http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Slamming was the word applied to the activity in which
at a young age Keith Ensing invested a large amount of his inheritance. It was
what made him enough money to get Redwoodland off the ground. And who among
those who lived during that time could ever forget the controversy Slamming
caused?
Originally the idea was to use satellite
systems—satellite photography, specifically—perfectly available to the public,
yet utilized in such a way that someone viewing the images, under conducive
conditions, experienced the sensation of looking at the world…from beyond it.
The conditions conducive to this sensation ranged from viewing the images in a
helmet to stepping into a small isolation chamber and undergoing the experience
there. This latter case was what seemed to bring the greatest effect. Such was
the clarity and realism of the illusion, when an occupant in a booth used the
technology to zoom the view from satellite to planet at great speed, the
results pushed to the limits certain areas of the brain. Stressed to what the
brain perceived to be the brink of death, the pineal gland—an endocrine organ
which produces the hormone melatonin—responded in a way that Slammers found
revelatory in the extreme.
People were seeing forms of energy, learning about the
energy within them, and when they tasted of the possibilities inside themselves
they saw natural life in conflict with the man-made world. When this dormant
organ at the center of the brain, called by some the Third Eye, revealed inner
vision to the ready individual, results proved overwhelmingly positive in that
people reported greater memory retention, markedly improved overall cognitive
ability and increased questioning of established cultural norms.
Public access to satellite technology soon thereafter
ceased.
But in that time Keith Ensing made his killing, and
there were some who said he took a massive payoff from the government to sell
it the patent rights, and that the drastically modified version of Slamming
which spread across the country, promoted by the governmental System, actually
harmed various areas of the brain and did nothing to stimulate the pineal gland
at all.
Still, with Redwoodland the killing for Keith Ensing was
infinitely greater. From all over the world people came to ride the track
through the redwoods, where the bulging burls talked like giant heads on living
trees for miles and miles and miles in the world’s biggest amusement park and
natural forest preserve....
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Wildfires
pounding the state were sending prey and predator alike scattering for cover.
People were reporting black bears and mountain lions as never before on roads
and around homes. Hiking alone on a forest trail differed little from a dip in
the ocean, and if a predator were to suddenly appear, Jay realized, his chances
for survival would be about as high as if a white shark mistook him for a seal.
The prospect therefore of spending the night in his hollow tree–“Even the trees
around here are burned out,” he said the first time he saw one–lost to the
proffered black-gloved hand of his strangely silent friend, a secret outcast
like himself and possessor of a scent he could not fully appreciate, due to a
near-drowning incident years before which did not eradicate, but permanently
impaired his sense of smell.
“Bitchin’
view, dude,” Jay said to what was Will Todd. He wiped the edges of his mouth
and stuffed the used paper napkin into the empty Yoga Yogurt cup, then sat at
the lip of the upper crypt, kicking legs dangling, looking into the interior
chamber where the dark figure quietly wrote.
“I
put that new lock on the chain outside for you. Got you that hacksaw, too, just
in case. Lock looks just like the one the caretaker replaced. I guess you saw
the keys where I put them next to that other tape recorder, right? You might
want to clean that one off a little. It’s got some kind of mud all over it. ”
Nothing.
But for the scraping of the pen in the slowly moving hand, the figure could
have been a statue.
“Makes
me feel like I’m back in the ol’ school days, watching you do your homework
there or whatever. All diligent and all. It’s cool. Kind of trippin’ me out
though, you know? Like when there’s one of those tests, and you totally haven’t
even cracked a book. You’re probably just doing some of that paperwork to set
up shop at the fair I guess. Awesome, dude. Kind of the grim way to get it
though, you know?”
The
bandaged face under the dark hat turned up.
“Well,
I’m just saying what are the chances that the lady at the book store with the
psychic booth gets stabbed right before the fair? And by her own kid. Whoa.
Sucks for her, major score for you.”
From
behind Jay boomed a stentorian voice. “Hey you! Get out of there!”
Jay
turned to see a tall, overweight man standing close to the iron gate of the
crypt’s entrance. One hand was on the new padlock which gave the appearance of
securing the gate. The other pulled a heavy set of keys on a retractable metal
chain clipped to a belt hidden beneath the man’s sagging paunch. It was the
caretaker. The glimmer in his eyes and set of his jaw told Jay the man relished
catching him with the satisfaction of a man lying in bed late at night who
hears a rat trap snap.
“I
got you now, buddy boy. I got you now.” The caretaker said this more to himself
than to Jay, but his satisfaction quickly turned to confusion as he realized
the key on his chain didn’t fit in the lock. “Get over here!” he ordered,
rattling the gate in unveiled rage.
The
last rays of the sun showed Jay the man’s bad teeth. Some of them were missing,
the others were crooked and stained. They almost looked like little versions of
headstones themselves tilted in the man’s mouth. Jay had no wish to decrease
the gap between the caretaker and himself. The man’s indignation, Jay intuited,
arose less from a sense of propriety and more from a petty desire to get back
at life. Probably he feared for his job. But the caretaker looked like he could
tear the gate off the hinges, and catching Jay dead to rights, he acted like he
was about to.
Snapping
the lock shut had only been an afterthought for Jay. He hadn’t seriously felt
there was any need, and nearly didn’t bother with the pretense only half an
hour before, just to avoid the hassle of having to reach through and unlock it
again. Jay was on the point of explaining something to this effect when the
caretaker’s attention was diverted by the slanted slab within, and the
black-clad form which rose from the exposed hole.
Jay
felt like a kid whose big brother showed up just in time to bully a bully. He
watched while the dude stood opposite the caretaker and calmly removed his
shades. Instantly the caretaker went visibly lax. It was hard to tell–it may
have been a trick of the sun’s dying light–but it almost looked to Jay like the
green vaguely flickering tint on the man’s vacant face came directly from the
dude.
For
a long, surreal moment the two stood opposite each other with what must have
been locked eyes. Jay couldn’t see the dude’s face. It was as though nothing
barred the two. So still, they could have been mirror images.
Then
the next thing Jay knew, the dude was putting his glasses back on, and the
caretaker wasn’t saying a word, but just turning on his heels and walking away,
as though nothing had happened at all. Jay went over to the gate and watched
while the caretaker left the cemetery, got into a beat up old pickup and drove
off.
“Whoa,”
he said. “That was really weird.” The dude turned around and climbed back down
into the interior crypt. Neither Jay nor anyone else had any idea that when the
caretaker got home, for some strange reason he cut off his left pinky toe with
a pair of garden shears and ate it....
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Even
standing outside in the wind she could hear the doorbell clearly. No one could
sleep through that. She stabbed the doorbell a few more times, then found her
hand checking the doorknob. It turned. Slowly Julie opened the door.
It was dark inside. The filth was
awful. In the murky gloom of Denny’s home Julie saw not only plates and cups
lying around, broken and molding, but furniture apparently knocked about and
overturned as well. Cobwebs were everywhere. A black stain evidently having
spilled over from something on the stove draped the front of the oven and parts
of the kitchen floor. That part was exactly like what she had seen in her
vision.
Ocean wind blowing in stirred a
stale scent which made Julie wince. Opening the door as far as it would go and
setting a chair against it she called out, “Anybody home?” as she moved toward
the kitchen.
A door appeared, as she knew it
would. Propping it open with a skillet on the floor, she flipped the switch to
the basement lights which provided a dim yellowy glow.
A quick sweep of the counter behind
her and her eyes locked onto a set of knives. From Utterly Cutlery, she
realized. Selecting the biggest, she headed down the stairs.
“What are you doing?” she thought.
“This is ridiculous. I should go back for the gun. I know I’m right. I know he
did it. How much proof do I need? What if he
has a gun and he sees me with this knife of his sneaking around in his house?
What if he saw me storming up to his house bright and early and went ahead and
called the cops?”
Wrapped in her thoughts, she found
herself in a long narrow aperture before a small rectangular door. In her
vision, she had seen Denny pushing Turk, wrapped in duct tape, through the
opening. By flashes and glimpses she saw Turk being eaten alive. The sound of
the dog’s plaintive whining assailed her mind, as did the sight of gloating
disgust fixed on her neighbor’s face in the opening he had constructed for that
express purpose. If she opened the little door, would she see Turk’s body?
Would whatever was inside–get out?
Then she realized, and through no
vision, that the flea from hell had been in her neighbor’s house, growing. He
had fed the thing her dog.
And on the instant she realized
this, she turned and saw. It was blocking the way she had come in, blocking the
way out. There was a head, shoulders, arms, legs. No clothing. Pinkish, fleshy,
devoid of hair. Whatever it was that had affected her affected Denny Holmes as
well. But differently. Denny Holmes was no more.
Blackish patches where eyes should
have been stretched across the face–or rather, the front of the head. There was
no actual face. Bizarre, dagger-like appendages hung in lieu of a mouth. Behind
these dangled two insect-like arms, tucked up beneath where a neck would be.
The thing had trouble standing upright due to the bulbous body it dragged
behind. Shifting itself on freakishly rangy legs with the support of flailing
arms along the walls of the narrow aperture as it positioned itself to spring,
the thing loudly emitted excited chitters.
Julie screamed.
The leathery plating of the bulky
sac-like body throbbed and the excited chittering coming from behind the
daggers of the walrus mouth rose to frantic pitch to rival the torrent of
bloodcurdling screams coming from Julie as she strove to open the little door
to the room just in time to drop the knife and dive in headlong, barely
avoiding the thing as nightmarishly it suddenly sprang fifteen feet across the
narrow aperture.
Inside the interior room, sunk six
feet deeper than the level of the basement, Julie could hear the thing
scrambling to right itself. It had overshot the opening enough that she could
now see the obscene dartboard-like rings at the base of the sac. Unable to turn
around, and having a hard time backing up, could it even fit through the
opening? Julie hoped not.
All of this she took in on the instant,
grateful for the single bulb illuminating the room. There were stains on the
floor, stinking of decomposition. The only avenue out other than the one she
came in was a hole in a plywood wall big enough to admit her.
Looking back as she climbed through,
Julie was shocked to see the thing in the opening drop down inside. Was it her
imagination, or did the arms now appear considerably less human? No, the body
was definitely more tapered, the shoulders entirely gone.
A broken two-by-four on the other
side skidded over the concrete when she accidentally kicked it with her shin
just as the creature slammed into the plywood behind her. She was in the crawl
space now, making her way to the exit. Behind, furious limbs flailed as it
tried to wriggle through the hole in the plywood, too. Julie grabbed the
two-by-four and chopped at the thing’s emerging head with everything she had.
Screaming, she jabbed an end at a
black indistinguishable eye. It backed off–only for a moment. But in that
moment Julie saw it definitely was smaller now.
Ahead of her, between the concrete
wall of the basement on her left, and a wall on her right consisting of
two-by-four uprights and spacers on the back side of the plywood, a dirt
incline took her the six feet back up to the original level of the basement.
She could see the steps ahead of her.
Heart racing, she powered up the
steps into the kitchen. At the moment that she tried to lock it in the
basement, the thing slammed into the door with a single prodigious leap from
the base of the stairs, and with such force that the door hit Julie on the
head, knocking her backwards.
With one foot forward she propelled
herself on the floor toward the door, pinching the thing against the jamb with
its six nightmare legs feverishly flailing under the jittering Nietzschean
mustache.
Now the thing was half its former
size, but by the way it slowly pushed open the door against her best efforts to
stop it, she knew she couldn’t hold it off for more than a few seconds.
Grabbing a mop from a heap of debris she jabbed at it well enough to get to her
feet, yank the microwave from the counter in both hands and heave it with all
her strength on the visibly diminishing shape that struggled to right itself in
preparation for a leap toward the warm form of a host body pulsing with
nourishment. The microwave hit the flea mid-air. Julie ran for the front door.
Still it was jumping behind her,
hopping mad. Kicking the chair she’d used to prop the door, she grabbed the
knob and slammed it shut as the flea shot through over her shoulder,
horrifically brushing her hair in its ungainly and repulsive flight, flopping
in the sand nearby, now about the size of a cat.
Julie caught sight of some big rocks
at hand and started chucking them at the thing as it tried to flop away across
the dunes, but now it was small enough and light enough that the strong ocean
winds of Whale Harbor buffeted the thing about toward the crumbling rock of
time-eroded bluffs. Julie watched as the flea was swept down a fissure in the
rock, still visibly diminishing, and as she watched she saw his life flash
before her eyes, while what had been Denny Holmes sank in a black canyon of
infernal descent into an underworld with no return....
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Morning
came to Kyle like a hot breakfast thrown in his face. The walls thrummed with
the approach of helicopters. The sound of the choppers did not pass but grew,
filling the air in omnipresent waves like an ocean liner over an open sea of
trees. Fischer was nowhere in sight. Kyle called out his name. No one else was
there at all. Whether or not Fischer might have something going on here, Kyle
didn’t want to stick around to find out.
Through a window he could see
multiple choppers rising over the trees and bending them in rippling waves of
green. Heading through the house he used the back door which went out to the
hillside and there took to the thick cover of the trees, looking back in time
to see figures dropping down on cables from hovering choppers like spiders on
their webs. He didn’t think anyone saw him, but had no way to tell and expected
every moment to encounter pursuit.
Even as he ran his mind scrambled to
make the best choice of what to do. Did he dare just stand around and wait to
potentially take the fall? Would they likely simply shoot him for running, then
call it an accident if they called it anything at all? He’d had a rude
awakening, was wrung out from the day and night before, and every bone in his
body screamed to get away as far and fast as possible.
In chaos Kyle ran, as one with the
wind-swept leaves.
Cody had his things packed and was
heading out the door just when the shit hit. Heidi, having finally gotten the
generator going around midnight, never did fall asleep either. Each was glad
that Brandi had left to spend the night with Autumn in Radley. When Heidi heard
the choppers coming in, she automatically ran downstairs to the gun room.
Already in his Pinto, Cody took the
road toward the trees, trying to drive casual so as not to send up too much
dust and call attention from the air, but still he was going so fast he
overshot the bend and took the Pinto rattling down into a gulley, by sheer luck
about the least rock-strewn one on the property, and threaded his way up and
down either side of the trench trying to negotiate it, his own constant yelling
barely audible in the mechanized thunder reverberating overhead.
Mobile task force units on the
ground moved through morning mist, weapons drawn, scouring the land. The
National Armed Resistance to Growers had a new member on the team in Neal the
Narc, who did not think of himself by that name known to the rest of the
community, but in a strange way not precisely irony yet somehow similar, did
think of himself as Neal the NARG.
Puffing over the hills in spanking
new special issue combat gear uniform fashioned with the helmet all tricked-out
and the radio on, Neal the Narc dug the green combat vision with the visor down,
flashing vital combat-mode tech info and crosshairs. The helmet received only
one station. “…You’re tuned to the
King—King KANG! Arbora, Newbrook, Glynville….” Everything was like a real
video game now. It was like he died and went to heaven. And Neal the Narc was
ready to score himself some points.
His was not to reason why the
Bargerville surrounding region was not represented in the call letters of what
had become, almost overnight, the only radio station, not just for NARGs, but
the entire area. Nor was he informed by the area’s fastest-growing source of
local news that the manager of the Bargerville LowCost, Roy Jorgens, whose past
stint as a priest landed him the job, now faced allegations related to his time
in the clergy, nor how as of yesterday evening the woman whose life Jorgens
claimed to have saved in-store on-camera had confessed that the entire incident
was, in fact, staged.
Of all that Neal the Narc knew
nothing—and if he had, per mainstream instruction, would have chalked it all up
to unfair bias. This right here was what he had signed up for. The grand
adventure of liberating. Like a noble knight. It was all up to Neal the Narc
and his trusty band of NARG brothers now. Way he heard it, satellite cameras
embedded overhead were getting the whole thing for a regular joe reality
heroism show.
Using the remote control on the back
of his glove, Neal the Narc turned down the Regal Lager commercial and raised
the visor up. “Hey guys,” he said, what’s going on?” He asked the question, but
he could see. Neal the Narc had stumbled on a bunch of his NARG buds loading up
baggies with fresh outdoor pot from the patch they found.
Intent as they all were, one of the
NARGs looked at Neal the Narc. “Well, you got your baggie? Don’t tell me you
forgot. Fuckin’ rookie!”
“What is it, Rick?” another said.
“Fuckin’ rookie here doesn’t have
his baggie. Fuckin’ shit, look at this one.” Rick clipped a big bud and held it
up. “Wait till Big Bill sees this baby. Fuckin’-a!”
“Shit man,” said still another,
“last time on my crew they had us just load up nets with a bunch of brush so
the choppers would have something to haul out for everybody to see.”
“Hey guys,” said Neal the Narc,
taking furtive glances at the sky, “I thought the satellites were on us for the
show.” Some of them said that wasn’t scheduled till next time. A couple others
assured it would just get edited anyway. Neal the Narc asked if anybody had an
extra baggie.
“No, not me.”
“Fuckin’ rookie!”
“Mine came with my equipment from
LowCost. It’s supposed to be part of the kit you get.”
Neal the Narc reached into an
oversize pants pocket and produced a small thin cardboard box bearing the
LowCost label in which was, sure enough, a plastic zipper-seal bag. He tossed
the box into the brush and started loading up his baggie. Just then, sudden
sounds nearby caught his and the others’ attention.
Gunshots sounding like strings of
firecrackers were going off. Hurriedly the NARGs in the patch packed their pot....
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
The midnight blue Karmann Ghia threaded
through the redwoods. It was 10:41, Beau noticed, looking at his watch for no
particular reason, having taken the turnoff from the highway back onto the
Avenue for the very specific reason that he spotted a cop camped out across the
bridge, all ready to make quota.
“Fuzz thwarted,” he announced. A
quarter mile down the road, where the sign proclaims Avenue of the Giants, they
got stuck behind a van.
“Looks like that one in ‘Up in
Smoke,’” said Liliana.
Beau didn’t register his surprise at
her referencing Cheech and Chong, saying merely, “Oh yeah.” An old bumper
sticker, he noticed, had defiantly resisted being torn, so that S. OUT OF HUMB
was all that remained. Suddenly he realized they hadn’t seen hardly any sketchy
people at all. Certainly not in Laibrook, boasting the pastoral tranquility of
golf. None on the north end of Bargerville thumbing, either. Not a single soul
in a boofy knit hat with a hungry-looking dog held perhaps with a piece of
rope, not a one in genii pants and weird scraggly beard. No body odor emanating
from any shirtless sorts hitching rides on strange journeys next to piles of poorly
packed stuff, skin of the thin limbs browned and burned and Biblical.
Taking the turn some miles later
down to the bridge which they would cross before merging back on the highway,
Beau looked for the old organic market, a Hippie store his parents patronized
years ago for the fresh produce. It looked like something more or less was
still there, but having to drive kept him from clearly seeing.
What he did see were people parked
at the bottom of the hill, milling around on the bridge. Beau slowed down to a
snail’s crawl.
“It’s like trying to drive at
Fisherman’s Warf,” Liliana observed.
Beau had never seen so many people
on Madrani Bridge in his life. “Hey, that guy right there,” he said, pointing,
“I know him from way back. We were in school together.”
The slower they went and closer they
got, the more faces from the past Beau recognized on the bridge. Down below,
Mist River flowed, and the different colors on the wide swath of rocky sandbar
sloping to greater deposits of the gray pebbly sand indicated the swelling
levels of the river’s rhythms, filling up in the winter and receding in the
summer, yet in the faces of the people he saw on the bridge few of the physical
traces of time stood out passing by.
Merging with the highway alongside
the river, Beau was glad to split the scene. He passed one turnoff to a town
with a liquor store where he’d worked, years and years ago, and another where
he’d also worked at a mill. If he thought about it, the distinctive muffled
sound inside the cooler at the store, machinery droning up close, bottles in
crates clinking at the touch, loose stacks of six-packs always in danger of
falling, sour smells of previous spills, were memories all readily at hand. He
could hear the buzzing grind of a machine at the mill called the Ripper, into
the multiple blades of which one guy pushed a piece of lumber, another guy
standing with his back to the pusher a few feet away receiving the jittery strips
slowly worked through, the trick being to grab them at the right time in the
right way, because failure to do so meant a funny rattling sound coming from
the blades for a moment prior to a strip of wood suddenly shooting backward,
zipping like an arrow hard enough to stick in a sheet of plywood, if it didn’t
stick in the operator easily enough first. In the days Beau worked those jobs,
he and Liliana were already history. How he had longed for those letters from
her, with what eager anticipation did his trembling fingers remove the scented
contents, pages penned by her sacred hand. And with what speed did he pour
through the pages past the hum-drum itinerary, looking for and often finding
the fluttery mush he so ardently craved. So many years had passed. So many
lives already lived....
https://soundcloud.com/stewart-kirby/surfboard-cindy
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Phil took off his smock, placed it on the counter and
stepped out the front door, which slammed satisfyingly behind him on a spring.
Breathing deeply of the pulp mill from across the bay he shook his head and
walked around the corner to where his car was parallel parked. He pulled his
keys, got in, turned the ignition, put on his belt, checked the rear view
mirror, and was just about to pull forward when there suddenly appeared
directly in front of his car two figures who had not been there a split second
before. One was a man with his back turned. The other Phil first took to be an
albino child. But when the man turned, Phil saw that the other was no child at
all.
The man,
who looked at first as though in the throes of a wild fit, took on an
unmistakably startled expression viewing his surroundings. The other, seeming
to take advantage of this lapse in concentration, sprang nimbly away and ran
down an alley.
The man
gave chase.
Through
the center of town the man ran. Past beggars pontificating in overripe robes,
patchouli-drenched in ponchos and dreadlocks playing bongos on the quad. The
white boiled egg head of the man’s diminutive quarry bobbed on slender frantic
limbs past once-ornate Victorians in various stages of disrepair bedecked in
tie-dye wind socks whipped in occasional gales.
Down
alleys.
Through
windows.
In and out of doors.
Up and
down the town they ran–past businesses–Nepal Noodle–Soy Boy–Whey To Go–over an
arching bridge with a rainbow painted underneath the rapid white small form
scurried from the pursuer–into a tunnel where skaters lazed and students
bearing backpacks hustled to the university fitting their mouths around
burritos–pell mell past classrooms they ran–thoroughfares clogged with plodders
domino-like sloshed coffees–
Ex-biker
Eddie at Wire You Hear cut off his own big toe when an acetylene torch sank in
his slackened arm. Shelves went down when they ran through Bookin’ It. Rodeo
Video was a mess. Utterly Cutlery, a disaster.
When it
seemed the man had lost the creature, with a wound on his left hand dripping he
made his way to a linen van parked with the back doors open. He grabbed a towel
to bind his hand as from the white stacks and out the van the frantic creature
darted.
A dog with
a tick on its neck happening by licked blood on the road from the man’s wound..,..
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Mary Christianson could not move. Even
when the light through the window in the loft over the bed hit directly on her,
Mary never moved a muscle, and was only dimly aware of consciousness itself,
the one image playing like a mantra over and over in what was left of her mind
being that of Twiggy. All memory of the night before was gone. No memory of
family. No memory of self. Certainly no memory of the otherworldly rock her husband
dug up from the lake, no awareness of her body condensing into hardened aspect,
limbs lengthening and firming, no awareness of the tough and knobby solidness,
only the one thought, the omnipresent mantra image, Twiggy, Twiggy, Twiggy.
The
thing that was Mary rose from the bed and flopped on the floor around noon. In
the mass of lashing tendrils might barely be discerned the vaguest semblance of
a torso. Two of the thicker branches moved like legs, while two more resembled
arms. There was no head, merely a misshapen knot. Clacking sounds of rubbing
branches accompanied the thing’s attempts to extricate itself from what was
left of clothing, and it trashed much of the room with its hard limbs flailing
in the process, but finally freed itself, and stood still awhile as if in
meditation, gently swaying in the middle of the mess. Then the thing that was
Mary, which had become Twiggy, moved nimble as a spider out of the room and
down the stairs. Splintering the front door, it scuttled outside and headed
into the woods....
They sat on thickly
cushioned swivel stools at the counter. Behind them some of the tables were
redwood slabs on burl bases, rich mahogany marbled wildly with radiating rings
and peppered with minute constellations of character, and the entire shape of
the slab was irregular and unique because it came from burls with knots and
roots and pockets milled into two- and three-inch slabs, no two exactly alike
in the world. In front of them stood a blonde-haired, blue-eyed animatronic waitress
wearing Daisy Dukes, trim white fringe on her tight cutoff jeans fluffy and
clean as if fresh from the wash.
“So
what was it like living when ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ was on?”
“Yeah,
that’s a pretty good one. I haven’t seen him do it for a couple years, but when
my youngest brother was nine or ten, and he’s I guess twelve years younger than
me, he used to go around wearing one of those long metal tennis ball cans all
the way up to his armpit, and wear a long-sleeved shirt over his arm so that
when we punched it or if he crashed into something it would seem bionic. And he
used to squint one eye to show that it was bionic, too. And he would move
super-fast, pretending to go in slow-mo. I guess he’d be eighty-eight now, if
he’s still…you know.”
“Still
alive?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s
sure not impossible. I know people in their nineties and hundreds. You should
try to look him up. Maybe he can help you.”
“You
know, you’re right. That means I’m a hundred. I might not look a day over
twenty-five right now, but I feel a hundred years old inside. I wonder if I’ll
suddenly start aging on the outside to catch up.”
Diego
had his phone out. It was the size of a corn chip, and at the touch of a very
tiny button seemed to expand to a door-sized golden rectangle glittering with
possibility.
“I’m
not seeing any Perlmans in the directory,” he said.
“None?”
“Sorry.”
The
Hippie saw in the door-sized hologram-like screen which was not actually there
clips of advertising firing away, dehumanized women shining and jostled and
screaming in fearful ecstasy the names of products, everything on-screen all
frantic pulsing color spinning to catch attention, and looking to the Hippie
like a jumbled mess of garbage falling constantly apart. Pictures of the world
beyond Redwoodland instilled fear and reverence. Famine and flame and deadly
disease. You couldn’t look away, and there was always more.
“Enjoy,
boys,” Cheryl, the animatronic waitress said, swiveling over with the orders.
“I
keep expecting to see Yul Brynner come in wearing a black cowboy hat,” said the
Hippie between bites of bacon cheeseburger.
“I
know the movie you’re talking about,” Diego said with a mouthful of pizza.
“‘Westworld.’”
“Right!
But it’s not like that here. There are such things as walking androids in the
world, true. They don’t have them here, though. Too expensive. Too much hassle.
These ones here are hard enough to keep up.”
Cheryl
just smiled. Nice midriff. Showed a lot of latex.
The
Hippie thanked Diego for the burger when they’d finished. Diego left his pizza
crust.
“No
problem,” Diego said outside. “I get it at a discount.”
“I
guess I’ll have to figure out how to start getting some of those credits,” the
Hippie said.
“I
guess you better. Where you going?”
“I
think it’s time to take off.”
“Take
off? Where to?”
“Oh,
I think I’ll start by going back to that tree, see if I can’t fall asleep.”
“You
got any more of those weird mushrooms?”
“Nope.”
“All
right then, good luck.”
“Thanks
for being cool with me, dude.”
“No
prob, dude.”
Deep
down the Hippie wondered if maybe Diego wouldn’t be letting him go. Wondered if
he wouldn’t have to turn around to see while he was walking away Diego with the
pistol leveled. But all Diego did was hop on his hover scooter and glide down
past the high school. The Hippie went in the opposite direction, back uphill,
toward the south end of town, taking a short cut across the bough-laced grounds
of the Whispering Woods Motel, where animatronic figures might have acted out
his youth, and the short cut led him to the dirt road, authentic dirt, rife
with authentic potholes, where houses lined either side of the road, and when
in passing he tripped a motion sensor here or there he saw the young
animatronic dads with their long thick sideburns and huge pointy collars
flashing teeth over drinks at chicks with Farrah hair who were moms and wore
halter tops and large colorful audibly jangling bracelets and went heavy on
mascara, and in one house he saw, as he peeped and he creeped around like the
Frankenstein monster, a little blonde animatronic boy fiddling with Atari
tanks, an actual Chuck Connors Tin Can Alley set placed in view behind him, and
a Daisy BB gun standing in the corner, Johnny West on a shelf next to Quick
Draw Action Sam Cobra. Past some houses farther on downhill he found the old
trail that took you down to the forest. Wide, tall, dark, huge. When the
presence of the forest began to be felt, the vast sound of stillness broken by
sharp pipings of birds, there appeared the haunted house, the real haunted house,
the one that he knew in his youth and now again saw, restored before him in all
its moldering glory. A couple of animatronic Huck Finns sprang to life for hick
fun on the roof when the Hippie broke the beam, but he kept on going down to
the bottom of the hill, thereby meeting the furthest limits of a large tract of
redwood grove, where the trees were much bigger, and the air far more dark.
Suddenly,
the sound of something moving. He’d tripped a beam, he knew, before the voice
came, a voice from above.
“A
decade is no mere number of years.” The Hippie looked up the nearby redwood at
the huge talking burl. “A time is a spirit. If the time is a positive one, it
needs to be carried on.” The mouth of the big fake burl clacked when it talked.
“So be sure to stick to the rules, and remember, anything you can see can see
you, too. Our Redwoodland Security family finds the darnedest ways to keep a
real good eye on us to make sure everybody stays safe. Lookout for Bigfeet now,
be sure to visit our gift shops, and keep on stayin’ groovy!”
Slowly,
the conical brown heads of Bigfeet rose on neckless shoulders from behind
fallen logs and large clumps of brush, and as he moved along the trail, slowly
they descended. Little woodland creatures lingering unnaturally seemed to the
Hippie like camera-laden spies, but he made it at last to his tree, a great
redwood with a split at the base revealing a cave-like interior. Trembling, he
went inside. Naturally everything he had experienced was all too much to bear.
His system couldn’t handle it. If he could just go to sleep, probably he would
wake up and everything would be fine in 1975. And he would never do mushrooms
again. Inside it was dark, the wedge-shaped opening allowing little of the
filtered forest light. The problem now was being wired. He tried to sleep, but
was too wired to be tired. When the omnipresent thought of what on earth he was
going to do became too much, the Hippie jumped out of the tree and ran through
the woods tripping beams that sprang striding Bigfeet to life and made talking
burls clack behind him as he ran pit pat down the forest path.
It
was in the wood yard at The Burl Barn that the Hippie saw Diego again.
“I
figured,” Diego said, crunching across the gravel drive, “figured you’d come
out at the Old Graveyard, or on the Avenue, or from up behind The Burl Barn
here.” The hover scooter was over by a wolf-bear-raven-Bigfoot totem pole, and
next to that was an animatronic chainsaw-carving tableau, featuring a
plaid-clad carver covered in sawdust releasing from a block of wood a standing
bear holding a salmon, and also featuring a guy with an ax in his hands
perpetually preparing for the Standing Block Chop.
“I
recognize this guy’s name,” said the Hippie, reading from a brass plaque. “So
little Carl wound up a Timbersports champion.”
“They
say that one’s modeled on what the actual guy looked like. They got a bunch
like that.”
The
Hippie wondered aloud if he’d see one of himself. This thought was a big
adjustment from having sat in front of “All in the Family” what was for him
only a matter of hours before.
“I
don’t think so,” Diego said. “I think I’d recognize you. At least you get represented.
Nobody from my world gets that here at all. And now here you are, no ID and no
idea what a credit is. You have to be a citizen to get credits, but you don’t
even have any paperwork at all. Undocumented, and nowhere to go. Man, you’re
lucky if I even hide you out. What kind of skills you got?” This last he said
barely retaining a snort of contempt. To his surprise the Hippie said that he
was pretty good with carpentry.
They
worked out a deal, stopping on the way back up to the house to chuck rocks at
the swordfish. Diego had the master remote control with him now, having left
the pistol at home, and they listened to Neil Young’s Zuma again through the motel recreation room jukebox without ever
setting foot inside.
When
they got to Diego’s house, his parents, in their seventies, still weren’t back
from work. Diego gave the Hippie the tour of the house from the outside,
explaining where he was not to go, and basically gave him the lay of the land
while he took the Hippie to the van.
It
was a little bit overgrown. Weeds grew up around the antique tires, which were
flat. It was a brown van in its time, and yellow. A rusty door squeaked open
and a musty smell came out. The carpet inside didn’t look too bad. Shag.
“I
can put some of my credits on another card for you. You can get what you need
down at the café. Most days the park has guests, so it won’t look like this all
the time, that’s for sure. But I can pretty much always scrape up something for
you to do. Like right now if you want to start on those bullet holes in the
wood over at your old house.” Diego showed the Hippie where they kept the tools....
https://soundcloud.com/stewart-kirby/cro-mag-i-wanna-be-your-dog
Look for my weekly reviews in
(Used to be that one could) Tune in on the first Thursday every month at 5:00 on KMUD 91.1 FM Garberville for the half-hour serialized show LOST COASTER!
http://www.amazon.com/Stewart-Kirby/e/B00572M8JC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
THANKS
