Visit Mohicanland

Inside Flap

2009-09-01T13:55:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Visit Mohicanland, an illustrated online novel, presented in consecutive posts below. The story traces a story of two friends, Blinky and Myron, who contend with rapacious capitalists, time-traveling historical figures and gooey aliens. Plus exploding gas stations and challenging golf courses. Rollicking, pithy, darkly funny, the narrative has the quality of a fable, told in the manner of a joke. Ultimately about gain and loss, in many respects.

This blog will not be updated, though comments are welcome. For timely reports from my studio, see my blog and studio site. If you like the story, please consider linking to it. Thanks–DBD.

Scenes 1 & 2

2009-08-29T22:44:00.001-05:00

There are two guys, named Blinky and Myron. Myron is the older, more serious, less happy one. Myron has a lot of gravity happening. He’s solid and thick. Blinky flits like a bird. He collects enthusiasms, one after another. Exotic diets. UFO coverups. Crackpot Egyptology. Everything that Blinky has learned about the world, beyond what he’s gained from his own senses, he’s gotten from cable TV, silly pamphlets, and talk radio. Said sources routinely make ridiculous claims that Blinky repeats uncritically. For example, that finely ground dandelion leaves, if you take them orally, will cure any disease in the world.

Myron broods; Blinky exults. Myron is turgid and jowly. Blinky is nimble and gaunt. Myron cites authorities, and Blinky is all caprice.

For the purposes of the story, they’re friends.
____________________

2

Myron owns a house. It’s a small brick number with a steep scoopy roof and white metal awnings. The lot is tiny, the yard nicely kept. Myron puts out potted geraniums. He parks his car, a rust-colored 1986 Buick Century, out front.

So one day. Birds are chirping. Traffic is sliding by the house. Inside, Myron wakes from a difficult sleep. Groaning, he draws his first conclusion of the day.

“I’m ill,” he thinks. “I’m sick!”

Myron struggles to sit up and puts on his glasses. He exhales dramatically. He indexes the discomfort, rifling through a stack of potential causes. “I suffer,” Myron concludes, not for the first time, “from a blockage of some kind.” He declares out loud, “I’m stopped up like a pipe!” He can scarcely open his eyes.

Stooped and wincing, Myron dresses and hurries over to see Blinky.

Blinky lives in a complex of outbuildings on the grounds of a big old mansion. He performs various duties for the rich occupants, but mostly he’s like an engaging pet. He comes and goes as he pleases. (Except when it rains or snows a lot; then he mows and shovels like crazy.)

Myron trudges up to the mower shed where Blinky keeps the lawn machines. He bangs on the corrugated metal and calls out. “Blink!” He announces his illness. Nothing. Then: the sound of Blinky moving the mowers. Blinky’s slender head pops into view, followed by the rest of him. He’s got a finger stuck in an estate-sale copy of Flying Saucers Have Landed, circa 1953, holding his place.

“You’re not sick,” offers Blinky, “you’re just anxious.” He gestures with a hand green from lawn care. “If you suffer from anything, Myron—and I’ve told you this—it’s a lack of experience.”

“Haw,” answers Myron, straightening. “I have an excellent position–”

“Not work experience,” interrupts Blinky. “Experience experience.”

“Don’t give me–”

“Myron, what do you do? You like plink on a keyboard. You look at numbers. Whoop-O.”

Myron reddens. “I manage databases.”

“Whatever,” says Blinky. He ducks back in the shed and pulls out a metal bucket, which he overturns to make a seat. Still holding his book, he sits on the bucket. “What I mean,” says Blinky, flipping pages, “is are you ever out there.” He looks up at Myron.

“Do you experience physical danger?”

Myron pushes back on his glasses.

“Do you have paranormal experiences.”

A giant eyeroll.

“Do you like, violate company policy? Are you getting laid?”

Myron snorts.

“See?” pronounces Blinky, as if addressing a jury.

“See what?” demands Myron.

“I’m telling you, Myron!” Blinky sets the book down and gets up off the bucket. “You need to get out of that office and smell the tuna. Have an experience, or like five.”

Myron stuffs his hands in his pockets.

“You need,” summarizes Blinky, “a vacation.”

“Hmph,” replies Myron.

“And not some cruise. Instead, like camping. Or travel to a bizarre international location. Turkey. Java.”

Myron has turned away. His arms are folded, and he’s peering down at the gravel.

“Look,” says Blinky, stepping forward. “I could stand to get out of town myself. Let’s go somewhere! Let’s walk crosslots for 200 miles, and get really thirsty, and strip to the waist, like Mohicans, or Mohawks, or whoever, and hide out in a National Forest.”

“Mohawks,” says Myron flatly, insultingly.

“I’ll tell you what,” adds Blinky, retreating. “the Indians know the score.”

“Whatever you say, Blink.” answers Myron. He gestures at the book. “Whatever the aliens tell you.”

“I’m just saying. Travel would do you good.”

The subject has been exhausted. And Blinky, like some decent hunk of bread in a bad bowl of soup, has absorbed Myron’s distress.

“I’ll tell you what would do me good. A raise,” corrects Myron, with real-world self-importance. “A promotion would do me good. I could use a little recognition of the role I play–”

“Myron,” interjects Blinky, nearly whining.

“I keep that place in order.”

“And what do you get? Chronic digestive whatever.”

Blinky bends down and picks up Flying Saucers Have Landed. He points the book at Myron ruefully. “You know, you laugh at me, but I am not the one living in like Ulcer City.”

“I don’t have an ulcer--”

“I have been thinking about this. I ask you: why is it that visitors from other worlds are going to totally mop up when they get here?” Blinky tucks the book up under his arm, holds out his hand and enumerates two points. “Not enough outdoor activity is one reason. And focus on all the wrong things is the other.”

Scene 3

2009-08-29T22:43:00.001-05:00

Myron works at the O P & Q Company, a wholesaler of machine parts. One day, along with a big shipment of aluminum rotators, comes word of changing circumstances. The floor guys are rumbling. The company’s up for sale. “The old man, he’s got a fish on the line,” says one.

A mysterious black truck has parked behind the building. Sharp-looking men in dark suits have been spotted. Lawyers.

“If he sells out to one of these big outfits, we’re on the street,” says another.

Outwardly, Myron isn’t having any of it. “Mr. Q. would never sell this company.”

O P & Q was founded by Osborne, Packer, and Quinn, three paratroopers who came back after the big war and went into business together. They got a warehouse and and a loading dock and some trucks.

Understand about Mssrs. O P & Q: they are virtual Homeric Men. In Europe, they hurl themselves of out airplanes and float down over Belgium without getting their dings shot off. They overrun Germany. Now they carry super-heavy equipment up six flights of stairs. They tolerate big jolts of electricity casually. They make handsome money. Golf handicaps in single digits. This at the height of their powers.

But hey, nothing lasts forever. Osborne, the sales guy, is the first to go. He gets bored, cashes out, and moves with the wife to Nevada. Then goes Packer. He’s at a fishfry in 1979, eating beer-battered perch at the VFW, when Alma his wife goes to the bathroom. Suddenly Packer goes blue and flops over. WHAM. Fries everywhere. Chokes on a masticated fishball. Dies.

Myron comes on after this point.

Q is a man with white hair and big forearms. Q has an actual surname, “Quinn,” but everyone calls him Q.

Q hires Myron to keep track of where things are. At first, the system involves a great many index cards, and then it changes, to an inventory software package with an awkward name. Myron learns the program. He does well, in a limited way. He works in the outer office at a desk with a computer, behind milkily windowed walls that separate the clerical area from the shop floor.

Today, on the day of scary rumors, Myron’s getting worried. He can see several silhouetted figures in Q’s office. The white-haired Q is seated. Myron broods over his data. Q’s phone line blinks from 8:30 on.

Finally, near lunch time, the door opens and Q comes out of the office wearing a casual shirt. “Good morning, Myron,” says Q. He’s accompanied by two men in dark suits. They’re carrying fat brown accordian file things. Q introduces them, perfunctorily, to Myron.

“We’re from legal,” they say. Myron nods.

“Would you get on the intercom,” Q asks Myron, “and call a meeting?”

Everybody. Immediately.

Myron obliges, feeling sick. The company staff assembles out on the shop floor. Q makes a brief announcement that O P & Q has, in fact, been sold. But--he stresses--But. “Everybody’s job is going be safe.” The guys from legal smile thinly.

Q shakes a few hands, wipes an eye, and strides across the greasy endblock wood floor to the freight elevator. He yanks on the nylon strap and opens the gray slab door, virile as ever, then, at Friday noon, disappears into the elevator. He’s joined by Viv, the office manager, who’s got broad hips and a nice leer. Word is the old man turns up in Naples.

Florida, not Italy.

Nobody blames him but a small-minded driver named Newbauer. And Myron.

Scene 4

2009-08-29T22:42:00.002-05:00

The news spreads: the venerable O P & Q Company has been purchased by an outfit called the Sucke Brothers.That’s S-u-c-k-e. Probably they’re British, which is the only decent explanation for the silent “e.” The Sucke Brothers are diabolical capitalists. Major turnip-squeezers.

“The Sucke Brothers,” says Blinky. “I think I’ve heard of them. They move into places and buy everything up.”

Myron, who struggles with transitions, gurgles and dissembles all weekend. But come Monday, by the time he can actually string sentences together, he’s gotten on board. “Vertical integration of products and services. These Sucke men must think big!” Myron ponders the opportunity.

Blinky isn’t optimistic.

The Suckes waste no time taking control. They cut half the staff, and modify the company insurance plan to require all visits to the doctor to occur between the hours of 3 and 5 am, on Wednesdays. They also begin to charge for parking.

Contemptibly, Myron curries favor. He’s promoted. But even Myron has trouble with the Suckes. “They’re peculiar,” he admits to Blinky, “and a little scary.”

Understand, no one has ever seen a Sucke Brother, or even spoken with one. As a matter of company policy, the Suckes communicate only by fax. In lieu of an actual physical presence, they send along little busts of themselves, the kind that piano teachers give out to students. (These busts, which are made by machines and composed of solidified corn starch, are very inexpensive to produce.) They come with instructions. The miniature Suckes are to be placed around the office furniture. So they can keep an eye on things. These little figures have a weird power, and no one likes them. They survey the office ominously, while the fax machine burps and beeps. Additionally, just in case the spell wears off, and employees begin to disregard strict rules prohibiting private use of the photocopier, an unmarked helicopter hovers outside the O P & Q offices at irregular intervals.

After a period of months, during which working conditions at the O P & Q Company steadily worsen, Myron is one of a tiny handful of remaining employees. Finally the day comes when Myron too is dismissed, and replaced by a mechanical dog.

Scene 5

2009-08-29T22:42:00.001-05:00

Myron is pacing.

“Did they give you any kind of severance,” asks Blinky.

“Fifty bucks,” admits Myron, “and the leftover coffee packets.”

Blinky is seated on Myron’s living room carpet. He’s been to the photocopy place. Papers cover the floor. A copy of Prehistoric Indian Mounds in the Eastern United States sits on the early American coffee table.

“Blinky, we have to oppose these people,” says Myron, pivoting.

“What people.”

“The Sucke Brothers!”

Myron had been able to tolerate the slow squeeze at O P & Q by distracting himself. He concocted an elaborate fantasy, according to which he would come to play an exalted future role among the Suckes: Vice President for Facts.

Then, poof.

Now he’s wearing a groove in the carpet. His plans are wrecked. His aspirational framework is gone. His digestive misadventures, which go back and forth between blockages on the one hand, and intestinal mudslides on the other, have resumed. So Myron’s a little bent over.

But he’s finding his way to a new thing.

“You mean like a boycott,” says Blinky, distractedly.

“Maybe sabotage,” counters Myron, seating himself in a worn cloth chair. “Do you realize that the Sucke Brothers are destroying the fabric of life in our city.” Blinky looks up. “They are fraying the bonds of kinship. I am telling you Blink, our children deserve better!”

“Myron,” says Blinky. “You don’t have any children. You don’t even have a girlfriend.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“You know, they didn’t bother you before--”

Myron rises. “It’s true, I am only now waking up to this.” He starts pacing anew. “I was mistaken about their intentions. But I’m seeing clearly now. The Suckes have bought the whole city,” he goes on. “The roads, the schools, the monuments, the radio stations. The grocery stores. The utilities. Yesterday they bought the newspaper.”

All of this true. The Sucke Brothers are hoovering up the whole metropolitan area.

“It’s not right!” declares Myron. “We will shine the light of truth on these people. Anonymously, of course.” Myron is moving more quickly. “I gotta use the bathroom.” Abruptly he ducks into a side room.

Blinky is paging his way through 19th century drawings of Indian Mounds. “Do you have an atlas?” he asks, loudly.

“They will be so sorry.” Myron’s voice is coming through the bathroom door. “They will beg to get me back on board. Because I had a clear grip on that place. I knew where everything was. What was what.”

“Hey, Myron.”

“I bring things to the table,” Myron mutters. “I have skills.”

“Myron!”

The toilet flushes. Water runs in the sink. The door pops open. “What?” says Myron.

Blinky says “You need a vacation, man. You’re talking to yourself. We gotta get you out of town.”

“Why.”

“Myron! Don’t you get it? The Suckes will be looking for you.”

Myron swallows.

“You’ve got the inside dope on their game.”

Myron blanches. He sits down in the worn chair.

“Some R & R might be okay,” he admits.

“Good,” says Blinky, “That’s settled.” He gathers up his book and pile of photocopied drawings. “I’ll meet you first thing.”

“Tomorrow?” says Myron, alarmed. “We’d have to check the weather.”

“Or,” says Blinky, “I suppose you could just sit here--”

“I’d have to stop the mail--”

“--And wait for some Sucke legbreaker to appear,” finishes Blinky. He’s standing in the doorway with his coat on. “It’s up to you. I’m not sticking around, under any circumstances.” Blinky lets this sink in. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Myron’s eyes have gotten big.

“If you’re not ready,” warns Blinky, pulling the door after him, “I’m taking the bus.”

Scenes 6 & 7

2009-08-29T22:41:00.001-05:00

Blinky shows up at Myron’s place around 8 with clothes in a grocery bag. Myron brings his stuff to the door in a hard plastic suitcase. They throw the luggage in the back of Myron’s 1986 Buick Century and close the trunk.

Myron has hardly slept. He’s anxious about the trip. He’s had more diarrhea.

Blinky is wearing a Turkish hat. He offers to drive.

“About where we’re going,” says Myron. “I want to go to Florida. I brought my suit.” Blinky notes this with a nod. “Just so you know,” continues Myron, “we’re not getting off the highway to look at dumb attractions. We need to make good time.”

“Why?” asks Blinky, simply.

“This is about Point A to Point B.” Myron whips out a map with a route marked in orange. It runs straight southeast, across to Chattanooga, Tennessee, then south to Atlanta, and on down to Florida.

“I’m open,” adds Myron, “about which side, once we get there. Gulf, or Atlantic. But I’m leaning Gulf.”

Blinky has looked at the map. “Mm-hmm,” he says.

“It’s my car,” says Myron. The meaning of this is unclear.

They get in the Buick and drive away, headed east. As the car passes over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Myron is already drowsy.

They pass a four-door sedan with two people in it, a man and a woman. It’s on Myron’s side of the car. His eyelids are beginning to droop, but he notices them squabbling over the car radio. They can’t agree on a station. The odd thing to Myron, who’s now tumbling toward sleep, is that they’re wearing masks. They look like squids or something. Strange.

Now Myron is dreaming of the ocean.

As the onetime senior clerk at O P & Q slumbers, Blinky aims the rust-colored Buick east, toward Indianapolis.

_______________

7

Blinky is driving. Myron has napped intermittently. They’ve stopped for gas and food, and for Myron’s bowels, once. Things are firming up there.

The miles are rolling by.

They’re listening to a talk radio program hosted by a person with the last name of Colfax. He’s mixing some material about healthy lifestyles with some other stuff about not trusting the government to do anything. “Let’s talk a minute,” proposes Colfax, “about the radon crisis.”

“Can we listen to some music?” says Myron. Blinky reaches over and turns the dial in seach of tunes. The vast majority of what’s available is bad country-pop. He settles on oldies, Myron’s normal preference. His passenger grunts what sounds like approval.

Blinky glances over at Myron. He looks pale and uncomfortable. Blinky says, “Myron? Are you okay?” Myron is clenching his jaw.

“You want me to pull over?”

Myron nods. “Maybe a rest area.”

“Got it,” answers Blinky. Lately he’s been reading 400 billboards about the approach of an exit with a giant RV dealership. Now he’s on top of it. Blinky makes a decision to pull off the interstate. He decelerates and slides toward the exit, which curls gently off to the right. Blinky follows it, then slows and pauses to read at the T-shaped crossroads. There is a brown sign for some historical site, with an arrow to the left.

“Go right,” instructs Myron weakly. To the right lies the biblical supply of Winnebagos. But Blinky takes a sip of his sports activity drink and turns left.

“Come on!” Myron complains.

The car speeds past a few prim houses, a rusted trailer, an old yellow ceramic brick store. They drive by the turn to Arcadia. Next they pass a sign that says: GREENVILLE 4. Myron groans. “Go back to the exit. This is too far.”

“We’re almost there,” says Blinky, racing. Myron is looking up at the weave of the ceiling fabric, jiggling his knees, making low sounds. They come upon smattering of commercial properties and billboards. “Welcome to Greenville, Ohio” say the Rotarians and the Evening Optimists, in a big blue script.

Blinky follows a sign. He turns left onto the main drag, and left again, pulling up at a small open field, the size of several lots. A few houses flank the field, plus a laundromat. There’s a billboard with a Ford pickup truck, and a Catholic school nearby.

“They’ll have a bathroom in there,” says Blinky, pointing at the laundromat. Myron swears and exits the vehicle.

Blinky looks back at the field. There’s a huge chunk of pink granite mounted on a pedastal near a tree.

The signs have led him here.

Scene 8

2009-08-29T22:40:00.001-05:00

Myron bangs his way into the laundromat. It’s a shotgun-style space with windows along the front. Almond-colored washers and dryers face one another along the walls. Tables for folding laundry sit between the appliances, upon a plane of gummy, crap-dotted floor tiles. Except for the missing ones, the tiles conform to a checkerboard pattern of previously-ivory and blue green.

The air is filled with tobacco molecules and memories of powdered detergent.

A biggish older woman sits at a desk with a cashbox near the window, looking dumb and proud. She’s at the helm.

The woman turns to look at Myron, inhales through her nose, then looks over at a 35 year old retarded guy that Myron figures to be her son.

A grizzled man in a black tee shirt is only other person in the place.

The grizzled man is trying to get from one spot to another with a basket of wet clothes. But the retarded son is weaving back and forth in front of him, oblivious, super-determined to check the lint in the dryers.

“Ronny,” says the woman.

Ronny’s flummoxed by the fact that several of the dryers are still running. He’s paying very close attention to the orange indicator lights. The guy in the tee shirt still can’t get past him.

“You got a bathroom?” Myron asks the older woman, urgently. A large envelope sits in the middle of her desk. The woman picks up her big arm and points to the back, toward a hallway near the vending machines.

“In the back.”

She glances back at her son. “Ronny,” she says sharply. “Get out of the way!” Ronny, spooked, steps aside in a panic. He hurries down to the other end of the row of dryers, next to an aged pinball machine.

Then Ronny remembers something.

“Is nat na man?” he asks, pointing at Myron.

She sniffs another breath. “No.”

As Myron speed-walks between the washers and the dryers, the woman looks back out the window, then down at her watch.

Ronny looks over at his mom.

“Is na man hewe yet?” asks Ronny. “Is he hewe?”

“He’ll be here in a little while, Ronny.”

Myron flies into the bathroom, rips his pants down, and plants his rear on the toilet.

“Nnnnngh,” he says. Myron blasts the rectal horn a few times belowdecks. But sound and sweat are all he’s able to produce.

Cramps.

New blockages.

Already it’s been a long day.

Myron remains on the toilet for five minutes or so, attempting to gather himself. Then somebody tries the knob. “Just a minute,” says Myron, who finishes, hauls himself off the seat, and buttons his pants. He runs water over his hands, lathers and rinses them, then wipes them off on brown paper towels.

Myron opens the door to encounter the grizzled man holding a garment bag. “Let’s go,” he says impatiently. “Gotta drain the vein.”

Myron mutters, “All yours,” and steps past him into the hallway. It strikes him as odd that the guy has a garment bag.

Ronny the Retard has been loading soap boxes into a vending machine. Or meaning to, anyway. The single-load boxes of All are stacked, waiting to be placed in rows inside the coin-operated dispenser. But Ronny has turned away from the machine. His neck is craned toward the back of the building. Ronny looks worried.

“Na man is hewe!” Ronny declares. “Na man is hewe!”

Myron follows Ronny’s distracted stare, into the alley behind the laundromat. He sees the front end of a 24-foot truck, painted black with tasteful gold lettering on the door. Myron’s jaw drops. “Not possible!” he croaks.

Myron strides toward the front of the laundromat, just shy of a run.

The big woman is looking up from papers she’s pulled from the big enveloped. First she’s trying to figure out what is the problem with Ronny. And then Myron’s move for the door unnerves her. Anxiety waves are breaking over the place.

Ronny is walking back and forth between the vending machine and the rear door, waving and rocking.

The woman gestures with the document, suspiciously.

“Are you a building inspector?”

“No, ma’am,” replies Myron, slowing to keep from looking panicked. He notices that the heading on the document reads, PURCHASE AGREEMENT. SBE, LTD.

“Because I don’t want you people messing with my business.”

“Listen,” says Myron. The woman looks at him .

The toilet flushes.

“What,” says the woman.

They hear the sound of water running in the sink.

The door to the bathroom opens. Ronny is caught halfway back to the soap dispenser from the alley entrance, dead in front of the grimy bathroom door. Yellow light breaks over his uncomprehending face.

“You got something to say?”

Just then the grizzled man steps out of the bathroom. Except he’s completely sans-grizzle at this point. The jeans and black tee shirt are gone. He wears a light colored dress shirt with a dark suit. He’s wiping his hands on a brown paper towel like he expects to erode the skin off the muscle. And his posture has changed.

Myron thinks: a spy!

Myron says to the woman, confidentially, “Tread carefully.”

Ronny is completely freaked out, in part because the guy has come out of the wrong door. He keeps pointing toward the truck in the alley.

“Now what in hell does that mean?” barks the woman at Myron.

“Na man! Na man!”

“Good afternoon,” announces the formerly-grizzled man. He’s clean-shaven. He looms. The guy is a corporate shark from the prehistoric era of corporate sharks. Teeth with fins and a tail maybe 50 feet long.

“Mama! Is he na man?”

A totally savage acquisitor. A nut-buster.

“Ronny,” says the woman, flustered. She looks at Myron. “I don’t know.” Turning to the man, she asks, “Are you?”

The man stops. He’s balling his paper towel. “If you mean to ask: Am I the representative of those with whom you seek to do a transaction?”

He tosses the ball smartly into the trash. “The answer is, yes. I am.”

Ronny blinks and slobbers a little.

The man straightens his cuffs. “I’m from legal.”

“But--” says Mama.

“My superiors insist upon sound research. They like to know the people and the properties they’re dealing with.”

Ronny the Retard looks frightened.

“So as to forge lasting business relationships.”

Myron exhales deeply and turns. “I gotta go,” he says.

“Splendid,” replies the lawyer. “Have a good day.”

The door bangs behind Myron.

“Now,” says the man. “Shall we turn to the documents?”

Scene 9

2009-08-29T22:39:00.001-05:00

Blinky is looking at the pink granite marker. Which is big enough to work as a gravestone for a bus. There’s a diagrammy picture engraved in it, showing outlined people with numbers, like a key to a photograph. The silhouetted people are characters in a commemorative painting, located elsewhere. The numbers correspond to a list of people chiseled into the stone.

Blinky learns he’s standing on the X. At the place, the very spot, of the signing of the Treaty of Greeneville, in 1795. “Wow,” says Blinky. Knowing zero about the event, he reads on. The treaty, he learns, was an 18th century deal struck between the United States and an Indian Confederacy. The confederacy included the Miami, the Shawnees, and the Delaware, and a number of other tribes. The agreement followed bitterness, bloodshed, nasty frontier business. Ongoing warfare. Finally, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in 1794, the Army of the United States defeated the Confederacy.

The treaty opened up the Old Northwest, or the territory around the Great Lakes. “Opened up,” that is, to white settlers, and all their wagons and horses and crap. They chopped down trees at a fantastic rate, flattened fields, and otherwise got the place ready to farm.

The Indians got $20,000, some goods, plus land a little further west. AKA present-day Indiana. The marker does not provide Blinky with much more information, other than noting that the two major participants were one Mad Anthony Wayne, the American commander, and Little Turtle, the Miami Chief. Plus that Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark, was there. Other colorful figures also attended, including the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket.

Myron emerges from the laundromat and trots--an effort at nonchalance, versus a dead run--over toward Blinky across the street. But something attracts his attention. Two figures, dressed in period costume, have begun to stroll around the miniature field. They’re maybe 20 yards beyond the spot where Blinky stands, near the giant marker. “Who,” Myron wonders passingly, “are those guys?”

Blinky is already transfixed. “Wow.”

“Blink,” says Myron, nudging him.

“That is so cool.”

The reenactors are starting the show. One of them, who’s graying and portly, is gesturing excitedly. “Why NOT Custer and Crazy Horse?” demands Wayne. “Why not Penn and whats-his-name?” Little Turtle’s arms are extravagantly outstretched. A gesture of presentation.

“Blink. You won’t believe.” Myron points across the street toward the laundromat.

“The Sucke Brothers are moving in. Here.”

“It was a minor treaty,” complains General Wayne.

“They’ve already got a contract on the laundromat,” announces Myron.

“Minor, for all the press you get. Yes,” he concedes, “it was broken.” Little Turtle continues to offer his gift, as the reenactment seems to require.

“Blinky!” whispers Myron.

Blinky holds a finger up to his mouth. “Shh.”

Wayne removes his hat and turns away. “I can’t stand it! We’re stuck out here, day after day, me with the full knowledge that your biographies are full of fawning crap. ‘The apex of native leadership,’ Makes me sick. For my part, I’m bombastic and harsh--”

“And intolerant. And craven for glory,” adds Little Turtle, mischeviously. He turns to look at Myron, and winks.

Myron is disgusted and uncomfortable. “Get out of here! Freaks in costumes.” He grabs Blinky, looking back at the laundromat. “Come on!”

Blinky resists. “Cut it out!”

“You’re the wise man, the statesman,” blusters Wayne. “Goddamn it, it galls me.”

“Accept the gift,” encourages Little Turtle, arms outstretched. “Take the wampum, let’s be done for the day.”

“Keep the goddamned wampum!”

“We must accept the burden, Wayne.”

Blinky’s engrossed. Myron’s exasperated.

“Actors!” huffs Myron, raising his voice.

Wayne sighs. “Mishiekonga.”

Myron can stand no more. “Look, enough! What do you guys actually know about American history.” He steps into the performance.

Blinky, mortified, stage-whispers, “Myron!”

“Not very much, I suppose. You would have attended drama college?” Wayne and Little Turtle exchange glances. “I will attempt to make a long story short. A long time ago,” narrates Myron, “there were people living here--Indians, natives.” He nods to Yellow Turtle. “You guys.”

“Then, large numbers of other people--English, mostly--”

Wayne interrupts. “I am not a Brit--”

“came along,” Myron continues.

“Nor am I an actor--”

“and tricked or bullied these guys out of everything they had.”

Little Turtle nudges Wayne.

“Everybody knows that much.”

Blinky is beside himself. “These guys are professionals, Myron!”

But Myron continues. “What you don’t know is that the same story is unfolding yet again. Today. Here.” Myron gestures toward the storefront. “There’s a woman in that laundromat, a woman with a grown up mentally handicapped son named Ronny. And that poor old woman is about to sell her business to a huge company. A company,” adds Myron, “with which I am familiar.” He yanks on his coat.

“An organization for which I worked.” He sighs.

“Ronny the Retard, mark my words, will end up on the street.”

He returns his gaze to Little Turtle and Wayne.

“And I can tell you, because I was privy to certain things, that the laundromat is only the beginning. Before you know it, this organization will own everything you can see. Everything.

“And the people who live here?” Myron points. “In that house, and that house, and that one, and that one? They will be out of luck. Their livelihoods will be gone. Their property will be gone. Their whole way of life. Gone!”

Myron exhales self-importantly.

“Here, and the next town, and the next town after that. On a massive scale. I have knowledge of this. It torments me.”

Blinky is ready to puke.

“And gentlemen, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Which is why I’m heading to the beach for awhile to plot my next move.” He nods to Blinky. “But one thing I definitely am NOT going to do is sit around indulging stupid hobbies like playing historical dress-up while serious, serious things are happening.”

He steps toward Blinky. “We gotta go, Blink. Gimme the keys.”

“No.”

“Gimme the goddam keys!”

“No!”

Myron glowers at him.

Disgusted, Blinky hands the keys to his friend.

Myron walks briskly to the Century.

“Come on!” he barks.

Blinky turns back to Wayne. “Look,” he offers, “I am really sorry.” Gesturing toward the vehicle, and Myron, Blinky says, “That was totally rude. Please,” he implores Little Turtle, “keep going.”

Myron opens the driver’s side door and gets in.

“You are extremely convincing. Please.”

The Buick roars to life.

General Wayne says, “I want to speak to that man.”

Myron blows the car horn.

“Look,” pleads Blinky, “he didn’t mean it, he’s had a bad week. Sorry to mess up your performance.”

“You!” Wayne shouts at Myron, inside the car.

“Really, you guys are excellent,” backpedals Blinky.

The general begins to advance.

Myron throws the car into reverse and backs it up. He glares at the road ahead.

“Don’t mind us, we’re going.” Blinky slips around the far side of the vehicle, rips the passenger door open, and gets in. “Myron!” he barks. “What is wrong with you!”

Myron peels out and drives off.

Wayne is shaking his hat in the rear view mirror.

Scenes 10 & 11

2009-08-29T22:37:00.000-05:00

Back inside the laundromat, the man from legal is opening a large box. Ronny is trying to help him. “I got it,” says the man. “Please.”

Ronny moves away.

The formerly grizzled man pulls out some styrofoam packing and sets it aside. He reaches back into the box. “Here we go.” He strains a little. Carefully he extracts a large fax machine. Mama pulls the box away as the man sets the machine on one of the laundry tables.

“We are almost in business now,” says the lawyer.

“Look!” cries Ronny. He’s got his hands in a small case, sort of like the thing you carry a flute in. He’s fingering something.

“Little mans!”

Ronny’s found an ensemble of small corn starch busts, identical to the those that dotted the office furniture at O P & Q. Ronny is unwrapping them.

“Little mans!”

“Hey!” snaps the formerly grizzled man. “Don’t touch those.”

“Ronny!” rebukes Mama.

“You better watch him,” says the man.

After a moment, he speaks into his watch. “Claude,” he says.

“Bring the truck around to the front.”

_______________

11

“Blinky,” huffs Myron, “where’s the map.”

“I don’t know.”

They are racing back toward the interstate.

“Well, you had it.”

“I threw it away.”

“You threw it away?!”

Myron is trembling with anger.

“Look,” says Blinky, “I’m not a follow the magic marker type of person.”

“Where are we, Blink.”

Blinky looks over at him.

“We’re in Ohio.”

“Ohio! Ohio is not on the itinerary!”

“Yeah, well, that’s where we are.”

“We should be in Tennessee, on the way to Florida!”

Blinky looks out the window. “I thought you’d figure it out before now. We’ve only been driving for six hours.”

“I have been a little preoccupied by my blockage problems!”

Myron cannot believe the situation.

“How could you screw this up?”

“I didn’t screw it up,” retorts Blinky.

“I don’t want to go to Florida. I want to go to Indian country.”

“They have Indians in Florida, Blinky! Seminoles.”

“There are things I want to see, okay? LIke the Serpent Mound,” says Blinky. “I’ve never seen the Serpent Mound.”

“The Serpent Mound.”

‘Yes.”

“Which you’re going to tell me,” says Myron, “is a center of paranormal activity, or a place where water flows up, or some dumb-ass thing you saw on “Unexplained Mysteries.”

Blinky brightens. “You saw that one?”

Myron seethes.

Blinky reaches into the backseat.

Scenes 12 & 13

2009-08-29T22:35:00.000-05:00

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.

_______________

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.”

Scene 14

2009-08-29T22:34:00.001-05:00

The tension in the car is still pretty bad. Myron has stopped to buy a new map and some highlighters, none which Blinky is permitted to touch, back at the Nine Thousand RVs exit. Myron has a new itinerary planned, which involves traveling east on Interstate 70 as far as Interstate 75, near Dayton, which will take them south.

Blinky is back driving. Myron is staring at the map, as if by doing so he could control events on the territory described by it.

“You know,” says Blinky suddenly, “the Indians believed in spirit animals. Your spiritual self had an animal counterpart.” Myron looks out the window at a tomato farm. “So we have like a corresponding thing going with a given creature,” says Blinky. “I think that’s cool. Question.” Blinky looks over at Myron. “What do you think yours is?”

“My what.”

“Your spirit animal.”

“Aw Blink, I don’t know. Why didn’t you ask the goof in the Indian costume when you had the chance?”

“I think in your case, there’s an obvious answer: the beaver.”

“A beaver. I’m a beaver.”

“Yes,” answers Blinky. “One, they are dogged creatures. Like you. They do not give up. Second, they concentrate really hard on one single thing, which is they chew on trees. I think you’re a total tree chewer. And then they take those trees, and what do they do? This is three: they make dams. Which are what? Blockages. Am I right? So it’s obvious. Beavers.”

Blinky permits this to sink in.

Myron rubs his head. “I see.”

Point of fact, Myron’s recently interrupted office life has been extremely beaver-like. He knows this, even if he couldn’t have come up with a metaphor for it in a hundred years. Which he can’t, or couldn’t. He’s bad at metaphor.

“Now,” adds Blinky, “I will interject this.” He’s being serious and playful at the same time. “I will bring to your attention that you were just an extremely rude butthole back there, at the historical reenactment.”

Myron is silent. “Hysterical,” says Blinky. “Obnoxious. You were.”

“But,” continues Myron’s friend. “I will concede that, from your perspective, you were obnoxious for a point.”

“Thank you.”

“Which, when you think about it, maybe isn’t so beaver-like. Which brings us back. To that fact that maybe, in your case, the obvious answer is totally not the correct one.”

Myron is lost.

“Forget the beaver. You, my friend, are truly a more dominant animal. But you are only beginning to suspect this. I’m thinking maybe an elk. A buck of some sort. Seriously, you are one big buck, Myron.”

Myron is flattered by this. Antlers. Leadership. His mind is playing nature-film clips of dueling bucks.

“You just gotta get those antlers going.”

“What do you mean?”

The landscape slides by. Wet brown fields, isolated Victorian houses, most of them derelict. Signage.

“You know,” says Blinky, surveying the scene, “during the time of Little Turtle, I’ll bet all this was forested. Because the Mohicans were a woodland tribe.”

Myron sighs.

Blinky begins, “Can you imagine--”

Myron cuts him off. “Miami,” he says. “Little Turtle was a Miami chief.”

“No, I think it was Mohican.”

“I just read it on the marker.”

“He was definitely Mohican.”

Myron starts to lose it. “Blinky, it’s Miami! I can read!”

He’s quiet for a moment, but then he can’t help it. “I’m not even interested in this stuff, and I know the guy’s tribe! This is your problem! You read like every other word, and then you yak about it like you know something. Half that junk you watch on TV, and practically everything you read, it’s just people making things up! They don’t know! You don’t know! Have your ever checked a source in your life? Do you even know what a footnote IS? Beavers! Spirit animals! It’s all stupid!”

Myron’s arms are folded.

“Stupid? I’m stupid? You’re the one who’s gonna go from a wholesale clerk to like the vanquisher of a giant, powerful corporation, and I’m stupid!?”

Myron is unable to reply. He looks to his right, and spends the next several minutes reading signs. PROTECT YOUR SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS. FAMILY BUFFET. REST AREA 1 MILE. Then, suddenly: “Pull off here. I gotta get out for a minute.”

“What is it with you and normal life?” demands Myron. “Why can’t you have a job and a house and not like your work? You do all this goofy exotic stuff.”

Blinky tries to respond. “Because,” he offers, “I have. . . a fervor. . . that I don’t know what to do with. I don’t like it, that all the milk comes in cartons. You can’t get honey, except in plastic containers. I want it from the bees, or like, right from the cow.” Blinky looks at his hands. “I don’t know. I want to fly, too.

“I want, like, a super-actual existence.”

Out of nowhere, the car begins to hiss. Smoke pours out from under the hood. The temperature gauge is buried in red. “Goddammit!” shouts Myron. Luckily, they’re on top of an exit. “Damn, damn, damn!” Myron guides the 1986 Buick Century onto the ramp, and coasts all the way into the Fuel King Myron is pounding on the steering column. “Why have a plan, if you don’t follow the plan! What is a plan for? An orderly result! Florida! It’s such a simple thing!” He’s winding himself up into a genuine tantrum. “I want my Goddamn plan back, Blink! I want it back!” He’s bellowing inside the car, which has come to a stop next to the gas pumps.

Scene 15

2009-08-29T22:33:00.003-05:00

The corporate advance of the Sucke Brothers, the mysterious fax men, is well underway. They start in a selected fifteen or so cities, and then, like blots of ink leaching on paper, they spread out from there. Buying things up. The whole thing is financed with small amounts of cash and stacks of fancy notes. It works like this. A lawyer shows up with a proposal. You get a certain amount up front, and piles of stock to go with it. The stock is backed by the giant corporate enterprise that is Sucke Brothers Enterprises, Ltd. Except there’s a catch. You’re not really getting SBE stock, your thing--which is your ice cream stand, your bank, your auto repair shop, whatever--your thing is placed into its own fund, a local fund, along with the enterprises that your neighbors sold. The diabolical Suckes then hook up a vaccuum tube to the local fund of Winnetka, or wherever, legally hoover it out, then leave it there like a dessicated sac. Aside from the modest bit of cash he receives at the beginning, the seller gets nothing. The Suckes, then, are sort of like business vampires. The liquidation of O P & Q, for example, produces some nice short term bloodflow to SBE, Ltd. But then old Mr. Q. wakes up one day in Naples and finds that the SBE Sub e) Bullet 9) Line 4) Supercapitalized Holding Company--the corporate vessel into which his life’s work has been placed--cannot issue him dividends. His shares can’t even be sold for the cost of the transaction.

Q gets an empty bag.

A handful of properties from every inkblot on the map do get handled differently. Because they keep paying forever. So SBE, Ltd., holds onto the utilities, the energy outlets, and the communication organs. The owners of the TV stations are in on the deal. Enough people do well to keep the whole thing from exploding into a giant scandal.

Scene 16

2009-08-29T22:33:00.001-05:00

Mad Anthony is trying to sound reasonable. “Come now, Mishiekonga. Must we persist in this? It’s inglorious.”

“Put your hat on and let’s sign,” answers Little Turtle.

“Why? I detest this treaty!” thunders Wayne, waving the document. “This treaty was abrogated, at great cost to you!” Mad Anthony lowers his voice. “You died in disgrace. They settled Indiana out from under you.”

The Chief is silent.

“They were supposed to leave you alone. The government was going to roust out settlers on your land, and you had the legal right to do it yourselves. Article Six; it was a fair provision.”

“Agreed. But it was not enforced.”

Wayne turns away. He gestures at the neighborhood. “The bastards kept coming! There were too many!”

The chief nods.

Across the street, the big black SBE truck pulls up in front of the laundromat. Claude and another guy get out and walk back to the rear of the truck.

“It grieves you,” acknowledges the Indian. “To have signed your name to worthless document.”

“Well, you did the same,” retorts Wayne.

Claude pulls an aluminum ladder out of the back of the truck and sets it up against the laundromat. He goes up the ladder and begins pounding nails along the front of the building. The other guy pulls out a second ladder, sets it up, and bangs in a few nails on his end. Then Claude gets down, goes back to the truck, and drags a roll of rubberized canvas out of the back of the truck. Working together, the two of them hang the roll of canvas over the nails.

“We both failed,” declares the General. “And so we’re stuck here.”

“Having our faces rubbed in it, day after day.”

Claude and his partner let the canvas go. It rolls down over the window, covering the old hand-painted lettering for the Olde Miami Laundromat. A new sign has been printed on the canvas. It reads: Suck ‘M Dry Laundry.

“Unfortunate,” replies the Indian.

Claude and his buddy go in the laundromat.

“Don’t give me that stoical crap. You can stay on through eternity if you want to, but I’ve got places to be. I’m ready to make a move, LT.” Wayne moves in on the Indian. “I have been pondering those two men who stopped here. They may need assistance.”

The door of the Suck ‘M Dry opens. Ronny is standing in the door, wailing frantically. Mama’s snapping like a turtle in the background.

“Maybe, Mishiekonga, we can reverse our fates.”

“How?” asks Little Turtle.

“We could strike a blow for the Red Guy.”

“I believe they say ‘little guy.’”

Claude wraps his arms around Ronny’s chest. Ronny’s flailing and howling and jerking his head and flinging drool.

“Whatever the expression is--”

“You’re thinking of ‘Red Man.’”

Claude carries Ronny down the steps of the stoop, sets him down on the sidewalk, turns around and goes back in.

“There is no color with guy,” explains LT. “Just size. He’s little.”

Ronny is honking and wailing. He tries to get back in the door, but can’t. He’s yelling for Mama. Then his eyes get big like he’s got an idea, and he chugs down off the stoop and runs around the back.

“For example, that person would be the little guy.”

The laundromat door opens again, and Mama gets shoved out onto the stoop. The door closes with a slam. Mama vibrates with rage. The whole scene is like an opera, except the music is replaced by swearing. Mama bangs and yells for Ronny and tears at herself. Now she runs around to the back.

“Listen to me!” demands Wayne. “I’ve had it! I’ve watched it all go by. Two centuries’ worth. The fort, the settlers, the farmers, the town going up. The rise of shopping malls. Buggies, cars, jet trails--it all keeps rolling by, the total triumph of the white man, which I had a hand in producing. And it’s all held against me.”

“But General,” says the Indian. “We have our duty. Let us sign the treaty again.”

“We’ve already signed the damn thing 73,000 times! It hasn’t done any good. But something else might.” He looks over at the laundromat. “That pathetic display we just observed. Does it not confirm what the obnoxious visitor predicted? There is distress in the land.“

“Yes,” agrees LT.

“We could make a gesture.”

The Indian frowns. “Not a gesture,” he replies. “Gestures are cheap.”

“Alright,” answers Wayne. “An action, then.”

“An action sounds better,” says Little Turtle.

“Fine, an action! We’re men of war. We specialize in action.”

Wayne strides across the lot. “We must find those two. They know the details. We must put a stop to this thievery.” He’s totally energized. He’s tugging on his uniform and looking at the billboard, the one with the pickup truck on it. “A little industry is required, that’s all. A little imagination!”

Scenes 17 & 18

2009-08-29T22:32:00.001-05:00

Myron is driving again. Blinky has dug back into the pile of stuff in the backseat and gotten a second book out. It’s a non-fictional volume, that describes evidence of cosmic colonization. The publisher--extremely obscure, and located at somebody’s dining room table in California--provides some terrifying liner notes about Alien adventures in the American Middle West. On the basis of this, Blinky buys the book.

Apparently, the visitors in question are able to assume humanoid form until they become angry or aroused, or simply impatient. Then there’s a cephalo-morph thing that occurs, which reveals their true, above-the-neck form. They have octopus heads. Or things that resemble octopi, at any rate, very moist, with tentacles and googly, gelatinous eyeballs.

The author, who claims to have interviewed some survivors of telepathic encounters with the Octos, reports that many incidents have occurred at convenience stores and laundromats. The survivors, naturally, are cowed into silence by a contemptuous and disbelieving public, which totally plays into the hands of the Aliens. Speculation on the causes for their arrival center on insect-like social organizational models. Why octopi, much less bipedal ones, are speculated to have anything to do, sociobiologically speaking, with honeybees is anybody’s guess.

But the author, who’s name is Darryl, contends that the evidence does in fact point to a connection. There is some argument concerning the relationship between six and eight, the numbers of legs and tentacles that insects and octopi possess, respectively; likewise there is some consideration of enzyme signatures in the erotic secretions of same; finally Darryl cites a special feeling that the disquilibrium in our world affects these two sets of species in much the same way.

Where all this goes is tied up in a galactic nesting thing. Potential mass death, captive homo sapiens, forced labor, etc. Blinky is entertained, even thrilled by the dynamic possibilities of such dislocation. “What,” he’s wondering, “would that be like?”

______________

18

Little Turtle and Mad Anthony Wayne walk into a Ford Dealership. A salesman named Trent walks up, looks them over and says, “And how can I help you gentlemen.” Trent has about five pounds of gel in his hair. Wayne is very direct. He offers some livestock, four rifles, and several shiny pieces of metal for an F-150. The salesman looks at them. “Guys,” says Trent in an oily voice. “This is an unusal offer. I’m gonna need to talk to my manager.” He walks back to an office. Laughter erupts from the rear.

Before Trent gets back they’re gone with a truck.

They zip over to the local historical society and break in. Soon they’re driving down the road with an 18th Century cannon and a rack of twelve pound balls in the back. Little Turtle is smoking a cigarette. Wayne says, “I’ve always wanted to drive one of these.” LT takes a drag and says, “In certain respects, it beats a horse, doesn’t it?

Wayne is bouncing up and down on his rear end. “More give in the seat.”

The pickup drives past a row of homes. There’s a guy outside washing his driveway. Around the side of the house, some neighbor kid is crimping the hose, just to annoy him. The guy is looking back toward the spigot. All of which is normal. Except the guy’s got an octopus for a head.

PART TWO Scenes 19 & 20

2009-08-29T00:39:00.000-05:00

Blinky has begun to subject Myron to M. Darryl’s lunatic disquistions on interplanetary horseplay. Myron can bear no more.

“What is it with you and normal life?” demands Myron. “Why can’t you have a job and a house and not like your work? You go in for all this goofy exotic stuff.”

There’s a very long pause, that begins to feel serious. Myron looks over at him.

Blinky tries to respond. Almost gravely. “Because,” he offers, “I have. . . a fervor. . . that I don’t know what to do with.”

Blinky presses on his hat.

“I don’t like it, that all the milk comes in cartons. You can’t get honey, except in plastic containers. I want it from the bees, or like, right from the cow.” Blinky looks at his hands. “I don’t know. I want to fly, too.

“I want, like, a super-actual existence.”

Out of nowhere, the car begins to hiss. Smoke pours out from under the hood. The temperature gauge is buried in red. “Goddammit!” shouts Myron. Luckily, they’re on top of an exit. “Damn, damn, damn!” Myron guides the 1986 Buick Century onto the ramp, and coasts all the way into Tom’s Fuel King. Myron is pounding on the steering column. “Why have a plan, if you don’t follow the plan! What is a plan for? An orderly result! Florida! It’s such a simple thing!” He’s winding himself up into a genuine tantrum. “I want my Goddamn plan back, Blink! I want it back!” He’s bellowing inside the car, which has come to a stop next to the gas pumps.

_______________

20

Exit 49. Looking down on it, you’d see a light-colored line marking the interstate against the browned-over fall fields. A weaker, thinner line would demarcate the state road running perpendicular to 70, making a cross like package string on the bottom side of a box. Irregular rectangles of pavement would be laid out cattycorner to each other at the crossing point. It would hardly occur to you to think that the exit, dressed in low cheap architecture and sectional wire fences, would provide a setting for anything, let alone biographies of compulsion, tales of danger, and time traveling historical figures. It would just look like a half-hearted and three quarters-thoughtless arrangement of crap.

Scene 21

2009-08-29T00:38:00.001-05:00

Myron stomps into the gas station. He sees a woman from behind, standing in the door of the garage. There is a metallic pounding sound coming from beyond the door. “Aw, baby, I can’t believe you did it!” she’s saying. “You haven’t even met these people!” The pounding stops for a moment. A gravelly voice comes from the garage. “Now listen to me, Charlene. I done it cause I think it’s a good idea.”

The woman turns and sees Myron. “When is he coming?”

“None of your damn business, is when.”

“Okay, baby,” says the woman. “I sure hope that envelope don’t get put somewhere funny. Like to get lost.” The woman turns around and sees Myron standing at the counter. Suddenly a menacing-looking man pops in the door holding a big tool. “It ain’t gonna get lost, Charlene. Or somebody’s gonna get her ass beat. You hear?”

Myron is dumbstruck. The man looks at him. His face is all folded up with anger--long term anger, 24 hour anger mad multiplied by weeks times years. His eyes poke out to the sides, and his forehead looks like a hammer. He’s wearing a work shirt. His name is on the sewn-on oval over the breast pocket. It says, “Tom Thick.”

“What in hell do you want,” says Tom.

He’s terrifying.

Myron, who came in the door mad, is backing off a bit. “My car overheated. It has to cool down. I’ll need some antifreeze and some gas.”

Tom says gruffly. “Leave it out there. Couple hours.” Then he turns to Charlene and takes her upper arm in his enormous, greasy hand. “I mean it. Nothin’ better get lost.”

She’s unfazed. She puts one hand on his, and with the other, touches his chest lightly. “I know, baby. Nothing’s gonna get lost. It’s behind the register.”

Tom Thick releases her and turns around to look for the envelope. Charlene places her hands on his back and looks at Myron.

“Good. I’m almost done with this job,” Tom says over his shoulder.

“I’ll watch for him,” says Charlene.

“I’m gonna go over everything one more time.”

“Okay, baby,” says Charlene. Tom walks back out to the garage.

Myron is still getting over the spectacle of Tom, when he truly begins to get an eyeful of Charlene. He’s almost afraid to even look at her. Charlene has dark hair that runs down to her shoulders and licks up in a weak curl. Her complexion is dark. Her eyes are brown and black, and she’s got a mouth that you can’t believe. There’s some serious swivel on her.

She’s 35, 40. Magic and mileage, both.

The pounding sound resumes in the garage.

She’s wiping the grease off her arm. Now Charlene is sizing him up. “You need something else?” Myron pushes his glasses back. He looks out the window at Blinky, who’s plopped himself down next to the smoking car. “Why are simple things so hard sometimes?” says Myron, spontaneously.

“Because nothing’s simple, that’s why.”

“No, some things really are simple. Most things are simple, if you ask me.”

“I wish you were right.” She’s friendly and rueful and dangerous, all at once.

“How long do you think it’ll take for that to cool down.”

Charlene shrugs. “Awhile. You have time for a beer.” There is the tiniest hint of challenge in her voice. “Take a little edge off.” She points out the back door, across an enormous parking lot, to a sign that says “Star-Lite Lounge.” It’s a low commercial building.

Myron doesn’t drink much, beyond a once-a-year spiked egg nog on Christmas Eve. He’s about to say this, when something tells him not to. “Thanks,” he says, and pauses. Subconsciously, Myron puffs up a little. “You’re really nice,” he adds.

“No, I’m not,” says Charlene.

“Is it that simple?” Myron has no idea where he gets this sentence.

Charlene smiles. “Of course not. I’m a woman, aren’t I? Women are complicated.”

“I know that,” says Myron, as if he’s speaking from wide experience. He thinks about winking at her, but can’t actually. He never learned how. Even so, Myron’s freaked out that he gets the idea at all. “I’ll be over there,” he says, pointing to the Star-Lite.

“We’ll know where to find you,” says Charlene.

Myron walks out the back door.

Scene 22

2009-08-29T00:37:00.001-05:00

“Goddamn it,” barks Wayne. He’s driving the truck. Behind him, twelve-pound cannonballs are rolling around the bed, clinking up against each other and pounding the truck. Little Turtle is gazing out the window at the landscape. Brown fields shaggy with cut stalks and metal barns dominate the landscape. The farms are contrasted by explosions of signage and outbreaks of commerce around the highway exits. Auto care, fast food, equipment rentals, bottomless cups of coffee.

“We never stood a chance,” says Little Turtle.

“What?” says Wayne. Some car pulls ahead of him and changes lanes, and he brakes. Too hard. The cannonballs go flying--WHAM--against the back of the cab. Wayne swears again. The cannon, at least, is stationary.

“I said,” replies Little Turtle, “that we never had a chance. Look at this,” he says, gesturing at the land.

“I don’t know about that,” replies Wayne. “You had quite a run.”

“No,” says Little Turtle.

“Mishiekonga,” says the general, “you were very cunning. You put us on the defensive. President Washington personally charged me to raise an army, to replace the one you destroyed.”

LT leans over and pushes in the cigarette lighter.

“You thrashed Harmar. You annihilated St. Clair.”

The lighter pops out.

“Seven hundred men. You sent old St. Clair hobbling off to retirement.”

Little Turtle lights a butt and puffs on it. “These are weak.”

“But then. Then. You begged off the big one at Fallen Timbers. They all went off to fight, and you stayed home.”

“I knew we would lose,” says Little Turtle. “I argued not to fight.”

“You denied me the chance to kill you honorably, in battle. Instead I got to negotiate with you.” Wayne is resigned. “I won, but I lost.”

The farms are zipping by. The day is getting grayer by the mile.

“If we hadn’t wasted ourselves a hundred years earlier in wars with the Iroquois, we might have been more ready to defeat you. Still, it would not have mattered. You would have overwhelmed us. You would have dragged us off.”

“You are correct,” agrees Wayne. He looks out the window. “And all for this.” The truck is passing an exit. There’s a Gas N Go and a sign for a 99 cent Burger Doodle. A giant red balloon proclaims some other thing.

Wayne looks beyond the restaurant. He spies a liquor store, just as the truck is flying by the exit. He begins to perspire.

All of a sudden, a deer comes bounding out of the brush next to the highway. Like something out of an Audobon book, the thing springs out into the roadway in slow motion. It hovers so long in the air, you’d think you really could paint if before it comes down. But Mad Anthony Wayne cannot stop the truck, and he can’t swerve, either.

The truck plows into the deer. The impact makes a hideous noise, a low violent clap. Like what he actually hits is maybe an airborne sofa, as opposed to a living thing. The animal snaps back and bounces off into the median.

The vehicle gets clobbered. The bumper bends back, and a huge fold in the hood pops up. This partially obstructs the driver’s view. Muttering oaths, Wayne limps off onto the shoulder. Little Turtle hops out and runs back to the animal.

It’s a buck, relatively young, a three-pointer. Dead. Its tongue is lolling out to the side, and blood’s coming out. Wayne lumbers up as Little Turtle kneels over it. The Indian stoops down and gets it on his shoulders, sort of. He half drags, half carries it to the edge of the road. Traffic is whizzing by.

“Back it up,” instructs Little Turtle. Wayne complies. Together they throw it into the back of the truck. They arrange its legs so it slips in around the sides of the cannon. The deer’s head pokes up a little over the side.

“I’d like to find myself a whiskey, if you don’t mind,” says Mad Anthony. “Maybe a tavern.”

The Ford F-150 pulls out into traffic. The bashed hood vibrates loudly. Wayne keeps to the right.

Scene 23

2009-08-29T00:36:00.002-05:00

Blinky is leaning on the 1986 Buick Century, out by the pumps. A growly voice erupts behind him. “Where’d she go?” Blinky wheels around to behold the fantastic figure of Tom Thick. Blinky gasps a little. “Who?”

“Charlene.” Then Tom looks at Blinky quizzically. The creases in his giant forehead fade for a moment. “Hey. What kind of hat is that?”

“Oh,” says Blinky. “It’s Turkish.”

“What?” says Tom. ”What does that mean.”

“Made by Turks. In Turkey.”

“Not no birds, though.”

“No, no,” confirms Blinky. “Absolutely not.”

Blinky sticks his hand into the peculiar silence that follows.

“I’m Blinky.”

Tom ignores him.

“What’s taking her so long?”

“Who’s Charlene.”

“Black hair.”

Blinky nods. “Haven’t seen her.”

“This your car? That boiled over?”

“Kind of.”

“You with that other guy? With the glasses?” Blinky nods. Tom Thick darkens. “He’s a goddamn clown.” Blinky shrugs.

“She said she was goin’ to the store,” says Tom.

“Take a minute, she said.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s always gonna take a minute.” Tom glowers at the overpass, then looks toward the Star-Lite. “I’m waitin’ for somebody,” announces Tom. “I gotta be in the office.”

Blinky nods empathetically. The guy does not look like his natural environment is an office. The guy does not look like he necessarily knows how to read.

“Keep a watch out,” barks Tom.

Blinky agrees.

Tom starts for the garage. Then he looks back toward Blinky.

“You want a pop,” he growls. “Something to drink.”

Blinky waves appreciatively. “Thanks, man, no.”

“Hey,” adds Blinky suddenly. “Do you have any good Ohio maps? That show the counties?”

Tom grunts and nods, apparently yes.

Blinky bounds over to Tom and follows him back into the station. He says to the back of Tom’s head as they cross the threshold, “Do you know if the Great Serpent Mound is anywhere near here?”

“What in hell’s that,” asks Mr. Thick, reaching into the map rack.

“Here,” says Blinky. He digs in his pocket and produces a postcard. He shows it to Tom, who stares at it furiously. The old engineer’s drawing traces the route of a unfurling snake down a gentle hill, swooping back up a second rise, up toward the snake’s mouth. The earthen beast opens wide to ingest a big egg.

This if you know how to read topographic junk. Otherwise, it’s some curlicues. Tom turns the postcard over. Nothing. The big man snorts.

“Never mind,” says Blinky, retrieving it. As he puts the card back in his pocket, Tom slaps his chest with a map.

“Thanks,” says Blinky. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

Blinky walks back to the rust-colored Buick. He opens up the map and locates his destination, very isolated, out in the sticks well east of Cincinnati. He reaches into the car and pulls out one of the forbidden highliters. He draws a bright green line from Interstate 75 to 275, along State routes 32, 41, and 73 to the Great Serpent Mound.

Scenes 24 & 25

2009-08-29T00:36:00.001-05:00

The Star-Lite Lounge is located in a metal building that began life as a printing plant, with a couple of windows cut in the siding. The bar has a big seating area, ringed by stools, two-tops, and a row of booths. There’s a bunch of video games. The light is pretty good, for a bar, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Beyond the bar proper and up three steps is a larger food service area, with a sandwich counter and two dozen four tops. There’s a giant salad bar, about the size of a 1974 Chrysler New Yorker, that features six varieties of macaroni salad, a creamed soup, worn-out iceberg lettuce in a big bowl, onions, and any number of canned vegetables. The salad bar is strategically positioned to block your view of the bar from the restaurant.

Myron starts out in the bar. Charlene comes in on some pretext and relocates them to the restaurant area. She’s positioned herself like a mobster, with a wide view of the room. She can see the bar from her seat; she can also shift her weight and disappear behind the salad bar. Myron’s a got a beer in front of him, for lack of a better idea. Charlene is working on a whiskey sour.

She’s watching the door and speaking distractedly.

“The blockage thing. Lots of people have trouble with stomach acid,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “Try eliminating dairy.” She puts down her bic. “I’m very interested in healing. Different approaches to diet. Massage therapy. Stuff like that.” She exhales a plume of smoke. “I think touch has a great effect on people.” Charlene puts her hand lightly on his forearm. “Don’t you?”

Myron is thinking he might die before seeing Florida. But he stays put.

_______________

25

Over at the Fuel King, Blinky reclines on the back of the Buick, alternately daydreaming about spaceships and watching the overpass. He does not notice the approach of a large black 24-foot truck as it thunders up from the exit, until it’s practically on top of him. The truck pulls into the station and drives beyond the pumps, stopping out front but off to the side. Suddenly aware, Blinky reads “SBE, Ltd.” as it pulls past. He’s aghast. “A Sucke truck!” he exclaims quietly.

A man in a business suit and overcoat gets out of the SBE, Ltd. vehicle. His manner is crisp. “I”m looking for a Mr. Thomas Thick,” says the formerly grizzled man.

“Just a sec,” says Blinky.

Blinky bursts into station and says, “Is your name Tom?” He sees the name in the shirt oval. Tom is looking at a complicated document.

“You’re not getting involved with the Sucke Brothers, are you?”

Tom’s hammer-head is sweating; he’s looking pretty nervous. Tom holds up the papers. “I don’t know what this means,” he says. “A bunch of stuff about parties.”

Through the window, Blinky can see the man walking toward the door. Blinky scoots back outside. “Sir. Can I ask, are you an actual Sucke Brother?”

The man looks at him guardedly. “No. I’m from Legal.”

“Ah,” says Blinky. “Because you know, it’s funny, I’ve got a friend from out of town who’s had a bad experience with--”

The lawyer, who’s carrying a big envelope and one of those brown accordion folder things, smoothly redirects Blinky by ninety degrees, turning him away from the door.

As Tom steps outside, a new Ford truck with a squashed front plus an antique cannon and a dead deer in the back roars past the station and drives around the rear.

“Son,” the lawyer is saying to Blinky, “have you ever been on the receiving end of litigation? Have you ever been deposed under needling, deeply personal questioning for weeks at a time?”

“No,” says Blinky.

“Have you ever had your ass kicked in a dark alley by semi-pro hockey players?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“How does that idea grab you? Would you like to meet Claude?”

Blinky’s silence says No.

“Now, I’d like you to go stand over there by that car, where you can mind your own beeswax. Thank you.” Blinky blinks.

The lawyer turns back to the business at hand. He and a worried-looking Tom go into the gas station. “I’m sure we can get this signed quickly, Mr. Thick,” the lawyer is saying.

Scenes 26 & 27

2009-08-29T00:35:00.001-05:00

Mad Anthony Wayne and Chief Little Turtle walk into a bar. General Wayne steps up and orders a drink. “What’s with the outfit,” says the bartender. Wayne ignores him. He drains his whiskey and orders another. “Who’s your friend,” asks the bartender. “The Indian.”

“He’s from Cleveland.”

The bartender smiles. “Hey, Chief Wahoo,” he calls out to Little Turtle. The Indian ignores him. He’s busy looking at a video poker machine. Wayne finishes his second drink. “200 years is a long, long time,” he says to nobody at all.

The general steps to the bar and reaches over it to spear a bag of Doritos with his sword. The bartender is not amused. “Hey Pirate Man. That’s not approved conduct here, buddy.”

Wayne ignores him, and plucks the bag off the end of the blade. “I said, HEY,” yells the bartender. Keep your toy out of my snack rack!”

Wayne whips the sword around and backs the barkeep up against the liquor shelf. “I am the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army,” he thunders. “And you’re an insolent sloth I’d have flogged.” The bartender’s eyes are big as saucers. “I’ll have you know,” announces Wayne. “I’ve killed Redcoats with this sword.” People are staring. “And Creeks,” continues the general. “And some of his lot, too.” He nods toward LT. “I can’t recall running through an ill-bred barkeep, but I think I ought to have.”

“General Wayne,” says Little Turtle.

Mad Anthony returns his sword to its scabbard. LT turns back to the video poker machine in disgust.

“May I have another drink. My good sir,” says Wayne. The barkeep obliges him. Nervously.

_______________

27

Blinky is hovering outside the station, popping up in the window every time the lawyer looks away. He’s waving his arms like he’s calling an incomplete pass, and mouthing DON’T DO IT!” Tom is staring at him, trying to understand, when the lawyer stands up and says something into his watch. Behind him, Claude and the meaty guy get out of the back of the Sucke Brothers Truck and start toward him.

Blinky shakes his head one more time at Tom and slips around the back of the station.

Claude and friend stand guard in the lot.

Blinky wanders over to the Star-Lite, walks in, looks around, fails to see Myron for one of two possible reasons: a) because he’s sitting on the far side of the giant salad bar, and/or b) because he may have been peeing at the time. Blinky sits down for a game of video golf. He’s a quick study. After a string of early bogeys, he shoots a 29 on the back nine. He turns and scans the bar again, looking for Myron. No luck. On his way out he walks past a booth where Little Turtle is sitting. “Hey,” says Blinky. Wayne sits opposite the chief. They’re looking at a newspaper.

“I saw you guys earlier. Yeah, at Greenville. You guys were great.” He gestures to the costumes. “This is very intense. The work that goes into those things. Amazing. You play Little Turtle, right? And you’re that pompous guy. The General.”

“Where is your friend?” asks the Indian. “The sour one.”

“I don’t know.”

“He mentioned going to the water,” says LT.

“Are the two of you headed somewhere?” asks Wayne.

“We’ve been debating that,” says Blinky. “Myron says we’re on vacation. But I don’t think that describes it.” Blinky leans in and whispers, “We’re making a passage,” confides Blinky.

“What do you mean, a passage,” asks Wayne.

“Going from one state to another. But not like say, Illinois and Indiana. Like a state of being. This is my philosophy. You can drive around, or you can go somewhere serious.”

Scenes 28 & 29

2009-08-29T00:34:00.001-05:00

Myron sits back down, oblivious, his back to Blinky across the food area. Myron’s a combination of woozy and aroused. Across from him, Charlene is playing with her drink straw. She’s an explosive piece of fruit, an apricot injected with gin.

“I could throttle Tom.” She’s been going back and forth between focusing on Myron and talking about her dumb-as-box-of-rocks husband. “He’s not the sharpest guy,” she says. “He thinks he’s a wheeler dealer, but he ain’t. If you wanna know, he’s a dumbass. He’s buying into a franchise deal. But I fixed it. I rewrote some stuff in the contract and put it back. It won’t be legit.”

Myron is not really listening. He’s awash in sexual thoughts.

He’s not exactly well-traveled. His last go-round was with an evangelical schoolteacher named Becky who drew the line at medium petting. That was three years ago.

“I gotta go the girls’ room,” says Charlene. She’s pulling out a lipstick as she walks away.

_______________________

29

Based on what he’s heard on the radio and absorbed from the O P & Q saga, Blinky is giving a rundown on the Sucke Brothers to Mad Anthony Wayne. The General is listening, switching back forth from Blinky’s testimony to the newspapers spread out in front of him. The papers contain exciting news of acquisitions, projected expansions, economic zoominess. The bad parts, which include mass local layoffs in neighboring towns, are in the back. There’s a big story in the Mechanicsburg Crier about a new playground complex with brightly colored plastic parts. The fancy equipment and the park in which it will sit have been donated by SBE, Ltd, which is totally focused on community betterment. Although somewhat buzzed, Mad Anthony is getting the picture. He has concluded that Blinky is possibly a giant goofball. But slow-motion economic mayhem is afoot.

Scene 30

2009-08-29T00:33:00.000-05:00

Myron is watching Charlene swing her way to the women’s bathroom. She disappears behind a divider. Sighing, Myron turns back to his beer.

Little Turtle has materialized in Charlene’s seat.

“Jesus!” gasps Myron.

The Indian nods.

Myron looks dully around the table. “Where did you come from!”

“My Indian name is Mishiekonga. You know me as Little Turtle.”

“What?” Myron claws back through the alcohol to something like a clear head. He remembers something. “Hey. Yeah, you’re an actor. You’re that guy from the reenactment.”

“That is where we met, so to speak.”

“Is this your hobby? You dress up and pretend to be some famous chief.”

Little Turtle shrugs.

“But what,” asks Myron, “are you doing here?”

“We have come to see you.”

“Oh, you have.” Myron cranes his neck to see if Charlene has emerged from behind the divider.

“She’s going to be back here any minute, Chief.”

Little Turtle is unmoved.

Myron turns away from him. “Come on. Go find some other--”

“You are full of anguish.”

Myron looks at the Indian.

“There has been a betrayal. Yes? The men you worked for. They are brothers.”

“And?”

“You have been mistreated, you seek redress.” Little Turtle picks up one of Charlene’s cigarettes and lights it. “Ecch,” he says. “Menthol.”

LT stabs the cigarette out and waves at the smoke. “Listen to me, Myron.”

“How do you know my name?”

The Indian shrugs. “I know things.”

Myron drains his beer.

“I know your heart,” says Little Turtle. “You wish to right wrongs.”

“These jerks marched in and bought things up. The company where I worked, and nearly everything else in my town.” Myron gestures grandly. “Wanton theft. Even if they did pay cash.” Myron looks at the Indian.

“What do I call you. Injun Joe?”

“Mishiekonga.”

“Misheh--. I’m drunk. Mish. That’s all I can handle.”

“You are dispossessed.”

“Mish. You’re a clever one. You have the lingo down. Blinky would love you.” Myron leans in on him. “I’m telling you, they’re still at it.”

“These brothers.”

“They will not rest. No.They want it all.”

“I know the story,” offers Mishiekonga.

“I bet you do.”

“Treaties. Pledges. Promises.”

“That’s right,” agrees Myron. “At first, what do you do, you go along. You cooperate with them. Because they make assurances. You believe them.” Myron is pleased with the sound of his story.

“But then they betray you,” adds the Indian. “And you resist.”

“You’re damn right you do.”

“We resisted bravely. We did not surrender for a long time. We shed blood. We defied them.”

“That’s better than I did.”

“We stalked St. Clair’s army. 1791. We ambushed them in the woods. We filled them with terror, Mr. Myron. The screaming. They ran headlong, afraid, but we caught them. We killed them among the oaks. We cut them down. We peeled their scalps. We butchered them.”

“Who are you, really?” asks Myron.

“And later Wayne butchered us.”

Little Turtle takes a drink of Charlene’s whiskey sour.

“I sought peace.” He looks at the drink. “Firewater. But fruity,” says Mish.

Myron is stupefied.

“Defeat followed victory. Ah, the indignities. I was lucky enough to die before they relocated us. But later my grave was defiled. Two men digging a basement in Fort Wayne, Indiana disturbed my grave. They played with my bones. They sold my effects.”

“When was that,” says Myron, a little flatly.

“1911,” answers Little Turtle. “Fort Wayne. Think of it. My ancestral home, renamed for my foe. The man who vanquished me. The humiliation.”

Myron leans in toward the Indian. “We’re not going to let them get away with it, Mish!” Then he says, “I’m going to run for office. Or get appointed, or something.”

“Here is what I have to tell you, Myron.”

“What.”

“The righting of wrongs. The redress. Forget it.”

“What do you mean,” says Myron.

“Cut the best deal you can, and figure it won’t last.”

LT motions with his eyes. “She’s coming back.”

Myron looks back toward the restrooms. Poof, the Indian disappears. Myron turns back around, and he’s looking at an empty chair. “Jesus!”

Charlene is walking back to the table.

LT reappears down on the bar level, at the video poker machine.

Scenes 31, 32 & 33

2009-08-29T00:32:00.000-05:00

Blinky exits the Star-Lite. The relentless gray of the day has yeilded to the beginnings of a sunset.

He walks through the exhausted commercial smattering of the exit. He passes a venison-prepping business with a yellow sign showing an elk head. There’s a trenchdigger dealership, and a derelict Hen House restaurant. Blinky looks at the blank cinder block walls and the dumpsters and the spinning fan things atop the flat roofs. He picks his way across the enormous, littered lot behind the Fuel King.

Blinky squats for a moment at the base of a giant streetlight. He looks across at the overpass.

He watches a semi-truck hauling a big load of steel coils disappear down the highway. Then a car with a canoe tied to its top, and a pickup carrying debris. Next comes an Extra Wide Load, jeeps with bikes, a man with a sack. Blinky, so accustomed to all things quick and light, is beginning to discover gravity. He’s weighed down by the spectacle. He labors under the concept.

Myron’s anxiety has nested right in between his shoulder blades.

The sun casts long blue shadows across the earth. The engines groan. Orange light inflames the asphalt and the signage. Blinky trudges back to the station, stooped over a little, like he’s got osteoperosis or something. Or possibly an anvil on his back.

_______________

32

“Did you see that guy that was here?” says Myron.

“What guy?”

“The Indian.” Charlene makes a crooked face.

“I think maybe I just had a hallu--. I hallucinated,” says Myron.

“Oh,” says Charlene. “Of an Indian?”

“Never mind,” says Myron.

Chalene is blowing over the hole in Myron’s empty beer bottle, trying to produce a sound. It’s working, sort of.

“I think I want another drink,” he says.

_______________

33

Old Mr. Quinn is sitting at his breakfast nook in Naples, Florida.

Q has a bunch of law books out, and a legal pad. The guy is up there in age, but he’s still got his shock of white hair and his can-do fighting spirit.

Like many victims of the various Sucke swindles, Q has tried to reach someone inside the organization; also like the others, he’s gotten lost inside the Byzantine SBE, Ltd. voice mail systerm. But Q has not let up. He’s working on the beginnings of a class-action lawsuit against Sucke Brothers Enterprises, Ltd. He’s writing letters with a fountain pen.

In the meantime, Q’s condo is on the market. And he’s looking for commerical opportunities.

Scenes 34, 35 & 36

2009-08-29T00:31:00.000-05:00

Blinky walks around the front of the station, just as the lawyer is coming out. “After all that,” he’s saying. “errors in the contract! Well, have no fear, Mr. Thick, I have fresh copies.”

The guy gets some more files from the truck and goes back in. Blinky watches through the window as Tom signs.

Then the lawyer speaks into his watch, and the door on the back of the SBE, Ltd. vehicle opens up, and the two guys get back out with a ladder and a big plastic sign that reads, “SUCKE BROTHERS PETROLEUM PRODUCTS. We’ll Fill You Up.” In what seems like seconds, they have surgically removed the existing Fuel King placard, which lands with a plasticky thunk on the ground. The new sign goes up just as fast. Meanwhile the lawyer is carrying a cardboard box back into the gas station. He pulls out a brand new fax machine and installs it quickly. Then he pulls out a bunch of little things wrapped in tissue paper.

Soon, there are eight or ten corn starch busts, just like the ones Myron described from O P & Q. They’re watching the inside of the station. One of them is sitting on the cash register. Another has a good view of the pumps.

The lawyer opens a cellophane package and hands Tom a SUCKE BROTHERS PETROLEUM PRODUCTS work shirt. He puts it on.

He looks ridiculous. And very alone.

The lawyer and the two signage guys get back in the truck and drive off. Now it’s gotten to be twilight.
_______________

35

Myron’s guard is so down it’s at his ankles. He drinks from his plastic cup and looks back at Charlene, who’s got her shoes off. “It’s not your gall bladder, Myron. I think,” she says, smiling, “it’s something else.” Underneath the table, she puts her foot on Myron’s wiener. “I know what’s all blocked up.”

On the far side of the salad bar, Mad Anthony Wayne has gone back for another drink.

“Let’s go, baby,” says Charlene. She drags him out of his chair. As they move, Wayne gets a good look at Myron, and vice versa. “Hey,” thinks Myron, “I know that man.” Wayne points at Myron, and barks in a slurred sort of way, “You!”

“Come on,” says Charlene. Myron throws money on the table and lets her guide him. They stumble out the Star-Lite through a side exit, using a fire door that says it’ll set off an alarm, but doesn’t. It occurs to Myron, fleetingly, that she’s done this before. They scamper across a parking lot and past a bowling alley, to the Deluxe Motel.

They get a room. The sheets are old.

Charlene takes her shirt off. Myron is thinking maybe it’s all a big tease, or even a scam that will lead to his own death, when Charlene starts to get down to it.

_______________

36

Wayne stumbles out of the Star-Lite just as Tom Thick is headed in. They collide. The General barks about the decline of manners and what an insufferable oaf etcetera. WHAP!—Tom slams him up against the door jamb six inches off the ground. Wayne puffs up like a surprised fish and flops around for his sword. The Hammerhead bears down on him and growls, just as the jukebox hops to life inside. Tom lets go and stomps inside. Wayne gasps for air.

A third of a mile away, Blinky is gathering dead grass. He’s pulling stuff up in a miniature prairie next to the Fuel King. He’s dancing with his woodland creature friends. He’s stooping over plants. He’s breaking pieces off a dead tree. He’s making a pile on the concrete. He’s opening the car door, and pushing in the lighter.

Scenes 37, 38 & 39

2009-08-29T00:30:00.000-05:00

“Where is she,” demands Tom Thick. The bartender says, “Left a while ago, Tom. Hey, nice shirt.” He gestures at the Angry One’s Sucke Brothers Petroleum uniform top. “Where’d you get that shirt?” Thick Tom glowers at the guy. “Who was she with?” The bartender shrugs. “She was up on the restaurant side. I couldn’t see. I think she was alone.” Tom’s great head kind of vibrates and folds over on itself, he’s so mad. The man needs his wife. “I’m gonna find her. I’m gonna tie her to a sonofabitchin’ chair.”

The bartender says, “Take it easy now.”

Tom wheels and stomps. “Clown,” he says darkly.

Because even now the guy is unaware of the fake fire door trick, Tom goes back out the front door. He’s about to stomp over to the Deluxe when he notices a funny glow to his right, back toward the station. It’s very small, but bright.

_______________

38

Charlene is sliding up and down on Myron. It’s almost dark out. Myron’s all splotchy with excitement, and breathing through his nose.

She slips off, sits astride him and leans down to nuzzle and talk.

“You know,” she says in a murmur, “I have the funniest dream.” She runs her nose along his neck. “It’s not really a dream dream, though. Because it happens when I’m awake.”

“Hmmm,” replies Myron. “What happens. In your dream.”

“I have a vision.” She rears back for a moment, stressing the final word, pressing her arms to pooch out her boobs. Myron inhales and reaches up for her, but she takes his hands and pins his arms.

“In my vision,” she says, “I see the garage.” She’s working his neck at this point. “At the Fuel King.”

Myron makes a positive noise, on the order of “Uh-huh,” but less articulate.

“And I see my husband.”

The mention of Tom Thick interrupts the rapid relocation of Myron’s brain to his weiner, now fully underway. Zot! goes the message to Myron’s amygdala, the structure that manages fear and operates the klaxon horn. Myron’s eyes get big. Charlene, observing this, is quick to get the process reversed again, using a variety of procedures.

“Oh, Myron,” she says, and etcetera.

“Now in my vision,” Charlene resumes, “there’s a certain person in the garage. Mm-hmm. Working on a car. That’s right,” she continues, nuzzling and kissing him tirelessly. “And do you know what?” she adds. “That old garage door is down.”

_______________

39

“...Dumb bastard!”

Someone is shouting at Blinky. “Run! Run!” His eyes labor to fix on a figure in the dark. “You...stupid bastard!” The guy looks like Napoleon. He’s bellowing, and he smells like bourbon. “Get up!” Napoleon is hitting him with his hat. “Get up and run!” Blinky is conscious of warmth and light. His feet are scrambling under him.

Blinky is beginning to ask himself where this Napoleon guy gets off, but most of his brain is occupied by making his legs move. He’s traveling into the cold.

Wayne! he thinks, racing instinctively. Turning back, Myron sees the big man with the hammerhead thundering on to the scene. Sprinting like a wild man.

Scene 40

2009-08-29T00:29:00.001-05:00

“And the car,” mumurs Charlene, “is running.”

Myron is beginning to get the plan.

She’s biting his chin. “Hnnn.

“Mmm.”

She’s nibbling his ear.

“What,” purrs Charlene, “do they call that gas?”

“That comes out,” intones Myron.

“Mm-hmm.” She’s massaging him like a pro. “It comes out. Of the car.”

“Mon. Oxide,” Myron says, breathlessly.

“It puts you to sleep, doesn’t it.”

Myron sucks in air.

She corrects herself. “Certain people, it puts to sleep.”

Myron is wondering about her interest in healing.

“Mm-hmm,” coos Charlene, not pausing for a moment.

“It’s just a little nap,” she breathes, “for Tommy Thick.”

She remounts Myron and moans.

“Do you think,” she asks, “that would be hard?”

She kegels him a good one.

“Hard to do, I mean.”

KABOOM! Myron climaxes.

“It wouldn’t be hard for you, baby!” groans Charlene. “Not for you!”

Myron growls in satisfaction. Grrrrrr!

Charlene slumps, giggling weirdly.

“You know I’m serious. Don’t you baby?”

Then, KABOOM! again.

And KABOOM! KAPOW! KABLAM KA BABABOOOOM! The room shakes. The glass in the sliding doors pops. Orange light pulses into the room. There’s a terrible rushing sound outside.

Charlene scrambles off Myron and out of the bed to the window. Myron pops his glasses back on and pulls himself along behind her. Their mouths are open. They’re staring past the cracked glass.

Half a mile away, flames are gushing from what used to be the Fuel King. Black smoke is billowing up. Charlene is breathing in and making noise. Sort of a klesping sound. Now she’s screaming. Myron is racing to get dressed. “Charlene!” he says sharply. “Get your clothes on!” Charlene is hitting him. “Tom!” she’s shrieking. “Tommy!” She’s clutching at herself and grabbing garments. “Taaahhhhmmm!”

The alcohol is wearing off.

Now they’re running full blast through the cold to the scene. Myron has forgotten his coat. He’s shouting for Blinky. He’s thinking about the Indian. He’s running toward the flames. Charlene’s four steps behind him, still shrieking.

Scenes 41, 42 & 43

2009-08-29T00:27:00.000-05:00

The dead eye of the deer is full of firelight. The carcass shifts slightly, as the truck accelerates from a stop. The gears go back and forth. The deer trembles artificially. Now the animal’s hair starts to singe, and the fire in its eye gets bigger yet.

_______________

42

Myron races up to where he can barely stand it, 70, 80 yards from the fiery crater where the pumps used to be. He’s shouting for Blinky. Charlene is shouting for Tom. The crowd from the Star-Lite is tumbling out. The gush of flame is roaring like a train. The signpole is bent back, and the new plastic SBE Petroleum sign is melting off the top of it, like a burned marshallow falling off a stick. Shredded lottery tickets flutter in the air. Beer grenades and plastic motor oil bombs are going off. And it’s raining Buick parts.

Inside the remnants of the station, the little corn starch men are strewn about and fried to crisps. The fax machine is a pool of plastic and circuits.

Charlene is hysterical. She and Myron are trotting around the heat as best they can. Over the sound of Charlene and the fire and the exploding beverages, Myron hears a terrifying sound: whobb whobb whobb whobb whobb whobb whobb. Right away, the guy knows what it is. He grabs Charlene and whirls her to face him. Shouting, he says, “Who was Tom selling the station to? Who!”

Whobb whobb whobb whobb. . . .

Charlene is sobbing and catching her breath. She’s making that weird klesping sound again. “To . . . the . . . Sucke Brothers!” she manages, just as the first of the copters sweeps low around the column of flame. It has “SBE, Ltd.” written on the fuselage.

“These are not,” Myron says loudly, “people who handle property damage well.”

The copters are swarming. They are beginning to strafe arbitrarily. Myron is scanning the landscape for any sign of Blinky. “I shouldn’t’ve left him,” he’s muttering again and again. He’s beginning to entertain the possibility that Blinky’s been atomized, or shot, when he notices another sound, this one lower and more percussive. Boom! Boom! He follows the sound to its source, and discovers, to his total amazement, Mad Anthony Wayne standing in the bed of a Ford pickup. The guy is firing an antique cannon. The copters are turning like angry wasps.

Some guy with a loudspeaker in one of the helicopters is reading from a prepared statement about the legitimate rights of the Sucke Brothers Petroleum Distribution Company and Sucke Brothers Enterprises, Ltd. to pursue legal remedies to the destruction of company property and, secondarily, the loss of corporate personnel.

A door from the Buick comes down with an awful thunk. Myron wheels around just in time to see Blinky’s head slowly rising from behind an overturned refrigerator. He’s scorched. Smoke is coming off his eyebrows. Little bits of his skin are gone. He’s like a red-spotted Blinky. Myron dashes over to him. “Blink!” he shouts. “Are you okay?!”

Blinky’s in shock.

Whobb whobb whobb. . . .

Myron is looking frantically for a way out. The copters are strafing Wayne.

Then, out of the flame and the fluttering debris, something--some animal?--emerges. Myron is squinting into the smoke. A magnificent three point buck trots out into the light. A copter swoops by. The deer takes a few steps, looks around, then picks its way over to Myron and Blinky. It stops for a second, snorts at Myron, then trots off in a direction away from the fire. It stops, looks back, then trots a little further. Myron is beginning to get the idea when a large orange truck pulls up just beyond the deer. It’s a Department of Transportation vehicle, a salt truck, the kind they use to salt the roads in the winter. Which it’s getting to be. Winter that is. Myron is really cold.

The buck walks around to the back of the salt truck and looks up at the gate. Myron grabs Blinky and hustles him toward the vehicle, staying low. They’re starting around toward the back, when Myron looks in the cab. Little Turtle is driving. He’s sipping on a cup of coffee and looking at a map.
_______________

43

Mad Anthony Wayne is bellowing into a manufactured wind of the copters. “You bastards! Come on and get me!” He’s lighting the cannon with a cigar. “Try this one on!” Rounds of machine gun fire rip across the bed of the Ford. BOOM! goes the cannon. He’s already bending down to get another ball. “Goddammit! Too low.” They swing around for another pass.

For a cavalry guy, Wayne is getting the hang of artillery pretty fast. “200 years,” he’s hollering. “200 years with that goddamn savage!” He’s trying to jack the cannon up, to get more loft. “Get down here, you cowards! You goddamn greedy Britishers!” He loads the next ball. The copter is swinging into position for a run. He’s holding the cigar off the taper. “You are my ticket out!”

The lead copter is bearing down on him. “Lower,” he’s coaching it, “lower . . . and fire!”

He jabs with his cigar. The stogie lights the taper, the taper lights the powder, the cannon erupts. Helicopter disappears in a fireball. KABLAM!

The guy with the megaphone stops talking.

Wayne is hooting and dancing.

A rocket from the second copter slams into the Ford. Kablooey. Annihiliates it.

Scenes 44 & 45

2009-08-29T00:25:00.000-05:00

The darkness of the November sky is dotted with stars. Myron is staring straight up from a bed of salt. He’s unable to see beyond the boxy frame of the truck. It’s like a giant TV, except it’s vertical.

When they first clamber in and collapse, Blinky cries out frantically. Salt in his wounds. Myron turns him around on his back, where he’s more or less intact. Myron cradles him.

Helicopters scan the darkness, criss-crossing like angry birds. Blinky is yammering. Nonsense, mostly. Plainly, the guy is distressed. Which he’s got a right to be. Myron tries to shush him. No luck. Then Blinky starts making actual sentences.

“I was standing in that lot,” Blinky says. “Watching.”

“Watching what,” says Myron.

“Cars,” says Blinky. “Watching the cars . . . drive.”

“What about--”

“And I figured it out.”

“Uh-huh,” adds Myron.

“The stuff . . . they carry.”

Blinky pulls himself up and looks at Myron intensely. “Everybody,” he says, “is carrying something around.” He falls back a bit. “I mean, like a burden.

“This guy has cancer. That guy owes money. Some woman hates herself.”

“Yeah,” says Myron.

“Man, it hurts,” Blinky says.

“It’s okay, Blink,” soothes Myron.

“All those people,” says Blinky, “all that junk they carry around.” Myron cradles him tighter and pats his arm. “Ow,” says Blinky. Myron apologizes right away.

“It freaked me out,” says Blink. He’s getting a head of steam up. “And then I had, like, a vision. You know the spirit animals, they were all around. A beaver. A pheasant. Your buck was there. Then.” He stops talking for a minute. “Then we all got cold.”

Blinky licks his lips with effort. “The station was locked.”

“And then what,” says Myron.

“We built a fire.”

_______________

45

The green light of the dash functions barely illumines the two figures in the cab. “What do you mean we’re not done!” demands Wayne. “We struck our blow.” The Indian is silent. “You stoic son of a bitch, answer me! You said we needed an action, and we executed one. That was a first class diversion!”

Little Turtle says, “But not adequate to the purpose.”

“And that would be? A total defeat?”

“That’s unrealistic,” avers the Chief.

“Well, what then?” demands Wayne. “What!?”

Little Turtle looks over at him and says, “Anthony. Can I just drive?”

Scene 46

2009-08-29T00:23:00.000-05:00

Myron is looking at the stars. He’s shivering but trying not to, so Blinky will feel protected. A few of the stars shimmer and wink off. The atmosphere gets weird-looking for a second, and then pop, there’s a translucent cigar-shaped thing hovering in the air above them. Like 50 feet up. (Because Myron doesn’t go for science fiction, he’s clueless about the fact that the thing has a cloaking device. To him, the cigar just appears.) There’s a squid looking out the window.

“Hey,” he says. The cigar-shaped object disappears.

“Did you see that?” Myron asks.

Blinky murmurs no.

“I think I just saw a UFO,” says Myron.

“Cool,” says Blinky.

The truck slows and stops for a moment, then rumbles through a right turn. Blinky and Myron look up as they pass under what looks like a huge open garage door. The navy sky goes to black. The truck stops.

They’re inside a conical salt dome, the kind that you see along the highway system. It’s like a cross between a beehive and giant shingled teat. But what matters, for the purposes of the story, is that they’re out of view. The helicopters aren’t going to find them in the dome.

Myron whispers to Blinky. “I think we’re okay in here.”

He gets down out of the truck. They’re in front of a giant spreading apron of salt, stories high. To the right, there’s an open semi-office, kind of like a janitor hideaway, set apart from the tons of salt by a high wall. There’s a desk with a bookshelf, and a coffeepot, and a cot. Myron walks around to check the cab of the truck. It’s deserted. To Myron’s amazement, this does not surprise him. Normal gets more remote all the time. Myron returns to the truck, helps Blinky over the side, then, struggling, carries him to the cot. He lays Blinky down and tends to him. He fixes a wet paper towel, a blue one like you clean your dipstick with, and gently dabs Blinky’s wounds with it. “Blink. You’ve done some dumb things before.” Blinky flinches under the dabbing. “But I don’t think that you have ever come close,” says Myron, combining tenderness and reproach, “to the level of dumbness required to light a fire in a gas station.”

“Ow. It was dumb, I know--”

“But hey, live and learn.”

“It was flaky,” says Blinky.

“You know what it was, it was an accident.”

Myron gets up and makes a pot of coffee. He putters around as it brews, then pours two mugs. He brings one to his friend.

Blinky props himself up on the cot. His eyes are brimming. “Poor Tom,” he says, taking the cup. “I killed Tom.”

Myron says, “Not poor Tom. Nasty Tom. Tom the Menace.”

Blinky is not consoled.

“Myron--”

“Yeah Blink.”

“I’m going to prison.”

“No, you’re not.”

“He totally blew up.” Myron looks down for a second. “Just like, BLAM,” adds Blinky.

“He was kind of a slow guy,” Blinky says softly, “who worried about people knowing he was slow.” Blinky licks his lips. “He was afraid.”

“I suppose.” Myron touches Blinky’s arm gently. “I saw the guy in action.”

“You saw,” says Blinky with effort, “his old lady in action.” He smiles sadly. His eyelids are heavy.

Myron leans over. “You are not gonna believe this. She was planning to kill him.”

Blinky is quiet.

“She tried to get me involved.” Myron laughs. “But,” he says, “you beat her to it.”

Boom, Blinky’s asleep.

Myron gets up and walks to the high open doorway and looks out. The stars are winking at him. A serious vista. The red glow from the Fuel King fire is far off, three or four miles away. Blinking lights, probably on the copters, are circling wide around it and heading off to wherever such things and people go. Some imperial outpost of the SBE, Ltd. system. Monumental busts arrayed in a great hall, looking down on rows and rows of accountants and lawyers.

Myron shudders. He reaches up and rubs his head. He’s feeling around on the top of it. Slowly. He’s thinking antlers.

PART THREE Scene 47

2009-08-28T17:58:00.001-05:00

Old man Q is standing on the par 3 fourth tee at the Stooped Egret Golf Club in Naples, Florida. “God damn it,” he growls. “Pulled it.” He’s hit his first ball well enough to carry the water, but left. It lands wide, on an unforgiving slope back toward trouble. The ball bounces then reverses course and dribbles down to the water. Plop. Ripple. Sigh. Q tees up in nothing flat and whacks another. He swings like he’s pouncing on prey. This one stays low and straight, clears the water, and ends up on the back fringe. Q finishes with the club tucked under his arm and a rueful look on his face.

“You know,” he says, not talking about golf, “I really did think I’d cleared the hazard.”

“Aw Quinny,” says the woman. She wears peach colored shorts and a friendly floral thing on top. She’s been in the sun for a long time. She looks like an iguana with sunglasses, and her voice sounds like a thousand packs of cigarettes. “If you can be patient, I can get you a better price.”

“I can’t be patient, Harlene.” Big leafy plants hover over the exchange.

Q gimps over to the cart. He puts the 6-iron back in his old-fashioned tartan plaid bag. “I do like smacking the ball around.” The old man with the thick white hair and the warrior forearms steps around to the wheel. “But I can’t afford it.” Q sits down. “I need to make some money.”

Harlene the realtor sits down next to him in the cart as he punches the gas off toward the ladies’ tee. “Aw, Quinny,” she says.

“And I need to stick it to those Sucke bastards.”

Scene 48

2009-08-28T17:57:00.000-05:00

Myron is propped up against an interior wall inside a giant roadside salt dome off Interstate 70 west of Dayton, Ohio. He’s been asleep for who knows how long when he hears footsteps and startles awake. The fluorescent light is harsh. It’s cold. Myron rolls over and spins around to get his feet under him.

Poor singed Blinky is dead to the world, but not actually dead, on the cot nearby.

Salted footfalls crunch over the concrete floor.

Myron looks over at the truck--the mysterious vehicle that brought them to their oddball sanctuary. Sound is coming from behind it. Two figures in Ohio Department of Transportation uniforms walk out from behind the cab. The first is a squared-off woman with a mannish gait, a bowl cut, and a pallid complexion. The other’s a shuffler. A funky Igor. The woman walks into the light and digs into her pocket for a cigarette.

Myron blanches.

Blinky stirs.

“Have you fire?” She asks.

“What?” says Myron.

“Fire.” She makes a match-striking gesture.

“Uh, no.”

She nods at Number Two, the Shuffler. He shuffles over toward Myron, who rises defensively, keeping himself between the Shuffler and Blinky.

“What do you want,” says Myron.

“Fire,” says the woman. “Also coffee I see.”

The Shuffler searches his pockets frantically.

Blinky rouses.

The shuffler shuffles to the desk, and rifles through drawers.

“We were cold,” says Myron.

Matches are secured. The shuffler makes a happy sound. Then he pulls the steaming glass pot from the coffee maker.

“My friend—“ offers Myron, but she cuts him off.

“You two. Who are you,” says the woman. She speaks in a thick German accent. She’s like the ODOT Lotte Lenya. She walks up to Myron, as the Shuffler comes over with two cups of coffee. She receives them both, then gestures to Myron.

“Black?” She says.

“I take non-dairy creamer.”

Blinky and the German lady wince. The Shuffler lights her cigarette.

“But black is great,” offers Myron, accepting the cup. Then he asks warily: “Do you work for the Sucke Brothers?”

“Nein,” says the woman, exhaling. “I vork for ze Great State of Ohio.”

“Okay,” says Myron. “But are you in the pocket of the Sucke Brothers?”

“How you say? Ve mean you no harm.”

Myron looks over at Blinky. He looks bad, but he’s increasingly functional. “I sense coolness,” says Blinky.

That is an idiotic sentence, thinks Myron.

“As in okay,” adds Blink. “I’m saying, I think it’s cool.”

“I am ze Professor Kleinenfloncker,” says the German lady, grandly. “But you can call me Professor for short.” She takes a drag on her cigarette. “And zis,” she exhales, gesturing to her weird-ass shuffling assistant, “is Alan.”

Scenes 49 & 50

2009-08-28T17:56:00.001-05:00

Certain theories claim that governments are designed to help people in valuable ways. For example, governments protect citizens from physical harm (by fighting crime or restraining wild animals) as well as emotional harm (by inventing colorful flags and rousing songs to keep people focused on the right things). In the age of the Sucke Brothers, government officials stay pretty focused on maintaining a tax base, to pay for the fire engines and the filing cabinets and the Styrofoam cups, not to mention their own salaries. But the tax base problem is a big one. The Suckes empty a place out, which tends to leave a crater where the tax base was before. Yet states and cities—and the people who govern them—have to look busy, to keep everyone from grabbing their pitchforks. The Suckes know this. So SBE, Ltd., having hoovered the place up in the first place, sends out minions from the omnivorous corn starch men to negotiate with the government people. There’s always a big conference table and a lot of liquid stool behind the scenes. These negotiations typically produce monumental headlines announcing (say) six custodial jobs, a refurbished lunch counter, randomized gift certificate awards and possibly a bronze cast of somebody’s wife. Then, in following days, word trickles out: gigantic long-term tax abatements have been granted. These will keep the company viable for the next two decades, but zero out the tax effect except for payroll deductions on the janitors. People can make it sound good. But it’s a screw job.

_______________

50

Myron explains things simply. Old friends. On vacation. A quarrel. Myron is feeling guilty, silly and duped. Professor K is looking at Blinky. “He will need ze healing.” Then she looks at Myron, and squints. “I zense someting. You. You need ze healing too.”

Myron objects. “No, I’m fine. We have to take care of Blink--”

“No,” says Professor K. “There’s someting. In here.” She makes a gesture that traces her digestive tract.

Blinky is struggling to reach for something. K pulls a postcard from the scorched jacket. She turns it over to look at it, and says, “Ach.”

Blinky struggles to speak. “I want to go there.” The Professor inhales deeply then walks over to a cabinet behind the desk, which probably stores rusty tools and sticky old plastic binders from 1978. She opens the cabinet, bends down and looks very carefully at whatever is in there. Then she pops back up with a book.

“Ze Moundbuilders!” she announces, way theatrically. “Ze Mysterious Moundbuilders!”

She starts walking around, lecturing. “Ven the settlers first came to zis country, to ze vest, past ze Alleghenies, zey discovered many many of ze eartworks. Mounds, zey called zem. Zey discovered tousands of mounds.” She goes on to explain that these mounds were made from millions of baskets of dirt, dumped on top of each other, day after day after day. The earliest of these structures were seriously BC. Conical-shaped piles. She gives a technical name that nobody remembers later.

The function of these things had to do with burying people.

“How do you know about this stuff?” asks Myron.

“I am ze professor. Ze professor of Archaeology,” she says grandly.

“Wow,” murmurs Blinky.

“Mansfield Community College,” she adds. “Ze night school gig.”

She sits down with the book in her lap. “You call me ‘Professor K.”

“Special K,” says Bllinky, smiling.

Scenes 51, 52 & 53

2009-08-28T17:54:00.001-05:00

Q is bent over a putt, calmly gauging the distance and break on a 20 footer. Long green shadows stretch over the putting surface. Beyond the green, across the road, sits an ancient bus. A bunch of high school kids with paintbrushes are milling around the bus.

Wizened old Q draws the putter head back and strikes the ball nicely. It rolls by an inch north of the cup. The golfer sighs.

The high-schoolers are stepping back from the bus and looking at their work.

Q walks off the practice green and drops the putter in his tartan bag. He looks over at the parking lot and the bus. Q calls out, “Are you people almost done?” Chirpy affirmatives come floating back.

His shock of white hair moves in the breeze. His Neapolitan golfwear flutters like a flag. And his magnificent ancient hands twitch some as he looks back toward the clubhouse.

Q picks up the bag by the handle and walks it over to the bus. There is a brief exchange, a check is written, and Q gets on the glistening powder blue seriously old bus and starts it up. The kids disperse to clean their brushes.

The ball is still sitting on the green when Q drives away.

________________________________

52

“Back in Heidelberg,” says Professor K, pouring glasses of schnapps from a grimy old decanter for Myron and Blinky, “ze Kleinenflonckers were ze big academic family.”

“So how do you end up teaching community college in the Midwest?” asks Myron.

“Thanks,” says Blinky, accepting his drink in a metal coffee cup.

“I follow my dream,” she says fiercely, producing Blinky’s postcard. “Ze mystery of ze mounds! Ze New Vorld archaeology great—how you say—riddle, puzzle, somezing.” Now she’s pacing. “And so,” she says, “ze famous Serpent Mound!” She pronounces this grandly, borderline like a Bond villain. “Known to every school child in ze state.

But zis,” she goes on, “is ze small potatoes, as you say. Ze big stuff is up ze plateau.”

Blinky’s mouth slips open a little.

Professor Kleinenfloncker, once of Heildelberg now of Mechanicsburg, just north of Interstate 70, explains that “ze most significant” mounds get built between 100 BC and 500 AD. She’s going on about astronomy and watersheds and other science stuff.

“Ze mounds were ceremonial enclosures. Very big. Built of earten valls, and based on ze geometrical figures.”

She takes out a piece of paper and scribbles some mappy-looking things.

“Squares, circles, ochhtagons.”

She gestures to her drawings. They look like geometry problems mated with sentence diagrams.

Creepy old Alan is hunched over everybody else, trying to get a view. His nose is all drippy. Irritated, Myron hands him a box of Kleenex.

__________________

53

Ask anybody about major prehistoric activity in the New World, and they’ll tell you about the Mayans and Aztecs. The Incas, if they remember South America. Twenty-to-one they won’t know jack about the Hopewell, who were running around the Ohio Valley a hundred years before Jesus does the wine trick at the wedding and later the bit with the fish sandwiches.

Special K has a junior research library in her home-base salt dome. The books in it, which are mostly non-kooky ones, would tell you this about the Hopewell: as a group of people, it seems like they hung out in Southern and South Central Ohio, with a big center of action in present-day Chillicothe, and other sites in Newark, Portsmouth, and Marietta. In each of these places, they build a big ceremonial structure on a shelf next to a river. Where they do who knows what, probably dances, and funerals for sure.

The Hopewell got their name from a farmer, Mordecai Hopewell, who owned the land where the first mounds were dug up. (They put on a big show of mound stuff at the Chicago Exposition in 1893.) The Hopewell constructed gigantic enclosures out of dirt. For example, the Newark Earthworks, the biggest piece of architecture made with dirt ever, anywhere, covered four miles from end to end. They built embankments, or like raised berms, from 6 to 15 or so feet tall. Viewed from above, the embankments look like line drawings made out sod. There are smaller mounds inside that look like dots or points.

The lines form very regular shapes. There’s a guy who says that where the angles of these things intersect, adjusting for like a date of 250 AD, you can find astronomical alignments.

Nobody knows any of this stuff because in the 19th century, all the settlers wanted land to farm on, and the new towns wanted good positions above the rivers. So they started digging them all up. Like they weren’t there at all. The Smithsonian freaks out and sends out two guys named Squier and Davis to survey these things before the mysterious Empire of the Moundbuilders is totally wiped out. This is in 1848. The report sits in a drawer.

Scene 54

2009-08-28T17:52:00.001-05:00

Professor Kleinenfloncker has sketched a problem. “So I ask you: truly, who built the eartworks?”

Myron says, “Aliens, of course.” Creepy old Alan laughs out loud, and schnapps flies out his nose.

“You are not funny,” says Professor K.

“The Indians built them,” offers Blinky. He gestures at the drawings. “Like, prehistoric Mohicans.” He winces.

“Take it easy, Blink,” says Myron.

“Zat is ze conventional explanation.” Professor K stresses the word ‘conventional’ like she thinks idiots believe this. “Ze Europeans asked ze natives who built ze mounds. Ze natives did not know, but said zey tought it vas zeir ancestors did.” She pauses dramatically, like she’s about to release major new information. “But ze natives. Zey are stupid.”

“Then who did build them?” asks Myron.

“Ze Jews,” says the Professor. “Ze lost tribe!”

“You’re crazy,” says Myron.

“No, no, ze lost Tribe of Eezakhhar.”

“How did they get here then?” demands Myron.

“Ze land bridge, how else! Zey valked from Siberia to Alaska.”

There’s a noise outside. Blinky’s eyes get big. “Somebody should be watching the door,” barks Myron, and strides toward it. Then the silhouetted figure of Little Turtle appears against the night sky. He passes into the light.

“How is the skinny man,” asks the Indian.

“I’m okay,” says Blinky. “Come on in.”

“You’re lucky,” Little Turtle says. “That was a big boom. A big fire.”

“Yeah, I know,” replies Blinky.

Little Turtle notices the drawings and the postcard.

Professor K looks over at Alan.

“These are sacred places,” says the Indian. “You know the ancestral sites. How.”

K rolls her eyes theatrically. Dumb Indian!

Blinky wonders out loud. “You’re not really an actor, are you?”

“No,” says Little Turtle. “I am not.” He says this while looking at the drawings. Now he looks up at Blinky. “I am a prisoner.”

“Of what,” says Myron.

“Of my own decisions.”

Everybody kind of shuffles around for a second. Like, what’s this guy’s deal? Not Blinky.

“What about the other guy?”

“He is also a prisoner.”

“He saved my life,” says Blinky.

Alan has inched into the light “What happens at these sites?” he asks.

“They are places of replenishment. Of healing,” he says. “The magic is strong in them.”

“Which,” asks Alan, seeming totally Peter Lorre and henchman-like, “is the most potent?”

“There,” says Little Turtle. He points to a diagram of a circle connected to an octagon shape. “Near Flint Ridge. On Raccoon Creek. A doorway to the upperworld.”

Alan looks like he’s gonna pee. He steps back out of view. There’s a weird squishy noise.

Myron’s flipping out. The professor walks over to the bookshelf.

Alan steps back to the table, wiping his nose.

The Professor pulls an old book off the shelf. It’s filled with surveyors’ drawings of Indian mounds. She opens it to a drawing of the earthwork that Little Turtle mentioned. It’s marked Octagon Works. Licking County, Ohio. “Ze healing is good here. Ze native is correct.” She turns to Myron. “You must take your friend zere. It vill help vit ze fire wounds.”

A helicopter passes by outside. It sounds angry.

“I vill give you vat you need, ze books, ze maps. But now you must rest for ze short time.” Professor K edges Myron toward a cot behind the desk. In her mannish way, she is almost tender with him. He does not resist.

“A little nap can’t hurt, can it.” As Professor K turns to Blinky, Myron adds, “Get some sleep, Blink.

“Wake us before dawn,” he instructs, as Little Turtle slips out, unobserved. The last image Myron sees before his eyes close is the curious figure of Alan, wiping his face with a rag.

Scene 55

2009-08-28T17:51:00.000-05:00

In a later chapter of his book, Darryl poses three crucial questions: From where have the Octoheads traveled? Why have they come to Earth, of all places? And what are they doing here now, instead of say, during the Age of Steam Power?

Some think the Octos are likely to have popped into our galaxy from another one, via a space time tube thing commonly known as a wormhole. Alternatively, it’s possible they’re from our neighborhood. Spores from earth could have landed on moons in the outer solar system, most likely Jupiter’s, and combined with elements there to create a new kind of life form that runs on methane. The author is careful to insist that the Jovian Methane-Pod Thesis is an unproven thing.

Wherever they come from, the Octos must be fleeing bad developments on their home world. Things have changed, resources are scarce, maybe a civil war or a drug crisis or something like that. It’s negative energy, that’s for sure. There could be a reproductive problem. Possibly the Octo Queen is having a hard time laying eggs.

For the purposes of discussion, the Octos have two key objectives here on Earth: 1) They need a place to rest. To recover from the negative energy, whatever it is, and 2) Real Estate. The Octos are looking to buy. Plus, to exterminate and/or enslave.

Scenes 56 & 57

2009-08-28T17:50:00.001-05:00

The silhouetted figures of Mishiekonga and General Mad Anthony Wayne can scarcely be made out against the navy-colored eastern sky. Dawn is still a concept. They huddle briefly, then Wayne gestures and wanders off. Little Turtle remains fixed, calm, turned toward the rumor of the sun. They remain there, along the ridge above I-70, until the angry buzzing of the last copter has been replaced by whippoorwill song, and the traffic has begun to pick up. Wayne lights a candle and produces a rolled sheet of paper from his coat. The two of them study the unfurled sheet. Wayne points and slashes with his finger. He’s a bossy guy. But Mishiekonga is unfazed.

_______________

57

Professor K ensures that Myron and Blinky are up well before dawn. They load up the truck with archaeology texts, nineteenth-century maps, some obscure German decoder thing, and a case of Gatorade. Before they get in the vehicle, the professor fusses over Blinky’s bandages. She looks at the two of them, narrows her eyes, and says, “Zis is a very important ting you do. Ze big forces. Zey are converging.” They both nod.

Their mission has been spelled out. They’re heading for Newark, Ohio, to the site of a first century earthwork that Little Turtle has identified as imbued with magical power. Cosmic action is anticipated.

For the record, Newark is pronounced “Nerk.”

Myron gets behind the wheel. They rumble out of the Transportation Department complex and merge with eastbound traffic on Interstate 70, headed toward Columbus. Nerk is on the far side, another hour past.

They stop at a trucker’s place on the way there, to get some breakfast. Myron eats an enormous platter of food. Blinky drinks coffee and reads. He’s looking at one of the books that Professor K sent along.

“I don’t get it,” says Blinky. “There isn’t anything here about the lost tribes of Israel.”

“Of course there isn’t, Blinky,” answers Myron through a mouthful of egg. He finishes chewing and says, “I did not want to get into it with our expert the fraulein. But she’s a crackpot.” Blinky frowns.

“Whoa,” he avers.

“Blinky. The land bridge across the Behring Strait was formed during the Ice Age. Approximately 15,000 years ago.”

“And?” says Blinky.

“Remember Moses? And the Egyptians? Pharoah and the plagues?”

“What’s your point?”

“Think. Do you remember any mastodons in Egypt?”

Blinky is puzzled.

“Any saber-toothed tigers?”

The gears are grinding.

“Or giant sloths? No, you don’t remember any, do you. Here’s why. The Ice Age comes before that. Before the Egyptians, and before the Israelites. In order for the lost twelfth tribe of Israel to build the Indian Mounds, they would have to have crossed the frozen Behring Strait. Except they do not exist 15,000 years ago! Not possible.”

Blinky is unconvinced.

“Okay,” says Myron. “How do the Israelites get here, Blinky.”

“How else?” says Blinky, like the answer is obvious.

Myron sighs. “Spaceships,” he says.

“You can’t prove me wrong! Can you?”

“You can’t prove a negative. You can prove a positive. You can prove gravity.”

Scene 58

2009-08-28T17:49:00.001-05:00

Professor Kleinenfloncker is nursing the last of her schnapps, speaking wistfully of her lost youth in the Rhineland. Perhaps, she wonders aloud, it would have been best if she had selected a discipline or an area of research “wit more connection to ze future.” Maybe lasers, or nanotechnology, or possibly Atlantis. She looks over her upturned crystal goblet at Alan, who’s got a funny expression on his face. He’s suddenly seeming way less deferential. His upper lip is sweating like crazy. “I disagree, professor,” he announces weirdly. “You chose well. Your research drew me to you.” He leans forward melodramatically. “And you have been very helpful to us.”

His face is quivering.

Professor K recoils. “Vat do you mean?”

Alan laughs in a new kind of gurgle.

“Vat is wrong vit you—“

His expression disappears into a undulating viscous mass in the moments before his tentacles shoot across the table. They make a sound like jello on the move, but snap like rubber whips. They grip her in a millisecond and yank her face into his heinous, beaky mouth. The scream is barely underway before her head bones go khunhhhk, like a hard-boiled egg on the floor.

PART FOUR Scene 59

2009-08-27T15:58:00.003-05:00

“I’m taking the outer belt,” says Myron. It’s morning now. Blinky is still studying the Hopewell texts. Myron steers the vehicle onto a highway that circles Columbus, Ohio. It’s loud in the cab.

“It says here,” says Blinky, “that these mounds were like portals.”

“Portals?”

“If you watched even a little science fiction, this would be easier.”

Blinky points at the illustration of the earthwork. “You remember what this thing looks like? It’s got a circular side, and a little connector piece, and then an octagonal part over here. They call them enclosures. This says that the circular end was like a model of the earth. And the octagon was meant to be a model of the sky.”

“They’re guessing,” says Myron.

“No, this is a real archaeologist. I understand about 70 percent of this.” Blinky turns back a few pages. “This is about burial practices. They would make a little house--they call it a “charnel house”--and they’d take the dead guy, and they’d cremate him. Then they’d pile a bunch of dirt on the house, and make a mound.” Blinky pages back to the drawing, and points to it. “The charnel mounds are inside the big circular thing. See? Inside this enclosure is a special area. It’s the model.”

“Of the sky.”

“No. The round part symbolizes the earth. Which is why these little burial mounds are there. At least I think so.”

“So if the circular part is supposed to be the earth,” ask Myron, “then how does the octagonal part relate to the sky?”

“Somehow,” answers Blinky, reading, “it’s aimed at the moon.”

“Aimed at the moon. The moon moves around.”

“So maybe it’s a calendar? Okay, it says that the moon comes up in different spots along the horizon, on a 19-year cycle.” Blinky looks up. “Did you know that?”

“No,” says Myron. “I didn’t.”

“So the mounds are aligned with the moonrise at different points of the cycle, or something to that effect. Bottom line, the points on the octagon relate to some aspect of the moon.”

He closes the book.

“Basically, it’s astronomical.”

“Stonehenge.”

“More or less.”

Myron adds, “More dirt, less rocks.”

Blinky chuckles.

Morning sun is streaming into the cab.

“Okay,” continues Myron, curious, “go back to the portal concept.”

Blinky opens the book back up and flips around for a minute. “Alright,” he says, “here it is. The idea is that when the dead guy gets burned in his charnel house, his soul is released. Remember, this is the circle enclosure, the Earth side of things. So the smoke from the fire floats up with the soul in it. Through the circle. Which is, I gather, sort of like the “hole in the world” that Little Turtle mentioned.”

Blinky reads on.

“So then, when the soul in the smoke travels up in the atmosphere, he passes into like the domain of the moon. He’s over in the octagon then, and I guess he sort of looks down at the diagram, or maybe it’s a map. Supposedly the moon thing tells him where to go.”

“Which is where.”

“I don’t know. You’d have to be dead to know that.”

The rumbling sound in the cab seems to get louder in the silence that follows.

“Maybe,” says Myron, “your friend Tom is up there.”

“I hope so,” says Blinky. “I just hope he takes his time and figures it out.”

Scene 60

2009-08-27T15:58:00.001-05:00

Long described as a microcosm of the nation as a whole, the State of Ohio developed an economy based on many industries: agriculture, manufacturing, retail, professional football, a variety of things. In a virtual tie with Iowa and Brooklyn as the fictional home of the greatest number of television and movie characters in American entertainment history, Ohio serves as a representative geographical unit of everyday life. But its alleged super-normality masks certain innovations, including the Soap Box Derby and an enlightened approach to archaeology. Unlike many states in the Union, which watched, indifferent, even bored, as mound-littered sites of prehistoric significance were given up to the plow, Ohio develops a more flexible attitude. Here’s how it works: if an archaeological site deserves preservation, the land can be leased to a somebody with a plan for wringing a dime or two out of it in the meantime. This produces Moundbuilder Christmas tree farms, Go-Kart tracks, and ice rinks. It works great!

Scene 61

2009-08-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

Myron and Blinky rumble on through to Nerk, where—across from a Burger chain and a high-speed oil change place—they stumble onto a fairground with a gigantic circular trough in it. The trough, which is pretty wide and maybe 6 feet deep, runs up on the far side to a height of approximately 12 to 14 feet above ground level. That is, from nadir to zenith we’re talking 20 feet of dirt wall. The trough inscribes a perfect circle maybe half a mile across. The place is highlighted on the map, which prods Myron to turn in. But only later will Myron recognize that this enormous circular ditch is one of the last surviving elements of the Octagon Earthworks complex. As things stand, they’re practically on top of their ultimate destination, an elaborate set of prehistoric embankments, what Little Turtle identified as an ancient portal to the world beyond.

They park the truck in the lot by a small cinder block building with a darkened glass door. Signs suggest it may contain a display of Indian mound culture stuff. A diorama. Myron steps down from the cab to have a look, but discovers that the place is closed. A sign made with a Sharpie announces that the museum-lette is only open between Memorial Day and Labor Day. “Crap,” says Myron.

He’s peering through the window to get a look at the diorama. Blinky gets out and hobbles over to join him. Blinky’s wondering if and how the museum people expect to show Mishiekonga’s ancestors with JC Penney mannequins.

The reflection is so bad on the glass door that they can’t really make out the dark scene beyond it. Eyes wide, they strain to focus on the far side of the pane, to peer into the exhilarating murk of native prehistory. But no dice. Mostly they see the dumbass commercial landscape reflected behind them. Blinky gives up and wanders back toward the truck just as Myron, pupils gaping, sees a Hummer drive up behind them in the reflection. It parks next to the salt truck.

Before Myron has begun to absorb what he is seeing, six guys get out of the Hummer and begin to move on Blinky. Creep-out of all creep-outs, ever, each of the six guys has an Octo-head. They are not even bothering to conceal them, like the vile Alan, or the people fighting over the radio. Myron spins around in horror.

The Octos operate as a group. Two of them swing wide, two walk straight, and two flank the middle guys. Blinky is backing up, moving toward the side of the truck. He looks dazed and scared. The Octos are bearing down on him.

“Myron—“ he says thinly.

Myron’s beginning to hyperventilate. But he does not freeze. Looking around, he spies a few tools left by the maintenance shed next to the diorama thing.

“Okay, Blink,” says Myron, trying to think ahead. He picks up a shovel, clenches his jaw, and skips like a bowler, winding up into a diagonal uppercut. As the Octos close, Myron brings the shovel across as hard as he can, bent side down, smashing it into one of the middle guys—reasoning in a vestigial, tribal sort of way that the middle squid is probably the leader. But the shovel doesn’t really smash or crack anything, it just makes a wet sound and slides off.

“Myron!” Blinky screams. They are touching him now. Their tentacles are sliding over his skin.

Myron grabs a heavy rake from the tool pile and whips it around over his head straight down on top of a second guy. The tines on the rake go ploooosh into the guy’s funky gelatinous head, and puncture it. Gooey stuff comes out, and he buckles then goes down. Myron jerks the rake out of his head and yanks it back to wind up again, as two of them on him. He gets an incomplete swing in before one of them reaches a tentacle up to block the rake, but he’s got enough force behind it to make a glancing strike on the guy’s face. He takes out a googly eye and pops through the skin or rubber or whatever that crap is, and number 2 goes down, damaged but not dead.

Blinky, screaming, has scrambled free. Winding up again, Myron spins like a ninja to a position behind the truck. He is bellowing at the Octos to come at him. One stays in pursuit of Blinky, but Myron picks up a rock in the parking lot and fires it hard, thwocking and planting in Octo #4’s nasty bulbous head. This angers him, and he, too, turns toward Myron. Unaccustomed to situations of this kind, Myron relies on memories from his youth. He swings the rake provocatively. “Come on squids! You squid pussies!” The Octos raise tentacles, sort of like multiple cobras. “That’s right,” says Myron, “I called you a pussy!”

Blinky, gasping, scrambles up on the steps of the ODOT vehicle.

All the Octos are advancing on Myron now. He watches them come toward him against the backdrop of the salt truck, and suddenly an idea comes to him. “Blinky!” he shouts.

“Yeah!”

Myron digs in his pocket. Success!

“Heads up!” he calls, jingling the truck keys.

Myron takes a step back and throws the keys over outstretched tentacles to Blinky. “Blink,” barks Myron, “I think a squid is kind of like a slug. You know what I mean? Like a slug!”

Blinky does a double-take.

“I think,” says Myron, drawing on universal boyhood knowledge, the pitch of his voice rising as sucker-covered appendages begin to envelop him, “a slug treatment would be a really good idea!”

Blinky shouts like a cowboy, jams the key in the ignition and flips a switch. Then wonnnnnng--there’s the sound of hydraulics groaning, the bed goes up, the load shifts, the gate flaps open, and about a ton and a half of salt spills out on the ground and all over Myron and the Octos. Bam, just as Myron gets his first terrifying glimpse of a beaky Octo-mouth ready to snap his facial bones, his adversaries are screaming and writhing as the salt reacts on their gloopy, viscous funky skin, and they melt into gray marshmallows. Like salt on a slug.

Scenes 62 & 63

2009-08-27T15:55:00.001-05:00

Mad Anthony Wayne has got his sword out. He’s listening closely from an awkward crouch. Wayne half expects somebody’s dog to come tearing around the recycled plastic outdoor play set and crash into the dogwoods, among which he’s stopped to get his bearings. But the beast never comes. After a minute he steps out of the trees and slips around an air conditioning unit into a sideyard. The turf slopes down to the street, giving a view of Heathermoss Glen Trail on its looping route through the new Mansard Woods subdivision. Wayne adjusts his hat, then drinks in the view of the street spread out before him. The quickest glance tells him: bad period for domestic architecture. Fortresses costumed like cottages line the street. Ponderous loads of brick bear down on cheap squat entryways with fake multi-pane windows. The proportions have been worked out by a badger. Wayne looks beyond the allotment to the commercial strip on Muskingum Avenue, and on to the purple curtain of leafless trees arrayed as a backdrop half a mile off.

He knows this terrain.

In 1793 Wayne leads a contingent of troops through these very hills, toward Fort Recovery further west. The Shawnee chief Blue Jacket knows he’s coming. By this time, Little Turtle has seen the writing on the wall, and forecast the end of the Confederacy. But Blue Jacket disagrees. He figures that killing off Wayne will put the scare back in the United States, and buy the Indians more time. So Blue Jacket and his warriors are hiding in among the folds of present-day Muskingum Plaza and Mansard Woods. They trick the scouts that Wayne sends on ahead, and are there waiting when the first detachments come through.

Wayne looks across at the minivans and the car wash place and the Higgins Family Restaurant, squinting at the invisible gravesite. Underneath all that concrete and asphalt the ground remembers the blood that dampened it. But the people here are oblivious. Because a veneer of settlement has been troweled over what Wayne knows to be there—corpses, both Yankee and Indian. Under the salad bar, over by the tow truck, along the fronts of these massive, ugly houses, you can find the dessicated fruit of Blue Jacket’s ambush and Mad Anthony’s counter-assault. Wayne knows their names—at least the American ones—but the people in the happy sedans with stickers about honor students do not. They are clueless to the war. But they stay busy anyway. They’re improving their positions. Managing contacts. Transferring funds. That sort of thing. They navigate their various hollows, heathers, dales and glens, where the Sucke Brothers—so far, yet a rumor here—are coiled like snakes.

History’s a mute pile of stacked shit pressed together. And every layer smells.

Wayne disinters a bugler named Connolly from under the car wash. Wayne cleans him up, then sets him to work summoning the rest of the group. “There’s work to do, Connolly! Rouse the troops, for God’s sake!”

_______________

63

Blinky and Myron are scrubbing themselves in the men’s restroom at a rest area south of Newark. After melting the Octo-heads, they get back in the truck and drive as fast as they possibly can away, anywhere away, to scrape their skin clean of tentacle-woo. If they’d had wire brushes they’d be by every layer of skin by now, tearing at naked flesh. Intermittently they shout and swear to cleanse their minds, too. Finally they calm themselves enough to actually converse. Blinky smiles a little and compliments his friend. “I think we are definitely adjusting your spirit animal.”

Myron just makes a weary, appreciative sound.

“No question,” continues Blinky, who’s a little embarrassed about his panicky response to being accosted by 48 tentacles, back at the diorama location. “You have totally gone all the way over to buck now. The beaver is a thing of the past.

“Buck all the way, baby.”

Myron pats Blinky’s shoulder. They’re both red from all the rubbing and scrubbing.
“Thank you,” says Blinky.

“That was so freaky.” He shudders a deep one.

Privately Blinky worries he’s been implanted with an Alien device. In the first frightening moments of his embrace by tentacled tourists from another world, Blinky may in fact have suffered a microscopic skin violation. Just before Myron planted a rake in his head, Octo #2 strained to insert the dread cephalopod confabulator, an item unimagined even by the prescient Darryl of suburban California.

Scene 64

2009-08-27T15:53:00.001-05:00

Having managed to position themselves on the seriously bad side of 1) a diabolical corporate menace, 2) a face-sucking interstellar landing party, and 3) the Ohio Department of Transportation, Myron and Blinky are back in the now-empty stolen salt truck. They’ve decided to head off on county roads for a while, looking to confuse and/or disorient the bad guys before ditching the vehicle and commandeering another. Their objective remains unchanged: to duck back into Metropolitan Newark, to locate the celebrated Hopewellian Octagon Earthworks.

Myron is following a two-lane highway past a place with 600 trailer hookups toward what looks like a flea market or a carnival. They can see a big yellow tent in the distance, and people streaming toward it like ants going to their little hill. It looks like a big deal. And maybe a good place to get lost before the copters and the cigar-shaped squid carriers close in.

As Myron makes the turn, he looks in the rear view mirror and sees Wayne and Little Turtle swinging in behind them. In a cement truck. Little Turtle is driving. Wayne, riding shotgun, has a rifle beside him.

Myron and Blinky see a sign by the road leading to the goings-on at the tent. It says:

EBENEEZER COLFAX.
LIBERTY, TRUTH, HEALTHY LIVING
SUPPLEMENTS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

A line of vehicles is crawling into a fairgrounds area. They’re almost at a stop. Suddenly Myron hears that distant whobb whobb whobb. Blinky turns stiffly and points out a helicopter, swinging low over the horizon half a mile off. “They’re over there,” Blinky says. Myron is looking at Blinky’s arm, which has begun to take on a grayish cast.

Myron exhales.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asks, worried.

“I can’t tell,” answers Blinky. “I feel different, but I don’t know how to describe it.”

Myron looks at him.

“I’m fine,” says Blinky. “Really.”

“Okay,” says Myron. “I think it’s time to ditch the truck,” He pulls over into the grass on the side of the road. “Blinky,” he says, “we gotta get out. We gotta mix into the crowd.” Blinky nods grimly. Myron kills the ignition.

They get out of the truck. Wayne has opened the passenger door of the cement truck. He’s waving his tricorner hat, an apparent blessing of Myron’s plan. Little Turtle has gotten out a pair of opera glasses.

Proceeding on foot, Blinky and Myron pass through an outer ring of candy and sausage vendors. They encounter people selling tee shirts and cassette recordings. Large, thick people lumber along next to them. Everyone’s pressing toward the large yellow tent, the center of activity. Soon Blinky and Myron can hear an amplified voice. It’s a jabbering sound, not understandable, but musical and creepily appealing.

On walks the crowd. They pass a row of portable toilets and a haphazard collection of parked cars. There’s a bank of people selling Colfax mineral water. “With cleansing ingredients,” says one. “Helps speed metabolism!” People keep advancing on the tent. Finally the crowd bunches up and slows down. Now the voice attaches to a colorful figure in striped pants with a headset and a snakelike posture. He’s ranting. They recognize the voice from the radio.

“That’s Mr. Colfax,” whispers Blinky.

“I’m asking you, in all honesty,” declares the figure, gesturing plaintively, “do you think that Justice--that grand draped lady with the scales. . .” He pantomines the gesture of holding something up. “Do you think that Justice lives here today? Do you think that she dwells in this magnificent country?

“I don’t. My sources are telling me, and they’re reliable, that Justice has been slipping away from federal courthouses all around this great nation. Sneaking off under cover of darkness. In shame, people, in shame. Gone into hiding. Why? She is hoping against hope that no one will associate her good name with the stream—the torrent, the roiling river—of crime that has been spilling down from those same courthouses. Crime and corruption and ever greater concentrations of power, spilling down. Under the name of the public good.”

An assistant places a bottled water on a stand next to Colfax, who unscrews the cap and takes a swig in a single motion.

“Oh, that tastes good. Oh, Jim Dandy it does. The supplements in that clean fresh beverage, they fortify me, for the struggle.”

He returns the bottle to the assistant. The helicopter skirts along the edge of the fairgrounds, 200 feet up. A security man onstage is watching through binoculars.

“Now, as I was saying, before I cleansed my palette and girded my loins, I was saying that Justice has gone into hiding. She is trembling in the wine cellar. And why does she tremble?” Colfax raises his hand to the sky, his pants billowing in the wind. “Why? Because the poor grand dame of America is in fear for her life.

“And she’s right to be!”

The crowd shouts its assent. “They’re up there, aren’t they?” continues Colfax, “The Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms, and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and probably a few gutless traffic reporters along for the ride, people who are paid to keep us all in a permanent state of mental gridlock. Which is only part--a single facet--of a larger plan, which also includes pumping radon into peoples’ homes, and the widespread use of dangerous food additives--”

Myron turns to Blinky. “You want a hot dog?”

“—a plot which I will outline in a moment.” continues Colfax. “But let’s keep an eye on the fact the whole project is sustained by frippified fops and supporters of federal mandates, and people who think more highly of trees than they do of you! For the love of God!”

“Blinky,” says Myron, “I’m worried about you. You gotta eat.”

“These minions of the intrusive state that flutter around us, they do not know the mind of the people, do they!

“No!” shouts the crowd.

“They do not know who they’re messing with!”

“No!” comes the response.

“Frozen yogurt?” says Myron, raising his voice over the commotion. “Nachos?”

“These are the very same people who, joined by shadowy figures in the French government--yes!--are actively planning to replace our entire native population with millions of Burmese peasants!”

Blinky is rapt. Myron wanders over to a stand where another guy in striped pants is selling E. Colfax mineral water with B6 complex.

“And why would they want these people here?” thunders the libertarian dietetic prophet. Myron buys a bottled water and brings it back to Blinky.

“Drink this,” says Myron.

“Because they can’t read warning labels, the pitiable bastards, anymore than they can read Madison and Jefferson!”

Blinky takes the water but doesn’t open it.

He’s preoccupied.

“We must face facts, people,” Colfax says to the crowd.

“Myron,” says Blinky.

But Myron doesn’t hear him. Myron is watching the security detail behind the stage.

“Our politics has been poisoned. And we are vulnerable to this poison precisely because our food supply and our water and the whole environment we operate in, these have also been poisoned!”

Myron notices that the security guys with the binoculars are not tracking the helicopters anymore. They’re scanning the crowd.

“Oh, crap.”

“By the same people! These toxins sap us! In our weakened state, we cannot mount a response to this grave challenge to our liberty!”

“Myron,” says Blinky, a little louder and a little more anxiously.

One of the guys with binoculars is scanning their part of the crowd. He stops abruptly, then focuses.

“What are we supposed to do, you ask?”

He’s seen something.

Myron begins to push Blinky behind a sales booth.

“This is the question that’s troubled me, friends.”

It’s too late. The security guy has spotted Blinky. Now he’s pointing, and the others are beginning to jump down off the back of the stage.

“As a patriot, I ask myself,” continues Colfax, “what am I to do? Well, I have plunged myself into my work. And I have produced, after long reflection and longer effort,”

Myron grabs the bottled water from his friend’s hand. In tiny letters, along the bottom of the label, it says: E. Colfax is a registered trademark of SBE, Ltd.

“--I have produced a series of NEW products designed to decontaminate our republic, by first ridding ourselves of the toxins used to weaken us!”

“It’s a front! The guy’s a Sucke!” exclaims Myron.

“Myron!” shouts Blinky, grabbing him by the arms.

“What?!” Myron shouts back.

“I can see them!” Blinky’s weird feeling has morphed into a perception. He knows which people in the crowd are Aliens. Their octoheads are tucked inside fake faces.

“Octos!” he shouts.

“Which ones?” demands Myron. Blinky takes off running. He darts through the crowd like a maniac, stomping toes every fifth step or so, kicking somebody in the shin. He nails the guy who sold Myron the water, and a biker chick, and a guy who looks like an engineer. Each one of them cries out in sudden pain, and out pops an Octohead. People in the crowd are freaking. Total chaos.

Interlocking multi-layered conspiracies of domination are breaking out into the open like a runaway biology project. The Sucke Brothers have manufactured a fake populist opposition which—true to form—also manages to produce income. But seems like the Suckes may have been blind to the underground advance of the Octos, whose thirst for domination goes totally past accounting. In any case, the shit is hitting the fan. Indeed, the whole pace of things, possibly including the rotation of the Earth, has begun to accelerate.

Blinky and Myron are sprinting toward the RV and truck parking. Myron is flipping through mental options in his brain, but all the cards are blank. Realistically speaking, odds are they’re screwed. Breathing hard, Myron scans the landscape. The cement truck is nowhere to be seen. “Damn,” breathes Myron. He looks back over his shoulder and sees that the Octos and Sucke Brothers security people are mostly occupied with each other, except for like a squad of guys in pinstriped suits and transistor radios. They are booking along behind, gaining ground, when several of them shudder and go down. Arrows to the chest.

Little Turtle has ceased to fuck around.

A powder blue-colored bus pulls up alongside Blinky. The door opens, and there’s an old guy driving the vehicle with a thick shock of white hair. “Get in the God damn bus!” he’s shouting. “Myron! Get in the God damn bus!” Myron looks at the side of the bus. It reads, “Quinn Transport: Where You Want to Go.”

“Q!” shouts Myron, and pushes Blinky into the bus.

Scene 65

2009-08-27T15:52:00.001-05:00

Most people accept that Aliens come in two basic categories: 1) bloodthirsty colonizers, and 2) empathic bulb-skulls. Members of the first group do not conceal their hostile natures, because the superior firepower they weild would soon render us toast. The second group tends to be ugly in the conventional senses of the word. They rely on our affection for the underdog and knowledge of motion pictures to make the transition from heinous-looking space beast to loveable companion.

Due to the poor behavior of certain advance agents of the Octo Empire, some have concluded—possibly erroneously—that the Octos fall in Category 1. And yet—a moment’s reflection tells us that most groups include admirable individuals as well as creepy losers. Really, who can say on the basis of available evidence whether the action of Alan, vanquisher of Professor K, betrays the hostile intentions of his race, or merely his own depravity? The jury’s out, despite strong feelings to the contrary articulated by Darryl in drafts of a direct mail campaign intended for subscribers of certain magazines.

Meanwhile the microscopic cephalopod confabulator is chugging along through Blinky’s bloodstream toward its new home in his thyroid gland. The grayish cast of his skin tracks the progress of the device. Soon, when the confabulator sets up shop at Blinky HQ, a splotchy pattern will appear, optic masses will go certifiably googly, and excess oils will begin to flow. Before long, Blinky will have become a rubberized version of himself. But to what end?

As the Quinn Transport flagship barrels down County Road 9, Blinky has begun to experience strange new sensations, best termed empathetic episodes of perception, especially in realms of invertebrate biology. Despite the apparent tactical error of having provided a human with Octo-detection powers back at Colfax Carnival, these eight-limbed space travelers may—may—be in the process of appealing to Blinky’s generous nature, so as to establish themselves—albeit via galactic species rape—in Alien Category 2. Truthfully or not.

Scene 66

2009-08-27T15:51:00.001-05:00

Q had been unwilling to give up all aspects of his retired life. He bought the bus for a song and quickly built a business chartering the thing out, with an emphasis on golf tours to very nice but reasonably priced public courses in the Eastern half of the United States. He got to play several times a week, made decent money, and put himself in a position to monitor the ongoing mass swindle being executed by SBE, Ltd. He’d gotten a tip about an unusual course in the general Columbus, Ohio area and had driven up from his last charter stop to have a look.

Now Q is barking at his former employee. “What in the hell are you doing here, Myron? One minute I’m driving along trying to find Route 13, the next I’m mixed in with a crowd of crazy bastards at some drug-oriented event. Then I look over and it’s you, running for your life!”

“It’s hard to explain,” says Myron by way of understatement.

But he gives it a whirl. The basic rundown, post-O P & Q to now. Perfidy, time travel, consuming fire, paranormal crap.

“I’ll be damned,” remarks Q. “You went and got yourself a spine, Myron.” He grins his old grin.

Myron swells and almost pops in a burst of pride and common-feeling. Q—the sole surviving Homeric Man of the postwar period—approves!

“So what do you say,” offers Q, “let’s go make more trouble for those swindling bastards.” Myron whoops in agreement. Exhausted but totally giddy, he stumbles his way toward the back of the bus. “I always knew that Colfax character was a corrupt sonofabitch,” barks Q over the sound of the bus. “I never liked his show.”

Blinky is curled up in a seat in the back.

Myron sits down in the row in front of him as Q barrels on.

Blinky rolls over and says, “I feel super weird.”

Based on your appearance, thinks Myron, I’m not surprised! Blinky looks oily. And he’s a funny color.

“Jesus,” says Myron.

“I think maybe the Octos gave me a shot or something.”

Myron squats down close to him. They do not touch.

“Something’s happening to me.”

Myron nods.

“They’re lost,” says Blinky. “They’re looking for a way out.”

Myron takes this in.

“Who,” he says.

Blinky makes a weak gesture to himself, as if to say, who do you think?

“Can I get you anything?” asks Myron. “You want some Gatorade?”

Blinky shakes his head. “Maybe some clams. Or small fish.”

“Clams? Really? Like fried clams?”

“No,” says Blinky. “Live ones. In a bucket of water.”

Suddenly the bus slows down. Q shouts toward the rear, “Is this your Indian? Up here on the right?” Dazed and nauseous, Myron turns away from Blinky and peers outside. Sure enough, Little Turtle has materialized up ahead, at a roadside stand marked “Indian Corn.”

“Pick him up!” hollers Myron.

Scene 67

2009-08-27T15:50:00.000-05:00

Minutes later, Quinn’s Transport pulls up in front of major surviving elements of the Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, which, as it turns out, shares a mailing address and more with Moundbuilders Country Club. Historians will later observe that the economic magic worked by Cultural Legacy Department bureaucrats in Columbus hit a true high point here in Newark, assisted by the endless innovations of SBE, Ltd.

Myron’s mouth drops open. Little Turtle looks like he may puke all over the bus.

“So this is it!” says Q.

Myron puts his hand on the Indian’s back and guides him out of the bus. Q follows.

Beyond the asphalt parking lot, grassy embankments spread out in both directions. The outlines of the Hopewell complex can be made out, but only partly, due to the scale of the thing. It’s vast. But the mounds and low walls aren’t the most striking thing about the crazy vista confronting Myron, Little Turtle, and Q. The golf holes are. And the carts and flags and the landscaped flowers and fake colonial-looking clubhouse and the maintenance buildings. An 18 hole arrangement has been stretched over and across a two-thousand year old ceremonial ground. Like a cultural dry-erase board used with the wrong markers. A landscape palimpsest. The effect is one of cosmic miniature golf, except they have 500-yard par fives. Poor golfers in bright pants are hacking their way across embankments, around dead guys in buried charnel houses, oblivious, but graciously giving each other mulligans like there’s no tomorrow.

“I sure as hell hope they replace their divots,” says Q, whose instantaneous excitement has been tempered by the look of devastation on Little Turtle’s face.

“That’s horrendous,” offers Myron.

“But this is a sacred place,” observes Little Turtle, in a tone of voice that communicates a sentiment on the order of: so why don’t you just fuck me in the ass with a scratchy log?

“Mishekonga,” says Myron.

As it happens, they’ve been looking for the same place. Though he’d forgotten the name, Q had been trying to find his way to the Moundbuilders course, having read an article about it in Golf Traveler magazine.

“On the positive side, the greenskeeper is obviously very good,” adds Q, correctly. The greens putt fast and true.

But the Golf Traveler article had withheld certain crucial facts, including the developer’s identity. Turns out that the golfers working their way around the course are playing in an SBE Ltd. four-man scramble. It’s their home course. (Newark, rather than Columbus, gets designated a regional data hub, due to the low overhead.) All the fluttering flags read “SUCKE.”

“These guys are everywhere,” says Myron.

Meanwhile, the SBE, Ltd. Security Chief is holed up in a secret lair, tracking developments on television monitors. He’s reading the reports from the Colfax event, intended as per usual as a sideshow for an unwitting populace. But the disturbance at the event, including open conflict between SBE personnel and Octo advance men, has raised concerns. The Suckes have never acknowledged the potential existence of rival dominators except in the commercial sphere, in which they are Spartans, Romans and Germans all rolled in a ball. Nobody can touch them there.

Moments later, there’s a sound in the doorway of the bus. Myron, Q and Little Turtle all look back.

“Holy Christ,” says Q.

“Oh, no,” says Myron.

Blinky stands in the doorway, an Octo-Blinky blend, gray-green, rubbery, his arms and legs lined with suckers, eyes all jellyish. He looks like a guy in an Ed Wood film. The first thing that occurs to you looking at him is, man, that suit must be hot inside.

His transformation is complete.

Myron walks over and looks up at him in the doorway.

“Oh, Blinky,” says Myron. “Look at you.”

Blinky makes a nodding kind of gesture. Sort of flippy.

Myron tears up, and inhales hard. “Hm,” he says. “Hm.”

The squid looks back.

“Is this what you wanted?” asks Myron.

“Do you feel,” he asks, pausing to recall his old friend’s language, back in the 1986 Buick Century, “…Super-Actualized?”

Myron spends the next ten years trying to interpret the expression that Blinky makes next, an attempt to respond to this question. Blinky’s rubber face scrunches a little. His glistening eyes narrow toward the top. His snuffly-looking mouth area sort of purses up. Myron thinks he sees wisdom and fear and expectation and regret, all at once. He’s really not sure. But for once, and probably for all, Blinky has stopped talking.

Scene 68

2009-08-27T15:48:00.000-05:00

An insane convergence of motor vehicles and cultures comes together in space and time at the maltreated but nonetheless magical Octagon Earthworks.

On the verdant, over-fertilized plain above Raccoon Creek in Licking County, Ohio, the air is crackling with awareness. Below ground, elsewhere, the Sucke Security Chief is screaming into the phone. “Offensive mode! Offensive mode!” He’s stabbing at buttons on the console. Suddenly the golf carts trundling around Moundbuilders Country Club start to shimmy and whine. Then Whap! Halftrack treads and cannons pop out of every one. A little monitor on each dashboard instructs the SBE, Ltd. finance guys out for a round of golf to prepare for action. (Just like every cook and corpsman in the Army knows how to fire an M-16, each SBE accountant has been through Basic.)

Out of nowhere, WHHHOMMMMM! A cement truck blasts through a row of pine trees along the fourth fairway and grinds its way onto the number three green, completely trashing it. Mad Anthony Wayne rips open the driver’s side door, shouting commands like a man possessed. An unending stream of surprisingly upbeat dead guys with muskets comes pouring out the back of the mixer. They slide down the chute, one after another onto the ruined green and take up positions along the embankments. Connolly the bugler is blowing that thing.

A cigar-shaped spacecraft shimmers into view above the clubhouse. A squad of Octos with ropes, rayguns and survival gear rappels down to the ground and barrels onto the course. As Myron and the others watch, transfixed, Blinky leaves the bus like a hovercraft and slides over the fairway along the ninth hole, through the neck of the earthwork. The Octos race to assume and maintain defensive positions around him, facing outward in a bristling flower formation, as Blinky floats toward the back nine.

Back in the control room, the Chief is hollering into the phone, “These people cannot trash our stuff!” He’s watching his monitor and popping veins. “Take them out!” As he watches the battle unfold, the Chief himself is watched, and carefully, by miniature corn starch busts perched along the rail. “Take them out!” he bellows.

Each golf cart is equipped with a skilled litigator in addition to cannons. Informed of the monstrous property damage now underway, these people pop out and begin to draft extremely aggressive legal briefs. “Where is my air support?” bellows the Chief. “Where is my artillery?”

The finance guys in the golf carts crank up the cannon fire on Blinky. The Octos absorb much of the assault. Invertebrate flesh-woo is flying, as Blinky, untouched, hovers along toward the center of the circular enclosure.

“Fire!” screams Wayne. The Fort Recovery contingent opens up with a punishing barrage of musket fire on the carts, just as black SBE helicopters whobb whobb whobb into view along the horizon.

But one of the finance guys has anticipated Wayne’s flanking maneuver. He’s led a few carts back behind the maintenance building, and is tearing around the back. If he gets where he’s going, he’ll be in a position to blast the cement mixer back to the gravel pit from whence it came.

Myron is watching this unfold. “This is your chance,” he says to Old Man Q. “Do you want a shot at these guys?”

The defrauded proprietor of O P & Q grins broadly, his white hair waving. In seconds they’re back on the bus, tearing past the mixer, racing into position to head off the sneak attack on Wayne. Sure enough, they clobber the lead cart just as it makes the turn, crunching and flipping it repeatedly beneath the bus. The others scatter. As Q slows to bring the bus around, Myron jumps out and ducks into the maintenance building. Seconds later, he flies out the door in a cart of his own.

As Blinky ascends hundreds of feet in the air, the atmosphere gradually fills with glowing, cigar-shaped vehicles. Squid-looking guys peer out the windows as Blinky gestures like a prophet to the figures below. The wind is whipping like crazy. Copters are strafing and shooting at the cigars. Suddenly the clouds part, and there’s the moon, big as day, right over the octagon. Then Little Turtle appears in the air on the right hand of Blinky. Some choir starts up. Next, just as the lead copter tears a new one across one of the cigars, there’s a flash of light like in the Bible, and the portal opens up with thunder and swirling clouds.

The bus has taken fire. Q stumbles out and finds himself among the dead but energetic veterans of the Fort Recovery campaign, chortling and leering through their stretched faces. One of them hands Q an eighteenth-century musket.

He takes it.

Wayne fires up the cement mixer and heads for the ninth hole, following Blinky’s path through the neck.

The portal is swirling and pulsing.

Between musket volleys, Myron races across the sixth fairway, whapping the other Sucke carts like it’s a dodgem ride. This disorients the golfers and litigators briefly but long enough to let the dead guys reload. Slowly, Q is figuring out the drill with the black powder.

Overhead, the cigars open up with lasers on the copters. Sucke ships start to go down.

The choir is going like there’s no tomorrow.

Wayne is racing up number 18 in the cement truck, shouting and cursing and blasting golf carts with abandon. “Mishiekonga! Goddamn it! Wait for me!” There’s a second, totally blinding flash, and the air is awash in positively-charged ions.

Poof.

Blinky and Little Turtle are gone.

Wayne pulls up in the spot below the portal and jumps out as the clouds spiral tighter and tighter together. “Goddamnit!” he calls.

As copters swirl haplessly to earth, the cigar shapes do a quick formation thing that looks like a synchronized swimming move. Then they too, slide through the portal.

The sky goes Zot!

“Goddamnit!”

The portal has closed.

“Son of a bitch!”

Wayne’s stamping on his hat and screaming.

“Indians! Goddamn Indians!”

Q looks up from the smoking wreckage of his bus and peers across the devastated landscape. He leans over to Connolly. “Some scramble!” says Q.

Scene 69

2009-08-27T15:44:00.000-05:00

So.

A number of things get clarified in the first week after the Ascension. First of all, Darryl was wrong on the narrow but critical question of motive. The Octos did not seek global dominance. Because Blinky metamorphosed into a semi-immortal cross-species translator and tipped Myron off in that exchange on the bus, the world learned that here was a simple case of galactic disorientation. Turns out the Octos looked into all kinds of metaphysical possibilities; it just so happened that Professor Kleinenfloncker had the best material, luckily brought off the shelf by the misadventures of Myron and Blinky; unluckily, creepy Alan was probably just a bad apple. Possibly Telly Savales in The Dirty Dozen. Bummer for Special K.

Meanwhile, the climactic contest revealed a crucial weakness of the Sucke Brother Empire. No matter how skilled, how ruthless the Suckes might be—and they were both, in spades—in the end, they were shown to be nothing but technicians. They wanted too little, even though they took everything. A terrified species in fear for its very survival rose up and ate them for breakfast. Today the Suckes remain in business, still more than a match for your average city or county government. But they’re chastened. And they sold off the remaining helicopters.

Mad Anthony Wayne did not advance to the other side along with his co-signatory of the Treaty of Greeneville. It’s possible the whole thing was a terrible mix-up, and nothing more than lost spiritual luggage, partly rectified much too late. Alternatively, and more likely, Wayne remains on this side of the portal for personal reasons—specifically, because he struggles so to control his emotions. Ask anybody: anger will keep you stuck like nothing else.

Q suggests that the best corrective training in the world can be acquired through the game of golf. “It’s so damn frustrating,” he observes. “But the reality is: you can’t play mad. You must tame your anger to get any good.” Which is true. Unfortunately, Q isn’t very good anymore. Neither is General Wayne. But they’re both still out there, whacking and cursing their way around the course. Which no longer occupies the site of the Octagon Earthworks. They fired the guy in charge of the Ohio Cultural Legacy Department, who turned out to have acquired an entire tropical island on a $32,000 salary.

Little Turtle’s passageway to the upper world was re-colonized by Shelley Palomino (nee Shertzer), a fiftyish woman disillusioned by the Church who changed her name and launched a wildly successful but totally bogus Native American sun-worshipping cult. She offers an impressive array of reasonably-priced audio cassettes, shiny stones and talismanic effigy figures in the renovated clubhouse. The piped-in flute music tells you right away when you walk in: this is an extremely spiritual outfit.

And Myron. Myron walks away. Literally. He swears off the corporate life, buys a wide-brimmed hat and some snowshoes, and learns to live off the land. He completely outgrows his intestinal problems, likely tied to pervasive anxiety about how he’s perceived by others. Has he accomplished enough? Is he important enough? These things matter less now.

Myron tramps crosslots a hundred miles or so through the sticks, down to the Serpent Mound, in honor of Blinky. It makes a big impression on him. The mound runs along a steep ridge, the edge of a giant prehistoric impact crater. On the day Myron gets there, in winter, the place is abandoned. He shares the grounds with a big buck deer that follows him in. They pick their way around independently, then Myron climbs the observation tower to get a proper view. Perched up there in the rusting tower, looking down on a quarter-mile worth of unfurled snake opening up to chomp on an egg, Myron wonders whether Little Turtle was right. Is it best to live your life with an expectation of harsh dealing, developing your stoic Zen muscles in the face of an unforgiving fate you can’t know and couldn’t control if you did? Or is it better to fight and flail, accepting nothing, biting down hard on life with a vengeance? Does Mad Anthony Wayne have it right after all?

Every now and then, Myron pulls out Blinky’s weathered postcard and asks the question: which comes first, the Serpent or the Egg?

End.