In the City of Shy Hunters by Tom Spanbauer Read Free Book Online Page A

western shit stop?
    Ellen’s mouth was moving extra for the amount of her words, and a big hank of hair with a chopstick in it was hanging down over her ear.
    It all seems so movie, so stereo . . . typical, Ellen said. So fake.
    Tourist Town, I said. Robert Goulet right down the road.
    Oh, God, I’m in Camelot! Ellen said. Cowboy Camelot!
    Jackson Holeewood, I said.
    I can’t tell you how funny Ellen and I were just then, so funny that man and woman went away between us, and there we were in all the world, just two people laughing.
    THAT SEPTEMBER , 1982, Ellen stayed on an extra week. We went backpacking in the Tetons. Fresh salmon on the grill, Pinot Gris in the wineglasses, her nipples through her halter top, Ellen said love on Jenny’s Lake. I said no to sex.
    All hat and no cowboy.
    My belt buckle the tombstone for my dead dick.
    At the Jackson Hole airport, Ellen and I parted friends. Then my dog got run over by a car. I wrote Ellen a letter, told her about Crummy Dog, and proposed a Christmas visit to New York City, thinking as I wrote her, Maybe I should say Chanukah visit. Thinking as I wrote down her address on the envelope—205 East Fifth Street—that I didn’t know East Fifth from West Fifth, didn’t know the five boroughs from the seven wonders of the world, shit from Shinola. Didn’t know what was important, what wasn’t.
    Chanukah, for Ellen, however, was Monsieur Maurice Clavelle, wedding bells, the Arc de Triomphe, the Tour Eiffel, and Paris, France. Maurice Clavelle was a man she could fuck marry.
    Back in Jackson Holeewood, I enrolled in French class and a correspondence course in fine wines called Vin et Vous.
    That spring, Ellen wrote a letter back, offering her everlasting friendship, and something else.
    Her Manhattan apartment—$650 a month. Ellen’s uncle owned the building.
    You need to come east, Ellen wrote, To the center of things. Start a new life. Get some sophistication. What are you so fucking afraid of?
    IN 205 EAST Fifth Street, I -A, I turned off the unrelenting fluorescence from above and closed and locked the door behind me. My strange footsteps in my damp, wall-stained, cat-spray home. I opened the kitchen window, stripped down to my T-shirt and shorts, rolled a cigarette, leaned out into the hot August Wolf Swamp night.
    Outside was a courtyard. Four brick walls went up five and six stories, the brick walls at the top, where there’s more weather, faced with a layer of mortar. Below the line of mortar, the bricks made a dull red grid, chinked, sagging, settled. The windows were barred, were broken, were cacti and suffocating philodendron-pressed, plastic-flowered, window-fanned, were open, closed, filthy, were clean red-and-white checkered curtains. The fire escapes rusted zigzags, cat perches, meat-frying Hibachi stands, catchalls. A patch of city light a diagonal down the side of a building.
    In the kitchen, I slid my fingers through a drawer of leftover stuff. A thumbtack tacked itself to my thumb. The kitchen light was an unrelenting halo of fluorescence when I turned it on. I stood right underthe bright halo, put the thumbtack between my teeth, opened my blue Velcro wallet, found the folded newspaper clipping.
    My fingers unfolded the newspaper clipping, the sound, and then the newspaper clipping was in my hand, against my open palm.
    On the wall, on the tobacco-yellow kitchen wall, next to the window, I pushed Charlie 2Moons’s photo onto the plaster with the thumbtack, blew the plaster powder off with my breath. My fingers smoothing smoothing the newsprint, the photo out flat.
    A photograph. No bigger than the palm of my hand.
    Things and the meaning of things.
    Charlie 2 Moons’s head is turned a bit to the side. His hair is in a ponytail, white shirt and tie, black leather jacket, gap-toothed, smiling big, standing on the stairway to an airplane, waving. An Idaho State flag in his hand, a bundle of ocelot skin under his