Randall Zaphtig took his daughter Penelope by the hand and led her from the car. They were on a long roadtrip from his ex-wife’s (Penelope’s mother) funeral back to his home in Oklahoma. He had decided not to fly, thinking that the drive would give him time to get reacquainted with his daughter before introducing her to his new wife – her new mother – for the first time. The trip was turning out to be quiet and even more awkward than he had been afraid it would be. He was prepared for tears, but not for the withdrawn, silent, robot-like waif that his daughter had become.
On a whim, Randall left the Interstate at the New Calebtown exit. He turned off almost by habit – he had lived in New Calebtown for his first three years out of school and had worked in the Caleb Brother’s hat factory there as a production engineer.
For some reason, unknown even to him, he had a strong desire to show her the factory he had once worked in. He drove to the plant parking lot by reflex memory but when they both climbed out of the car he saw that the building was no more. All that was left was the cracked parking lot, with mean looking weeds starting to poke up through the fault lines in the asphalt.
Still he took Penelope’s hand and together they walked across to the broken lines of concrete footings that outlined where the factory used to be. Looking down at the parking lot next to that he saw peeling, faded, yet still visible orange lines stenciled in and over the almost invisible now yellow parking demarcations and a strong, long forgotten memory came flooding back, causing him to stumble a little.
The orange lines were from the forklift rodeo. The men in the shipping department took great pride in their ability to move undamaged product out of the door quickly and a great part of that was their ability to drive their forklifts. These were country boys and men, farmers, that had grown up driving trucks and farm equipment not long after they had shed their diapers. Industrial and agricultural machines were in their blood – hydraulic fluid, lubricating grease, and diesel fuel moved under their skin. Driving a forklift at the plant was nothing more than a further fulfilling of their destiny.
The highpoint of their year was the forklift rodeo. There were local, county, and finally State competitions and it was a sad year when somebody from Caleb Brother’s did not place high in the State Finals. A handful had won the competition over the decades and their trophies were displayed proudly in a glass case at the entrance to the office row.
A young hotshot out of college – Randall was expected to referee the factory rodeo. The orange lines were painted on the lot to the exact specifications of the annual contest. They were supplemented by piles of wooden pallets in strategically placed locations to form an obstacle course the contestants were expected to navigate with the heavy trucks, moving forward and backward, fast and slow, picking up, moving and dropping loads according to strict rules and regulations.
Randall had to stand on the dock over the aisle where a contestant would enter with a pallet on his forks, drop the pallet, back out, then turn around, re-inter and retrieve the pallet. He had a checksheet where he would note the proper use of the horn, back-up signal, and whether the driver would turn his head and look for oncoming traffic. He would note the angle of the forks when picking up or lowering, and the height of the forks when moving naked.
There were dozens of details that had to be adhered to and Randall used his checklist to grade the contestants. They would argue later over over whether their heads had turned or if they had looked closely enough or moved too fast backing out. In order to be victorious in the contests, there had to be practice and Randall was assigned to help out with this an hour a day for the month leading up to the Rodeo.
He hated standing out there for hours in the heat watching those men riding the smoke-belching machines, making little tick marks on his forms, and having to argue over every little detail. The men would rib him, especially teasing him endlessly over the fact that he couldn’t do what they did every day. It was humiliating.
Now, decades later, he wondered what happened to those men when the plant closed down. They all had families – sometimes three generations had worked there. Men like that had few options. There wasn’t anything else in New Calebtown for them. Randall had no idea how their families could survive.
He was pulled out of his sad reverie by his daughter. She had been walking along the cracks in the pavement and looking at the harsh spiny nettles that were fighting their way up. A few of them were blooming and she had carefully pulled the flowers off of the sharp stems.
“Here, Daddy, for you,” Penelope said, handing him the bunch of surprisingly colorful blossoms. He held them to his face and was surprised at how sweet they smelled.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said to his little girl, “We’ve still got a ways to go.”
When I was riding the DART train Friday night, I saw a poem up on the wall at the Lover’s Lane train station. I couldn’t see if clearly through the windows but it was a sort of list of synonyms for Osage Orange trees (in Texas, they are usually called Bois D’ Arc). There are ubiquitous trees across the middle of the country – they were planted by the millions in hedgerows after the horror of the dustbowl in the thirties to act as a barrier to the wind.
The land used to be divided into neat square mile parcels by these rows of trees. Now, a lot of the hedges are being torn out to get the last square inch of production out of the land.
These trees are fast-growing and scraggly, but thick and strong. They have these weird inedible green fruit that is covered in brain-like convolutions. I thought about the hedges and the trees and their relationship to the land and the people that live there and came up with this little snippet – maybe a story first draft, maybe not.
Osage Orange
Sam spent a lot of time over the summer with his friend Jim. Even though Jim’s father worked at the same advertising firm as Sam’s dad – he lived out in the country in a farmhouse he was leasing. Sam figured out that Jim’s father fancied himself a man of the earth and would wear denim overalls, dirty workboots, and an old weather faded straw hat on the weekends, though he would trade that for an Italian wool suit on workdays and Sam had never seen him do any actual farmwork.
Jim had a big family, with four sisters that were always out and around riding their horses and trying to drive Jim and Sam crazy. Sam was an only child and Jim’s mother would always ask him how his parents could stand being alone. Sam replied with a shrug, but he always thought his parents seemed glad to get rid of him for a week or two out at the farm. They acted like they were about to go on vacation.
Back then, people only had one television per family. Sam’s house had a plastic black and white in the kitchen with silver squares of foil folded around the rabbit ears. At Jim’s farm, they had to put up a big antenna on a pole to get reception out there, but they had a big new color set in a glossy wooden cabinet right in the middle of the living room.
Sam loved Saturday Night at the Movies at Jim’s house. The whole brood would pack into the living room and watch the movie of the week together. Somewhere in the middle of the show a Coca-Cola commercial would come on and Jim’s mother would heave herself up from the couch and waddle into the kitchen to fetch a cold bottle from the refrigerator. She would always do this when a Coca-Cola commercial would come on and had no idea why she was suddenly thirsty.
Jim and Sam would laugh and she would give them a perplexed stare but they never told her what was so funny.
Though Jim’s father only rented the farm house and the outbuildings, the kids pretty much had the run of the farmland in that whole corner of the county. Jim’s sisters would wander with their horses while Sam and Jim would hike. Over a steep ridge to the south of the farm was a big farm tank – a pond larger than most which dotted the country. The water was an opaque green and always contaminated by the cattle that strolled over to drink, but after a short time they spent getting used to the idea, Sam and Jim would swim in the pond, especially on the hot summer afternoons when the water was a welcome respite from the sun and various biting bugs. The bottom was soft mud and would bubble and stink when they walked through it but the water was surprisingly deep and kept cool even on the hottest stretches of summer.
Exploring further they crossed another, even higher and steeper ridge and discovered a construction crew digging out a hedge row of Osage Orange trees.
“They’re going to put in a subdevelopment here. My dad told me,” Jim said.
“That’s cool.”
“No it’s not, my dad says the whole city will grow out this far and swallow up all the farms and land and we’ll have to move farther out.”
Sam thought that would take a long time, but he kept his opinions to himself.
One day, walking up on the construction, the boys found a large pile of wood from the felled threes. The work crew had cut up the hedge and arranged the wood so that it could be hauled off easily. The big trunks were piled in a giant heap next to the big balls of roots, but off to the side the large branches were separated and cut into lengths.
“Hey, Sam, look at this!” Jim said, excited, “We can haul these back to the pond and built a raft.”
“Isn’t that stealing?”
“Nope, they’re going to have to haul this off or burn it anyway, we can take what we want.”
The boys ran back to the farm and returned with rope, their hatchets, and a bow saw. They made rope harnesses and dragged the wood over the ridge and down to their pond. They picked straight pieces but took some big ones. The wood was very heavy, orange in color, and tough. These were the hottest days of summer, the sun beating down. The boys worked together to move their burden, roped in tandem to the logs. Shirtless, they sweated until the salt burned their eyes and with each load completed they would dive into the pond to rinse and cool off.
All day Saturday and Sunday they hauled wood. They wanted this done before the work crew came back on Monday. Jim didn’t think they were stealing anything, but he didn’t want to have to answer any questions.
The rest of the week they worked cutting the logs. The logs they hauled were at least twice as long as they needed so every one had to be cut in half. The Osage Orange hedgeapple wood was strong as steel and hard as fint. Their little Boy Scout Hatchets would skip off the wood and only flake off little splinters with each blow – no matter how sharp they honed the edges. Their bow saw worked a little better and the boys took turn sawing until their hands were covered in blisters.
“This is too much work,” Sam said. “We need a different kind of wood.”
“No, this stuff is like iron, think of how strong the raft will be. It will last forever.”
Sam thought then of the two of them poling back and forth across the pond in their raft, and the image made him smile and gave him the motivation to ignore the pain in his palm and go back to sawing with his blister-covered hands.
After three days of sawing they began lashing the logs together, using the ropes left over from the harnesses they had fashioned the week before. In the movies it had always looked easy to lash together a raft, but they struggled with it. They had to revise their design several times, until they realized the importance of diagonal bracing in keeping their raft from collapsing sideways.
Finally, on Saturday, a full week after they had started, they finished their raft. It wasn’t as beautiful as the one they had filled their minds with, but they were very proud of the amount of work they had put into their creation. The sun was already touching the horizon when they decided to launch the raft.
“Well get it into the water tonight, then come out tomorrow and sail it around,” Jim said.
The two of them took up their places on either side of the raft. They had saved two of the smallest and straightest logs to use as a skid to slide the raft down into the water. Still, it was amazingly heavey and hard to move. The boys reached down deep and summoned up their last drops of adrenaline, closed their eyes, and shoved as hard as they could, working together.
Finally, somehow, the raft slid, gaining speed as it moved down into the green mucky water. With a healthy splash it freed itself from the skid and launched out over the pond. In his young mind, Sam saw a mighty ship leaving the quays and floating out onto the sea. With their feet sinking into the mud in the shallow water at the shore the boys gave a last loud spontaneous simultaneous shout and pushed the raft out towards the center of the pond, already thinking of swimming out there and climbing aboard and enjoying their work as the sun set orange in the west.
The raft moved out and sank like a rock.
“Of course it did,” Jim’s father told the two dejected boys after they had trudged home, “Osage Orange is the hardest, heaviest wood there is, that’s why they use those trees for hedgerows. Especially when it’s fresh and wet, it’s heavier than water.”
He let out a grownup laugh, but the boys didn’t think it was very funny.
Sam was going to go home in two days. He had thought of calling his parents and asking to stay another week. He had wanted to spend it floating around the pond on the raft. Now, though he didn’t want to stay. The boys didn’t hike to the pond the next day like they always did. They even let Jim’s sisters ride them around on the back of their horses, which seemed to make them happy, though Sam had trouble concealing the fact that he was actually scared of the horses.
The next summer, Sam came out to the farm for a few days. Sitting in the back seat while his parents drove him out there, he saw the yellow pine two by fours they were using to build the new homes where the hedgerow used to be. They were in perfect rows and squares, all exactly the same. Jim and Sam talked about walking out there to explore the half built houses, they knew they would have to go by the pond on the way and they couldn’t do that.
Sam kept thinking about the raft slowly rotting into that foul mud at the bottom of the pond and called his parents to come get him two days early. Jim understood this was for the best, and his mother assumed wrongly that Sam for some reason finally missed his own family.
Go ahead – read it now. It’s not very long – it won’t take up much time.
I read this story in college. For a chemist, I took a lot of literature classes. Most of them were honors level courses – and looking back, I didn’t get much out of them. They were very intellectual and were interested in ferreting out symbolism and deconstructing the text… and now, decades later, I realize they completely missed the point of what we were reading. My fiction writing classes were worse than useless; they set my writing ability back so far I’m only now, in my fifties, beginning to unlearn the false dreck violently stuffed into my young head.
After having exhausted my allotted supply of honors courses, I tacked on an ordinary English class – The Art of the Short Story. Basically, we cranked through a textbook that contained one hundred classic stories and wrote three papers or so a week. Our instructor was intimidated by the classroom setting so we met in a bar, talking about literature while we drank cheap yellow 3.2 beer from schooners, listening to each other’s conversation, and watching rivulets of condensation run down the thick glass.
This was a revelation. There was none of the vicious oneupmanship of the honors classes or the viscous boredom of the scholarship. It was true, lively banter where everyone was able to bring a different point of view along with some fresh ideas.
I’m sure I wrote an essay on A&P, but don’t remember what my angle was. I was working at a gas station over break back then and I remember really liking the paragraph where Updike writes about the sounds an old-fashioned cash register makes. He had it exactly right.
I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT — it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)”-the splat being the drawer flying out.
The other day, after all these years, I discovered a short film version of the story. You should be able to watch it at this link – courtesy of SPIKE TV of all things:
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I stumbled across this short looking up information on the new Three Stooges Movie. The guy in the short will play Larry in the Stooges movie, and, of course, you remember the actress that plays the girl, Queenie, from Road Trip.
I’m glad that they made this short. I am very glad I saw it. However, like any time a visual representation is made about a piece of literature that was important to you, I’m disappointed at some of the changes they made in the presentation.
The video doesn’t really fit my impression of the story… I think it’s the cutsie music. Or maybe the Ipswich accents.
The short story is edgier than the video suggests.
I didn’t like the scene where he imagines meeting Queenie at the party (though I suppose they had to pad it out somehow). It makes the story more of a romance fantasy, or a poor boy/rich girl story… which it is not. It is a much more fundamental conflict at work here – an elemental question of values.
And worst of all, all though the short has no qualms about presenting the protagonist’s internal dialog in voice over, it leaves out the last, most powerful bit. I’m talking about the last half of the last sentence of the story. The internal dialog that contains the horror of the story. The voice over says his stomach fell, but it doesn’t say why.
The story does.
I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
“how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” I still remember reading these words in college and the fear that they struck in me.
I was playing half the games. I’d play the first half, and then I’d sit down so that Wilma could get her turn. Wilma was a big girl; sort of shapeless. Nobody else could ever remember her name. I don’t know if she was a little slow in the head, or maybe only really, really, shy. At our age there isn’t much difference between the two. I don’t know why she played soccer. Probably her parents made her – like most of us. During the games she never even kicked the ball. She would stand around looking miserable, usually with her arms crossed. I guess it should have made me mad that I had to sit on the bench while she stood out there, useless, but I didn’t care. That’s probably why the coach always made me sit instead of any of the other girls.
You see, this was a recreational league. The rules said that everybody got to play at least half of the game, no matter what. Our team really sucked. All the girls that were any good had left a year earlier – they had gone off to play in the select leagues. That is where the teams get to choose who they wanted and the girls’ parents paid thousands of dollars so they could practice every day and go to tournaments in Europe and stuff like that. That’s not what we did. We were the girls nobody wanted.
We played on terrible fields in some rundown city park in some scary neighborhood. The girls on the select teams got the good fields, the ones with lights and smooth, level, grass.
The weather was always awful. It would be cold and rainy at first, then in the summer it would be so hot you couldn’t even think straight. The ground would dry out and split open like a tomato in the sun. There would be these big cracks and if you stepped in one, even if you didn’t break your ankle, all these crickets would come swarming out. It was really gross.
One game, the first one of the spring season, was really cold. It had been raining for days, the field was a muddy mess and the temperature wasn’t much above freezing. There was this big brown puddle in one corner of the field and Brenda tried to kick the ball when she slipped and fell in. It was weird – she completely disappeared. Who knows how deep that puddle was but for a few seconds there was no Brenda, only that brown water. Suddenly she came out, shooting up and out like a rocket. Brenda was a tough girl, never took anything from anybody, but she came out of that cold water crying like a baby. Her mother wrapped her in a blanket and took her away sobbing. She went home.
Some of the girls teased her about it the next week, but I didn’t like the look of that cold brown water and I knew how she felt.
Our coach last year, coach Barracha, would make us roll around in the mud before the games. He said, “I don’t want you girls afraid to get your uniforms muddy.” He had named the team River Plate. The other girls couldn’t understand why we were named after a plate. It seemed like an odd name to me too, but Coach Barracha was from Uruguay and I found that was the name of a famous river, and soccer team, from down there, so I guess that was OK. Coach Barracha was way too serious for our team. We lost every game and only scored two goals all season. At first he would get madder and madder every week until he finally gave up. When the season ended he didn’t even come to the Pizza party.
I was happy because I figured with no coach, there would be no team and I wouldn’t have to play this year. But then all the parents got together and convinced Eleanor’s Dad, Mr. Wiggins, to be the coach. That was terrible. Mr. Wiggins, like Eleanor, to tell you the truth, is kind of crazy. He renamed the team The Blue Squealers, which has to be the most embarrassing thing in the world. After giving us that terrible name, he pretty much did nothing. I guess that was all right; we weren’t going to get any better no matter what he did, and I guess he figured he might as well cut his losses.
With all the good players going to the select teams you would think that the other teams in our recreational league would suck as much as we did but no such luck. You see there were all these poor kids, these Mexican girls, who couldn’t afford to join the select league but still they lived for soccer. Their teams had Spanish names with the word futbol in them. They would beat the crap out of us, week after week.
Actually, when I was setting on the bench in the second half of these games I like to watch some of these girls play, even when they were thrashing my team. A lot of them were just small and fast and relentless, swarming and pushing, but a few were real artists. They could run and move and make the ball spin this way and that without even looking at it. Their game was a thing of beauty and for a second you could forget that you were sitting on a splintering bench in a run-down park watching kids trying to give a damn about a game that meant nothing.
Believe it or not, that year we had a good player. Really, her name was Missy Higgins. She was tall and fast and she said she had been playing soccer since, “I was in diapers.” Missy had been on a select team but now was faced with the humiliation of playing with us.
The girls talked about her all the time when she wasn’t around. They all said that she had been kicked off her select team because she had been caught drinking with some college boys while they were out of town on a tournament. That seemed to make sense to me, but I listen to the parents talk when I sit on the bench and I heard her mother say she had to quit select soccer because was having knee problems after a growth spurt and needed to get stronger before she could try it again.
At first I thought this was an excuse, because her parents must have been ashamed because of the drinking, but I watched her play and even though she was really good, a ten times better player than anyone else on the team, she was obviously in pain. She would grimace and groan, though nobody other than me seemed to notice. One game, she tried to make a sharp cut right in front of me on the bench, to keep the ball from rolling out of bounds, and her knees gave out and she tumbled onto the ground. I heard her mutter, “I’m a cripple,” as she pulled herself back up.
You would think that our team would be good with a girl like that but it didn’t really make any difference. First of all, soccer isn’t that kind of a sport. One player can’t make up for a whole team of suck. None of us could ever really make the ball go where we wanted it to. When we kicked it the ball would go squirting off somewhere else, usually spinning like crazy. It was kind of fun, trying to guess where the thing was going to end up. So we couldn’t actually pass the ball to Missy, even though we wanted her to have it and we tried all the time.
It didn’t take the other teams long to figure it out too. The other coaches would put two girls on Missy all the time, usually one big girl pushing on her from behind and a little quick one darting around in front. It must have been really frustrating for Missy, especially since that meant somebody else didn’t have anyone defending them, but good luck with that. When Wilma was playing the other teams would ignore her completely.
Missy tried really hard on defense, too, but it didn’t do much good. If the other team had the ball they would always kick it wherever Missy wasn’t at.
Still, Missy would usually score one goal almost every game. I remember her getting the ball and kicking a spinning arching shot that bent around the other team and sneaked in a top corner of the goal. The goal keeper stood there with her mouth hanging open. It was a thing of beauty.
In the end, though, all Missy could do is get us so we would lose, say, seven to one,
The time I sat on the bench I’d watch the girls on the other team, I’d watch Missy, and I’d watch the parents – our parents and the ones on the other team. Every game they would come trooping out of their trucks lugging their folding chairs and line up along the field. The other teams’ parents would bring air horns or wooden clacker things to make noise to cheer on their girls. They would jump up and yell at the referees and cheer for their kids. Our parents looked like they were waiting to get dental work done. They would clap halfheartedly at the beginning of the game but once the inevitable slaughter began they would go calm.
Sometimes, I would spot a little metal flask moving between some of the parents. Coach Wiggins hardly ever said a thing, though he would at least stand and pace through the game. He looked lost. I think I saw Brenda’s dad pass him that little flask once or twice, but I’m not really sure about that.
Wilma’s stepmother brought her to the games. Since Wilma played while I sat, I could watch her. I thought that her stepmother would at least watch or cheer a little, but she never did. She was a lawyer and would talk on her bright red cellphone or text away on her little Blackberry during the whole game. Some times she would do both; wedge her phone against her shoulder under her ear while she texted away with both thumbs.
Finally, it was the last game of the season. It was against the other team from the suburbs. They were called the DeeFeeters and they sucked almost as much as we did, though you would never know it from how cool they thought they were and how loud their parents would yell. They even had a father that would bring this big apparatus that had a tripod and a pole that he would crank up into the sky with a video camera on top. He had to film every minute like it was the Super Bowl or something. I hated those people.
Like I said, though, that team sucked almost as much as we did and even though they had scored two quick goals, they must have got lazy and Missy scored a goal and then Brenda tried to kick a pass and it spun and wobbled and bounced into the goal. The game was almost over and I was sitting on the bench getting excited that if we were lucky we might get out of there with a tie. You can have ties in soccer and it would be cool to not lose for once.
Well, there were only a couple minutes left and Missy was trying really hard and the other team kicked it past the line so we had a corner kick. Missy always took the corner kicks; she was the only one that could kick the ball all the way to in front of the goal. Missy went out and set everything up, Coach Wiggins always let her; she knew lots more than he did about what to do and what was going on.
From the bench I watched her take Wilma by the arm and move her away from everybody else, far away from where the ball sat by the little flag in the corner. It sort of made me mad; it looked like Missy was moving Wilma away from the action so she couldn’t screw anything up more than it already was. This wasn’t fair, no matter how bad and weird Wilma was she still deserved to be in the middle of things. It was strange though, nobody else was paying attention, they were all moving around and pushing against each other but I saw Missy saying something to Wilma, whispering in her ear. She was shorter and had to stand on her tip toes to get her lips close to Wilma’s ear.
Then Missy took Wilma’s shoulders and moved her – sort of almost pointing her in a certain direction, and then pulled her crossed arms down and making her hold them down at her sides. Then Missy walked across to the corner and took her kick.
I had noticed all year that Missy was getting stronger and her knees were hurting her less as the weeks went by. She ran up and kicked the crap out of that ball.
The kick arced up like a rainbow, going higher and farther that anyone had guessed, flying completely over the bunch of girls shoving at each other in front of the goal. It came curving down and, like a sniper shot, hit Wilma square in the chest. It fell to the ground right in front of her and for a split second Wilma stood there petrified, staring at the ball, but then she seemed to shake for an instant and stepped forward and kicked the thing.
Of course, nobody was anywhere near her and the goalie was completely out of position so the ball bounced a couple time and ran up against the back of the net. Everyone looked stunned except Missy who was jumping up and down and screaming. I couldn’t believe it, she knew exactly what she was going to do and she did it… perfectly.
I turned on the bench to Wilma’s stepmother, who hadn’t seen a thing. She was looking away and was talking into her phone.
“Um, Mrs…. Um… Wilma’s Mom?” I didn’t know her last name. “Wilma just scored a goal.”
She said something sharp into the phone, snapped it closed and then frowned and turned to me, “Oh God! What has she done now?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. It was a good thing. She scored a goal. I’m afraid you missed it.”
She stood there with her mouth hanging open, holding her phone in one hand and her Blackberry in the other, turning and staring at all the girls jumping and hugging Wilma in a big clump. I don’t think she ever really figured out what happened.
It would be a better story, I guess; if we had gone ahead and won the game, that Wilma had kicked the winning goal in our only victory. I’m afraid, though, there was too much time left and the goal really pissed the other team off and they scored three goals in the last five minutes and we lost five to three. I don’t care though, that goal was a thing of beauty.
I will always remember watching that goal from the bench. I think I would rather watch something like that than actually score an ordinary goal myself. It’s good to know that every now and then there is a perfect thing in this world. Also, as long as I live, I’ll think about and wonder what Missy said to Wilma when she whispered to her, standing there holding her shoulders, right before she kicked the corner. I wish I knew; I wish I had heard it.
That was my last soccer game. After the season I thought about what would be the best time to hit them up and one afternoon, when they were in a good mood, I went to my parents and begged them not to make me play another season. They went along with it, but I had to promise to sign up for band next year.
I have to be careful with what I’m reading. It influences what I write. I distort what comes out of my pen by what goes in my eyes.
Lately, I’ve been reading too much lurid pulp fiction.
Whip Hand
W. Franklin Sanders is a pen name for Charles Willeford… Ebook Here. Whip Hand was also published under the title, Deliver me from Dallas. In this heat… I know the feeling.
I needed something to take to our writing group, so I punched up a writing prompt generator and what came up was: Nonchalantly she reached into the other woman’s handbag and whipped out her purse.
Using this prompt, I wrote out a quick four pages…. this is what I came up with, Raw First Draft.
Pickpocket
The book she had read was nothing more than a pamphlet, printed long ago in blue mimeograph ink on office paper and crudely stapled into a small, rough book form. Loralee remembered the smell of fresh mimeo from grade school. The pamphlet paper was brittle, the blue fading, and crisscrossed with yellowed cellophane tape repairs but it was all still readable.
Loralee had bought the pamphlet at a strange little bookstore she had stumbled into while on a trip to a business conference in New Orleans.
Her boss had called and set up a meeting on the second day of the conference in a private hotel room. It seemed a little odd to Loralee, but she figured there was a new program to launch or some reorganization she had to help smooth over.
Instead she was laid off.
“Well,” her boss said, “At least you have two more days in New Orleans to enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about the meetings; and your hotel is paid for.” Her face seemed to creak as she forced out a frightening smile.
Thanks a lot.
Loralee spent the rest of the afternoon at the hotel bar, hitting it hard, charging the tab to her room. But when the meetings finished and she saw her coworkers returning to the lobby, gathered into conversational clots like old spilled blood, she couldn’t stand it and staggered back up to her room. As soon as she entered, she had to tumble into the bathroom and barely had the time to stick her head into the toilet before she heaved and puked up what seemed like a lot more than she had drank that afternoon – which was a lot. She continued to convulse even after she was empty until her diaphragm ached.
Finally spent, she tumbled onto the sagging hotel bed and fell into an uneasy sleep full of terrifying dreams.
When she awoke she saw a half-light splayed across the sheer curtains of the room. The digital clock had six fifteen glowing in red numbers. Loralee didn’t know if it was AM or PM and curled on the bed, staring at the curtains until she was sure that it was getting lighter, rather than darker. Six AM it was.
Hungover, wearing sunglasses despite the overcast sky, Loralee stumbled the uneven brick and cracked concrete of the French Quarter looking for… she didn’t really know. As she walked she chanted, “Laid Off – Let Go – Laid Off – Let Go” over and over like a Mantra. Almost everything was closed this early in the morning, street sweepers pushed filthy piles of cups, bottles, and beads down the middle of the street. Each block seemed to have an unconscious person still snoozing up against a building or beside a stoop. The smell of last night’s old beer and piss hovered over the still air like a filthy umbrella.
Finally she spotted the open door of the old bookstore. It actually opened out into an alley, with the entrance barely visible around the corner from the sidewalk. The alley had a rusty streetsign – the letters were faded, but it was barely legible, “Rue Deday.” A red neon light glowed PEN – the “O” was burned out. Without knowing why, Loralee turned the corner and went in.
The stacks smelt like old mold. Loralee thought that most used bookstores were musty like that – but this was one step beyond. Maybe it was just New Orleans, maybe the French Quarter, maybe the ghost of Katrina. There was a lot of evil old water around.
The books were not marked, no prices. Loralee wanted to stick it to her company so she asked the ancient, bent proprietor, “What’s the most expensive shit you got.”
He did not flinch – simply peered over his thick glasses at her with eyes that were surprisingly bright and clear for someone of his age – otherwise he looked to have one foot in the grave. “Well, dear, we have a drawer of very expensive shit right here.” He pulled a massive key chain off a nail by the register and removed a padlock from a small metal filing cabinet.
The cabinet was full of old manila folders, each marked across the front with a scrawled red marker. The marker showed various prices – all over one hundred dollars each. The folders contained various bits of paper: single yellowing crumpled sheets, folded maps, handwritten notes.
Only one folder had anything that was thicker that a few sheets. That one had a folded and stapled booklet with the label, “How to be a Pickpocket, Guaranteed!”
The price on the pamphlet was one hundred and twenty five dollars – which seemed really steep, but Loralee still had her company credit card. Somehow, her boss had neglected to confiscate it in her “exit interview.” She knew it would be deactivated any minute and wanted to waste anything still left in the account.
“I’ll take this one,” she said to the old man. “Here charge this card,” she said as she extended her company card for the last time.
Back home she fell into a languid life of half-hearted job searching. She ventured out to a big warehouse store and bought a case of frozen fried chicken dinners and several of ice cream. She would send out enough letters and resumes, apply online when she could, enough to keep an unemployment check coming, but her heart wasn’t in it.
One thing that did interest her was the old pamphlet she had stuck her company with back in New Orleans. For something so short it was surprisingly complex. She kept noticing something new every time she picked it up.
Different paragraphs were written in different styles, all jumbled together. Some were in a modern, hip, joking style, talking about “Stealing for Dummies,” and such. Others were in an arcane style, full of old-fashioned spellings and extinct phrases. The text seemed to be one third cold, dry instruction, one third psychology lessons on how a mark thinks and what he will and won’t notice, and one third strange incantations designed, as the pamphlet said, “To reste the spirit and calme the blood.”
She read and re-read the thing. When she would put it down to try and watch TV or to get something to eat, she would feel it growing in her mind until her hands would actually quiver and itch for the feel of its aged paper between her fingers.
Some of the pages contained simple exercises meant to improve dexterity and quickness. She set up some little stations around her apartment. Everything was laid out exactly as the pamphlet called for, bits of cloth, small metal weights (she used some old hexagonal steel nuts she pried off the bottom of her coffee table), and shapes folded from shirt cardboard as diagrammed in the pamphlet.
Loralee would practice over and over again. First she would mumble the words prescribed on the pages; she felt an odd urge to try and get all of it exactly right – no matter how silly it seemed. Then she would go through the motions of snatching the metal nuts from whatever cradle they were hidden in. At first she would make her move while looking directly at the setup, but – as the instructions dictated – after a while she would work with her head turned, and then, finally behind her back. She was amazed to find that, with enough practice, she could snatch the prize without even touching the cloth or cardboard. She felt she could almost see her goal in sort of a glowing mist inside her head, see it clearly, even though it was behind her back.
After three months of preparation and practice, she decided she was ready.
There was a Starbucks near her apartments and as she entered she immediately picked out a matronly woman in a faded print dress at the end of the queue of customers looking confused at the lighted menu overhead. Loralee sidled into line directly behind her as the woman began to ask questions of the barista, “But I don’t understand… are you telling me the Venti is bigger than the Tall?” Loralee muttered one of the incantations under her breath. This steadied her nerves as she leaned over, pretending to look into the case of pastries.
Nonchalantly Loralee reached into the other woman’s handbag and whipped out her purse.
She then calmly pulled the money out, leaving a single five and the change so the woman could pay for her coffee. Without taking her eyes from the pastries she then replaced the purse, sighed quietly, turned and walked out. She could hear the woman going on behind her, “Oh, tell me again, what’s the difference between a latte and an espresso?”
It became easier and easier as her marks became larger and larger. Loralee began to frequent spots – casinos, expensive nightclubs, the racetrack, where customers would be carrying a lot of cash and might be drinking a little. She made enough money to begin buying expensive clothes. That enabled her to sidle her way into parties and receptions of the highest levels of society, where she could accumulate jewels and watches in addition to the mounds of cash she was quickly developing. Luckily, the pamphlet had advice on fencing those goods, and on the methods to safety and surreptitiously convert her ill-gotten gains into diamonds and gold coins – portable efficient receptacles of growing wealth.
She didn’t pay any taxes and couldn’t trust any bank, of course, so she bought a heavy safe and disguised it as a pedestal for her new wide-screen television.
She began to travel. She went to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Palm Springs… anywhere that the marks might congregate with the cash.
She even returned to New Orleans to push her way through the huge dense drunken crowds at Mardi Gras. That was almost too easy. She could reach out and grab whatever she wanted without even thinking about it. For old time’s sake she returned to the street where she first saw the old book store, but it was gone. She moved along the alley running her hands over the rough brick, but there wasn’t even any evidence of where the door used to be.
Loralee decided she must have been mistaken about which street it had been off of. Even the street sign was missing, so she must have been lost.
After a year of work, her safe was bulging with gold and diamonds, three dresser drawers were stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. Loralee began taking it a little easier. She felt her skills begin to slip. Once, for the first time, a mark turned and shouted at her. She dropped the man’s wallet and fled. She decided to stop, at least for a while. She had enough to last, possibly for the rest of her life.
She liked to treat herself to a nice dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant around the corner. She received the best food and the best service, the waiters like her generous, cash tips. This night she stayed a little longer than usual, sipping on a particularly nice brandy after dinner; thinking about a European trip. It would be her first non-working trip to the old country, and she smiled, mentally planning it.
When she returned home and pressed her key into the lock, her door swung open freely. With a rising tide of fear choking her throat, she quickly pushed on inside. The apartment was a shambles. Everything was tossed about – not a stick was undisturbed. Her television sprawled face down on the floor. Looking at the stand, she saw the bulging cloth covering and knew the safe was open. Pulling the cover aside, she verified what she already feared. It was empty.
She dashed into her bedroom where the dresser drawers were tossed on to her bed, cash all gone. In a rising panic she rushed about the place looking in corners and hiding spots. Everything of value had been found and stolen. Even her old pamphlet on how to be a pickpocket was stolen. She realized she was doomed, there was no way to get this back without her instructions.
Finally, standing in the center of the room, fighting back panic and tears, she noticed something new. On her dining table was an old, dirty, and worn manila file folder. She approached the folder and saw, scrawled across the front, “One Hundred Seventeen Dollars,” in red marker. Shaking, she opened the folder. Inside was a single, torn, worn piece of paper covered with faded typing. At the top it said, “How to be a Burglar, Guraranteed!”
Snippet Sunday – Rufus Amalgam Loved his Bluetooth, Part 3
The mud down by the creek was so thick and sticky that Rufus lost his shoes within seconds and his feet were getting cut up by hidden roots and buried thorny vines as he thrashed around in the thick underbrush that covered the shallow water.
“He’s not here, I swear to God!” he yelled up at Sandy.
The sun was rising now so at least he could see what he was doing, but Rufus hadn’t slept in over a day now and his head was swimming with effort and lack of sleep. He looked up the bank at Sandy but all he could see was a blanket standing up with two hands holding the top corners. She was using the blanket as a shield so she didn’t have to see what was going on down in the creek. She didn’t want to actually have to look at a filthy naked Sylvester if Rufus pulled him out of the weeds, dead or alive.
“Keep looking!” Sandy yelled back. “He’s got to be down there somewhere.”
“I think maybe he woke up. He must have walked away.”
“Do you see any footprints?”
“We’ve been stomping all over here all night, how can I see any that are his?”
“Shit, Shit, Shit, what do we do now?”
“Hey you were the one with the dead guy… the comatose guy in her apartment, you figure it out.”
“Don’t start in with me, you sent him to see me in the first place. You’re in this as much as I am. You’re in as deep.”
“Well, he’s not here, help me up, I can’t get out of this muck.”
Sandy flipped a corner of the blanket down to Rufus who grabbed it. She backed away, pulling him up out of the creek bed.
“Jeez, look at you,” Sandy said, “You are covered with mud… it smells like hell. I don’t want you in my car like that.”
“Give me a break, what are you going to do? Leave me here? Put the blanket down on the passenger’s side, I’ll sit on it.”
“That’s my favorite blanket, no way.”
“Favorite? You’ve already used it to haul a dead guy.”
“He wasn’t dead, only comatose.”
“We didn’t know that at the time, did we?“ Rufus snarled as he haphazardly spread the blanket out and plopped down. “Start ‘er up and let’s get the hell out of here.”
As they were driving, Sandy turned up the radio to drown out Rufus’ constant complaining with some Country Music. At the twenty minute break there was a morning traffic report.
“And the East-South Carribelo Expressway is stopped,” the voice said. “Police report a naked man running across all six lanes of traffic. We have not had confirmation.”
“The Carribello? That’s right near your place isn’t it.”
“Yes it is, dammit. You don’t think that he’s…”
“Of course he is. Where else is he gonna go. I don’t think we should go to your condo… lets head to my place and wait it out.”
“No way. I am not going to that hellhole of yours. And I want some help, some reinforcements if he shows. I’m not gonna let that loser run me out of my condominium.”
It didn’t take long. They parked and as they were rushing to the apartment the thick bushes along the front walk began to rustle and the naked Sylvester popped out to block their path. Sandy and Rufus jumped back, but really didn’t have much choice but to throw the blanket back over Sylvester and rush him up the stairs and inside as quick as possible.
They hustled Sylvester into the shower. While he was getting cleaned off, Sandy dug around trying to find something for him to wear. They had already thrown his clothes away on the way to dispose of the body. She found a green pair of sweats and a T-Shirt – that would have to do.
She threw the clothes into the steamy bathroom and he emerged looking like a lime popsicle.
“I am so glad to see you, “ he said to Sandy, “I have no idea what happened to me.”
“Now that you’re out, I need one too,” Rufus pushed by into the bathroom, hoping there would be some hot water left.
“Hey, why is he so muddy? He smells like the place that I woke …”
“Umm, I have your wallet,” Sandy changed the subject, “and your keys.”
“How did you get those?”
“Ummm. Well… you see….” Sandy couldn’t think of a thing she could say.
The tree gliders, brilliant painted toys, revolved like lazing birds above Coral D, waiting for the first clouds to pass overhead. Van Eyck moved away to take a cloud. He sailed around its white pillow, spraying the sides with iodide crystals and cutting away the flock-like tissue. The streaming shards fell toward us like crumbling ice-drifts. As the drops of condensing spray fell on my face I could see Van Eyck shaping an immense horse’s head. He sailed up and down the long forehead and chiseled out the eyes and ears.
– J.G. Ballard, The “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D”
The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D, By J. G. Ballard
When I’m writing I have to be very careful about what I read. Too much aesthetic sensibility, too much style, too many splintering ideas come in through my eyes and fall out of my fingertips. I have to read something that is related/similar/compatible with what I want to do, or it all goes to crap.
Well, it seems to all go to crap anyway, but….
I’m rereading some classic J.G. Ballard short stories right now. I forget sometimes how much I love his stuff. I first encountered J. G. Ballard in the early seventies, in the form of a moldering handful of cheap pulp paperback short story collections borrowed from an informal lending library in Managua. I was devouring this stuff back then, reading almost a book a day and very little of it remains in the cobwebby recesses of my failing brain – but one thing that did stick is Ballard.
I remember “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” in particular – actually I remember the whole world of “Vermilion Sands.”
I remember being caught off-guard by the bizarre dystopian decadence of the fading fantastic vacation resort. It was a door into a frightening yet seductive world tilted away from our own at an oblique angle. The human heart has been twisted – but not so much that it isn’t recognizable. It wasn’t until decades later and I read “Empire of the Sun” that I began to understand the source of Ballard’s vision.
Last night in bed, while I was fighting to stay awake, I reread “Prima Belladonna” – a story about a mutant beauty with golden skin and insect-legged eyelashes and a man that sells plants that sing. It turns out that it was his first sold story. I love the idea that he bought a pram with the proceeds.
One of the stories in the collection, “Prima Belladonna”, was the first piece of fiction that l ever published, and I can still remember the thrill of receiving the cheque for £8. At last I was a professional writer, and my wife and I celebrated by using the money to buy our baby son a new pram. Pushing it past the department stores in Chiswick High Street, a hundred ideas in my head, I felt that I had found the philosopher’s stone.
I’m in the final stretch of editing my collection of stories – and I am glad that Ballard shares my love of the form.
THE SHORT STORIES that make up this collection were written between 1956 and 1970, and once they were published in a single volume I never returned, regrettably, to this genial playground. By sealing one’s imagination between hard covers one can close the door forever on a still vivid private world. I’m glad that I began my career by writing short stories, when I was free to chase any passing hare in a way that is no longer possible, and without over-committing myself to a single idea. Fiction today is dominated by career novelists locked into their publishers’ contracts like the prematurely middle-aged encumbered by mortgages and pension plans. Irresponsibility, especially the agreeable variety displayed in Vermilion Sands, has a great many neglected virtues.
J.G. Ballard, from The Independent, October 24, 1992
(Emphasis mine)
Vermilion Sands
I don’t know if it was the odd fiction or the electrical fields from the constant lightning booming down from the Texas summer middle-of-the-night thunderstorms outside my window… or nothing at all – that caused a very odd, intense, and complete dream.
I dreamt that I had gone back to college and was moving back into Ellsworth Hall in Lawrence for a year. Everything had changed so much – the front desk gave me a key that was a little sculptural fob shaped like a tiny Picachu. The dorm was surrounded by a maze-like complex of restaurants and entertainment – it was a frustrating navigational feat to simply find the elevators – my room was 1127. I remember that the residence hall had only ten floors.
I felt so old, so out-of-place – like Rip Van Winkle.
This week for Snippet Sunday I’m putting up an entire short story. This is the rough first draft I wrote some months ago and then abandoned. The biggest problem is that it is simply too damn grim. I like a few things about it and want to completely re-write the thing in a lighter vein, if possible. In the meantime, here is what I’ve got. Any ideas?
The Fortress of the Copper Thieves
Mobungu tossed all afternoon – he had a two day shift of guard duty coming up starting that sundown and he wanted to get some sleep. In his dreams he ran through a thick forest – its image was blurred and indistinct because he had never actually seen more than a handful of trees at once – chased by something hissing and shaking the foliage behind him, out of his sight. He wanted to turn and look, but knew that if he paused, it would overtake him, whatever it was. In the dream he could feel hot breath on the back of his neck. All he could do was continue to rush forward in a fog of overpowering fear – thorn-studded vines tearing at his skin, brambles cutting his feet, and branches grabbing at him, pulling him back. It felt like he wasn’t moving at all and the thing behind was just about to catch up.
For the twentieth time he woke shivering, his blankets cold and wet – soaked through with his own sweat. Orange light was pouring in under the lip of the lean-to and Mobungu realized that it was finally evening and time for him to move to his guard post. His joints creaked as he rose and pulled on his tunic, then his woven serape marked with the double triangle symbol of his tribe, and placed the rusted iron pot over his head. He gathered up his spears and atlatl. They clanked as he bound the the throwing stick and the barbed shafts with the cloth strip that served as holster and sheath – again embroidered with the sign of his tribe. Mobungu shuffled out of the shelter and struggled through the cold mud down to the water.
His canoe was tied up on a stake driven into the slippery clay of the bank. Mobungu slid down and hooked a knee around the stake, reaching out with a metal bucket to bail the water out of the canoe. It was made of thin iron plates hammered flat and riveted together. It leaked like a sieve. As he worked, the clang of the bucket against the wet metal was familiar to Mobungu – but that didn’t make it any more pleasant.
The sound reminded him of his old pirogue, which never leaked and was always quiet. His father had built the canoe before he was born. It had been hollowed out from a single log – a log that must have been far larger than any piece of wood that Mobungu had ever seen. His father said they had built a fire inside the log and used scrapers to hollow it out, to fashion it into the long smooth shape that slid so silently through the water. His father had been a great warrior and the pirogue his prized possession. When his father had fallen in battle – an arrow pierced his throat – there was some talk in the village of the honor of burning his body in the fire of his battle-canoe, but his wife said that was too wasteful and the pirogue was passed down to his son.
Mobungu protected the pirogue as long as he could, but as the white powdery plant-death spread and spread the shortage of wood became so acute that one icy winter evening, the village elders commanded him to drag the canoe up to their metal hut where it was chopped apart and used for their heating-fire. It felt like a chunk of Mobungu’s heart had been ripped out and consumed by the Elder’s need for heat, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Once the canoe was bailed, Mobungu slid into it, nestled himself against the cold bottom and ungiving sharp bulkhead and began to paddle. The oar was a metal tube with a flat piece bolted to the bottom and it was cold in his hands. The vessel was not efficient but Mobungu was strong and he moved quickly down the estuary and out into the choppy salt water of the large bay. It was short distance across to a small island where the first line of defense for his village was set up.
They had traveled a long way to reach this point, the farthest east they could go. Almost a third of his village – most of the children and all of the old people – had died in the terrible journey, but they had no choice; driven forward by tales of a gigantic ancient city full of treasures. The elders had called the tribe together and set them on the long trail to the east, knowing they could no longer survive on the dying lakes and barren mountains of their home. The pain and tribulations of the journey were almost unbearable, but the tales were truthful. Paddling with his head held high – as he neared the guard post Mobungu could see the rotting towers of the ancient city still glittering in the failing light of the setting sun. It was still a long way away, isolated on a huge island in the estuary, covering an island that split a mighty river that poured down from the north right before it joined with the sea.
The expanse of water between the shore and the city was rough and wide, but not an impenetrable barrier. After their terrible migration Mobungu’s tribe was stopped, though – trapped, starving, on the bank, thwarted in their desperate quest by the powerful tribe that lived in the city. They were doomed by the tribe of the copper thieves. The vast bay and the estuaries that lined it was guarded by the fortress of the copper thieves, which was on a small island. Mobungu’s guard post faced that island fortress, across a short stretch of water. If the copper thieves were to launch an attack on his village, a quick warning would be the only thing that might save them.
Darkness fell quickly as Mobungu slid into the guard station and climbed out of the canoe. He was replacing Teemanga, who had been on duty for the last two days. As he approached the shack Teemanga was stretched out beneath a blanket and snoring loudly. Sleeping while on guard duty was a crime punishable by death, but Mobungu simply kicked Teemanga on the back of his legs until he woke with a snort. There were many crimes that were going unpunished in these dark days.
“It’s all yours. Your food has been delivered,” said Teemanga as he gathered his few belongings together for his return to the village. He moved with a weary sloth and gestured at a small pile of stale disks of biscuit arranged on a cloth.
“That’s not enough for two days,” said Mobungu.
Teemanga shrugged, “That’s what you’ve got.”
“You bastard, You’ve taken some of mine, let me see.” Mobungu started grabbing at Teemanga, pulling on his clothes.
“Go ahead, look all you want. I’ve got nothing.”
“Then you must have already eaten it.”
Teemanga simply gave another shrug and silently walked down to his canoe, which was smaller and leaked even worse than Mobungu’s. He would have a difficult crossing in the cold darkness.
The sun was now completely gone and a cold fog blowing in from the sea. Mobungu sat down in a chair they had fashioned that looked out towards the island fort. It was invisible in the darkness and fog, but Mobungu knew his duty was to keep looking, no matter how futile. Weakened by hunger and exhaustion he didn’t think he slept, but still, the dream in the forest kept coming back, so he must have dozed off. He was amazed by the beauty of the forest but terrified by the unknown horror that chased him.
He thought he felt a scaly hand lined with icy razor claws begin to close on his shoulder when he started awake with a scream and realized the sun was rising to the east, the horizon glowing orange and peach, the water calm. The sun warmed him and gave him a little strength and after an hour or so burned the fog off of the water and Mobungu could see the fort of the copper thieves clear as crystal in the still morning air.
The island fortress was silhouetted against the distant slanted falling towers of the ancient city and stood like an impenetrable obstacle to the riches that must still be there. Mobungu lifted an apparatus they had built out of a metal tube and glass lenses found in an abandoned town along their journey and raised it to his eye.
The clear morning and magnification of the telescope enabled him to see the fortress clearer than he ever had. It looked so close, he could almost reach out and touch it.
The major part of the fortress was a huge star-shaped stone building, taking up most of the area of the little island. Mobungu knew that an assault against these vertical walls of stone was a hopeless gesture – the warriors within were safe from an outside threat. Rising from the center of the star was a series of gigantic steps leading up to a stone building in the shape of a giant pillar, towering up into the sky. This pillar was decorated with columns and windows and was built stout and strong.
The elders of the tribe had said that this giant pillar had once supported an enormous statue, reaching a hundred arms high. They said it was a statue of a woman and it was made of the most precious metal of all, it was made of copper.
Mobungu smiled at this – surely it wasn’t true. He had never seen more than a handful of copper in his life, what tribe could possibly have the unimaginable riches they could use to build a giant woman of this metal, and put her up on that stone pedestal. He closed his eyes and imagines the smooth, red-orange expanse of polished copper. He thought of the smooth curves of the giant woman, the swelling thighs, the overhanging breasts, the flowing hair molded in precious metal. Mubungu imagined she would be smiling at him, maybe with giant arms outstretched in welcoming.
It was impossible, but it warmed his heart to imagine it so.
The elders said the copper thieves pulled the statue down and melted it to make armor and weapons. Mobungu returned to his telescope and gazed at the top of the pedestal, at the statue the copper thieves had built to replace the woman they had destroyed.
This statue was obviously male, and, while not made of a rare and beautiful metal, it was constructed of something extremely precious to Mobungu and his tribe. It was made of wood.
It looked like it towered fifty arms high, half as big as the elders said the woman was, it wasn’t as high as the pedestal it perched above, but it was still the most massive thing Mobungu had ever seen made in his time. It was a stylized warrior, feet together, knees bent facing out to sea. His head was topped by a fringed helmet, his face obscured behind a lathwork of a protective screen. His hips were thrust forward and one arm held a huge round shield. The other arm was raised high, holding a spear toward the heavens. The tip of the spear was barbed with a wicked looking series of wooden hooks.
The statue was not very old. When his tribe had arrived the thing was still yellow and fresh and they could smell the fresh-cut aroma when the wind was right. They could still hear hammering and cutting sounds booming from the interior as the copper thieves completed some unseen bracing.
As the summer ended and the cold winter fell upon them, the tribe gazed upon the graying and weathering statue, imagining the warmth that the wood could produce. They never could figure out where the copper thieves had obtained the raw materials. All their searches west of the river were in vain, everything was dead, killed by the spreading white plant-death. Any attempt to cross the river or to approach the ancient city was met by swarms of soldiers from the army of the copper thieves. They were watching and would dispatch death upon any one that tried to enter their territory.
Mobungu looked at the statue, at the fortress below and at the small area of the island that bordered the fort. The island had grass. It was dormant and brown now, but during the summer the ground was green, a color Mobungu rarely saw. Most amazing of all – there were still living trees. Some stood alone, and a couple of small groves hugged the stone walls or the surging shore. Some had lost their leaves for the winter, but a few were pyramid-shaped and still held their foliage. Seeing the color green, and knowing the trees were still alive, filled Mobungu with longing and a tiny spark of hope.
Through the day and into the night Mobungu stared at the statue. He would look through the telescope until his eyes grew tired and then he would stare with his bare eyes. By the afternoon he had eaten all the biscuit that had been left for him and he knew he had a day and a half of hunger ahead of him.
He knew he was supposed to stay awake, but how was that possible for two days? That night was clear and the moon was full. As he sat in the chair and looked through the telescope he could see the statue and the fort below… dim but clear. Beyond, the ancient city seemed to glow with flickering ghosts in the moonlight.
Without realizing he was doing it, Mobungu drifted off into sleep and instantly began to dream. This time he was running through the forest but he didn’t feel the rough branches clutching at him, he didn’t feel the thorns of the vines tearing at his skin. Instead of a panicked run he felt like he was floating along a wooded path. He was able to look around and realized that the trees now looked like the ones he had seen that day on the fortress island. He was still being chased but he felt no fear.
Once he realized he wasn’t afraid any more, he drifted down to a stop along the path in the forest. He calmly turned toward what is was that was chasing him, and he saw the branches shaking and moving and he felt a great joy as he waited for whatever it was to emerge from hiding. The first thing he saw was a wooden man – a copy of the statue on the island, but small, human sized. His wooden skin was polished, supple, and showed a glossy grain. One arm was still extended back into the hidden shadows beneath the trees and as Mobungu watched, the wooden man held the hand of a companion that emerged into the light. It was a copper woman, a normal sized woman, a copy of the ancient statue that Mobungu imagined in his daydreams. She gleamed in the sun, polished and flawless. She stood beside the wooden man and they smiled at him, together. Mobungu noticed the swelling in the copper woman’s belly and he realized she was pregnant.
Mobungu woke, not in fear like he had every morning since before he could remember, but calm, relaxed. He realized he had a purpose. It was almost dawn, the moon had set, but there was the tiniest smear of gray across the eastern horizon. He took the cloth covering that wrapped his spears and wound it around the tip of his longest, straightest weapon. He gathered up a flint stone and striker that the guards had kept next to their lookout post. At one time, the idea was to light a signal fire in case of attack, but the fuel had long ago been used up. Still, Mobungu knew he could use it to kindle the tip of the spear. The cloth was of ancient origin and he knew it would melt and burn with a quick and strong flame.
He took the flint, striker, spear, and Atlatl and slid into the canoe. He paddled hard across the smooth morning sea towards the fortress of the copper thieves. The sun began to rise as he coursed across the water and the edge of the orange disk peeked above the broken towers of the ancient city as he slid against the shoreline and leaped up onto the island.
He had not been noticed yet. A single small canoe with one half-starved man must not be enough of a threat. He began to run and marveled at the feel of the dormant grass against his bare feel. He looked at the ruined city, closer than he had ever been to it before and realized that between the toppling towers small groves of trees were growing. He ran to the closest tree and touched it, feeling the rough bark against his fingertips. This one was leafless but he quickly moved to one that still was covered with green. The leaves were thin, sharp needles, and Mogundu ran his fingers into the branch, feeling the sharp tips pierce his skin. The ground was covered with needles that had fallen, but these felt soft against the soles of his feet. The tree gave off a sharp, sweet odor that he had never known, and a yellow sticky sap came away from his hands which smelled the same.
He heard shouting in the distance and realized that he had been seen. Knowing he didn’t have very much time he dropped to his knees in the sweet needles under the green tree and pulled out the flint and striker. A couple quick blows and the cloth wrapping on the end of his spear was glowing with flame. A spark fell and the bed of needles began to smolder. Mogundu stared and smiled at that, breathing in the sweet smoke and marveling at the crackling sound. He almost missed the soldier running at him, covered in shining copper armor and swinging an orange-gold sword.
The clanking armor slowed the soldier and Mogundu was able to dart up and run towards the fort. A horde of guards was pouring out of a line of copper-clad wooden doors and rushing toward him. They clanked along, faces hidden by copper screens, the rising sun glinting off their waving weapons. He was fast though, and he ran almost unchecked through their ranks. A swinging blade swished against his shoulder, slicing skin and leaving a red streak that began to spout. It was his left side, and Mogundu knew he didn’t really need that arm. He laughed at the pain and kept running until he began to approach the very wall of the fortress.
By now the cloth wrapping was burning brightly and flames were whipping back, fanned by the wind of his rushing forward. Without slowing down he used his right hand to fit the end of the spear into the atlatl and holding it firmly used all his momentum and the strength in his legs to swing the spear-thrower forward, launching the flaming spear in a high, fast arc towards the statue of the wooden man.
The spear rose with frightening speed, propelled by the leverage of the atlatl, until it struck the statue in the hip. The wood was dry and weathered and the burning cloth stuck to it like a bee to a flower.
Mogundu fell to his knees and stared, laughing like a madman, watching the flame immediately begin to spread. He was so delighted he never saw the guard running up behind him and swing down, his bright copper sheathed sword striking the kneeling man in the back of the neck, completely severing his head from the rest of Mogundu’s body. It was still laughing when it hit the ground.
That morning, as the villagers gathered they could see the column of smoke in the east. They rushed to the waterside to see the distant giant wooden man consumed by flame. They couldn’t know what had caused the conflagration, and it filled them with deep despair. After a short counsel with what leaders that still remained, they gathered their belongings together and began to move off, slowly, into another doomed journey, this one to the west.
Pretty damn depressing, huh. Well, to make you feel better, here’s a video to cheer you up. C’est Si Bon. It’s all good.
Bill Chance 