Plato opens his *Republic* with the words, “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday.”  The first verb is “kataben,” from “katabaino,” meaning “I went down,” the same verb that is so prevalent in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus offers his blood and descends into the underworld.



      The movement of Plato’s long meditation can be seen as one of descent.  In many ways the *Republic* is Plato getting off his high horse, descending from the heavens of rationality and righteousness, rolling up his sleeves, licking his lips and preparing to do the dirty work of governance.  He is interested in the human world where people are not perfect.  He is interested in practicality.  His mathematics and high geometry are meant as much for intellectual speculation as they are for the construction of catapults or the guidance of ships at sea.  Plato says that the true philosopher king must go down, must use his rationality and ethics in the sordid real world.



      If the trajectory of the *Republic* starts in the rational heavens and moves to the real world, then Book 11 of the Odyssey starts in the real world and travels down to Hades.  Odysseus is looking for guidance from the dead, but once he obtains it, he busies himself chatting up the residents of this strange land.  He asks his mother for family news.  He greets Achilles who wants to be told all about the exploits of his son.  And everyone else crowds around Odysseus to ask after those they’ve loved and lost.  When Odysseus tells us about his trip he quickly glosses over encounters with the godly dead like Minos and Orion.  He rather spends entire paragraphs on the commonplace: the hovels of fathers, the airing of old arguments, old grudges concerning stolen armor.  No one speaks about death, rather focusing on the banalities and joys of the living.  Death is tempered by this menagerie of the living.



      In Episode 6 of Ulysses, Joyce opens not with kateben but rather with, “Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself.”  This is Joyce’s recreation of the Odyssean descent to Hades, and while the word kateben itself is lost the motion stays the same: we start with an image of going down, of carriage riders ducking themselves into the funereal vehicle for a ride to the cemetery.  But in this “underworld,” as before, death is only as powerful as the commonplace.  During their deathly descent the men joke amongst themselves (“the sky is uncertain as a child’s bottom”).  They worry about debts. Bloom notes that he is sitting on something hard, and it is making him slightly uncomfortable.  This is a world of death, but it is mostly a world characterized by the worries of the living: where fathers complain about the company their sons keep, where sons observe the anniversaries of their fathers’ suicides.  Death and the everyday go hand in hand, and it is through the everyday that Bloom arrives at the extraordinary. The mutterings of a father remind Bloom of his lost son Rudy, the origins of his marriage: among the most important events in his life.  In the cemetery, Bloom and his compatriots have entered Hades.  But even here—wonder of wonders—they are surrounded by the daily elements of their human world.



      If the tension in literature comes from the embarkation on a journey—a journey down—then the release from that tension comes when we convince ourselves that down-here is mostly the same as up-there.  Bloom sees it when he surveys the crowd-like rows of headstones (“How many!  All these here once walked round Dublin”).  Homer’s underworld and mortal land look strangely alike when, down below, we see Odysseus and Ajax, childlike, failing to reconcile their differences.  But in the *Republic* we see this sameness most explicitly and artistically, in the closing Myth of Er.



      A story of the regenerative afterlife, the myth details the post-mortem travels of the good soldier Er who dies in battle but comes alive again to tell us all about the underworld.  He speaks of hosts of the dead and their great journeys across rivers culminating in a wide meadow where the dead choose who they want to be reincarnated as in the next life.  Should they become rich?  Poor?  Powerful?  Should they be a hero?  Or simply reclusive and unknown?  It is Plato’s belief that to make the right choice, to pick a future life that will be good and happy, one must be schooled in the ways of justice and reason.  This is the ultimate carrot at the end of the string, an all-important reason to be good.



      Tracing the trajectory of the *Republic*, the rational philosopher-king must go down from the heavens in order to school the masses in the ways of justice.  Then these pupils must carry themselves up, just as Er does at the end of the myth.  After their transformation, the reincarnated travel past the River of Unheeding and up the stream of forgetfulness, elevated back to the earthly plane.  What goes down has come up.  The two worlds become the same.



      This is why the opening of the *Republic* sounds so familiar to us, from, “I went down to the Piraeus,” to, “The slave caught hold of my cloak from behind: Polemarchus wants you to wait, he said.” That’s when the philosophical conversation starts.  In the lines up to it, Plato describes his descent into a real world that he can make just as holy as his rational heaven.  He sees it so vividly, this world that he is so fond of, this land of human interaction and human agency: He tells us that “he went down to the Piraeus” yesterday with Glaucon, Ariston’s son.  He wanted to say a prayer to the goddess, but mostly he wanted to see the parade that was coming through.  Perhaps he watched the young girls tossing flowers or saw the old drunks staggering behind.  He says he enjoyed himself at this admittedly frivolous entertainment, and was about to head back to Athens.  Just then—a swish of a cape, a darting hand—a slave catches hold of his cloak.  He bids him wait because his master wants a word.

          In Andrew Wyeth’s winter landscapes, Pennsylvania seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue. Down it sweeps, over wide brown plains and farms, over towns and small cities. It gentles the cows that graze in fenced-in fields, the light-eyed farmers who bring them out to pasture, and the crows that guard them both. It smoothes the wheat that covers its body like a winter fur. The state is cleaning, making ready for the spring, when the sunlight will reveal all its dirty and dusty corners without mercy.



          Sometimes the wind loses interest in the middle of a stroke. Other times, it licks energetically to the bottom of the state, where it comes up against an old stone mill on a broad lot. For fifty years, this mill was Wyeth’s home. Here the painter died on January 16 of this year, tucked in bed, as stray gusts rattled at the windowpanes.



          Wyeth painted this landscape and the people and things that populate it for nearly his entire life. It was a gentle scene, and a seductive one. His America was calm and austere, his Americans vital and strong. So why did critics so vigorously attack them both?



          At the peak of his career, in the 1960s and 1970s, Wyeth’s images of Pennsylvania and Maine, where he spent summers, made him both one the most popular artists in America and one of the most disparaged. Art world insiders derided his sentimentalism and “anti-modernism” even as thousands of patrons flocked to surveys of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. The artist’s work was paradoxically controversial given its aesthetic conservatism. Robert Storr, now the dean of Yale’s School of Art, named the painter “our greatest living ‘kitsch-meister.’” Dave Hickey called him pretentious and accused him of working in a palette of “mud and baby poop.” Intellectually, these critics were reacting to the artist’s uncritical populism. Wyeth catered to mainstream tastes, and he displayed none of the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of the incoming postmodern artists. His art was humorless, retrograde, inferior—clearly meant for the masses.



          But the objections to Wyeth’s work were not just academic. Often they were visceral and emotional. This seems odd; after all, the artist was only painting sparse landscapes and meticulous portraits in a clear and expressive realist style. Yet however strange the debate over his art seems, it had been rehearsed (albeit at a lower intensity) a half-dozen times over the past fifty years. The same argument surfaced every time a “regionalist” artist achieved widespread success.



          To be called a regionalist is either to be slandered or to be praised, depending on whom you ask. Detractors take the genre’s name for what it is. They often argue that regionalists are close-minded and lack the creative vision of their more radical, cosmopolitan counterparts. Supporters claim that regionalists do the United States a service by providing it with images of itself. Either way, the regionalist label, which has been in use since the late 20s, generally applies to artists whose work depicts a rural part of the country in an accessible, place-conscious way. When written with a capital “r,” it refers more specifically to Midwestern artists working between the two world wars. As the vagueness of both terms suggests, “regionalism” is less a clearly defined category than a means of signifying that a certain sort of debate has taken place over an artist’s work. The conflict it refers to is, on its surface, nothing more than an art-world iteration of urban-rural tensions.



          But with Wyeth, it was more intense. He made the city critics howl. They were not just dismissive; they seemed to be uncomfortable. There was something about the paintings that made them anxious. The artist’s works possessed some hidden and powerful reactionary force—a force that was driving audiences crazy. Some commentators attributed their own unsettled feelings to the artist’s simple-minded sentimentalism. Others slammed him for producing representational art in an age of abstraction.



          Few critics talked about the people Wyeth painted—and here, they may have missed the source of their own unease. The artist’s most famous and most frequent models are not “native” New Englanders. They are not recent arrivals like Italians or Mexicans or Jews. They are not former slaves or Native Americans. They are Nordic and German immigrants and their descendents. Some of them were forced out of their native lands by demographic pressures; others fled a blasted Europe in the middle decades of the 20th century. They were hardly welcome here even by Wyeth’s time. In the United States, the World Wars had taken the form “not simply [of] a struggle against Germany, but also [of] a fight against things German,” as the historian Stephen Gross puts it. Decades later, many Americans still distrusted Teutonic and Teutonic-looking newcomers.



          Yet there they were, on canvas after canvas. Christina Olson, Siri Erickson, Helga Testorf, Karl and Anna Kuerner—a spread of pale, wide brows, golden hair, rosy cheeks, glittering light eyes. Their figures seem to fade into his bleak landscapes, into the wind, the brown earth, the clear gray sky. To the artist, these people were “truly wholesome” and “fresh, really American.” To city-dwellers, they were alien, and frightening—foreign, but better suited to the land than they were.



          Wyeth was confronting the beaux-monde with a hardier, more perfect race of American. The city folk just couldn’t look them in the face.



          Fifty years before the critic Peter Schjeldahl called Wyeth’s Helga pictures “as threatening to your sense of self as a quilted pot holder,” Grant Wood was painting the German woman’s distant cousins. The Iowan took up the brush at a young age, not long after his family moved from Anamosa to the suburbs of Cedar Rapids. Though he left it in 1901, at the age of 10, Wood would always claim that the tiny farming town formed him as an artist. Certainly his later paintings bear out this statement: from 1930 on, the artist almost exclusively depicted rural landscapes, small towns, farms—and, of course, the hardworking, upright people who populated all three.



          But Anamosa was the last thing in his mind during what he later termed his “bohemian” period. From about the time of his family’s move to the city to his 40th birthday, Wood began to gather strength as a painter. He also made what in retrospect seem like a series of half-hearted attempts to escape the physical and moral orbit of the rural Midwest. He moved to Chicago in 1913, and spent the next four years as a sometimes-student at the Art Institute. After his return to Cedar Rapids, he was able to save enough money from sporadic teaching and design jobs to embark on a series of trips to Paris. Inevitably, he returned from these excursions talking, acting, and dressing like a denizen of the Left Bank and painting like a minor Impressionist. Eventually, however, Wood settled back down in his Iowa town for good. He began more and more often to paint the people and places he had seen since childhood.



          Wood was just bohemian enough for the people of Cedar Rapids. The townsfolk didn’t quite approve of Braque, or Matisse, or that Picasso fellow—and certainly not those oddballs over in New York—but Wood seemed just about right for an artist, at least to them. He kept strange hours, couldn’t manage his own money, and was probably too creative for his own good—but wasn’t he harmless, really? He taught their middle-schoolers and designed the stained glass window for the Veteran’s Memorial building. His early paintings hung in hundreds of homes and businesses across the state. True, that moustache and goatee he wore after his first European trip were a little much, but he shaved them off pretty quick. All told, Wood was the kind of artist they could really like. He didn’t stir things up or challenge their values too much, but he brought a bit of color to the place. So as long as he continued to meet their expectations, his fellow citizens would support him with commissions and patronage. A little market sprang up in the area for original Grant Woods.



          The artist returned their favor in the 1930s with what would be called his Regionalist canvases. By the start of the decade, he had completely abandoned his earlier pseudo-modernism and dedicated himself to painting meticulous, gently caricatured visions of the Iowans and their landscape. These works were both stylistic and thematic breakthroughs. Not only had Wood engineered a new realism from American folk art and mural-painting traditions and Northern Renaissance portraiture; he was giving rural subject matter a substantial artistic treatment. His innovations were important enough to earn gallery space for his work in Chicago and in the East. Through his paintings, city-dwellers finally had a chance to meet their country neighbors.



          But what the urbanites saw may have been disconcerting. If they were expecting people who looked or lived like they did, they were wrong. Wood’s landscapes are cartoonish, rounded, sinuous. His buildings stand rigidly upright. But his Iowans fall somewhere between the two, somewhere oddly inhuman. Their noses and chins are rotund, their eyes dark and moist, their necks stiff, their lips tucked into little lines of rectitude. Their limbs are rounded, but their motions and gaits are jerky, angular, stylized. Although they should be of the town—most of them were the descendents of German and Nordic immigrants who had arrived in the area just decades earlier—visually, they bridge the town and the land. They are not fully of the built environment, although it is an environment of their own construction. Over time, they have grown into the American Midwest, until they are more than natives. They are natural features. Few people in the East felt so comfortable in their own cities.



          Unsurprisingly, Wood’s Regionalist works were criticized for the same retrograde qualities as Wyeth’s later ones. While some modernists praised the painter for *American Gothic*, which they saw as a critique of rural values, the rest of his work elicited their ire. Formalists ripped him apart for what *The New Republic*’s James Sweeney described as a lack of “sensibility to color,” a “feeble sense of modeling,” and “insensitively stylized forms”—in other words, for failing to meet the criteria of orthodox modernism. Those who judged him on his own terms as a vernacular realist were just as harsh. His Iowa was too curvaceous, too alluring, and too far removed from what critics assumed were the realities of the Depression. Lincoln Kirstein accused him of painting with a “simple-minded mannerism” that at times sent his figures into “fat toy territory.” Even Thomas Craven, a pro-Regionalist, accused him of a “frivolity” that damped his attempts at expression. Wood’s popular reception was enthusiastic, particularly in the Midwest, but the opinion of the urban art elite was consistently, aggresively negative.



          However, Wood’s real or imagined shortcomings as a creator didn’t warrant the vehement responses of his detractors. Boring, conservative, insufficiently innovative, or overly imaginative paintings might be expected to produce indifference or mild distaste, not outrage. There was something else about Wood’s work that was making critics downright antsy. Something lurking in the Iowa landscape. Over round hills and fields sewn with wheat, it comes—a relative the city folk can’t recognize, a countryman to whom they can’t relate. A new sort of American. Wholesome, strong, and completely comfortable in the land—far more comfortable than they were among the skyscrapers and subway cars.



          In Wyeth’s work, this figure finally drifted into view.



          The first time the painter saw the Prussian-born Helga Testorf walking down a snow-strewn Pennsylvania road, he was enchanted. Immediately he noticed “all her German qualities,” qualities Karl and Anna Kuerner also possessed: “her strong, determined stride, that Loden coat, the braided blond hair.” He asked her to pose; she agreed. She became his “most perfect model,” and his most frequent. From 1971 to 1985, Wyeth secretly painted and drew 246 images of Testorf. There was Helga in the forest, Helga at home, Helga walking, melting into the landscape as if she could become a part of it. And Helga naked—on a stool, in a sauna, on her knees or her back in bed. Betsy Wyeth later told reporters she was unaware that Testorf had modeled for her husband. Andrew Wyeth claimed their relationship had never been physical.



          The art world exploded at the news of the series upon its sale to a single collector in 1986. The paintings’ scandal threatened to completely erase the public memory of the rest of Wyeth’s work. *TIME *ran a story on the collection and suggested that the artist and his wife had craftily manipulated reports about the series to inflate the value of his other paintings. Insiders, at least, did not need to be convinced that the pictures were tawdry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art declined to show the paintings, even though it was offered access to the entire collection. *The New York Times*’ Roberta Smith called the eventual National Gallery exhibition “a theme show with all the sentimentality and sensationalism—and even the element of soft-core pornography—of an afternoon soap.” Most critics bore similar feelings, and expressed them just as strongly. The general art world opinion of Wyeth had fallen even further.



          But what did these viewers find particularly offensive about the Helga pictures? It couldn’t be the implied affair between the artist and his model, nor the scandal that surrounded its revelation—both are commonplace in art history. The paintings are just as technically competent as Wyeth’s other works. They are just as spooky, just as kitschy. What, then, was the matter?



          Helga herself was the source of the critics’ unease. She is the apex of Wyeth’s Teutonic fixation, its symbol and best representative. Her thick brow, flat face, blonde hair, blue eyes—that Loden coat, that straight and solid bearing! She is a pure Prussian, the product of good Germanic stock—and strangely military. This, Wyeth would tell us, is the face of America. A “wholesome” and “fresh” face. But it was already familiar to most viewers, and not so wholesome to some of them. How did the city-dwellers feel when they learned that the new American, their country neighbor, their superior, their potential replacement, was Aryan?



          Critics were uncomfortable with Grant Wood’s paintings, but they were far more troubled by Wyeth’s. They had reason to be. Both artists appealed with their paintings to Americans yearning for “a lost agrarian past,” as The Washington Post put it. They presented their audiences with a new sort of rural person—a hardy breed well-suited to the land.  In Wyeth, however, the “breed” takes on an overt racial character. The progressive American art scene may not have been ready to accept a painter who fetishized the same qualities that had preoccupied Nazi eugenicists. They were qualities that had haunted many of the art worlders, or their parents and families, in a time so different it could have been another life. They were qualities over which, in a sense, Americans once went to war.



          But strangely—perversely—Wyeth’s fame and popularity have grown over time. By now, Wood has been reduced to a single, indelible image: American Gothic, much parodied and much discussed. His fellow regionalist, however, is considered the greatest American artist of the twentieth century in some circles. His paintings are exhibited across the country. Even the notoriously Wyeth-averse Museum of Modern Art displays *Christina’s World*. And the news of his death has propelled another burst of interest in his paintings and legacy.



          This time, the critics have been more generous. Robert Storr has acknowledged Wyeth’s “great energy and conviction.” Others have claimed him as a closet innovator. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Kathleen Foster has called him “a different voice of modernism.” She curated a posthumous exhibition of the painter’s work that went up in late January. Other shows have opened in Tennessee and Maine. With more time to plan, other, larger retrospectives will debut—public demand for the artist is high. Once again, Americans will come face to face with Helgas and Siris and Olsons and Kuerners. Urbanites and city critics will have another chance to look them in the eyes.



 

      I want to preface this by saying that scorpions have never really killed anyone. At least, not in Arizona. Not since the forties. And even then, there were probably other complications. I mean, I don’t know the specifics. I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. But it’s easy to imagine. Sick, dehydrated. Probably got stung while out hiking. Inexperienced traveler, and all that. The kind that thinks you can climb South Mountain, no sweat, with no training and a small bottle of water. My dad used to call them “hippie climbers,” the ones who say your body is the source of all energy and a man can climb Olympus as soon as a tree in his own backyard.

      My sister latches on to this last reference. “Exactly,” she says. “Hippie climbers. How do you know we’re not turning into hippie climbers?”

      Because, I say. These scorpions are in your own backyard. I’m a little thrown by her hesitation. We grew up with scorpions. June and July are Scorpion High Season but we’re trained to react any time of the year, really, turn on a dime when we see the tail tucked up like a dog’s and the two wide pincers and the small pinpoint black eyes and the yellow-brown splay of its eight legs (scorpions are arachnids, I have to tell people out East. Not insects. Also, not lizards. I’ve gotten that before. It’s the tail.). I haven’t lived in Arizona for years now but I haven’t lost the instinct; a well-shaped piece of lint or a curl of rubber on the floor of the garage starts me up every time. But not because scorpions are particularly dangerous. I honestly can’t imagine anyone dying by scorpion unless they swallowed the thing and it stung the shit out of their stomach or something. Or maybe if it were a baby. And there were other factors. Lung trouble.

      My point is, they aren’t killers and my sister should know that. We just vacuum the suckers up. I’ve used overturned glass jars, slippers, books, a chair, a hammer, pretty much anything to smash scorpions, or to trap them until I can get back with something that will. She’s done the same. It isn’t anything to holler about, because scorpions come with the territory. We grew up with them the way most people grow up with Velcro or Lunchables. And we rarely miss.

      There isn’t anything a hospital can really do for scorpion stings, but I say this as a comforting thing. I mean that most people do just fine without any help at all. A nurse will tell you to drink some fluids and maybe, if you’re elderly, put you on watch, but otherwise they turn you loose right away. Most of the sharper pain that comes with the sting goes away after twenty-four hours. The muscle spasms and tremors stop after about ten, and are more annoying than they are anything else. The rest is an achy soreness that rides itself out in a few days. I’ve heard some people say there are experimental antidotes now, that they’ve administered them in extreme cases. Wimps.

      My sister lives right up against a mountain range. The desert practically spills into her backyard. She’s had snakes, javelinas, raccoons, the works. It’s what happens when your lawn makes up a majority of the greenery within a ten-mile radius. Most folks might be surprised to find that scorpions are the real trouble. You can keep the rest out with a good fence and wire. She’s getting three, four scorpions a week in the house now. Like I said. High season.

      We aren’t that close, to tell the truth. She called me up a few months ago, something about she heard it was a hard winter. It was March, and we were coming out of it, so it’d been a little odd. She said what did I use, antifreeze? Did the street plows make it to my neighborhood? I said my fireplace had crapped out but we’d made it through okay. It was the first time we’d talked in a year. Then she called in April, said that we both knew summer wasn’t the best time but did I want to come home. She called again the week after, said I could come anytime, really, she and Todd didn’t have any plans. I took the hint. What the hell. We’re family.

      I can’t remember the last time I’ve been back. The airport’s changed a lot. They’ve gotten rid of the old carpet with the pixelated phoenixes and put in a nice tiled vinyl floor. New murals, too, with accents in hard red and blue glass and the typical desert fanfare, pastel sunscapes, that kind of thing. Still, the first thing I notice is the way the air hits you, stepping onto the jetway. It even smells hot, suffocating in that way that you start to feel under your armpits, anywhere where skin touches skin, really. Dry enough that you can look out at any yellow, brittle excuse for a lawn and feel the life withering. Every building, every street, every sign becomes a reflector for the sun, another surface of heat and light. Can’t say I miss it.

      The people look washed out, too, even my sister. Her hair and eyes are dull and she’s skinny, not in a good way. She’s always been the skinny one but this, this isn’t a good look for her. I wonder if it was high school when we started being less. When she and her killer legs and her sheer enthusiasm had gotten her any boy she wanted. I had been tall, but that was all, just tall, and occasionally athletic. It hadn’t felt so long ago, but seeing her here now it suddenly does.

      She pulls me into a hug and plants a weak kiss on my cheek. I hold her tight, then tighter. She likes hugs, I remember that.

      “Todd couldn’t make it,” she says. “Something came up at work. As usual.”

      “As usual?”

      “You can catch up at dinner.”

      “No problem,” I say.

      “Luggage?” she says. We make our way down the escalators to the baggage claim. She isn’t talkative. I can’t remember if that’s a new thing.

      “So what’s new?”

      She shrugs. “Everything’s pretty much the same.” She shoots me a quick look. “I missed you.”

      “Love you, too,” I say.

      She smiles a little at that. “How long since the last time you were here?”

      “I’ve been trying to figure that out too. Four years, maybe?”

      “Longer than that,” she says. “It was before Todd switched jobs.”



      I don’t know what to say to that because I honestly have no idea. I spot my suitcase and haul it off the carousel, and then we head to the parking lot. The air hits me again when the doors slide open. God, it’s hot. “It’s getting to be bad out,” Jess says apologetically.

      “I remember,” I say, even though I don’t feel like I do. I don’t remember having to cope. It just was the way things were. A hundred and fifteen degrees out, and rising. No big. Keep the AC cranked up. Park in the shade. It suddenly hits me that I’ve never invited her East. Not recently. “You should come visit,” I say. “Escape the heat.”

      She just nods. I wonder if I’ve offended her somehow. Like she thinks I only offered because she did first. She did choose to stay, after all, all those years ago. Arizona’s always been her home. But seriously. It doesn’t mean she can’t travel.

      “Next summer,” I say. “June. July. When it feels like this.”

      “That’d be nice. I’ll ask Todd.”

      Her car is tan, and a Toyota. She’s so predictable. 

      “I’ll help you make dinner,” I say.

      “Now?” she checks her watch. “It’s four.”

      I shrug. “Then we’ll make a big dinner.”

      “There are only three of us,” she says, but it’s half-hearted.

      “Jess,” I say. “We should celebrate. It’s been four years.”

      “Longer,” she says.

      She’s a little livelier in the kitchen, which is a relief. Jess got more than just the looks in our family. She got most of the skills. Cooking included.

      “Do you remember,” she says, “when you made Mom scrambled eggs in bed for the first time? And you didn’t know how they got scrambled, even though it was the easiest thing ever, so you fried an egg normal and then ripped it up into little pieces?”

      I do. Mom had been recovering from strep. She’d laughed so hard she’d practically hacked up a lung. She said it was like me, to think of a difficult solution to any problem, no matter how easy.

      Jessica goes into the pantry, then pauses. “Kate, will you get the vacuum? It’s in the closet by the stairs.”

      I feel that familiar twinge of adrenaline. Just enough to get your heart to pick up the pace a little. When I return with the vacuum I peer over her shoulder (I am still tall) at the bent legs and the fat, yellow body. It moves suddenly, runs along the baseboard with the tail straightened behind it. The vacuum slurps it up.

      There was a time when we’d used a modified vacuum, specially designed for this express purpose. It was called the Bug Sucker, and it had a clear, hollow, triangular foot you could use to trap whatever bug you wanted before you switched the suction on. Inside was a tiny mesh cartridge with a one-way door. Once we were good at the trapping and sucking on our own, though, we swapped the Bug Sucker out for a regular vacuum. You didn’t have to change the cartridges as often.

      “We don’t get those on the East Coast, you know.” “Still gets you going, huh?”

      “’Course. Doesn’t matter how long it’s been.”

      Jess puts away the vacuum. “They’re getting worse.” “It’s July.”

      “Still. I think there’s an infestation or something.”

      The door opens and Todd comes in, throwing his keys into a crystal bowl by the door. I sent them that bowl for their wedding.

      “Hey,” he says.

      “Hey,” Jess says. “You’re home early.”

      “Meeting got cancelled. Hey, Kate. Sorry I couldn’t come meet you.” He comes over and gives me a hug. He smells faintly of cigarettes.

      “We’re having a big dinner,” Jess says, putting her hands in a mixing bowl. She kneads, hard.

      “Great. I’m gonna get washed up, and then I’ll help.”

      “No, don’t worry about it. I can manage.”

      “It’s fine.”

      “You don’t have to.”

      “I want to.”

      Jess watches him go, her hands still in the bowl. She rests her wrists on the edge, her fingers in the dough.

      “You didn’t tell me Todd smokes now,” I say, to fill the silence. “Doesn’t that drive you crazy?”

      “He doesn’t smoke,” she says, but her brow furrows and she looks faded. Like the art projects we used to make in elementary school out of construction paper. Our teacher would hang them in the window, and in a couple of weeks you could flip them over and see the color the paper used to be. Those windows were tinted, too.

      Todd yells from the next room and we both jump.

      “Coming,” Jess sighs. She wipes her hands on a towel and heads for the closet.

      “You gotta do something about them, Jess,” I say, following. “Call the Terminator.” Our little joke, when we were kids.

      “You mean the exterminator.” Jess doesn’t remember. “Todd doesn’t want to spend the money. It’s not a big deal, it happens all the time.”

      “You said yourself there might be an infestation. And as for the money—” I shrug. “Do it yourself. I’ll help you.”

      “With what?” she’s exasperated now. “We’re thinking about getting a puppy. I don’t want poison all over the yard.”

      “Jess!” Todd yells, and Jess moves a little faster.

      “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

      “Too late.” He comes out into the hallway, his tie undone. “I lost it somewhere under the bed. Christ, Jess.”

      “Todd’s from Chicago, you know,” Jess says. “I don’t think he’s used to it yet.”

      “Can’t you call someone?” Todd yanks on one end of the tie and it slips out of the collar in a whiz of silk.

       “What about the dog?”

      “Dog?”

      “The puppy.”

      They stare at each other a moment.

      “Yeah,” Todd mumbles. “The puppy. Right.” He turns back into his room and closes the door.

      Jess lets out a breath, then nudges me gently into the kitchen.

      “Todd’s been a little stressed lately,” she says.

      "I get it,” I say. She starts to knead again, and I pull up a stool at the island, facing her. It’s silent, except for the smack-smack of the dough against the sides of the bowl and the distant hiss of the shower. Her hands press, press, the tendons standing out, knuckles rising and sinking under her tan skin.

      Todd was the reason Jess stayed, and part of the reason I left. Our mom used to worry because I had never been in a relationship longer than a handful of months. “Love will settle her,” she kept saying to our dad. Todd was everything I was afraid of. I’m no rocket scientist or New York exec, but at least I don’t live here.

      “Jess, let’s do it,” I say. “The scorpions. It’ll give me something to do.”







      Scorpions, as with most desert life, are nocturnal. No surprise there. We go out back after dinner with a flashlight and a couple of slippers, the wine warm in our bellies. The night is a different rendition of heat. Duller, worn, like a tired argument. I go up to the edge of the dying grass, scan the yard. There’s a bed of gravel in the back, butting up against the low brick wall that runs around the house. Along the top of the wall stands a standard metal fence with vertical bars every five or six inches, and Jess has boarded up or run wire tight through the gaps where it meets the brick. I flash the light down the sides of the house, which are lined with stones, turn it towards the edge of the pool, shine it on the grill. We take a few steps towards the barbecue, crouch down on the concrete. We’ve only been out a few minutes, and already I can feel the sweat pooling in the dips behind my knees.

      Jess’s hand flashes out with the slipper and smacks down hard on the cement. She’s almost pulled back before I hear the soft crack, and my light refocuses on the juicy cud, tail twitching, a couple of the legs waving slowly. The tail keeps going even after the rest of the body stops. That’s the thing with the tail. When I was in middle school my friend’s mom smashed a scorpion with a textbook, and got most of the body, though she missed the stinger. When she lifted the book off, the tail got her in the wrist. She had a numb arm for a week.

      I nudge it with my slipper and it flips over, leaving a dark smear. “Nice work, Jess. Got it in one.”

      “I wish they weren’t so hard to find,” Jess says, peering around her feet. “They’re never around when you want them. Watch your ankles.”

      “I know.”

      “Babies, too. They’re everywhere.”

      “I know.”

      The babies look exactly like adults, only in miniature, and are a lot lighter in color. Some are even orange, the color and translucency of an overripe cantaloupe. They ride in a cluster on the mother’s back, sometimes stacked three deep, and they’re always falling off. Usually you find one, you watch out for more.

      I shift uncomfortably on the balls of my feet.

      “So you’re thinking of getting a dog, huh?”

      “Maybe. Why are you so surprised?”

      I shrug. “You didn’t like our dog all that much, when we had one.”

      “It wasn’t that I didn’t like him,” Jess laughs. “It’s that he was always messing up our fun.”

      There had been a lot of fun. We looked forward to every spring, however brief, when our mom trimmed the garden. We had huge rose bushes, though most of the flowers died, of course, even as early as April. But when the heavy heads of petals were still soft and full, we stole the pruned branches and cut off the thorns, then shaved the green skin off with a knife. Then we sparred with what was left. Our dog, Bungee, tended to gnaw on the weapons a little, especially when we left them out in the sun. For curing.

      Before that, we had played with Legos. We each had our own house. Her people were the Maytrees. Mine were the Momdads. I could still name the people. The engineering twins, Eugene and Genette. The ambitious pianist, Eliza, and the Jedi wannabe, Obi-Now. There was the failed robotic experiment and exercise in artificial intelligence, Bozo, and the runt of the family, Wimpy. He’d met his end in an appropriately stupid manner when Jess had taken Wimpy and Obi-Now outside in their van. I’d discovered Wimpy’s shiny yellow head and parts of the van in one of Bungee’s deposits on the lawn the next day. Obi-Now had never been found.

      She knows what I’m thinking and gives me a shit-eating grin that I remember from high school. It’s true, what people say about being happy. For that one second, she looks younger.

      I find another scorpion on the side of the barbecue and strike at it with the flip-flop. I miss and it falls to the concrete, stunned until I hit again. This time, I feel the sweet press of it under the sole before my hand rises and comes down one more time for good measure. The hand of God, striking it down. 



      It goes on like this for a few more nights, though we only find a couple each time. Jess looses the bloodlust another night in, and I feel like some kind of soldier general at breakfast trying to get her to agree to one more sweep. Todd is oddly silent on the issue, and though Jess doesn’t say anything I can tell she thinks he isn’t taking our actions seriously. I don’t blame him. At two or three a night we’re hardly wiping out a nest, and we’re still finding ones in the house.

      Jess glances at Todd when he comes out for breakfast. His suit is pressed, and his shoes have been buffed. He wants my opinion on the tie he’s chosen.

      “You look sharp,” Jess says, then adds, “For someone boarding a plane.”

      “Well, it’s San Francisco, they have standards there.” He whistles while he pours himself a cup of coffee and scoops Jess’s famous scrambled eggs onto a plate.

      “I don’t see what the point is if you’re just going to change.”

      “I’m going straight to the conference.”

      “Todd has had a lot of out-of-town conferences recently,” Jess says to me, but her eyes are fixed on Todd. “I hope they realize it. How hard you’re working.”

      “Well,” he says, “Maybe I’ll get promoted.”

      He shovels the eggs down and goes to retrieve his briefcase.

      “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?” Jess says.

      “No. Thanks,” he brushes past her and gives her a quick kiss. “Don’t bother. I got a cab. See you, Kate.”







      It’s Jed, one of our mutual friends from high school, who mentions the blacklight trick when we meet to catch up over lunch and mention we’re becoming proficient in scorpicide. Jess and I head down to a hardware store right after and ask someone in the front. It’s no urban myth, apparently.

      I’m surprised you didn’t know,” the store clerk says, and looks over at Jess. “You’ve been living here how long?”

      Jess manages to look appropriately abashed.

      “The scorpions light up like a sick Christmas tree. It’ll scare the crap out of you, first couple times you do it. Did me.”

      “Blacklight? As in, fly traps? And the eighties?” I envision Jess erecting a neon display in the backyard. “Yeah. You can get it in a flashlight. Here, we’ve got an easy display. Show you what I mean.”

      He leads us towards the back to a counter, where they’ve got a couple of scorpions along with a rock and some sand in a glass jar. One rests uncomfortably up against the curved slope of the wall, like it started on the offensive and lost the will to go on. I’ve never seen the underside of a scorpion before. I feel a little sick looking at the mechanics of the jointed legs, how they plug into the segmented abdomen like piping.

      “It’s quite the demo,” he says, reaching for a flashlight. The bulb flashes on, tinting the shelf and the sand in a familiar, boozy glow. Jess leans in closer, the white accents in her shirt standing out. There’s no mistaking it. The scorpions brighten into a low acid green.

      “What the hell,” I say.

      “Wanna give it a try?” he passes the light to me, and I bring it in. Brighter. Greener. One of the scorpions raises its tail hesitatingly.

      “Do they all look like this?” Jess asks.

      “Well, living here you’ve got yourself sixty different species, but none of the blue-turning ones. They’re black, normally. Emperor scorps. Whole different classification. We don’t have them in AZ, you know.” He says the letters, ay-zee. People do that here.

      At the checkout counter, he bags the light with a few batteries and a heavy-duty localized-only spray. “Don’t look into the light,” he winks. “Seriously, though, you’ll go blind. Good luck, ladies. Happy hunting.”



      Todd’s still away on business, so I accompany Jess to the mall for a movie and whatever else she feels like. I sip a soda slowly while she runs her hands up and down some dress shirts, trying to decide green or blue for Todd. She says he complains a lot about his clothes, these days. That they’re all old. She doesn’t put in her usual effort and ends up asking the saleslady which men’s shirt is the most popular. When they don’t have Todd’s size, we leave.

      There’s not much in the way of fun in Arizona. Most outdoor activities you can scratch right off the list. You could go hiking, though you’d need to be up at the crack of dawn for it not to be a suicide mis- sion. You could listen to the world’s worst city orchestra if you were one of Arizona’s rich. Just imagine a school band gone pro. Halloween, walk a desert trail populated with luminaries. Or luminarias, as the Jo-Ann Etc. crowd call them. And Christmas: lights with the family at the local Mormon temple. Some might be surprised to discover you can ski in Arizona, December through March. That’s right. Flagstaff is just a four-hour drive from Phoenix. Though that might be changing, too, with the new highway they’re setting up. I guess even Phoenix has to start speeding up, like the rest of us.

      People visit, they keep saying there’s got to be more. And they’re right. There’s probably a hole-in- the-wall Peruvian restaurant somewhere next to a laundromat. People would probably get up to more crime here, if the heat didn’t sap even the will to live. It’s an exciting day if you run into someone with an unusual name, like Bryan or Siobhan.

      Arizona’s genuine, though, even if it is in a backwoods, cowboyin’, rodeo kind of way. I’ll give it that much. They name streets and neighborhoods with the same kind of come-from pride that D.C. does. Only, instead of district blocks of presidents, we’ve got Hohokam. Ahwatukee. The Superstition Free- way. Some people like the idea of driving around in their air-conditioned cars and looking out over the fenced-off Indian reserves, feeling like maybe some of that tradition still applies. They like the atmosphere. Still, names only go so far, and we haven’t got enough atmosphere to get a plane off a runway. The scorpion light thing is probably the highlight of Jess’s summer.

      When we go out that night, though, even I have to admit that the blacklight is more than I expected. Jess switches it on way in the back and outright screams. In the dark the effect is the store demo times ten. Each scorpion—and there are twenty, thirty at least—is like a little scurrying light, brighter than a glo-stick. Bright enough to convince you they’re lighting up from the inside. There are whole clusters of them with chalky, neon-green tails and pincers, curling up, scuttling left and right in the purple-washed dark. The sand throws up freckles of purple light, and highlights from the flashlight flare in thin reflections along the metal bars, along the shiny hood of Todd’s grill.

      “Holy shit.”

      “I wish Todd could see this,” Jess whispers.

      One crawls a little closer along the wall towards us and she backs into me, so I take the light from her, raise the shoe in my right hand and crush it. It drops to the stones below, bouncing like a rubber imitation. That starts them all up and it’s a sudden free-for-all. There’s a part of me that enjoys this, a twisted game of whack-a-mole that gets Jess a cleaner house, but as I lay into a fourth scorpion I realize my hands are clawed. Fighting off Arizona, one scorpion at a time.

      Jess is freaking. Really, truly freaking. “Shine it over here! Shine it over here!” she shrieks, and she raises the spray bottle and starts squeezing off rounds into the oleander bushes, where scorpions hang on the low branches and exposed roots like some kind of alien fruit. “Over here, Kate! I can’t see!”

      I wish we had two flashlights. I wish there were about four more people here smashing away.

      “Oh my God. Oh my God,” Jess keeps saying, her hands fumbling with the spray. “Kate! Kate!”

      I feel the drops on my leg and shriek, “What? What is it?

      “It got me! It got me!”

      “What?”

      Jess is clutching her ankle.

      “You need to lie down!” I shout at her. “Go inside!”

      “What the hell!” she screams at the ground. She hobbles around, stomping on the scorpions by her feet. I have to grab her arms, and both of us nearly fall over with the effort.

      “Inside, Jess! Stop it!”

      “You’re not the boss of me!” She lets go, drops the spray, then the slipper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t mean it.” She lets me run an arm under her shoulders and keeps whispering apologies as we stagger across her lawn.

      Inside, I lay her down on the floor and run to grab her a glass of water. She’s still whispering apologies, only now it’s so faint I can’t make out the words.

      “Shut up,” I grit my teeth, and she stops with a surprised look on her face, like she didn’t know she was still talking. By the time I kneel next to her with the glass, the sweats have already started, and her leg is doing little tremors. The muscles in her neck twitch.

      “It’s fast,” she says, almost in awe. “Did you know it was this fast?” “You’re gonna be fine. Do you want to go to the hospital?” “What for?” she says.

      “Nothing. How’s your breathing?”

      “Fine,” she says, calmer now. Her leg jerks up and down. “I’m good.”

      I get her another glass, lean up against the island while she downs it. When she’s done I lay down on the floor next to her, put my ear to her chest.

      “I’m still fine.” It sounds fuzzy to me, though, and the two of us fall silent, listening to the rasp of her lungs.

      “There’s an antidote now,” she says suddenly. “The FDA approved it. It was in the news last week.” “Do you want it?”

      “It’s for extreme cases.”

      “Oh.”

      “Mine’s not extreme,” she clarifies, like I didn’t know.

      “Do you want me to call Todd?”

      “No. Shut up.” Then she says, “Get me a pen.”

      I get on my knees and feel around the countertop for a Bic. Then I crawl back to her. She sits up and draws an uneven line a few inches above her ankle.

      “What time is it?”

      I tell her. She writes it next to the line. Then she lies back down, still holding the pen.

      Ten minutes later, she asks again. She prods at her leg like it’s some kind of meat and draws another line an inch higher. Marking the numbness. The numbers are backwards, facing her.

      “Shut up,” she says, when I open my mouth to speak. We lie there for another ten minutes, then twenty. Her hands are crossed over her stomach, the pen uncapped in them.

      “Todd’s not away on business,” she says to the ceiling. “He’s having an affair. What time is it?”

      I tell her. She draws another line.



      We end up sleeping on the kitchen floor. I wake up every half hour and check her breathing, but it’s relatively smooth. Her leg dances every now and then, but for the most part it lays flat. The lines go half- way up her thigh now, though she lost interest an hour or so in, and the numbness had slowed by then anyway. We try meat tenderizer, the kind with papaya extract it in, and make it into a little paste for the puncture wound, to help break down some of the proteins in the venom. She makes me take pictures, then sniffs at it tenderly.

      “My leg smells like a chemical hazard,” she says.

      She starts to talk about Todd, how over the course of three months he’d been really attentive and then been sullen and reserved and then been irritable and called her suffocating, and how she should’ve figured it out. How she’d called the office for some reason or another when he was gone once and found out there wasn’t any conference in LA. How much the co-worker on the other end of the line had pitied her. How she’d noticed the cigarette thing, too.

      Her breathing gets worse, then, and so instead we talk about how the last time we’d fallen asleep together in our house she’d been four and wet my bed and I’d refused to let her sleep there ever again. How when she was older I still hated sharing a bed with her on family vacations, because she kicked in her sleep. How she was always getting into trouble, how in elementary school she’d hacked into the school server once and found the full names of all her classmates and pulled all three names on anyone who messed with her. How they’d had no idea how she knew these things, were even awed, and the principal had to tell her to stop. He’d also asked her to stop trying to catch birds in the parking lot for class pets.

      “You were so smart, Jess,” I say finally. “And so funny. You were snatching birds. And hacking into computers.”

      “I told you, it was an accident.”

      “You middle-named kids. That’s kind of manipulative.”

      “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

      “You were smart. Really smart.”

      She narrows her eyes at me. “Not everyone wants the same things,” she says, but it’s half-hearted.

      I get it. It’s the difficulty of freedom. The taxonomy of living.

      “You know, Arizona isn’t this awful place you make it out to be,” Jess says. “I don’t think you hate Arizona. I think you hate us. The people in it. For not thinking big, like you.”

      “That’s ridiculous.”

      “Look,” Jess says. “Some things find you. It doesn’t really matter where you are. Look at me and Todd. I was mad at her, at first. I wanted something bad to happen to her, something really bad, and for a while I thought about finding out who she was. But then I realized it wasn’t about her. It was Todd. The jackass.”

      By then she is exhausted and a couple of Advil have dulled the pain enough for her to finally doze off, the sweat drying on her brow. Her eyes spin erratically under the lids. I keep checking her fever, and every time I check I wake her up, until she finally snaps at me to cut it out. We lay there together, drifting in and out. Her leg jerks and she kicks me in my sleep.

      In the morning, she makes me take a nap while she showers, her leg mostly under control. I wake up with her bent over me, her hair fresh and her eyes puffy but lucid.

      “Before we kill all the scorpions,” she says. “Let’s catch some.”



      The ants have carried away most of the dead, though there are a few bodies tossed brokenly in the gravel, like this is some mob dumpsite for scorpion killers. Their bodies have already shriveled in the heat; the stringy gristle left behind is testament to a sun that never ends. I remember learning in the third grade that the sun would give out one day like an old man’s back, and thinking at recess while we fought for the shade that my teacher couldn’t have meant our sun, the same one that beat down and first made people restless and then filled them up heavy with its exhaustion. Scorpions can survive minutes in a microwave, hours underwater, even months without food. But Arizona always gets the last say. In the end, all anything ever is here is dead, then dried, then dust. Sometimes before the next sun even rises.

      Jess stands in the lawn, keeps weight off her right leg. She watches as I flip the discarded sandals over in the dirt with a nudge of my foot, make sure there’s nothing living underneath. Same with the spray can, which goes flying. Guess Jess used more than we thought. We spend the rest of the day indoors, organizing old photos while watching television. Jess doesn’t even get off the couch for lunch, so I bring her some canned soup heated in a bowl. Todd calls sometime in the afternoon and I turn down the volume on the TV. Jess sounds tired but even. Doesn’t mention last night. She rallies a little at the end, asks him how San Francisco is. If the weather’s nicer. I hear him say something about low seventies and a jacket at night and she rolls her eyes at me, mouths the word jackass.

      “I almost asked him to bring me something back,” she says when she hangs up. “But I thought that might be too obvious. God, is television this bad everywhere?”

      She’s picked out a jar, drilled some holes in the lid with a spare nail, rummaged in a drawer of kitchen serving spoons and salad tossers and cheese graters until she’s found a couple of tongs. She sees my face and calls me a wuss. It’s not the same, though. Tongs mean prolonged contact. I like the hit and run version better. She gets the light and limps outside and I follow, picking up our old hunting equipment.

      There are still about thirty scorpions, two or three clustered around the grill, which we dispatch from the get, the rest scattered along the back wall. Jess pinches with the tongs, picks up the fibrous pulp of the leftovers in the gravel and drops them into the jar. You can see the shriveled tails flopping when she bounces the jar on the palm of her hand, the wrinkled segments worse than raisins.

      Even the dried scorpion mush lights up under the blacklight. That and some of the withered oleander flowers that have dropped, though the reflection’s dimmer. Doesn’t stop us from reacting, though. Anything glowing out here is suspect. Jess gets in the fray, baring her teeth with disgust. The tongs might be a foot long but you can feel the teeth grip the scorpion wriggling at the end from the pressure. Like spearing crawdads. We get maybe fifteen and then she can’t take it and screws the lid shut and rolls it away into the grass, scorpions whirling like hell inside. We knock out the rest of them with the slippers and spray, smacking hard to stomp out the feeling that’s crawled up inside our throats.

      The jar sits in the kitchen next to the toaster for two days. At first she put it in the middle of the island like a jar for change until breakfast, when I refused to eat with her if she didn’t move it. Her display has a time limit, though. Turns out, scorpions love eating other scorpions.

      Jess doesn’t want to talk about confrontation or divorce, or counseling. She just sits with the jar, keeps tapping the glass, trying to figure out how many of the scorpions are still alive. She works from home, but now she brings her laptop and all the papers and spreadsheets out into the kitchen and uses the jar as a paperweight. Every few minutes, her eyes drift over.

      She starts to bring it everywhere. Into the bedroom with her at night, when she leaves it on the night- stand by Todd’s side of the bed. Into her study, when she has to make work-related calls. She leaves it on the floor by her feet when she watches television in the living room, by the sink when she does the dishes, on top of the ironing board when she folds her clothes. Sometimes, she shines the blacklight on them, which turns the whole thing into a lamp a twelve-year-old boy would probably trade his right arm for. She gets an almost zoned-out look on her face when she studies it, the kind a kid has when he watches a fish tank. Not that the scorpions move much. They get restless when she takes them someplace else, but once she’s set them down they settle in, too.

      The morning Todd comes home I wake up and the jar is gone. I guess Jess finally realized how morbid it is, keeping them around like that. For one thing, it’s like cockfighting, but with scorpions. There was one big one that had been dominating for a few days, enough that she’d named him Champ. He was missing a leg but that didn’t stop him. For another thing, the jar is glass, which means that visually, they aren’t caged at all. It’s hard to relax when you can see them all rolling over one another smushed together a couple feet away.

      Jess comes in, hair wet, looking for her keys. “I gotta pick Todd up,” she says, digging through her purse. She fishes out her sunglasses and snaps them on. “Can you mail some things for me before I get back? They need to get out before the truck comes to pick them up. You can take Todd’s car. The mail- box’s still at that place. Across from the gym.”

      There’s a stack of letters on the table by the door: a couple of bills, from the look of it, plus a package in one of those standard USPS boxes. Jess gives me a quick kiss in thanks as she darts past, then I hear the slam of the car door and the rumble of the garage.

      After a shower and breakfast, I gather up the mail, tucking the letters into my purse and balancing the package under my arm. The weight inside isn’t even; I can feel something rolling around and the shift of sparse, Styrofoam peanuts. I freeze in the doorway and lift the package, press my ear to it.

      I can almost hear the sudden scratch and rustle of something moving on glass, panicked, disturbed, the shredded scramble of legs. The soft, juicy thickness of bodies tumbling up against the sides. The sounds of hunger and consumption.