“Look on the Bright Side – You Might’ve Been Noticed”

"Tut-tut, what language!"

Look at me.  Fucking look at me.  I’m not sure if I’ve quite mastered mind control, but it’s a decent attempt.  There she sits, iPod buds in her ears and polar blue eyes looking at the ceiling, the seats, out the wide side windows; anywhere but at me.  C’mon, bitch.  Look at me, just once.  Nothing.  I’m less than nothing, just a thing to not acknowledge like a lump of shit or a dribbling pile of vomit.  But I’m handsome.  So look at me.

              It’s impossible to meet anybody in this city.  I try, God but I do.  Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just too old-fashioned a kind of fashionable.  C’mon, everybody likes a guy in a polo.  It’s a fucking Lacoste.  Look at these Ray Bans on my head.  Look at me.  It’s not like this stuff comes cheap either, I’ve got money.  I’ve got money, if that’s all you really want.  She’s not looking.  Maybe she’s just being coy, or can’t help being stuck up, or maybe thinks she’s a dyke.  I can’t make odds or ends of it.  All the girls in town are like this.

            I’m checking my collar – still popped, standing upright.  Hell, nobody seems to do that anymore.  What happened to style?  What the hell happened to cool, to partying?  Nobody parties anymore.  C’mon bitch, I know you like to party.  Beneath that knit scarf and those funky leggings there’s a little girl just aching to party hardy.  I used to be able to talk like that, and girls liked it.  At least, they reacted to it.  They fucking well looked at you, for one.  I can do fifty chin-ups, no sweat.  I can go all night if you like.  Just look at me.

            Fucking bus.  I need a car again.  Three more months and I’ll have that license back, be able to rescue the Mustang from the Admiral.  Fucking Admiral.  Never been on a boat in his life.  Never lived a day, that tight bastard.  I’ve lived.  I’ve lived, baby.  Look at me:  Mister Life Experience here, the goddamned article.  It’s these hipster cocksuckers that are spoiling my game.  It’s been a few years in the making, but the little shits that used to be all Emo took off the makeup, grew shit beards, put on shit flannels and read up on making beer.  I know their game, fucking phonies.

            Fucking phonies, girl.  I bet you like them, yeah?  Bet if I had a beard you’d look at me.  Christ, is there shit on my face or something?  Am I so out of touch?  I’m still me.  Same guy everybody loved in college.  Fuck, the Greeks couldn’t get enough of me.  Ol’ Brother Dawg Rawlins.  D-Raw.  The Rawster.  The fucking article.  I didn’t need to change, still don’t.  Look at me.  I voted for Obama – I didn’t really have a choice in it, but hey!  He got Osama, that’s something.  Last time I vote Democrat, weak bastards.  Last time I do anything just to be popular.  Maybe I should flex an arm muscle, pretend it’s all achy.  Yeah-

            That’s got her attention, just for a second.  You haven’t really changed.  Nobody has, bitch.  Five years ago I put all the girls like you to my sword.  D-Raw.  Back when whey protein and a Bowflex made a guy into a god.  Look at these; do you remember?  You were in a sorority – every girl was once.  Every girl that mattered, except for those Tri-Delts.  The Dairy Farm, we used to call that one.  Man, this sucks.  Just now going over the bridge, ages before we get to my stop.

            She’s turning, sitting sidesaddle with her face against the window so she doesn’t have to look at me.  Pretending to take in the river, the cityscape.  It’s nothing, all man-made.  I’m the real article.  Look at this, this perfect specimen of cool.  Look at me, you slut.  This is starting to piss me off.  And now I think I spy some skinny bearded faggot at the back looking away too quickly, checking me out.  I remember you guys too, punk.  I remember having to get a little physical, keep the gyms clear of you boys and your wandering eyes.  I hate you.  Look at me again and I’ll come back there and squash you.

            What’s wrong with this world?  Gays in the military, married in some places.  Girls chasing after bearded queers, the economy all to shit and Iran building a nuclear arsenal.  And weed still isn’t legal!  I’m glad I haven’t changed.  Shit, I’m glad life is all cyclical.  Give it a few years, and we’ll be back – people like me.  I don’t know where my bros have all disappeared to, but they’ll be back.  And I’ll be their fucking king, the guy that never stopped being real.  Dawg Rawlins, King of Cool.  Look at that, bitch.  You and all the bitches like you’ll be crawling back, standing in a fucking line for my bread.  Then I’ll get to yawn, act all nonchalant and look out the window while the begging begins.

            My stop’s coming up.  Fucking city.  The park is still blocked off from those commie occupiers, probably because it’s a biohazard with all their piss and shit.  That shit wouldn’t have flown five years ago.  There would have been more sane people like me to send them home.  Fuck, send them to a fucking hospital!  Whiney protesters and thieving bums, nothing but hipsters.  But my day’ll come.  Just you wait.

"The Roughest Farewell" pt. IV

IV.

            I awake from my nap after what seems like weeks, the sun by now just passed the sky's highest point and beginning its way toward the western horizon.  I sit up and stretch the stiffness from my shoulders and lower back, a hearty yawn on my lips- stifled, when I see the distant clouds of dust kicked up on the southern road.  Four horsemen, maybe five approaching our Skokie Pines.  Five horsemen.  Trouble.

            I leap to my feet, a chill in the pit of me as I begin to leg it back to town.  Five horsemen, doubtless after Ned.  Would they be state marshals?  Pinkertons?  Federals?  Unrelated?  How much did they know; could they know what horrors transpired the night before?  A chill in the pit of me, as cold and horrible and lifeless as they come.  What could I say?  What should I say to the townsfolk?

            On the rocky path back, sprinting and bounding over odd stones and dusty ruts as the little township draws sluggishly nearer.  I can’t run fast enough, it feels.  Legs of iron, knocking hardened heels on stagnant earth.  Kicking up a dust trail of my own.  I’m finally running past the First Church – mounds of flesh in the yard behind – past the tailor, the smithy, to the office.  Dead empty and lifeless, the lot of them.  Heat of the day, it comes as no surprise.  Were it not for the icy pit in my stomach I might succumb to the stroke.

            I burst through the heavy wooden door, surprising Angus and little Cousin Clara playing the tarot on the great wooden desk.  “Ye gods!  Men approaching town- fetch Horus,” I tell to her, surprisingly out of breath now that I’ve reached my purpose.  I falter on towards the gun cab as the two remain standing on, watching me with ignorant fishes’ eyes.  “Now, dammit!” I wheeze as I pull out a brace of Winchesters.  I hurl one blindly at Angus and grab up a box of cartridges.  Gods, but my hands quiver.  I drop them, one-two, as I make to load up.

            “Man Jesus, Sheriff!  What’s got you all huff n’ puff?” Angus gawps with the rifle hanging in his arms.

            “Men!” I cry breathlessly.  “Five men approaching town on horseback.  Moving fast.”

            “God Zeus,” he whispers, at last understanding.  He scrambles for the cabinet, changing out the rifle for the double-barrel ten gauge and a box of shells.  I’m still struggling to load, still dropping cartridges on the floor 6-7-8.  Hands everywhere as I stumble towards the door.  At last I’ve got the thing locked and ready and I’m stepping back out onto the porch as Horace walks briskly up with Clara close behind.

            “I hear there’s trouble approaching, Cousin Spur?  To do with the outsider?”  Despite the raised eyebrows and the gapen mouth of concern, Horace seems excited; positively excited.  I nod and he raises clenched fists towards heaven.  “If the government wants trouble, then they shall have it!” he exclaims.  “I’ll alert the folk.  We shall meet them prepared.”  Horace rushes off shouting, “Invaders!  Marauders!  Arm yon selves!”  Skipping, dammit.  Skipping down the street and shouting.

            “Mind you do nothing drastic, Our Horace!” I cry after.  “Let me talk to them!  Mayhap it’s nothing!”  But there’s a sickly foreboding about the words as I say them.  “Mayhap it’s nothing.”  I stand there with my rifle in the shade of the porch, Angus poking out his head through the doorway.  We both stand, taut and unnerved for one minute, three minutes, on to ten.  Finally with a hissing sigh I relax my whitened grip on the wooden stock.  I tell to Angus, “Just sit back tight in there.  If’n there’s trouble to say, come out blasting.”

            He nods and largely closes the heavy door, and I take a seat in the creaky rocker with the Winchester in my lap.  There is movement in the buildings across the street; I can hear the creaking of the floorboards grind away to stillness, an awful sort of stillness that precedes a thunderbolt before it tears the sky apart.  And then…  hoofpats from the east.  Clolloping calmy round the last upward bend into town.  I set my rifle to one side against the office wall and make to light my pipe.  I can’t for the quavering hands, so I simply hold it in my lap and wait.

            The five horsemen ride up the main drag, two to the front with the others hanging behind.  The laggers seem awful nervy, the fat man up front right on edge.  But the slender fella with the drooping moustaches rides with a buoyant calm – though he also seems eye the place with a keen regard.  It is him I fear, my instinct tells me.  I raise a hand to them in halloa.

            “Greetings, y’all,” I chirrup in a slightly crackling voice.  I make to stand on warbled legs, pressing an arm nonchalantly against the roof beam for support as I lean to one side, pipe still in the other hand.

            “Greetings, Sheriff,” the thin man replies in a robust, haughty sort of voice that sends shivers down my spindly spine.  His is a look of triumph, the cat that caught the canary.  “I suppose you would be the one to know what became of a friend of ours, what passed through here yesterday morning?  He was about on business, specifically to see your office.”

            I clear my throat, an idea sprung to mind.  “Yessir, a Mr. Norris it was.  Collecting renders for Caesar.  He came and went by noontime, once he’d seen to his business…”  I’m starting to feel a little more confident, the blood returning to my hands and feet and hopefully face.  But the gangly horseman nods on in that knowing way as he pouches and rolls himself out a cigarette.  It’s unnerving, him sitting there atop his Appaloosa nodding on in silence with that smirk.  Pressing out the lumps and rolling that cigarette between his thumbs and fores.  He places the thing on his lip and produces a match, shooting me a sharp glance as he lights it.

            “Afraid that isn’t possible, friend.”  He inhales deeply and tosses aside the matchstick.  A cloud of smoke explains, “Afraid he was to meet up with us outside of town once he was finished up hereabouts.  Straight up, if you understand me.  We waited til nightfall and a bit through the morning, on the off chance he was enjoying your town’s hospitality.”  He pauses there, taking out his cigarette with two fingers and admiring it at arm’s length a bit.  “We waited.  He didn’t show up.  Now we’re here to figure why, precisely.  So?  Where is Ned?”

            The blood again flees my appendages, my knees feeling like lead weights.  The man is clever, alleys covered and all.  But what is he?  Contract?  Badge?  “I told you what happened,” I tell him, trying to rouse some semblance of authority to my voice.  “Now who are you to question me?  I’m a sheriff, after all.  I’m the law round here.”  I tap my pentangle with a thumb for emphasis, yet can’t rid myself of the nervousness.  I’m playing a losing hand, too far gone to fold with not enough guile to bluff it out.

            “Me?”  He laughs, a husky smirky sort.  “I’m the Lord on High, in these parts.  I’m Marshal Conniff Starks.  And I’m afraid I've heard a few things about ol’ Skokie.  S’why we decided to escort Mr. Norris along.  S’why we’re here now.  S’why I’m asking you what it is you’re doing with that Winchester perched up against the door frame, and why you’re shitting bricks at a simple question.”  His dark-eyed gaze is slicing right through me now, cutting me to the very quick.  He spits out his cigarette and puts a hand on the revolver handle jutting from its holster.  His men are already guns-in-hands, ready to follow suit should the necessity arise.  Never have I been so close to death, I’m feeling through every last strand of myself as I stand there on the open lopsided porch outside the office.  As the man says, shitting bricks.

Starks sucks the spittle off the side of his great moustache.  “So I’ll ask once more-” he begins, cut short by an explosive report from above Weebleman’s.  The five of them are cut short as the first report is followed by a dozen others, horses trying vainly to wheel around as they and their riders drop to earth left and right.  The door swings wide as I scurry over for my rifle, catching me hard atop the head and dropping me flat; Angus comes out a-screaming and empties both barrels.  Catching Starks square in the chest, I believe.  As I roll over on the porch I can see him sprawled out lifeless and bloodying up the dusty earth, his mates all strewn about him.  One of his boys had the horse shot from under him but has managed to sprint off behind our Sheriff’s Office.

“Get the outsider!!” Horace shouts wildly as he comes charging out with a bayonet-tipped Springfield, followed by a dozen screaming fellows brandishing pistols, cleavers, and axes.  A few fall upon the fallen marshals, laying in to chopping and kicking.  The rest run off in pursuit, and after an exchange of shots and a bloodcurdling cry of anguish return with the decapitated head of the last.  I can’t climb onto my feet, legs unwilling to support me – legs made of lard, you might say.  I sit on the porch, shocked at this gratuity opened up upon the road of my town.  Carnage.  Bloody, horrible carnage.

And more yet to come, I realize with added horror.  Starks wouldn’t have been fool enough to come without a plan of contingency.  We could well have the Army sent down upon us!  Carnage tenfold, if that were the case.  Angus strides up, shotgun tipped across his shoulder in a cocky disposition.  “That’ll show’m.  Goddamned federals.”

I shake my head as Horace stands amid the corpses, admiring the scene.  “The day is ours!  The bloody business is finished, and there shall be much feasting the night!”  There’s a general whoop as men, women, and children step out onto the road with their weaponry, exulting with each other in the afternoon’s ambush.  “Prepare the fires!  And prepare a pit to inter the desecrated fallen.”

I still shake my head.  Fearing the worst to come, I suppose.  And perhaps also lamenting our collective action, the rashness of our nearest past.  Uninvolved in the melee, I can see now with outsider’s eyes the town for what it is.  We are outsiders, soon to be given a rough farewell of our own once the world-that-be figures what’s become of its representatives.  “We’ve lost,” I mutter, throwing head into hands.

“But none of’m escaped,” Angus corrects me, perplexed.

“None of them had to.  Now all we can do is wait for the rest.”

*          *          *      christ! see what transpires next, soon    *          *          *
or check out the previous installments:  I  II  III

"The Roughest Farewell" pt. III

III.

            Morning next.  Sitting in the dark and smoke-filled office with my boots propped up on the pinewood desk, throat raw and dry from a night’s sit.  Like pemmican, I suppose.  Heavy lids dip low upon my tired eyes as I take another sip from the earthen triple-x jug set beside me on the floor.  It’s been a long night, a real hoo-haw of a thing.  My stomach muscles ache, my back hurts, my knees are scuffed, and the piles are acting up again.  But worst of all are the memories.

            “Lest we forget,” I prost myself as I tipple back anew.  Another facet of the First Church plot, another little hump of earth to forget, more water in that vast well of souls.  Lest we forget.

            “Man Jesus!” Angus whoops as he swings open the office door.  A blinding blade of light cuts in behind him before the door swings back to.  He plants his bony ass on the desk and motions over for the jug.  “That was a real hoo-haw, last night was.  Hell if they send any more tax agents round these parts!”  He swigs a taste and croaks, “Gods-blasted government.”

            “Yeah,” I sort of sigh tiredly.  Or is it wistfully?  Lest we forget.  “Those damned federals.”

            Angus hums his approval as he idles over the jug, neither drinking nor passing with the dad-gun thing set in his lap.  “Yeah, poking their noses where they dun’t belong.  Upsetting the general will, you know?  Greater good,” he mutters, quite definitely in wist.  Tottering the bottle in his lap, neither lifting for the swig nor passing it on.  Giving me the ants.  I stand.

            “Gotta get me some air,” I say, I fear with a trickle of the sweats and a shake.  Vomitous uprisings in the bowels, bit of the spleen upacting.  Lest we forget.  Hitching up my belt I decide to holster the shooter I’ve left lying across the desktop. 

            “Specting trouble?” he drawls from beneath the great flat brim of his hat.

            “Nah, just holds my pants up.”  I exit into another blinding swath of sun rising overhead.  Not nearly so high as to leave a shade on the porch, yet well above the spread of town to make it painful to the dank-weakened eye.  “Christ’s cross.”  But sun besides, there’s a mild touch of breeze about the air that seems pleasant and refreshing.  Quelling the troubles below, as it were.

            I saunter, but then there’s nowhere quite to go in town when a body wants to be alone.  I turn toward the hills, past First Church and the mounds of earth in the yard.  Mounds of flesh, sizable cups in the well.  Or maybe mere thimbles.  It’s beyond me to speculate at present.  Looking onward, the ancient shaggy Scarsdales hump along the sky’s bottom edge, a sort of earthen corrugate cut out.  Two silky plumes of smoke trickle upwards, mining camps in the hills’ midst.  No doubt still reeking of the morning’s bacon and saltpork and burnt coffee and distant shit.

            I walk along and off the dusty trail, hoofing it down a grassy knoll.  To someplace secluded and lonesome and scrubby-green.  Mayhap to laze about the junipers and sage and withered pines and ponder, or even to thoughtlessly gaze at the unending skies above.  In either case, to mull alone for a spell.  To lie upon Mother Earth and under our most distant relative, the Sun.  Among birds and mule deer and dozy bugs, to stretch out and reflect – lest we forget.  Because Ned’s world won’t forget where he’s got, and a hard rain’s bound to fall after him.

            I sometimes wish I could just up and ride away with the sun, to travel on like the unending day and ceaseless night.  But then, I don’t much like horses.  Sarta dee, sarta dum…  I find an inviting little spot overlooking the south plain and drop down in a grassy patch.  Tossing aside my hat and cradling head in hands I watch the azure skies above, clear and pure as a church pane.  Lazy clouds off to the east, drifting southward to Mexico, or the Gulf.  Hard to say for sure.

            Peaceful repose, badly needed serenity.  Lest we – and with a mighty mid-morning yawn – string ourselves up ado over nothing.  I close my eyes and it feels good, real good.  I can feel the breeze picking up, gusting the soft and pleasant scents of fresh sage to my nostrils.  Warm sun on my face, rather quickly I find myself drifting off…

*          *     is this the end? find out in our next installment     *          *

"The Roughest Farewell" pt. II

II.

            Grim dusk yawns upon us, the darkness of the sky pushing away the sun as another day meets its end.  Or at least, as another day in Skokie Pines ends.  I’ve been told the sun moves along, shining upon other lands west of us and far beyond and around until it crops up again in the east the morning next.  There really are no days, by that logic.  More like one endless day and an endless night, skulking about in an unending push and chase around our fair little firmament.

            The whole township is gathered in a great omega, facing myself, Angus, and a whimpering Ned between at the nadir of this celestial congregation on the steps of First Church.  Cousin Horace stands ahead, enrobed in the full regalia of his high office.  He prays upon this ritual in the old tongue, our denuded townsfolk bowed down over Mother Earth and saying their piece in response.  I say nothing.  I am the instrument of the body, nothing more.

            Ned is sniveling quietly, mouth agape and eyes a-popping at these proceedings.  “Easy on,” I whisper to him.  “Mussn’t heap further sacrilege upon your crimes.  Be worse if’n you do.”

            “Sheriff, this is madness,” he starts saying, and I’ve got to jerk him quiet by the collar.  Ned whispers on, “I mean, this is madness.  How can such heathenry exist in our day and age?”  And he looks at me imploringly for an answer, manacled and sweaty-browed.

            “Supposed to help the crops,” I shrug, thinking of the reasons laid down by the forefathers and yon.  “Harvest your spiritual energy for the township, in a manner of speaking.  Anyway, you shouldn’t’ve done what you did.” 

            “Hell’s bells, Sheriff… you can’t let them do this.  You’re a justice of the peace!”

            “Quit raising your voice during the ritual, dammit.”  I tap the tin pentangle pinned to my vest.  “And that’s your world, not ours.  Mine is a local office.  Anyway, it’s more or less like a hanging in other parts.  Only more meaningful.  You aren’t just dying… consider yourself becoming part of something bigger.”  Just tipping the earthen cup into the greater well, fluid and free and all-enveloping.  So we say.  It’s all one big communion by the endless day’s close.  But my counsel doesn’t comfort our prisoner any.  He mutters and shakes a right mess, I dare say beginning to go faint and fluttery as Horace ends the dedication.

            Arms upraised in a theatrical gesture, Our Horace addresses the very cosmos.  “We are now gathered before the First Church of the Aeon, to dedicate the life of an erstwhile unworthy individual – an outsider – guilty of trespassing upon the collected wills of our humble people of Skokie Pines.  Seni peikoks.  Have you anything to say before the bonding ritual is carried out, Brother Nedward Norris?”

            Angus gives Ned a shake, but it’s no good; Nedward is unresponsive.

            “Very well,” Horace continues.  “Place him in the well.”  Our cue, Angus and I drag Ned forward as the drums begin tattooing their primal thunder and the people become animated, exuberant.  Betsie locks each arm around the necks of her neighbors as they go to ground, while Anna Weebleman begins her siren song that sends shivers down my spine.  Many’s the night I awake from the sound of those drums, and that song.  Many a weary pipe I smoke ‘til our resumption of the dawn.

            Suddenly Ned leaps to life, the torso trying to tear itself from its very arms.  “Nooo!!  Nooooooo!!!”  Angus bats him in the eye with an elbow, but he rolls right with it as we drag him onward towards the center.  “You people are monsters!!  Pigs!  To Hell with the lot of you!!”

            “My my, but he’s a feisty one!” Angus squeals, baring his ugly chompers in a donkey bray.  The thundering drums pound on, a downpour upon my ears as we reach the hole.  With some pushing and kicking we get Ned’s legs in and push him down, him screaming and biting and vacillating as Angus begins pushing in the dusty red soil.  I’ve got to keep his shoulders pressed down, a hard feat considering.  Horace looms above us with outstretched hands and an upturned chin, chanting loudly away-

Mares away a fodder’s chum

Da prey ta bon num spake

In ta da erith bon num hest

Ayardi nigh da leaf.

            Sarta dee, sarta dum comes the refrain from all sides and I feel as though my very bones will jump free of my body, the pressure on my head explode in a shot of red.  Sarta dee sarta dum, sarta dee sarta dum and on and on.  Finally Angus presses the earth over Ned’s shoulders and I release them, rising to help pack it in with my spurless boot.

"GOD!!" Ned wails.

            “GOD!!” Ned wails.  “Oh Jesus Christ, Our Father who art in Heaven,” and so on, a parrying chant of his own against so many unburied others.  Horace hands me the burlap sack with the seventeen stars and I crouch down.

            “Sorry Neddy, sorry you have to experience this roughest of farewells.”  With a muffled shout the bag is placed over his head and I step away.  The drums, the thundering drums and Our Horace rising upon their rhythm with the wildest of ululations.  The mob goes mad.  Sarta dee!  Sarta dum!  They rise from their throng with stones held high overhead as the last ray of sun disappears behind the westward horizon.  All that’s left to us is darkness, darkness and a couple sundry stars as a kind of justice rains down.

*          *          *     to be continued yet     *          *          *

"The Roughest Farewell"

I.

            “Sweet Je-zus, Sheriff!  Can’t you,” and here the wormy little profligate falls into a mumbling bit of whimper.  “Can’t you just flog me, send me off and all?  I won’t come back!”

            Miserable little weed.

            “Nah, Ned, you won’t be coming back any time soon,” I tells him matter o’ fact like, rummaging through the chest o’ drawers next to the gun cabby.  “I do declare-” and I pause to relight my pipe as my thoughts hurry about the office.  Where, o where, have our black hoods gone….  They’re normally kept in the second drawer, next to the manacles.

            It’s hard to think, what with Ned yammering on from the town cell.  Not really a cell even, more an elaborate cattle pen hemmed with barbed wire and glass fragments.  Iron bars don’t grow on trees in Skokie Pines.  He stands as close to the slats as he can, pleading for his useless life with such gibbering despair.

            “Gawd- I’ll fly right off, Sheriff, it doesn’t haftabethiswayouknowIdon’t- deservetodielikethat please Sheriff, pleASE!!!”  Bawling and slobbering and snotting on, shaking like a leaf in an autumn breeze. 

            I head for the door.  “No need to shout, Ned, keep your pants on.  I’m over to Betsie’s, see if she can fix you up a proper hood and all.”  And I look back, a grin on my face.  “Wouldn’t want the townfolk have to watch your perfidious mug die, right-right?”  And I shut the door as he begins a-wailing again.

            It’s a beautiful day out the day, bright enough to blind a fella.  Course, the office doesn’t have any windows.  Very stoutly built, if simply so.  Angus idles in a rocker on the porch, hat pushed over his eyes.  “Lotsa noise he’s making in there, Sheriff.  Want me to shut’m up?”  And he gives one of those sour rotten smiles Angus and his braars are known throughout the county for.  Teeth’re the first to go in that fam.

'...more an elaborate cattle pen...'

            “Nah, none too necessary.  Gorgeous day out, though!  My word, I’m nigh on blinded by it.”  Angus hums assent and lifts his brim a bit with a thumb.  He makes another ghastly smile and lowers the hat back as he settles into his nap.  “Keep up the good work, hoss.”

            I walk on, boots scuffling along the rough dusty stretch of road that cuts through town.  Hard on the heels mostly, but a gluey morass at the first sign of rain.  Old Milo once suggested we lay down some broken stones from the mining op uphill.  A grand idea, if anyone wanted to shift them down here.  I think Milo really just wanted the township to pay him something extra, proposing it in that roundabout way of his.  In any case, it in't as though it comes as any detriment to the regular pace of things.  Old Skokie is a small sort of place, eleven buildings thrown up at the foot of the Scarsdales and the little mines and paltry claims that operate there.  

            I saunter across to Weebleman’s, a sort of one-stop for dry goods and much-about everything.  Uncle Weeb is dead now, stuck in the dusty ground behind First Church.  The store lives on via my brother Paul and his wife Betsie, formerly our Weeb’s eldest.  Course, Betsie’s sort of the family facet.  A harbringer, our stagecoach regular Emmitt once called her.  She’s outlived three husbands now; two of our cousins and another of my brothers, Geoff.  Now facets themselves behind the First Church.

            I push open the only screen door in town and step inside to the murky cool of the shop.  “Mornin’ Spur,” Betsie pipes up from behind the far counter.  That’s me by the way, Spur; called so because I don’t wear spurs, on account of my piles.  Horses and I aren’t the best of friends, let’s say.  “Ned still due for dusk?”

            “Yup, I do believe he is.  Course, do you think you can fix up a hood for him before then?  Can’t seem to find any in the office.”

            “Hrmmm,” she thinks audibly back in the coquettish, playful sort of way she does.  Everybody has a way, I suppose.  But she scrunches her face and puts a finger on those lips, amber eyes upturned off and away presumably finding the answer somewhere among the pressed tin ceiling tiles.  “You know, I think I can solve that problem right now.  We could use one of these barley bags instead.”

            She rummages one out from a pile of cloths and hands it to me, smelling of gal-musk and sassafras.  I roll the bag around in my hands; seems a proper fit for a head.  We can affix the appropriate stars and signs later.  “I dare say you’re a clever devil, Miss Betsie.  What might the township owe for this generosity of yourn?”

            She pulls the pipe from my teeth.  “Paul is away yet, 'til sometime later this afternoon.  I don’t suppose the township could part with a sheriff, at least for a little bit?”  And I hafta say, there’s nothing like a little anarchy now and then to make a community stronger.

*          *          *     to be continued     *          *          *

“Chewed Up and Spat Back By the Yawning Gods Over Portland”

"Mind the minors, plea-uzzzh!"

Interminable deluge of bacchanal delights as Binksie and myself tut-tut-tuttle our way pedestrially along the high-and-mighty Grand Avenue.  Enjoying the liquid splendor from humble brown paper parcels tucked into unseasonal jackets as we amble along peaceably, exulting in God and Mother Earth and Cthulhu all.

            “Blessed Double Dog Dare debauches, dearest brother Binks!” I exclaim loudly, arm slung around his bulky stumbling shoulder.

            “All too right, most honorable Hoff,” he chides along in good-natured fashion, taking a pronounced tipple from his parceled bottle.  “But-” and he lowers his voice a bit, ever mindful of the nosey ear of the peeping tommy eyes of our general pop.  “But where’re we off to now?  I thought we were bringing the stuff up to King.  We’re headed south.”

            “Right you are, old boy,” I tell him amicably.  And drawing him aside down a knock-turn little backstreet, add in a whisper, “Can’t be too careful, fuzz about and all.  We’ll meander our way as best we can up the byways and side-alleys.”  Because a half-pound of meth is a hell of a thing to carry, plastic-wrapped and duct-taped and sagging weightily within the jacket pocket as it does.  Weighing years’ and yonks’ and lifetimes’ worth of bar-biting brutality, a menstruating mother-down cacophony of malice for honest lot like ourselves.

            But it makes for a troubleless sort of venture, dark and fragrant garden plots overflowing onto crumbling sidewalks and a sky full of stars, though for the most part unseen to the urban eye.  Cool air, distant train… the sort of night such things were made for.  “Because what’s money anyway?” I accidentally ask aloud.

            “An illusion!” Binks pipes in, never missing a beat.  “A reflection of the means of production meant to hamper the proletariat.”  He doesn’t stop with the jargon, “Money is the root of all evil, the great oppressor.  The death of mirth, the sucker of life, the whore of-” and with a mighty – whooph! – Binks stumbles short as I elbow him sharply beneath the ribs.

            “I think I hear something,” I warn him, hearing only the refreshing sounds of nocturnal silence.  An ode to my personal joy, sipping on a waning bottle of cab-sav beneath this celestial bouquet of ours.  “Let us continue on in silence, and take advantage of our surprising element.”  He whispers agreement and we saunter on.  Waning moonlit shadow puppets of monstrous oaks, slender alders.  Fig trees and maples and the occasional elm.  Quietly shifting in the breeze, scarcely heard above the odd hum of a latter-season air condition system or the buzzing power units strung overhead.

            “Would that it would all stop,” I whisper, mostly to myself.  A world without its Electric Giant, a world of worthy equals parleying about after life’s necessities.  Neither trapped nor ensnared by fantasy or whimsy, living for the now, that terrible and awesome nemesis to the future and repressor of our glories past.  Dwelling for the second-by-tick-tock-second, as myself and Binksie here on this darkened avenue.

            “I thought we were walking in silence,” Binks mutters reprovingly, and I remember our pact.  So we walk on in silence, past Weidler and Schuyler and Tillamook- to can’t quite say where, gentleman’s agreements and so forth.  But after a bit of strolling back and forth we finally find the place, an unlit white-sided house hemmed with juniper bushes. 

Ditching our bottles in the gutter we begin our approach up the well-kept walk, when a wild hair grips me.  I grapple Binks’ shoulder.  “What if we awayed with the thing?” I ask him, deadly serious.  More’n a pop for a puff, couple thou lining the pockets minus the odd splurge.  “Hell, we could make off for California.  Buy a plot and start a farm, breed rabbits.”

“What is this, Steinbeck?” Binks spits, face flushed.  “We’ll get nobbled.  These guys’re animals.  Let’s just dump this stuff off and get gone.”

“Sage advice,” I say to my spineless colleague.  But it’s true nonetheless; best to get this burden away and disappear with the dawn.  Besides, what’s money?  We’ll still fork in a few hundred for the trouble.  “After you,” I say, and again the thought creeps up.  Run.  Disappear into the night and head south.  Or hell, north!  Canada!  Health care and Molson’s and poutine and foreign women.

But Binks is already buzzing the bell and the front door swings open, briefly basking the lawn in a column of white light before the pair of us are leeched inside from the darkness without.  The doorman is a big bloke, shaved head and pierced face with enormous empty eyes, like the discs of a ceiling lamp.  Very imposing.  “Goat the stuph?” he asks us in an indeterminate drawl.  I nod, the gether uncomfortable by the size of our host and sudden closeness in-of-doors we find ourselves in.

The Bulk ushers Binks and myself into the living room as I drag out the bindle of mealy white powder from my pocket.  But I nearly drop the bag as I find ourselves surrounded by luminous blue fish tanks on every side.  Stacks of them, gallons and gallons of salt and fresh tanks filled with delicate, multi-colored fish and sea creatures.  “Jesus me,” I exclaim breathlessly.  It’s less like being at the aquarium than a well-stocked pet shop, same unnatural humidity and all.  Very dank.

“You got the stuff?” asks a voice from the hall, and in comes who I take to be the fish-fiend.  Sluggish looking fella with a mop of ruddy blonde hair and acne pocks about his face, looking a bit groggy and stoned for the wear.  “You got it?” he reiterates testily, and I can’t say I care for the way he’s looking down the nose at us.

I hand over the bag, which he gives a cursory glance to before chucking it across to the Bulk by the door.  I wait expectantly, for bills or something.  Cigarettes, wine, anything at this point; I’m starting to get the creeps from this inordinate number of steamy fish tanks.  “Well, if you’ve got our money…” I begin, and the Slug sort of frowns the more deeply.

“Your money?” he asks wearily.  “Your money?  That’s Marestal’s problem.  He’s got your drinking money, not me.”

“Look, Fish Tank,” I start to tell him, torn between a life-ending veil of red and a self-saving interest of getting the hell out.  I start to say, but the Bulk takes a step forward and Binks loses what little pigment he’s got and steps a ways back.  “Look man,” I begin again, lightening my tone.  “Marestal said you’d pay us on delivery. Contractual and all that.”

“Fuck you,” the Slug tells me curtly.  And I wanna brain the churlish monkey, take a bottle and shove it right up his pasty middle-class asshole.  But I haven’t the bottle, and then the Bulk has this look of enraged disgust on his flattened face.

“I don’t think this is dust,” he says to Slug, who yawns angrily at the pair of us.

“Oh?” he purrs, and again I’m wanting out.  Fucking Marestal.  Talk about shoving bottles…  What’s money, anyway?  Bit of fluff and mirrors, light dancing offa the silver platter at the end, little man behind the curtain.  Nothing worth losing the thumbs over, nothing worth getting a nostril split for.  “Let me see that,” and the Bulk forks over the bag and idles taut in front of the exit.  I’m shitting bricks myself, though not quite going the Binksie route with his audible whispers of harried Hail Mary’s, still yet the spineless idolater. 

“Hnmmm,” Slug murmurs.  “No-” and he looks at the pair of us with a positively disdainful hate.  “No, I think this is best taken up with Marestal.  It’s wrapped too well to have anything to do with you two.”  And a burden was altogether dropped, I suppose.  Everything happens so fast:  Binks sighs a praise of relief, Bulk relaxes from the doorframe uneasily, my anus unpuckers as the body realizes it has months yet to go on.  Hunky-dory goodness abounds in the karmic universe, save one altogether nasty chap named Marestal foolishly asleep on the south end of town.  Binks and Bulk and my anus, all harmoniously at ease and relieved.

Then the Slug goes on about no paydays in bum town, or paper rain on a bum parade- I don’t know.  But I hit the plump cocksucker in his pursed mouth as he’s mmm-ing out the um in bum.  Think I split a knuckle in the ensuing bedlam, claptrap fat faggot falling backwards into a toppling tank of tetras, crash-smash double splash in a bacchanal deluge of blood and water as he takes a crimson tumble onto broken glass fragments.  My right fist flaring screaming in a red rocket of flame I biff the bulky bouncer in the eye with my left as I’m pushing past for the door.  He’s stunned, but not particularly worse for the wear.  I’m thinking best make for the nearest dumpster or storm drain for a disappearing act. 

Binks – goddamn trusty Binks – is putting a boot in to the Slug as I’m rounding the corner, disappearing from view.  “Jesus, Hoff!” he’s shouting.  “Jesus, Hoff, what’d you do!?” as he stamp-stamp-stamples down upon the fallen drug peddler fish-fiend lying amid flopping dying neon tetras.  I’m one-two-three out the door and back into the dry cool air of the Portland night, urban dim-star sky yawning on above me.  With preservation on my mind, a spring in my step, blood oozing from my crippled right and eyes darting for the nearest knock-turn backstreet.  Trees quietly shifting in the impotent breeze, scarcely heard amid the shouts and muffled scuffle from within the white-sided juniper-hemmed house in King.

"Night Watch"

“Yeah, yeah.  G’night, you swine,” I say with a laugh as I head down the decrepit stairwell and the apartment door clicks shut and locks behind me.  Down the stairs past naked pipes and obsolescent wall switches, thinking about the past day or so; a blessed waste, of corn dogs and pizza and beer, of Get Carter and discussing Baudrillard and smoking Japanese cigarettes outside in the rain.  Of everything and nothing in particular, another blessed waste of a day.

Tick-tock, tick-tock though.  Not many days on the calendar yet, and no word about any of the applications I’ve sent out.  Money dwindling, ulcers germinating, headaches beginning.  As I push through the double lobby doors and step out onto the dark and moistened pavement I’m wondering what the future may yet hold.  An uncertain thing at best most any of the time, one might say.  Ever the thing to be feared, trod towards with a mindful step and all.

Like the bus stop.  It’s a couple blocks’ walk through an admittedly chancy sort of neighborhood, parade grounds for the lost and the homeless.  Walking along mostly darkened streets, the occasional abstract car speeding along to home or to another bar someplace.  Odd man perched against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette.  I’m walking with a sobered step and a wary set of eyes now, absorbed less in the thoughts of the day than the shadows of the present. 

It reminds me of any other number of lonesome nighttime streets I’ve sauntered.  Solwezi back-alleys and Whitehorse thoroughfares, the Old Town nocturnal markets and that Kapiri motto:  never, ever be in Kapiri after dark.  Drifting along in the shadows, thinking of one’s fellow man; sizing up and discounting and ever moving forward towards one’s destination.  Then the empty victory at the night’s end, arriving safe and realizing with weary relief you’ve expected nothing but shit from the great human parcel.  And yet.

Yet as I jay across an empty red-lit street corner to avoid the potbellied shadow coming up the way, as I cut across the parking lot and scrutinize the cars for signs of life; I wonder why not sacrifice a bit of good will for a tisch bit of safety?  One never knows, come night.  Besides, it’s not like I’m packing, ready to fire off shots at the first shadow or anything.  I just like to know when I’m best into a run.

Which is partly why (reaching my stop, checking the schedule and seeing I’ve got ten minutes yet) I don’t really ‘fun-run’ for exercise.  I’ll walk miles, certainly.  But running… save for sport, there’s no real reason for it short of life-and-limb.  Besides which, I dislike wearing shorts in public.  It propels me back into grade school, short pants and crispy boogers and utter helplessness.

Ten minutes to wait, if the bus is on schedule.  That it usually is makes me wonder about the city government, of latter-day fascism and bloated Rotarians swinging upside-down from unfinished gas stations.  More crucially, I’m standing about in the darkest center of the block on the outskirts of a parking lot for the next tiddly ten minutes.  There’s a bit of foot traffic about, and I’m wondering about each and every that heads by, off, and across.  Occasional couples, the odd group of young people, the single men and double chums and nuclear families.

A woman in a rather fetching brown wool topcoat crosses at the corner, walking on in a visibly hurried fashion.  Do I walk like that?  Or do I walk like the hooded sweatshirt scuttling across the opposite side of the street as he approaches, hands buried in oversized front pocket and head down?  A city of people afraid of the dark, of each other.  Even young-black-male, inadvertently sending chills up my spine as he approaches with his textbooks in hand.  Walking that same quick gait as everybody, probably more wary of me perched in the darkened center of the block than I should be of he.  

And then when he approaches the fear is less a one of defense than of standing about all rigid and churlish, of the body language being overtly stand-offish.  I try and stand a bit easier and hope I’m not coming across the wrong way, but it’s a no-win in a game nobody’s even keeping score at; everyone’s on the way home.  He passes and I breathe easy, all overactive amygdala and empty phantasms.  I check my phone:  I’ve five minutes yet to wait.

But I suppose the best mugging duo would be a father-son combination, or mother-son; parent-child, if one’s to be truly fair about it.  Something sort of Lock Stock, Big-Chris-and-son kind of like.  Nobody expects (or at least, I don’t) trouble from a person with their kid in tow, save the occasional ticket handler, cashier, local ombudsperson; I suppose anybody who doesn’t care for youthful antics and doting parentage might bristle a bit.  Never mind.

But really (I ask myself as the bus appears at the end of the street) who mugs people these days?  It seems almost fictional, a cliché from 70s and 80s films more than real life.  Like carjackings.  Or terrorist plots.  Arson and electric fires, cancer, bankruptcy, and death.  Bad things never happen to anybody I’m thinking as I rummage through my pockets, hoping I’ve got the exact change.  The bus pulls up and hisses to a halt, doors pishing open brightly against the drizzled darkness.  Once we get to where we’re headed, bad things never happen to anybody.  Ourselves especially.

"Unrecyclable Atomic Backlash"

            Work is going a bit slowish the day, Tuesday-after-a-holiday like.  Tim idles behind the counter, staring off into space at gods-know-what with jaw ajar.  The obligatory and presumably consumer-friendly elevator music has been discarded in favor of a rousing and somewhat questionable selection of the Girl Talk.  Not my call, of course, being more loosely disposed towards the mixing boards and harpsichords.

            Wolf and the Gem are sitting at one of the dining tables, gossiping and talking everything but shop.  I suppose I would join them there, but can’t quite trouble myself to do so as my thoughts wander beyond the room.  Thinking about electrons, mostly.  Millions of billions of tiny electrons spinning about in the tips of my fingers, inexorably gravitating around their protons and neutrons for all time.  Then again, I’m wondering if atoms ever really ‘die’, or if time and due process merely shift them about for eternity. 

It’s really starting to bother me actually, stretching my thoughts as far back into 11^th grade chemistry as they will possibly go.  Further even than that, I’m reminding myself, remembering that I’d taken 11^th grade chemistry in the 10^th.  11^th was a private school year, parochially stripped of the biological sciences.  Spent instead learning about man’s place in the environment so intelligently designed as to have a few flaws here and yon.  We’d gone to a recycling center that year and learned from a gruff overalled mainstay of the program that most of the shit people throw into the recyclables are not, point of fact, recyclable.  Thin plastic, for starters.

Thin plastic that I find myself looking at back in the now and here, one of those take-out containers we dole out by the hundreds every day for fat fuckers’ caramel rolls and oatmeal bars and crispy whatsits.  Sitting there atop the recycle bin brazenly, a bulky unrecyclable travesty that likewise leaves its consumers feeling unduly good about themselves the rest of the morning.  I recycle, ergo sum on his (or her) crumb-encrusted lips.

“Gerroff,” I grumble as I pick the vaguely unclean thing up and drop it into the proper trash.

“Hey!  Hey!  What are you doing?” the Gem pipes up from the table.  “Why did you do that?”

I shrug.  “It’s non-recyclable.  We shouldn’t even carry the damned things.”

“Non-recyclable?” and I swear that she’s up on her tiny feet and stomping towards me rather quickly.  “Non-recyclable?  Look- Look!” she exclaims, fishing out the box and shaking it at me in an incredibly irritating fashion.  “See those arrows on the bottom?  See them?  Do you see?”

“Look, you daft cow,” I begin, near about as much as I can take.  The music is maybe making me nervvy, or perhaps I just hate the very sight of Gem after five or so months of coworking the same shop.  I push the box away, incredibly careful not to make any contact with her tiny hand.  “Just because it’s got the arrows doesn’t make it so.  As it happens, cheap thin little plastics like this are not recyclable.  They get burnt off in the process by the millions.  Haven’t you ever been to a recycling center?”

“Look,” she says again with a gesticulative thrust of the box, and I dare say I thwack the thing from her hand.  The box lands, oddly enough, in the recycle bin once more.  She stands there nonplussed, a look of moral outrage growing on her cleaver of a face.

“Fucking spastic,” I mutter as I march back round the kitchen towards the office.  “I’m going to look this up!” I shout, and by God and the Wikipedia I fully shall.

“You hit me!” she says after me.

“I never even touched ya!” I reply, feeling a bit like something out of a Spencer Tracy film.  Course, there wasn’t any contact.  Of course of course, I can only tell myself, a dozen conflicting arguments flaring up within.  She shouldn’ta been pushing the box in my face - s’about time - shun’ta done that man - in for it now - and the like, tempestuously rollicking against each other.  But I sit down to the big desk and jiggle the mouse as the computer screen crackles to life, doubts and thoughts subsiding as our erstwhile question takes over.  

Of course, now the moment has passed I find myself less interested in the recycling question, wondering instead about my earlier atomic problem.  I type, wondering what the easiest way to phrase my query might be.  how long do atoms last seems about right, and sure enough there’s a spot at the top, tailor-fit to my question.  I follow the link and read on, learning after a minute or so that atoms either fade out after a malformed nanosecond or else last forever until otherwise dickered with. 

“Hmm, interesting,” I say aloud to myself, feeling fairly well satisfied that the train of thought had reached its destination.  Disembarked, I’m wondering what’s new on the Facebook.  I punch in the address and go, and at a cursory glance am somewhat surprised to see myself already logged in.  I don’t stop to ponder; rather, I’m looking through the Home splash, seeing who all is doing what.  Surprisingly, there are a dozen friend requests showing red in my upper left corner.  I begin to peruse them, don’t-know don’t-know thought-we-were-friends don’t-know and the like, paring and picking and choosing perfunctorily.

Finally I’ve got the list back down to nothing pending, and I’m starting to check the bulky array of messages in my inbox.  Jesus wept if it isn’t filled with spam!  Big meaty hunks of noble cause, fundraisy spam all sent to me by one Sara Kimball, whose name I don’t quite recall.  Join now, donate this, perfunctualate that.  “Who the holy hell is this?” I hear myself exclaiming as I’m skimming and deleting, skimming and deleting.

“The hell is who?” Wolf asks from behind me, and I explain to him the Kimball spam situation.  “Unfriend her ass,” he says with a smirk.  “I only keep fifty friends at any time, bumping people I don’t talk to or can’t remember knowing too well.  I figure fifty people is the most I can physically deal with at any one time.”

“Huh,” I reply as I go through the unfriending and block process with Miss Kimball.  “That’s a fairly new idea.  Am I in the top fifty?”

“For now.  Just don’t ever cross me,” he winks and we share a laugh.  “The Gem’s fairly pissed at you,” he adds after a bit as I’m scouring the friends listing.  I can’t say I remember half of these people, if that.

“I didn’t even make contact with her,” I begin to say, and suddenly my body freezes as I see the name in the top left of the screen:  Shoshone Dirker.  The Gem.  “Oh Jesus Christ,” I whisper.  “Is there any way to undo anything I’ve just now done?”

“Why, what did you- oh wow.  HA!”  And after a double-take Wolf laughs once more.  I explain to him the mix-up, I think rationalizing to myself that we share so many of the same friends I’d simply thought it had been my own page.  “Wow.  Don’t tell her,” he admonishes, and I heartily agree.  I log off and we exit the office, indeed intent never to mention this again.

“Well?” the Gem snaps, feigning to nurse her hand over a cup of tea in the kitchen.

“Like I said,” I say.  “They’re not really recyclable.  It’s a corporate thing.”

"For the Birds"

            “This is your stupidest idea yet,” Binks begins and I can already visualize myself putting the boot in to his whiney keister.  I don’t of course, mates and all and besides which I’ve got to maintain my reserve for the passers by.  There’re a couple of khaki-shorted tourists approaching that look like they might drop a dollar or a cigarette or two.

            “Just shaddap and play,” I respond in low tones, thumping out a sharp little number on the bon-go drum I’ve got tucked between my legs.  I’m thinking Charade meets Ginsburg playing Lucien Carr, fast-tempo and exhilarating.  Binks is trying to keep up, strumming out some cool bass lines and beatboxing a bit of fake trumpet à la Hugh Laurie.

            The tourists pass us by with a wide berth, pausing their conversation – their very breathing – and avoiding eye contact as they do so.  “Help the homeless?  Sirs?  Sirs?”  Not even a look as they sashay to the crosswalk and jay across.  I stop my drumming.  “That was awful,” I’m glaring at Binks, who has likewise stopped off on playing and is sipping from his paper sack.

            “How can it be anything else when you can’t hold a beat?” he shoots back all barby.  “Besides, nobody’s going to believe we’re homeless, even with this milk carton banjo and your pathetic coffee can.”

            “Do you know how long it took me to string that carton?”  And I mean, it did take upwards of fifteen, twenty minutes.  It may not be climbing Everest, but time is money.  “And don’t even start on talking beats.  You’ve got the rhythm of a walrus having to, I dunno… play with its cock or something.”  And we bicker on, comfortable enough in the shaded parkway of the eponymously-named Park Avenue.  It’s a hot day, bordering on the muggy if not for the steady breeze bustling through the trees.

            We pause and take thoughtful sips from our respective sacks, grimacing a tisch over the lukewarmy tang of Hurricane backwash infused with a couple nips of gin.  Clearly the band thing isn’t working out, having spent the majority of the day playing without hardly any payoff.  At one point some fresh-mouthed teenager offered us a dollar to stop.  And a couple passing JWs left us copies of their Watchtower periodical, which eventually got picked up by the breeze and left dismally tossed about in the roadside shrubbery.

            “Maybe you’re right, Binksie.  Bohemian folk music is old hat, dime a dozen and all.  We need a new gig, something unique.”

            “Can’t we go scouring for cans again?  That paid off nicely.”

            I shake my head.  “The can bums,” I remind him, men and women of the street who make their dime filling grimy shopping carts with cans they dive through the bins for.  They’re a mean lot, a sort of informal guild that doesn’t take to tin-poaching lightly.  “That one promised to take my thumbs if he ever saw me near another recyclable.”  A weighty threat, nearly always having a can of some sort in hand.  I try holding the bag with just my palm, nearly dropping it.  I’d probably have to switch to bottles, living sans thumbs.

            “How about palmistry?” I suggest.  “Like, fortune-telling!  I learned how to do it once back in college.  We could set up a bench down by the Pearl…”

            “You can read fortunes?” Binks sneers, and once again I’m thinking about thumping him one.

            “Nobody can read fortunes, you nit.  But any dumb shit can read a palm.  You just have to know which lines mean what, and sort of embellish on from there.  Gimme your hand.”  And I take his resisting arm and spread his hand palm-up on the top of my bongo can.  It’s sort of awful, touching Binks’ clammy mitt, vaguely and quite uncomfortably sexual in a way.  But eventually he quits struggling and I get to looking over the lines.

            “See, now this is your life line, by the thumb.  It’s a shrimpy little thing, meaning you’ve got no joie de vivre, no lust for life.  No head line to speak of… actually, maybe your hands are just too doughy.  Probably bloated from all the drink-”

            “Give me that!” he says irritably, pulling back his arm as I’m having a laugh that’s sort of turning to a disquietingly wet cough fit.  “You don’t know what you’re doing.  Besides, that idea’s dumber even than the folk band.  We might just have to get jobs, Hoff.  I know, I know, don’t look at me like that.  I’m just saying that the checks’ll be drying up soon and money doesn’t just come, you know?”

            “Money doesn’t just come,” I agree, “but who’s going to hire the either of us?  Spotty records, at best.  Scant sobriety, at best.  Ours is destined to be the life of the streets, man.  Of freedom!”  And with a sweeping gesture I point out the trees et al above and around us, we masters of the open spaces.  Feeling inspired, I start to tap out a rhythm dedicated to our Mother Nature, evocative of peace and joy and solidarity and-

            “Stop, stop, stop!” Binks stands abruptly, shaking his head and squeezing the bridge of his nose.  He wrests the can from me and throws it into the grass with a soft tum.  “You have no rhythm, you crazy bastard!  Soon to have no money.  No place.  No future!  We’re not characters in a goddamn Kafka novel.”

            “Kerouac,” I correct him.

            “Whatever!  It gets cold at night, Hoff man.  And sometimes it rains.  People aren’t birds; they need apartments and rent money and groceries.  They need something fucking soft to sleep on, something that doesn’t smell like piss.  Because they have pots for that, too.”  He begins to walk off down the Park Avenue, arms out and incredulous like the Monopoly tycoon on a tax day.

            “You’ll be back, Binks!” I call after him.  “It’s written in your life line!”  He shouts back something indefinably obscene as he jays at the cross.  Blinking red hands everywhere, it seems.  I lay back in the grass, cradling my head in my hands and admiring the twisted branching limbs of the oaks stretching out above me, wondering if there’s a science to arboreal palmistry.  Some passing mug flicks a quarter at me as he walks.  “Bless you, sir!” I say after him, not deigning to right myself and fetch it.  After all, it’s only a quarter.

"Bread Basking"

            So there I stand, shaking my head at the paltry assortment of comestible sadness scantily cladding my cupboards.  Two tins of tomato paste (Hunt’s, not even Contadina), a half-jar of banana peppers, a can and a half of coffee, a bag of dried beans, and two lukewarm cans of Pabst still hooked at the ring.  There’s flour in the counter bin, maybe some sugar.  The fridge might have some mustard and a bottle of pomegranate juice, and most definitely a half-case of Steel Reserve.  I’ve got nothing.  Nothing but coffee and malted beverage, and a stomach that’s beginning to grumble.

            I rummage out a pad from the junk drawer.  From the Mind of Hoff, lovingly printed at the header.  I pull a pen from my pocket and start scrawling like, outpouring a deluge of thoughts and staples and whimsy.  Onions, big meaty yellow sweet and sharp Vidalias, a half dozen at least.  And eggs!  An eighteen pack of AA super-grade eggiweggs, sizzled up in butter with bacon on the side.  Shredded cheddar, sour cream, two-percent milk- scratch that, whole milk, goddamned buttermilk!  Orange juice, Texas Toast, vanilla extract, fakey never-go-bad syrup… and that’s just breakfast!

            I’m having to pull up another sheet:  vine-ripened tomatoes, twenty pounds of spaghetti, butcher-fresh sagey sausage, non-virgin olive oil, machine-rolled Totino snackems, split peas, ham hocks, Progresso soups, chicken wings, Sweet Baby Ray’s, a goddamn ribeye… I’m chuckling to myself, the thought of all this food is making me so happy.  In reality once I get to the store I know what it’ll be; a case of Ramen and another can of coffee, but a man can dare to dream.

            I know there’s a Safeway across the river by the Binks’ but I’m hoping for something closer by, something I need only heft a few blocks for the haul.  I can think of a few bars and like, but I honestly can’t say I’ve ever looked about for grocery stores.  I pull up the Google Earth on the desktop and begin searching.  What luck!  Shopping cart icons everywhere, it seems.  And a Safeway only three or four blocks southeast of me.  With a jump and a skip I’ve got my wallet and my list and I’m headed out the door, wondering as I go whether I should nip off a Steel into a Nalgene for the walk.  Naw, I’m telling myself after a bit of thought.  It doesn’t do to drink when there’s food afoot.  A couple sips and a body loses the hunger, that drive that makes us all human.

            So I’m out the door and into the aggressive hello of the sun’s rays.  It is a bright, obnoxiously beautiful day, balmy and just a bit breezy.  To my liking, so far as sunny days go.  I’m walking east through the neighborhood, a downright bounce in my step as I go.  Thinking about food - Food! - real food, with the heat and grime of real cooking.  Real chopping, real mincing, real preheating and temping and scouring.  Reality, sustenance for the life and mind like.  Only a stone’s throw from growing it all yourself, but I’m not sure yet how to apply for a community plot.  Not quite sure how I’d fit in with the garden set, either.  Trés gentrifique, them.

            But the neighborhood’s pleasantly quiet the day, just another Sunday in Godless Portland.  A time to rest and reflect, to revel in goodliness and peace and such.  A time to grocery shop.  I reach my street and start heading down, noticing an easy chair on the pavement that might do nicely in the apartment.  High backed and cultured, a beigey ‘sitting room’ sort of affair.  First things first, though, and after a few more blocks than I’d expected I’m at the crossroads, mildly perplexed at the rubbled lot before me.  I’m looking to the street signs and yes, this is indeed the proper spot.

            Proper spot too late, apparently.  Safeway gone and relegated to a lot, paving the way for a new strip outlet sometime next spring.  Hum, I’m thinking to myself, wondering where next on my little adventure.  There’s nothing but cafes and shops to my right, so I continue eastward on Hawthorne towards nowhere in particular, sun hovering above me.  Real LBJ, the sun today.  The back of my neck is already starting to get sticky damp, my mouth dry to taste.  Perhaps a Nalgene would’ve been a good call, and I’m wondering if I really need any food at all.  A couple malts, maybe an impromptu soup with the beans and tomato paste…
            Treasonous thoughts, I’m telling myself as I see ahead a sign that reads MARKET across the street.  My hopes aren’t up though; it could just as easily be a sign that says LAUNDROMAT or MOTEL or any other number of shoddy inner-city semi-conveniences.  My guess is that they won’t even have a produce section or cold untinned meat, like the dozens of fucking Plaid Pantries masquerading as grocery stores.  Gas stations without the pumps, more like.

            I cross on over, fears turning to reasonable doubts turning to unlikely hopes to the contrary.  It’s no different than any number of liquor shops, and as I go in I see the chip aisle, the condom section, magazines, and three walls of cooler doors filled with beer and booze and energy drinks.

            “Hey!” the clerk greets me warmly with a pleasant, nondescript sort of accent.  “Wonderful day, no?”  I greet him back; it is, in fact, a wonderful day.  With a heavy tread I saunter the two aisles, looking for any mislaid eighteen-count cartons of eggs, or bacon, or even a bundle of asparagus.  Nothing except for Vienna Sausages and Doritos, and the cold case beckoning me thither with its soft iridescent blue glow.  And after talking to the clerk I suppose I’d feel bad not buying anything.  I peruse the walls, gravitating towards the singles.  With a sigh I grab a giant Fosters and a large Guinness, and a bag of wasabi peas that catches my eye towards the counter.

            “I.D. please?” clerky asks me as he rings my tawdry groceries through.  “These good?” he asks of the peas.

            “Oh yeah, I love’m,” I say.  “Would you happen to know of any grocery stores nearby?” I ask with vain hope.

            “Sorry man, I don’t know.  It’s my first day, you know?”

            “Not a worry, thanks.”  He hands me my bag and card and receipt and I’m back out the door into the soul-crushing sunshine.  It's deleriating, sweltering, demoralizing.
             I'm wondering where I should go from here, and as if to answer my thoughts some white-hatted shite riding shotgun in a passing pickup suddenly shouts out at me, "GO HOME, FAGGOT!!"  So with a shrug I head west.  Homeward bound and less the hungry than for the thirst.

"Tuesday Most Glourious"

Binks and myself are milling about by the stop 2-6-4-2 on the Hawthorne over-underpass, drinking Old German pounders from the bag.  Exulting life, I suppose, soaking in the resplendence of God’s own day, that most glourious of Tues-days.  The government and church establishment perhaps haven’t officially recognized it as a holiday, our Tuesday, but I rest assured that they someday will.  

How could they not?  Ineffable solar rays, a moocow lowing of the tugs and boats on the river just ahead, scritching birds, droning cars, sweeping breeze!  Truly a day to be out and about and headed downtown to extend one’s snap account.  “Isn’t it great?” I’m shouting to Binks as a bus rolls by.

            “No, I think we missed our bus,” he’s saying dismally, off on a different tangent altogether.

            “Damn your balls, man!  Can’t you see it’s a wonderful day?  Heavens above and beyond,” and I take another surreptitious slurp from my bag, enjoying a lukewarm pizzy mouthful of stale wash as I scope out the number on the disappearing bus.  “Nah, you fool, it’s not ours!  See, we’ve got a few minutes yet before ours comes along.”

            “Right-right, then!” he chimes in, brightening up immediately as he tips and drains his can back.  “Well, I’m dry” he shrugs, tossing bag and can back over the side, into the weedy concertinaed-off lot below.

            “Littering wag,” I’m muttering after him as my eye follows the thing’s descent, impact, and insignificance among forgotten cars and racks of canoes tangled in tall grass.  And suddenly I’m putting it all together, scanning the lightposts above for camera boxes.  “Ye gods, Binks!  We ought to take a canoe,” and already I’ve got my unsteady eye on a shoddy kelly green thing in the corner, built for two and a case and easy enough to lift.  One that nobody’d miss, I’m thinking.

            “What, down the river?  Are there paddles?  What about our food stamps?”

            “Don’t bring me down with details, dammit!  We can use those planks as paddles, the river’ll be our starboard and the breeze our compass!  We can head downtown another day this week.”  And already I’m leading the way down the concrete stairway, Binks tittering on behind me.

            “You’re crazy, Hoff.  Goddamn crazy,” he’s admonishing me, nigh-on complimentary.  “We just take this thing north, to the ocean?  And what then?  How’ll we get back?”

            “Details again, you little squint.  You can’t nitpick inspiration on days like this.”  We’re on the ground now, rubbley litter-strewn stretch of disused earth.  I’m looking about for weaknesses in the fencing, but it’s all razor-tipped and padded off from the general pop, tight and proper.  “Well ass,” I’m cursing at the thing, foiled before we could make good on our venture.  “Maybe there’ll be a bedroll along the river or under an overpass or something.”

            “What, you’ll ruin somebody’s bedroll now?  That’s all some’ve got, you crazy bastard.”

            “Fine, fine,” I’m conceding.  Binks has a point, even if he is a complaining little weed.  “We’ll look for something though.” 

From above comes the hiss of what is most likely our bus.  “Shit, shit!” Binks is shouting angrily, running pell-mell for the staircase.  “Dammit, wait!!”  It’s a funny sight, watching him scramble up those stairs.  Binks can really leg it if he wants, despite being a dumpy cuss.  The bus hisses on though, grunting its way back into traffic towards the bridge.  “I missed it, you shit!” Binks is calling from twenty, thirty feet up.

“Why don’t you throw a can at me?” I’m laughing back at him, still looking about for a way through the wire.  Perhaps I could crawl under and push the canoe over…  “Hey Binks, I’ve got a plan!  Binks!  Binks?”  But he is gone, probably crossing the bridge on foot in a huff.  Shame, really though.  The canoe might take a crack if there isn’t somebody on the other side to catch it.

I leave off toward the esplanade and the river with a shrug.  It is a glorious day, not one to be wasted on scurrilous details.  I tip back my Old German and drain out the very last and plunk it softly into the yard.  These are the gifts one mustn’t prod too roughly in the teeth; this sun, these birds, this traffic thundering onward overhead, completely oblivious to the wonderful world below it.

"The Barfight"

It was another Wednesday at the Blue, myself and Tony and Kelly all elbows across the bar with our drinks in hand.  Talking about movies, making Simpsons references, complaining about our Cubs and Twins and Tigers, half-heartedly ogling the gals strewn about; a lot of small talk, a thing to do to help the beers go down sort of like.

            So the way we were arranged was this:  there were two scurvy fat looking fellers nestled in nearest the bathrooms, followed by Kelly, then Tony, then myself.  There was nobody to my left for much of the night, until these two collar popping young sugarwaifs strut on up and take stools nearest the door.  “What have you got in a Belgian wheat?” one’s asking bartender Kenny, while the other orders up a Mike’s Hard.  Belgian Wheat leans stiffly on his elbow, trying to lock cocksure and not at all ridiculous.  Meanwhile Mike’s Hard is cocksure and keeps bobbing his head suggestively as he sips, akin to a walking chicken or a turkey or something.

            It’s fairly ludicrous to watch these college boys doing their thing and I’m thinking back to my own college days, wondering if I was ever so daft.  Not like them, certainly, but each in his own way like.  They start commenting to each other about their drinks in overloud nasal voices, about clarity and hoppiness and so forth.  I’m having to bite my lip and suppress a laugh by then, but as I always say, far be it from me to be the rude one, eh?  Sage advice perhaps, but once their convo started drifting into the murky waters of politics one of the hefts at the other end of the bar was not above so being.

            Belgian was just remarking to Mike’s about those ‘idiot Tea Partiers’ and the current budget crisis and all, and daft though they are I’m nodding along so to speak.  Then an empty bottle gets set heavily down onto the counter nearest the john.  “Idiot Tea Partiers, you say?”  We’re all craning our heads down the bar to see him, this plump leather-clad thing from out of the Thunderdome - Bill, I think his friends generally call him.  He’s twisting the top off another Bud Light and smiling all big and menacing like.  “What about those idiot Dumb-o-craps who can’t even balance a budget properly!?”  And his buddy - fat man in greasy overalls I think’s called Gary - is laughing it up and flashing a few broken teeth.  He’s a real character even if he doesn’t talk much, and I’m thinking to myself how perfect he’d be in a novel or story someday.

            “Right now the President is trying to get a balanced budget passed,” Belgian whinges in response.  “The Repelicans in Congress are just blocking it for their stupid political reasons.”

“Your President is being a dictator. Congress - which represents the people of America - has spoken! Yet Obama will not let go of his ideas and let democracy prevail.”

“Look, man, there’re two halves to Congress.  The Republicans only have the lower half.  It’s a split legislature at most.”

“The House majority has spoken and they represent the people of America!” and I dare say Bill was standing upright and thundering his fist against the bar.  “Most Americans don't want to raise the debt ceiling - fact! However, do you find it responsible to increase the borrowing level without having a balanced budget? If the Democrats came up with a balanced budget, perhaps raising the debt ceiling would be warranted!”

But Belgian won’t be stifled, climbing to his own feet in less than intimidating fashion.  “The Democrats are trying to balance the budget, you hayseed yomp!  It's just their approach is a combination of increasing revenues and cutting spending. And as to the wisdom of raising the debt ceiling, I've heard sensible arguments to either side. But – hell!!  - if it's a question of hard politics, storming out of a directionless meeting is a fair response to unbending ideological rigmarole.”

Point though he was trying to make, Belgian was well out of order with his ‘hayseed yomp’ remark.  Bill was already walking around Tony and Kelly and coming our way, and I can feel his presence pass by me like an angel of death.  But then he’s past and that presence is lifted from my shoulders and I feel at ease again.  More’n could be said for Belgian, though I have to give him some sort of praise for standing his ground.  Bill comes right up to him, face in face like.  “The Republicans have offered to raise the debt ceiling if he cuts spending.  Fair?”

And there is a moment of silence, save for the terse seething of two very close faces.  “No, it’s not fair,” Belgian snaps.  “They’re just offering to raise the debt, not find an equilibrium.”

“I’ll give you equilibrium!!” Bill roars as he grabs Belgian by the easily accessible popped collars.  By this time we’d backed right on off next to the bathrooms.  I’ve never seen an actual bar fight before, but I’m expecting bottles and glass and the like to start flying any minute.  Gary hasn’t even moved from his seat, still watching and chuckling from the far end of the bar.  But Mike’s Hard pulls Bill around roughly by his shoulder and the two seem squared off in the bar’s center floor.  Mind that Mike’s isn’t a big guy either, and Bill’s looking slightly confused as the kid crouches down for a judo attack stance or some such thing.  And then-

It was a beautiful thing to see, a legitimately movie-perfect kick.  I mean, Mike’s really launched himself at Bill, bringing his whole person into the single point of his foot right into the fat man’s solar plexus.  Bill was thrown backwards and Mike’s does the Bruce Lee quiver as he bounces himself around to perfect stillness.  Then fast as lightning Gary pushes past us and brings a bottle down right over the top of his head.  And Bill was back up in a jiff and throwing down at the fallen, bleeding persona of the Mike’s. 
What happened after, I couldn’t well say.  The three of us were already headed out via the service entrance into the crisp blackness of the night, the muffled shouts and cries of anguish and the crackle of furniture fading fast as somewhere sirens perked up in the distance.