He placed a delicately flowered pink dish of extra olives
upon a metal tray beside the extra beverage
that wouldn't fit in the short glasses in a pitcher,
like the one that held Mike's tomato juice side.
He poured generously as always.
As he set the drinks down on their table,
he ruefully smiled at them.
Mike raised her eyebrows as they tipped him $17--
big tip for a $3 charge.
At Bog it always was happy hour.
The couple sat without speaking-- the girl
at the edge of despair, the boy calm and collected.
He was pretty-- shaggy hair, doe eyes, thin but not frail.
They took coordinated sips of the martinis.
They conducted a long staring contest.
"Good night," Mike said as she bent down
to get her umbrella and lunch sack off the floor.
Pete was cutting up lemons slowly and methodically
with a sharp knife that had belonged to his mother.
She'd once run for mayor.
The knife had a white bone handle
into which the words Mike for Mayor. were carved.
His mother was also named Michael.
Pete raised the knife in Mike's direction "I wave goodbye,"
and then he went back to the slicing.
She took a deep breath in the pine-scented rain.
An empty bus went past, whooshing up
the hill toward the park.
It looked like the magical cat bus from a Japanese movie
she'd seen as a kid with her mother.
That bus could fly.
It even had fur.
She stared down the hill toward the city.
It was quiet-- no motion.
And up on Mount Fair, the deep fog had settled.
Mount Fair had a beautiful silhouette
by moon and by streetlight-- fir trees against the night sky lit
by the city.
It was a covered volcano.
Mike turned to her home, though the volcano, as always,
beckoned to her.
In her second story apartment, in gray flannel pajamas,
she leaned out a window.
She flicked ashes down through the pines.
She took just a few puffs of an old cigarette
before tapping the lighted end out on the building's faded
gray siding and slipping the barely smoked cigarette back
into a very warm carton and under the mattress.
It was a white curtain with a picture
of a black camera on it.
Mike and her friends had bought it in high school downtown.
This was the day they also acquired fake driving
IDs under a tent in an alley.
She'd been Mike's dearest friend.
Often, they went up to Mount Fair
and read favorite verse to each other.
"I've painted a picture of a ghost upon my kite
and hung it on a tree.
Later, when I loose the string and let it fly,
the people cower and hide their heads and so forth."
Poems that went like that.
Some years later, the friend had jumped
from the roof of the building where her own mother had died.
"Assholes don't kill themselves, no one was there,"
her suicide letter had read, the night watchman had found it.
Rain hit the windows.
It was only drizzling now.
The sound was muted, electric.
It was morning when Mike dozed off at last.
The rain had stopped and the sun shyly shone through the window.
Sometimes when it rained so much in a place,
the sun becomes awkward, like a person who doesn't often
get out of the house.
As usual, Mike would sleep until noon, and when she awoke,
our story started once more.
"There was a little dead family cold
as a ghost younger than most, one in a little trench coat,
and they all lived in a warm wooden building.
The little dead father said 'good morning' one day,
put on his hat, and went away into his little dead world.
The little dead mother bathed her dead child,
and off the girl went to play on the volcano in the park
near where they lived.
It was a wild, wild park.
Pine trees grew all over the ground,
and wild winds blew through the air,
wild cones fell from the trees, and wild owls
whispered in the dead child's ears and made her wonder.
'Hoo, hoo/'"