Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Bliss Review of Atheist Manifesto Review of The Stones Cry Out Film review of "Karov La Bayit" Creative Nonfiction A Reverence for Words By Virginia Hendry For the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Yeats, I Give Thanks By Sara J. Ford Birth By Clint Pearson Poetry Gong Fu By Tim J. Brennan Phases By Tolu Ogunlesi They Are Driving Their Cars Again, They Are Driving... By Anne Cammon Death of the Travelers By Abigail Grant Leaves By Matt Gee Fiction The Wood Splitter By Michael Phillips Boogie & Sarah Leigh By Sandra L. West What Happened to Matt Dillon By Chris Drangle Red, Manhattan, 523 By Beth Hogan Titanic Hat By D.K. McGill About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Senior Editor - Mike Munsil Assistant Editor - Steve MacNeil Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Titanic Hat By D.K. McGill What’s it like to have your worst fear realized day after day after day? When I was a young bartender in Monroe, Louisiana, a reporter who wasn’t much older told me that his greatest fear was that he would never be famous. That was a long time ago and day after day after day I read newspapers and turn on the television and I never hear a thing about him. These days, I have trouble remembering his name. I do remember that, before he confided in me, he asked me what my biggest fear was and I muttered something about not having thought about it very much. That was a lie but it would have been bad for business to tell him that my greatest fear at that moment was that he was never going to leave. It was a rare night in Louisiana. It was snowing. I had the bar all to myself and I liked it that way, even though it meant no tips. I could drink beer, fry myself up a burger, enjoy the smell of hot grease and onions hanging in the air. The bar was a ramshackle old white frame building anchored on the south bank of Bayou DeSiard and jutting out over the water on piers. Daytime customers got a nice view of the cypress trees and the bayou through big picture windows behind the bar, but the nighttime view usually wasn't much. On this night, however, fat snowflakes caught the dim light from the bar as they drifted down to the slow-moving black water. My only problem that night was a gnawing fear - my real greatest fear - that this was all I wanted, not just for this night, but forever: A full belly, cold beer and Frank's Bayou Bar & Grill all to myself on a snowy night. I was a recent dropout from the local college and my lack of ambition scared me more then than it does now. The reporter had walked in around eight o'clock. He surveyed the empty room, reached into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, pulled out a tiny brush and ran it through his beard and mustache. He walked up to the bar, took off his coat and draped it over the back of the barstool before easing himself down. He was overweight and the wood-and-metal barstool made little popping noises, like a house settling, when he sat down. He rolled up his sleeves, lit a cigarette and ordered a glass of an expensive brand of Scotch -- he told me once that some bartender in New York had told him it was Jimmy Breslin's favorite. Every 15 or 20 minutes or so he would wander off to the bathroom, do some toot, then come back and start talking about a married woman he was chasing at the Chamber of Commerce or what screw-ups his editors at the newspaper were. Around 9 o'clock he checked his wallet and he switched from Scotch to beer. He became morose as the evening dragged on. I guessed he'd run out of drugs. It must have been around ten when he asked me my biggest fear, and I told him the lie about not really having thought much on it. He told me he wanted to be a columnist for a major daily that was nationally syndicated. It had to happen, he said. He could not even envision a life without it happening. "That's MY biggest fear," he said. “That I'll never be famous.'' Then he laid his head on the bar and started snoring. A television was perched on a shelf above the picture windows behind the bar. I grabbed the remote control and clicked the volume up. A pretty, dark-haired woman on a talk show was complaining that nobody could remember her name. She was right. I recognized her. She was lovely and talented and funny and she could dance up a storm. She had a Tony award. An Oscar too. Didn’t matter. I couldn’t remember her name. It was Hispanic, I think. “The name's important folks,” she said to the audience. She had a trace of a Brooklyn accent. “As long as they remember your name, you ain't dead in this business.” She turned to the host. “Remember that, Merv,” she said. “The name's Johnny,” the host said, and the audience roared. From behind me I heard a raspy laugh and then a cough. “I like that girl!” Frank McAllister shouted. He had padded quietly down the stairs from his attic room. “I like her -- that, that, uh ... What's her name?” “I can't remember,” I said, turning down the volume as I turned to look at him. He wore old leather slippers and a ratty purple bathrobe that was short enough to expose the shins of his bird-thin legs. It fell open above his potbelly to reveal the surgical scar that dissected the big green seabird tattooed on his chest. His hair was wet and combed straight back, as always. He was old, but the hair was still more red than gray. “You're off,” he said as he ambled around the bar. His knees were stiff and he waddled more than walked. “You shoulda woke me up two hours ago. You know there ain't no overtime rates in this business.” “You gonna tend bar in your bathrobe tonight?” I asked. “Who cares. Nobody's gonna come in here on a night like this,” he said, staring at the reporter, whose face was buried in his hairy forearms. “Nobody important, anyway.” “Why don't you close up?” I asked. “Don't feel like closing.” The reporter snored. “You want me to wake him up and call him a cab?” I asked. “Naw. Ain't no cabs gonna come around here in the snow. And if you wake him up he'll just start talkin'.” “Guess so,” I said as I drew myself a beer. “Thinks he's a big-shot,” Frank muttered as he waddled up to the cash register, which was against the back window. While I walked around the bar and sat down next to the slumbering reporter, Frank opened the drawer to the register to count my night's take, which was almost nil. He looked over his shoulder and scowled at the reporter. “He the only customer you had tonight?” he asked. “Only one,” I said. “Big shot,” Frank said again, shoving the drawer shut. “Ain't got nothing better to do with his time on a winter night then come out and sit alone and drink in the snow.” He opened the drawer again, ran his fingers through some loose change, then half turned around and looked at me. “He's s'posed to be a ladies' man, ain't he? Ain't he always comin' in here and talkin' 'bout his women? If he's such a big-shot, what the hell's he doin' in here tonight? Huh?” I just shrugged my shoulders. My silence seemed to irritate Frank. He shoved the drawer closed again, harder this time. “He ain't a big-shot!” Frank continued, his big voice getting bigger. “And he ain't ever gonna be a big-shot! He's a know-it-all jerk-off and he talks all the time and he don't ever listen!” There was more laughter on the television. Frank grabbed the remote, lowered the volume some more, then turned to me, and shook the remote in my face. “I know things!” he shouted. “I'm plugged in this town. Ain't nobody in this town can say Frank McCallister don't know what's going on. I know all the brother-in-law deals and the shortcuts. I know what's going on at the parish road department and City Hall. People come out here. They drink. They talk. They talk to me. “But he don't wanna listen to me. He's been coming in here for months and I used to treat him like a son. But I'd try and slip him the real skinny and he'd just blow it all off. “He thinks I'm nuts.” He stopped shaking the remote and looked me in the eye. “I ain't nuts. You know I ain't nuts.” I suppose he was looking for affirmation from me, but I just sat there, looking stupid, I guess. I was a bit stunned by his sudden little tirade. He stared for a few seconds more. When I didn't respond he screwed up his face in a look of disgust and turned back toward the television. The pretty woman was singing a Broadway show tune. Frank turned up the volume for a few seconds, then turned it back down and whirled around to face me. He wasn't finished. “This guy wouldn't know a story if it bit him in the ass,” he said, glancing briefly at the reporter, then fixing his stare on me again. “Do you know what I mean?” I didn't know what he meant and I didn't say anything. Again, my silence seemed to make him angrier. His face reddened as he stared at me, squinting. Like he was seeing me for the first time. Evaluating me. Then he lifted his right index finger and started shaking it in my face. “You stay right there,” he said. Then he poked me in the chest a few times. “Stay right there. Don't move.” He backed away from the bar and turned around. The beer cooler protruded from beneath a shelf of liquor bottles that lined the bottom of the picture windows on the back wall. Frank climbed up on the cooler. Slowly. It hurt to watch. I could almost hear his bones creak as he lifted one bare knee and then the other up onto the cold metal lid. He stood up, rose on tip-toes and extended his body and his right arm just enough to get a finger over the edge of a shelf mounted over the windows. He was barely able to crook one of his skinny fingers over the brim of a dusty old bowler that sat on the shelf about a foot to the right of the TV, among old softball and golf trophies. He pulled the hat to the edge of the shelf. It tumbled into his hand. From the way the dust flew, I could tell that nothing had been disturbed on that shelf in years. The hat had been sitting there for God knows how long. Now, however, once Frank had slowly climbed down off the beer box, he handled the bowler like it was a museum piece. He spread a clean bar rag in front of me and gingerly placed the hat on it, slowly withdrawing his fingers from it as more dust, dirt and some unidentifiable crust fell off of it. It was a washed out gray and looked as if it might disintegrate if I so much as breathed on it. “My mama gave it to me,” he said, staring down at it. “It was a prized possession. It was the only thing other than the clothes on her back that she had with her when they rescued her from ...” Here, he looked up from the hat and right at me. “The Titanic.” Frank McCallister had never before mentioned being the son of a Titanic survivor and I never would have marked him as a descendant of the moneyed classes that traveled on luxury liners. As it turned out, he didn’t spring from aristocracy. His mother, barely 20, was working her way across the Atlantic as kitchen help -- while trying to avoid the amorous advances of, as Frank put it, “every stinkin' rich bastard that thought he owned the Atlantic Ocean.” “She hated `em,” Frank went on. “Except one she couldn't really hate 'cause he seemed like such a harmless kinda guy. She even felt kinda sorry for the little fella. And, when I say little, I mean little, 'cause, well, you can see that it ain't very big.” He nodded toward the hat. “The hat belonged to him?” “Yep. Poor little bastard.” I looked at the hat again and the realization that it had belonged to a doomed man washed over me in an icy wave. “His name was Jimmy Smithers,” Frank continued, “although my mama didn't know that at the time. He was about the umpteenth guy to come on to her that night, but no one was about to get anywhere with her on account of she was on her way to the states to meet up with my daddy. She was gonna get married over here and she wasn't that kinda girl, anyway. “Anyway, she was leaning on the rail, just looking at the water. She wasn't supposed to be out there on the deck where she could fraternize with the passengers but she didn't figure it would hurt -- there weren't many people out on the deck because it was cold. But there's this one little guy, an American, who was walking, kind of stumbling down the deck toward her. He was holding the hat in his hands....” Frank, warming to the story, held an imaginary hat against his chest with both hands, as though the brim were between each thumb and forefinger. Each pinkie was extended. “He looked up at Mama -- he only come up to about her chin – he looked at her and he told her she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He said something corny like, uh, ‘You're the cat’s pajamas,’ or something. You know. Whatever guys said trying to hustle women back in 1912. “Well, on top of bein' little and wearing a coat that was too big and having a collar that was too tight and having a funny lookin’ widow's peak, he had a kind of high voice too. So what he said, which was corny, and the way he says it, in that funny voice, well, it made Mama laugh. “The little fella got all red in the face and embarrassed and Mama felt bad. Then, the little guy turns around and walks away. He kinda waddles back along the deck and disappears. Mama felt bad for him then. And, of course, she felt even worse the next time she saw him, which was when the ship was going down.” “Man!” I said. “How'd she survive, Frank? Did she make it to a lifeboat?” “About all she remembered was the lifeboat, Jimmy Smithers and lots of bells and yells and whistles. They say the ship's band played music on the deck while the ship was going down. I read that somewhere once. But she didn't remember it. She didn't remember anybody waking her up or telling her what was happening. She just remembered running like hell up all kinds of steps for the lifeboat deck, while the ship was heading down.” “So, where'd she see the Smithers guy?” “Well, she gets to the top deck, cause she figured she could get on fast before they lowered 'em to the lower decks. But she was wrong. When she gets to the top of the stairs, there's all kinds of people in lines four or five deep to get on the boat that's in front of her. And there's others running back and forth to see if any of the other boats are being loaded. Some of the boats have already been lowered and some ain't even been uncovered yet. It's all crazy. “And the noise! Some of these people are calm but most of them are either screaming or crying or yelling. And they're doing it in all different languages. There's some French and Germans and Swedes. What a mess! “Anyway, she's just gotten up the stairs and gotten out onto the deck when she looks to her left and there's the little fat guy. He's sorta plastered up against the wall like this.” Frank demonstrated as his mother must have demonstrated for him years ago. He backed away from the bar until his backside hit the cash register. He clutched his imaginary bowler to his chest with his left hand. His right hand shot straight out to his side, and pressed against the window glass. “His mouth,” Frank said, “is kinda opening and closing, like he's having trouble breathing.” Again he demonstrated. “And he's got this big patch of red on his face, like maybe somebody's hit him or slapped him, maybe. Mama didn't know. She only saw him for a few seconds. They looked at each other and his face got all red, then she stepped toward the lifeboat. “She falls in line behind three people. In front of them, there's a guy in an undershirt and trousers yellin' `Women and children first! Women and children!' He probably is part of the crew but it's hard for Mama to tell since he ain't got a uniform on. He's been helping women step down into the boat, where a guy, in a uniform, is waiting to help them find a seat. “But there's this hysterical French woman at the head of the line now and she falls into the boat before anyone can help her. Then, this couple with a baby walks up to the edge and the woman climbs down and the man hands down the baby and all three of them are crying as the man backs away. “Now, it's Mama's turn to get in the lifeboat. The man in the undershirt takes her arm to help her down. But just as she's about to step down, this big fat lady behind her starts yelling.” Frank raised his raspy voice an octave and tried to imitate the woman's British accent. “’She's not a passenger! She's not a passenger! She can't get on the boat! She's a scullery maid, a kitchen girl! This boat is for passengers isn't it? Isn't this boat for passengers?' “She's jumping up and down with her fur coat on over her nightgown and making a big racket and yelling at the guy in the undershirt. “Mama said the guy in the undershirt looked for a minute there like he didn't know what to do. And then -- can you believe this? – he listens to the rich bitch. I mean what if there WAS a rule! The boat was goin' down! What were they gonna do? Fire him? “But he ain't thinkin' like that. He grabs my mama's arm and says `This boat's for passengers, lady.' He pulls her away from the edge of the deck and tries to kinda shove her away! Mama starts crying and hanging onto the guy, grabbing hold of his undershirt, but he finally shoves her aside. “She thought she was dead and she didn't know what to do. But she didn't have much time to think because next thing she hears above all the other noise is this high, squeaky voice screaming: `Leave her alone! Leave her alone!' “And she looks over and she sees the little fat guy throw his hat down as he's running like hell right toward the edge of the deck. I mean, he musta had a horrible look on his face because people were getting out of his way. He starts running toward her and the crowd parts like the goddamn Red Sea. “Next thing Mama knows, the big guy in the undershirt just doubles over like he's been punched in the bread basket, or maybe kicked in the you-now-where -- Mama was never real specific. And then the little guy has a headlock on the guy in the undershirt and he's beatin' on the guy's head with his tiny little fist.” Frank acted the part of the little fat man, with his arm around an imaginary neck, his fist beating an imaginary head. “Everybody backs away from the edge of the deck while the big guy in the undershirt rears up and tries to shake the little fat guy off, but Smithers hangs on for dear life -- I mean his feet swing right up in the air when the guy straightens up, but he's got his left arm around the guy's neck and he ain't letting go. They're right on the edge of the deck and it looks a couple of times like they'll fall over -- into the lifeboat or into the drink -- but they don't. “Now, while the big guy's yellin' and cussin' and trying to pry Smithers' arm off his neck, Smithers takes his little bitty right thumb and just jams it in the guy's eyes. Once in the left, once in the right. Hard. Real hard. “Mama always said that if that big guy survived the shipwreck he was prob'ly blind the rest of his life. “Anyway, the guy in uniform climbs up outta the boat to try and break up the fight and get people boarding again. He pulls Smithers off the man in the undershirt, who just falls down and rolls around on the deck screamin' and covering his eyes. “The man in the uniform grabs ol' Smithers from behind, but Smithers is like a little animal now. He picks up one foot and drives the heel of his shoe into the man's shin, then he comes down hard on his instep. The guy lets him go and then Smithers whirls around like a goddamn hurricane and buries his fist right in the man's belly. The man doubles over and Smithers jumps up and just about bites his nose off. Then he shoves him backward and the guy falls over the other guy, the one in the undershirt who's still laying on the deck with his hands over his eyes. “The man in the uniform gets up, holding his nose and disappears into the crowd. “Now, Mama sees her chance. She makes for the lifeboat, but somebody else grabs her arm. It's the little fat guy! “He tells Mama to wait. But when she asks him what he wants her to wait for he just stares. He starts to say something, but he don't know what to say. “People are crushing in around them, stepping over the undershirt guy and climbing down into the lifeboat. Mama wants to join in, but she don't want to just pull away and leave the little guy standin' there. He probably just saved her life, after all. “`You can come with me,' Mama says. `There's still room.' But the little guy looks at the people getting into the lifeboat and looks down at the undershirt guy and he just busts out crying. “`No. It's just for women and children, dammit,' he says. Then he cries some more and says, `Oh, I'm gonna die here.' And he's holding Mama's wrist so tight that it's hurting her. “Now the ship is starting to list pretty bad. Mama can see that the lifeboat is swinging a little bit away from the edge of the deck -- enough so people are jumping to make it in. One man rushes up to the edge and throws something, a ring or something, to a woman, who blows him a kiss while she's crying. “Now, Mama starts crying. She tells the little guy he's hurting her, that he's got to let go so she can get in the lifeboat. “The little guy is still just sobbing his little eyes out and hanging onto her for dear life when he looks down and sees his hat. It's kinda been kicked toward the edge of the deck from where he threw it down.” At this point, Frank grabbed my left wrist off the bar with his right hand and gripped it tightly. “He's got hold of Mama's wrist like this,” Frank said. “And he bends over and picks up the hat and then he presses it in her hand like this.” Frank picked the hat up off the bar with his left hand and firmly pressed the brim into the palm of my open left hand. “The little guy finally stops crying and he just looks up at Mama and he tells her, `Take this with you.' And Mama says, `What?' and the little guy squeezes her wrist even tighter and he tells her again to take the hat with her. “And Mama asks him why and the little guy opens his mouth to say something only nothing comes out, and then he starts sobbing again. “And he says, `I don't know why! Please, just take the hat!' And he still doesn't let go but he starts dragging her closer to the edge of the deck. “Mama asks if she should give the hat to his family but, in between sobs, he tells her he's got no family and says for her to please just take the hat. “The edge of the deck around this particular boat is about clear now. The little guy drops Mama's wrist and hangs his head and says, `Oh God,' and keeps crying. “Two guys in uniforms grab the little fat guy and start hauling him off. They hook their arms under his armpits and start dragging him away from the edge of the deck. At first he tries to dig his heels into the deck but the fight's just about all out of him now. “Mama looks at the lifeboat. It's not a bad jump, she thinks. But then she hears something that freezes her: The little guy just keeps shouting his name, over and over, at the top of his lungs. “`MY NAME IS JIMMY SMITHERS!' he keeps screaming. And it makes Mama feel kinda ashamed 'cause she'd never even thought to ask him in all the hubbub. “He keeps yelling it again and again. Sometimes he yells it like he's scared and sometimes like he's mad. But he keeps yelling it over and over. `JIMMY SMITHERS, GODDAMMIT! MY NAME IS JIMMY SMITHERS.' The voice fades away and somebody gives Mama a hard shove. She lands hard in the lifeboat, hits her head on something and she goes unconscious for a couple of minutes but when she's awake again she realizes she still has the hat in her hand and that she's seen all she's ever gonna see of the poor, plump, widow's-peaked little bastard. “But, you know what? She said she kept hearing him screaming out his name, sometimes like he's angry, sometimes like he's scared, long after the ship broke apart and disappeared. She heard it when she was awake. She heard it when she was asleep. She heard it over the sound of the waves and her chatterin' teeth. She heard it for hours, she said. Right up until dawn, when the Carpathia started picking up survivors. “She remembered it till the day she died,” Frank said. He was still pressing the brim of the hat into the palm of my hand and looking me right in the eye. He stared at me for a good half-minute, I guess, waiting for some reaction. But I just sat there with, I suppose, a stupid expression on my face and he just sighed and pulled the hat brim from my hand. Frank turned away and started climbing back up on the ice machine, lifting one arthritic knee and then the other onto the cold, flat surface, grimacing with every move. “Nobody knows a good story any more,” he said, as I gradually became aware again of the laughter and applause on the television. And the reporter's snoring. There were three people in the bar that night. One’s dead now and two are middle-aged men whose greatest fears have been realized. I never went back to school. Frank left me the bar in his will and I make a decent living with it. I live upstairs. Lay a college girl every now and again. Never married. Never amounted to anything. Turns out that’s all I wanted out of life: chilled mugs of draft beer and the smell of hot grease and fried onions hanging in the air. Every few years, I even get a little snow. That snoring reporter is now most likely toiling anonymously, or nearly so, at some job somewhere. Maybe he works for some other, somewhat bigger paper in a somewhat bigger city and maybe he has a steady readership of folks who eagerly watch for his byline, or maybe people just scan their paper each morning then toss it in the garbage each day with the egg shells and coffee grinds without really taking notice of his name or that of any other writer. Like I do. Maybe he’s got a real job now. Maybe he’s successful in business and he’s the president of his local Chamber of Commerce or Kiwanis Club. Maybe, he’s just an alcoholic bum begging for change on the street. Maybe he’s an axe murderer. Whatever. He’s not famous. You wouldn’t recognize his name, even if I could remember it. Jimmy Smithers I’ll remember. Maybe Frank made the whole thing up, but I’ll remember the guy, whether he existed or not. And he may not be famous, either, but I’ve told the story enough times to enough people that he’ll live a long, long time. Maybe forever.