A Map of Tulsa Read Online Free PDF Page A

like, sacrificial table.”
    “Edith said you were a poet.”
    “I
want
to be.”
    Adrienne sat up. “Tell me why.”
    She was prepared to take me seriously, if I wanted. I tried to think. “I want to be a poet so that I can actually write good poetry,” I said. “I want to be very good.”
    She nodded. “Because you think you already are, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    A long moment passed. We both lay in the dark. When the wind blew, we could hear the leaves whispering all around us, but we couldn’t see them.
    Adrienne turned to me. “When you think about your work…are you frightened?”
    “No. But I know what you mean. I will be someday.”
    “Yeah.” Casually darting, Adrienne got up and walked away from the table. “Come on,” she said.
    We walked deeper into the trees, until we stood at Chase’s back fence. The next house behind slowly became visible. It was taking on shape, an imposing outline against the just-blueing sky.
    “Do you want to go over?” she asked.
    “You know them?”
    “No.”
    I had to haul myself over—to be so athletic was a strange breakthrough, on top of everything else.
    She walked ahead of me on the neighbor’s lawn. It looked like in a silent movie when they film night scenes in the day. An elegant woman at a garden party—until she looked back at me and acknowledged the thrill of it. I ran to catch up. “Do you want to swim?”
    I considered: if she wanted to swim, what that would mean. But she seemed up for something else as well.
    “I want to keep going over fences,” I said.
    We traveled laterally, crossing over into another backyard, and another. Each one was like its own aquarium, planted with its owner’s choice of plant, ornamented with its own plastic castle, or gazebo, or jungle gym, sunk in its own blue. I thought of the home owners I knew, people’s parents. There was something pitiful aboutbackyards, people having them. The notion that they were private. “We’re running through people’s dreams,” I called to Adrienne. “Like cycling through them while they’re asleep.”
    We were literally running, alert to each yard’s obstacles, deerlike, but sufficiently full-tilt to make ordinary conversation impossible; some people talk while they jog—it was all we could do to lash out with second-by-second commentary, streaming flayed ribbons of conversation behind us.
    A light came on and we instinctively dove into the grass. I remember it was a set of big bay windows, we saw a woman in silhouette, as if in a lightning strike, her hand attached to the pull-chain. I remember trumpet vine, and a wooden lattice with a hooped garden hose. We looked at each other, and immediately got up running. I ran on; I made no silent apology to the home owner.
    I was helping her up a poured concrete wall, molded with pillars. “We should break into one of them,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
    “We probably should.” I pictured an unlocked back door, a narrow hall, with faintly visible photographs on the walls, like a museum. And then opening a refrigerator to steal orange juice and being afraid of the light that spilled out.
    But we kept running. It was obvious, I think from the way the air smelled, that morning would be coming soon. In the next yard we stopped, as if in celebration of something. Adrienne’s eyes were big, her shoulders thrown back, breathing.
    I spoke: “I wonder if we can get to Philbrook through these yards.”
    “What?”
    “I think it’s on this block.”
    “I don’t know Jim—I’m lost.” She came out with this very nonchalantly and grabbed my shirt and pulled me onwards. My jacket, I realized. My jacket was streaked with grass. My parents had bought it for me to go to college.
    “Come on,” she was already saying—we squatted down in some mulch and hunched our way underneath the branches of a low-hanging cherry tree, waddling into a kind of bower someone had anciently built, with hedges planted on two sides for privacy. There was