Serpentine, Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1999

The Twin Skies of Twilight

by Gina Ochsner

Looking back, it seems strange I ever took the billboard job: I'm a little afraid of heights and the hours weren't so good. But there I was at the A.K. Media office, the push mop in one hand, a bucket of glue in the other one bright September morning. The guy before me had quit unexpectedly, some problem with the glue Jerry, my super, said with a wink. Actually I was a little surprised A.K. Media even had a billboard division: Ames isn't a tiny town, but it's not that big, either, only had four billboards that I could think of, and I wondered if there would even be enough work to last the month.

        After I took the pee test, filled out the paperwork and showed my BIA card, Jerry drove me in his old Chevy van to my first board. Outside the van it was all amber skies of crisp leaves and the sharp smell of smoke in the air. I loved September, thought it was the best time of the year to be alive because it was in the early morning chill and warming noontime thaw that reminded you of breathing, of the quality of air and of life. You could almost hear the earth turning on the rusty nails of its axis, grinding into the next season. I inhaled a deep breath through my nose and smiled, and thought, what a cake-walk of a job, scraping old paper in long trailing tears, peeling it off like dead summer skin, and slapping up newer skin.

        "We're a little different than some of the other advertising companies around town, Ray." Jerry said, shoving his Credence tape back into the tape player. We'd been hearing the chorus of "Lodi" for three blocks before he realized the tape player was stuck and probably eating the tape. "We don't just place an ad for our clients. We take care of that ad for our clients. We believe in quality, in seeing a job through from start to finish." Jerry said.

        I nodded, though I had no idea what he was talking about. The truth of the matter was I needed this job, and I didn't care what I had to do. I had just been fired from the meat lab at the University for eating an infected test sample of pork. I think a part of me must have been begging to get fired and I suppose I have always wanted to astonish someone. It was the day before our oral exams, and I wanted to give everyone a good laugh, so I ate the pork while doing a Jim Carey "Turbo-Juicer" impression. An hour later, one of the lab techs drove me into urgent care to get my stomach pumped before the trichinosis took hold in any vital organs. "You're lucky, like a cat with nine lives" the male nurse had said to me as he snipped the yellow ID tag from around my wrist. But even then, I'd noticed that all my lives were small and insignificant, as if instead of nine, I had eleven or twelve really stupid disposable lives left. I dropped out of the program the next day and had been coasting on student loans through the summer. Now it was September and I was broke.

        In front of us a big grey Lincoln full of Phi Kappas, pulled a U-turn.

        Jerry pounded the steering wheel with his palm. "College people," he said turning to me. "The smartest idiots you'll ever meet."

        "Yeah," I said, studying my fingernails, "real idiots."

        "Anyway, tearing down the old ad and putting up an new one is just the start."

        "Lodi" was still playing and this time I jiggled with the tape player.

        "After you paste the new ad up -- and don't worry, I'll show you how to do that so it doesn't bubble or warp on you -- then you gotta sit with it."

        I nodded. Sit with it. No problem.

        "Questions?"

        "After the glue dries, then what?"

        "That's it. You baby-sit.

        "For how long?"

        Jerry pulled out the Credence tape and threw it onto the dash where I noticed he had gummed a menagerie of saints: Ignatius, Anthony, Jerome, Christopher, all my favorites. "That depends on the client. Sometimes they want somebody to stay up there and act as a sort of bodyguard to the ad."

        "This is a joke, right?"

        "No joke. Scouts honor. That's what I mean by baby-sit. Take this first job for instance. It's a political ad. It's controversial. I'm talking hot. You can imagine," Jerry said, turning and smiling.

        I shook my head, slowly from side to side, to say no, no -- I couldn't imagine.

        "So they're paying extra for you to sit up there and make sure no one damages the ad. Get it?"

        "Do I get hazard pay?"

        Jerry gave me a sidelong glance. "Sure, Ray, sure," he said with a trademark wink.

*

        What most people don't realize is how dangerous some minimum wage jobs can be. Take mine, for instance. Right from the get go, I could tell that my first board job was going to be a volatile one. No sooner had I peeled the old Caterpillar ad down and started prepping the backing for the new ad, I had drawn a crowd. I unrolled the glossy, a smaller square that came in one big piece, and centered it on the board. That's when the heckling started.

        "Hey, Chief!" A big fat guy called up to me.

        A few people next to him started yodeling or something -- the sort of sound I guess they thought a real Indian would make. Ordinarily the 'Chief' stuff doesn't bother me. But today I flipped the guy off before I went back to rolling a coat of sealer. I arched my back into my harness to get the brush up on the top edges of the ad, a political slogan: "Vote NO on 49" in big block letters.

        I was finishing the final coat of sealer, and the name-calling was escalating from below on the street. A few Anti-49s had also gathered at the bottom of the ladder were mixing it up a little with the fat guy, some counter-name calling, mostly. Then the fat guy started swinging. I aimed globs of glue in Fat's direction, but the glue caught wind and flew off course. Finally, I unhooked from my harness and started making my way down.

        That's when a flying object, a bottle, from the sound of it, hit my head. Luckily, I was just three rungs from the bottom and my fall was a short one. Someone drove me to the hospital where 'No on 49!' supporters trekked en masse, crowding the hallways outside the examining room. From inside the little examining room packed to the gills with catheter kits and boxes of latex gloves and supersize cartons of gauze, I could hear them milling outside the door and offering encouragement:

        "Way to go, brother!" They called in to me, giving me the thumbs up sign through the door's little square wire window.

        "Right on!" A woman wearing a purple wool facemask cried. But I wished they would just all go away. What would they think of me if they knew that I didn't know what ballot measure 49 was even about, wasn't a registered voter, didn't even believe in voting?

        "Hey again." It was the male nurse, the same one who'd pumped my stomach last spring. "Sounds like you're some kind of hero," he said to me. I couldn't be sure if he was making fun of me or not, so I shrugged. Afterward, after more paper work and some painkillers, I walked home to my sleeping room, careful not to run into anyone who looked politically motivated.

*

        After the ballot measure business, Jerry gave me a small consolation bonus, and for a while, I wore my full-face bike helmet while I board-sat. In my absence the Pro-49ers had added their own creative touches to the ad, whiting out with sloppy brush strokes the "NO" part of "Vote NO on 49". It was easy enough to fix, but the helmet cut visibility down and I had to turn my head too far in either direction to really see what I was doing. All that turning in one direction or the other eventually made me so dizzy that I worried that even with the ropes, I would lose my bearings and fall. So I decided to go without the helmet. But even then, sometimes the lights would seem to cut in and out and I'd grip the edge of the board and wait till the world undizzied itself and the sky went right again.

        Jerry would check in on me two or three times a day, bringing coffee and donuts, and sometimes even cigarettes and gum. But then the same day I got my stitches out, Jerry gave me instructions to pull down the 49 ad. The 49ers had declined to pay for their ad space because their ad had been defaced while it was entrusted to A.K.'s care.

        Jerry gave me a knowing look. "Don't worry, Ray," he said. "This sort of thing happens all the time, and believe me, it's not your fault." I rubbed the place just under the top of my braid where my stitches had just come out and wondered if I was really the right billboard sitter for A.K. "I wouldn't blame you it you wanted to quit," Jerry said to me then, unloading the oversized cardboard tube that held the new ad.

        Maybe it was that bump on my head, or maybe I was really beginning to like how from up here I could see the way a broad shaft of sunlight could illuminate a whole building, turning it from something common to something on fire and glowing. Or how distance turned the trees into cracks on the skyline, little mile markers on a colossal compass. I'm not sure why, but I decided to stay up on the catwalk. I wasn't quitting. The truth of the matter was that this was the most exciting job I'd ever had.

        Jerry winked at me. "It's a Camel Ad," he said, turning for the van. I felt my stomach drop a few notches. Camel had been battling it out with Marlboro for supremacy in the Plains states for a while now and I wasn't looking forward to anymore confrontations. "Have fun." Jerry called over his shoulder. Then he nosed the van onto the street and was gone.

        I have no real strong feeling about cigarettes. I'm a scavenger and I smoke whatever's offered, whatever's free, or, at the very least, cheap. But when I unfurled the ad and started pasting it up, one strip at a time, I thought, "My God -- have I died and gone to Heaven?" Before me in colors so vibrant and true that put the shedding trees below me to shame was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. Stretching across the whole board in plum velvet and a push-up bra, her hips a dangerous curve, was this year's new Camel model. She was draped over a couch, her long brown hair flipped over one shoulder, and in a cigarette dangling from her hand. A special neon ring with a chargeable battery pack attached to the end of the cigarette giving the tip a soft red glow. I stood on the catwalk and stared, open-mouthed, and ran my hand over her black velvet heels, half expecting to feel the buzz of velvet under my hand. Though I had always thought the Joe Camel character was suave, as a suave as a cartoon could possibly be, he was no match for the airbrushed beauty of a real woman.

        This was the closest I would probably ever get to a woman, I must have realized. While this discovery should have depressed me, it didn't. Instead, I made a decision. I would be committed to this Camel ad. Commitment is not a word to be feared, I told myself. It is a female myth that men fear commitment and I decided to prove that I could and would be as committed to this ad with the buxom girl as I had been in any relationship, real or imaged, I'd ever had. That's why on the third day after I pasted up the ad, I went back to my room, collected my sleeping bag and some essentials: beer, toothbrush, toothpaste, some clean underwear and change of pants, and decided to live up there on the catwalk where I would be lulled to sleep under the heavenly bosom of the Camel girl and the sweet sounds of the 3:00 a.m. train.

        The next two weeks were the golden days of board sitting, all starlings and sky and me testing the wind for flight. People slowed a little to look at the billboard, to look at me, shocked, I suppose, to see someone up there, and I imagined as the traffic crawled by and some people honked, that I was some kind of a star. A billboard hero, or something.

        Then I thought of my disposable cat lives and knew it couldn't be much longer before the winds changed and with it, my luck. I'd never been lucky, never won a cakewalk, a round of Bingo, or a lottery. Each day I woke up on the walk I could hear the imaginary tick tick, the winding down. Then came the day I was sitting on the platform, my feet dangling over the walk's edge as if I were sitting on the bank of an enchanted stream and the cars and people below were minnows. I was eating sunflowers, spitting the husks on the traffic below when I heard the sound of a chopper: a distant buzz that took shape as it shifted direction, a black and red wasp, a nightmare growing larger and more ominous with sound.

        I couldn't even hear the whir of the turbine without thinking of my Uncle Morry, a chopper pilot, and the first Indian, the first "True American" the papers called him, to die in Viet Nam. But then I heard something strange coming from the helicopter, something like orchestral music: trilling flutes, crashing symbols and the bluster of trumpets. I hooked into my harness and leaned into the board and held my hat down. When I looked up under the bill of my hat I saw hovering before me a Marlboro chopper. The red undercarriage was swollen and fiery like a Black Widow's with a dark M sprawling over the belly that in my mind grew longer legs and untangled into a giant swastika. I swallowed and thought I could feel another cat life crawling away from me.

        They made several passes, each one knocking me to my knees where I would cross myself and thank God for the harness. And then with the music still blasting and the whir and whine of the rotors filling the air, the chopper spun quickly and simply disappeared beyond the upper edge of the board. I held my palms over my ears and waited, crouched, like an animal, waiting for the cymbals to stop crashing inside my ears. When I stood up, I scanned the sky, sure they were coming back, bringing more choppers maybe. But they were gone, completely gone, all that noise replaced by the hum of the wind.

        I sat down and pulled at the stubble on my chin. I wondered what the chopper business was all about, wondered about the pilot and copilot seated inside. Maybe they were curious or just a little bored. I bet they weren't even loyal Marlboro smokers, and like me would smoke whatever was around. Maybe I'd get to know them. I made a mental note to bring more beer, just in case, and to ask Jerry again about that hazard pay.

        The next day I woke up just as dawn broke and commuters to Des Moines were clogging the streets. The air was turning, had taken on sharper edges and I thought I'd tell Jerry it was time for a battery operated thermal blanket. Overhead the birds exploded from the trees like grapeshot, scattering and wheeling, practicing their Ride patterns, testing their wings. I thought, Good for them. There are friendlier cities for birds than this one. Just last month the townspeople passed a city ordinance: the birds roosting downtown had to go -- they were crapping on the sidewalks, picking through the trash, and driving down property values. So every evening, at that time of fireflies when the birds began to settle, the board members, shop keepers and their families went up and down the street banging pots, clanging chimes and shooting blanks through a bazooka launcher, all to drive out the birds.

        I was thinking about all this, the birds, how it might not be healthy to live in a town that does not like birds, about a good name for my Camel girl, when the I heard in the distance a droning growing louder. My hands started shaking. I thought about the memory of my uncle, the true patriot, about how he used to say that thunder was the sound of tiny birds destroying the bad thoughts of people. I thought about how I would like to do one good thing in my life, one right thing before these Marlboro people gave me a heart attack. I pulled on my harness and hooked up to the lead rope, sat back down on the boards and held a six pack of beer in my lap.

        Given the terror the sound of a whirring turbine can produce, the way my heart feels like its climbing right up and out my throat, it was hard not to just unhook and climb down the rungs. But I stayed, sat there with my eyes open and watched them approach.

        They blew by me, the first time blowing my hat off and over the board, the second time just for good measure. Then they nosed in, the rotors just inches from shredding the board, the cockpit only a foot or two away from me. I held up the six-pack and pointed to it and gave the pilot a big smile. "Ride of the Valkyries" blared from the loudspeakers mounted just under the cockpit where I could see the empty shafts of missile launchers. The co-pilot smiled back and flipped me the bird. Then he slid open a small side window and lobbed raw eggs at me. The first two slid right off my shoulder and down my chest. The third one caught me on the side of my head.

        I slammed the six-pack on the boards and threw my hands up in the air.

        "Why do you torment me? I am your brother!" I yelled over the trumpet blasts. Through the Plexi-glass, I saw the pilot shaking his fist, could see his lips moving, could even make out the entire string of profanity. He whipped the chopper around and blew by me, the draft from the rotors throwing me into the board, all the while the music blasting, the trumpets piling up in a huge crescendo and the cherry-on-the-top cymbals ringing in my ears. And then they were gone, lifted up and over the top of the boards towards the long line of the horizon.

        I wiped the eggs off my chest and face and opened a beer. It was clear now that we would never be friends, that their professional dislike of their competition and product loyalty ran deeper than mine did. All in all, I had to admire the sheer tenacity of these guys, the genuine ardor they seemed to posses, the vigor with which they embraced free market in all its savage beauty. I worried, though, how far their enthusiasm would take them and if I shouldn't be wearing my helmet again.

        That afternoon, when he came by with some coffee, I told Jerry about the Marlboro Chopper of Intimidation, about the "Ride of the Valkyries" blaring over their loudspeaker, the display of Anti-Camel aggression.

        "Bastards," Jerry said, slapping the dash with his open palm, "What kind of person doesn't like a camel?" He joked, turning to me, and I knew then that he didn't believe me.

        I climbed inside the van and we drove around for awhile before Jerry pulled in for a Slushie at 7-Eleven. "You could go sit at another board, if you want," he said, at last.

        I shook my head. The truth of the matter was that this job needed me, and this billboard needed me. What would the Marlboro guys do if I weren't there?

        "Let's get back to the ad," I said, panicked, sure that some harm would come to the Camel girl if we didn't hurry.

        "Holy cow." Jerry whistled as we pulled up between the metal supports of the board. He stepped out of the van and surveyed the Camel model's expansive bosom. "I guess I can't blame you for wanting to stay."

        That night I had troubled dreams of sparrows who couldn't find trees to roost in, of hawks slamming into the board, mistaking the black velvet for night, of turbulent clouds and Viking women with horns on their heads, and no matter how I turned or curled on the platform, I couldn't get comfortable. The next morning, I woke up, tired, and with a bad taste in the back of my molars.

        "Hey up there!"

        I rubbed my eyes and peered over the edge of the walk.

        "Could you come down here for a minute?" It was the girl with the purple facemask, the one from the hospital.

        "Could you, uh, do you think you could come up here?" I called down.

        "No. I'm afraid of heights," she called up.

        I unhooked my harness and started the climb down. "I'm Ray," I said, stepping off the bottom run and offering her my hand. She took my hand carefully, held it for a moment in hers, and then carefully curled my fingers up into a fist.

        "I'm Mina. Mina is short for something else, but I'm not telling you what that is," she said, letting go of my hand. I wanted to ask her why she was here, why she was even talking to me.

        "Why are you wearing that mask?" I felt my face turn hot. That wasn't the question I meant to ask.

        Mina's shoulders stiffened. "I'm protecting my nose," she said. "I work in a test lab; I smell things, mostly feet and sometimes armpits." I could hear a hard edge in her voice.

        "Well, hey, good to meet you, Mina. I've never met anyone who smells things all day long in a lab and I like the mask, really, I do."

        Mina was studying the tops of my shoes and twisting a silver and turquoise ring around her finger.

        "So do you get paid hourly or by the foot or armpit?"

        Mina's lips curled up into what I thought might have been a smile, though it was hard to tell with her mask on. "I have a good nose. I can smell things before they even happen. I can open a refrigerator and tell you how many more days you have before something goes bad."

        "Wow." I held my hand over my mouth. I hadn't brushed my teeth yet.

        Mina nodded. "I'm not bragging. It's just the way it is. I can even smell when someone's angry -- there's a sort of an odor to anger, even if there are no visible signs of it, I can tell. The same way I can tell when someone's lying to me."

        "No kidding." I looked at her facemask, at the purple bump that was her nose.

        "Well," Mina took a step back. "I just wanted to introduce myself."

        "Why?"

        "I've been watching you." Mina said. "You were here at this board during the whole 49 campaign."

        "Yup." I bent my head and rubbed that hard knot at the base of my hairline.

        "I thought you were really brave. It takes some guts to stand up for what you believe in,"

        Mina looked up at the Camel girl and suddenly I felt a little ashamed.

        "Most people don't know this, but Camel is developing a new cigarette, a more environmentally friendly cigarette. That's why Marlboro is advertising so aggressively. It's all out cigarette warfare -- crazy stuff. You wouldn't believe it even if I told you"

        "I gotta go now." Mina took another step backward. I could tell she wasn't buying my Camel story. "But I'll come back again tomorrow," she said, and then she turned and walked away.

        "This is for you," Mina yelled up to me the next afternoon, balancing a brown paper bag on the bottom-most rung.

        I unhooked the harness and scaled down the ladder. Inside the bag was a tube of toothpaste and underarm deodorant. "It's from the lab," Mina said, fiddling with her facemask.

        "Could you do me a favor?" I asked her, my palm over my mouth. "Would you take that off?"

        Mina's back went rigid and her hands flew to her sides and I knew I'd made another mistake, a big one.

        "I'm sorry," I said to her. "I'm half Sioux, but sometimes I'm just all ass-hole." I saw her eyes take in my face, my eyes, my skin. Then her eyes narrowed. She peeled the mask over her face and head, in a motion so fast her hair was hanging in her face before I'd had a chance to get a look. She kept her head bent and her black hair in her face. Then I watched as her shoulders lifted and she drew in a big breath, tipped her chin up and let her hair fall back out of her face. Her skin was mottled like she'd been burned by hot oil and a thick long straight scar connected the outer corner of her left eye to her bottom of her jaw. But even with her strange markings, Mina had beautiful skin, brown in most places and just as I thought, she had a great nose. I followed her gaze up to the Camel girl.

        "Come up on the cat walk with me, Mina." I grabbed her hand.

        "No," she pulled the mask back over her face. "Some other time," she said backing away from the rungs. I couldn't blame her for not wanting to be up here with me: there wasn't a whole lot of room on the catwalk and with the buckets of sealer out, she was probably afraid of falling. Then there was the Camel model. It's not easy to be anything other than typical and blonde in the Midwest. Though I've been in Ames for way too long, I still have trouble writing checks at the grocery store and I'm carded everywhere I try to buy beer.

        "Some other time," she said again and she turned and walked away.

        But Mina came back every day after that, each time bringing me something from the lab. And each day, I'd try to get her to come up on the boards with me.

        "You won't fall," I promised her, but it was several days before she'd even climb up the ladder. And then a few more days of her gripping the top rung of the ladder before she would come up on the platform, and even then only with the safety ropes hooked up.

        "You seem pretty smart. You could probably do something else and make better money," Mina said to me one day. I thought about telling her the meat lab story, but then decided against it.

        "I like it up here. The overtime pay is pretty good," I lied. "And the benefits," I whistled. "Just look at them."

        Mina turned and looked out over the city, her hands white from gripping the ropes. She was wearing her purple wool mask.

        "No, you can't see it that way. I've tried it. You gotta look without the mask on -- you can see a whole lot more than way."

        Mina studied me for a minute.

        "Don't worry; no one will see you up here."

        Mina pulled the mask over her head, and stuffed it into her coat pocket like it was no big deal. But I noticed that she wouldn't turn in my direction and kept her head tilted so that most of her hair was hanging over the side of her face.

        We didn't talk; we just looked out over the city. Every now and then I'd offer her some gum or coffee from my thermos. She'd sit up there with me for a good hour almost every afternoon and smoke a cigarette, just one because smoking was bad for her nose, she said, but good for her nerves.

        We went on like this for a week and I knew I'd better officially ask her out soon because so far things were too good to be true and I was afraid she'd just disappear from my life just as quickly she had entered it.

        Our date would have to be up here, on the boards, of course. The Rolling Stones were coming to town, the big "Voodoo Lounge Tour," everyone around campus had been talking about. I could care less. A free show was a free show. I'd even listen to U2 if they came by.

        "Go out with me." I said to her the next afternoon. It was late September now, but the sun still burned warm.

        "Where?"

        "Up here. The Rolling Stones are at the stadium this weekend. We'll have the best seats in the house."

        Mina wrinkled her nose and twisted her turquoise ring around her pinkie finger. "Throw in some root beer and you got a deal."

*

        Saturday night. I had gone back to my sleeping room, paid the rent, took a shower and shaved. Now I was back up on the boards with extra blankets, root beer, real beer, and a bundle of nerves. Mina had never been up here in the dark. It was different up here in the dark; it was easier to misjudge space, to think you had more room that you did, to get flustered by lights and sound. I draped my blanket over the billboard floodlights. I could probably get fired for it, but I knew Jerry was planning on drinking himself into a stupor tonight and wouldn't be out to check on me.

        "Hey there." Mina hoisted herself over the top rung and onto the platform. She was wearing her red scarf instead of her mask. I reached behind her for the harness, but she pushed my hand away.

        "Not tonight. I'm feeling risky."

        I handed her a root beer. "It's not much, but you're worth it." Mina looked at the can of soda. "I mean, that's not what I meant exactly." I stammered.

        "Shhhh." Mina put her fingers to her lips and smiled.

        "What are you so afraid of?" She asked, untying the scarf and stuffing it into her pocket.

        "Marlboro Cigarettes." I said. Mina laughed. "No, really. I haven't told you about the Marlboro Chopper of Intimidation and Doom, yet. On lonesome nights it comes screaming over the horizon, playing loud Viking music and raining down anti- Camel literature and free samples of Marlboro Cigarettes."

        "Doesn't sound that bad to me," Mina said, poking around in her shirt pocket for her lighter.

        I studied her by the light of the glowing Camel cigarette tip, that white swizzle stick that looked as if it were shooting from out of the back of her head and into the hand of the velvety model. I looked at Mina, at her nose, her beautiful long and straight nose that divided her face into two equal halves. "You're beautiful," I said.

        Mina shook her head. She tipped her head back and studied the plum velvet breasts of the cigarette girl. "That's beautiful," she said.

        "I guess." Even as I said it, watching her eyes, I saw doubt traveling like clouds over her face and settling in the lines around her eyes. She wrinkled her nose and I knew she was sniffing me out. I could sense a mistake, a big one coming, the same way my whole body is seized by stillness just before a great and violent sneeze. I shrugged and imagined another one of my little cat lives in a crumpled paper bag, circling in the current just before going under.

        I wanted to touch her hand, lightly, gently. I liked those little bones in her hand. If I were some kind of an artist I would draw her hands. A woman's hands are the most beautiful part of her body -- forget everything I ever said about breasts. I was just gathering courage when the nightmare started: the droning whine and hum of the Marlboro Chopper. Shit! I thought, Not now. I could stand their abuse any day of the week, but why now? I had to get Mina down off the catwalk and fast. She'd never been steady, not even with the ropes. And here she was, without the harness, because she trusted me, was depending on me to steady her. If those bastards blew by us, and I had no doubt that they would, Mina would probably never forgive me, never trust me again, no matter how I begged or pleaded.

        "Let's go," I said, bold now, and taking her hand.

        "But the show is about to start."

        "Forget the show."

        "What's wrong, Ray?"

        "I just want to get out of here, that's all." I could hear the droning whine getting louder and I knew it would be half a minute or less before they were on us.

        "Please, Mina." I looked behind the board to the sky to see how far off the chopper was.

        "No, Ray. I'm staying." Mina sat back down and opened another can of soda.

        They were coming, there was no denying the sound of thunder growing behind us.

        "Honey." I was pleading now.

        And then it happened: I saw myself moving in slow motion as if time and sound were water. I leapt toward Mina, grabbed her around her rib cage and pushed her against the board and held her there. Her mouth was open and though I couldn't hear her over the noise of the chopper, I knew that she was screaming from the way the cords in her neck stood out and her eyes were squeezed shut. I didn't hear "Ride of the Valkyries," and when I opened my eyes, I saw that the chopper had veered toward the concert and that it wasn't my Marlboro Chopper of Doom after all, but a concert chopper, probably out shooting video. I looked down and saw that my hands were on Mina's breasts. Then she was crying, big powerful sobs pushing her shoulders up and down.

        "Mina, I'm sorry," I said, moving my hands from off her chest and onto her shoulders. Mina was still sobbing, but it was a quieter, strangled kind of a cry. "I thought it was those Marlboro bastards, I thought -- " Mina shook off my hands and started down the rungs.

        "Mina, please. Let me explain," I called down to her, but I knew even as she pulled her mask back on that this might be one of those mistakes an apology, no matter how complex and sincere, could not ever fix.

*

        Now, out of sheer habit, I'm back at the billboard. Jerry has asked me if it isn't time for me to move on, to rotate, or just quit. He probably thinks I'm crazy, but I know I'm not. Up here I have a clarity I never had before. Up here I can see the world both on fire and freezing over. >From up here I can see storm clouds roll in, wet with the look of a crow rising up from a river in flight, those one-lung moons, or the best: clear twilights when I can look straight up over the top of the board and see the moon appear one rib at a time. And then, too, there's something about the pull of stillness and how it is broken by the wind, how the wind can change in an instant, catch me off guard and throw me against the harness, reminding me of where I am.

*

        The season had changed out for cold and I doubted I'd ever see Mina again when I heard someone coughing with purpose at the base of the ladder.

        It was Mina. She was wearing her red scarf, a sign of promise, for it meant she was giving me permission to see her face. She had been crying: her nose was red and her face looked crumpled and hurt and angry all at the same time. I could see her mouth moving like she was practicing, trying out what she could say. Finally she settled:

        "Hey."

        "Hey." I shimmied down the ladder and grabbed her hand.

        "You scared me the other night."

        I held her hand, or she was still letting me hold her hand, and I gave her hand a quick squeeze.

        "I know." I could feel a clean sharp pressure in my nose, the kind I get just before a nosebleed, the kind I get when I'm blinking back some guilt.

        "If I could redo that whole evening, I would." I said, my voice catching and splitting in my throat.

        "I brought you these," Mina said handing me a brown paper bag.

        I opened the bag: deodorant, a comb, a bar of soap, mittens.

        "You need them," she said, her voice straight as a razor's edge.

        "Thanks, Mina. Really."

        Mina studied her hands. "It's no biggie. They were free, from the lab. We're doing feet again this week, so maybe I'll bring some anti-fungal spray, if you want."

        "OK, Mina." The ends of her scarf flapped like bird wings.

        "I'm really sorry about our date. I'm an ass."

        Mina scratched at her ear, tucked a strand of loose hair back under the folds of her scarf.

        "Ray -- there is no Marlboro Chopper. You're paranoid."

        I closed my eyes and rubbed the knot under my braid. True, no one else seemed to be talking about the Marlboro Chopper, but, then again, I knew how sneaky those guys could be. I looked at her. "Do you think we could try another date sometime?"

        "On the walk or off?" Mina fingered the edges of her scarf.

        I looked up, studied the clouds for shapes, wondering if it wasn't a trick question. Then

        I imagined her trying to picture herself with me at a bar, a bar where we could blend in together without anyone noticing us.

        "Anyplace." I said.

        "I'll think about it," she said after awhile. " I really will."

*

        It's the last day for the Camel girl. Days have gone by, then a week and still no Mina. The rains have come, bringing with them hints of the first snows and even with my battery operated blankets, I'm freezing up on the catwalk. Though I don't want to leave the Camel girl, and I hate the thought that I might miss Mina if I leave, I know it's time to go. So I'm tearing down the woman of the heavenly bosom and each tear registers as sadness and regret lodging in the spaces between my vertebrae: by the time I get to her upper torso I'm on the verge of tears and back is killing me.

        I'm trying to remove the last strip in one large block, moving side to side. If I'm careful, I tell myself, I can do it, I can save her, keep her intact, take her home and preserve her on my wall where on cold clear nights I will lie awake looking at her, imagining I'm up on the boards. And then I make a mistake, my hand moves too fast and I rip her apart at the chest. In even this, I think, I can't have one whole thing. I move more slowly then, gently, determined to save a fraction of her, thinking about hope and possibilities. I think of the color of Mina's eyes, which are like trampled water, all the shades of brown at once, and how looking at her makes me think of the air, how the birds shake it up with their tiny wings, how my heart is a bird with tiny wings, but only when Mina is around.

        After I've recovered all the strips of the cigarette girl, rolled them up separately to take home later and piece together, I look at the board, an empty canvass, naked and dull like the sky that's threatening to snow. Below me the last leaves on the trees hang on for this first true snow. The leaves are red, red like blood, and I wonder aloud Are the trees bleeding? I look up, wondering how I will cross this ocean full of distance, motion and flight. I'm the closest to crying I've been in years; the bottoms of my eyelids rim over with tears which are illuminated by the small lights of the city mixed with the flat iron sky.

        I climb down the rungs and walk home to my little room where the window panes are warped and the birds outside are still singing, true, but it's a strange warbling, a sad tortured sound of habit and pain, not of lightness or flight. And I hear the strain of remorse, of conscience upon the folding rows of cornless stalks, the soft machinery of the birds' wings, and my heart that makes wind-up noises and bleats like a bad electric clock. I think of heaven and earth bowing before the wind and to the stalks under the wind, of my heart in the shape of a starling, a bird that crumbles into a thousand flakes of snow at the first touch while the whole city keeps spinning toward another year, toward the year's end of holidays. And I can't see anything for the impossible bones of Mina's face, her chin, her cheeks, her scars, and her strong nose that under the twinkle of dark stars, through the distance and mismanagement of memory, the poor grammar and regenerative powers of faulty recollection, begin to arrange and reassemble themselves into an uncommon likeness of the cigarette girl. At home, I unfurl the glossy paper and touch the lips of the Camel girl and say her name aloud, Mina, count her teeth among glimmering skins of dying stars and watch the sky let loose the drawstring and shake out the first snow against the shifting black wings of the twin cormorants: night and sky where I live between the wings and wait.

Gina Oschner teaches creative writing at George Fox University, a small Quaker college in the heart of the wine country in Oregon.

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