I Am the Summer Wind

Something happened on this river, about 11 years ago.

A girl got carried away.  Well, it was more like driven under.  The river was swollen, spring melt, and she tried to raft it on a green-plastic raft, and things went terribly wrong.  She got pinned in a deep spot, and the raft got hung up against a stack of logs with her caught underneath, and the current held everything there for a few minutes, just long enough to take her from us.

There used to be a wooden sign at the river’s edge:  We love you, Patti!

But the years have been passing, of late.  They’re like the river – they just keep on going by you, slow and steady and fast, all at the same time.

She is, she was, she isn’t anymore.  Many of the people who knew her then have moved on, too.  Her older sister Belle . . . she lives down in Texas now.  She married a guy who works in an oil company office outside Houston.  Last I heard, they had a couple of kids already in school.

I ate lunch with her at the high school, Kenmore Heights, during our junior year.

She told us how she was really hot for Brad Pitt.  But of course, that was back when Brad was younger.  (I heard a rumor the other day that he’s balding now and wearing a hairpiece.  Can you believe that shit – Brad Pitt balding?)

She worked down at the Wendy’s, too, after school.  You’d pull up to the drive-in window and there she’d be, big as life and wearing a great big Smile! Button and taking your order on the speaker-phone:

“Hello!  Welcome to Wendy’s!  Have you tried our new Chicken Jubilee Fresh Fruit Salad?  Please place your order when ready!”

It’s strange.  The months turn into years and the river keeps on running through town.  The porch light goes on . . . and a big old spackled moth starts bumping his head against the yellow bulb.  A flurry of leaves rises from the pavement, blows through your headlights.

That time Patti was among us – I want to know where that time is now.  Does it still exist somewhere?  Is there a place where she’s still chattering away on Wendy’s speaker-phone?

I dreamed of her raft one time.  This must have been a year or so after she died.  I dreamed the green plastic, like a great big puffed-up plastic doughnut, and she was stretched out on it and wearing these enormous red sunglasses, and the raft drifted past me on the riverbank, and her soft blonde hair rippled against the breeze –

I tried to call out to her:

“Patti!”

“Patti!”

But no sound emerged.  Nothing but air rushed from between my lips, and try as I might, I could not give that air a voice.

So I stayed behind.

The raft disappeared around the next bend.  I was alone.  I watched the leaves on the weeping willow go rustling away from my breath, and for a moment I understood: I am the summer wind.     

One Is Necessary, One Is a Piece of Fate

 

Brown’s father, dying, struggles to lift his head from the pillow.  “You were always a good kid.  I love you, Frankie. . . .”

Brown’s wiping tears.

Outside the hospital, a windy summer night.  The leaves twist, writhe like tortured snakes. Then a quick patter of rain gleams against the black skins of the oaks.  We’re walking toward the parking lot, Baltimore General.

“Fuck,” says Brown.  “You know . . . he worked his guts out at Beth Steel.”

“I know, Frank.”

“Worked on the Number Two Blast Furnace.  Sometimes . . . more than once – the fucking guy’s hair caught fire.”

“I hear you.”

“I need a drink.”

But he sits motionless behind the wheel.  The rain trickles along the windshield.  This is late July in Crabtown.  “You know what he did, Jerry?”

“What’s that?”

“A couple of weeks before I started the first grade, he takes me down in the basement.  We were living in one of those tiny rowhouses in Dundalk, you know.  Argyle Avenue?  But we had a little basement.  The furnace . . . he takes me down there one night, he says: ‘Okay, you’re starting school – so you gotta learn how to fight.’  He’d hung a heavy punching bag from a rafter.  So he ties the gloves on my hands.  They’re too big, but he ties ’em on as best he can.  He says: ‘Okay.  Hit the bag.’

“I take a swing.  Not much muscle behind it . . . I’m only six years old. He says, ‘Come on, hit it.  That’s the bully on the school parking lot.  Knock his block off, kid!’”

“I take another swing.  Still not much there.  I’m new at this.  He shows me how to throw a punch, a right cross.  ‘You set him up with your left, Frankie – hook him!  Hook him!’  He’s jabbing the air, trying to show me.  Then he comes in with the right cross – the bag jumps: POW!”

Frank sighs.  “My pop.”  He sticks the key in the ignition.  “Now he’s dying.”

What can I say to him?

“He cared about you, Frank.”

He nods.  “His hair burned, Jerry.  That’s how hot it was around the Number Two Blast Furnace.”

*

 

So we drove down to East Baltimore Street, went into the Circus Show Bar.  They had some green and purple strobe lights going in there; the lights broke your face up into patches of sliding color.  The sound system crackled and spat:

 

Daddy was a rollin’ stone;

                        Wherever he laid his hat was his home. . . .

 

A drum rolled somewhere in the back of the club, but not very loud.  “Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to the luscious Kitty Kat!”

A tall blonde stepped onto the tiny stage.  She wore silver panties and what looked like two pint-sized fly swatters over her nipples.  She moved to the music some, but she seemed pretty listless for the most part.  There were only four or five guys in the joint, hunched over their $6 draft beers.

Brown was wiping tears again.

We drank a couple of beers.  The next morning Frank learned that his dad had died while we were sitting in the Circus Show Bar.  Around one a.m., the doctor said.

I kept thinking of that punching bag, of Frank’s tiny six-year-old fists going into the bag.  “Come on, slug him!  Knock him on his ass, Frankie!”

Crabtown.  You ever watched a crab scuttle around the bottom of a bucket?  Eyes bulging on their stalks . . . and that big fighting claw twitching and quivering.  That’s the real story, isn’t it?  Isn’t that the name of the game?  That naked claw . . .  quivering?

 

Our Invisible World

This morning around ten-fifteen, I told Dr. Horn that I no longer know what anything is.  That’s how I expressed it.  I said: “Dr. Horn, if you want the truth, I don’t know what anything is.”

He looked at me for a few seconds.  Then he scribbled something on his yellow legal pad.  “That’s interesting,” he said.  “Can you elaborate?”

“All right,” I said.  “Wall Street has melted down.  Am I correct?”

“Well …”

“The economy is in the toilet, and the planet is heating up.  The Wall Street vampires are drinking our blood.  Yesterday we lost a piece of ice the size of Connecticut.  The goddam thing fell off the Arctic Rim, or whatever.  The oceans are rising; we could lose Hong Kong any day.  Plus, I feel a new weirdness in my spine.  My vertebrae aren’t meshing properly.  Yesterday, without meaning to, I suddenly hopped.  I was walking down Jefferson Street, an ordinary morning, and all at once I hopped.  It was involuntary, I assure you.  And there’s more.  When I turn on the TV these days, I have trouble knowing what they mean.  Oh, and I read in USA Today that human beings are actually on fire.  Like, when you eat a sandwich – bologna, lettuce, pickle, a little mustard – what actually happens is, you ignite that sandwich.  Huh? There’s no flame, as such . . . but way down there at the molecular level, oxidation is the order of the day.  And that’s fire.  Oxidation is simply fire.  Remember tenth-grade chemistry lab?  Oxidation.  Anyway, I also read that we’re swarming with bacteria.  We think we’re pretty elevated creatures . . . you know, homo erectus and all that. But the fact is that we’re actually carrying ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells.  We’re bacteria dumps, Dr. Horn.  We’re absolutely groaning under the load.  And that’s pretty humbling, don’t you think?  We’re laboring under these enormous continents of leaky bacterial slush – goddamit, they’ve got us hauling them around town all day!  I’m exhausted just thinking about it, and then I saw this plastic model of a human spine – it’s just a series of hinged plates, you bend over and the plates all readjust like something on an automated assembly line, and you ask yourself: What really happens when I brush my teeth?  If you slosh some mouthwash around in there, do entire cities of bacteria start screaming and dying?  Or would it be better not to think about the bacteria sneaking along your gum line?  You see, it’s pretty damn strange . . . the way we’re told that most of our world is invisible.  Huh?  Huh?  It’s invisible, and the atoms and the various quarks, the top quarks and the bottom quarks, the bosons and the muons – they’re all invisible.  And then the molecules keep jiggering through the Brownian motion – did you have the Brownian motion in the tenth grade?  Here are the molecules, they’re all quivering and twitching and whatnot, and that’s the Brownian motion.  Am I making any sense at all, Dr. Horn?”

Dr. Horn looked at me for a few seconds.  Then he scribbled something on his yellow pad.  He said: “Do you feel anxious, Mr. Doyle?”

I nodded.  “I do.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“Okay,” I told him.  “I hope I can get this across.  It’s like . . . in our invisible world, nothing has any time for itself.  Okay?  Like, I watched this chipmunk the other day.  Just a little guy.  He ran up the side of the bird-feeder, and he looked inside.  Then he darted inside.  He was eating the birdseed – I saw a few husks go flying.  But then he darted back outside and took a look around.  Huh?  He took a look… then he zipped back inside.  Husks flying.  Huh?

“So I asked myself: What’s going on here?  And after a while, I figured it out.  He was eating birdseed . . . but he was also afraid of being eaten.  Any minute, a red-tailed hawk could drop out of the sky, nail his tiny ass, devour him in a New York minute.  So he couldn’t eat for long.  See what I mean?  Quick little bites . . . husks flying.  He had no time for himself, no time at all.  I watched him darting in and out of the bird-feeder, and I thought: If only I could send that little guy on a Bahamas cruise!”

“I see,” said Dr. Horn.  He scribbled something on his yellow pad.  Then he said: “I’m sorry, but I think our time is up.  Please pay the cashier on the way out.”

 

Sisyphus Loves The Rock

 

goddam price of gasoline –

and I’ve got this spastic colon-thing going, these blue pills I take?  The blue  chemical “tricks” the gut muscles into relaxing for a few minutes.  I blame Father Horstnagel.  Down on the molecular level, it would be nice to know what’s happening –

Ever looked closely at a Walking Stick?  Horrifying!  I mean, the goddam thing is alive, okay?  Knobby-headed, and a tiny pair of emerald-hued eyes hanging off the stick?  One eye hanging off each side of the stick?  You’d swear you were looking at a stick, and then the fucking thing moves on you, and you realize: “That’s no stick – that’s a Walking Stick!  That’s an insect programmed to look like a stick!” –

Father Horstnagel wore a black gown, I’m sure it had a name.  He also wore a dorky little three-cornered hat: the biretta.  He hopped around town, collecting money under various pretexts.

Scary?  Hey, the woods are full of weirdness.  Everywhere you look, it’s so strange you want to dial 911.  Call in the Marines!  And then I pick up the USA Today – what do I find?  All these toads are exploding in Belgian ponds.  This is no joking matter.  Thousands of brown-spotted toads, and they’re spontaneously inflating in Belgium, some sort of inner gaseous event, ka-plooey, toad guts in your face.  I totally blame Father Horstnagel, not just for World War I, but also for the general kinkiness, the fruitcake episodes, nobody has a clue, with entire Chinese empires collapsing, toads detonating in every direction, and what do they tell us by way of explanation?  “It’s a flaw in the DNA.”  All right.  Ask yourself: Does that satisfy you?  Does “a flaw in the DNA” satisfy you?  I mean, is it all electrical, or what?  These molecules – I assume we’re talking about electrons zipping in and out of different holding patterns?  Forming ions, and what not?  And that causes the violence?  The insane killing everywhere – and the soft yellow moon on a summer night?  Is there an architect’s rendering we can eyeball, maybe?

Before he came hopping into our town, Father Horstnagel had been a U.S. Army chaplain in the Pacific.  He’d blessed men on ships, men who were about to ride the landing boats onto Japanese-held islands.  While they died, Father Horstnagel went down to the Captain’s table and ate the flapjacks with the Aunt Jemima Molasses.  God hovered in the ventilation shaft, only four feet from the priest’s bobbing head.  Father Horstnagel’s large yellow teeth sank into the flapjacks.  Good syrup.  Sweet, but a tart after-taste.  Full-bodied.  Good syrup.  The first shells landed among the boats, ripping through the young boys in the steel helmets.

It’s not clear how the hominids evolved down through the Holocene to finally culminate in Father Horstnagel.  But they got there.  All those Precious Blood Fathers – a pack of starved Germans – all those lean guys with the fearsome body odor.  Wild, wild, how the hominids somehow evolved all the way to the priest in the black gown and the funny hat.  Don’t ask me to unravel it.  You’ll start my spastic colon going again.

 

 

Waiting for The Call

Epp sat in his cubicle drinking a cup of Awake and waiting for the call.

He looked down: his fingers were quivering a little.

He noticed a spot of yellow sunshine glowing against the dull brown carpet.  About the size of a dime.  The sun was an immense ball of flaming gases, nine million miles distant, and the bright spot consisted of trillions of photons that had been generated within its nuclear furnace.

Epp knew these facts.  They were objectively true, but difficult to believe.    Sunlight.  How strange it seemed.  He remembered a comment by Edward Hopper, the American artist: “All I wanted was to paint the drama of sunlight on a wall.”

The phone rang, and he sat up straight.  Was this it?

“Got your coffee?” asked a bright voice on the other end.  It was only Green, the District Manager.  “Sales meeting in five minutes,” said Green.  “Conference Room B.”

“Okay,” said Epp.

Maybe they’d tell him at the meeting?

No . . . everyone else had been told on the phone.  They’d all gotten calls from Bronson.  “Hi, Carl.  This is Skip Bronson, up in Schenectady?  I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Look at me, Epp told himself.  I’m sick with fear.

            What would a real man do?  That was easy: a real man would lock and load.  He’d fight back.  He’d wander the halls at Corporate, picking off the execs one by one.

Epp took a sip of his Awake.

Three days before, he’d driven around a crushed squirrel on I-28.  The creature had been reduced to a lump of mangled red meat, and nothing more.  That was the reality.  And the sun . . . the sun was a nuclear reactor, that’s all.  A monster furnace floating in space.  And the people in his office . . . they were like ants creeping back and forth across the sand, hunting food.  Hunting red meat from a mangled squirrel.

The phone rang.  He sat up straight in his swivel-chair.  But it was only Marge calling from home.  “Hon,” she said.  “Don’t forget, we’ve got Lindsay’s Honor Assembly tonight.  It’s at six-thirty in the Main Auditorium.”

“I’m on it,” said Epp.  “No problem.”

“Any news yet?”

“Nothing,” said Epp.  “I guess they’re gonna wait until after the sales meeting.”

“Maybe they won’t call you.”

“No,” said Epp.  “They’ll call.  You know the score, Marge.  It’s a done deal.  Sales were down 30 percent last quarter, and I’m near the bottom of the totem pole.”

She sighed.  “Okay.  Good luck, hon.”

He hung up.  Took a last sip of his Awake.  Rose to his feet.  For a fleeting moment, he remembered his father sitting in the wheelchair at Westminster Acres.  Scowling.  “You didn’t get here in time – now it’s too late for ice cream!”

“Sorry, dad.  Traffic backup . . . an accident on I-28.”

“I wanted ice cream!”

He put his hand on the door of the cubicle, and the phone rang.

He was due at the sales meeting . . . should he pick it up or let it go?

He grabbed it.  “Good morning.  Epp here.”

Silence for a moment.  The little dime-sized spot of sunlight had vanished from the carpet.  Then a voice said: “This is Skip Bronson, up in Schenectady.”

“Hey, Skip.  How you doing?”

“Going good, thanks.  But I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

 

20 Questions for Modern Man

 

1.  If he was so smart, why did Sigmund Freud snort up all that cocaine?

2.  We know that ants communicate via chemical odors . . . but do they translate those odors into ant “thoughts” – or only into ant “feelings”?

3.  How should we picture quarks, if we want to get a realistic picture of quantum mechanics?

4.  Does the fact that no future civilization has ever traveled back through time to help us solve our problems prove that our species will vanish before such a civilization can be born . . . or does it simply prove that time-travel is impossible?

5. Whatever happened to the joy people once felt when they pressed Silly Putty against comic strips and then lifted the cartoon images from the page . . . before bending and stretching them grotesquely by pulling on the Putty?

6.  When our ancestors painted wild animals on the walls of caves 25,000 years ago, did they get to erase and “redo” animals they got wrong . . . or were they only given a single shot at each cave painting?

7.  Are today’s birds actually dinosaurs . . . or are they simply a new kind of animal that the dinosaurs became over millions of past years?

8.  Whatever became of Alan Ladd?

9.  Do antibiotics kill germs by depriving them of oxygen . . . or simply by cutting them up with specially designed, extremely sharp molecules?

10.  Could atomic escaping radiation actually produce giant ants powerful enough to take over the New York Citysubway system?

11.  Is our world merely a holographic projection on a “cosmic soap bubble” . . . or is the jury still out on that theory?

12.  If the 1950s radio program The Great Gildersleeve is eventually listened to by sentient beings in a distant galaxy, what will the listeners make of Gildersleeve’s troublesome nephew, Leroy?

13.  Do tropical leaf-cutter ants know they’re actually farmers?

14.  Now that former U.S. President Gerald Ford has gone to his final reward, should we feel remorseful about all those times when we joked that he “couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time?”

15.  If we actually do find the Higgs Boson, do you think the discovery will change your daily routine?

16.  Are historical events (Booth shoots Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, for example) over forever once they’ve taken place . . . or do they continue to occur again and again, but only in their own time?

17.  Did Julius Caesar really say “Et tu, Brute?” when he was stabbed . . . or did somebody make that up later because it was a sound bite?

18.  If squirrels didn’t have cute, fuzzy tails, wouldn’t every public park in America be crawling with hideous-looking rodents?

19.  Isn’t money simply the basic tool we use to push each other around?

20.  If Freud was high on coke day after day, how come everybody now believes in the reality of the human unconscious?

The Rains Will Wash Us Clean Someday

On Beaver Island, I visited an Ojibwa medicine man named Blackbird.  He was a chunky guy who wore his glossy black hair in two thick braids.  During one of our conversations, the healer pointed out that he never talked on the telephone.

“The phone is not so good,” said Blackbird.  “Phone turn you into the ghost of yourself.  Make you dry up and then you blow away on the wind.”

I thought about these statements for a minute.  I’d just gotten off a jetliner fromLos Angeles.  “How do you become a ghost, Blackbird?”

He sent me a wan smile.  “You talk on a wire and then you turn into electricity.  Zzzzzttt!  That’s all you are now – a red spark on the wire.  You can’t even smell the man you’re talking to.”

I blinked slowly at him.  I could tell that he regarded me as a ghost – a pale, northern fellow who’d been driven mad by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

“Blackbird,” I said, “this may seem like a strange question . . . but what is the true nature of human reality?”

He smiled again.  “Reality?  I would say that spirits rule the land of the living.  When you are walking in the forest and a snake crosses your path – at that instant you have been warned.  Or a red-tailed hawk turns in the air.  He screams at you:  ‘Don’t take that path!’”

I mulled this notion for a few seconds.  “Blackbird, do you think there’s a Hell?”

He shook his head.  “No Hell, Noonan – but there is a dead world.  When you land a rocket on the moon, and you don’t ask permission of the Moon Goddess . . . let me tell you, the penalty for that is the dead world.”

He ran a hand along one of his braids.  “NASA,” he said.  “This is the ruler of the dead world.  Here men drink from the river . . . but the water runs through their fingers and they are never satisfied.”

I groaned.  “I’m screwed, Blackbird.”

“I know,” he said.

“They ate my brain.”

“Yes,” he said.  “You wake up one day and the birds are silent.”

“When I write about the Ojibway in the Detroit Free Press – what should I say, Blackbird?”

He considered my question for a few seconds.  Then:  “You could say that a remnant lives on.  That we still honor our sacred sites.  That the oil spills cannot hurt those who still pray at the sites.”

I thanked him.  “I’ll try to work that in.”

He took my hand.  “You ask too many questions,” he said.  “Just remember:  The rains will wash us clean someday.  Now follow my truck – we go to Dairy Queen!”

I did as he instructed.  We drove slowly along the island’s one paved road.  The pale moon hung like an ivory-hued lantern above the waters of Mich-ee-goo-mee.  Now and then a shadow-winged moth would flutter through the medicine man’s headlights.

About a dozen Indians had gathered on the Dairy Queen parking lot.  They were all leaning against their pickup trucks and eating ice cream with white plastic spoons.  The moon glowed above the ice cream stand as if powered by very strong batteries.  The medicine man ordered a Cherry-Berry Split with M&M sprinkles . . . and he refused to let me pay for it.

A Lesson from the Zen Guy

I was feeling a tad down, what with the economic bust-out and such, so I went to see the Zen Guy.  He lives behind a Chinaman’s furnace on East 57^th Street.

“Zen Guy, good morning.”

“Uh-huh,” he told me.  “That’s right.  I’m eating a cracker.”  He held it up.  “Do you see this cracker?”

“I do.”

“Learn from it,” said the Zen Guy.  “What kind of cracker are we talking about, kemo sabe?”

I meditated.  “Saltine?”

He grinned.  “Not a bad guess.  Actually, it’s a Krispy.”

“All right,” I said.  “A Krispy.  I see no problem.”

“Good, good,” said the Zen Guy.  “It’s Saturday morning in New York City.  Beyond that, everything is speculation.  Do you have an issue?”

I thought for a minute.  “I’m afraid of so many things, Zen Guy.  I’m afraid something will jump out and hurt me.  Something large, and probably green.”

He nodded.  “I hear that kind of concern quite often.  Are you afraid of being bitten, voyager?”

I stared at him.  “Damn,” I said.  “You are reading my thoughts.  I fear the teeth on the green thing.  Do you think I might have been traumatized, growing up?”

The Zen Guy chuckled.  “You’re growing up right now,” he said. “You’re a child at this moment, but in another place.  I’m sure you understand that time doesn’t exist.  Time is a place, dear heart.  Get over it.”

I nodded.  “I’m afraid there will be a shortage of cash,” I told him after a bit.  “I’m afraid I’ll be forced out into the weather as a result, and I won’t be able to pay for my medication.  Snow will pile up on my eyebrows.  No more Coney Island dogs with chopped onion and bright yellow mustard on the boardwalk.

“Honestly, I’m afraid something green will jump out of the Dipsty Dumpster and bite my abdomen.”

The Zen Guy sent me his wisest smile.  “Golly gee,” he said, “but you do sound like a ’fraidy cat.”

I had to agree.  “You’ve called it, Zen Guy.  I’m scared all the damn time.  That’s why I suspect early trauma.  I think a black spider may have worked me over in the cradle, and I mean a big one.”

He chuckled again.  “Man,” he told me happily, “I’m really enjoying this, okay?  Here’s my thought: If you run out of money, you can stay with me.  Fair deal?  You can live on the other side of the furnace.  There’s plenty of room over there and I’ll give you a Krispy from time to time.”  He sent me a cheerful wink.  “Have I helped your cause, hombre?  Have I eased any of your travail?”

Instead of answering, I took his hand.  I shook it.  “Thank you, Zen Guy.  I’m back on the beam, and you’re the reason why.”

He was reaching for his Krispy box.  “Take a cracker,” he said.  “Shit, take two – they’re small.  And remember to keep exhaling.  You’d be surprised how many people forget that.”

Soon I was back out on 57^th Street.  I walked west for a couple of blocks.  I knew that three guys might be moving a refrigerator at that moment, 40 stories above my head.  They’re lugging it past a big open window – and right at this moment, one of ’em steps on a roller skate.

Aw . . . shit!

The fridge topples through the window and here it comes, 400 pounds of glass and steel in a thriller produced and directed by Isaac Newton.  And there goes my head.

But hey . . . that’s mere speculation.  And I’m not going there.  I’m going to keep on walking, that’s all.  I’m going to nibble on my cracker and do some significant exhaling.  Okay by you?

Quantum Thriller

 

In this interpretation of quantum mechanics, every event is a branch point; the cat is both alive and dead, irrespective of whether the box is opened, but the “alive” and “dead” cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which cannot interact with each other.

–From the Wikipedia entry on “Quantum Mechanics”

 

 

The door of Room 409 swung open, and the card-players looked up from their hands.  Their eyes jumped with amazement.  What the hell is this?

The new arrival was a fat man carrying a nickel-plated gun.

Nobody moved.

“Okay,” said the newcomer, “you boys cleaned me out last night, but now I’m back.  And I’ve brought my two friends along – Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.”

He pointed the dark snout of the Smith & Wesson .38 at each man in turn.  There were five of them at the table, and their eyes were very large.

“You boys hoodwinked me,” said the gunman.  “You took my money and you laughed.  You said: ‘Fatso got a lesson tonight; we fucked him good.’”

Nobody moved.  The radio was playing a Golden Oldie, It’s Over, by the long-dead American blues crooner Roy Orbison.

They listened for 15 or 20 seconds to the wailing of his lonesome guitar.  Then one of the men at the table raised his hand.  He was a slender fellow with a bristly, nicotine-stained mustache.

“Look here, Farabaugh.  It was a joke.  Okay?  Harmless fun.  We were pulling your leg, that’s all.  We were gonna call you tomorrow, give you your dough back.  Don’t worry, we never planned to keep it.  It was all a joke.  We just wanted to see how you’d react.  For God’s sake, it was harmless fun!”

Slowly, the fat man shook his head.  Then he snuffled wetly.  Did he have a head cold?  Or had he been weeping as he rode up in the hotel elevator?  “A joke,” he said softly.  “Harmless fun.  I don’t think so.  I think you were playing for keeps, hombres.  And that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

They heard the metal clack of a round sliding into the chamber.  Roy Orbison crooned on, slow and easy: It’s over.  It had begun to rain a little; behind the music, they could hear the slow patter of rain on window glass.  It was a moment, that’s all.  Rain, cards, ice melting in the glasses of whiskey, sorrow from Roy Orbison.

And then the fat man took them out, one by one.

 

***

 

And then the fat man surprised them by lifting the gun to his own temple.  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.  “Let’s see if you can laugh at this, boys.”  And the gun flashed once.

 

***

 

And then the fat man dropped the pistol onto the thick beige carpet.  He turned away.  He started toward the door.  Then he looked back over one shoulder. “You boys had you a real good laugh last night . . . but tonight it was my turn.  Haw!”

 

And then the fat man

 

And then the fat man

 

At The Big K

Thornhill went down hard, right next to girls’ apparel.  The linoleum squares rushed toward him – black-white, black-white, BAM! – and at first he assumed that he’d been shot.  He was an American, after all.

His left arm, just below the elbow?  A hole of fire had opened there, a black hole ringed with glowing embers – a mouth of fire was eating his arm!

No.  It was something else.  Wow, Thornhill told himself.  This is probably a heart attack, bopper.  This is probably a situation at the Big Kmart.

By now his two eyes had gone their separate ways.  The left saw only black.  Was that eye dead?  The other one had focused on a bulb-headed little guy in funky sneakers.   The bulb-head was sky-blue, and grinning, and Thornhill saw that it was pointing to a group of words printed in white:

discover

                        the easy

                        way to pay

                        Kmart layaway

Thornhill tried to make sense of these white words, and got nowhere.  But then a balding angel arrived.  His round head glowed with soft, milky light . . . and his eyeglasses winked silver, winked golden in the pooling fluorescence.

Thornhill read a pale orange sign over the angel’s shoulder: plus size.  With his remaining eye, he studied the movements of the angel’s mouth.

Can

                        you

                        hear

                        me,

                        sir?

Thornhill tried to respond, but the wires were down.  He could not say, “Don’t let them get my Jeep,” try as he might.  Instead of making words, he growled tenderly . . . and it occurred to him that words were nothing but little bursts of air pushed around by your tongue.  And your tongue was . . . a slab of soft red meat.  And your brain knew how to move that meat, how to twist and turn it and curl it back upon itself . . . and it was this movement, this bending and shaping that converted the growling into the words on the Kmart sign:

visit our

                        garden shop

But the angel was singing to him now, crooning at him the way a mother croons to soothe her troubled babe: we’ve called for help, sir, so just hang on.

And Thornhill nearly smiled, because it had occurred to him that you could put those words to music, stretch them into a melody:

we’ve called

                                    for help, sir, O yes, we have!

                                    we’ve called for

                                                            hellllllppppp!

                                    (So

                                                just . . .

                                                            hang . . .

                                                                            on!)

Thornhill wanted to applaud.  He watched the radiance sparkle, flicker around the angel’s eyes.  How strange it was, on an ordinary Thursday afternoon, to discover that nothing . . . or rather everything . . . Bopper, he told himself in music rather than in words, you did the right thing, you came to the right place, you came to the Big K!

The angel was smiling at him.  Thornhill tried to say thanks.  He tried to open his mouth.  He tried to –