Lady Liberty

 

Like many staunch patriots, Lady Liberty’s origins were on foreign shores.  In fact, he was a refugee, a product of the Vietnamese diaspora.  

Perfume River, Fargo’s best Vietnamese restaurant, began in a strip mall on a cold, windy boulevard near the freight yards.  Squeezed between a nail emporium operated by the proprietor’s aunt and a used bookstore specializing in fifty-cent paperback Westerns and Harlequin romance novels, the joint was modest, cheap, and popular with students.  The University was two miles away, but Fargo is a city that must be navigated by automobile, and, so, college kids patronized the place and, indeed, made it profitable.  The owner expanded his dining room into the fingernail styling storefront after first fumigating the place with industrial-sized fans to eliminate the odors of nail acrylic and acetone.  Nonetheless, patrons sometimes complained about the faint fruity smell of esters tainting the air.  

The fingernail business migrated to the neighborhood near the freeway, humble strips of storefronts satellite to the big mall with its anchor department stores and atriums decorated with tap-water fountains jetting up over big concrete tubs and hip-high planters clogged with dwarf rubber trees and exotic orchids.  After a couple years, Perfume River opened a larger restaurant in a building previously occupied by a franchise, all-you-can-eat steakhouse.  (People have big appetites in North Dakota and, without portion control, the steakhouse was literally eaten into bankruptcy.)  Mr. Nguyen, inspired by the fountains and pools in the Mall, built an ornate reception area in his restaurant.  A mural painted on the wall depicted famous beauty spots in Vietnam, landscapes shaggy with tuberous-looking stony mountains and islets adorned with fragile pagodas shaped a little like vertical centipedes pushing up into a cerulean-blue sky.  A small pump powered a tiny river that flowed in a figure-eight within a plastic trough simulating river-rocks.  Visitors met the hostess at her station flanked by two fierce lion dogs purchased from a lawn ornament factory on the freeway near the south gates of the Air Force base.  An arched bridge led over the gush of water stirring between planters full of miniature fiddle-leaf ficus trees, spider plants, and calathea with white and green striped leaves.  And, the plashing stream, shaped like the sign for infinity, was bright with koi dancing in the silvery water.  

One of those koi, a calico about nine-inches long, was colored red, white, and blue.  No one paid any attention to this goldfish, one of about a dozen in the loop of running water, until one night, when a little girl led by her father over the modest arch of the footbridge, looked down and exclaimed: “Daddy, that fish looks like a flag!.”  The little girl was holding souvenir chop-sticks and a little bag of fortune cookies for her mother – her parents were divorced – and she peered down into the water at the brightly colored fish gliding along the sluice of artificial creek below.  “She’s a living flag,” the child said. Her older brother agreed with her that the gold fish was colored like the American flag and a lieutenant from the Base, wearing his military fatigues, made a mock salute in the direction of the fish as he exited the restaurant.  Other diners, as they left the place after their meals, paused to look at the calico koi.  Mr. Nguyen came from his office to see what the people were gawking at and announced: “Yes, she is a patriotic fish.  We call her ‘Lady Liberty’.”

As it happened, Lady Liberty was a fresh addition to Perfume River’s stock of ornamental koi.  Mr. Nguyen’s brother-in-law, Mr. Tran, owned a successful landscaping business in North Carolina and maintained several ponds on his premises stocked with koi.  Sometimes, customers for whom he had created water features ordered a few of those gold fish to enliven their little ponds and lagoons.  Mr. Nguyen had loaned some money to his brother-in-law a few years earlier and so the landscaper owed him a favor.  When Perfume River’s flagship restaurant was opened in the bankrupt steakhouse building, Mr. Nguyen acquired six koi from the Mall where the gold fish were breeding at an alarming pace.  But there was something wrong with the water and fish’s mouths turned white and rotted and, soon enough, the creatures were belly-up in the stream.  Then, Mr. Tran supplied a tub full of koi, hardier fish it was thought, a nephew driving them cross country in a covered plastic bathtub in the back of his pickup.  Water was hard in Fargo with a distinct chemical taste, sulphur-flavored chlorine, and half the gold fish died before the water-chemistry could be brought to an equilibrium adequate to support the koi.  At first, the fish later later known as Lady Liberty was ailing, shocked by the insalubrious water, and, for a week, the koi’s swim-bladders were affected so that the creature paddled spastically on its side, flat as a flounder.  But Mr. Nguyen improved his water quality, performing chemical testing and titrating his stream for pH, and the fish rallied and, even, flourished after this initial crisis.  

Lady Liberty was a pretty fish.  His dorsal fin was colored cream-white with flares of blue and he had a tripartite “peacock” tail, each lobe a different hue and, indeed, red, white, and blue like a perpetually animate pennant.  The koi’s operculum (that is, the wedges of bone between eye and gill) were spotted white and blue on one side with red petal-shaped colors dispersed in white on the opposing side.  The fish had a lithe torpedo-shaped body, also speckled with red and blue against a pale background of white scales.  His mouth was rimmed with a metallic-looking silver color.  The fish was intelligent and kept time like a clock, reliably lifting his mouth to the surface of the ornamental stream, when feedings were scheduled.  When people gaped at the fish, open-mouthed with wonder, the fish gaped at them as well with dark, perfectly circular eyes and O-shaped lips that seemed to pout and blow kisses. 

At first, Lady Liberty was good for business.  A reporter from the local paper profiled the fish for the Sunday lifestyle supplement and people came to Perfume River to see the koi.  But not everyone entering the lobby ate in the dining room and there were a fair share of gawkers.  Mr. Nguyen told the hostess to impose a one-drink minimum at the bar for those who simply wanted to gaze on Lady Liberty.  Some of the kids interested in scrutinizing the fish were underage and this led to awkward incidents.  Mr. Nguyen thought it was inhospitable to expel potential patrons from his business, but, sometimes, this was necessary.  And, some of the guests drinking at the bar over-indulged.  So there was trouble. 

On election night, a couple of patrons, giddy with Mai Tais staggered out to the infinity river and, one of them spilled, a drink in koi pond.  A serviceman from the Base interpreted this conduct as disrespectful and unpatriotic.  He seized the rude man by the lapels and demanded that he apologize to Lady Liberty and salute her as well.  The drunk guest refused and, because people were on-edge over the election, insults were exchanged and a crowd of rowdy patrons adjourned to the parking lot to exchange punches.  The night was cold and sleet was falling and so the fight was ineffectual.  But, nonetheless, there were some black eyes and bloody noses and, so, the cops had to be called.  The airman from the base was picked up at the Law Enforcement Center by military police and a report was made to the serviceman’s commanding officer.  When the affray was investigated by the police, some of the bus-boys and prep cooks who had witnessed the riot were hesitant to cooperate.  This reticence led to additional inquiries and certain illegal practices with respect to immigration laws were alleged against Mr. Nguyen’s enterprise.  These difficulties soured him on the fish – it seemed that Lady Liberty was more trouble than he was worth.

The Public Relations Officer at the Base came to Mr. Nguyen’s rescue.  He had learned about the flag-colored koi from reading reports as to the fracas at the Vietnamese restaurant.  With hs girlfriend, the PR Officer dined at Perfume River and, then, after an excellent meal of Pho with spring rolls and noodles, asked to meet the owner.  The PR man said that there had been some consideration about banning servicemen from dining at the restaurant – just “a word to the wise” he said – but that the Upper Brass at the Base were also interested in acquiring Lady Liberty, perhaps as a mascot and for recruiting purposes, and that the Air Force would pay good money for the fish.  Mr. Nguyen expressed interest. “How much?” he asked.  

“We buy widgets out there and screwdrivers for five-thousand a piece,” the PR Officer said.  “I’m pretty sure we can do business with you.”

A week later, a van from the Base arrived with two corporals and they took possession of Lady Liberty, ladling the famous fish out of the figure-eight loop of the artificial stream.  The gold fish was taken to the base and installed in a large 80 gallon tank equipped with two albino crayfish and an undersea palace modeled after a structure featured in Disney’s Little Mermaid with a flock on neons and tetras to keep the colorful koi company.  This aquarium made a pretty display in the Officer’s Club on the frontage road next to the Base’s main gate.  Two NCO Technical Sergeants were assigned as support personnel for Lady Liberty.  It was one of these airmen, who first discovered Lady Liberty’s gender.

As it happened, Lady Liberty’s aquarium was placed against a wall where there was an electric baseboard heater.  When temperatures outdoor plummeted (and it gets very cold in Fargo), the baseboard heater, operated by thermostat, engaged to warm the floor and lower parts of the room.  Heat from this appliance raised the water temperature where Lady Liberty was patriotically disporting himself.  Technical Sergeant Hernandez observed that Lady Liberty had developed a rash of white pimples on her (or his) gills.  This concerned the conscientious airman and, so, he did some research and discovered that the pimples, in fact, were goldfish breeding tubercules.  When the water in the tank warmed, this triggered a spawning response from Lady Liberty.  The tubercules, in fact, were full of spermatozoa – Lady Liberty wasn’t a lady at all, but, rather, a male koi.  (Since there was no female in the aquarium, the sperm was wasted, enveloping the fish in a cloud of misty-white ejaculate.)

Technical Sergeant Hernandez sent an email to his commanding officer and reported that Lady Liberty was, in fact, a male gold fish.  There was some anxious consultation among senior Brass and it was decided that the koi’s gender should be classified. 

“We are going to consider Lady Liberty ‘female’ notwithstanding her biological gender,” a memo advised.  “This is strictly confidential.”

There was some debate as to whether new transgender-friendly policies adapted by government mandate might be at issue with respect to Lady Liberty’s sex assignment.  However, ultimately, it was determined that pronouns applicable to Lady Liberty would be “she and her.”

Technical Sergeants Hernandez and Obala acquired a water thermometer and monitored tank temperature.  They reduced the temperature in the aquarium by three degrees and Lady Liberty stopped ejaculating.  During the cold season, Lady Liberty remained in her tank in the Officer’s Club.  Once, when the men at the bar were watching a football game, the national anthem was played on the TV set.  Several of the officers approached the tank singing the words of the patriotic song and they saluted Lady Liberty.  She seemed to bow gracefully to them.

When the Winter had passed and Spring come, Technial Sergeant Obala was ordered to transport the goldfish to various promotional events.  The fish appeared at recruiting fairs and, on the fourth of July, Lady Liberty rode a float in the parade, her tank atop a metal dais shaped like a Tomahawk missile warhead.  A video camera was trained on Lady Liberty and flashed her image on a large screen overlooking the aquarium on its martial plinth so that the parade-goers lining the streets could admire her. 

In September, when schools were back in session, Lady Liberty was assigned duty at a ROTC recruiting event on campus.  Technical Sergeant Obala set up Lady Liberty’s tank, a bright teardrop-shaped globe next to a folding table where Master Sergeant (Line Recruiter) Gayle Johnson was seated with her clipboard, application forms, and brochures.  To the right of the Air Force Recruiting station, there was a booth operated by the Campus Republicans.  The Muslim Student Association was situated to the left of Lady Liberty’s post.  Across the aisle, the NDCA (North Dakota Chess Association) was hosting a speed chess tournament.   After confirming water temperature and the integrity of Lady Liberty’s globe, TS Obala drove across town to have lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant about which he had heard excellent things. 

Mid-afternoon, one of the Campus Republicans, a fat youth carrying a copy of Atlas Shrugged, slipped and fell in front of the Air Force Recruiting display.  When Line Recruiter Gayle Johnson hastened to  assist him, she discovered a puddle of water pooled beneath Lady Liberty.  Apparently, the fish’s tank had developed a hairline fracture and water was leaking.  The corpulent young Republican said that he had injured his back.  As Line Recruiter Gayle Johnson was apologizing to him –she was a very attractive woman who looked not only sharp but sexy in her uniform– two other Campus Republicans used their cell-phones to take pictures of the water leaked onto the tile floor.  

Msgt Gayle Johnson excused herself and went into the ladies’ room where she called Technical Sergeant Obala.  “Your fucking fish is leaking,” she said.  “We’ve had an incident.”

“An incident?” TSgt Obala asked.  

“There’s water coming out of the tank and some idiot just fell down,” MSgt Gayle Johnson said.

Technical Sergeant Obala called for his check, paid for lunch, and hurried back on Campus.

By this time, Lady Liberty was sprawled sideways at the bottom of the half-empty globe.  Her colors looked limp and forlorn.  A janitor with mop and bucket was swabbing up the water.

Sergeant Obala was perplexed.  He knew that the local water was heavily chlorinated, but thought that a cupful of bad water would be better than no water at all.  The Line Recruiter didn’t have a glass or cup at her table, nor did the Campus Republicans.  The Chess Club had a couple of mugs, but they were full of some suspicious liquid that smelled like Irish Coffee (and, in fact, things had become pretty giddy at Speed Chess match) and so they couldn’t help. However, the Muslim Student Association was handing out free bottles of AquaFina water and the young woman wearing a headscarf was happy to donate two flasks to Officer Obala.  He thanked the young woman, poured the water into tank where Lady Liberty was ailing and, then, called Technical Sergeant Hernandez.  He asked Hernandez to bring another globe for the fish, filled with suitably treated water.  

Technical Sergeant Hernandez went to a pet store and bought a gold fish bowl with small aerator.  Then, he stopped at a big box store and purchased a couple gallons of distilled water.  Unfortunately, the store manager had decided in improve his enterprise’s profit manager by filling up jugs labeled “Distilled Water” with water from the tap.  Technical Sergeant Hernandez hurried to the Campus and found Lady Liberty in obvious distress, her mouth open and gulping as if for air and her long peacock tails limp and wan.  The injured koi was lifted from the leaking globe and gently slid into the new globe recharged with “Distilled Water” that was, in fact, chlorinated hard (iron-rich) water from the city water system.  

Some passers-by gathered around the new globe where Lady Liberty seemed to revive.  She unfurled herself proudly, Old Glory shimmering above the Rockets Red Glare, but, then, began to twitch and convulse.  The flag twisted around itself, gills spasming, and fins flailing, and, then, the patriotic koi rolled belly-up.

One of the Campus Republicans, waving a cell-phone with which he was taking pictures, sputtered: “I saw it all.  I’ve got pictures.  The Muslim Association murdered that fish.”

The girl in the head scarf was indignant.  “Are you crazy?” she asked.

“I saw it.  I have pictures,” the Campus Republican said.  “These fucking terrorists put poison in Lady Liberty’s fish bowl.”

“That’s a lie,” the girl in the head scarf said.

“Are you calling me a liar?” the Campus Republican cried.

One of the inebriated nerds in the Chess Club came to the rescue of the Muslim young woman.  He shouted: “Back off!” and pushed the Campus Republican away from the table.  But there was still a puddle of water on the floor, the old, damaged globe still leaking, and the Chess Club ambassador skidded backward, falling in the center of four boards where players were playing speed chess.  Pawns and rooks and knights flew into the air and, then, scattered across the floor.  The other Chess Club members jumped over their table and seized the Campus Republican.  He swung his fists at the Chess Club members.  The Muslim girl screamed.

“We’re staying out of this,” Master Sergeant and Line Recruiter Gayle Johnson cried.  Some more punches were thrown and a Republican staggering away from the fray smashed into the gold fish bowl where Lady Liberty was dying.  Glass broke on the floor and famous fish sprawled on the tiles, flopping weakly among the wet shards.

Lady Liberty was too large to be flushed down the toilet.  Technical Sergeant Hernandez cradled the dying fish in his arms.  Later, he wrapped Lady Liberty in some newspapers and put the fish in a garbage dumpster on the base.  And, thus, perished the patriotic fish known as Lady Liberty.

          

 

Two Scorpions

 

In Cathay’s far west, beyond the snowy mountains, a vast brown desert the size of several kingdoms stretches from horizon to horizon.  Sometimes, the waste of hot pebbles and soot-colored dust is crossed by caravans of men leading patient, plodding camels.  But mostly, it is only the winds, hot as a furnace, that traverse the barren terrain.  The desert is the home of the scorpion and these poisonous little creatures hide under every stone and within every arid crack in the boulders piled on hilltops there.

Monks have made an oasis around a spring from which water seeps.  The oasis is lush with willows and desert cottonwood, trees crowded around several ponds created by the religious order.  Canals irrigate fields where pistachio nuts, poppies, and pomegranates are grown.  The monks wear white linen fashioned from cotton that they raise near a warm marsh where white heron stalk about spearing frogs with their long beaks.  The holy men live in dwellings quarried into the hillsides and, in stone alcoves, ancient statues of the Buddha are covered in shadow and, sometimes, even wear a garland of living bats around their brows.  A pagoda made from stone as white as porcelain casts its pale reflection on the lagoon in the oasis.  Several of the pools near the pagoda are “ponds of mercy” – this means that the water is filled with bright gold and silver fish that the monks feed daily and that they protect against birds that might otherwise feed on these swarms of colorful, inquisitive fish.  

Sometimes, amber-colored scorpions with heavy black stings scuttle into the brush and grass in the oasis seeking prey.  The scorpions move swiftly on their eight crooked legs and hold small creatures in their pincers to stab them to death with their agile, arched stings.  The scorpions are very fierce and, if they can’t catch beetles or small mice, they eat one another.

One day, as it is said, a scorpion ventured to the edge of a “pond of mercy” and saw the fish thronging in the crystal water.  The scorpion scented some crickets living in a hollow log on the other side of the pool.  Scorpions can’t swim – their articulated bodies are too heavy for that and their diamond-shaped stings are hard and dense as stone.  The scorpion ventured to the edge of the pond, looking wistfully across the water to the crickets sporting in the rotten wood.  A bullfrog, playing in the pond, swam to the shore and, then, squirted itself up on the pebbles at the edge of the pool.

“Brother frog,” the scorpion said, “will you ferry me across this water to those crickets that I hear chirping on the other side of the pond?”  

The frog kept his distance from the scorpion.  Such creatures, the frog knew, are unpredictable and impulsive.

“No,” the bullfrog said, “I’m afraid of your venomous sting.  If I were to let you ride on my back, I fear you would sting me to death.”

“Nonsense,” the scorpion said, courteously gesturing with his crab-like pincers.  “Why would I sting you?  My sting is deadly and, if I stabbed you in the middle of the pond, we would both sink into the water and drown among those dim-witted goldfish.”

“I suppose that’s true,” the bullfrog said.  He ventured a little closer to the scorpion.

“Come,” the scorpion said.  “Let me climb onto your back and, then, you can swim across the water to where those crickets are playing.”

“You won’t sting me?” the frog asked.

“No, that would just result in both of us dying,” the scorpion reassured the frog.

So the frog inched a little closer to the scorpion and, then, flinching a bit as he felt the creature’s sharp claws on his back, allowed the scorpion to grip him along his spine.  Then, the frog set forth, kicking his powerful legs against the water, and propelling himself, and the scorpion on his back, across the pond.

The gold fish looked up in wonder to see the scorpion, pincers like the horns of a bull and the deadly crooked staff of the arachnid’s sting, flying across the water on the green back of the bullfrog.

In the middle of the pond, the scorpion reared up and thrust the dagger of his sting into the frog’s emerald side.  The frog gasped and rolled over.  The gold fish, witnessing the murder, fled to the sides of the pool.

“Why did you sting me?” the frog cried.

“It is my nature,” the scorpion said.

The dying frog twitched and the scorpion was flung by that convulsion into the water.  He sank like a stone and perished at the bottom of the pool.  Unaware of the deadly peril from which they had been spared, the crickets sang and danced in their rotten log.

A few days later, another scorpion ventured to the edge of the pond.  An old monk with a novice was feeding grains of rice to the goldfish.  

The scorpion and looked down and saw another arachnid just like himself sitting at the bottom of the pond.  Although the water seemed dangerous to him, the scorpion wondered about his fellow creature who seemed to be enjoying the pebbles and small feathery sea-weed amidst the schools of bright gold fish.  

“Perhaps, that fellow down there is fat with gold fish that he spears and eats,” the scorpion said to himself.  And, so, with tiny mincing steps, the scorpion ventured into the sunny pool of water.  But the stone ledges at the edge of the pond were slick and the scorpion’s little clawed feet couldn’t grip the rounded pebbles and, so, the creature slid into the water and began to sink.  

The old monk, turning from the hungry goldfish, saw the scorpion drowning..  He reached into the pool, and, taking the scorpion, in the palm of his hand, lifted it up out of the water.  But it is the nature of a scorpion to sting and, so, the arachnid plunged his sting into the monk’s thumb.  The sting of a scorpion is painful, much more sharp than that of a wasp, and the monk, crying out, dropped the scorpion into the pond.  Again, the arachnid, helplessly flailing at the water with his pincers, sank into the pond.  The monk bent forward again and, once more, took hold of the scorpion, seizing him by his jointed back.  But, again, the scorpion couldn’t resist stinging the monk and, so, once more, he fell into the water and began to settle down to the bottom of the pond.

The monk’s hand was bloodied by his encounters with scorpion’s sting.  A flush of fever made the monk’s breath come short and he felt clammy, cold chills running up and down his spine.  But, again, he bent toward the drowning scorpion.

The novice monk, stepping forward, restrained the monk, holding back his hand.  

“Don’t you see,” the boy said, “it is the nature of the scorpion to sting you?”

“But it is my nature,” the monk replied, “to save.”

“I don’t understand,” the novice monk said.

“It is human nature to care for others, even scorpions, and to endeavor to save them,” the old monk said.

The novice pulled up a large lily-pad anchored in the bottom of the “pond of mercy.”  Then, he scooped the scorpion up out of bottom of the pool so that the creature rested on lily-pad.  The boy, then, used a twig to prod the raft of the lily-pad and its passenger to the edge of the pool.  Without showing any gratitude at all, the scorpion darted onto dry land and hid among the stones and grass at the edge of the pool.  The brilliantly colored goldfish bobbed again to the surface, hungrily opening their mouths of the specks of rice thrown down to them.  

Amerigo's Racial Reckoning

 

1.

Amerigo Vespucci rested on his bronze shoulders on the creek’s muddy bottom, collateral damage in what was called a moment of racial reckoning.  A few yards upstream, Columbus, stout and barrel-chested, but dressed in a floppy liver-shaped hat with breeches and hose and a mantle like a pig-butcher cast in a Shakespearian play, was drowned deeper in the ooze.  Skid marks in the river-bank showed where the statues had been dragged and, then, forced underwater.  Some malt liquor cans, flyers printed with demands for justice, crumpled potato chip bags and candy wrappers marked the site of the demonstration.  In the park, plinths for the statues stood forlorn, empty granite pedestals with rusting metal staples where the figures had once been fettered.  

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea was older than Vespucci and much more distraught about his watery fate.  In the hollow cavity of his bronze head, Vespucci heard Columbus raging about the injustice that he had suffered. – It is all based on a misunderstanding, Columbus cried, his indignation booming in the empty grotto of his chest and belly, sending a watery signal that reverberated in Vespucci’s own voids.  Columbus was vain and supercilious, easily offended. Amerigo was more equable.

Vespucci was the product of an eccentric Kiwanis club with some wealthy Italian members, cast in the fifties from a half-scale model of the figure gracing the facade of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  He was more compact and less readily angered and, in fact, was relieved to be submerged, the hot sun no longer stinging in his patina and birds no longer able to insult him with their sticky white lime.  The creek bed was cool and soft and little minnow were already kissing the algae that had formed on his outstretched finger-tips and smooth chin.  The anonymity of the stream didn’t bother him.  No one recognized him when he was upright on his pedestal.  In fact, with his yearning hands gesturing under his belly and his face upturned, as if to adore the sun and sky, many pedestrians had mistaken him for some sort of saint, casually approaching only to see the scroll of map at his side, marked “AMERICA”, and, then, wondering who he was and why he was so displayed.  The plate affixed to the pedestal named the Kiwanis club and listed some donors but was, apparently, otherwise incommunicative – Amerigo couldn’t see it because his face was elevated and cocked toward the distant horizon and, so, he wasn’t sure what it said; the only thing certain to him was the information inscribed on that bronze plate was uninteresting, since visitors only glanced at it and, then, walked away.  

When the crane came in the middle of the night, Columbus demanded that he be first saved.  Light searched the stream and blazed in Amerigo’s eyes.  Of course, no one could hear Columbus’ imperious commands.  The crew wore masks, although perhaps this was due to the pandemic, and they worked in haste.  A couple of friendly cops had been bribed, and, influenced by FOX News as to the Culture Wars in any event, they turned a blind eye to the men who maneuvered the hoist over the creek, swung its hooks and elastic cradle into the water, and fished out the statue of the cartographer.  Water poured off his fingers and drained down from his eye sockets, drizzling from his pointed nose.  A truck with hay bale bedding was waiting on the terrace above the stream and Amerigo was swung through the air and lowered into its freight hold.  As the self-propelled hoist backed away from the creek, Amerigo could hear Columbus shrieking imprecations.  Apparently, no one had told the rescuers that there were two bronze figures sunk in the river bed.  Crew members smoothed the ruts made in the lawn, raking out the furrows as the cops anxiously watched them.  Columbus continued to demand that he be retrieved from his watery grave, but, of course, only other statues can hear statues, and, when the grass was repaired, the hoist drove off and, with the policemen waving, the truck accelerated around the park lane’s looping curves and, then, exited from the preserve of trees and monuments onto an adjacent boulevard lined with fast food places and, finally, found the freeway westward.  

2.

The air in the garden was cool and luminous with bird song.  Amerigo was wrapped in a tarpaulin and, then, hauled in that canvas cocoon out of the back of the heavy truck.  Straps yanked him upright and he felt his feet in their long pointy shoes pierced by metal bolts screwed into another big plinth, icy cold like a tombstone.  (Since he had no feet and no body, only a bronze shell of garments, of course, it is a misnomer to say that iron staples pierced his feet.  His elegant shoes with their narrow tapering toe enclosing his echoing void was the part of him fastened to his stone base.)  All around, from varying distances, Amerigo heard voices greeting him.  But the accent was that of the mariner from Genoa, a distinct twang in the dialect that was somewhat distasteful to Amerigo’s Florentine ear.  Apparently, he stood amidst a host of Columbuses (“Columbi”?) mostly hidden behind him or to the sides where he could not see.  Within his range of vision, Amerigo saw a steep slope where a slick-looking tar path wound in switchbacks among dark green pines.  Scattered among the trees on little stone shelves cut into the hillside, Amerigo saw bronze figures of Columbus, forms that would have been regal except for the ignoble floppy hats on the heads of the statues.  Flowers flared like torches in the bright sunlight, the attenuated air of these heights shimmering with bees and tiger-striped wasps and long, green and grey Western locusts that rocketed here and there in the slanting early morning sunlight.  Evidently, the slope ended at a precipice and the ravine dropped away into empty, glowing space.  Water was flowing in the green shadow and, somewhere, cascades whispered among the trees.  Far away, a city spiked glass towers into the sky, buildings floating over a vast tawny prairie.  It was a pretty view, freeways far below throbbing like arteries around the city’s shining steel edges.  The horde of Columbuses gathered in the gorge sang a Te Deum to the dawn, rejoicing as the light rose golden and abundant up the flanks of the mountain.  Bronze throats resounded and, down on the rolling brown plains, Amerigo saw jets rising and falling over the inscrutable diagram of runways.  It was a view to gladden the heart of a cartographer.

Amidst the murmurs of the assembled Columbuses, Amerigo heard voices behind him.  A handsome old man with a silver goatee stood at his feet.  A young woman, possibly an assistant, was next to the old fellow.  She carried a cell-phone and wore dark glasses.  Lips moved and flesh and blood spoke.

3.

Mr. Spellacy, the beer tycoon, said: “This one looks quite different.”  

The young woman nodded and, then, glanced back uphill where two dozen bronze figures of Columbus rescued from the looting and mayhem in the cities stood among the pines in the ravine cut through the side of the mountain.  

“Yes, he’s quite different,” the young woman said.  She had the faint, insolent drawl of someone who has attended an Ivy League college.  

“I wonder if there is some mistake,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“Well, he must br Columbus,” the young woman replied.  “You see that he is pointing down to a map marked “America’.”

“Indeed,” the beer tycoon said.

“I don’t suppose anyone knows how Columbus really looked,” she added.  

Higher up the slope, a peacock screamed, a high-pitched cry that sounded like a cat’s amplified meow.  Near the ruins of the old brick brewery, several of the birds had spread their tails and were slowly rotating with the intent, it seemed, of displaying their iridescent eye feathers to that other greater eye of the sun, now just peeping over the skyscrapers.  Some silky white pea-hens with little tufts on their heads like thin-stemmed mushrooms were scratching in the pine-needle litter.  In a stony trough, a stream dashed downhill and, then, plunged off the side of the mountain.

Mr. Spellacy pushed on the bronze figure’s ankle.  The statue was firmly set in place.

“This looks good,” he said.  “Go ahead and pay the invoice.” 

4.

It wasn’t Ellis Island, but the rough-and-tumble commerce in the mining camps that changed Giacomo Spallacci’s name to Jack Spellacy.  After working in saloons in the West for twenty years, Mr. Spellacy’s great-grandfather, an immigrant from Naples, accumulated enough cash to invest in a brewery.  The enterprise was owned by a Bavarian, Emil Oder, who, recognizing that all beer is more or less alike, imparted to his brew a certain Old World elegance by making the stuff in a brick castle perched high above the city (then just a glorified mining camp) in the ravine on Lookout Mountain.  A spring sprung from the hillside in the cleft in the mountain, a crystal fountain, that Oder enclosed under a brick arch with bright alabaster troughs that conveyed the precious water into the brewery.  He acquired peacocks and outfitted his beer hall adjacent to the castle with militant, jutting antler horns.  The walkway into the place was curbed with the bleached skulls of bison.  Ostentation on this scale was costly and Herr Oder found himself deeply in debt and, thus, sought investors to defray expenses.  Jack Spellacy, along with a couple of other men who were ambitious miners, purchased shares in the brewery.  After a decade, Spellacy had bought out the other investors to become Oder’s full partner.  Oder was moody and vacillated between mania and the deepest melancholy.  On a trip to the Alps with his 19-year old mistress, Oder threw himself into a crevasse in an ice field where he was buried so deeply in the blue bowels of the glacier that his body was never recovered.  Spellacy, who was frugal and industrious, purchased his partner’s half of the business from Frau Oder, a grim and embittered matron.  The mistress, content to be in Switzerland, never returned from Europe.  

During the next generation, the beer brewed in the canyon above the city was famous in the area, served at the spas catering to the wealthy along the front range, but not elsewhere in the State.  Mr. Spellacy’s father expanded the enterprise and shipped the brewery’s products throughout the Intermountain West.  But it was Mr. Spellacy, later the collector of abused and despised Columbus statues, that made the business famous throughout the United States and, then, expanded the market into Europe and Asia.  With his family, Mr. Spellacy still lived in the chalet next to the brewery but the old castle with its crypts full of spring water and mighty boilers and fermentation tanks was obsolescent.  The brewery on the mountain was closed, its operations moved into the valley.  The picturesque beer hall with its immense oak tables and sinister crests of pronghorn and elk antlers was dismantled, trucked down the hill, and reassembled next to the gleaming new factory.  (Tours of the brewery are available with complimentary tasting in the old beer hall that has been recently restored.)  For the first time in sixty years, the gorge in the mountain no longer smelled of yeast and sickly-sweet fermenting malt, the smells that Mr. Spellacy had inhaled all his life.  One night, the wood inside the castle caught fire.  It was winter time and the canyon road was inaccessible to fire trucks and so the flames continued unabated until the blaze burned itself out.  When the hillside thawed in April, crews cleared the fallen timbers and shattered bricks clogging the spring and cut channels lined with cobble-stones, freeing the bright water so that it could flow in cascades regulated by concrete through the steep inclined gardens to plunge over the cliff at the bottom of the ravine.     

Mr. Spellacy believed that he was living in End Times.  He hired men to erect an iron-walled bunker in a subterranean chamber cut into the living rock under his chalet.  From his eyrie, he could look up to the shining mountains and down to the city and its suburbs and the great columns of stainless steel tanks in his brewery below.  

5.

After a light mid-day repast, Mr. Spellacy strolled in his Columbus garden.  At his side was Prana Daruwala, director of marketing.  Mr. Spellacy was attired in a grey suit with a charcoal-colored shirt and green silk tie.  Mr. Daruwala wore a light jacket marked with the company logo, tailored jeans, and expensive cowboy boots.

They took the zigzagging asphalt trail from the ruined brewery downhill to the look-out at the precipice.  The treeless steppes stretching to the blue horizon were golden and the city was splendid with light glittering in the shards of its towers.  

Mr. Spellacy inquired as to the campaign to launch a new beer, Red White & Blue Brew.  

“Will we be ready to promote the product in June?” Mr. Spellacy asked.

Mr. Daruwala assured him that the advertising campaign was poised for marketing Red White & Blue Brew for the upcoming 4th of July.  

They turned from prospect over the city and the gush of the waterfall to trudge back up the gorge.  Mr. Daruwala climbed mountains on the weekends and so he was in excellent shape.  Mr. Spellacy huffed and puffed on the incline.

The two men paused to rest in front Mr. Spellacy’s new acquisition.  

“This one looks quite different,” Mr Daruwala said, gesturing at the impassioned holy-looking figure pinned to the featureless granite pedestal.

“Yes, it’s an interesting variant,” Mr. Spellacy replied.

“How many do you have?” Mr. Daruwala asked.  

“I don’t know exactly.  I’ll have to count.  Maybe about 30.”

“Remarkable,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“I’m doing these municipalities a favor,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “I make their problems just disappear in the dark of the night.”

“And you’re preserving the statues for posterity,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“This is true,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “The time is short, but I still think that we’ll see the pendulum swing back to what is normal.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Mr. Daruwala said, with, however, a skeptical note in his voice.

“Columbus was a great man because he was bold and innovative,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “You know my motto – ‘Innovate don’t imitate’.”

“I do indeed,” Mr. Daruwala said and, then, he repeated the slogan in a soft, reverential voice.

“These fellows have been battered and abused,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “But they’re still standing proudly.  At least, that’s what I think.”

Mr. Spellacy said something about scripture and the End Times that Mr. Daruwala pretended not to hear.  

Then:  “Do we have the heroes on board?” Mr. Spellacy said.  

He was referring to ten soldiers, suitably diverse as to ethnic origin, color, and creed (as well as both male and female with a transgender warrior thrown in for a good measure), recruited to promote Red White & Blue Brew.  The soldiers had all been awarded medals for valor and Mr. Daruwala planned to film them toasting their country with foaming mugs of beer at a party staged under the noble profiles carved into Mount Rushmore.  A suitably munificent donation to the National Park Service had been arranged and a generous honorarium budgeted for the heroes.

“I will want to bring them here for a meet and greet,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Daruwala replied.  “I think it might be too soon.”

“Too soon?”

“Too soon after the racial reckoning,” Mr. Daruwala explained.

“But the time is growing short,” Mr. Spellacy replied.

“Not that short, boss,” Mr. Daruwala answered.

“No cameras,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “No publicity for the ‘meet and greet’.  I just want to bask in the presence of our heroes.  You have to humor me.”

“I understand,” Mr. Daruwala said.    

Above the bright, running water, the air seemed fresh and invigorating, like champagne one might have said if mention of that product had not been verboten in the park.  The wind sluiced down the ravine, entwining itself about the statues and they seemed to ring like bells.  

“I’ll make it happen,” Mr. Daruwala said about the meeting with the ten heroes.  

“You’re my right hand,” Mr. Spellacy said appreciatively.  “It’ll be a sort of test.”

“Test?”

“For our Legion of Honor.”

Mr. Daruwala looked up the passionate sacred-looking figure atop his pedestal.  Then, he eyed the figures of Columbus in the groves, each standing stalwart atop his plinths.  

“He really got it wrong,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m an Indian, you know, a real Indian.”

“You’re a true blue American, Prana,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“But those poor native people,” Mr. Daruwala said.  “Going under the wrong name entirely.  And just because this bloke didn’t know what he had really discovered.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

6.

Lunch was served buffet style in the formal dining room at the chalet.  Limousines lined the drive, parked under a flourish of aspens shivering in the wind.  The heroes ate with good appetite and, of course, there were frosted mugs of beer.  Toasts were proposed: to America! to Patriotism and Good Deeds! to the Flag and Thank you for your Service!  Mr. Daruwala tentatively proposed a toast to Columbus.  The heroes looked puzzled: Wasn’t Columbus a town in Ohio?

After they had eaten, Mr. Spellacy guided his guests through the solarium and past the old swimming pool embedded in marble like an immense bath tub under glass ceiling studded with solar panels.  The way was handicap-accessible, without steps and gently ramped from the house into the gardens between the great fins of slick-looking red rock lining the canyon.  Two of the heroes, a legless Marine and a paraplegic Navy Seal with mild brain damage, used wheelchairs and each had been assigned an administrative assistant to discretely steer them away from hazards – there were steeply sloped paths in the garden and those had been blocked with orange highway cones.  But the wheelchairs could, of course, roll off the edges of the mild inclines and it would be unbecoming to have a hero hung up on a curb surrounding a bed of flowers or an ornamental shrub.  

Mr. Spellacy paused with his entourage at the ruins of the old brewery, now half-collapsed and ancient in appearance, like a Anasazi cliff-dwelling, some crumbling masonry towers tucked under the overhang of rock beside mysterious brick cellars, one them foaming with the spring, dark in the shadows but moving with mysterious intent to pump out a thick foamy rope of white water coursing down the hill. Two peacocks standing like sentinels flanked the asphalt trail and the heroees marveled at them.

Blinking in the bright sunlight (Mr. Spellacy thought it disrespectful to wear sunglasses in the presence of these warriors), the beer tycoon said that his great-grandfather had come as an immigrant to this country and that he had hefted 100 pound blocks of ice with tongs and on his shoulder, hauling the frozen stuff up mountain gorges to mining camps.  Then, he had peddled beer from a wagon and pulled draughts in saloons greasy with tobacco spit.  Italian immigrants were despised on the frontier – they were said to be lazy and corrupt, stupid, criminal, rotten with Catholicism and obedient to evil priests, their women whores and infected with social diseases.  

“It was prejudice of the worst kind,” Mr. Spellacy said to the heroes.  Then, he pointed to brewery ruins.  “But he prevailed and built this.  This brewery is his monument.”

A female Special Forces officer, a heroine among the heroes, said that her parents had come from a poor village in the mountains of Mexico and so she understood what he was saying.   The brain-damaged 

Seal seemed baffled and he muttered: “USA!  USA!  USA all the way!”

“Let us continue,” Mr. Spellacy said.  He lead the way deeper into the gorge, along a relatively level path that curved between pines to the first statue of Columbus.  From this place, the mouth of the ravine was visible and the drop-off down to the lower foothills and the glass skyscrapers below.  Statues hulked on terraces below, bronze shoulders and heads partly obscured by the pines that enclosed them.  From this perspective, the garden looked like a cemetery with tombs at intervals amidst mournful, flame-shaped green trees.  

The heros looked around suspiciously.  The sun broke through the clouds and cast a theatrical beam of light on the upturned face of Amerigo Vespucci standing on the ledge near the cliff and the waterfall.  Vespucci’s suffering seemed exemplary, his slender form with gesticulating bronze hands poised at the brink over which the silver strand of water poured.  

Mr. Spellacy pointed to the figure of Columbus, a bronze giant towering over them. “This was the first figure in my collection,” Mr. Spellacy announced.  

“Who is it?” a burly female soldier asked.

“Columbus,” Mr. Spellacy said.  Mr. Daruwala averted his eyes, seeming to take notes on a legal pad clipped to a clipboard that he held against his belly.  

Silence.  The shriek of a peacock.  Water pouring over rocks with a sound a bit like the comb of a woman brushing her hair only louder, amplified by the amphitheater of red rocks.

Mr. Spellacy said that his grandfather was the founding member of the city Italian-American League, an association devoted to improving the plight of recent immigrants and promoting their culture.  There was much xenophobia at the time of the First World War, Mr. Spellacy said, and, so, his grandfather, with other prosperous Italian-Americans donated money so that a statue of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea could be erected in the park near the State House downtown.  A fine bronze figure was cast and ceremoniously installed on an expansive plinth of Carrara marble quarried in Italy.  Ten-thousand people attended the festive occasion and bands played and Enrico Caruso sang arias by Verdi.  Then, the festival orchestra played the chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco and choirs assembled from four Methodist and Episcopalian churches sang and, as the sun set, fireworks adorned the sky.  

“My grandfather was very proud of the statue and, when I was a little boy, he took me downtown to see it.  There was my family name written in bronze letters with a greenish patina on the base of the statue.”  Mr. Spellacy said that he was thrilled to see the big figure of Columbus scowling over the lawns that rolled downhill to the Capitol building itself and that the statue made him feel bigger and more comfortable in his own flesh and more confident of his ability to do great things.

“I like to think that Columbus would approve of my company’s motto,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “That is, ‘Never imitate, always innovate’.”

A couple of the soldiers, chests all abuzz with medals and decorations, saluted the statue and cried “Hurrah!”

“When I saw on TV that mobs were desecrating Columbus,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “I knew that the End Times were upon us.”

Mr. Daruwala cleared this throat nervously.

“I knew that I had to act,” Mr. Spellacy continued.  “Not to oppose the protesters because they were merely exercising rights for which you all fought and bled.  No, I didn’t try to stop the expression of sentiment, as it were, about my forefather, but, later, after a few days had passed, I sent a crew to rescue the statue from the river where it had been thrown.  And this is the result.”

Mr. Spellacy pointed up to Columbus.  He had been dragged over concrete and part of his nose was abraded so that a hole on one nostril opened into the dark hollow inside the figure.  The corner of his floppy, clownish-looking hat was knocked off.  The mob had painted the words “murderer” on him and dowsed his belly and thighs with red paint and some scaly traces of that pigment could still be seen adhering to the bronze.  

“I now have retrieved thirty, I think thirty-one of these statues from all around the country,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “This is private property and I am preserving here.”

“Preserving them for what?” a Black lieutenant asked.

“Well, the End-Times are coming and –“ 

Mr. Daruwala coughed.  If the End of the World was, indeed, upon us, selling Red White & Blue Brew seemed like a foolish enterprise.

“Things will change,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “The pendulum always swings back.”

A Navajo sniper (National Guard from Window Rock, Arizona) raised his hand.

“Thank you for your service,” Mr. Daruwala said preemptively.

The Navajo sniper, reputed to have killed over a 100 Iraquis in the battle of Fallujah, asked: “Do you see, sir, how this statue might be offensive to some people?”

“Well, I have thirty, or is it thirty-one, of them,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“It’s actually 29,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“But do you see how these statues could bother some people?” the Navajo sniper asked.

“Of course,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “But this is private property and so I have the right —“

“The right to what?” the Navajo asked.

“To celebrate my heritage, just like you have the right to celebrate your heritage,” Mr. Spellacy said.

Columbus’ lips were set and he seemed to scowl fiercely at the heros and Mr. Spellacy.

“But –“ the sniper began.

A peacock shrieked and, then, one of the women hovering over the two heroes in wheelchairs screamed.  The legless Marine, bored by the conversation, had pushed himself a little down the trail to inspect a shrub florid with pale blue and white snowball hydrangeas.  The marine reached forward to pluck a blossom, releasing his hand from his brake, and the wheelchair rolled down the incline, dividing the two orange cones that fell away to the side and, then, careened down the steep trail.

The woman responsible for guarding the man ran over the terraced lawn, hoping to intercept the wheelchair at the first curve on the downgrade.  She reached the sharp turn just before the wheelchair but it ran over her foot.  The young woman howled and fell forward into the flowers.  

The Marine deftly negotiated the first turn and, then, the second and, in fact, it seemed that he was enjoying his wild ride because he let out an exuberant yelp.  Mr. Daruwala pulled out his cell-phone and called 911, certain that this would not end well.  The brain-damaged paraplegic, enthused by the spectacle, shouted “USA!” and followed the Marine down the trail, but he was less adroit and crashed on the second switchback, flung against an evergreen with the wheelchair bouncing violently through the trees and crashing against the base of one of the Columbus statues, tilted sideways with silver wheel still spinning.  

The heroes dashed down the trail and Mr. Spellacy was left alone standing under his grandfather’s Columbus blinking in the bright sunlight.

At the bottom of the twisting trail, the Marine saw that the path ended at the outlook beneath the tall, rail-thin saint with the map nestled against his thigh.  Beyond Vespucci, the cliff dropped into the valley, a column of feathery white water falling onto rocks below.  The Marine was traveling too fast to stop himself and so he veered sharply, smashing into the plinth supporting the bronze cartographer.  The wheelchair spurted out from under him and he fell into a bramble thicket.  

Mr. Spellacy told Mr. Daruwala to fire the Administrative Assistant who had been minding the Marine.  In the gorge, the siren of an ambulance wailed.

Spellacy and Daruwala hurried down the trail.  A couple soldiers paused to inspect the brain-damaged paraplegic who was worming his way through another flower bed of hydrangeas.  “USA!” he shouted, clearly pleased with himself.

The Marine lay in a truncated heap at the foot of the bronze figure of Amerigo Vespucci.

The Navajo sniper knelt over the injured man.  The Marine said that it was fun ride while it lasted.  He gripped the arm of the Navajo and said that his back hurt.

The Navajo National Guardsman said: “Do you see what I mean?  Do you see what I mean?”

But no one seemed to see what he meant.

“These racist statues have to be taken down,” the Navajo sniper cried.

“How can a statue be racist?” Mr. Spellacy asked.

“They must be removed,” the sniper said.

“Before I take down my statues,” Mr. Spellacy said, “I’ll invite them to supper and these lads will come and dine with me.”

“You said it,” the sniper replied.

“I have said it,” Mr. Spellacy said.

7.

Amerigo Vespucci couldn’t see the commotion under his bronze feet.  His eyes were resolutely fixed on the sky and the little oculus in the clouds from which a beam of sunlight rained down.  

But he heard Mr. Spellacy’s speech and the words resounded in his hollow head.

Statues are always awaiting permission from their human masters to leave their plinths and stalk about. But, such permission is almost never given.  But here the words had been spoken.

Vespucci passed along this intelligence to the other statues.  

The casualties were picked out of the flower beds and brambles and pushed uphill on ambulance gurneys.  Mr. Spellacy demanded that a written report be submitted to him by noon the next day.  Mr. Daruwala contacted the company’s insurance broker. 

8.

After the day’s excitement, Mr. Spellacy dined alone.  His newest wife had gone to Monaco.  Both of his daughters lived in Manhattan where they attended college.  Mr. Spellacy worried about his daughters and was afraid, that, in an unguarded moment, they would run afoul of the wrong people, be abducted, and held for ransom.  New York City was a dangerous placed.  

Guadalupe prepared a simple meal for Mr. Spellacy: pan-fried rainbow trout with pozole soup.  Of course, a frosty mug of Red White & Blue Brew sat beside his plate and soup bowl.  Mr. Spellacy ate in a small room with green tile walls next to the kitchen and pantry.  There was no need for the formal dining room with its dark-paneled walls and long heavy table with many place-settings, thirty chairs in all padded with red velvet under a barbed chandelier fashioned from deer antlers.

The green-tiled room had a little nautical-looking porthole.  Mr. Spellacy sensed that something was moving outside –a shadow lumbered by the window and, then, another.  Then, he heard a heavy knock on a far away door.  The sound echoed through the chalet’s empty corridors and rooms.

Mr. Spellacy took his cell-phone from his breast pocket and texted Guadalupe that she should come to where he was eating.  Another loud thud sounded at the front of the house.  

Guadalupe appeared in the doorway.  Flour used in breading the fresh trout marked her dark apron.  Jose, the kitchen assistant, stood a little apart from her with downcast eyes, careful to avert his gaze from the big boss.

“Someone is pounding on the front door,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

Guadalupe replied that, for her part, she had heard nothing but admitted that she was playing the radio in the kitchen.  Jose just shook his head.

Another bang sounded, this time so loud that it seemed to shake the walls, causing the china in the kitchen cabinets to click together, a sound like dice being rolled.

“There!” Mr. Spellacy cried.  “You must have heard that.”

“It might be a bird flying against the windows in the over the pool,” Guadalupe said.

“No, no,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “Someone is at the front door.  You! Jose, go and see.”

Jose nodded his head and, still looking down at his shoes, shuffled away.

But it was too late, the heavy door at the front of the house creaked as it opened.  Mr. Spellacy heard the rusty hinge squeak.  Then, something heavy dragged across the marble floor in the distant reception hall.  

“They’re coming,” Mr. Spellacy cried.

“Who’s coming?” Guadalupe asked.  

“The statues,” Mr. Spellacy said, half-whispering as if to himself.  Guadalupe looked at him quizzically.

Mr. Spellacy listened intently, cocking his head, eyes closed.  A brazen fist pounded on another door, now closer to the little room where he had been eating.  Then, he heard bronze boots scraping across the floor in the hallway next to the formal dining room.

“Surely, surely, you hear that?” Mr. Spellacy muttered, but Guadalupe just shook her head.

“Call security,” Mr. Spellacy demanded.  

Guadalupe fumbled for her cell-phone.  The clatter in the next rooms was confused, metal on metal..

Out-of-breath, the two security guards hurried into the small room.  Mr. Spellacy asked them to escort him to the safe room, the security bunker in the chalet’s cellar.  

“It’s an emergency ,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

“But –“ one of the security men began.

“Do as I say!” Mr. Spellacy cried.

With the two guards flanking him, Mr. Spellacy hurried through the dark corridors.  As he passed the formal dining room, the door to the chamber was open.  The antler chandelier was dark, a great hooked spider hanging over the immense table where Mr. Spellacy thought he glimpsed giants squatting over the velvet-padded chairs.  One of the security guards took a walkie-talkie from breast pocket and whispered something.  

The cellar beneath the chalet was vaulted with heavy stone arches, some of them encrusted with tiny white pimples where mineral-laden water dripped down onto the concrete floor.  Light bulbs burned at intervals and, in the corner of the crypt, between two iron columns, there was a big metal box, windowless like a safe in a bank.  One of the security guards tapped a code into the key pad next to the iron door.  The other guard whispered again into his walkie-talkie.  Mr. Spellacy heard heavy bronze footsteps thundering in the joists overhead and the brick barrel vaults shook down a fine mist of mortar and milk-colored grout.  Mr. Spellacy felt the stuff in his hair and on his shoulders.  

The door to the iron chamber sprung open and Mr. Spellacy pushed past the plump sacks of rice, the tubs of peanut butter, and the gallons of water in sealed metal barrels.  Some tuns of beer in round kegs like propane cylinders were pushed against the back wall, a hovering arch of reddish rock that was part of the mountain. The security guard shoved the door shut and it made a loud, clanging sound, like an iron bar dropped heavily on the concrete.  

“What was that all about?” the guard with the walkie-talkie asked.

“Some kind of anxiety attack,” the other man said.

“The End Times he’s always talking about?”

“I suppose,” the guard replied.

The intercom spit static into the air.  “Boss, can you hear us?” one of the men asked.

A weird high-pitched scream came from within the metal box, vibrating in the little speaker affixed to the door.

“What is that?” the other security guard asked.

“A peacock,” the security guard said.  “He must have a peacock in there.”          

“How could that be?” the guard with the walkie-talkie asked.

“Go figure,” the other guard said.

   

9. 

In the moonlight, Amerigo Vespucci saw the Columbus figures lumbering through the garden.  They moved with the stiff, clumsy gait of old monks marching to Mass in their cloister.

Columbuses 1 through 28 had found the formal dining room and taken their places around it, but there were no plates set, no goblets nor any cutlery and the guest of honor was absent.  The big cheerless table was like the New World that the Admirals of the Ocean Sea (numbers 1 - 28), an ocean island that he had expected to be graced by the Great Khan and the princesses of Cathay and the lords and ladies that Marco Polo had met during his travels.  But there were no dignitaries to meet him, no temples and no bright harbors scented with spices.  There were just empty sand beaches, clotted with flotsam and the miserable naked cannibals, the poor people of the Indies.  It was a great disappointment, but Columbus was always being disappointed and so the fact that there was no banquet for him (or them) and no host awaiting them at the mansion-house was not a surprise.

Amerigo Vespucci was more skillfully wrought and he had no difficulty ascending the plinth of his monument.  He had seen the city below, streets outlined in pale orange lights and the grid of the towers and the planes at the airport rising and falling over a geometry of red beacons.  It was all very beautiful and could be charted to make a very fine map.  Without maps, Vespucci thought, we are helpless.   

                                                                                                     

Salamander

 

I was tired of living in the flames.  Three times, we were evacuated with fire lapping at the edges of the neighborhood in the hills where we lived.  Once, we had to flee after midnight, when a sheriff’s deputy knocked loudly on the door as squad cars cruised the streets with bullhorns blasting out commands in the orange, flickering gloom.  Twice, we were ordered to leave during daylight hours:  at dawn with the air all a grey pall of smoke, and, on another occasion, mid-afternoon as high winds flopped fist-sized cinders across the highway.  On the last occasion, I was at work, and my wife had to leave with the dogs and navigate the curving switchbacks on the highway off the mountain without my help.  Both sides of the road were burning in places and my wife was so frightened that she required therapy for six weeks, a process that resulted in her leaving me.  In each case, the flames stopped just short of the house, either lost in the ravines where the coyotes howled at night, or driven uphill by the stiff winds and away from the bowl in the mountains where we lived.  But the experience was disconcerting and, each year, fire season lasted longer and was more intense: it was either global warming or mismanagement of the forests or the encroachment of urban sprawl on the wilderness or a combination of all of these things – but, whatever the cause, no one had any bright ideas how to ameliorate the fire risk and, so, I decided to sell the home in the mountains (probably necessary in any event due to the divorce) and move to the valley.

At first, I wasn’t happy with the home that I rented in the basin.  It was hot in the lowlands and the lots were landscaped with terraced gravel and cacti.  I missed the forests on the mountain and the wildlife, the deers and peregrine falcons and, even, the coyotes that sang in the twililght.   But I didn’t miss fire season with its sleepless nights and, almost continuous, warnings and alarms.  The house below the flank of the big, green mountain was comfortable and surprisingly cheap to rent.  Perhaps, the low lease payments had something to do with the neighborhood – there was a big Fulfillment Center, an Amazon warehouse, stretching ominously along the base of the foothills a couple miles away and, closer to the home, a factory with turrets and walls that made it look like a maximum security prison.  The Fulfillment Center and the factory worked around the clock and the boulevard near the cul-de-sac where I lived was busy at odd intervals, sometimes in the middle of the night or during the placid hours of the afternoon or mid-morning.  The realtor said that I should rent the property on a short lease – perhaps, six months and, thereafter, month-to-month; a contract for deed was said to be available if all went well.

The rental house was about forty-years old, built in a Spanish revival style, with Mexican tiles in the dining room and a heavy oak door, bisected by ornamental brass straps.  The most noteworthy amenity was a large swimming pool, four-lanes wide and almost eighty feet long, running along the home’s back facade.  The pool was enclosed by a weathered wooden fence built from 8 foot high slats for privacy.  Curiously, a sort of wooden pew, a bit like something you might find in an old church, was backed into the fence, about ten feet from the edge of the pool.  The bath-tub-shaped sides of the pool had once been painted bright turquoise but the sun passing through the water rippling there had bleached the color to a mild greenish blue.  Apparently, an earthquake had cracked the sides of the pool and there was a zigzagging white scar running from the tile deck to the bottom of the basin, grout used to repair the walls and keep the water impounded.  The swimming pool was deep, without a sloping bottom, eight feet of water from end to end.  Some bolt holes in the tiles showed that a diving board had once propelled swimmers into the pool but, probably for insurance reasons, it had been removed.  An Aztec calender made of some light metal cast to look like bronze was above the wet bar under an awning, mounted on the wall of the house overlooking the pool.  A mask at the center of the calender’s elaborate concentric rings showed dark eye-holes, skeletal cheeks, and a knife-shaped flint for a tongue protruding from flesh-less lips.  At each end of the pool, there was an oily-looking eucalyptus plant growing from a bed of pink gravel.  Roots from the eucalyptus trees were levering up the dark Mexican tiles of the terrace holding the pool and their trunks shed flakes of aromatic bark that cluttered the walkway.  

Once more, fire season was upon us.  My bedroom was on the second floor of the house, a little room above the cul-de-sac.  It was cool at first and rainy for almost a month and I slept with my bedroom windows open.  A couple of times, I thought I heard splashing in the pool behind the house, but the sound seemed remote and so I didn’t get out of bed to investigate.  Then, the rains stopped and the hillsides dried out, the little perennial streams flowing from the flanks of the mountain extinct in the arid weather, just dry gulches fanning out from the peak.  The valley became warm and I closed the windows to air condition the house.  The fans, buried in the bowels of the structure, were loud and I couldn’t hear much beyond the walls of the house.  The forests near the crest of the mountain were onfire.  I saw the summit glowing red like an erupting volcano.  Then, I was glad to no longer live on the heights.

One hot night, wind gusting in the gravel lawns and kicking up little vortices of dust, I heard something that woke me, and, then, went to the toilet.  My old Labrador retriever (my ex-wife had kept our dachshund) wasn’t exactly vigilant.  The dog was awake, fearfully sniffing the air, and not really barking – to maintain some self-respect as guard dog, the old animal was making a sort of discrete huffing noise.  One of the walls with an window to the rear of the house was painted blood-red and, when I looked to see the origin of the light, I saw fireworks in the backyard, a fountain of red sparks reflected in the pool where people were swimming.  

I collected my handgun from the bedside drawer, put on my pants and a flannel shirt that my ex-wife had sometimes worn as pajamas and went to investigate.  I kept the pistol on safety, tucked into my jeans.  

About a half-dozen people were sitting on the pew next to the long pool.  Another Roman candle was flaring next to one of the eucalyptus trees and I was afraid the bark shed from its trunk would ignite.  Two coolers with beer and hard seltzer sat next to the pool.  A man was earnestly swimming laps, kicking up water with each stroke.  Two young women, topless but wearing bikini bottoms were floating on either side of the lane used by the swimmer.  The men and women seated on the pew were drinking, whispering among one another, also wearing bathing suits with towels as capes or hitched around their hips.  Someone had been smoking marijuana – there was a strong skunk odor in the air.

The people on the pew eyed me curiously.  

“Good to see you, boss,” one of the men said.  He offered me a beer.

“Good to see you,” I said.

I held the cold beer can but did not open it.

“How did you get in?”  I asked.  

“We have keys to the gate on the fence,” the man said.  He waved a little carved piece of metal in the air.

I could see that the back door into the house was propped open.  That door led down to a landing (there was another set of stairs to the upper level) and, then, more steps down to the basement.  Another man pushed open the back door emerging from the lower level of what I thought was my house.  He was wearing an immodest Speedo and had a heap of towels in his hands.

“Didn’t they tell you, boss-man?” the man with the keys asked.

“No one told me,” I said.

“Well, boss, this is kind of the neighborhood swimming hole,” he said.  “The owners have made it a custom to keep the place open for us.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

Overhead, the mountain was glowing red above the gouged-out side where there was a small ski resort.  The fires high on the mountain caused the night sky and the clouds of soot in the air to glow with a livid red glare.  

“We’re all shift workers at the factory or the Fulfillment Center,” the man said.  “In warm weather, we like to come here for a dip when our shifts are done.”

I nodded my head as if this explained things.

One of the topless girls dragged herself up the poolside aluminum ladder and out of the water.  She stood dripping on the dark Mexican tiles.  I saw a droplet clinging to her left nipple, trembling a little in the breeze and, then, falling from her skin onto the tiles.  

“Someone should have told you,” the girl said.  “But, in nice weather, we come here a lot.  It’s always been okay with the owner.”

“I see,” I said.

“Why don’t you join us?” the girl in the dark bikini bottom said.  “The water is very nice.”

I shook my head.

“We don’t care if you skinny-dip,” the girl said.  “After all it’s your pool.”

“Yes, it’s your pool, boss-man,” the young man added.

“We can all skinny dip,” the girl said.  

I shook my head again and said that I was tired and would go back to bed.

“It’s okay, boss,” the young man said.  “See you soon.”

Someone lit another Roman Candle that hissed, a jet of red and dark blue sparks flaring in the darkness.  I saw the year and day marks on the Aztec calender moving as if animated.  The monster with the flint blade for a tongue seemed to wink at me.  

I went inside but couldn’t sleep.  After tossing and turning for an hour, I went back to the toilet and looked down at the pool from my back window.  It was dark outside, except for the faint red light from the fire on the mountain top.  The pool was empty and there was no sign of the people who had gathered there.

In the bright light of morning, I thought that I had dreamed.  I went through the sliding glass doors onto the tiles next to the pool.  The water was limpid, a bluish plane reflecting the back facade of the house and the grey plume of smoke overhead.  The pew was dry and there were no burn marks in the eucalyptus bark below the trees.  

But when I went downstairs, I almost slipped in several pools of water by the bathroom on the lower floor of the split-level.  The puddles seemed to have been tracked into the house and there were several towels drying on a nylon line pulled across the downstairs rec room.  I hadn’t noticed the nylon clothesline before, nor had I taken any note of the big armoire shoved into the corner of the room.  When I opened the cupboard doors, I found that it was full of neatly folded towels. 

Nettie Blair

 

In those days, people used the river for all sorts of things.  A maze of mill races poured river-water over wheels turning gears that powered machines and families fished in the lagoons and under bridges and barges bearing cattle for market or timber or, even, steel girders, coursed up and down the stream.  And there were dams making rational the river where there had once been irregular rapids or outright falls and canals with locks detouring around the dams and, at intervals, huge beehive-shaped brick structures built to store blocks of river ice for the summer in cocoons of sawdust.  Canoes slipped through the shadows cast by trees on the river’s banks and young men rowed their sweethearts to shaggy islands in the stream and pleasure cruises lit by lanterns and crowded with people drinking and singing sentimental songs plodded downstream.  Waders waded and bathers bathed and, sometimes, a brave soul would be glimpsed in the center of the current puffing and blowing out water like a river god.  

Nettie Blair contrived another use of the river.  She was the joy of our town, and much admired, but certain circumstances, about which the less said the better, rendered her desolate and friendless.  At that time, she had been expelled from her father’s house and was living at a boarding house only a few steps from the river’s bank.  Many among us would have gladly helped her in exchange for some modicum of tenderness, but Nettie Blair was proud and recoiled from our advances.  It was obvious that we were not the solution that she desired to her problems.

One warm afternoon in August, Nettie left her humid room at the boarding house and made her way to the river.  People fishing downstream from the dam saw her venture onto the rim of the wall impounding the river.  She made her way daintily to the middle of the dam and, then, planned, it seemed, to slip into the deep water upstream.  She was wearing patent leather boots and a full hoop-skirt and held a parasol shaped like a flower over her head.  

But, something, went awry and, instead of dropping gracefully into the deep pool above the dam, she lost her footing in the spillover and slid on her haunches, most unceremoniously, down the steep concrete apron at the falls, dropping into the churn of white water below.  Clad as she was, her boots and dress pulled her under.  A couple times, she surfaced sputtering and spitting water, but, then, the young woman sunk into the brown river and did not rise again.  A fisherman in his boat rowed to the place where she had vanished, abandoning his watercraft to dive for her.  He dragged Nettie out of the flood and, swimming sideways, yanked her to shore.  At that time, she was not breathing and her life was despaired of, but, after some vigorous exertions by her rescuer, Nettie regained consciousness, groaning and vomiting water.  

For several days, Nettie was hospitalized.  Then, she returned to her dwelling in the boarding house, sitting on the porch in the warm shade, and regarding the river flowing nearby with a numbed, mask-like expression on her face.  She gave no excuses nor apologies and spoke to no one.  The other guests at the boarding house said that she scarcely touched her meals.

In late September, as the days were growing shorter and more cool, Nettie Blair made her way to the swimming beach with its little docks for the bathers now hauled out of the lagoon and stored among the big trees on the shore.  The food kiosks were closed for the season and there was only a single boy working at the concession that rented row-boats to guests.  Nettie Blair handed the boy some money and waited as he counted out her change.  Then, she went to the boat, bobbing next to the little white-washed docked, and stepping aboard, put the paddles into the oar-locks.  She rowed upriver in the twilight.  

An hour later, the overturned rowboat drifted back down stream.

Kosmos

 

1.

Nelson’s dwelling was more like a badger’s sett than a proper cabin. The dug-out was gouged into a hill with a semi-circular opening.  Two logs, charred to white ash on their round, upper surfaces, had been rolled away from the pit’s entry.  Evidently, Nelson dragged the logs across the entry to this grave, setting them afire at night so that flame would bar people and animals from creeping into his home.  

Hoyt peered into the dug-out and saw that Nelson had surfaced the inside of the hole with lathe and bits of old plank, salvaged, it seemed, from a defunct wagon.  The wagon’s wheels were stacked in the turf outside the cave.  A goat was cropping the grass on the slope over the dug-out and a twig and wattle wigwam held three dusty-looking hens.  In another smaller shelter, made from interlaced reeds and thorn branches, a rooster with little red eyes was scuffing at the earth.  Nelson had cut a tub-shaped hollow in the dirt in front of his house and a big, green snapping turtle was wallowing in the mud there, one of its hind-legs tethered by chain to a iron stake pounded into the sod.

Where was Nelson?

Hoyt hallooed.  Nelson called out.  He was concealed by a copse of willow trees along the stream, digging there for roots.  

Carrying a pail with his cuttings, Nelson pushed through the saplings and came up the hill toward Hoyt.

“You didn’t need to stop working,” Hoyt said.  “I would have come to you.”

“Finished for now,” Nelson said, glancing down at his half-full pail.

Hoyt told Nelson that he had bartered for the services of a surveyor, employing a Scotsman who lived among the Mormons.  The Scotsman had made plat for a future town in the vicinity of the Crow River’s west fork, a neat drawing complete with easements for streets, parcels set aside for schools and, even, an institution of higher learning, as well as spacious, well-ordered lots on which the habitations for a happy multitude could be built.  

Nelson asked Hoyt if he had the plat in hand.

“No, not for fear of having the work spoiled with smudges,” Hoyt replied.  He continued: “There is wanting only a name for this settlement of the future.”

The rooster in his cage of thorns crowed hoarsely.

“I’m opposed to bringing people here,” Nelson said.  “The air in towns is insalubrious – the wind is wont to stink of knacker’s yards and tanneries.”

“Progress,” Hoyt said.

“Not so,” Nelson replied.  “Nature is best where it is barren of men.”

“You were the first to venture into these parts,” Hoyt said.  “It was all wilderness when you arrived, a desolate place with of savages and howling wolves.”

“A paradise,” Nelson said.

“I had thought to consult you as to the name of the settlement,” Hoyt said.  

“It is a matter of indifference to me,” Nelson said.  “What is your idea?”

“Kosmos,” Hoyt said.

Nelson shook his head and said that it seemed a fanciful enough appellation for what was still simply prairie buckled up around small lakes and marshes.

“Not so in the future,” Hoyt replied.

Nelson invited Hoyt into his shelter to share a pipe with him.  

Hoyt said that he had other business to which he should attend and, thanking Nelson for his hospitality, walked down to where his mule was waiting patiently.  A small path, faintly impressed into the grass on the bank of the Crow River, followed the meanders of the stream across the treeless prairie.  Hoyt raised his hand in farewell and followed the stream until bank and badger sett were lost in the green distance.   

2.

“So does he veto the name?” Atkins asked Hoyt.  

Hoyt said that Nelson told him that the name of the city platted on the plain was of no interest to him.

“Did you ask him if he wanted the settlement to bear his name?” Atkins asked.  “After all, he was the first pioneer here, a brave fellow considering the Indian troubles.”

“Heavens no,” Hoyt replied.  “Nelson is a solitary man.”

Atkins was burning some brush in front of his small cabin.  The air smelled of ash and fire, but the smoke kept away the mosquitos rising in stinging clouds from the slough beneath the hill.  

“Everyone calls his stake, ‘Nelsontown’,” Atkins said.

“ ‘Town’?” Hoyt asked.  “I didn’t see any town.”

“Exactly,” Atkins replied.  “It’s called a ‘town,’ because there is no town.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Hoyt said.  

“Sometimes people name a thing for what it is not,” Atkins said.  

Hoyt just shook his head.

3.

The mule was balky and Hoyt walked most of the way to the Mormon settlement.  He led the beast at his side on a hemp halter.

The Saints had built several cabins close to the ground under the big oak trees on the lake shore.  The cabins had low walls smeared with clay with roofs sloping only very slightly to ridge-lines about six feet above the ground.  Tin pipes pierced the shingles, a thin curl of smoke hanging overhead.  A frame wall supported by braces stood apart from the log buildings.   Canvas lean-tos were tacked to the whitewashed wood wall, tent-flaps open in the mild weather with fabric propped up like awnings on poles whittled from tree limbs.  Children were hoeing weeds out of a garden and, under the turf banks of the lake, women were kneeling over laundry.

Hoyt expected the place to be full of women, the wives of the patriarchs, but he didn’t count that many females.  Perhaps, the harem was hiding somewhere, possibly in the green shadows of the brushy forest on the hillsides overlooking the lake.

Hoyt asked a man chopping wood about the settlement’s leader.  The man blinked and seemed confused by the question.  Some skins were posted like official warrants on the trunk of a tree that had been stripped to a thick, bare pole.  The skins looked to be otter and muskrat.

The man with the axe pointed along the edge of the water to where the pale clay banks parted and a creek glided downhill away from the bright, open expanse of the lake.  Reeds fringed the shore and some white water-birds with black stilt legs were fishing in the shallows.

The Mormons were working to build a grist mill and had blocked the outlet to the stream with a slick, oozing weir of irregularly chopped logs.  A pile of field stone made a cairn next to the dam.  The creek bed was full of mud and frogs were bouncing around in ponds where the water had once flowed.

Hoyt inquired after the head man.  An older fellow with a spade-shaped beard looked at Hoyt suspiciously.  This was Elder Dodge.  He signaled that it was time for noon rest and walked away from the dam to a shady arbor at the edge of woods.

Hoyt said that the plat that he had prepared with the help of the one of their men, a land surveyor, was complete and, now, ready to be filed at the County Seat, although it wasn’t yet clear what settlement would have the honor of being so designated.  Elder Dodge said that this was fine and that it was good that the blessings of civilization had come to this land and that, of course, many more Saints were already underway to travel to their settlement.  

“Some day,” Hoyt said, “this will all be city.  A great metropolis with broad streets and many fine buildings.”

“So it shall be,” Elder Dodge said.

“So there is the matter of the city’s name,” Hoyt said.

“What name?”

“I’m advising that I have named this city ‘Kosmos’,” Hoyt told him.

The Elder squinted. A woman came across the wet meadow and brought him a chipped ceramic bowl with hot stew in it.

“That’s not much of a name,” Elder Dodge said.

“Well, I would like your approval, in any event, because I want to file the plat, of course, and hope that there will be no objections from those already living on the land.”

“I object,” Elder Dodge said.  “ ‘Kosmos’ is not a Christian-sounding name.”

“It’s a very good name,” Hoyt said.  “We are hoping to attract a university with the finest faculty.  The name signifies harmony and beauty – it’s Greek, the language of the New Testament, the tongue of Jesus our lord and savior.”

“It seems like a heathen name,” Elder Dodge said. 

Hoyt nodded.  He asked mildly: “So what would you prefer?”

“Perhaps, ‘Beulah’ or ‘Shiloh’,” Elder Dodge replied.

“The late war has spoiled ‘Shiloh’,” Hoyt said.  “A shame, I think.  And ‘Beulah’ – I think there are other places bearing that name.”

“That might be,” Elder Dodge answered. “But, in any event, the name will have to be acceptable to us.  We are the majority in these parts.”

“For the time being,” Hoyt replied.  

“God willing,” Elder Dodge said.

“I don’t see many women around your settlement,” Hoyt said.

“We have plenty of women in this Stake.’

“I thought you kept several for each husband.  Of course, I don’t purport to any judgment on that subject.  But I think the sheriff perhaps...”

“Not so,” Elder Dodge said.  “You mistake us for Saints of Brigham Young’s persuasion.  We reject his doctrines as to marriage.”

“Is that so?”

“Indeed,” Elder Dodge said.  “We divided from the Nauvoo branch of the faith over that issue.  A matter of conscience. That’s why we’ve come to this place and not followed the emigration beyond the Missouri to the West.”

“I see,” Hoyt said.

“In any event, the sheriff is a scoundrel,” the Mormon said.  

They sat in silence for a few minutes.  A coyote called in the underbrush and the air at the encampment echoed with the sound of axes hacking wood.

“Call the city ‘Dominion’,” Elder Dodge recommended.  “For man shall have dominion over all the lands and the beasts of the air and the water and earth.”

“A worthy suggestion,” Hoyt said.  He tipped his hat to the Elder.

“Just remember,” Elder Dodge said.  “For the present we are the majority and will vote as a majority.”

“So there’s no dissent among the dissenters?” Hoyt asked.

“Not in this Zion,” Elder Dodge called to him.

4.

The cottonwood trees standing along the West Fork of the Crow were still green and, when the wind blew, showed the bellies of their leaves pale as an overturned frog, but on the hills, where the maples sheltered in the ravines, the leaves were amber and gold.  Some of the maple leaves had blown down across the open land to the tea-colored water running in the meandered stream and they made a little yellow armada on the current.

Atkins asked if Hoyt intended to take a census as to a name for the city platted for the land between Nelsontown and Mormon encampment on the lake.  

“I don’t think the Mormons should vote,” Hoyt said.  “They don’t follow the law of the land.”

“What do you mean?”

“Their marriage customs,” Hoyt said.  

“I thought that our neighbors rejected that doctrine,” Atkins said.  “At least, so it appears to me.” 

“I’m not so certain although I think they protest over-much.”

“I’ve seen nothing unseemly,” Atkins said.

Mr. Hoyt said: “Come unannounced, a-gallop, and you will see quite a scatter of quail fleeing the settlement for the forests.”

“Really?” Atkins asked.

“Yes, I’ve seen the lasses with my own eyes making for the bush.  They keep their harems concealed from strangers in the gloom of the woods.”

“I have my doubts,” Atkins said.  

   

He paused.  The sun was setting and the air grew cold.  Hoyt had been helping him stretch wire between fence-posts.  The wooden posts marched down the hillside to the edge of the river.  The stream would serve as a natural boundary to the land that Atkins was fencing.  

“So when will you file?”  

“At the first opportunity,” Hoyt said.  “Once I’ve filed the plat, I will travel down to St. Paul and discuss our city with the politicians there.  Soon, enough, I warrant, we’ll have the railroad knocking at our door.”

Atkins nodded his head.  

“The name will be an attraction,” Hoyt added.  “I’ll wait to travel when the ground is frozen and, then, make my way over the sloughs and streams on ice.  That’s the most expeditious way.”

Hoyt said that Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s book Cosmos published in five volumes was famous among learned men.  He told Atkins that the name for their city would attract the railroad as well as scholars and other well-educated people.  

“So why don’t you just call the town ‘Humboldt’?”  Atkins asked.

“There are already a number of places bearing that name,” Hoyt said. 

5.

Colonel Renville, distinguished for his service in the late War of the Rebellion, was the first grantee of all land in this part of the State.  It was known that he had government land patents signed by the President in his possession.  Colonel Renville had shown Hoyt these imposing documents, written on parchment in ornate chancery hand, when he first conveyed to him territory now platted as Kosmos.  The land patents were kept in a iron-braced seaman’s trunk that Colonel Renville had secured to his buckboard hitch wagon under a shroud of taut leather.  The trunk was the County Seat and contained all cadastral documents of record.  Renville regarded himself as the County’s sheriff and land commissioner.  It was said that he had acquired his land patents as an advantage of his military rank and in consideration of a grave wound that he had received during the siege of Vicksburg.  The colonel wasn’t interested in developing land and so he parted with his property on a reasonable basis – politics and the emoluments of elected office were his enthusiasms.  He had commanded men in battle and was desirous to retain his authority now in peace time.

Colonel Renville was peripatetic, always going up and down in the country.  He hauled the county seat in its nautical trunk with him during his travels.  Atkins told Hoyt that Colonel Renville was encamped at a place called Ottertail Lake, apparently fishing, hunting and managing some trap-lines that he had placed in a marsh nearby.  The commodity of beaver was much diminished in the territory, but Colonel Renville still took some animals from streams and ponds in the woods.  

Hoyt rolled his plat map into a tube and, then, covered the document in oil-cloth.  The map was about a yard square, cloth-backed with the markings made in blue ink on linen.  The different subdivisions in Kosmos were hand-colored in gray- green and light brown and pale pink tones.  The cadastral map was  a very fine thing to see, pleasant to the eye.  Hoyt carefully packed the plat in an osier strapped to the side of his mule and set forth to find Colonel Renville. 

Ottertail lake was a dozen miles away, across open prairie flowing with a half-dozen small streams that Hoyt had to ford.  Although it was late in the season, the weather was warm and the bright sun drew exhalations from the withered flowers and brown grass that made the afternoon smell like August.  A late efflorescence of mosquitos troubled Hoyt much during his march.  

The wind had blown some of the brown and yellow leaves from the trees surrounding the lake.  The water was low and glazed, stinking ribs of mud showed around the edges of the lake.  A couple of rude log cabins stood on an old Indian mound overlooking the shore.  The people living there were Swedes unable to converse in English, but, by gesture, they gave Hoyt to understand that Colonel Renville had departed a few days earlier.  One of the farmers pointed in the direction that Renville had gone and Hoyt thought that he saw the ruts of the iron-bound wheels of the buckboard transporting the County Seat, narrow grooves imprinted on the meadow.

Hoyt wasn’t about to chase after Colonel Renville, although he was anxious to file the plat and make official the organization of Kosmos.  It wasn’t clear to him that the Swedes knew exactly where Renville had gone and, so, Hoyt ate some roast turnips and bony smoked fish with the farmers and, then, set forth to return to his cabin.  Halfway home, his mule gingerly lowered herself onto the sod, turned her head away from Hoyt, and died.

6.

A week later, Hoyt learned from a traveling salesman, that Colonel Renville was lodging at Lake Lillian, nine miles to the southeast of the land platted as Kosmos.  The Colonel, in his capacity as sheriff, had taken some reprobate into custody and, then, escorted him to that village.  The salesman said that there was a half-empty granary sufficiently stout at that place to confine the criminal while Colonel Renville awaited the marshal said to be en route from the capitol.  Soon it would be cold, blizzard season, and it was thought best to extract the prisoner from his jail and move him to St. Paul before snow made travel difficult.  

The night before he left for Lake Lillian, Hoyt surveyed his plat by lamp light.  The small lots checkering the map were winsome, waiting to be assigned to settlers, and, with his finger, Hoyt traced the right-of-way granted to the railroad that he expected to attract to town.  He examined the boundaries set by bearing trees and witness corners and touched with the tip of his little finger the meander line in the survey of the West Fork of the Crow River, a stream soon to be arched over by many neat and well-made bridges.  It was unseasonably warm and the oil burning in his lamp made the air foul in his dwelling.  Hoyt carefully rolled the plat map into a tube and, then, covered it with oil cloth that he tied with a string.

A hard frost two nights earlier had killed all the mosquitos and biting flies and so, because the interior of his cabin was warm and airless, Hoyt took a bear-skin pelt to a grassy hillside and lay on his back surveying the great expanse of sky and stars above him.  The pelt had been prepared in haste by the hunters who had killed the bruin for the sweet meat of his hump and the fur smelled faintly of carrion.  The sky overhead was dense with stars, some of the familiar constellations disarranged it seemed, out of joint, probably because Hoyt hadn’t gazed into the heavens this late in the season.  Some patches of blackness drifted among the twinkling fields of stars; Hoyt knew these were clouds.

He imagined the city with a broad street that spanned the river.  This street was named Milky Way.  The roads crossing Milky Way were identified by the signs of the zodiac.  At Scorpio Street and Milky Way, a large lot was reserved for the University of Kosmos.  Hoyt imagined buildings made from pale, yellow slabs of limestone.  The buildings had arched windows with points at their tops so that they resembled Gothic cathedrals.  The commercial zone stretched along the railroad tracks and Hoyt thought of brick storefronts and warehouses of the kind that he had seen in St. Louis.  Just before, he fell asleep, Hoyt pictured a locomotive chugging into town.  The locomotive was made from translucent crystal and so he could see the flames banked at the center of the engine, a glowing red heart with its chambers linked to an intricate system of bronze and iron gears, rotors, regulators, rods tirelessly rising and falling, spinning flywheels, everything exposed within that carapace of clear quartz.  The vision made Hoyt glad and he fell asleep rejoicing.

7.

The next morning, Hoyt donned his boots and put the plat wrapped in oil-cloth in a cargo net that he slung over his shoulders.  The sun was just rising, painting the water meadows pink and yellow.  

For the first couple miles, Hoyt was sweating.  The air was humid and, after the brief blaze of early morning, black, congested clouds filled the sky.  The atmosphere felt charged, tingling with galvanism.  

The shortest way to Lake Lillian was the most difficult.  The village was a couple miles beyond a tumble of densely wooded hills that people called the Leaf Mountains.  The hilly landscape was intricate with bare crooked ridges above deep marshy hollows and narrow shards of spring-fed lakes.  Hoyt hunted in the hills every year and like to ramble among the heights and green shadowy potholes.  Sometimes, he encountered families of Metis there, half-breeds from the Selkirk and Pembina country.  They were friendly people and showed him the ravines where deer were abundant and fowl readily taken.  The Metis knew the streams and ponds as well and, sometimes, guided him to green lagoons where there were big fish with bony jaws full of teeth that could be netted in the shallows.  Hoyt felt a little lonely and one of his legs was sore so that he walked with a slight limp and he hoped he would meet a half-breed family encamped in the Leaf Hills, a place to sit with a friend on the turf and share a pipe, perhaps, and a bite of food.  

Hoyt rested on a big pinkish boulder next to the trail that rose steeply up a slope into the hills.  The boulder was still slightly warm from the earlier sunshine but the air was now cool and, sometimes, drops of cold rain dampened the trees and grass.  He thought that he should hasten and, so, started his ascent up the hillside on the dirt path.  It began to rain and, then, the rain became icy sleet.  The path was slick and Hoyt fell several times.  But he was glad he was under the trees and not exposed directly to the falling sleet that clicked and chattered against the bare boughs and trunks of the oak and maple.  By the time, he reached the top of the hill, the wind was howling and, now, the air was clouded with snow.  Hoyt increased his pace, but found that the gale sucked his breath away and made him unsteady on his feet.  Several times, he lost the path, now all white with snow and, therefore, no longer visible.  The falling snow covered the roots pushing through the earth underfoot and made them slick so that he fell again and again.  

Hoyt found that he couldn’t see where he was going.  Snow swirled around him.  Everything seemed to be happening very quickly, before he could adjust for the cold and the wind.  

The path, if it was one, forked and forked again.  Hoyt found himself in a savanna of trees that were shivering and twisting in the wind.  The snow was now knee-deep and hiking in the stuff sapped his strength.  After walking for a long time, but not seeming to make any progress against the wind, Hoyt found a big tree and sat down with his back against the trunk.  The tree arched over him and should have protected Hoyt from the gale, but the wind swept around the obstacle and made a vortex wobbling over his head where snow flakes and blown chips of ice spun in the air.  

Hoyt thought that he would have to deliver the plat map to Colonel Renville to be recorded the next day, when the winds were more temperate, and sun was again shining.  He tried to find some lucifers in his pockets but his fingers were numb and he dropped the matches so that they were hidden in the snow.  

After a while, he became very hot.  The warmth in his breast burned and glowed like the lava in Popocapetl, the Mexican volcano that Alexander von Humboldt had climbed during his adventures in Mexico.  Hoyt tore off his coat and, then, stripped down to his shirt.  When he decided that this was a mistake, Hoyt tried to lift his coat to cover him, but it seemed frozen to the ground.  Hoyt thought that he should remove the plat map from its oil cloth and spread the linen and cloth-backed document over his breast and, then, rest under that sheet.  He removed the cylinder from the cargo net and scrolled open the document, wrapping the oil cloth around his throat like a bandana.  The wind caught hold of the plat map and ripped it from his hands and, then, Hoyt saw the precious document spinning in the air before it vanished in the blizzard.