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ZUMA PEDLEY hailed from Lubbock, came to L.A. in '02 with his guitar, some songs, and an ugly dog. He didn't think to change the world, wasn't built that way, but thought music might lessen the burden of those with hearts. He was looking for an army of smiles, but settled for a girl with corn hair and a bungalow in the hills, grew tomatoes. The dog is still ugly.

I AM EXPLORING in the Bones, formations of caves interspersed with rock basins open to the sky. I hear a sound like a turbine as I exit a cave and approach the light ahead. I'm sure it's a waterfall. What I encounter is a massive beehive, honeycomb several stories high, millions of bees. I crouch down to avoid detection and notice a shift in the tone of the hive's collective drone. I turn around and see the bear.

SHE TRUSTED grins, they were shot directly from the heart. Whereas smiles, oh, smiles could trick, be untrue, do you harm. Mendacious, twisted with bad intentions, like her father's, his mouth turned up at one corner like a beckoning finger, pulling his eye down into a squint.

WHILE I WAS AWAY you managed to rust all my tools. How is that possible? Did you dip them in the bathtub like tool fondue? I do not understand. You deny everything but cannot explain the rusted brad puller, pliers, awl, and bucksaw in our bed. "Maybe someone was playing a joke," you say, then add: "A wet hammer is still a hammer."

Rust, Jeff Bridges (0:29)

THE GUNNYSACK hangs from the pommel, full of sparked ore. I let Shorty sip from the stream, long neck arching in the sun. There is a ghost in the cottonwood I sit under to reread your letters. It tries to sniff the pressed flowers you sent from the garden in Boston, but the scent is gone. The petals and paper, envelope, all smell like campfire now.

MOUSE AND I lie on our stomachs on the warm and weathered planks. The little bridge spans the stream two feet below and the sun lays its hands on our backs. We drop pebbles into the creek and startle water striders, add to the trove of shining rocks and stones. Preteen bombardiers, we laugh at splashes. Twenty feet away, in another world, our parents and their friends sit on blankets, eat sandwiches and drink beer.

HE CALLED AGAIN. I accepted the charges of course, paid no attention to what he was saying, it's always the same story. I focused on the background noise—the grunts and rough laughter, the shouting. Once I heard a scream, his receiver clattered against the wall, the line went dead. I picture the wall, men leaning against it, scratching names and pictures into it, waiting for their turn. I try to imagine the smell. I can't.

TODAY I'M JIMI HENDRIX, but I don't own a guitar so I set fire to a kitchen chair instead. The crowd roars. My wife refuses to be the drummer, just clucks and stirs the soup. "Have some bisque, Hendrix," she says, hands me a bowl then sits down at the table. I have to stand, 'cause I burned my ax, man. So cool, so cool.

LORD MUMFORD cleared the table with a sweep of his arm. Before the clattering pewter had come to rest, the dogs were fighting over the gristle and bits of potato, lapping after rolling peas. "Brandy!" he shouted and pounded on the table. Sunday Pringle stood before him with decanter and glass. Mumford put his fat hands on her slim hips. "Stop trembling," he said.

Mumford, Ian McShane (0:21)

THERE IS A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. Another. I slip out of my house shoes and Indian-creep to the peephole. I peek and see only hair, shiny dark. I hold my breath. There is banging on the door. I crouch, duck-walk to the couch and lie down behind it, perfectly still. I close my eyes. There is a knock on the door across the hall.

HUMANITY SERVICES came around today. They checked on the size of our bed, the quantity of cans in the pantry, the amount of stretch in your panties. I wasn't home at the time, it was my shift at The Mill, and you were at work, but Angie let them in. They inspected her hair and teeth, measured Buddy's doghouse. Angie said they were polite. She offered them a glass of water but after testing our faucet, they declined.

THE MUSEUM GUARD smiles as I shuffle past the familiar paintings to the one in the corner, near the fire extinguisher. It is a picture I myself painted long ago, when I was very young. It baffles me, I don't understand it. Why did I paint it? I stand before it until closing time, looking for clues, knowing I'll return tomorrow to look again.

CLIFF KNODES had a thin mustache, clusters of wisps that faded as they swam across his upper lip and met at the philtrum. At thirty he expected a more hirsute profile, a pistolero smear above his mouth. He applied nostrums, oils, and unguents, all to no avail, remained pink, fuzzy as a skinned bunny. He met a woman whom he convinced to forgo the waxing she maintained for years. He loved the scratch when they kissed.

I HAD NEVER punched anyone in the face before and was surprised at how much it hurt my hand. I wrapped a bag of frozen peas around it to take down the swelling. My father, the recipient of the blow, held a piece of raw steak, hurriedly taken from the freezer, against his black eye. Our relationship thus thawed, we pressed cold cans of beer to our foreheads, promised to meet again in the future for further bashing.

"ARE YOU MY MOMMY?" said the little blue egg. "No, dear. You are a plastic trinket full of sweets," said the brown hen. "My baby is over there," and she pointed to a pink marshmallow chick being torn apart and devoured by a toddler. The hen screamed and woke up, her pillow wet with sweat, the sheets twisted around her legs. "Christ, I hate that dream." She reached for a smoke.

NOT FAR FROM HUNTSVILLE we waited. Johnny and I whittled on some birch, but Messenger paced the river, said he was leaving if Del didn't show up soon. I told him to calm down, check the guns, make sure the rope wasn't tangled, see there was enough room in the trunk. He threw me one of his chickenshit looks, spit in the water, but pretty soon he was sitting on a rock practicing his knots, good boy.

THE BOOK SITS IN MY LAP, heavy and dull as cinder block. Why he chose me, I don't understand. I did not know him. Perhaps he saw my photo in the paper, was impressed with my philanthropies, or the cut of my jib. It arrived the day after he was found floating in the bay. It was wrapped in brown paper, festooned with stickers and hand-drawn stars, tied with twine. It smelled of cigarettes. There was postage due.

HE DIDN'T tie his shoes the way the other kids did. He had his own method. And though sometimes the loops of his tying attempts were longer than the dangles, he never lost a shoe when running from the bullies. The shoes were always brown, leather soles, metal eyelets, shined. He walked everywhere until he was given a bicycle as a graduation gift, pedaled out of town on Saturday, told his mother he was going bowling.

I BRING Copernicus to the vet's office and this guy is standing there, his thumb swathed in bandages. The doctor comes out carrying a large cage that contains a beautiful macaw, its belly wrapped in gauze and tape. He hands the man the cage, then reaches into his lab coat, brings out a small box. He offers it to the bandaged man. "Some of it was already digested, but here's what we could save."

THE WANKER IN THE WARDROBE sits on my wife's shoes. He amuses himself by pressing his face into her wool skirt. He breathes deeply, imagines himself a bat flying through a humid night. Each evening we leave a saucer of gin out for him. One time we panicked when the dish remained untouched for three days. He'd been away.

"OPEN THE GODDAM DOOR, RONNIE! I mean NOW!" He's locked himself in there again, turned Slayer and Deathhammer up all the way, the cheap speakers distorting the already distorted to the point where I know the fish will pulsate and wobble in their water. The blue tetras Miriam got him after his release, to make the room cheery. The poor, poor little fish.

THE OAK TABLE, set for twelve with bone white china and crystal goblets full of sparkling water, glistening silverware, was sprouting lettuce. It pushed out of the worn wood, knocked over the glasses, spilled water that irrigated the new growth. Plates were overturned by root vegetables pushing upward, silverware sent scattering by tomato vines and beanstalks until the entire table was a victorious garden.

HE FISHED the Pecos, sat on the bank singing about Jesus and crows, card games and shootouts. He ran out of songs, hoped the river wouldn't run out of fish. Peeling off his boots, he stepped into the water, shouted the name of a girl who married a grocer, didn't want to ride or plant corn or pull a calf out of a cow. He shouted her name till his throat was raw, then drank from the river and lay down on a rock to dry.

THE FLOOR MANAGER cued him for the break. "When we return, a report on elder abuse." He stood and stretched, sat back down when the stylist came to fix his makeup, adjust his hair. "You're so handsome," she whispered as she dropped two pills into his waiting hand. "You're killing me," he said and put his hand on her ass.

THE PRISONER OF NOISE stood before the bathroom sink, fingers in his ears, head down, mouth wide open, willing the sounds in his head to spill into the basin—the yelps and booms, screeches, screams and howls, crashes and groans, explosions and roars and babel and bangs. What if they formed a hairball of din, clogged the sink, scared the children when they came in at night to pee? He closed his mouth, went back to bed.

"MY LIFE IS NOT some cheap reality show, a magazine spread," she said, crossing her legs. I pushed myself away from the table, stood up and looked around at the other loungers sunning themselves at the café. "You know, Vivian, you should get a website, sell those things you make. I bet there's a market for them." She ground her cigarette into the ashtray, finished her wine. "Maurice, you are such an idiot."

THERE WAS A MOUSE that lived behind the big metal trash can in the kitchen. Mother weighed the can's lid down with a brick to forestall rodent encroachment. She wrapped a piece of twine around it, tied it to the handle at the center of the lid. One day she returned from the mill to find the twine chewed through. The brick lay on the linoleum, looking guilty.

TURNS OUT she wasn't really pregnant, just doing a number, needing someone to hold onto. Hell, I've been married four times, I sussed it out. Anyways, I cut her loose in Bismarck and got a job on a road crew. Saw a big gray wolf deep in a field of snow. He sniffed the air and was gone.

"GERONIMO!" I leap from the trestle high above the river, imagine myself parachuting into occupied France during WWII and meeting up with Marie, a beautiful dark-haired fighter of la Résistance. We kill some Krauts together, then hide out in the hayloft of a barn. I draw her to me, kiss her neck, her full red lips, unbutton her tight white blouse, and hit the cold water. "Sacrebleu!" I scream. "Sacre fuckin' bleu!"

I SAW YOU on the road, in the distance. You were walking to town holding Kim's hand. I couldn't reach you, there were wolves between us, they were sleeping, their teeth hidden, but their tails twitched and I was afraid. I took the back way to town and searched for you in the fog. Someone whispered that you were at the hotel and I went there, but all the doors were locked. I slept under a bush and waited for you.

THE LOOK ON THE NURSE'S FACE when she scanned my chart should have told me to stay put, but I was determined to march out of that ward and into the street and back to Flaherty's. No one said a word as I hoisted myself onto the barstool, barefooted, my ass hanging out of the back of the hospital gown.

FREEDOM, peaceful roamer, sniffer of trash and trees, catcher of thrown balls, a real good mutt, was shot by my jerk neighbor Norris, a mean prick who'd chop up your ball with an ax if it landed in his yard. Freedom wandered onto Norris's land and Norris popped him with the .22 rifle he uses on squirrels. We had to amputate Freedom's left hind leg, but he's a better three-legged dog than Norris is a two-legged human.

THE ASPEN SHIMMERED like the flank of a trout as I made my way down through the foothills and into the meadow. The bay whinnied and scared up some grouse. We stopped at the stream and I dismounted, let her drink. I wiped the inside of my hat, lay down in the grass, and read the clouds until my eyes closed and I dreamed of the sea.