I am walking point through the jungle and longing to drink the dew from large eared plants. Monkeys jabber in the tree cover above and other unknown sounds throng around me, occasionally erupting as I pass too close.
        A noise? Voices? I hide belly down beside the trail. The voices become clear before I see anything.
        "He must still be alive. I cannot for a single moment believe he's dead. I don't feel he's gone."
        "Please Mama, don't hold on so. It's going to be hard to bear if you don't at least allow the possibility he's dead."
        "Ah child I cannot, for I do not believe it."
        The voices passed me but no bodies spoke. The words were like whispers, words overheard. I called out to them but the voices slipped by unable to hear, only to speak.

        My mother has a voice like that. A voice with windchimes in it. Sitting on the back porch, on the swing seat with my feet up on the rail, I could see her singing, my sister scurrying around her feet and the laundry waving in time to her song. As she walked towards the house she stopped and looked up at me on the verandah and laughed.
        "There'll be a time," she smiled, "when you'll remember this and be ready to stop your running and stay in one place longer than dinner."
        "You're right Ma," I said, "but I cannot stop for it's not me that's restless. The wind inside me blows me around just like your sheets. Maybe when I'm dry someone will come and take me down from the line."
        Joel came through that evening as he'd promised. Ma said Joel's promises were more like threats and kissed me good-bye. I took off with him as the sun came up over the maples. We drove through my twenty-first year with the top down and for a time whatever winds blew seemed to be of my own choosing.
        Joel's death finished that.
        The postcards from my sister had too much postage on them. It was one of her ways of saying she loved me. When she heard that Joel was dead the card she sent was a detail from a painting by Breughal, of death and macabre dancing. She had circled a small scene, a corpse smiling in the arms of a weeping man. The picture haunted me and that month the heroin was cut with something cruel and gave more pain than relief as I stumbled from motel room to motel room. In the late night flickering, images of war cut into the darkness as tearstained and blood-soaked soldiers came back from the fighting carrying the bodies of their dead buddies.

        Joel got married in Phoenix. I was best man. The ceremony took place in the cool of the desert evening with the bride and groom sitting on the trunk of Joel's and my convertible. From the money earned building boxes to house the growing city, Joel had sprung to have the car repainted. It was not completely dry by the wedding, the paint still soft, and after the ceremony, when everyone had left for the reception, the trunk bore the imprints of Karen's wedding dress and Joel's rented tuxedo.
        When I parked the car I ran my fingers over the textured patterns. I was a blind man reading Braille. I read of Joel's happiness at settling down but contrary to my desire I found no mention of myself.
        A week later Joel was dead. A sudden desert storm had hit the outskirts of the city, and Joel was blown off the roof of the building we were working on.
        I broke the news to Karen. She'd been singing in the kitchen when I knocked on the screen door. She looked up, saw me and laughed.
        "You know you don't ever have to knock."
        "Karen," my voice broke, "Joel's dead."
        I wrecked a lot of furniture then, the anger finally breaking through and I left Karen and Joel's home in ruins. I took the car and drove without stopping to San Francisco and waited for a postcard from my sister to blow me to Vietnam.