6
There appeared at some little
distance among the fern and redwood a figure decked in a large wide-brimmed hat
and a brown and green serape, who, in spying Beau, approached with a genuinely
wary eye but exaggerated quizzical expression which he dropped when stopping a
few feet away with a hand held out, palm up, and saying with a straight face,
“Spare a few bucks for a cup of coffee?”
Bedraggled, weary, sopping wet, Beau
was still too deep in shock to see that the guy was kidding. In spite of his
troubles, he reached back and produced his dripping wallet.
“I think I’ve got some ones in
here.”
“Couldn’t they be dry? Hey bud, it’s
okay, thanks, I was only joking. What the hell happened to you? Are you all
right?”
“Um….”
“You in some kind of trouble? I thought
I heard gunshots up river.”
“I saw something, yes. I am. I was.
Those shots were fired at me.”
“Someone tried to shoot you? Why?
Who’s trying to shoot you?”
“I don’t know who it is. Some crazy
asshole with a gun. I thought he was going to kill me.”
The man in the serape paused, as
though he were weighing what to do. Then he said, “I have a safe place we can
go right nearby here. I don’t see any gun on you. Are you carrying one?”
“No.”
“All right. I can see you need some
help. There’s been a lot of people going missing lately. Some right here in the
forest. I’ve got a safe place you can hole up if you think you need it.”
“I think I need it.”
“Come on. I’ll show you my tree
house.”
Woody lived in the woods. He had
been…in the shit. And now knew not to trust the government. Did he know about
the Congressional Military Industrial Complex? Yes. Big-time. These things Beau
learned climbing a redwood, largely by use of some rungs nailed into the side
of the tree a good eighty of the perhaps two hundred feet up. The chatter
didn’t start until they reached the branches, and even with a little cover,
Woody kept the chatter low, but Beau got the feeling this was intended to
distract him from looking down and getting scared, which was entirely true.
Woody said so when they reached the safety of the snarl of shoots up top.
Here thick branches running
laterally bore robust clusters which, when penetrated, revealed ladder rungs
descending into the hollow tube of the living tree.
“I can’t believe I climbed all the
way up here,” Beau said, trying to wipe from his eyes the invisible little
redwood bits that drifted down from Woody. “I haven’t climbed a redwood in a
lot of years. I’ve never even been this high up in one.”
“I’m so used to it, it didn’t occur
to me that you might not be able to till we got about halfway up.” From within
his serape Woody produced a Mag-Lite with a piece of cord attached; when he
clicked it on and wore it like a necklace, the downward-pointing light
sufficiently illuminated the wooden rungs leading into the spiraling and
gradually widening interior. “There’s an emergency exit at the bottom that I
keep barricaded. I’ve never needed to use it. Plus up top I stash a roll of
heavy waterproof canvas I use as a cap over the entrance. How you doing up
there? Can you see well enough?”
“Oh yeah. This is no problem. How
long did it take you to put these rungs in?”
“I banged it out in a couple days. I
wasn’t in any hurry. Hung ropes from the top and rappelled my way down.”
When they reached the bottom, Woody
turned on some lamps, revealing the spacious interior of the chamber and a
plethora of camping supplies. “There’s the emergency exit,” he said, moving the
beam of the Mag-Lite over to a natural cleft. A dark tarp covered the aperture.
“I plugged it up a few weeks after I found it. I was just hiking around. Then I
really got into this tree. It got to where I was spending so much time in here,
I started bringing in some of my stuff. First I’d stay for days, then I’d stay
for weeks. Now it’s months at a time. Anyway, I’ve got a clean towel you can
use”—he produced one from a duffle—“and a clean change of clothes if you want.
There’s at least one pair of pants in here with old paint stains and a bunch of
shirts I was going to cut into rags, but I can spare some old clothes. You
don’t even have to bring them back.”
“Wow. Thanks. I don’t know what to
say.”
“You did. Hungry? I’ve got gorp,
jerky, cashews—never eschew a cashew—carob, crackers, cheese, gorp—wait, I
already said that—grapes, bagels—here, do a bagel.”
“Thanks. Say, what happens if you
have to take a leak or a dump? You don’t have to climb all the way out, do
you?”
“You don’t want to know. You don’t
have to go, do you?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to know.”
Beau checked his watch. At first he
was surprised to see it wasn’t even four-thirty yet. Then he noticed the sweep
hand wasn’t moving and realized his non-waterproof watch had stopped. Time
itself had seemed to stop. It was hard to imagine the world was still happening
outside.
A sound within the giant redwood
moved about the chamber, a low haunting echo of the long weird creaks and
stretching moans of the living timber, irregularities to the twisting interior
of the tube accentuating odd acoustics, like being in the belly of a groaning
whale.
The thought hammered in Beau’s mind:
He faced them when he should have
run, he ran from her when he should
have faced.
“Here,” said Woody, handing Beau a
thermos cup, “drink this tea, it’ll do you good.”
“Thanks.” The tea was luke warm.
Beau drained it at a gulp and started drying off. “You said something before
about people going missing.”
“That’s right. Too many. Crazy
Marty, Sedona Sanchez, Mama Odessa, Shreveport Stevie. More than that. These
are people I know. People I’ve been friends with for ages. Just disappeared.”
“All at once?”
“No. Practically, though.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no idea. Nothing good. Someone’s
doing something. And I mean these people were creators, every one of them a
musician. Shreveport Stevie was all excited about a song he’d written, ‘8-Track
Mind.’ Then, poof, gone. Man, we’re losing our artists. When you start losing
your artists, you start losing your culture.”
Hearing all of this was a big relief
to Beau. None of it matched with what he thought he had seen. And now he began
to wonder if he had really seen what he thought he saw in the first place.
First of all, what if she wasn’t as
young as he looked? The same could be said for Liliana. And what if she was
merely asleep? What if both of those guys knew he was there and were merely
pulling his leg? After all, that was what Woody had done. What if he had
misheard them, as he had misheard Liliana in the car? What if some
skinny-dipper drowned, and those two really were trying to protect the body
before going for help? Beau wondered now if he had killed an innocent man. The
other guy could hardly be blamed for defending himself. A jury might even call
it heroic.
On the other hand, if he saw what he
thought he saw at the time, then he would have to report it. Indeed, this was
what he had to do, but he would have to do it anonymously. For all he knew,
there lay in the woods the body of a guy who had suffered a head wound, and
another who succumbed from a blow to the chest.
Beau finished wringing out his shirt
and stared into space. “Goddam,” he said after a while. “I can’t believe I was
just getting shot at.”
Reclined against a rolled-up
sleeping bag on a wool blanket spread out over the hard ground, Woody hung his
hat on a nail, picked up a guitar and regarded Beau’s reverie with an open face
as he began to lightly strum. “I wondered when you were going to get around to
that. Are you an artist? Maybe you saw the killer, if there is one.”
“You never know. I don’t think I’m
too much of an artist, though.”
“What are you?”
“Well, I’m a person who doesn’t live
around here anymore. I used to. I grew up here. Hey, that’s nice playing, but
don’t you think that might be calling attention?”
“No, don’t worry. You could be
standing right outside the barricade and barely hear it. And why would you be
standing there when it’s all a bunch of brush anyway? I’ve never once seen
anybody hiking over here. You saw. There’s no trail. I could probably scream at
the top of my lungs and nobody would hear. Even without the cap on top. That
barricade’s got a mattress in it stuffed tight.”
From a half-filled duffle Woody had
indicated with a nod, Beau pawed through some old clothes inside. The first
thing he did was use two t-shirts to dab each item in his wallet dry.
Hanging out with Woody reminded him
of sharing a room with his brother growing up. His brother used to play pinball
like Tommy. Beau would watch him rack points and free games in the rec room,
eating snacks and spitting chew-juice. Now their old room stood out in his
mind. His brother leaning back with a dip in his lip and reading a Conan book
on one side, Beau with a disgusting chunk of chaw in his cheek like an idiot reading
a Tarzan on the other. It was his brother, Beau never forgot, who came up with
the idea of serial killer trading cards long before that actually happened.
The rags spread out before him
reminded Beau of the time he and his brother had stuffed some of their old
clothes with piles of wadded newspaper and made a life size dummy, affixing
shoes and gloves as realistically as possible, and adding a head consisting of
tightly taped newspaper slugged repeatedly into proper shape, then fitted with
a modified pillow case and blessed with a Magic Marker face. Once it had eyes,
the paper man came alive. Beau had suggested they throw the paper man off the
bridge, to see what that would look like, but his older brother was afraid the
old man who lived near the bridge would see and call the cops. So they drove
one night down the Avenue instead, and Beau got out of the car with the paper
man while his brother headed down, turned around, and came back at cruising
speed in his gas-guzzling Gran Torino, that Beau might chuck the paper man by
neck and ass into the path of the oncoming car.
The light of the lamps, requiring
winding, had dimmed drastically down. Beau presented Woody with some freshly
dried cash, which Woody, playing a song he learned from listening to the Gipsy
Kings, “A Mi Manera,” politely refused without breaking rhythm, merely by
closing his eyes to it and shaking his head no. Beau left it on a backpack
anyway, having selected from the duffle a paint-stained pair of pants, a t-shirt
and some socks. Used underwear he decided to do without.
When he finished the song (still
lightly strumming in the gathering dark), Woody told Beau he should really keep
his money. “Stash your cash. I had an extra good year a couple back. So I’m all
set for a while.”
Beau ignored, though. “Thanks for
the clothes, and the grub, and the music, and sharing your place here.”
“Hey, it’s the planet’s, not mine.
But you’re welcome.”
“I probably better take off.” Beau
didn’t bother explaining to Woody that he needed to go report the body
anonymously. He didn’t want to make Woody a potential accessory to murder. Also
he needed to call Leif and get back on some regular clothes. For those things
he was definitely going back to his folks’ house. The problem was, he wasn’t
sure exactly how to get back to the Avenue. Woody seemed to read his thoughts.
“Sucks to go crashing around through
the brush when somebody’s trying to kill you. You can stay overnight if you
need.”
“That’s okay.” The darkness of the
chamber at the base of the ancient tree felt like limitless space. A strong
wind blowing across the top of the redwood whistled like breath blown into a
giant empty bottle of beer. “Thanks, though.”
“Well then, I can tell you the
easiest way back.” Woody put down his guitar and cranked the lamps back to
full. When the power was restored, Beau looked up and saw, hanging from some
fishing line nailed to an outcropping overhead, of all things, mistletoe.
A shining golden bough.
7
Gargantua, as Woody called his tree
house, did not perceptibly sway when viewed from ground level. But climbing up
inside, Beau definitely felt it. More than once he thought for sure that he
would lose his grip, or that a rung would break, or that the entire tree was
going to fall. By the time he got to the top and looked over the side, Beau was
so startled to see his view move due to the slight swaying of the tree, he felt
as if he might actually faint.
In a state of shock, managing the
upward and easier half of the climb outside was one thing; descending now—in a
wind, mind—was quite another.
“Don’t look down,” Woody said,
climbing up, as though in a race against time to bring Beau down safely. But
once Beau managed to get a leg over the top, he was basically home free as long
as he went slow and gripped the brittle branches with the downward sweep right
tight to the tree, which he did, pleased to see that Woody had followed him
down to see him off.
Dusk-lit fibrous redwood residue
sifted down to the rust duff of the forest floor from the friction of the
soul-grip. “Hey man,” Woody said, “it’s been real.”
“Your hospitality is the stuff of
legend, sir. I salute you. Now then, I’m thinking probably the best way back to
the Avenue is…hmm….”
“See that big tree? Go up there to
that one and you can see the creek. Just follow that back up the hill. It
shouldn’t take you too long.”
“Fantastic. Well, time to hit it.
Adios.”
They bumped fists, Beau trying to
ignore the ill fit of the clothes, the musty smell which they exuded and the
itchy feeling against his skin resulting from not having properly bathed after
the soaking in the river and subsequent climb. He had nearly made it to the
tree when suddenly he whipped around, madly patting pockets for his wallet.
“Shit! I forgot my wet clothes. At least I have my wallet. Shit! Well, keep
‘em.”
“I wondered when you were going to
notice. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have let you take off. I tossed them from the
top. They’re in a bundle right there.”
Beau looked where Woody indicated.
“Oh, fuckin’-a, right on.” So then he went back and got his clothes, all dirty
from the fall, and finally took off after that, waving back at Woody one last
time, kind of ticked at the whole exit deal being dragged out so long,
thinking, “Shit and fuck, now I know how that youth group felt.”
Far enough away that he felt
comfortable talking out loud to himself, Beau never expected the words which
assailed his ears:
“Hey, how’s the weather down there?”
Scanning backward and upward, Beau
spotted Woody over halfway up Gargantua, waving at him from the branches. “I
wondered when you’d notice. You talk to yourself too, huh?”
An exaggerated shrug from Beau.
“Birds of a feather I guess,” Woody
called. “You take care now. So long, bud.”
Beau turned back, saying, “So long.
Goodbye.”
Rounding a bend in the creek bed, he
thought for sure he got away, although he didn’t dare chance talking to himself
yet. And a good thing too, because Woody had gotten still higher quite quickly,
and could now see, over the rise, the creek bed again, for a good bit, up which
Beau started running when he looked back and saw.
“Hey!” he heard Woody holler. “You
all right?”
“I’m
fine!” Beau yelled, not stopping at all, not even when he reached the
Avenue, nor for another hundred yards after that.
Beau got off the road when he heard
a car coming. There was no way he was letting anybody see him wandering around like
a stupid ass in the ill-fitting rags of some guy in a tree. Hustling through
the light undergrowth with decaying old branches sticking up on the ground
cracking and snapping underfoot, Beau hid behind a redwood till the car passed
and he realized: the last thing he needed was calling attention to himself
anywhere remotely in the vicinity.
“What’s
this you say, officer? Dead bodies? Why yes, I do remember seeing a man of that
description….”
No thanks. Time to stay away from
the roads. He wondered what time it really was. Just like that time with the
kid in sixth grade playing hooky. Except now there was at least one dead body
and a guy with a gun. Beau still couldn’t get his mind wrapped around that
first part especially.
From a spot on the hillside
overlooking the Avenue Beau saw where he had crossed in his rags moments before,
realizing it was also the same exact place where he had thrown the paper man,
and for a split second Beau felt like his youthful self had thrown his older
self by neck and ass across the Avenue and up into the forest.
Then once again the quality of quiet
overtook the woods, the Doppler effect of occasional cars bump-bumping the gold
fractured glint of center line reflectors insulated from Beau’s ears by the
green sea of trees. A curious cross between the lull of relaxation and
heightened alert to aspects of expectation pervaded as Beau’s wondering mind
wandered through the forest of the past peopled with the visions of his youth,
and his shadow swam over the rocks of a dry creek bed parallel below, till
topping a rise he came to a place where a new road was being cut into the
hillside and heavy machinery lay in disarray looking like giant kids’ toys left
out where churned earth loosed ghosts. From somewhere not far away, the sounds
of approaching ATVs grew.
The whole area seemed somehow
preternaturally clean. It was strange to see a perfect little park-like glade
so far from the Avenue, bearing no signs of the State, and looking like a
painting from Salvator Rosa. Not wanting to be seen, Beau took the closest
refuge—a tall, hollow stump. He climbed up and hid inside, peeking through a
thin cleft in the direction of the advancing noise.
The droning grind of ten ATVs soon
filled the arena area, buzzing like an unimaginably huge hive of insects, all
the more monstrous to Beau simply by going unseen, initially. But when the
reverberating tremors passed and parked some little distance away, there lay in
view a strange scene to Beau’s spying eye behind a mossy hole.
Ten women cut the engines and stood
around chatting. Occasional laughs went echoing up.
“Who the hell are these people?”
Beau thought, feeling immediately trapped in the stump and yet unable to stop
looking at them, because, why should he? To a man these were all good-looking
women, and Beau was the man.
Of the ten Beau thought he
recognized three—but not for who they were. It was only that one looked like
Joan Cusack, the other Maureen McCormick, and the third one he couldn’t quite
place. Someone called the fake McCormick Audrey; the first one’s name, Wanda,
was revealed by the questions put to her from those wanting to know further of
the order they were in. This had Beau stumped. Gradually he realized they
weren’t talking about sects. Their order had nothing to do with sects at all.
It was indeed a strange thing to
see. Nobody seemed to need to issue any orders, but they all moved toward the
very stump in which Beau huddled. Touch-and-go then, whether he would have to
climb up, clamber down and run. Instead he stayed, and witnessed the women
forming a ring at about fifteen feet from the stump all the way around it.
Wanda, who seemed to Beau to be some
sort of event organizer, dropped the banter-demeanor and took on a more
purposeful air.
“We join at the final moments of
dusk for this invocation to the earth, in the spirit of balance, in the spirit
of harmony, that this crisis which has come to us and taken our friends will
depart in the wake of this spell of united creative energy.
“I guess I’ll start us off, and we
can keep it moving to the left, clockwise.”
Then one-by-one, like candles on a
giant cake slowly getting lit, the women recited the lines of their creation.
In turn. Aloud. All of this was pretty creepy to Beau. He hated public
speaking.
“When the wind blows in a
thunderstorm,” Wanda pointedly intoned, “the leaves whipped in the trees sound
like waves crashing on the ocean. Raindrops hit like sad insistent fingertips.
Finally the land is somewhat free. Peering eyes of ugly faces hide, huddling
forms hurry, crouching below the meager bits they hold, twitching to their
holes, in hate of wet and dark, and the noises of the sky all falling down upon
them.”
Beau very nearly clapped. But the
hole in the side of the stump allowed him a view of the next speaker, a trim
brunette with elfin features and a tiny tank top.
“Oppenheimer quoting The Bhagavad Gita: A big white
black-eyed goat sprang from the center of the circle. The power of stillness
pervaded. The rearing goat hung, swelling self-lit in devastating silence. We
did not know what we had done. Then the cloven hooves crashed upon the
rock—‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
As with Wanda, on finishing, the
speaker remained in a fixed position, standing still, looking forward. The next
two speakers, however, Beau could not see; yet another hole on the side of the
stump seemed a promising orifice to investigate, provided he crawl on all fours
across the hard-packed dirt with deliberation sufficient to retain his
anonymity.
“I may not seem partial,” the third
woman in low timbre enunciated, “to the things which ye so desperately clings,
but one thing’s fer sartin, I’m…gonna…kill ye—gonna ram m’ blade clean through
to the hilt, good, solid an’ strong in ye—again an’ again—an’ again an’ again
an’ again—I’m gonna cut yer bleedin’ gut wide open—stick yer neck—cut,
here—here here here here here—slash yer skull, an’ rip out yer ‘eart, an’ yer
liver—gonna drive m’ big shiny knife wamwam quick like so in yer sockets, an’
slop up an’ down amid yer mushy gore, aye, an’ stomp ye to the pave—when the
killin’-time’s come.”
At this point Beau had crawled over
halfway across as slowly as he could, but when the protective cover of the
woman’s speech ceased, he had to hold an awkward position, as though he were
playing Twister, until the fourth woman spoke.
“Cemetery candy: Mud’s tongue licks
skulls clean of meat. The grave mouth sucks till bone is gone. Death smears the
pit’s lips. Spoiled dirt smiles fat, finding fun in funeral.”
The fifth kept up momentum.
“When the night cycle reaches
zenith, flowering begins! The key to flowering induction is a healthy growing
environment of uninterrupted darkness! Height, branching, maturity, all are maximized
in the greenhouse underground! Uninterrupted darkness! Kill the males, keep the
females!”
As did the sixth.
“If I could awake on the skin of a
bear whose cave I took, and run as the sun rose over a mountain to a river that
made me shiver alive, to a green field that rolled on the other side, where on
the edge of a wood stood a stag eating grass, till creeping and leaping alight
on its back with a wrench of the rack that made the neck crack—without a living
soul to see—I would be the better for it, and commemorate the occasion with a
poem no one would read.”
And the seventh:
“Slumbering delighted, the
world-dreamer drifts alone, partially submerged, partially afloat, upon a lake
of lotus without limit, above and below a pillared heaven. The sun grows. The
whole world withers. Wind spins into cyclone, and cyclone into fire. The spider
re-spools its web.”
By this time, Beau had found a good
hole. For, more than one hole lay in that old stump; and while it may not have
been the hole-iest of natural chalices, Beau managed to luck into a sweet one
without being seen and get a good peep through—this time, at none other than
Dream Maureen, the fake McCormick, who spoke with an earnest glow in her voice
which very nearly sounded obscene.
“Today we go to woo the wood, saw in
the copse a corpse, rush the brush, usher a gusher, create a sacrifice. This
redwood dissolution, dissipation, desolation, rings fertile rot. Down to earth
bark screams, back to duff the compost turf. There on the mulch sprouts bloom,
ray and clay rejuvenate, regenerate, reanimate, spermatize resplendent
unstopped, and this is how a god gets chopped!”
Night had fallen. High above, the
black outlines of the treetops were offset by the blue of the new evening sky.
Now came the ninth.
“In the ultimate poem first and
final, letters combine to align in arrangement which reads not just left to
right, but up and down and back and forth in every possible language, all
making sense, all making beauty, no space omitted, it all interacts,
inside-out, diagonal, form and content match, and the letters take shapes which
in turn comment, missing nothing, texture, color, senses over senses, and the
poem becomes thought, and the thought becomes matter, and we walk in the poem,
and we breathe in the poem and our hearts beat the poem and beyond all language
the poem explodes.”
Then came the final speaker of the
ten, a woman with a Scottish accent who sounded in the darkness much older than
any of the women had looked.
“Hieing to the wombed hill mid yip
and yirr of Baalists beery, we woozy skirmishers wambled past the whippoorwill
and gave a girn to gimcrack, bedaubed in wizardry and woodcraft, riled rimers,
with pyretic vim, barmy each pant and peck we salivating songsters, scragging
victuals along the junket, raw wood thrush and song sparrow our stark
beefsteak. Rooty wolfberry sopped the Bacchic balladry, blackish the scape, our
mockery beneath Varuna, till to indigenous ziggurats we did sorn the shadow
lords, a measly chiliad of bubbling keeves ripe for us to batten.”
He kept expecting to see a light go
on. None did. Still the voices in the blackness spoke, and in the brief moment
of happy chatting which he heard, Beau discerned an overwhelmingly positive
reaction to the proceedings from what seemed to be all the participants.
“I do believe the spell went well,”
Wanda’s voice rose in the darkness. “Congratulations to all those in this
healing circle whose contribution unites the creative energy essential to this
ancient knowledge and us all.”
Now Beau heard other voices in the
night, latecomers come newly, and, by the sound of it, consorts. Yet still, not
a scrap of light. Sufficient ruckus ensued which let Beau carefully stand, feel
around and climb up the side of the stump, clinging at the top and peering
over. He could hear the voices of the women and the others merrily merging and
moving en masse into the forest, yet
without the aid of so much as a single flashlight.
When he was sure that everyone had
gone, Beau climbed down and made his way as quickly and quietly as he could
back to the heavy machinery where the new road was being cut. He found it shining
slightly in the dark, and followed the road till it turned to pave and took him
down to the eastern edge of Madrani, a hillside thick with redwoods and dotted
with a handful of houses.
8
A dog behind a fence barked. Beau’s
tired feet slapped asphalt with sharp echoes, like a basketball bounced on an
empty court. He still had to make his call, and still had to change his
clothes. But the call wouldn’t be anonymous if it came from home. The closest
pay phone was at the junior high down the street, and Beau was beginning to
formulate what exactly he would say, when the sound of an approaching car sent
him instinctively scurrying over toward and crouching down behind a muddy pickup
parked in front of a house where all the lights were off. It was starting to freak
him out now, hiding so many times. And this time he didn’t even have to. All he
really risked was getting caught being guilty of poor fashion sense. Then the
car turned the corner, entering the glare of the streetlight, and Beau
recognized the driver as Chuck, the one with the gun down by the river.
Fucking
fuck, he thought. I was sure I
cracked that sternum. The first thing Beau did was look around for another
rock. Then the car passed by, not having far to go before turning out of sight,
and when it did Beau dashed down the street to the junior high school on the
corner barely in time to hunker down behind some shrubs as the same car roared
back down the same stretch, screeched around the corner and burned off.
Now Beau saw that the old pay phone
had been removed. All that remained were four holes on a wall where bolts had
been, still visible under multiple layers of paint. Bleary with overuse, Beau tossed
himself down on the ground against the corner of a building in the shadows,
noticing now a light on in one of the rooms. The window was open, pushed the
few inches outward allowed before meeting the length of angle iron welded in
place to keep kids from pushing the window wider and slipping in and out at
will. Sounds of conversation drifted, which Beau could not help but hear.
“…and again, scientific studies show
belief works best, on the human mind, for our purposes, when the personified
product character, or logo, which we’ll be using, is depicted from long ago,
somewhere else. This is because, as the research indicates, it is much more
difficult to make the audience being targeted accept the supernatural powers of
the character in the marketing campaign as actual fact, that literally
happened, when that same audience could, in theory, merely look around and see
that none of the amazing special effects of the story ever happen here and now
in real life. However, paradoxically, if we set our personified product
characters in ancient times, and distant places, we also remove the applicability,
and the immediacy, necessary to the crowd of which it is our aim to control.
This is the problem we face. Now then, any ideas?”
A group of county advertisers conducted
a meeting in a room at the junior high. Two of the nine present had gone
through school in Humbaba, and one of them had done so right there in Madrani
at the junior high, and across the football field at the high school as well.
“How about a product character that
shows everyone around him smiling, and accepting his supernatural powers? That
would show they don’t hold his superiority against him. They admire him, want
to be like him, and liked by him.”
“Go on. Why?”
“Because. He’s popular. He’s young, he’s
fresh, he’s hip, he’s pushing product. It’s harder to get money from people
when they have more experience. We can add in any image we want around the
central image of him being in charge, supernatural and well liked. He’s got his
pals, and they’re all just hanging around at the mall.”
“We know he’s young. I’m seeing
white male here.”
“I agree with that.”
“Absolutely.”
“And what about his enemies?”
“They’re jealous. They’re bitter and
resentful of his supernatural success.”
“Go on.”
“Well they’re just so darn
unhappy—outright dangerous, really—because of not hanging at the mall. There’s
a barrier….”
“Yes, go on….”
“A barrier, wall, some sort of
fence, something that divides, and the enemies of the central image, jealous of
the lifestyle of the central image, aren’t willing to work hard enough to earn
the privilege…of being…nearer to him…so they’re off on the fringe, on the
outside looking in. Very jealous. Very dangerous. Certainly no one you would
want to allow into your home!”
Polite laughter.
“All right. I think we’re onto
something. ‘Hanging at the Mall.’ My god. I love it. And I see by the clock
we’re out of time. Okay people, we’ll pick this up next week and see if we
can’t really make some magic happen.”
Sounds of scooting chairs reached
Beau’s ears, chit-chat of participants released.
Dammit, he thought, seeing that most
of the cars in the cul-de-sac were facing him, and realizing he would have to
scoot on around to the back of the building sometime between everyone leaving
the room and the lights of the cars coming on.
“Beau? Beau Black?”
Beau looked up. Some guy was in the
window, with his hand on the latch set to pull it in shut. Beau couldn’t place
him at first. Then it dawned.
“Andy Slater, hey, how’s it going?”
“It’s going great. How about you?
What’s going on? Who else is over there?”
“Where?” Beau looked around. “It’s
only me.”
“At the reunion. Over at the high
school. Shit man, you guys already break out the shots?”
Beau stood up, acutely conscious now
of his awkward appearance and ill-fitting clothes. “Oh, these? Shit, I’ve been
partying all day. It’s a long story.”
Ad-man Andy’s bright eyes widened. “Wow,” he said. “Hang on, wait for me.
I’ve got a bunch of booze. We’ll do some fuckin’ shots, man.”
“Well….”
“Just hang on.”
There was no point turning down the
shot. After all, he’d been shot at. Beau figured what the hell. Once for rice
wine’s sake. One for the old times road.
From a car in the cul-de-sac Andy
pulled a bottle of booze and a shot glass and walked, tie precisely loosened,
with Beau over to the junior high field overlooking the high school where they
kicked it by the backstop, Andy talking a good bit about the purchase of his
car and adding a story about the smooth way it handled before suddenly asking
what it was that Beau now did.
“Oh, shit, man,” Beau said taking a
slug, “investment banking. What the hell do you think?”
“Financial wizard, huh? I thought
about getting in that game, but I guess you could say I did pretty well for
myself. Best goddam sales in the regional sector.” That last he slipped in like
a royal flush right before tossing back a shot.
Beau was thinking about how he
hadn’t seen that other guy in the car with Chuck, the one he clocked with the
rock. If the one was feeling well enough to drive, might not the other be up
and around, too? Surely if his pal was dead, this guy wouldn’t be tooling
around town, would he? Unless, of course, he was looking for Beau….
Even as these thoughts raced through
his mind, Beau declined a second shot for himself and watched, amiably
listening, as Andy hit his third, going off on a litany of successful
advertising contracts before screwing the cap back on affirming he was “really
going to enjoy sticking it to all those dirty goddam shits.” When Beau deflected
an attempt to compare incomes, compare them like report cards, Andy launched
into how, really, he never did even feel challenged by the educational system
anyway, but remember the time so-and-so was going with so-and-so? and everybody
wanted to know if he and so-and-so went all the way? so so-and-so told
so-and-so they never did, but actually….
Looking back on it, Beau couldn’t
remember a time when he and Andy Slater had ever hung out. In fact, now that he
thought about it, nobody ever hung out with Andy. He was Dirtbag Andy. That was
what everybody called him.
Poor old Dirtbag, Beau thought. Look
at him there, wounded, drunk, bragging about regional sector sales. Somewhere
down deep in that abused pile of aged flesh there’s a child screaming for help.
Andy eased an elbow Beau’s way.
“Hey, you seen Rachel?”
“Rachel Sandesky?”
“Man, is she fuckin’ stacked. Yeah,
I know. Everybody wants to see us get back together and everything, I guess.
Fuck it, man. I heard she’s married now anyway.”
A reunion contingent came over from
the high school as Beau tried to get away. “Hey, Slater!” one of them called.
“Who’s that with you?”
Andy immediately seemed more sober
and was able to quickly relay to the four-man squad crossing the field that
Beau here was in the investment banking game now.
“Oh really?” said another. “So am I.
What do you think of the Hartley-Kester merger?”
Intent as he was in negotiating the
hillside from the junior high field down to the high school track without
busting his ass in the dark, Beau hadn’t seen which one of the four had asked,
nor, for that matter, had he even determined just who the four were. “Who the
fuck is that?” he said.
“Listen to this guy—‘Who the fuck is
that’—who do you know who was least
likely to ever get in the game?—and
do so damn well! It’s me, Donny!”
“Holy shit! Who else you got there?”
“Hey, Beau. Al. Long time no see.
You remember Earl and Nate.”
“What the hell happened to your
clothes?” That was either Earl or Nate.
“Long goddam story. Started early.”
“Shit man, you guys doin’ shots?”
“Fuckin’ go for it, man,” Andy said,
handing over the bottle with the shot glass on top.
“Hey, if that’s what we’re doin’. I
will if you guys will. You guys wanna do that?”
“Whaddaya say there, Beau?” Andy
looked fixedly at him as best he could.
“I gotta go.”
“You takin’ off?”
“Just over to my folks’ place here
in town so I can change my clothes.”
“You’re comin’ back though, right?”
“Oh, most definitely.”
“Well then fuck yeah, I’ll drink to
that. You gonna do one more shot with me man, or what?”
“I’ll see you in a few.”
“Fuckin’ get back here.”
Beau headed off.
“Fuckin’ get back here, man!”
Beau stopped and turned around. In
his wrong-sized clothing he felt nightmarishly awkward and had no wish to
facilitate Dirtbag Andy Slater feeling like a grownup play-acting important,
the neurotic alcoholic. But on the other hand, he didn’t have to take one ounce
of shit from the likes of him ever. Beau started toward him.
“What did you just say to me?
‘Fuckin’ get back here?’ Come here.”
“Hey, ease off, man, settle down! I
didn’t mean nothin’ by it! Shit man, don’t go ballistic!”
Beau turned around and headed back
off, conscious of being watched. He could hear the music now, coming from the
gym—Aerosmith’s “Make It”—and it almost started to put him in a good mood, but
he exited the gates from the field anyway and headed out onto the road which
ran parallel with the high school toward Madrani Market. The store was still
open. Beau recognized Leif’s car parked out front, and thought he saw Leif
standing in line inside, talking to some people, of whom Beau assumed at least
one was probably attending the reunion, but then he looked back over toward the
school and saw Leif walking up to the gym. Beau called out and waved him over.
Having conferred, they concurred. They would need to take the situation to the
nearest rooftop.
9
A severed pig’s head had once
adorned the halls. As did coil after coil of razor wire deftly clipped and left
stretched to maximum negative effect for the janitor to discover as an added
surprise to the toilet paper confetti littering the trees. It had been surreal
to see, that morning long ago. Kids clutching packs open-mouthed and aghast
knew true wonder and honest awe, dazzled by the evidence of the night’s pranks.
Refutation of authority duly noted. Those who benefited stood nothing to lose.
Indeed, the children whose deadening daily grind had so satisfyingly suffered
disruption doubly won when the spoiled white brats who ruined the long-standing
Senior Prank Day tradition for all got their little asses caught. Then they
were merely kids again, and there wasn’t any smart-talk when they had to file
off for their caning, or whatever other ugly and embarrassing humiliation had
to come down. Crapping late at night on a disliked teacher’s desk might’ve
gotten a laugh, but it was a shitty thing to do, and when the kid who crapped
got caught, that was the second time the true beneficiaries won.
Ghosts of that time drifted below
Beau and Leif on the roof. There where the rooftop pipes vented continuous
billowing issue, the saturnalia of the reunion increasingly promised
promiscuous intercourse among the feasting revelers in the mad pursuit of
pleasure. It was the end of the agricultural season. Evidence of the outbursts
of the pent-up forces of human nature, bound to abound with harvest at hand,
appeared in pockets of vignettes on the tableau below. Shadows hinted of
gropers humping. Gym doors thrown open spilled Cheap Trick out freely, flooding
the town with “Dream Police” like the Hoover Dam before Superman could turn
time backward.
“When did you find out about the
reunion?” asked Beau. “Nobody told me a goddam thing.”
“Yes they did. Remember we talked
about it on the phone about five or six months ago? How they were going to move
it from summer to now?”
“No.”
“Remember how—”
“Oh that’s right. Okay, I remember
that bit now, but shit, that was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, but that severed pig’s head
seems just like yesterday. I forgot it was today, too.”
“A little ESP there, man. I can
still see the shaving cream left on the snout.”
For a simple quiet moment time hung
suspended: There was Andy Slater down below, red-cheeked, puffy, glazed eyes
glinting with dim monotonous desire to claw back at life; there Nadia Onek and
Harmony Singer, erstwhile trophies both, each seeking to feel more credible
than the other in the role through the judicious use of increasingly strident
laughter more vicious than vivacious, and the bending forward of the shoulders
that produces the illusion of cleavage. Nothing had changed. The redwoods still
stood. And a gentle groove could be detected, threading an invisible path over
the grove, tracing the flight of the deer that leap and winding through the
forest all the way to the ocean, where down an iridescent stretch of perpetual
blue curling tube the lifeforce surfs.
Suddenly there she was, Rachel
Sandesky and her bounteous chest.
“Holy shit,” murmured Beau. “Dirtbag
Andy wasn’t kidding.”
Leif waved over a couple of old
friends, who followed his advice on the best way up, where the ramp to the
tennis courts met with a low section of roof. They appeared on the geometric
horizon and chatted with Leif near the vents for a spell while Beau turned his
attention to Rachel and saw that she had spotted him.
“Beau Black, is that you?”
“Hi, Rachel.”
“How did you get up there?”
“At the corner by the tennis
courts.”
“Oh, show me,” she said, hustling
over, and Beau stepped down to help her up. She was so sweet to pretend to be
dumb. From a rectangular pocket Beau showed her carefully how to use pipes and
outcroppings as stairs and provided her with a gentlemanly hand. When they had
reached the top of the wing on which she had seen him, she wanted to stop for a
proper hug. Beau warned her that he needed to take a shower and get a change of
clothes. Whereupon Rachel took him by the hand, wagged a raised finger in a
gesture which said, “Not to worry, I know exactly what to do,” and pulled him
further along the roof than he had been, to where it met with the corner of
another, slightly higher, and in this manner they trod the rooftops like sets
of giant steps, Rachel pausing now and again to ask whether someone she saw
below was really who she thought, even sharing anecdotes concerning those in
question, and being sure to crouch down with Beau behind a large exhaust vent
whenever it seemed they might be discovered, until at last she’d led them to a
window at a corner in the shadows out of view. Here the angle iron was loose,
and the window, Beau found, lacked a lock.
Rachel’s excited face smiled inches
from Beau’s own. “The showers are inside,” she whispered, for no particular
reason, it seemed, other than to be close. Her breath smelled minty. Beau held
the window up for her, and looked around before climbing in.
In a dim swath of light he saw a
telephone on a table. Beau picked it up and got a dial tone. “I have to make a
quick important call,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, still whispering.
“I’ll be right back. I think I know where I can get you some clothes.” Then she
slipped out through a door into a hall, and before he could talk himself out of
it, Beau made the call.
“Hello, operator? Listen, I’m making
an anonymous emergency call. I found a body in the woods in Madrani below the
market, near the river. I don’t know anything about it except I saw the body of
a girl down there. Please send someone.” He nearly hung up, but paused to ask,
“Do you understand?”
“City and state,” the operator said.
“I’m making an anonymous emergency
call. Did you hear anything I said?”
“City and state, please sir.”
“You don’t understand. Listen to me,
I found a body, in Madrani, below, in the woods below Madrani Market, near the
river. Do you understand? Please send the police to go investigate the body.”
“Do you wish to make a local call?”
“No! I want you to tell the police
about the body below Madrani Market.”
“You wish to report a robbery?”
“No! A body! Send the police!”
Beau hung up just before Rachel came
in carrying some clothes.
“Got these from the band room,” she
said, holding first a white button-down and then some dark slacks up against
him. “I think they’ll fit.” The slacks she held for a while, and when with her
right hand holding the hem at the proper position near his ankle, her left hand
holding up the waist band accidentally bumped him a couple of times, neither
said anything.
Suddenly the phone rang.
Rachel, still on her knees, was so
startled, she accidentally bumped her face against Beau, who quickly reached
over and unplugged the phone. He gave her a hand up. She thanked him, and
keeping his hand in hers led him out the door, down the hall, and around two
more corners to the showers.
“I’ll just…wait right here,” she
whispered, standing in a locker stall, which still smelled of its strange stale
corn chips smell and Brut.
Beau went over to another stall,
taking off his shirt, thinking how good a hot shower was going to feel, and how
he couldn’t wait to dig into some grub. His wallet he kept in the back pants
pocket as always, but his wet wad of clothes rolled up was, presumably, still
by the junior high field backstop. He would have to go back and get his things
in the morning.
Leaving the clothes he had worn
arranged neatly on the little bench in the narrow stall—down every one of which
he’d had in his day a locker at some point—he walked to the showers with the
soft slap of his feet on the tile echoing in a weird and lonely way that
reminded him of Keir Dullea’s clinking utensils toward the end of “2001.” And
then he was showering, happy to see soap, yet a little worried, though he went
ahead and used it. And when he had bathed, facing the stream (finding, again,
similarities between that and the stream sequence which Dullea’s Dave undergoes
prior to the echoing part) and felt as much as heard, reverberating through the
halls, Stevie Wonder singing about smoking cigarettes and writing something
nasty on the wall, there suddenly appeared before him Rachel Sandesky in all
her glory. She approached. They touched.
An entire wall of the shower room
toppled over with a soundless crash, and the actual, real Stevie Wonder
appeared on the other side singing. People from the past Beau both knew and
never met turned, greeting, through the school, down the town, right on out and
into the redwoods, where Bollywood goddesses danced synchronized on the
hillside, bearing supple cinnamon midriffs, gossamer orange, fuchsia, yellow
and magenta shimmering in time all along the Avenue, and all kinds of people
from all kinds of places sat and stood in apertures of redwoods, like the
living souls of the trees, nodding and smiling with knowing looks, waving in
the breeze, and overhead, overlaps of scintillating fireworks widened and
rained, but all the high-steppin’ in the redwoods where the colors crisp as
chutney splashed came crashing to a horrid halt at the end of the song with
seven simple whispered words:
“So, I hear you’re an investment
banker.”
From a hundred and thirty to zero in
two seconds flat. Immediately perceiving, Rachel said, “Don’t worry, I’m in the
pharmaceutical business now. I work for Raisex.”
Raisex, the latest and greatest in
erectile dysfunction technology. Raisex, the wonderful solution with bizarre
side-effects—generating business in turn for the companies that make the
medicines that relieve the side-effects. Some of which with side-effects all
their own.
Raisex, the corporate-owned company
whose campaigns of misinformation against its only competition, the natural
world, included writing and purchasing laws intended to separate people from
the natural world, and prevent people from choosing to freely avail themselves
of it, in order to force people to instead purchase their own manufactured and
patented inferior imitation, which causes harmful side-effects.
Raisex, the erectile dysfunction
pharmaceutical industry leader today, and for the benefit of its own select
interests, major political force of tomorrow.
With entrenched industry comes the
corruption of the machine which supplants humanity. All the wrong things
happened with cheating and lies because the honest solution produced less coin.
Bone-deep, Beau knew, and he just couldn’t go through the motions.
They put on their clothes in
separate stalls. Beau knew she still didn’t know he wasn’t an investment
banker. “Thanks for the stolen band room clothes,” he said on the way out to
reunite with the reunion.
“Anytime,” she replied with an airy
patience which seemed intended to convey the significance of a double-entendre.
“By the way”—here she caught Beau by the elbow, staying their emergence—“is
there anything you could maybe tell me about the Hartley-Kester merger?”
It was a fortuitous inquiry, for in
the time it took to submit to a guided grope, Beau seeming hesitant to part
with such valuable information so wantonly, he peered around the corner in the
event that anyone should come, and saw on the other side of the gym two cops in
the doorway. Not much older than the college kids in Carata.
The call. The operator had probably
gotten his call precisely fucked up enough to be responsible for this.
Beau took Rachel by the hand.
“Listen, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about that, but not here.
Can I trust you?”
“Yes, of course!”
“Then come with me,” he said,
leading her all the way back past the showers to the room with the window by
which they had entered. The last thing he needed was Rachel blabbing to the
cops anything to do with him at all. Beau shut the door, and almost locked it,
but headed for the window instead, emphatically pronouncing before he crawled
out, “Hartley-Kester’s for shit,” and adding with an airy patience hinting of a
double-entendre he was certain neither Rachel nor her chest would ever
understand, “some things just aren’t meant to be.”
Crossing quickly by way of the roof
to the back of the gym, Beau climbed down and left through the gates to the
track and field for the second time that night, being sure to stay out of the
line of sight to the gym.
Heading toward home he heard a car
behind him and happened to turn around and look. In the glare of the
streetlight down by the high school he saw that
same car, the one with Chuck inside, coming up the hill. Beau didn’t think
that Chuck had seen him, but knew in a moment he would. There was nothing to
hide behind. And if he started running he would call attention to himself like
a frightened rabbit.
Suddenly a convertible appeared at
his side. Liliana looked smart in a sleek black dress which could have doubled
for a negligee.
“Hey there, handsome. You look like
the kind of guy who’s dressed to escort a gal to an evening at a castle.”
Beau hopped in and the Karmann Ghia
sped away.
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