Harder Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “I was named Pythia, from the Greek word pytheuls, which means to eat. It’s not pejorative hon, really it ain’t. What’s a compost pile if not rot and from that rot cometh new life, am I right? See in one of my former lives—we’ve all had a bunch, donchu know—I was the Oracle of Delphi, the one over to Greece? Not the one makes car parts down to Lansing, and people and minor gods too, they come to me, though there ain’t been a rush of minor gods recently, but in the past they come, all right, everybody comes to me for answers to life’s problems and pinchy quandaries. What I am in modern verbology is an aficionado of public souls.”

  Ruthie knew the woman had an inflated opinion of herself, but it wasn’t selfish. She truly believed she was on the Earth to help folks, and she tried. Though in Ruth’s mind, Pythia Culvert was mainly a world-class gossip and when she was on the beam, she tended to draw more gossip right out of folks who seemed hardly aware of what they were revealing.

  “Now I know when a girl like me modestly propounds to have answers, there is likely to be lingering doubt among the pawpaws filled with doubting Thomases, but you listen close and then tell me later I ain’t hit the nail on the head more’n I missed.”

  In this preposterous claim Pythia was absolutely right, which is why Ruth Brennan was putting herself through the entire three-hour ordeal, because it was an ordeal, physically and emotionally and pick any dictionary you want for the word and definition that makes you most comfortable.

  The salon was called Hair Oracle and Pythia’s chair was in the center of a circle of six hairdressers, whom Pythia pointed out, she “commanded the way that Bernstein guy does all that snappy John Phillip Sousa stuff and why we don’t got more red-blooded American marches these days makes no damn sense to me, our kids being at war all over the damn world. I mean my nephew Harry’s been deployed ten damn times now and not one new march coming out of them music-making big shots out east.”

  The arrangement of chairs struck Brennan as downright odd, like a center circus ring at the big top, but nobody seemed to mind. Regal Pythia with straw-colored hair as dense as a lion’s mane had an estrogenic voice spewing torrents of words in waves, floods, tsunamis, oceans of words and thoughts drowning all they sloshed over.

  Mostly you just sat and watched and listened as the master of revelry went on and on, and when time came for other actors to say their lines, she’d let them know, but this show, make no mistake was about Pythia and all others were supporting cast.

  Court assembled, chairs occupied, Pythia began, “Sweetest Sue, youngest and new, what have you for we who are here today?”

  “It’s Molly,” Sweetest Sue said saccharinely.

  “Miss Molly youse may speak your mind here in the Hair Oracle, Honey. Like Vegas, what gets said in here stays right here, so what shall it be, dear?”

  The speaker was fiftyish, short gray hair—double crow’s feet around her eyes like crackled glass and the windy whistling cadence of a troubled carp. “My grandmother-in-law, God bless her, is ninety-four, a South Bend gal with Golden Dome blood thick in Catholic cells, once removed from a ship, out of Cork or thereabouts and here so long she forgets who’s speaking when she hears her own brogue.”

  Pythia smiled benignly, her eyes sparkling. “Ma, we call her, which is Gaelic for boss. Some years back her youngest daughter married a fella of the Jewish persuasion in New Rochelle, New York, and since has converted to Jeweydeism, whole hog so to speak, and old Ma’s never said a word, nor been quite the same. See, she expects religious conversions to flow the other direction, Jeweydeyitics to Catholics, as it was in the time of Jesus, who she insists was the first Catholic, Catholicism being the only Christianity back in the start.”

  “Never a word about the conversion?” Pythia asked.

  “Nary and a Silence of the Lambs quietetude,” Molly said, “except every year she expects, no—she commands—all her blood kin to draw Christmas names and give gifts of a minimum of one hundred American dollars, minus shipping and the wayward and objectors are compelled to participate even though she and her spouse and kosher flock do not celebrate the birth of baby Jesus. This is an insult to my aunt and her kin and a financial burden on younger folks. Why would she keep to this nonsense, and what do we do about it? What can we do?”

  Prounounced Pythia, “It’s clear the boss is clinging hopelessly to hope, like a dingleberry clings in stubborn wooly desperation that her child has not gone over to the dark side. I would suggest the family pool resources, fly Ma out to this New Rochelle place and put photos of her daughter in her First Communion dress in the front of the room, have them tear their clothes and recite, Baruch dayan emet, which means Blessed is the one true judge. This done everyone should express regrets to Ma for the loss of her daughter and at the same time rejoice at the gain of a fine new son.”

  “She’ll die,” Molly said.

  Pythia pursed her lips. “So there’s your backup plan. Shall we have a snort in the fort?” One of the hairdressers produced a bottle of Captain Morgan spiced rum and a portion was poured in a dozen small paper cups and distributed and Pythia said, “With solidarity with the ewe in pain, l’chayim.”

  Brennan expected hosts for communion, but it was down the hatch neat and back to the show and business at hand, Pythia scanning the circle, steadying her gaze on a hairdresser named Mazie and her client, a redhead named Charlemagne but known locally as Charlie.

  “Last we heard,” Pythia said to Charlie, “your sister Louisa was caught up in a downward cycle if I may be so insensitive to express her troubles so indelicately.”

  “I can be a lot more direct,” Charlie said. “Sis was born with a charcoal furnace betwixt her legs, which was made by God, like all the other parts, to render wood to ash. Claims she’s had hundreds of rutting partners, with no plans for a cutback. We’re all worried.”

  Pythia snorted. “If the sex is good, what’s the worry? One of my Fredericks didn’t know a clitoris from a pig’s knuckle. Your sister has her a gift, why not celebrate it?”

  “It’s immoral,” Charlie said. “And unhygienic.”

  “There ain’t no morality in fucking,” Pythia said, “only in who you tell about it. If sis can’t keep her knees together and her mind on Jesus, tell her to keep her pie-hole closed. Drinks around!” Pythia declared and out came the rum again, chugged down, cups tossed, everyone sitting back with greatly relaxed eyes.

  The oracle tapped Ruth’s shoulder. “Ruthie hon, what’re you bringing to the multitude this morning?”

  Brennan had not expected this, not after what this was costing her. She whispered through clenched teeth, “This isn’t part of the deal.”

  Pythia patted her shoulder. “Relax and trust your oracle, honey.”

  Brennan took a deep breath. “This is embarrassing.”

  “Keep going,” Pythia said.

  “Well I have to look stuff up in the World Book. And it makes me feel dumb that I don’t know more than I do. It makes me feel, like flawed, you know?”

  “Nonsense,” Pythia said. “Looking in the World Book don’t mean you don’t know stuff, even if you got to look it up again and again. The point is you know where to look, which is the same as knowing the answer by heart and at the same time gives you a lot more clear space in your brain. What the heck do you think that whole Google thing is about ’cept a World Book on people’s computers. Spice the mainbrace! Drinks around!”

  “You done good,” Pythia whispered as they waited for their rum portions.

  The fourth client declined, but the fifth hairdresser introduced Mrs. Bob Harrie Senior who said, “I’m Mrs. Bob and I am seventy years old and my husband Mr. Bob and I are members of Christians Without Borders, Mentors and Walls. Our twenty-one-year-old grandson York is a spirited young fellow still at loose ends and without direction in his young life. Mr. Bob and I have prayed and prayed and one glorious morning we awoke, Mr. Bob said, ‘Wheeke ha
s a gift.’ What Mr. Bob meant was that York has loved to hunt and fish since he was a wee lad, hunt and fish, and start fires. York’s nickname is Wheeke which comes from the sound a young pig makes when you stick a big knife in it. Wheeke! Wheeke!,” Mrs. Bob shrieked, freezing the whole room in abject horror. “Well, Mr. Bob and I set Wheeke up in the animal disposal profession and if a neighbor or area farmer has a wolf or bear problem, they call Wheeke and he eliminates their problem. Praise God, his services are in high demand and over the last year alone he’s got three bears and seven wolves, four coyotes and a bobcat or two. He has found his true vocation in life,” Mrs. Bob concluded. “But now we’d love to find our Yorkie a bride. Now Wheeke don’t much take to girls, so I am here for suggestions.”

  Not a single response. All the women stared at the woman like she had just stepped out of a starship and through the silence Mrs. Bob smiled benignly and insipidly as if she was being baked in amazing grace.

  Hair done, Pythia walked Ruth Brennan to the door. “Get what you hoped for?”

  “Even more, thanks for calling.”

  “There’s a reward for this, right?”

  “I’m submitting your name but I can’t promise it will come through. I don’t make the decision for such matters, but this is a solid lead and we’ll see where it takes us.”

  Brennan followed the woman at a distance to a farm near Engadine, broke off and headed home. She called her lieutenant. “You at the D office?”

  “Ruthie?”

  “Yah, you are not going to believe what I’ve got,” the veteran conservation officer said. “Be there in twenty minutes.”

  One and One Is a Future Crowd

  Mary Thomisine Kyd knew she was unusual, had known it since she was five and already twice as tall as her kindergarten classmates, a difference teachers, doctors, and social workers insisted would even out over time.

  It didn’t.

  Mary Kyd, distant kin of the famous English author Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare’s contemporary and possible colleague and collaborator, was six-foot-six and two hundred pounds of muscle. Division Two volleyball All-American, she had opted to become a cop, not just any kind of cop, but a conservation officer, called a game warden in her old kin’s sixteenth century.

  In college at Ferris State Mary Kyd had majored in English literature and criminal justice and had done everything she could to learn all she could about her ancestor, the writer. Failing to secure a place in law enforcement, she would end up a reporter for the East Yoop Gazette, her dad’s weekly rag with circulation that went all over the world. Papa Kyd looked forward to the day his daughter would take over the editor-­publisher’s chair. It had nearly broken his heart when she announced choosing a badge and gun over a notebook, not that paper notebooks really existed anymore, except as artifacts of old-time reporters from a far different era when millions of trees died to bring news to the public. Pa Kyd was a veteran of the AP in Korea and Vietnam, and longtime outdoor editor of the Saginaw News before moving the family to St. Ignace in the southeastern Upper Peninsula.

  There was in Mary’s mind some poetic thread reaching from her to playwright Thomas, whose specialty was eye-popping violence, a difficult effect to create in an audience with a ruling queen with a penchant for lopping the heads off legitimate criminals. Some folks in Thomas’s time merely ran afoul of her majesty’s erratic moods and ended up with their heads chopped off and spiked, body parts dropped in various parts of London as grisly reminders of the penalty for crossing her majesty, discarded like so much fertilizer to give root to fear among the hoi polloi. Thomas Kyd wrote of crime and passion, violence and madness, the same things Mary Kyd dealt with every day in her job.

  Never mind that Kyd died penniless and broken at thirty-six, her very age now, and died a snitch to boot, having accused playwright Kit Marlowe of heresy, said accusations made only after weeks of brutal torture of Kyd after Marlowe accused him of the same offense, the sort of professional back-biting and a falling out that quick-stepped from sad to tragic. Released from prison, Kyd was persona non grata among all player companies and condemned to obscurity. Marlowe, meanwhile, stayed out on bail and was murdered in a barroom brawl. Kyd’s fault, some insisted.

  She had been tempted to write, but the politics among such creatures was more base than among the basest criminal class, which described the fish and game poachers and violators who were her daily clients.

  Happy in my job? Sure. You bet. Completely. But who among us is entirely happy?

  Then Pop died and left full ownership of his piss-poor flagship business to her, not the weekly, which was a hobby at most, but his damn junkyard-­scrapyard, Kyd’s Lots Of Treasure, a play on Stevenson’s work. More theft than play, but that argument had fallen on deaf ears when she tried to explain it to her dad.

  It wasn’t enough to be a full-time game warden, but full-time nursemaid to a junkyard in a time when massive unemployment was sending everyone scrambling to find stuff to steal and sell, not just to peddle to her, but to steal from her as well.

  She had tried electronics and dogs, all to no avail, and one day her CO colleague Tommy Butch called her to regale her with a tale of a raid on a dope house in Flint, where the raid team confronted an animal perfect for her security needs, and after hearing Tommy’s pitch, she agreed to take possession after all legal requirements had been satisfied, all legal hurdles cleared, and evidence no longer needed.

  That had been three years back, and since the day she’d brought Susie home, problems with local marauders had ended. Her sign Beware of Killer Dog, did not, however, deter out-of-town ganking crews. As with strangers across all time and all places, they had to learn the hard way. So it had been, so it is, and so it shall be.

  The system was simple. She had a steel fence ten feet high, which all but the most uncoordinated fools could easily scale. No electric current in the metal fence. No walls topped with broken glass or punji sticks, just a big wall painted electric red, and inside the fence, one very large sign, think billboard size, a sign declaring, You Are Now in Deep Shit.

  Now, any fool would know a red fence was not likely to stop a determined thief, but if someone touched the fence, their touch triggered sensors that hooted in Susie’s ear and sent her loping across the grounds to investigate. See, Miss Susie, as Mary liked to refer to her, took the sensors as a call for food. Usually Kyd found perps confronted by the five-­hundred-pound lion, with Susie growling and urine pooling on the shoes of the whimpering intruders.

  Tonight when she heard the alarm, she wondered what entertainment there would be, because that’s all Susie amounted to was entertainment. In truth she was as tame and nonviolent as the meekest house cat, but she could play the man-eater and Kyd, in thinking about this, decided this was yet another thread tying her back to her ancestor and legendary playhouses. In fact, she used a line from Shakespeare from time to time to greet all of Miss Susie’s stops.

  Kyd, on a study abroad one summer in Oxford, had discovered in the Bodleian Library, the Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft from 1584. She had loved the old university town northwest of London. Contrary to its title, the venerable old tome was a how-to on staging tricks, a handbook with the specialty of bodyless heads resembling that of the the actor Leon Rippy. Kyd wondered often how many makeup artists and press people in Hollywood knew about the resource and how much it affected certain things today.

  Scot’s taught her to fashion astonishingly realistic (and grotesque) heads, human and animal, male and female, which she placed on eight-inch-diameter poles all around the junkyard. In daylight you couldn’t see them, but once the night lights came on, the heads lit up—if you were inside the fence. Many of the heads were set by Susie’s usual stopping spot, to assist the old girl in getting the full attention of the miscreants, the heads set five feet off the ground, at eye level and not visible until Susie roared, the sound triggering sensors that illuminated spotlights on al
l the heads, replicas of Mr. Rippy. With Susie growling, Kyd would say over a loudspeaker, “Here we have a company of course and evil fellows, Susie. Shall we dispatch them anon, or are you of a mind to play? You have seen a kitty play with prey I pray, lads? Plucking off a toe or an ear. You’ve seen that, right?”

  The reaction was unanimous and immediate. Tears, shaking, rapid chin nods, pissed-in pants. She’d call the local constabulary to come fetch the trespassers and she always filed charges.

  Tonight’s alarm presaged more sport. She considered the invasions a form of stage performance, and smiled for her ancestor, hoping he was looking upon the offering, She looked skyward. Gone but not forgotten, Tommy boy.

  Alarm sounded, Mary Kyd picked up her shotgun and went to find Miss Susie.

  Who was nowhere to be seen. Immediate stoppage of her heart and dry mouth. What if some of the assholes had hurt Susie, killed her? It would be your fault. No more floodlights, no more performances, no more pissed on two-hundred-dollar sneakers, just darkness, still and cloudless and heavy as wet wool. Shit.

  Kyd retreated stealthily to her home and sat at the second-story window looking out on the junkyard below. A growly groan awoke her and as her eyes adjusted she looked down to find Miss Susie and a mountain lion, cougar, panther, nittany lion, whatever, no longer indigenous to Michigan. Susie batted the cat and pounced heavily and the two rolled around in the dust and Kyd thought, great, I have to watch my damn cat getting her ashes hauled. Eventually Susie got tired of it and made a show of wanting to be fed. Kyd fetched raw meat from the cooler and feeling more than a tad nervous stepped out on the porch and set the meat where she usually put it, and the animals leaped on it and began tearing at it.