The Artful Trade

Inseparable willmaguiretn@mail.com When I was seventeen and living on my own, certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home. My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead.It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living. The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door. The only thing past there was the interstate, the county line and the cemetery. That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter. I was poor and dumb and usually hungry and broke so I was always looking for another job. Passing through one day, I saw a Help Wanted sign and answered it. They hired me on the spot. The people there were so old I thought they were another species. Kind of human, but not like me. They weren't racing through the day...

I don’t believe in luck or fate or coincidence. I don’t believe that planes can fly above heartache. And I don’t believe any car is fast enough to ever catch a dream. But I believe in trains. Trains can take you places no car or plane ever could. Trains go beneath the surface, to the heart of things. And I believe in guardian angels. Because one night I took a subway train to Chinatown in New York City, I was saved by one, and somehow that same night, I became one. At 18, I was a naïve, dark-haired college basketball player, certain I was headed for the Hall of Fame. One night, after a game in Madison Square Garden, I got drunk. As drunk as I have ever been. Waiting for the subway, I got separated from my friends. Uptown was home and downtown was lost. I stepped on the express train to lost. At night in Manhattan, roaring through dark tunnels, it’s easy to lose your way. Being lost is a little like being stupid. Usually you don’t know you are. And that night I was both...

  There have always been things in the air that make living and breathing hard. We can’t see them: wind and heartache, ragweed and grief. But they are there just the same. I was seven when I first began to understand that. I woke gasping one morning, and my worried mother hurried me to the doctor. “Very severe,” the doctor said. “Ragweed.” His face fell, certain it was the kind of trouble he couldn’t fix. “Nothing to be done for it,” he whispered. “It’ll be hard on him. Poor little guy.” “What’s ragweed?” I wheezed. He touched my hand. “There are things in the air, son. Things we can’t see.” My mother thanked him, took my hand, and we stepped back out into the world and the air, filled with things that made living and breathing hard.   That year I learned there were other things in the air, too. There were songs that poured from the radio. Every night as they filled the air my sisters danced and dreamed about boys that might love them forever. And later they would listen for t...

The Hard and the Beautiful When I lived in New York I would regularly pass through Times Square.  It always had a few 'end is near' prophets begging the tourists and the strippers, the 3 card Monte dealers and kids that sold a pint of blood for 6 bucks on the 42 St clinic, to repent. When I was broke once I tried. They threw me out. I hadn't eaten in a few days and they said I would pass out down a pint. Too much trouble. I recall passing by them hectoring the sinner...hungry me... with their certainty and their signs. There was one guy that stood at the corner of 42nd and Broadway. But instead of bellowing about righteous punishment and how near judgement was he stood still repeating the same few sentences. "Living is hard. Living is beautiful."  The hard is trying to make you beautiful." Whenever I passed by I would look for him. Once in a downpour I stood next to him waiting for the rain to ease. He repeated his gospel again and again and seeing me near se...

Maybe Even American... excerpt  The Unforgotten Like everyone else in the kitchen, Armando was from Colombia. One of the hotel owners had a coca farm there. And after the original kitchen staff started to make noise about overtime, back pay and unions, he decided to make an offer to some of the Colombian farm workers.  He rounded up a dozen men, some as young as 16, all bachelors, and offered them a chance. A chance to leave their village and go to America.  “You’ll travel the ocean and see a great city,” he said. “You’ll have jobs and a place to stay and the pay will be twice what you make pulling weeds and kneeling in this dirt.” Each young man looked into his father’s tired eyes, then one by one laid down those weary dreams. For something more. For maybe even becoming American. One by one they said, “Yes señor. I will leave all I have known of this life I will go and live among strangers and try to be something greater than a gatherer of coca leaves.” They said goodbye...

The Numbers Game An old friend, a bond salesman, called me that morning from the 68th floor of a high-rise a few blocks away. I had been to church trying as I sometimes do, to pry myself away from my coyote instincts, hoping that someday something in me could be culled into something true.  He described the second jet, low and fast. His voice shook. I told him to get down on the street and head east up to Delancey and over whatever bridge he could into the refuge of Brooklyn. They had turned off the main elevators so he found the freight lift, stumbled in his blue suit down to the street then up through Chinatown, over the bridge and off the island. He walked the 9 miles to Queens and the train. Catching his reflection in a mirror, he saw that blue suit was entirely white, his face chalky, covered with a mist of dry wall and asbestos.  He said he looked like his own ghost. Back then, I often could not sleep. I didn’t count sheep. I'm Irish. I counted heartaches. For years I wa...

Stolen Away When I was a boy I tried to steal forgiveness from the record store in my small town.  It was a single—they called them 45s then. The Hollies. He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother . . . but it wasn’t about the record.  It was about regret.  The owner saw me slip out the door and run away. At ten, I was fast and light and he was slow and heavy and couldn’t catch me. I went back a couple weeks later figuring he would have forgotten such a small thing. He hadn’t. He grabbed me by the arm and called the cops. They came, looked annoyed and then called my father. Together they decided on my punishment. Each day after school I had to sweep Main Street in front of the record store.  But every night the wind would blow and dust would churn. And dirt once more would cover the road way I had tried so hard to clean. Broom in hand, day after day, trying to sweep away my guilt, I slowly began to understand.  Forgiveness cannot be stolen. You have to pay. It always has a...

copyright@2021 will maguire Late one night in Little Italy, I was 2 six packs in and stumbling home up the stairs. Passing an open door I saw this old Italian man all of about 50.  His wife had been hit by a bus on Fordham Road that summer. Killed.  When he got the call he just dropped the phone. Never said a word. He went silent the way some men do, trying to make himself deaf to grief by ignoring it, by vowing to never speak it and never listen to its roar... like the sound of the el train each night.  So he stopped answering the phone and and then his door. Tried to make himself unreachable to grief.   And he went to work each day, praying with his sweat that the ache in his back might someday quiet the ache in his heart.  That night he had the radio on some oldies station, standing at the stove, the smell of onion and sausage and peppers in the air.  As I passed it started to play The Very Thought of You.  ‘The mere idea of you...the longing h...

The Unforgotten copyright@2020 w. maguire “It aint right” the old woman said. “Young girl like that..her wedding night. Like to break my heart.” Sara nodded and sat down beside her. The beds had all been stripped and the laundry started and the old woman had stepped into an alley behind the laundry. She had smoked two packs of no filter Camels since she was 13 and her voice, rough as a gravel road, sometimes sounded like a cough when she spoke.  “All these rooms empty and them on a honeymoon. Just feels …dirty to me.” The old woman had spent her life cleaning other peoples sheets, bleaching them stark white and making beds, like laying in her sheets was the way to make up for all the dirt the city people did to each other. Sara watched as she took a drag. “Have you ever been in love?’ she asked. The old woman looked away. She began to speak but her voice caught. She wheezed and broke into a cough. “I don’t know. Maybe once.” “What does it feel like?” Sara asked. The old woman exhal...

 A Hunger for the Sweet copyright@2020 W. Maguire It's been a year since customers began arriving at Donut City before dawn each morning to buy dozens of donuts. One Monday, the shop sold out at 7:30—hours before its usual 2 p.m. closing time.  That week, regular customers had noticed that something was amiss. Every day for the past 28 years, the inseparable husband-and-wife team — Stella and John—Cambodian refugees, stood together behind the counter. But that month for the first time in decades Stella was absent. When customers asked, John quietly said she had suffered an aneurysm and had been hospitalized. John could not afford an employee. He could only see his wife after closing . . . or until that day's donut were sold out. Word spreads fast in a small town and there is still a hunger for sweetness in places where the bitterness is baked in. So soon friends and neighbors and then even strangers began to line up in the predawn dark, each waiting to order dozens of donut. P...

      copyright@2020 will maguire  Last year one of my tires started going flat. A slow leak. As I began looking for a service station, I couldn't help but remember another time that I needed air. When I was kid I had a bike, the kind with really fat tires that were so old they were always leaking. Every week I had to stop by the nearby filling station to air them up. The old man that ran the place sat in the shade just outside the screen door. And each time, gravel in his voice, he would ask, “You ever going to buy something, son?” I’d shrug and say, “No sir. Got no money.” He would look hard at me, then, eyes softening, he’d say - “Well, that's all right, boy...air is still free.” Like everyone else these past few months I've been watching the slow roll of the COVID death toll. Five thousand, then ten, now an unimaginable 110,000. I’ve listened to doctors plead and wives cry out. I’ve heard strong men in hospital wards gasp for air through ma...