Chapter One: The Parson’s Birthday
I woke up alone in the grey-blue light. My thousand-mile-stare, said pictorially, “..nothing hostile approaching.”
My wife had gone back to her place. She had said something about, her family coming there for the weekend.
Still coming out of the corridor to wakey-wakey land, November, fixed in my mind’s eye.
Seeking guidance from tell-tale fragments of my short-term memory to fix an approximation of date.
“What long-weekend is there in November?”
I prompted myself, causing the cursor to slam full-screen with the sub-committee in full agreement; it was “novembrance day” of course.
Good thing I took Ginkgo biloba last night, or I never would have gotten that one.
With a smirk, I realized that I had nothing pressing for the next four days.
Jammie-bottoms, clean wife-beater and pink fuzzy-bunny slippers, (because I’m hard enough, to pull it off as a crisis-fashion statement)
made me feel at home in my skin.
Still too growly to let the sun through the wicker blinds, I kept the black-out curtains drawn in the groove-room, until I had my breakfast.
A mug of espresso, a small plate of watermelon and a candle, brought the day a little more peace.
To the uninitiated, watermelon is the perfect thing to eat, just before vomiting.
I live two miles from the refinery.
This is one of those irregular verbs that we are hearing about.
Refinery emissions are hostile, consequently they are “regulated”.
Now that they are regulated, there is nothing more to say or do. Everything is within safe parameters.
However, between the hours of midnight and 4 am, the inspectors have gone home, and it is time to turn a profit.
This is why I try not to be home during these hours.
Half a dozen cigarettes, a little citrus in my water, and everything that shouldn’t be there, is in the wastepaper basket.
Watermelon is easy to eat in the morning, it is full of nutrients and doesn’t scratch the throat on the way back up.
I was poking at the almost clean surface of the coffee-table and fumbling with a toothpick structure when the phone rang.
Someone was inviting me to a ‘soiree’ at the scrap-yard.
“What day is it?” I slur-stuttered.
“November 11th.,… c’mon fool, people wanna see ya! You gonna be there or what?” followed by a click.
The scrap yard is a quarter-section or 40 acres of farmland, with a rail-spur running through it, that someone had had the good sense
to pay the 2$ to have re-zoned as industrial.
Now, no one technically lives there,
but the night watchman, doesn’t live anywhere else either. (see irregular verbs)
The surrounding merciless plains are covered only in ‘African-brown-grass’, whose only friends are the north wind and the long gone bison.
However, brother wolf still pays a social call.
A valley has been created around the center compound
through years of collecting and packrattery.
A vertical wall, composed of stacked crushed car bodies and other twisted metal, rises 20 to 40 feet above the various trailers, buses and sheds
that are grouped together in the center.
The metal foothills, extend back several hundred yards in all directions, leaving a very peaceful center.
The 45gallon barrels of earth that serve as the watchman’s garden were all still as I passed them. All the plants leaves,
dead, taken by the frost.
I stuck my head in the main trailer to ask, “Is he in?”
Denis, who was carving or sharpening something, said “No, but he might be back for the cops coming.”
“What time are they coming?” I queried
“ 12:45, with full lights and sirens, .. will you be sticking around for that?” he paused then added,
rather convincingly, “its really nice this time of year, with the lights and everything!”
“I don’t know,” I said cheerfully, “I’ll see how I feel later.”
“okay” said Denis as I pulled my head out, followed by, “have you been to the post office,
there is something there for you.”
The post office is a Boler trailer whose interior walls are lined with
old walnut pigeon-holes from small towns.
This is the permanent mailing address
of many people.
Of course, some people just leave other people things here too.
Mine is the cardboard box, next to the dog’s dish.
Someone put two boxes of Chinese tea and an antique straight razor in there, one still made from the good steel.
Maybe it was the dog, he is such a joker!
How nice, I thought, I was thinking of taking up shaving certain parts of my face again.
Next to the signing counter, beside the writing desk, someone had left a puzzle-box open, full of odd bullets, with a piece of paper with notations
of what size drill bit one would use to make the barrel for each.
I didn’t know that 50 calibre was half an inch.
We aren’t really allowed guns here, so it was a nice gesture of someone to leave zip-gun makings, for whoever needed that.
If that crow hadn’t left my yard at the end of last summer, I might have made a gun.
As usual, at these things, there was a veggie-platter with dips and cheese and so forth on the small table in the middle.
I loved this post office, everything was so normal here.
The first time that the police tried to raid the post office,
Denis just stood in front of the door with his arms crossed looking confused.
Next, he leaned forward, in all earnest and asked
“How can I be held responsible for what you find, if I am not given advance notice
of a search?”
The police noted his point, and now, someone always telephones first. (I don’t know how much he pays for this.)
An Indian that I didn’t recognize pulled up in a pick-up, by the main fire.
He got out and held up clear plastic carton bags of cigarettes and yelled,
“30$”. The kids all scampered towards him as, full white retail on a deck
of premium brand smokes is ten bucks or 80 a carton.
He sold-out the truck-load in under twenty minutes and left.
Me and most others with an adult attitude , already had our deep-freezers full,
but, it was nice to see the kids get a break!
The hookah was silent as I walked past it, its hoses hanging in their forks, but it was still vibrating, or was that just me?
One by one they exhaled, it smelled like Nepal.
R&D is old school, but that’s who this was.
First the incessant jabbering about recent advancements in solar voltaics, then, an impatient look from one who had
something new to say.
“No, look man,…we stream the pure methane into the vacuum chamber, over the 8 intersecting lasers producing 800 Celsius or some shit.
But instead of precipitating the diamond onto the standard silicone or ceramic puck or whatever..
We build component molds for an all diamond spaceship.
So there’s’ like 20 or 30 different component molds, then we machine ‘em with other lasers,
I don’t know, tongue and groove, or whatever, and stick ‘em all together. Then we stick the whole thing in a bigger precipitation chamber,
and glue the whole thing together like that. So then, we power the lasers with solar panels and windmills and shit.
The methane, we make our own from compost, with the standard isolation procedure.
See, free spaceships, … but the set-up costs are a bitch.
Oh ya, the not free part is, buying one of those hydrogen, arc-jet engines from that broad in Germany.
Oh ya, she’s a fucking idiot, hydrogen streamed over electrodes producing an obscene amount of heat, venting 28,000 kilometers per hour out the back side.
That’s double current capacity. With a diamond body and a heat exchanger to the skin, forget about it.”
In our circles, “fucking idiot”, is a term of endearment, for someone with an I.Q. over 150,.. who gains distinction by the implementation of original thought.
Someone asked the obvious question.
“So what, you're going to sell this to NASA?”
“Fuck no! its not bad enough that they have their heads up their asses that far, but the circulation is cut off by the bible-belt.”
“If for no other reason than, just because no one smoked on star-trek, nasa thinks its an inter-galactic rule or something.”
“Arizona would be a good place to do this, they got the solar set up already.”
“Ya, sure, right by where they did the first nuclear tests, then they made all those spaghetti-westerns.
Everyone who worked on those ‘sets’ got lung cancer. Then they told them it was because they smoked tobacco.”
“fuck it, let someone else invent it.”
Just to be part of the problem, I leaned in and told a joke.
“NASA is responsible for global warming.”
“all that junk they leave up in space, the earth is losing critical mass, and we are falling into the sun,”
I got the snickers I wanted.
Someone else said, ”We should make them go up there and bring all that stuff back,.. every little piece.”
Snickers got bigger.
When someone said “They could make low-cost housing for the homeless out of it…”
We all fell-out.
I walked on and something unexpected happened. Somehow there was an unopened bottle of Chianti under my arm and I was sitting in a Toyota bucket seat up against the wall.
It was too late in the season for snakes, and for some reason, I didn’t care if it wasn’t.
A girl approached, wearing cut-offs over black leotards and doc martens. She asked if she could be with me tonight. I asked if she was on X or blow. When she smiled no, I put my
hand on the back of her head to pull her six inches closer, but was overcome by joy from the texture of her thick straight yellow hair. My peripheral vision scanned for who had sent this angel. She wasn’t more than 23, I felt like a pedophile. Then I saw Steve hoist her glass at me from a nook in the wall. A single ray of moonlight through the wreckage, caught her expression.
Steve was a dyke about 5’8’’ and 100lb. Her face was healing from acid burns used to take out bad acne scars. At least I always thought she was a dyke. She was never with anyone, and she lived alone. She never came within 40 feet of me, but I loved her. I loved her like one loves a particular monkey at the zoo, for how it looks at you. I smiled back.
The yellow-haired creature had cobalt eyes, just like mine used to be, or so it seemed in this light. With all the heavy-lifting done for me, I asked if she wanted to stay here, or come home.
“What you say, is good by me.” Was the noise coming out of her eyes. I could tell by the rarity of a muscle movement on her mouth, daylight was going to come too soon.
My mind’s eye scanned my house and out buildings, for anything compromising that I may have left in plane sight.
At my front gate, I realized that I hadn’t checked my mail. Since it was on her side, the little yellow-haired person got out to do it for me. Gee, I wonder if she can drive. Just as she put her hand on the long rectangle in the box, I recognized the wrapping paper that Dave used when he sent me letter-bombs. Dave didn’t mean any harm, more to the contrary. A loose tether wire on a hair-trigger, any fool could deal with that, if they recognized what it was. It was Dave’s way of making sure that I wasn’t too lonely on Veteran’s day.
There was nothing to do, she was robotically doing chores before bed. I didn’t know her well enough to know the one-word commands to make her stop.
She leaned in and heaved back to dislodge the carton from the mailbox.
I saw the tether go tight and snap free again, as she turned, proudly holding the parcel across her chest.
She smiled the happiest smile that I had ever seen. I smiled back, with all the beaming love I could muster!
Then I saw the white yellow dot of light in the center of the package. Her poutty lips turned to oh, she looked concerned, but she was just my mirror.
I smiled again, but she could not reciprocate, before someone pushed the zoom focus button.
The light filled the screen.
When it stopped, I stretch to see out the broken car window. She was lying down and her knees were flexing alternately.
But, she wasn’t there from the top of her cut-offs up.
I brushed aside thoughts of “well I could still..”
With a stern cold, ”This isn’t
Bosnia .”
At this moment, I found it convenient to notice in the rearview mirror, that I was leaking from my head.
I woke up with a bright light in my eyes, which I was glad to still have.
There was this vicious ringing inside my head. It was my cell phone. It was Steve asking if I was okay.
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Its November 11th , Remembrance day, its your birthday, fool.
There’s a party tonight, you gonna be there?”
“Ya, I’ll be there, thanks Steve, wouldn’t miss it.
I got up and made a café, and wandered around the house for a couple of hours muttering.
“Check the mail, check the mail…CHECK THE GOD DAMN FUCKING
MAIL.”
* * * * * * *
Chapter 2 (Cathy's new coat) is at this link:
dredone.com/page/page/4430717.htm
