Our father has grown corn. It stands in angled rows to the midday sun. His garden is small, but he walks through it as if it were a field, taking long strides, letting silk cling to his sweater sleeves, pulling down ears, shucking them and biting into them raw. When he comes to the end of the row he turns around again and walks back through. He holds empty glasses up to the sun, saying he is looking at colors that are aqua and green and violet like his mother’s eyes. He goes back to work on the Steenbeck and the image on the screen is of a soldier jumping over a log and then he rewinds and the soldier is jumping backward over the log and then forward again and then finally my father freezes the image of the soldier over the log in midair.

“That’s me,” our father says, “They needed a soldier in the film. I had boots and I bought fatigues. How about it? Would you know your father’s leg?”

Later I walk outside calling for the cat. I can see my father’s slut in their bedroom. She has come from the shower and there’s a towel in a turban on her head. With arms crossed she looks out the window and I wonder if she can see me out in the darkness where I am calling for the cat. But she is not looking down, but looking up maybe, some kind of fortune teller who can read futures in passing dark clouds.

The cat comes with a mouse hanging from her mouth. The head is all the way in her mouth and the hind part drags on the ground. The cat is purring loudly and the tail of the mouse still moves and switches back and forth. My father comes outside, swaying, almost missing a porch step and the wine in the glass he holds sloshes onto the grass. The cat runs up to him to show him her catch.

“What is it to be that mouse? To be up inside all that thrumming purr?” he says while he pets the cat on the head and she closes her eyes.

At my father’s summer place we go for walks on the beach. My father talks to the fishermen early in the morning as they pull their nets up the sand and pick through their catch. They give us their strays. A flounder and dogfish, a sea robin my father says is so ugly he can’t imagine wanting to eat it. The mornings are foggy and we can’t see the waves, we can only hear them close by us as we walk back to our car with the fish my father holds by the gills. He throws them onto the backseat where they lie on the vinyl. An occasional flop here and there as we drive back to the house. The slut eats dry toast and coffee and reads the paper in the living room. Holding the fish again by the gills, my father brings them in to show her.

“Oh, God,” she says.

Then I’m put on the train again, back to the city. The slut decided I had already stayed too long. It’s early in the morning when I get to Penn Station. I don’t take the subway home, instead I go to see John. I sit on my suitcase by his hot dog cart.

“How was your deserted island?” he says. That’s what he calls Long Island. I tell him about the cat who ate the mouse and the ugly fish, the sea robin the fishermen gave us. John sits on his milk crate and then he says come here and makes me sit on his lap and I feel his fingers going up to my tits again.

Maybe once John had blond hair but now it’s gray. He maybe once had blue eyes, but now they’re so bloodshot it’s hard to tell they’re blue at all. More people pour into the park as the day heats up. I tell John I’m going for a walk and I go into the park and the place hums with noise, the ticking of spokes on bikes whizzing by, the hum of blacks in conversation, saying, “ahh hmm, mmm hhm,” the motor of the fountain spouting water. I know how the mouse feels. Up inside all that thrumming purr.