The Great Man's Gait

 

The photo-op with the Great Man was scheduled for the steps of the Palace of State.  Journalists were gathered on steps rising to the building’s vast marble and bronze portico.  Sometimes, the Great Man answered a few questions shouted at him by the reporters and, perhaps, he would say something newsworthy today.  A few big cranes tilted their giraffe-necks over the former Palace.  Everyone knew that the place was being remodeled – the great reception halls had been subdivided into sheet-rock cells and information kiosks were installed in the formal lobby with its towering mirrors and porphyry pilasters.  In a few months, the Palace would be a hospital, serving the poor but with teams of physicians so accomplished that it was thought that, even, the wealthy would clamor to be admitted.

The sun was bright and high overhead so that the journalists and photographers stood on the hems of their own abbreviated shadows.  Panel trucks and pickups were coming and going at the service entry to the Palace and crews of sheet-rock workers with buckets of mud and aluminum stilts swarmed into the building hurrying like industrious ants.  From inside, we heard the faint report of pneumatic nail guns and sanders sanding and heavy panels booming as they were dropped into place by hydraulic hoists.  The General directing the construction work stood flanked by men in dress uniform and white, spotless gloves.  The General was heavy-set and wearing camouflage fatigues and his wrists and fingers were bare so that he could shake the Great Man’s hand.

The motorcade approached slowly.  Behind the barricades, people surged and pushed.  The big car with the dark windows and flags on its hood stopped next to the roadblock where a row of soldiers stood.  The door opened and the Great Man emerged, slipping his sunglasses over his eyes.  Then, he approached the group of dignitaries at the bottom of the steps rising to the Palace.  I had never seen him before in person, but he looked like his pictures: his head was large and handsome with the ruin of his broken nose between high cheek-bones; his shoulders were broad as condor’s wings.  It was curious that he didn’t seem to walk in a straight line, but, instead, shuffled to his right and left, limping a bit, and, sometimes, taking tiny steps, at other times, lunging forward to plant his big feet decisively on the sidewalk under him.  There was something unhealthy and hobbled, it seemed, about the way that he walked.  His great, famous head was turned downward, sweeping back and forth as he surveyed the concrete ahead of him and under the soles of his boots.

The Great Man approached the General who was supervising the hospital and shook his hand for the cameras.  The photographers jostled one another and their digital devices whirred and hissed softly.   Questions were shouted, filling the air.  Then, the Great Man gestured for silence and it became very still.  He made a few comments about transforming the Palace of State into a charity hospital.  Then, he shook the hand of the General again.  Journalists shouted more questions, myself included, but the Great Man merely bowed slightly, turned with face downcast, and made his way back to the motorcade a hundred feet away, beyond the orange saw-horse shaped barriers.  Again, he stepped sideways, then, forward, striking his boots hard on the pavement, zigzagging over the pavement.  

I turned to the cameraman from my paper.  

“Why does he walk that way?”

The cameraman shrugged.

“Maybe, it’s from the torture,” everyone knew that the Great Man had been tortured for years by regime.  His political enemies had kept him in solitary confinement for a decade and he had been imprisoned for almost a quarter of a century in the harshest conditions.  Perhaps, torture had ruined his legs and caused him to walk crookedly.

“It must be because of torture during the Resistance,” I said.

“No,” the cameraman told me.  He had covered the Great Man for several years and knew about his habits.  

“Do you see the insects, there, on the sidewalk?”  

I looked down and, at first, saw nothing.  But, then, when my eyes adjusted, I saw ants here and there, darting across the concrete.  A beetle with green iridescent wings scuttled along a crack in the cement.  One ant seemed misshapen but I looked more closely and saw that the creature was carrying the tiny corpse of a fruit-fly.  

“I suppose he doesn’t want to step on them,” I said.  The Great Man’s reverence for life was well-known.  Everyone had read about his pet mouse in his prison cell and the spider in the corner for whom he had tenderly cared.  

“No, it’s weird,” the cameraman whispered.  “It’s the opposite.”

“What?”

“When he walks down the street, he slips from side to side so that he can crush as many ants as he sees under his feet.  He’s zigzagging to step on them.” 

I looked at the Great Man. It seemed that he was doing a strange dance on the concrete, tapping his feet to one side and, then, the other.

An attache opened the door to the limousine and he stooped to slide inside.  The windows were tinted so that we couldn’t see within them.  The car rolled forward, then, turned in a sharp circle.  I saw a couple of small butterflies like tiny forlorn pennants caught in the limousine’s grill.  Then, the big dark car, towing its motorcade behind it, sailed down the boulevard of the Revolution.  

Red Flag

Red Flag means fire.  Drought baked the foothills and the stock tanks ran low.  Heat squeezed the sap out of the douglas firs and the juniper trees and the pine-scented air felt combustible.  The wind was too much, spilling down the dry canyons and roaring across the bare hilltops.  Red Flag means fire or the risk of fire.  

Before things became too unbearably warm, Milt drove his pickup from the house up along the ridge road.  The bluffs broke into brown and pink cliffs with aprons of talus, broken like the shards of pots, at their base.  Milt told Billy that he had dreamed that a gate opening into the upper pasture had been left free to swing on its hinges.  Billy said that there were a couple of cattle grids in the gravel road under the upper pasture and that the cattle couldn’t cross over those.  “It’s open range anyway,” Billy said.

“Just humor me,” Milt said.  “I have the feeling that something’s wrong.”

Milt had the AC running full-blast but it wasn’t sufficient to cool the cab of the pick-up and so both of them had rolled down their side-windows.  The wind was enormous and buffeted their vehicle.  A few dust devils were twisting on the hillsides below the outcropped rock at the top of the bluffs.  

The road climbed in lazy switchbacks into the foothills.  The higher mountains were blisters of blue lava against the sky.   They bounced over the first cattle guard.  The road ran straight along a grassy terrace overlooked by low ridges lined with pines.  In the distance, Milt saw a pale plume rising over the road.  

“Fire?” Billy asked.

“I don’t think so,” Milt said.

At the base of the plume, there was green Impala lurching from side to side on the gravel road.  Milt saw the oncoming vehicle shudder as it barreled over a cattle grid a half mile away.  The car was dragging a wide tail of greyish-yellow road dust.  

“It’s odd that someone’s up here this time of day,” Milt said.  Billy nodded his head.  

The Impala didn’t exactly yield to them and, so, Milt pulled to the side of the gravel lane to let it pass.  The car’s sides were white with dust.  Inside, Milt saw a driver with his face masked and two passengers.  They had masks over their faces too, eyes popping beneath sun-burnt red foreheads.  Milt saluted the people in the car, but they ignored him, the Impala fishtailing through the loose gravel.  For some reason, the trunk of the car was open.  Milt looked in the rear-view mirror as the Impala passed and thought he saw something red glinting under the lid of the trunk.  

“They’re sure in a hurry,” Milt said.

“Fucking idiots,” Billy replied.

At the top of a rise, a mile down the road, Milt pulled over to inspect his gate.  It was federal land, but he had grazing rights under his lease.  The cattle were resting in the shade of trees beyond the drought-yellow meadow.  The gate was padlocked shut.  

“You see,” Billy said.

“I guess my dream lied to me,” Milt replied.  

As they were turning around, Billy said that he saw a slick of black smoke above the head of a canyon gouged into the hillside about two miles down the road.

“We better take a look,” Milt said.

A single-lane track ran from the county gravel road toward the canyon.  They bounced over the track.  In the shade of trees, they saw an old sheepherder’s trailer.  But there didn’t seem to be anyone around.  The road ruts ended at a point of land overlooking the canyon, a dry stony trench angling downhill between eroded banks of sand and gravel.  The grass was burnt at the overlook and a stain of sooty black was spreading across the hillside, oozing grey smoke at its edges.  

“Fire,” Milt said  

The wind flung handfuls of cinders at them and, as they looked down at the fire, burning ash fluttered up overhead and lit tufts of grass along the lane over which they had come.  The flame snaked across the meadow and ignited a pine tree.  

“We better get out of here,” Milt said.

As they drove back to the gravel road, the pine tree exploded into a shower of orange sparks.  

“I knew there was something wrong.” Milt said.

A tongue of flame crept along the side of the gravel road.  Milt stopped and drained his water bottle onto the fire.  Billy pissed on the flames.

“Not much chance of putting this out, I guess,” Milt said.

They drove a mile back toward the ranch and, then, Milt pulled over to call the Forestry Service to report the fire.  

The man at the Forestry Service said that someone else had reported the fire ten minutes earlier.  “He wouldn’t give his name,” the man said.  “He said that he was right there when the fire lighted up.”

“There was someone on the road,” Milt said.  “Going hell for leather down out of the hills.”

“Who knows?” the Forestry Service guy said.

“I had a feeling that something was wrong,” Milt said.  “It come to me in a dream.”

They drove down to the ranch.  Some planes with big silver bellies were hovering above the foothills, dropping water onto the grass and tree-tops to steer the fire away from the livestock.  

The wind blew the blaze down the canyon, funneling the flames into the valley below.  A crew of men with bulldozers on flatbed trucks inched up the Ridge Road.

Mid-afternoon, Milt and Billy went to the Cattlemen’s Lounge in town.  The dust-coated green Impala was parked among the pickups outside the bar.  The air-conditioners roared like jet turbines.  

Milt and Billy went into the tavern.  Three young men that they didn’t know were sitting at a corner booth, behind the pool tables.  The young men had a pitcher of beer sitting between them.  Their surgical masks were lying like limp, dead butterflies next to their glasses.  A half-dozen ranchers were watching football, an exhibition game. 

Milt went over to the corner booth. 

 “I thought I saw you up on the ridge road,” Milt said to the men.

One of them looked up at him, a little startled.  His eyes were wide and staring and his forehead and the bald patch on his skull were sunburned.

“We don’t know the area,” the man said.  

“What’s the ‘Ridge Road’?” one of the others asked.

Billy had come up behind Milt.  “We seen your green Impala,” he said.

“Yeah, we’re in a green Impala,” the man with the sunburned bald patch said.  “What of it?”

“Well, what were you doing up there?” Billy asked.

“Well, friend, that’s none of your business, is it?” 

Billy shrugged.

The other man said: “I think you’re mistaken.”

“You were wearing masks,” Milt said.

“You want to make this into some kind of political situation?” the sunburned man asked.

“Nah, but you’re not wearing masks now,” Billy said.

“Not required in this establishment,” the man said.  “We inquired.”

Milt said: “I thought I saw a red gas can in the trunk of your car.”

“How could you see into the trunk of the car?  You have x-ray vision or something?”

“It was open,” Billy said.  “I seen too.”

“Are you making an accusation?”  the man with the bald patch said.

The other two strangers shifted uneasily in the booth.

A sheriff’s deputy came into the bar and said that the town had to be evacuated.  The wind had suddenly shifted and the fire was coming in their direction.

“No need to panic,” the sheriff’s deputy said.

People filed out of the tavern, handing cash to the owner who stood by the door. A hillside about a mile away was burnt black between copses of trees that were blazing like torches.  The air smelled of smoke and burning tree-resin.  Billy wanted to follow the strangers in their Impala down the highway in the procession of vehicles leaving town.  But Milt said that they had to get up to ranch to get some of their personal effects and valuable papers.  Wild fires were common in the foothills and it was Red Flag weather and so, like most folks, they had suitcases packed and important documents wrapped-up in rubber bands in plastic bags in a duffel bag.    

As they bumped down the drive-way from the ranch house, Milt asked Billy: “Did you get their driver’s license?”

“I didn’t see the plate,” Billy said.

“That’s a damn shame,” Milt said.

“Was there a fire-pit up there by that sheepherder’s trailer?” Milt asked.

“You know, I didn’t think to look,” Billy said.

Smoke drifted over the highway and the ditches were burning.  Their eyes stung and it was hard to see.

Bridge

The bicycle’s rental was more expensive than he expected.  The credit card was maxed-out and so Teabury paid with cash.  The clerk in bike store gave him eight dollars in change.  There was no more money.  

He had the motel room for another 24 hours.  His fuel tank on his car was about half-full.  Teabury didn’t think that would get him back to Santa Fe but he didn’t know for sure.  

What next?

It was about nine miles to the famous bridge over the gorge from the bike rental place in the strip mall.  The morning was clear and the air was cool for the time being, a faint incense-smell of creosote pine in the air.  People were eating in cafes near the intersection downtown and, already, traffic was backed up at the stop light.  Some of the art galleries were already open, glass windows full of pictures of Indians and pueblos and abstract desert landscapes that were the color of salmon and bone.  

Even if you haven’t been on a bike for years, you never forget the skill.  To avoid traffic, he took residential roads toward the edge of town.  The houses were shaped like old adobe dwellings, but the walls and flat roofs were built from concrete.  The lawns were pink gravel studded with cactus.  He saw expensive cars parked in driveways.  Behind him the mountain rose like a blue and green shield, looming over the village so that it seemed to protect the place or, perhaps, threaten it depending upon the configuration of the clouds at its summit.

The plain outside the town was barren and there was no shade.  Cars and trucks passing him on the highway flung pebbles in his direction and bathed him in gusts of hot wind.  Sometimes, the road climbed to plateaus above the plain, stony embankments where ATV tracks had scuffed the patina off the desert surface.  Behind each plateau, the road ramped down into hollow places where ragged-looking trees stood hip-deep in black craters.  

The sun began to torment him half-way to the bridge over the gorge.  Hot rays beat down on him and a cross-wind seemed to nudge Teabury out into the traffic speeding by on the straight highway.

The empty landscape and the wind as if from an oven and the sun blazing overhead turned Teabury inside out.  What was hidden within his body became his surface, exposed to the cruel light.  Purplish dots swam before his eyes.  There was no shade anywhere.  

The road curved down to the metal ramp rising over the desolate terrain to the bridge span.  Trucks zooming by caused Teabury’s bicycle to wobble a bit.  In all directions, blue flints of mountain rose above the horizon, immeasurably distant and featureless like shadows without any object casting them.

It didn’t seem that far down to the jagged-looking terrain below the approach span.  But, then, suddenly, the slot of river gorge came into sight.  Teabury only glanced downward as he labored, pedaling up the incline.  A joint rattled underneath and, then, he was on central span, an arch of girders hanging over the great black fissure where the river ran as a dark ribbon far below. In the midday light, the sun’s rays dropped down into the center of gorge and ran in bright and blinding scales across the river.  From this height, the river seemed entirely motionless, a grim, grey serpent ground to death by the stony vise of the canyon.  

Midway across the gorge, a metal-fenced balcony extended out from side of the bridge, an overlook into the canyon.  Some tourists wearing sunglasses and colorful red and blue baseball caps were making their way from the opposite rim toward the center of the bridge.  The height seemed to appall them and they approached in silence.  Another bicyclist wearing a streamlined purple hat paused at the balcony, dismounted, and, taking a selfie-stick from a backpack, posed for some pictures.  

Teabury put down the kick-stand and looked down into the grey and black gorge.  He was very thirsty.  Wind swept across the bridge, a hot torrent of air that made Teabury’s eyes sting.  The wind deafened him.  If people were speaking, he couldn’t hear their words, swept away by the hot gale.  

Next to the overlook, a sign said that if you were considering suicide, there was hope: there is hope.  Teabury felt his insides were outside.  The sun was roasting him and his mouth was dry.  Implacable mountains many miles away stood sentinel on all horizons.  At one of the corners in the fenced balcony, a silver box was printed with words: There is hope and Crisis? the letters next to a red button.  Call here, it said on the face of the box.

How many people had thrown themselves off this point?  Teabury thought of pregnant girls abandoned by their boyfriends, old men with cancer, junkies.  He had no insides because everything had been turned inside-out.  Therefore, he didn’t know why he had chosen to ride to the gorge.  Whatever thoughts that had impelled him to make this trip, using pretty much all of his remaining cash, were unclear to him.  He felt inaccessible to himself.

After the tourists had gawked for awhile at the depths, muttering about the heat, they turned away and walked over the span toward the access ramp and their cars glinting in the sunshine on a distant ledge.  Some more cars and trucks swept by, hauling behind them dismal plumes of hot dust and tiny, sharp stones.  Teabury felt a little dizzy.  The abyss was calling to him.  Out of an impulse, he pressed the red button on the box labeled Crisis.  If there was any response, Teabury couldn’t hear it – the wind seemed to swirl up out of the depths and spin in a vortex around his head.  He took out his phone to dial the phone number emblazoned on the sign next to the words There is hope.  But, on the ride out to the bridge, he had used his map function a little too much and the cell-phone’s battery was dead.  To get over the fence, which was chest-high, you would have to haul yourself up atop the metal rail and, in this wind, that would be a difficult thing to do and, most likely, you would fall, not jump – it wouldn’t be a clean dive into oblivion, but a tumble down into the gorge, topping end over end like a rag doll.  Teabury thought that would be distasteful, particularly with a small group of tourists approaching, several of them small, and, it seemed, children.

Teabury put up his kick stand and wobbled away from the overlook, the bicycle unsteady under him.  The wind pushed him out onto the highway and a passing SUV honked loudly.

Halfway back to town, Teabury thought that he had never intended to jump off the bridge and that it was merely the heat and thirst that made his head pound and throb and the invitations to suicide posted all over the span that had confused him.  The bike seemed to move on its own, automatically without any effort on his part.  But when he came to the long incline up to the stony plateau overlooking town, he had to dismount and, panting, push the bicycle to the top.  The plateau was completely desolate, knee-high wrinkles of congealed lava twisting away from the highway.  A calligraphy of tread marks scarred the barren top of the plateau.

Then, it was all downhill into town.  He felt faint and nauseous.  Sometimes, he rode with his hands at his side, not touching the handlebars and in the center of the highway, letting the cars roar around him in a blaze of honking horns.  

The houses on the outskirts of town looked like stone barges stranded in the stony wilderness.  Teabury felt that he would perish if he couldn’t find a drink of water.  He saw a bright green hose screwed onto a faucet on the side of a house, let his bike fall into the gravel by the mailbox, and, then, lurched forward toward the hose connection.  He turned the faucet and a tiny spray of water misted the air where the hose was screwed into the pipe.  It took all of his will power not to suck at the hose connection.  Instead, he turned and walked along the course of the hose to where it flowed into a small bed of prickly-looking roses mounted on a wooden trellis.  He put the hose end in his mouth and sucked at it.

A voice sounded: “Can I help you?”

Teabury turned around and saw a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a sun-tanned brown chest covered with freckles under heavy loops of bright turquoise necklace.  The woman was holding a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger by the look of things.

“I got caught out in the sun,” Teabury said.  “I’m real thirsty.”

The woman said: “It’s the high elevation.  You have to stay hydrated.  I have some lemonade, if you’ll wait at the picnic table.”  

She gestured toward the side of the house where there was a paving stone patio and a metal table under a remuda hung with red, tallowy-looking ristras of chili.  

“Thank you so much,” Teabury said.  He put down the hose.  “Please shut off the water,” the woman said.

She went into the house and Teabury twisted the faucet shut.  He sat at the table.  In a hollow cactus, a dozen feet from the patio, Teabury saw a tiny white owl winking at him.

The woman brought a large glass with lemonade and ice.

Later, he returned to bike to the cycle shop, bought some day-old doughnuts for ninety-nine cents at a gas station convenience store, and, then, went back to his motel room.  The motel was old and built with adobe brick and the inside of the room was as cold and moist as a cave.  The walls seemed to be very thick and held the heat outside at distance.  

Next to the bed, a deep niche in the wall sheltered a little painted statue.  A young woman wearing a green dress down to ankles stood in the shadowy alcove.  In her arms, she cradled a book with a gold cover on which a four-leaf clover was embossed.

Teabury took a shower to wash the poison from the sunburn out of his skin.  His neck and arms tingled.  The sheets on the motel bed were fresh and clean and he laid down to take a nap.  He was sure he would feel better after sleeping.   

Legion of Glory

 

1.

The terrorists stood behind a long yellow banner on which red words were painted.  They had come in great numbers on foot or by bicycle.  The Metro was closed and the buses detoured far around the place where the terrorists had gathered so as not to feed the mob of rioters.

The day was warm and moist.  The Colonel watched as bottles and paving stones flew through the air. Those toward the rear of the procession were also throwing things and the projectiles fell short, landing amidst the front ranks of the terrorists.  The Colonel saw a stone knock down a woman in a blue vest, her face masked against tear gas.  He thought that the security forces would surely be blamed for that injury.  A couple of bottles burst on the pavement in front of him and a questionable liquid splashed in the air.  

So far the soldiers were showing forbearance and good order.  The command was to shoot to wound, not kill.  Dead terrorists just meant more funerals and each of these ceremonies led to additional rioting.  Wounded terrorists were a burden to their movement and a warning more severe, the Colonel thought, than dead martyrs.  

The terrorist mob was a river of people with its headwaters in the suburbs.  All the alleys and side-streets were tributary to the rioters in the public square.  Signs surged on the rippling spine of the crowd.  The lettering was sloppy and words were misspelled.  Terrorists, the Colonel thought, are poor spellers.  He looked to the periphery of the mob: it was important that the rioters not flank the triple line of security forces deployed across the square.  More bottles and rocks arced overhead.  The troops batted them down with their rifles or riot batons.  Some mortars were deployed behind the Colonel and he heard their muzzles coughing as they tossed tear gas canisters in high trajectories down into the mob.

The rain of rocks and bottles ceased.  The terrorists were singing their marching song.  The Colonel thought that this was a good thing – people who are singing aren’t likely to pitch projectiles at the security forces.  He had heard the song before, enough times that he almost knew the words, but had never really paid much attention to it.   He noticed the song to the extent of recognizing that people who are singing aren’t attacking, or, at least, not yet.

The song was built on the melody of an American pop tune that had been played frequently a decade earlier.  The Colonel listened for a moment.  He recalled that he and a girlfriend had danced to that music in a discotheque several years before.  The tune made him a little nostalgic and brought warm memories to him. Why was it that the subversives and hooligans had all the best songs?

At the back corner of the plaza, there was some kind of skirmish.  Some shots sounded.  The Colonel saw two armored personnel carriers slowly lumbering into position along the side of the terrorist procession.  More tear gas canisters burst on the pavement and the air was stinging.  The marching song broke into fragments, here and there a choir of voices, it seemed, still shouting out the words but without melody.  

The terrorist mob suddenly seemed to boil, hissing like the monsoon rain when it fills city lanes with water almost hip-deep and flushes away all the debris in the gutters.  The Colonel saw the shadows of projectiles fleeing across the pavement like black birds.  He didn’t need to give the order to fire.  The troops were shooting sporadically into the crowd on their own initiative and some of the terrorists were motionless under the big yellow banner with red letters.     

2.

That night, at the barracks, the Colonel heard some of the troops gloating about terrorists that they had shot.  The Colonel thought that these remarks were tasteless and he pretended not to hear them.

In the toilet, one of men was whistling the terrorist’s marching song.  The notes were clear and piercing.  

The Colonel admonished the man: “Soldier, who’s side are you on?”

“What do you mean?”  The man asked him.

“That song you’re whistling,” the Colonel said.

The soldier looked bewildered.  Then, he said: “Oh, I hadn’t even noticed.  It’s a catchy tune.  It gets caught in your head.”

“Be more careful,” the Colonel said.  

3.

The terrorists returned the next day in even greater numbers.  But the rioting was anticipated.  The Colonel’s men stood to the rear of the front-line of armored soldiers.  Bottles and cobblestones rained down, rebounding off the shields that the front-line troops wielded.  

The Colonel heard the marching song rising from within the mob.  The melody sounded wind-borne, inflated somehow by the humid breeze, amplified by the concrete towers surrounding the square.  The Colonel remembered his girlfriend and dancing with and resolved to ignore the song.  But today the singers seemed particularly robust and enthusiastic and the Colonel thought that he heard harmony in some of the stanzas.  There were endless words affixed to the song, but they didn’t matter – only the melody had significance and it rose and fell, climbing to high notes that vibrated over the crowd.  

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t sing as well,” the Colonel said to his adjutant.  He ordered that the supporting troops in his column sing their regimental tune, “Legion of Glory.”  The men did as commanded, but, reluctantly, it seemed – their notes were haphazard, words pronounced hesitantly as if half of the men didn’t know the verses that they were supposed to be singing.  “Legion of Glory”, the Colonel thought, is a dull, listless tune, dour and gloomy and monotonous without the fine fire and esprit of the terrorist’s song.  

A bottle ricocheted off the pavement in front of him and smashed into his shin.  The men behind him kept singing monotonously like robots.  Waves of melody rolled across the columns of terrorists.  The soldiers in the front line, dropped their shields, knelt and fired into the mob.  The Colonel wasn’t sure whether they were using live ammunition or rubber bullets.  A swath of terrorists dropped to the concrete and their song turned into a high-pitched atonal wail.  

4.

After his evening meal, the Colonel paced back and forth across the parade-ground between the barracks.  Fires set in the city’s center painted the sky orange and red.  The Colonel found that his steps fell into a certain rhythm.  Then, he found himself humming a tune.  To his dismay, he realized that he was humming the terrorist’s marching song.  He jammed a cigarette into his lips and began to smoke to avoid singing along with the terrorist’s melody.  Even when he was silent, however, the song vibrated in his imagination.  For some reason, the melody was caught in his mind and he couldn’t expel it.

5.

Even more terrorists had gathered in the square the next day.  The city workers had only just washed away the blood stains from the day before when the mobs appeared, crowding forward toward the ranks of security forces.  The same badly spelled placards and banners bobbed over the mass of people.  All sorts of things were flung through the air and dropped among his troops.  The Colonel knocked away projectiles and heard stones rattling like hail on the pavement.  

He wished the protesters would sing, but they didn’t.  The soldiers and the terrorists mingled in hand-to-hand combat.  Tear gas boiled off the ground.  Far away, in an alley somewhere, the terrorists were singing, but the melody was distant and hard to hear.  Nonetheless, it seemed to resound in the Colonel’s ear.  

A thunderstorm covered the sky and obliterated the city streets with vertical sheets of rain split by lightning.  

6.

Crowd control was going poorly.  Many of his men had suffered minor wounds in the fighting.  Several trucks came to cart the dead terrorists from the square.  The bodies were sodden and heavy.  Far more rioters were thought to have been killed, but their bodies had been dragged away from the square by their fellow rebels.  

The Colonel thought that the authorities should ban people from singing the terrorist anthem.  The song seemed to be giving the hoodlums strength.  

7.

The next several days were for funerals.  The people who gathered for the funerals were different from the mobs that attacked the police.  But, after each burial, great choruses of mourners sang the terrorist anthem.  The Colonel and his men watched the funerals from a distance.  The song inspired the hooligans to lay down in a solid carpet at several intersections.  City police rode on horseback over the protestors dashing them with the sharp hooves of their horses.  But, when one person was injured, another took his place.

8.

The riots were getting worse, more violent and deadly.  A soldier died when a rock split open his skull.  There was sniper fire and it wasn’t always entirely from the security forces.  When the Colonel sent his men hurtling down the streets on patrol, they quick-marched past acres of burned buildings.

9.

One morning a large mob of terrorists, most of them women and children, had gathered in the plaza.  Their voices were raised in song.  The Colonel thought that he could sing as well as these hooligans, that he had a better and more robust voice.  So, he decided to step forward and show the terrorists that he knew their song as well as they and that he could sing it even more vigorously. 

The heroic melody surged in the humid air.  The Colonel stepped forward, advancing through the open space between the ranks of his men and the terrorists.  Some bottles bursts before him and a couple of tear gas canisters dropped on the pavement were whirling around like tops, hissing and jetting fumes into the air.

The Colonel had a beautiful tenor voice and he began to sing the terrorist anthem. Something knocked him down and he heard the shot barked off the concrete walls of the towers only after he had fallen face down on the pavement.  In his mind, the melody continued even as the darkness gathered around him.  

Think: Why Die?

 

1.

The four-lane pushed down from the hills onto the flood plain.  Twenty-eight miles from the city, construction stalled.  The plain was flat and plowed black with deep fertile soil and land prices were exorbitant.  Acquiring highway rights-of-way proved difficult and eminent domain proceedings advanced slowly through the courts in the two counties traversed by the new road.  Some tribal land intervened between the place where the freeway narrowed to the two-lane county blacktop and the broad controlled access road at the outskirts of town and tribal negotiators asserted sovereignity over their territory, further complicating acquisition of acreage for the roadbed.  Then, the economy went into freefall, not once but twice during the fifteen year hiatus in construction.  Land values were unpredictable and budget estimates had to be revised repeatedly and, for a time, the Department of Transportation engineers supervising the project despaired – the link between the City highway and the freeway in the hills seemed indefinitely delayed.  

But the economy improved and legal obstacles to finishing the 28 mile stretch of freeway still incomplete seemed to dissolve, perhaps because all parties were exhausted, and, one Spring, when ice had melted in the little meandered creeks winding across the river bottom, earthmovers as yellow as the dandelions growing in the easement ditches, rolled into place and began cutting open the fields to lay the new roadbed.  Lebendiger drove out to the hillside where the bulldozers were knocking down trees and gouging out troughs where four-lanes of concrete would be poured.  A survey crew was about a mile away from the construction, shooting gradients along the mapped route.  The old two-lane county state-aid highway curved away from the little knoll where the surveyors were working, trucks and cars passing over that portion of road.  A half-mile distant, the highway’s curve straightened where the black-top went white, a cement overpass arched only slightly over a small stream.  The bridge stood on pale pylons, far longer than the little meander that trickled under it – on this plain, these streams were prone to flooding and so the span stretched across a broad, shallow trench lined with reeds and small willow trees before crossing the braided river bed.  One of the survey transits was aimed at the chalk-colored bridge.  

“Take a look,” the surveyor said.  The sky was bright and the man was sweating in his bright orange safety vest.

Lebendiger put his eye to the transit.  On the far side of the creek bed, three diamond-shaped signs stood atop four-foot iron stakes.  The signs were lettered: Think: Why Die?  

“State fatality markers,” Lebendiger said.

Lebendiger knew that the inverse of the sign was labeled X Marks the Spot.  The top half of the diamond-shaped metal sign-face was treated with a reflective surface intended to capture and reflect beams from headlights.  The bottom part of the sign was funereal black, but, also, shiny.  Lebendiger knew that this part of the sign also reflected light, although as a dark, scarcely perceptible flash when it was night-time.  

“What are we supposed to do with those?” the head surveyor asked.

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Lebendiger replied.  

2.

Back at his office at the DOT, Lebendiger looked up the State’s regulations as to motor vehicle accident fatality markers.  Old-timers swore that the signs had first been placed in the late 1930's as part of a campaign for road safety mounted by Farm State Mutual Insurance.  But this was a myth.  According to the official web site, fatality markers were first installed along highways to identify places were travelers had died in car crashes beginning around 1990.  Although the program was partly subsidized by an insurance company, the markers were owned and managed by the State.  

Signs were supervised by County road officials.  Regulations were simple: markers were installed unless the family of the deceased objected.  When new road was constructed, signs were removed.  There was no other guidance.  The markers were numbered and, somewhere, there was a registry identifying the date of the MVA and the name (or names) of the victims.  Lebendiger located the computer ledger but it was only current for the last decade.  No one knew where earlier records were stored.

The State Patrol maintained records by road and mile-marker.  Lebendiger called his survey team and wrote down the mile-marker closest to the signs.  The accident turned out to be 25 years old, a crash involving some Hispanic migrant workers.  Alcohol was involved and the car had veered from the road to slam head-on against the bridge abutment.  The car rolled into the swamp under the bridge pylons.  Everyone was ejected (speed and seat-belt violations): someone survived but the other three were DOA.  One of the bodies was recovered, a little downstream, washed into a tangle of brush by the river’s current.  The young men were undocumented; the names they had given their employer, a sugar beet refining company near the County Seat, were invalid and their social security numbers registered to dead people in Harlingen, Texas.  Rumor was that two of the bodies were collected by cousins and driven down to Mexico.  The third corpse was cremated at County expense and the ashes delivered to the local Catholic church.   

Lebendiger sent an email to the General Contractor on the road project: he was authorized to remove the accident markers and send them with the State Engineer back to DOT headquarters.  Probably, the signs could be re-purposed.

3.

Lebendiger was on a ZOOM-call when the receptionist handed him a slip of paper.  Someone named Mr. Hernandez was waiting in the lobby.  “Does he have an appointment?” Lebendiger wrote on the note.  “No,” the receptionist scribbled.  Lebendiger muted his microphone and told her that the visitor would have to wait.  “I’ll come out as soon as I’m done with this call,” Lebendiger said.

The ZOOM conference lasted another half-hour.  After he logged-out, Lebendiger went to the lobby.  The waiting room was empty.  “He just left,” the receptionist said.  “Is he planning to come back?” Lebendiger asked.  “I don’t know,” the receptionist said, “I had trouble understanding his English.”  Lebendiger went to the window and gazed out at the parking lot.  He didn’t see anyone outside.  It was hot and the air shimmered over the chrome and metal car bodies and, across the green mall, the State Capitol building, looked wilted and pinkish in the blaze of sun, a great pale blossom turned upside down under the blue sky.  “It’s a scorcher,” Lebendiger said.

But the lobby was cold and the receptionist had put on a sweater.  “Too much air-conditioning?” Lebendiger asked.  “I guess,” the woman said.

The next day, Lebendiger was on the road, meeting with several concrete contractors.  He didn’t return to the DOT until later afternoon.  “That Mr. Hernandez was here again,” the receptionist said.  “Well, I wasn’t here,” Lebendiger said.  “You weren’t here,” she repeated.

“That guy is weird,” the receptionist said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was dirty and wet.  Maybe, he was just sweating,” she said.  “He said he wanted to talk to you about a sign.  I think he waited for a half-hour and kept falling asleep.”  

“Falling asleep?”

“Just closing his eyes and dozing I guess,” the receptionist told him.

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with him,” Lebendiger said.

“Thanks a lot,” the receptionist pouted.

Mr. Hernandez appeared again, late the next afternoon.  “He’s here again,” the receptionist said, shuddering a little.  

“I don’t want to see him,” Lebendiger said.  

“What am I supposed to tell him?” 

“That I’m sick.”  Lebendiger added: “It’s not far from true.”

“Okay,” she said.

Lebendiger went out the back door and got into his pickup truck.  It was still hot and, except for heat, the sky was empty.  The legislators weren’t in session and the Capitol grounds were deserted.  

On the way home, Lebendiger felt faint and had to pull to the side of the road.  He got out of his car and vomited into the ditch.

In the morning, he felt better and went to work early.  The waiting room at the DOT building smelled bad and there was a puddle of stagnant water on the carpet in front of the reception desk.  This was inexplicable  – it hadn’t rained for several weeks.  Lebendiger thought that the air conditioning system was leaking.  The muddy puddle on the carpet looked menacing, the kind of water that transmitted Legionnaires Disease.

Over the noon hour, Lebendiger went to DOT garage across town.  A couple of workers were washing down some State dump trucks in the pole-barn bay.  

Lebendiger asked the workers about the MVA victim markers retrieved from the project linking the State freeway to the city boulevard up in the Valley.  “They were here until about a week ago,” one of the workers said, gesturing to the metal wall against which some battered signs were resting.  The other man said: “I don’t know where they’ve gone.”  

Yellow hard hats hung on brackets on the wall and there were yellow vests with outlined with reflective tape.  

“They’re gone now,” the worker holding the hose said.  Water spread across the concrete floor and gurgled down a drain.

4.

The State Highway department partnered with a county far to the north on an overpass project.  Lebendiger attended the bid-letting at the county courthouse.  It was late afternoon when his work was done.  He’d been feeling a bit queasy in recent weeks and considered staying at the motel in town.  But the place looked uninviting and, so, Lebendiger decided to drive home.  

He took the State Highway jogging through the northern forests.  The late afternoon sun raked through the trees and they cast long crooked shadows over the black top.  The little towns in the woods seemed deserted.  It was still light when the highway dropped a ramp down onto the freeway.  The sun set over the rolling prairie.  Lebendiger pulled in to a rest stop.  Under the florescent lights in the toilet, he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror.  Lebendiger thought that he looked old and harried, his skin pinkish-yellow.

There was very little traffic.  Now and then, he passed a semi-trailer hauling animals to slaughter.  Headlights in the oncoming lanes were few and far between.  After an hour, the divided highway skated down some hills between shadowy, black ravines and, then, the road ran over the flat flood-plain.  Construction signs warned about the place ahead where his south-bound lanes contracted to two-way traffic.  Obediently, he slowed, following a line of orange cones on a temporary slick of asphalt over the median onto the old State-aid highway.  Headlights flared oncoming, dangerously close.  On the side of the old highway, Lebendiger glimpsed some colossal machines hulking in the darkness, earthen ramps, a conical pile of gravel looming over a dump truck.  Someone had hoisted a generator forty feet in the air where it hung from a crane draped with an American flag.

The fatal bridge abutment was ahead.  His tires singing underneath the car changed tone as the road went from asphalt to concrete.  A white skull-like face suddenly loomed out of the shadow on the right side of the highway.  Lebendiger was startled and instinctively veered left, away from the apparition.  A cold chill ran down his spine and he shuddered.  

It wasn’t obvious how he could turn around.  Some headlights glared behind and, far ahead, the front of an oncoming truck sprayed rays ahead of it.  Lebendiger thought that it would be best to just continue on his way, but the pale, bony face hovering in the darkness troubled him and he thought it would be cowardly to proceed without investigating.  A quarter mile beyond the bridge, he found a long gravel driveway running to a palisade of trees where a yard-light glimmered.  Lebendiger turned around and drove back up the road, over the bridge, and, then, turned around in the construction site.  A scatter of stones like pebbles on the moon shone in his headlights.  He looked up and down the highway: nothing.  Then, he drove toward the bridge, rolling forward at about 10 miles an hour.  He lowered his window and could smell the moisture in the air, a heavy warm odor of mud and still water.  Crickets and frogs sang.  

A white plastic bag, a grocery sack, it seemed, was caught on one of the tenth-of-a-mile markers, a stake on the side of the road with a little diamond-shaped reflector.  Although there was no breeze at all, air had inflated the bag and it hung bulbous from the top of the marker.  The sack billowed slightly and, as it moved, Lebendiger saw that it simulated – at least when seen obliquely and glimpsed – a human skull.  Eye sockets were indented in the pale plastic and there was a bald bony brow over them.  Sometimes, a round mouth twitched at the base of the sack blown against the metal stake and trapped there.  

For a few miles, Lebendiger felt relieved.  There was a natural explanation for what he had seen.  But, by the time, he reached the city, he was troubled once more.

5.

The new four-lane reached the stream.  The old cement bridge was jack-hammered into rubble and buried in the median under a mound of dirt.  

Winter was coming.  Soon most of the work would have to be suspended.  

Lebendiger’s engineer at the construction site sent him an email with a photograph attached.  Someone had jabbed a MVA victim marker into the wet concrete on the new overpass above the stream.  The steel stanchion and the metal lozenge of the marker hung from the side of the bridge like a hatchet.  Graffiti was scribbled on the new abutment: KILLER.

“Already defaced,” the email message said.

“Probably several felonies here,” Lebendiger replied.  “Better set up a surveillance camera.”

“Just kids,” the site engineer wrote back.

A small camera was set inside a pickup truck parked near the new bridge.  Several times, the camera showed shadowy figures on the bridge deck, but it was agreed that these were probably deer crossing the river on the concrete span.  After the MVA marker was retrieved and the graffiti sandblasted from the abutment, there were no further incidents.  The MVA marker was indexed as one of the three that had previously been planted near the old bridge.

6.

The cancer seemed to advance from place to place.  It was building bridges across his body.  Lebendiger was unwell.  He thought of his body as comprised of nodes of sickness that were slowly constructing connections over spans of glistening tissue.

7.

A couple days before the stem-cell transplant, Lebendiger went to the DOT garage and asked the supervisor to tell him the truth about the three MVA markers.  The man was suspicious and asked if he were in some kind of trouble.  “No,” Lebendiger said, “but I just need to know.”

The garage manager said that the markers were unstable and kept falling over with a loud crash that startled the men.  Finally, one of the workers said that he was just going to get rid of the signs.  The manager didn’t know where they had been taken.

Lebendiger had the employee brought to the shop office.  The man looked uneasy and asked if he needed to call his union steward.  Lebendiger assured him that all was well.

“I know I shouldn’t have done it,” the man said.  “But I took them over to a lake out in the country and dumped them off the fishing pier.”

The man named the lake.

Lebendiger and the worker drove out to the lake.  It was a perfectly round body of water, shallow and surrounded by reeds.  Some clumps of brownish algae were floating as islands near the center of the lake.  Big dragonflies darted between the cattails and, across the lake, four steel grain bins were reflected in the still surface.

At the end of a couple hundred yards of gravel lane, a sandy spit extended into the water.  To the side, some planks had been hammered together to make a rickety wooden pier.  A big dead carp, eviscerated, lay on the wood planks.  In the center of the lake, a rowboat drifted, apparently empty.  The rowboat was cream-colored with oars in their locks and bright with a single red safety vest.

“I pitched the markers off the dock,” the man said.  Lebendiger walked to the end of the dock, careful to not slip on the entrails of the carp smeared on the planks.  The water at the end of the dock was muddy and he couldn’t see any trace of the signs.  The row boat slowly rotated in the middle of the lake and a cloud dragged shadow over the water.

“I wonder where the man has gone,” the worker said, gesturing at the little boat.

“He’s probably fallen asleep and we just can’t see him,” Lebendiger said.

“I suppose,” the highway worker replied.