• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

he’d traveled that far. Can’t stand to be

left out. Act as though you get it.

They spoke a spit dialect, like Daffy Duck

and Sylvester the Cat. And they held long notes,

ho-o-o, who-o-o-o. Laugh when they laugh.

They didn’t seem to be talking about him; they

weren’t referring to him with their squinty sly

eyes. The spitter with yellow tobacco fangs,

Sylvester, looked straight at him, and asked

something. Yes, nodded the agreeable American.

Yes. Sylvester and Daffy glanced at each other.

Complicity. Good, they seemed to say, let’s

go, let’s do it. They stood, paid,

waited for Wittman to pay, saw his wallet,

watched him pay with a bill that made

the proprietor use up all his change.

He walked deliberately step by step up to

the suspected muggers, and said in English, “Don’t

you mess with me, bro. You’re gonna get what for.

You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to ya.

You mess with me, you messin’

with the Man.” He reached inside his shirt

for his gat. The bravos vamoosed. Onlookers,

who will gather at any commotion, gave way.

And spread the word: armed man, American

with a gun, come to town. Whichever twisty

turning meandering path he took, Wittman

felt people keeping slant eyes on him.

And so, as the bad stranger, he arrived at

the meat market. The halves of a boiled hairless

dog hung by meat hooks through

its eye sockets. Paws in begging posture.

German shepherd? Labrador retriever?

Parents have brought children to watch the butcher

do something to it with a knife. At another

stall, a tub of piglets, like human babies,

some dead, some but stunned, alive

and moving, bloodied. A customer chose a snake

from jars of live snakes, haggling price

all the while. The snake man squeezed

the sides of its head, the jaws opened,

the fangs shot milk, which he caught in a bowl.

Just when you’re feeling relief, they aren’t harming

those snakes, he killed one, drove

a nail through its head. (So this

is the ancient culture that Chinatown defends

against the Department of Public Health and PETA?)

Wittman stayed in that town. Don’t turn away.

Face what’s real. Fix my reputation.

He found a hotel, a house with door wide

open, showing a front room with cots as

furniture. The crony witch widow woman

pointed at each bed, choose, choose,

you choose, first guest, no

other guest. Ah, but there’s more;

she led him to a ladder, indicated up

up, you up. The loft was the private

one-bed room, fit for a rich tourist.

He paid her, held out money, let her take

however much the charge. Then up ladder

again, and fell into the rag nest bed.

Sick. Gave in to illness, every

part of his body ill. Ceiling and walls

waved, buckling, fluttering. He’ll tilt

and roll off the edge of the loft into

darkest China. Hot. The roof? Fever?

Time spirals in China. In America, it shoots

straight out, like the line on the heart monitor

of the dead. The line faded between forever

and instance, awake and asleep, actual and dream.

It seems, at some twilight, the widowlady

witch fed him a brew, a medicine or a poison.

So kind or wicked of her, too old

to be climbing ladders, yet climbing the ladder

to take care of him. The ladder was missing.

No escape. He had memory of it: one pole

taller than the other, for climbing up to the mesa-

like rooftop, and down into the kiva,

when I was an Indian, a San Ildefonso

Indian, former life. I’ll make the witch

happy, recognize her, she and I were

girlfriend and boyfriend. I know

she recognizes me too, ministering to me so

nicely, palming my brow. I hear voices.

I can understand them; they’re plotting to steal

my money. All she had to do was ask.

I fanned out my money, take, take.

But she wants my life. Do I have a soul?

I can’t feel my soul. I think soul

is something we have to imagine. Want

soul, imagine one. Like imagining I have

it in me to be a husband, a father. Imagine

the peaceful dark, and you go into the peaceful

dark. Imagine the white light, and you enter

and become the white light.

May all beings be safe from danger.

May all beings