Aurora

I’m only a reporter now. I only sit and write the things that other people tell me and try not to let on what I think of it all. I almost never know anything about the things they say, but I make a good show of it.

When I talk to people I take care to look closely at them. I note how they act, how their arms and eyes move when they talk, the books on their kitchen table, the pictures above their tv, the color of their tennies. I try to put those things in the stories I write. Mostly, though, I just talk to them on the phone and I finally know nothing about them at all.

But I do know how important what they tell me is to them. I try to get that across. How important it is.

So I’m simply reporting this. I want to tell how important it was but I don’t know how. It seemed so endless then, so normal. Events came in like the tide.

The trip to Oconto was Francis’s idea. He decided one night while the four of us were sitting in Rosey’s that we had a lot in common with Kerouac and Cassidy in “On The Road.” King Kong and Borski agreed. I did too, though I had never read “On the Road.”  Francis stared over a tilted beer glass and straight into King Kong’s eyes and said, “Let’s go up to your old man’s place. If we’re going to get famous we might as well get started.” Francis was all hair. It was straight and ragged and mousey and hung down to the middle of his chest. He was wearing an Arab headdress. He had a lot of hats. “It’s OK with me,” said King Kong, staring back, black eyed, black maned. Borski said, “Take off that goddamn hat.” Borski was a Jew and recently had adopted an attitude. I just sat there waiting for somebody to order a beer so I could say, “Me too.”

Francis could stare at you with eyes as dead as jade but with a little grin on his lips. He wouldn’t look away. He held the glass to his lips, the beer a half inch from his mouth. “We could grab a couple cases of beer, jump in the car . . .”

“Whose car?” said King Kong, grinning back, contesting. “Can’t Get Started” oozed from the jukebox. The noise was growing as the afternoon chess players and taxi drivers slowly gave way to the nighttime college kids and vodka and water crowd.

“Yours,” said Francis. “Your cabin, your car.”

“And my beer, right?” Neither looked away.

“Right. Your cabin, your car, your beer. Or at least your old man’s. He owns a cabin, a car and a store, right? The store sells beer. . . . I’ll have a Schlitz,” he said to the passing waitress.

“Me too,” I said.

“So we might as well take advantage of your old man’s good fortune.”

“Good fortune,” said King Kong. And he threw back the dregs of his glass and stuck it out at the waitress.

“A couple cases of some exotic beer, a few typewriters and we could knock off some really good stuff,” said Borski.

 

So that’s what we did. We drank until 9, went to King Kong’s old man’s store about the time he was locking up, bought a couple cases of Foster’s Lager, conned him out of the keys to his cabin, and hit the road. It was an uneventful trip. We drank a case on the way up. We sang “Marching to Pretoria” and “Proud Mary.” We wrote down some of the clever things we said. At least Borski wrote them down. He was in the front, beside Francis who was driving King Kong’s Buick, and wrote his notes in the faint light from the glove compartment. Everybody said clever things but me. Years later, when I was editing Francis’ poems for a book that never appeared, I came across Borski’s notes. The only time I was mentioned he wrote, “Scooter doesn’t say much.”

King Kong was a symphony percussionist and he had his sticks along. He kept drumming on the back of the front seat. The rhythm was set by the tires stepping over the cracks in the pavement. Whack, whack, whack, whack said the car. King Kong played off the rhythm, pounding and humming, deadly, intent, desperate. “Deer!” Borski yelled. Francis blew by her, never swerving, eyes forward, that little grin on his mouth. King Kong leaned into his private song, the tires whacking away and him pounding, pounding. At times he would stop suddenly, and toss back his beer. Then he would hand me the empty and I would hand him a refill. Otherwise, I just sat there and drank my beer and collected the empty cans. When we stopped on some desolate, noisy road and peed next to a driveway outside Fond du Lac, Borski dumped the cans in a ditch.

It was a dank Wisconsin night. We took the slow back roads creeping northward into the winter. The leaves had turned and fallen, and the true, clear cold had not yet settled in, and we just cruised on singing “Marching to Pretoria” and drinking Foster’s Lager all night long.

I remember them as well as my mother and father. Francis, under that kaffiyeh, I see aglow in the green light of the dash, with that purposeful look on his face. He rarely, really smiled and never laughed. He wrote poems about fire hydrants spitting umbrellas. Borski I see taking notes, trying always to live up to the standards the drugs he took required. He always was trying to go faster. King Kong is big and wild and black and woolly. And me, I felt like I was standing on a wing.

 

The cabin was dark and wet as a cave, with water staining the ceilings and collecting in corners. Up there, outside Oconto on Lake Mary, it was winter. King Kong didn’t know much about the place. It had a kerosene furnace, but he didn’t know how to light it. It had electricity, but it was turned off somewhere, and he didn’t know where. It had plumbing, but the water was shut off. We figured out the electricity first. We all flipped useless switches up and down until Francis decided the main switch must be outside. It was. Near the road on a pole. He turned it on. When the lights went on, King Kong just stood in the kitchen, staring at Francis.

“Hey,” said Francis, throwing out his hands. “So I found the damn lights. So what?” He brushed by King Kong and put his typewriter on the kitchen table, plugged it in, and started typing. “Gotta get it down.”

Borski made for the bathroom and threw up his share of Foster’s Lager. He went through the kitchen like a man on ice skates. That forced us to look for the main water valve. King Kong wandered around, stiff, upright. Borski found it behind the toilet. Francis kept typing. King Kong didn’t know who not to stare at.

“Hey, King Kong. You ever been to this place?” said Francis. “Listen to this — ‘Borski dragged all our poetry from the air and wrote it on the glove compartment lid. Outside, the beer cans rattled in the ditches and were crushed to death by red-eyed monsters in the night.’ — What do you think?” He looked around the room. King Kong was staring at the kerosene furnace. I nodded. Borski skipped back and forth behind Francis, snapping his fingers. “Let me,” he said. And Francis moved away so Borski could take his seat.

“I’m going to bed,” said Francis.

“Me too,” I said.

Borski started typing. He later said that sometime near morning, after even he had run down, he heard the kerosene furnace blast into flame and King Kong creak onto the davenport in the living room. I don’t know when I fell asleep. It was after Borski stopped typing but before there was heat. I lay on my cot as wide eyed as King Kong. I saw the pictures in the books, written years after our weekend, of me and Francis, or King Kong sitting at his typewriter, or Borski, in his sunglasses and snapping his fingers, or the four of us together, laughing. I saw my name on the covers of books. I saw dedications I would write to my good and famous friends. I knew I was no story teller, but I knew I would get better. And they would too. And we would start and be a literary movement. I dreamt of being someone. I knew that with them I would be part of something. But I knew, too, it was a fantasy. I was full of them, full of awe, rich in wonder and longing, and I think now that even then, even when my dreams came on demand and stayed forever, I knew we didn’t have a chance.

 

I was the last to awaken. From my cot in the pantry I could hear them clicking away. Francis was flying along the keys in the kitchen. I knew it was him by the flow of his typing — steady, unceasing, easy. In the living room was Borski intermittently speeding and stopping and exclaiming to himself at his progress. King Kong pounded away in the other bedroom like an engine with a broken valve. I heard the furnace kick in and a mouse scramble along a joist in the wall beside my cot. The sunlight was high on the wall and dust sparkled in the morning air. I could hear water dripping from branches outside and tearing into the dead leaves piled high on the ground. I felt myself breathe, and thought the others would never have me.

All that Foster’s Lager had sucked the liquid out of my body and brain. “Coffee,” I mumbled as I crept into the kitchen.

“Here, sit here,” said Francis. “Get into this sucker.” He slid out of his chair. He was wearing boxer shorts and a barracks cap.

“Coffee,” I coughed.

“Be damned,” shouted Francis. He looked at me and squinted. “I’ll get the coffee.”

So I slid in front of Francis’s Smith Corona and began to read his work. It meant nothing to me. It was rambling, typed onto a roll of cheap paper. It was endless, patternless. I read it and Francis poured the coffee. “Go ahead,” he said, looking at the sink. “Jump in.” I think he knew what I thought of his writing, at that moment, with me quiet, and him staring at the old, porcelain sink. I think he knew it, but it didn’t matter because whatever it was he was doing, he could do it and I couldn’t. He was what I wanted to be ­– certain. He turned and put a steaming cup on the table for me. “We’re all going to work on each other’s stuff.” He walked around the table. “I’m taking over for Kong and he’s taking Borski’s,” his voice rose to a shout, “and Borski is taking a break.” He laughed and left.

The typing in the other rooms stopped. Then Francis started up on King Kong’s machine with that unmistakable deliberation and Borski skidded into the kitchen.

“Scooter,” he said. “Rained like a bitch this morning. How’d you sleep, man?” He stopped and looked at me. “Nice day though.”

“I didn’t hear it. Was up most of the night.”

“Yeah,” he said, and turned and went outside. The heater kicked in and I stared at Francis’s words. It was all giants in the rain, mystic emptiness, supernatural visions of Borski and me and King Kong and what Francis said we said. I thought, I don’t get it. I couldn’t write like that in a lifetime. I wasn’t up to the task. It was morning of our first day and I had failed them. But I had to do something, so I started to type. It was simple sentences, I think, about riding in the car, and the night, and singing and drinking beer. After awhile Borski came back in and read over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said. “A sane voice in the wilderness. Yeah.”

He picked up my coffee and took a swallow. “Wow. Cold,” he said. “Take over for Francis. Rotate, you know.” I slid out and he slid in.

There we were then. Pursuing fame. I don’t know what we wrote that long weekend. Borski kept it all and I haven’t seen Borski since the funeral. We wrote, though, all weekend. It became less regimented as the hours passed but most of the time at least one of us was typing. We also drank a lot. Mostly beer, but we did send King Kong to buy some whiskey in Oconto that first afternoon. Four bottles. Bushmills. One for each of us to last the two days until Sunday night. We drank it all. And we ate all of Borski’s “black Cadillacs” that kept us up and roaming and writing and drinking through the quiet times.

In the late morning we took a walk in the forest. King Kong had been standing on the shore in front of the cabin looking over the water. He stood there alone, occasionally looking at his watch. I wondered what he was thinking about. Maybe he had some vision of the forest, I thought, or even the city. I like to think of him reckless in the rain forest. Giant trees with giant leaves. But I don’t know. King Kong never spoke of his thoughts. He was too big and strong, maybe, to reveal much, too hairy and dark and full of emptiness. He wore nothing but blue jeans and khaki shirts. He wore his black hair long and snarled. His army boots were scuffed and drained white from the road salt in the city. He was not given to self-expression. He stood by the water alone and then he came in and told us we ought to go into the woods for inspiration. Standing on the shore for an hour didn’t work.

King Kong led us into the forest that grew to the back door of his old man’s cabin. Borski had never been in a forest before. Francis had lived beside the northern wilderness since he and his family had arrived from Poland shortly after the war. I, alone among them, felt at ease there. I have always felt right in the forest, facing into the brambles, ankle deep in dead leaves, with nowhere to go but deeper.

King Kong delighted in leading us. He waded into clearings and thickets with joy. He’d been into this particular patch of trees hundreds of times since his old man had bought the cabin and he knew that a straight course from the back door would take us to a logging road. So it was a straight course he took. In the process he flushed two rabbits, countless squirrels and a pair of quail that so shocked Borski with their sudden and loud fluttering that he sat down on the ground.

Borski, in his jogging suit and sunglasses, seemed surprised by everything. “Wow,” he said when the first rabbit sprinted away from us. “Look at that, look at that,” he said when the second one took off. When he exclaimed at a squirrel, Francis could take no more. “Jesus, Borski,” he said. “It’s only a squirrel. The city is full of squirrels.” But Borski was having none of it. He was jumping around, looking at the ground or into the treetops or beyond them at the sky. He spun and danced there in the underbrush and gave out with many yeahs and wows and oh mans.

After about 20 minutes we popped onto the logging road. “Where’s it go?” I asked King Kong. He stood with his head high and hands on his hips and gazed off down the road. “Don’t know,” he said. So I dragged a fallen branch from the brush and laid it across the width of the road to mark our entrance. “Let’s go,” I said, and began walking. Borski followed tight behind me. “Good plan,” he said, nodding. “The branch.”

The road had not been used in some time and was covered with leaves. But after awhile it crawled up a small hill and entered into a cedar stand. There the road surface cleared and we could see deer tracks cut into the sandy soil. “Deer tracks,” I said, pointing at the ground. Borski stopped. “How do you know?” he asked. “Because, Borski, that’s what they look like,” said Francis. “And they’re going that way,” I said, pointing down the road in front of us. Borski looked astonished. “How do you know that?” he said. “Because, Borski, that’s the way they look when they’re going that way,” said Francis. “Borski,” I said and squatted beside the tracks. “They’re fairly fresh.” Borski squatted beside me. He wasn’t buying that. “Now, how can you know that? What are you, some kind of Indian?” King Kong and Francis walked up behind me. I pointed at the heart-shaped dents in the ground. Squatting there, I heard my father’s voice come out of me. I knew I was about to put poor Borski around the bend. “See that?” I said. “Remember that rain this morning? Well, the ground around the tracks is pocked from the rain and the ground inside the tracks is smooth.” I looked at Borski, who looked at the tracks. “That means the deer came through here after the rain,” I said. Borski stood. He was awed. “Good,” said King Kong, nodding. “Very good.” And we started off again down the logging road.

I don’t know how I knew the deer were standing there. Maybe it was a sound they made, a snapped twig or a rustling among the young birch. Or maybe I saw, unconsciously and in the corner of my vision, the white flash of their tails moving among the greenery. It was maybe ten yards beyond where we stopped to admire their tracks that I held up my hand and said, “Wait.” Then I pointed down the road. Two doe quietly jumped into the road, stopped for just a breath, and then jumped back into the forest on the other side of the road. “God,” said Borski. “Shh,” I said, “there’s more.” And the buck was standing there. He had simply appeared. He stood looking right at us, cocked his antlers, turned and disappeared. We walked on to where we thought the deer had been, but there was no sign of them. Not a mark on the ground or even a trembling twig. Just a lingering feeling in the air. They may as well have been ghosts. We stood in that spot, swaying with our heartbeats, not daring to breathe, listening for some sign of deer. Finally, silently, we walked on. A little farther along, the road emptied into a clearing and we sat there and Borski got out a notebook and wrote it all down. I turned to Francis, looked at the ground. “Their eyes are brown,” I said.

 

We were almost killed in a bar in Marinette. It was a tin shack, almost a Quonset hut. The floor was concrete. Just inside the door was the bar itself, long and thrown-together plywood. On one end was an area with pool tables. On the other was a concrete dance floor and at the far end of that was a slightly raised concrete stage. We ordered two pitchers and four glasses and staked our claim to the territory around the cigarette machine. The place was called Chief’s and was full of Indian boys and underage girls in white socks.

The cigarette machine was Francis’s idea. He thought the best place to meet women was the kitchen at a party and the cigarette machine in a bar. “They all come to the kitchen,” he said. “Sooner or later.” He felt the same about cigarette machines, and he was right. I was leaning on the machine when I saw a girl I loved. Her name was Angela and she was buying a pack of Viceroys. We met at a wedding of a mutual cousin about ten years earlier. I had kissed her once in a forest not unlike the one around Lake Mary. It was some years after we met and after we had stopped going out with each other. During the months we dated we had never kissed. In fact, we had never even had a real date. We were young and our mothers would take one of us to visit the other. Back then the freeway system was younger than we were, so a trip from my house in the city’s northern suburbs to hers in the south could take an hour. We didn’t see a lot of each other.

Then we stopped seeing each other altogether. We got older. I kissed other women, and she became engaged to a man named Jim who I never met. But I met Angela again, one weekend in a campground where she was camping with some girlfriends. She was beautiful –dark and glowing and young as fruit. She had black hair and deep brown eyes and she looked at me and I knew that before the weekend was over I would kiss her. I did, of course, beside a fire my friends and hers had built in the woods. It was late at night and the fire had burned to coals and we had all been laughing and telling stories of life in communes and adventures in war. Then we had gotten into a pushing and laughing fight and I had pushed her off the fallen tree we were sitting on and I rolled off on top of her and kissed her. Twice. That was it.

And now, here she was in this native, mysterious bar on a north Wisconsin night buying Viceroys. She stopped and smiled at me and I knew I would kiss her again.

She stood and nodded and before she or I could say a word Francis broke in.

“Hello, there,” he said.

She looked at him like he had crawled out of a bag of potatoes. With his long beard, orange corduroy sports coat and white fez he looked tall as a warrior. He grinned at her and she turned back to me.

“Scooter,” she said. “Long time.”

She had put on a few pounds, but was still a beauty. Her once-long black hair was short and some of the glow was gone from her deep eyes, but she remained dark and smooth and glorious.

“Angela,” I said. I looked around and then back at her. “Long time.”

“Give me a hug,” she said.

The band took the stage and began to play. I wrapped my arms around Angela and asked what she was doing there. She said she had come north with Jim five years earlier and when he had left she stayed. She drank beer, she said, at Chief’s, where she was among the sophisticates. She had a job at the Tasty Freeze and she threw pots in the summer and had a kiln in a cottage near a small lake. All of this she told me while the band played bad Rolling Stones and my friends leaned on the cigarette machine and watched us dance.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“Tend bar,” I said. “And go to school.”

“College,” she said. “What do you take? What do you want to be when you grow up?” she laughed.

“English,” I said. “I take English.”

“English. So, you want to be English?”

Francis had gone over to the bar with an empty pitcher and was talking to a guy in a John Deere cap and an Adam’s Apple the size of King Kong’s Buick. He pointed at the band and then looked around the dance floor and then pointed at the cigarette machine. The guy in the John Deere cap shrugged and bobbled his Adam’s Apple at Francis, who took his filled pitcher and threaded his way through the Indians and underage girls back toward the cigarette machine.

The music stopped. Angela and I walked back to the cigarette machine. Francis handed me a beer and Borski said, “Guess what?”

“We’re taking the stage,” King Kong said. “We’re going on stage.”

I looked at Francis. “Right,” he said. “That guy with the John Deere cap over there,” he said, nodding off toward the bar, “he says he’s their manager. He says we can go up at the end of the night.”

“I didn’t know you played,” Angela said.

“I don’t.” I looked at Francis. “We don’t play.”

“It’s cool,” said Francis, nodding. His towering fez waved in the smokey space above everyone’s head. “It’s just for a picture.”             “A picture,” I said. “Jesus.” I felt the way I did when I knew the deer where nearby. I could feel something hovering. I felt I could point to the stage the way I had down the logging road and there in front of us would be an apparition, a devil, laughing and dancing and waving us on up there. The thought of going on stage in front of a bar full of people I didn’t know, and one woman I did know, was as frightening to me as a gunshot.

“I ain’t going,” I said. “Not a chance.”

“Have a beer,” said Francis. “The night, as they say, is young. Enough of this and you’ll not only go up there, you’ll learn a few chords.” Angela and King Kong and Borski laughed, and I drank my Old Style and smoked Angela’s Viceroys, and slowly the dread left me.

The night in Chief’s slid on. The waitress kept the pitchers coming and all the guys danced with Angela. A few other girls came by and asked if I was the one who knew Angela from before. I said I was and they asked me to dance. They smiled at me and said Angela was a fine woman and what was she like ten years ago?

I said she was very young. But what I thought about was that night I kissed her beside the fire. I could see her there on her back on the grass and leaves, with her hands up over her head. I had kissed her and she had kissed me and I held myself up over her on my elbows and looked at her. She gazed straight into my eyes and said nothing. I loved her then, that instant, with the fire crackling and her silent brown eyes softly melting me. As I looked at Angela I felt myself evaporate. All sorrow left me, all pain, and I became empty, air, free. I rolled away from her then and helped her back onto the fallen tree and she leaned her head on my shoulder. But when the fire was nearly out she went off with her friends and I stayed with mine. The next morning, by the time I had worked up the courage to stroll by her campsite she was gone.

I didn’t tell any of the women I danced with how I remembered Angela. I still wonder what she said about me to them.

By the time the band had rocked through its last set even King Kong had taken a few turns around the concrete dance floor, sloshing through the mud and puddles of beer. The last number was a dance-hall version of a song by The Band, called “The Weight.” Then it was our turn.

It was Francis’s idea that we would get our picture taken like The Beatles. King Kong, being a drummer, would be Ringo. Francis would be George, Borski would be John and I, Paul. I was just barely drunk enough to go on stage, my desire to be one of them overcoming my great fear of spectacle. So I went up there with them, though I was dying, and the great crowd inside Chief’s turned to see what was going on. They pushed up to the bandstand and stood staring up at us. In the middle of them was the guitar player whose guitar I had slung over my head. He held up Francis’ camera and we posed, but before he shot he pointed to me. “Hey,” he said. “If you’re going to be Paul you got to turn that guitar over.”

I did. And he took our picture. Then I grabbed the strap and started to lift the instrument over my head and it fell off the L-shaped hook on the guitar body. I couldn’t stop it. I saw it go and felt my intestines start to loosen even before the guitar hit the concrete floor and its neck snapped off. I can see Francis, as if I am hypnotized, watching me try to lift the guitar strap over my head. He’s smiling, and his head is tilted to one side. He looks as if he’s saying, “See what I’ve brought you to now. See how I’ve changed your life.”

When the guitar hit the floor I squatted. Francis came over and squatted beside me. King Kong just sat behind the drums. Borski leaned his guitar against a wall and came over and squatted between me and Francis. “We’re in deep shit,” he said.

Indeed we were. The Indians were mumbling and moving the underage girls in white socks away from the stage. There was about to be a massacre. Angela was gone forever.

The boy with the camera came on stage and dropped to one knee on the concrete. He slid both his hands under the guitar and scooped it up. “My 1955 Les Paul original,” he said. He looked at me. “Jesus,” said King Kong. “A 1955 Les Paul original,” the kid said again.

“Is that good?” I said. I had never heard of Les Paul.

“Apparently,” said Francis.

“A 1955 Les Paul original,” said the kid.

By now the Indians were starting to do some serious mumbling. “1955,” I heard. “Original.” “Les Paul.” “A 1955 Les Paul.” “1955.” They were stumbling about, bumping into each other.

I looked at the kid. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“I’ll handle this,” Francis said. “Look,” he said to the kid. “We’ll find a way to take care of this.”

“Take care?” said the kid. “Take care? This is a 1955 Les Paul original. Do you know what that means?”

“Can’t be replaced,” said King Kong.

Francis turned toward King Kong. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for that bit of timely information.”

Then he said to the kid, “Listen, we might as well get this right up front. We can’t pay for it. We don’t have the money.”

“Can’t pay?” said the kid.

“Don’t you have insurance?” asked Francis.

“Insurance?” said the kid.

He didn’t have insurance. He didn’t even have a driver’s license. He was 15 years old and was playing in Chief’s illegally. There was nothing he or his friends could do but kill us.

We split into groups and took on the band and its followers. Somehow, I ended up with the kid. We sat at the bar and had a beer on Chief, who stayed behind the bar and near his telephone. He told us that if fighting broke out he would call the cops and get out. Cops around the Marinette Indian reservation were notorious for their lack of communication skills.

I told the kid I couldn’t pay for the broken guitar. I had no money, just a typewriter, which I said I’d be glad to give him. I don’t know why I thought my typewriter would replace his guitar. I think it had something to do with one artistic instrument replacing another, though he wasn’t much of a guitar player and I wasn’t much of a writer.

“You don’t even play guitar, do you?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I tend bar. I go to college.”

“Figures,” he said.

Francis had the leader of the band and a small gang of Indians over by the door. He was making a deal. It turned out to be a complicated scheme that involved the kid sending the guitar to me through the mail and then, when I opened the box and found it broken, we would file a claim and he would be paid for it. Not a bad plan, but we never tried it.

King Kong had the drummer and the biggest band of Indians. He was talking to one and then another and then suddenly standing upright and telling them all to back off, which they did not do. King Kong was big but there were a lot of Indians.

Borski’s bunch wasn’t so much in a conversation as it was just standing around listening to Borski. It was while I was watching his group, though, that I noticed all three groups were slowly creeping toward the door. Francis was now and then glancing up at me and Borski and King Kong. Through what appeared to be some force of will, Borski and King Kong were slowly moving their little groups toward Francis. They talked and nodded and shuffled their feet and inched past the cigarette machine from one direction and the pool cue rack from the other. I began to see the humor in the situation. The Indians were resisting the movement, but since they didn’t consciously notice it, their resistance was mostly inertia. It was as if King Kong and Borski and Francis each was trying to move a puddle of water with the toe of his boot by gently nudging it along. A nudge just a little too hard and the tension would be broken, the game would be up.

“I’m going to see what’s going on,” I told the kid. “Yeah,” he said. “Live it up.” He had surrendered.

By the time I reached Francis the three groups had merged. He was saying, “Right, no problem. We’ll get you the money. Here’s my driver’s license. So you can find me. Scooter, give them your driver’s license.”

I reached for my wallet. The inertia was broken. A nearby Indian said “Scooter?” and slugged me. He hit me in the shoulder and spun me around. I ended up looking right at King Kong, who went nuts. I wanted to tell him that it was all right, it didn’t hurt. I’d been hit by people before, people that meant me real harm, and this wasn’t like that. The Indian who punched me in the shoulder probably just couldn’t stand it any more.

I wanted to explain the situation to King Kong, but I didn’t. I just stepped aside. I saw Borski duck and head for the door. Francis, who was taller than me by half a foot, went around me on one side and got between me and the crowd. “All right,” he said. “All right.”

King Kong went after that poor Indian. When I turned around I saw some guy try to take a swing at me by reaching around Francis. Francis punched him in the arm pit and the guy fell down.

I looked past the Indians, who were doing a lot of cursing and posing, and saw King Kong catch up with the unfortunate young brave who had started it all by hitting me. King Kong took hold of his shoulder, turned him around, and smacked him on top of the head with his palm. The Indian sat on the floor and King Kong started after the rest of the tribe.

That’s when Chief jumped over the bar. He had been smart enough earlier in the evening to put away the pool cues and balls and empty glasses and pitchers. There wasn’t much left in the bar we could use to hurt each other. But King Kong didn’t need much. He’d managed to get hold of the remains of that 1955 Les Paul original. He was holding the body of that fine instrument in one hand and the neck in the other and was about to crush some Indian’s head between the parts when Chief stepped in front of him. “Whoa there big fellah,” he said. “Fight’s over.” The Indians immediately stopped mumbling and posing and King Kong dropped the guitar.

Borski, who during the whole fight had been dancing in and out of the door, wanting to run for his life but also not wanting to leave his friends behind, now ran for his life.

King Kong strutted through the crowd behind Chief and passed by me and Francis and walked out. Francis turned around, said, “Let’s go,” and followed King Kong. I reached for my wallet, took out my driver’s license, found the kid still sitting on his stool at the bar and said, “Here. We’ll work it out.” I sailed the license toward him and left.

Outside the three of them were waiting. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Francis. We ran to the car and sped away. As we were leaving I saw a lot of Indians pour out of that bar. I saw a few headlights behind us on the way back to Lake Mary, but the Indians were driving old pickups and there were a lot of them who probably got in each other’s way. We were driving King Kong’s old man’s big blue Buick. We blew those Indians away.

It was 3 a.m. Francis drove back to King Kong’s old man’s cabin. Borski sat beside him and scribbled on his pad in the dash light. At one point about halfway home he turned around and said to me, “You all right?”

The moon was setting into Lake Mary when we pulled up to the cabin. It was my night on the davenport in the living room so I went in and flopped down without turning on the light. I heard two of the other guys come in and go to bed, but the third stayed outside. After a while I sat up and looked out the window behind the davenport. Francis was out there, standing by the water.

I watched him for a long time. It was quiet in the house. King Kong had not yet started to snore. There were not even any mice running in the walls. He stood there for maybe 15 minutes with the air as still as ice and Lake Mary reflecting the stars. And just when I thought he was about to come inside, the northern lights exploded above us.

I never heard from the kid about his 1955 Les Paul original and I never went back to Marinette. A few weeks after our trip Francis and I went downtown and got new driver’s licenses.

The winter settled in on southern Wisconsin and we spent the next months in our kitchens and in bars, talking of fame. We did talk about our weekend, and the writing and drinking and barroom brawl. But we didn’t talk about it much and I haven’t talked about it since.

Then one night in spring Francis and I were left by the others to close Rosey’s. At 2 in the morning we walked to the parking lot. It was a warm night and Francis was wearing his white fedora, a hat he had forsaken even his yellow straw hat for. We strolled through the nearly empty lot and talked about women and poetry. As we walked up to his car he took off his hat and sailed it toward the open driver’s side window. It glided through and struck the other side of the car. When Francis got in I saw it on the floor.

The next morning the phone rang. It was King Kong. “Francis bought it,” he said.

The police said Francis had driven his old Mercedes under a parked flatbed truck. They said that when they pulled his car out from under the truck, they found him lying on the front seat. It looked as if he was reaching for something, they said, on the floor. It was 1976. Francis was 30 years old. I was 25.

That summer King Kong went on safari. He left his group, though, and joined the Rhodesian army. I rarely saw him after his war was lost, and it didn’t take us long to drift apart.

Borski and I had so little in common, outside of our mutual friends, that after Francis’s death and King Kong’s safari, we never saw each other. I hear he joined his father’s real estate firm.

Now, all these years later, King Kong wanders the streets of our home town, looking for a fight, and Borski is a landlord. As for me, I dream of them. And I am compelled to tell what happened.             I saw the moon tonight and I remember how I was when I had those dreams of fame, dreams of importance. And I remember Francis, with the moon just gone and the aurora rising.

I wish I had loved