along and curled over under and between Merilee and Sam.

15. Hinge

The four of them slept through the next day. Sam missed his plane to San Francisco and his one and only opportunity to address the Hotelkeepers of America in congress assembled. No sweat, he told Merilee.

15. Conditions variable

What with the goodbye gifts from the Tribe, they lived in plenty of one sort.

"But still," Merilee told Sam and Alyosha, "if I could get my hands on a kee somewhere and take it up north to sell, do you realize what we could clear? We may be on emergency rations, but up there the folk must be-whushl" It made them shiver to consider.

In material terms Sam and Merilee had grown quite poor. In September Sam either had quit managing the Sea Anchor or had been fired, it was never quite clear to Merilee which. He devoted himself full time to his sculpturing in the garage. Tools and blowtorches were expensive and had taken all Sam's savings. Merilee worked at the Bede Game on her propitious days.

"No. I categorically won't have you doing that."

Merilee gazed fondly on her fiance, the first man who had ever loved her enough to worry much about her getting busted.

"And besides, there's no keeds anywhere," said Alyosha, the person who always knew where all the kees were at the way the best poker players magically know the location of all the aces.

Sam went back to hammering. It made Merilee happy for her amore to have his thing. It made the keeds ecstatic. They could sit forever, Girl and Alfred, contentedly watching him torture his metal and rusticating it or affixing the electric eyeballs to his clowns. Freed, Sam loved the woman who had baked the file into his cake, and they were happier than Merilee had believed people in groups of more than one could ever be.

Sam arced one afternoon on the only thing he missed from his previous life in Philadelphia, namely Springtime. Merilee had mentioned la primavera and he started shouting The Primal Verities! and went running into the garage with Girl and Alfred galumphing along behind.

By the time Merilee got up to bring him his pants-the garage opened on the street and their straight neighbors already resented them for Sam's pounding in the night-Sam had moved his circus pieces into the corners and was deep into the idea for a thirty-foot interlocking monument which would reveal to the seasonless people of California all the mysteries of budding and blooming. He pulled down the garage door and Merilee leaped naked for the rafters and depended her great square feast of a body in various attitudes while Sam sketched her. After seven hours of it, Merilee had to rest.

Two days later Sam came inside to sleep, bent over and exhausted by the great weight he had been carrying on ais strong shoulders. Then, with six ? ours of snoring under his belt, he was caddy to go again.

"What can I do?" Merilee asked.

"Can you get me to eat?"

"Of course. Got gold?"

"Nope."

"Then I'll go to work and they'll pay me and it will take time but we will eat," Merilee promised, nodding.

Sam blew her a kiss from the doorway. "And when 'La Primavera' is done, we will get married," he said, and split for his work.

Back. "Hey sugar, did you just drop?"

"Yup."

"Why?"

"Felt like it."

"You sad about something?"

"No."

"How can you go to work stoned?"

"I string better stoned."

Just sit there in the back room at the Bee Game away from the inquiring eyes of tourists and make wonder from shiny glass. Gifts from Merilee to the world.

16. Magic garments to enhance our nakedness

Spring and Fall, all the changes in a single beaded gown worn by its creator to the unveiling of her husband's sculpture in Century Plaza. Priceless.

Merilee had never experienced the Fall, the unhappiness and even desperation Sam said comes when you see the leaves leaving the trees and you are left behind. But she was an artist as much as Sam was, darn it, and the artist goes traveling in his head where he has never been on his two feet. Goes unafraid and plucks from his experience things other people would leave for dead and buried. The greatest artist stands sans fear of anything he is capable of imagining. A world traveler with all the credit cards. Heaven in his mind, and hell.

The magic gown grows apace, bead by careful bead. On its kinetic, pixilating and luminous surface, swallows fly away, the Great Migration of the Tribe is played in loving sad detail, the anxious braves move south on their short ponies not knowing that they, peaceful folk, are about to found a bellicose nation and the first New World zoo. The resolute squaws come behind with the babies and the baggage. Their bare feet. One squaw remains at home, tearful but happy. Diamond beads for under her glistening eyes. Happy happy-so full of happiness she comes near to bloating-and there are no others to share it with. On the magic gown also see that men leave their wives, boys forsake girls, fathers daughters, daughters husbands, families leave German Shepherds for dead on garbage heaps, the background turns Tulsa and Ada black and stormy with rushing gusts of leaves and swarms of swallows and locusts perch on your nose. Through magic arts we absorb the unfair burdens of our lovers' dreams.