Passing In Little Aleppo

A dog was better than a rifle in the mountains, at least for protection. Best defense in the whole world is to make your opponent fear you enough to leave you alone. Walls, moats, armor: these are all reactive contraptions that can be overcome, but your enemy running the other direction when they see you is a winner every time. None of the animals in what would later be called the Segovian Hills wanted anything to do with a dog, especially not a hundred-pound growly beast like Black Eyes. She was a working dog, she was a hunting dog; she got mean when she went into the woods. That was where the killing was done. In the village, she was mellow and curious; that was where the eating was done.

But she was in nature now, she was where she treed and harried black bears, where she ran down deer only wounded by the hunter’s arrow or bullet, and ornery. Her fellow animals could sense this, and gave her and the two men she accompanied a wide berth. A puma does not recognize a rifle, but it can smell a pissed-off dog from three miles away. Black Eyes marked trees as she went by. Humans would describe the scent of the markings as “dog urine,” but animals could translate the complex hormones and pheromones: I dare you. I fucking dare you to try me. No creature did.

Which was good, because the Pulaski name for what would later be called the Segovian Hills was Jesus Christ, don’t go up there; there’s squatch up there. 

“Was there any decoration on the cave walls?”

“No. I don’t think so. It was dark. Why are you asking this?”

“I wanna know how smart they are,” Talks To Whites said.

“Plenty smart. I mean, one kidnapped me,” Cannot Swim said.

“Cats do that. They bring their prey back to somewhere it’s safe to eat. And, shit, squirrels do that, too.”

“Don’t compare me to an acorn.”

“You should be thrilled to be compared to an acorn. Acorn’s gonna grow into a mighty oak one day. You? You’re the guy who nearly got eaten by a monster.”

It was still very early in the morning. The light was fresh and everywhere, and colors were so very much themselves and bouncing off the dew still mounting the ridgeline. The pass through the mountains was in between the fourth and fifth peaks (if you’re looking at the range from the neighborhood), and so the cousins and the dog had decided to ascend the northern face of the fourth hill, then cut around when they hit the level of the pass. Easier to be sneaky on a horizontal plane, Cannot Swim figured. They walked quietly. There was no path, so they watched their feet as they walked, and paused often to listen. The chaparral was thick in places, but the men were wearing the leggings that the hunters wore, which were not pants, but rugged deerskin tied individually around each leg. They weren’t particularly comfortable, but the poison ivy, needleberries, and Sackett Weed lining the slopes were worse. (The Sackett Weed, named after longtime Chairman Emeritus of the Harper College Botany Department Angler Sackett, grows exclusively on the second, third and sixth of the Segovian Hills. Resembling a long grass, the Sackett Weed produces welts upon contact, plus causes a drastic reduction in vocabulary. Hours after handling the plant in lab tests, subjects were still pointing and grunting.)

“They are smarter than the other beasts. It mimicked me. That’s a sign of intelligence. Ever see a bear do that?”

“I have seen very few bears, cousin.”

“They don’t do that.”

“But did they draw on the walls?”

“Why?”

“Creating art is pretty high-level thinking.”

“Good for art. I didn’t look. It was dark, and I was about to be eaten.”

Black Eyes got her name from the strap of dark fur that crossed her face like a burglar’s mask; mostly, she was gray. Her shoulders came up to the waist of the tallest men in the village, and her snout was long with a few white hairs in it. Her ears were big, prickish, upright, and the left one had a chunk missing. Must have been a bear, Cannot Swim thought. Nothing less than a bear could put a dent into Black Eyes. She walked point. Sometimes the men were single-file, and sometimes they walked abreast, but the dog took point. It was easier for her to slide through the vegetation, anyway. Her thick head scanned the ground, the sky, the future. She pissed on bushes. There were squirrels and chipmunks, and she wanted desperately to chase them, snatch them, eat them, but she didn’t.

They came to their hidey-hole, a natural blind created when a tree collapsed onto a boulder. The bushes and vines and grasses had filled in the negative space that was left, and the two Pulaski men and the one Pulaski dog took a knee behind it. The White was back on the pass with his doodads. The Blacks were with him.

“Should we just walk out there?”

“What other options are there?”

“I dunno,” Cannot Swim said. He was a crack shot, and could dress a deer faster and cleaner than any of the other hunters. He was a good friend, and had been a good son all his life; he was kind and attentive to his wife; he would make a fine father. A few seasons ago, he had grown an 80-pound pumpkin. He could do a backflip from a standing position. Cannot Swim could not do intercultural negotiations.

“We chat him up,” Talks To Whites said.

“‘Chat him up?’ What does that mean?”

“Small talk. The Whites talk to everyone they meet. It’s a thing with them.”

“I don’t think he will just tell us his plans.”

“He totally will. He will absolutely tell us fucking everything because he thinks we’re morons.”

“He hasn’t even met us.”

“Doesn’t matter. The Whites think everyone who isn’t a White is stupid.”

“We can use this to our advantage.”

“We could. Yeah, we could. If there weren’t so many of them, and they weren’t so well-armed. Remember, that’s not just one guy. He represents every White on the other side of the mountains.”

“Are there a lot?”

“So many. They have cities with…more than we can count…people in them.”

There was no “million” in the Pulaski mathematical system. Numbers were specific up until a thousand, and then got progressively vaguer until you reached “more than we can count” and that was good enough.

“What about the Blacks? Do they have cities of their own?”

“I cannot explain the relationship between the Whites and the Blacks to you again. I’m beginning to think you’re slow.”

“I just don’t understand it! How do you own a person!?”

“Easily! By being a bastard!”

“Uh, boys? Boys? How you doing back there?”

That was the White. He held his notebook up to shield his eyes against the low sun. The Blacks, behind him, used their hands.

Cannot Swim stared at his cousin in anger.

“You are the worst hunter in the entire world.”

“I never claimed to be a hunter. Not once, not ever.”

Talks To Whites slapped his cousin on the shoulder and said,

“Lemme do the talking,”

And then popped up from his crouch before Cannot Swim could say anything.

“Howdy!” Talks To Whites called out in English.

The White tossed the notebook aside, and settled his long coat behind the pistol on his right hip.

“There’s two of you back there, yes?”

“Uh-huh!”

Talks To Whites lifted his cousin upright by the armpit and said in Pulaski,

“Wave and look friendly.”

Cannot Swim tried. He mostly got it.

“We’ll just come around the tree, how about that?”

“Sounds fine ‘less you’re two assholes.”

“One at the most!” Talks To Whites shouted out, and the men walked around the fallen tree. Black Eyes stayed down, hidden crouched in the low scrub. She had been watching the White’s eyes. He had not seen her. She would stay where she was, and neither man called to her as they left their position. Each had a rifle that hung from his right shoulder. Cannot Swim slowed and wanted to hang back, but Talks To Whites walked straight across the 30 grassy yards separating them from the Americans and so he followed him.

Chatting the whole way.

“Didja make it up all right? Bit of a slog coming up this way huh? Or did you take the long route? Long route’s not as steep.”

When he got ten feet from the White, he stuck out his hand. Kept walking.

“But then it takes longer. That’s why they call it the long route. How are ya?”

When he got to the White, the White shook his hand.

“How are ya? Funny story: in English, my name means ‘Person that can talk the White language.’ But it’s not pronounced that way in my language, and I’m sure you won’t get it right, so usually I just have Whites call me Peter. What about you, chief? What they call ya?”

Talks To Whites’ father was also called Talks To Whites. He taught his son English beginning at birth, and brought him over the pass into C—-a City starting not much later. The father walked him around the growing settlement and named the world of America to him. This is how the Whites eat, pray, fight; this is how they treat those who are not themselves; so on. He could not teach his son how to read, but did teach him the White numbers. Sent the boy to live with the Greenwoods for a month at a time. Caleb and his son Johnny. They were the first homestead that the father had encountered when the village sent him forth into the world for his Assignment, which was to learn English so that the tribe may trade for guns and ammunition and knives without getting ripped off. The father stayed with them for six months, exchanging his labor and some of the gold-colored rocks that littered the streams in the valley for room, board, and English lessons. He would return with his boy, leave him there to speak English and hear Caleb’s lectures on America. (“Warn’t no good no more.”)

Since his father’s death, Talks To Whites had been out to the Greenwood farm twice. Caleb told him both times: America’s coming for ya. C—-a City was bulging and bloating and building constantly. Caleb said he had seen signs in that season’s crop. Johnny had been kicked in the neck by a horse and died a few years prior, and Caleb didn’t have anyone to talk to. He had been seeing a lot of signs lately. America’s coming for ya.

“Furlong Christy,” the man said.

“Fur how long?”

“No, no. Not for long, a furlong.”

“I don’t know for how long. You’re supposed to be the horse guy.”

“I am a horse guy. And I’m telling you it’s a furlong.”

“That last little bit.”

“Yeah.”

“The home stretch.”

“It’s a furlong.”

“That’s what I’m asking you!”

Backy & Reo were the only good act the Davidian Theatre ever booked, and they were only okay. Benjy “Backy” Bachscheim was tall and barrel-chested–it was 1911, so he would have been called “vigorous”–and he slicked back his light-brown hair with a product called Old Dixie pomade, whose cans featured a mascot exactly as racist as you might imagine. Marcello “Reo” Arboreo did not slick his black hair back; he would drag his hands through it in frustration and confusion, and by the end of the routine, he would have a sweaty comedy corona: this matched his body, which was spheroidical and a foot shorter than his partner’s. Audiences would laugh when they stood next to each other.

“Tell me about this horse.”

“This horse here? He’s a mudder.”

“He?”

“Yes.”

“A mudder?”

“Yes.”

“How’s that happen?”

“His father was a mudder.”

“Waaaaaaait a minute!”

That was Reo’s catchphrase, and God help any performer sharing the bill who used it. A dog act in Omaha, Maxie Mauser and his Six Sharp Schnauzers, said the magic words during one show, and Reo stole into the box office, liberated all the coins into his sock, and beat Maxie and two of his dogs silly. Let ’em steal jokes, Reo thought. We stole all of ours. But when they steal your hook? Then you have to go to the coins. Backy was pissed at him for hitting the animals, but didn’t say anything. Even really sensitive people, a group to which neither man belonged, didn’t talk about their feelings in 1911. The duo had a far more efficient system of interpersonal communication: instead of discussing whatever was bothering them, Backy would be passive-aggressive until Reo snapped and popped him in the jaw. Backy had a thing about hitting little guys. He just didn’t do it. But hitting a little guy back? That was like heaven. So, every couple months or so, Backy would whale the tar out of Reo–nothing on the face and no broken ribs, but still a healthy beating–and Reo would maybe take it out on a dog act and his dogs.

There’s no business like show business.

There had been theaters in Little Aleppo since the Main Drag was made of horse shit, instead of just covered in the stuff like it was in ’11. There was the Twilley, which was across from the Wayside Inn and sat 80 on wooden pews. The stage curtains had come all the way from Baltimore. There were five actors in the troupe, two men and three women, and the neighborhood–still at that point more of a camp than a neighborhood–strained themselves trying to yell out a work that at least two of the performers didn’t have memorized. A song they didn’t know (with harmonies) or comedy routine.

Previously a tavern-owner and a pimp, Johnson Twilley accepted Christ in Seattle, hired actors, moved to Little Aleppo, built a theater, named it after himself because nobody could stop him, and produced the show. Shortly after opening, and even though business was impressive, Johnson was considering renouncing Christ and going back to pimping. The company of whores was surely more pleasurable than that of actors, he thought. My God, the conversations I’ve had to referee, the disputes–the disputes!–and the never-ending petty thievery. They do it just to annoy each other, and then you can’t hit them. That’s the worst part, Johnson thought. Hitting a whore solved a problem, but hitting an actor created dozens of new ones. Christ ministered to whores, he thought, and He couldn’t do that were there no whores. Gotta be whores to save. And, Johnson further contemplated, if there’s gotta be whores, then there’s gotta be pimps because whores can’t take care of themselves. The Bible is for pimping, he decided. The fact that the actors had been playing one of their favorite games, Weaponized Vocal Warm-Ups, for 20 minutes did not push his theological decision one way or the other, he assured himself, and quietly snuck out of the building and down to the First Bank of Little Aleppo, where he withdrew everything, and then at the livery for a horse and he was gone.

The first theater in the neighborhood was short-lived, only 19 months, but iterated and became the second theater that night. The building was still there, and the actors, and none of the bored-stupid locals cared about who owned the joint–Johnson Twilley didn’t take the audience with him over the hills, either–and the troupe performed that evening as always. There are three primary sources on what happened after the curtain. Two of the sources are the actors’ own journals. Both describe an unusually exuberant crowd that demanded repeat renditions of My Sky Is Named Virginia, and one goes on to make a vague reference to “our new patron.” Early Days in the Valley, Doc Wallop’s history of the first years, recounts the story several of the troupe told him, that Miss Valentine was just standing there in the shared dressing room when they got off. Just her, none of her guys. The actors had been living across the street from the Wayside Inn for long enough to know who she was. She had brought whiskey and shot glasses, six of them, and they were lined up on the table. Poured neatly. And then–and all of the actors told Doc Wallop this exact phrase, Miss Valentine said, “Hello, employees.”

The troupe, being actors and therefore appreciating a decisive dramatic gesture, took up their glasses and they all drank to a new chapter in the life of what would now be called the Valentine Theater. (She couldn’t help herself.) Miss Valentine had to rotate her guys in and out of watching the theater–they would stomp back into the Wayside with tears in their eyes muttering “words hurt, man” or run off with one of the actors if you let them stay over there too long–but it was worth the hassle. Anything is worth the hassle if it’s someone else’s hassle. The dummies she employed didn’t understand: it was real estate. Right on the Main Drag. Five years from now? Ten? Once the Turnaway really gets going? That’s my future right there, she thought. Along with all the other shit in town I own, but the theater, too. Might as well make me some steady income while I search feverishly for a stimulant to appreciation. Gotta think long-term.

The Valentine Theater burned in the First Wayside Fire.

After that was a place on the Downside with mismatched chairs and chain link in front of the stage called the Skillet; it was called that because the ladies sizzled. You stood as good a chance of catching a beating as you did a venereal disease: it was the theater of the people. Were the miners and farmers and gamblers and crooks of the West not just the same as Shakespeare’s groundlings? And was not a bunch of floozies waggling their tits at them just the same as actually performing one of Shakespeare’s plays? Little Aleppo would say so. Von Cannon’s Expositionarium & Theater For The Purpose Of Education, Enlightenment, And Excitement Of The Senses opened in 1891, but there were too many words on the sign and the building collapsed and everyone died. The Napoleon Showroom was on the Upside, and so did not feature naked girls in between comic monologues, instead presenting nude women in between dramatic soliloquies.

But there weren’t any family joints. You couldn’t bring your wife to, say, the Falconer Odeon because they did Aristophanes in the nude, or the Sopwith Auditorium because their show was just a guy reading Mark Twain novels while people fucked behind him. Sure as hell couldn’t bring your kids to the Stubert Theatre because that goddamned place changed blocks every week and the ticket booth would attack passersby. F.F. David would change all that. F.F. David would build the Davidian Theatre on Sparrow Drive about a mile into the Downside, and F.F. David would present a clean show. A vaudeville show.

Couldn’t say “gosh.” A juggling contortionist named The Floppy Lucy slipped a “willikers” into her patter one night, and F.F. tossed her–still rolled up into a human pretzel–out the stage door. No lewd dancing: you could not can can. Comic acts were forbidden from routines about religion or politics or sex, and intoxicants were never to be mentioned, and no insult was to be made against the audience, i.e. don’t talk back to them when they heckle. The musicians were not allowed to play in the key of C Sharp, and no one could ever figure out why.

“All right, pally, go out and milk the cows.”

“I bring the cows milk?”

“No, no, no. You get the milk from the cow.”

“Is the cow the milkman?”

“No, no, no. You reach under the cow and squeeze the utter.”

“The other what?”

“Oh, not this again.”

Two shows a day every day, a matinee and an evening performance, and a late show on Fridays and Saturdays, too. First act played while the crowd took their seats, settled in, slight punching, and this was a silent act. Cholly Antin the Living Statue was a perennial opener; he stood there really still. Next up were the family acts: the Gummberly Triplets from Albuquerque or The Cousins Prince, and they would usually sing and play instruments; it was traditional that a patriotic song be sung during this slot in the show. Comics were next, solo or in teams. Sloppy Carmichael, and Bertrand & Rosie, and Little Larry Lewis, and Digby Beck, and Ethel Nyquist & Al. (Ethel came on like Jenny Lind, but each time she attempted to sing, she would get in a comedic argument with her piano player, Al. They did that routine for 30 years and she never once made it past the first line of the song, My Happy Home. They didn’t change the song in 30 years, either; it was the only one Al knew how to play.) Fourth on the show was a freak act. Stumpy Newton was a tap dancer missing both legs, and Myrna Sable juggled haddock (or whatever similarly-sized fish was available locally), and then there was an intermission when patrons could buy candy or try to sneak backstage to make a run at Myrna.

After the break was an act that needed set-up, usually the Transolle Family, who numbered 17 and each played an instrument but none well. The Transolle’s dog, a yippy Cairn terrier named Fooey, rang a triangle during one of their numbers, so it was an animal act, too. The headliner was next, and Vaudeville headliners were stars. They could make tens of thousands a week. In New York, they could make tens of thousands a week. In Little Aleppo, ticket prices were lower and so was the pay, but it was still a year’s worth of money in a far shorter time. Morey Amsterdam came through once or twice, and so did Fatty Arbuckle before he got into movies and trouble, and W.C. Fields, too, back when he was a juggler, but mostly the Davidian got the B-listers and sloppy knockabouts.

(In her definitive history, Little Aleppo: Everything We Can Prove, Lower Montana noted that a surprisingly high number of Vaudevillian performers settled in the neighborhood after their touring careers were over.)

“Hey, Backy.”

“Yes?”

“You gotta explain somethin’ to me.”

“As usual.”

“Lincoln.”

“President Lincoln?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about him?”

“How come he’s telling the whole world where he lives?”

“What?”

“He gave out the Gettysburg Address, right?”

“No, again you’ve misunderstood that which even a foreign child would understand.”

It was precisely as much entertainment as you’d expect for a quarter, and people paid it; there was nothing else to do. Until there was: in 1906, the first movie theater in the neighborhood opened up. Place was called The Tahitian, and it only cost a nickel to get in. F.F. David and his Vaudevillians thought that movies were a fad, all of them that hadn’t already decamped for Los Angeles, and the show ran on. Until it didn’t. F.F. died in ’21, and Vaudeville with him, at least as far as Little Aleppo was concerned. The Davidian stayed open. Acts that couldn’t fill the Absalom Ballroom played there, and they still do. The seats have been reupholstered but backstage is a handwritten note on a wall, framed a long time ago, with a list of words that respectable performers did not use in respectable houses.

“Furlong Christy.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a name. Again, I’m Peter. And this here is my cousin, Cannot Swim.”

“Never gonna get over the fuckin’ things you folks name yourselves.”

He was not as tall as the Pulaski men, and not as wide, and his eyes were the color of a fox’s coat. His boots were brown and laced up outside of his trousers. The right side of his long coat was still hooked behind his holstered pistol. His hat was wide-brimmed and clean. The two Blacks were behind him, twenty feet or so, with the supplies they had humped up the hill. Neither wore a hat. The five men were on the flattened hump that was the pass’ apex, and the sky was clear and bright.

“Sure. It’s wild. So, uh, What is this, huh?” Talks To Whites pointed at the wooden tripod with the metal device on top. He knew what it was, but he also knew how to play dumb.

“This here? It’s called a theodolite. Can you say that? Theodolite?”

“Theodolite.”

“Good work. Hey, Barney,” he called over his shoulder. “This savage motherfucker speaks English better ‘n you do!”

Both of the Blacks smiled, and spoke under their breath to one another. Talks To Whites could not hear what they said.

“Oh, shucks. Theodolite? Theodolite. Wow, great word. What, uh, does it do?”

“You boys Miwok?”

He was standing up straighter now.

“Miwok? Us? No. Wait. Yes. Yeah, we’re Miwok.”

“You sure ’bout that?”

“Oh, yeah. Proud Miwok injuns.”

Cannot Swim heard a word he recognized and turned to his cousin.

“<Miwok?>”

“<Miwok,” Talks To Whites said in Pulaski. “<Let’s let this asshole think we’re Miwok.>”

“<We had absolutely no plan coming into this, did we?>”

The White smiled real wide. He was missing his right eyetooth, but the rest were straight and shiny.

“Miwok, huh? That’s great. I know some Miwok. You know the big chief they got? Big old boy, must be seven feet tall.”

“Tough guy to miss.”

“He is, yeah. He really is.”

He was still smiling.

“What’s his name?”

Now Talks To Whites was smiling, too, mirroring the White’s expression everywhere but his eyes, which had frozen. He was trying to decide whether to blink or not. Which would look better. He should either blink or not blink, but he should do it soon, he felt this deeply and suddenly–he had never been taught to bluff, you see–and he made a noise like urrrrmmm and started nodding like an idiot, he thought, he thought he was nodding like an idiot and his head kept bobbing up and down with no regards to his opinions and the noise continued urrrrrmmmm and might very well have continued like that forever had the White not pulled his pistol and shot Cannot Swim right in the face.

“Won’t abide a liar,” he said, and the pistol swung towards Talks To Whites, who didn’t have time to raise his rifle before the White thumbed the hammer back on his Remington and then there was not the sound you would expect, not a BOOM, but a growl and a shriek: Black Eyes had covered the 30 yards from the blind to Furlong Christy’s throat, and then no shriek just a gurgling and a THUMP THUMP–that was hands beating against a dog’s side–and then thump thump because the hands had less strength and Black Eyes was standing on the man’s chest pullingpullingpulling and then all of it was out: the trachea, the esophagus, the larynxy, glottis, supraglottis, and then the tongue.

The Blacks are running now, running east, running down, running back to America, and Talks To Whites has his rifle in his arms; he shoulders the Winchester and drops one of the Blacks. The other will be gone before he can reload, so he calls the dog.

“Black Eyes!”

And she’s off like a shot and on the Black and in his throat, and then it is very quiet on the pass and there is just the clear sky with no clouds and the trees minding their own business. Four fresh corpses, a guy, a dog, and no shamans at all.

“Hello, cousin.”

And then there was a shaman.

“This isn’t my fault,” Talks To Whites whispered.

“Nothing’s anyone’s fault,” Here And There said to him. She was barefoot and her hair was loose and her tunic had a turtle embroidered on its front.

“Have you been up here the whole time?”

“In a way.”

“Why didn’t you stop this?”

She said nothing, just whistled. Black Eyes looked up from the Black, muzzle covered in blood, and trotted back to stand beside Here And There, who scratched behind her ears.

Talks To Whites knelt by Cannot Swim’s faceless body and put his hand on his cousin’s bloodied shoulder.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

His face was dirty, so you could see the tracks that the tears were cutting. He looked up at Here And There and said,

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Nothing’s supposed to happen,” she said. “And yet it all does.”

Talks To Whites didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything and the sky was clear and bright and tomorrow would come the rains just like they came every 18 days in what would be come to be called Little Aleppo, which will be a neighborhood in America.