Free Boys of Life by Paul Russell

hazy—but I think in the dream somebody says the police have found eighty-five bodies in that tree stump, though by that time I'm living somewhere else, on a sea coast. I'm eating ice cream with Ted—he's wearing sunglasses so nobody'll know him. We're way up on a cliff, sitting in lawn chairs on a kind of terrace with pots ot red flowers and the ocean way down below us.
    How the story of that dream connects with the other story I'm trying to tell, I still don't know.
    v>

    □ PAUL RUSSELL
    As for Netta and Sammy, who stayed in the apartment's other room—if you can call curtains around a mattress any kind o( room— they were always there too, especially Netta, who never left the apartment a single time, as far as I could tell, till she moved out for good sometime in the middle of that winter. They'd yammer away at each other in that foreign language they always spoke with each other. It always sounded like they were arguing, but I guess they weren't because they spent hours in there together. Sometimes Netta would get in these moods and play tapes of opera singers on a little cassette player she had—she'd play each song over and over like she was trying to figure out something about it before passing on to the next one.
    When that'd happen, Sammy would always move out into the other room where I was. At first it made me nervous. We hadn't exactly hit it off with each other that first day back in Kentucky. But for some reason, maybe because he was as bored around that apartment as I was, he seemed to take some kind of liking to me. At least he'd talk to me, which was more than Netta usually did. Ever since we'd dug weeds together in that field, she'd pretty much acted like she couldn't he bothered with me.
    Sammy's real name was Szlama Finkelsztajn, and he was horn in the year 1900, which in Jewish years was the year 5661, something 1 thought made sense: the world was older for them than it was tor us. He told me about how he used to live in Poland, and what happened in 1939, or 5700, depending on how you wanted to call it.
    "Everywhere," Sammy said, "there were the signs." He never
    looked ar me when he talked. He was going over this Stufl again and
    n in his head, and I could've been anvbodv there to listen. We
    were both Miring at this rickety kitchen table, and I had a tea cup with
    lC Canadian Club in the bottom oi it. "Bui we would not believe
    the signs," he said. "No one would believe. 1 low could \ou go on living
    and believe tlu.se signs.' But this One day there is no longer an\ doubt.
    I ,nu walking and It is hot, it is summer. Because I have noi eaten 1
    am ver\ weak. And 1 pa« i ^ hun h, .i ( htisti.m i hun h I he C hun h
    <>t the- Virgin M.u\ if i^ called, and from the- vet) first that thej closed [hetto this church was closed up al tie Is allowed in it. But
    n, and thin- are women, lewish
    :, and out ot the open doors "t the Church oi the
    Virgin \1.u\ Wh.it is this, 1 ask, that \oii t! In and out ot the
    Christian church? And a woman tells me, It Is the Institute <>t Feather
    i si L:n beside the doot and It Is true, It

    B O Y S O F L I F E D
    says Institute of Feather Cleaning. So I go inside, and what I see is, everywhere white feathers piled up on the floor and floating in the air. When I take a step white feathers float up into the air of the
    church. Every breeze that comes through the door, white leathers float up and sink back down. All over the carved altar and the great organ and the statues of saints white feathers are floaring. And everywhere Jewish women are at work."
    44 I don't get it," I told him. Lots of times I got the feeling Sammy thought I knew things I didn't really know. It always made me want to dive into the Canadian Club a little deeper than I already was.
    "There in the Church of the Virgin Mary," he went on, "Jewish women were ripping open the pillows and featherheds of the Jews who had been murdered, and cleaning the feathers, and sorting them, and shipping them to Germany,