Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Lions at Lamb House Review of Jamestown Review of The Children of Húrin Review of The Politics of Life Film Review of "300" Creative Nonfiction Home By Marion Agnew One Foot and Then the Other By Greg Coykendall Poetry Hannah Plays with Light By Kristine Ong Muslim Caricature of an Early Planter By Michael Lee Johnson Comes a Push-Cart Down a Long-Ass Ghazal By Levon DeBranch Modern Day Moses By Bob Boston Squares (2) Plaza De Armas, Santiago, Chile By Graham Burchell Fiction The Larchmont Campaign By Zain Deane Body Warmth By Louise Kantro The Good People Up North By T.M. Spooner Triple Word Score By Patricia C. Meringer Texans Abroad By Franklin Strong Hunting for Manhood By Jason Sizemore Staten Island Zen By Michael Enright 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 - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D 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.

Body Warmth By Louise Kantro Something very big was troubling Lilia. Joan’s third graders were pronouncing vocabulary words. The sounds from the children came back to Joan either in a close approximation of regular English speech or with an accent. Though they spoke in unison, Joan could usually spot which children were stumbling over sounds. Lilia was sitting on Joan’s lap, watching her face. Mimicking the movement of Joan’s lips, Lilia repeated each vocabulary word as Joan pronounced it. Every day the child either leaned on Joan or actually sat in her lap for the first hour or two, though the other third-graders had outgrown such a need. Normally, she was able to sit at her desk by the time they got to vocabulary. Today, Lilia’s presence in her lap was making it hard for Joan to hear the rest of the class. She thought about gently urging the child off, deciding instead to move quickly from pronunciation to meaning and practice. During the transition between activities, Lilia leaned her head against Joan’s chest, like a baby soaking in the essence of her mother through body warmth and the beating of the mother’s heart. Then, without speaking, she climbed off Joan’s lap and headed for her desk. Yes, something very big was troubling Lilia, but any time Joan asked her questions, the child just shut down. Joan had to satisfy herself with just providing a comforting lap for Lilia. Pulling the cordless phone away from her ear, Joan took off her cloisonné earrings, placing them on the headboard. She slipped her loafers off and flopped onto the bed, settling in to listen to her sister Elaine, who was complaining about the new precinct captain. But she was thinking about a film she’d seen in junior high. In the movie, a ten-year-old girl, one of many children in a migrant family, was struggling to survive in school. She was dirty and rarely spoke. “Elaine?” Joan said when her sister took a breath, “do you remember a movie about a migrant girl? I saw it in Mr. Franklin’s English class, and you had him too.” “There is no way in hell I’m going to remember a movie from that long ago,” Elaine said. “Are you thinking about one of your students?” Elaine could always tell if there was something underneath. That was the detective in her. “Yes. There’s a girl in my class who hasn’t been in school for a week.” “Did the office call home?” Joan watched the play of shadows across her lacy curtains. The day darkened, clouds moving across the sun. “I sent them a note with the roll,” she said, “but I haven’t heard back.” “Any signs of abuse?” “She’s pretty withdrawn, but then she’s just learning English.” It was happening again: the interrogation. Well, Joan had brought up the subject. “No bruises on her legs?” “She wears pants.” Joan was good at checking for bruises, but there was no way she could check under clothing. “Is she able to stay awake in class?” “Yes, but she’s a lost soul, Elaine.” “Have you spoken with the parents?” “I’ve called a few times, but the phone just rings and rings. I should have kept calling when no one showed up for Parent Conferences.” Joan pictured Elaine finger-combing back her short, gray hair. “Are you thinking that something happened to her?” Elaine could just hammer at a witness or suspect, and sometimes Joan felt like she was on the “suspect” end of the conversation. Joan, on the other hand, often just let troublesome thoughts slip away like sand passing through the hole in a three-minute timer. Patricia, her therapist, had taught her this visualization as a way of showing that everything passes with time, but sometimes what was supposed to be a coping mechanism could turn into something else. Over the years, Joan’s desire to pursue positive endeavors often just slipped through that three-minute timer and disappeared along with her negative thoughts. But she wasn’t going to let Lilia slip past her. She had to know what was going on. “I’ll check with the office again tomorrow,” she said to Elaine. “If they don’t know anything, I’ll get her address.” “I can’t come with you.” “Why not?” “They switched me to the four-to-midnight, remember?” That’s right. Nights. They’d discussed Elaine’s change in schedule because it meant they’d have to turn their regular Friday night dinner get-togethers into Sunday brunches. This week it was Joan’s turn, and she always consulted a cookbook and tried something new. Elaine, whose townhouse contained what Joan called a mini-kitchen, generally just ordered pizza or Chinese food. Either way, they ate. “Well, I’ll see what I can find out about Lilia tomorrow,” Joan said. “Oh, and come about eleven on Sunday, okay? I think I’ll try a new frittata recipe.” Joan reached across the bed to hang up the phone. She rested for a few minutes, her arms behind her head. Then she got out of the bed, took off her knee high stockings, which she placed in a bag for delicates, removed her blouse and slacks, throwing them in the hamper in her bathroom, and put on her jogging clothes. Grabbing keys and license from her purse, she stuffed them into her fanny pack, which she wrapped around her waist. This time, instead of following one of her regular routes along the canal, she would jog at the junior college. She needed a track, a path to follow, laps to count. Morning Circle was one of Joan’s favorite school activities. Today Jaime shared his frog and Omar passed around the watch his father had given him before sending him on the big airplane to his uncle in America. Joan thought about Lilia, who had been brave enough to share only once during Circle Time. Today Joan’s lap felt especially empty. She asked if any of the students knew where Lilia was. No one did. Morning Circle ended. Next came social studies, math, California History, lunch, Sustained Silent Reading, and science. At two-thirty, the children were too tuckered out to do anything but listen to a story, so she started Reading Time ten minutes early. When the final bell rang, Joan always felt like a tightly wrung washcloth or, on more physically exhausting days, as if she had been running a race she could never win. The gaps between her and the children were great. She was from an upper middle-class family. These children were poor. She had graying blond hair, green eyes, and very pale skin. Most of them were dark in hair and skin. She was five-eleven. Most of her children came from Third World countries, so few of the boys would ever reach her height. When Joan finished adjusting the desks and picking up the litter between the tables, she headed for the office. She wanted to see if they had reached Lilia’s parents. “I tried,” said Maria, the school’s bilingual front office clerk. “Three times, spread out over the day. No one answered. And there was no recorder.” “I guess I’d better have the address, then.” When she got to her car, Joan placed the slip of paper Maria had handed her on the dashboard and routed around in the glove compartment for a city map. As she drove, she tried to anticipate Spanish words she might use. At “V” Street, where she turned, the paved road gave way to dirt. She crossed the canal, turned left again, and slowed to check addresses. House numbers were hard to see. Scaredy-cat. Scaredy-cat. Joanie is a scaredy-cat. Joan forced herself to get out of the car. The tallow plant was just a mile down the road, and the odor assaulted her immediately, a kind of sticky-sweet pancake syrup smell. Within a minute, the smell morphed into something else: vomit. Joan hardened her stomach and started walking. Unlike her suburban neighborhood, here there were no sidewalks or curbs framing the houses. That these were not tract houses, not identical, would have been a selling point had they not been so small and shabby. Lawns were brown, most driveways merely leveled dirt, and only one house on the block had a garage. Rusting cars made in the sixties, when V-8 engines ruled the roads, were parked in carports, on the street, and on lawns. Not all mailboxes had house numbers. When Joan saw 517, one with no number, then 525, she decided that the no-number one must be 521, Lilia’s. She knocked on the door. Nothing. She knocked again, harder. This time she thought she heard something, a kind of scuffling sound, like a cat’s claws on linoleum. She squinted at the front window, trying to see through the crack in the sheet that was serving as a curtain. No matter how hard she squinted, she could see only darkness. She decided to check in the back yard. The grass was dry, and there were piles of old machine parts near the gate, but no playing children. Maybe one of the neighbors would know something. She went back to the front of the house and looked around. Two doors down, across the street, was a small house much like Lilia’s. A beat-up tricycle, an old yellow dump truck, and a doll were strewn across the lawn. A neighbor with children seemed a good place to start. She would do some detective work. When she reached the porch, she saw four pairs of eyes peering out the front window at her, but before she could knock on the flimsy wooden door, it opened. “Buenas tardes,” Joan said, smiling her nicest, most ingenuous smile. A tiny, wrinkled woman whose graying hair was wrapped in a bun nodded at her. “Soy la maestra de Lilia.” I am Lilia’s teacher. The woman looked confused. Well, maybe she knew Lilia only by sight, not by name. Odd, though. These children seemed about the right age. Joan pointed at Lilia’s house. “Lilia vive allá.” The woman shook her head, still puzzled. Joan described Lilia, explaining that there was an older brother, a younger sister, and a baby born to the family a few months before. The woman said she hadn’t seen anyone at that house for days. Could it be a week? “Quizás.” Maybe, but probably three or four days. Does the family have a car? “Sí.” There was no car now in Lilia’s driveway. The woman had not seen anything odd, but the family was...not friendly. She knew nothing about them, really, except, well, she kept her own children away, that’s all. The parents, expecially the father, but maybe Joan understood. Did she have children? Joan nodded (yes, she understood), also shaking her head (no, no children). “Muchas gracias,” she said, smiling in thanks. She could feel the eyes of the children as she walked back to her car, her thoughts churning. Pleased that she had actually spoken Spanish so somebody could understand it, she was mostly relieved that she could start thinking in English again. Too bad she’d learned only two things, that the family owned a car and that the parents were, perhaps, not to be trusted. As soon as she opened the door to her house, Joan dropped her tote bag on the kitchen table. Should she call Elaine at work? It was four-thirty, so the briefing between shifts should be over. Elaine was probably at her desk, just starting on her paperwork. But what solid information did Joan really have? Would Elaine do her “just the facts, Ma’am” number? She picked up the phone. When Elaine answered, Joan explained about how nobody answered the door but she thought she’d heard something. “What kind of something?” Elaine asked, using her Ms. Detective voice. “I don’t know. A scratching sound. Or maybe...thumping?” What was the word she had thought before? “A kind of scuffling. But maybe it was just my imagination.” Ghosties and goblins and ghouls! Ghosties and goblins and ghouls! Squelch the voice. She’s dead. She’s been dead for seventeen years. Squelch the voice. “I’ll check it out on duty tonight if I have a chance,” Elaine said. “Otherwise, I’ll go tomorrow morning on my own. That’s all I can promise.” “Okay,” Joan said. She hung up the phone, vowing to be patient. What else could she do? Good things come to those who wait. Like with Mama. She had gotten the cancer then died within six months. Mama’s relatively quick death had been the only gift she had offered besides the money, and Joan had never been sure if her swift death had been an act of will and therefore meant as a gift, or pure chance. Now that Mama was dead, she and Elaine only had to deal with her in their minds. Patricia had taught Joan the chant, Squelch the voice. And for those times when Mama didn’t speak but just hovered, Get thee gone. Joan’s chants didn’t work for Elaine, though. Elaine used to say she was saving money by doing therapy vicariously, through Joan, until Joan told her to shut up and get her own damned therapist or stop talking about saving money because it wasn’t about money, it was about survival. So Elaine stopped teasing her, and Joan, realizing that Elaine needed vicarious therapy as much as she needed the real thing, shared with her sister the things she was learning about how to cope. The chant that worked for Elaine was, She’s dead now, dead. She had to say it just that way, with two dead’s in the sentence. Patricia helped them learn to face the pain and then experience it as a dull throb, an ache. But Patricia kept pushing for more. For four of the five years she was in therapy, Joan resisted hearing that Mama herself must have suffered abuse as a child. But Joan had seen the lines of pain etched on Mama’s forehead, and she remembered moments of unexpected tenderness. She knew intellectually that abusers are made, not born (though Elaine had brought up Ted Bundy when Joan tentatively put forward this idea). What Patricia wanted was a step Joan was never able to take: a true acknowledgement of Mama’s pain, her dolor, she thought suddenly, the sounds and flavor of Spanish fresh in her mind from this afternoon’s visit to Lilia’s. But Mama’s power had reached its tentacles across her childhood into her adulthood, putting Joan on alert when she heard loud noises. Patricia called these alerts panic attacks. As years passed, though, the panic attacks came over her less and less frequently. Was it Mama’s tentacles or Daddy’s absence that poisoned her relationships with men and made it hard for her to open up with adults? Waiting for word about Lilia wasn’t easy, especially now that Joan was actually worried rather than merely concerned, but there was always grading to do. When Daddy took off, leaving ten-year-old Elaine and eight-year-old Joan to cope with their mother’s daily, sometimes hourly, outbursts, Joan had lived for school. School and books. Reading and Elaine. Elaine and long walks down suburban streets, streets that housed happy families, families Joan dreamed about, night after night, year after year, even after she was safe. When Mama died and the money came through, nearly a half million for each of them in trust and seven hundred thousand from the house, they were financially and emotionally comfortable enough to move away from each other for the first time since they had moved away from Mama and into an apartment together two weeks after Joan’s graduation from high school. They now lived a little over a mile away from each other. Joan glanced at her watch, surprised to see that twenty minutes had passed since she had spooned out the French Vanilla decaf coffee grounds and started the coffee maker. She turned on the twelve-inch TV she kept in the kitchen to fill the room with voices and settled at the table to grade papers and half-listen to the news. When the phone rang two hours later, she had just begun to think about making herself a sandwich. “Joan?” “Elaine?” “It’s bad, Joanie.” “Is she dead?” “No. The parents are gone, and the children were – well, there are three of them. They were tied to the furniture and locked in the house. The oldest, the boy, is in the worst condition.” Joan swallowed hard. “How long...?” “We don’t know yet. Four days maybe. The house was a complete pigsty. There were dirty dishes everywhere. There were three large cups on a table near the children, the kind you get at a convenience store. There’s no residue in the glasses, but we think there was water in them, which is good.” Mama never failed to feed them, never left them alone. Oh, how they had wanted to be left alone just to have some peace. But not really alone, not abandoned. Wait. Something was wrong. “Did you say three children?” Joan said. “Yes. I’d guess between the ages of four and ten.” “No baby?” “Baby?” “Yes. Three or four months old.” “We’ll have to dig up the yard,” Elaine said, her voice like sand. “Where are Lilia and the other children?” “St. John’s, in Intensive Care.” “They probably won’t let me see them since I’m not family,” Joan said. “Meet me there at eight, room four-twelve.” Joan kept imagining Lilia’s face, her dazed, lost look. She wanted to see Lilia but dreaded it, too, a dread that filled her with guilt. She would have to be brave so she could help Lilia feel less afraid. She turned into the hospital driveway, found a parking spot, and hurried inside. As she pressed the elevator button, she tried to prepare herself for what she might see. Emaciated children, like the ones they showed on TV to solicit donations? And, while the crimes against Lilia and the others were neglect and abandonment, Joan was imagining bruises, cuts, broken bones, and maybe even internal damage. She got off the elevator and followed a sign directing her to the waiting room, where she saw Elaine right away, pacing in a corner. “Joanie?” Elaine looked very old. “I just called the station. They found the baby, buried in the yard.” “The baby? Buried?” Dead baby. Lilia. Others. Two? Or was the baby one of the two others? Why did the number of children keep slipping behind a curtain in her mind? “We called DCF,” Elaine said, adding “Social Services” at Joan’s puzzled look. “Social...what?” “You keep repeating everything I say,” Elaine said. She sounded annoyed, like when Joan was little and Elaine would tell her to stop badgering her to explain what was going on in the TV programs they were watching. “You’re seeing the same show I am,” Elaine would say. “Just pay attention.” “The parents,” Elaine said slowly, as though talking to a child. “Lilia’s parents have disappeared.” “Oh.” Get thee gone, Mama. Get thee gone. The chant wasn’t working. Get thee gone. You’re dead now, dead. Joan began to shake. A flush swept over her, and she felt the throbbing of her pulse, the shortness of breath that signaled a panic attack. She knew what she had to do to stop it, but she would have to slow herself down to make her fingers work. Her hands trembled as she unzipped her handbag, pulled out a paper bag and opened it. Placing the open end of the bag at her mouth, she breathed deeply, counting in-out, in-out, slowly, slowly, spacing out her breaths. When she knew she was going to be able to breathe, when the heat had gone, she looked up at Elaine, who seemed to just now be taking in what was happening. “I’m sorry,” she said. Elaine nodded, and Joan was glad that Elaine knew to give her space and time. Joan closed her eyes. Her eyelids loose, she willed every part of her to relax, and her body began to feel limp and fluid. As she sank further and further into the chair, Joan was handed the realization, as though she were being offered a canape at a party: the chants she and Elaine had used for so many years weren’t going to work anymore. Joan was on the edge of figuring out what she was supposed to be realizing when she decided she was going to just have to let it – the insight, the idea, whatever it was – find her. She opened her eyes and, looking up, saw past the short-cropped gray hair and no-nonsense blazer to the girl with round cheeks and long, brunette braids who had been her refuge for as long as she could remember. She and Elaine were safe now, safe in ways that Lilia and the other children could not imagine, in ways that Joan had not until this moment believed she would ever feel. Come, Mama. Come with me, with us. “Joanie? Are you okay?” These children were not Mama’s children, not her mirrors nor the sources of whatever pain or guilt or shame Mama had felt. Come. Feel it, Mama. Feel what Lilia feels. Could people learn after death? Mama had never humbled herself to seek their forgiveness, had never forgiven her and Elaine for being born, or maybe for not being the children she’d wanted. But what about now? “Elaine, do you think Mama can see us?” “Are you asking me if I believe in an afterlife?” “I don’t know,” Joan said, standing up. Elaine shook her head, impatient now. “Are you ready?” Joan nodded, hooking her arm in Elaine’s. “Let’s go.”