The Rainbow Horizon - A Tale of Goofy Chaos

by Karen S. Cole

No reply? Oops!

  “Ah’m sorreh, ah kep’ ya waitin’ fer years. Here ya goo…Mayan.”

  Is there any reason Scarlett gets Rhett? Is’t because he’s th’ butler, and the butler “did it” with Scarlett O’Hara, goin’, “Sorry I don’t give a damn.” Swearing, and the South shall rise up again is not what I ask for…so long ago, ah was fantasizin’ the weirdo Shuba, an’ that he’s Jewish…what is the Here and Now?

  Editorial Note II: Jew MAY check for typos, forever ‘n never, amen.

  Artie jerked the important wad of greenish-rainbow bills, slowly, from out his hippie shirt pocket. Two dog-eared twenties stuck in the flap on their way. “You poor ol’ fella, yoo better buy yerseff a nooo shirt. Kin ah getcha a drink? Heah.” Shuba tremblingly and falteringly lifted his softly bushy, flat, black head. Nothing altogether human was visible in his tempestuously black eyes. They held death.

  Artie painstakingly, slurrily, and histrionically (but without quite the stellar performance exhibited by Miguel S. Shuba, whom the judges awarded an overall eight-point-twenty-five) handed over to Mr. Naked Chain Man all six hundred of his borrowed dollars. In thirty twenties, Artie’s usual form of currency; two bunches of fifteen, each held pinched tight together midway with a rust-colored, breaking-in-process rubber band. It came halfway undone during the time-consuming circuit of Artie’s drunken hand motions.

  Shuba’s staring, dead black eyes, pledged to an abyss far deeper than Hell itself, never even registered the transaction.

  As though he had, effectively, died. They were limpid, dull, and bottomless, rimmed with flat, translucent crystalline tears and shot with squiggly lines of red. One trickling snail-trace pearl left a line exactly one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, a vertically crooked nepenthine run down his stubbly brown cheek. But yeah, he took the money. He just wasn't going to run out the door with it. No pressing engagements today for Senor Shuba…

  He stuffed it, neatly and hurriedly, albeit ghastily across his disturbed chest, into his left blue-jeans jacket pocket, kissing it first--again, Mr. Hamilton wasn't there to feel it--and, while sustaining his two-point kneeling position, he dramatically allowed his thickly furred head, blacker than night itself, to sink all the way downward again ‘til it almost began dropping off.

  He then soundly crashed down to the other, hidden knee, although it was surely not the properest time to do so, with an audible thud. Too audible to be natural, real, or otherwise malevolent or nice. His ghastly face was lost symmetrically…forever? In a sea of dark, thick curls and blue-black feathery sweeps, a heart-shape covering his burly naked chest; like a wet dog he shook all over, as…como si…he might be getting rather chilly. Not to anything environmentally cold. He wasn't humanely reacting. Both hands were balled into stubbornly purple fists, grinding fully into the dirty and streaked with mud restaurant floor.

  Wow, Artie blurrily mused, he’s starting to sob. Might be good for the dude. Too bad he’s such a sore loser.

  Perhaps this peculiarly-staged manoeuver implied some sort of insanely heroic and tragic defeat. The finalized sting of death? The agony of Heat? It was. Hives? Feet—smelly ones?

  Then again, it was indubitably Artie’s chance to strike a decent knifely bargain, on his very own behalf and in his best favor.

  “Say, Mike, kin ah tek thet Boowie as parta th’ bar-gain? Hit ain’ wuth too much, his hit? Kin ah hev hit fer th’ diff’rance, thar? Ah thanks,” he drawled, sneakily placing his hand on the gargantuan but stationary blade, and swiftly scraping it all the way across the table to the window, placing it parallel to the napkin holder and the juke box selection machine, “thet’ll keeps this heah fish boner, mahseff, for ya.” Artie’s face had a drawn, dour, severe cast to it, Grey as ash, fixed as rocky granite. He looked cold serious for a change, in other words, but his hippie clothes remained the same brilliantly clownish attire. After all, it's not that easy to look “for real” in a dayglo orange-and-purple tie-dyed one-pocket shirt.

  YES, IT WAS an impressive pudgy and fudgy weapon. Like, killer-Diller. Oh yes, indeedy. “Is yoo gon’ be hokay, senior? Kemo sabe? Yo?”

  No answer. A tiny, diminutive, loser’s symmetrical shoulder shrug, clearly faked in summa toto or in part. After a few whispered words hesitantly escaped Shuba’s peeling, ruddy, dried-out flabby lips. A few.

  “She’s dead,” was intoned and that was all, in mutteringly funereal tones. “Would that I were, as well." He didn't intone that; in fact, he sounded oddly familiar.

  The complexity of “Latino” stillness malevolently pervaded the generally cheery atmosphere of this otherwise homely small-town café. Stifling agony, dead love, lapized silence, and heat…I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life…

  Shuba, a foreshortened torrid ghost, had faded out to a minor whisper, and Artie, the drunken hippie, pretending rank disinterest, snuck several lingering casual glances towards and through glass door, indicating an expectancy of something.

  Perceiving a romantic, baseless, irresistible and treacherous urge to follow his gaze further up the street, he found that…there did seem to be a wholesome and pretty teenage girl away up ‘airs…kinda Messican. She looked faint, ghostly, eerily lovely like his Caza, God his Caza wuz bee-yu-ti-ful, and look, she…but this gal’s blurry form was younger somehow, or mebbe she…

  …when he turned back, Shuba was GONE. Vanished in a puff of cigarette smoke. Omigod. No Moor Open Mike!!!!!!!! They sure taste kinda funny, but…it keeps them on the knife. Gee I don’t like Army life, it doesn’t like me. Nor anyone. Gee, I don’t like Army life, gee - and I wanna go home…enlisted sucks. They drafted me four short years after I left Montana, cuz I forwarded mah mail. To Unionville, WA. Ah had plenty of tall brothers and sexy sisters, feuding requires same. You die, you get “reborn,” they used to tell me all the time. “Artie, why doncha like to kill niggers? Why?” They actually meant the white families shootin’ and killin’ ours; nobody was black. Nobody…so short folks over time got ran down and brutally killed…they turned round to face mah bullets, ‘cuz I’m six foot one inches.

  Wasn’t That a Long Joke?

  Blend checked his reeking but clean and languorous self for the money, no, that were gone, too, but he performed his own personal nose test for the DTs and found he still had his balance or whatever ‘tis ya lose, those resters an’ relaxers. Phewww! He checked out the floor. No ungodly knee imprints. No buttons! No weird blood, not even “vampire” blood. And no golden chains with attached Mogen Davids jangling. If there had ever been one, there was nonetheless currently no Miquel de las Siegas Del Shuba, king for a day and queen of the May. Knifie Wifie Island, not a gun man, ah guess. Neither open nor closed. End of Weirdo the Rival!

  The waitress, previously occupied in the shadows, came up to the table. She was extremely familiar.

  “Y’been sittin’ here an hour Art, whaddya havin’ from me, hmmm?” Pretty Jeannie Ontermeyer asked of the aging hippie, who was parked all alone. She flourished her blue-lined ticket pad and a good black pen, burnishing and furnishing an expression of mild female sarcasm. She had real class, for a kid at her stage.

  Artie rolled his perplexed and watery eyes up at her. He had, thank God, bathed today, blessedly for Caza. And washed all his hairs. He smooth his ashtray but brazen golden head of hair back with one bulky pale hand, running his pink fingers repeatedly through it, almost a task in itself.

  Glancing over to his left, he was able to see that the giant knife was still exactly where it belonged. He licked his lips. Grabbing it, quickly, he stuck both his callused hands under the Formica table, concerned lest Jeannie should care too deeply about, uh, things.

  “I’ll have a soup and salad, ma’am, blue cheese dressin’, with crackahs. An’ a large Pepsi. Without ice.” Jeannie Ontermeyer smiled her smashing, famous award-winning smile. It relieved the tension, unless you were making it, and often then-times as well. She poised her black, sometimes leaky ink pen for business. She spoke, a sustainable but rendered by situ
ation atypical, past-time.

  “We got fresh strawberry and peach ice cream, flown in today, too if’n you want some, Art. Jest you ask!” She took down the order. She looked so cute walking away, wiggling her behind accidentally, or incidentally. Artie sighed wistfully, lovingly, happily.

  I’ve gotta thank of mah Caza all th’ tahm, or ah’ll wandah ‘way, an’, ah’ll sin surest in mah deeper thoughts. But ah truly loves mah li’l gal. Wail, ah gots th’ hots, Mahk, an’ th’ knahf now too. S’alraht!

  To Continue: Artie put the Bowie in the bag the money’d been in. Jeannie shortly brought his soup and salad. It was very good. He was starved. The salad, however, had brown leaves, wilted edges, and was a teeny bit dry.

  Artie simply requested Moor dressing.

  Notes from Mein Kampf, a tome artistic types, squirming junior high children and their mysterious bullsnarb teachers might “enjoy” (you bet, if you delight in the deaths of millions.) But if you read it, you know the Holocaust happened. There’s pictures of the huge, violently black and ash-coated gas ovens, among other atrocities. And glowing descriptions of the money being made by the crematorium manufacturers. Hitler bragged a lot in it. Of course, those events have been televised, so who needs Nazi literature nowadays?

  Hitler delighted in over-using the (German) words “besonders” and “damals,” thus explaining the 1980s cigarette ads for “evil camels.” These words were used to talk folks into the splendid aberration called cigarettes. Even if you like losing your capacity to breathe, aren’t they low-life scum? I thought they were referring to me with lovely phrases like scumbag and dirt bag; but in fact they were referring to my vacuum cleaner, named Snoopy. A filthy rich machine of love.

  Nah, I’m gonna write stuff about suburbia of the 1980s-1990s, called The Men’s Baby Club. It concerns a white golfing league, starting to see brown and black players, where the men go round to restaurants dressed as naive babies, in diapers etc. in order to order from the children’s menu. This is to make them lose weight while under media lights, because they are obese. It’s a sad commentary on human existence in that partial Seventh Heaven, the outskirts of middle-class American suburbia.

  SHE DIDN’T WANNA be a state worker for the Chinese. North Vietnamese, her name had been Ha’i Phuong. Her missionary teachers gave her a children’s book, so simple and beautiful to her, of ancient German Teutonic fairy tales. From patiently reading this book in English, she derived an altogether new name, like her superheroine Sojourner Truth. If anti-Islam, there, would let her, at her proto-advanced age…which was about thirty. I mean, anti-state work. The Russians kept a vigil on her region, turning her into one long desire to escape.

  One clear, wild, wet, wind-surf day in Honolulu, the soul-rearing blue tide came in on Waikiki Beach, funny. There was a mawkish and swarming open boat carrying one giant mass of dying Vietnamese boat people, and it screeched up on the lapping shores near a dilapidated, hippiesque t-shirt stand. On Waikiki Beach, the surfer’s PARADISE. Eight-ninety-nine a shirt, cotton ts. Tsk.

  The majestically native Hawaiian fella running the stand immediately ran to that giant broad canoe out there, carrying eight or twelve t-shirts to heroically cover the boat occupants. He automatically slowed to a standstill in his frantic approach…it looked to be about fifty people, or what remained. They had been, and were being, broiled alive by the red-hot, screaming sun, and most of their laughable clothing was flapping, in destroyed rags and tatters, or gone. There were filthy woolen blankets over some, possibly covering the dead. They smell, mostly like salted meat. Very old, contagious salted meat, eerily not completely infested. A weird communal sound of intense, unholy, unbelievably ultimate pain filled the balmy air. It was indeed a gorgeous day to die on the beach.

  Safe at home, cramped but definitively so, Gabe could sure picture that, in his mind; there was the boat, grinding, churning and wedging into the imported sand from Florida, the surfers with their long and short boards gathering around, awe-stricken and the wretched moaning and gasping of the swarming denizens of the beached vessel so earthily human, yet tormented beyond all human recognition. Their wind-lashed faces were heartlessly blotched with virulent flaming pink patches, running-vanishing into bloodlessly white, swollen, sodden faces; their dried-out mouths kept mutely wheezing testimonial series of breaking gasps for precious unattainable water and blessed Hawaiian air. Twenty-eight of them were stinking, damned, fetid corpses. Sri-Hong Fud, standing up with six others in the boat, was not one of them. Not yet.

  “Michael rowed the boat ashore,

  Hallelu-jah

  Michael rowed the boat ashore,

  Hallelu-jah.

  “Sister knows to set the sails,

  Hallelu-jah.

  “Sister knows to set the sails,

  Hallelu-lu-jah.

  “For the river is deep and the river is wide,

  Hallelu-lu-jah;

  Peace and plenty on the other side,

  Halelu-luuuu-jah.”

  Dame Gretchley truly had a lovely voice when she honestly tried. Gave it her best. Mezzo-soprano, “Beau” guessed.

  The woman who later was to become the only major Christian leader, sans all unnecessary competition, in the typical, peaceful, rural small town of Rama, WA, was being covered with an extra-large-sized white T emblazoned with the words “Live Fast, Die YOUNG, Leave a Good-Looking Corpse,” delicately outlined in robin’s egg blue on the front. The Hawaiian boothier, lost in a personal twilight of unbelief, leaned her dragging, near-lifeless body against his as he pulled her out of the boat. He was joined by other beach hangers-on and a few of the boulder vacationers. They found and pulled the discernible living out of the reeking, infested, stinky and disgusting boat.

  Hesitantly, the incredulous and misplacedly sexy bikini’d living people spied and pried at the dying and fighting-for-life South Vietnamese. One magic, gruesome corpse had rotted frozen to his seat. He was repeatedly stared at, as though he would go away if enough people did, also. ‘Twas an old man, smelling to the higher skies like something deathly fierce; thankfully, the salty brine had preserved him and the other dead from rotting too remorselessly, sense of smell-wise, for the accidental or Providential sake of the near-depraved Asiatic living and the beach kids, who were losing and gaining several years of time and sanity. “God!” exclaimed a six-foot-two, blonde and male young surfer. “These folks are DEAD!” The boat was VERY full of salty wash, which had nearly rotted out the bottom and the sides. Almost.

  A few were gingerly able to walk out of the boat. Three fell.

  Pepsis, diet root beers, iced tea and any amount of cold machine water was offered to all victims who could take it. Cool, fresh torture was splashed over first-, second- and third-degree sunburns, filling with agony every salt-eaten crack and causing various happy expressions of surprised pain. Blankets were gently laid upon the sand, the dying and the dead was swiftly and expertly stretched out upon them.

  Racism was dynastically non-existent as the mostly white or Asian, some black somewhat, and naturally Japanese or Hawaiian beach funcationers, plus the hotel and stand employees, and those bums, no cops there then, struggled out a handful of words in Vietnamese, Laotian, French and Korean, both superfluous and heard, as the tormented, refugee, formally land-dwelling souls. They universally groaned back. Sri Hong was heard to moan a word very like “Satan.” Perhaps not. It might be important.

  “Boat people! Genuine boat people! Why didn’t a dink from the Coast Guard buzz shore ‘bout this, HUH?” frantically sputtered an incredulous, and possibly incredible, square-jawed white male lifeguard. With freckles. He was tanned, tawny, blustering, tough and tall, monstrously Hawaiian, and totally bewildered. He held a multi-band, five-channel hand-held receiver and was frantically attempting to re-establish contact with the Great Out There. Nothing was doing, and it crackled deafening slapstick static at him instead. He calmed down and shut it off.

  “They were s’posed to have radio’d this in for us! T
hese folks shouldn't have been allowed to hit our god-damned beach! Dear God, this is Waikiki Beach, for Christ's-sake! The Guard should've stopped ‘em MILES or more short of shore. Allah! I think. Nobody’s supposed to wash up out of nowhere like this! Half these people are stone-cold the dead. Absolutely dead!" They were definitively not a pretty sight for tourists with stomachs.

  What effect such a scene actually ever had on Oahu’s tourist trade is impossible to gauge. Bull, Gabe thought to himself, mentally viewing the scene from his privileged afar. There was no other place to go, and he felt his own lack of escape from there, too. There was none for the tourists who worshipped at that particular, easy- and cheap-to-get-to slab of surf and sun and imported sand, stolen straight from the Florida Keys; nor for the boat people, who had their scape-grace amazing unpaid-for crack at it. Except that their swarthy, ruptured skin and lips were all split. Such a payment, for mere old life. Yes…

  The Dame’s lips were cracked and bloody, and the Coke she sipped hellishly stung them as she dazedly and gratefully slurped from the red-and-white cardboard soda cup. At home snugly in Rama, she still felt the taste and texture of the balled wax on her mouth, remembering when, as a four-year-old girl in her tiny village near the predecessor of PHnom Pen, she had tasted her first Coke and had tried to eat the wax on the cup’s edge. Best thing was scraping it with her teeth, because it was all rolled up and sticky and tasted fun. Besides, it wasn't anything worse than the bloody Coke," she laughingly told Gabe. She had magic gemstone eyes, solely hers, beamed straight at Gabe like piercing lances, toothpicks, or arrows. Gabe recalled she had already spun this story for him twice before, spacing it about six months apart, the last year and the proceeding. When he first came to Rama to stay.

  “Beau” was able to picture it well by now, the bright cheerless sunlight, the overcrowded wooden boat, the thronging and colorful beach, the noisy grinding of the open boat’s prow into the expensive important white Florida sand, the hollow yodels of outlandish acknowledgement from the dying, salt-scarred passengers of an end to the monumental rocking, splashing, stinging, burning, and tidal churning of a seemingly endless open cobalt mothering sea. And perhaps he, traversing his own soul, sensed the lurking presence of the Awesome sea God, though mythical at best, WAVES, the boat riders’ miraculous, hallucinogenic deliverer. Gabe had a hard time returning back to real life…aves…have nots…

  Perhaps he didn't.

  The Sea had impossibly propelled them all the way around Oahu, north to most of the other Hawaiian Islands, and past Honolulu, dumping them neatly on the east side. It had taken them up in a magic and defiant arcane dutifully, as though called upon by God and Mary, and perhaps anything else plunging down to lift them powerfully in its massive slate-blue hands and wisking them, whirling fiendishly as a machine-spun driedel, into the beautiful blue-green paradisal waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands.

  Without sails, motor, or rudder, they had idly floated all the way from Laos, their escape point, being started well on their way by a few well-equipped “Vietnamese" young men with long, heavy, god-sended oars. One of those four saints died swiftly on the water, out in the nowhere, said the Dame, with hushed sadness. She thought he had a long infection.

  Listening, day-dreaming, Gabe remembered aloud a scene in a ’70s American novel where two little black girls, playing in jest, threw a weakling little black boy into some water, and he accidentally drowned. Sula. “Did you ever throw anybody overboard?"

  “Heck, nahhh, by the time we all started dying, nobody had the strength! I thanked God for the salt in the water that filled the cracks in our skin, saving us from more severe infections. It was preserving us, like we were salt pork. I did grow an infection in my right leg, clear above the ankle. They had to incise the muscle. I still limp if I don't think. Wanna see my limp?"

  “I’d rather be your occasional crunch."

  “Fine! I had to say goodbye to about a dozen friends, including my father, my grand-aunt, my sister's husband and her three sweet children. May God rest them. They were the sweetest little children." The Dame seemed well past her mourning now, and completely healed inside. But something misted behind her wrinkled, crinkly, surprisingly unbrown eyes, taking her away from the meaning of the surrounding silence of the church basement. She was politely sipping at a half-cup of coffee, as rain lashed comfortingly with wind outside the church's basement window. It needed wiped with glass cleaner and paper towels. It was still light outside, but they had best get going…

  Gabe wanted to do something for the good Dame after she finished the story, even though it was the third time he heard it; so he swept and mopped the main meeting hall, vacuumed the basement, and rearranged all the kitchen cabinets. He even straightened out all but lumped-together, unpolished silverware, just to save her the trouble, staying for a while even after she left for home. She left him a key.

  That made her very happy.

  AT NIGHT, SOMETIMES, when Caza would lie awake because her lower back pains amply gave her trouble and she couldn't chase them away, she would drowsily indulge in a limpid pictorial fantasy or three. Usually quite asexual. She called it day-dreaming at night, or Sonar en La Noche Alerta. Selna, for short. Like in Alabaster.

  She’d visualize running through fields, madly picking her lightened feet up, whilst she stepped lightly into blooping mud, gradually lifting up both her beautiful and wasting legs, floating, then flying, at first moving suspended in the air, finally transcending all the verdant ground beneath and soaring ‘way over the rustic tops of trees enchantingly ringing the field. The mud ha-ha’d, cracking and drying on her feet like shoes as she churned her arms and swimming motions, propelling herself over the beautiful trees. Soon after, too soon, she landed cleverly on the other side. And then she had to take a job working in the masters’ fields on that side of the trees! She left!

  Another wonderful "fantasy" took place at several old neighborhoods and schools she used to inhabit and attend. She enjoyed walking around, as though scrupulously inspecting every area, in detail, and every old traffic-ridden haunt she used to wander in and wonder about. No berserker riots. It was peaceful and serene, but she was always alone. The Lost Princess, short and brown. She rode a bicycle all over a city intricately reconstructed in her own mind out of scraps of fading memories.

  She rode downtown, as though on clouds, dominating Unionville, finding impossibly huge buildings she'd never seen before. That weren’t in the real Unionville, que no? She rode back home to the small town of Gahanna, named after either two local "Indian" or after the garbage dump of Jerusalem and the Bible. Lost in her old neighborhoods, tooling around for blocks, then miles, pathetically unable to find home. She stopped and laid the bike down.

  To be different, she switched to roller skates, white with silver laces, back AGAIN with her same-age little Italian, German, Jewish and Hispanic friends, skating this time up and down every single concrete driveway in a weird smoothened end mixture of Unionville and Gahanna that she'd produced full-blown from her head, that was wilder and freer and more infinitely open than anyplace she'd ever seen before in her real and limited existence. All the usual people had changed and were normal and friendly to her. Hadn’t been exactly that way in real, unadulterated criticizable life, not for her…but the people were new and fascinating. They talked.

  And she raced through Empirical dreamscapes of tall houses, entering and leaving them…

  …in one she was in, and it was too small, she was alone, and a middle-aged man came in and visited, leaving and forgetting his bowler hat. He came back within a darkening day, it seemed, and gave her a children's music box. Strangely the music box came from out of his hat. It contained a special particular meaning, being constructed on the spot by the man, who had instantly disappeared, most gently, leaving the music box playing in her whitened hands. They look like other than hers. And…

  …still later she ran with several hillbillies, with pigtails and torn clothes, and cats, searching from hous
e to house, looking for some other hillbillies forever in, in each, and coming in right after they’d invisibly left. Never did she find the thing they were looking for, nothing but emptiness, drawing her fourth out of her soul. Empty house after empty house after empty house… She cried.

  Yet much later, as she drove a car up and down ninety-degree angle hills that slurped hot water off the dark black road, which rawboned off the ground, tossing her up and down, she was safely slurped at once in her car floating back to earth. Her mother and two cousins from Nevada were in the car with her. And she rode in the back; then her mother, riding bravely on a long trip, going nowhere, disappeared from the driver’s seat, and Caza had to climb over the seat to take the place. Or no more car! The cousins laughed at her and gave her a beer, in the dream.

  They drove, one time, to her ancient wizened grandmother’s tiny house, isolated and far away. And she ended up in the half-space attic, after calling her childhood friends, a little right boy and magical known girl, on the living phone to come over. Behind the terrible door, where the statues of Frankenstein, the, Mummy, Dracula, the Wolfman, and other such monsters were kept. Then, she and her faithful school-friends entered the gratelike silver screen hovering inches above the attic floor, with a NASA control panel on the inside, beyond which all in pastoral space of largesse was magic, colorful and full of monstrous dreamscape flora, trees, clouds, bushes, rivers, rainbow flowers and miles of exquisite greening scenery. That she was never allowed to enter…she abruptly woke instead. To pain.

  She prayed to God to send her longer dreams.

  One miraculous night she was visited by a Mexican ghost. At the very least, it was a distraction from the pain.

  It was one of those nights. Artie wasn't home; he was staying overnight on a job out in Cle Ellum, lasting for three days or longer. She expected to be alone at night for quite a while. Apparently, the ghost found out, for he visited almost immediately on the second night. Caza was in terrible lower back pain. She'd always thought her nightly day-dreaming would get out of hand one day. Apparitionally, something in her head was projecting to the outside and being unreasonable. It had taken this new, irrational form, now. Could she be getting tired from staying up ‘til dawn, watching the re-runs of old TV shows she’d seen and insipid late-nite comedy movies. Her Indian nature drew magic from the other place that more than met the

  TV shows…

  But, who was this? Somehow, light was involved. Greenish light…the thing, glowing emerald, was giving off enough light to see random details of the sloppier parts of the General Mess in their room. She hadn't bothered to pick up before Artie left. There was a glowing rainbow halo around a four-foot wide pile of laundry that had, as yet, not even been separated into colors. Caza was debating with herself the merits of not using bleach anymore.

  The Green Spirit, as Caza termed the apparition, was in outline buffoonish. He came on strongly, resembling Villa Sancho, but being paunchy, clownish and underage like Panza Pancho. Or something. He mildly resembled her third cousin Cosecho in fact, and in earnest, who had wildly frizzy Afro auburn hair. It, or he, glowed a grisly buggerish faded yellow, in bon chance to match the greenish aura he was casting about everywhere like a fly fisherman.

  Gunshots sounded, from galaxies far away, echoing all around him. He plainly wore two thin, worn-out and bulleted sparse gunbelts, peeling leather giving off faint aroma of cowhide, in a large X across his barrel of a porker chest. He threw them down, slapp-slapp, to the floor, and they rattled her bed ghostishly. He moved to her bed-side to hover over her, in an unangelic manner. And his gaze was filled with pity over her pain. But the eyes in the face were only a greenish blur.

  She was lying on her side, nervously watching. She hoped it would leave, soon.

  He gave off sparks of a greyish-blue light, like those revolving lamps that change tonally, tinging himself, as he came into clearer focus, with yellow and red, and emanating brilliantly orange warmth like a wood-burning stove. Caza shrank back, but was entranced with this probable sleepless ecstatic hippie fantasy; she was somehow causing this. In her mind. Memories of drugs. She reached up her right hand to falteringly touch the enigma and met only coolish air. It spoke.

  “I was called thence from death,” he said, in a dark, hollow and commanding voice in her head. "My name is irrevocably lost, destroyed forever. GOOD RIDDANCE. It does not matter. Yet I was mentioned before by a scholarly another, which disturbed my blessed fateful sleep, and now I am here lingering with you. It's because I wasn't allowed by God to pester that older white man, the one who read my story and care. He is unconscious and could not hear me. Thus he receives no such vision as me.

  “No, I must pester you, instead. Ask me not why, my lovely." So saying, he emitted several yellowish ghostly sparks, like a fourth-of-July pinwheel does, and then bent over to presumably kiss you on the lips, my dear,” and here he sparkled with a growing profuse menace, "you must come downstairs with me, and then he sparkled with a growing profuse menace, “you must come downstairs with me, and then you must stay there forever! " He began his descent. What a fast mover! Caza turned her face, and the ghostly kiss simply fell upon her shrinking right cheek. She felt the unwelcome memory of what were once human lips, and warm, brush softly against her shadowy face. Sparks hit and singed her pillow, sputtering brightly. "It is because you accidentally overheard my (indiscernible word) of the story…"

  “…where you got killed? Because you threatened the bartender with the gun?"

  “No, I only threatened to come after him. I was sadly unarmed. Is that unheard of? He did not know that. I never stood a chance. It is too late for me. Even so, as you can see, I am now wearing a useless gunbelt." The sparks subsided. "It is because the old man cared about me." His pinwheel was burning out. "I mustn't forget it when I leave." He reached down, the citrus-fruit arcane glow bending with him, to pick it up.

  “Are you sure you're really here with me?" Caza felt mounting fear grip her soundly, and her unstill and troublesome heart skipped three of four beats. Perhaps she would die after all, if she failed to chase away this demon being.

  “No. You are imaginativa. I am a vision. You are india, and so are subject to these flights of mental, ah, fantasia. If you want me to stay, ohhhhhhhhhh, I alone will exist for you, only for this moment, buttt if you want me to goooo…” He seemed to be reacting to a force somewhere behind him, drawing him away. He bowed.

  Poof! The response was instantaneous. Caza had done nothing but frown.

  She was too loyal to Artie to cut out on him with the ghost. Also, what could a ghost, even a Mexican one, do for her in bed? Nothing!

  She sighed, algo a su satisfaccion, and drew the covers over her chin. The ghost, se fue. Se acado, acabamiento, ya no hay mas. Se perdido, no more vision. Not without her contacts! She’s halluuu-cinated, or dreamed it. A quiet room awaited her further silvestre fantasias, u sueno. Eventually, there was sueno. Burp.

  Artie was back home in a week, with over nine hundred dollars, give or take beer money, in his bulging wallet. “Ya shoulda seed th’ fat freakin’ worksaht. We don’ clained hup fortah acres o’ stone daid trays. Clared hit all hout fee noo gruth, cuz thar wuz a chem’cal laik thet kilt all th’ trays. And then we washed hout th’ chem’cals with nitro-gen. We done seltzered everythang. Naw they kin plant.

  “Ah wuz escared we wauz bein’ expose ta hahm-full chem’cals, but th’ bosses slapped these wahld silvah seamless soots on hus, pertectin’ hus from th’ chem’cals. An ah ain’ got no ex-posures. Ah’m a-hokay!” pale but unfrail Artie declared, spreading his huge palms out in glee. “See?” He picked Caza up and spun her around a few times, rousingly fast and carousel-style. She was cheeringly roused.

  However, Caza remembered the glowing green man who said he'd been shot. But then, how was he alive? Was he a presage of doom for her Artie? Nothing seemed to be wrong with him, though, as Artie glowed with his usual health, strength and vigor. Or with booze, how can ya tell. Anyway. He told
Caza she too probably had a case of the Indian Vapors. “Mah work buddehs gat thet GOOD. Yooo needjer rest, mah dear li’l mama!”

  That same night, hours later, Caza shared with big blonde fur-bearing Artie what strange events that happened, that night that week ago, when she lay awake. All about el visitador. He thoughtfully went, “oooooooooOOOOOOOOOlllllll-ooooooooh. You saw an’ traw a GHOOOOST? How quixotico! He laughed, kissing her sweet-smelling hair. “I GOT TO do it early,” he said. “Now I get to watch everyone saying, ‘oh my God.’”

  The winner of the contest, Anthony Rodriguez, received a trip for two to Hawaii and four hours of exposure on…local TV, of course.

  --Quote from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, WA

  MR. AND MRS. BITTERS did not necessarily suffer from the unhappiest of marriages. What with one thing and another over years, they did have a leafless tendency to experience a general pulls of marital strife, kind of an “adjustment gestalt.” Love saw them deal with such wonderances.

  As in church, they mercilessly harmonized, no matter how much they arguably differed or speciously conflicted in opinion.

  A mysterious universal power seemed to weld their marriage into a solid piece, supporting perhaps the fact that Mrs. Bitters had forsaken her career in favor of following and depending upon and supporting only Ed’s. This didn't sit with her entirely well. Old age was imminent. She never did have to, well, work to get by and all, but now it was nearly too late not to do so. Small town syndrome had set in.

  They were a single unlost force, but were not a hurricane, nor a major juggernaut to be reckoned with. They were another lonesome duet, harking free in the boondocks. Sometimes they went bowling, fishing, picnicking in the parks.

  The Bitters had a daughter and two sons. All were originally from Chicago. But Sharone had been born healthy in Sandburg, Illinois. There were adoptive children involved, nieces, nephews, nubiles, Nubians, nimble elven 11 devils of the brighter souls who endeavor to win. At all costs, save DEATH! Well, if you save death, it makes it easier to be buried or cremated. However….if you save souls, maybe trading stamps are far better to redeem than people.

  Mrs. Bitters, secretly a Minister in the Universal Life Church, which involves partial oversight of the Entire Universe and some of the Cosmiverse when you’re “only” a wife, mother and ardent bridge player, enjoyed creating goodies for bake sales and for the church. She used to compete "against" Brenda Boole’s cookies with her strawberry pies and spicy meatloaf or fish casseroles.

  She often went on ten-mile walks by herself, sometimes with Ed’s company. He mercifully shrunk away from "suchlike childish excessive exercise." He said it made them no money, and he'd rather spend the time furthering his career and their mutual life interests, and their children's futures. So usually Emilia walked safely alone. She did get him out on almost Sundays. What a use a small town can be.

  Rama was the accredited 1990 Guinness Stat Book "World's Safest Small Town," with virtually no crime rate. Someone robbed the Unionville Hardware Store, fifteen miles straight out of town, well over three or four years ago. No one was injured and the police caught the guy. He was fat, short and sandy-haired, no one anybody knew. He was sent to jail and gone for ages.

  Mr. Bitter’s suit against the hospital received a lot of public attention. Raman-sized, being one of the few exciting happenstances occurring in this otherwise eventless, small-side-walked rural village. Some even thought it was largely unrelated to racial discrimination, that, Mr. Bitters’ being let go. "Maybe they were going to save on paying a pension to a recent hire," speculated Mr. Goneschlaw, rapidly talking in hand signs, Ameslan, to a reporter interviewing local citizens on their differing views of the case. She was from a small regional newspaper and she carefully and pointedly said she "Would be sure not to cause much trouble for the hospital," as the news wasn't going anywhere, "for now." That's what she said. "My editor told me to be honest, but nice."

  Perhaps fortunately for Mr. Goneschlaw, the interviewer’s Ameslan was somewhat limited, and thus she wasn't able (or didn’t care) to overstep the boundaries of taste and reason, either accidentally or on purpose, regarding Ed Bitters’ recent work problems. Robert Goneschlaw was disabled, after all, and a war veteran. Why pick on him? He knew Mr. Bitters casually, as a tavern acquaintance.

  Ed’s employers were clearly the ones to blame, if blame must be laid, on close appraisal of the situation; they had hired him with glad-handed good intentions, then proceeded to stab him in the back, summarily. They dug his job out from under him, slowly undermining it by taking away his hours and limiting his responsibilities and tasks. Definitely no way to go.

  One big wide-open morning, ready to be filled will work, Ed found a note on his desk left by someone other than his last-night itself. Really only a memo, announcing that Ed Bitters was being released "due to needed budgetary restraints." It was unsigned, which meant he promptly wadded it up. His salary was clearly budgeted-out each biennium, and reviewed semi-annually, and also was known by him "personally" to be well within the hospital's financial boundaries.

  He unwedded the note, flattening it on his desktop. Nothing could be pointed to as a probable act of racial discrimination, but Ed felt he was doing a capable job, accomplishing the task for which he'd been hired, and the sudden diminishment of his jobs and the unexpected firing could only point to something at least as unreasonable.

  He was popular in the department and did more than his share of allotted work, regularly.

  Ed chanted friendlily with any coworker each morning when the business section of the hospital opened, discovering no problems and locating solutions. He cared deeply about people's personal struggles, and meticulously coordinated the overall supply of hospital resources; he checked frequently to be sure each wing of all the floors was being stocked with each of the necessary linen supplies. He knew every person's full name in the business section and how to counsel each position. He'd even been checking with the department head to coordinate writing a proposal to see if the hospital could afford to put in a hot-air hand dryer, to save paper, in each floors restrooms.

  Ed was that bedrock-solid of a department super. Or so he thought. Not the kind of person you’d want to see let go of for no reason. He took care of every person under him. He dreamed up new goals, new tasks to be tackled and accomplished. Far as he could tell, no reason was the reason he was being let go.

  “It hurts,” he told Emilia over dinner in their two-bedroom home, a white American colonial house with light green and yellow trim. It was dusty and needed repainting; Ed was contemplating hiring Artie and Gabe to do it. Very very quiet little neighborhood, in some beautiful backwoods country. "I haven't done a single bad turn in there that I know of. You know that I may have. But I don't see how. I helped Ridgeview save $400,000 on last year's budget. This is out of the clear blue sky; for the last year or so things were odd, but I thought we'd work things out. At worst I expected some salary cuts. As yet, we have a laugh or two on them, if they're expecting we’re ruined.

  “We own stocks and bonds, thousands of dollars’ worth, and property in three places outside of town. As you know, we’re living in the house you bought, m’dear, with our property investments from the fifties, when prices were low. We’re fixed great and it's more the thought than the actual petty larceny that's a concern for us. Our kids are grown and our daughter’s a highly-paid nurse. They’ve attacked the wrong people.”

  Perhaps the employment laws would work, and the legal system would help them stop this obsequious train in its non-productive tracks. But Ed didn’t want to hurt Ridgeview too soundly. It was the only local hospital, it was the biggest going concern in their town, and he and the missus liked to hear.

  “What can I say, they should fear for themselves? Ridgeview is excellent at treating patients. I’m sure I’m not scared of going there m’self, except for after the fur has been discovered. I wonder how the personnel will react. Anyway, I hate to get people’s worst sentiments
aroused. Never could understand about weirdo groundless grudges, anyhoo.”

  “Me, too,” histrionically, but meaningfully, sighed Mrs. Bitters. She paused, and took a minute to reflect on the vagaries of life. She began more heavily. Without a single rattle.

  “But honey, I have an idea. You won’t like it, immerhin.”

  “I’m always made out of complex moral ears. What, darling?”

  “What if we become Christian Scientists? They believe in spiritual healing, and don't allow invasive surgical procedures and medications."

  Ed appeared very interested. He simply loved sitting back and listening to Emilia’ beautiful, still sexy and young voice.

  “I know people who lived to be 96 without taking any medications or having any intriguingly invasive surgery—one lady converted after they botched her back surgery and crippled her--or even having so much as chiropracty or herbal therapy done. It's similar to the alternative medical movement. You're forced to exercise and keep physically fit, I guess, until you begin to suffer and die naturally. If you do! A man who's a Christian Scientist told me he doesn't even exercise. He rests, keeps his mind fed spiritually, and eats only healthy foods. He’s 74 years old and walking tall. I guess I could still have a chocolate coffee every so often, ja?”

  She grinned sinfully behind her hand, like a Japanese lady holding a brown fan.

  “You certainly do like your treat, my lady. Do you want me to fetch you the can?" Emilia thought, the only thing I don't want about this sweetheart of mine is he snores and whistles after mid-night sometimes. Watch him spring right upwards to make me a coffee drink! Limber as a mallard.

  “We wouldn't ever have to haunt their darned hospital again, and there are statistics the CS people have postulating we might show them and put in another thirty or forty years. Or longer…

  “You depend solely on prayer, good thoughts, and ideas about healing, through Christ. It doesn't sound so bad as all that…" She looked at him and tsked, doubtfully. "I’d hate to give up completely on medicine."

  “Yes, honey, agreed, but I really don't like what they're doing to me, personally, in this case." Ed almost began drifting away, momentarily, thinking heavily in his own way about Emilia’s possible conversion to a CS lifestyle being the motivating, universalized Karmic force behind his job loss. ‘Something else, wouldn't it be, if it was really God's will, drawing them to natural healing instead of wasteful expensive surgeries. Who likes getting cut? Not I, nor her. But he still didn't like the unscrupulous actions that had hurt his feelings and his good job standing. He liked to work and to be recognized for the terrific employee that he was. He was very angry.

  “Maybe God will draw us there, Emilia, but for now I believe I will fight this case." “Dear Ed, don't think for a moment I was trying to distract you! I never would, ever. You can count on all my support." Mrs. Bitters accepted the proferred cup of instant coffee, her favorite blend. “Tell me what to do, I’ll do it immediately!" she cried. "But as I was investigating CS lately, I thought I would offer it up to you as an alternative suggestion against patronizing that businesslike haven of the establishment that is giving you such a hard time. Obviously, they truly are in it solely to make money, especially if they are stealing your benefits, those crooks!"

  “No way, highway brigands is more like it."

  “Armed robbers is the way I’d say it."

  “Indeed! Mercenaries, all! Oh, well.”

  Mr. Bitters looked at his wife with deep affection, stroking her pretty salted and peppered hair with the backs of his fingers, putting it right, and arose from the table slowly, with a creaky but elegant dignity.

  “I have to go to bed within this hour, my sweet. It's growing late, and it's terribly dark outside." He yawned and stretched, a think man, with legs like stilts and long terrible arms that gently fell down to his sides. “Gonna meet the lawyers tomorrow and iron out current technicalities.

  “At seven o’clock. They makes you rise an’ shine (yawwwwwn), those legal dudes.” Emilia too arose, joining her loving husband. They left for bed together, one slowly but surely after another, out of the narrow pantry entryway.

  (Fade the kitchen lights, mostly the overhead and two side-lights of a much lower strength, to a single, centered pinpoint of wavering yellow light hovering, middle-of-the-air phosphorescently, emanating from the plastic fixture hanging three feet above and directly over the polished deep brown wooden table. In the air stayed an echo of the scraping of metal chair legs. God made that moment before the light vanishes.

  Thank you. Wink it out. Ping!