Barry Peters

My Brother Guards a Hole in the Ground
 
He sits in the driver’s seat of a Chevelle under a hardtop and marbled stars. Summer job, construction site, third shift. The hole is huge, its darkness deep. Heavy equipment surround the perimeter like hellhounds. One night, trespassers gather outside the fence. Weeks pass; the hole neither grows nor is filled in. He wonders how to measure it, but he failed geometry. His silver flashlight, heavy as a gun. He kills time listening to the radio. West Coast baseball, bombastic preachers, conspiracy theories. He checks the locks. Radius, volume, circumference. When the batteries die, he begins hallucinating. Bulldozers and front loaders chase him round and round. The hole yawns. He pauses at the brink. The hounds rear up, applaud with their forepaws. He climbs their backs, pets their yellow necks. Every night, trespassers gather. Verily, it disturbs him greatly.
 
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Method Actor
 
Clint Eastwood and Dustin Hoffman walk out of Central Park one sunlit April morning, Eastwood upright as an axe, Hoffman a foot shorter and bouncy with pep. Their ballcaps are pulled low, but that doesn’t fool my friend Jon. He watches them jog through traffic and approach a group of utility workers in reflective vests huddled behind yellow tape. The workers point and gesture; Eastwood and Hoffman nod like apprentices. The next thing Jon knows, everyone’s exchanged headwear. Eastwood, now in a hardhat, operating a jackhammer, vibrating like the red dog in that Dr. Seuss book. A few minutes later, Hoffman’s vibrating too. The workers cross their arms in approval. Pedestrians stream the sidewalks but they’re oblivious to the scene, or they don’t care, they’re New Yorkers--all except Jon. Every spring break he spends his teacher pay on Broadway while his students frolic on Florida beaches and sneak into tiki bars. At the end of the week, Jon flies back to Ohio and resumes the role he would play for thirty-five years, jogging nowhere, hatless, vestless, jackhammerless.
 
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Vanilla
 
The owner of the college bookstore blamed me for a series of mis-shelvings the week before the semester. One of us reversed the micro- and macroeconomics textbooks; another thought Billy Budd was the author of a novella titled Herman Melville. We were part-time undergrads, all making mistakes. Every day at lunch, we ran across the street to Swanky’s for a beer, that’s how dedicated we were. So the owner called a meeting, said he had to make an example of someone, and didn’t schedule me for a week. Maybe he suspected that I knew about his affair with one of the cashiers. Rumour had it they would meet in the basement storage room. It was true that when I went searching for stock, I would linger for a few minutes, maybe more. There was something intimate about that basement: the silence as opposed to the bustle upstairs; the floor-to-ceiling books, new and used, hardbacks and paperbacks, all those words; even the odour, a trace of vanilla. I would finally carry a wobbly tower upstairs, my chin on the top book, a little disoriented, vaguely aroused. I never did see them, the owner and the cashier. It was just rumor anyway. Now, when I’m the only customer in a bookstore, the only patron in a library, I think about that job sometimes. I linger. Walk the stacks, look around. Open a book or two until I detect the scent of vanilla, perfume rising from the pages.
 
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The Fantasy Factory
 
The get-up I wore to The Fantasy Factory that night with M. Put on a vest, she said, you’ll fool the doorman. She was a senior, and she was right: He winked me inside. The bells! The whistles! We bumped under lights that spun like the coloured wheel my parents shined on our silver Christmas tree. But poor M: I moved like an offensive lineman and gripped her hands like dumbbells, tipsy from two beers and her alluring turvy.
 
Decades later, I drive six hundred miles to find that night again, but the turnpike is littered with weekly-rate motels and mini-marts, pawn shops and package stores. At the corner where The Factory stood, a man with a bucket steps from the curb and begins to wash my windshield. Stocking-capped against the cold, he glows in the neon glitter of a sweepstakes parlor. Inside the car, the radio plays Disco Inferno. Outside, his pink rag streaks the glass, dancing the dirt in silent circles.
 
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Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. Publications include Barrow Street, Grist, Image, New Ohio Review, RHINO, and The Southern Review.