Quick Beef Stroganoff

 

The recipe for Quick Beef Stroganoff was this:

1.  Buy a Hormel brand package of Beef Tips and Gravy;

2.  Microwave according to the package instructions;

3.  Boil 12 ounces of egg noodles and salt to taste;

4.  Poor heated beef tips and gravy over the drained egg noodles;

5.  Add a dollop of sour cream with two tablespoons of Heinz Chili Sauce and mix thoroughly.

Goins’ wife and daughter liked the dish and, so, he prepared it weekly.  Perhaps, the instructions for making Quick Beef Stroganoff don’t really deserve to be called a “recipe”.  Goins had just combined a couple of food items to make this dish.  But isn’t that the essence of a recipe?

One weekend, while shopping at the grocery, Goins saw that there was a special on fresh sliced mushrooms.  He bought a package, sauteed them in butter with a dash of garlic, and, then, added them to his Stroganoff.  This seemed to Goins to be more like actual cooking and he thought that the addition would much improve the dish.  A few years earlier, Goins had ordered Beef Stroganoff at a Russian restaurant called Moscow on the Hill.  (“The Hill” was an old neighborhood centered around a big Catholic cathedral that overlooked the city below in the river valley.)  At the restaurant, the Beef Stroganoff, of course, was excellent and Goins recalled that the dish was prepared with mushrooms and, probably, red wine in which the meat had been braised.  

Although Goins daughter thought the mushrooms made the dish better tasting and more elegant, Goins wife, was appalled.  

“Why do you always tinker with recipes?” she asked him.

“I like to be creative,” Goins said.  “It feels more like cooking.”

“How long have we been married?” Goins wife, Teresa asked.

“Thirty years,” he said, “give or take a few.”

“And in 30 years of marriage – or 32 years to be exact – you haven’t learned that I hate mushrooms?”

“I thought it depended on how they were prepared,” Goins said.  

He told her that you could barely taste the mushrooms in the Beef Stroganoff.

“I can taste them just fine,” Teresa replied.

“Well, I thought you wouldn’t mind,” Goins said.

“When have you ever seen me eat mushrooms?”

Goins thought she had ordered food containing mushrooms at an Italian restaurant where they sometimes ate.  But he wasn’t sure and didn’t think it prudent to quarrel with her.

“It hurts my feelings,” Teresa said.  “To think that after being married for 32 years, you still don’t know what I don’t like to eat.  Have you paid any attention to me at all?”

Goins didn’t answer.

Jesse, Goins’ daughter, helpfully said that she liked the mushrooms in the dish.

He had been teaching Jesse to drive and she was grateful for his efforts.  Goins was a careful driver and was successful in Jesse’s instruction with one exception: he had been unable to teach her how to parallel park.  This was because he didn’t know how to perform this maneuver himself.  Of course, once he had mastered this skill well enough to pass a license test himself, but that was many years ago and, in almost all cases, he avoided situations requiring this sort of parking.  

A couple years earlier, Goins and Teresa celebrated their anniversary at Moscow on the Hill.  There were several trendy bars and a couple of other cafes at the intersection where the Russian restaurant was located.  It was an old neighborhood, six blocks from the brooding hulk of the cathedral, ancient brownstones lining the side-streets near the Victorian commercial buildings at the place where the two avenues met.  A park fenced with black cast-iron spears was nearby and there was a tiny chapel shingled on all walls and roof with a small open watchtower overlooking the copse of trees arranged around an alabaster basin irrigated by an angel or, perhaps, just a virgin pouring water from a bronze jug. Sometimes Goins and his wife mistimed the traffic and arrived early for their reservation and they had sat at a bench in the little park across from the fountain listening to the water splashing and the birds singing in the twilight. 

It was snowy on the night of their anniversary and traffic had been snarled on the freeways and so, this evening, they were late for the dinner reservation.  Goins couldn’t find any place to park, although several times, as he circled the block, he passed a space requiring parallel parking.  

“Right there!” Goins’ wife pointed.

“I don’t think I can get in there,” Goins said.

“It looks like a big space,” she said.

Goins braked and tried to enter the parking spot without parallel parking.  This effort failed.  He drove around the block.  The brownstones frowned at him with vague disapprobation.  The commercial buildings were dark with heavy cornices leaking slush.  The Cathedral on its hilltop was turbulent with Gothic windows and buttresses and little towers.  

Goins passed the opening among the cars parked along the curb, stopped, put his Volvo in reverse, but something went wrong and he couldn’t fit the vehicle into the space.  He pulled ahead, almost clipping a car that had slipped by him.  Again, he tried to park but the geometry eluded him.  Someone was honking.  Embarrassed, Goins fled the spot, made a left turn at the intersection between the steep, brick commercial buildings.  He saw a small parking lot, next to a flat modern structure beside the cast-iron fence protecting the maiden with the jug.  An accessible space beckoned to him and he nosed his car into that spot.  Sleet was falling and the sidewalks were slippery.

After their dinner, Goins and his wife were a little giddy with vodka.  They held hands as they walked to the place where he had parked his car.  The slipperiness underfoot had vanished and it seemed that they could dance on the wet sidewalks.

Goins’ car was missing.  It had been towed.  The lot was apparently a no-parking zone, associated with a convent where retired nuns who served at the cathedral lived.  A sign clearly posted above where Goins had parked provided a telephone number for the impound lot where the car had been taken.  

In his haste to make the reservation, Goins had left his cell-phone in the car.  Teresa’s cell-phone had no power.  Goins noticed a pale, yellow light glowing in a window between the shingled walls of the chapel.  He climbed the stone steps to a wooden porch protecting the chapel’s old double-doors.  A sign said that the place was a Swedenborgian Church.  Goins knocked but no one came to the door.  He turned the brass knob and the door opened and gave inward.

A short corridor led into a bigger room lined with pews.  Concentric wooden circles were at the front of the sanctuary.  The place had a nautical aspect with little windows like portholes.

A very beautiful old man appeared at the side of the meeting room.  His white beard was luminous.  Goins told him that his car had been towed.

“Oh heavens!” the old man exclaimed.  He told Goins that this sort of misfortune happened often and that parking in the neighborhood could be difficult.  Goins asked if he could use a phone.  The old man nodded and led him into a room with many old books and a wooden lectern where a heavy Bible bound in leather was open.  The telephone was antique, made from black enamel with a rotary dial.  Goins called the impound lot, verified that his car was there, and, then, wrote down the address.  He asked the old man if he could make another call.  “Of course,” the old man with the white beard said.  Goins lifted the receiver but realized that he didn’t know the number of Yellow Cab and there was no phone book in the small, book-lined chamber.  He told the old man that he would make this call from the restaurant.

“If you need anything,” the old man said, “come back.  We are always here to help.”

Goins thanked him.  Teresa was sitting in the back pew of the chapel, her eyes closed.  Their evening was spoiled.  They went to Moscow on the Hill and asked the hostess to call a cab.

The Volvo was located in a sort of frigid hell next to downtown, several dead end streets between crumbling warehouses and salvage yards full of jagged blocks of crushed metal.  The air smelled of spilt oil and rust.  The man in the shack at the impound lot had only one eye and sat behind panes of crazed plexi-glass.  It was expensive to ransom the car.  Goins had the money, but he felt angry and humiliated.  The one-eyed man was alternately threatening and servile.  

On the way home, Goins’ wife said: “You really should learn to parallel park.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he replied.

“You should have let me try,” she said.  “I still know how to do it.”

Goins tried parallel parking a few times when he was teaching Jesse.  But each effort was unsuccessful.  The car either ended up on the curb or blocking traffic on the street.  Because he didn’t know how to parallel park, Jesse failed that part of the license test.  She knocked over the cones defining the space where she was supposed to park or ended up on the curb.  After her third fail, for which Goins blamed himself, the man administering the test, told her to sign up for three sessions with a professional driving instructor.  Jesse completed those sessions and passed the test the next time she took it. 

A month after she received her driver’s license, Jesse tried to parallel park in front of a friend’s house.  She misjudged the space and backed Goins’ car into a fire-hydrant.  The rear bumper was damaged and the red plastic lens covering the left-side parking light was shattered.  Jesse was tearful.

“It’s my fault,” Goins said.  “I never taught you how to parallel park.”

“I will never drive again,” Jesse said.

“That’s nonsense,” Goins told her.  “Listen, you have to be alert.  You have to always know what is around you when you are driving a car.”

Later one of Jesse’s friends came and she left for the night.  

Goins was sitting in his easy chair watching TV.  People were competing on an obstacle course equipped with lagoons full of jello and gaudy towers. Teresa was doing laundry.

“Jesse feels very bad about the car,” Teresa said.

“I know,” Goins replied.

“Well, I don’t want her to be so sad,” Teresa added.

“She shouldn’t be sad,” Goins said.  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Teresa said that this was very true.

Goins said: “I recall once that I was driving all alone in the country.  A little kid, maybe five years old, darted out from nowhere, just appeared, and I couldn’t stop.  I remember she had golden hair that seemed luminous to me.  The kid was knocked into the ditch.  I backed up and saw the child lying there in the weeds.  I recall the sun on her hair.”

“And?” Teresa asked.

“The little child wasn’t moving,” Goins said.  “But there was no-one around.  No one at all.  I didn’t even see any farmhouses nearby but there must have been a place somewhere around.  Anyway, I didn’t get out of the car.  I just drove away, leaving the little kid in the ditch.”

“That’s not true,” Teresa said.  “Why would you say a thing like that?”

“It is true.”

“Why would you say a thing like that?” Teresa asked again.

“I never told you,” Goins said.  “There’s lots about me that you don’t know.”

Teresa sniffed.  She said that the load of laundry was done and that she had to take it out of the dryer.

   

Two Varieties of Tears

Scientists say that human tears come in two varieties.  Most tears are the result of physical pain or   sharp, if transient, emotional distress.  These tears are dilute, mildly salty, and cleansing.  However, some tears originate in deep and unremitting grief.  These tears are alkali and corrosive.  They don’t cleanse but destroy.

Judd jogged at the outskirts of town.  In the old days, people didn’t like to live next to cemeteries and so those places were founded on the edges of the village, a few hundred yards from the houses scattered around the settlement’s perimeter.  For this reason, there was a graveyard just outside city limits, a fenced tract of old stones and tilting obelisks bounded by a creek flowing though a shallow wooded grove.  The cemetery was Catholic with a plinth at its center supporting a terra cotta sculpture of the crucifixion.  When he jogged the route from his home in the nearby neighborhood, Judd made a loop through the graves, around the place where Jesus was nailed to the cross.  Most of the stones were old and illegible; the graveyard was always empty – for most of the dead, even their mourners were now gone themselves.

One night, Judd was delayed at work, meeting with some customers of his firm.  He didn’t get home until after dark on a cold winter night.  He slipped on his jogging clothes and tennis shoes and set out for his run.  

The streets were empty and the sidewalks had been cleared of snow.  His path wasn’t slippery, at least, if a runner knew where to put his feet.  The alleys and backyards were drifted and the little huts of the garages seemed desolate in the cold, dark night.  A few intersections were lit by yellow streetlamps, showing empty crossroads slick with ice that cars had polished onto the asphalt.  At the edge of town, Judd saw that someone was working in a shed next to his house.  A man wearing a hood stooped over a grey metal machine that whirred faintly – a motorized blade was stirring on the steel worktable.  The man stood in a pool of light, his head hidden under the hood, yellow hands fumbling with something in front of him.  A radio sang out in the garage, tuned to a Classic Rock station.  

Judd turned the corner at the end of the block where the path led into the cemetery.  The gate was open as always – death extends its welcome to all.  He trotted down the narrow lane between the old stones leaning this way and that among the low, crescent-shaped drifts of snow.  It was cold among the tombs and the wind blew ice particles into Judd’s eyes so that they smarted.  He circled Jesus’ bland anguish and, then, jogged pn the footpath leading along the ravine where the creek, mostly frozen, whispered where its ice was broken and the water black.  A crow sitting on a bush cried out.

Someone was crouched on a terrace among shattered branches and toppled tree limbs that floods had borne onto the river bank.  The figure was turned away from Judd.  He saw that the figure’s shoulders were trembling with some deep and relentless sorrow.  Below the trail, the ice was divided and an oily torrent flowed between embankments of snow.  Judd was concerned that the person might be planning to hurl herself into the frigid water.  He stopped and looked down to the woman squatting next to the stream.  When he called-out to her, she didn’t turn to look up at him.  

It was completely silent except for the crow’s baffled caw.  Although the figure seemed to be sobbing convulsively, she made no sound.  Judd slid down the bank to stand by her side.  The crouching woman didn’t seem to notice him.  Little avalanches of snow skidded down the hillside and clumped around the woman’s ankles.  

Judd said something and, then, touched the woman’s shoulder.  She turned her head up toward him and he saw that she had no face.  The front of her head was bald and white as an egg.

Then, he was running along the path above the creek, no longer jogging but sprinting.  His breath sounded like a saw blade in his throat.  Judd passed through the gate and, ahead of him, saw the shed where the anonymous man was bent over his handiwork.  The radio sounded louder now.  He could hear words echoing through the icy darkness.

It was bright in the shed.  Tools hung on the walls and there were parts of motors on a folding table.  Judd cried out to the man who ignored him.  The radio continued its indifferent song. When Judd tapped the man’s elbow, he turned to the jogger.  Then, Judd saw that the man’s face was missing and that the front of his head was featureless, like a globe of the earth from which all the seas and lands and words have been erased.    

After Lafcadio Hearn

Trays Oyos

– from an explorer’s diary:

...and come down from the ridge red as a coxcomb by ways winding and narrow on stones slippery in rayn To where there was small prairy above a lake well-sooted to make camp and spend a cold nite in violent wind Next day Captan Armstrong is taen with grate payn in his side and not abel to walk at all and the Lanero Raynosa cownsels best to stay in camp on account of the lower hillslopes being much wet and steep and droping down to baysin encrusted with sault and difficult to traverse with a sick man in travoy -- Hunting party out at dawn and to kill and butcher a gang of elk and sevral deer also but the deer very poor and Armstrong still hurting with violent payn –

Dark shewing flair like false dawn lite on the playn below Reynosa tells us to go a diffrent way along the slope where the trayl is leen as a gote’s path in this steep wilderness He will not guyde us onto the baysin becaws Trays Oyos is there and a sign that men should stay out of that desert playce We see the poynt of lite below on the sault playne shining far away in the night with a fog around that firey ray shewing red green and amber Laneros (his people)  keep away says Reynosa give wide berth to the baysin because many devils are there and sprites and demons at leest so the Indians mayntayn --

Armstrong much improved after another night of resting easy He can walk now altho somewhat unstedily on his feet So we stryk camp and march down hill threw broken cuntry among mity stones and dark raveens where we see more deer and elk (stags and dose) The appearance of the terrayn chaynges now to flatter slopes and the baysin’s edj is a crayter rim all cracked and crook’d Reynosa stops where the playa (as he naymes it) stretches out ahed and tells us he will follow our dust trayl which will rise white as a pillar and thus rejoyn the march under the blew mountains on the other side because he has much fryt for the Trays Oyos which his people avoyd at all costs

It is a strait way over the sault with the gryme rising to our nostrills and like lyme crusting our lips and theres many an hour spent trudjing threw-out this wayst The flat land shews the Trays Oyos from far away as a sentree posted in this barren playce to overlook and rule it all and so we see and gayze with amayzment long before we come close to stand under where the thing casts a shadow like a sun dyalls noman out along the stile of the day from wich we have taen our approach –

It appeers as tall as an oke tree but without branches or bows and made from a kind of gun mettle or cast eyron but argent in hue At its top a gibbet arm extends a short reech from wich depends a casket also of eyron wherein are seen the three eyes with lids that are open and unclosing Then the top lites as if with sharp flaym and is one color as if flowing blood and dims so that the second below the top lites for a moment lasting about the span of 8 or 10 breths and then the third in tern glares out its rays and thus in sucksession over and over agen blood-red to amber to grene as leaf or moss when the dessart is all dust around --

This is wondrus to behold but also fearsome and aweful the work of giants or spirits of the ded and so we hurry away the lite beckoning to us from behind and hard march until Captan Armstrong falls and can walk no more We make camp in a waterless playce and at the skysill in the landskip the lites of Trays Ojos makes a beat clapping such as on a drum from blood red to amber to grene as any leaf or moss Not sound but sensayshun and we pass the dark hours without so much as wink of sleep from many fears and then are on our way agen -- 

Reynosa is on the other side with some Lanero boys and he aks me if Trays Ojos is still standing like unto a mitey man in the ryme of sault I say yes he is there garding all the wayst lands 

Captan Armstrong is much worse feebrish and babbling In the night he dies and we bury him under the sand on the edj of the playa as it is called –

There are many straynge things in places unfreekwented by men --

The Aztec Calendar

 

The house on the cul-de-sac was ill-starred: people didn’t dwell in the home for long and it was vacant for months at a time.  This malign reputation had nothing to do with the appearance of the place: viewed from outside, the home was large and well-kept, standing two stories under a steep, shingled roof, walls sided in fresh white vinyl overlooking a neatly trimmed lawn with shrubs underlining big picture windows that usually appeared slate-grey and empty, mirrors without reflections in them, visited only by an occasional bird flitting past or the shadow of someone walking a dog on the round pool of asphalt where the lane rounded into the dead-end.  Above a sleek, newly poured driveway, a three-car garage, recently renovated was turned at a right angle from the home’s front facade.  Although, it wasn’t visible from the cul-de-sac, somehow we knew that there was a redwood deck behind the home and the round socket of a hot tub in the cherry-colored planks, some benches, and down the hill a few steps, a swimming pool with pale blue bottom and sides.  (A creek glided past the back of the house, folded into a seam of willows and sedge and, perhaps, we had glimpsed the pool and deck while canoeing there.) A few years after the owners of the house vanished, an Aztec calendar like a great, ornate mill-stone was suspended on iron brackets on the back wall next to the sliding doors opening onto the deck.  We saw the calendar (apparently stone, although, perhaps, simulated in stucco) hanging like a great, somber sun over the hot tub and pool.  This was at the final party hosted by the Orthopedic Surgeon who, then, occupied the house.  

A decade earlier, a contractor had built the home, although with only a two-car garage.  Neighbors who had been in the house were impressed by the large kitchen with its marble-topped counter-island offset from a corner glistening with stainless steel appliances.  The rooms were roomy and enlarged by floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the bathrooms had walk-in showers with glittering fixtures and there were more marble counter-tops, a ceramic basin like a great pale lily blossoming under gilded faucets.  A towering field-rock chimney rose over a deep round hearth in the great room and there were balconies suspended overhead in upstairs stucco openings that had a vaguely Moorish appearance.  What this cost was unknown but no detail had been overlooked and there was, even, I think, a wine cellar in the basement.  Of course, it was unsustainable.  The building boom imploded and the contractor, with his compact and pneumatic trophy wife, was gone suddenly, the place abandoned in the middle of the night.

A family moved into the property, following the delivery of their furniture in an orange truck and, for a few months, small children bicycled around the cul-de-sac.  But, even, before the first snow-fall, the orange moving van returned once more and the people departed.  In this climate, it’s hard to sell a home in Winter and, so, the place stayed vacant until Spring, when another couple with small children appeared, this time without a big van, using a rented U-Haul to move their things.  They survived in the house for a year, but were gone by the next Summer.  Then, the owner of a trucking firm that hauled meat from the local packing plant bought the place, restored the pool and hot tub and, even, was sociable enough to invite some of us to gatherings in his home.  Commercial trucking is a tough business and the man was big with broad shoulders, square at the hips and built like a linebacker.  His wife had dried her skin to parchment, tanning at resorts in Mexico where she spent several months during the cold season, and she was shapely, still presentable in a bikini, with long black hair falling over her nut-brown shoulders.   Her husband flew to Mexico on the weekends to join his wife, but, apparently, didn’t spend his time at the beach because he remained pale and grey as the Winter weather from which he had come.  Back in town when the weather was warmer, dining at the country-club, the trucker’s wife made an exotic appearance – her small feet bare in sandals studded with semi-precious gems, wearing an embroidered campesina dress edged at the hips with bright fringe, strands of beaded turquoise arrayed like a chain-mail between her breasts and her fingers adorned with silver and turquoise rings.  She made quite an impression, was cultured and well-spoken, and most people imagined her as the brains of the trucking firm – her husband supplied the brawn, but she met the right people, and cultivated them, intimate with the wives of the mid-level managers at the slaughterhouse, friendships that kept her close to the logistics personnel upon which their business depended. 

All went well for a time, but labor relations in our town are volatile and there was first the threat of a strike and, then, an actual work stoppage.  Outsiders became involved, criminals and thugs – some aspects of this business are under mob influence.  People were beaten up and, at a blockade, a refrigeration truck full of carcasses was stopped and set afire.  The truck company hired its own goons but they were unsuccessful in defending their routes and drivers.  It was rumored that the owner of the company wanted to sue for peace, but his wife was adamant and unyielding.  Then, she was gone.  The trucker didn’t say anything about her absence and, naturally, it was assumed that he had sent her to Mexico, Cabo San Lucas, in fact, to be away from the danger.  The enterprise cracked under pressure.  Drivers quit.  Hauling into Chicago and New York and Los Angeles became impossible.  The secretary at the Country Club, a volunteer and, therefore, not to be trusted with confidential information, let it be known that the trucker and his wife were in arrears on their membership fees.  Then, the company filed for bankruptcy and the fleet of trucks were sold and, supposedly, the owner of the firm also fled to Mexico – it wasn’t certain where he had gone, but he was no longer seen around town.

For a couple years, the house in the cul de sac was mostly empty, sometimes rented out for weekend parties through AirBnB.  It was around this time that the Aztec calendar appeared, perhaps as a homage to the trucker and his wife who were thought to be living large in Mexico.  Parties at the house were raucous and, sometimes, involved underage drinking and the neighbors disapproved of the festivities.  When a teenage girl almost drowned in the pool, a neighborhood group appeared before the City Council to insist that the zoning ordinances in their part of town be strictly enforced.  Some litigation ensued and, then, the house stood empty again, closed down for several seasons.  Then, a pilot who ferried packing plant executives around the country in the company’s private jet moved into the home.  He had just been divorced and, apparently, had no furniture, just a mattress and some lawn chairs, but he owned a half-dozen motorcycles and, so, had the old garage torn down and a new structure with three bays installed.  After a year or two, he re-married and moved to different part of town.  Another pilot, a fellow who owned a crop-dusting service, moved into the house.  This man also had a showy wife who was gone for half of the year – they maintained another home in Las Vegas.  The cropduster hauled several big boulders onto his front lawn and set them up facing the cul-de-sac.  The boulders were granite, speckled with mica crystals, and they were set upright, grey and pink monoliths leaning against concrete blocks.  This landscaping seemed to fortify the home, to protect it behind a rampart of boulders.  

The rock barricade was unavailing:  police raided the place pre-dawn.  The snow edging the sidewalks was bathed in the bloody radiance of the cop car lights.  Apparently, the cropduster operated a drug-smuggling business on the side and several pounds of cocaine were seized at the house.  After some more legal proceedings, the home was forfeited to the Feds and, then, put up for rent.  By this time, the place had an evil reputation.  Families renting the home from the Federal Marshal’s office said that they heard panicked splashing in the swimming pool during the dark of night.  Someone was drowning.  But, when the night lights were turned on, the pool was empty and the water still and silent.  Voices whispered from the Aztec calendar.  Muttering sounds seemed to come from the figure at the center of the calendar, the sun god with great ear-whorls and a flint-blade extruded between his teeth like a tongue. 

No one stayed in the house for more than a season and, then, at last, it wasn’t rented at all and the place stood vacant.  An Orthopedic Surgeon at the clinic bought the property at auction.  With his family, he moved into the place and brightened it up.  His gardeners tore out some of the shabby-looking shrubs under the picture windows and put in flower beds.  The hot tub was replaced with a newer model and, inside the home, a back room was renovated into a sauna.  The Orthopedic Surgeon was as handsome as a movie star and sociable.  Once again, people were invited to the home for gatherings.  

On New Year’s Eve, the Surgeon hosted a large party.  A string quartet from the college attended by the Surgeon’s beautiful twin daughters was hired to play in the great room.  The great wheel of the seasons groaned a little as it was slowly turned toward Winter.  But it was unseasonably warm that night, at the last party, a moist wind moaning through the willows lining the stream and the hot tub was steaming like a cauldron and a few nurses from the hospital were cavorting there, in bathing suits notwithstanding the snow dusting the ornamental evergreens in the backyard.  A half hour before midnight, some guests arrived by canoe on the river, carrying lit Tiki torches, and people cradling their drinks came out onto the deck to applaud the grand arrival of the Urologist and his wife.  Steam swirled up off the hot tub and the mascara worn by the nurses streaked their white faces as if with black tears and, then, the Orthopedic Surgeon went down to the edge of his pool where he had set rocket-launchers to blast fireworks into the air.  

The warm wind swept over the fields of snow, picking up the mint scent in the drifts.  Then, the Surgeon set off the rockets and they burst overhead, showering the creek and snowy meadows with bright sparks.  The string quartet, now moved onto the redwood  deck, played Auld Lang Syne and people danced.  The flare of colored fire in the night sky sent red and green shadows skittering over the Aztec Sun Stone and the spiky rings of strange beasts and glyphs seemed to shudder in the glare.  A drunk woman lost her footing and stumbled against the bracket supporting the Aztec Calendar.  The round stone shield that looked so immensely heavy was, in fact, apparently fashioned from some kind of plaster-of-paris or, even, paper-mache – the calendar tore free from its supports, crashed onto the redwood deck, and, then, rolled like a juggernaut toward the pool.  People dived out of its way and another woman slipped and fell into the swimming pool where she floundered in the cold water.  The Calendar rolled onto its side and broke apart like a pinata, spilling its contents on the tile at the pool’s edge.  It was full of all sorts of foulness – mummified rats and hairy spiders like diadems, human bones, ribs decked with turquoise and petrified fingers also adorned with silver and turquoise rings, shattered skulls, and bony knees like yellow skull caps, dead bats and living ones as well, every kind of filth you could imagine, all of this skeletal stuff and nightmare rubbish flickering in the fireworks screaming across the black sky overhead.

There was an investigation but it was inconclusive.  The Orthopedic Surgeon was sued for malpractice, lost the case, and left town.  A few months later, someone set the house on fire.  A firetruck arrived in time to put out the blaze, but slid on the ice in the cul-de-sac, tires gouging into the front lawn and the vehicle’s axle was caught on the boulders defending the place so that the hoses couldn’t be properly deployed.  The firefighters darted about their pinioned truck trying in vain to jack it off the boulder on which the undercarriage was trapped.  Flames flared and the polished chrome on the pumper truck ran red with flickering fire light and, then, the shingles fell inward and the walls slumped and, at last, the whole house dropped into its cellar burnt to ash and smoke.   

The Noteworthy Adventures of a Young Englishman

 

One day, a young Englishman hitched a ride to London on a wagon carrying the mail.  It was the lad’s first visit to the big city where he planned to lodge with his sister and brother-in-law.  The young man arrived in town late at night with only the Postmaster as a traveling companion.  The night was dark and the city immense and the young man didn’t know the way to his sister’s house.  He asked the Postmaster if he could sleep with the mail at his office by the Thames.  But the Postmaster, responsible for the all letters and parcels in his possession, was a cautious and fastidious man.  So he told the youth that he couldn’t remain with the mail, but, rather, should accompany him to his Aunt’s lodging, only a few blocks away.  The old woman had a small bed chamber with two cots where they could spend the night.  In the morning, the young man could venture out into the City to find his way to his brother-in-law’s place.  

The Postmaster’s Aunt was pleased to see her nephew.  She heated up some sausage for them and the Postmaster shared a couple of mugs of strong beer with the young man.  Then, the two of them groped their way through the dark apartment – it was a maze of small rooms and corridors – to the chamber appointed for their use.  After resting for a while, the young man felt the beer heavy in his belly and he asked the Post Master if there was a pot in the room that he could use.  The Post Master looked under both cots but this convenience was lacking.  “I’ll have to go outside,” the young man said.  The Post Master recalled the intricate passageways that they had traversed to reach the bedroom and told the boy to go left first, then, right and right again to find a door opening onto the alley.  “The Thames is only a few feet away, down the embankment, and take care that you don’t fall into the water,” the Postmaster said.  A brisk wind was blowing and the walk to the house had been a cold one and so the Postmaster told the boy to wear his coat.  “The door into the alley is a little tricky,” the Postmaster said.  “The lock is broken and so you’ll have to slide the blade of my jack-knife between the door and its frame to dislodge the catch so that it will open.”  The Postmaster reached into his trousers, extracted his knife, and handed it to the boy.  “Be careful,” he said. 

The room was pitch-black and the young man’s need was urgent and so he drew over his shoulders the Postman’s official jacket thinking it was his own coat.  Then, he hurried out of the room, first turning left, then, right, then, right again to find the door with the damaged lock that he pried open to stumble into the dark alley.  The cobblestones were slick with dew rising from the river and the boy fell down, scraping his arm and bloodying his nose.  In England, beer is served warm and it heats the body and so the boy’s nose gushed blood profusely.  Down the alley, the young Englishman heard the Thames rushing under its banks.  The darkness and loss of blood and the whisper of the river all combined to cause the lad to fall over in a dead faint.

Back in the bed chamber, the Postmaster waited and waited for the footfall of the returning lad.  But he heard nothing.  Then, a dreadful thought occurred to him.  In those days, the British navy and its merchant marine were in desperate need of able-bodied sailors and, so, it was the custom that roving bands of ruffians haunted the streets after midnight, plucking up men from pubs and inns and brothels.  If the man was suitable, the thugs kidnaped him and, at dawn, he would find himself in the noisome hold of some sea-faring vessel rocking back and forth on the surge of the English Channel.  This practice was called impressing seaman (or ‘pressing them).  The Postmaster muttered to himself: “Surely the boy has fallen into the hands of one of these gangs and been ‘pressed.”  So saying, he got out of bed, put on his boots, and, leaving the chamber, turned first left, then, right and right again, to find the door into the alley open to the outside.  The Postmaster hurried through the streets, again turning left and right and making another right so that he fell directly into the hands of a gang of scoundrels who were roaming the alleys in search of prey.  The Postmaster was a burly fellow with strong arms and back from hefting parcels and freight and the thugs, seeing that he was hale and well-built, knocked him over the head and hauled him down to the harbor.  And the next morning, as light seeped through the bulkheads of the ship’s hold, the Postmaster felt the currents of the sea strong under foot and, climbing onto the deck, found that the ship was already far from the sight of land.

The lad lying senseless on the cobblestones, at last, regained consciousness.  It was still gloomy, the skies grey and the pavement wet with dew.  He staggered back to the house where the Postmaster’s Aunt lived and, finding his way to the bed chamber, in which it was still midnight-dark, fell asleep on the cot.  At the Post Office, the workers were surprised that their boss had not yet appeared to help them sort and deliver the mail.  Several hours passed and, then, the assistant Postmaster sent a boy to look for the missing man.  The Postmaster’s wife said that her husband had not yet returned from his mission to collect the mail in the country but she said that, sometimes, when he arrived in town late at night, he stayed with his Aunt near the Post Office to which he had delivered his parcels and packages and letters.  

At the Aunt’s lodging, the young Englishman was found still sleeping, his face and breast covered with blood, and wearing the Postmaster’s official coat.  When the lad was searched, the Postmaster’s knife was found in the boy’s trousers and, in official’s coat, the authorities discovered the postman’s signet ring for impressing wax seals on letters, a heavy silver object dangling from a hemp lanyard.  The boy was dragged before a magistrate.  After a short interrogation, the young man was sentenced to be hanged that very afternoon.

Justice was swift and certain in London at that time, if a little negligently administered.  There were so many scoundrels meriting execution that each midday, the criminals were hauled to their doom on a big, broad wagon like a hay wain.  The men’s hands were tied and halters nailed to a crossbeam overhead were slipped under their chins and, then, the oxen were prodded to drag the wagon out from under the men leaving them flopping and kicking in midair.  A spectator, and there were many, would have seen people darting out of the crowd and seizing the legs of the hanging men.  The spectator might be excused for thinking that these interlopers were attempting to rescue the condemned, but, in fact, they were merely hastening their demise by pulling on their feet since the drop was short and men hanged weren’t killed outright but instead strangled slowly to death.  Of course, the poor young man had no cousins or other kin to perform this kindly office and, so, he swung back and forth, his jaws and cheeks turning blue as the rope choked him.   

Morbid curiosity drew onlookers to the spectacle.  At twilight, a man and woman ventured down the lane to where the miscreants were hanging.  The woman looked up at the gibbet and screamed: “That’s my brother hanging there.”  She fell in a swoon to the ground.  Her husband, looking up at the hanged man, saw to his horror that the boy opened his eyes and his blue lips moved slightly and the pupils rolled in his head.  The lad’s brother-in-law was a decisive fellow, accustomed to bold action.  He carried his unconscious wife into a tavern down the street and, then, distributing cash around the room, engaged several men to assist him in cutting down the man hanging from the gibbet.  This was soon accomplished and the young Englishman, the noose still twisted around his throat, was hauled through the night by a hack to the home where his brother-in-law lived with unfortunate boy’s sister.

Warm and bitter English beer was applied as a medicinal and the lad regained consciousness.  After spending a few hours in a delirium, the boy improved and soon was well.  But the situation was perilous.  The boy was under decree of death and, if the authorities discovered that he was still alive, he would find himself at the gallows again, probably accompanied by his sister and brother-in-law.  And, so, it was resolved that the young man would be sent abroad, sailing anonymously across the Atlantic to America.  The boy embarked on a vessel that made its way down the Thames and across the ocean, docking after eighty days in the bustling port of Philadelphia.  

The youth stood on the pier among rum casks and bales of fabric and his heart was heavy.  Despite the crowds around him, he felt very lonely.  He thought: if only God would show me someone here whom I might recognize as a friend.  And, even, as he considered how alone he was in this big city, he saw a wretched-looking fellow dressed in the miserable rags of a poor seaman.  The seaman was eyeing him closely and, then, he approached and the boy saw that the man was the London Postmaster, now a mere galley-slave.  The young man was happy to see a familiar face but the joy of this encounter was quickly diminished by the ragged sailor’s rage: “You lousy son of a bitch,” the former Postmaster cried: “Do you know that your nocturnal rambling got me ‘pressed into service at sea.”  The English lad replied: “Goddammit, you big waste of space, on account of you, I got hanged.”  

After this exchange, the two fellows found their way to a tavern near the piers, At The Three Crowns.  They exchanged stories over some pints of beer, served cold on this continent.  The young man had a letter from his brother-in-law introducing him to the import trade.  He worked without rest for months, saving money so that he could purchase the Postmaster’s freedom.  When this was accomplished, the Postmaster embraced the young man at the harbor and sailed back to London to his wife and children.   

After Hebel

The Conspiracy of Virtue

 

Human happiness experts say that it is unlucky to be declared a child prodigy.  This is particularly true with respect to musically gifted children.  At an early age, children with special talent for musical performance are groomed for the concert hall.  They earn accolades on school stages and, later, attend expensive, and prestigious, conservatories of music – Oberlin, for instance, or Eastman or Juilliard.  The entire system of education conspires to make child prodigies of this sort feel special, privileged, and unique.  Yet, the dirty little secret is that there are hundreds of thousands of musically gifted people ultimately vying for a few hundred jobs with symphony or opera orchestras.  And very few are sufficiently charismatic to become solo concert performers.  Therefore, initial acclamation as a child prodigy leads only to a life of disappointment.  Most child prodigies end their careers teaching High School band or playing on weekends with a local ensemble rehearsing for one, or, at most, two concerts a year – perhaps, the Fourth of July and Christmas.  Suburban church choirs are full of people who once imagined that they would tread the boards of Carnegie Hall. The glittering dreams of youth simply wilt away and, unless the ex-child prodigy is firmly grounded in reality and well-balanced, dashed expectations may lead to sadness and, even, despair.

Something similar is true of kids who have mastered the guitar, garage-band drummers, amateur cartoonists and artists, and, even, writers.  Many are encouraged, and, even, encouraged lavishly, but very few will manage to make a career of their avocation.  The world is full of talented people who showed great promise when they were young but never accomplished much of anything later in life.  Indeed, most of us will never accomplish anything worth mentioning.

Goodman was told that he was a brilliant writer when he was a boy.  In third grade, he wrote a little poem called “The Gratuitous Centipede.”  Actually, Goodman’s mother, who taught singing at the Catholic School (although she was Lutheran), helped her little son with the rhymes and supplied some of the big words that adorned the verse.  Goodman’s father, who was a lawyer, made photocopies of pictures showing centipedes to decorate the little chap-book.  Everyone was very impressed and Goodman was told that he was gifted and that great things were expected from him.

For a few years, Goodman wrote short stories and several of them were published, first in the High School literary magazine and, then, in the fiction supplement to the weekly newspaper at the college that he attended.  Goodman won several prizes for his short fiction and, for a while, thought that he was sufficiently talented to become a professional writer.  But the stories that he sent away to periodicals that printed fiction were always rejected.  He tried to find a literary agent to help him, but no one was interested.  Goodman flattered a novelist who taught at a local college by sending him notes praising his writing and attending the writer’s readings at bookstores downtown.  After several years of blandishments of this sort, Goodman persuaded the novelist to read several of his stories.  The novelist sent him a letter advising that he thought Goodman’s stories were worthless, although they were written in serviceable prose.  The novelist suggested that Goodman enroll in a M.F.A. program at the University if he wished to pursue this work.  But, by this time, Goodman was employed as a real estate agent and had a family to support and, so, he was unable to continue his education as a writer.  Nonetheless, he devoted a couple of hours each weekend to his prose and, over a number of years, wrote several hundred short stories.

Most of Goodman’s stories were inconsequential and, after he had written them, he could scarcely recall their content.  Every two or three years, he gathered together the stories that he deemed best and self-published them using a computer program available through Amazon.  One of the members of a creative writing group to which he belonged owned a small bookstore in the suburb where he lived.  Goodman consigned a half dozen of his books to that bookstore and, sometimes, people purchased them.  The owner of the bookstore reported the sales to Goodman and wrote him small checks and, even, asked him to replenish the inventory of books when it ran low.  Over thirty years, Goodman self-published four volumes of short stories.  He estimated that he sold about ten to twelve books a year.  He sent copies of his books to friends in lieu of Christmas cards and, even, sometimes gave volumes to his real estate clients.  This was the extent of Goodman’s literary activities.  By the time, he was sixty, it was pretty clear that someone (or some several) had played a mean trick on Goodman, arousing desires in him that would never be satisfied.

One afternoon in November, Goodman took a house-key from the cubby hole in his office and drove to a lonely home on the edge of town. The day was dreary with a dull, lightless drizzle darkening the sky and the roadways.  The house was just outside the city limits and, therefore, not connected to City sewer and water.  Goodman noted the wet, glistening mound of the septic field sepulchral in the home’s backyard.  There was a damaged picket fence around the property overgrown with nettles and a metal stake to which some long dead dog had been tethered.  The neighborhood was not zoned and a couple of small manufacturing businesses in metal sheds stood along the alley that led to the for-sale house.  A railroad siding built on a low weedy embankment looped among the forlorn-looking dwellings.  On the State Highway, a bowling alley showed some neon against the dying day and, on the facade there was shapely white pin, a bit like a maiden doomed to the Underworld and half as tall as a church steeple.  A hundred yards down the road, an old barn was occupied by the local Alanon club and there was a field dotted with metal posts where a Drive-In Movie Theater had once been located.  The abandoned projection booth, a squat bunker of concrete blocks, stood in the field grooved with puddles where cars had once parked.  

Goodman wasn’t representing the property.  He was showing the place as a favor for a friend in the business who was at the Clinic undergoing chemotherapy.  (Goodman was used to work with more expensive, high-end real estate.)  The prospective purchasers were ahead of him, parked in the gravel driveway, under the eaves of the house. Goodman pulled next to the black SUV and saw that it had tinted windows.  He got out of his Cadillac and the couple who had asked to tour the home emerged from their vehicle.  Goodman shook their hands and, with the key, he let them into the house.

The place was shadowy inside.  The ceiling lights didn’t seem equal to the later afternoon gloom.  The rooms were stark and bare and the floors were very cold.  The windows showed grim theorems of fractured trees and empty lots.  The steps to the upstairs creaked loudly.  The woman prospect remarked that the closets were very small.  The carpets in the upstairs bedrooms had been recently shampooed and there was a sour reek in those chambers.  Goodman pointed out that the bathroom on the second floor had been recently remodeled.  The woman turned on the faucet and inspected the flow of water.  There was air in the pipes and faucet coughed.  

They went downstairs and looked at the kitchen again.  The microwave was new as was the dishwasher.  Goodman wasn’t enthusiastic about descending into the basement – that was where the bodies had been found.  But he opened the wooden door, inhaled deeply, and, then, led them down the steps into the old cellar.  The walls were piles of fieldstone grouted together and there were several ancient posts supporting the floor above them.  

“Is it dry?” the man asked.  

Goodman said that he wasn’t certain since it wasn’t his listing.  He asked if the couple had received the disclosure form.  They said that they had read that document.  Goodman looked at the walls and cement floor with its eye-shaped drain.  “It looks dry,” he said.  The air smelled musty but not foul.

A mud-room with an inclined roof was attached to the house.  It was quite cold in the mudroom and Goodman could see his breath flickering under his nose.  A small table with a formica top stood against the wall and there were four chairs.  The man asked if the price was firm or negotiable.  “I don’t exactly know,” Goodman said.  “But generally you can negotiate.  Make an offer and we will see what the owner thinks.”  The man removed a pad from his breast pocket and wrote a figure on a sheet of paper that he tore out and handed to Goodman.  “Why don’t you initial the proposal?” Goodman said, sliding the note back to the man.  The woman pretended to look out the window.  The man put his initials on the note and Goodman slipped it into his wallet.

“Are you a writer?” the woman asked.  

“Sort of,” Goodman replied.

“Have you published much?” the man asked.

“Very little.”

“You know,” the woman said, “we were very impressed by one of your short stories.”

“Really?” Goodman said.  “I’ve never met someone that I didn’t know who had read one of my stories.”

The man nodded: “I think it was called something like ‘The Conspiracy of Virtue’.”

“I know I wrote a story with that name,” Goodman said.  “But I can’t recall it very well.  That was almost twenty years ago.”

The woman said: “That’s right.  It was a long time ago.  We were passing through this area and stopped at the bookstore across from the strip mall and...”

“That’s where we acquired the book of stories,” the man continued.

“I don’t remember that story very well,” Goodman said.  “I have written so many stories.”

“We liked it a lot,” the man said.

They went outside.  The drizzle continued and the old house’s eaves and down spouts made a faint sound like a flute being played.  Goodman said he would convey the proposal to the agent representing the home’s owner.  “I hope we can do business,” he said to the couple.  “I hope so too,” the woman replied.

Goodman went home and found a copy of his short story collection in which “The Conspiracy of Virtue” was printed.  (He had several boxes of unsold books in his basement.)  He had written the story under the influence of short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges.  In the story, a man discovers that the world is sustained by a secret league of righteous men and women.  The story’s hero comes to believe that he is one of the forty Just whose virtue upholds human existence.  Goodman thought the story was competently written but without much conflict or drama.  Once the premise was established, there wasn’t much that could be done with it.  Goodman admired the subtle suggestion embedded in the story that the hero was, perhaps, mentally ill, even, maybe, a paranoid schizophrenic.  It seemed to him highly implausible that anyone would have much admired the tale, let alone remembered it for many years.        

An infection complicated the listing realtor’s chemotherapy and Goodman again went to meet the prospective buyers at the house at the edge of town.  Snow was falling in wet pellets and its weight made the home’s eaves sag.  In the icy white wind, the house almost disappeared, an apparition in its shell of broken, leafless trees.  Goodman unlocked the door but didn’t want to wait in the house and, so, he sat in his vehicle.  The buyers’ black SUV rolled silently down the lane and parked next to him.

They went inside and sat at the cold formica table in the mud-room.  The woman handed Goodman an earnest money check written to the sick realtor and marked in the memo line with the address of the property.  The man said that there were some specific features of the dwelling that he wanted to research.  “Go ahead,” Goodman said.  “Look to your heart’s content.”

The man removed his shoes to avoid tracking water into the home and, then, went inside.  

The woman looked at Goodman fixedly, as if she were trying to evaluate some subtle quality in him.  

“Did you look up your story?” she asked.

Goodman nodded his head.  

“Of course, you just reversed things,” she said.  “But the details are all accurate.  It would be a pretty bad breach if you hadn’t turned things upside-down and ass-backward.”

“It’s just a story... fiction,” Goodman said.  “I can’t recall exactly where I got the idea.  Maybe, some other writer.”

“That’s nonsense,” the woman replied.  “You know as well as I.”

“In fact, I don’t.”

Goodman heard doors in the house opening and closing.  Water ran under a sink faucet.

 “Well, how do you explain the details?

“What details?”  Goodman asked her.

“Of course, we are thirty, not forty, but the concept is the same,” she said.  “And you’ve got the objective reversed.  You say it’s for the Good, but, of course, we know the opposite.  But otherwise...”

“I just made it up.”

“Well, people are wrong when they say that there’s no such thing as evil,” she said.  “The idea that evil is just an error, missing the mark so to speak –that’s completely wrong, although, I suppose, the concept serves us.”

“Us?” Goodman asked.  “Who is us?”

“Who are you?  Is that what you mean?”

“I invented a short story and you’re acting as if it states some sort of truth,” Goodman said.

“You know,” she said, “the intent has to be accomplished.  It has to be performed.  You can’t just rest quietly waiting for it to happen.”

“It’s impossible for someone to desire evil,” Goodman said.  “That’s why the story is about the league of virtue.”

“Evil is our good,” the woman said.  “And you have to work every day, every minute to accomplish it.”

Goodman heard the man’s steps approaching inside the house.

“Don’t be obtuse,” the woman said.  “You know what I’m talking about.  We sought you out because you revealed our secrets.  And you can’t reveal those things unless you’re one of us.  Otherwise, how would you know?”

“This is crazy,” Goodman said.

“Can you think of anything good or virtuous or, even, slightly, helpful that you’ve ever accomplished in your life?”

“My mind doesn’t work that way,” Goodman told her.

“Of course,” she said.  “Of course, it doesn’t.  That shows, you’re part of the conspiracy that upholds all that is bad in the world.”

“That’s nonsense,” Goodman said.

“You wrote it.  You put it on paper.  Just upside down,” she replied.

The man stood in the door frame, on the threshold between the mud-room and the living room in the house.  The wooden frame around him made the man seem immense, as big as the house, as big as the world.

“So is your conference complete?” the man asked.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Do you understand?” the man asked Goodman.

“I don’t,” he said.

“All your...what do you call it?”

“Writing?” Goodman said.

“Your... scribbling,” the man said.  “That’s the sign of the harm that you’ve done.”

Goodman shook his head.  

“You have to labor hard to pervert things,” the man said.  “And, you’re certainly, nothing if not assiduous in your efforts.”

“We’ve seen what we want to see,” the woman told Goodman.

They rose and went outside into the snow.  Goodman locked the house behind them.  

He delivered the earnest money check to the sick agent.  The man’s face was waxy and his clothing slouched on him as if he were just skin and bones.

“What are the buyers like?” the sick man asked.

“Nuts,” Goodman said.  “Delusional.”

“Do you think it’s just morbid interest?” the agent asked.

“I don’t know – ‘morbid’. That’s the least of it,” Goodman said.  He flushed and his ears were burning a little.  He didn’t know why he was suddenly so ashamed. 

Of course, the check bounced.  

Three Thieves

 Three Thieves

This is mostly true.  I typed it out just for you.

Hank and Fred were brothers and crooks too.  They learned thieving from their dear old dad who was a permanent resident at the iron-bar motel.  They had a buddy from school, Red Dick, a younger kid who hung around with them.  They didn’t kill people or commit armed robberies but were mostly content with car theft and shoplifting.  They fenced their ill-gotten gains at a flea market and didn’t make much in the way of money.  But the boys had a good time boasting and daring each other to do this or that.    

One day, when they couldn’t find anything to boost, the lads went for a stroll in the park.  Spying a bird sitting in her nest high up in a tree, Hank asked his buddies if they thought it possible that one of them could climb up and snatch the eggs out from under the fowl without her even noticing.  No sooner dared than done: Fred, nimble as a cat climbed the tree, crept under the nest, and, then, bored a hole in its bottom so that one egg after another dropped down into his hand.  Fred, then, said: “I bet you can’t sneak up there and slide the eggs back into the nest without the bird noticing.”  So Hank climbed the tree with Fred right behind him.  As Hank was slipping the eggs back under the fowl, Fred slowly pulled Hanks’ pants down to his ankles.  Hank had a bare ass before he knew what was happening, reached down to cover himself, and dropped right out of the tree.  They all had a good laugh and agreed that Fred ruled when it came to pranks of this sort.  Red Dick said: “I can see that I’m not in your league and, if I stay with you guys, I’ll end up the hoosegow or worse.”  So Red Dick went on his way, straightened himself out, and, even got married.  He kept his nose clean and stayed out of trouble.

Late in the season, Dick went to the grocery and bought himself a fine, fat turkey for Thanksgiving.  That same day, Fred and Hank stole a motorcycle and tooled over the Dick’s house on the purloined scooter.  Pulling up to Dick’s place, the boys asked how he was doing.  They saw Red Dick unloading the fat bird from his car and licked their lips.  After the two thieves said goodbye, Dick put the turkey in the refrigerator to thaw.  A little later, when it was time for bed, Dick began to fret about his bird.  “They’re up to no good,” Dick told his wife.  It was cold outside and Dick said that he was going to hide the turkey in a snowdrift next to his back door.  

In the middle of the night, the crooks slipped through a hole in Dick’s fence and crept into his house.  They looked in his fridge but didn’t see the turkey thawing there.  Dick heard the thieves tiptoeing around the house and got out of bed to look for them.  Hank went around the side of the house and found the front door open.  He slipped into Dick’s bedroom and, pawing the Mrs. where she lay, whispered: “Woman, the turkey wasn’t in the fridge.”  She pushed his hand off her ass and said: “Why are you talking nonsense?  You know as well as I do that you hid the turkey out in the snowbank.”  “You’re right,” Hank said, imitating Dick’s voice as best he could: “I guess I’m half asleep.” Then, he slipped out of the room, went outside, and dug the turkey out of the drifted snow.  

Hank was supposed to meet Fred in a grove of trees a few blocks away.  It was very dark.  Dick patrolled the house and, then, went into the backyard where he found that his turkey was gone.  “Those jail-birds have stolen our bird,” he told his wife.  

Out in the woods with his prize, Hank was wading through the deep snow.  Dick followed his tracks and caught up with him in the dark woods.  Dick saw that Hank was all alone and, so, he murmured to him: “Bro, that bird looks heavy.  Let me carry it for you awhile.”  Hank thought it was his brother, Fred, and so he handed the bird to the shadowy figure and, then, hurried along ahead to light a bonfire so they could roast the fowl.  Fred was lost, wandering around in the woods, but then he saw the fire roaring among the trees and stumbled toward it.  With eyes as big as saucers, he saw Hank feeding twigs and branches to the fire but without anything to cook.  

Back at Dick’s house, husband and wife were both wide awake, tending to an open fire on the hearth under their chimney.  They had cut the turkey into quarters and were cooking it in a kettle over the flames.  Dick said: “I’m pretty hungry and we had better eat this right away.  Otherwise, they’ll snatch the food right out of our mouths.”  

Dick told the woman to watch over their turkey.  Then, he crawled into a corner to rest his eyes.  Soon, he began to snore and dream.  While he was twitching in his sleep, Dick’s wife looked over at him and didn’t see a long sharp fork slowly appear in the chimney flue above the kettle where the bird was cooking.  The fork poked into the tender meat and a quarter of the turkey vanished up the chimney.  Dick continued to grumble and growl and wince as he dreamed and his wife turned to look at him again just as the fork stabbed down into the kettle for a second and, then, a third and fourth time.  After a while, Dick’s wife said: “Wake up.  It’s time to eat.”  But when she looked into the kettle it was empty.  Dick said that his wife had been careless and let the thieves steal their turkey; his wife replied that he should never have left her side and fallen asleep.  As they were quarreling and close to blows, Hank and Fred popped through the door carrying the roast turkey.  “It’s too much for the two of us,” Hank said. “Let’s have a feast,” Fred added.  So the table was set and Dick brought out a case of beer and they ate and drank until it was dawn.  Then, the seven o’clock whistle sounded at the plant and the sickle moon slipped below the rooftops and the dogs all howled with the whistle calling honest laborers to work.  Hank and Fred were drunk and passed-out on the sofa when the cops showed up at the door.  The stolen motorcycle was parked outside at the curb and had led the police to the home.  Fred and Hank were handcuffed and taken to the county jail and they are now living with their dad at the expense of the State if I am not mistaken.     

After Hebel.

 

Punctuality

 

Loris led his squad to the rendezvous coordinates.  He was on-time, even a little early.  Second Lieutenant Loris had learned in the Boy Scouts to be punctual.  The men groaned about the fast march to the meeting point, but, now, they could rest for a few minutes.  Loris told his Sergeant, Baby, to protect the troops from the midday sun and keep them hydrated.  

It was an awful place, too dry and hot even for lizards, a dusty basin under a mountain fringed with a skirt of ragged badlands overlooking the flat.  Baby positioned the men in a ravine where there was still a little shadow.  The sun was high and the shadows were prim, stiff, and short.

At 1300, when the rendezvous with the second patrol was supposed to occur, Loris thought he saw the platoon commander, a lanky soldier with a reddish beard, appear on a hilltop eight-hundred meters away.  But it must have been a mirage because, when Loris looked again, no one was there.  The second patrol was late and, a half hour later, the badlands lit up with muzzle-flashes.  Some rockets stormed down on them and a couple men were hit.  

The fighting lasted for several hours.  At times, the enemies were so close that Loris and Baby could hear them calling to one another.  Rocket-propelled grenades snaked down out of the bad lands and a machine gun raked the basin, kicking up geysers of alkali dust.  Loris told Baby that if they escaped from this ambush, he would attend his sergeant’s birthday thirty years in the future.  Baby vowed that he would do likewise on Loris’ birthday.  The two men huddled together in a shallow hole next to boulder.  Loris memorized Baby’s birth date and Baby memorized the Second Lieutenant’s date of birth as well.  “If we get out of here, then, thirty years,” Loris said.  “Thirty years,” Baby replied.

Ten minutes later, the gunfire ceased and the other squad appeared on a ridge, limping down to the meeting point.  “You’re goddamned late,” Loris said.  The Patrol Sergeant said that the Lieutenant had stepped on a land mine and been killed a couple hours earlier.  And there had been other casualties that had to be air-vaced back to the fire-base.

“Better late than never,” the Patrol Sergeant said. 

“That’s not how I see things,” Second Lieutenant Loris replied.

After the war, Loris studied Law Enforcement at a Community College and, then, was licensed as a peace officer.  He worked as a cop in his home town for fifteen years.  The town was serene and dull and, after his first marriage ended in divorce, he wanted to try something different.  So Loris joined the Drug Task Force and worked undercover for five years, until he had made so many arrests that he was too well-known to continue in the operation.  He returned to his home town on the plains near the border with South Dakota and worked for the County Sheriff.  When his boss died suddenly of a heart attack, Loris took over the job and, then, won two elections for the office.

Loris re-married but was again divorced.  He lived alone in a farmhouse a few miles from the County Seat.  His children were grown but he had never been close to them and so they didn’t visit often.  

On Loris’ birthday thirty years after the fire-fight in the desert, Baby and his wife came to see him.  Loris was a little embarrassed at his austere and empty house and, so, after drinking a few beers on his porch, they drove into town for steaks at the Country Club.  Baby was grey but fit.  He had an insurance agency in a small city on the far side of the State.  

After remembering the battle, Baby talked about his children who were both in graduate school in Colorado.  He told Loris that he had started smoking weed again because his kids lived in Colorado and the stuff was cheap and legal there.  “Good for you,” Loris said.  Loris said that pheasants were plentiful on his acreage and that Baby should come out during the Fall to hunt with him.  “I have a very good dog,” Loris said.  “I noticed,” Baby’s wife replied.  She asked him the name of the dog.  Baby said that he would certainly drive out to hunt with Loris sometime before the end of the year.

The next day, Loris and Baby played golf.  It was a fine afternoon.  Baby’s wife took a nap at the motel on the freeway.  Then, they left and drove back across the state, two-hundred miles to the city where they lived.  

Loris hunted alone.  Baby wasn’t able to make time to come and chase down pheasants with him.

At Christmas, Loris saw his son.  The young man was laid-off from construction work, laying tunnels for fiber-optic computer cables.  Loris’ son said that he would come to his father’s house in time to watch the football game.  But he was an hour late.

Loris chided him: “Do you know what I used to tell my soldiers?” Loris asked.

“No, I do not,” his son said.  

His son’s girlfriend giggled: “He’s always late.  He’s never on time.”

Loris continued: “I tell them that to be early is to be on-time.  And that to be on-time is to be late.  And to be late...well, I don’t want to even think about it.”

“Wow,” Loris’ son said.

Baby’s birthday was in mid-January when the weather can be snowy and unpredictable.  Loris listened to weather forecasts on his patrol car radio.  A blizzard was coming.  This bothered Loris because of his vow to see Baby on his birthday thirty years after the firefight.  

Early on Baby’s birthday, Loris left town in his pickup truck.  He thought that if he began his trip in advance of the blizzard, he would be more likely to get to Baby’s house on time.  

The dawn sky was clear and pale blue when Loris began his drive.  But, after only a few miles on the freeway, clouds rolled over the horizon and, then, rammed the earth with an almost palpable thud.  Then, fine, pale snow began to sift down over the exposed country.  The wind picked up and flung the snow across the highway.  Driving became very difficult.  

Loris almost rear-ended a semi-truck parked on the freeway shoulder.  He didn’t see the truck’s trailer until the last instant.  Then, he veered to the left and spun out, although his truck remained on the freeway.  At the next exit, Loris took the ramp toward town.  He stopped at a fast food place and ate an early lunch with coffee.  He was a little shaken by the ferocity of the storm.  

When he began driving again, the freeway was closed.  A gate had been drawn shut to block the entrance ramp.  On the radio, Loris heard that the county had pulled its snow-plows off the highways.  

Loris drove on two-lane back roads for another sixty miles.  He used the right-hand fog-line to navigate.  The little towns through which he passed were drowned in snow.  He came upon several bad accidents and felt guilty when he hurried past them on his mission.  Then, he lost control of his pickup on an overpass, skidded against the abutment, and, then, dropped into the ditch.  He was breathing heavily when the car came to a stop, slowly sinking into a big, fluffy snow drift.  He took out his cell-phone and tried to call Baby but there was no service.

Three hours later, a deputy sheriff stopped in the middle of the snowy windswept road above the ditch where Loris was stranded.  Loris saw the flashing lights.   He forced open his door against the encroaching snow and limped up to the highway.  It was slick as a skating rink.

The deputy saw his sidearm.  “Gun?” he asked.  

“I’m a cop,” Loris said.  “Sheriff two counties over.”

“I see,” the deputy said.

They crept through the blowing snow for a few miles and reached a small town beside a frozen lake.  The snow spun in vortices over the ice.  The motel in the town had burned down a few years earlier.  Stranded travelers were quartered in an old bowling alley on the edge of the village.  The place smelled of stale beer and sweaty feet.  There wasn’t anything to eat but French fries and frozen pizza.

Loris again tried to call Baby to tell him that he would be late for his birthday.  Again, there was no service.  He sent a text message: “I’m doing everything I can to get there, brother.”  Then, he sent a text to his ex-wife:  “Trapped by the blizzard.  When roads clear, please get chow and water for dog.”

Loris waited at the bar for an hour or so.  Then, he said that he was going to smoke a cigarette, pulling his stocking cap down over his ears, went outside into the storm.

A hundred miles away, Baby’s two sons with their wives and babies were at the house.  Baby’s wife had made a big birthday cake and studded it with candles.  She had several expensive steaks defrosting in the fridge and a couple dozen jumbo shrimp as large as little lobsters.  Baby poured vodka into orange juice for his wife and boys.

“He’s never gonna get through this storm,” Baby’s wife said.

“That dude is crazy,” Baby said.  “I bet he’ll make it somehow.”

They ate some hor d’ouevres and, then, had Chinese take-out for supper.  Baby’s sons went to bed.  His wife went upstairs to listen to a pod-cast.  Baby went into the basement to work on his lathe.

Just before midnight, Baby heard someone upstairs.  He shut-off his lathe and climbed the steps to his kitchen.  Loris was standing, a little dazed, it seemed, next to the kitchen table.  He gazed down at Baby’s birthday cake.

“I made it,” Loris said.

Loris had kicked off his shoes so as not to track snow onto the kitchen floor and his feet were bare.  Snow whitened his shoulders.  He was wearing a Minnesota Vikings stocking cap.

Baby went to Loris and hugged him.  He noticed that Loris’ upper lip seemed to have been slightly burned and was cracked and there was a faint smell at his mouth that, at first, Baby couldn’t identify.

“Let me get you some booze, old buddy,” Baby said.  

“No, I can’t drink,” Loris said.

“Then, I’ll get you something to eat.”

“No I can’t eat either,” Loris told him.

Baby realized that the smell at Loris’ mouth was the stink of the battlefield: smoke and cordite.

“I’m amazed you got here,” Baby said.

“A man’s soul can travel faster than his body,” Loris said.  “But I got here on time.”

He sat down at the table next to the birthday cake pierced with unlit candles.  Baby saw that the back of his stocking cap was all soggy.

“Let me get my wife,” Baby said.  He went upstairs and told his wife that Loris had arrived.  “How is that possible?” she asked.

When Baby and his wife came downstairs, Loris was gone without a trace.    

After Lafcadio Hearn

#WWG1WGA

 

1.

Molly brought it up: “You know...so, maybe, some good can come of this...” 

Shane didn’t like the idea.  There but for the grace of God...

Shane said that he would have been along for the ride but for the virus.  His secretary at the realty firm where he worked had tested positive the day before the trip to Washington. 

“You know that was just an excuse not to go,” Molly said.  “You don’t even believe in the virus.”

That wasn’t true.  Shane believed that the Covid existed and that it could make you very sick.  It was the death statistics that he challenged.  A bad flu is no picnic and, sometimes, old folks or people with other sicknesses died because of it.  Only a fool runs the risk of contracting the flu (or spreading it for that matter) and Shane said that he didn’t want to get the others sick.  He had no symptoms, but the news said that people who seemed completely healthy could spread the illness.

Molly showed him several screen shots that she had printed from her Pad.   

“That’s him isn’t it?”  Molly asked.

Shane hesitated.  “Well...it looks like him,” Shane replied.

“That’s a crime,” Molly said.  “That’s sure enough a crime.  The idiot posted it on Facebook.”

Shane pondered the point.  “Who are we to decide if that’s a crime or not?”

‘You’re right,” she said.  “We just make the report and let others decide.”

On the wall, the TV was tuned to a football game but without the sound.

“Tony’s tuition is due,” Molly said. “I’m behind on car payments.”

Sales were slow at the office and several of the junior associates were on furlough.  Shane hadn’t earned a good commission for almost four months.  Times were unsettled and there was sickness everywhere and people don’t sell and buy houses when they are quarantined.

Molly pushed across the table another screen shot printed with an FBI reward offer for tips leading to convictions.

“We need the money,” she said.

“It’ll never work,” Shane responded.

He knew that the real reason that he had not traveled to the Capitol was that he had a weak bladder and his bowels had been a little loose and unpredictable, probably due to fretting about the hard times ahead of them.  He thought it would be embarrassing to have to beg the driver to pull over at fast food places or rest stops to accommodate him.  It was an affliction.

“It seems a little disloyal or something,” Shane said.  

‘You can be loyal to that group of goons,” Molly said, “or you can show some loyalty to your family.”

“I have to think about this,” Shane said.  

He called his dog, attached the leash to her collar, and walked outside.  Wind rustled through the trees and the sidewalk was dark.  The dog was excited about her walk and panted.  Shane’s friend lived a couple blocks away.  The lights inside were soft and low.  Through the window, Shane saw a lamp casting its yellow rays on a refrigerator in the kitchen.  A big TV shone in another room like an aquarium lit from inside.  The garbage bin had been dragged to the curb and, as Shane stopped to note the address on the house, he smelled a faint odor coming from the refuse – perhaps, rotting shrimp.  

The dog defecated under the street lamp and Shane picked up the mess in a plastic sack from Costco.

At home, his wife, Molly, was on him again.

“You don’t have to pester me,” Shane said.  “I will do the right thing.”

He took his cell-phone from his breast pocket. The phone was cold and inert.  Shane imagined a wise older friend, a bearded man with kind blue eyes, almost like a brother to him, but not a brother and, therefore, entirely objective.  “What should I do?” Shane asked this friend.  But there was no friend.  No one was looking out for him.  That was the problem.  When these ideas occurred to him, tears came to his eyes.      

2.

Wentworth, whom everyone called “Wiggles,” sat on a stool at McDonald’s commanding a view of the parking lot.  It was an hour before dawn.  He held a cup of coffee in front of him, but he wasn’t really drinking.  The ride would be several hours in the car and he didn’t want the coffee to inconvenience him.  

He looked at his watch.  There was ground-fog in the hollows.  Cars were probing the grey mist with their headlights.

Already, they were behind schedule.  

A television in the dining room broadcast news about the certification of the electoral college votes.  The place was mostly empty although vehicles were lined-up for the drive-through.  Probably, most of the patrons were unsure as to whether the dining room was open.  

Norman’s Honda prowled through the fog and rolled to a stop outside flashing its lights.  Wiggles took a tiny sip of the hot coffee and, then, left the cup on the counter.

At the same time, Gloria’s husband drove into the parking lot.  Gloria got out of the car and tentatively approached the black Honda.  Wiggles saw the man behind the wheel scrutinizing the Honda and its occupants.  He looked a little downcast.

Wiggles got into the backseat of the Honda behind Osbourne who was seated ahead of him next to the driver.  Osbourne was wearing a military vest and holding a helmet on his lap.  Gloria sat next to Wiggles in the backseat.  A floral bouquet filled the vehicle – Gloria’s perfume.  Wiggles asked about Shane.  Norman said that Shane was sick and couldn’t come with them.  Wiggles glanced in the back of the Honda and saw that there was some khaki-colored tactical gear stowed there.   

They drove out of town.  Their breath fogged the windows.  There was no point in talking about politics or current events.  They all agreed on most things although with varying degrees of intensity.  The level of commitment to the cause could be a source of friction and so they talked about the weather and sports.  Norman tuned the dial to a talk radio station and, after a while, they just listened to the voices coming from the console.  Osbourne fell asleep and dropped his helmet on his foot.  He grunted with pain.  

Wiggles would have said that he was 100 percent committed to the cause.  But Norman was more gung ho than him and would have claimed that his enthusiasm was 200 percent.  Discussion, therefore, would have been pointless.

The road ascended and crossed the Blue Ridge above the Shenandoah Valley.  At the top of the grade, Norman exited for a rest stop.  Gloria thanked Norman for the bathroom break.  Wiggles stretched his legs.  Snow lay in silent mounds between the trees.  Animal tracks dotted the snow imprinting innumerable shadowy windows in the drifts.  Birds with a springtime timbre in their song called out to one another.

On the other side of the Blue Ridge, the freeway passed exits announcing Civil War battlefields.  Wiggles was interested in the Civil War and, once, had spent a good deal of time reading about its generals and battles.  He wanted to educate the others in the car about those battles but was frustrated that he couldn’t remember them that well.  

Norman drove across the great bridges.  White buildings with tall columns stood on knolls overlooking the wan watery landscape.  

It wasn’t hard to drive into the City.  Traffic was light.  Norman knew the place well and they easily found a parking ramp.  “In case we get separated,” Norman said that his passengers should write down the address of the parking place.  Norman also told them to make sure their cell-phones and watches were synchronized with respect to time.  “If we get split apart,” Norman said, “we’ll meet here at three o’clock this afternoon.”

Several thousand people were already listening to speeches and tape-recorded music was playing.  A row of cops stood across the roadway that had been closed for the demonstration. The cops were all wearing plexi-glass masks. 

Wiggles looked up toward the Capitol building.  It was the pale color of the snow drifted on the Blue Ridge and also pierced with innumerable small windows.

3.

A lot of people were standing on the white marble porch.  Wiggles held back.  He expected the phalanx of cops massing under a stand of trees on the Mall to charge forward and entrap the mob on the stone porch.  But the cops didn’t move and, indeed, backed away from the building.  The crowd made a sound in which cries and cheers mingled together so that the roar sounded like the sea beating on a rocky coast.  

Hollows suddenly opened into the sides of the big round building.  Wiggles was curious and, so, he walked to the stone steps.  The marble porch was high above him so crowded that people seemed to dangling from its edges.  He looked around.  Gloria was no longer at his side and Norman had gone missing also.  Osbourne was ahead of him, climbing upward step by step.  Wiggles recognized the duct-tape seaming the back of his vest and Osbourne’s round green helmet.  The crowd was all around, pressing against him and Wiggles thought that, if he dared, he could hover between steps held in the air above the marble treads by the crush of the mob. 

After a long time, the ascent leveled and Wiggles was on the porch.  The building was like a mountain overhead, pierced at its base by ragged, cavernous openings.  Broken glass was underfoot creaking and squealing on the marble.  Something gave at the base of the building and Wiggles was shoved forward, the whole crowd lunging at once with flags and banners tilted down as if to joust at the white marble flanks of the structure.

Then, he was inside.  His eyes didn’t immediately adjust to the gloom.  The space was dark and filled with stinging fumes.  Big columns seemed to crouch under the weight of a heavy and intricate ceiling pressing down overhead.  The floor was sodden with puddles and smears of mud.  The roar of the crowd echoed and re-echoed in the building, a deafening tumult in which individual voices were indistinguishable.  Wiggles slipped in the water on the marble and dropped down to his knees.  Someone stepped on his ankle and he bellowed in pain.  Hands like claws lifted him up and dragged him sideways.  Then, his back was against a stone wall.  He was sitting on the slick wet floor.  The crowd had encountered some obstacle and it spun back way from the center of the big stone room.  Wiggles felt as if he were far, far underground.  

  

4.

Hickberd had never voted in an election.  He didn’t even answer on-line surveys.  Hickberd had never attended a sporting event.  For a couple of years, he posted videos of himself rapping to freestyle beats that he downloaded from a lease-free website.  Hickberd proclaimed that he was rapping for Jesus.  One of his posts recorded 2 million clicks.  Hickberd was surprised that no one seemed to know anything about him despite the enormous popularity of that track.  Then, he discovered that the clicks were all ‘bots and that, in fact, no human ears had heard his music at all.  This was disheartening.

One afternoon, Hickberd happened onto a video showing a crowd besieging the Capitol building.  The people in the crowd had banners and they fought with policemen wearing green uniforms.  The flags were on long poles that could be used as lances and both sides sprayed one another with mists that were mostly ghostly white but, also, yellow and pink.  Hickberd didn’t know exactly what the battle was about but it fascinated him.

At that time, Hickberd was working to devise code to create computer games.  His efforts were hampered because he didn’t really know how to program or write code.  Although he had posted an advertisement seeking a collaborator, no one but nasty trolls had responded.  The assault on the Capitol interested him primarily because it seemed to present material that could be adapted into a game.

A few clicks brought Hickberd to a web site where footage showing the riot was posted to the internet.  Many of the clips were time-stamped and, so, the sequence of events at the Capitol could be reconstructed.  Hickberd watched the videos for several hours and, after a while, began to see patterns in the imagery.  Certain figures recurred, appearing in different locations and seen from various angles.  Of course, there was a large man with a bare-chest who wore a fur-covered helmet with bison horns.  This man’s face was neatly painted red, white, and blue and his biceps seemed to be tattooed in a pattern that suggested the bricks in a wall.  Sometimes, this man formed his jaw and lips into the shape of a trumpet and he bellowed.  On other occasions, the man with the horns on his head stood alone, stamping his feet and chanting.  There were others that Hickberd named and, then, tracked on their adventures inside the Capitol building: “Tall Dark Goon” was a very lean, almost skeletal man with a black skullcap and a black scarf covering the lower half of his face.  TDG, as Hickberd called him, wore some kind of gaiters around his calves, the sort of elastic sheath that keeps the trousers of  couriers from getting entangled in the spokes of their bicycles.  WW was Wild Woman, a small middle-aged lady who wore a blue banner as a cape.  DTM was a fat older man wearing a green military helmet that was emblazoned with a red insignia.  The plump man’s khaki-colored vest was too small for him and had split open across its back where the rift was closed with swaths of duct tape.  One of the sleeves to the man’s vest had also become detached and had been repaired with more duct tape.  Jolly Guy (JG) was husky man wearing a hooded sweatshirt over a motorcycle helmet.  He was always braying with derisive laughter.  GB was Goat Beard, a man with the eyes of a horror movie villain sporting a long beard that had been braided into a long, furry spike dangling from his bony chin.  GB roamed the Capitol with Dreadlock, a man with grey whiskers and long hair that seemed to have been styled by the same person who had braided his friend’s beard.  A woman with red hair and a turquoise cell phone decorated with big glittering hearts, Hickberd named CPL or Cell Phone Lady.  Accountant was a studious-looking fellow with black horn-rimmed glasses who carried a brown briefcase with him as he rambled through the marble halls of the building.  CA was a man who looked like Rasputin (at least as the mad monk was portrayed in comic books), wearing a sweat-shirt hand lettered CAMP AUSCHWITZ in crude white characters.  A fellow who looked like a hillbilly to Hickberd was nicknamed BBQ.  Q was a big man wearing Doc Martens with the letter Q painted on his forehead.  ZTM looked like a cop and carried a big white blossom of plastic zip ties.  With each hour, more and more videos were posted on-line.  By the end of the day, more than ten hours of footage was available for Hickberd’s study.  The more he looked, the more he saw.

The adventures within the Capitol were like a video game.  Hickberd’s protagonists roamed through a three-dimensional maze consisting of subterranean chambers with many Moorish-looking columns, long corridors barricaded in places with cherry-wood doors protected by cops, a huge round room with enormous shadowy paintings on the wall, brownish scenes with figures with honey-colored faces enclosed by gilded frames, and a place where marble statues gestured at the crowds of people marching through the room between red velvet ropes slung from heavy-looking brass stanchions.  There were stone stairwells, small airless-looking offices with pictures of politicians standing next to famous celebrities, and several big chambers with unfurled flags and marble balconies with Latin words inscribed on the walls.  The characters that Hickberd had named roamed around this terrain like the first-person shooters in games such as Doom or Duke Nuke-em.  Sometimes, they encountered small policemen, all identically clad, and diminutive – the policemen were pygmies and readily swept to the side by the rampaging mob.  The objective of the game was unclear.  The rioters seemed to be looking for something but it wasn’t clear what they were seeking.  Perhaps, they didn’t know themselves.  

For several days, Hickberd scrutinized the footage.  With each hour, more videos were added.  He recognized the men and women whom he had named.  After awhile, they seemed to him to be familiar acquaintances, almost friends.  Sometimes, he went upstairs to make himself a sandwich and there was a cooler in the corner of his basement room where he kept cold energy drinks.  

Hickberd fell asleep in his command chair at the console of his computer.  In his dreams, he had been inside the Capitol himself roaming the galleries with ZTM, Accountant, and Duct-Tape Man.  He smelled something cooking and went upstairs where his mother and sister were heating a pizza in the oven.

“What have you been doing down there?” Hickberd’s mother asked him.

“Working,” Hickberd grunted.

He had a couple of slices of pizza and, then, went back down stairs.  In the interval that he had been in the kitchen, three more short videos had been added to the archive. 

5.

Norman programmed the Honda’s navigation system for Richmond and blocked routes that required freeway driving.  He didn’t intend to actually go that way, but thought it prudent to confuse the On-Star system because government satellites, he said, could access the directions and use that data to hunt for them.  Norman said that the authorities were erecting checkpoints at the freeway ramps and so it was best to use surface roads and make many turns.  It took them a long time to reach the suburbs beyond the river and, then, the suburbs of the suburbs.  Norman used a paper map to find a way to the Interstate far from the city.  Osbourne held the map across his lap.  Wiggles saw that the duct-tape on the back of his tactical vest was ripped.  

At a rest stop in the country, Norman re-set the On-Star for a route to Luray Caverns.  “That will confuse the bastards,” Norman said.  They used the toilets and, then, continued on their way home.  Norman was hurt with a bad limp.

Gloria was a little miffed.  “You guys just abandoned me,” she said.  “Well, I got caught up in the moment,” Norman said.  Osbourne said something similar.  Wiggles was apologetic.  He told her he had been swept into the building, but, then, fallen and, now, his back and ankle were aching him.  Gloria extracted a vial of Ibuprofen from her purse and gave Norman three tablets.  Norman found an unopened bottle of water under the seat and swallowed the medicine.  

Gloria said that the speeches were all fine and inspiring and that she hiked the street u[ to the Capitol with the rest of them.  The crowd was peaceful, she said and everyone was happy to be part of a majestic common purpose.  Then, she saw people fighting up on the big porch to the building.  The crowd rolled forward and, then, broke against the steps with some groups recoiling back down the lawn toward the Mall.  Gloria found herself separated from the others as squads of police inserted themselves into the marchers and began to provoke them.  She slipped on something spilled on the sidewalk and would have fallen except that a very tall man dressed all in black caught hold of her and kept her upright.  The tall man was wearing goggles as eye-protection and he had curious no-color pupils and the swath of skin visible between his black stocking cap and black mask was as white as ice.  The man muttered something that Gloria couldn’t hear clearly.  “What is that?” she asked.  The man’s voice seemed somehow distorted by his mask, as if there were a device hidden in the cloth to disguise the sounds that he made.  In the garbled words, Gloria thought she heard the man say: “Where we go one, we go all.”  Then, he beckoned that she should follow him and hurried toward the Capitol steps, cutting through the crowd the way a knife cuts through butter.  

Gloria had to find a toilet.  So she went toward the side of the crowd where the police were standing in a disorderly and disengaged line.  It seemed to her that people should have planned better for an event of this size.  Somewhere, there should have been ranks of Porta-potties for the demonstrators to use, the sort of accommodations that you find at a music festival.  Gloria said: “If we had been Black, you can bet they would have set up Porta-potties and lots of them too.”  In the distance, she saw several porta-potties and hurried toward them.  But the portable toilets were inside of a small construction site where several yellow front-end loaders and forklifts were parked.  A couple of demonstrators were using bolt-cutters to rip open the wire mesh fence.  Someone flashed a weapon.  She saw a gun muzzle under someone’s coat.  This frightened her and she backed away from the construction site.  A few blocks away, she used a restroom in a Starbucks.  By that time, police had surrounded the Capitol and, so, there was nothing for her to do but sit at the coffee shop and wait for the time when she could meet the others at the ramp where the car was parked.  She ordered pastry to pass the time and read a newspaper.  

“That was my day at the Capitol,” Gloria told the men in the Honda with her.    

6.  

It gets dark early in the first week of January.  They crossed the Blue Ridge in the darkness.  Norman told the others in the Honda that he had seen several blood trails on the marble floors, perhaps, in the rotunda or the place with the statues.  He had reached a gallery overlooking a big room where there were pews arranged in a semi-circle facing a great wooden throne.  The room had a blue carpet with yellow markings and there was a flag hanging down like a colorful curtain behind the throne.  People were rummaging around in the cubby-holes under a rostrum.  Norman said that he took a picture to prove that he had reached this place and, then, gone into the corridor and down the stairwell without ever encountering any guards or police.

“It’s like they just welcomed us into the place,” Norman said.

Norman said that he had kept a sharp eye out for surveillance cameras but didn’t see any at all.

“You weren’t looking, dude,” Osbourne said.  “They were everywhere.  About every 30 feet.”

“I didn’t notice,” Norman replied.

They drove through the darkness.  The exits were lit by big steel towers displaying signs for fast food places.

“There were too many of us,” Norman said.  “No way that the feds can make any arrests.”

“I don’t know about that,” Osbourne replied.

“No, I just ambled right in,” Norman said.  “No one tried to stop me.  I thought it was okay.  No one’s gonna be arrested over this.  Not when they just opened the doors for us.”

“No one opened the doors for me,” Osbourne said.  “I had to fight my way in.”

“I just don’t see how any one can be arrested.  We were welcomed inside.”

“They’ll come down on all of us like a million-ton shit-hammer,” Osbourne replied.  “Mark my words, brother.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Norman said.  “There’s just too many of us and I didn’t see any surveillance cameras.  I didn’t see any security at all.  It was like we were their guests for the afternoon.”

At the rest stop, Norman had posted his pictures of the big room with blue carpet to his Facebook page under the caption: “1776!”  He now wondered if he should maybe delete the posting.

“It’s a popular movement,” Norman said.  “You can’t just arrest everyone.  And if you can’t arrest everyone, you can’t arrest anyone.”

“Where we go one, we go all,” Gloria said.

“I’m right aren’t I?” Norman asked.  “There are just too many of us for anyone to be prosecuted.  I’m right, aren’t I?”

The exits and signs were becoming more familiar to them.

“I don’t know about that,” Osbourne said.

“I’m sure it’ll be okay,” Norman said.  “There’s too many of us.  They won’t dare.”

7.

Osbourne’s experience was different.  He told the others in the Honda that he had scrambled into the Capitol building by crawling up and over a heap of fallen bodies.  Guns were firing on all sides and flash-bangs burst in the clouds of tear gas.  Fortunately, Osbourne had treated his eyes before charging into the Capitol, rubbing his eyelids with slices of raw onion that he kept in a baggy in his tactical vest, and, so, he was able to charge through the stinging fog.   

People were skirmishing in the marble tunnels.  Osbourne avoided the fighting.  He saw several flags fallen to the stone paving slick with mud and water tracked into the halls by the demonstrators.  Osbourne said that he searched high and low.  First, he found a narrow alabaster alley barred by several heavy iron doors.  The doors were marked with black letters on yellow background warning that no one was authorized entry.  Beyond the doors, a ramp led downward to where Osbourne saw altars for sacrifice and blood-spigots.  Suicide chambers were marked by numbers and there were torture dungeons for kidnaped children.  In a dark vault, tracks crisscrossed, subway lines running to various places where cult members worshiped or murdered little boys and girls.  Osbourne saw congressmen and -women fleeing through the shadowy passageways but they were wearing black masks with parrot beaks and he couldn’t identify them.  

On an iron scaffolding above the subways, Osbourne found metal stairs scaling the inside of the Capitol dome.  A sign said that there were 365 steps, one for each day of the solar year.  He ascended the steps and heard his boots echoing against the iron in the curving chamber.  Great iron ribs soared above him and between them, Osbourne saw vats of human blood insulating the spaces between the stone outer dome and the ribbed iron structure supporting the marble facade.  The higher that he climbed, the tighter the space and the steeper the steps.  Small portholes opened onto a great abyss.  When Osbourne paused, panting from the climb, he peered through the round steel-framed oval windows.  Far below, patriots clashed with police on the elaborately patterned floor of the rotunda.  More human blood was stored between the domes the higher that Osbourne climbed and, now, it seemed that he was inside a vast and corrupt body, spiraling upward between huge pillars of blood squeezed into translucent tubes.  It was hard to breathe and the air smelled like the gutter of a slaughterhouse and the darkness in the cramped space increased, a deep crimson gloom through which Osbourne was climbing.  At last, he reached a tiny porch ringed by marble pillars.  It seemed as if he could see the whole republic from that vantage: the tidal basin and rivers spanned by bridges animate with traffic, the sea shining against the cloudy horizon, and the wave of the Blue Ridge toppling over the western horizon.

Osbourne said that he climbed back down to the floor of Capitol.  All of the towering doors were open and he simply walked out of the building and, then, down the mall.

“That’s quite the story,” Norman said.

Osbourne replied: “It’s all true.”

8.

On the dark web, Hickberd found detailed diagrams showing the interior of the Capitol building including its secret chambers and defensive bunkers.  Some of the websites were annotated with information as to where certain members of congress could likely be found so that sentence could be executed upon them.  A few of the charts were marked with places where explosive charges might be planted to bring the Capitol dome tumbling down.  

Using the comprehensive plans for the Capitol and adjacent structures, Hickberd was able to trace very precisely the movements of his rioters through the building.  Using time-stamps on some of the video footage, he could chart a chronology of the events in the Capitol.  His spread sheet tracking the people prominent in the Capitol attack grew to many pages.  Hickberd imagined devising a program that would schematically display where the various people that he had identified had been and when in the sequence of events.  His idea was to prepare a great synopsis of the attack on the Capitol that could be displayed with animated figures darting here and there in the labyrinth of rooms and corridors in the building.  

CA, for instance, entered the building on its west side, fighting with cops briefly in the crypt and, then, marching through the statuary hall climbing some steps and, then, crossing the rotunda to the House of Representatives chamber.  Q entered with CA but avoided the fight in the crypt and, instead, found his way directly to the well of the Senate.  BBQ reached the rotunda and, then, climbed to an upper gallery where he walked up and down a corridor.  The man wearing the tactical vest repaired with duct tape came through a smashed window on the main level and, then, descended some steps to the crypt.  He vanished for a few minutes and, then, reappeared in the rotunda.  Then, DTM disappeared for another fifteen minutes materializing later in stairwell near the dome.  Wall mounted surveillance showed him ambling down a long carpeted corridor where he stopped at each office, knocked, and, then, tried the door to see if it was unlocked.  The doors all seemed to be locked.  He appeared to be looking for someone.  Later, he exited the building through a handicapped entrance on the side of the great cascade of stepsleading up to the porch around the Capitol.  ZTM and Accountant made a bee-line through building to the Senate where they ambled around for a quarter of an hour.  Goatbeard and Dreadlock spent most of their time in the stairwells by the Senate.  They rushed up and down the steps several times.  Video showed them chasing a Black man in a police uniform who, sometimes, paused to brandish a baton at them.

And so it went: 136 characters in the video game, moving here and there, sometimes together and sometimes apart.  After Hickberd put the final touches on his spreadsheet, embedding links to the relevant surveillance and cell-phone footage, he called the local police.  Rewards could be earned by providing information leading to arrests. The officer who spoke with Hickberd provided him with a phone-number for the FBI tip-line.  Hickberd called the FBI and explained his research and the spread sheet that he had developed with links embedded to the actual time-stamped surveillance and cell-phone footage.  The woman at the FBI seemed to be very interested in his research.  She took down his name and home address and said that an agent would be dispatched forthwith to review the results of his analysis.  Hickberd said that he thought it was his patriotic duty to cooperate with authorities.  He waited for several weeks, but no one from the FBI contacted him.  Then, he called again.  This time the person who spoke with him tried to get him to admit that he had been at the Capitol among the rioters,  filming the uprising himself.  The conversation was unsatisfactory and Hickberd hung up.  

9.

A month after the election, the old man was still flying a blue Trump flag over the front steps of his home.  He was a disagreeable neighbor and quarreled constantly with those living near him.  The old man owned a small terrier that he let roam the neighborhood and it was constantly pooping on other people’s lawns. 

After a dispute with the lady next door, the old man began to build a wall.  He researched city ordinances because he wanted the wall to be as high as allowed by law.  Several truckloads of brown bricks were delivered to his property and piled up in disorderly heaps.  The old man had worked in the construction trades for most of his life and so he knew had to build things.  First, he erected corner pillars measured to the exact height specified by the ordinance.  As finials atop the corner pillars, he placed wrought-iron lamps that he wired to a switch in his house.  Then, he began to lay bricks between the pillars to complete the wall.  

Twice, the lady next door called the City and an inspector came to the old man’s yard and measured the wall.  It was an eighth of an inch below what the ordinance forbade.  There were ambiguities about the lamps – strictly speaking they didn’t represent wall but, rather, lamp posts and these could be taller. 

The lady next door used her computer to access the FBI Capitol Violence tip line.  The website had a place where informants could post digital images identifying people implicated in the uprising at the Capitol.  She wasn’t sure that her complaints about the old man as a bad neighbor were relevant, at least, strictly speaking, but was pretty sure that the old man supported the insurrection and was a domestic terrorist.  So, she used her cell-phone to make a video of the spite wall on her property line.  In several shots, she took care to portray in the background the blue Trump flag hanging next to the old man’s front door.  She also posted a video of the old man’s terrier pooping under a shrub next to her house.  A man with a foreign accent called her a few days later and said that he was investigating the old man’s involvement in the assault on the Capitol.  The woman thought that the FBI man was an imposter and she told him all sorts of incredible lies.  She assumed that he was calling from India or Bangladesh.

A week later, a car with government license-plates pulled up to the old man’s house.  The old man was at the wall, laying brick.  Two men spoke with him and there was some kind of disagreement.  The old man threw a brick at the government car and one of the officers tased him.  He flopped to the ground, crying out in a shrill voice.  Then, the other officer rolled him over and put handcuffs on his wrists.  Working together, the two officers lifted the old man up and put him in the backseat of their car.  The old man was weeping and his hunched-up shoulders trembled. 

10.

One of Hickberd’s friends, @partyallthetime, was also interested in the characters involved in the Capitol riot.  He emailed Hickberd a link to some footage that he had acquired showing ZTM.  Most of it was familiar to Hickberd but there were a couple of additional shots showing Zip-Tie Man using a urinal in an ornate marble toilet.  The image had been posted on social media with a caption in which ZTM said that he was pissing in a famous congresswoman’s toilet.  This didn’t make much sense because the image showed a urinal in a men’s bathroom. @partyallthetime said that the FBI had been very interested in his compilation of surveillance and Facebook postings showing ZTM.  In his email, @partyallthetime said that his images of ZTM were proprietary.  “I don’t want you taking credit for my work,” @partyline emailed.  “No offense, but there’s a reward involved.”  Hickberd responded that he was insulted that his friend thought that he would poach his footage.  

@partyline asked Hickberd if he had any footage of the “dude running around in duct-taped flak jacket.”  The authorities were apparently interested in this man as well.  Hickberd said that he had some video showing DTM.  “I could say it’s proprietary, but I won’t.  It’s the internet.  Everything’s for free,” Hickberd emailed @partyallthetime.  He sent him a link to his images of DTM.

“I’m not interested in specific people except as they interact with the whole group,” Hickberd wrote @partyallthetime.  “I’m a historian,” Hickberd said, “and a game developer.  I’ve got people interested in a game called ‘Storm the Capitol!’.  It’ll recreate the whole insurrection.”  

@partyallthetime wrote back to Hickberd and said that he had looked at the pictures of DTM.  “Not much of a rampage,” Hickberd’s friend emailed. 

“You know who DTM looks like?” @partyallthetime asked.

“Who?” Hickberd asked.

“Luigi,” @partyallthetime responded.

“Who is ‘Luigi;?”

“Super Mario Bros,” @partyallthetime said.  “Moves like Luigi too.”

“I see the resemblance,” Hickberd emailed him.

11.

If things can be remembered, that is, brought to mind, so also can they be intentionally forgotten.  The door swings both ways.  Wentworth, whom everyone called Wiggles, decided to turn over a new leaf.  He changed his diet to eat only organically-grown foods.  Pesticide-impregnated and genetically modified fruits and vegetables were part of a plot to induce mutations in the gene-pool.  This was also true of meats butchered from animals raised in confinement, force-fed hormones, and injected with dangerous antibiotics.  A vast conspiracy existed in the food industry and Wentworth knew that the citizens of this republic were the unwitting test subjects of sinister experiments.  He purchased meat in bulk from a like-minded farmer to whom an uncle had introduced him.  At the supermarket, he shopped for only certified non-GMO organically raised produce.  As a result, he lost weight and felt more healthy than he had for years.  

Wiggles remembered when door-to-door salemen sometimes called.  When he was younger, the doorbell’s ring might summon him to an encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries with scrubbed, freshly shaven faces wearing white shirts and black ties.  Every few years even politicians running for re-election might come to his door.  But, recently, it seemed that there were no more door-to-door salesmen hawking magazines or girl-scout cookies or home cleaning products.  The Witnesses and Mormons didn’t call anymore and the politicians all seemed to be in hiding.  And, so, Wiggles decided to remove the button for the door-bell next to his front door.  He used a screwdriver and simply took the apparatus from the wall, using some grout to fill up the cavity.  Wiggles put in an improved lock to his door.  The lock wasn’t to keep people outside from coming in; it was to protect those inside – at least, that’s how Wiggles thought about these security measures.  

His home had been built many years earlier, before his neighborhood was annexed to the city.  He had his own well, although recently the water had tested high for nitrates.  But Wiggles didn’t want to be connected to the municipal water.  Who knew what kinds of chemical additives and mind-control substances had been dissolved in the city water?  And, then, he received a notice that the city intended to build a sidewalk along the front of his property using the boulevard right-of-way for the project.  This troubled Wiggles and seemed an infringement upon his rights and, worst of all, he received an assessment in the mail declaring that he would have to pay for this improvement to his property.

Wiggles told his wife that he intended to appear at the City Council meeting to protest the assessment.  She replied that it was best for him to keep a low profile particularly in light of his trip to Washington.  “The dust hasn’t settled on that yet,” she said.  “Every day that passes means I am less and less likely to hear anything more about that cluster-ef,” he replied to her.

At the City Council meeting, Wiggles became agitated and said that he was being persecuted.  In the corridor outside the council chamber, Wiggles spoke with a lady who lived in his neighborhood.  She had a petition before the Council about a spite wall that her next-door neighbor had built.  “Why do you think they are persecuting you?” the lady asked.  She was a school-teacher and Wiggles had observed the bumper-stickers displayed on her car.  But he was excited, twitchy with adrenaline from his presentation to the Council.  Public speaking frightened him and so he felt all jangly and voluble.  Wiggles said that he thought the authorities were coming after him because of his visit to the Capitol building.  “Really?” the woman said.  

A week after the Super Bowl, Wiggles was sitting in his recliner watching TV.  There was a thunderous knock at his front door.  Of course, there was no doorbell to ring.  Wiggles stood up and parted the curtains slightly and saw several men standing on his porch masked like brigands.

12.

The phone rang.  Shane’s wife picked it up.  She listened to someone speaking so loudly that Shane could hear the sound of speech, but not the words.

Shane’s wife put down the phone.  It was rare to receive a call on the land-line.

“What was that about?” Shane asked.

“Crazy stuff,” Molly said.  “Something about Judas and thirty pieces of silver.”