Scenes 12 & 13

Under the paper bag containing Blinky’s several changes of clothes, toothbrush, and mineral supplements, lie several idiosyncratic paperback books, including a truly kooky one about imminent alien conquest, and the pile of photocopied materials from Prehistoric Indian Mounds of the Eastern United States. Blinky extracts this pile of material, pulls it into the front seat and begins to flip through it, theatrically.

The amount of time that Blinky has spent with the text of this volume is not great; mostly, he xeroxed the diagrams and maps of certain ancient earthworks. Thus, at best, he is wildly fuzzy on the anthropological facts as presented by the authors, though he is very keen on the earthworks themselves.

Long before the arrival of the Europeans, in the mid-second millenium A.D., and way before the development of the historical Indian tribes the Europeans encountered, prehistoric Indians were active in the Eastern woodlands of North America. They traded across large networks, lived along stream beds, ate clams, were big on the production of stone pipes, and, most notably, constructed enormous geometric earthworks. Almost all of the most remarkable of these were built with buckets of dirt during, say, roughly six hundred years beginning about 100 B.C., in the southern half of Ohio.

Most of these things are very formal-looking enclosures, involving squares, circles, and octagonal shapes, some as big as 1000 yards across. In certain cases, as in the Great Serpent Mound, the earthworks were built to form images, but most are of the geometric variety. Some scholars have suggested that the enclosures function as portals, from this world to the next. Blinky is on board with this idea.

When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they asked the Indians where the earthworks had come from. The Indians were mostly clueless about the mounds, but they did attribute them, however vaguely, to their ancestors. The Europeans were skeptical.

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13

Wayne and Little Turtle are standing in the street. The general is holding his hat.

“What do you make of all that,” he asks. “A repeat of history.” He looks at LT, then back down the road. “Is it possible?”

“I believe,” replies Little Turtle, “that it happens all the time.”

The two costumed figures walk back onto the lot with the granite marker.

“I’m sorry, General,” offers the Indian. “But we’re not done for the day.”