Heeding her breath, she geared her pace till her breathing and striding were in sync. The rhythms of her body then flew a new Richard Thompson ballad into her mind: “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Why this tune? Lore wondered—then linked the song’s Red Molly to Shari’s red lips and hair. The ballad’s pace matched her stride so perfectly she felt like singing it, but she only remembered enough of the words to mangle a great rowdy biker song. If she were to sing it, she’d have to roll her own words.

  Scanning her route for material, she peered up the road to where it threaded between the Steitzs’ and Heidlemanns’ meticulously landscaped sidehill yards, turned onto a rutted rock track, and after a quarter mile dead-ended. The Heidlemanns were never home. But old Walt Steitz was almost always outside and alert, tracking everyone and everything. Lorilee liked Walt. He was the hood’s last hale World War Two vet, but he never told war stories. Never indulged in Hobson-style gossip. Walt’s thing was quick-witted repartee, and several times in passing his place Lore’s dry wit had proven so quick she’d trumped him at his own game. He loved her for this. “What that li’l gal might say is anybody’s guess,” Walt more than once remarked to his wife, Dee Anna. Who’d been dead for three years.

  As the rhythm of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” filled her body, Lore zeroed in on Walt. Though rumored to be a bona fide Pacific Theater war hero, his claims to local fame stemmed from five machines. Walt owned four immaculate classic pickups: a ’49 Ford; a ’50 GMC; a ’54 Chevy; a ’57 Dodge. Lore knew this because he drove all four past her garage apartment in sequence, twenty minutes per vehicle, every other day. But Walt’s machine of greatest fame was a green and yellow 1982 John Deere Lawn King tractor mower with so many attachments, blades, tines, drags, and extensions that he seemed to use it for everything but mowing his lawn. Case in point: when Lore first spotted him, he was roaring across the grass dodging sprinklers and cactuses and trees, mowing blades idle, with a yard or so of bright pink gravel in the bright yellow scoop in front. Lorilee knew Walt had spotted her, though his gaze remained averted as she approached. This was his style. Pure coincidence, she was to believe, that his tractor mower tasks just happened to intersect her uphill path perfectly.

  Not till she was within a few yards did he turn to make a slow, stern study of her backpack, instrument case, purposeful stride, and direction of travel. He clearly wished to interrogate. But since he missed nothing, he’d also taken in her DON’T ASK! ball cap. Like most World War Two vets, Walt obeyed orders, like ’em or not. His curiosity was so intense, though, that he did something he’d never done in her presence: shut off the Lawn King! Sure that an interrogation would follow, Lorilee beat the old man to the punch:

  “Make you a deal, Walt. You don’t ask me what I’m doing, and I won’t ask about all that pretty pink gravel you’re playing with.”

  Walt turned in his tractor seat, gravely pondered the desiccated peak above them, turned back, and even more gravely pondered small, delicate, very alone Lorilee. Incredible, she thought, the way some old military guys can read you the riot act without even speaking. Forced to replay her one card, Lore turned and, just as gravely, stared holes in Walt’s pink gravel.

  “Campin’ trip?” the old man asked.

  “Yup,” said Lore.

  “Anybody ever tell you there’s three mountain ranges full of pristine lakes, creeks, and forest within two hours o’ town?” Walt asked.

  “Seen ’em,” said Lore.

  “So you’ve got special reasons to camp on a ugly, snaky, dried-up, lonely heap of a peak.”

  “Somebody force you to buy that gravel, Walt? Or are you just kind of a closet pinky?”

  Walt cracked a smile so rare it made crackling sounds in his mouth corners. “Sorry to poke my nose, Miss Lore. But if you’d tell me what day you plan to come down, I know one old man’d sleep better the next few nights.”

  “I’ll be two nights out. If you don’t see me by sunset the third day, call Search and Rescue.”

  Walt nodded, then moved, stern gaze first, to the next visual riddle. “You always take a big metal wastepaper basket backpacking with you?”

  “This excellent device isn’t a wastebasket, Walt.”

  “What is it?”

  “A low-tech amp for my dulcimer.”

  “A what for your who?”

  “I’m a musician, Walt. A rusty one, thanks to single momhood and an old-fashioned need for work that pays. But still.” She pointed to Walt’s big carport. “If we head into the shade there a minute, I could demonstrate what a wastebasket does for a dulcimer.”

  Walt nodded militarily, fired up the Lawn King, and Lore followed him down.

  Just nine in the morning, but the shade already felt welcome. Walt shut off his engine and sat quiet, watching her closely. His carport, to Lore, had an equestrian feel, the immaculate old trucks like high-end sport horses watching her quietly from their stalls. Strolling toward her favorite—the forest-green ’54 Chev—she saw a dark green Lorilee loom like a fish up out of the truck’s polished depths.

  Shedding her pack, she unstrapped the wastebasket, took her dulcimer from the case, parked on the ’54 Chev’s running board, set the wastebasket on the polished concrete floor right side up, then gazed up at Walt. “See this?” she asked, running her finger along the wastebasket’s rim. “Coated with silicon. Makes it grippy, so my dulcimer won’t slide off.”

  Serious as an officer being briefed for battle, Walt nodded in the affirmative.

  She set the instrument across her thighs. “Appalachian-style lap dulcimer. Four strings is the norm. Mine’s a five-string built to my specs by a ma-and-pa outfit, Blue Lion. A trouble dulcimers have is, guitars and fiddles drown us out. So mine’s oversized, both for volume and heft in the bass clef. Has a few extra frets too, for richer scales and chords. By adding this”—she nodded at the wastebasket—“I’m in the game, volume-wise.”

  Another nod in the affirmative.

  Lorilee tuned up, then plucked a chord so Walt could hear the dulcimer “un-amped.” Setting the wastebasket between her legs and the dulcimer on top of it, she then struck the same chord, planning a thirty-second demo of what the hollow metal added. But the concrete floor, cinder-block walls, and trash can created such an enormous sound that Lore herself was stunned. And Richard Thompson’s ballad was still dancing in her head.

  “Tell you what,” she muttered. “I’m gonna try something. Don’t listen yet, okay?”

  Setting her instrument back on her lap to quiet it, she worked out a simplified, version of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” guitar part, then set the dulcimer back on its “amp,” turned to Walt enthroned on the Lawn King, and revved her imagination up as high as it could go: Walt usurped Thompson’s outlaw motorcyclist, James. Lore herself displaced black-leather-clad Red Molly. Shoddy but serviceable verses came on in a flood. Bending forward over the amp, she strummed a single bright chord, then damped the strings to silence and, for shock value, sang her first verse acapella:

  Said Lorilee to Walt Steitz,

  That’s a fine riding mower

  With its scoop of pink gravel

  Rotary blades and snow-blower.

  Jubilant strings erupted from the wastebasket, resounding off the cinder blocks:

  Says old Walt to Lorilee,

  My ball cap’s off to you

  It’s a John Deere Lawn King 1982

  And from my point of view

  There is nothing in this world

  Beats a trash can amp performance

  By a freshly single girl

  And no Toro, Snapper, Lawn Boy

  Could suit the likes of you

  They just ain’t got the soul

  Of the Lawn King ’82

  So now listen to my offer

  My sweet songbird Lorilee

  I have seen better days my lass

  I’m nearly eighty-three

  So if fate…

  Should break my stride…

  Let me give you…

  My Lawn King…

  To rrrrrrrrrrride!

  Oh, music hath alarums. Walt’s incredulity had doubled the size of his eyes, making him look twenty years younger, and dangerous if not quite handsome. Charmed, Lore riffed a hard-strumming dulcimer solo, then flew by the seat of her pants into her climactic lines:

  Come down fast, Lorilee

  To Walt Steitz’s yard

  There’s been a sidehill accident

  The Lawn King threw him hard!

  When she knelt by his side

  Walt was staring straight at death

  He had run outta lawn

  He was runnin’ outta breath

  But he groaned, “Lorilee my lass

  I’ve no more use for these!”

  And he reached for her hand

  And he slipped her his keys.

  “I see angels on bright riding mowers

  Of yellow, green, and chrome

  Swooping down with scoops of

  Pink gravel to carry me home!”

  And he gave her a kiss

  And he died……

  But he gave her

  The Lawn King

  To rrrrrrride!

  As the last notes faded, Walt snatched off his VFW cap, pulled out a hankie, and had to wipe his brow once and blow his nose twice to recover. In a voice gone husky, he said, “Miss Lore! That might be the best thing I ever heard, period. This carport and me’re gonna feel famous the rest of our days!”

  Smiling, she cased up the dulcimer and strapped the magic trash can back on her pack. But when she started to lift the pack, Walt fairly flew off the Lawn King to take it from her. “Will you do me the honor,” he said, “of settin’ yourself down on this pink gravel so I can run you up to the trailhead?”

  “I’ll bet you give all the girls pink gravel rides to the trailhead,” Lore teased.

  “Every one who sings and plays like you, I sure do.”

  It amused Lorilee to assume the zazen posture on a crunchy bed of pink. Walt handed her the dulcimer case, strapped her pack onto the rack behind his seat, mounted, and away they rattled and roared. The engine proved too loud for talk, but halfway to the dead end Walt hollered back, “You still driving that beat-up old silver Civic?”

  “Hey!” Lorilee called. “My silver Honda and me are color coordinated. And only a quarter million miles on us. Our best years lie ahead.”

  “After hearing you play,” Walt hollered, “I believe it!”

  When they reached the boulders blocking the trailhead, Walt took Lore’s dulcimer, gave her a hand out of the scoop, then surprised her by shutting off the Lawn King a second time. “Got a minute for a story about what you were sittin’ on?”

  Sensing a seriousness about him, Lorilee said, “Sure.”

  Walt looked off down the hill toward Pipestone, then said, as if to the view, “One morning, three and a half years back, Dee Anna took me by surprise. She asked me to order in ten yards of pink gravel. She collected pink-blooming cacti by the hundreds. Green looks good with pink, she said, and in spring her blooms’d match her choice of rock.”

  The old man began to struggle. “I loved that woman more’n life, Miss Lore. But that day, damn me, I got all stiff and yard-proud, told her pink rock’d be an embarrassment, and refused to order it. Then, so fast my head still spins, she took sick. Six months later she was gone. And what are cacti famous for? Those spines. Even the names of hers stab me now. Coryphantha hesteri. Escobaria vivipara. I’ve took back what I said ten thousand times. I’ve tended her cacti like they’re her. But—” Walt’s voice broke. “Can Dee Anna feel that?”

  Lore was grateful for the sunglasses hiding her welling eyes.

  “Here’s the truth, Miss Lore,” the old man said. “I am a closet pinky. This color looks so good to me now, I might bury my whole damn yard in it.”

  Lorilee had a sudden feeling, and took a chance. Lifting her shades, looking Walt in the eye, she said, “I don’t mean to trespass, but I feel this so strong I’ve gotta say it. Dee Anna forgives you, Walter Steitz.” Walt made a sound as if he’d been punched. “She loves you as much as you do her,” Lore said. “And for the gravel, and whatever else, she forgives you.”

  Walt seemed to take two more punches, then turned to stare out over Pipestone. He was quiet for some time. When he turned back to her, she was relieved to see the stern old vet had returned. “You, Missy, are awful damn cute in that ball cap. So may I ask, do you carry protection? A handgun? Bear spray? Snake bite kit? Whatever you forgot I’ll lend. Out of selfishness. I’d like to keep my favorite music comin’.”

  Picturing Elmerina Buddha wrapped in the beach towel in the bottom of her pack, Lorilee said, “Got all that covered, Walt.”

  “Good. Go find what you’re looking for then. But can you stop by an’ gimme a shout on your way back down?”

  When Lore saluted, Walt did the same. He then started the Lawn King, roared off down the rutted track, and Lore turned to tackle the mountain. But after Walt’s good company and warnings, the massive, sun-blasted slope made her feel small and alone.

  Then came a sound, far below, rising over the Lawn King’s roar: old Walt, quavering at the top of his lungs:

  And he gave her a kiss

  And he died……

  But he gave her

  The Lawn King

  To ride!

  Taking strength from her own grin, Lorilee started climbing.

  VI. On Irony (Yeah, Right)

  (Rhode Island School of Design, early 1990s)

  [I]n fear, in hope, in charity, in a rule of life one wishes to keep, in tears, in the desire of devotion, in the bent for sweetness, in terror of God’s threats, in distinction between beings, in receiving, in giving, and in many things we judge good, Reason errs.

  —The Beguine, Hadewijch of Brabant

  Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

  —David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  BOTH OF JULIAN’S nicknames had caught on. “Not-Quite Dr. Gage” launched her “Irony Seminary” by smiling at each student, then slamming them with this:

  “Let me begin our seminar without irony by asking whether you share my feeling that we’re born to a generation cursed. To define what I mean by cursed, it’s hard to beat the prophet Isaiah: ‘For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations…And the streams shall be turned into pitch, and the dust into brimstone, and the land shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day. The smoke thereof shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste. None shall pass through it for ever and ever…The Lord shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.’ Not a bad description of a world with two-thirds of its forests clear-cut, polar ice sheets and glaciers vanishing, mountaintop coal removal, the desertification of Africa, and so on. But I want us to feel free to question the psychological and artistic repercussions of catastrophic data. Has Isaiah just made us better citizens? Better artists? Better friends to our friends? Or is there a tipping point where litanies of horror shove our empathy and creativity where the sun doesn’t shine? In a world so terribly out of balance, should we limit the amount of bad news we take in? Or is the honest artistic position to get bashed out of balance by the news, and imbue our art with imbalance and despair? Comments?”

  The group’s Wheaton College dropout, Jonathan Grens, said, “The preachers of my fundy childhood used Isaiah to scare us into filling offering plates, and it worked. But I’d wager good money the Prophet Anna could smoke that old boy in under sixty seconds!”

  Julia Gage smiled, glanced at her watch, then at Anna. “Do you accept the challenge?”

  Anna drew a busty breath and let fly: “Hundreds of nuclear facilities storing radioactive wastes with a half-life of ten thousand years, lots of them in earthquake zones! Billions of tons of carcinogens and toxics leaching from landfills and mining sites into groundwater, rivers, oceans, globally! Obliterated mountains, slag-filled valleys, and countless dead streams across American coal country! A marine bird and mammal holocaust caused by mistaking billions of tons of waste plastics for food! Feedlot cattle fattened on grain, offal, and antibiotics, eaten by us, creating medicine-proof super-diseases! Genetically modified dairy cows infected with mastitis pouring pus into our milk! American pus milk, stored in plastic containers, turning men’s testosterone into estrogen and women’s estrogen into—”

  “MINUTE’S UP!” Julia Gage cut in, and the class broke out cheering. “Take that, Isaiah!” “EVERYBODY NEEDS PUS!” “You go, Prophet Anna!”

  Anna just glared, miffed that her litany of horrors had been interrupted.

  “So I’m wondering where the age of eco-holocaust and pus milk leaves us as artists,” Julia Gage said. “Knowledge is an artistic necessity. But extensive knowledge of an irreparable world maims sensitive psyches, leading to blindnesses that can mess up an entire generation. When the Great Depression and World War Two threatened our grandparents’ lives for two decades, a tremendous unified response ended both threats, but cloned their generation as if it were poured out of a factory mold. Yes, they defeated Japan and the Nazis. But when their cloned psyches assumed power on Main Street, Wall Street, and in government, it led to travesties like internment camps for loyal Japanese- and Italian-Americans, the Cold War arms race, McCarthyite blacklists, a near-nuclear holocaust over Cuba, and US-assisted fascist coups all over the world. My parents’ generation saw this, but if they mentioned that World War Two idealism got twisted by demagogues into vicious diplomacy, useless military campaigns, and so on, our grandparents’ response was blind fury. So our parents’ generation blew them off and fought back with massive protest, peace marches, occupied administration buildings, forcing universities to divest from arms dealing, supporting civil rights, and starting a back-to-the-land movement that held promise if it hadn’t been so sexist and stoned. But then what?”

  “The sixties idealists were co-opted in so many self-indulgent ways that their rebellion fizzled too,” Klaus Hauptmann said. “There’s a pattern here. The idealists of the forties, refusing to bend, became the fascists of the fifties. Then the idealists of the sixties, opposing that fascism, went blind to their own narcissism and hedonism and lapsed into self-parody.”