“Dishes for a week plus that little Shimano reel you hardly ever use anyway.”

Bob explained to Joe, “You’re gonna be here a long time, buddy, because my brother is a no-class, show-ass jerk.”

Swabbing sweat off my brow, too hot for prolonged negotiations, I surrendered. “Hand me that damn bottle of shampoo.”

I lifted the tub again, sweat-blind in the heat, and awkwardly squirted some shampoo on Joe’s scrotum for lubrication. Taking a deep breath, I began working Joe’s testicles around in his sack, trying to arrange them vertically for a push upward, all the while providing a running commentary on my feelings for Bob’s amusement and to deflect all but essential attention from the task at hand: “Forty-nine years I’ve been alive. Representing the present culmination of millennia of species evolution. Of exacting natural selection. Years of formal education. Diligent study. Developing skills. The long, excruciating refinement of sensibility. And now I understand my whole life has been a preparation for this moment: trying to get your dog’s nuts unstuck from a bathtub drain. And I don’t know if that’s perfect or pathetic or both or none of the above.”

“Well,” Bob offered with a dry sweetness, “for sure it’s better than something worse.” Then to Joe, “Listen to him snivel.”

I saved my breath and, working by touch, manipulated Joe’s nuts around till they were stacked, then, using sort of a reverse milking move, squeezed his scrotum from the bottom. The top testicle popped through, then the other. Joe was free. With an agility he hadn’t shown in years, he leaped from the tub and started rolling in the dirt, moaning.

Bob smiled. “There you go, buddy! Happy dog!”

When I dropped the tub off my numb shoulder, the dirty water sluiced forward and slopped over the rim, drenching me.

I sniveled some more: “Oh great, I free his worthless old nuts and what do I get–soaked with mutagenic Joe scuzz.”

Bob laughed. “Plus you get our eternal gratitude– don’t forget that.”

I won’t.

Mahogany China

My grandmother tells me

About her first love

Johnny Hansen was his name

She’ll always remember

A warm autumn day

She was fifteen

Or almost fifteen

Had a mare named Patches

And she and Johnny went riding together

Down along the Chetco River

Low and mossy before the rains.

She can still taste the fried chicken

She made for their picnic

And how worried she was

Her lips would be all greasy

If he wanted to kiss her.

Tells me this as she polishes

The mahogany china closet

Over and over

Five minutes

The same spot

Till it shines.

The First Cut Is the Deepest

Nipples hard

in the chill dusk air,

she stood hip-deep in the Mad River,

pointing as a Great Blue Heron

lifted ungainly from the riffle above

and flew downstream toward the mouth.

We made love all night on the shore,