Baroque wished he and Marlboro were back at the house watching the medical shows with their sister, Lisa. Instead, they were in a truck with Denton, their brother-in-law. Baroque wasn’t used to Denton being this nearby. Denton was an accountant, and Monday through Friday he was at work all day. Weekday evenings he usually disappeared into the back bedroom after dinner. Of course Saturdays and Sundays Denton was around more, and more often in the front of the house, and it was starting to take just a little thing like opening the refrigerator door for their brother-in-law to give him and Marlboro a look, a long unblinking look. One night Denton had called him and Marlboro lard-asses and claimed they lacked ambition and would never amount to anything if that didn’t change. He’d said it just the one time, but Baroque could tell Denton had thought it more than that one time. He and Marlboro had even sat on the porch for a few minutes yesterday, just to get somewhere Denton wasn’t. But they were with him now and you sure couldn’t get away from him in a truck cab, and the three of them were riding up a bumpy dirt road in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, doing something that Baroque was pretty sure wasn’t just a little illegal, like smoking pot or running a stop sign, but a lot illegal, like getting sent to prison, regardless of Denton saying it was a public service.

The dirt road came to a sudden dead end. Cinder blocks marked the parking lot, and there was a trail on the other side. Denton told them again everything they were supposed to do and handed Baroque the cell phone, then left with the pistol and knife strapped around his waist. Up the trail a few yards and suddenly gone, like the woods had just swallowed him up. That made Baroque feel spooky, Denton disappearing like that, but everything about this bear business had been spooky. Like the way two weeks ago Denton had brought a big carton home after work and opened it in the living room in front of Baroque and Marlboro. Denton took out a steel trap and then pulled out a pistol and a yellow box of bullets and then the knife. A big knife, the kind Baroque had seen only in movies where maniacs hacked people to death, and they were maniacs who always had some mask or hood covering everything except their eyes, which made it worse, because it could be anybody who was the maniac, even the person in the movie who seemed most normal. To kill bears, that’s what Denton said when he took the trap and pistol and knife out of the box.

Like Marlboro, Baroque was wearing only a regular shirt and a sweatshirt and he was getting real cold. The warmth from the heater seemed to have whooshed right out the moment Denton opened the door. Baroque and Marlboro hadn’t been with Denton when he set the bear trap, but Baroque wished now that Denton had made them come then, because it had to have been a lot warmer that day. His breath clouded the windshield and Baroque felt his body start to shiver. He looked at the trail, then cranked the engine and put the heater on high.

“Denton said we shouldn’t do that unless we got real cold,” Marlboro said.

“Well, I am real cold,” Baroque said, “aren’t you?”

Marlboro nodded and clapped his hands together once and rubbed them. “How cold do you think it is?”

“Eight degrees,” Baroque said. “That was the number on the bank sign.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever been in weather like this,” Marlboro said.

“No,” Baroque agreed. “It’s probably never been this cold in Florida, except maybe during the Ice Age.”

“I wish Lisa could have come down to Florida to help us get a job there instead of up here.”

“That would have been better,” Baroque said, “but there’s nothing we can do about that. “

“I guess this is our first job.”

Illustration from a photo by Alan Vernon

Nonfiction by Clyde Edgerton

Poetry by Jeanne Emmons

A poem by Carol Peters

Nonfiction by John Hay

Poetry by Sandra Meek

Poetry by Claudia MonPere

Poetry by Jean Esteve

Poetry by Greg Nicholl

A poem by Aaron Smith

Poetry by Paul Guest

It was late August. In the harbor the boats lay still, not the slightest stirring of their masts, not the softest clink of a sheave. The restaurants had long since closed. An occasional car, headlights glaring, came over the bridge from North Haven or turned down Main Street, past the lighted telephone booths with their smashed receivers. On the highway the discotheques were emptying. It was after three.

In the darkness Fenn awakened. He thought he had heard something, a slight sound, like the creak of a spring, the one on the screen door in the kitchen. He lay there in the heat. His wife was sleeping quietly. He waited. The house was unlocked though there had been many robberies and worse nearer the city. He heard a faint thump. He did not move. Several minutes passed. Without making a sound he got up and went carefully to the narrow doorway where some stairs descended to the kitchen. He stood there. Silence. Another thump and a moan. It was Birdman falling to a different place on the floor.

Outside, the trees were like black reflections. The stars were hidden. The only galaxies were the insect voices that filled the night. He stared from the open window. He was still not sure if he had heard anything. The leaves of the immense beech that overhung the rear porch were close enough to touch. For what seemed a long time he examined the shadowy area around the trunk. The stillness of everything made him feel visible but also strangely receptive. His eyes drifted from one thing to another behind the house, the pale Corinthian columns of the arbor next door, the mysterious hedge, the garage with its rotting sills. Nothing.

“Akhnilo” from Dusk and Other Stories (Modern Library edition, 2010) by James Salter. Copyright © 1981, 1988, 2010 by James Salter. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Photo: Lana Rys

The road to the coast was a long, steamy corridor of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d tried to tame beneath a pretty blue scarf. He wore a pair of black Ray-Bans. She wore prescription shades with the swept and pointed ends of the day. He whistled crooner songs and smoked Winstons, and early as it was, no one really talked. My older brother, Hal, slept sitting up, his mouth open as if he were singing silently in a dream.

This was before things changed, before Hurricane Camille, the casinos. Long before Hal’s death in a car wreck at the age of twenty-one, my father’s heart attacks and fatal stroke, the aneurism that took our mom, my younger brother Ray’s drug addiction and long-term illness.

On this trip Ray, too young to bring along, too much trouble most of the time, had been left with our grandmother. He was just two, yet already his sharp, hawkish eyes constantly sought their prey, which was insufficient attention, which he would rip to shreds with tantrums, devour in small bloody satisfying chunks until he received either punishment or, better, mollification. I was so very glad that he was not along, not only because of his querulous nature, but also because his absence made it more possible—or so I imagined—for me to get more of Hal’s and my parents’ attention myself.

By noon we smelled the brine-and-fish stink of the bays. The land flattened into hazy vista, so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Downtown Gulfport steamed an old Floridian vapor from cracked sidewalks and filigreed railings, shaded storefronts—not a soul out, everyone and everything stalled in the heat, distilling. The beach highway stretched out to the east, white and hot in the sun. Our tires made slapping sounds on the melting tar dividers and the wind in the car windows was warm and salty. We passed old beach mansions with green shutters, hundred-year-old oaks in the yards. A scattering of cheap redbrick motels, slat-board restaurants, bait shops. The beach, to our right, was flat and white and the lank brown surf lapped at the sand.

East of Gulfport, the Alamo Plaza Motel Court, with its fort-like facade of white stucco, stood flanked by low regular motel rooms around a concrete courtyard. The swimming pool lay oddly naked and exposed in the middle of the motel’s broad front lawn, one low diving board jutting over the deep end like a pirates’ plank. No one was out.

We stopped in the breezeway beside the office and went inside, where the floor was cool Mexican tile. Lush green plants sprouted from large clay pots in the corners, and there was a color television on which we could watch programs unavailable back home. I have a vivid memory of seeing a Tarzan movie there in which Tarzan, standing in the crook of a large tree, is shot right between the eyes by a safari hunter’s rifle, and doesn’t even flinch. Is it possible this is a true memory, not invented or stretched? Would Hollywood in the thirties—for this was an old movie even then—have allowed Tarzan to be shot directly in the forehead with a high-power rifle, the bloody spot at the point of entry jumping out on his skin, without so much as blinking his eyes? I was, I am, as incredulous as the safari men on the jungle trail below, holding their high-power rifles and gaping at this jungle god, who just stared coolly back at them with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

It seemed very real and possible, however, in the moment.

Photo: Justin Cozart

First comes the Cape Cod walk. Past the private beach, past the houses, out to the bluff below the scraggly scrub oaks and toward the cluster of rocks where the cormorants gather. How many times have my feet padded along this sandy path? Hundreds, I think, until I do a little math, and realize the answer is thousands. Thousands of times, then. Occasionally as a child, often as teenager, daily as a young confused man fresh out of college, and then again for six years after the return from Colorado with my new wife.

I would like to say I was loyal to the Cape walk when I headed west at thirty, that I pined for it. This would not be true. In Colorado I daily hiked a squiggly red line, heading straight up into the mountains—leading from the room I rented in the blue gingerbread cabin in Eldorado Springs, the hippie / biker / rock climber town where I’d landed—up into the sandstone flatirons that shot up in the sky like a ripple in the land’s carpet after the thousands of miles of flatness called the plains. Swifts carved the sky overhead. I stared at the nearly fluorescent lichen that glowed on the rocks hanging above me, stopped to splash my face with the cold creek water, crushed sage like smelling salts, and inhaled an odor that reminded me this was a whole new place.

In Spanish, the word for pilgrim is peregrino, though this is not its only meaning. Peregrino is also strange and absurd as well as fleeting, transitory. Strange and absurd made sense to me, for a pilgrim had to be a little weird to choose the blisters, leg pain, and cumulative fatigue that inevitably accompanied days of walking in the hot Spanish sun. But fleeting? This other meaning, I decided, would take time to reveal itself.

Onward, from the jewel-like St. Jean Pied-de-Port through Roncesvalles I walked, immediately grateful for the gentle curves of the Pyrenees, and the mild temperatures. To guide me, a yellow scallop shell, the official sign of the pilgrim, adorned trees, telephone poles, even the corners of buildings.

Six days into a pilgrimage I had begun on a remarkably mild first day of August, I left the mountains for the softer rise and fall of Navarre. It was outside the village of Estella that I misread one of the yellow signs and wound up straying a good eight kilometers from the Camino before realizing that I was heading east, back into the mountains, instead of west toward Santiago.

According to the medievals, the pilgrim shed her former self en route to Santiago, the sins or at least the baggage vanishing with the sweat and excess pounds. By walking west, a person walked out of herself. The old self must die for the new self to be born, the Compostela said.

And what did I need to shed? The tear-streaked face of the twenty-four-year-old woman who stood before a candlelit altar at the university chapel and vowed to love, honor, and cherish Ian—a man I had met during my first year of college—until death do us part. Ian, a man who had walked with me through the Alps of Austria; but also a man who had become someone strange to me, someone in whom I could no longer recognize my own face. Until death do us part.

By the time I reached the auberge (pilgrim’s hostel) in the village of Viana, it was pitch dark. The dinner had already been served, and there were no leftovers. As for the beds, each and every one had been claimed. My faulta meant that I had to dine on a gristly hunk of cheese and some hard bread. Worse yet, my only sleeping option became a tent with three Spaniards, all of whom were named Jesus and all of whom snored.

Even now, as you stand at the edge of one of those vast brown fields, you feel like you could walk and walk, walk into your own old age, and meet your Maker out there somewhere, kicking up dust.

Some people who come here even say they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize, and may never understand.

Some places look made-up, look imagined. The art deco landscape of South Beach looks like it was dreamed up by the writers of a comic book; the skyline of Atlanta seems stenciled by bankers. Las Vegas was set ablaze by electricians; Richmond is ridden by dead soldiers on marble horses.

This place is not like that.

Photo: Magdalena Solé

A poem by Mark Doty

The saplings stood in neat rows along the winding avenue, each leafless maple growing from a dark hump of soil that resembled a small grave. They rose six, seven feet above the sidewalk. With flashlights and a trowel, we uprooted the shortest one we could find and carried it off to our plywood fort in the desert. I was fourteen that year, and so was Kilburg. It was late on a Sunday—warm and arid, though summer was still two months away—and I’d left my house in the middle of the night without permission. Surrounded by catclaws and schist rocks, the rickety fort sat stark and uninviting in the middle of a dried-up arroyo. Kilburg had said that all the outside needed was a little greenery, a few trees.

Earlier that evening, I’d learned that my father was going to die, and I was glad to be out in the open, away from home. Kilburg had convinced me to sneak out my bedroom window and meet him at the end of our block at a quarter past eleven. Now he had me on my hands and knees, scooping rocks and hard-packed dirt, baked solid after a rainless winter. The drought that had begun in December had yet to subside. People joked that their faucets might soon run dry. Out at the fort, a twenty-minute walk into the desert that bordered Las Vegas to the southeast, the air sometimes smelled of the chlorinated swimming pools and freshly mowed lawns that were partially at fault for the city’s water shortage. Beside me, Kilburg massaged his aching stump. He could stand for only so long before he had to remove his prosthetic leg, a hollow plastic thing, a mannequin’s appendage. He had diabetes, and had lost his leg at the age of six due to a blocked artery.

“I don’t know about you,” Kilburg said, “but I sure could use some action.” The leg, which had once matched the color of his skin but had faded to an unnatural ivory, lay beneath him in the dirt. He sat crouched on it as though it were a log next to a campfire. In one hand he held a flashlight, and with the other he kneaded his stump in a slow figure eight, avoiding the spot in the center where the skin had been knotted together like the end of a sausage.

“Action?” I asked, tossing a clump of dirt over my shoulder. “What kind of action?”

The sapling was balanced against the overturned paint bucket we used as a bongo drum. Behind us, the fort stood at an angle, leaning westward, undeserving of its name: it wasn’t fortified in any way, and appeared on the verge of collapse. But deep in what seemed to us an uncharted region of the Mojave—there were no trails, no cigarette butts or empty beer bottles—and concealed by the arroyo’s high, crumbling banks, it was at least unknown to the rest of the world. Building the fort had been Kilburg’s idea. We spent an entire Saturday wrestling with the sheets of plywood we’d found in his father’s tool shed. We shaped a door frame with his ancient jigsaw and dragged the sheets one by one through the desert to hammer them together, but in the end our construction was nothing more than four unpainted walls and a low, flat roof, less complex than your average doghouse.

Kilburg shook his head at the ground, the way he did whenever I asked him a question. “Action,” he said. “Chicks. Jesus, do I have to explain everything?”

“Oh,” I said, and lowered my eyes back to my work.

Photo: constantgardener