Merlin rose. His white dinner jacket looked like Jackson Pollack had done a practice session on it. He focused exclusively on the exit door and moved toward it with single-minded resoluteness, not looking at a soul as he departed from the room and the building. He walked home in the sticky night, with the concoction covering him making it even stickier.
Shep saw the fall from the corner of his eye; he bowed his head and closed his eyes for a couple of seconds before taking the next drink order. When he looked again, Merlin was gone.
• Twenty-three
Tite Dûche reclined in the big leather chair in his grandiose office at Dûche Ovens and noticed a call on his silenced mobile phone. He recognized the number and answered.
The man on the other end of the line spoke with an accent. “The Indians are coming to the cowboys.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-two.”
“I thought there were supposed to be twenty-five.”
“There were. Three fell asleep.”
“Then put them in the dormitory when they get to the fort.”
“At night?”
“Yes. Do it late. Feed the others and separate them.”
“Consider it done.”
“Good. Update me tomorrow.”
“Okay, boss. Will do.”
Tite touched the red disc on his phone that ended the call.
“Three out of twenty-five,” Tite said aloud. A twelve percent attrition rate, he calculated on his phone. Not great, but not too bad—within the deal tolerances for the cost of doing business.
• Twenty-four
Merlin sat at his usual spot at the corner of the bar in the locker room at Bayou Boughs Country Club. He rested his gym-shoed feet on a support bar of the high barstool.
“Hey, Magic Man,” Shep said, “you sportin’ some fine kicks, cher!”
“I had to get them.”
“Oh, yeah. The new rules. I know, but hey, I think you might be onto something good.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man, they suit you.”
“They do?”
“Yes sir. Wouldn’t say it if is wadn’t true.”
“I found them online.”
Shep and Merlin looked at the giant untied white high-top basketball shoes embroidered with red Houston Rockets logos on the outside of their uppers at the ankles.
“An’ you supportin’ the home team at the same time.”
“I found them on a fan site. They were pretty expensive.”
“Hey, but they worth it. Like I said, they suit you.”
Merlin’s expression turned from dubious to hopeful, and he almost smiled.
The second stage of Merlin’s Magic Mountain breakfast special arrived.
“Now, like I tole you, we’re doin’ this in courses now so nobody gets in trouble,” Shep said in a low voice.
Merlin nodded. A few seconds passed, not enough time for the runner from the kitchen to completely clear Merlin’s first course from the bar top beside him after placing the steaming hot plates from the tray in front of him. Tite Dûche emerged from a locker room hallway next to the bar, glaring at the plates, then at Merlin, and then at Shep.
“Hey, Chet!” Tite called to one of his cronies.
Chet Fettle looked up from his breakfast at one of the center-of-the-room tables.
“Mind coming over here?”
Fettle rose from his table and joined Tite beside the bar.
Dûche queried him: “Do you see this?”
Fettle nodded in grim silence. Tite glanced at Shep, then glared at Merlin and said, “This will be dealt with at the board level.” Merlin looked back at Dûche in terrified silence as Shep lowered his head, now looking at his own shoes.
As a crescent moon waned above steaming Bayou Boughs, Merlin stood at his armonica, its glass discs spinning away from him. His hands hovered over the instrument for a pregnant moment, and with great deliberation and gravitas, he began to play the first part of the first movement of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff—Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: O Fortuna. He sensed his world gyrating off its axis as he watched the graduated glass bowls turn, but this apprehension did not diminish the quality of his playing. If anything, it intensified the seriousness with which he approached the piece, its mournful strains filling the upper reaches of the observatory. The very walls, ceiling, and floor seemed to vibrate in sympathy with the foreboding tone of the iconic opera introduction.
As he was about to begin the second part of the first movement, Fortune plango vulnera (I lament the wounds Fortune deals), he heard a ding from the computer alerting him that an e-mail had arrived. He left his post at the armonica and went to his workstation. It may have been because it happened while he was playing O Fortuna, but the computer ding also seemed to have a foreboding timbre. The message was from Lyudmila Sukhova, marketing director of Fandango Utilities.
To: FUBAR Team
From: L. Sukhova, Dir., Mktg.
Subject: Airmadillo Repositioning
Fandango Utilities is opening new market in Midwest U.S. Also, two major golf tournaments will be in that region over remainder of summer. This is great opportunity for Airmadillo to highlight F U services and get extra exposure for company as aerial shot source for high-profile, nationally televised golf events.
Airmadillo will remain in service in Greater Houston area until end of month at which time it will relocate to Ohio for rest of summer. Captain Dirk Kajerka will fly blimp to base outside of Akron where a full ground crew and maintenance unit is already in place serving other blimp, which will be relocated to New England until end of summer.
Fandango Utilities will assign Houston ground and maintenance crew other tasks until end of summer. FUBAR offices will close for rest of summer on July 1st. Company will do its best to assign remaining office employees other tasks, but Fandango encourages them to find short-term work while blimp is gone. Management apologizes for the inconvenience, but we trust you will understand this great opportunity to open new market for increased corporate revenue must not be missed.
Sincerely,
L. Sukhova
P.S. Please direct any inquiries to HR.
Merlin’s brow furrowed on reading the news and did not unfurrow thereafter. What would he do? The Airmadillo had become what New Agers might call his spirit vehicle, and he the spirit animal animating it. (If pressed, Dirk Kajerka might confide that he and Svetlana were really animating it, if not simply mating in it.) A young woman as attractive, worldly, and demure as Miss Slahtskaya could find compelling employment quickly, Merlin mused, but he guessed his skill set might be a bit more challenging to market. Additionally, the price of oil and gas remained low and was reflected in the still less-than-abundant monthly distributions from his trust. Perhaps Fandango Utilities could find something for him in its IT department. Still, the most important thing was the blimp. What would he do without the Airmadillo in his life on a regular basis? He knew that like a giant mechanical migratory waterfowl it would return in the fall, but still, he had become attached to the slow-moving, low-flying whale of an aircraft.
When this level of anxiety assaulted him out of nowhere, Merlin struck back with a tried-and-true antidote: an Axis Powers progressive dinner. Several years earlier, after a bout of anxiety over one of his cable TV channel’s canceling reruns of Xena, Warrior Princess, he found himself on Westheimer Road, where he decided to let the 82 Metro bus spirit him where it would. The 82 runs up and down this east/west artery, and Merlin headed eastward toward the restaurant-dense zones of Montrose and Midtown. He spotted a Japanese place first, where he commanded a central position at the sushi bar, ordering the chef’s omakase of the day, which consisted of a variety of nigiri featuring fish both standard and exotic. He then returned to the 82 and exited near a Neapolitan pizzeria, where he established a temporary beachhead and downed an order of gnocchi in a white truffle sage cream sauce after dispatching a medium-size pizza margherita. Not finished, he once again boarded the tru
sty 82, and after a few minutes disembarked for the third time, finding himself deployed at the doorway of a Bavarian restaurant, where his entrée included sauerbraten, bratwurst, sweet red cabbage, and Swiss-style rösti potatoes. A slice of Schwarzwälder kirchtorte à la mode rounded out his assault on the German position.
On this sad, humid June evening years after the first of several ensuing Axis Powers progressive dinners, Merlin’s sweat-drenched march toward the nearest Westheimer Road bus stop helped take his mind off of his concerns, and his entry into the cool air-conditioned confines of the bus seemed to begin the process of focusing him on the mission at hand. As reliable as an infantryman’s semiautomatic M82 anti-materiel rifle, the Houston Metro 82 bus remained the surefire answer for projecting his indomitable gustatory power toward this varied and formidable culinary triumvirate. A Japanese izakaya restaurant came into view; he steeled himself and focused as he prepared to once again vanquish the first of this unlikely trio of national cuisines.
• Twenty-five
That night Merlin slept without stirring for quite a while, but he awoke with a start in the wee hours. He looked at his phone: 3:33 a.m. His mouth was an arid cavern, so dry he couldn’t swallow. He went to the refrigerator and focused on two full quart containers of hibiscus ginger tea sweetened with agave nectar. He quartered a lime and squeezed the juice into each container. He stirred and drank from one pitcher directly, completely draining it. Hydrated and wide awake, he was anxious for an update from the Agglomerator. He brought a glass and the remaining tea with him, situated himself before his three screens, and clicked the program to life.
The Agglomerator’s warning panel flashed orange. He clicked on the Event Horizon window and saw a new message reading “Event Horizon—August.” Merlin was intrigued and pleased his brainchild had continued to grind away—even as he slept—and was unwaveringly generating increasingly specific predictions. Additionally, the gyre moving over Houston appeared to be tightening and thickening. Merlin clicked on the Projected Gyre Track button, and a real-time animation played, showing the whorl just east of town, traversing downtown, and arriving at a stationary point west of the city’s business hub.
Merlin turned to his right screen, and a button he named “Cryptid/Energy Event Nexi” caught his eye. He knew that energy events throughout recorded history were often accompanied by sightings of strange creatures. He had coded this part of the program to collect, slice, and dice data regarding this phenomenon. He was reading an account of werewolves roaming the Black Forest in late 1300s Bavaria after a freak summer snowstorm when he noticed the Sasquatch icon slowly pulsing in the corner of the right screen. He clicked on it, and a highlighted message read, “Sasquatch Nexus Possible.” Seeing this alert caused a tingling sensation at the nape of his neck, where each curly hair felt as if it stood straight up.
He had always had an affinity for this allegedly mythical beast. The obvious connections were the dimensions and reported hirsuteness of the creature, but there were other, more subtle aspects that imparted a sense of kinship. Although immense, they were said to move deftly and stealthily through dense forests and over steep, craggy mountainsides. Additionally, they were reported to be telepathic, for instance, mentally communicating to humans who sighted them not to approach them too closely. Their keen attunement with their woodland worlds most attracted Merlin to these creatures, as he considered himself especially attuned to the energy of his own environment.
He had coded each cryptid with its own identifying color for the program—werewolves were silver, chupacabras were brown, and thunderbirds were black. The color he had chosen for Bigfoot was purple, doubtless alluding to what he considered the regal bearing of this legendary king of the forest. He looked back at the main central screen and noticed that the approaching gyre had a slight purple hue. “An energy event with a Sasquatch nexus. Very auspicious,” he said with satisfaction. Then, just as suddenly as his neck fur had straightened, a heavy drowsiness overtook him. He rose and stumbled toward the bed.
He fell into a very deep sleep. Just before dawn, he began to dream intensely. He saw himself in the passenger pod of the Airmadillo, but instead of manning the pilot’s seat or sitting in the passenger area, he was floating in midair inside the space in the flight position of a superhero, with his head facing the front windows and feet pointing backward. His arms were stretched perpendicular to his body. He was even larger in his midair dream position inside the blimp passenger compartment than he was in real life. When he angled his body to the right, the Airmadillo turned right; when he rotated his body to the left like a banking airplane, the blimp turned left. Lifting his chest and looking upward caused the airship to rise, and as he cast his gaze downward, raised his feet, and assumed a slight swan dive posture, it descended. To accelerate, Merlin swept his arms backward, and to slow down, he moved them forward, turning his palms toward the windows of the cockpit.
He saw himself as somewhat akin to a Third-Stage Guild Navigator from Frank Herbert’s Dune, but instead of finding himself suspended in massive amounts of transformative orange spice mélange, the air surrounding Merlin seemed to be suffused with a faint mist of seasoned crawfish boil water, its madder brown tint providing him with whiffs of cayenne, garlic, onion, black pepper, and a host of other South Louisiana seasonings. He could smell the pungent spices, but they caused his eyes neither to burn nor to precipitate tears.
He then saw himself as a much larger floating mass filling the giant envelope of the blimp itself and taking up the space where its helium ballonets should have been. The same crawfish boil mist surrounded him, but it seemed slightly denser. Additionally, the fore part of the blimp’s skin was transparent, providing him with a huge view of the sky and landscape. It was like the blimp had been circumcised, but a transparent skin remained at the fore of the craft.
The same body movements that directed the blimp from the passenger pod also worked for Merlin in his supersize, blimp-filling mode, but the results of his actions seemed more immediate, more dramatic, and maybe more graceful than they were in the passenger pod. The Airmadillo responded instantly to his movements, with no delay from the blimp pilot’s promptings of rudders and elevators as in the real world. His body moved forward, and his face was near the transparent front of the blimp, just the way the Guild Navigator Oberon floated forward in his glass-encircled container to speak with the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV in the David Lynch version of Dune, but, as far as Merlin could tell, his body had not morphed into a grotesque shape like the navigator of the classic science fiction tale. He was just a proportionate, blimp-size version of his already substantial earthly self.
He was enjoying swoops, climbs, and steeply banked turns in this mode when he suddenly found himself floating once again as the formerly smaller version of his larger self in the passenger and pilot pod of the Airmadillo. Now the madder brown of the crawfish boil mist had become so dense it was almost liquid, and as he brought his arms and hands forward, he registered with horror that they were no longer arms and hands but the giant red pincers of a gargantuan crawfish. Even greater existential terror ensued when he looked back toward his legs and feet. They, too, had been transformed and were no longer legs and feet but the large, muscular downward- and inward-curling tail of a supersize crawfish. He flicked his tail slightly and moved backward a few feet in a quick, jerking motion. He then used his right claw to feel his face. Had it changed, too? He sensed the contours of his own familiar mug and was relieved he had not been completely morphed into a mudbug.
His relief was as short lived as the bright burning fire of a shard of ignited flash paper, however, as when he looked forward into the dark opacity of the seasoned mist, he could make out a menacing figure heading directly toward him. The first things he saw were violently snapping crawfish pincers, not as big as his own, but supersize just the same. On seeing this, he swam backward reflexively, but the most horrifying aspect of this claw-flailing assailant was about to appear.
&nbs
p; Where the head of the crawfish should have been was that of N. Teitel Dûche V. He was wearing a stylish pair of designer faux tortoiseshell eyeglasses. A sea-green cashmere pullover sweater was tied with studied casualness around Tite’s neck, with the body of the sweater draping most of the top of the hard carapace of his cephalothorax. Tite’s lips were pursed in rigid determination, and his eyes burned with rage as he angled both of his snapping pincers toward Merlin’s vulnerable, non-exoskeletally-protected face and neck.
As Crawfish Tite moved within striking distance, Crawfish Merlin flicked his tail with all his might and shot backward several feet. He saw the pincers relentlessly approaching him and flicked his tail again, but after moving backward a couple of feet, the hard chitin of the posterior dorsal segments covering his abdomen and the powerful musculature enabling swift backward movement rammed into the much harder metal arc of the interior of a seafood boiling pot, causing a terrible clanging that woke him with a start. Eyes wide open on the bed with his heart racing, Merlin lifted his arms and held his hands in front of him. To his great relief, they were no longer giant pincers but the familiar puffy paws he knew as his own. Additionally, he was covered in sweat. After he wiped his brow and eyes with his fingers and the heels of his hands, he looked at the liquid sheen on them. It glistened with the slightest of reddish-brown tinges.
• Twenty-six
Svetlana, Dirk, and Merlin stood in a solemn triangle outside the passenger pod of the blimp. Dirk cleared his throat and began to speak in a tone almost as serious as the one he used the night he cut off Merlin’s shirttail after the trip home from the coast. “Okay, as we all know, this is the last Houston mission for the Airmadillo before its scheduled return in the fall. I am already preparing for the overland repositioning flight to Akron.”
Tears formed at the corners of Svetlana’s eyes.
Merlin of the Magnolias Page 15