Thoreau's Rooster

My sister Katie called me in tears. Our beloved cat, Kisses, had succumbed to liver failure and had to be put to sleep. Up until his death – yes, his – Kisses had stopped eating. The vet would later tell us that Kisses’ body, in lieu of food, started sending fat cells to the liver. Those fat cells were then processed into lipoproteins for fuel. Kitty livers are not terribly efficient at processing fat, and much of the fat was stored in the liver cells. Eventually, his liver just gave up.
But I knew the real culprit.
When I came home for the burial, I found three plastic cannons in his litter box.

          Hi Steven,
          Thank you for finally writing your Gramma Collins. She shared your letter with me. You are a good writer. You are gifted everyone are coming over for clam dip and chips. They come to my apt. I like cooking in my own kitchen.
          Love and hugs,
          Mom

1. Le Songe de Chevaux Sauvages – Wild horses run through a burning ocean shore; the platinum one is gone.

Not two days after ripping the wrapping paper, all agleam, off her Christmas presents, Carole asked her mother, “Can I have a doll party?”
Outside, December crashes into January beneath the Adirondack fog, the trees aching for the spring.
Her mother remembered when her daughter once brought her whole class home for lunch. When the mother refused, the daughter insisted, “No, Mom, we’re all gonna have lunch!” so she prepared the sandwiches herself, slathering peanut butter onto the week’s supply of bread and handing them out to her classmates.
“Such a sweet little girl,” they said.

All her friends had arrived, dolls in tow.
In the kitchen, the mother prepared a snack for the loquacious seven-year-olds. One approached, timidity dripping from her fingernails down to the porcelain face of her marionette.
“Is Carole OK?” she asked.
None of the children, her mother, or her seven brothers and sisters could rouse the child, clutching her forehead, from the couch. Not even the oldest, Bill, or his new wife, Madeline.
Outside, the father, from his front porch, surveyed the Oriskany fields where, years earlier, a joint British and Mohawk alliance ambushed General Herkimer. In the ensuing battle, Herkimer and his horse were shot. Too proud to admit defeat, he hoisted himself up against a tree and lit his pipe.
When the screams roused him, the father was not thinking about the fate of Fort Stanwix.
Lifting his daughter’s burning body into his arms, the father was not thinking about acquiescing to defeat.

Lights gleam under the treetops. The sun penetrates her. She smells the gelid currents of the Hudson, the Black, the Oswegatchie, the Grass, the Raquette, the Saranac. She feels the weight of the Canadian Shield crashing upon her. Time and pressure mold her into magnetic iron ore. The central core of the Earth spins her into bits. And the ever-changing arctic kilopascals squeeze her back together.

On the way to the hospital, the daughter turned black in her father’s arms, her head boiling.
The encephalitis took six days to spread.
When they laid her down in the satin coffin, her skin still bore a charcoal hue, so the father agreed to bleach her.
“Such a sweet doll,” they said, stooped over her crystalline body.
Years later, on the shores of Lake Ontario, Madeline would regret naming her first born Carole.

          Dear Steven,
          Please write to one of us so we know your OK! We are all worried about you. Where are you in school someone told me you were taking film-making.
          Love, Mom

2. Crin Blanc – The courageous stallion steadfastly refuses to be captured and broken.

When Bill returns from the skies over Germany, he takes his wife and their new daughter north to Utica. They will continue north after the births of her sisters to Watertown, drawn by the pull of the poles, the lunar tug surging waves across lake Ontario.

Carole is skiing in the mouth of Black River Bay, before her sisters are old enough to try. Before she has met her husband and quit school when he got a job, before moving to Syracuse, to Chicago, before having two sons and a daughter – she would always say Steven was the easiest. “Came out just like a cannonball.”
Before Ohio.
She is brown and sparkling. Her tendons nearly burst from her skin as she pulls and flexes and bends and weaves across the cerulean breakers. She slices through the water, gutting the lake with such magnificent cruelty. Foam sprays through the tinniest gap between her front teeth. The skies rip from her feet but she stays uprights, skidding along her calluses. The water tries to swallow her, the undertow tries to suck her into the deep but no no it can’t nothing can keep up with her until the sky bears down upon her, clouds ripping apart from one another to cast wind and rain upon her but still she slides across the torrent. The rope breaks, the boat is gone into the air and still she moves, her velocity ever increasing until there is no more water to tread, until it has been soaked into her skin and bones and hair, until there is nothing but beach and sand and stones.

          Hi Steven,
          Please write! – do the family Mom is 84 so don’t take to long – I’me 504 – I am still at           Johnson and Hares for my degree in management – We all love you – do you have a car and a dog?
          Your Mom!

3. Versailles – A hunting lodge in the swamp, then the most spectacular palace
in Europe. We share the burden of growth.

Rome first encountered the Celts in 400 AD. Descended from the Alps to the Patina flatland, the Celts forced the inhabitants of that region – mostly Etruscans – to relocate. The Etruscans, lacking the means to oppose the Celts, turned to the Romans for help. Instead of responding violently, the Romans chose to send messengers to the Celts’ leader, Brennus. He, having appreciated the peace gesture of the Romans, sent a response to Rome via his own envoys. To settle the dispute with the Etruscans, Rome and Brennus agreed to participate in a contest that was popular among the Italian peninsula’s populace, to be played on the southern shores of the Po River – a dice-strategy game played on a drawn paper map. The winner, it was decided, would hold claim over the territories that had been forcefully occupied by the Celts. Fortunately for the Celts, Brennus won the game. However, the Romans argued that Brennus had performed illegal moves and demanded the game be played over. The peace talks failed, and a long and bloody war followed. The Romans were defeated, and Brennus kept his newly conquered land.
Often during his reign, Caesar and some members of the Senate indulged in a similar dice-strategy game. During one such game, the Roman leader argued with a provincial governor over a dice roll. The governor, having rolled a low number, claimed the dice had slipped off his hand. When he asked to re-roll, Caesar, refused, yelling “Alea iacta est,” or, “the dice have been cast.” When the governor did so anyway, Caesar leapt forward and beat him half-to-death. Historians have not examined this fateful game in detail, particularly who the winner was, but it has been stated that the outcome of that game led to a prolonged enmity between Caesar and the Senate, which culminated into political infighting, from which Caesar overthrew the Senate, followed shortly by Caesar’s murder.

          Hi Steve!
          Do you like Ball State. That’s where Peggy Kelly went. I think. She was always a good friend for me I am enclosing a gift card. Mom gave you one from the gap – I’ll go to Penny’s for your from me.
          I love you and am so proud of you,
          Mom

4. Le Vent des Amoureux – The vastness of this desolate wild is not to be trifled with; investigate the light emanating from it.

Memory comes in lightning flashes. It moves fast, barely lingers, obscured by fog.
We can hear the battle raging in the bedroom. We can hear the screams, the lamps shatter, pounds and stomps. It’s over it’s over it’s over, they yell, and then it is over.
Supply lines severed, we pack up the Chevy.
The drive from Ohio to Massachusetts took two days. We stopped in Castle,
Connecticut, offering sublime protection, moats of asphalt and neon and fluorescence.
We are storming, swords drawn.
The ocean is calling.

Katie and I play in the sand of Fort Phoenix, climbing over walls and rocks, from where, years earlier, the British drove a small Colonial militia, burned the barracks, smashed the gun platforms and all but one of the cannons.
I sit on the edge of the cannon and Katie pretends to light it. I leap, breathing in the salty mist from the coast and the ancient gunpowder lingering in the air, up above the scarred, bullet-ridden walls. I leap before Mom pulls us from the sand, before her sister asks us to leave and, before she rips us from our beds and barrels down the highway to New York City, before she stays in bed all day, before we have to steal food from Wal-Mart, before we walk home from school, before the clear tide rolls back revealing blackened shards of porcelain.
Before she disappears.

My father arrives in a huge red van, rented and clean. He helps us pack our things into the backseat. Our friends show up, Katie and mine, and wave us goodbye. They have presents, too. Piles of drawing pads, packages of pencils, charcoal, tortillions.
“There’s someone back home who will help me take care of you. She’ll be your mother from now on,” my father tells us.
I drew the ocean, sooty and viscous.

          Christmas arrives. We are waiting for Mom #2 to come over. She has made a breakfast for us at her house, and we can’t open presents until she arrives. Jason pulls me under the staircase and shoves a gleaming box into my arms. Underneath shimmering wrapping, a Risk board.
          So I ask the father, “Can I have a Risk party?”
          Inside, childhood crashes into adolescence.

          Hi Steve,
          Did you get the ltl. box I sent you a tee shirt for you and one for Leah?? I hope you sent Gramma Collins, a Mother’s Day card. I’d like one too! I heard your father is re-marrying a younger woman. Have you met your step-mother yet? Gotta run, the phones ringing –
          Love and Prayers,
          Your Mom!

5. Le Ballon Rouge – A little boy finds a bright red balloon outside his bedroom window. Watch it follow him everywhere – It is aware.

The fireworks will scar the courtyard pavement. It only takes about five minutes for the cops to arrive. Wear black. Stay low to the ground.
You’ve never truly laughed until you knock over a porto-potty at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. Really gotta put your back into it, shoulders forward. Cleats are best.
Toilet paper is hardest to clean off after it rains, but the toss comes first. It takes some time to get the spiral right, you just have to keep keep keep at it.

          The Yeti is driving too fast. On the radio rock runs into punk runs into rap and sitting here the lights stream by in iridescent folds. He has the ice-caked windows down.   He is called the Yeti because he insists on keeping them down, even in the dead of winter. It is a test of endurance, a battle against the senses. We are mothered by conflict.    Travis is orating from the front; I’m clutching the back of his seat.
“Steven, do you know how Risk was invented?” Travis asks.
          “No,” I say, wishing I’d brought a coat.
          “Well, a French filmmaker came up with the idea in the fifties.”
          “Oh,” I say, wondering if he was really the first.
          “Yep, Albert Lamorisse.” He attempts a French accent. “Have you seen The Red Balloon? Great film.”
          “No,” I say, laughing at the accent.
          “Well, he wrote and directed it.”
          “Oh,” I say, hoping it’s as good as he says it is.
“Made about seven or eight films, actually. All short. He died in a helicopter crash making one. They all had names like ‘The Lovers’ Wind,’ ‘Wild Stallion,’ ‘Stowaway in the Sky,’ real motivational shit.”
And I’m wondering if the axels can support us, spinning donuts in a parking lot.

          Mom,
          Here’s what you’re missing. Here’s how I am growing up.
          Steven

My maturation comes with a new lexicon. Jeet Kun Du, MGD, Tae Kwan Do, Muay Thai, Semper Fi, Blade Runner, the JT USA Tactical Tac-5 Recon semi-automatic paintball gun with a blade style double finger trigger for increased rate of fire.
Camouflage, helpful knowledge when you’re trying to sneak hits off a joint behind the church across the street.
For these things we prey.
Our fathers and mothers who art not in Heaven.

Travis and the Yeti are playing Risk on the bedroom floor. I’m on Travis’s bed: a bare mattress held up by stacks of military history. It’s freezing and God what was that I put in my body he is talking and talking and all I want is to pull the American flag down off the wall and drape it over my freezing body wrap my arms in dead patriots from days long gone my grandfather his father everyone on the soil spinning with the Earth drifting with the plates but no don’t you fucking dare put that over yourself go get a blanket.

I am somewhere between sleep and consciousness, in the spaces between milliseconds where memories blend in, disappear. I sit up in my bed. It takes a moment for my eyes to focus. The lights are on in the bedroom but colors are streaming in from the windows and I can tell by the indentation above me that Katie isn’t in the top bunk. There is shouting from outside the room. Mom is there draped in a bathrobe flailing her arms above Katie, cradling herself on the floor. Now I can hear the sirens and the pounding at the door and the no! no! as they wrestle her to the ground and how did they get in here who called and she pulls herself away from them and runs to the window and they tackle her again onto the bed and that’s when the cuffs go on that metallic chink that sound that sound and the neighbors take us in and give us pizza and stroke our heads.
We rise from the ashes.

“Did you have a good night, son?” my father asks, Mom #2 knitting on the sofa.
“Fine.”

          Dear Steve,
          I am so glad and proud of you!
          Love, Mom

6. Fifi la Plume - Witness a bumbling burglar: don an abandoned nightgown, feel as though he has been transformed into an angel and join a strange circus.

Mom #2 stands at the top of the stairs, winds up, and lobs something down at my father, who laughs. She stomps into the master bedroom and slams the door.
He might have told me to stop hanging out with them, but I cannot remember. I cannot pinpoint the moment where friendship turns to enmity; you cannot mark the change of seasons in one moment, or know why, standing in July, it was June one second earlier.
All I know is that I had to find people to play Risk with. If I couldn’t escape the conflict, I could at least oversee it, and conflict came in six colors.

I got some guys together, guys I had classes with, played sports with, guys who could get free pizza. Pizza is key. And we played how we lived.
I attacked constantly. Africa was optimal; I was open to attack anyone I wanted. Charles usually sat in Australia and never did anything. Matt made deals to assure that he’d come out in the end with at least second place. Kyle attacked the first person who attacked him and usually made a vendetta out of it. Bret tried so hard to win but couldn’t ever figure out how to hold Europe. Games culminated in indigestion, arguing, and the throwing of tiny metal armies across the room.
They really hurt when you step on them the next morning.
I was aggressive, short-tempered and passionate about strategy.
“Bret, you can’t roll two die right now.”
“Kyle, it’s pronounced km-chtk.”
“Matt, is there a reason you let Kyle have a whole continent for turn after turn?”
“Charles, how about you fucking do something down there?”

          Mom,
          Here’s where I turn it around, fists clenched and eyes open.
          Steven

It wasn’t long until people started to ask to join.
Our people. They overheard us make our plans during class and in the hallways, and they wanted in. Legions of the dejected, the oppressed, the judged, they flocked to us. The kids who played Stratego, Axis and Allies, Magic, D&D. Even the chess team wanted to be a part of it all.
We built a following.
A following of pocket protectors, oily hair, Star Wars t-shirts, lisps. We made tournament brackets, t-shirts, and even got faculty advisory from the high school. It looked great on college applications.
At the center of it all was our table. Just the five of us. We were close. We looked out for each other.
Family sprung from war.
If one of us was in trouble, the other four were there. Nothing came between us outside of the Risk game. Even if Kyle double-crossed Matt in the Middle East, it didn’t matter come Monday morning. Kyle tutored me in chemistry class, and I helped him in English. Matt took Bret under his wing during baseball practice, and Charles helped Kyle perfect his breaststroke. But that didn’t stop anyone from thinking twice about killing one another. Alliances secured, we sought a new continent to explore.

          Hi Steve,
          Did you receive the pkg. I sent you. Gramma Collins read your letter from you. I’m so proud of you. You were always my best baby! Don’t tell Jason and Katie. What are you going to do this summer? Come see us!
          Love, Mom

7. Voyage en Ballon – See this small child, fascinated by a lighter-than-air balloon? He clambers aboard. An empyrean journey begins.

My father and Mom #2 and Katie are carrying boxes up to my dorm room. You can hear the clattering of metal and plastic in one. Risk 40th Anniversary, Castle Risk, Classic Risk, a French board called “La Conquette Du Monde,” a homemade board with the Falklands and Svalbard added, DVDs of Lamorisse, Goddard, Truffaut films. A life encapsulated by cardboard, ferried from its roots and set up in a tower of concrete.

Strategy Tips
1. Conquer whole continents: You will earn more armies that way.
2. Watch your enemies: If they are building up forces on adjacent territories or continents, they may be planning an attack.
3. Fortify borders adjacent to enemy territories for better defense if a neighbor decides to attack you.

Later, on the way home my father will tell Katie that he just wants to be happy, and the next time I come home I will meet Mom #3. Hello, we’ll say. Are you a friend of Katie’s, I’ll ask. In the ensuing silence, I’ll stride away with unequivocal primacy.
The next time I come home I’ll try to get everyone back together, yeah just play a little Risk like old times, oh? You can’t, ok, sure man, later. Where does it end? Here? Where does the change occur? At what point does the tide decide to turn back, to defy the moon and the pull of the universe? Where is this moment? Is it merely obscured by the crash of two instances, minutes into minutes? Strangers shoot to kill, but loved ones steady themselves, aim, and pull ever so slowly on the trigger. We cut ourselves apart, double-cross, cheat, lie, scheme, kill, for small victories, a chance at glory, greed. Can we get back to where we were before the dice were thrown? The next time I come home, there will be no crashing. The next time I come home we will look back on our histories and not find bloodied soil or the tracks of armies. The next time I come home we will find this instance of change and stretch it out across all eternity, bathe in it and drink in the softness of its clarity, pinpoint the turn of the tide, every impetus, and drown it with all the fury of the lightest touch a mother can give to her ailing child, the next time I come home, the next time I come home.

          Mom,
          Will you forgive the sky?
          Steven

8. Le Petit âne Bim--Pirates, princes, butchers and paupers--What do they seek?

As a gift my sister once bought me an electronic version of Risk that I can play on my computer, even by myself.
It won’t let you break alliances.