---

---

 

When Ty pushed Vergil in his wheelchair out to the cement pad that Ty called their patio on the empty lot that overlooked the river, Vergil said, We’re like the blind man and the cripple. From the corner of his eye, Vergil saw a rattlesnake slip across the corner of the slab. It was the kind of day, he thought, when, if he didn’t blink, his eyes would dry out.

We are the blind man and the cripple, you fat fuck.

At the center of the pad, Ty blocked the wheels on the wheelchair and felt for a camp chair he had stored in the pocket behind it. Vergil spat some thin liquid from between his teeth without moving his face. Ty hawked a chunk of thick stuff and sent it in a parabola toward the river. The sky was clear and the river was flat, the fence on the far shore tall and thick. A CBSA patrol boat’s wake sloshed against the near shore. The sun was still low. The patrol boat tailed off toward the old psych center. Vergil plugged a tablet into a car battery and propped it on the edge of the pad. A voice from the tablet read headlines. Fires and landslides in the Coastal West. A natal rights bill in the House. The Salt Line had advanced five kilometers. Pennies on the dollar for land in the South. Crowding in the North. A gang of Anglos in Denver had broken shop windows. The mayor had issued a statement calling for tolerance and understanding.

Many are the fucked-up things, Ty said, but nothing is fucked-upper than people.

Above the far shore, a large bird—a hawk or a turkey vulture—teetered.

Shut that thing off. 

Vergil switched the tablet to waltz music.

She shouldn’t go looking where she shouldn’t.

What did you come back as last time?

Angie Dickinson’s bra strap.

What was that like?

Suffocating.

An ICE boat left the near shore and approached a CBSA boat. At the center of the navigation channel, both idled their motors. A man on the ICE boat appeared to lean over and shout something at a man on the CBSA boat. On the near shore a group of people who looked like Scruffies stood near a rocky point. One turned his head to speak with the group. As he spoke, he looked at one person, who was slim with longish hair. The rest of the group fanned out into a semicircle. The man took the woman’s hand and knelt. The woman’s hands went to her chin. Then, she took the man’s hands in both of hers and drew him up into a standing position. The people in the semicircle applauded. The man in the CBSA boat said something to the man in the ICE boat and then nudged it with the blade of a long oar. The officers headed back to their respective shores. The Scruffies wandered inland and disappeared under the bluff. The fence on the far shore was black and dull, but a corner of light bounced off and tagged Vergil’s eye. When he moved or blinked, it felt like his body weighed a ton. The back of his shirt stuck to his shoulder blades.

Take me home, Vergil said.

Ty stood up, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, and kicked out the standing brakes.

---

Nelson was sick of hearing from his father how his father’s father had left the Island when the cities began to flood every month and everyone had started buying property on higher ground that they couldn’t afford. He was sick of hearing that everyone had started over on the Mainland and his father had built a car-repair business even though the lily-white crackers had torched his shop, and that he had had to start over again after he had strapped his son to his back and taken his old father and his wife on the camino de lagrimas or whatever the hell they called it that ended in the promised land that was a shitty trailer park on the wrong side of the Saint Lawrence after floods and fires did to the Gulf Coast what they had done to the Island. He was sick of never doing anything right. And he was really sick of playing stepin fetchit for his father lying face up on a dolly under a car in the shed outside their trailer.

It didn’t help that his father was named Jesus.

Give me the alicates, his father said. 

Nelson looked at the bottom half of his father sticking out from under a Musk. Outside the door, the river and a hot blue sky. Inside, dark, stillness, and heat like plastic wrap. Nelson counted the purlins in the shed roof.

Hey. 

His father stuck his hand out from under the car and twitched it. The knuckles looked like golf balls and the palm like a catcher’s mitt. The skin was covered with black. Nelson remembered how they felt. He tried to breathe, but the air came hard. He thwapped a pair of pliers into the palm.

Wake up, his father said.

This sucks.

His father wheeled himself out from under the car and looked at him. His hair was wet, and his forehead was speckled with oil and dust. He was too far away for Nelson to smell him, but he knew what his father smelled like when he looked like this. There was a bluntness in his eyes that Nelson could not get past. His father rolled the dolly farther away, stood, wiped his hands, and walked over to the tool chest at the back of the shed. He opened a drawer and took out a caliper. The drawer at the bottom of the chest, Nelson knew, was where he put the CADNY cards customers gave him when he fixed their cars. At the end of the day and the end of the week, he would sort through the cards, count them, and fan them out like a poker hand. That was when the dullness in his eyes softened and the crack between his eyebrows became shallow. You use a caliper to measure, Nelson thought, but you could also use it to bang, cut, or scratch soft tissue.

What did you say?

Nothing. 

Nelson’s voice was higher than he would like, and it shook in a way that annoyed him. His father scowled. Pendejito is what he meant. You were born here. You have it easy. Me and your mother—  

Bete.

His father flicked his hand. Then he wheeled himself back under the car.

---

Moira Scheuring and her two sisters lived in an older home with metal siding on a small hill between the Spanish section and the office that overlooked the park, the town, and the far shore. They spent their time sitting at a card table on their porch, playing a game they called Indian Poker. One sister would take a card from a deck and put it on her forehead, face out. All three would bet on the value of the card. Since their eyes were not good and they had only one pair of eyeglasses between them, the game was more challenging than it appeared. Instead of betting cash, the sisters kept score on long pads of legal-sized paper. The way it worked—as far as anyone could tell—was that one sister would hold the card to her head, another would write down the bets, and the third would tear off the betting sheets. They threw dice to determine which sister would get the eyeglasses. The juice in the game—people said—happened when the sister with the card on her forehead won the eyeglasses. In those rounds the betting was high, and the outcome was unpredictable. The outcomes of the rounds in which a sister without the card had the glasses were trivial. Nelson had heard that they kept the records of their games in a bunch of filing cabinets stored in a basement that they had dug into the hillside under their home. They had been living there since before anyone in the Spanish section could remember. Nelson had never seen them not on the deck. He had seen them there in forty-five-degree weather, rain, hail, wind, and dust storms. Their home was not far from the empty pad where Ty, the fat blind guy, and Vergil, the cripple, like to hang out.

Hi, Nelson said as he walked past the old ladies’ trailer. Moira held a five of diamonds against her forehead with her first and second fingers. Her sister Clothilde scribbled on a note pad. The third sister, Addie, tore a sheet from another pad. Nelson waved. The sisters paid him no attention.

---

Ty had a yoga-ball belly and a bald head, and he wore shades. The one time Nelson had seen his eyes, they were milky-white. He and Vergil lived in a trailer not far from the park office, but they spent most days on their patio overlooking the river. Vergil had old-man tits and legs that looked like sticks. Nelson’s mother said that some people said that they were married, but people, his mother said, say all kinds of shit. 

On the patio, Nelson stretched his legs on the Home Depot bucket Ty and Vergil kept for visitors. The sun was at ten o’clock, and the air was thirty-six or thirty-eight. He didn’t want to think about the wet bulb index.

He didn’t used to be an asshole, Nelson said.

At the bottom of the hill, a toddler pedaled a Big Wheel across the basketball court. An older sister trotted behind. The sister shouted, Jayden!

It was fine until a year ago. Then he became like, Do this, do that. The Island this, the Island that, your mother this, your mother that. Then, he says shit in Spanish.

Something tickled the back of Nelson’s neck and bit. He smacked it, and the sweat made a slap. On his palm, pulp from a large bug.

When I look at women bending over in the supermarket, it’s like…

What?

I don’t know.

Vergil spat a short thin stream of liquid through his teeth without moving his head or face. He did not hear what Ty and Nelson said to each other when they spoke. 

And… Nelson started to say. He wasn’t sure how to finish. He struggled to find the thoughts the way you try to move your hand when your arm is asleep. A small cloud scudded across the sun. The wake from a barge slapped against the near shore loudly enough for them to hear it from where they sat. A Scruffy—it looked like a man—waded into the water from the near shore dragging an empty plastic hundred-liter tank. When he reached hip level, he pushed off the bottom and put his arms around the tank. As the current took him, a CBSA boat hovered near the center of the channel, watching. The wake from the barge guided the tank back to the near shore. The man pushed off again.

What, Ty said.

From when I wake up until I fall asleep, Nelson said, I feel a drill bit in the gut. It starts up when I open my eyes. It keeps me from sleeping at night.

When do you think about it?

All the fucking time.

Do you ever forget it?

When I run. Just for a minute, out of the blocks.

What do you think of when you close your eyes?

That, Nelson said. He pointed to the far shore. Beyond the fence, the land looked greener and better-kept. In school, they learned that the border had been sealed when Ottawa realized that the frog had been boiled and there was not enough remaining green space to accommodate, you know, everyone. Flight from below the Salt Line created a dam effect on this side of the river, only with people instead of water. His parents told him he was lucky to live where he did. You can go from this to that—his father had pointed at a tarp on the bank of the river with ten Scruffy legs pointing out from under it—in a latido. He snapped his enormous fingers when he said the L word. Nelson knew that, but fuck if he felt lucky. When he tried to name what he felt when he looked at the sliver beyond the wall, he fell short.

That’s Canada, kid. It’s not the sublime.

The sun hurt Nelson’s eyes.

Ty handed Nelson the rest of a bag of sunflower seeds that he had been sharing with Vergil. Then he hawked and sent a gob of something thick toward the far shore.

---

After he left Vergil and Ty, Nelson wandered. The park was shaped like a capital I, with the long stroke parallel to Route 37 and the river and the short strokes perpendicular. The Spanish people lived on the upstream stroke, and the Anglos lived on the downstream stroke. Ty, Vergil, and the sisters lived near the center of the long stroke, above the office, the basketball court, and the common spaces. Nobody beat on you if you went to the wrong place after the sun went down. You could walk wherever you wanted, but who wanted? The Scruffies were everything and everywhere. 

Nelson walked past the septic house, the basketball court, and the pole barn. When he got to the office, he saw that shade from one of its walls covered the porch. He sat down, dangled his legs, cracked the sunflower seeds, tried not to think about an elephant, alicates, or the drill bit in his gut, and kicked the upright behind his leg.

---

Frankie knew she was not like other kids. For one thing, she saw sounds. O was white. A was yellow. I was a dark red. E like in eh was a bluish gray. E like in peek was blue, too, but a darker and brighter blue. Ü, like they said in German, was lavender.

Shapes make sounds too, she told Ty.

What do you like about Nelson, Ty asked her.

I like the way his shin squashes against the chair when he sits, Frankie said. I like the way he held my hand that time.

When she talked with Ty, she found, she didn’t have to speak. Vergil didn’t catch their conversations.

What color do his shins make?

Hee hee, Frankie said. Wouldn’t you like to know?

---

She had not spoken to Nelson before the time he first held her hand other than to say hi. He was a year older and lived on the other side of the park, where the Spanish people lived. At school he ran track. Frankie did theater. Her family had been in the park since before the co-op owned it. His had moved in when people left the Gulf.

She had gotten off the bus, and he was sitting on the porch in front of the park office, kicking his heels against an upright and cracking some kind of seed between his teeth. She had walked past there a million times, but he had never been there before.

Hey, he said.

He squinted. She realized the sun was behind her. She let him squint.

Do you want some? he asked.

He held out the bag of seeds. She sat next to him. He kicked his leg against the post behind him. She bent her knee and kicked the same post. He kicked again, harder. She kicked harder, too. She liked the way things were going. She held a seed between her fingers, put it sideways between her teeth and cracked. The sound made a straight line, thin and black. She spat the shell awkwardly. The tiny tip of seed barely seemed worth the effort. Her left thigh squashed on the porch floor not ten centimeters from Nelson’s. The skin on her thigh was white with peach fuzz. His was darker and hairy. She ran her left hand over her head and then remembered. She put the hand behind her back quickly. Then, she put it under her leg.

Show me, he said.

No.

He took her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and lifted. He had biggish hands—wide at the knuckles with some hair on the back and flat spaces at the end of the fingers. She felt gooey in the stomach. What color is that, she thought, but couldn’t say. Nelson’s hands were warm and dry. Her own hand was sweaty. A surface tension gave when the skin on the hand parted from the skin on the thigh. 

Does it hurt, he asked.

She let him pull the hand to the space between them and open it. They sat with the palm between them, looking down. She looked at him, looking at her hand. The outside thumb opened flat like the rest of the fingers. She waggled the inside thumb at him. His breath, she noticed, smelled like toothpaste.

No, she said.

He explored the joint between the thumbs. It’s only a hand, she thought. Even with the, you know.

Can you move them separately, he asked.

She bent the inside thumb mid-knuckle and straightened the outside thumb, then reversed the positions and made the thumbs wave at him. 

Can you feel this, he asked.

He ran his finger down the outside thumb and up the inside thumb and lingered on the corner that joined them. When he did that, it tickled.

That tickles, she said.

She pulled the hand away. He reached for it, but she kept it behind her back.

It’s gross, she said.

It doesn’t bother me, he said.

She looked up from him and saw that half the sky was black with clouds moving in from upriver.

Shit, she said.

A hailstone the size of a chickpea hit her head. A tap on the deck, then a tap-tap and a tap-tap-tap. The air, which had been forty degrees, was now cold and wet. When the wind started, the hail came horizontally.

Fuck, he said.

She put her backpack over her head and bent over.

Bye, then, she said.

Bye.

She watched his shins and his butt carve a path toward the other side of the park. He was a middle-distance runner, she had read on the school Arpa page, but he could sprint, too.

---

At the base of the bluffs, a family of Scruffies—a man with a ponytail, a woman with ink on a shaved head, a baby, and a toddler—tied three inner tubes into a triangle. The adults tied the children onto one inner tube and waded out. At knee depth the woman sat on the second tube. When the water covered the man’s hips, he climbed onto the third. In the middle of the channel, a CBSA boat hovered. The triangle drifted downstream. After some time, the toddler dropped off. The woman let go of her inner tube and ducked under the water. As they drifted downstream, the woman stayed where she was. She appeared to stand straight up, with the water up to her chin. Then, she tilted her face upward so that it was flush with the surface of the water and made motions with her arms as if she were climbing a ladder. The CBSA officer stood on the deck watching as he kept his boat to his side of the channel. The man and the baby, still on the inner tube triangle, drifted downstream. You can’t paddle upstream, Vergil thought. They will bust you if you cross. Downstream, where the river becomes a line, you run into the cable net. If you get caught against that, you are in a world of hurt. Past that it’s Native land—and fuck if you want to go there. They are dumbasses, but the urge to cross is hormonal.

---

When Jo had been Frankie’s age, she was the kind of kid she told Frankie not to be. She remembered the name of the boy who did it to her, but she didn’t like to think of it. It was morning on a Saturday. Rod wasn’t her grandfather, but he sat in the place on the porch where grandfathers usually sit and he had a fly swatter that went pap when he zapped a fly and a cooler of beers like grandfathers do. It was springtime. A lot of mud and horseflies. It was hot, but not as hot as, you know, now. Two boys were supposed to pick her up. They were going—they told Rod—to a soccer game. The first boy showed up. He stood awkwardly in front of Jo and Rod as Rod sipped his beer and zapped the flies. After some time, Rod crushed the can he had been drinking from and asked, When is the next idiot coming?

Rod, Jo had said. He has a name! Then she said his name.

They had gone to a house next to some rapids on the river—not the big river, the smaller river that runs into the big river—where some kids had set up a fort, or a clubhouse, or whatever. On school days, they would take the bus to school, enter the building, and leave after first period. They might hang out behind the school, but mostly they would come to the house. Some of the boys had found a couple of old futons that they put on the floor of the room that had been the living room, and someone had found some chairs that they put around the table that they took out of the kitchen. On colder days, they would rip wood out from the walls to burn in a two-hundred-liter drum that they kept outside the door to keep warm. On warmer days, they would do the same thing, but just for fun.

When the school told Jo’s grandmother and Rod that she had not been showing up, they said that she would be put on probation. They might assign her to another school, but they couldn’t force her to do anything.

What kind of a job are you going to find, Rod asked her, after the letter came from the school. He had a soft face and a dewlap. His cheeks were round in a way that made his eyes squint.

I don’t care, she said.

They will come to take you away and put you in another school, he said.

They can suck my cock, she said.

After the boys picked her up, they drove to the house. She lay down on one of the futons and drank something from a clear bottle. Then, the sun was low over the river—the bigger river, which you could see from the window of what had been the living room, not the smaller river, which flowed directly past the back of the house—she was naked from the waist down and bleeding from you-know-where. A bunch of kids were gathered in a circle around the two-hundred-liter drum, throwing pieces of wood into the fire. She found her pants and walked outside. The boys who had picked her up were in the group, drinking beer. One of them—the one whose name she didn’t like to think of—ran his tongue around his lips and smiled at her.

I want to go home, she said.

You are home, one of the boys said.

I want to go home.

Her grandmother was skinny and dry, and usually stayed inside the trailer when Rod sat outside on the porch. When Jo came home, she walked through the storm door and the main door and saw her grandmother sitting in front of the screen. Her grandmother stood up, with a look Jo had never seen before. She had seen her grandmother look angry. Now she looked scared.

I am so sorry, Grandma, Jo said.

There, there, her grandmother said.

I am a bad kid.

No, you’re not.

Yes, I am.

---

Jo once heard a woman who worked at the main office of the school tell another woman that having a baby was like shitting a watermelon. For three hours, she tried to shit what seemed like a football, only oddly shaped, while a bunch of nurses and doctors stared at her middle-parts while she bent her knees and lifted her hips. When she was too tired to scream anymore, they put a sheet across her belly, gave her a bunch of shots, and cut her open. The baby that they handed her was covered in goo and looked more like an alien than a person. His arms and legs were skinny, his head flopped back, and his dick was, well, there. When she held his head up, she tried to think that there was a whole world in there, but he just looked like skin and bones. He smelled like soap and shit. She couldn’t get enough of it. When the woman from the agency wrapped him up and took him away, she strained to smell the imprint of an absence of a void.

I will be good, she told her grandmother.

Her grandmother sat by her bedside, tidying something. She had the bed next to the window. The curtain around the bed was drawn, but nobody was in the bed next to the door.

You will have more kids, her grandmother said.

Really, Jo said. I will go to school. I don’t even like those guys.

---

When Nelson lined Frankie, the room turned pink and yellow. She almost thought she would see a rainbow, or a unicorn. She didn’t wait to respond, the way they say you should.

Where? she lined back.

Same place, he answered.

When?

After school?

What will we do?

Same as last time.

---

His face, she noticed, was dark and oldish for a boy his age. The nose was prominent and strong. Two folds led from the base of his nose to next to his lips. His eyes were dark, wide-set and frank. He was sitting where he had been before when she arrived, holding a white woven thing in his hand. 

Here, he said. 

She noticed that his hand was shaking as he held out the glove and his voice trembled when he spoke. She took it from his hand and unfolded a left-handed glove made of white linen with a second thumb sewn next to the first. The stitches were made with thick black thread looped around the hole he had cut.

Your sewing sucks, she said. The purple of the ew and the orange of the u pleased her.

He placed the glove on her hand. The stitches strained but held. He held on for a beat after the glove was fully unrolled and flattened. She flexed both thumbs.

I love it.

He squeezed the hand through the glove. She stroked his index finger forward with the inner thumb and back with the outer. She pulled him toward her and kissed him. She was surprised when their teeth collided. His breath still smelled like toothpaste. His hand was warm as he ran it up the back of her shirt to her shoulder blade. They pulled away from each other and looked to the right and the left. The park was quiet, but the office porch looked out over fifty mobile homes, arranged in herringbones. A hundred or more eyes were looking at them.

We are putting on a show, Nelson said. Everyone can see us.

Let everyone watch, Frankie said, and grabbed the back of his neck with her good hand.

---

What’s for dinner, Ty asked.

Coffee.

The river was flat. Half the sun was below the upstream. The day had been clear, although the Arpa had said that there were fires in the southern Midwest. Ty sent a louie in an arc toward the far shore. Vergil lifted his right knee and shin with his hands and crossed it over his left. A group of Scruffies in a pool float and a CBSA boat eyed each other across the near side of the channel.

She’s going to do it.

Give it a rest.

The population of Detroit, the tablet said, had voted for home rule. A conscription bill in the House had failed on a cloture motion. Powerful interests opposed a bill to eliminate tax farming. The Treasury had changed the units in which the federal deficit was denominated. A bill to eject refugees had passed overwhelmingly, but enforcement was difficult. 

Turn that shit off.

Dub music drifted from the patio toward the river.

Have you ever known it to be this bad?

Oh, sure. 

Vergil wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The heat was like plastic wrap.

Have you known it to be this hot?

Where are those women?

Addie had the card on her head, and Clothilde had the glasses. A glass of wine sat in the middle of the table, and three wine glasses sat in front of the sisters. With her free hand, Addie picked up her glass and took a dainty sip. A single fiber on the top of the deck’s sill-plate held it in place. The railing swayed when Addie put her glass down. Ty scanned the horizon, as if his shades were a radar dish.

A hair to the right, Vergil said.

Ty adjusted his stance and gave the sisters a two-fisted bird.

When do you think the Bills will win, Vergil asked.

When the river overflows its banks, Ty said. When politicians grow cojones. When equilibrium is reestablished.

 

---

JOHN KAUFMANN is a mobile home park owner who lives near New York City. His writing has appeared in The Washington Square Review, Off Assignment, Epiphany, Tax Notes, The Journal of Taxation of Financial Products, and The Journal of Taxation of Investments. His first novel, Leisure Living, is due to be published by Under the BQE Press in late 2027.

Featured image by Fotoliberta Bob, courtesy of Unsplash.