
blood . . . Why is this, of all songs, playing in Mort’s mind? Though by now, high noon according to the hard-boiled sun, Mort feels as though his blood has turned to mud. That could explain it. As for the other men, strung along behind him, they appear no better, worse in Henry’s case, who every ten steps or so, in his delirium, cries, “Pretty bird, pretty bird.”
Backtracking up the streambed, the men had side-winded down the plateau and found another gulley to follow. With the Colorado River in earshot, they’d pressed forward, parceling out clothes as communal sun shields, sipping sweat from Eagle’s kerchief, and helping each other up when one fell into a sunburnt heap.
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go, Mort’s earworm is singing when, once again, his hopes plunge like imagined water from a precipice. This precipice. They’re on another plateau. Pointing to the river, at least five hundred feet below, Mort says, “We have a better chance of rain than reaching that.”
“Rain,” a familiar voice says.
“Look what’s on your head, Mort,” says Eagle.
“It’s Tennessee Ernie Ford,” Mort says as Ernie hops aboard a finger. No wonder
“Sixteen Tons” had filled Mort’s head. It was the Tennessee Ernie’s signature song. Mort must have seen his namesake flying earlier. “Long time no see, Ernie.”
“He says it going to rain,” says Eagle.
“Rain,” squawks Ernie before launching from Mort’s finger, circling the men three times, then veering down and perching on a cactus flower.
“I think Ernie wants us to follow,” says Mort.
“Pretty bird, pretty bird,” says Henry, who must have seen Ernie earlier, too.
With his eyes on Ernie, Mort zigzags down the plateau, the men on his bloodstained heels. Every now and then Ernie circles back and perches on Mort’s head, which the men take as a signal to rest and swap clothes. In this way, with the river growing louder by the head-perch, Ernie leads them to the promised shore.
“Attaboy, Ernie,” Mort says, stroking Ernie’s blue wing.
On a large flat rock hanging out into the river, the men carry on like prepubescent brothers, yipping, yelping, and splashing snowmelt from the Rockies on each other’s sun-scorched skin.
“Fantastisch!” yells a rejuvenated Henry, snapping the wet kerchief against Mort’s bare butt. (In the final stretch, Mort had loaned his pajama bottoms to Schmidt.)
“Wunderbar!” cries Mort, cannonballing from the rock into the water, bobbing up
in time to see Schmidt pull Eagle’s boxers to his socks.
“Who let the horse outta the barn?” shouts Schmidt.
“More like a pony,” says Henry. “Look!” But as Mort climbs from the river onto the rock, he realizes Henry is not looking at Eagle’s pony.
So preoccupied were the boy-men, so loud the river, they had failed to notice the raft approaching from the east—two men, one young woman, and the guide (possibly a man, possibly a woman) now growing larger by the oar stroke. Wild West World Adventure: blue letters on the orange raft’s side.
Pulling up alongside the rock, the guide shouts, “Need a lift?” Hurriedly, Mort takes his pajama top from Henry and fashions it into a loincloth.
“Your budgie?” the young woman asks, pointing at Mort’s head.
Now, as the raft zips westward through the canyon—Mort, Schmidt, Eagle, and Henry in the prow, the strangers in the stern—above the river-roar Schmidt yells in Mort’s left ear, “Are these people dead like us or what?”
“No idea!” shouts Mort, rocking to one side and the other as the raft yaws this way and that. “Ask them!”
But before Schmidt has a chance to ask, the prow drops into some rapids, sending a cascade of water into Mort’s face and lifting the four dead men from their seats. “Hold on, boys!” the guide shouts to Mort, Schmidt, Eagle, and Henry—in the same boat at last—as Ernie, clinging to Mort’s shoulder, turns his wet, blue head toward Mort, blinks his eyes against the spray and squawks, “Rain.”
Mark Williams lives in Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. His stories have appeared in Indiana Review and the anthologies, American Fiction and The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation. This is his second appearance in Drunk Monkeys.