Hadn’t he been promised a trip to the future match where the notorious Big Newton from Reedsport was going to meet Horrible Hank in an attempt to break the title holder’s long winning streak as well as his neck? And repelled as I was by Gibbons’ clumsy subterfuge and his sickening, two-faced good-fellowship, I knew I secretly rooted for his gladiator to put the champ down for the count. Les and I were heart to heart joined in this cause: we wanted the champ down simply because it was insupportable to us that he had the audacity to be up there—perched arrogantly on the throne, when we were not. But even as I lay in bed confiding this to the ceiling, I knew I was not Newton the Nemean Lion with a record of barroom fights to rely on, nor was I Leslie Gibbons, who could be satisfied as a gibbering and drooling spectator sucking up vicarious kicks from the ringside. My part in the dethronement, the necessary abrogation, would have to be both passive and active at the same time: passive in the sense that I knew better than to wage open physical battle against my work-hardened brother— WATCH OUT warned my monitor inside, my ever-alert distress signal that shouted FIRE at the first smell of a cigarette—and active because I needed the catharsis of being part of his overthrow. I needed to wield the torch, hold the knife. I needed the stain of his actual blood on my conscience as a poultice to draw out the pus of long cowardice. I needed the nourishment of victory to give me the strength I had been cheated of by years of starvation. I needed to fell the tree that had been hogging my sunshine before I even germinated. My sunshine, my need howled. Sun to grow on! to grow out of the shadow into myself! into me! Yes. And then—listen now—perhaps then, you poor runt, when you have brandished the torch! overthrown the champ! felled the tree! when the throne is empty and the sky overhead finally clear and the jungle finally safe for Sunday walk ...perhaps then, you poor chicken-livered wretch EASY NOW you may be able to establish the Reason for Lee, you may even find the courage to live with that twisted corpse that has been lying in your brain since she dropped it there from the forty-first floor, lying in your brain there, rotting indomitably away like a clock ticking; and, Lee boy, if you can’t measure up you’d better see to shortening the measuring stick down to your own size . . . because that clock is ticking right along. Viv walks upstairs to the bathroom. She removes her blouse and washes her face and neck. As she stands looking at her freshly dried features in the mirror—wondering if she should put her hair in a pony-tail for dinner or leave it down—she finds herself trying to recall if this is the same face she kissed good-by in her cracked mirror in Colorado. It really shouldn’t be so very different from the face that looked out of that old oval mirror; she hasn’t wrinkled—this climate is good for keeping down wrinkles, moist so much of the time—and she looks much younger than Dolly, whose birthday is a month after her own...but what about these stranger’s eyes that sometimes look back at her? And did she really once kiss these alien lips? She can’t remember. She turns from the mirror and picks up her blouse to hold across her breasts as she walks to her room— deciding Hank would rather she left it long, lots of hair hanging and swinging, as he puts it . . . For I was certain by now that no other elixir would heal me; no potion but victory would stem the curse and halt my slow ascent up the steps to my own forty-first floor. My whole future keened silently with suffocated need for that victory, my whole past screamed in fury for it . . . while across the ceiling overhead, with its stigmata of cavernous knotholes exuding forms hideous and vapors terrifying, walked the evidence of those very weaknesses that rendered my wrath impotent and my victory impossible. Watching helplessly, I was struck by the parodoxical beauty of the situation. It seemed to me that up there, projected overhead, was at once the absolute proof of my need for a victory over my brother as well as undeniable evidence of my inability to bring about that victory. The need instigated and paralyzed itself simultaneously. Helpless, I lay witness to my production: a panorama of unparalleled paranoia, as every neuron cowered in terror from its neighbor while the sheep were being slaughtered. WATCH OUT WATCH OUT WATCH . . . ...She finds the table lamp in her room and switches it on and drops her blouse over her sewing chair. She sits down and pulls off her frayed tennis shoes, then removes her jeans. At the bureau she opens a drawer and removes a bra and half-slip. She pulls on the slip and reaches for the bra—thinking how ridiculous, with her build, to have to wear such nonsense... Then, at the moment, with exquisite timing, just as I was about to surrender to death by Status Quo, there came to me a sign, my pillar of fire leading to salvation, my torch . . . A click in the next room sent a thin finger of light through that hole. The finger wrapped itself about my head and tugged. I lay still for a long time before I gave in to the pull of the light and let it draw my throbbing bones standing. . . . And, fumbling at her back with the task of hooking the fastening, biting at her lip, she becomes aware that she has been staring for some time now at the empty bird cage suspended from the ceiling. She ceases her fumbling and lets her hands and the bra drop gradually to her sides. In the cage a long solitary filament of cobweb hangs from the little swing, laden with dust. That’s about as birdless as a cage can get, she thinks. Should have bought another bird. Hank had even offered once to drive her to Eugene for just that purpose. She always liked canaries. She should have got herself another one. She still could. The next trip to Eugene she could ...She turns from the cage... I remember perfectly my first impression: that the girl—not the lamp behind her—was emitting the light. She stood there, motionless, her back to me, seemingly entranced by some vision across the room; clothed from the waist down in a beige-colored slip and nothing else ...quite pale, quite slender, with wonderfully long sorrel-blond hair following the slender line of her head down over her shoulders—and she made me think of a burning candle. She moves, tipping her head slightly forward. Then she turned, and as she walked directly toward my spying eyes, smooth almost hipless body, graceful wick of neck, pale unpainted face which seems to flicker and glow like a solitary flame . . . I saw that her cheeks were wet with crying. Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more—let me see—more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps. . . . As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries. As a trilobite wades out of the paleolithic age and drags itself across the ruts of Breakbutt Road into the outskirts of town, and across a field of hop clover and beer cans, finally up the steps of the Mad Scandinavian’s shack to stop and scratch at the front door like a dog wanting in out of the chill. As an antique Indian with a face like an aerial photograph of a bombed-out city—Indian Jenny’s father, incidentally—sits in a pine-log shelter back up fifty years of practically impassable dirt road, on a pine-needle floor with a greasy bearskin robe pinned at his wattled neck with a porcupine quill, intensely watching “Have Gun, Will Travel.” As Simone leans against her empty refrigerator, studying through the half-open door to her bedroom the little carved Virgin that studies her in turn, breathing the kitchen’s odor of candlewax and wine. Who do they think they are, anyway? These Stampers? To make this bad strike? As the rest of the town breathes their own passing breezes: Willard Eggleston, in his theater’s ticket office, counts the night’s take. “If it don’t get worse, if I can take in just this much a night I’ll make it to the first of the year.” Every night the take gets smaller. One night it will be too small. Floyd Evenwrit............