Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Tempting
There was noise and violence in the valley last night. I saw lightning, but I heard no thunder. That was you.
Ok.
Ok?
Well, what should I say? I kill people all the time. ‘sin the job description. Your father’s as well..
Tell me something.
Before we are through here I’ll tell you many things…
Josh ignored this and asked:
Why?
Why?
Yes: Why?
If you really mean that, I’m disappointed. I really thought you had a bit more on the ball than that. It’s puzzling really. “Why.” You sound like one of them.
I AM one of them.
Is that really what you believe?
It’s what I’ve been told.
Told by who?
Told by the air, told by the people, told by the prophets and my brothers and sisters in the streets, and in the desert. Told by the writings of my father. Told by the truth that guides me even now, tonight.
No truth brought you to this cave boy. If you believe that anything happens here without benediction from your father and I, than perhaps you really are a man. Pity. We had expectations.
None though, that you thought you might share with me. The only child of the only supreme being, and I’m not even looped into the family business.
Oh, but you are. A different man would have seen the path and made his way. The things your father and I decide to do to, with, or for the race of men is for the two of us to decide. From you, we only require loyalty.
Loyalty and conquered lands. I will not be your hands and voice to take up swords and shout out threats. My father made me. He - of all people - understands the things I’m capable of.
That’s what you really think isn’t it? That he made you, and guides you, and knows all that will become of you?
If I’m wrong I pray you educate me. I haven’t been sleeping well and I’m running out things to pray about.
Very well. An education then. But not here in the baking desert. Let’s walk and talk, shall we?
They started out walking, but soon, gradually enough so that Josh didn’t notice right way, they began to float. Rising gently on the easy desert winds like a child’s balloon. Lu - as most good teachers will - began his lesson with a question.
When was the first time you realized that you were different than others?
As far back as I can remember. My mother likes to tell a story about the time the giant mammoths of Zanzibar came through the Old Road in Galilee. She and my father took me to see them, as did - it seemed - every family for every child in the entire country. The crowds in the square were the largest anybody could remember, even today. The merchants and whores of the village were overwhelmed by the onslaught of curious folk. It seemed to me, at the time, that there was a wine-steward every block and even in the hot noon-day men weaved and stumbled from drink. By the time the show began the crowd was wine-filled, passionate, and unruly.
A gigantic stage had been created, and it was there the great beasts were performing. Flanking them were the musicians, playing music without words and creating it on the spot, in synch with the animals. I was eleven months old, and I remember those two mammoths as if they were in front of us here, now. The wrangler had them stand at attention and climb onto one another, but - really - the beasts themselves were enough of a show. I would have stayed there with those amazing creatures for as long as they would have me, they dazzled me so. Unfortunately, my time there was cut short.
Lu knew what had happened but he let the boy continue in hushed, almost reverent, tones:
Just as the wrangler was preparing his final trick, disaster struck. The wrangler had meant to finish the show with a great amazement. A barker was brought out to rile the assembled and announce the surreal intentions of the beast-master:
Ladies and gentlemen, your attention if I may? For this next trick, I will need a volunteer from the audience. Who here would assist me with these wild and ferocious beasts? Who among you…
But he needn’t have continued. The crowd, numbering now - it seemed - in the tens of thousands, let go a mighty cry as one voices, and raised there hands up high. Jumping at the chance to play pretend with these alien land-leviathans. The barker, dressed from head to tow in black loose fitting linens, paused scratching his beard and acting out his decision. Within a few moments he addressed us once again:
Good people! We have our assistant. Thank you ALL!
Then he knelt at the front of the great stone edifice and was lost to sight for a few minutes. The crowd murmuring it’s wonder and swaying visibly from the grape, was just beginning to loose it’s collective patience when the barker spoke again:
Please welcome KIT! Our dear lovely girl!!
He held her up. She couldn’t have been a day over three and all wrapped in white linen. She was clapping and squealing as the Carney put her on display, waving her in little arcs at the edge of the stage. After the long cheers had subsided, the trick was prepared. The wrangler walked one of his beasts to the far right and the other to the far left so that they faced each other with the stage vacant, save for the wrangler himself. It was then, with the monsters arranged just so, that I really came to appreciate the sheer immensity of them. Both were at least 15 feet high at the shoulder, with ferocious looking tusks flashing downward, almost resting on the rocks. They looked about as invincible as anything alive and just being around them had put the crowd - myself included - into a sort of trance. What sort of benevolent deity would put it’s energies into the creation of an awful beast like this?
I remember the barker having a short conversation with a large man in the front row. They were pointing at the animals, and at the little girl, wandering the stage now and still squealing and clapping. She’d ranged to the far side of the stage by the time the wrangler got done talking. He looked surprised to see her so far away, and mimed a hands-on-hips disappointment before getting after her. She saw him and began to run the opposite direction. Running AT one of the mammoths and still squealing and clapping. I saw what was about to happen, and moments later, everyone else did as well. The mammoth stiffened somehow. A shock of muscle tension racked his mighty ribcage and the awful tusks were raised. As the child closed, the thing let out a low, lethal-sounding growl. The babe was doomed, and the crowd could only watch.
Then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t. A hand shot up from the crowd below us and grabbed the babe by the ankle. She tripped and fell but the hand gripped her fast. The mammoth bellowed, and was readying his attack, but another man, the one who’d been talking to the barker before the trick, had jumped up onstage and grabbed the girl while the wrangler moved to calm the raging pachyderm. The relief was an audible “whoooooo,” from the assembled and a comfy, grateful buzzing began. The man was - of course - the father of the child and he was holding her, still on the stage, and whispering comforts into her face, and telling her that everything was all right.
That’s when the great beast attacked. Nobody had noticed it’s advance because the beast master had stepped off stage for a drink of water just after calming the thing. The monster took two steps forward, and drove his left tusk through the girl’s father back, and through her own chest, skewering them like pieces of chicken on a roasting stick. The father’s head lolled back on his shoulders and a thick spew of dark arterial blood fountained from his nose and mouth. A shocked silence fell over the crowd, but it was replaced by a revolted hum that rose with the killed father and daughter as the enraged animal reared and brought them up. For a moment, all were captured in silhouette against the sun: Beast and victims. Then the mammoth roared a great roar, and spiked them down upon the rough surface of the gigantic stage. The crowd screamed then, and began to disintegrate into madness.
I remember a lot of things after that, but they flash through my mind like so many moths around a lantern light. I saw the girl and her father split open on the stage. Flies already gathering over the crimson pools growing there. I saw the girls arms twitching and jumping. I saw the murdering beast rear up again, this time bringing both his front feet down directly the fathers head and upper body. I remember a red mist, and the stench of blood and fluid cooking on the sun-bleached rocks. I saw the other mammoth come unhinged by the violence and charge his wrangler. Impaling the screaming man on his right tusk without loosing a step and driving both tusks deep into the neck of his opposite number. There was another sound then: The sound of two giant mammoths broadcasting hatred, coupled with the desperate screams of those who’d come here to be amazed. The beasts tumbled into the crush of onlookers, crushing and maiming the unlucky few who couldn't get clear. The barker had surveyed the scene from offstage and tried to duck into the crowd while the fighting happened. Instead, the mob fell upon him and rained steel. Daggers, knives, swords, hammers, pumped and jabbed until the mans arms,legs, feet, and head had all been ripped away from his body and and flung into the heaving masses. Later, safe at home and resting, I heard my father Joseph relate the day to my old mother. He told her all and left nothing, adding only this: He said that the girl who was crushed was a godless heathen. You see, Jospeh had learned that the child's family worshiped the old Gods. He said and that her fate, and her father's fate were sealed many years ago, when they refused to accept our one, true, God.
That’s when I knew I was different, Lu. Different and doomed. I knew my real father would agree with the ignorant lout. I knew that he had no concerns for those who didn’t pay him respect and loyalty. That day was awful for families from here to Persia and back, but the townsfolk, MY folk, saw the destruction of four godless animals where I saw the unmendable grief of families. The holes left in the lives of loved ones and the pain. Grey, evil, and endless.
Boy you are odd. I’ve gotta get to your dad. The problem is bigger than we’d thought.
Bigger and unmendable, like the grief of those who died under the elephants.
Ok.
Ok?
Well, what should I say? I kill people all the time. ‘sin the job description. Your father’s as well..
Tell me something.
Before we are through here I’ll tell you many things…
Josh ignored this and asked:
Why?
Why?
Yes: Why?
If you really mean that, I’m disappointed. I really thought you had a bit more on the ball than that. It’s puzzling really. “Why.” You sound like one of them.
I AM one of them.
Is that really what you believe?
It’s what I’ve been told.
Told by who?
Told by the air, told by the people, told by the prophets and my brothers and sisters in the streets, and in the desert. Told by the writings of my father. Told by the truth that guides me even now, tonight.
No truth brought you to this cave boy. If you believe that anything happens here without benediction from your father and I, than perhaps you really are a man. Pity. We had expectations.
None though, that you thought you might share with me. The only child of the only supreme being, and I’m not even looped into the family business.
Oh, but you are. A different man would have seen the path and made his way. The things your father and I decide to do to, with, or for the race of men is for the two of us to decide. From you, we only require loyalty.
Loyalty and conquered lands. I will not be your hands and voice to take up swords and shout out threats. My father made me. He - of all people - understands the things I’m capable of.
That’s what you really think isn’t it? That he made you, and guides you, and knows all that will become of you?
If I’m wrong I pray you educate me. I haven’t been sleeping well and I’m running out things to pray about.
Very well. An education then. But not here in the baking desert. Let’s walk and talk, shall we?
They started out walking, but soon, gradually enough so that Josh didn’t notice right way, they began to float. Rising gently on the easy desert winds like a child’s balloon. Lu - as most good teachers will - began his lesson with a question.
When was the first time you realized that you were different than others?
As far back as I can remember. My mother likes to tell a story about the time the giant mammoths of Zanzibar came through the Old Road in Galilee. She and my father took me to see them, as did - it seemed - every family for every child in the entire country. The crowds in the square were the largest anybody could remember, even today. The merchants and whores of the village were overwhelmed by the onslaught of curious folk. It seemed to me, at the time, that there was a wine-steward every block and even in the hot noon-day men weaved and stumbled from drink. By the time the show began the crowd was wine-filled, passionate, and unruly.
A gigantic stage had been created, and it was there the great beasts were performing. Flanking them were the musicians, playing music without words and creating it on the spot, in synch with the animals. I was eleven months old, and I remember those two mammoths as if they were in front of us here, now. The wrangler had them stand at attention and climb onto one another, but - really - the beasts themselves were enough of a show. I would have stayed there with those amazing creatures for as long as they would have me, they dazzled me so. Unfortunately, my time there was cut short.
Lu knew what had happened but he let the boy continue in hushed, almost reverent, tones:
Just as the wrangler was preparing his final trick, disaster struck. The wrangler had meant to finish the show with a great amazement. A barker was brought out to rile the assembled and announce the surreal intentions of the beast-master:
Ladies and gentlemen, your attention if I may? For this next trick, I will need a volunteer from the audience. Who here would assist me with these wild and ferocious beasts? Who among you…
But he needn’t have continued. The crowd, numbering now - it seemed - in the tens of thousands, let go a mighty cry as one voices, and raised there hands up high. Jumping at the chance to play pretend with these alien land-leviathans. The barker, dressed from head to tow in black loose fitting linens, paused scratching his beard and acting out his decision. Within a few moments he addressed us once again:
Good people! We have our assistant. Thank you ALL!
Then he knelt at the front of the great stone edifice and was lost to sight for a few minutes. The crowd murmuring it’s wonder and swaying visibly from the grape, was just beginning to loose it’s collective patience when the barker spoke again:
Please welcome KIT! Our dear lovely girl!!
He held her up. She couldn’t have been a day over three and all wrapped in white linen. She was clapping and squealing as the Carney put her on display, waving her in little arcs at the edge of the stage. After the long cheers had subsided, the trick was prepared. The wrangler walked one of his beasts to the far right and the other to the far left so that they faced each other with the stage vacant, save for the wrangler himself. It was then, with the monsters arranged just so, that I really came to appreciate the sheer immensity of them. Both were at least 15 feet high at the shoulder, with ferocious looking tusks flashing downward, almost resting on the rocks. They looked about as invincible as anything alive and just being around them had put the crowd - myself included - into a sort of trance. What sort of benevolent deity would put it’s energies into the creation of an awful beast like this?
I remember the barker having a short conversation with a large man in the front row. They were pointing at the animals, and at the little girl, wandering the stage now and still squealing and clapping. She’d ranged to the far side of the stage by the time the wrangler got done talking. He looked surprised to see her so far away, and mimed a hands-on-hips disappointment before getting after her. She saw him and began to run the opposite direction. Running AT one of the mammoths and still squealing and clapping. I saw what was about to happen, and moments later, everyone else did as well. The mammoth stiffened somehow. A shock of muscle tension racked his mighty ribcage and the awful tusks were raised. As the child closed, the thing let out a low, lethal-sounding growl. The babe was doomed, and the crowd could only watch.
Then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t. A hand shot up from the crowd below us and grabbed the babe by the ankle. She tripped and fell but the hand gripped her fast. The mammoth bellowed, and was readying his attack, but another man, the one who’d been talking to the barker before the trick, had jumped up onstage and grabbed the girl while the wrangler moved to calm the raging pachyderm. The relief was an audible “whoooooo,” from the assembled and a comfy, grateful buzzing began. The man was - of course - the father of the child and he was holding her, still on the stage, and whispering comforts into her face, and telling her that everything was all right.
That’s when the great beast attacked. Nobody had noticed it’s advance because the beast master had stepped off stage for a drink of water just after calming the thing. The monster took two steps forward, and drove his left tusk through the girl’s father back, and through her own chest, skewering them like pieces of chicken on a roasting stick. The father’s head lolled back on his shoulders and a thick spew of dark arterial blood fountained from his nose and mouth. A shocked silence fell over the crowd, but it was replaced by a revolted hum that rose with the killed father and daughter as the enraged animal reared and brought them up. For a moment, all were captured in silhouette against the sun: Beast and victims. Then the mammoth roared a great roar, and spiked them down upon the rough surface of the gigantic stage. The crowd screamed then, and began to disintegrate into madness.
I remember a lot of things after that, but they flash through my mind like so many moths around a lantern light. I saw the girl and her father split open on the stage. Flies already gathering over the crimson pools growing there. I saw the girls arms twitching and jumping. I saw the murdering beast rear up again, this time bringing both his front feet down directly the fathers head and upper body. I remember a red mist, and the stench of blood and fluid cooking on the sun-bleached rocks. I saw the other mammoth come unhinged by the violence and charge his wrangler. Impaling the screaming man on his right tusk without loosing a step and driving both tusks deep into the neck of his opposite number. There was another sound then: The sound of two giant mammoths broadcasting hatred, coupled with the desperate screams of those who’d come here to be amazed. The beasts tumbled into the crush of onlookers, crushing and maiming the unlucky few who couldn't get clear. The barker had surveyed the scene from offstage and tried to duck into the crowd while the fighting happened. Instead, the mob fell upon him and rained steel. Daggers, knives, swords, hammers, pumped and jabbed until the mans arms,legs, feet, and head had all been ripped away from his body and and flung into the heaving masses. Later, safe at home and resting, I heard my father Joseph relate the day to my old mother. He told her all and left nothing, adding only this: He said that the girl who was crushed was a godless heathen. You see, Jospeh had learned that the child's family worshiped the old Gods. He said and that her fate, and her father's fate were sealed many years ago, when they refused to accept our one, true, God.
That’s when I knew I was different, Lu. Different and doomed. I knew my real father would agree with the ignorant lout. I knew that he had no concerns for those who didn’t pay him respect and loyalty. That day was awful for families from here to Persia and back, but the townsfolk, MY folk, saw the destruction of four godless animals where I saw the unmendable grief of families. The holes left in the lives of loved ones and the pain. Grey, evil, and endless.
Boy you are odd. I’ve gotta get to your dad. The problem is bigger than we’d thought.
Bigger and unmendable, like the grief of those who died under the elephants.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Caravan
The caravan hovered out of the fog. It was lead by six elephants. In their wake traveled a large hunting party, along with two troupes of dancers and actors, thier crew and technical staff, and - just behind them - stock supplies of wine, surfactant, kahammi leaves, and hashish. The hash rode suspended in a tracings suspended between two donkeys. Wrapped, in multiple layers of leaf and cloth, against the sun and the elements. Wrapped better, in truth, than most of the performers. It was the hash that Lu smelled on the breeze swelling before the massive column of bodies. It was the smell that made Lu climb a gigantic boulder adjacent to the caravan track. The mammoth drivers saw him before they heard him and when they heard him they stopped. Immediately.
Heyoooooohhhhhhhhhhhh.
Lu yelling like a bird. He bounded down the boulder side as the big train stopped. Ran to the front to stand between the two front-guard Elephants. The beasts gave him wide berth. Their handlers, noting this, drew swords. They looked down at Lu.
Oh stop it. I need a fuckin’ ride. First off though, can one of you tell me, is this Jerusalem? Are we…Are you coming from Jerusalem? I need to get there. I have money!
He held up a large bag of indeterminate-but-obviously-high dollar value. The guards looked at each other, sheathing swords and going to the rear to find the Van driver.
***
Lu spent most of his time on the road to Jerusalem in his usual traveling state. That is to say: very drunk, and flitting in and out of consciousness at the very rear of the column. The road was smoother back there, trampled as it was, by his fellows ahead. It so happened in this instance, Lu found himself riding with the hash, suspended in a makeshift litter between the two donkeys, a situation none to pleasing for anybody but Lu himself.
After a few days, as the train got nearer to the holy city, he was summoned off the donkeys and made to stand before the nobleman Kleeg, who apparently owned the entire operation, and who, it was made abundantly clear, wanted his hash back. He had been en route to Jerusalem - he said - to unload it to a lucky few for a healthy profit.
A special preparation.
He’d said, in answer to his passenger’s ample appreciation,
...Made only once every 10 years by a secret guild working by night in the village where I live.
And indeed it was. Special and tasty and ridiculously potent. Eyes were reddened and tongues tied wherever it was brought out, and the slab that Lu had been terminating with extreme prejudice up till just this moment, had been accounted for and monetized. It was put to Lu that he’d never be able to pay for the oily-potent goop, and must settle his account before any further consumption. They told him to cease and desist, at first with impressed smiles but later with a sort of regretful sneer, and finally with a severe, aggressive bark. The separating of his head from his shoulders was broached more than once. Lu listened to all of it looking intense and thoughtful. When - at last - the last caravan-passenger had had his say on the matter, he sat quiet for a time, than cleared his throat and began to speak.
***
Two of the wagons in the caravan belonged to a man named Katesh Katesh. They drove the rear, took things a bit easier for it than the trail-blazing vanguard up front. Their cargo, mysterious and swaddled though it was, was very delicate, and did not travel well. Still, those in the caravan who knew things knew that Katesh was a renowned master of the taxonomies, and was traveling East on his way to the Orient. He had been sending riders out, one a day to secure passage there from the port city of Baht, just south of the holy lands. Lu braced Katesh one steamy afternoon as the Van sided a river called Fikteh, inquiring about the man’s travel frustrations and also about the well-hidden treasures so carefully packed in the wagons. He told Katesh:
I know some smugglers that operate out of Baht, and they - each of them - owe me a favor. Let me get a peak at what you’ve got stashed in those cabs and I’ll see you safely to the East without so much as a penny falling off your books.
Katesh was a smart man and a brilliant judge of character. He didn’t find himself inclined to entertain the shifty man who’d been smoking all the drivers hashish. For one thing, he stunk. Badly. Lu hadn’t showered in almost a year by the time the train crossed into the outskirts of Baht, and anyone - man and beast alike - caught in his draft would risk stomach ailments and nightmares from the stench. The stinky little whippet was making physical sense however, and in the end, Katesh was a businessman before he was anything else. He told his new patron:
I’ll let you into the menagerie tonight after we’ve allowed for our cookfires and prayer. You may spend as much time as you like amongst my wares for the next few days. All I ask in return is the arrangement you promised me at the rates we discussed.
And so Lu was allowed amongst the animals. The Cars were organized only by size, with the larger beasts forward in the cabs. Katesh had his people remove the contents of both cabs that first night so that Lu might examine the properties in comfort. The old taxonomist Katesh handed Lu a bright torch and left him with his creations. Lu was beside himself. The happiest he’d been in years by quite a good bit. The animals of earth had been his creations, and yet he’d not hardly laid eyes on any of the sneaky bastards. The first four pieces - two large male groundhogs, a wolverine, and a brown desert wolf - were things he’d never seen except in their creation. Lu found himself tearing up as he examined the contours of musculature and brilliant functionality of pelts and teeth. Next he pulled the covers from a great white mountain lion almost four feet high at the shoulder and at least eight feet in length. He marveled at the ferocious thing from all angles, thinking back with fondness on the nights he and his best friend created this lethal, brilliant creature. He moved slowly, careful to put the tarps and cloths back just so on Katesh’s miracles. Before the sun came up he’d spent quality time with three types of giant sand rats, a male and female three toed sloth, and a family of giant African hedgehogs. He’d studied the claw function and position of an evil-looking black panther, and wondered at a female crocodile Katesh said was caught from salt water, unwittingly falling victim to a fisherman’s net. Just moments before the sun crested the far hills in front of them, Katesh had his people unwrap the final piece: A giant white and black stripped tiger from the triple-canopy jungles of the West Indies.
This devil killed an entire village one day last year when the spring floods were late. When a beast of this size gets hungry, the gods help anybody alive in a fifty mile radius.
Lu nodded and kept staring. If he hadn’t been on business here he’d have blown the entire caravan to hell and taken the amazing pieces for himself. As it was, he was forced to remain on task. His friend needed him and he meant to answer the call. He thanked Katesh and gave him a bag of gold dust in appreciation. The ships were waiting, as promised, for the old huntsman in Baht, and his passage to the Orient was safe and comfortable.
***
I’m sure you don’t mean the things you say to me sir, and so I’m giving you a chance to reneg. One chance. Do not waste it: Apologize to me out loud, here in front of the van, and you’ll remain the whole man, standing here before me. Deny me my courtesy though, and we’re going to have trouble. A pound of hashish will not be worth the kind of trouble I speak of. I implore you: Let us make amends.
The Caravan driver, however, was a dry and humorless man. He didn’t hold with theft and he didn’t hold with threats on his person delivered publically, and with a marked dearth of respect. His answer came quick and direct: He whipped out his cock and began to piss into the black leather satchel that served as Lu’s travel bag and portable office. Lu heard the piss dropping into the leather and looked down to see his papers and baubles drowned in yellow, desert-honed piss. A steam began to rise, and urine splatter began to turn the sand black around the bag. Still Kleeg pissed on and on, muttering curses in seven different languages and laughing. Lu just stood there watching, a broad smile blooming on his face.
When he was done pissing, Kleeg kicked the bag over and a miniature piss-tsunami rolled out. Lu’s sandals got caught in the deluge and before he knew it his feet were soaking as well. Kleeg closed the distance between them, the fingers of his left hand hovering over the massive gold scimitar at his waist. His fist closed around the hilt as he approached and he was just beginning to draw on Lu when his head fell off.
Or, in any case, that’s what it looked like to the throng of people who’d - by this time - formed a fighting pit around Kleeg and his tormentor. None of them had seen the razor sharp, black bladed dagger Lu had knitted into his linen pants. None of them saw Lu’s hand sweep up, grabbing the blade, and then across, separating Kleeg’s head. It looked as if the Van driver’s head had just hopped off his body. Lu let it tumble a few times in the air before catching it in two hands. The body stood in front of Lu after having closed, but it’s arms were bothering about his neck and shoulders, frantically trying to find the missing cranium. Two stanching fountains of crimson slime were blasting two feet high out of the head hole and the crowd was vexed. Lu heard women faint and children cry. He heard Katesh the taxonomist crying about sorcery. Holding Kleeg’s head in front of him, he turned to address Kleeg's body:
Begone with you, you are no longer needed here. Run as far as you can without stopping, and run towards the west man! Word of what I've done here will spread like fire through dry twigs. The emporers will have the dogs after you before the sun rises.
Kleeg's body looked forlorn and offended, making an awkward situation even worse with a pitiful grab at it's former head. Lu jerked the head away and hissed:
GO you fucker!
The headless body ran then, turning fast and vanishing into the gloaming. Lightning bolts of red and silver zapped and popped down around him, urging his haste.
Lu heard the van swooning and freaking out over the pyrotechnics. He'd made more of a scene than he'd intended. Turning again to the head in his hands, he addressed it as if Kleeg was still in there:
You see where you gave me no choice there, sir? I hate to cause any pain or discomfort, but without respect I am nothing.
The crowd had lowered it’s collective voice to hear what the crazy man was saying to his victim. So by the time Lu was through, they’d become almost completely silent. Silent enough to hear Kleeg respond in kind:
It’s me who needs to apologize, my friend! This heat gets to me, and I cannot hold my words. I’m sorry to you and your family.
At this, the caravan was dissolved. Most of the wagon train had begun to disperse quickly at the first few words from the head. By the time he’d finished begging forgiveness, the wagons, the drivers, the livestock and all the wares were gone. They scattered in twenty different directions, just trying to put distance between themselves and the obvious black magic that was afoot between the two men. All were gone save one: The taxonomist Katesh meant to collect his debt despite magic of any kind. Lu, again, found himself admiring the desert hunter’s style. He grabbed the reigns of Katesh’s wagon himself and vowed to see the pieces safe to port and on board. In return he asked only one thing. Another simple courtesy that he was certain Katesh would not begrudge him. That very night, the taxonomist, his wares, and all his people were tucked safely onto two giant longships bound for the east. Lu saw them off and watched them till they were mere dots on a graying seascape. Then he left town for the hills that surrounded it. In spite of all the fun, he still had his appointments to keep.
***
This one? Oh no sir, I couldn’t possibly. The piece shouldn’t even be on display. It speaks to me, and so I wish to show it around, but to part with it, for some paltry sum agreed upon under a baking, alien sky? My dear dead ancestors would never forgive it…
Katesh hadn’t been in the Orient long but already he saw it’s people were as enamored and adept at the art of bargaining as he himself. The challenge made every day an adventure.
Surely sir, there must be some price upon which we may build a deal. I agree, the item here is singular and unique. All the more reason to strike now though, no? While the thing is still new. Before unforeseen disasters might make themselves known. The East is a big place, and you are but one man.
Two men you ignorant horse-piss-face!
The beast was yelling up at the customer again. Not helping anyone’s cause. Katesh looked on a bit before throwing the tarp over his old friend Kleeg. No matter how much money the talking head cost him in sales not made, the old desert merchant still felt an advantage in the bargain. At the very least he got a hearty, daily laugh watching the Van driver shout down potential buyers in the marketplaces and shops. Swearing at them in an alien tongue until Katesh tarped him, once again, and set out for the next town. The man Lu - he allowed - had done him a boon, and a little venom spoken - hilariously - from a stuffed groundhog with a man’s talking head had proved well worth the trouble.
Heyoooooohhhhhhhhhhhh.
Lu yelling like a bird. He bounded down the boulder side as the big train stopped. Ran to the front to stand between the two front-guard Elephants. The beasts gave him wide berth. Their handlers, noting this, drew swords. They looked down at Lu.
Oh stop it. I need a fuckin’ ride. First off though, can one of you tell me, is this Jerusalem? Are we…Are you coming from Jerusalem? I need to get there. I have money!
He held up a large bag of indeterminate-but-obviously-high dollar value. The guards looked at each other, sheathing swords and going to the rear to find the Van driver.
***
Lu spent most of his time on the road to Jerusalem in his usual traveling state. That is to say: very drunk, and flitting in and out of consciousness at the very rear of the column. The road was smoother back there, trampled as it was, by his fellows ahead. It so happened in this instance, Lu found himself riding with the hash, suspended in a makeshift litter between the two donkeys, a situation none to pleasing for anybody but Lu himself.
After a few days, as the train got nearer to the holy city, he was summoned off the donkeys and made to stand before the nobleman Kleeg, who apparently owned the entire operation, and who, it was made abundantly clear, wanted his hash back. He had been en route to Jerusalem - he said - to unload it to a lucky few for a healthy profit.
A special preparation.
He’d said, in answer to his passenger’s ample appreciation,
...Made only once every 10 years by a secret guild working by night in the village where I live.
And indeed it was. Special and tasty and ridiculously potent. Eyes were reddened and tongues tied wherever it was brought out, and the slab that Lu had been terminating with extreme prejudice up till just this moment, had been accounted for and monetized. It was put to Lu that he’d never be able to pay for the oily-potent goop, and must settle his account before any further consumption. They told him to cease and desist, at first with impressed smiles but later with a sort of regretful sneer, and finally with a severe, aggressive bark. The separating of his head from his shoulders was broached more than once. Lu listened to all of it looking intense and thoughtful. When - at last - the last caravan-passenger had had his say on the matter, he sat quiet for a time, than cleared his throat and began to speak.
***
Two of the wagons in the caravan belonged to a man named Katesh Katesh. They drove the rear, took things a bit easier for it than the trail-blazing vanguard up front. Their cargo, mysterious and swaddled though it was, was very delicate, and did not travel well. Still, those in the caravan who knew things knew that Katesh was a renowned master of the taxonomies, and was traveling East on his way to the Orient. He had been sending riders out, one a day to secure passage there from the port city of Baht, just south of the holy lands. Lu braced Katesh one steamy afternoon as the Van sided a river called Fikteh, inquiring about the man’s travel frustrations and also about the well-hidden treasures so carefully packed in the wagons. He told Katesh:
I know some smugglers that operate out of Baht, and they - each of them - owe me a favor. Let me get a peak at what you’ve got stashed in those cabs and I’ll see you safely to the East without so much as a penny falling off your books.
Katesh was a smart man and a brilliant judge of character. He didn’t find himself inclined to entertain the shifty man who’d been smoking all the drivers hashish. For one thing, he stunk. Badly. Lu hadn’t showered in almost a year by the time the train crossed into the outskirts of Baht, and anyone - man and beast alike - caught in his draft would risk stomach ailments and nightmares from the stench. The stinky little whippet was making physical sense however, and in the end, Katesh was a businessman before he was anything else. He told his new patron:
I’ll let you into the menagerie tonight after we’ve allowed for our cookfires and prayer. You may spend as much time as you like amongst my wares for the next few days. All I ask in return is the arrangement you promised me at the rates we discussed.
And so Lu was allowed amongst the animals. The Cars were organized only by size, with the larger beasts forward in the cabs. Katesh had his people remove the contents of both cabs that first night so that Lu might examine the properties in comfort. The old taxonomist Katesh handed Lu a bright torch and left him with his creations. Lu was beside himself. The happiest he’d been in years by quite a good bit. The animals of earth had been his creations, and yet he’d not hardly laid eyes on any of the sneaky bastards. The first four pieces - two large male groundhogs, a wolverine, and a brown desert wolf - were things he’d never seen except in their creation. Lu found himself tearing up as he examined the contours of musculature and brilliant functionality of pelts and teeth. Next he pulled the covers from a great white mountain lion almost four feet high at the shoulder and at least eight feet in length. He marveled at the ferocious thing from all angles, thinking back with fondness on the nights he and his best friend created this lethal, brilliant creature. He moved slowly, careful to put the tarps and cloths back just so on Katesh’s miracles. Before the sun came up he’d spent quality time with three types of giant sand rats, a male and female three toed sloth, and a family of giant African hedgehogs. He’d studied the claw function and position of an evil-looking black panther, and wondered at a female crocodile Katesh said was caught from salt water, unwittingly falling victim to a fisherman’s net. Just moments before the sun crested the far hills in front of them, Katesh had his people unwrap the final piece: A giant white and black stripped tiger from the triple-canopy jungles of the West Indies.
This devil killed an entire village one day last year when the spring floods were late. When a beast of this size gets hungry, the gods help anybody alive in a fifty mile radius.
Lu nodded and kept staring. If he hadn’t been on business here he’d have blown the entire caravan to hell and taken the amazing pieces for himself. As it was, he was forced to remain on task. His friend needed him and he meant to answer the call. He thanked Katesh and gave him a bag of gold dust in appreciation. The ships were waiting, as promised, for the old huntsman in Baht, and his passage to the Orient was safe and comfortable.
***
I’m sure you don’t mean the things you say to me sir, and so I’m giving you a chance to reneg. One chance. Do not waste it: Apologize to me out loud, here in front of the van, and you’ll remain the whole man, standing here before me. Deny me my courtesy though, and we’re going to have trouble. A pound of hashish will not be worth the kind of trouble I speak of. I implore you: Let us make amends.
The Caravan driver, however, was a dry and humorless man. He didn’t hold with theft and he didn’t hold with threats on his person delivered publically, and with a marked dearth of respect. His answer came quick and direct: He whipped out his cock and began to piss into the black leather satchel that served as Lu’s travel bag and portable office. Lu heard the piss dropping into the leather and looked down to see his papers and baubles drowned in yellow, desert-honed piss. A steam began to rise, and urine splatter began to turn the sand black around the bag. Still Kleeg pissed on and on, muttering curses in seven different languages and laughing. Lu just stood there watching, a broad smile blooming on his face.
When he was done pissing, Kleeg kicked the bag over and a miniature piss-tsunami rolled out. Lu’s sandals got caught in the deluge and before he knew it his feet were soaking as well. Kleeg closed the distance between them, the fingers of his left hand hovering over the massive gold scimitar at his waist. His fist closed around the hilt as he approached and he was just beginning to draw on Lu when his head fell off.
Or, in any case, that’s what it looked like to the throng of people who’d - by this time - formed a fighting pit around Kleeg and his tormentor. None of them had seen the razor sharp, black bladed dagger Lu had knitted into his linen pants. None of them saw Lu’s hand sweep up, grabbing the blade, and then across, separating Kleeg’s head. It looked as if the Van driver’s head had just hopped off his body. Lu let it tumble a few times in the air before catching it in two hands. The body stood in front of Lu after having closed, but it’s arms were bothering about his neck and shoulders, frantically trying to find the missing cranium. Two stanching fountains of crimson slime were blasting two feet high out of the head hole and the crowd was vexed. Lu heard women faint and children cry. He heard Katesh the taxonomist crying about sorcery. Holding Kleeg’s head in front of him, he turned to address Kleeg's body:
Begone with you, you are no longer needed here. Run as far as you can without stopping, and run towards the west man! Word of what I've done here will spread like fire through dry twigs. The emporers will have the dogs after you before the sun rises.
Kleeg's body looked forlorn and offended, making an awkward situation even worse with a pitiful grab at it's former head. Lu jerked the head away and hissed:
GO you fucker!
The headless body ran then, turning fast and vanishing into the gloaming. Lightning bolts of red and silver zapped and popped down around him, urging his haste.
Lu heard the van swooning and freaking out over the pyrotechnics. He'd made more of a scene than he'd intended. Turning again to the head in his hands, he addressed it as if Kleeg was still in there:
You see where you gave me no choice there, sir? I hate to cause any pain or discomfort, but without respect I am nothing.
The crowd had lowered it’s collective voice to hear what the crazy man was saying to his victim. So by the time Lu was through, they’d become almost completely silent. Silent enough to hear Kleeg respond in kind:
It’s me who needs to apologize, my friend! This heat gets to me, and I cannot hold my words. I’m sorry to you and your family.
At this, the caravan was dissolved. Most of the wagon train had begun to disperse quickly at the first few words from the head. By the time he’d finished begging forgiveness, the wagons, the drivers, the livestock and all the wares were gone. They scattered in twenty different directions, just trying to put distance between themselves and the obvious black magic that was afoot between the two men. All were gone save one: The taxonomist Katesh meant to collect his debt despite magic of any kind. Lu, again, found himself admiring the desert hunter’s style. He grabbed the reigns of Katesh’s wagon himself and vowed to see the pieces safe to port and on board. In return he asked only one thing. Another simple courtesy that he was certain Katesh would not begrudge him. That very night, the taxonomist, his wares, and all his people were tucked safely onto two giant longships bound for the east. Lu saw them off and watched them till they were mere dots on a graying seascape. Then he left town for the hills that surrounded it. In spite of all the fun, he still had his appointments to keep.
***
This one? Oh no sir, I couldn’t possibly. The piece shouldn’t even be on display. It speaks to me, and so I wish to show it around, but to part with it, for some paltry sum agreed upon under a baking, alien sky? My dear dead ancestors would never forgive it…
Katesh hadn’t been in the Orient long but already he saw it’s people were as enamored and adept at the art of bargaining as he himself. The challenge made every day an adventure.
Surely sir, there must be some price upon which we may build a deal. I agree, the item here is singular and unique. All the more reason to strike now though, no? While the thing is still new. Before unforeseen disasters might make themselves known. The East is a big place, and you are but one man.
Two men you ignorant horse-piss-face!
The beast was yelling up at the customer again. Not helping anyone’s cause. Katesh looked on a bit before throwing the tarp over his old friend Kleeg. No matter how much money the talking head cost him in sales not made, the old desert merchant still felt an advantage in the bargain. At the very least he got a hearty, daily laugh watching the Van driver shout down potential buyers in the marketplaces and shops. Swearing at them in an alien tongue until Katesh tarped him, once again, and set out for the next town. The man Lu - he allowed - had done him a boon, and a little venom spoken - hilariously - from a stuffed groundhog with a man’s talking head had proved well worth the trouble.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sea Story IV
Tad Broach and his wingman Gunnar Brooks watched their carrier succumb from 500 feet in the air. Circling and flying point in tight formation with the other two F-19’s, they banked the wing into a holding pattern around the two ships. They were trying to decide what to blow up when the first blast went off. Tad saw a bright flash from under Stephen the King that lasted a split second. Then another light-burst, this one longer in duration and engulfing the whole carrier in an curtain of flame. He saw a shockwave go skittering across the water 360 degrees around and away from the ship, and then the carrier Stephen the King exploded from the middle, nearly cleft in two from the super-heated concussion. There was a gigantic spray of water, and Tad saw a cloud of debris leak out into the water where the ship had split. He knew immediately what had happened and was about to address his team when Gunnar clicked in and yelled:
Demon Fire! Holy shitballs that was the fucking Demon! I wonder if they’ll follow with the…
Just then, as if in answer to Airman Brook’s unspoken question, they watched rapt, as what looked like thousands of tiny vapor trails broke from the sea around the Stephen the King. From fifty yards to Port and fifty yards to Starboard, Broach watched as the deadly trails rain-bowed through a sharp ellipse and then went bombing back down toward the Carrier, penetrating, and disappearing, into her flaming decks.
Gunnar again on the coms:
oh boy, this is gonna be…
They saw the results three whole seconds before the concussion tried to knock them from the sky. Broach rolled hard away from the roiling turbulence, and they were looking straight down when the upper decks of the King disintegrated in fire. When the smoke cleared, the Carrier Stephen the King had been reduced to a crippled scow, dead and breaking apart in the calm frigid Atlantic. Everything clear of the sea was burning and the water around the ship was a black death gruel of machines, spent ordinance, and ripped flesh. Broach didn’t waste time. He hailed the wing and spoke calmly:
Break the wing and climb. One at the deck, two in the clouds.
Gunnar cleared the coms then, and the three aircraft split the formation with Tad‘s plane throttling and heading for the ceiling, with number two spaced at one hundred yards and rocketing the same direction. At the apex of the climb both fighter jets heeled over like skateboarders on a half-pipe. A moment later they were diving full-out towards the sinking wreck. Broach didn’t have the Simnus on his radar, the cloaking device had made that kind of tracking impossible. He did however, have a good idea of the thing's location considering where it would have to be to deploy a Demon Fire / Dark Promise protocol. Tad heard Gunnar praying into the aircraft coms:
Don’t dive motherfucker, don’t fucking go deep. Not yet…
***
The conversation, all but completed, had suddenly taken a turn for the worst. The thing inside his friend had tried to buy him, promising him riches and women and whatever else he may desire in exchange for the prize that Stark and Stark alone could give. He’d sounded urgent and almost desperate though, and by the time he was finished threatening and bragging it was clear to Kevin that the Thing’s plan - whatever it was - was not going to go off unless he gave the Thing what it needed. That knowledge made Kevin Stark invincible. He knew it. The thing knew it. Stark would die, but he’d die with his honor and his secrets intact.
The beast, in all his time traveling in and out of the earths history, had never heard anything from human beings save cries of helplessness and pleas for mercy. This time it was he who was absorbing the taunts and jeers, and he who was doing the begging. He went at Kevin Stark a hundred different ways. He threatened him with death. Stark said “kill me.” He threatened the death of family. Stark had none. He threatened to wipe out every living thing on the planet. Stark wished him luck. Before long, frustration turned to rage and the meter on Kevin Stark’s life ran out. As he got up to leave the Captains quarters, the Thing lashed at him with the open hand of Brendt crushing into the back of his skull. The blow - only meant to hurt, was too much for Stark’s neck. His spine broke cleanly at cervical two, and he was dead as he slid to the floor. The Grey Beast shed the skin of Captain Brendt then, making ready to proceed without the precious information so coldly withheld from him. He got to the con as a giant moving puddle of grey slime, and made sure the ship was still steaming toward the coordinates he’d ordered.
Demon Fire! Holy shitballs that was the fucking Demon! I wonder if they’ll follow with the…
Just then, as if in answer to Airman Brook’s unspoken question, they watched rapt, as what looked like thousands of tiny vapor trails broke from the sea around the Stephen the King. From fifty yards to Port and fifty yards to Starboard, Broach watched as the deadly trails rain-bowed through a sharp ellipse and then went bombing back down toward the Carrier, penetrating, and disappearing, into her flaming decks.
Gunnar again on the coms:
oh boy, this is gonna be…
They saw the results three whole seconds before the concussion tried to knock them from the sky. Broach rolled hard away from the roiling turbulence, and they were looking straight down when the upper decks of the King disintegrated in fire. When the smoke cleared, the Carrier Stephen the King had been reduced to a crippled scow, dead and breaking apart in the calm frigid Atlantic. Everything clear of the sea was burning and the water around the ship was a black death gruel of machines, spent ordinance, and ripped flesh. Broach didn’t waste time. He hailed the wing and spoke calmly:
Break the wing and climb. One at the deck, two in the clouds.
Gunnar cleared the coms then, and the three aircraft split the formation with Tad‘s plane throttling and heading for the ceiling, with number two spaced at one hundred yards and rocketing the same direction. At the apex of the climb both fighter jets heeled over like skateboarders on a half-pipe. A moment later they were diving full-out towards the sinking wreck. Broach didn’t have the Simnus on his radar, the cloaking device had made that kind of tracking impossible. He did however, have a good idea of the thing's location considering where it would have to be to deploy a Demon Fire / Dark Promise protocol. Tad heard Gunnar praying into the aircraft coms:
Don’t dive motherfucker, don’t fucking go deep. Not yet…
***
The conversation, all but completed, had suddenly taken a turn for the worst. The thing inside his friend had tried to buy him, promising him riches and women and whatever else he may desire in exchange for the prize that Stark and Stark alone could give. He’d sounded urgent and almost desperate though, and by the time he was finished threatening and bragging it was clear to Kevin that the Thing’s plan - whatever it was - was not going to go off unless he gave the Thing what it needed. That knowledge made Kevin Stark invincible. He knew it. The thing knew it. Stark would die, but he’d die with his honor and his secrets intact.
The beast, in all his time traveling in and out of the earths history, had never heard anything from human beings save cries of helplessness and pleas for mercy. This time it was he who was absorbing the taunts and jeers, and he who was doing the begging. He went at Kevin Stark a hundred different ways. He threatened him with death. Stark said “kill me.” He threatened the death of family. Stark had none. He threatened to wipe out every living thing on the planet. Stark wished him luck. Before long, frustration turned to rage and the meter on Kevin Stark’s life ran out. As he got up to leave the Captains quarters, the Thing lashed at him with the open hand of Brendt crushing into the back of his skull. The blow - only meant to hurt, was too much for Stark’s neck. His spine broke cleanly at cervical two, and he was dead as he slid to the floor. The Grey Beast shed the skin of Captain Brendt then, making ready to proceed without the precious information so coldly withheld from him. He got to the con as a giant moving puddle of grey slime, and made sure the ship was still steaming toward the coordinates he’d ordered.
Sea Story III
She always slept well aboard-ship. Even harried as she was by the whereabouts of the submarines she‘d been tasked to hunt, not to mention the safety of her own fleet, the familiar twin comforts of the sea, and movement soothed her. For a few moments - scant and fleeting though they were - Admiral Jessica Lowery felt rested and at peace. Before long she was fast asleep and dreaming in what was more a state of sudden and severe unconsciousness than peaceful slumber. She lay still as a mannequin, still in full-dress, on a rack that remained neat and made. It was a matter of minutes before the dreams began to overtake her.
She found herself alone, once again, on the familiar greasy, grey sea. Floating on her back, eyes closed. No current. No distant shore. Nothing but a slick grey fluid stretching for leagues in all directions. As usual, she found herself hovering just above the scene, looking down from a modest height on her own body. She was naked, and again, as usual in this dream, only the very tips of her shoulders and heals were actually in the fluid. The rest of her hovered above it, arms at her sides. She could see her eyes were closed, her breathing was measured. She felt at peace. Safe and comfortable in a place where nothing bad or dangerous could get at her.
It was the same dream she’d been having for ten days, and it had had started the night they’d set out. General Craig himself had found her in the Indian Ocean, completing a tour of the Navy’s readiness there in preparation for whatever followed the giants. The President had used pretty words like “patience,” and “justice,” speaking for the cameras in the wake of the giants invasion and subsequent disappearance. When she joined him after though, the calm talk and platitudes melted off him like so much winter ice melting to runoff in a blazing spring sun. He ushered her in and showed her to a seat directly under the big oak desk. Instead of taking his normal place behind the desk though, he took the second leather guest’s seat. He leaned in close as he began to speak.
Admiral Lowery...Jess: the giants brought this country to it’s knees last week, and then - thank the fates - they had the courtesy to vanish. Unfortunately even as the giants became more and more scarce, a new threat has been detected.
Jess almost didn’t hear the explanation. Instead of listening she’d been studying the President’s face. It had become red since returning to his office. A fine glistening sweat manifest all around his head and neck area. Admiral Lowery could see it bothering and irritating him as the President spoke. His eyes were lidded and black around the edges. He looked a mess. Jess could smell his unpleasant breath and he was leaning in closer with every passing second. His eyes were haunted and spastic, looking at her and then flying around the room and resolving back to his death-lock gaze on Jess.
I know faith is a rare commodity in this town, but I’m asking you to have some in me. The Simnus and her crew have gone off the reservation. They must be brought to heal or else...
The Chief let his words fade and then the two of them just sat in the awkward silence. Jess Lowery hadn’t known the President long, but the fist executive - in her experience - had never been one for embellishment or dramatic spin. If the alternative to capitulation was destroying the Simnus, then something huge was in play. Watching the desperate, exhausted lines in The President's face as he passed the order to pursue, she knew he wasn’t exaggerating now.
***
She could see now, the sea of grey becoming a wide river, a giant lake, a great sea, and - finally - the ocean itself, stretching off into the horizon and meeting the sky hundreds of miles away. It was, all of it, Grey and viscous looking, undulating and bubbling even though she felt no wind whatsoever. She became a bird. A giant tern or an albatross, something that could fly as high as the sun. A thing that could dive and destroy. She roared and hissed and fire came from her mouth and nostrils and eyes. She was encased, she saw then, completely socked by the fire around her. Then she looked down.
The landscape below her had been mountainous. Covered with green pine and laced with snow and ice and wind. Now things appeared to have changed. She didn’t know what she was looking at, but she saw the color: A dark Grey. It was all, it was everything and it ranged to the horizons in every direction. A flat, viscous looking sea of glistening Grey ooze. It revolted her, turning her stomach and making her retch. The Grey sea seemed an evil thing. An unnatural venue for the proliferation of ugliness and despair . She was trying to figure an escape plan, turning all around to find a dot on the horizon where the Grey Thing wasn’t, when the dark sea began to pull her down.
It was tempered at first, as if it wanted to conserve what power it could. Jess felt it mashing her wings into the air currents, trying to get it to bleed altitude until she was flying low enough to be grabbed. For a moment she felt like she might beat it, escape it’s grasp, and find a direction home. Then the thing ramped up the intensity, and she knew she had no chance. She resisted with all her strength but lower and lower she flew. She was tiring though, and fast. Exhaustion was setting in. She ached and her entire being was burning under the stress. With an angry defeated flourish she tumbled and skidded along the slick surface of the ooze. She started sinking as soon as she stopped tumbling.
The Grey Thing enwrapped her and began to squeeze, and then she realized she was going to die. As she sank her body began to buckle under the weight of the oily grey matrix.. The Grey Beast was hurting her. Hurting her and burning her alive. She opened her mouth to scream but instead it filled with the grey stuff and she felt it enter her and fill her up in seconds, and then there was nothing left and she was sinking into the dark grey nothingness.
***
Jess felt the blasts before she heard them. In the three seconds before the death machines slammed into the hull of the Carrier, Lowery had tried to remember what she could about the use of weapons on a United States Navy submarine. The things riding up to meet her now, she knew, were demon missiles. Essentially, the Demon was a torpedo fit with after burners and wings so you could launch it at air, land or sea targets. The difference between the payload of a torpedo and a Demon though was noteworthy. Instead of the 500 pounds of TNT packed into a normal torpedo, demons were made of a moldable explosive called simply “Number Seven.” One direct torpedo strike with a demon could bring a carrier to the bottom in scant minutes. The Simnus had fired two.
She also remembered a companion weapon to the Demon that ramped up the destructive power to a level far above normal. Dark Promise was what they’d named it. It was a weapons protocol involving hundreds of tiny rockets milled from depleted uranium. The rockets were fired at once directly after a Demon strike. While the enemy reeled and spun from the blow, the Dark Promise was loosed to finish the job. Each rocket was designed to strike and then penetrate to a distance of fifteen feet. Before detonation, each DP would release a spray of molten metal ripping through a thirty foot radius, killing and burning whoever and whatever wasn’t handled in the previous strikes. After the hot metal the rockets were set off. A hundred little bombs, each buried deep in the enemy’s hull. Lowery had seen pictures of the results, but she didn’t have time to think on it before most of the ship she commanded was erased from the surface of the sea.
***
She found herself alone, once again, on the familiar greasy, grey sea. Floating on her back, eyes closed. No current. No distant shore. Nothing but a slick grey fluid stretching for leagues in all directions. As usual, she found herself hovering just above the scene, looking down from a modest height on her own body. She was naked, and again, as usual in this dream, only the very tips of her shoulders and heals were actually in the fluid. The rest of her hovered above it, arms at her sides. She could see her eyes were closed, her breathing was measured. She felt at peace. Safe and comfortable in a place where nothing bad or dangerous could get at her.
It was the same dream she’d been having for ten days, and it had had started the night they’d set out. General Craig himself had found her in the Indian Ocean, completing a tour of the Navy’s readiness there in preparation for whatever followed the giants. The President had used pretty words like “patience,” and “justice,” speaking for the cameras in the wake of the giants invasion and subsequent disappearance. When she joined him after though, the calm talk and platitudes melted off him like so much winter ice melting to runoff in a blazing spring sun. He ushered her in and showed her to a seat directly under the big oak desk. Instead of taking his normal place behind the desk though, he took the second leather guest’s seat. He leaned in close as he began to speak.
Admiral Lowery...Jess: the giants brought this country to it’s knees last week, and then - thank the fates - they had the courtesy to vanish. Unfortunately even as the giants became more and more scarce, a new threat has been detected.
Jess almost didn’t hear the explanation. Instead of listening she’d been studying the President’s face. It had become red since returning to his office. A fine glistening sweat manifest all around his head and neck area. Admiral Lowery could see it bothering and irritating him as the President spoke. His eyes were lidded and black around the edges. He looked a mess. Jess could smell his unpleasant breath and he was leaning in closer with every passing second. His eyes were haunted and spastic, looking at her and then flying around the room and resolving back to his death-lock gaze on Jess.
I know faith is a rare commodity in this town, but I’m asking you to have some in me. The Simnus and her crew have gone off the reservation. They must be brought to heal or else...
The Chief let his words fade and then the two of them just sat in the awkward silence. Jess Lowery hadn’t known the President long, but the fist executive - in her experience - had never been one for embellishment or dramatic spin. If the alternative to capitulation was destroying the Simnus, then something huge was in play. Watching the desperate, exhausted lines in The President's face as he passed the order to pursue, she knew he wasn’t exaggerating now.
***
She could see now, the sea of grey becoming a wide river, a giant lake, a great sea, and - finally - the ocean itself, stretching off into the horizon and meeting the sky hundreds of miles away. It was, all of it, Grey and viscous looking, undulating and bubbling even though she felt no wind whatsoever. She became a bird. A giant tern or an albatross, something that could fly as high as the sun. A thing that could dive and destroy. She roared and hissed and fire came from her mouth and nostrils and eyes. She was encased, she saw then, completely socked by the fire around her. Then she looked down.
The landscape below her had been mountainous. Covered with green pine and laced with snow and ice and wind. Now things appeared to have changed. She didn’t know what she was looking at, but she saw the color: A dark Grey. It was all, it was everything and it ranged to the horizons in every direction. A flat, viscous looking sea of glistening Grey ooze. It revolted her, turning her stomach and making her retch. The Grey sea seemed an evil thing. An unnatural venue for the proliferation of ugliness and despair . She was trying to figure an escape plan, turning all around to find a dot on the horizon where the Grey Thing wasn’t, when the dark sea began to pull her down.
It was tempered at first, as if it wanted to conserve what power it could. Jess felt it mashing her wings into the air currents, trying to get it to bleed altitude until she was flying low enough to be grabbed. For a moment she felt like she might beat it, escape it’s grasp, and find a direction home. Then the thing ramped up the intensity, and she knew she had no chance. She resisted with all her strength but lower and lower she flew. She was tiring though, and fast. Exhaustion was setting in. She ached and her entire being was burning under the stress. With an angry defeated flourish she tumbled and skidded along the slick surface of the ooze. She started sinking as soon as she stopped tumbling.
The Grey Thing enwrapped her and began to squeeze, and then she realized she was going to die. As she sank her body began to buckle under the weight of the oily grey matrix.. The Grey Beast was hurting her. Hurting her and burning her alive. She opened her mouth to scream but instead it filled with the grey stuff and she felt it enter her and fill her up in seconds, and then there was nothing left and she was sinking into the dark grey nothingness.
***
Jess felt the blasts before she heard them. In the three seconds before the death machines slammed into the hull of the Carrier, Lowery had tried to remember what she could about the use of weapons on a United States Navy submarine. The things riding up to meet her now, she knew, were demon missiles. Essentially, the Demon was a torpedo fit with after burners and wings so you could launch it at air, land or sea targets. The difference between the payload of a torpedo and a Demon though was noteworthy. Instead of the 500 pounds of TNT packed into a normal torpedo, demons were made of a moldable explosive called simply “Number Seven.” One direct torpedo strike with a demon could bring a carrier to the bottom in scant minutes. The Simnus had fired two.
She also remembered a companion weapon to the Demon that ramped up the destructive power to a level far above normal. Dark Promise was what they’d named it. It was a weapons protocol involving hundreds of tiny rockets milled from depleted uranium. The rockets were fired at once directly after a Demon strike. While the enemy reeled and spun from the blow, the Dark Promise was loosed to finish the job. Each rocket was designed to strike and then penetrate to a distance of fifteen feet. Before detonation, each DP would release a spray of molten metal ripping through a thirty foot radius, killing and burning whoever and whatever wasn’t handled in the previous strikes. After the hot metal the rockets were set off. A hundred little bombs, each buried deep in the enemy’s hull. Lowery had seen pictures of the results, but she didn’t have time to think on it before most of the ship she commanded was erased from the surface of the sea.
***
dogshitart
Sea Story I
The Simnus came uncloaked at close range, directly underneath her target, a nuke-powered Carrier called Stephen the King. The tactic left the gigantic warship no time to evade, or even reposition to minimize damage. The death-black ship had appeared underneath them as if by magic, arming three Excocet ship-destroyer missiles before the King’s boatswains could so much as gasp in fear. They were still trying to figure out exactly what had happened when the Simnus drew it’s bead, and locked them in-frame. They looked on, helpless, as the Simnus’ radar signature, angry red and blinking, birthed a fast-climbing litter of three.
Admiral Jess Lowery could only stand and witness as the red beams closed. They disappeared and she heard the bridge navigator Thomas Dwight say:
We weren’t even supposed to be here.
And she thought she heard him start laughing before the world turned red.
***
The Glanton Holden - one hundred meters long, nuclear powered and armed, running a silent watch between Patience Island off Jamestown, and the waters of Montauk Neck - had been pressed into search and rescue at the urging of the President. The Simnus, another nuke, had gone missing somewhere in the far North. Going radio and radar-dark during a classified deployment for god knows who. The Glanton steamed northward for forty-eight hours with orders to poke around the scene, but nobody knew where to begin. What were they into? Why the fuck had they been sent here? The entire North Atlantic didn't quite play as a venue for a search and rescue under a skeleton crew. The Men and women aboard the Glanton were not optimistic.
They were given coordinates. A natural shelf, fifty miles off the Grand Banks, tapering down almost fourteen miles beneath the surface. Sailors called the spot “Frozen Keep,” because the angry tumult of tides and currents that marked it were apt to hold a ship hostage, assailing the control of the even the strongest and experienced crew. The orders had taken them from appointed rounds, and not a man aboard knew the why of it. The brass simply said “jump.” They jumped.
But with the entire East Coast under siege, and the giants beginning an inexorable push to the west, the Navy could hardly spare an entire patrol. Instead, the task fell to the Glanton and one nuke Carrier: Stephen the King from Newport News. The King was an impressive ship in and of herself, but the joint chiefs sent her with an entire wing of assault aircraft. Five Army A-10’s (devastating low-level attack-fighters armed with underwater weapons systems and punched up sonar) sat steaming away on her forward decking. There was an assault squadron of F-19 fighter Jets each with two extra fuel pods. There were 12 Apache attack helicopters, each capable of sustained attacks on targets up to 400 miles away.
The Grey Thing had taken the minds of everybody aboard the Glanton before he’d boarded. Snatching their wills as they cruised silently past Quonset Point. Before any of the crew of fifty knew what was happening the Thing had knocked out their memories, their conscious decision-making, their very conception of who they were and what they were doing. In the place of all that, he’d left one message: Obey.
And so they had. Using the Glanton’s Seal Deck - an airlock chamber designed to pluck special forces units out of the water - The Thing had been brought aboard, the killing began right then. Within minutes after boarding he’d used the ships engineer, Robin Stavros, to broadcast the camera feed from Seal Deck on every monitor of the sub. Every man aboard would see what was about to transpire. That done, the Grey Thing began to feed. The first man, Boatswain Ronald Krysanski, came to the beast on legs he no longer controlled as his own, his eyes were tearing and his mouth was twisted in a stressed rictus, but the entire crew watched on the monitors as he stood, facing the Grey invader toe to toe and shaking like a newborn chick. A few seconds passed, as if the terror was deciding what to do with the quivering sailor, and then Ronald Krysanski made his move. He was still staring straight ahead at the Grey Thing as he picked his Ka-Bar knife from the leather holster on his belt. Ronald began to protest through his forced-closed mouth:
No. No. No. Please. No No No…
But his arm acted with no consideration of the pleas. He raised the great black blade in his right hand and began to peel his left hand like a ripe apple. He started at the top of the index finger, and within seconds the thing was flayed, with the bones visible and the blood flooding and containing off his elbow onto the floor. He was saying:
It hurts. It hurts. Oh God, it hurts…
As the knife finished with the rest of his fingers and began to move down the arm.
It took him almost ten minutes to get to his shoulder and by then he was standing in a stinking puddle of his own blood and tissue. He was screaming, and he’d lost consciousness twice, only to be borne up again by the monsters touch and made to continue his awful mission. He finished peeling his arm with a flourish and the Grey Thing made him bow to both himself and the cameras. The rest of the crew looked on amazed, revolted, and - above all - terrified to the point of insanity as Krysanski began the second part of his assignment. Kneeling in the puddle of blood, he put his stripped arm down on the deck palm-down. He raised his knife again, this time using it to cut. The shocked Crew looked on helpless as Krysanski sawed off his flayed digits, one by one starting with his thumb. The shocked silence turned to screams of protest but Boatswain Krysanski wouldn’t be swayed. Finishing up with the pinky, he paused for a moment and gazed into the boney muck as if hypnotized. Then he rolled and sat down with his legs folded under him, looked directly into the security camera, and popped the first finger into his mouth. He chewed and chewed, staring into the camera with his sleepy, vacant eyes. Somewhere between his index and thumb, the doomed man began to laugh. It was then the Grey Thing came up in front of him and swallowed the sailors entire body in two huge bites. The Beast found the meat tastier then he’d even expected, soaked - as it was - in the Ronald Krysanski secreted broth of abject fear and terror.
The Grey Thing continued. Before the day was out Forty-two crewmen of the Glanton had been savaged and consumed on camera by the Grey Thing. He broadcast all the feedings over the ships circuit, each one more delicious and compelling than the last. They’d seen Major Willem Manks stab his own eyes out with a dull number two pencil. Captain’s mate Rick Minnest was forced to drink gallon after gallon of bleach until his insides bubbled and steamed. Bossun’s Mate Juan Carlos Martin was made to stick his arm up to the elbow in the Glanton’s industrial-size cuisinart. He was than instructed to add liquid rat-poison from the ships store to the mix and then drink the horrible slurry until he collapsed, twitching and dying, on the deck.
The Grey Beast moved through them day and night, each murder more graphic and awe-inspiring than the last, until only eight remained (name them and their posts). They were scared almost past the point of insanity, and ripe for the picking but the Beast had searched the minds of everybody on the ship even as he’d been consuming their flesh. The six remaining sailors (Boatswain's Mates Gifford, Owen, and Driesdale along with Weapon's mates Hall, Johnson, and Rickenbacher) were needed and necessary, and so the thing calmed them, and reassured them that the killing was done, and the boat once again secure. Then he turned on the radar cloak and began full-steaming to intercept the Simnus high in the north Atlantic.
Admiral Jess Lowery could only stand and witness as the red beams closed. They disappeared and she heard the bridge navigator Thomas Dwight say:
We weren’t even supposed to be here.
And she thought she heard him start laughing before the world turned red.
***
The Glanton Holden - one hundred meters long, nuclear powered and armed, running a silent watch between Patience Island off Jamestown, and the waters of Montauk Neck - had been pressed into search and rescue at the urging of the President. The Simnus, another nuke, had gone missing somewhere in the far North. Going radio and radar-dark during a classified deployment for god knows who. The Glanton steamed northward for forty-eight hours with orders to poke around the scene, but nobody knew where to begin. What were they into? Why the fuck had they been sent here? The entire North Atlantic didn't quite play as a venue for a search and rescue under a skeleton crew. The Men and women aboard the Glanton were not optimistic.
They were given coordinates. A natural shelf, fifty miles off the Grand Banks, tapering down almost fourteen miles beneath the surface. Sailors called the spot “Frozen Keep,” because the angry tumult of tides and currents that marked it were apt to hold a ship hostage, assailing the control of the even the strongest and experienced crew. The orders had taken them from appointed rounds, and not a man aboard knew the why of it. The brass simply said “jump.” They jumped.
But with the entire East Coast under siege, and the giants beginning an inexorable push to the west, the Navy could hardly spare an entire patrol. Instead, the task fell to the Glanton and one nuke Carrier: Stephen the King from Newport News. The King was an impressive ship in and of herself, but the joint chiefs sent her with an entire wing of assault aircraft. Five Army A-10’s (devastating low-level attack-fighters armed with underwater weapons systems and punched up sonar) sat steaming away on her forward decking. There was an assault squadron of F-19 fighter Jets each with two extra fuel pods. There were 12 Apache attack helicopters, each capable of sustained attacks on targets up to 400 miles away.
The Grey Thing had taken the minds of everybody aboard the Glanton before he’d boarded. Snatching their wills as they cruised silently past Quonset Point. Before any of the crew of fifty knew what was happening the Thing had knocked out their memories, their conscious decision-making, their very conception of who they were and what they were doing. In the place of all that, he’d left one message: Obey.
And so they had. Using the Glanton’s Seal Deck - an airlock chamber designed to pluck special forces units out of the water - The Thing had been brought aboard, the killing began right then. Within minutes after boarding he’d used the ships engineer, Robin Stavros, to broadcast the camera feed from Seal Deck on every monitor of the sub. Every man aboard would see what was about to transpire. That done, the Grey Thing began to feed. The first man, Boatswain Ronald Krysanski, came to the beast on legs he no longer controlled as his own, his eyes were tearing and his mouth was twisted in a stressed rictus, but the entire crew watched on the monitors as he stood, facing the Grey invader toe to toe and shaking like a newborn chick. A few seconds passed, as if the terror was deciding what to do with the quivering sailor, and then Ronald Krysanski made his move. He was still staring straight ahead at the Grey Thing as he picked his Ka-Bar knife from the leather holster on his belt. Ronald began to protest through his forced-closed mouth:
No. No. No. Please. No No No…
But his arm acted with no consideration of the pleas. He raised the great black blade in his right hand and began to peel his left hand like a ripe apple. He started at the top of the index finger, and within seconds the thing was flayed, with the bones visible and the blood flooding and containing off his elbow onto the floor. He was saying:
It hurts. It hurts. Oh God, it hurts…
As the knife finished with the rest of his fingers and began to move down the arm.
It took him almost ten minutes to get to his shoulder and by then he was standing in a stinking puddle of his own blood and tissue. He was screaming, and he’d lost consciousness twice, only to be borne up again by the monsters touch and made to continue his awful mission. He finished peeling his arm with a flourish and the Grey Thing made him bow to both himself and the cameras. The rest of the crew looked on amazed, revolted, and - above all - terrified to the point of insanity as Krysanski began the second part of his assignment. Kneeling in the puddle of blood, he put his stripped arm down on the deck palm-down. He raised his knife again, this time using it to cut. The shocked Crew looked on helpless as Krysanski sawed off his flayed digits, one by one starting with his thumb. The shocked silence turned to screams of protest but Boatswain Krysanski wouldn’t be swayed. Finishing up with the pinky, he paused for a moment and gazed into the boney muck as if hypnotized. Then he rolled and sat down with his legs folded under him, looked directly into the security camera, and popped the first finger into his mouth. He chewed and chewed, staring into the camera with his sleepy, vacant eyes. Somewhere between his index and thumb, the doomed man began to laugh. It was then the Grey Thing came up in front of him and swallowed the sailors entire body in two huge bites. The Beast found the meat tastier then he’d even expected, soaked - as it was - in the Ronald Krysanski secreted broth of abject fear and terror.
The Grey Thing continued. Before the day was out Forty-two crewmen of the Glanton had been savaged and consumed on camera by the Grey Thing. He broadcast all the feedings over the ships circuit, each one more delicious and compelling than the last. They’d seen Major Willem Manks stab his own eyes out with a dull number two pencil. Captain’s mate Rick Minnest was forced to drink gallon after gallon of bleach until his insides bubbled and steamed. Bossun’s Mate Juan Carlos Martin was made to stick his arm up to the elbow in the Glanton’s industrial-size cuisinart. He was than instructed to add liquid rat-poison from the ships store to the mix and then drink the horrible slurry until he collapsed, twitching and dying, on the deck.
The Grey Beast moved through them day and night, each murder more graphic and awe-inspiring than the last, until only eight remained (name them and their posts). They were scared almost past the point of insanity, and ripe for the picking but the Beast had searched the minds of everybody on the ship even as he’d been consuming their flesh. The six remaining sailors (Boatswain's Mates Gifford, Owen, and Driesdale along with Weapon's mates Hall, Johnson, and Rickenbacher) were needed and necessary, and so the thing calmed them, and reassured them that the killing was done, and the boat once again secure. Then he turned on the radar cloak and began full-steaming to intercept the Simnus high in the north Atlantic.
Sea Story II
Kevin Stark, Crew Chief of Weapons on the Glanton Holden had been awake and under the sway of the Grey Beast for seventy-three hours when the Simnus finally appeared on his radar. He wasn’t aware of this of course, the Grey Thing held him completely in thrall for the duration, but his physical self had been screaming for relief. He’d been dozing in his quarters, finally easing himself into the comfort of a mind and body at rest, when Lt. Augustus Brendt hailed him on the ship‘s circuit. The Grey Thing had been in command of the Glanton for the better part of three days, but he’d allowed his remaining crew to pilot their own minds when they were not being used directly. If he wasn‘t doing what the beast commanded, then Lt. Brendt was still the captain of the Glanton, and Stark meant to honor that while he still could. Whatever it was they were seeking out here, he felt the end was coming soon. After bearing witness to the awful fate of his fellow crew under the influence of the unholy passenger, Kevin Stark knew what awaited him when things had run their course. “Maybe,” he hoped in the distant backwaters of his mind, “maybe if we do what he wants he’ll make it painless."
He dressed quickly, nearly forgetting strapping his sidearm on his hip and his cover on his head in his fevered excitement. He made the bridge to find Capt. Brendt and the remaining six officers comprising the Glanton’s full (and very depleted) compliment.
I was here less than an hour ago. I didn’t see…I was…
He fumbled for the words. The Grey Thing had been driving and controlling him for so long, he was finding it difficult to sustain even the simplest conversational exchanges. Capt. Brendt sympathized in silence, motioned to the forward screens and led Stark over. Somewhere up in the waves through the bridge and across almost a mile of darkened twilight sea, the Simnus was waiting.
He, uh, it, told us what to do a few days ago. I can’t…
A tear rolled down Starks face. The Captain stopped then, waiting on an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. Stark had begun to cry in earnest when the captain said:
We’ve found her.
He almost smiled when he said it, but Kevin Stark saw the tears welling in his captains eyes as well. He and Brendt had known each other since they were navy brats together, enjoying the uncertain thrill of popping from base to base in Europe and the States in Uncle Sam’s post-Vietnam Armed Service. They’d gotten in fights in Prague, bought hookers together for the first time in Kyoto, and generally raised hell from Quonset Point to San Diego as they groomed for the great battles they’d both undoubtedly be fighting one day. Brendt had graduated West Point a year before Stark, Stark had been the best man at Brendt’s wedding, and his second wedding. The end of the hunt for the Simnus would probably mean the end of both of them.
***
The Simnus, brand fucking new and the most dangerous ship in the ocean by a good bit. Basically a redesign of a Tomahawk missile submarine that enabled the deployment of tactical weapons (in addition to nuclear) and high speed pursuit. Where its progenitors were basically in the business of hiding for months and launching Nuclear holocaust if the cold war Russians were ever of a mind to do the same, The Simnus mission - post-cold war - had evolved.
The Simnus added a hundred-thirty meters to the Tomahawk’s hundred. She’d lost her forward missile compartments, which in the original design had been packed with enough apocalypse-fuel to destroy the earth many times over. In the place of the massive nuclear arsenal there was now a vast array of strategic high explosives and missiles. The Simnus could dive as deep as the ocean got, but would have no trouble crouching low in shallow tributaries where she could deploy a massive store of anti-aircaft, ship, and infantry weapons. She’d hundreds of “Daisy Cutter” missiles in her forward payload, each capable of laying waste to thousands of tons of earth and rock. She could bring remote-controlled drones to bear, launching ten and twenty bird sorties with pre-programmed and remote-programmed mission memory. To her aft, and running all along the sides, the Simnus had new HE drone-missile tubes. Each one could loose a hundred “Pitchfork” rockets, each was capable of cutting a destroyer class battleship in two, and each could be fired underwater and also into the air. Each was rigged with a set of servos and sensor packages that allowed the user to take full control of each using a small joystick and screen-radar just on the weapons array. An army of amphibious death controlled to the centimeter by computers and human interaction.
***
Instead of killing them, the Grey Thing had allowed them to sleep. For twelve precious hours Kevin Stark lay in his rack and slumbered without disturbance save from by the most awesome dream-visuals and dream-actions. The reveries came so close on the heels of one another that it was hard to keep up. He felt himself launched out of the sea like a missile and screaming for the shores of the East Coast in search of soft targets. The wind whistled through the superstructure and he felt the fuel in his heart drain as the afterburners punched him toward a fiery end. Then he looked to the left and right and saw massive wings sprouted like time-lapse vines one hundred meters on both sides. No rocket now, just a massive, terrible flying creature from the swamps of pre-history itself. He flapped the giant arm-wings and roared a great roar. He saw fire spring from his mouth like a thousand bombs had touched off in his throat. A dragon then! A dragon formed from the entirety of humanity and sent to fight, to defend, to crush and burn under urgent, gigantic wings. He dove then, aiming for a twin peak far below him and shrouded in fog. The wings dissolved then and he was falling, folding and enwrapping himself within himself to brace for the shock when he hit between the giant spires.
There was no impact though, and he felt himself falling through between thee giant stone edifice. He fell and fell and fell. Through dark and light and heat and cold. A thousand miles and a thousand more he was falling inside a dream-tunnel through the very center of the earth itself. Despite the speed he made out shapes and forms going past. Warriors on the march, giant lizards stalking prey while the land shook and smoked. There was noise also, screams, yells of pain, orgasmic shouts and moans, and the cries of the dead rotting in the ground, afraid of fate and what might happen next. He fell through it and bore witness to all of it. Somehow able to make sense of what he was feeling and seeing even as he plummeted towards….
Before he could answer it was darkness around him. He had been falling in the black, but now he felt ground beneath him. Was he once again a man. Had he been delivered from the ships and the sea? What was to become of him? A meaner thought overtook him then, “what if he’s done away with me as I slept and this is my hell?” He tried to discern shapes in the dark but he could make nothing. Terror then, sour and heavy, gripped him and pressed down. He found the tears coming again. He was spinning and trying to see, dizzy and looking for any light at all.
***
The Grey Beast boarded the Simnus and took the crew in much the same way as the Glanton. The Simnus crew, however, went to their destiny in even more pain and horror than the forty-three who perished on the Glanton. Kevin Stark woke from his rest under the full sway of the Grey Beast. He dressed and made for the Glanton’s bridge.
Once there he realized two things: The first was that the boat was at the surface. He saw light beaming in from a row of tiny windows surrounding the conning tower. The beams were like lasers focused on a single point amidships and the rest of the Glanton’s crew was also gazing up. Stark heard a familiar noise below him, and saw the Captain make for the hatch that lead to the first deck. The monster was taking them outside. Stark followed the Captain and was dazzled upon making the deck. Of the Simnus there was no sign, but her entire crew - a compliment of fifty-three hands and officers was here, on the Glanton’s deck, with him. Facing him as a matter of fact, standing about five yards away toeing an imaginary line. They looked scared and tired and none of them said a word. Kevin looked at the Captain standing next to him and was about to speak when he saw his friend move. Captain Brendt was checking his Glock sidearm, and before Kevin could think he found himself doing the same thing. He raised his weapon, racked the slide and pointed it forward, sighting the second ensign of the Simnus at point blank. Stark had started to say the words “I’m sorry,” when the shooting began. By the time it was over, he found himself - once again - having avoided the slaughter. This time though, there was only himself left, along with Captain Brendt. The crew of the Simnus, along with his remaining compliment from the Glanton Holden, lay at their feet, twitching and bleeding, their brains leaking out onto the first deck and steaming in the noon sunlight. The Beast made them kick the bodies into the ocean, and they watched as the beast consumed them. He was fast, and by the time the sharks got to the scene a few minutes later there was nothing left for them. After a fashion, he and Brendt were forced to go back inside and the Glanton dove again. This time, Stark suspected, for the final time.
The Grey Thing summoned him - yet again - just as he was loosing himself to the will of his own natural, circadian cycles. The Beast had summoned him to the bridge, and he had him practically running to get there. Somewhere in the underpinnings of his unconscious self, Stark wondered if the Thing had finally decided to favor him and end his troubles once and for all. The thought gave him a melancholy kind of hope and he found himself smiling on the inside when he reached the bridge.
***
You’re friend is dead.
Brendt spoke from behind his desk in the corner of his captains quarters. He was a sub captain, so the room was small, and not befitting of the man’s high rank, but Stark had never heard him complain. Brendt was a sailor, and sailors spend most of their time at the con.
I know. All our friends are dead. The bastard thing made me murder’em. I recognized all those men. I can’t bear to…
Brendt cut him off:
No. Your friend. Captain Brendt. He’s killed and done. There is only us now Mr. Stark. Only us. I have some questions for you, but I understand that the answers I seek will not be volunteered. I propose a bargain. Questions for questions.
“I don’t understand. What is it you want.”
That is none of your concern Mr. Stark, and it is also a tale far too long for the limited time we’re afforded now. Suffice to say, that what I want is very close, and will be gained within a matter of hours. Your role in this is strictly in an assistants capacity.
What in fuck are you?
His friend, or - more correctly - the thing that was wearing his friend threw his head back and laughed a great laugh for what seemed like hours. He seemed honestly amused.
Forgive me Stark, I’m always amazed by the boldness of humans. Here I’ve destroyed everything you hold close. I’m surely about to kill you and I’ve already stolen your ships, yet you demand things as if it were you sitting where I am sitting. Such pride. It’s no wonder your race has failed.
Stark looked down, and neither man said anything for a long while. It was the Beast that eventually broke the silence.
Well then Mr. Stark if that’s all then…
OK. Wait. Maybe I do have questions…
By the time they were finished talking it was late at night. Kevin Stark was depleted and tired beyond tired. He asked a final question:
Why not just wear me like you wear Brendt? It seems you’d be able to grab the information at will and you’d be off to the races.
The thing inside his old buddy just grinned.
Ah ha! You would think. You would think. I’m sill learning the things I can and cannot do to you people, but I’m quite sure that the contents of a persons mind cannot be made available to one such as me. I can force most beings to do my bidding, but extracting a tiny piece of information hidden in the vastness of somebody’s mind is a bridge to far. Maybe after a few hundred more years, no?
Stark said nothing.
***
He dressed quickly, nearly forgetting strapping his sidearm on his hip and his cover on his head in his fevered excitement. He made the bridge to find Capt. Brendt and the remaining six officers comprising the Glanton’s full (and very depleted) compliment.
I was here less than an hour ago. I didn’t see…I was…
He fumbled for the words. The Grey Thing had been driving and controlling him for so long, he was finding it difficult to sustain even the simplest conversational exchanges. Capt. Brendt sympathized in silence, motioned to the forward screens and led Stark over. Somewhere up in the waves through the bridge and across almost a mile of darkened twilight sea, the Simnus was waiting.
He, uh, it, told us what to do a few days ago. I can’t…
A tear rolled down Starks face. The Captain stopped then, waiting on an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. Stark had begun to cry in earnest when the captain said:
We’ve found her.
He almost smiled when he said it, but Kevin Stark saw the tears welling in his captains eyes as well. He and Brendt had known each other since they were navy brats together, enjoying the uncertain thrill of popping from base to base in Europe and the States in Uncle Sam’s post-Vietnam Armed Service. They’d gotten in fights in Prague, bought hookers together for the first time in Kyoto, and generally raised hell from Quonset Point to San Diego as they groomed for the great battles they’d both undoubtedly be fighting one day. Brendt had graduated West Point a year before Stark, Stark had been the best man at Brendt’s wedding, and his second wedding. The end of the hunt for the Simnus would probably mean the end of both of them.
***
The Simnus, brand fucking new and the most dangerous ship in the ocean by a good bit. Basically a redesign of a Tomahawk missile submarine that enabled the deployment of tactical weapons (in addition to nuclear) and high speed pursuit. Where its progenitors were basically in the business of hiding for months and launching Nuclear holocaust if the cold war Russians were ever of a mind to do the same, The Simnus mission - post-cold war - had evolved.
The Simnus added a hundred-thirty meters to the Tomahawk’s hundred. She’d lost her forward missile compartments, which in the original design had been packed with enough apocalypse-fuel to destroy the earth many times over. In the place of the massive nuclear arsenal there was now a vast array of strategic high explosives and missiles. The Simnus could dive as deep as the ocean got, but would have no trouble crouching low in shallow tributaries where she could deploy a massive store of anti-aircaft, ship, and infantry weapons. She’d hundreds of “Daisy Cutter” missiles in her forward payload, each capable of laying waste to thousands of tons of earth and rock. She could bring remote-controlled drones to bear, launching ten and twenty bird sorties with pre-programmed and remote-programmed mission memory. To her aft, and running all along the sides, the Simnus had new HE drone-missile tubes. Each one could loose a hundred “Pitchfork” rockets, each was capable of cutting a destroyer class battleship in two, and each could be fired underwater and also into the air. Each was rigged with a set of servos and sensor packages that allowed the user to take full control of each using a small joystick and screen-radar just on the weapons array. An army of amphibious death controlled to the centimeter by computers and human interaction.
***
Instead of killing them, the Grey Thing had allowed them to sleep. For twelve precious hours Kevin Stark lay in his rack and slumbered without disturbance save from by the most awesome dream-visuals and dream-actions. The reveries came so close on the heels of one another that it was hard to keep up. He felt himself launched out of the sea like a missile and screaming for the shores of the East Coast in search of soft targets. The wind whistled through the superstructure and he felt the fuel in his heart drain as the afterburners punched him toward a fiery end. Then he looked to the left and right and saw massive wings sprouted like time-lapse vines one hundred meters on both sides. No rocket now, just a massive, terrible flying creature from the swamps of pre-history itself. He flapped the giant arm-wings and roared a great roar. He saw fire spring from his mouth like a thousand bombs had touched off in his throat. A dragon then! A dragon formed from the entirety of humanity and sent to fight, to defend, to crush and burn under urgent, gigantic wings. He dove then, aiming for a twin peak far below him and shrouded in fog. The wings dissolved then and he was falling, folding and enwrapping himself within himself to brace for the shock when he hit between the giant spires.
There was no impact though, and he felt himself falling through between thee giant stone edifice. He fell and fell and fell. Through dark and light and heat and cold. A thousand miles and a thousand more he was falling inside a dream-tunnel through the very center of the earth itself. Despite the speed he made out shapes and forms going past. Warriors on the march, giant lizards stalking prey while the land shook and smoked. There was noise also, screams, yells of pain, orgasmic shouts and moans, and the cries of the dead rotting in the ground, afraid of fate and what might happen next. He fell through it and bore witness to all of it. Somehow able to make sense of what he was feeling and seeing even as he plummeted towards….
Before he could answer it was darkness around him. He had been falling in the black, but now he felt ground beneath him. Was he once again a man. Had he been delivered from the ships and the sea? What was to become of him? A meaner thought overtook him then, “what if he’s done away with me as I slept and this is my hell?” He tried to discern shapes in the dark but he could make nothing. Terror then, sour and heavy, gripped him and pressed down. He found the tears coming again. He was spinning and trying to see, dizzy and looking for any light at all.
***
The Grey Beast boarded the Simnus and took the crew in much the same way as the Glanton. The Simnus crew, however, went to their destiny in even more pain and horror than the forty-three who perished on the Glanton. Kevin Stark woke from his rest under the full sway of the Grey Beast. He dressed and made for the Glanton’s bridge.
Once there he realized two things: The first was that the boat was at the surface. He saw light beaming in from a row of tiny windows surrounding the conning tower. The beams were like lasers focused on a single point amidships and the rest of the Glanton’s crew was also gazing up. Stark heard a familiar noise below him, and saw the Captain make for the hatch that lead to the first deck. The monster was taking them outside. Stark followed the Captain and was dazzled upon making the deck. Of the Simnus there was no sign, but her entire crew - a compliment of fifty-three hands and officers was here, on the Glanton’s deck, with him. Facing him as a matter of fact, standing about five yards away toeing an imaginary line. They looked scared and tired and none of them said a word. Kevin looked at the Captain standing next to him and was about to speak when he saw his friend move. Captain Brendt was checking his Glock sidearm, and before Kevin could think he found himself doing the same thing. He raised his weapon, racked the slide and pointed it forward, sighting the second ensign of the Simnus at point blank. Stark had started to say the words “I’m sorry,” when the shooting began. By the time it was over, he found himself - once again - having avoided the slaughter. This time though, there was only himself left, along with Captain Brendt. The crew of the Simnus, along with his remaining compliment from the Glanton Holden, lay at their feet, twitching and bleeding, their brains leaking out onto the first deck and steaming in the noon sunlight. The Beast made them kick the bodies into the ocean, and they watched as the beast consumed them. He was fast, and by the time the sharks got to the scene a few minutes later there was nothing left for them. After a fashion, he and Brendt were forced to go back inside and the Glanton dove again. This time, Stark suspected, for the final time.
The Grey Thing summoned him - yet again - just as he was loosing himself to the will of his own natural, circadian cycles. The Beast had summoned him to the bridge, and he had him practically running to get there. Somewhere in the underpinnings of his unconscious self, Stark wondered if the Thing had finally decided to favor him and end his troubles once and for all. The thought gave him a melancholy kind of hope and he found himself smiling on the inside when he reached the bridge.
***
You’re friend is dead.
Brendt spoke from behind his desk in the corner of his captains quarters. He was a sub captain, so the room was small, and not befitting of the man’s high rank, but Stark had never heard him complain. Brendt was a sailor, and sailors spend most of their time at the con.
I know. All our friends are dead. The bastard thing made me murder’em. I recognized all those men. I can’t bear to…
Brendt cut him off:
No. Your friend. Captain Brendt. He’s killed and done. There is only us now Mr. Stark. Only us. I have some questions for you, but I understand that the answers I seek will not be volunteered. I propose a bargain. Questions for questions.
“I don’t understand. What is it you want.”
That is none of your concern Mr. Stark, and it is also a tale far too long for the limited time we’re afforded now. Suffice to say, that what I want is very close, and will be gained within a matter of hours. Your role in this is strictly in an assistants capacity.
What in fuck are you?
His friend, or - more correctly - the thing that was wearing his friend threw his head back and laughed a great laugh for what seemed like hours. He seemed honestly amused.
Forgive me Stark, I’m always amazed by the boldness of humans. Here I’ve destroyed everything you hold close. I’m surely about to kill you and I’ve already stolen your ships, yet you demand things as if it were you sitting where I am sitting. Such pride. It’s no wonder your race has failed.
Stark looked down, and neither man said anything for a long while. It was the Beast that eventually broke the silence.
Well then Mr. Stark if that’s all then…
OK. Wait. Maybe I do have questions…
By the time they were finished talking it was late at night. Kevin Stark was depleted and tired beyond tired. He asked a final question:
Why not just wear me like you wear Brendt? It seems you’d be able to grab the information at will and you’d be off to the races.
The thing inside his old buddy just grinned.
Ah ha! You would think. You would think. I’m sill learning the things I can and cannot do to you people, but I’m quite sure that the contents of a persons mind cannot be made available to one such as me. I can force most beings to do my bidding, but extracting a tiny piece of information hidden in the vastness of somebody’s mind is a bridge to far. Maybe after a few hundred more years, no?
Stark said nothing.
***
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
dogshitart
Cold Season by Scott Corrao
In the end, it was the laptop.
It had belonged to Mario’s Papa, an outrageous expenditure for a man of his means and one Mama never really got over. “Who do you think you are,” Mario had heard her demand of him, “Mr. Bigshot with a computer?” Papa was the only person in the village with such a thing. He had saved for months to buy it from a used electronics store in Oaxaca De Juarez.
Papa left no will, but after he passed the laptop was given to Mario. Who else would use it? Mario was fifty-seven, too old to travel north for the harvest anymore, and like his Papa he’d always had a way with stories.
Near the end of the month, he decided to write. It was July, the temperature over 100degrees. Mama had roasted beans overnight and the odor clung about the house. Mario sat on the porch and stared at the blank screen. He had a story in mind, but couldn’t think how to tell it, how it should sound. He couldn’t think whose voice to write in. He stared almost three hours at the screen before Mama called him to dinner.
***
A few days later, Mario was again on the porch with the laptop and a beer, staring again at the screen. He had started and stopped writing a few hundred times. He had produced almost an entire paragraph.
Someone said, “Mario Fuentes?”
A smiling young man stood at the base of the porch stairs. He looked just like Rudy Gonzalez. Mario hadn’t known anyone was there. He asked, “Are you related to Rudy Gonzalez?”
The young man said, “He’s my brother.”
“How is Rudy?”
“Fine. He lives near San Marcos with his wife.”
“How many children does he have now?”
“Just the two.”
Mario nodded.
Rudy’s brother said, “I have a field in Guadalupe.”
Mario made an impressed face, “You’re young to have a field.”
“This is my first. My grower approached me after the harvest last year. He said I was a natural leader and should have my own field.”
“Yeah?”
“So now I have my own field.”
“What does your brother Rudy say about it?”
“Rudy says to find you – Mario Fuentes. He says you’re the best man to help me farm strawberries.”
“Rudy’s crazy. I’m fifty-seven.”
Rudy’s brother kept smiling. He had the spritely stoop of the young berry farmer. “That’s what I told him,” he said.
Mario smiled back. He said, “That’s nice of Rudy to say, but I can’t help you with your farm.”
“Rudy said to offer you $200 a day.”
“How much will you get per box?”
Rudy’s brother shrugged.
“You can’t pay me $200 a day without knowing what you’ll get per box.”
“That’s what I’ll pay you. It’s a guarantee. I’ve got a good route across the border.”
“Sonoyta?”
“Imperial Valley. And I’ve got us a nice house to live in. Barsug – the suburbs. And a good crew.”
“You’ve got all this. Why do you need me?”
“Rudy says you’re the best. He says you’ve seen it all.”
“I’ve seen lots of babies try to be farmers. For most of them it doesn’t work out. Picking’s the easy money, kid.”
Rudy’s brother said nothing, but smiled still.
Mario said, “I’m going to Acapulco this December, to sell ice cream to Americans.”
“What will it pay?”
“Not $200 a day.”
***
The drive to Mexicali took four days. Rudy’s brother had a Dodge Charger from the seventies with enormous rear tires with white lettering. The air conditioner did not work most of the time. They drank beers and some tequila on the ride. Mario had the laptop with him, tucked between layers of clothing in his duffle bag so it wouldn’t jounce around too much.
They stayed in a motel outside Mexicali, waiting on four pickers. Most of the guys Rudy’s brother planned to use were already in the states. Rudy’s brother left the Charger at a friend’s house and borrowed a white Dodge Van Ramwagon for the drive across the desert.
The pickers arrived. Three of them were Mixtecs living in Mexicali – all sons of men who’d known Rudy at one time or another. The fourth was a woman in her late thirties named Marta. Marta’s hair was streaked grey and her thighs were bulky with muscle. As they rode in the back of the van out of Mexicali, she told Mario that she had been picking for over twenty years. She said she had picked for every grower in San Diego County, including Coastal Berry and Berryfornia. She said her name was known at the offices of the California Strawberry Grower’s Association, and that her photograph had been used in a brochure published by that organization in the mid-nineties. She said she could pick strawberries as fast as anyone – no matter their age or their gender – and that Rudy’s brother had begged her on his knees to work his farm for him.
Mario thought Marta was pretty attractive. He’d never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure what to make of it. She seemed sure of herself in a way most women he knew were not. Mario’s wife Anna had been prim and withdrawn. She died in 1989.
After midnight Rudy’s brother drove the Dodge Ram Vanwagon over a boulder, tearing off the muffler and much of the undercarriage. It soldiered on another seven miles or so, vomiting smoke and strange noises – Mario, Marta and the Mixtecs coughing in the back – then shuddered and died in the desert.
Rudy’s brother kept smiling. He even made a few jokes. Mario wanted to yell at him, but did not. They had one working flashlight among them, but Mario advised them not to use it. He said their eyes would adjust to the dark.
The next day they walked the Imperial Valley desert. It was August and there were no clouds. The sun rocketed skyward and it became deadly hot. There had been a case of bottled water in the Vanwagon. They all had plastic bottles stuffed in their pockets and the waistbands of their pants. Mario turned his baseball cap to shield the sun but still felt his one cheek bake, then his forehead, then his other cheek. One of the Mixtecs mumbled to himself.
Marta asked Mario why he didn’t just leave his duffle. Mario didn’t want to get into it about the laptop and everything.
They crossed a mountain pass that would have been wide enough for the Vanwagon. Rudy’s brother reminded them this was a good route. The air was silver and hazy. The desert stretched out. Many miles to the west, Mario could see the almost artificial green of housing development lawns and beyond that what may have been the Pacific, or maybe just the horizon. They kept walking.
About three hours later, Marta fell and began to seize. None of them knew what to do. Rudy’s brother knelt beside her, crying and calling her name. Mario looked away, toward the tendrils of San Diego just visible in the far off.
“Marta! Marta!” Rudy’s brother’s shouted. One of the Mixtecs crossed himself and said the Hail Mary. These sounds, along with Marta gagging and her limbs luffing on the desert floor, were all Mario could hear.
Rudy’s brother implored the Mixtecs, “She’s my sister in law’s aunt! What will I tell, Maria?”
Later, there was some discussion over what to do with Marta’s body – carry her, bury her, or whatever. Mario lent no opinion to the debate. In the end, one of the Mixtecs covered her from the chest up with his windbreaker then weighed the edges of the garment down with rocks so it would not blow away. They left her like that, a mound of windblown fabric with legs sticking out.
The Border Patrol found them at dusk. Mario had just finished his last bottle of water, which was the last water any of them had. His mouth felt like gravel. As the Border Patrol pulled up, Mario told Rudy’s brother and the Mixtecs to shut up and let him do the talking. There were two of them in a green Ford Bronco. They had close cropped haircuts. One looked Mexican and wore a cowboy hat and gave them all Snickers bars and said to Mario, “Man, tell me your van broke down. No one your age would be so stupid to cross the desert on foot.”
Mario stared at the ground and chewed the Snickers.
The white one said, “Can’t hear you, amigo!”
The Border Patrol wrote down their names. Mario called himself Carlos Fuentes, thinking that was pretty funny. The Border Patrol fingerprinted them with a type of fancy portable fingerprinting unit Mario had never seen. They handed Mario and his party summonses to appear before a judge in San Diego in four months.
Mario considered telling the Mexican looking Border Patrol about Marta, but decided against it. What could they do about a dead woman in the desert?
***
They took a Greyhound bus from San Diego to Barsug, riding the 5 and the 405, the 101and the 1. Mario had missed these American views of water and city, unseen for so long. Rudy’s brother tried to ask him about Marta at one point, but Mario shushed him and stared out the window.
As they bussed through Oxnard, Mario asked Rudy’s brother about his field.
“It’s twenty three acres,” Rudy’s brother said, like a man waking from a bad, dimly remembered dream.
“And who is the commission merchant?”
“GrowMark Produce. You have heard of them?”
“Of course. Who approached you about becoming a Mexicano, was it Paolo V.?”
Rudy’s brother smiled, “You know Paolo V.?”
“We used to cross together, me and Paolo and Rudy. He’s naturalized now, right?”
“Yes. He’s very well regarded at GrowMark. He runs the entire Guadalupe operation.”
This news calmed Mario. He had been worried about Rudy’s brother, who was likeable despite being a dumb young kid. Every picker knew bad stories about Mexicanos being forced into debt slavery or sent to US prisons or worse. But if Paolo V. was involved the deal must be okay. Mario hadn’t seen Paolo V. since the early nineties but they had been friends once. Paolo V. was a good guy.
***
They had to walk to the house, which was in a suburban development. The neighborhood was lined with berry fields, and beyond the fields were other developments with more houses. Rudy’s brother led them through a gate into the back yard and picked up a funny looking rock which wasn’t a rock at all but a hunk of plastic with a compartment in it and within the compartment a key. The house had two floors, four bedrooms, kitchen, living room, dining room. It was a palace with no furniture. The electricity did not work.
Mario said, “What’s with the electricity?”
And Rudy’s brother said, “I’ll call someone and have them turn it on. You guys find a bedroom. Let’s go to sleep.”
***
The next day, Mario locked the door to the bedroom he’d claimed and turned on his laptop, breathing relief when it started up okay.
Without thinking, he started to write. The words came unimpeded, a new/old voice telling a story that – though unfamiliar – might be his own.
Mario smiled. He kept writing.
***
A week later they planted. Three Tuxpenos had been added to the crew by then, men Rudy’s brother knew from previous seasons. The Tuxpenos didn’t like the Mixtecs and the Mixtecs didn’t like the Tuxpenos. A disagreement over bedroom assignments, the details of which were too complex to decipher but seemed to dovetail with ancient tribal grievances, resulted in strict racial separation in both house and field. All were good workers though, and listened well as Mario and Rudy’s brother instructed them. Of the eight men, only Rudy’s brother and Mario had planted before. The rest had only harvested. Mario showed them how to lay the plastic sheeting and inject the methyl bromide. He showed them how to install the drip irrigation system which, like the Border Patrol’s portable fingerprint machine, was new to him, nifty and unexpectedly convenient. He showed them how to work the plants through another layer of the plastic sheeting so that they were all fit and even. The plants looked hearty. Mario had confidence in them.
All the equipment and the plants appeared at the edge of the field before they arrived each morning, and Rudy’s brother was never surprised. He told Mario that GrowMark provided everything as part of their contract.
“They just give it to you?” Mario said.
“Not exactly.” Rudy’s brother said.
Mario didn’t see his old friend Paolo V. for another three weeks. By this point the strawberry plants had taken root. Twenty three acres was a lot for eight men. Rudy’s brother had wanted to bring on more help, but Mario knew it could be done.
He had said, “It will save you money. You’ll be able to afford more workers for the harvest. You’ll pay them better and they’ll work faster and take better care of the berries.”
Rudy’s brother had said, “My brother was right – you are the best, Mario.”
Paolo V. drove up in a sharp Ford F-150 with the King Ranch package, the truck red and shining in the early sunshine. Paolo V. looked good getting out, tall and narrow as ever, but with a healthy belly hanging over his belt. Even at this hour, he had his hair slicked back and handsome. He didn’t seem to see Mario at first. He walked right by him to get to Rudy’s brother, who stood up straight to shake hands and accept his congratulations on such a fine looking field. Then, while they were speaking, Paolo V. noticed Mario staring at him and stopped in mid sentence and said in English, “Holy shit! Mario Fuentes!” Like Mario was a celebrity or something. Paolo V. hugged him and Mario hugged Paolo V. and felt happy to see this old, good friend he hadn’t seen in so long.
Paolo V. said to Rudy’s brother, “You’re smart, having this one along. No wonder your field is so well maintained!”
Rudy’s brother thanked Paolo V. and told how his brother had insisted he seek out Mario Fuentes of Tejalapam.
“You’re so lucky,” Paolo V. kept saying. “So lucky to have Mario Fuentes.”
Later, Mario and Paolo V. strolled the fields together. They talked about what each had done since the last time they’d been together, Mario explaining how his father’s illness and his own old age had driven him home; Paolo V. talking about the opportunities that finally came his way – reward for having stuck to the strawberry business for so very long, “Since both of us were boys, hey?”
Mario told Paolo V. he had a good feeling about Rudy’s brother’s field and about the season in general. The air felt dry headed into fall. He was sure the rains would spare them.
Paolo V. laughed and said, “I hope you’re right, Mario!” Paolo V. only ever seemed to exclaim things now, a quality Mario could not recall from their youth.
He told Paolo V. how profitable he thought the field would be; what a high quality berry he planned to cultivate – “No Cat’s faces” – and what an able manager Rudy’s brother was. “You picked a good one with that kid,” he said.
Paolo V. nodded and smiled and said, “Has anyone been bothering you out here? Guys coming around?”
Mario didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, “Guys?”
Paolo V. smiled and patted Mario’s shoulder, “Forget it, Mario. Don’t worry about anything.”
***
For the next few months, the eight men worked every day in the fields. They watched the berries go from green red buds to bright red fruit. They tested and checked the irrigation system. They administered a non-chemical pesticide of Mario’s own creation to battle back an eelworm infestation. The Mixtecs and Tuxpenos, while never growing to like each other, at least achieved mutual toleration. At night everyone drank together in the living room, sitting in a circle on scavenged folding chairs and fruit crates, telling stories of their childhoods – all the girls they’d fucked and men they’d fought.
Mario heard them downstairs as he typed. The story he told the laptop grew and grew. It was far beyond what Mario had imagined it might become, almost 200 pages. There were nights where he’d never stop typing. He’d look up and see the sky lightening and know it was time to go to the fields and that he’d lost his chance to sleep, and he wouldn’t care.
Rudy’s brother paid each of them every two weeks in American cash. Mario didn’t ask where the money came from.
In late November Mario left the field early to get pork for their dinner. When the rest returned home after 6:00 pm, they carried bright yellow flyers. The flyers said that migrant strawberry workers were an oppressed population, and that the only way to safeguard the workers was through unionization.
“What’s it all about?” Rudy’s brother asked Mario.
Mario concentrated on the pork. He had cut the lean belly into strips and been simmering it for hours in oil, onion, garlic and lime juice. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”
After that, new people showed up at the field every day. Most of them were white. Some drove jalopies with political bumper stickers and had dreadlocked hair. Some drove shining SUV’s and wore suits. All of them distributed bright colored flyers with such devotion the workers felt guilty not taking them. Mario told the workers not to speak to the people with the flyers, to pretend to only understand Spanish.
They kept all the flyers in a stack on the kitchen counter. They were all handed out by different organizations, The United Farm Workers, The Strawberry Workers of California, The American Berry Pickers Union, The American Farm Union, Strawberry Growers United. Each group had its own flyer with its own message. Mario didn’t know what to make of it. He tried not to read the flyers, lest they distract him from more important things. He encouraged the others to do the same.
***
Mario woke up one morning in December and went downstairs and there were nineteen new men in the house. They had all arrived in a group, bringing beers and microwave burritos from the convenience store four blocks over. Rudy’s brother introduced him around, calling him “Mario the head man,” or “Mario the Foreman.”
The harvest was still a month away, but Rudy’s brother had decided to bring the pickers on early.
“They’re all good guys,” he told Mario. “I’ve known them all for years.”
“But we don’t need them yet.”
“But they need the place to stay, and the money.”
“You’re paying them already?”
The new guys weren’t bad, but they were many. They slept in the halls and on the kitchen floor and even in the room which used to be Mario’s alone. He had to stow his laptop for fear one of them might ask about it. The house’s two tiny bathrooms soon broke under the relentless use. The men played loud norteno music at all hours. They drank and made raucous conversation. Mario had trouble sleeping. Leaving for the fields in the morning he saw white neighbors throwing curious looks toward the house. At least they ate well because the new men, appreciative of Rudy’s brother’s generosity, kept the house stocked with beer and food.
When it was time for the new men to start work in late December they proved an asset, energetic and eager to help, waking early and preparing migas and coffee for breakfast. They took Mario’s instruction on how to harvest – to twist the berry off the vine, to be ever so careful with the skin of the fruit, to leave the smallest touch of green on the berry’s crown, to arrange the berries in the tray just so – even though they’d probably taken such instruction many times from many different foremen.
The winter was uncommonly mild and dry. The berries ripened early – fat, juice-filled, blood red fruit. Mario and the men were bent in the field from first light, Rudy’s brother among them, everyone pitching in. The early harvest was ready January 15th and presented well. They would be a great success and fetch a good price. Paolo V. claimed them with a huge smile.
As the Mixtecs loaded berries into the King Ranch, Mario bragged, “Have you ever seen fruit like that, Paolo V.? They will bring $12.00 a box!”
Paolo V. nodded but said nothing. He asked, “Is that one of those union fuckers?”
One of the hippy kids from the UFW was standing around talking with some of Mario’s workers. The hippy kid’s name was Brad. They all liked him. You had to. Brad with his goofy rainbow painted pickup truck and floppy clothes. Brad gave them flyers two or three times a week, asked the men to spread them around but didn’t press too much. He mainly asked where the guys were from and how they got here.
Mario said, “That’s just Brad.” But Paolo V. was already walking over. The wind kicked up and Mario couldn’t hear what Paolo V. said to Brad, but he sounded agitated. Brad turned to Paolo V. and smiled, the workers around him smiling as well; then he stuck his hand out to shake and Paolo V. hit him in the mouth. The workers kept smiling a minute before they realized there had been a change.
Mario ran over and grabbed Paolo V. who cursed Brad in Spanish and English. Brad stood with his hand on his jaw. He made the stink eye at Paolo V., but didn’t seem to even consider punching back. Paolo V. was not so big, but there was something in the design of his body – a springloadedness in his chest and arms – that dissuaded other men from challenging him; it had always been so.
Mario said, “Take it easy, Paolo!”
“You let these union fucks on your field?!” Paolo V. demanded this of Rudy’s brother, who had run over to see what the problem was.
“He’s alright.” Rudy’s brother said. “Brad’s alright.”
The workers milled around, looking curious. Mario walked up to Brad and the younger white man leaned his head back so Mario could look at his chin. It was swollen, but his eyes showed no fear.
“I told you to keep these union fucks out of here! Don’t we have a good thing going?!"
“Sure we do, Paolo V.” Rudy’s brother said, “Sure we do.”
Brad spoke softly, so only Mario could hear him amidst the commotion. He said, “How much are you getting per box, Mario?”
Mario just looked at him.
***
They got home that night to find a skinny blonde white woman in a business suit waiting outside the house. She called, “Senior Gonzalez? Senior Gonzalez?” and the workers flowed around her like a boulder in a river until Rudy’s brother said, “That’s me!”
He wore a big smile while he shook her hand, the same he’d worn at Mario’s house in Tejalapam. He took her gently by the elbow and guided her down the walk away from the house.
That night was their first sleeping in the field. Someone had discarded some lumber by the road and they used it and a blue tarp to build a shelter. They slept in rows, the smell of strawberries in their hair. Rudy’s brother had presented it to them as an opportunity rather that a setback, saying that the savings in rent would mean increases in all their wages, plus they’d not have to worry about being too loud anymore late at night, and they could sleep an extra twenty minutes every morning. Some of the men were angry. Most had slept in worse. And Rudy’s brother’s confidence was infectious. He even had Mario convinced that the move wasn’t a complete nightmare – at least until it started to rain.
Mario woke to the tarp collapsing, to a blue and wet world like underneath the ocean. Around him men cursed and shouted. This was about 4:30 am. He dug himself out from under the tarp and stood in the downpour.
Though the sun rose that day over the purple hills of Ventura County, the men never saw it through the clouds. It kept raining. Mario stowed his duffle under bags of fertilizer, hoping to keep the laptop dry.
It rained all that week. They tried to protect the strawberries, but it was impossible, many would be lost to bruising. They would have to be harvested early and sold cheaply. At least they had harvested a good amount of high grade berries before the rain.
It was a long week. They ate frozen burritos and drank cans of Coke and beer. Some workers fell ill from being outside in the elements. Brad from the UFW came with some other guys and a motor home. They set up an awning and cooked a hot meal and let the men sleep inside the motor home and on the ground under the awning. They had a fire and even a television to watch the Angels.
Late that night Mario sat in the cockpit with Brad and Rudy’s brother. They’d all been drinking for a long time, even Mario, and why not? So long as it rained, there was nothing else to do.
Brad asked Rudy’s brother, “How much will Paolo V. pay you for those early berries?”
Mario said, “GrowMark will charge at least $12.00 a box for those beauties. What did you get, $7.00, $8.00?”
Water coursed down the expansive windshield. Rudy’s brother said, “$4.00 a box.”
Mario coughed, “$4.00?!”
“That’s the contract.”
Brad echoed, “That’s the contract.”
“The contract says how much you get a box, no matter what?”
“Don’t worry, Mario.”
“How do you pay for all the equipment, our wages?”
“GrowMark loans me the money. You’ve gotten paid, haven’t you? They’ve all gotten paid.”
All the time Mario knew him, Rudy’s brother never seemed to stop smiling like that.
***
The sun came out two days later and Brad called more UFW guys in. They came with tables and pens and pins and Mario lined up his workers and they signed – as employees of GrowMark Farms – a petition demanding the formation of a union. This happened early and fast and they were out in the fields by 7:00 am, inspecting the damage from the rains.
It could have been worse. The plants were hearty and thickly leafed. Some larger berries at ground level were unaffected. Mario suspected a few thousand boxes might still come out of this, though he didn’t see how – at such a miniscule price – Rudy’s brother could possibly break even, never mind the interest on the loans.
At 11:00 am the men were all bent in the rows, picking. That’s when Paolo V. showed up, driving his Ford F-150 King Ranch ahead of three Caterpillars and a bulldozer. Mario told his men to keep working, but they were all too distracted. Rudy’s brother’s smile actually slipped for a second – Mario saw this clearly – then reassembled itself. They walked out to meet Paolo V.
Paolo V. skidded to a halt and got out shouting, “You’re a liar! You’re a liar!” and brandishing a short folded stack of papers.
Rudy’s brother said, “I know… I know…”
“It’s in your contract, fucker. You’re not to talk to these union fucks!”
Brad walked up saying, “Just take it easy, Paolo. They already signed.”
“Who signed? These guys? These guys aren’t GrowMark employees. These guys work for him.” He pointed at Rudy’s brother, who kept smiling. “The contract states! These guys work for him, and not for us!”
“It’s your equipment, Paolo V.” Mario hated the pleading sound in his own voice. “It says GrowMark all over it.”
“He rents it from us, and he owes us for all of it. You owe, fucker!” Paolo V. had a bullhorn slung over his chest. He used it to shout in Spanish toward the men in the big machines who, upon hearing him, began to drive onto the field. Paolo V. turned his bullhorn toward Mario’s workers, who had gathered to see what was happening, “This field is closed! GrowMark Farms is closing this field for contract violations!”
Mario watched the lead Caterpillar dig its blade into his strawberries, so lovingly cultivated. Rows of his fruit climbed high into the air then fell, their almost sexually red flesh buried in curds of brown. The other machines joined in. The field dug under and buried.
Paolo V. exhorted the workers, waving the contract, pointing out Rudy’s brother. “This guy did this to you! And these guys too!” he pointed out the UFW volunteers, “Now you have no jobs!” Everyone’s attention was divided and confused. They watched the bulldozers tear apart the field. They watched Paolo V. rail.
Mario swung a shovel at the back of Paolo V.’s head and grabbed the bullhorn strap as he fell. He brought the bullhorn to his lips and pressed the button and Mario knew just what to say and how to say it. He would explain everything so it could be understood. He would set everyone at ease, the workers, the union guys, the men in the big machines. Even the death of the woman Marta in the desert would make sense once Mario’s words, his voice, were heard.
But someone hit him and he fell. He saw frantic legs and feet squelching California soil.
***
It was the laptop in the end.
Not the bullies or the bulldozers, or the pickers or the unions. It was the laptop, Mario’s story.
He deleted all 273 pages, highlighting it line by line and jabbing the delete key and saying yes when the laptop asked if he was sure. The story may have been right but the words were all wrong – the voice, his voice. All wrong.
He sat on his porch in Tejalapam. He heard his mother rummaging in the house.
He stared at the screen, fingers hovering.
He waited for the words to come.
He waited to be able to speak.
It had belonged to Mario’s Papa, an outrageous expenditure for a man of his means and one Mama never really got over. “Who do you think you are,” Mario had heard her demand of him, “Mr. Bigshot with a computer?” Papa was the only person in the village with such a thing. He had saved for months to buy it from a used electronics store in Oaxaca De Juarez.
Papa left no will, but after he passed the laptop was given to Mario. Who else would use it? Mario was fifty-seven, too old to travel north for the harvest anymore, and like his Papa he’d always had a way with stories.
Near the end of the month, he decided to write. It was July, the temperature over 100degrees. Mama had roasted beans overnight and the odor clung about the house. Mario sat on the porch and stared at the blank screen. He had a story in mind, but couldn’t think how to tell it, how it should sound. He couldn’t think whose voice to write in. He stared almost three hours at the screen before Mama called him to dinner.
***
A few days later, Mario was again on the porch with the laptop and a beer, staring again at the screen. He had started and stopped writing a few hundred times. He had produced almost an entire paragraph.
Someone said, “Mario Fuentes?”
A smiling young man stood at the base of the porch stairs. He looked just like Rudy Gonzalez. Mario hadn’t known anyone was there. He asked, “Are you related to Rudy Gonzalez?”
The young man said, “He’s my brother.”
“How is Rudy?”
“Fine. He lives near San Marcos with his wife.”
“How many children does he have now?”
“Just the two.”
Mario nodded.
Rudy’s brother said, “I have a field in Guadalupe.”
Mario made an impressed face, “You’re young to have a field.”
“This is my first. My grower approached me after the harvest last year. He said I was a natural leader and should have my own field.”
“Yeah?”
“So now I have my own field.”
“What does your brother Rudy say about it?”
“Rudy says to find you – Mario Fuentes. He says you’re the best man to help me farm strawberries.”
“Rudy’s crazy. I’m fifty-seven.”
Rudy’s brother kept smiling. He had the spritely stoop of the young berry farmer. “That’s what I told him,” he said.
Mario smiled back. He said, “That’s nice of Rudy to say, but I can’t help you with your farm.”
“Rudy said to offer you $200 a day.”
“How much will you get per box?”
Rudy’s brother shrugged.
“You can’t pay me $200 a day without knowing what you’ll get per box.”
“That’s what I’ll pay you. It’s a guarantee. I’ve got a good route across the border.”
“Sonoyta?”
“Imperial Valley. And I’ve got us a nice house to live in. Barsug – the suburbs. And a good crew.”
“You’ve got all this. Why do you need me?”
“Rudy says you’re the best. He says you’ve seen it all.”
“I’ve seen lots of babies try to be farmers. For most of them it doesn’t work out. Picking’s the easy money, kid.”
Rudy’s brother said nothing, but smiled still.
Mario said, “I’m going to Acapulco this December, to sell ice cream to Americans.”
“What will it pay?”
“Not $200 a day.”
***
The drive to Mexicali took four days. Rudy’s brother had a Dodge Charger from the seventies with enormous rear tires with white lettering. The air conditioner did not work most of the time. They drank beers and some tequila on the ride. Mario had the laptop with him, tucked between layers of clothing in his duffle bag so it wouldn’t jounce around too much.
They stayed in a motel outside Mexicali, waiting on four pickers. Most of the guys Rudy’s brother planned to use were already in the states. Rudy’s brother left the Charger at a friend’s house and borrowed a white Dodge Van Ramwagon for the drive across the desert.
The pickers arrived. Three of them were Mixtecs living in Mexicali – all sons of men who’d known Rudy at one time or another. The fourth was a woman in her late thirties named Marta. Marta’s hair was streaked grey and her thighs were bulky with muscle. As they rode in the back of the van out of Mexicali, she told Mario that she had been picking for over twenty years. She said she had picked for every grower in San Diego County, including Coastal Berry and Berryfornia. She said her name was known at the offices of the California Strawberry Grower’s Association, and that her photograph had been used in a brochure published by that organization in the mid-nineties. She said she could pick strawberries as fast as anyone – no matter their age or their gender – and that Rudy’s brother had begged her on his knees to work his farm for him.
Mario thought Marta was pretty attractive. He’d never worked with a woman before and wasn’t sure what to make of it. She seemed sure of herself in a way most women he knew were not. Mario’s wife Anna had been prim and withdrawn. She died in 1989.
After midnight Rudy’s brother drove the Dodge Ram Vanwagon over a boulder, tearing off the muffler and much of the undercarriage. It soldiered on another seven miles or so, vomiting smoke and strange noises – Mario, Marta and the Mixtecs coughing in the back – then shuddered and died in the desert.
Rudy’s brother kept smiling. He even made a few jokes. Mario wanted to yell at him, but did not. They had one working flashlight among them, but Mario advised them not to use it. He said their eyes would adjust to the dark.
The next day they walked the Imperial Valley desert. It was August and there were no clouds. The sun rocketed skyward and it became deadly hot. There had been a case of bottled water in the Vanwagon. They all had plastic bottles stuffed in their pockets and the waistbands of their pants. Mario turned his baseball cap to shield the sun but still felt his one cheek bake, then his forehead, then his other cheek. One of the Mixtecs mumbled to himself.
Marta asked Mario why he didn’t just leave his duffle. Mario didn’t want to get into it about the laptop and everything.
They crossed a mountain pass that would have been wide enough for the Vanwagon. Rudy’s brother reminded them this was a good route. The air was silver and hazy. The desert stretched out. Many miles to the west, Mario could see the almost artificial green of housing development lawns and beyond that what may have been the Pacific, or maybe just the horizon. They kept walking.
About three hours later, Marta fell and began to seize. None of them knew what to do. Rudy’s brother knelt beside her, crying and calling her name. Mario looked away, toward the tendrils of San Diego just visible in the far off.
“Marta! Marta!” Rudy’s brother’s shouted. One of the Mixtecs crossed himself and said the Hail Mary. These sounds, along with Marta gagging and her limbs luffing on the desert floor, were all Mario could hear.
Rudy’s brother implored the Mixtecs, “She’s my sister in law’s aunt! What will I tell, Maria?”
Later, there was some discussion over what to do with Marta’s body – carry her, bury her, or whatever. Mario lent no opinion to the debate. In the end, one of the Mixtecs covered her from the chest up with his windbreaker then weighed the edges of the garment down with rocks so it would not blow away. They left her like that, a mound of windblown fabric with legs sticking out.
The Border Patrol found them at dusk. Mario had just finished his last bottle of water, which was the last water any of them had. His mouth felt like gravel. As the Border Patrol pulled up, Mario told Rudy’s brother and the Mixtecs to shut up and let him do the talking. There were two of them in a green Ford Bronco. They had close cropped haircuts. One looked Mexican and wore a cowboy hat and gave them all Snickers bars and said to Mario, “Man, tell me your van broke down. No one your age would be so stupid to cross the desert on foot.”
Mario stared at the ground and chewed the Snickers.
The white one said, “Can’t hear you, amigo!”
The Border Patrol wrote down their names. Mario called himself Carlos Fuentes, thinking that was pretty funny. The Border Patrol fingerprinted them with a type of fancy portable fingerprinting unit Mario had never seen. They handed Mario and his party summonses to appear before a judge in San Diego in four months.
Mario considered telling the Mexican looking Border Patrol about Marta, but decided against it. What could they do about a dead woman in the desert?
***
They took a Greyhound bus from San Diego to Barsug, riding the 5 and the 405, the 101and the 1. Mario had missed these American views of water and city, unseen for so long. Rudy’s brother tried to ask him about Marta at one point, but Mario shushed him and stared out the window.
As they bussed through Oxnard, Mario asked Rudy’s brother about his field.
“It’s twenty three acres,” Rudy’s brother said, like a man waking from a bad, dimly remembered dream.
“And who is the commission merchant?”
“GrowMark Produce. You have heard of them?”
“Of course. Who approached you about becoming a Mexicano, was it Paolo V.?”
Rudy’s brother smiled, “You know Paolo V.?”
“We used to cross together, me and Paolo and Rudy. He’s naturalized now, right?”
“Yes. He’s very well regarded at GrowMark. He runs the entire Guadalupe operation.”
This news calmed Mario. He had been worried about Rudy’s brother, who was likeable despite being a dumb young kid. Every picker knew bad stories about Mexicanos being forced into debt slavery or sent to US prisons or worse. But if Paolo V. was involved the deal must be okay. Mario hadn’t seen Paolo V. since the early nineties but they had been friends once. Paolo V. was a good guy.
***
They had to walk to the house, which was in a suburban development. The neighborhood was lined with berry fields, and beyond the fields were other developments with more houses. Rudy’s brother led them through a gate into the back yard and picked up a funny looking rock which wasn’t a rock at all but a hunk of plastic with a compartment in it and within the compartment a key. The house had two floors, four bedrooms, kitchen, living room, dining room. It was a palace with no furniture. The electricity did not work.
Mario said, “What’s with the electricity?”
And Rudy’s brother said, “I’ll call someone and have them turn it on. You guys find a bedroom. Let’s go to sleep.”
***
The next day, Mario locked the door to the bedroom he’d claimed and turned on his laptop, breathing relief when it started up okay.
Without thinking, he started to write. The words came unimpeded, a new/old voice telling a story that – though unfamiliar – might be his own.
Mario smiled. He kept writing.
***
A week later they planted. Three Tuxpenos had been added to the crew by then, men Rudy’s brother knew from previous seasons. The Tuxpenos didn’t like the Mixtecs and the Mixtecs didn’t like the Tuxpenos. A disagreement over bedroom assignments, the details of which were too complex to decipher but seemed to dovetail with ancient tribal grievances, resulted in strict racial separation in both house and field. All were good workers though, and listened well as Mario and Rudy’s brother instructed them. Of the eight men, only Rudy’s brother and Mario had planted before. The rest had only harvested. Mario showed them how to lay the plastic sheeting and inject the methyl bromide. He showed them how to install the drip irrigation system which, like the Border Patrol’s portable fingerprint machine, was new to him, nifty and unexpectedly convenient. He showed them how to work the plants through another layer of the plastic sheeting so that they were all fit and even. The plants looked hearty. Mario had confidence in them.
All the equipment and the plants appeared at the edge of the field before they arrived each morning, and Rudy’s brother was never surprised. He told Mario that GrowMark provided everything as part of their contract.
“They just give it to you?” Mario said.
“Not exactly.” Rudy’s brother said.
Mario didn’t see his old friend Paolo V. for another three weeks. By this point the strawberry plants had taken root. Twenty three acres was a lot for eight men. Rudy’s brother had wanted to bring on more help, but Mario knew it could be done.
He had said, “It will save you money. You’ll be able to afford more workers for the harvest. You’ll pay them better and they’ll work faster and take better care of the berries.”
Rudy’s brother had said, “My brother was right – you are the best, Mario.”
Paolo V. drove up in a sharp Ford F-150 with the King Ranch package, the truck red and shining in the early sunshine. Paolo V. looked good getting out, tall and narrow as ever, but with a healthy belly hanging over his belt. Even at this hour, he had his hair slicked back and handsome. He didn’t seem to see Mario at first. He walked right by him to get to Rudy’s brother, who stood up straight to shake hands and accept his congratulations on such a fine looking field. Then, while they were speaking, Paolo V. noticed Mario staring at him and stopped in mid sentence and said in English, “Holy shit! Mario Fuentes!” Like Mario was a celebrity or something. Paolo V. hugged him and Mario hugged Paolo V. and felt happy to see this old, good friend he hadn’t seen in so long.
Paolo V. said to Rudy’s brother, “You’re smart, having this one along. No wonder your field is so well maintained!”
Rudy’s brother thanked Paolo V. and told how his brother had insisted he seek out Mario Fuentes of Tejalapam.
“You’re so lucky,” Paolo V. kept saying. “So lucky to have Mario Fuentes.”
Later, Mario and Paolo V. strolled the fields together. They talked about what each had done since the last time they’d been together, Mario explaining how his father’s illness and his own old age had driven him home; Paolo V. talking about the opportunities that finally came his way – reward for having stuck to the strawberry business for so very long, “Since both of us were boys, hey?”
Mario told Paolo V. he had a good feeling about Rudy’s brother’s field and about the season in general. The air felt dry headed into fall. He was sure the rains would spare them.
Paolo V. laughed and said, “I hope you’re right, Mario!” Paolo V. only ever seemed to exclaim things now, a quality Mario could not recall from their youth.
He told Paolo V. how profitable he thought the field would be; what a high quality berry he planned to cultivate – “No Cat’s faces” – and what an able manager Rudy’s brother was. “You picked a good one with that kid,” he said.
Paolo V. nodded and smiled and said, “Has anyone been bothering you out here? Guys coming around?”
Mario didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, “Guys?”
Paolo V. smiled and patted Mario’s shoulder, “Forget it, Mario. Don’t worry about anything.”
***
For the next few months, the eight men worked every day in the fields. They watched the berries go from green red buds to bright red fruit. They tested and checked the irrigation system. They administered a non-chemical pesticide of Mario’s own creation to battle back an eelworm infestation. The Mixtecs and Tuxpenos, while never growing to like each other, at least achieved mutual toleration. At night everyone drank together in the living room, sitting in a circle on scavenged folding chairs and fruit crates, telling stories of their childhoods – all the girls they’d fucked and men they’d fought.
Mario heard them downstairs as he typed. The story he told the laptop grew and grew. It was far beyond what Mario had imagined it might become, almost 200 pages. There were nights where he’d never stop typing. He’d look up and see the sky lightening and know it was time to go to the fields and that he’d lost his chance to sleep, and he wouldn’t care.
Rudy’s brother paid each of them every two weeks in American cash. Mario didn’t ask where the money came from.
In late November Mario left the field early to get pork for their dinner. When the rest returned home after 6:00 pm, they carried bright yellow flyers. The flyers said that migrant strawberry workers were an oppressed population, and that the only way to safeguard the workers was through unionization.
“What’s it all about?” Rudy’s brother asked Mario.
Mario concentrated on the pork. He had cut the lean belly into strips and been simmering it for hours in oil, onion, garlic and lime juice. He said, “Don’t worry about it.”
After that, new people showed up at the field every day. Most of them were white. Some drove jalopies with political bumper stickers and had dreadlocked hair. Some drove shining SUV’s and wore suits. All of them distributed bright colored flyers with such devotion the workers felt guilty not taking them. Mario told the workers not to speak to the people with the flyers, to pretend to only understand Spanish.
They kept all the flyers in a stack on the kitchen counter. They were all handed out by different organizations, The United Farm Workers, The Strawberry Workers of California, The American Berry Pickers Union, The American Farm Union, Strawberry Growers United. Each group had its own flyer with its own message. Mario didn’t know what to make of it. He tried not to read the flyers, lest they distract him from more important things. He encouraged the others to do the same.
***
Mario woke up one morning in December and went downstairs and there were nineteen new men in the house. They had all arrived in a group, bringing beers and microwave burritos from the convenience store four blocks over. Rudy’s brother introduced him around, calling him “Mario the head man,” or “Mario the Foreman.”
The harvest was still a month away, but Rudy’s brother had decided to bring the pickers on early.
“They’re all good guys,” he told Mario. “I’ve known them all for years.”
“But we don’t need them yet.”
“But they need the place to stay, and the money.”
“You’re paying them already?”
The new guys weren’t bad, but they were many. They slept in the halls and on the kitchen floor and even in the room which used to be Mario’s alone. He had to stow his laptop for fear one of them might ask about it. The house’s two tiny bathrooms soon broke under the relentless use. The men played loud norteno music at all hours. They drank and made raucous conversation. Mario had trouble sleeping. Leaving for the fields in the morning he saw white neighbors throwing curious looks toward the house. At least they ate well because the new men, appreciative of Rudy’s brother’s generosity, kept the house stocked with beer and food.
When it was time for the new men to start work in late December they proved an asset, energetic and eager to help, waking early and preparing migas and coffee for breakfast. They took Mario’s instruction on how to harvest – to twist the berry off the vine, to be ever so careful with the skin of the fruit, to leave the smallest touch of green on the berry’s crown, to arrange the berries in the tray just so – even though they’d probably taken such instruction many times from many different foremen.
The winter was uncommonly mild and dry. The berries ripened early – fat, juice-filled, blood red fruit. Mario and the men were bent in the field from first light, Rudy’s brother among them, everyone pitching in. The early harvest was ready January 15th and presented well. They would be a great success and fetch a good price. Paolo V. claimed them with a huge smile.
As the Mixtecs loaded berries into the King Ranch, Mario bragged, “Have you ever seen fruit like that, Paolo V.? They will bring $12.00 a box!”
Paolo V. nodded but said nothing. He asked, “Is that one of those union fuckers?”
One of the hippy kids from the UFW was standing around talking with some of Mario’s workers. The hippy kid’s name was Brad. They all liked him. You had to. Brad with his goofy rainbow painted pickup truck and floppy clothes. Brad gave them flyers two or three times a week, asked the men to spread them around but didn’t press too much. He mainly asked where the guys were from and how they got here.
Mario said, “That’s just Brad.” But Paolo V. was already walking over. The wind kicked up and Mario couldn’t hear what Paolo V. said to Brad, but he sounded agitated. Brad turned to Paolo V. and smiled, the workers around him smiling as well; then he stuck his hand out to shake and Paolo V. hit him in the mouth. The workers kept smiling a minute before they realized there had been a change.
Mario ran over and grabbed Paolo V. who cursed Brad in Spanish and English. Brad stood with his hand on his jaw. He made the stink eye at Paolo V., but didn’t seem to even consider punching back. Paolo V. was not so big, but there was something in the design of his body – a springloadedness in his chest and arms – that dissuaded other men from challenging him; it had always been so.
Mario said, “Take it easy, Paolo!”
“You let these union fucks on your field?!” Paolo V. demanded this of Rudy’s brother, who had run over to see what the problem was.
“He’s alright.” Rudy’s brother said. “Brad’s alright.”
The workers milled around, looking curious. Mario walked up to Brad and the younger white man leaned his head back so Mario could look at his chin. It was swollen, but his eyes showed no fear.
“I told you to keep these union fucks out of here! Don’t we have a good thing going?!"
“Sure we do, Paolo V.” Rudy’s brother said, “Sure we do.”
Brad spoke softly, so only Mario could hear him amidst the commotion. He said, “How much are you getting per box, Mario?”
Mario just looked at him.
***
They got home that night to find a skinny blonde white woman in a business suit waiting outside the house. She called, “Senior Gonzalez? Senior Gonzalez?” and the workers flowed around her like a boulder in a river until Rudy’s brother said, “That’s me!”
He wore a big smile while he shook her hand, the same he’d worn at Mario’s house in Tejalapam. He took her gently by the elbow and guided her down the walk away from the house.
That night was their first sleeping in the field. Someone had discarded some lumber by the road and they used it and a blue tarp to build a shelter. They slept in rows, the smell of strawberries in their hair. Rudy’s brother had presented it to them as an opportunity rather that a setback, saying that the savings in rent would mean increases in all their wages, plus they’d not have to worry about being too loud anymore late at night, and they could sleep an extra twenty minutes every morning. Some of the men were angry. Most had slept in worse. And Rudy’s brother’s confidence was infectious. He even had Mario convinced that the move wasn’t a complete nightmare – at least until it started to rain.
Mario woke to the tarp collapsing, to a blue and wet world like underneath the ocean. Around him men cursed and shouted. This was about 4:30 am. He dug himself out from under the tarp and stood in the downpour.
Though the sun rose that day over the purple hills of Ventura County, the men never saw it through the clouds. It kept raining. Mario stowed his duffle under bags of fertilizer, hoping to keep the laptop dry.
It rained all that week. They tried to protect the strawberries, but it was impossible, many would be lost to bruising. They would have to be harvested early and sold cheaply. At least they had harvested a good amount of high grade berries before the rain.
It was a long week. They ate frozen burritos and drank cans of Coke and beer. Some workers fell ill from being outside in the elements. Brad from the UFW came with some other guys and a motor home. They set up an awning and cooked a hot meal and let the men sleep inside the motor home and on the ground under the awning. They had a fire and even a television to watch the Angels.
Late that night Mario sat in the cockpit with Brad and Rudy’s brother. They’d all been drinking for a long time, even Mario, and why not? So long as it rained, there was nothing else to do.
Brad asked Rudy’s brother, “How much will Paolo V. pay you for those early berries?”
Mario said, “GrowMark will charge at least $12.00 a box for those beauties. What did you get, $7.00, $8.00?”
Water coursed down the expansive windshield. Rudy’s brother said, “$4.00 a box.”
Mario coughed, “$4.00?!”
“That’s the contract.”
Brad echoed, “That’s the contract.”
“The contract says how much you get a box, no matter what?”
“Don’t worry, Mario.”
“How do you pay for all the equipment, our wages?”
“GrowMark loans me the money. You’ve gotten paid, haven’t you? They’ve all gotten paid.”
All the time Mario knew him, Rudy’s brother never seemed to stop smiling like that.
***
The sun came out two days later and Brad called more UFW guys in. They came with tables and pens and pins and Mario lined up his workers and they signed – as employees of GrowMark Farms – a petition demanding the formation of a union. This happened early and fast and they were out in the fields by 7:00 am, inspecting the damage from the rains.
It could have been worse. The plants were hearty and thickly leafed. Some larger berries at ground level were unaffected. Mario suspected a few thousand boxes might still come out of this, though he didn’t see how – at such a miniscule price – Rudy’s brother could possibly break even, never mind the interest on the loans.
At 11:00 am the men were all bent in the rows, picking. That’s when Paolo V. showed up, driving his Ford F-150 King Ranch ahead of three Caterpillars and a bulldozer. Mario told his men to keep working, but they were all too distracted. Rudy’s brother’s smile actually slipped for a second – Mario saw this clearly – then reassembled itself. They walked out to meet Paolo V.
Paolo V. skidded to a halt and got out shouting, “You’re a liar! You’re a liar!” and brandishing a short folded stack of papers.
Rudy’s brother said, “I know… I know…”
“It’s in your contract, fucker. You’re not to talk to these union fucks!”
Brad walked up saying, “Just take it easy, Paolo. They already signed.”
“Who signed? These guys? These guys aren’t GrowMark employees. These guys work for him.” He pointed at Rudy’s brother, who kept smiling. “The contract states! These guys work for him, and not for us!”
“It’s your equipment, Paolo V.” Mario hated the pleading sound in his own voice. “It says GrowMark all over it.”
“He rents it from us, and he owes us for all of it. You owe, fucker!” Paolo V. had a bullhorn slung over his chest. He used it to shout in Spanish toward the men in the big machines who, upon hearing him, began to drive onto the field. Paolo V. turned his bullhorn toward Mario’s workers, who had gathered to see what was happening, “This field is closed! GrowMark Farms is closing this field for contract violations!”
Mario watched the lead Caterpillar dig its blade into his strawberries, so lovingly cultivated. Rows of his fruit climbed high into the air then fell, their almost sexually red flesh buried in curds of brown. The other machines joined in. The field dug under and buried.
Paolo V. exhorted the workers, waving the contract, pointing out Rudy’s brother. “This guy did this to you! And these guys too!” he pointed out the UFW volunteers, “Now you have no jobs!” Everyone’s attention was divided and confused. They watched the bulldozers tear apart the field. They watched Paolo V. rail.
Mario swung a shovel at the back of Paolo V.’s head and grabbed the bullhorn strap as he fell. He brought the bullhorn to his lips and pressed the button and Mario knew just what to say and how to say it. He would explain everything so it could be understood. He would set everyone at ease, the workers, the union guys, the men in the big machines. Even the death of the woman Marta in the desert would make sense once Mario’s words, his voice, were heard.
But someone hit him and he fell. He saw frantic legs and feet squelching California soil.
***
It was the laptop in the end.
Not the bullies or the bulldozers, or the pickers or the unions. It was the laptop, Mario’s story.
He deleted all 273 pages, highlighting it line by line and jabbing the delete key and saying yes when the laptop asked if he was sure. The story may have been right but the words were all wrong – the voice, his voice. All wrong.
He sat on his porch in Tejalapam. He heard his mother rummaging in the house.
He stared at the screen, fingers hovering.
He waited for the words to come.
He waited to be able to speak.
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