by Ron Charach
—Ha! Palace revolt? Staged from “hospital headquarters,” from this stinky bed? By the way, henry—you lose control o’ yore bladder?
—Long story... No, but just suppose someone got some action going...
—You mean galloway?
—Well, suppose it weren’t galloway. Suppose it was someone else...
—Townies?
—Jesus, just suppose, will you? Suppose you had to take on galloway? Henry figures he can ask it out loud; he’d spent the better part of an hour yesterday searching for hidden microphones—had found one and dismantled it. Whether there’s some sort of closed-circuit television besides that, he can’t really be sure. Let him lip-read...
—No, shrugs barton, I know what life would’ve been like outside this little shell lily-white harold set up for us. Had we not joined him—we’d be cinders, like the rest of our X-tended families. No, I dance with the one that brung me.
henry makes a little hand motion to barton—to assure him they’re not being listened in on. But he won’t come around. Suddenly, amos spots a sheet of typed paper lying on the floor and scoops it.
—Wait! You don’t have to—
—Ho, ho! What’s this, Henry? Barely dressed milk-bodies creasing cutely... This ain’t half-bad...hmm, but what’s this? You dirty old man, you...freeing her bottoms from the blushing grip...why, Henry, you could write for Penthouse... Dear Penthouse...ha! Now I never was big on poetry, but this I can relate to. Not your weirder shit. But what’s this about: firm little choirboy bums? You have “issues,” Henry?...pro-clivities?
barton backs off at Henry wincin’ and holdin’ his throat. Askin’ fer nitros. He returns the page and says sorry, and gives his former mate a sound squeeze on the shoulder. He sits with Henry for a moment of silence before rising.
Leavin’, he reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a folded envelope that he hands Henry.
—So long, amos! God bless, Henry calls out after his friend’s disappearin’ cowboy boot.
a final pome
Henry is as embarrassed as one of the ass-letes caught in the relentless gaze of the poem. amos’s leavin’ helps bring his ticker back in line. Restores him to sinus rhythm, as Doc Halverson would say. He foregoes another nitro and gets back to workin’ on the piece he’d started in the mornin’. It’s different from the old Playboy poem, and he’s burnin’ to write it, chest pain or no...
For a moment he thinks of another literary type like himself—a former lawyer named “Slim” Reggie Canuck—now dwellin’ among the townies, keepin’ a low profile. Slim Reggie’s hands and feet were de-formed by polio. Yet he c’n still accompany himself on guitar when he sings, and he sure does like to sing. For him, ridin’ with the eight was never an option.
Slim Reggie liked to tease the good doctor about his versifyin’. He’d dabbled in the art but gave up writin’ poetry early to try his hand at guitar pickin’ and song writin’ and even a bit o’ journalism—what he called creative non-fiction. Initially Reggie pooh-poohed the flight to Wyomin’ venture, having no more regard for Harold Galloway than Morganstern did—but once The World Situation began to deteriorate, he decided to come along fer the ride, takin’ so many daily notes on the new set-up that he could give the Pickwick Club a run for their money. He got so into codifyin’ the Wild West-speak that even Henry did some double-takes tryin’ to git through it. Reggie said —Somebody has to pass along our story—if only for posteriors.
As galloway’s intended bio-grapher, Reggie had the CEO’s ear whenever he needed it. He was the only man galloway felt superior to, at least physic’lly. Reggie had more wit in his bent pickin’ finger than galloway had in his sixty-string steel guitar, though he’d never say as much.
Henry closes his new poem with a wish, then mulls it over:
Public Domain
for “Slim” Reggie
It’s Pete Seeger bursting into banjo,
one more rousing refrain
from the Public Domain.
It’s the right to shoot a man dead
and pay a rightful price;
It’s camping out beneath the stars
without a job, between wars;
It’s a Negro slave with a spiritual
and a crevassed face,
nodding over a bowl of gruel,
a cattleman high up on a gelding,
a steer at the end of his lasso,
a branding iron in place;
It’s stringing wire and open fires,
routing redskins ’cross Monument Valley,
turn-of-the-century big city life
and violent death in the alley;
It’s union men who sweat like sin
and die standing up for their rights,
farm boys pining for painted ladies
and coming to grief in fights.
It’s everything our folks got through
to get where we are now;
Let’s belt those pure folk song refrains
and make sure it don’t gain on us.
He reviews it one last time: not bad for a first draft. Thumbnail sketch. But of what? Patriarchy? The word sticks in his craw. He remembers how he felt like a pussy-whipped dupe durin’ his younger days in college, when he got roped into toeing the women’s lib line. He’d gone along out of personal weakness and confusion compounded with anger at his personal patriarch—his father, who left him totally unprepared for the conventional male role. Until his early thirties he had to improvise and fumble around whenever it came to doing anything remotely handy. Nor did anyone ever show him his way around in a kitchen. Thanks for nothing, Dad. Thanks too, Mom.
Still, it speaks to things men have always been willing to die for, or kill for. He’ll run it by Claire next time she drops by. But what he really wants—though God only knows why—is to show it to Rose.
He picks up the envelope barton handed him—pink with the initials H. M. on the front of it. He uses his pen to tear it open: in it are two slips of paper.
Dear Henry,
I meant to teach you a lesson, but never dreamed I’d nearly kill you. Please accept my apology for what you must be going through.
I hope you can see that I was willing to risk my own life by doing what I did. But I had to do something pretty drastic because your mid-life ride with the eight lent them a certain legitimacy. My brother harold knew it, and he counted on your cooperation.
I’d like to visit, but will only do so if you say the word, through either Claire or Arlene. I hope we can count on you in the difficult days ahead.
Wishing you a speedy recovery,
Rose Galloway Seeton, formerly known as “ma”
The other slip is simpler. It is another list, like the one his bio daughter Carla/Arlene had sprung on him, and it is in the same hand:
See reverse for encryption data for bunker, dome maintenance and DARPA reactor, including coordinates of machine shop location.
Just in case…
He isn’t entirely sure where to tuck that one.
journal entry
Roses are red,
violets are blue.
Sick doctors must have
patience too.
Reduced to ditties. God knows, I can’t write much else. Mornings are the worst. I get up after nights of sleep so light it’s as if I’d never stopped thinking. By day my eyes are heavy and sore, my mouth has the foul taste of sleeplessness, pimples pop up on my back and face, and for the first time I have zero interest in sex. I also haven’t had a crap in nearly a week—probably because I’m not eating. My thoughts turn over in slow motion, as if the groggy silt of sleeplessness were choking every last cell of my body.
I left the hospital the same day they brought in Mr. Finlayson, a half-dead townie, formerly employ
ed as a seam repairman who patrolled the dome and caulked the leaks. He must have had his job for too long, because by the time he was my roommate, his skin was covered in a rash and he had the worst case of radiation sickness I’ve ever seen—or heard, even for a townie. He spent hours with his head curled over a stainless steel bowl, vomiting and dry-heaving—not even galloway’s IV brew could touch him.
Thoroughly nauseated myself from having to listen in, I made a decision: in medicalese, I “signed myself out” of hospital, and now here I am, at Claire’s. But where is Claire? Out. Out meeting with Rose. (Ah, yes, roses are red indeed—they’re absolutely livid.) She may even be meeting with Arlene—something she’d never have dreamed of doing before. And why is all this table-hopping suddenly possible? Why can three isolated womyn finally get together? Naturally, they’ve figured out who each is with respect to the other—there always was a resemblance between Claire and Arlene, even if they dismissed each other as junkie and painted hussy.
The possibility that Rose has told Arlene about her brother’s and my past entertainment—worse—told Claire, makes me want to challenge Finlayson to an upchuck contest.
It’s taken me half an hour to write this paltry journal entry. Not like I have anything else to do. My chest is still tight. I’m wearing a corset up to my throat, though the crushing chest pain is rare now; only comes when I “overdo it,” to use Claire’s little phrase for me tryin’ to be half the man I used to be.
I never got around to saying how it is that the weird sisters now manage to hold meetings. You guessed it. New reformed policy by galloway. galloway, they say, is mellowing more each day. Rumor has it he might even be willing to “sponsor” his sister and her new friends in trying to change things around here—give up on his little divide-and-conquer imperium. They say he looks awful—looks his age, though more in the pink than yours truly. I still won’t see him. The only company I have is Claire—when she’s available—and Doc Halverson for check-ups; the old guy is annoyed with me for leaving the infirmary too soon, battery-pack Holter monitor and all, keeps urging me to leave this little apartment more—get some “exercise” wandering through the tubes around the town perimeter. He agrees that it wouldn’t do for me to walk around inside the residential area, even when the eight (the new improved eight) aren’t likely to be out moseying. Not that they’d shoot me dead on sight—they’re out to thrill and chill more than kill, always were—though who knows: in my new reduced state I couldn’t stare down a townie. And it would only take one o’ them to make handy work of me if they got a chance. Won’t even think what John Gideon could do. Teddy Cruz ain’t got nothin’ on you…
Maybe I should let galloway come over and lecture me. He might apologize for his sister’s “appalling behavior”—that’s galloway talk for you. But my keeping him away puts pressure on him to do the right thing, to take control over this jerky reel he’s running. Before the bombs hit there were over 300 million guns in the hands of American civilians, more than 800 hate groups, and the Second Amendment trumped the sixth commandment. Not that I’m one to talk, with a two-gun holster still hanging on the doorknob... galloway hasn’t yet seen the need to come get ’em.
Anything happens to me, Slim Reggie, and you get all this to re-cord. Someone has to work with paper.
film time
As the eight file into the dimly lit movie room, hangin’ their holsters along with their greatcoats, only one thing is on harold galloway’s mind: that once the ladies turn into killers—even would-be killers—things have gone too far. He’ll show Morgan that there is room in this town for more than one man o’ conscience.
cabana saunters in—always first to slide off his gun-belt, slowly turretin’ 360 degrees before claimin’ a front-row seat next to the popcorn machine. Watchin’ that classic pecking-order strut, galloway starts to feel like the den-mother that he has turn’d into these past years.
It’s not ’til the most madcap scene in Mad Max comes on that harold galloway gently closes the theater doors—oss-tensibly to block out that extra bit of light that might fade the film image, but really to start clearin’ the coats an’ pistols from the lobby. Though the feeble word dis-armament tastes bitter—makes a hideous bleepin’ noise in his mind, like the word liberal—he nonetheless joins Schulberg, Doc Halverson, Parkinson, Abrams and Gideon as all five townsmen drag gun belts with Colts and Magnums and Smith ’n Wessons to the armory a good hundred yards away. It backs onto a gun shop—what’s an American town without one?—and a liquor store, conveniently lo-cated in a slum where no one who counts for much will get hurt. With a heave-shut on a set of heavy, folding metal doors the gun shop disappears into the armory and both are effectively padlocked off limits. That simple.
Not that galloway noticed John Gideon slippin’ on a particular semi-automatic Glock 19 of Tucson fame with a couple extra ammo clips under his gabardine vest. This more up-to-date modern weapon bein’ an extra toy of cabana’s—for years he’s been allowed to keep it on him, ’specially since he’s always the first to hang his holster.
A galloway more his old self would do a final weapons count, but he wants to get it over with quick as possible. With that in mind he hands each of his townie accomplices a revolver from his personal ko-llection. Each of the five guns chambers only two bullets. There will have to be some cooperatin’. After the recent town-hall meetin’, he confiscated the very last bit o’ townie contraband. He figures that if the five of them have a measly ten bullets among ’em, there’ll be less temptation to stage some sort o’ anti-galloway coup.
The plan is to switch off the projector in the middle of the movie and announce to the eight from the booth that they are surrounded, that they no longer have weapons, and that they are to march with hands over their heads to the one room that could double as a jail for them—namely the great big larder back at ma’s. He already moved a generator and a couple of space heaters in there to make the night-cold less cruel than it proved to be for poor Henry Morganstern.
When the sound of Mel Gibson’s screen voice skids into a low-pitched whine and the picture collapses into a white light on the screen, big ned lets out a blood-curdlin’ FECK IT!! cabana springs to his feet and stares up at the projection booth. galloway, knowin’ that the four men planted outside are ready to rush in with guns poised, stutters his ultimatum while John Gideon boldly swerves ’round the front row holding his two-bullet revolver in front of cabana and ned.
But cabana grabs big ned as a shield and shoves him onto Gideon—Gideon’s two bullets pumpin’ into ned’s careenin’ carcass.
trapper dan takes to bayin’ like a wolf and barton pleads with galloway to let him outa this mess as they throw their arms in the air, Western style. Far as they know there are more bullets in Gideon’s gun. They look on in horror as ned’s huge body gets real-white ’n shocky as he lays there shakin’ and blubberin’ on the floor. Swift-like Gideon slips his other friend from under his vest and begins pumpin’ bullets into the others, as galloway hollers for him to stop, nearly takin’ one of those bullets himself.
cabana leapfrogs over row after row of theater seats and makes it out the back door into the waitin’ gun barrels of galloway’s less deadly accomplices—but the four men are confused by the sheer abundance o’ shootin’ and in the confusion cabana tears off between them, leavin’ two of ’em to shoot after him an’ mebbe graze him. cabana is gone. The rest of the eight are shot up real bad by Gideon who uses up a good twenty bullets and puts a hole in a few sweaty foreheads before aiming his pistol straight at galloway’s face.
—Don’t anyone try to shoot me, y’hear! roars John Gideon. —Now, galloway, you and Halverson and Parkinson just throw down your little two-bullet specials. That’s right... Now we’re all gonna take a nice long walk somewhere’s else. It’s time for the Lord’s chosen posse to run things around here.
By now Halverson is happy to part with his gun and is doin’ what co
mes natural to him—checkin’ t’see if any of the dyin’ can be salvaged. Abrams and Schulberg shake their heads and leave t’go home.
The unarmed galloway walks over to look at barton, who has taken a bullet clear through the neck. His head and neck haloed in blood, he looks convincin’ly dead—more Justice John Roll than Rep-resent-ative Gabby Giffords. Not that anyone is gonna name a battle cruiser after black amos b.
galloway then walks out of the theater tellin’ Gideon and the others —They’re all yours! Steppin’ away out of his own new order, into early re-tirement.
He can’t shake the sight of a pleadin’ amos b. from his mind, and as he walks off he doesn’t care if John Gideon chooses to plug him from behind. He can still hear those malicious fifteen or twenty extra shots ringin’ out from the theater, then hears another five or six more; he knows what that means; John Gideon is doin’ a bit of mercy-killin’. Finishin’ off the last seven of the eight at point-blank, beggin’, squirmin’ and burblin’ range. Savorin’ every minute of it.
visitors
Henry Morgan slouches in what has become his go-to chair, feet up on an ottoman, a cold washcloth over his forehead. There’s a sharp knock followed by two short knocks at the door—the password he and Claire devised to let him know it was just her. Rose Seeton occasionally visits, as does Arlene, though during Rose’s visits he’d often leave out the back way and hang out in the tunnel that led back to the center of town—what had once been a big-eight bypass, but is now just a place where you are less likely to meet up with townies. The odd rat would scamper by, sick with radiation, trippin’ with curvy clawed feet on the metal seams then scurryin’ off, and there was always that whistlin’ sound that tunnels get that was ’specially eerie where the tunnel join’d the much wider central pipe a few hundred yards off.