DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW, DARN RIGHT (Part Three)

(do I need to say this? Please read parts 1 and 2 first - thanks)

Trying to keep a huge round glass bowl full of red water animated and in front of the TV cameras 24/7. That was the hardest part of the whole operation.

Sure it was distracting to be monitoring every last electronic signal coming in from everywhere in the world, all jammed into one computer complex and being categorized and sorted automatically and pared down so that Boss only had to actually view or listen to maybe 2% or 3% of them. Even that small percentage meant Boss had to cover millions of separate pieces of data every second. How could he do this? Why would he do this? And all of it channeled through the chips of a stupid camera phone. Wouldn't you think he would centralize his intelligence in something with a bit more in the way of cajones? Maybe a few more ringtone options or something? Winston refused to let the word "apps" enter his thought processes. It just pissed him off.

Winston Three tried to stop this line of thought and turned his own enhanced memory back to the business at hand, which was channeling and sorting the date, or the percentage of it that got to him, then sending it on to Boss. So Boss could take action and then send those orders out to Winston Five, who was the conduit for outgoing information and instructions. It was really a simple system, organized like a newspaper route or something. Yeah, times twenty billion or so.

Winston Three could never understand computers even though essentially he now was one. It was kind of ironic. The philosophers could say "Know Oneself" but if oneself is all electronic and digital and shit, how do you know even what you know? Three had no clue.

The program projecting the giant pitcher of diplomatic and magnanimous Kool-Aid was acting up again. he was supposed to be tipping side to side a little bit when he ran around, but not to the extent that he was spilling himself all over the carpet. And he wasn't supposed to keep changing color either. He was supposed to be a cheerful pinkish red color at all times. But he kept switching from red to green to yellow (nice effect there, nine hundred gallons of piss jumping around and talking to you, splashing out onto the floor). A lot of the time colors got mixed and he looked like a big round bowl of sewage with a grin and a glass handle. Beautiful.

It all seemed pointless to Three. Almost nobody still believed that a giant pitcher of homemade soft drink mix was running the world governments. Three was sure of this. This whole business with the Kool-Aid was just part of Boss' sick sense of humor. Most likely everybody knew this sloshing and grinning front man was just some tricked up animated ding dong gimmick and not an actual three dimensional creature. Just another program. They had to know this.

Of course so much of the rest of it was real that it did lend some credence to the possibility that the Kool-Aid stooge was for real as well. But Three knew he wasn't.

Once a human, Winston Three was now something you might ca a "cyborg" if you were into that science fiction shit. Parts of his human brain remained and were responsible for his cynicism, what remained of his sense of humor and also his general laziness. Most of his mental functions were performed by sending a bunch of 1s and 0s slithering every which way. The circuitry, or whatever it was, that Boss had developed for installing in about anything he wanted, could be spread from one entity to another instantaneously like a thought wave, at the will of the "Ringtone in Chief" (Winston Three thought that was pretty damned funny but most of his sense of humor had been replaced). Winston was also physically enhanced to enable him to work endless hours at incredible speeds. Yadda yadda yadda. He wished he knew where he could find a decent blueberry pumpkin cake donut in what remained of the world's bakeries. Now that was important stuff which had plumb eluded him.

Boss could inject his instant circuitry or whatever it was, into almost anything, as noted. Step right up and gecome a sentient being, albeit probably a crazy one. He favored plastic or metal toys, and also animals (Three figured stuffed animals coming to life was too creepy even for Boss). But lots of other things had been "enhanced" also. Even some insects for some reason - not sure what kind of intel you could get from a mosquito but apparently there was some advantage to be had. All the Blackberries, iPhones, and of course every computer and other form of electronic communication and information gathering device. TVs, stereos, alarm systems. In most cases cartoon characters posed a barrier that could not be breached, and had to be operated holographically like Tubby the Kool-Aid Dimwit. But there was some evidence that even this rule was not absolute. Three had to confess he did not understand how all this worked, even with his brain enhancements. Three felt like he was kind of the Number Two in the operation and should understand this more. The total defection and disappearance of Winston One had left a gap that Boss had not really dealt with yet. He was still trying to find One even though there was something about him that made him immune to most of the methods that Boss had for tracking people or information. What a screwed up setup.

Three's brain was so fragmented he couldn't keep track of what he was thinking about - he couldn't account for what information was being passed on or why, he didn't really know what orders he was giving, anything like that. It was all functioning on some level below the surface of his consciousness. But it all seemed to be working, as far as he could tell.

And he still had time to ask himself: Why? Why was I "born and bred" for this function over forty years ago, before there was even such a thing as a computer? How was this possible? And why is Boss causing all this chaos? Why does it seem like he is instigating the end of the world? Wouldn't the humans have fucked it up on their own soon enough? And most importantly - once the human population had all been converted or eradicated (Three figured that had to be the goal here), then what? What in hell would a bunch of smart mouthed cell phones and recalcitrant DVD players do when there were no stupid human beings around to fool with?

It just didn't make any sense. Three wished he could talk to his uncle, Winston One - last Three was able to find out he had left Chinook, the small town in Montana where he had been for years before all of this began. One was a Winston Churchill before this whole thing ever started up; he was the "Second Generation WC" or so they called him. As far as Three knew, at this point he was one of a kind and that had something to do with his immunity to the influence of Boss. Three was sure that he knew what was going on.

Meanwhile all the digitalized data that was pounding in and out of his mind was driving him nuts. The remaining human part of his brain was developing a king sized migraine. Three wished the built-in miniaturized pharmacy in his stomach would hurry up and produce some kind of pain reliever and get it into his blood stream.

* * * * * * * *

Every dog has fleas. Where and when the dog bites just tells the fleas where to go next and when to do it. Fleas have no sense of time except as is determined by the bite of the dog. They have no goals, no purpose, no expectations - except as delineated by he jaws and the teeth. There is no moral imperative except such as is imparted by the chosen time and place of the host's aggression.

The flea takes more than blood from the dog. When they bite they are defined - or rather they become so when the dog bites back. The vulnerability of the host is underscored. Even though the perpetrator is nothing. A flea.

No dog can actually harm a flea. A flea is too small to be injured or killed by something as large as a dog. They can be displaced. Their lives can be turned upside down perhaps, their futures redefined. But no death can come to them on the jaws or claws of the canine they inhabit. That death is reserved for the larger, the more visible, the more important. As death often is.

My name is Frank Lloyd; at least now it is or so I will claim. I am currently living in Rapid City and I am trying to do so in complete secrecy. And these observations about the dogs and the fleas, these are my thoughts, as I stand on my tiny balcony (a "lanai" I suppose it would be called nowadays) and watch the tableau that unfolds in the street below.

I don't know where it came from exactly, but along the curb below my third-story vantage point there is now an impossibly large sofa (call it a "davenport" if your memory goes back as far as mine does). Where a straight-line sofa would typically have perhaps three segments, this one has five - and by segments I don't mean separate sections, detached pieces to be strategically positioned in order to establish the proper feng shui. Rather I mean the sequential presence of large cushions or the dividing demarcations on the sofa's back rest, along the overall framework of the piece. Five segments is an incredibly long in-line sofa, which was no doubt assembled at some factory by workers who envisioned it spanning a single wall in some vast living room or lounge somewhere. The number of homes that might have accommodated this antiquated beast has to be small. And this one in particular, at this moment - would be very difficult to find a spot for.

Since it is engulfed in flames from one end to the other.

I did not see who or what placed it here in the street. It's nighttime and most likely it was carried in by hand, but of course by entities that don't actually even have hands - my guess is some good sized animals who could stand upright sufficiently to maneuveer down the street with such a large, cumbersome object in tow. Most likely it was dogs, large dogs. Dogs that are now functioning as fleas, as it were. Ironically it was probably police dogs.

I came to look when I heard the commotion, mostly caused by the police who were shouting and blowing whistles. I could hear their desperate shoes scuffing along the pavement in the dark. There was a fire engine in the distance, howling away. The flickering light from the burning sofa crossed the paths of the police occasionally as they scampered comically about, apparently seeking the perpetrators of this act of vandalism. Said perpetrators were of course long gone by now.

The fleas had chosen their spot, they had inflicted their bite, and when the host provided a somewhat predictably delayed response in the form of a violent kick of sorts - well, the offending parties were far removed from the spot by then, on their way to the next destination. Such is the way of fleas.

I heard my wife enter the room behind me. She had been out in the hall, talking to someone even though I strongly tried to discourage this - probably they were discussing the pandemonium that seemed to be blasting away almost worldwide, as far as anyone could tell - engulfing us all in flames as we floundered helplessly like giant pieces of furniture; out of style, rendered almost immobile by our stature, virtually without purpose in the "modern" world. mostly right now I was wondering why the police and fire departments, as fractured and frantic as they were - why were they even iinterested in this small, localized criminal act? Weren't there bigger concerns to be dealt with?

Illyana stepped closer to me, framed now in the balcony's doorway. The backlighting silhouetted her tall slim form. Her dark hair was pulled up severely. She wore a form-fitting printed blouse and black pants that clung to her tightly. She was about five feet eight but so slim and elegant that she seemed even taller - she was a woman who generally did not look her age.

"Winston? Honey, what is going on out there now?" I thought she sounded tired.

"Lana - I told you before, stop calling me that! You don't know who could hear, and we are hanging by a thread here in spite of our advantages! Damn it!"

She hung her head and I knew I had probably overreacted. Suddenly she looked old after all, and when she spoke again her voice sounded so very tired. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I'm so sorry, Frank."

Baltimore

(this is for a girl named Connie something; it was 1975 and I don't even remember what she looked like. Just the feeling remains.)

Peering through your Baltimore hair

your lips smack - snap like crabs

in briny pots. I hate your accent

which you say you do not have.

I also hate you in my thoughts

you move inside me along the beltway

like a stone in a hubcap.

I want you but this is too grisly

Like some gnarled dwarf candy striper

melting butt first in the back of an ambulance.

Stop talking in that voice! Your Dundalk salt lip

words confuse me

After tonight

I'm driving a Plymouth Duster

back to my college where talking

about playing lacrosse would just get you dead.

Okay check the mirror

for 2-way men

love me till

the windows bleed.

HOW TO LOSE A FROZEN HORSE-TURD FIGHT, Part Two

This is the second and final installment of "How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight", which is the 4th chapter of the "Oscar" series. Previous chapters are (1) Oscar and Someplace You Don't Want to Go - posted April 13th; (2) Moose and Molly and the Double Wide Bird of Paradise - posted April 29th; (3) Paint It, Wayne - posted June 6th; and (4a) How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight Part One, posted July 13th . I recommend reading the chapters in order. Thanks.




Soon the Johnson boys found themselves each morning counting the minutes until the school bus arrived to haul all the kids to town, and living in fear of the end of the school day when it would haul everybody back again. Most of the time around the ranch was spent outside, even in the cold. This was an ordinary thing with the Tooles. Horses lived outside, so they did too. Horses didn't take showers or baths; so ditto for the Toole boys. Horses didn't brush their teeth - well, you get the picture. As the week went on it kept getting a little more frightening every day. With all the slopping through the mud and manure and general filth, by the end of the day everybody on the whole place was quite a sight. Honky and John had brought a lot of clean clothes with them and to their relief, Eliezer and Vernon at least started each day with clean jeans and a laundered shirt on their backs. As near as the Johnsons could determine, neither of their two companions really owned a coat. The cold didn't seem to matter much to Vernon and Eliezer Toole.


By Saturday morning John and Honky could see the end in sight. One more night and they would get picked up by their folks. One more night and they could be returned to the world of a clean kitchen table, swept floors, warm clean covers on the bed, and a bathtub that was ready for actual use in the manner for which it was designed. They were short-timers and they knew it and they could barely stand the wait.


Now it should be said that every last one of the Tooles was good to the guests. Mrs. Toole kept an eye on them and made sure they didn't get into anything really bad. They got fed. They got to wash off with a wash cloth once in awhile. They even got to brush their teeth and Nessie offered to do their laundry after Honky got knocked off a horse by a low tree branch on one of his few riding adventures, and landed in - what else? - a big pile of fresh shit. It was just that the Tooles had their own way and the two Johnson boys had to rub shoulders with it pretty much all day. By week's end mostly they were both just really worn out and tired and homesick.


Out in the yard Saturday morning Billy Brylcreem showed up from somewhere. Neither of the Johnson boys saw him arrive but there were so many horses around, horses everywhere, it seemed likely he had ridden up from his place down by the ferry. Billy was a pretty tough kid himself and was used to recreating with the Toole lads frequently. Now there were five boys to figure out something to do to pass the time. With Billy present Myrna suddenly appeared and kept the numbers even.


Vernon and Eliezer were hunters and a good amount of the time that week had been spent tramping through the trees and brush down by the river, taking potshots at random pheasants and the like. The Toole boys also liked to ride, of course, and spent a fair amount of the week on horseback when they weren't hunting or in town at school. Most of the horses seemed kind of rough and tumble to John and Honky so they managed to stay off them for the most part, especially after Honky got dumped off during his first attempt. Both Johnson boys had ridden, of course, but not like this - the wild stallion in these animals seemed to still be pretty close to the surface as far as the guests could tell.


Another almost unnatural ability that the Toole boys had was - well, they both had throwing arms that were off the charts for any young teen boys. In another environment, with their natural athletic abilities, their raw power, they probably could have ended up playing professional sports. But their lifestyle wasn't going to prepare them for anything like that. Vernon in particular had an arm that could about throw a snowball through a stop sign. Eliezer was pretty close to that level too. Not much technique involved, just raw power. It was just the damnedest thing you ever saw, it really was.


Running around the yard knocking each other into big plowed-up piles of snirt took up part of the day but got kind of tiresome. Snirt, by the way, is what folks around here call it when the snow gets mixed in with the dirt to the extent that a new kinda substance is formed. Plowing the snow on dirt roads or farmyards usually resulted in some hellacious piles of snirt, which just got dirtier and snirtier as they slowly melted - once it warmed up to above freezing that is.
Now the way I heard it, nobody recalls exactly who, but one of the boys suggested they break off into two teams and have a rock fight. Before the snow set in, piles of gravel had been dumped in a couple places in the yard - it was supposed to be dozed out on the farmyard to cover all the dirt and make it more passable during winter, less full of ruts, and so on. Of course it didn't get spread around before the snow came, so now there were two big piles of rocks in the yard.
Certainly it was one of the Toole boys who campaigned for the rock fight. The piles were about twenty-five yards apart and they made some teams - one Toole boy on each team to try and keep it fair. The Johnson boys managed to stay together and joined with Vernon, with Eliezer, Myrna and Billy taking the other rockpile. In no time at all the rocks were flying.


Big rocks, little rocks, handfuls of gravel, it was all sailing through the air. This went on for awhile but somebody figured out that, with the big rock piles to hide behind, nobody was getting hit. And where's the fun in that? You could lob some rocks and try and get them to drop on the enemy but this didn't involve velocity so it wasn't very satisfying - tossing handfuls of gravel into the air maybe caused some dirt and pebbles to rain down on the other team, but most of it wouldn't carry that far so again, no real harm done. A truce was called so the two squads could negotiate some new terms.


Besides piles of snirt and the rockpiles, there was one other thing piled in the Toole yard. With all the horses everywhere there was a real abundance of horseshit around. This was so plentiful it had also been shoved up into piles, but they were much lower hills that a person could not really seek much cover behind. It had been piled when the weather was a bit warmer but now that it had frozen again, you had some nice round "road apples" that were just about as hard as the rocks. And they fit right into the palm of your hand.


By mutual agreement the teams each relocated near their respective horse turd fortresses. The Johnson boys were cold, their fingers were numb except where they were stinging like crazy, their nostrils stuck together when they breathed, and they really just wanted to go indoors somewhere. Maybe wash their hands even. But nonetheless the game was afoot and the battle was re-engaged. Vernon and Eliezer were the big guns on either team, since they had such power and velocity in their throws. Everybody else was kind of laying low at this point, although Billy Brylcreem was up there with the Toole boys some of the time, trying to connect with a target.


Mostly Vernon and Eliezer hit each other. Neither was particularly accurate but they managed to bounce a few off one another. Vernon, having been clocked by a solid steel truck box, getting hit with frozen horse shit didn't bother him much. Eliezer also seemed rather impervious. John and Honky were just wondering when this was all going to play out and they could go eat some cold mashed potatoes or something. Those boys were downright miserable at this point.


Then Vernon decided he needed to strike a lethal blow so his squad could claim the victory. He was as patient generally as a man could be but he was just starting to tire of this business. It was mostly him against Eliezer anyway, and they spent so much time pummeling each other on a daily basis it just wasn't that exciting. He would rather be riding a horse.


So not really having much of an aim, Vernon decided to make up for it with added velocity. He stood up, reared back with a good sized horse turd in his right hand, cocked back his arm, stepped into his throw and fired that turd, straight as a frozen rope as they say, right towards the lair of the adversary. Honky and John crouched halfway hidden behind the dwindling mound of frozen shit, watching the trajectory of this frozen feces missile. They held their breath even more than normal when surrounded by piles of ice cold livestock shit.


As luck would have it, Eliezer had bent down to try and select a satisfactory turd for his next shot, and Billy chose just that instant to pop up to see how the battle was going at the far end of their little Coliseum of Crap. Both the Johnson boys saw what happened next and, to hear them tell it around school afterwards, it was something they would never forget. No matter how hard they tried.


Myrna saw what was coming and said something to Billy like, "Watch out!" The lad turned his head a bit towards her, and right then the Supersonic Horse Turd of Doom and Destruction collided at full speed with his jaw. It was like a new take on the Big Bang Theory or something. Mountains were moved. Seas were parted. Black clouds rolled across the sky at breakneck speed. Or so it seemed to the brothers Johnson as they witnessed the strike from across the yard. The only black hole in sight was the gaping mouth of Billy Brylcreem as the horse shit rocket found it's mark.


Blind-sided as he was, Billy had no chance to prepare - not that much save maybe a quick prayer would be suitable preparation for being hit in the mouth with a frozen horse turd propelled at a speed of over one hundred miles per hour. His jaw shot out of its natural position below the rest of his skull; muscles were torn and teeth went flying. Literally; Myrna had a couple of Billy's teeth in her hair when it was all over with. Blood exploded from Billy's mouth. His nose started to pour out more blood. Billy managed to bite off just the tip of his tongue and promptly swallow it. There was just no immediate way to assess the degree of bone, tissue and tooth damage that was done. The sound was something you might hear if you hit a grapefruit with a claw hammer. Only louder.


Vernon and Eliezer, kind of slow in terms of reacting to anything, just sort of stared at Billy writhing on the frozen ground. Both Honky and John were frozen with fear and for a week afterwards didn't even seem to remember what exactly had happened, though eventually the horrible images all came back to them. But Myrna was there, and she was sweet on Billy as I mentioned before - so she took action.


Not as big as her brothers, Myrna was still a mighty sturdy young gal and no weakling - she could most likely have whomped the hell out of any boys in school up to at least the age of seventeen including the linemen on the football team. She grabbed up Billy in one quick motion, at the same time picking up a couple of his teeth that were on the ground next to him; she headed off towards the house and started yelling for her Ma at the same time.


"Ma! Ma! Open up the door! Billy's got his face busted up on account of Vernon's horse turds! Hey, Ma!"


Eliezer seemed to come around a little at this point, when he heard the desperation in his sister's voice. He started towards the house too, although at a more leisurely pace. He stopped at the old Chrysler station wagon in front of the house and got in and fired it up. He knew they were probably going to have to get Billy to some kind of a doctor; he probably wasn't going to be able to just shake this one off like most injuries that occurred at the Stallion Valley Ranch.
Oscar told me once that Eliezer's name actually translated into "God is Help" in Hebrew. Nobody figured Eliezer actually knew this but somehow I guess he figured he should lend a hand regardless. He got out and opened up the endgate on the old station wagon as Nessie and Myrna carried Billy back out of the house with a big towel wrapped around his head. They tossed him in the back and set off for the ferry dock.




* * * * * * *


About the same time as all this was going on, Milo was downriver a couple miles and going about his business - meaning, he was getting his dynamite ready and working himself up to do a little serious power fishing. He had a date to meet some of those high school kids over by the ferry dock on the Wynona side that afternoon - also, Bird Brain was going to bring him some Seagram's whiskey so he needed to have some fresh fish to make the trade. He already had a bag of dope in the boat and another empty bag to put his catch in, after the bombs went off.
Milo dropped four quarter-sticks of dynamite and then sped off down the river a ways, to set up for the pick-up phase of his operation. His net was ready.

"KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM!" The explosions echoed from deep in the water with a throaty roar. In about a minute the dead fish started bobbing up above the bomb site. Milo got into position.
It didn't take him long to scoop up a half a bag of good looking sturgeon and some pike and even a few nice Rainbow and Brown trout to boot. Milo thought, why the hell mess with fly fishing to get some good trout? These were probably close to 18 inchers and they only took him about five minutes to get a whole passel of them.

Satisfied with his work, he turned the boat downstream towards the ferry. He knew he was late for the meeting with his customers, so he really threw it into gear. He had been pounding down bourbon all morning and he was now finishing off a bottle as he tore along parallel (more or less) with the south bank of the Missouri. There were ice floes here and there and he had to dodge around them as he went. This did not dissuade him from proceeding at full throttle of course.
Meanwhile the Tooles had gotten to the ferry with poor ol' busted up Billy. His dad came running down from the barn, took one look at him and fired up the old diesel engine on the ferry boat - he knew the doc was a hell of a lot closer in Wynona than the one going the other way, with about sixty miles of dirt road in between. Billy was awake and looked at his dad from above the wrapped up towel that covered the bottom half of his face. He wasn't about to actually say anything but just sort of gurgled. His pa knew exactly what he meant though.

The ferry started out for the Wynona dock with just the Toole's station wagon on board. Besides Bartholomew there was Nettie and Myrna in the car along with Billy in the back. Eliezer had come along from the Stallion Valley Ranch and hopped out when they arrived in the Brylcreem's yard in order to locate Bart as quickly as possible; now he took a tremendous leap and jumped back onto the boat as it was leaving the riverbank. For some reason he still held a half thawed horse turd in his hand.

The ferry drew close to the Wynona side and Bart was kind of perplexed to see a whole crew of folks standing on the shore. None of them looked like they were wanting a ferry ride and in fact seemed to be more interested in watching downriver to see if something was coming their way. Bart recognized the bald head of Bird Brain Baner with his built-in bird's nest on the top of his noggin. The rest appeared to be high school boys but he didn't know any of them personally. There were a couple of cars but they had been parked well back from the ferry dock.

About that time Bart realized that there was a huge ice jam along the riverbank right where he needed to dock the ferry. It was probably thirty feet wide and must have drifted up and lodged itself into that position since his last run, which had been the day before. His heart kind of sank because he knew he needed to get his boy onto that dock and into town to see the doctor or dentist or more likely both - but his ferry wasn't going to be able to get through that ice jam. He ran right up against the ice but then idled down the old diesel engine and sat there trying to decide what to do next. The water was too deep and of course way too cold to try and get in there and bust things up by hand.

Somebody on the other side was now pointing downriver and yelling something. About that time Bart heard a noise over the idling diesel. He looked to the west following the sound and saw a site that took even Bart a minute to sort out.

It was that crazy son of a bitch Milo Matrovik in his speedboat. He was coming full speed towards the ferry dock; his boat was swerving like crazy and Bartholomew could now see that the drunken Polish bastard didn't even have a hand on the wheel - there was a bottle in one hand and his big black cowboy hat in the other.

"Wheee-haw!" Milo was hollering. His face was cherry red either from the cold or the booze or both. Two big flour bags were bouncing around by his feet as he stood in the boat, which was careening, apparently out of control, right towards where the ferry was ice jammed, thirty feet from the dock.

Everybody on board and on the shore was watching this whole thing unfold. Nobody knew what to do or what to say, so nobody did or said anything. They just watched. Bart was looking for something to hold onto. With his foot he accidentally kicked over an extra can of diesel fuel that was sitting next to the engine on the ferry.

When that damned speed boat slammed into that ferry, and into the ice jam it was wedged up against, there was so many noises all at once that there didn't seem to be any sound at all. Bart was jarred off his feet. That big chunk of ice had huge cracks through it that made it look like a jigsaw puzzle somebody had just put the finishing touches on. The bow of Milo's speedboat was completely stove in and that thing started sinking so fast you could see it dropping down into the freezing water a foot at a time. At this point though, Milo was no longer on the boat.

At the point of impact, three things had come flying out of that speedboat and onto the ice. One was the bag of dope which was dispersing its contents into the air as it flew. This got the attention of the high school boys on the bank. Another was the bag of fish, and those fish were like flying fish now, they were spinning through the air and ending up all over everything - on the ice, on the deck of the ferry, even some clear up on the bank by where Bird Brain was standing with his mouth hanging open like a barn door after the horses were all long gone.
The third thing to fly out of the speedboat was Milo Matrovik himself. Like some cartoon dog smashing his jalopy into a telephone pole, Milo was catapulted a good twenty feet in front of his doomed speedboat and skidded unceremoniously across the fractured ice. Almost immediately the ice around Milo started to break up and drift. Milo's weight was causing the piece he was on to slowly sink. He was of course out cold.

But then Myrna sprang into action. She leapt from the front of the ferry, gandy-danced across the slippery chunks of ice, and made it to Milo just as his personal ice boat was dipping below the surface on its way to Davy Jones' Locker. She grabbed him by the collar and drug him towards the shore, continuing to skip from one broken sliver of ice to the next.

Milo partially regained his consciousness briefly at some point. What he saw was a large woman surrounded by fish scattered in all directions; this woman had ahold of him and was pulling him towards shore. From the ferry behind him he heard voices - they were calling "Myrna made it! Myrna made it! She saved him!". As he looked back it appeared to him that the entire river was on fire. At that point Milo lapsed back into drunken unconsciousness.

Somehow a spark had ignited the spilled diesel fuel on the deck of Bartholomew Brylcreem's ferry boat. The fuel had spilled over the front and the fire quickly spread; the bow of the ferry and the ice in front of it was covered with flames. It was quite a sight. And a few of those Northern Pike ended up cooked pretty good, as it turned out.

But other than that the fire was not good news. Bart jumped to the engine of the ferry and started it up. He got the ferry going forward as fast as he could; it was pushing the now-shattered ice aside and gradually it made it to the dock on the Wynona side. Then Bartholomew stepped back as the Chrysler wagon driven by Eliezer careened past him through the flames and up onto the dock. Myrna jumped in without the car even stopping, and they set off towards Wynona as fast as possible. In the back Billy Brylcreem looked about and then gurgled his relative satisfaction with the current situation. Bartholomew stepped off his ferry and watched as it was slowly consumed by smoke and flames. Boyd Baner looked at the fish scattered in all directions across the ice, the ferry deck and the riverbank, and decided to just keep the case of whiskey and drink it himself. He set off back towards his car.


* * * * * * *


When word about this whole fantastic incident made its way into town (which really didn't take all that long), I was sitting on a stool in the Vet's Club Bar drinking ice cold Great Falls Select beer with Oscar and Stutterin' Mickey on either side of me. We all listened to the information being relayed, about how Billy Brylcreem got all busted up at the Toole ranch, then got chauffeured across the Missouri by his dad on a burning ferry boat that was rammed midriver by an insane drunken redneck in a speedboat, and then barely made it through an ice storm to get on the road to the doctor in Wynona. Of course the fella relaying this story hadn't actually been there so already the facts were getting a bit distorted.

Mickey's adam's apple was bobbing up and down like a drop target on an overworked pinball machine on a Saturday night. "Whoo-whoo-whaaat happened to B-B-B- whooo! Billy to st-start this business?" he was asking.

The storyteller then relayed what information he had on the horse-turd fight and Vernon's gate-busting shitball strike that felled everyone's new legendary childhood hero, Billy Brylcreem. He also had some info on Milo Matrovik, after they brought him around on the Wynona side of the river by dumping a quarter bottle of Bird Brain's Seagram's down him.

"Milo was pie-eyed as hell, soaked in whiskey, water and fish grease, but he swore up and down that a beautiful golden-haired mermaid had sprung from the water in a shower of ice crystals and fish guts and had drug him to the shore in the nick of time, just before he met his fiery death on the River Styx on his way to the Afterlife once and for all. Milo swore he heard folks calling his savior a mermaid," said Chippy Drago, the young fella who had brought the story into the bar. It sounded to me like maybe Chippy had a bit of a flair for the dramatic himself and that might be more evidence that the story had been somewhat compromised, factwise. I looked at Oscar when the mermaid stuff came up but he was staring at the ceiling and whistling some old Chicago blues ditty, having apparently lost all interest in the entire matter. It did kind of add up, in a sort of wild-eyed redneck booze hound hallucination sort of way. Even Stutterin' Mickey was willing to swallow that one it turned out.

So we all went home. Billy got his jaw wired back together and won a newfound appreciation for Myrna Toole. Vernon decided he better not throw any more frozen shit at anybody unless he was damned sure they were lookin' and could see it coming; other than that things were pretty much unchanged for him. The two Johnson boys found out the best way to lose a frozen horse turd fight and get it over with so everybody could get back in the house before their asses just froze clean off. And they decided they maybe shouldn't raise so much hell at home so that they wouldn't end up sentenced to a week at the Stallion Valley Ranch in the dead of winter with frozen turds piled high in the yard and some overgrown manchild wild maniacs coming at them from all sides. Nobody really knew what Eliezer ended up thinking about the whole experience and it always made me wonder.


* * * * * * * *


As Oscar veered off at his front gate and headed up towards his house that night, I looked at him one last time. He was trying to light one of his exotic cigarettes using a book of matches he had found in a snowdrift outside of the Vet's Club Bar. On the third strike the match took. Sometimes even water isn't wet if things get cold enough I guess.

"Hey," I asked him. "What do you think Eliezer got out of all this anyway? Do you think it made an impression on him?" It was hard to imagine the Toole boys being anything other than disinterested in even the most spectacular events transpiring right in front of them unless horses were involved. But Eliezer had seemed to connect to things in the course of this adventure and like I said, it made me wonder.

Oscar tossed the book of matches into the snow beside his doorstep, as if to say he would know where to find them the next time he needed them.

"God is Help," he said to me without looking back. "God is Help. Eliezer might have to start up his own religion. Or else maybe he'll grow up and buy a bar on the reservation and spread the good word to the People that way."

I couldn't even hear the latch click when the door closed behind him.

HOW TO LOSE A FROZEN HORSE-TURD FIGHT, Part One

This is the first installment (of two) of "How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight", which is the 4th chapter of the "Oscar" series. Previous chapters are (1) Oscar and Someplace You Don't Want to Go - posted April 13th; (2) Moose and Molly and the Double Wide Bird of Paradise - posted April 29th; (3) Paint It, Wayne - posted June 6th. I recommend reading the segments in order. Thanks

When you were with Oscar you could usually tell by looking at his face if something had just happened somewhere. Or, that is to say, if something was going to happen somewhere for somebody else but it had already happened for Oscar. He was the only person I ever knew who had a reverse Eidetic memory - meaning, he had a hard time remembering anything after it happened but he sometimes had a pretty clear and detailed picture of something that hadn't happened yet. It's hard to say if a more ordinary person would have found such an ability to be a gift or a curse. Oscar said he deserved to have it. As far as how he felt about it, that didn't tell me the answer either way. I do know that one of his sayings was, "the events which haven't happened yet are the ones that are shaping our lives." I usually listened to stuff like this and then kind of stored it away, thinking someday it might make sense to me. Or not.

One day we were sitting in the cab of a broken down pickup truck behind Oslo Norway's auto repair slash junkyard. This old rusted out Chevy truck had no wheels, no engine, just raw springs for a seat, and the aroma of mouse poop as an air freshener. The inside door panels were long gone and the skeletal workings of the door latch and window crank were prominently displayed so you could jam your finger in them and damn near cut the tip off if you weren't careful. Not to mention the jagged pieces of broken out window glass. Usually if I was looking for Oscar and I couldn't find him in any of his other haunts, I knew there was a good chance he would be back here in this pickup cab in the midst of the Norway "yard". Even at this time of year.

Old Oslo pretended Oscar wasn't there for the most part; Oscar made him kind of jumpy with his quirky behavior and unorthodox viewpoints. So Oslo had no choice but to let Oscar sit in the old truck, since usually Oslo wasn't even admitting Oscar existed in the first place. I think the trouble had all stemmed from the day when Oscar told Oslo the reason that he had been given such an unusual name. And the truth about the midgets. But that's a story for another time I guess.

I was sitting there next to Oscar, trying not to freeze to death or gag on the smoke of his God-awful cigarettes, when all of a sudden he gave out a grunt and got a big grimace on his face. Oscar was kind of a tall skinny guy and he sort of spasmed over forwards, folding himself in half so fast his head might have hit the dash, except most of the dash panel had been removed so he just got stuck in the ear a little bit by a stray piece of wire.

Presently he sat back up in the seat, picked up his cigarette off the floorboards, returned to his previous posture and, I guess you could call it, previous "state of mind". His face was relaxed again and the wrinkles on his faded purple sweater had repositioned themselves into the exact same configuration they had been in before he had lurched forward.

"What's going on?" I asked. As I have said, I knew Oscar pretty well, probably as well as anybody still both alive and in these parts, so I knew he had experienced some sort of occurrence that us regular type folks didn't really get to be privy to. Jury was still out as to whether I should even be asking about it.

"Billy Brylcreem," he said. "Billy is going to have to get some work but Bartholomew will need to ferry him over to the other side if the burning river melts the ice. Milo has a bag of mermaids and the second son of Zipporah is there to help."

Billy Brylcreem was a rawboned kid of about twelve or thirteen who lived down by the river; his father ran a one-horse car ferry that crossed the Missouri so that folks could get from our town over to Wynona. Almost nobody ever really needed to go from one jerkwater town to another when eighty miles of dirt road - and a river crossing - separated them, so basically old Bart Brylcreem only had to make a couple crossings a day. He was a farmer in addition to his ferry boat captaining, and sometimes somebody would have to go drag him off the tractor or out of the barn in order to get him to haul them across. If you were on the Wynona side opposite his farm and wanted to cross you had to just honk your horn over and over and over, or stand on the riverbank and curse at the top of your lungs, until he or one of his family members heard you. For years there had been talk of building a bridge - but there was one county on one side of the river and another county on the other side and everybody thought somebody else should pay for the bridge. So, no bridge; just a lot of honking and cursing and farming and the occasional angry individual making the crossing on horseback with great difficulty.

I really didn't know if this information about the Brylcreem kid warranted me asking more questions or not. Right now it was actually winter, so cold out the river was impassable by the ferry some of the time (and it was way too damned cold to be sitting in some busted-ass pickup cab behind some stumpy Norwegian's garage, to tell you the truth). Milo Matrovik was another old boy who farmed upriver from Brylcreem - well technically he didn't do much farming, mostly he drank and war-whooped and tore up and down the river in a souped-up speedboat while wearing a big black cowboy hat. Generally his wife did most of the field work. She also grew a patch of marijuana in her garden in the summertime and got Milo to make speedboat runs back and forth to the Wynona side of the river with the fruits of the special garden project hidden in a flour sack, to sell some pot to the high school kids while they were on summer break. And of course she smoked plenty herself, in order to stay mellowed out sufficiently so she wouldn't take a pry bar and pound her wild and useless husband into the middle of next Tuesday.

In spite of his, shall we say, unfocused efforts as potential breadwinner for the family, Milo was fond of saying, "I put food on the table." This was true in the sense that when he wasn't roaring up and down the river Milo would sometimes do what he considered "fishing". Power fishing he called it. This consisted of setting up in the middle of the river at some point where the current was slow and lazy, then dropping some quarter sticks of dynamite into the water. Real quick he would zoom downriver a hundred yards and wait for the fireworks. After his "depth charges" went off, lo and behold, the surface of the river was bobbing with dead fish. As they slowly drifted downstream Milo would zip back and forth with his boat, using a net to pull out the choice catches - mostly Northern Pike and pallid sturgeon (he let the carp and goldeye just float by). Sturgeon are a bizarre animal, with an exoskeleton (actually a series of large plates) that gives them the look of some sort of alien or prehistoric creature. Milo called them "Missoura river dinosaurs" and claimed they were good eating because the exterior plates meant less bones inside - and they weren't blown all to hell when his unorthodox fishing technique was employed.

Not only did Milo's indulgence in this so-called sport bring food to the Matrovik table, but Milo was able to trade off some of the fish to a gin-soaked bar owner from Wynona, a fellow by the name of Boyd Baner - a sloppily dressed old boy whose most defining feature was his big bald head rimmed with a crown of impossibly wild and unkempt hair. Boyd had a bar in Wynona named simply, "Bar". He was always borderline between making a modest profit and running it into the ground due to his own drinking habits (around here this sort of behavior is known as "drinking up the farm", even if no actual farm is involved).

Boyd was a bit of a simpleton anyway and folks around Wynona usually referred to him as Bird Brain rather than Boyd Baner, and his bar was known generally as "Bird Brain's Roost" or sometimes just "Bird Nest". Baner was always happy to meet Milo on the riverbank along with the high school kids, and when Milo delivered the dope to the boys for cash he could swap off a big bag of fish to Boyd for a case of whiskey. Everybody seemed happy with this arrangement. Except for the fish of course.

It kind of boggled the mind to find yourself spending time sorting through all this stuff

about various local characters and weirdos from across the river, just because of some

incomprehensible sentence or two that Oscar spouted out of nowhere when you happened

to be within earshot. But I was kind of used to doing it I guess.

When Oscar treated you to one of his "revelations" you never knew exactly how it was going to play out, or when. Since it was winter and Oscar mentioned the ice, I figured this one couldn't be too far off in the future. Unless it was going to happen next winter or something. Or already happened fifty years ago. But I decided to just file it away like usual and see what came of it. Usually these things didn't impact on me directly but once in awhile they did, and I made a mental note to stay away from the river crossing for awhile.

* * * * * * * *

Up the river past Milo's place, maybe three or four miles from the ferry, was the Stallion Valley Ranch. This was a great big spread that bordered the river for several miles and also stretched back into the river breaks and beyond, encompassing some farmland but mostly pasture. It was several thousand acres, mostly consisting of land that only the hardiest of grasses would grow on, and then not very well. There was lots of sagebrush and cactus plants but those didn't do anybody a lot of good. And lots of sand dunes, where some folks liked to go hunting for Indian arrowheads. I never had the patience for it personally. And the one time I went with Oscar he found some artifacts and then stood around conversing with a bunch of dead Indian spirits that he said inhabited them, and it got pretty tedious before long. First things got all moral and mystical and philosophical and religious and then on top of that there was a general mapping of which buffalo jumps had been the most useful and which had not. Somehow knowing which ancient Crow buffalo jumps really didn't work worth a crap didn't strike me as information that I could get much benefit out of personally. But that's Oscar for you.

Most ranches had horses in order to work the herds of cattle. In such cases the cattle greatly outnumbered the horse population on a given ranch, as the horses were basically a four-legged tool that was useful in herding and moving the cattle. Nowadays some guys use four-wheeler ATV's instead of horses for this but that sort of thing doesn't go over real well with the old timers.

The Stallion Valley Ranch was a bit different. They had a few cattle but mostly they had horses; several hundred in fact. The ranch had been owned by the Toole family for several generations - most of the land had originally been populated by herds of wild horses going back to the Indian days, back before anything was fenced or privately owned by a bunch of white men. These wild stallions ran free on the land and continued to inhabit it after the land was parceled out and then fenced. A lot of the herds died out eventually, or were wiped out by various diseases, predators, dog food manufacturers, and so on. The Toole family now owned the remainder of these horses, the descendants of the wild stallions who had been there before the land was settled. These horses were eventually "broken" and transformed (for the most part) into tame horses that the Tooles sold to others as riding, working or breeding stock. Everyone in the Toole family, regardless of age or gender, seemed to know every which way around a horse and was able to relate very directly to the equus caballus mindset - they could all ride from practically Day One, they could all rope, they could sniff the wind, and without fail they could think like the horses they dealt with nearly every waking hour of every day. In fact, in terms of behavior, the line between being a human and being a horse had gotten kind of blurred, especially with regard to the current Toole family that lived on the Stallion Valley Ranch. They definitely considered the horses to be their equals in most ways. Take personal hygiene, for example. More about that in a bit.

Financially the Tooles had fallen on hard times in recent years. The market for their horses was dwindling; at least, the part of the market that would pay a decent price. Some said the Tooles didn't really manage their financial affairs all that well either. There was a lot of land involved and that meant you could get yourself into a lot of debt borrowing against it from the bank. Members of the family often traveled far and wide to participate in rodeo events, O-Mok-Sees and whatnot, and the cost of hauling horses and people all over the state and beyond could add up in a hurry. There was supposed to be some farming involved in the Stallion Valley Ranch setup, but that got pretty much neglected. It did not directly involve horses.

Somehow, once in awhile, the Tooles managed to take in boarders for a few days or a week at a time, as a bit of a supplement to their income. The current Toole family consisted of Nessie, the mother; Grady, the father; about five or six daughters (head count could vary depending on what rodeo events were going on across the state), and two sons. The sons were the youngest two in the family, though one of the daughters, named Myrna, was somewhere around the same age. I didn't know exactly how old they were, but the older son, Vernon, was about the same age as the Brylcreem boy and the younger son, Eliezer, was a year or two behind. So these boys were young teenagers or thereabouts. The girl Myrna, who like the two boys could be described as "strapping", hung around the place more than most of her sisters because she was sweet on Billy Brylcreem and sometimes he would come for a visit with her brothers.

When you saw these boys you didn't dream they were as young as they were. To say that they were unnaturally physically mature for their age would be an understatement. These fellas were tall and straight and sturdy as granite - but at the same time there was something there that I guess you would call grace. Power and grace. They were smooth but they were angular too, as if a new kind of geometry had been invented just for them. their physical strength was obvious. Muscles rippling as they walked, they looked like every move they made was made in slow motion, just to make it look like normal speed to the rest of us. Vernon in particular kind of dropped his shoulder and moved with something that was more of a lope than a stride. This stride was not a normal man's stride. These boys did everything but snort and paw the earth.

Their dad was short and gnarly; their mother was big-boned, tall and heavy -- something in the cross of these bloodlines had produced two young fellas that were kind of off the charts, as far as standard theories of genetics or evolution went. In the course of a regular day every living thing on the Stallion Valley Ranch banged and shoved and butted and slammed each other around - all the girls, all the boys, all the dogs and horses and even a couple ornery chickens - so for all these folks life was kind of a rowdy contact sport and generally they weren't scared of anything. The boys in particular seemed to be indestructible.

One time at the grain elevator in town, the hydraulics went out on a just-emptied truck box when young Vernon was standing under it - the huge metal structure went into free fall and slammed him right on top of the head. It knocked him to the ground and everybody was sure he was dead. But in a minute he sat up, shook his head, and crawled slowly back to his feet. He had sort of a sheepish look on his face and some blood was trickling out of one ear. He never bothered to wipe it off.

So sometime after my chilly experience with Oscar in the cab of that old Chevy pickup, some folks from out Southeast near Lonely Dog Bench found they had to go across the state for a funeral. The Johnson family didn't want to take their two young boys out of school to attend this event, and the boys had been full of piss and vinegar lately anyway and kept getting into trouble. Their folks thought maybe they needed something to settle them down. So Ron and Latona Johnson arranged to leave John and Honky Johnson out at the Toole's while they were out of town. The trip was expected to take about a week. Ron Johnson knew pretty well how things worked out at the Toole place and he figured his rowdy boys would be taken down a peg or two by the time the family was reunited on the Bench.

The boys got dropped off in time for lunch on a Sunday and they weren't there for ten minutes before Grady rode his horse into the kitchen. The horse just kind of ducked his head and came right in through the porch door - obviously he had done it dozens of times before. Honky was right wide-eyed standing there by a horse's ass in the suddenly crowded room. The horse shook his head around and huffed, and then swatted the boy right across the face with his tail, which of course smelled more than a little of horse shit. Meanwhile Vernon was eating mashed potatoes from a pile plopped directly on the table, and he was eating from the eraser end of a pencil instead of a fork. This made it slow going but nobody on the Toole ranch was ever in much of a hurry. The day, in fact the week, was off to a fine start. Even though it was going to drag on more than a bit for John and Honky Johnson.

END OF PART ONE

SQUALL

black spider storm

marauds in from the north

tarantulating the sky with its arms

neighbors stacking children in for the winter

buckets set out

frothing red under luminous trees

I hollow a spot in my brain

to receive your words

you don't call and I fall asleep

at midnight rain fills the hole

TRIBUTARIES

(originally written in 1981, revised a few times in the late 1980s, and again today when I found it in a pile of papers)

Water, I wrote years ago

has great messages for me.

I hear the river voice, a low blue tumble

towards some goal too distant to discuss.

Meanwhile I stand like an impatient anchor

waiting for my father

downstream

checking the lines.

I reach into the flow, wet

my sleeve to the elbow. I watch

it slowly dry. I can feel it

the water has returned to the river now, I know.

From the mountains, the streams bring offerings

faithful to the power of the flow

as it reaches for the sea.

And the sea

I cannot even consider it

the feeling of being too large to hold yourself

in check, too wide to map your own girth

too deep, too dark

to even believe that boundaries exist.

For water, there is just more of the same

a question whose finish is lost somewhere

in the middle. I feel it caress

itself endlessly, the only lover it can ever know.

As for my father,

he is dead.

He drowned years ago.

Three Boring Poems From 1981 and 1982

(obviously thirty years ago my motivations were different and my frustrations were much further below the surface. Wouldn't that probably be true of all of us? I guess these were written before I started having weekly brain aneurysms or something. It is all I can do to reproduce these as is without "correcting" them)

TELEVISION FOR THE DEAF

I turn down the sound

to steal your voice on the bedroom

phone. It's easy to picture:

you lie

on the bed, laugh

bounce one foot -

Your hair runs happily across the pillow.

When you come out

you'll look much different. On the screen

Hoss passes Little Joe without a word.

THREE TILES

After I argued with my girlfriend

I walked to the library

there are three tiles on the floor in the entryway

three tiles that are loose

I always step on them all

clank at me as I step

I step on them every time.

FIXATIVE

It's morning

Trix rabbit turns through my bowl

You strike a pose

angular, military

mahogany of your breasts

curls inside your white bra

like secret machinery inside the Pentagon

the five sides of memory

lock your elbows into place

position your hips

unfold the dark helmet of your hair

pour the fluids

that give you milky, sweet definition

The Gathering Storms of 1979

(photo by R. Moes)

DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW, DARN RIGHT (Part Two)

Inside the garage with the smooth, cool concrete floor and the dim lighting, it seemed almost tranquil. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Yes. Tranquil. Peaceful. Nice.

But only for a moment. I heard Rhonda's door slam just as my pants hit me in the head. She had stepped out and thrown them across at me above the car's roof, having already slipped into some gold colored sweats that she apparently had under the seat or next to her by the driver's door. It took her about two seconds to do this, apparently; and she also had on flip-flops. I guess it made sense though - it was her damned car, she knew about it's "issues", so she came prepared. Or as prepared as a person could be nowadays.

Rhonda was pacing back and forth along the driver's side of the car. She seemed agitated and she slapped her hand rhythmically on the car's hood and fenders as she paced. I knew that she used to smoke and that she had quit years ago but I was betting she could have used one about then. I had a gigantic fat Jamaican sized joint in my shirt pocket and I was thinking about asking her if she wanted to give that a go, to kind of wind down. I reached in and rolled it between my fingers.

I had known Rhonda for maybe four years. We had met in a "professional capacity"; she was getting a divorce and I was the lawyer representing her asshole husband. She was tall, almost six feet, and quite slim. If I remembered right she had played college basketball at some podunk school somewhere - but I didn't remember where exactly. I did remember that the coach was some sort of greasy slimeball named Roy something, who had tried to get into her pants and she had quit the team over it. She was now about thirty years old and her figure was still striking and athletic; she cast an imposing shadow and she looked like she could take care of herself - which I knew for a fact, she could. The athleticism was no accident; Rhonda worked out or ran almost every day - up until recently I guess. She was very pretty with strawberry blonde hair cut quite short, well-formed facial features and just enough freckles to make you want to fantasize about the farmer's daughter your dad always joked about. She didn't have the pigtails though, and if you tried to pinch her cheeks you would definitely get smacked. So it didn't quite fit. And she was no hayseed by any means - I knew she could play a man if it suited her needs. She had done it to me, after all.

"Hey, what the hell are you so worked up about?" I asked her. I was now fumbling for my shoes under the edge of the front seat of the Peugot. "We made it in, no problem."

"I know, I know," she said rather distractedly. "But every day it gets worse. I'm not even sure what those damned ferret things were - must have been twenty of them and they were dressed up like baseball umps? That was it, wasn't it? Where would they even come from? For Christ's sake - animals think they're people, toys and dolls think they are bad-ass motherfuckers, and half the real people don't think at all, they've just disappeared into the cosmic goo somewhere, or crawled up inside of their own insanity. I think sometimes I might be about there myself - not really sure if I am seeing reality or just hallucinating like some dope addict or something."

I stepped away from the car and slipped the joint back into my pocket. It was pretty dark in this garage but it was spacious, with maybe five or six other cars parked in various spots around the room. This was actually a small parking garage that serviced the three-story office building above us.

"Well you were just saying, it is what it is, or whatever. Best to figure, if you are seeing it, then it's reality at this point, no matter what it is. Here we are, we have been dropped dead on our asses in the midst of something, and we have to keep our heads clear if we are going to not let it roll over us." I paused for a moment. "I think those umps were outfitted for the American League. They had inside chest protectors didn't they? I think the National League still wears the old fashioned ones on the outside of their jackets. Probably the NL ones were over on Nosferatu Boulevard calling balks or catcher's interference or something."

Rhonda grinned. She seemed more relaxed now. "Fuck you, counselor," she said. As she turned away from the car she was suddenly staring straight into the fervent face of Larry the Prophet. He had a National Geographic magazine in his hand. I figured he must have lost his Gideon's Bible again.

"So you're blaspheming again?!" he shouted right in Rhonda's face. I winced, expecting him to get a swift kick in the testicles but Rhonda held it in check and just stepped back a bit. "Didn't I tell you, the lord Jesus is sitting in his transparent tomb, he is browsing through the magazines and eating the wax fruit and he is looking out at you and me and all the rest, and soon he is going to open the glorious sliding patio door and step out and melt us all. Just melt us all with his vampire breath."

"Prophet!" I called out. "How does Dracula Jesus feel about a bunch of uptight snake-eating rodents running around in the street making ball and strike calls?"

Larry had been a bean-counter in one of the offices upstairs. He was a good example of the distressingly large percentage of folks who had pretty much totally caved in when things started going all to shit. I never heard him say a word in my life until he turned up here in the garage as the Prophet - before that he just stood in the corner of the elevator with his head down. Now he had on some kind of high school band jacket that had darts in the front, his dirty tee shirt had a Robert Crumb Mr. Natural "Keep on Trucking" image on it, and he was wearing a lady's leotard. Most of the time it was pretty obvious that he was sporting a boner inside it too. A modern day Man of the Cloth, to be sure.

Now Prophet had the bug-eye going and he was going up and down rapidly on his tip toes for some reason. "The snakes must be cast out! You know that! If it takes a group of short furry sports officials in regulation league equipment to do it then praise the dripping fangs of Jesus and let it be!" Larry often got going on how Jesus was the original vampire and he had got a bunch of folks to drink his blood and had given them eternal life. I think he had it that Jesus died on the cross just because it was a cross and it burned him up or something - plus I think some Roman soldier supposedly stuck him in the side with a wooden stake while he was hanging around on Mount Calvary. Saying the Son of God was some kind of unholy demon from hell was kind of a novel approach based on the ideology of most organized Christian religions, but somehow Prophet had it all worked out. When shit just stopped making sense some folks can make their own kind of sense out of anything I guess. Or nothing. Personally I figured taking God and sticking him right in the middle of all this bullshit that was going on right now, just wasn't being very fair to God. But of course a lot of people got out their God hats and buckled on their God boots and started marching around, once this shit came down.

Welcome to the world that never ends, and of course it's got to be on all the cable stations, and probably in high def to boot.

Prophet was not the only other person in the garage. Most forms of work had basically ceased in the last few weeks. My legal skills weren't being called for too much; not very many divorces were being initiated. But somehow trucks were still running carrying food and fuel and other supplies, and many grocery stores, gas stations and a few medical facilities were staying open. Also the porno shops. In spite of my smart remarks about high definition, TV was off the air. Lots of people didn't feel safe in their homes - hell, if you looked in the carport to find Rover and some of his canine pals were building a guillotine out of PVC and your woodworking tools, you might start thinking about other options for living arrangements. A place like this parking garage was somewhat of a sanctuary with limited access from the outside and remote access available just to those who had worked in the building above. So once the street level windows and doors were completely blocked off, there was a little bit of security here. Not much, but a little. Maybe ten or so of the former employees from above were here now, with families if they had them. Probably twenty to twenty-five people. It was hard to tell, all of them were never here at once, even at night.

And there was a strict rule against pets - no animals allowed. And no dolls or "action figures" for the kiddies, or even those little plastic army men. Somebody let their kid bring in a couple G.I. Joes, unbeknownst to the rest of us, and then Jimmy Redding's wife woke up in the middle of the night with a little plastic guy in a sailor suit sitting on her chest and trying to get her bra undone. Some of the cars, like Rhonda's, had also been tampered with, and all we could figure was, these little soldier boys had done it. Nobody knew how, or what they had done. And let's not even try and get into why. Since the intellect in the cell phone system was able to get about anywhere, and tell his minions to do whatever he wanted, it was really, really hard to keep from being infiltrated in some way. Try to get everybody to agree they can't have a phone on them. Maybe they can go without toilet paper, maybe they can crap and wipe their asses with a sock, or a newspaper, or a raw pork chop; but they just can't let go of their little picture phone gadgets. The "evil genius" who was currently at the top of the food chain was using them to communicate and to spy, through the camera functions, so if there was a phone around you were compromised. Same with computers, iPods and anything else with a wireless network involved. Near as we could tell, we had finally gotten rid of all of them here in the garage.

I pushed by Prophet and moved towards the stairs that went up into the building. "Hey Bram," I said as I shoved him aside, "maybe you should go out for a garlic dinner or something. Leave Rhonda alone, will you?"

He looked at me rather blankly. "The Tennessee stud loved the Tennessee mare," he said. I just shook my head and walked on. Upstairs I had some notes that I needed. If I could connect all the dots, I might have a line on one of these former Winston Churchills, one who might even be right here in Rapid City. There had to be something we could learn, something we could do.

Rhonda came up beside me and we started to mount the stairs together. She rubbed lightly up against my arm, looked over at me and smiled. I swear the thought of pinching her cheeks never even crossed my mind.

"I saw that monster ganja reefer you pulled out of your bag of tricks earlier. What say we go up to the Office of Reclamations and Reconciliations and fire that fucker up?"

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