The seventh night of boot camp, they take my gun. “Kitchen duty,” they say. “Go tomorrow morning.”
Night is the now. My field bed shakes with me. The nearby beds screech as metal touches metal. The tent hums silence back; eighty-four girls breathe the summer in their sleep. Then, one wakes. I hear her through the darkness—her skin strokes the rubber mattress.
“Is it family? You miss your family?” she whispers.
I am gasping for a . . .
“There he is,” Tavia said.
“Good.”
Eliza gave a last stroke of blue to the bashaw of Tripoli’s robe, then, setting her brush aside, looked up from her watercolor and watched as Tavia’s eyes followed Dr. Cowdery through the China Room’s window. Tavia had said the doctor would return this afternoon; still, despite believing the girl, Eliza had let herself worry all morning and through luncheon’s picked-at chicken . . .
The Woman
Tonight, the Woman would be Big Red. It was Tuesday. She would put on the white skirt, the red blouse, the white boots, the big red wig, the gold hoop earrings. She would paint her lips red and serve a red fish, too—salmon. When the Man She Married came home from work, she’d serve it to him, like she always did, on a yellow plate beside a glass of water and a glass of Pinot Grigio, while Frank Sinatra’s 1966 concert at the Sands played in the background.
“Hi, honey,” he’d say, a . . .
By the time I read Jack London’s story “All Gold Canyon,” I was nearly done with shooting the Coen brothers’ film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Like most youngsters, the first book I read by London was The Call of the Wild. Required reading. I was swept away by the drama and adventure that came sailing off the page. Next time I encountered London was a memoir called The Road. I was a teenager and had become transfixed by the Beats and especially their bible, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . . .
It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated, many-antlered buck.
On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a cool, resilient surface of green . . .
In 1918, Word War I ended. The German, Ottoman, and Austrian-Hungarian dynasties were torn apart. Europe was destroyed, physically and emotionally. Since the world was a blank canvas, some Modern Movement / Bauhaus artists, architects, designers, theater producers, and moviemakers proclaimed: “Together let us conceive and create the building of the future . . . [which] in one unity will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like a crystal symbol of a new faith.” Go to it. Let’s do it. . . .
