LITMIR.BIZ

      “Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

      T.S. ELIOT

      DJ spotted a deer trail that looked as if it led to the Menomonee River while I tried to think of a way to explain death. The space for my words imploded as my son moved away from me toward the passage through the trees. It is July 2, the date of a full moon in the month that Buddhists believe the dead return to visit the living.

      This morning, only a few houses from our home on the way back from DJ’s summer orchestra lesson, a buck with just an inch of antler crossed in front of our car, grabbing my line of sight with his intent dark eyes and reminding me that my eleven-year-old son and I were overdue for a nature outing. Nature came to get us. DJ claimed the buck stared directly into his eyes as he passed, but I swore he glared into mine and even turned his head back over his shoulder to maintain eye contact as he traveled from parkway to suburban lawn. His interest in us evaporated as his front hooves hit the curb. We kept watching him, unaccustomed to seeing a slow-moving deer so near. Usually they bolt across our road or stand statuesque for a moment before darting back into the veil of trees and shrubs. This buck seized our attention and then became oblivious to us, as if we didn’t exist in the same dimension.

      We saw the short spikes on his head that inspire the name of the July full moon in the Farmers’ Almanac: the “full buck moon.” This is the month the buck begins to re-grow antlers in preparation to fight, to the death if needed, for the right to mate. His coat was caramel with cream trim and scratched from shoulder to rear as if keyed by an angry hoodlum. He grazed on the neighbor’s lawn, and she came out on the porch and sat on her step with her chin in her palm to watch.

      On the strip of mowed parkway in front of the woods where the buck had emerged, a red-tailed hawk swooped down for a touch-and-go landing, sporting a squirming mole in its clutches. A poplar tree with stark white undersides of leaves winked in the light breeze.

      At home, the morning paper headlined “Five US Servicemen Killed in Attack at Iraqi Base” and “White Pelican returns to Wisconsin as Mississippi Wetlands are Restored.” And from the obituary page, “Beloved daughter departed this earth…born 1995.” I didn’t know this girl, but I scanned the death notices looking for a distance this “beloved daughter’s” age withheld. Ninety-eight was comfortable, sixty-nine was so young, and the iniquitous reality of a teenager as a corpse unsettled me. Death sometimes tries to shove itself to center frame in my life; I push back.

      I’d been away from home for almost two weeks as a part of a graduate program. When I’d left, DJ’s voice seemed to play every sharp and flat note possible in the measure of one sentence, but when I returned, he spoke in a smooth, deep voice that I knew other women would come to love. On the day I returned from my residency in Vermont and drove to DJ’s bus stop from day camp, I expected a gleeful look and a hungry hug when he spotted me as the pickup person. He saw me, but he looked away and didn’t even bend to look in the car window. When he approached, I saw only his arm reaching for the handle and his blue Homer Simpson “This is your brain… on doughnuts” T-shirt. His greeting was a baritone, “Hi.” Moments later, I could see only the back of his head because he looked out the window and away from me. A block later, on a quiet, anonymous street, I pulled the car over and hugged and kissed my acquiescent son.

      The following day, as I tried to work at the computer, he lingered next to me, and when I draped my arm across his waist, he crawled into my embrace, and all five feet two and a half inches of him lingered in my lap. In front of the window, a clattering of bikes and kids passed on the street that separates our house from the woods and river. He dropped, as if assault weapons were spraying the house with bullets. From the floor, my son inquired, “Anybody see me?”

      “No one saw you hug your mom. They didn’t even look.” I closed the blinds and didn’t get any work done while DJ told me about camp and complained about too many little girls in his horse-riding group.

      Although DJ had seemed enthusiastic when he’d agreed to walk with me in our neighborhood woods, he raised his eyebrows as he saw me stuffing a backpack with bug repellant, water, and field guides to trees, birds, and wildflowers. The weight of my hiking boots reminded me that this neighborhood walk was different from my usual morning walking circuit. This was my opportunity to explore the areas I usually buzzed by while trying to keep my heart beating at 70 percent of my maximum rate. While swinging my arms and discussing kids and dinner plans with my walking girlfriend, I often looked at the trails, ponds, and bridges with longing and intention to come back for a better visit. The route was a rectangle with a river running in the middle and bridges at each end. Today, DJ and I were going inside the rectangle, something I hadn’t done in almost two months.

      DJ’s eyes looked up at me, but his neck and shoulders tilted down. “Why are you bringing all those books and stuff just to walk across the street?”

      “Don’t worry. We won’t be more than a few hours.”

      DJ’s exploration with me was a gift he’d promised to give, and he didn’t whine or try to beg his way out of it. Instead, he teased, and before we’d left the yard, he rapidly fired all the complaints he was too mature to say in earnest. “Are we almost home? How much further? I have to go to the bathroom.” That done, he elbowed me and pointed across the street to bright orange blooms of summer.

      The blossoms of the day lily species each last only one day and often bloom in succession. They are so prolific along roadsides that most folks call them ditch lilies. Six buds on a lily could mean that in six days, the flowers would be gone for a year. Negative thinking, I told myself. Something else will come into bloom when the prairie lilies are done, and more buds may form on these plants to bring more weeks of summer blossoms. It’s only in July, though, that summer is this bold.

      We crossed the black top road, and I silently recalled the mess we’d seen there on an evening dog walk last month. Perhaps DJ did too; his eyes focused on the same stretch of blacktop that revealed nothing of prior events, not even a faint stain. That night a possum lay split open on the street, and seven nubs of babies crossed the road ahead of the body, recreating an image of the impact. DJ had bent over one of the nubs, shook his head, and ticked the roof of his mouth. The mamma and her scattered pearls were gone by morning.

      There’s a man in Milwaukee who drives an old truck under contract with the county and picks up offensive refuse that can be handled by one man: dead dogs, bloated raccoon carcasses, and all manner of carrion and objects dumped on the street. I saw his picture in the paper a few autumns ago when he found a garbage bag holding a cold newborn baby with a smidgen of cry left in her. He called the Rescue Squad. She lived. I wonder if that man still considers that baby girl, in a warm home, her light brown hair grown in. She must be walking, already talking like crazy, now almost ready for kindergarten. I wonder, as he scoops up death with his dark flat shovel, if he looks for life, if he turns his head and bends so that his ear grazes each found garbage bag, and if he stops to weigh discarded parcels with his large worker hands. Does he sometimes tear open bags of litter dropped in arrogant thoughtlessness, just in case? I’ve never seen this man who works vampire hours, but I recall the strange reinterpretation of an American Gothic picture: man, upturned shovel, and pickup truck.

      His services may not be needed so close to our woods. Our small road kill is always gone by morning. When a deer dies, we have to call the DNR, and the carcass may sit a few days. For our smaller corpses, foxes slip out of their dens under cover of night, spill down the curb like quiet dark shadows. And with their long sharp canines and incisors, they drag the unsightly dead out of sight and into the woods we were about to enter.

      We found a trail after crossing a secondary stream. DJ jumped across, chiding me, “Come on. It’s easy.” I followed, showing him with my clumsy landing that I couldn’t cross a stream even a hair wider than this one. I windmilled my arms forward to pull my heels up from the soft bank and to prevent my seat from splatting in the muck. As soon as my feet were planted solidly under

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