Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud 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 Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock 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.

For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish Angie needed a drink, and had already waited ten minutes for Fran to offer her one. Finally she went into the kitchen, found a glass, and returned to the living room. She joined Fran on the soft leather couch, and helped herself to the whiskey from the crystal bottle on the coffee table. The funeral had been long. A lot of people Angie didn't know gave voice to her father's good deeds, I remember when he taught Bess to play her first scale, and He guided Collin through his first recital. Fran was the last to speak. She cried as she described their seven lovely years together – a second marriage for us both but even better than the first – then closed with your music is silent now, my love, though for you my ear remains keen. To Angie it was big bore. She'd given up on her father years before, and was only there to get something for her trouble, something she could take away and hang onto. "Find out about insurance," Kevin had said as Angie boarded the bus to Ann Arbor. "An old guy like that, he'd have insurance." He didn't, though. He didn't have a will, either. "Because he wasn't planning to die," said Fran, when Angie asked why not. "Don't you think he'd have put his affairs in order, otherwise?" Angie sipped her drink. Her father was only sixty-two. He'd been a piano teacher. Angie's mother had been one of his students. Their marriage was four months older than Angie, a last minute arrangement, she was always told. Angie was five when her mother ran off with another man, and she remembered nothing of it, though her father said she'd been right there, watching the car drive away. What Angie did remember was her mother's absence, the sudden silence in the house, and then a postcard from Montana saying, I made a mistake. Her mother didn't write again, she didn't come home, and went on living with her mistake, Angie hoped, until word came of her death from pneumonia in an Arizona hospital three years later. "There are a few photo albums you can have, and some costume jewelry of your mother's, although I don't know why he kept it, under the circumstances. Oh, and you can take the ashtrays. You know how he loved those," said Fran. And the bars he lifted them from, with Angie on the look-out, those many nights when staying home was no comfort at all. In the beginning they were turned away. What are you thinking, trying to bring a child in here? In time they were allowed to stay. And stay they did, through the lunch crowd, the after lunch crowd, the happy hour crowd, smoke and laughter taking them towards night. Everything I ever learned, I learned in a bar, Angie had told Kevin more than once. What she learned was how to use silence and wide eyes to get pretzels and soda, sometimes a sandwich, sometimes a sweater or a pair of shoes that no longer fit the bartender's son or daughter. People gave you what they thought you needed easily enough. The trick was getting what you wanted. "What about that old piano?" Angie asked Fran. "The one in storage? Goodness, I'd forgotten all about it." Angie's father discovered it in the basement of a church where he'd woken up after walking the streets and screaming at the violet sky. Angie had spent the same night alone in their drafty house, with only the television's grey-blue face for company. Later at the church she held her father's sweaty hand, thought of how hungry she was, and looked at the piano. Tiny painted roses decorated the closed keyboard lid. The finish was dull and scratched, something her father pointed out while he haggled with the Father. You've a keen eye, the Father said. I can see you're a man of taste. If I weren't a good Christian I'd drive a harder bargain, but the truth is that this room's to be converted, and we've no more need of it. Then the Father asking her, Can you see yourself here, playing those fine, round notes all up to Heaven? His hand in her hair, on her neck, then under her shirt because her father was gone then, off to the bank for the money, and the Father said he'd give her breakfast because it looked like she could use it, but all he did was tug her forward why don't you and I just sit here a bit, on this nice, fine bench? What a shame it is to let it go. "Well, it's yours for the taking. I suppose you'll want to sell it," said Fran. Angie didn't know what the piano was worth. Maybe a thousand dollars. That would be a lovely windfall. She could get that leather coat she'd had her eye on, and that silver and turquoise bracelet she and Kevin saw at the mall. The rest she could bank for that rainy day that always came along so fast. Kevin, though, would want to put it up his nose. His cocaine habit used up all the money his father gave him. There was more money to be had, but his father had become difficult, and cut off his allowance. "Good plan. Better to sell it here, though, don't you think?" Angie told Fran. That way Kevin wouldn't have to know a thing. Listen, Babe, things didn't work out so well. That Fran, she's got things tied up tight. Must be how my old man wanted it, leaving it all to her. Figures, doesn't it? "Suit yourself, only I'm leaving first thing in the morning," said Fran. "Really, why?" She spoke of a brother out in Santa Barbara, and needing a change of scene. It occurred to Angie that she could do with a few more days away from Kevin. They'd come to that hard point between lust and love, and spent more and more time on their bare mattress, a mattress she'd like some sheets for to cover the brown stains of her period, and the yellow stains of her sweat. "I've got enough for one night at the motel, but after that I don't know," said Angie and glanced at Fran, who stared firmly into space. "I can stake you to a second night." "Oh, you're sweet! But don't you think it would be easier if I just stayed here? After you're gone, I mean. Don't like to be underfoot." Fran turned her leaky eyes on her. "I'm sorry, Honey, you can't." Angie had visited last year with Boomer, Kevin's predecessor. When they left Fran found herself missing a silk scarf, a pair of gold earrings, and a fountain pen she'd won in a church raffle. Angie sometimes wore the earrings and scarf. The pen she'd never used. When her father called to report the loss, Angie blamed Boomer. She said he was a recovering heroin addict (he wasn't), and that he'd spent time in jail (he hadn't done that, either). Her father believed her. Obviously Fran didn't. Boomer, who knew nothing of the theft or the phone call, moved out several weeks later when he realized Angie had been helping herself to his wallet. Fran offered to ship the piano down. Ann Arbor to Kansas City was a pricey distance, a fact Fran regretted with a lift of one eyebrow. Angie wasn't moved. There'd be no distance if Fran had stayed put. When Angie struck out on her own at seventeen, with no desire to finish high school, Fran pulled up stakes, and dragged her father up to her home town so they could float on the sale of her late husband's grocery store chain, forget the past, and begin again. Angie wrote her new address on the back of a museum flyer Fran had on the coffee table by the whiskey. The French Impressionists. February 4th - March 31st. Gauguin, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh. Angie couldn't imagine her father going to see that kind of nonsense, but then with Fran her father always thought he was better than he was. "Well, then. I'll call a mover. They'll let you know when to expect it," said Fran, and drained off her glass of whiskey. She stood and tugged the jacket of her stylish black suit into place. Angie got up, too. She towered over Fran. Angie was five foot ten, skinny as a boy, with size-ten feet. She'd stuck out at the funeral with her torn jeans and red linen jacket. She looked down at the white roots running through Fran's dyed black hair and kissed her hard, right on the top of her head. Outside, the heels of her cowboy boots banged on the wide brick steps. Above her the sky was a tender blue, the yellow clouds a dream. Fuck, she thought. It would have to be a beautiful day. ~ The piano was an upright, not a grand, and because a ramp had been built for a handicapped tenant some years before, the movers were able to get it inside Angie's apartment without loading it onto a dolly. Angie shoved it across her apartment, around the coffee table which she realized later could have been pushed aside, to the wall by the kitchen. The wheels gouged the wood. "Cool," said Kevin when he came in. Then, "Look what those morons did to the floor." "Yeah." "Better not lose my damage deposit." He smelled of cigarette smoke, which meant he'd been with Ramon again. Ramon was where Kevin got his coke. If he had any now it would be on loan, because Kevin's father was still being a jerk. Angie had met Ramon only once. He was so short she could have put her chin on his head. He worked as a car mechanic and promised to get Kevin hired on to do oil changes. Of course nothing had come of it. Kevin went to the kitchen and made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Marta, his German Shepherd, clacked across the floor and sat politely in front of him. He offered Marta some sandwich, then pulled it back just as she opened her mouth to take it. After the fourth time, Angie said, "Stop being such a mean fuck and give her some." His blow sent her sideways into the kitchen counter. The blood tasted like metal, and made her suddenly remember falling on the school playground. Kevin stared at her. He was still chewing. The hand he'd hit her with had opened from its hardened fist and was poised in mid-air, fingers bent, like an old man's. On the street, without her coat, she shivered. Her lip went on bleeding. She could feel it swelling. The Chinese restaurant smelled of hot grease as she passed. Bits of paper lifted in a gust of wind, swirled, then floated back to the sidewalk. At the corner a homeless woman sat on the steps of the church, her garbage bag below. She wore new track shoes with silver laces. They looked at each other. "Somebody got you good," the woman said to Angie. "Somebody with good aim." Angie stood with folded arms. Her lip throbbed. Behind a square glass pane on the wall by the door the message "I AM THE LIFE EVER AFTER" stood in white letters, advertising the sermon that coming Sunday. "You go on in, clean yourself up," the woman said. She drank from a tall plastic coffee cup, then looked at her wristwatch. Not homeless, Angie realized. Just sitting there. "What you doing, Girl?" Angie asked. "Name's Yolanda. Waiting on a guy. Coming to get a donation." "Of what?" "What you think? Clothes. Food." "In a bag. You put it in bag." "You got something better?" Angie went up the stairs. Inside was dark and smelled of dust and wood. The daylight leaked through the stained glass window. The ladies' room down the hall had a scent of bleach. Angie examined her lip in the small mirror over one of the two porcelain sinks. She felt her teeth. None was loose. On her way out a bulletin board with squares of bright paper caught her attention: Babysitting, call Clair. Moving? call Jerome. Yardwork. Home Health Aide. Used van for sale. Wanted, upright piano for Church Basement/Nursery School. Angie took the long way home, down the street towards the record store and dry cleaners, then past the park where the children were warmly dressed. She kept walking until she was too cold to walk anymore, and then went home. ~ Kevin watched her across the candlelit table. The sky had given in to snow, and the power had gone out. Angie wore long underwear beneath a cotton skirt. On top she was naked but for a jean vest of Kevin's she'd grabbed in the bedroom. They'd had sex for hours. He'd dug inside her until she was as dry as dust. "God, you have great tits," he said. "For a skinny girl." "For anyone." Kevin leaned back in his chair, his arms folded across his bare chest. Angie admired Kevin's arms, his shoulders, too. Sometimes she pressed her teeth there, and sucked up the salt on his skin. "Know what I think?" asked Kevin. "I think you're the kind of girl who can take a whole lot of a guy." "You'd know." "Maybe you can take some more." "Maybe." She sipped icy Vodka from the coffee cup. In four days her lip had healed a lot. She'd been hit by men before. Not by Boomer, whose real name was Brad. The nickname had come from his mother, because he'd been such a loud baby. He wasn't loud when Angie met him. He never once raised his voice to her, except when he found out about the money. He called her a "cunt," which hurt more than she thought it would. Before Brad there was Toby, a bicycle messenger. He didn't hit her, though she'd hit him for cheating on her with their downstairs neighbor. Before Toby was Pat, and Pat had blackened her eye when she wouldn't get him another bottle of beer. Kevin looked at the piano. He asked her again about selling it because now Ramon was pressing him for the two thousand he owed. Kevin's father was out. The last time Kevin called his father said, It's time to face facts. All the money in the world's no use to you. And when are you going to get rid of that slut? Angie didn't think that was the word his father would have used, and that Kevin had chosen it for effect. "I'll get on it," she said. She thought of the ad she'd seen, and of the piano returning to a church, going back where it came from, like ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. She laughed softly, then with a harder edge. Kevin went on watching her with his blue marble eyes. ~ Ramon sat at the far end. Angie waited for Noreen to get him, but it wasn't Noreen's station and Noreen knew it, so she let him sit. He had the fidgets. One thick tattooed arm jiggled on the bar, one leather-clad boot danced on the bar rail. "Hey," said Angie, and put a clean square napkin down in front of him. "Where's Kev?" "Thought you could tell me." He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. "He said he had a job interview." "Not likely," said Ramon. "No, probably not." He asked for a Scotch and soda. She mixed it and brought it to him. He stirred it with the red plastic stick she'd dropped in. "When you see him last?" he asked, looking at her tits. She saw herself in his eyes. The blonde dye she put in three months before had slid down and left a wide cut of black. Her pink tank top and the cold in the bar brought her nipples up like two ripe olives. Kevin's words, not hers. Angie had never eaten an olive in her life. "This morning. Why?" she asked. "He owes me money." She leaned over the bar. "You'll get it." "I better." He drank his drink and she pulled back, towel over one shoulder, held by what he was about to say. And when he did she didn't have to agree. That's how it worked when you were there for the taking. Nothing had to be said. ~ "Ramon says he'll drop it to a grand and call it even," said Kevin. Angie went on washing the dishes. In the dark window over the sink he stood reflected, hands on hips. He was a handsome man, with a fine square jaw, not at all like Ramon. Ramon's nose was broken, his skin was pocked, and his nails were filthy, but he trembled when he held her, even once cried out her name, and then talked of bad dreams, bad things remembered. "That's good," she said. "I just don't get it, though. He was so hot for me to pay up." "I know." "He even went looking for me, down where you work." "I was there." He shifted his long, lean weight. She had to move fast, before he added it up. She turned off the water, and rubbed her wet fingers on her worn out jeans. The blood rushed in her ears, down her back, all the way to the soles of her feet. She'd crossed more than half the distance between them by the time he caught her by the shoulders. They made it all the way into the bedroom with her mouth pressed into his. ~ Kevin had a plan. He knew two things: where Ramon kept his money, and where he kept his coke. "Cash in a coffee can, right there on the shelf. And the coke's sitting loose in an old box of laundry soap." Ramon also had a gun which he kept in his bedside table drawer, and another one in the kitchen, inside an empty fruit bowl on the top of the refrigerator. "Sounds risky," said Angie. "Only if I get busted, so I don't lift the coke. The cops won't ask about the money if they find it on me." "Still." "Come on, he's got at least a couple of grand. Plenty to go somewhere new. By the ocean, maybe." "He'll know you took it." "That's just it. There's this girl he used to live with, this Marcy something, and she's bad news, let me tell you. She comes in and helps herself to everything. He'll have to figure she took it. She's always after him for something. Major sleazeball. No surprise there, given the kind he likes." He dropped off and she was left to take one deep breath after another until she finally gave in to sleep. ~ In the rain she made her way down the block. The street was brown with dirt. Her skin was brown, too, and always had been. The big secret. Her father not her father. Her mother a woman who loved brown men so much she got knocked up by one, then left her husband for another. The driver of a car honked because she was walking in the street. "Fuck you!" she yelled. She loved him anyway. The drunk who took her into bars. The rain bent her face down, and when it lifted up there was Yolanda coming around the corner with a waste basket she must have emptied in the dumpster. Yolanda said, "I remember you." She had corn rows for hair, violet half moons for finger nails. "You looking for a piano?" said Angie. "Not me, the Father." Angie didn't like the sharp stare she was being given. "All right, then. Don't be standing around in the wet," Yolanda said. She followed Angie inside, and set the waste basket on the floor. She went down a hall and knocked on one of the doors, then leaned her head inside. She closed the door and called back to Angie, "He be right out." Yolanda went down the hall while Angie waited. The quiet was broken by the quick tapping of a radiator that slowed, stopped, and resumed like a sick heart not ready to quit. He came out the door Yolanda had opened a moment before, a short, round man wearing black pants, a priest's collar, and a ratty grey sweater. "I'm Father Mulvaney," he said and extended his hand. Angie didn't take it. "I understand you have a piano." "I can let you have it for fifteen hundred," she said. He nodded, rubbed his hands together, and stared into space just beyond her shoulder, as if he'd forgotten what he was going to say. "Hm. Now, what kind of instrument is it?" he asked. "Old and banged up." "An upright?" "Uh, huh." "Out of tune, I suppose?" "Probably." "Why are you getting rid of it?" "What do you think?" Angie had put a few paces between her and the Father by then. He took her in with one long hard look. "I think you could use a hot cup of tea, and a sandwich. I'm just about to have one, myself." Angie hadn't eaten breakfast that morning because she'd forgotten to get to the store the evening before. Sometimes she ate at work, if her boss left early. Last night he didn't, and she'd had two bags of M&M's for dinner. "Nothing fancy. Just ham and cheese," he said. His office was small and full of books and papers. The radiator's paint peeled gray flakes that showed a darker gray underneath. She sat in the chair opposite his, separated by an old wooden desk. On a smaller table were a plate with several sandwiches, a teapot, and a number of cups, most of them chipped. Angie looked at the amount of food, wondering. "Yolanda always finds a guest or two for me at the last minute. Saves the kitchen trouble by just having something made in advance," said the Father. "You must feed a lot of people," she said. "The mission down the street had to close its doors, and the economy hasn't picked up as much as we'd hoped." Angie finished her sandwich quickly, and the Father offered her another. She took it, but refused any tea. She looked through the window into the courtyard where a man swept bits of paper into a dust pan. His arms reached beyond the too short sleeves of his shirt. "What is it?" the Father asked. "Why is that guy working in the rain?" The Father looked through the window, too. "Francis? Well, I expect he needed to get some fresh air. He's not overly fond of being indoors." Angie watched the man some more and wondered what it was like not to mind getting wet. When she turned away she found the Father leaning on his elbows, watching her. "You pay cash, I'll drop the price a little," she said. His smile showed tiny uneven teeth. Above them his eyes were warm. "I'm afraid I can only offer something very nominal." "Like, how much?" "Can't really say, until I have a look at it." "Sure. You come by any evening. First floor apartment, end of the block going that way," she said, tossing her head over her right shoulder. Three days later Angie came home to find two bags of groceries by her door with a note Sorry to have missed you. I'll come again. Father Mulvaney. She took the bags inside and went through them. One had milk, eggs, butter, bread, frozen pizza, soup cans, spaghetti, even some coffee. In the other were flour, sugar, salt, a bunch of pretty fresh bananas, three oranges, and a can of peaches in heavy syrup. "Who the fuck wants that shit?" said Kevin. "Why doesn't he just cough up for the piano?" "He will." "He better." That night Kevin was going to rip off Ramon. He'd say to meet him at the bar where Angie worked, and then she'd keep him there with a free drink or two. Angie's boss didn't let her give away drinks. She'd have to put her own money in the till. Kevin didn't think about that. He only had a twenty on him. "I can make change," she said. "Forget it, will you?" Ramon didn't come into the bar at all. Angie called her apartment once, twice. At two a.m. when her shift ended she went home. Marta hadn't been let out. Angie cleaned the dog shit off the floor, walked her around the block, breathed in icy air. Angie's stomach was tight with hunger. Marta danced when the bowl of dog food descended from the heaven of Angie's human hand. The phone rang when she was fast asleep. "Babe, listen, I messed up." He sounded funny. He was crying, she realized. "What happened, Kev? Where are you?" "Ramon was there. He tried to get tough." It would have taken a lot more than a slap in the face to put Ramon down. Kevin would have had to finish it. "Kev, what – " "I can't believe it. I don't know what the hell happened." "Where are you?" "Never mind." He was quiet for a long time. "Kevin," she said. "I have to go. Oh, and look in the piano. It's yours." The line went dead. She got to her feet, and padded along the floor. The living room was given over to moonlight from the curtainless window. The piano lid took some lifting. The envelope inside contained one thousand dollars and the note, You don't know anything. The night was clear, and the violet sky thrown with stars. Take one down, her father used to say. That's what they're there for. Just reach up and take one. ~ The morning light seeped over the window ledge, then flowed like clean water into the room. Marta lay warm beside her. Kevin could be anywhere by then, though if Angie guessed right he was at his father's in Indiana, the place he hated so much he described it with a fist to his head – the blue twinkling pool, the big white barn in the middle of fifteen rolling acres, the yellow forsythia hedge. His father would take him in, because money took care of its own. And he'd never get caught, because Ramon was just some drug dealer from Tijuana who'd had nightmares about the truck he crossed the border in, the sealed-up heat of it, the days without water. Angie opened the kitchen door and let Marta into the little yard to pee. Marta squatted, then ran her nose through the dead winter yard until Angie called her back inside. After she had dressed and sipped a reheated cup of yesterday's coffee, Angie took Kevin's expensive wool sweaters, heavy flannel shirts, and three pairs of good leather boots and put them in a green garbage bag. She put his books on the sidewalk in front of the house with a note, written on an old grocery sack, Free. His toothbrush she threw away. The toothpaste he'd used was hers. She wasn't surprised by the wetness of her eyes, or the tightness in her throat. Ramon had made her feel more at home than Kevin ever had. Her neighbor, Joey, was sound asleep on a thrown out sofa two doors down. He wasn't homeless, but seemed to have trouble staying in his apartment at night. Angie nudged him with her foot, and he opened his gummy, red eyes. "You want to make twenty bucks?" she asked. He sat up, spat on the sidewalk, and scratched his head. His fingernails were filthy. "For what?" "Helping me roll a piano down the block." "You nuts?" "You want the money, or not?" Joey was several inches shorter than Angie, but strong. He had no trouble keeping the piano under control as it rolled back down the ramp. She took the other end, and kept it from veering off. The day was overcast, the air calm. They pushed past parked cars, one with someone asleep in the back seat, another with a broken out windshield, and another up on blocks. Every few minutes Joey stopped to clear his throat. When they reached the church Angie gave him his twenty. "How come we brought it here?" he asked. "That's my business. Now go on." The front door of the church was locked, and a side door, which gave on the alley between the church and the grocery store next to it was locked, too. There was a light on the second floor, and Angie threw a pebble at the window there, then another. The window lifted, and Father Mulvaney's head appeared in the open space. "Who's making that racket?" he called down. "It's here." "What is?" Angie pointed to the piano, which was being closely examined by an old man pushing an empty shopping cart. "So it is," said the Father. "It's yours. Free." "That's most generous of you." The Father's face took on a look of worry as he watched her from above. "Better get it inside before the weather changes," she said. "Miss – " But Angie had gone around the corner by then, back to her apartment. She needed to give Marta another walk after breakfast, get the bag of Kevin's stuff to the thrift shop and take whatever they'd give her in return, then gather up her own things. Then she'd find a pay phone, maybe by the airport, maybe by the stadium, some crowded random place where a trace wouldn't give her away. The call she gave the police would bring him in. He'd know it was her and one day, if he stopped hating her guts, he might realize that being taken wasn't the same as being bought.