The Rainbow Horizon - A Tale of Goofy Chaos

by Karen S. Cole

  Chapter Three

  ANY SIZE WE PLEASE

  Comfort and Joy – Words of brief lasting Hope

  No one was looking at his lonely case;

  So, like a half-mad outpost sentinel,

  Indulging an absurd dramatic spell,

  (Albeit not without some shame of face),

  He stretched his arms out to the dark of space

  And held them absolutely parallel

  In infinite appeal. Then saying “Hell,”

  He drew them in for warmth of self-embrace.

  --Robert Frost

  The Sun is coming. I’m goin’…wacka wacka…quietly crazy.

  “IN FRENCH, MA petite Cheri, the word ’grandmother’ is said as, ‘la grandmere.’ Which is a lot like saying she’s a big horse. Or she’s little and big. What do you think, do I eat that much?”

  The above ascerbic question was being posed to “Beau” by his beloved maternal grandmother, HeLouise, on the occasion of his “managing a visit” out east to see her and his parents. He hadn’t been out there for over four years.

  “I’d never pick for you having a weight problem,” claimed “Beau,” in their special “family talk” lexicon. Gramma was a tricky eccentric and liked to “jaw funny, shake the heads” when she took the time. Gabe used to feel close to being a backcountry hick because of her, but he accepted Gramma’s personal jests about being Indian, early Dutch New England stock (‘casionally in ‘em), and Spanish –thanks to Gabe’s father Donio.

  They were comfortably, albeit temporarily, ensconced in her warm and bright kitchen, in a “fairly” large house on the coast of North Carolina, in the small, isolated series of docks and beachfronts knows as Iberia. Gramma possessed many wise investments, leftovers from familial inheritances from her Dutch. This may have been what attracted Gabe’s father, who was Spanish, white, and at that time terribly charming, to Gabe’s quiet, introverted and Algonquin mother. No one knows why they fell apart, but now “Beau’s” parents live two states’ distance.

  Gramma HeLouise, a widow, was “the longer and the livelier, by gar. I h’ain’t going under the table soon.” He apparently ceased waiting around for manna, or love, well over ten years ago. Gramma was no spender. Due to ritually desired pretensions on Gabe’s part against his upwardly-mobile, con-the-system father, he and Donio didn’t “match opinions.” Mostly, Donio was “a screamie-meamer.” Gramma hated loud talk. “Ya don’t argoo with ‘em, they are allus right.” Gramma always did “settle” Gabe, and make him feel welcome at her home.

  Drinking “coffee with the fangs pulled” in the bright, roomy home of a loveable, rare native grandkin with the good fortune to have one and know it –she had even recently won a local lottery—was “plain real good.” Gabe used to want to live with her, as she’s need help someday; in that, “Beau” couldn’t fault his father. He was very helpful to the elderly, including Gabe’s grandfather. But things didn’t so connect as yet. Gramma lived “all by her lonesome.”

  “Yoo-er not escared of the world, are yer, honey? I know you younguns got it tough. It was tough when I was growin’ but we always did have a little penny to our names. Very lucky, out here, extremely, lots of east coast Indians died out. Brief exceptions or not. You, on the other hand, got to have heart and go take on the planet. Can you still rassle? Used to be you did that good.”

  Gramma liked to affect a detached air of yokel anti-sophistication, perhaps due to her desire to catch people off-guard about her being Native. She never enjoyed being chased. Their family situation had been unique. Gabe’s mother’s half had practically rebuilt themselves, in place, in New York. Mostly Indian, they had moved south after having sold several tracts of land within the last forty years, “very quietly,” and after buying up land on the coastal Carolinas. Myriad green-strip plots along beachfronts, choice and secluded.

  The well-lit kitchen dispersed light evenly; it streamed in from overhead flat, multi-sectioned, cleverly gabled ceiling windows. Sparks kept reflecting off Gabe’s candy-stripped coffee mug, sufficient glare to make his squint. He moved the mug. This house had been one of five Gramma owned, but she’d sold them and was currently living on the income. They were smaller houses, but some had commanded decent rent. Gramma was “flush.” She sent money to her other family, helped sustain what was left of several local Indian tribes, and even helped out on the local political scene as a kind of secret “mover and shaker.”

  Gabe enjoyed her fighting spirit and wanted to emulate her, and not his father, who, he felt was reciprocal polite bearskins, mas o menos.

  “I’m doin’ okay, grams. I got mine, I got time. My best friend has a pretty bad drinking problem, and I feel grateful that I’m okay. Yet, if I don’t watch myself, you know, like a hawk…”

  “You should talk, kiddo. I am goin’ on another diet, starting next week, and nothing can stop me.”

  “Yuh huh. Well, I found this lady who is truly swell, and I want to marry her, ah, but she’s sorta hesitant because her previous marriage was ‘rocky heck’ and she’ll take a while to see me as a nice guy for her.”

  Gabe hadn’t informed his family of Saragina’s “racial preference,” although he wasn’t afraid of rejection or sanction at all, especially from his mom and gramma. Gram was locquacious and unlikely to keep that, or any kind, or information secret. Or so Gabe thought. But, from whom? Who cared?

  “That’s the gumption, Binks. Maintain that drive. You’ll need ‘er. Yoooooo got the charm to pull that there lady in. I can’t wait to meet her!”

  “I’d really love to come live out here,” Gabe unexpectedly interposed. For as the sun always rises in the east and sets forever in the west, Gramma was becoming the results of years of smoking and being overweight. She was herself, peppy yet, but she’d need help, come her old age. “You’re welcome here anytime, you want, kiddo!” Gramma flung her arms wide open. She was probably looking for some company.

  But the sea air didn’t appeal to Gabe, and neither did “leaching.” It was nice to know he was allowed, though. What a fabulous way to raise kids…but Gramma might be bought out, eventually, by the banks. Did he live only to move in on her first?

  She lifted her hefty 185 pounds onto a dining-nook stool. She reclined graciously, dragging on a Winston. She wore soft pastels, muted yellow on green taffeta, with a Victorian lace crinkly, ruffled collar. It didn’t quite give her a clownlike appearance; in fact it was refreshing and startling and cute. Most Elizabethan, and tonally brown. Her face, rumpled with supernal happiness, easily brought to glower whenever her authority was deeply questioned, was pulled back into pocket dimples and submerged in a speckled tan. She was every inch a lady and every foot a beach bunny. She breathed big sighs of vast relief at being off her feet, blowing smoke from the Winston to create a progression of cheery white halos.

  She coughed, turning her head away from her company. “And I just gotta quit on these coffinnails. Playing with fire is getting me down, it’s outa control. Ha ha ha ha!! My friend wants me to take up jogging with him. We’d run along the beach together.” She’d been quitting off and on for years, which staved off more potentially sophisticated lung problems. So far, so-so good…

  Gabe coughed politely into his hand, and snuffled. He didn’t understand smoking at all, nuh uh. And he needed a Kleenecks.

  HeLouise was particularly good at making a single cigarette last.

  As “Beau” sipped his creole coffee, decaf of course, even de-acidified (what else was left to do it?), HeLouise swung her legs forward contentedly, then cringed. But just once. It was the phone.

  “Gabriello, sweetie, can you get that fer me? Lack of exercise has me slaggin’ around. Or is it fate? I’m gonna replace everybody with me. I swear, I’m gonna start a weight loss plan next month, or I’ll sink waist deep into the shifting Carolina sands. So salty, with quarrelsome breezes. Quick, get it! Go!!!”

  She never did understand why he always took his time answering the phone. He must usu-ally be exp
ecting bad news. Cough!

  BACK FROM THE EAST, Gabe relaxed assiduously at home.

  He never did make it out to see his parents. Too hard, two trips, too many memories. Philosophizing, Gabe thought to himself, was altogether the thing he did best. It was the only way to explain away all his problems, short of drowning in drinking or drugs. Or sex, or work, or gossip. Or watching football, or TV. Or the radio, which squealed. Or his recently acquired compact, disc player, coming from which at present were the muted, lilting sounds of Chandover, a little-known and French composerary of Beethoven’s. Chandover tended to overuse horns and symphonic fading, almost every five minutes and especially during this particular piece.

  Gabe had on big, chunky headphones, well-padded, and was leaning back in a $7 beach chair from Sears that needed restrung. As he began to drift away during a gentle, woodsy interlude, with flutes warbling in a background of tubas and trumpets, four major straps in the chair gave way. With a loud SNAP, Gabe was an entire foot closer to the floor. Frozen solid. Gabe grabbed the chair arms and, while heaving upwards in order to effect escape, felt the front bar of the chair punch a certain well-known portion of his anatomy.

  He was frozen solid as a Minnesota duck pond in early January. He was Louisa May All-caught.

  Time to become philosophical, he mused. It’s good for the ol’ blood pressure. The music continued into one of those lengthy trumpet moans that signal an upcoming change in tempo and atmosphere. Gabe wincingly attempted a parallel, easy-going upwards press on the plastic arms, but they were soft and flexed outwards, hopelessly unstable. With vast hopes of facilitating quick release, “Beau” flung his $28.99 stereo headphones away. Amazingly, this action caused him to notice his feet and how to lean forward over them. Gabe simply bent his back, yanking the chair harshly off his burning – but newly free and happy – rear end.

  Later, at the Krakatoa, one hour before Artie and he had to leave for a job involving pouring concrete in a vacant lot to convert it into parking spaces, Gabe and “Norworgeo” were sitting at the bar. Gabe said, “You can have your CD player back. I almost wrecked it today because of a cheap beach chair.”

  “What war ya list ‘nen to, man ‘cuz ah thought tha’ t’were a mahty fahn CD machine? Ah paid this gah $125 cash, an’ he wuz frum th’ ol’ neigh-bor-HUD. Know whut ah mayans?” Artie put forth a hang-dog expression at Gabe.

  “Whatever, but apparently, Artie, I can’t seem to properly handle modern stereo equipment without being enabled by the proper entertainment-center seating hardware. In brief, I need a new chair. Do you know where they’re selling fine, sturdy, stable chairs, perhaps a nice director’s chair, nowadays?” Gabe put a similar, but friendlier, hang-dog expression back at Artie.

  “No, ‘Beau Hooter’ man but if’n you’ll bah thet CDer Offa me, ah’ll glance aroun’.”

  “Then many thanks, Artie, but I think I’ll sell you the headphones I purchases recently instead. Yours still in the shop?”

  After work, Gabe walked back up to his place, passing Mrs. Stigowitalia on the stairway and noticing her limp was turning ever and ever more pronounced. Her walking was very slow; she exhibited sings of festination (from Parkinson’s disease.) It hurts to watch her, he thought. He didn’t feel like it was his business to ask her about her problems. It felt like prying, Gramma is heading thataways, too…it’s so sad. I need to write her a letter or call her. No, I just saw her.

  Once inside, Gabe, or “Beau” as he was sometimes called, packed the stereo equipment into a box and marked it “Artie” with a calligraphy pen. Very gothic. Then he ate half a sandwich and took the box over to the Krakatoa, where he dropped it off. On the way back home, Gabe watched beautiful giant cloud formations, stratified layers of fluffy condensation that he could almost remember the names of, breezily waxing and waning in majestic state across the sky. It was easy to walk along, so, towards the horizon, towards any horizon. He wore a peaceful smile.

  Before going to bed, he made a decaf mocha in the microwave, with an ounce of crème de cacoa, and he sat up for two hours reading a newly strange book by Garcia Marquez, glancing occasionally out the window to relieve his eyes. He had a wonderful city view; it’s only flaw was several bulky telephone wires leading across to the next building. He was five stories from the ground. Not high enough to jump out of.

  Perhaps I can buy an expensive manual wheelchair and a twenty-year old eight-track system, like the one I saw at Farmera’s Junction, and try it the other way around…might be safer.

  CAZA. THE MYSTERIOUS ZOOWEILER. Who’s “Zoie”? Was he dead?

  Both Caza and Saragina were previously married. Caza’s hubbie, Austrian-Czechoslovakian-Polish, with a Pole-sounding surname, died while impersonating an Italian elevator-repair maintenance man, a friend of his who made $35 an hour. He let him fill in for him one day on a job - because said amigo came down with wretched influenza from China. Mr. Zooweiler, known and beloved as a sweet little man named Zoie, who was trying to tell people about how Hitler had practically wiped out the entirety of Poland during WWII and the Holocaust…that sweet, ungainly small man, with a heart of pure European gold, swiftly fell sixteen floors. He hadn’t looked behind, and plopped over backwards. For some reason, no screams reverberated.

  It may’ve been premeditated murder. That’s what she told everybody, Caza, that she figured somebody had been deliberate. But nobody knows.

  Artie knew, for sure, that her father Andrzej had legally married one of his apple-orchard pickers, a very fast chica named Novena, while in season; she was one of the red delicious variety, but efficient and serious-minded as well. And he was an immigrant himself. Why not? She was in town long enough, and so, Caza. Caza’s disease may have been inherited from her stay-by-day father, or picked up from polluted water conditions current to that area at that time.

  Where Caza went, no one knew, when she was gone from Artie’s. Outa town. There was an abiding suspicion buried deep in the hearts of many of the snippity gossip beer-mongering denizens of Rama, WA, among whom Artie was fully at home, that she was goin’ to the same places over ‘n over again, like in farmworking.

  Turned out she had brothers and sisters farmworking in a couple nearby states, circling around and about getting seasonal work in orchards and acreage when-all they could. She visited at least monthly, those people, as often as once a week and for days at a time, and was known to come back with money.

  Everyone in Rama knew how unwell she was, and Artie had to slug only the one guy for talking. Artie was always glad when she returned, ‘cause his work schedule was normally too tight for him to join her on limited excursions. On trips out he managed to take with her, he grew worries about some of those Hispanic males who she visited with regular, the ones that weren’t close relatives.

  But he wasn’t really worried, as Caza was too weak to pick fruit or to be picked up by other men. She never stayed “out there” for long. She merely parlied with any old family she could find in the fields, and caught up on their news. ‘Times she stayed with Artie, especially over winter, for months, and exchanged “les lettros” with everybody else. She wrote and spoke fluent Espanol.

  Not everyone in Rama liked the farm workers. Dan Nuts had before, when he wasn’t drinking. Then he started getting drunk; being full of horseplay, as is his wont, he began making disparaging references to the profession in general, and to the involved people in particular. “How can you trust southerners that come and go like that?” he moaningly inquired. None offered reply. Dan continued:

  “They never do settle down and beef up our school enrollment. Do their poor kids even go to school regularly? Who checks? Who even CARES?” Dan, feeling he had made a point, stumbled off to a video game, leaving behind a trail of local people who mumbled slurrily into their beers that kids in general could take a very lengthy hike as far as Rama was concerned. There just wasn’t a school. Not for twenty miles.

  Whoever originally planned the town forgot to set aside a block or two of spac
e to set a school and grounds upon. Like the ghostly manufacturing plant, this dream never materialized. The nearest elementary and secondary schools were in Unionville and Sasquatch, many long miles on dirt roads out of town. At least there was an uncrowded freeway to Unionville.

  A local lawyer who frequented the Krakatoa said this was technically illegal due to a local ordinance stating there must be a primary school, a secondary school and a community college, all funded through county and city taxes with help from state revenues, within every mapped area of forty-nine square miles in the county. There also legally had to be a primary school within every mapped twenty-four square-mile area. There wasn’t anything like that. Several nearby zones were barren of schools. Local parents were forced to farm their kids out to nearby relatives or to take them back and forth each day, hours of back-roads driving.

  These parents formed up a group called the ‘Forty-Niners for Minors” and even wrote up a charter, but they fell apart when they could only find thirty interested families in the area. Somehow it wasn’t enough. Rama etc. was largely full of retirees, old folks with decent pensions and full-size RV’s, and it was all pretty much quiet as Hell.

  Swell.

  Caza’s friends and relatives had more kids than you could get away with shaking Moses’ staff at. They were crawlin’ with ‘em.

  Caza said they all did attend school, in varying counties at varying times. Nobody wanted to doubt Caza’s word, but everyone knew the crop-picking was accomplished primarily during the day, as was the planting and the weeding, and, pay being by the bushel of picked crop, the more kids out there playin’ hooky, the more money their folks got to raise ‘em on. They hardly got anything anyway. It was an automatic assumption on the part of the drunks at the Krakatoa that field bosses were turning the other way.

  This was largely because Caza and Artie were just about the only “townies” who ever went out to visit and talk with the farmworkers. Many such assumptions were made every Friday and Saturday night at the Krakie, especially towards closing. ‘Twas vunderbar.

  Still, there was plenty of hope for building up the town. At least, the Krakatoa crowd thought so. Gabe, Artie, and Thom all knew of jobs coming up, in early planning stages, involving laying foundations for shopping malls, restaurants, plaza centers and other such commercial enterprises that were springing up with great rapidity. Sooner or later there’d be plans for a local school. People would move in, there’d be housing starts, the banks would do plenty of business loans like they like, and the wildly needed manufacturing plant(s) might yet make a way back from the Third World…

  …”izzat Mercury or Jupiter?” asked Liona Bluitt of Billie Montparten, over beers-on-tap on Extra Sharp Darts Night, as they nestled snug and quiet among four ex-coal miners, all old guys who lived off social security and disability payments. A few received private pensions too. They piped right up.

  “Japan! They got all our shit:” burped one.

  “Korea and Taiwan makin’ all our machine parts an’ dies, an’ half our wool clothes now, I hears,” volunteered Ned England’s great-grandfather, Lupo Jay Charles, who was alive beyond all human reckoning. He looked just like Ray Charles, his name-sake, and they said he was much blinder. “They makin’ mo’ profit on a lowah pay mah-jin fo’ the workers, ah hears.” This ancient wizened black man was once a wheel-wright, a farrier (horse-shoer), and a cooper (barrel-maker) who currently owned a 10-acre garlic farm and who also had made illegal whisky and carefully distributed to three dry states for nearly twenty years. Never was caught.

  “They makin’ eighty billion horse manure dollars per cold season offa us. Dumb us!”

  Liona wailed out, deliberately short of a high-pitched whine, pleasant really, quite attention-getting: “Lupo, ‘t’ain’t your fault, but we got nothin’ lef’ but farms! Farms! I never owned one. What the heck will we live on? We gotta make them their tractors!” She laughed her fool head off, neatly.

  “What’ll we eat, already,” she squeaked, “food? Not FOOD! Surely, we won’t be stuck with farms, farm-workers, farm equipment, farm owners, and nearly unlimited food? Food…

  “Oh no, WHAT an awful Fate. To be stuck on a pension in a country that only raises taxes and tons and tons and more tons of god-awful food. Whatever won’t exactly happen to us, then, or something?” Liona, a real expert at milking attention, and an unconfused former owners of quite a goodly head of cattle, spread her fat arms and took up a womanly chunk of the bar. Billie sighed blissfully aloud, neatly following Liona’s train of obvious thought.

  “Huh! Would somebody care to watch another TV special on Ethiopia, or Bangladesh, or even Russia, land of Czars, y’know, and come on and tell me we gotta roll over and play dead from the eee-con-o-mee, or what? HAR!!” General raucous, ribald and unsophisticated laughter filled the Krakatoa, spreading to, then emanating from, the smoke-stained dining tables, reaching to the reverberating glass doors and growing like a mushroom soup cloud, spilling out onto the naked street outside the lusty tavern riotously and persistently blossoming into and FILLING the night sky, traveling up to the distant friendly stars…

  …a small, built like a brown brick walkup “pecia” of the Third World, three from the sun, still dusty with his travels or somethin’ like, ambled by on Rudnick Street. Trying to keep warm in the icy night air, Gabe felt the explosion of merry cherry-bomb love wrap around and engulf him like a lasting, living eternal flame of devotion. To what? What felt so good? It meant his own personal, undamaged, permanent sanity, for reasons not entirely beyond him.

  For a long and happy moment, he was exactly where he wanted to be, and for a change nowhere else.

  --dedicated to Snoqualmie/North Bend and STEHEKIN, WA

  BUT NOT ENOUGH…it didn’t make them move inland, where they didn’t drown. Nope. Nor did it make burning alive any easier or less putrid.

  Beauty contests. Sheesh…Gabe was strolling casually up LLewellyn, heading for Saragina’s, thinking about job searches. Artie had taken him out to the mission and gotten him signed up with WWII. But he should be looking around for a real job, doing it himself.

  Old people, dying of heart attacks, like usual. I love myself, if the world can’t stand me, I’m already standing. Such was Manhattan, a giant, sprawling, concentrated circle-bureau. Hope it stops, hope it all works out. There’s something more to life than hanging out and collecting money. I hate most street bums! They’re a spook of my future. But I give ‘em quarters when they’re polite.

  What those people want is their non-existant godhead, which strangely enough we will never achieve. On the other hand, there is what’s called “getting ahead.” There is, in fact, working for a living. Very few persons can, without proper education and training. At least a few days’ worth…

  But is only happens if I can get a job. A job. In this town, here, with Saragina in it. Or elsewhere near. If I go to school, the longer I go to school, the more money it will cost me. The free university might be a dying concept by now. After all, why not pay as you go. On grant or under loan. You know, work sixteen-hour days, or so. In a daze, or something. Work work work work. And work some more.

  But I wish I could keep having my senses clear and sharp. I enjoy that. Booze kills it, my me, the one that can take in all the transiently fuzzy details and extract a cogent ongoing reality from them, the one that’s not all ritual or aspersion, the one that comes in shapes and colors and pretty girls and funny guys and idiots who make me think about the right way to do things.

  You can always do it better than they can, that’s my motto. It’s because I forgot to try it the last time, the very latest time, when I didn’t realize that art isn’t good when it doesn’t include reality, no, that’s not it, that it isn’t good art unless there’s enough work and effort and reality and hours put into it.

  I want to live in a house. Manhattan is an Indian, maybe I’m a descendant. I read somewhere recently that if I have any Indian in me at all, any type, I can now apply for benefits, if I ch
eck in at the Indian affairs office. Okay, I’ll gamble when I get loose, but I don’t want to jump out of the boat yet.

  Bastards. I’m not one. I am one. Uh, no, I’m me. Okay, I need a fair crack at being an anthropology major, and a social engineer, and an engineer of the more stolid kinds, such as electrical, mechanical, computer, or commercial, it’s all so commercial, because that way I can make money and get married and go live in a house and ultimately, to fantastically create lotsa children. In short, I need to become an engineer.

  But, what if?

  What if, I’m holding this wire and I suddenly forget where to put it. And I stick it up my ass. And then, this other guy I’m working with throws the switch, because I loved him so much and wanted to be his sweet little friend. But, He actually planned it that way. To show us all how not to do things right. In short, it’s better to not do that, sticking a wire up my ass.

  Manhattan. This here is a li’l small town and two of it could easily fit into any single New York borough. Much more happening there. This town is, however, sweeter in harmony and closeness to nature. But not for me.

  The bluest skies above, but not for me, deee deee deee DEEE. I haven’t done anything like that, studying electronics. It would be like going home without a house waiting there…it…you can’t go home again, not without rent money, and a readily available job.

  I hate, really hate, backing down on a project once I start it. You see, you can begin something, and everything is incredibly easy to stop, except your life. So you can grind away for eight years and quit tomorrow. It’s end insane.

  The Dream Thing. My favorite dream is, no one ever sticks his or her finger in my face again. I don’t like the oral rape reference. For that matter, no one ever sticks it in any child’s face ever again. That’s why I think we should all evolve flippers.

  Money, other hand, needs to be made by me. Other than counterfeiting, and I’m okay at conundrums, not being humdrum, I need a steady job. My own business would be great, maybe I could open up a job-finding bureau like the one I’m working for. Thom DaLieken keeps talking ‘bout doin’ that. “We could get together,” Gabe found himself muttering, humming to himself, strolling along; yeah, like hell we would. Like hell on…wheels? Do I hear wheels? Lots and lots and lots of wheels?”

  Gabe had been walking down the street, not noticing or appreciating the general quiet until it was soundly disturbed. By the weirdest grinding noise. He began to notice the bicycling group. The noise drew his attention down the street. The group was huge, startling, and sorta far away. A humming sound, similar to distant honeybees, was rapidly building in intensity. What th--?

  Racks and racks of moving bicyclists. The lead cyclists, all men—no, there’s several dozen womenfolk—all wearing fancy colors on top, shirts and hats in brilliant neons, pants all black and shiny, but striped with neon colors, in symbolic cadre, skin-tight, circus-costume-sticking-like-paint outfits, all flashing noisily in the daylight, all advancing in a voluminous pack, towards him, taking up all of Llewellyn, at least six abreast, row upon endless row. A giant, bulky, and strangely individuated crowd on bikes. But they all wore white or blue helmets, or black and yellow hats with the bills turned up. Their heads bobbed like white pills on short stalks, a cascading river full to brimming of oceanic whitecaps. Wow.

  They were a good half-mile distant, inching towards him but headed north to the freeway. He craned up and saw what he unbelievingly thought were two or three hundred people, perched atop twice as many bicycle wheels, all grinding away to produce the same noise. It was unreal. Like the New York City Marathon, an annual event he’d always wanted to enter, his original family having fled New York on foot long ago. With suitcases of money and tentative contacts to buy land in the Carolinas.

  It was great. They were going to plunge straight through the heart of downtown Rama. Town had better wake up in time to see it! They’d be past in twelve minutes, Max. Can you see it? I give you, ladies and Germans, the Fairy Marathon. Beats the Long March and the Internment any old time.

  The bulk of the group was pressed tightly together, tagging along immejitly after the leaders. Gabe recalled a few cyclists he’d seen earlier that day, flashing neatly past at twenty MPH when he’d been coming back from the library with about ten books on agricultural zones. These were all located within the U.S. and Canada, where you could still buy land cheap and homestead. But one of the books was something humorous about Groucho Marx taking acid and travelling into the future.

  Those other, faster, lonelier cyclists had already gone. There had been no further indication of anything to explain the magic appearance of a group this size, nor had “Beau” heard a word about a race. Well, here it comes…

  Gabe stood on the corner of 22cnd and Guild, near Ridgeview Hospital across the shiny glass doors at the front entrance, and watched the massive pack begin to shoot and filter past. They were moving, true, but the size of the group, combined with their frequent and clearly blatant attempts to showboat, Being…more or less definable as backlash movements that caused the showoffs to quit and keep together, slowed them all down sufficiently for Gabe to see everything’s weird little symbol draped over their oncoming shirtfronts and retreating backsides. Nothing else clearly indicated the meaning of this symbol. But underneath each sign read the words: Lovelorn Pilots. Nothing else at all. A few riders seemed to sport a cola symbol on their helmets.

  Gabe couldn’t see anything but tallish young people on bikes, and there was little other than that for a very long time. The whirring sound, a kind of grinding chains noises, vastly deepened and strengthened, growing in volume and expanding as the mass of colorful fronts and sides and backs horizontally churned by.

  Perhaps I could stop one of them, mused Gabe, towards the end, and ask exactly what it is this mob is doing. But I think I already know. They’re having fun. So I’ll stand quietly and watch them; nah, I’ll yell. Hey! Muchachas! CARAMBA!!! VERFLUCHT! Already. YEOOOWWW! HaLOHA!!!

  That didn’t seem to do much but they sort of sped up. It was thinning out towards the rear and the whirring stragglers were straining to keep up with the almighty Joneses ahead of them. Gabe saw old men, women, teenagers, and what must have been three whole families struggling to maintain a steady pace, children standing on their toe-plates as though heading uphill, and all pumping hard just to stay upright and together. Gabe could swear he saw a five-year-old on a bike. Nahhh.

  “Beau” halfway expected, almost hoping for it, a crash. He didn’t know why.

  He caught himself wishing manfully for the mournful sound of a train whistle, hidden within the background behind the gradually fading noise of the crunching, grinding, greased and sandy chains.

  A ropy, wired, sweaty old guy zoomed by on a filthy, beaten-up old English bike festooned with red, blue, and green ribbons, white-painted bells, and shiny metal boxes wrapped with foil and carrying peculiar moving toys on springs that the cyclist made jump out at Gabe as the mechanical crowd whizzed madly past.

  Truly it was salutary, the end part being more varied, faster and more intricate than the curt beginnings. THOSE cyclists were already up the road further along, west above the freeway.

  The original few he’d seen earlier were winning the race, so this bunch merely imitated them, caught in their mammoth wake, a wake that outstripped the winners and ennobled the losers, awarding them poetry in place of speed. It created a newer, a bigger ONE, the craziest and most colorful thing Gabe Hooter of the pecker fixation troubles had yet to see in his tepid part of Rama, WA.

  The last of the this all-time three-ring fantastic rolling straggler bunch, the misfitiest of the psychedelic losers, were peddling merrily along, happy as an unsteamed variable clam. A couple college boys from the main pack circled around and came backwards for to check out the ending parties; Gabe saw a twelve-year-old sweaty fat girl, who showed main game strength but looked hot, get handed a water bottle by a tight-looking, tights-wearing neon-colored thin white man who checked to be sure s
he was OK (not falling off the bike now, are we, dear?) before he whizzed off ahead again, bobbing and weaving through the crowd, a faster-than- usual cyclist with the power to come and go as pleased, expertly. Whatta showoff.

  Almost some of the cyclists had not been white people. A few were otherwise. Gabe’s gaze lingered on the better and more Spandex-clad females of the beauties.

  When the last of them had gone awa’, he signed, and, placing both hands in his pockets, he leaned way over Llewellyn while standing on one leg. He stayed balanced and tried to look sophisticated. No one looked back. He held his nose.

  Someday, he promised himself, I’m gonna purchase me a ten-speed.

  He waved goodbye at two more cyclists who buzzed him on the street, saw a few more headed up further down the way, and wished he could sell them lemonade. He turned south to head home. How bizarre, it was growing dark.

  But first, he needed to drop in on Sararogino, see how she was. Was she still an undying fox? Yep…and Gabe gave her awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping details about the bikers’ amazin’ invasion. Meanwhile, the next section following this missive is due to a dying white hillbilly US Marine name Richard Hamm. With a brother whose “blond” leg got caught in a manure spreader, signed onto the Marines anyway, begging them to take him. Richard and his bro served in Nam a couple tours; one of them scouted underground VC mazes as a tunnel rat, due to his being of short height and extreme courage. They served their country, and their reward is to have died slowly of Agent Orange and cigarettes…phew!

  EVERY SMASHING, PULVERIZING, forceful blow told. His rotten paw crunched into my vulnerable, pitiful face like a gloved slash from a mailed Greeco-Roman fist, a silver glove studded with hideous three-inch silver spikes. Cut after gouge after fata rip. My face exploded in splintered, ultimate agonies of ecstatic pain, sickening borealan psychedelic lights dancing deep within my damaged, exploding brain. My useless arms swung weakly out into space, futile, destroyed. I could do nothing—I couldn’t even see. The PAIN!

  I finally crashed, piteously smashing into the gritty pavement, soggy and slippery with my innocent blood, scraping half my pulpy face away. This broke my exposed collarbone. Still, his sneering, blood-hungry voice, bestial and wheezing, carried into my torn, bruised and battered ears. I thought, if I was a man named George, this wouldn’t be happening to me…I’d hit him, I’d show no fear.

  “YOU GODDAMN SPACE SHIT, I couldn’t trust you with ten cents, let alone five hundred dollars! Well, nobody pulls a stunt like that on Miguel Shuba and exits scot-free!” He leered, gloating evilly, hovering over me. I courageously strained to reach up to him, but could not lift either arm. He meanly, coldly, cruelly reared back to resoundingly leg-kick my stomach in. THANK God I had time to brace my abdomen. Usedta have six-pack abs, lotsa push-ups, pull-ups, crunches, sit-ups, all from the US Navy Training Manual, used the eight-eight-eight Three method divvying up my day, you allus have a third of the day you can use. One third fer work, one third fer sleep, one third for training your body and mind; in my case, too often, one third drunk away in dribbles, swallowing up beer after raw, home-brewed beer in Viet Cong bars. They lemma come in, drunker’n a man wi’ yallow feet. Bar’s for the enemy, yet the Krakatoa are an old friend…GOD, my STOMACH!

  Red stringy worms, like red scarlet hair, racing across exploding eye sockets. Damn you Scarlet, I do not give a damn…Hell is a Mexican plantation, not a black one, I think, but who knows. They all own they own, creeps with money, who build it up slowly and end up hiring those who buy sexual slaves…girls.

  The kick destroyed the universe as I had thoughtlessly lived in it, forever, locking me into a forced rebirth; the original fetal position was instantly assumed by my jerking, shocked, earthly remains. Torrents of hot blood gushed out from between my broken teeth. I unlovingly gasped for air, unable to concentrate and get my lungs to work. I am done for, oh God. Please end it.

  Shuba, of course, loves Caza, thinks he owns where Artie slept for fifteen years, has worms. Tropical helminthes, the critters both round and flat. Who reproduce infamously, with and without sex, in the thousands? Ova ovum, enter the feet and legs, eggs. One quarter of the human world, hidden as parasites in digestive tracts, intestines upper and lower, traveling through blood, lungs, and their brains…the popular myths being, white people do not have them, while Jewish people don’t eat pork. Some do, some do not. True, trichinosis comes from uncooked hog meat…hawk maws, chitins, simple port chops, hunks of pig flesh…but hunnerds of types of helminthes, trichinas trichinous only one manifestation of Hell.

  Caza had a white Dad, “maestro” of the conditions of the plantations of Eastern Washington…slavery. Enforced, small, flooded, often jerrybuilt buildings…poor sanitation, overflowing toilets, why genius brown girl fled to white Artie, wishing to avoid what cannot be done. As a bookkeeper, she could dream, leaving Mexican intestinal worms behind, the million varieties of vermin. Vermicelli, spaghetti and meatballs, glimpsed up like a fist smashing through glass.

  Hel…a Nordic goddess, one who finds blonde hair cunningly free of trichinosis…all flat, curly or kinky hair resembles Medusa, Goddess of Snakes, li’l “britches” swimming in the waters of North America, infest your leg and crotch skin with swimmer’s itch, die as you heal and go away, leaving you high and dry. What if Miguel “delivers” butt worms to Artie, holding a gun to his mind, considering they infest the lower portions anus, swimming in a well of bile and bitter fluids – pooling and reinvested down there? What if he DOESN’T?

  “Don’t, Shuba, I only owe you pocket change. Conchae forgive?”

  Is ARTIE accidental Hope for Mankind? Because he is Nordic, or doesn’t eat pork and isn’t subject to Tropical Helminthes and the Wyrm? Nah. Dragons, a mean thing smaller than their reputation allows. A red giant, pulled from a little boy, His dying nose, strung out over two feet long. Well, he has a Scandinavian cyclic goddess, as I said. He is already in a kind of hell, from Vietnam, strolling through rice paddies flooded of human urine, blood and feces. His fate should have been to serve as a foot soldier in the American USA Army, in Southeast Asia.

  The Blend-man’s feuding hillbilly relatives, murdering friendly neighbors’ shotgunning neighbors, turned him off War. In 1963, or was it 64, C’mon Penh, running away from the Red Chinese, lifting my legs up with Agent Orange dripping sides of green khaki-colored helmets, greener’n trees in the Pacific Northwest, fringed all around me as jungle foliage – the enemy hides in to kill me ever day, killing us over and over and over, firin’ at will with a jamming rifle that misfires every other round. One long tour was mah goal, sole year’s duration; it made sense decades ago, abbreviated by the logic of heavy sporadic drink. There but for the grace of God, I go sipping, imbibing and teetotalling…but I hafta drink nearly ever day. They peeing on the streets of Rama, into the streams of South East Asia…clear, fluid, Black Saki wine, laced with cocaine and blotter acid LSD began anew fetal alcoholism, outa my drinker scummy parents, outside Ho Chi Minh City…eight months spent furtively in Nam.

  As a US Marine, two months on Parris Island, “WE OWN YOU NOW, BOY”, broke in spirit unescapable…his own stalwart soul, undeniably mature and overly superior…a fluke in itself, taller 6’ 1” means only superior to the worm. Beaten, yellow, longhaired, shaven off, wading rice paddies with an AK47 or an M16 that jams, a “failure to extract” worms and women cannot cure. The bullets fly out, shrapnel wounds you, but somehow the cartridge jams in the muzzle, failing to eject. Shot in the right leg by the enemy, one bullet grazing main artery, he founded an easy ticket home, no completing marine training. No hope for the VA hospital, mental retard rights, no actual health benefits…”you’re a hippie, you cut me no breaks,” my Negro gunnery sergeant mouthed, he said it to ever’body. “I’m God. You are a drunk. Get outa here, you’re no Jarhead, YOU’RE NOT A US MARINE ANYMORE, and YOU AIN’T GOT ANY GUTS…” Hit’s not cuz he is black, it is cuz I’m so stupid…cuz he is stupid…we’re stupid…American jerks kill native Asians
for lunch…money…then they strap TNT bombs to babies. Every ’body has guts, worms an’ all.

  You only complete the life cycle of Hell-menthes by eating people. The wendigo is a Native American myth, the white thing with freckles on the Wendy’s sign is a wendigo, they eat human flesh to assist their mater the Worm, without mercy…no Mary and only Jesus means that. Only one death, not two sexes. My Mayan, I am Cherokee, Artie sighs…LACK of worms here, and then things went south. In the South, blacks and Mexicans knew lies. Infested waters, broken legs again, breathing in the dust of ages, full of feces, things that crawl and slither. The Garden of Eden, a fake tree with his RED apple propped up in a pig’s mouth, meanders a snake for Adam and Eve. A snake called Lies; worms only infest living red, raw meat, not decent fruit in decent trees.

  Miguel…dare you say it…money isn’t the reason why, is it?

  “You deserve another nice little kick just for daring to go on BREATHING, you goddamn hippie, in my PRESENCE,” keened the freakish, boiling, sneering Spanish voice of my compassionless tormentor. Once he had been his good friend and business partner. Now he was a horribly confident and totally vengeance-ridden murderer. Certainly, I was gonna be beaten to death. Too bad…I did not kill my hundredth petty Asian…Dame Prettily, what if it was YOU. Gretchly, you fled, cuz it Taws over-pops in South Vietnam, by me, long the Maginot Line of the DMZ, gunnin’ for the Chinese gunning for Thee. “Nuff said!

  Overpopulation: people are just rats, eating their own filth and each other. Blond, dark, kids, saw somebody in his 80s eating his own hand. Nah, nibbling on his fingernails…long, scrawny nails, like a woman’s. If you get another opening in your male body, they might stick a dynamite in it and blow up. OUCH.

  The next kick brought me to full consciousness of an altogether welcome, but still fearsome, imminent death from internal punctures and collapse. Subsequently I blacked out, unknowingly spewing vomit all over Shuba’s largesse in a last miraculous attempt to so much as touch him in return. I did. I let him walk all over me, for fear of harming another innocent person. He did. I was to pay dearly for this act of idiotic saintliness. One must stay alive, it has seams.

  Days later, awoke in a clean, secure hospital bed, one giant unwound ball of pain with bruises on the breaks. The doctor said I had sustained serious internal injuries. They'd pumped my stomach and were currently discussing the need for major colon surgery, but the family jewels were all intact, and my head and face were starting to heal. I could still see out of one black eye, through the bandages. Caza had written “Get Well Soon!” on my bandaged for forehead.

  I breathed, haltingly, in relief, thanking God daily, joking with the pretty, vivacious nurses. The hospital food was nutritious and good. My appetite improved. Joy! The doctors said I would be out in two weeks, maybe less. My collarbone was healing, slowly but surely. Meanwhile I luxuriated in my soft bed, relaxing between full body spasms within cool, gentle sheets. But the abdominal spasming --though infrequent--left me sweaty and gasping for air. Gee, the nurses were swell…

  But one fine hospital morning, my window left open to let in the cooling summer breeze, I was forced to receive an unwelcome visitor. Miguel de las Siegas Del Shuba, alias “Injun Joseph,” the inhumane monster who had all but taken my worthless hippie blond and blue-eyed life, had stolen silently into my room. I'd forgotten to warn the hospital personnel in advance, and they had allowed him entrance. He said he was my best friend, and waved a get-well card. Unsigned, of course! The imposter. Why hadn't the police arrested him? Why?

  He stood glaring at me, looming over the foot of my bed, his face contorted into a grotesque leer. His deep-brown, wolvish face registered a hate-ridden and grievously sociopathic lack of concern for my sanity or continued healing. A starkly depraved judgment was being made towards my violent defeat. He bitterly snarled. I spasmodically clutched my sheets. Inwardly, I gave my soul over to whatever gods may be in charge of men like me. Outwardly, I fought back against the starkly outlined fears that must have been written all over my nearly bloodless face.

  Slowly licking his full, sensuous pink lips and cruelly atavistic sickening anticipation, Shuba adroitly reached into his unzipped jacket with his right hand. There was a rush of dire feelings of terror in my bruised and battered guts, despair at my sheer helplessness combined with a perverse longing to talk Shuba out of it. I even attempted to do so.

  “NO! They'll catch you! You'll go to jail, you might be executed, you FOOL… please, put it away, oh God, please…” I was the veriest picture of a damned wretched soul lost to the bottomless pit, about to moderately sink still further.

  “TOO late, you repulsive and cowardly clown,” he chanted harshly with heated breath. “Here is your long overdue reward for deliberately cheating me.” He drew the silver Luger out, aimed point-blank straight at my face, and FIRED. FLASH!!! Oblivion…

  The instant before he pulled the trigger, all my fears drained away, turning to vast relief. I thanked, silently, inwardly, all those whom I had ever liked the loved. I even blessed Shuba, the poor, demented maniac. He’d surely fry for doing this. As the bullets (he fired five times, emptying the magazine) shattered my head to bits and clove my poor chest in three places, I opened from within like a flower, not even feeling the shock of battering pain. I was transmuting rapidly into pure elemental joy. My immortal soul burst out of my obscenely destroyed body, happily and swiftly winging ecstatically upwards and outwards to greet all the blessedly merciful angels. They beautiously congregated to meet me, shimmering, and mid-care!

  Every dead and lovely person I had ever known was with me now, dwelling in beauty, awaiting the blissful, peaceful formation of my angelic self. There was nothing but the purest wild abandon to the supremest-highest-godliest love. One poor pitiful bodies were gone forever. We all embraced, the teeming millions of the forever and grateful dead, intertwined souls lost in immortal, complete eternal happiness. Oh, what utter ecstasy, joy and good-will! At last, I truly was free. Or, they won the stupid social game, which is indefinitely the likelier of the two. Following THAT premise.

  “So, what do ya think of that?” asked Gabe “Beau” Hooter Sancto of his amigo, Mr. the tall Norwegian, Artie Blend. “I was just elaborating an idea about what might befall you if a very self-righteous Miguel Shuba caught up with you, wanted his half-a-grand in-cash, and you didn't cough it up.” Gabe snickered evilly, not without insidious charm. He poked Artie in the stomach with his elbow.

  The Artful Dodger silently mused: Yah, swell, tha’s jus’ wha’ might happen. Ah here's Shuba gots a tempeh biggah’n Dollah Partn’n’s bra, head, an’ dat he pecks a hos piss-tal. Or sumpin’. Whoooo! But ah ain’ too escared, nah…

  “Ah’ll do lahk you sez, buddeh, lahk in th’ storeh—an we be hin a stir raht nayaw, hey--an’ gayev mahseff to God if’n thet water-back buffalo evah ketches may. ‘Cept ah guarantees ah’ll put up more uv a tussle, put thet galloot in th’ hospital steadah ME. Y’copy?”

  “Si. No, actually I made the story up all by myself.”

  “You shor do kills a fella hoff easeh with yer storyin’, Gabie-mah-mayan! Hee hee hee hee.” Artie winked slyly at “Beau,” who tried to live up to his angelic and saintly name, on the spot. For a change… He spread his hand, innocently, fingers splayed open on his chest, stepping back in fake surprise.

  “I had to do SOMETHING to getcha back for that pool ball in the belly routine. Even if only on paper. I hope there's no hard feelings.” Gabe grinned sheepishly.

  “Say,” he piped up joyfully, “it’s clearing to dry outside.” They were temporarily stopped in at the Tomato Grocery, the local eating establishment for the responsibly-minded, due to a sudden thunderstorm’s lively lashing downpour, and the rain had finally let up sufficiently for leaving purposes. So they left.

  Gabe had been reading Artie a stretch of his daily journal. Artie admired that perseverant, ritualistic sort of thing. Caza too kept a similar book. You've seen some of it earlier. “You Spanish folks sure lahk
to log yer sea-voyages,” noted the Blendman. They strolled along a shady, tree-lined stretch of Tomato Street. Gabe was obviously happy to have gotten this gripe off his troubled but cheerful mind.

  “I guess we'd think someone else, or at least God, simply must know our measly little life histories. Why not, it beats paying off a psychiatrist. Helps me to sleep at night.” “Someday ah’ll do th’ lahk. Brush hup on mah writin’.”

  Artie thought to himself, Gabe should send his story to a magazine or write a book using the story, but come to think, he himself was scared of the publicity it would bring. Shuba might get ideas. If Artie merely laid low for good long while, maybe Shuba’d never pester him again. And Artie would never again hurt Gabe, his new friend, out of frustration or mistake or whatever reason he'd hurt him before (like he said) ever again. He hit "Beau" with a pool ball? Wow. Musta been drankin’ too much, Artie thought; I forgot!

  As they walked down the street, Gabe dreamed remotely of buying a bicycle, or of perhaps investing in a used car. It was about time he arranged his own transportation. He was taking too many rides at work. And the groceries he semi-weekly carried home were getting to be pretty heavy in his arms.

  “Say Art, you know something about a used-car lot somewhere in these parts?"

  “Shore, up noath pest Onionville dey got ‘un, with’n mahl uv Harpers’ Point whar th’ ferrah his. Ah heahs dey gots rail low, low prahces. Or you culd trah down southeas’, dey got dailershits hall ‘Lang th’ road, nex’t’ th’ ray-pair shops. Ah heahs dey sells cars cheapah, but hit hain’ no dail, cuz dey breaks dayown an’ th’ dail his you gets ‘em fix’ at th’ ray-pair shops. In th’ self-same ay-re-ah. Sortuva Bleck neigh-bor-hood ‘roun’ there, ah wouldn’ trus’ ‘em, they rippin’ hoff all da cull-herds dere.”

  They continued in silence. Gabe checked his watch; he had four hours before the next jobsite preparedness meeting. He was going to go home, cook dinner, watch the TV news and research leaflets from a technical college in another state, nearby but necessitating relocation. There was also a similar college in North Carolina; both of these schools offer degrees in land management for zoning and building sites. You were almost a guaranteed hire if you passed, barring government-sponsored hiring freezes. But the cost of each school was in the five-figure range for two semesters, and his writing was beginning to look vaguely appealing to him again. Yeah, it kept sitting up and barking at him in that endearing way… like it would be worthwhile to pursue it, attempting publication of his short stories, and perhaps trying a novel further down the road. Barring his laziness. It was the Conqueror Worm, his laziness. Mythical, but real.

  For now, he fixed dinner in the comfort and privacy of his own rooms. He watched flood, fire and famine on the news. And he called Sarah after work, to see how she was, and to hear that incredibly pleasant lilt of her birdsong voice, so neatly tickling his eardrums.

  She wouldn’t let him read her the story--" You won't let me do anything!"--asking him to either mail it or deliver her a copy. "How’s ‘bout I lip-sync it at you over an elegant lunch, instead?" he begged of her, pausing dramatically. "Okay," she warmly sighed.

  They agreed to jointly purchase coffee at the Fantastic Café, therein to discuss fine literary trends, namely theirs, in sharper depth and with greater focus.

  Sarah had fourteen thick, soft-bound volumes of timely poetry she'd composed over an arduous, growth-ridden decade, and two feminist-oriented novels she’d started and unhappily left undone, occasionally going back to them to have minor ideational fun – while begrudgingly pushing them along a little further.

  "You wait," she melodically promised, "This time, next year, Saragina D. DeSoto’s gonna be a famous name on the New York Times Bestseller List. You'll have to sit back an’ watch me joke ‘roun’ with Hair-aldoo an’ Okra, an’ Morrish, an’ Pill, an’ Dinasaur an’ Dave an’ Johnny an’/or Lantern-Jaw, an’ what’s-his-name, Arsenic, poison or some-thin’…the cute guy. You know. Looks like me.”

  “I should?” incredulously inquired “Beau,” who only watched TV for the news and sports programs, important football games, etc., whenever he did.

  “Nah. But you’ll have to watch Atomic Number 33 then, I’ll be there, woooooo, I’ll be there, pluggin’ mah two books. The twin Aspirin Tabs. Which will be published by the same house, Acetaminnie-often Press, concommitantly. Detective novels, spy thrillers, featuring several baffling plot-thickening murders and Black flashily-smart guntotin’ methodical PIs and daft well-dressed swashbuckling criminals that throw the greasiest possible acrylic wool over your smolderin’ wide-open eyes, concomitantly knitting it into a fluffy pastel winter hat with matching mittens. With a ball-yarn tassel on top!"

  Saragina was good as her word, but after receiving thirty-three rejection notices for her first book, she set it aside for a prolonged re-write. Gabe, who had plenty of extra time, rode on his imaginary shining bright rainbow unicorn silver-and-blue charger stallion with a curlicue horn and a loaded eight-cylinder engine, to her rescue, encouraging her, helping her to edit and tighten up some of the feebler points of her Great Amerafrican Novel (Gam for short, silken-smooth and showing only millimeters below the calf), and nimbly adding some of his own Plot Devices in select spine-chilling sequences. This is a real book.

  He gave terrific neck and shoulder massages while she pounded out her well-polished final draft. That extra bone in Sara’s neck quit giving her trouble, then, especially when she…sneezed. ACHOOOOO!!!!!!

  This time, the third contacted east-coast publisher took it, like a man. Perhaps the New York agent helped, or perhaps it had been the Seattle one. The readers loved it! It was the latest Thing! Statewide, in Washington and not DC. Sara got a $15,000 advance based on projected sales, and signed a fair-handed contract granting her all original rights, copyrights, reproduction rights, abortion rights, worldwide rights and serial rights, but not really her American Civil Rights…that British clone flag went up and down the goalpost, once again…and 25% of the net sales of the book after printing and distribution costs were subtracted. She immediately began socking it away for school.

  “This ain’t goin’ to stop me from becoming a dietitian, like I like. That is my most thoroughly chosen career. I've only now got one other book in me at this time. But out churn THAT one out too, someday, know I will." She gave Gabe a soft, tiny peck on the cheek and treated him to a stage show in Unionville out of the advance money.

  They enjoyed themselves from third-row seats, orchestra, front and center. It was "A Khoros Line,” the New York group having packed it all the way out to southern Washington to do the geometric version, with an all-Greek cast. It was, shall we say, highly mathematical.

  "Beau” returned Sara’s fatuous distant peck with a monster infatuated warming hug during that famous showbiz belt-out tune, “Azte…ei…nai!”* The applause for the New York Greek cast was deafening, leaving the weekend audience in stitches.

  Gabe himself, in the midst of two a.m. and comfortably ensconsed in his cozy apartment, went to sleep during the sixteenth paragraph of a twenty-seven page love sonnet to Lady Sara.

  He had put pen to page at eleven p.m., not lifting it up once. Made some fascinating squiggles. It read floridly-impressionistic OK. He began snoring melodiously, with no one there to hear and enjoy.

  “Beau” decided he liked the Shuba vs. Artie story better than his poetry, during that brief period of time he methodically stayed lying there when his alarm went off at six-forty-five a.m. But he couldn't figure out how to work it into a novel.

  Artie had died in the story, after all, and how then would he continue to appear as a character? Sorta green? Shuba himself would have to show up someday and help Gabe to settle that.

  Naturally, he did.