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David Salner worked as an iron ore miner, steelworker, and machinist. His work has appeared in North American Review, Threepenny Review, Poetry Daily, and many other places, and his most recent book is John Henry's Partner Speaks (Pudding House, 2006).
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Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
The Best Summer
by David Salner | ns 69
He makes coffee and has the junkyard
all to himself. The sun dries out the steel hoods
as he stares at the tires sunk flat in the weeds
and stirs in sugar. Business picks up around ten
as men come in with crescents of dirt
jammed under their nails, asking for a carburetor
from a late-eighties Dodge or a wiper motor
from a ten-year-old Ford. After work,
he picks up Alicia, and they go
to a flooded ore pit and swim to the center,
floating and racing, as the sun sets
behind the tall spruce. They tread water—
legs waving as though under glass—
and drift in circles around each other,
swimming back to the ledge,
pulling hand over helping hand—to emerge
and brush mosquitoes off each others' skin.
They put a towel on a shelf of stone
and make love, gulping air,
holding tight, falling back
while the sky darkens. They doze then sit up,
pull a six-pack of beer from the quarry
and whisper, till the night gets cold.
The following day, he dozes in the junkyard,
drinks coffee, reads the headlines about the new war,
and searches for a quarter panel from an old Monte Carlo.
On the way home, he stops at the army recruiter—
just to ask about the new war—and signs up. He doesn't
know why. "I just wanted to get it over,"
he says. "What over?" she cries. "Us? Our lives?"
Next morning, he stares at the columns of cars
and imagines the drivers are here, each revving
their engines for someplace to go. After work,
he'll play basketball at the armory, then try
to make up. He'll tell her the rest of his dreams.
He spends the a.m. pulling an engine and picks up
the phone a couple of times. I must be crazy,
he thinks. This has been the best summer of my life.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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