A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

loaded with magpies and starlings, and the one thing Dixon said he told Hawk was that trees could indeed feel pain, and how would Hawk like a chain saw in his side?
    The crazy thing is, Dixon did have a twin, an unnamed baby boy who never even went home from the hospital. In fact, he was never named because he lived less than two hours. “He just wasn’t ready to breathe” is what my mother told us.
    Someone has to be pretty bored to take that little sadness from so long ago, mix it up, and throw in a baby killer like Gordon Jenner hasdone. A smart guy would have chosen somebody else to tell that story about, because if you traced Dixon back to a kid you’d see someone with the little teaspoon face of an angel, and you’d know that Dixon’s instincts and nature were as clear and harmless as water from his very start.
    I’m not saying he was perfect, but right down to his bones Dixon was good. Once, as kids, I tried to get him to steal candy with me, and as soon as I’d told him the plan, his hands were paralyzed—he said he felt ice all through his fingers. Years later, when Francine Johnson put the moves on him one night, he just didn’t have the heart to tell her to go bark at someone else. All the bad genes of three generations of Johnsons had settled in Francine—in her face, to be exact. Dixon took her home that night, which amazed me because he had an epic appeal to women—he could be wearing a baseball cap and dirty levis and in ten minutes he’d have some exotic female rooted deep as a mulberry right next to him. “So why Francine Johnson?” I asked him.
    He shrugged and put his feet up on the dashboard of my car. “In the dark,” he said, “with the lights off, everything evens out.”

    Some people don’t know when to shut up. “Diarrhea of the mouth,” my mother calls it, but I think it can signal something much worse—a bitter heart no bigger or better than a turnip.
    What Jenner has to be bitter about, I don’t know. There are no easy windows by which to look into another person’s life, so I judge it from the outside—what he does and says, if he has a dog and feeds it, how he treats his mate.
    I was good to my ex-husband, but good doesn’t necessarily mean close or bonded, it doesn’t mean you sleep cradled like two spoons at night, or that your future can stretch scary as hell like a suspension bridge out in front of you and as long as the two of you are together it doesn’t matter. Although he never settled to just one woman, Dixonknew all about couples and he warned me about Armand. “Love him or lose him,” he said, and he was right.
    If I had a dollar for every time Dixon was right . . . well. The one time he was wrong, though, he was seriously wrong. That was when he took off for Santa Fe, thinking his life here had stalled. He could walk it, he said—hell, cancer patients and paraplegics were crisscrossing the continent and he could do it, too. Adventure and bullheadedness always flowed together in Dixon like one muddy river. The fact that he started out on that trip with only a few dollars didn’t scare him. Dixon believed you could build your life up out of nothing—just like a fence—a brick at a time.
    On an Oklahoma two-way road in the oil-colored twilight is where it ended for my brother when a semi came up over a rise and could not distinguish Dixon from the shadows. His hair was dark. He wore an old brown corduroy jacket that became even browner after he rolled more than fifty feet in the dirt. I went down there to
identify
him, which after an accident like that is just a loose term, because the person I saw only vaguely resembled my brother.
    Dixon robbed the bank when he got his looks. He was big and lean, had a square jaw and a natural kind of abandoned grace when he moved. I’ll admit that I got the deep-water eyes in the family, but Dixon got the