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  You turn to Sue. “What do you want for your birthday?”

  She doesn’t miss a beat. “A fishing pole. Maybe a pass to the zoo.”

  “That’s my mom,” you say, nodding at the bank of pictures.

  “Where?”

  “Doing the limbo.”

  Sue doesn’t know what to say. “She’s pretty.”

  “You think so?”

  “She was in the club?”

  “She started it. That shot’s from later, though, from her birthday. I was trying to remember if I got her anything that year. I might have forgot.”

  “And you’re thinking, what are you supposed to get for the woman who’ll lose everything?”

  You shrug. “Judge Helen was telling a story one time on the bus, about how when it didn’t look like she was going to make it, her sister sent away to one of those mail-order companies that specializes in this. It names stars after people. God, they were howling over that one, I mean, laughing up their drinks. An eternal dot in the sky named Helen. Actually, it was Helen B-63, that’s how good business was.”

  Sue pauses. “Your mother, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That makes me feel a little better.”

  “I’m sorry, I meant she died last year.”

  “You mean, less than a year after that picture?”

  “Ten months.”

  “Fuck,” she says. “What am I doing around you people?”

  Sue stares at the dull brass of the bar rail, and you feel for her, but can’t get past that picture. The bartender is shaking glasses in soapy water. You tell him you want to take a look at something on his wall, and he looks at you like you’ve just asked for a key to the Ladies’.

  “Give him the damn picture, Bill,” Mrs. Cassini says and she’s right behind you once again this evening. “In fact, give him anything he wants. We’ll start with the picture, six shots, and an order for five taxis at midnight.”

  “Mrs. Cassini, I got to drive that bus.”

  “Oh, be quiet, Ben. Listen to your Auntie Cassini for once,” she says and slides onto the barstool next to you. It feels like being between the posts of a marine battery, as if you touched both these women at the same time, you’d see that blue light again.

  You’re handed a framed photo of your mother that’s been wiped with a bar towel. Tequila appears, lime and salt. Cassini licks the back of her hand. Sue bumps you as she hooks a heel in a rung of your barstool to better brace herself. The salt and alcohol burn in your fingernails. Three rims touch in front of you, and as usual, life seems to be moving just beyond your control, but for the moment, the place you’re headed feels good.

  “To cancer,” Cassini says. “A growth industry.” And you all nearly spray your drinks with laughter. In the mirror, Sue’s smooth head rolls back, a nautilus-curve. Her throat lifts and relaxes, and you drink too. A sharp, patient burn, like cactus, winters in your throat.

  Sue is fine until the lime. She lifts it to her mouth but the smell of it triggers something in her that makes her stand up. She puts her hands on the bar. “Not again,” she says, turning, pushing away the hand you offer.

  “Let her go,” Cassini says, anticipating your urge to follow. “She asked about you, you know. She’ll be back.”

  “When?”

  She passes you the salt. “Just a bit ago. Out back by the lake. I told her you were dead in the water.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “Stuck in a rut. Afraid to move on. Staring at your feet.”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “It’s true,” she says and fumbles for a cigarette in her cocktail purse.

  The bartender has the Weather Channel on now, and you glance at the bottle-necked shape of Idaho, seen from space. You are somewhere on that screen, you think. Idaho is blue, and Mrs. Cassini is in that blue next to you. So is your mother, somewhere. Your dad is watching this, you’re sure, but what he sees is clear skies.

  Mrs. Cassini lights a smoke, and you do another shot together.

  “I also told her you were looking to get laid.”

  You lick the tequila off your teeth and shake your head. It’s all you can do. “You’re killing me, Mrs. Cassini.”

  “Who gets the pretty one’s other shot?”

  “Go ahead,” you say.

  “See, that’s what I’m talking about. A rut. No zest. Your mom and I were pretty close. You know what she asked me? I mean at the end. She didn’t say look out for my baby or any crap like that. She said, ‘keep things interesting for Ben.’”

  “Life doesn’t seem that thrilling right now.”

  “Trust me. The excitement never stops,” she says, with a touch of bitterness.

  Your mom’s picture is surrounded by shot glasses. “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Oh, you can be a little bastard.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Mrs. Cassini puffs on her cigarette and looks at you. “You want a thrill?”

  You meet her eyes.

  “I’m serious. I’ll give you a grade-A thrill, right here.”

  It’s like you’re standing in your backyard, and you can feel that spot where that hole is, feel all those fears and desires hot through your feet.

  “Okay,” you tell her.

  Mrs. Cassini stamps out her cigarette on the bar. Then she takes your hand, wet with lime and alcohol, and places it under her dress. For a moment, nothing registers. The old man in the brown jumpsuit stands at the end of the bar, talking into a telephone. The Weather Channel now shows the whole northern hemisphere, all of Idaho lost under its curve, and then your fingers start to feel the inside of her hipbone, the moist heat from below. She guides your hand to the edge of a vinyl-smooth scar and traces it with your fingers downward to the edge of her pubic hair. You can’t help it, you close your eyes.

  It’s not a dance your hands are in, but a mechanical tracing. You are guided to the other side of her navel, where there, soft and flat, is skin you feel as blue.

  “It’s on the other side now,” she says and you open your eyes to meet a face without anger or sadness, and that holds you all the more for it. The strong bones of her fingers push yours hard against her skin, deep into the wall of her abdomen until you know it must hurt. “There,” she says, rolling the tips of your fingers. “Do you feel it?”

  There’s nothing there you can make out, nothing but heat and resistance, a yellow, oily pressure. You pull your hand away.

  “That’s the new baby.”

  Your fingers are red and you rub them under the bar, wanting another taste of lime for the brass in your mouth.

  “That sounded pretty bitter, didn’t it? I don’t know why I called it that.”

  There is nothing you can say to her.

  You do the shot on the bar and order two more.

  “That’s my Benny.”

  The bartender pours the tequila without limes or salt and when he changes the TV to the late news, Mrs. Cassini yells, “What time is it?” She turns to you, excited, and runs her hand though your hair, shaking your head with your earlobe at the end. “Come on, young captain. It’s time.”

  Waving her hand to the bar, she yells, “To the satellite!”

  With that great pull of Mrs. Cassini, you let yourself be swept. Reaching for the bar, you barely manage to grab a portrait of your mother and down that shot.

  Outside, the patrons empty onto an oil-planked T-pier, and drinks in hand, stroll above black water lightly pushed from a breeze farther out. The clatter and footsteps of those moving ahead seem to echo from landings across the lake a pitch higher, like the tin of old wire or metal that’s been spun, and it feels good to be part of a group moving together to see a sight.

  Mrs. Cassini is only a strong voice over the others, Sue, a glimpse through the shoulders ahead, and you follow at the edge, skeptical about what you’ll find ahead, even though you get that feeling like you’re safe behind the BlueLiner’s wheel, like nothing bad can come with
in fifty-six feet.

  At the end of the pier everybody looks up. You hear the soft thunk of a wrecker driver’s Zippo, his eyes scanning the night above the hands that cup his smoke. Mrs. Boyden and the older man are together again, each with a hand to the brow as if the stars were too bright to consider straight on. Even the boy who might be Tony squints into the night, and the way he absently wipes his hands on his apron makes you see him as of an earlier version of your father, thinking of policies and premiums as he looks to the future, though covered each way for whatever comes.

  “I told my husband I wanted to see the new satellite. Then this morning, over breakfast, he changes the sweep of its orbit with his laptop,” Mrs. Cassini says, and guides us across the sky with her hand. “It’ll be coming from Seattle and heading toward Vegas, with enough plutonium to make a glass ashtray of Texas.”

  Judge Helen coughs.

  You look at everyone’s faces and you know this is stupid. You can’t put a restraining order on a satellite the same way you can’t change the path of a tumor. It’s stupid to think you can just wave your hand and summons up something that doesn’t care about any of us.

  “There,” Judge Helen says and points back and away from where everyone was looking. They all turn in unison but you.

  “Yes,” says Sue.

  “Of course,” says the kid in the apron, with all the battle-battle-win optimism of a near-champion, and you look just to prove him wrong, because deep down you want to believe.

  Twenty fingers guide you to it. At first it’s too much to take in, all those stars. You wish your mother had thrown herself into something the last year of her life, like writing a cookbook or sketching cloudscapes, so that you could make some of those recipes and see how they tasted to her, so you could look up and see what she saw. Overhead, though, is a sky splattered as laughed-up milk, about as shaped as the mass in Mrs. Cassini’s belly. Until suddenly you say of course. It’s that simple. You see it: the green light of the Cassini satellite ticking its chronometer path toward Vegas. You remember the earth-shot on the Weather Channel and the thought that a satellite couldn’t see you but you can see it feels pretty damn good. It makes you want to write of course on a ten-dollar bill in red ink.

  Mrs. Cassini dives into the ice-cold lake and begins backstroking.

  At the end of the pier, you hear Judge Helen whistling the Blue Danube and look up to see her balanced on a tall shoring post. She launches, extending, and executes a thunderous jackknife, the crowd throwing up whoops as people begin diving in.

  The kid in the apron stands in disbelief, and you walk to him. It’s not your father he looks too much like, but yourself. In his hands you place the picture.

  “Hold this for me,” you tell him. “It’s important.”

  He angles the glass against the light off the lake to see. “Okay,” he says.

  You slip off your shoes, and barefoot, hop up to balance atop a post. From here you can see no more of the lake, but the women below are clear as they stroke and stretch as if doing rehab exercises. There will always be a reason not to jump in a cold lake, thousands of them, and a certain sense emerges from this. It’s like the logic of getting a court order against a husband who spends his evenings watching TV in the basement. It’s the desire to control anything you can.

  Mrs. Cassini floats on her back in the cold water, facing the sky. She looks at you, then closes her eyes, floating. “I’m twice as alive as you are,” she says softly, her voice so vital she almost sounds angry. Some women clap water in the air while others backstroke into deeper water, their arms lifting in graceful salute to a satellite that cannot see us, that for tonight at least, just passes on by.

  You jump. One slow tumble in the air that unfolds into a sailor’s dive, and you enter with your arms at your sides, chin out, barreling toward the beer caps awaiting below. You hadn’t planned on hitting the bottom, but it’s somehow not a surprise. The muted rustling of tin, when you make contact, is the exact sound of the BlueLiner’s air brakes—the shh of compressed air releasing—and the flash of pain in your eyes is bright enough to fire your irises white.

  Surfacing, you can feel the flap on your jaw and the warmth on your throat. You swim to Sue and kiss her, awkwardly, half on the nose.

  “Easy there, bus driver,” she says and has to smile, just her slick face showing.

  “You shouldn’t swim with a Hickman port,” you say. “You could get an infection and die.”

  “And that kiss was any safer?”

  “I suppose it wasn’t much of a kiss.”

  “I think you gave me a fat lip.”

  “I can do better.”

  “Another one like that and I won’t need the zoo pass.”

  “The fishing pole, then.”

  “Maybe it was the satellite,” she says. “All that pressure to perform.”

  “They’re watching us on the Weather Channel right now.”

  Sue gets a conspiratorial look on her face. “I saw at least three satellites up there. How many did you count?”

  You’re both treading water, breathing hard between phrases.

  “They were fucking everywhere,” you tell her.

  “That Mrs. Cassini. I think the satellite she’s talking about is halfway to Saturn.”

  Sue’s treading water with you, and that’s a good sign. You know you’re going to kiss her again. You have a photo of your mother safe with a friend and a mild case of shock. You’re immersed in ice water, losing blood fast, and still you feel an erection coming on, the kind you’d get when you were sixteen, appearing out of nowhere, surprising you with its awkward insistence on the terrifying prospect of joy ahead.

  TRAUMA PLATE

  I

  The Body Armor Emporium opened down the street a few months back, and I tell you, it’s killing mom-and-pop bulletproof vest rental shops like ours. We’ve tried all the gimmicks: twofor-one rentals, the VIP card, a night drop. But the end is near, and lately we have taken to bringing the VCR with us to the shop, where we sit around watching old movies.

  Lakeview was supposed to expand our way, but receded toward the interstate, and here we are, in an abandoned strip mall, next to the closed-down Double Drive In where Jane and I spent our youth. After Kmart moved out, most of the stores followed, leaving only us, a Godfather’s Pizza, and a store, I swear, that sells nothing but purified water and ice. It is afternoon, near the time when Ruthie gets out of school, and behind the counter, Jane and I face forty acres of empty parking spaces while watching Blue Hawaii.

  I am inspecting the vests—again—for wear and tear, a real time killer, and the way Jane sighs when Elvis scoops the orphan kid into the Jeep tells me this movie may make her cry. “When’s he going to dive off that cliff?” I ask.

  “That’s Fun in Acapulco,” Jane says. “We used to have it on Beta.” She sets down her design pad. “God, remember Beta?”

  “Jesus, we were kids,” I say, though I feel it, the failed rightness of Betamax smiling at us from the past.

  “I loved Betamax,” she says.

  I only rented one vest yesterday, and doubtful I’ll rent another today, await its safe return. There aren’t many customers like Mrs. Espers anymore. She’s a widow and only rents vests to attend a support group that meets near the airport. The airpark’s only a medium on threat potential, but I always send her out armed with my best: thirty-six-layer Kevlar, German made, with lace side panels and a removable titanium trauma plate that slides into a Velcro pocket over the heart the size of a love letter. The Kevlar will field a .45 hit, but it’s the trauma plate that will knock down a twelve-gauge slug and leave it sizzling in your pant cuff. I wear a lighter, two-panel model, while Jane goes for the Cadillac—a fourteen-hundred-dollar field vest with over-shoulders and a combat collar. It’s like a daylong bear hug, she says. It feels that safe. She hasn’t worn a bra in three years.

  The State Fair is two weeks away, which is usually our busiest season, so Jane’s working on a new designer li
ne we think may turn things around. Everyone’s heard the reports of trouble the State Fair has caused other places: clown killings in Omaha, that Midway shootout in Columbus, 4-H snipers in Fargo.

  Her custom work started with the training vest she made for Ruthie, our fourteen-year-old. It was my idea, really, but Jane’s the artist. The frame’s actually a small men’s, with the bottom ring of Kevlar removed, so it’s like a bulletproof bolero, an extra set of ribs really. The whole lower GI tract is exposed, but fashion, comfort, anything to get the kids to wear their vests these days. Last week I had Jane line a backpack with Kevlar, which I think will rent because it not only saves important gear, but protects the upper spine in a quick exit. Next I want to toy with a Kevlar baby carrier, but the problem as I see it will be making a rig that’s stiff enough to support the kid, yet loose enough to move full-speed in. We’ll see.

  Through the windows, there’s a Volvo crossing the huge lot, and I can tell by the way it ignores the lane markings that it’s not the kind of person who cares about the dangers of tainted water and stray bullets. The car veers toward Godfather’s Pizza, almost aiming for the potholes, and Jane sniffles as Elvis hulas with the wide-eyed orphan at the beach party. “Remember Ruthie at that age?” I ask.

  “You bet,” Jane says.

  “Let’s have another baby.”

  “Sure,” she answers, but she’s only half listening. She really gets into these movies.

  After Elvis is over, Jane makes iced teas while I drag two chairs out into the parking lot so we can enjoy some of the coming evening’s cool. We bring the cordless phone, lean back in the chairs, and point our feet toward sunset. This time of day brings a certain relief because even in September, a good vest is like an oven.