Springsteen Bus Tour

 

It was fortunate that there was a labor shortage. When the fire erupted at the fertilizer plant, the workplace was understaffed.  Two men from Honduras were working near the processing shed that exploded.  They were from a remote part of the Latin American country, jungles and mountains, and didn’t even speak conventional Spanish.  Their bodies were never recovered.

I saw the blast from across the harbor.  First, an orange glow slowly expanded, opening like the petals of a flower and the light cast transient long shadows down the streets and alleyways.  Then, we heard the distant report of explosions, sporadic pops and booms.  The fertilizer plant shot fireballs into the air, one after another, red rockets ascending into the night sky.  For a long time, the plant pumped fiery balls upward.  Then, the cannonade ceased and the glow fell into itself, sputtering and flickering like embers half-buried in soot.

Some of the firefighters said that there ash creatures stalking the fire, bathing in flames like mythical salamanders.  At first, three of these figures, wiry and made from soot, marched around in the flames.  Two of them disintegrated, evaporating into mists of ash.  The third looked like a very thin woman, pacing in the fire on high heels.  After a while, she vanished as well.

A couple days later, an attractive young woman, an immigrant from Columbia or Chili, registered for employment at the temp agency.  I prepared her application and checked her immigration status.  It was a little unclear.  She told me that her Green Card had been destroyed in a fire.  But some calls verified that she was authorized to work.  

Many positions were open, even for a person whose English was a little uncertain.  The woman worked for a month at a diner just off the State Highway.  Unfortunately, there was a grease fire in the kitchen and the old place burned down.  I placed her at a Vet clinic, cleaning cages and tending to hospitalized pets.  But that place burned down and a half-dozen dogs were roasted.  (Somehow the cats all escaped).  Bad luck seemed to follow her.  Next, she worked at a furniture warehouse, but the business went bankrupt and closed it doors when the owner was indicted.  I put her to work as a chambermaid at a hotel on the State Highway.  However, a building inspection turned up fire code violations and that place was shut down.  She must have gone to another temp agency, possibly associating me with her bad luck – I thought that she was trouble; she probably thought the same thing about me.  So I lost track of her.

Six months later, I retired.  A senior citizen bus tour was scheduled through our community center.  The theme was Springsteen’s America and the route was designed around places made famous in the Boss’ songs.  I signed up for the tour.  It was fine, even though we had to wear masks on the bus on account of the Covid virus.  

The tour was undersubscribed and the bus was only about one-third full.  Between Philadelphia and Allentown, we carried passengers who were not part of the tour – it was some kind of agreement between Greyhound and the tour operator.  Among the passengers, mostly Spanish-speaking people, I noticed the bad luck woman from either Chili or Columbia.  She was elegantly dressed, wearing black heels, and a gold cross on a necklace around her throat.  Most of the fares riding the bus seemed to be traveling in groups of two or three, but the woman that I recognized was alone.

Mid-day we stopped for lunch at the Catron Tennis Club.  This was a hilltop resort on the outskirts of Bethlehem, once a haven for the families of steel company executives.  Those firms were gone now and so the elegant club house and tennis courts had been converted to a summer camp for disadvantaged inner-city kids.  

We ate in the dining room, a big cafeteria with food served buffet style.  In the lobby, trophies were displayed and there were pictures of several young people associated with the club who had played in the Olympics.  I inspected the pictures showing handsome boys and girls dressed in white and clutching their rackets to their chests.  The food was excellent and the rest rooms clean and roomy.  Waiting to board the bus, I observed the woman from the temp agency gazing at me with a discreet side-long look.  When I returned her gaze, she looked away.

The passengers on the bus got off at the Allentown station.  Looking from the window, I saw them gathering their shabby luggage and duffel bags that had been set by the curb.  The woman waved to the bus as we pulled away from the station.  A little later, we learned that the kitchen at the Tennis Club caught fire an hour after we left and the place burned to the ground.

We spent the night in Trenton.  The next morning, departing the city at dawn, I saw the skyscrapers downtown suffused with yellow radiance.  The towers of the city looked like a clump of ripe bananas pointed up into the sky.

The Mummy Project

 

She preferred tragedies that were several thousand years old.

Dr. Emma Lane peered through a square glass portal into the chamber where technicians were adjusting the big x-ray machine.  A beige donut-hole almost a meter wide was suspended from a gleaming frame of bone-white plastic.  Brightly painted cartonage enclosed in bubble-wrap rested on a stainless steel gurney aimed at the orifice.  The instrument was all sleek and white without sharp edges anywhere.  Dr. Lane thought that the Big Bore CT scan looked like an enormous toilet seat, picture framed in the machine’s pale scaffolding, hygenic and indifferent to the stuff passed through it.

Dr. Lane craved a cigarette.  She had begun smoking again at the UN site on the Turkish border, a mass grave requiring her skills as a forensic anthropologist.  It was a bad place and she regretted volunteering for that work as soon as she saw the incision in the ground, a groove cut down into the meager top-soil and filled to the brim with corpses.  Perhaps, it was jet-lag but she felt a little twist of nausea in her belly. The earthmoving equipment had sheared through some of the cadavers, slicing torsos open and decapitating some of the bodies.  Mountains loomed over the crooked, twisting ravine where the victims had been bulldozed into the hole.  Clouds sealed the place from the sun and the sky and slopes of the hills were like the ribs and flanks of people dying of famine, austere rock like bone covered in a wet slurry of mud melting off the peaks.  It was cold, probably a good thing, due to the volume of corpses in the pit.  The bodies were black clots, shaggy with rags, and no matter how hard you looked at them they never quite seemed to come into focus.

The Oncology Wing of the San Jose hospital, of course, was better, dry and well-lit and smelling of chemical antiseptics.  She had agreed to consult with the Mummy Project on a lark, as a vacation from her more grim work involving massacres in Kurdistan or toddlers battered to death or the gnawed bones of hikers found in the desert.  Dr. Lane was wearing her hooded sweatshirt with the UN insignia, blue laurel garlands like parentheses around a map of the earth viewed from the North Pole.  The logo was calibrated like a target, as if were a gunsight aimed at the uttermost Arctic.  Of course, cancer patients had priority use of the Big Bore CT scan (it was used to locate and graph tumors for radiation therapy) and, so, it was after 11:00 pm, the doctors gone home and the patients in bed, dark and fragrant outside with a crescent moon rising over the canyons in the coastal mountains.  Although the cell containing the CT scan was brightly lit, Dr. Lane sensed darkness encroaching – it was in the corridors that she had walked to reach this instrument, shadows in the rooms of the sick people, and pressing close to the plate glass walls in the lobby.  An ambulance shivering with red light had been pulled up to the emergency room entrance.  Not her problem, Dr. Lane had thought, the tragedy tonight was 2200 hundred years old.  

The mummy in its bubble-wrapped box rested on the stainless steel tray.  One of the Mummy Project staff was carefully denuding the plastic from the brightly painted cartonage.  The hospital technician slid the portal window open and passed a computer cable through it.  Dr. Emma Lane plugged in her lap-top.  A menu flared on her screen and she entered the code that would allow her to access the images created by the CT scan.  The mummy was one of many in the collection at the Egyptian Museum.  The project was agency-funded to x-ray the mummies still intact in their cases and bitumen-encrusted wrappings, non-destructive analysis not requiring the ancient corpses to be unpeeled or otherwise disturbed.  Dr. Lane drove by the Egyptian Museum on her way to the hospital.  Although she had lived for much of her life in this city, she had never been inside.  The Museum was operated by some religious or anthroposophical cult that claimed ties to ancient Egypt and the building was an alabaster vault, its portico supported by great columns carved to look like papyrus reeds.   For some reason, she couldn’t recall the exact name of the cult.  The mummies had been acquired by the “Rosarians” or something like that.

The mummy’s case was festively painted, its occupant represented by a rosy-cheek face with kohl-rimmed eyes rising like a bubble from the top of the box.  Hieroglyphs ran in ribbons down the sides the cartonage.  The colors on the case reminded Dr. Lane of brightly colored souvenirs, painted lizards or coyotes, that you might buy in Oaxaca or on the Mayan Riviera in Yucatan.  The case didn’t look old – it looked like something made a week or a month ago.

The curator from the “Rosarian” museum knocked before entering the observation chamber where Dr. Lane was seated near the porthole into the CT cell.  

The curator was a middle-aged woman with long dark hair, a nose stud, and a slight indistinct foreign accent.  Dr. Lane wondered if she were a member of the cult.  The curator wore turquoise earrings shaped like flying beetles.  

“Who is he?” Dr. Lane asked.

“She,” the curator said.  She looked at her note-pad, scribbled with some entries.

“Really?”

“The wife of an inspector of mines from Thebes.  She’s named Pamphily.”

“How old is it?” 

The curator said that the mummy was to about 140 BC.  “Ptolmaic,” the curator remarked.

“Is that written on the case?” Dr. Lane asked.

“The date’s there with the standard curses to deter grave robbers,” the curator replied.

“Curses?”

“All mummies come with curses,” the curator said.

Dr. Lane nodded.  The technician in the next room was getting ready to activate the mechanism that would slide the sarcophagus through the donut hole.  She took several additional measurements to make certain that the box would fit through the aperture. Then, the technician pressed a button so that she could communicate with Dr. Lane and the curator in the adjacent room.  Most likely, the walls were lead-lined as precaution against radiation leakage.  

“Ready?” the technician said.  She began to recite by rote some information about the machine, how the patient would hear clicking sounds, and the necessity to remain motionless.

“I don’t think you’re gonna have any trouble with this patient staying still,” the curator said.

The technician laughed.  “It’s habit,” she said.  “I always tell them the same things.” She stood behind a curved metal shield.

“Well, there’s no one to tell tonight,” the curator replied.

The technician engaged the machine and there was a faint humming, more of a vibration than a sound.  The sarcophagus slowly slid forward, passing through the CT ring.  Then, the box retracted back from the x-ray aperture.

On her screen, Dr. Lane saw a cigar-shaped object, tuberose like a potato sprouting eyes.  The thing was stained with stiff-looking scabs of bitumen.

“Let’s do some transection slices through the torso,” Dr. Lane said.

The lap-top displayed a round cavity.  In the center of the cavity, Dr. Lane thought she saw a shadow shaped like the earrings that the curator was wearing.

“Heart is missing, replaced by – “ She didn’t know the name for the flying beetles dangling from the curator’s earlobes.

The focus shifted.  

“Lungs replaced by some kind of packing,” Dr. Lane noted.  She wrote on a legal pad next to her computer.

The cut showed the hollow of the mummy’s belly.  Some ribs, apparently broken dangled down into a black void.

“Female, verified female,” Dr. Lane said.

A small glowing form like a snail passed in and out of focus.  The snail was in the corpse’s uterus.

“She’s pregnant,” Dr. Lane said.

“Remarkable,” the curator responded.  “Are you sure?”

Dr. Emma Lane was sure. “Right there,” Dr. Lane said, pointing her pen at the snail-shaped form.  “That’s a foetus.”  

“That’s a first,” the curator said.  

Dr. Lane had seen fetal tissue in utero at the mass grave on the Turkish border.  How to account for this sort of victim?  One corpse or two?  She wondered if there was some place close to the Oncology Ward where she could smoke.  It was rainy in the deep valley in the barren mountains.  Sludge slid down the hillsides fanning out on the slope above the mass grave.  A pump plugged to a gas generator sucked tarry water out of the trench full of sodden cadavers.  Water droplets clung to the canvas edges of the tent where Dr. Lane was examining the corpses and supervising photographs.  The droplets fell at precise intervals as if controlled by some kind of metronome.  

“Wait a minute,” the technician said.

“What?” Dr. Lane asked.

“Movement,” the technician said.  “Your mummy just moved.  Look at your screen.  It suddenly blurred.”

“That can’t be,” Dr. Lane said.

“Nothing to move here,” the curator added.

“I saw the CT image suddenly blur,” the technician said.  “Of course, I’m familiar with this sort of thing.  Patients often fidget, move, mess up the scan.”

“This patient can’t move,” Dr. Lane replied.

“Maybe, it was an earthquake,” the curator said.  

“Did you feel anything?” the technician asked.

“Nope,” the curator answered.

“Me neither,” Dr. Lane said.

The turquoise beetles piercing the curator’s ear lobes seemed to have wings like a California condor.

“I don’t know,” the technician said.

“Do you have a blurred screen shot?” Dr. Lane asked.

“I think so – “

The lap-top screen went blank.  Then, an image flashed into sight, blurred at first, then, more clear, but still foggy.  The image was an oval ring with a hollow core, but the shape was out of

focus.  

“That’s a motion blur,” the technician said. “I’ve seen a thousand, more than a thousand.  If I had a living patient, I would say to her: ‘Try to stay still.  Take slow shallow breaths.  Don’t hyperventilate.’ Something like that.”

“Let’s take a break,” Dr. Lane said.  “Our eyes are playing tricks on us.  It happens sometimes.  Sometimes, you over-think things and can’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“The thing in the box moved,” the technician said.  

Dr. Lane gestured that she would meet the technician in the corridor.  The hall was long and wide, windows on one side and the other lined with doors, all of them closed.  The florescent lights in the ceiling shone brightly although one of the bulbs was winking at them at the end of the hall. The darkness outside made it seem that the corridor was buried far underground.  

The technician wore her hair in a shiny black bun atop her skull.  Dr. Lane thought she detected a very faint odor of nicotine on her breath.  (She had an excellent nose, too acute for her line of work.)  She made a gesture of lifting a cigarette to her pursed lips and winked at the technician.  The young woman shrugged and, without a word, led her down the hall to the place where the florescent light was tremulous overhead.  A door opened into a courtyard where there were palm trees that reminded Dr. Lane of the Arabian Gulf or the columns in front of the Egyptian Museum.  The little opening in the block of buildings was really just an air-shaft – above the square courtyard, some windows glowed faintly, illumined by night-lights in the sick-rooms.  

“If you shut the door,” the technician said, “you’ll get locked in.  So take off a shoe or something to prop it open.  If someone comes by and bitches at you, don’t rat me out.”

Dr. Emma Lane followed her instructions.  A narrow path, lined with fronds and eucalyptus plants led to a folding chair.  Under the chair, Dr. Lane found a coffee can with some sand and cigarette butts in it.  She sat down and lit a cigarette.  

No one cared about smoking at the mass grave on the Iraq border.  Some of the doctors smoked cigars as they pored over the corpses.  Dr. Lane remembered going a sixty meters up the valley to where there was a yellow bulldozer parked next to a little trailer.  She climbed up into the bulldozer to be out of the rain.  The trailer was on wheels sunk into the mud and locked.  She recalled lighting a cigarette as she sat on the hard bulldozer seat, some rods and levers between her knees.  It had been raining.

Something was ticking like a clock near her.  The sound was like rain drops splashing off a wet tent.  Dr. Lane looked around and saw that a large beetle with a shiny black carapace was pushing something through the dirt under the rubbery leaves of the eucalyptus tree.  The air smelled medicinal.  She watched the beetle while she smoked.  The creature’s industry was somehow both touching and comical.  

Retrieving her left shoe, Dr. Lane slipped it on and walked back to the Big Bore CT scanner.  

“Any more movement,” she asked the technician.

“Nothing stirring now,” the woman replied.

“It must have been a earthquake tremor,” the curator said.  “We often have events like these that you can’t feel.  But, maybe, the instrument picked it up.”

“Doubtful,” the technician said.  “The room is set on granite slab that weighs many tons and that simply floats on the soil.  To keep things steady.”

Dr. Lane made some more notes in her book and called out for different slices through the mummy.  The corpse’s brain had been removed through her nose and the sinuses were pierced.  Several images showed the dead woman’s face, wrinkled and faintly simian under the bandages.  

“Let’s record the amulets,” the curator said.

She handed Dr. Lane a photocopied schematic of a woman’s body.  The diagram graphed a bald woman with an asexual face with closed eyes.  

“Let’s mark the location of the amulets,” the curator said.

The technician shortened the focus to the surface of the corpse where the jewelry buried with the body showed as shadowy orbs and hook-shaped constellations of metal and gems.  

After studying the images for awhile, the curator asked Dr. Lane: “What do you have?”

“Scapular medal between the breasts, amulet over the genitals, bracelets bilaterally, gorget around throat...” Dr. Lane said.  She had sketched the jewelry on her diagram.  

“Then, there’s the bug-thingy in the cavity where her heart was,” she added.

“I didn’t see that just now,” the curator said.

The curator told the technician to adjust the penetration and focus for the thoracic cavity.  The image showed that the heart was missing but there was no amulet in its place.

“Do you see the scarab?” the curator asked.

“Not now, but I could have sworn that there was a scarab in the cardio-pulmonary cavity,” Dr. Lane said.

The image riffled through layers of the corpse as if turning the pages of book.  But there was nothing in the heart cavity.

“Didn’t you see something there?”

“A scarab, probably jade or lapis lazuli,” the curator said.

“Well, it’s gone now,” Dr. Lane said.  

“Someone’s nicked it,” the curator replied with a laugh.  

The first blush of dawn suffused the pinkish smog over the long boulevard in front of the hospital.  Its corridors smelled of food cooking for breakfast, a dense heavy odor that made Dr. Lane feel a little bit sick.  Already, there were queues of cars at the stoplights, people going to work.  Shift change was underway and nurses were giving reports to one another.

Dr. Lane felt very tired.  She exited the boulevard onto the freeway.  Traffic was heavy and fast – at this hour of the morning, everyone knew exactly where they were going.

After a half-mile, all the trouble-lights on her car’s console flashed at her.  Dr. Lane heard a grinding sound and, then, the engine turned off and the vehicle was in a free-fall, like a glider dropping through the clear turquoise sky.  She slid to a stop on the shoulder of the road.  A fence ran along the edge of the freeway glittering a little in the first light.  Off an exit, a quarter mile ahead of her Dr. Lane could see a convenience store with gas pumps.  But cars were roaring by, flashing next to her car only a yard or two away and she was afraid to leave her vehicle.  Finally, she crawled over the center console and opened the door on the passenger side of her vehicle.  Out of the car, the traffic roared and snarled at her.  She lit a cigarette and watched the sun rise between two mountains.  

After a half-hour, a police cruiser approached and, with lights flaring red and blue, pulled up behind her car.  

A trooper wearing a broad-brimmed hat came toward her.  Dr. Lane could see cars slowing to shift lanes around the red and blue light splashing around the patrol vehicle.  

“Can I help you?” the trooper asked.

“I hope so,” Dr. Lane said.  “I’ll need a tow.  The car is completely dead.”

“I’ll put down some cones and, then, we’ll get you out of here,” the officer said.  “How did it happen?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Lane said. “It’s strange.  Everything was fine and, then...”

“Just bad luck,” the trooper said.   

Hide-and-Go-Seek

 

We called the game “Hide-and-go-Seek.”  It had a different name in the rest of the town.  Others said “Hide and Seek,” easier to pronounce and, I think, less aggressive sounding. But up on 27th Street NW, we were proud to do things differently.  

Our street ended in a dead end, isolated by grassy hills awaiting development into suburban housing.  A frontage road ran along the new freeway that whined and raged with traffic at all hours of the day.  We lived in houses built before the freeway isolated our block.  On one side, a slope rising out of our backyards climbed over retaining walls and, then, past a marsh in a little grassy hollow between the hills up to the water tower on the height of land.  Across the street from the fronts of our houses, the same slope continued downward, undulating with grassy ridges and potholes, to the Quality Homes subdivision, forty or fifty identical dwellings lining a tangle of roads twisted around a small creek that flowed through a tunnel of sumac and black chokeberry. 

Our neighborhood was blue collar and Catholic.  So there were many children, five, at least, to each household. There were so many kids that some were, apparently, superfluous – little Jeremy had leukemia and was hairless with big bulging eyes like a Chihuahua; Katy drowned in the pond, a sump in the field across from the row of houses on 27th.  We used to make rafts from construction materials stacked on vacant lots where new houses were being built.  Either the water in the pond had peculiar characteristics or the construction materials, mostly two-by-fours and dry-wall, were particularly dense.  Our rafts never floated.  When we launched them, they sunk to the bottom of the murky marsh-water.  In the winter, we skated in tight circles on the little oval pool hedged by cattails and reeds.  One of Katy’s older brothers was supposed to be watching the toddler but she wandered away and ventured onto thin ice edging the pond in late March, slits of open water near the center of the pool.  She broke through the film of ice and drowned in three feet of water.   The afternoon was gloomy and the flashing lights of the ambulance and police cars inflamed the pale stucco facades of our homes.  Later, we marveled at Katy’s tiny white casket.  It was pretty and the color of a wedding cake.  The thing inside the casket was an approximation of Katy made from buttery wax.

Late in the day that I now recall so clearly, we played our first game of hide-and-go-seek at twilight on a fine evening in early May.  Growing darkness enhanced the appeal of the game.  We spread out to hide in the fields rolling down to Quality Homes, scattering behind irregular grassy mounds and little pits remaining from trenches that we had dug in the warm weather the year before.  An older kid was It, searching for us.  When we were discovered, It picked us up by the scruffs of our necks, throwing us around like sacks of potatoes.  It tickled the girls until they screamed that they were going to pee their pants.  Delicious to be found and battered by the hunter – this gave the game an edge of adventure and excitement.  I don’t recall any parents or teenagers intervening.  I can’t explain why supper was delayed, but it must have been.

It was after nightfall when the second game began, dark in the great grassy fields.  Someone was counting, a monotonous drone on the hillside.  We charged down the slope, skirting the pond where the little girl had drowned six weeks earlier.  The sedge rustled and the air smelled of rotting mud.  Then, we separated, darting to our separate hiding places on the little prairie.  I recall looking up from where I was crouched and seeing flashlights, several of them twinkling as they approached.  It was odd to see the flashlights bobbing up and down in the field as we were hunted.  But, then, suddenly, the lights vanished and the darkness rose up out of the grass and I could hear trucks on the Interstate, frogs chanting in the marsh, night birds skimming over the grass, a woodchuck or muskrat scuttling through the weeds.  I put my face down in the moist, soft grass and felt that the earth was heaped up over me so that I was protected.  The darkness was immense and imponderable, but not oppressive.  Rather, it was a soft dim cloak that shielded me in my burrow.  When the kids higher up the hill were found, I heard their happy cries, laughter, a chorus of voices and, then, stillness.  It was as if I had become blind and deaf – I was wrapped in a great remote solitude, hidden in the vastness of the night.  Perhaps, I would never be found.

I don’t remember what happened next.  Maybe, I drowsed off.  

Then, I was looking out the window of my home, gazing into the velvety darkness.  The leaves and grass seemed to glisten with star-shimmering dew and the shadows were tremulous with faint, indirect light.  Our parents had come into the fields to retrieve their errant children.  Fathers, smelling faintly of beer, tugged at their kids’ hands.  One by one, my playmates passed before my eyes on the street led home by their mothers or fathers.  I saw each child.  All of them were there, even poor bald Jeremy holding his sad father’s hand and little Katy in her sopping wet clothes toddling along the street unsteadily next to her mother.  

The Hide-and-go-Seek game was over.  Everyone had been found and it was time for bed.    

Is it “Hide and Seek” or “Hide-and-go-Seek”?