Tag: Little Aleppo (Page 4 of 20)

The grounds were stately. Poor people have stoops, and middle-class people have yards, but rich people have grounds and the best kind of grounds are stately grounds. The driveway snaked around hills and offered views of the city, the house, the pool, the stables, and then everything opened up onto a grand green lawn with a series of rectangular pools tangent to the front door and extending halfway down the mountain. The drive was hidden off to the side behind a row of cypress trees.

A woman rode a horse towards the house. Two women in a 1961 Lincoln Continental followed behind.

“It seems like she has the upper hand.”

“It should seem like that. She totally does.”

“Okay. Just trying to get a read on the situation,” Tiresias Richardson said. “What’s our play here?”

“Well, I don’t think she’s gonna murder us,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.

“She’s gonna murder us? I thought we were here to murder her?”

“There’s a fluidity to current events, Tirry. But I think we’ll be okay. She wouldn’t have invited us in to kill us. There’s, like, witnesses now and shit.”

The pools were surrounded by hedges. Rich people love hedges. Nothing proclaims one’s mastery over nature quite like a well-trimmed hedge. The rich people say, See this green, leafy bullshit? Wants to be a bush. See those fuckers over there? I pay them to make sure that never happens. It’s shrubbery! Yearns towards a certain wooliness and scrabble, but I say: Fuck you, plant, I want you to be perfectly rectangular. Look upon my hedges and despair. That’s what the rich people say.

Sheila and Tiresias waved at the gardeners.

“Did they see us?”

“Keep waving.”

“Maybe you should honk?”

“I’m not gonna honk.”

“Now you’ve got me all paranoid and I need to know they saw us.”

“That guy–”

Tiresias WHAPPED the horn real quick before Sheila could swat her hand away; the horse startled a bit and the blonde on top turned around annoyed. The gardeners did look, however, and Tiresias shoved her face right up close to the window and waved, then she turned back to Sheila and said,

“We’re safe now.”

“You’re my hero.”

“Do you think I should have a gun?”

“No. Why? Oh, God, no,” Sheila laughed. “Never. I’d give the horse a gun before you.”

Tiresias popped the cuffs of her blouse under her black jacket, took a deep breath, and pinched Sheila on the arm hard.

“What!?”

“You’re just mean!”

So Sheila takes her foot off the pedal to raise her knee in a defensive posture, and thwacks at Tiresias’ shoulder, who karate chops back at her; the car has now slowed to a stop on the incline of the driveway and the blonde on a horse has gotten quite a lead when she turns the animal around and yells at the two women having a slapfight,

“Are you two all right!?”

And the two disengage, Sheila gives the thumbs-up, and the car starts rolling again.

“Tirry, I love you.”

“I love you so much, Sheel.”

“I could have phrased my phrasing better.”

“Pinching is wrong.”

“How long is this driveway?”

“I know, right? This place is bigger than Harper.”

“The zoo or the college?”

“And the observatory. AAAAHahaha!”

They came around a corner and there was the turnabout, brick and over a hundred feet in diameter, with a life-size nude teen carved from stone and spitting water into the sky in the center. A Rolls Royce Phantom, mustard with a brown roof. White convertible Mercedes. The woman turned the horse towards the women in the car and said,

“I’m gonna put Chicken up in the stables and I’ll be right back. Go on in and make yourselves comfortable.”

And she rode off, presumably towards the stables.

“There are stables?”

“Presumably.”

“The horse is named Chicken,” Tiresias said.

“I gathered as much.”

Rich people in Los Angeles have three choices of house: Vaguely Spanish, Modern Nightmare, or Far Too British. This one was the third variety. It was alabaster and looked like a Duke had shamed his lineage there and the window frames  were judgmental. Chimneys abounded, and there was ample gabling. You half-expected the door to open and a butler in full livery emerge.

The door opened, and a butler in full livery emerged.

“Well, that’s cool.”

“I don’t know anyone with a butler.”

“I have a girl that comes by and cleans once a week.”

“Yeah. Tampa. She comes by my place, too, Sheel.”

“I’ve been meaning to fire her.”

“She’s the worst. She rearranges my furniture.”

“I fucked a butler once.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you find a butler?”

“Party.”

“How was it?”

“Quick.”

“He probably had to get back to work.”

“Right. Incredible posture, though. I remember that.”

“Did you make him keep on the outfit?”

“Of course I made him keep on the outfit. Half the reason I was fucking him was because–”

“Ladies?”

This was the butler. Full kit: long black coat, gray vest, white shirt with the starched collar. Windsor knot on the tie. He even had the gloves. Tall and stiff with a head like a sofa cushion. His hair had never been out of place.

Sheila killed the engine and left the keys in the ignition. She grabbed her enormous purse, and Tiresias took the briefcase and both of the women got out of the car and checked herself out in the window’s reflection as she closed the door. Tiresias was in the suit she had brought with her in case she got an audition to play a sexy FBI agent or a hot homicide detective or a district attorney you wanted to fuck, but she had overshot her mark with the slicked-back hair and the aviators and the cherry-red lipstick–plus the teetering stilettos–and the look was now “malfunctioning Soviet assassin droid in a Cinemax movie.” Sheila was in her leathers with the lace-up crotch and a black tee-shirt from The Snug’s second retirement tour; it was real tight, and there was a hole in the left armpit.

They were both chewing gum.

“Welcome to Standicott. I am Bottle.”

“Bottle the butler,” Sheila said.

“Goodness. You noticed the phonetic similarities. What a brain you must have.”

“Oh, you’re that kind of butler.”

“May I take your shabby handbag? Your incredibly suspicious briefcase?”

“I’m good.”

“No, thank you.”

He stood aside and gestured them in. There was an implicit middle finger to his motions; it was the most passive-aggressive gesturing the women had ever seen performed.

The foyer was damn near an atrium: three stories on either side with a double staircase leading to the second floor opposite the doors. The walls were made out of nooks, and the nooks were filled with sculptures, and the chandelier was the size of Zimbabwe. The house radiated out from the space along each wall, and under the stairs, and there were perches from which you could be viewed from above. A tasteful piano.

“You’re to wait here for the Lady’s return. Can I get you a drink? A fortified wine, perhaps?”

“I’ll take a scotch & soda, thank you.”

“Ooh, yes. Scotch & soda. And I’ll take Diet Dr. Pepper for my soda.”

“No, that’s not how it works, Tirry.”

“You don’t get to pick your soda in a scotch & soda?”

“It’s soda water. Club soda.”

“That makes so much more sense. I’ve never actually had one, but it’s so perfect for the moment. Good call.”

“I was gonna say martini.”

“Ooh, now I want a martini.”

“Bottle, can we change our drink orders? I think we’re going with martinis,” Sheila said.

“I have insanely specific requirements when it come to martinis, Bottle.”

“I’m bringing you scotch, and I shall spit in it,” the butler said, and withdrew from the room. Only butlers can withdraw from a room; the rest of us just leave.

“I played a butler. We did a gender-flipped Bertie and Jeeves play at Harper.”

“How’d it go?”

“Wodehouse’s estate sued.”

“That well, huh?”

They wandered away from each other, checking out the art. There were small, circular tables all about bearing impeccably-placed objets-de-art, and the two women repositioned each one. Just slightly. Sheila considered stealing an art deco turtle made from glass but decided against it, or at least that she should wait until she was leaving. Tiresias’ stilettos went TICKDACK TICKDACK against the polished wood floor. She picked up a piece, about a foot high, that looked like a dick.

“This is a dick, right?”

“Oh, yeah. All sculptures are secretly dicks. Put the dick down, Tirry.”

She held it at her crotch, began humping.

“Goofy things.”

“But there’s no upkeep,” Sheila said.

“True, true.”

“They’re wash-and-wear. Low-maintenance appendage.”

“Dicks are cats, and pussies are dogs.”

“Oh my God, that’s so true. Cats are less effort but they do whatever the fuck they want and cause nothing but trouble.”

“But you still let them in the house for some reason.”

“And dogs need constant attention or they chew through doors.”

“Maybe the metaphor falls apart a little at the end.”

“Fuck, no. I have known at least three women who could gnaw through doors with their vaginas. Nearly married one.”

“Glassy?”

“Glassy. Dude, she had a double-jointed pussy.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You’d understand if you fucked her.”

“Ahem.”

Not the sound “Ahem.” Bottle said “Ahem” is distinctly as possible. He had been standing there for several lines of dialogue. He had drinks on a tray. Tiresias put the dick down.

“Bottle!”

“Drinks!”

They went to him and took the glasses. Thick and heavy. The pale liquid caught the light, and so did the rim of the glasses, and the bridge of Tiresias’ sunglasses, and Bottle’s head. There was a lot of light to catch, and the tumblers made a low CLUNK when the women toasted–

“To Bottle.”

“Oh, fuck yeah. Bottle!”

–and threw back half of their drinks.

“Delicious.”

“So smoky. Is that what you say about scotch?”

“Yeah. Smoky. Very smoky.”

“I’m glad you make out the subtleties of the alcohol through your wads of Hubba-Bubba. Wait here for the Lady of the House. I’ll be in the next room.”

“Dude, hang out,” Sheila said.

“I have, like, a million questions about how the art and science of buttling. Did you ever see Clue?”

Bottle withdrew to the next room. The two sipped their drinks and wandered over to the piano.

“Scotch is so macho.”

“Scotch-o. Is there a school for butlers?

“Gotta be. There’s a clown college; there’s gotta be a butler school.”

“I dated a guy who went to clown college. The real one, the Ringling Brothers one in Florida,” Tiresias said.

“Of course it’s in Florida.”

“Oh my God, you have no idea of the long relationship between Florida and the carnival/sideshow industry. I got lectures. Guy’s name was Scott. Incredible body. Like a gymnast. Kinda short.”

“What was his clown name?”

“Sabnock Tasa, Builder of Towers .”

“That’s a choice. What happened to him?”

“Left me for a lion tamer.”

Tiresias grew up in Little Aleppo. Not all the way on the Upside, but a good distance into it–you couldn’t smell the Downside from there, for example–and so, along with the braces and acting classes and summer camp, she got years of piano lessons. She slid onto the bench and lifted the lid and TINKLEYDINKLEY played one of those show-offy hand-over-hand runs, an establishment of bona fides like a magician fanning the cards. Sheila did not receive musical instruction as a child, but that’s maybe 900th on the list of problems Sheila encountered during her childhood; she leaned against the side of the brown grand piano just like Tommy Amici used to.

“You know My Last Pantomime?”

“I think I do. In E flat?”

Tiresias laid her sunglasses on the soundboard and played the opening chords.

“That’s a good key.”

“It suits you,” Tiresias said, and played the head of the song. She hammered out the brass part with her left hand, covered the strings with her right, and Sheila came in a tiny bit late just like Tommy Amici used to.

Greasepaint
And heartache.
The tools of my trade

But those lights that heat you up
On the stage
Don’t shine into the dressing room.

Tiresias sang the next verse.

Costumes
And barrooms
The length of my daaaaays

But those friends that stand you drinks
At the bar
They’ll all find homes soon.

And they joined in together.

I’ll never take up
My makeup
Agaaaaaaaaaaain.

This is my LAAAAAAAAaaast…pantomiiiiiiime.

“HEY!”

Sheila and Tiresias looked up at the yelling voice, and saw that it was the woman from the pictures, and from the horse. She had changed into something white and slinky, and was leaning over the railing, having been symied in her attempt at a Dramatic Entrance. (“Mysterious blonde in something white and slinky descending a staircase in a mansion” is one of the more dramatic of the Dramatic Entrances. It’s up there with “Guy with enormous gun kicks in door” and “Undead motherfucker just appears in the middle of the room.”) But the piano was off to the side of the stairs, and a little bit behind, so the girls couldn’t see her and were drunkenly singing torch songs anyways.

“Oh my God, you look stellar.”

“You did your hair so quick!”

The woman stared for a second and yelled,

“Bottle!”

He emerged, stood at a dickish attention.

“Ma’am?”

“I left you instructions.”

“You did, ma’am. I ignored them wholly. I looked forward to ignoring them as you were relaying them to me, and then I ignored them and it made me happy.”

“Bring them up to my office,” she said and stormed up the stairs and down the hall. Tiresias played her a little walking-off music and a door slammed far away. Bottle raised an eyebrow, and Tiresias got up from the piano and they followed him.

“You two are awesome together,” Sheila said.

“Botty, sweetie–”

“You may not call me that.”

“–I am 100% switching to martinis once we get up there. Conceptually, the scotch is perfect, but as a beverage? Not feeling it.”

“You tried something new, though. That’s a good thing,” Sheila said.

They started up the steps.

“You know I’ve been so open to new experiences this year. That’s my thing this year. I didn’t even tell you: I tried that Mexican vegan place on Monarch Street.”

“Soy Soy?”

“Yeah. It just made me want real Mexican food,” Tiresias said.

“Uh-huh. Vegan food is edible, but it’s not actually food. I’m convinced most of ’em are lying, anyway. Remember Carla who used to work at the shop? Caught her at Anatoly’s having a bacon cheeseburger.”

“Didn’t she used to stage die-ins at the butcher shop?”

“Yeah, but I think she also had a personal thing with one of the guys that worked there.”

The butler and the two women turned left and the hallway was plush, dark, and covered in art with frames so fancy they stepped out of the shower to take a shit. The rug was from a country more dusky and exotic than any casually racist Victorian-era travel writer could imagine, and so thick that Tiresias was having trouble in her thin high heels, so she was walking on the far outside of the corridor where there was wood. Sheila had come over out of solidarity. Bottle walked in the dead center of the hall until he got to an open door, stopped, pointed.

“Hussies.”

Sheila reached way up and flicked at his nose and said,

“I bet you say that to all the hussies.”

And Tiresias said,

“Are you doing the martinis here or downstairs? Because if you’re doing them downstairs, I’ll write down–”

And Bottle closed the door behind himself.

The windows were arched, and two stories high, and confounded with draperies. There were globes and bar carts everywhere, and varnish. Every splinter of wood was so thickly varnished that, upon entering the office, you instantly began calculating the annual Lemon Pledge budget. A sitting area on one side with club chairs and a chessboard table, game half-played. On the other side, a desk that could have been sliced into eight or nine average-sized desks; stuffed lion’s head above it; behind, the high-backed chair was facing away from the room.

Outside the window was the pool, and beyond that was the tennis court, and beyond that were the stables. There was also an area for entertaining featuring a barbecue pit.

“This is even more macho than the scotch.”

“I’m almost positive we’re on our own where the drinks are concerned,” Tiresias said and then she looked around. “Jesus. Does Ernest Hemingway live here?”

“This is why straight people shouldn’t be allowed to be rich. They do shit like this with their money.”

“I like the bar carts.”

“Ooh, yeah.”

They slid over to the closest one, which had a roll-up top like a secretary’s that revealed five different types of glasses and a Christmas tree of mixologian utensils–strainer, whisker, that sort of thing–and leather coasters the same dark green as the upholstery on the club chairs. There was a shaker, too, and Tiresias put the silver briefcase down and picked it up. Sheila knelt and opened the cabinet in the base of the cart, and there were all your major boozes, plus a separate compartment that she opened to reveal ice.

“Tirry.”

Tiresias bent down, looked at the ice.

“That is so fucking clever. If it had a jukebox and a coke dealer, you’d never need a bar. AAAHahaha!”

“I mean, I know it can’t be brand-new technology, but I’m still impressed.”

“It’s just thoughtful,” she said and handed Sheila down the shaker. Filled, handed back, then the vodka and vermouth, and she bounced up.

She had faults, but Tiresias Richardson made the perfect martini.

• Set a martini glass before you. Now chuck it against the wall. The only useful martini glass is an enormous one that you put a burlesque dancer into. This is no opinion: it’s a matter of surface tension and fluid dynamics. The martini glass is a scientifically inappropriate shape to make a receptacle out of.
• Get a rocks glass.
• Whisper to rocks glass, “Vermouth exists.”
• Vodka, ice, shaker.
• Resist urge to say the stupid James Bond line.
• Extract five olives from the jar. Then, throw them against the same wall as the martini glass and straight-up pour the olive juice directly into the shaker.
• Pour 8-10 ounces. Do not garnish.

“Let’s drink to Bottle.”

“I already miss him,” Tiresias said.

They toasted CLUNK and Sheila looked around the office, then snagged a couple of shot glasses from the bar cart and dropped them into her purse.

“No, he’s a dick. But I figured the whole thing out because of him.”

“Can we smoke in here?”

“Oh, my God, we totally should be able to. This is totally a ‘smoke ’em if ya got ’em’ room.”

“The decor practically begs you to light a cigar,” Tiresias said, scanning the flat surfaces for…

“Bingo. Ashtray.”

There was a stand-up ashtray next to the chessboard table. It was brass and looked like it belonged on a sailing ship cruising the Seas of Nicotine. They shambled over as Sheila lit two Camels FFT PHWOO and handed one to Tiresias, and they sat in the club chairs that had their backs to the far wall.

“The horse chick is gonna ask us to kill her elderly husband.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, she doesn’t own the place. Bottle wouldn’t treat her that way. She moved in recently.”

“Go on.”

“Y’know, I’m so glad I came with you now.”

“Me, too. I love you so much.”

“The guy who owns this house has been here forever,” Sheila said, ashing her cigarette. “The Rolls out front? 25 years old. The little Mercedes?”

“Such a cute car.”

“Yuck. Brand-new. Old man’s car, young wife’s car.”

“Very sexist.”

“We’re in Los Angeles. I’m fitting in.”

“So Daddy Warbucks wants to off his chippy?”

“You accuse me of being sexist and then you call another woman a chippy?”

“You’re right,” Tiresias answered.” Besides, she’s not a chippy. She married the guy.”

“Yeah, that’s a trophy wife. I’ve thought about doing that.”

“Marrying an old, rich guy? I think about that all the time.”

“It seems like more hassle than money.”

“Like donating an egg?”

“I guess, sure. So, anyway, the guy who owns the house…what’s his name?”

“The guy who gave us the briefcase called him Buttermilk.”

“Oh, of the Denver Buttermilks,” Sheila said and sipped her martini. “So, the Lord Buttermilk is madly in love with the Lady, but she’s humping the stable boys. Heart’s broken. He calls us–”

“The professional assassins.”

“–to put an end to his sorrows by putting an end to her. But she found out about his diabolical plan, and now aims to turn it against him and inherit his vast fortune.”

“You’re a brilliant.”

“She is MOST CERTAINLY not!” came from the other side of the room, and then the high-backed chair behind the enormous desk yanked itself around and there was the blonde from stairs and the horse and the pictures, still in something white and slinky. “She was like twenty percent right and all of that was basic observations!”

Sheila and Tiresias blinked at her.

“You were going to do the turn-around-in-the-chair thing.”

“Ohh. That would have been so dramatic.”

“And we should have come and sat in front of the desk,” Sheila said.

“This is the second time we’ve done this. I feel terrible.”

“In our defense, Bottle did not instruct us properly in our roles.”

“Bad direction. That guy’s a handful.”

The blonde blinked back at them. The women ashed their cigarettes. There was a good forty feet in between them.

“Could you two come over here, please?”

On the way over, Tiresias picked up the briefcase she had left by the bar cart. They sat there, smoking. The blonde opened a drawer, took out a heavy glass ashtray, shuffleboarded it across the width of the desk. Sheila dug in her purse and waggled the pack of Camels at her.

“No. Do you two not know my name?”

“Names don’t matter to assassins,” Tiresias

“They make the job a lot easier,” Sheila added.

“Oh, sure. In most cases, you’d prefer to have a name. But it’s not essential.”

“The picture’s the thing. You need the picture. To do the job.”

“But we might know your name. You don’t know what we know and we’re not telling you.”

“Why would we do that? We’re assassins.”

The blonde nodded.

“Uh-huh. So I’ll just call myself Lady Buttermilk.”

“We have code names, too,” Tiresias said.

“I don’t care. My husband doesn’t want me dead because I’m fucking the stable boys. He’s fucking the stable boy, too.”

“Talk about horseplay. AAAHahaha!”

Sheila and the blonde who was calling herself Lady Buttermilk stared at her for a moment.

“He wants to replace me. I’m aging out of the role, apparently.”

“There’s just nothing good for older women in this town,” Tiresias said.

“How do you know?” Sheila asked.

“Because I’m the fourth wife, and he did this exact thing to the second and third wives.”

“What about the first wife?”

“He just divorced her when he got rich. The other two both disappeared in their mid-thirties.”

“They disappeared?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t know what happened to them,” Tiresias said.

“No, I do. The third wife? The one I replaced? I kinda planned the disappearance with Lord Buttermilk.”

“Wow.”

“Wow.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you here: I thought he would die before it was my turn. And I really wanted to be rich.”

Sheila and Tiresias were so morally outraged at this revelation that they nodded their heads and made small noises of agreement.

“And I was right: there’s nothing like it. And I’d like it to continue indefinitely. So here we are.”

Tiresias stubbed out her Camel and said,

“But you don’t want us to kill him?”

“God, no. I can’t even imagine the legal maelstrom that would bring about. Far too many lawyers asking questions. No, no: what I want is the status quo to keep restating itself until the piss-smelling fuck dies of natural causes.

“Every marriage is different,” Sheila said.

“What I want is for you two to kill her,” the blonde going by Lady Buttermilk said, and slid a manila folder across the desk to Tiresias. There was a photograph inside. Another blonde, mid-20’s. She said,

“Is this your replacement?”

“Not for much longer.”

Then the blonde threw a stuffed envelope at Sheila. There was cash inside.

“This should be a nice warning shot for the old man, huh?

“Parting shot for her, though,” Sheila said.

Which was true, even though none of the women in the office knew it at the time. The blonde in her mid-20’s in the photograph was named Lynn Danube and was lying on the bed in her Hollywood apartment with two bullets in her skull. Sheila and Tiresias got in the Lincoln, wound down the driveway, and pointed the car towards the dead girl.

Don Pajamas had echasethalassanesia, which was the belief he was lost at sea. It was a rare disorder. So rare, in fact, that most people in Little Aleppo thought he was making it up. He’d have his spells and steal a boat from Boone’s Docks and pilot it into the middle of the harbor and then he’d just kinda sit there making friends with random equipment that was onboard. The owners never got mad: Don wouldn’t leave the harbor, so they could keep an eye on him, and when they needed their boats back, they would pretend to rescue him and everything would be back to normal until the next time. The Abnormal Psychology Department at Harper College had noticed that Don blocked out the sight of the outgoing fishing vessels and the docking freighters, but some local smart-asses (none of whom were affiliated with any institution of higher learning) had also noticed that Don steered his boat out of the way of any oncoming traffic. Numerous letters about the case were sent to Oliver Sacks, but he never responded.

And the stealing. The local smart-asses always pointed to the stealing as a sign that Don Pajamas only pretended to be lost at sea. He had enough money to buy his own boat, but if he had his own boat, then someone could sabotage it, or plant a bomb on it, and there were plenty who would. Crime bosses accumulate as many enemies as they kill. But if his rivals didn’t know which boat he was going out on, then he was safe. It was like how dictators would sleep at a different house every night, but brinier. There were always snipers, but sniping was frowned upon by the criminals of Little Aleppo. What was the point in paying off the cops if you were going to pull some shit they couldn’t protect you on? You wanted someone gone, you beat them to death and placed them in the driver’s seat of a crashed car. Or held ’em down and gave ’em an overdose. Don’t forget tossed off a building: it’s a classic for a reason. Something the cops can write down SUICIDE for in the little box that asks for Cause Of Death that wasn’t too laughable. Putting a fist-sized hole in a guy’s skull half-a-mile off the coast would draw too much heat, and that would start a gang war and no one wanted another gang war. No one made money during a gang war, and if we’re not making money, then why are we doing all this? That’s what The Friend would always say, anyways.

Don Pajamas hated The Friend. He hated his tiny suits and his narrow little feet and the way he lit everyone’s cigarettes for them. The gentleman. Such a fucking gentleman. Don knew him from the old days. The McGlory days.

There were 12 of them, all short and stubby and if you lined them up in age order you could watch the hairline recede and the bald spot on the crown grow until they finally met, but most had never seen all dozen in the same place at the same time. You didn’t want to. Generally, it meant something terrible was going to happen. Billy was in charge. Patrick was older, and Conor was better with figures, and Kevin and Evan (the twins) were far better at violence. But Billy understood people; he knew how to twist them against each other, and themselves, and how to read their lies. Watch the hands, Billy thought. Most people only lie with their faces. They forget about their hands. Billy understood people, and virtually every criminal in Little Aleppo was a person, so he was in charge. Most days, he was at the Irving Club. The rest fanned out. Aidan ran the Salt Wharf from his office inside the Customs House. On paper, he was just a clerk, but he had the biggest office in the building. The casinos and the backroom games and any sidewalk dice tournament that got too large belonged to Peter and Paul. Whores and thieves answered to Matthew, Mark , Luke, and John. (Those last six names belonged to the six youngest boys; Ma and Pa McGlory had grown tired of having the “What should we call him?” conversation.) Sean was the Police Chief. The McGlorys had Little Aleppo under control.

And then one day in 1945, they didn’t anymore.

There had been Gang Wars before–the McGlorys always came out on top–but this was not that. Little Aleppo looked away from the page for a moment, and the book was changed out under them. Smoothly. Sharply. Not one thing had blown up! (Except for Alouette Hall over at Harper College, but that was a regular occurrence over there, and completely incidental to the underworld machinations.) Overcoated dickweeds with tommy guns did not run rampant through taverns and playgrounds. It would have been a magic trick, had any of the brothers ever reappeared.

Monopolies breed resentment. Upwards and laterally. Guy on top of you is keeping you down, and keeping you from getting ahead of the guy next to you. But a monopoly’s gotta be killed all at once–a coup, basically–or it’ll surge back on top of you and teach you unpleasant meanings of the phrase “captive market.” Takes a special kind of fellow to marshall all those scuffling parties together, get ’em all pointing the right way. Natural-born politician, that sort of fellow. Gotta really understand people. The Friend understood people. Be your own boss, he told the pimps and dealers and thieves. The union should run the Salt Wharf, he told the union rep. No fun taking orders from some guy in a nightclub, he commiserated with the cops, and besides: none of you are ever gonna be chief, huh? Figure a business owner can hire his own bouncers, he told the guys who ran the gambling parlors. Who you need protection from?

So on August 10th, 1945, everyone woke up hungover and there were no more McGlorys. This gave pause. The criminals, business interests, and cops that had betrayed the brothers were not working in tandem. All expected that their assassination would be the only one, and that there would be a normal sort of Gang War, a reasonable and escalating kind of deal, but they woke up and there no more McGlorys–the war was over–and everyone became rather respectful of The Friend, and greatly desirous to return his friendship.

Life went on. More importantly, business continued. Never miss a chance to let a man give you his money, The Friend counseled. He had tons of sayings like that. If he was one of those East Coast show-offs, he would have self-published a book of aphorisms, but he was a Little Aleppo criminal and so knew that the very worst thing a villain could ever be was famous. The Friend remembered this kid he knew in the 60’s, lent him some money and found him some laboratory equipment, one of those hippies. No one could tell The Friend why they were called hippies, since they weren’t hip at all. Tommy Amici was hip, and Dino was hip. These kids weren’t hip. They smelled. Anyway, he lent the kid some money and it came back in triplicate; he was thrilled , but the next thing he knew the kid was on the cover of magazines and people were writing songs about him. That was it for that friendship. No money in being the best-known drug dealer in the country.

Can a man not gamble? And if a man is not permitted to gamble, then why on earth did we make all these dice? The Friend believed that a man who was not free to wager was not free at all. Existence! Existence is a wager, he’d say. So how can a bet be wrong? It’s not if you’re betting on New York’s tables. Go and put your chips down on Wall Street, and no one looks askance. But in a backroom casino on Saffer Street in Little Aleppo? Call the feds. Or Vegas. Drive a few hours south and now your bet’s legal. Well, that wasn’t fair to people without cars, or who just didn’t want to go. Shouldn’t they be permitted to indulge in a game of chance at the Ambergris Room down by the Salt Wharf? (The whaling industry in Little Aleppo was far larger than most modern inhabitants like to admit.)

And what of drugging and whoring? Was a man not entitled to drug, and whore? And to drug whores, if he paid extra? Or to smuggling ivory? To medium-scale art forgery? To elaborate Medicare scams involving fictitious blood banks?

And even if a man is not entitled to these pursuits, has society any way of stopping him? It was a failure to understand people, The Friend thought. Men were gonna do as much wrong as they did right, and if the government did not want to tax those activities, then he would. Wasn’t like the cops and the criminals and the legitimate businesses and the Town Fathers had different agendas, anyway. They all wanted the neighborhood to run smoothly, and just a little bit moreso than yesterday. In public, they had to fight, so someone needed to facilitate. He’d make a call. So far, he had found few knots so Gordian a phone call couldn’t slice them. Occasionally–beyond occasionally; let’s say “rarely”–someone would disappear. Go to visit the McGlory Brothers, in the local parlance. Never any shooting, stabbing, any of that movie crap. Never any evidence. Just: poof.

Don Pajamas stole a 28-foot cabin cruiser, blue on the hull and white everywhere else. It was an orthodontist’s boat called the Brace For Weather that the orthodontist’s wife detested, but planned on demanding in the divorce. There was a stuffed giraffe in the cabin. He named it Falstaff, and argued with it about philosophy. Fucked it a couple times, too, but not without tenderness. He told Falstaff so many things, like about the mirror The Friend had that you could just sort of push people into. It was like half of a magic trick. He always meant to ask The Friend about it, but it didn’t seem like something friends discussed.

“Some things are personal,” he said to Falstaff, who was a stuffed giraffe. They bobbed up and down in the harbor, lost at sea, and they gossiped about the stars until they fell asleep in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The situation is the boss. Precarious Lee said that all the time, enough so that Big-Dicked Sheila made fun of him for it, but he didn’t give a shit. He said he learned it humping amplifiers and groupies. Respond to what’s happening. That’s the key, don’t sit there with your thumb up your ass (or the ass of some chick you just met) saying “Well, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.” Who told you anything was supposed to be anything? Use your eyes, and then your hands. Toilet backstage explode? Now you’re a plumber. Guy running on the stage? Now you’re a security guard. Going through the airport? Now you’re a smuggler. You could tell the situation, “Hey, that’s not my job,” but then the situation will hold you down and go in dry.

“We can’t let the situation go in dry.”

“You keep saying that, and I keep telling you I don’t understand any of the metaphor.”

“We need to respond to what’s in front of us,” Sheila said, spilling half her margarita. The situation, which was the boss, had ordered her and Tiresias Richardson to stop in a Mexican place in West Hollywood that made their trademark salty cocktails one part tequila to one part battery acid. Sheila had hers on ice, because it was a drink and therefore you should drink it. Tiresias had hers blended because booze slushee. The glasses were the shape of champagne coupes, but with deeper bowls, and the stems were saguaro cactuses.

“I am,” Tiresias answered, and slurped some of her drink into her mouth. “Holy shit, these are strong. We should move here.”

“I was talking about the briefcase.”

“Right. About that.”

The Halliburton Zero. You’d recognize the model if you saw it in its natural habitat: an illicit business deal, or handcuffed to a guy in a suit and sunglasses. This one was aluminum (though you could order kevlar-impregnated titanium that could constrain the explosion of up to three ounces of C4 within itself) and held no shine even though Sheila kept wiping her fingerprints off the damn thing. The ‘case had two sets of doubled ridges going horizontally and when you opened it up, you wish that you hadn’t. It was everything you’d need to assassinate some actress who lived in Holmby Hills

The bar was el-shaped–so many bars are–and Sheila and Tiresias were seated along the little line segment; their backs were to the window fronting Santa Monica Boulevard. They were not very good assassins.

“I think we should throw out everything that’s not the money and find a new place in, like, Venice. Forget this happened.”

“First of all, I’m keeping the briefcase.”

“You love that thing.”

“I’m gonna put stickers on it,” Sheila said. “And I’m keeping the gun.”

“You can’t keep the gun. It’s a criminal gun. Maybe it did crimes. They can track it. Forensics.” Tiresias realized she was running out of thoughts somewhere around “Maybe” but she soldiered on. She’s a professional.

“So I’ll sell it.”

“Oh, then you’re golden.”

“We’re not throwing any of this shit away,” Sheila said, “this shit” being the photos of the woman and the map to the house and the directions and the phone number to call after the deed was done. The gun and the money had been transferred to Sheila’s purse; it was a safe place. Tiresias had made a mental note to ask whether the money wouldn’t be even safer if split evenly between them, but she had scribbled the mental note and now could not read it after a few margaritas. There was originally five grand in hundreds and fifties, but they had stopped for cigarettes and were tipping the bartender rather grandly. Sheila was also playing the jukebox, so figure $4800 left.

“A woman’s in danger, Tirry.”

“Two are. Us.”

“No, the actress. The lady in the mansion we’re supposed to kill.”

“We don’t kill her. Problem solved.”

“Problem not solved. If we don’t kill her, someone else will. We have to warn her.”

“Send her a letter.”

“Takes too long.”

“Write her a letter, and we’ll drive up there and slip it under the door. And then run.”

Sheila KAH-CHOCKED the locks open–the code to both was 000–and flipped up the lid and removed the photos. Black and white. A blonde in her 30’s. Head shots and sneaky pics. Posing and fucking. Sheila spread the 8×10″s across the top of the bar, and Tiresias peered in. They were simply the worst assassins.

“She’s got chubby arms,” Tiresias said.

“Doesn’t mean she should be murdered.”

“Not what my mother used to tell me.”

“She’s rich.”

“Fuck her double, then.”

“And I’m sure she’ll be very thankful for our actions,” Sheila said. Her Camels were on the bar, under a picture of the intended victim fucking a guy in a horse trailer. She handed Tiresias the photo.

“I don’t trust horse people.”

“Never met one who wasn’t a raving loon,” Sheila answered and found her lighter FFT PHWOO and Tiresias snatched the cigarette from her fingers, so Sheila lit another and they blew out PHWOO together and both tapped their smokes against the ashtray even though there was not yet any ash.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and there were too many people in the bar. It pretended to be a restaurant and made most everyone sit at tables, but the food was almost deliberately bad–how could Mexicans make Mexican food this bad if not on purpose–and everything erupted with grease and cheese, everything: the rice, the napkins, and the waiters brought it to you on the brims of their oversized sombreros. The roaming mariachis had a tamale gun. You’d get a song, and then a 60 mph tamale to the face. This was the highlight of many tourists’ visits to Los Angeles, besides comparing hand sizes with the attractive dead at the Chinese Theater. Cocaine use was frowned upon unless you were at a back table.

“We should get some coke.”

“Tirry.”

“I mean, just to put in the briefcase. That thing doesn’t look right without some coke in it. AAAAHahaha!”

“Tirry, listen. We need to go to this house–”

She waved around the paper with the address on it.

“–and rescue this woman. This rich woman. Who will be very grateful to us for saving her.”

The bar was silent, except for the mariachi band and all the talking and yelling and tamale-shooting. Sheila was nodding up and down and so was Tiresias, but she had no idea why.

“A reward, dummy.”

“Names aren’t necessary.”

“There’s money in this.”

“So you don’t wanna save this chick. You wanna shake her down.”

Sheila’s smile had a tell. The real ones flared her nostrils. This one did not.

“Nooooo.”

“You’re a monster,” Tiresias said and upended her glass. The last grotty chunks of her margarita slimed down the side and she slid the glass across the bar and got the bartender’s eye. Sheila noticed, chugged, slid her glass, held up two fingers. Bartender nodded.

“I’m a small business owner.”

“Backbone of America.”

“We’re doing the right thing. And getting paid for it.”

“You don’t know that there’s money in this.”

“She’ll pony up.”

“Holy shit, you really are gonna shake her down.”

“Nooooo.”

The drinks arrived, were sipped, set down. Sheila swiveled her seat around to face Tiresias; Sheila’s skinny, leather-clad legs were in between Tiresias’ long, sweatpant-wearing ones, and she put her hands on the tall woman’s knees.

“I’m serious. We need to help this chick. I’m going with or without you, but you’re coming with me.”

Tiresias rested her head in her hand and said,

“Fine. But we need to change.”

“I’m wearing this. I look fucking hot.”

“I don’t. This requires a whole different approach.”

“Yeah, you look like shit.”

“And we need to finish our drinks.”

“Obviously.”

“Were we getting coke?”

“Yes, but later.”

“Aw.”

It took an hour to get to the car because they got coke; it was the harsh lull in the afternoon that exists in Southern California: the light was too bright, and everyone on the streets had aggressive necks. Sheila drove. Tiresias was in the backseat with her makeup case and hairbrush. She was going for severe. Mysterious. She had a black suit on–straight-cut slacks and a slim-fitting jacket that was darted both in and out–and the stilettos that made her almost 6’2″.

“You want a flat, sweetie.”

“You don’t like these?”

“Are you kidding? I would suck those shoes’ dick. They’re just not right for the occasion.”

“I’m doing a sexy spy thing.”

“Why?”

“When else am I gonna get this chance?”

“Your lipstick’s not red enough.”

“Y’think?”

Down the scuzzy patch of Santa Monica Boulevard. Shops that repaired vacuum cleaners with signs in Russian. Bookstores of both the religious and adult varieties. There was a place called Cuffs & Collars; it had a neon sign, and the women debated whether it was an S & M bar or a pet store. Hasidim walked down the sidewalk. They looked like chimney brushes, Sheila thought. Knock-off perfumeries that also sold luggage and fried shrimp. Mortuaries and set-back strip malls, and a place that rented exotic fruits. 7-11’s.

“We should open an inconvenience store,” Tiresias said.

“We’ll never open and we won’t have anything.”

“Coming over.”

She clicked the latches of the makeup box and slid it into the driver’s side footwell, and then bumbled over the back of the mile-long black leather bench; she clocked Sheila with her forehead and the Continental slid around in the white lines, fish-like, and then Tiresias FWOMPED onto the seat with her head in Sheila’s black leather lap.

“You’re on my nuts.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” she said and wrestled herself towards a vaguely-upright position; she tried reaching for the dashboard for purchase, but it was a dozen feet away. She got there, after a fashion.

“Do you have the coke?”

“You do.”

“Right,” Tiresias said, and launched back over the bench so that her torso was waving and swaying upside down in the rear of the car, legs kicking like the bottom partner of the old saw-the-lady-in-half trick; she bopped Sheila in the ear with her ass, and then whacked her again with an elbow returning entirely to the front of the vehicle clutching her rust-colored hoodie. She dug the baggie out of the pocket–it was bar coke and clumpy and sharp-smelling–and rummaged through Sheila’s enormous black purse until she came up with a flick knife, so she flicked the knife and edged out a shnarf’s worth of the powder, which she shnarfed, and then another pass with the knife. She held it out to Sheila.

“Don’t put the knife in my face, sweetie. There’s potholes and shit.”

So Tiresias shnarfed for a second time and Sheila stayed straight at Holloway and on through to the Sunset Strip–there it was, just like Mötley Crüe promised–and there was a marquee advertising the Waning Possums and the Roxy and the Rainbow, too. If the tables in there could talk, Sheila thought, they’d probably say, “Stop putting hot food on my face.” She rolled down her window to get some air after that thought, sober up a bit. The Riot House and several diners and the free clinic and that parking meter right there, no the next one, yes that’s it: Jim Morrison pissed on it. And that driveway up the road a bit. And also the road. Jim Morrison pissed on everything the eye can see: the Sunset Strip!

“We should come back here when we’re done.”

“Let’s concentrate on one thing at a time. And we should find a place to live first.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tiresias nodded. “We should totally find a new place to live. You think we can get Chateau Marmont money out of this chick?”

“Positive. Look at the house. It’s huge.”

Tiresias popped the briefcase opened and flipped through the papers until she found the map, directions, drawing of the house.

“Gimme the directions,” Sheila said, and Tiresias did, and Sheila squinted at them, and Tiresias took the directions back and read them out loud. The Strip was behind them and green all around, into the hills and away from the noise and blowjobs and dirt: everything was neat and groomed and murders were hired out. It was simply more dignified. The higher they went, the healthier they felt. The Hollywood Hills do that to you; both women contemplated donating part of their supposed gains to charity, but each woman kept that to herself. The houses were so expensive that they didn’t exist at all. Just hedges with slices taken from them on either side of the road. There was a rumor of a neighborhood.

Tiresias guided them through the winds and twists by the simply-drawn map, and then said, “This is it,” at a cut-out in the towering hedges that would barely register if you drove by.

“I wanna be rich and hide my front door,” Tiresias said.

“Now what?”

“Punch in the code.”

There was a security box outside Tiresias’ window.

“No.”

“Why?”

“We can’t sneak in. That’ll freak her out.”

“We were hired to kill her. We’re supposed to sneak in.”

“You just wanna sneak in.”

“A little. What if she’s not home? We could steal shit.”

“Sheel.”

“Tir.”

“I’m gonna buzz.”

Sheila was now half-buried in her purse looking for her cigarettes.

“And say what?”

“I’ll say–”

Tiresias thought for a second, then another. One more, and then a last for luck, and finally she said,

“We need to start thinking up plans before we do shit.”

“Improv it. That’s why we’re in this mess. Do your improv.”

“I love you so much and you get like this.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry.”

“You get like this all the time. Just a horrendous bitch.”

“I’m a Sagittarius, you know that.”

There was a TOCK TOCK that sounded–for very good reason–like a cowboy boot being gently tapped against the driver’s side door of a 1961 Lincoln Continental. Sheila turned to see the underside of a saddled horse, and then craned her head out and up. She recognized the blonde woman in her 30’s. She had Western-style denim clothes, but an English-style helmet. She also recognized the horse.

“Can you have horses up here?”

“You can have anything you want if you have enough lawyers,” the blonde said. “Are you the ones my husband hired to murder me?”

“YES, WE ARE!” Tiresias called from inside the car.

Sheila blinked once, twice; said,

“Yes, we are.”

The blonde leaned over and down and peered in to the front seat, where Tiresias waved, and then she sat back up and said,

“Great. Come on in.”

She took a garage door opener from her shirt pocket, and the iron bars dissolved into the shrub wall; slight pressure on the horse’s ribs with her heels and off smoothly and within the compound. The two women threw themselves into the ever-changing present; into gear and off smoothly and right behind.

The first newspaper was a guy with a real loud voice. He would stand in the town square–maybe he’d get up on a box or something–and bellow the day’s happenings. There was gossip, too, but we’re talking about the news: everyone finding out the same information at once. Broadcasting. Eventually, paper was invented, and then glossy paper which led to the Sunday Magazine.

Americans fetishized the newspaper from the hop. The Founding Fathers wrote the press’ freedom into the Constitution, then figured that was enough freedom and called it a day. Weren’t quite a town without a daily, were you? There were Globes and Gazettes and Registers and Evening Standards; so many that there were not enough spunky orphans to hawk them on street corners, and urchins had to be imported and taught to cry “WUXTRY!” at the top of their lungs. It was a time of growth for the country and the industry. Papers published in the morning, afternoon, evening, and one–the Cascabel Pennysaver–was flung at your sleeping head in the middle of the night. Americans made offerings to the newspaper (they called these subscriptions) and they sent prayers (letters to the editor) and sometimes they had reformations (burning the office down). The paper was the Gospel, if a fleeting one: nothing was true until it showed up under a byline.

“And we are the priests,” Iffy Bould said around the Kool dangling from his lips.

Lolly Tangiers was not as credulous as the other copyboys, as she had been beaten too much as a child.

“How so?”

“We live in poverty and never get laid.”

He ripped the sheet from the manual typewriter. It was an Underwood that went CHAK CHAK CHAK and then PUHCHONK you’d slap the carriage back to its intial position. The machine predated Iffy’s employment and he was glad that it did not have a soul. Lot of murders in this fucker, he thought. He felt bad for the typewriter sometimes. Could have been bought by a whimsical novelist and filled up with jokes and fun; could have belonged to an intellectual working through important problems. Nope: liquor-store holdups and apartment fires. Sorry, Woody.

(Iffy had never told another living soul–not even any of his wives–that he called the machine Woody.)

“Correct this and bring it to Goose,” he said.

“You have a pencil?”

The newsroom went quiet, no more CHAK CHAK CHAK and Barry Cho stopped screaming at the ceiling tiles (deadlines got to Barry) and the crap game near the sports section’s desks that had been going since 1953 paused and Lolly forced herself not to look around fearfully.

“You don’t have a pencil?”

Iffy was whispering, damn near.

“I usually do.”

He took the Kool from his mouth, ashed it, brought it halfway back, reconsidered, stubbed and rubbed. Peeled a freshie from the soft pack, screwed it in, felt around in the papers on his desk like a racoon looking for grubs, there are the matches. Right where he left ’em.

“Usually. No. No, no. You see, the whole job is writing shit down. Y’know what you call a reporter without a pencil?”

“No.”

The match went shhPOP and he lit the cigarette and blew out FWOO and made the most disappointed face he could at Lolly. It was not quantitatively different from his normal face.

“Just some asshole.”

And then the newsroom roared back to life. It was very dramatic.

“That was very dramatic.”

“Y’gotta get your kicks where you can these dreary days,” Iffy said. “Find a pencil, correct the typos, and bring this to Goose.”

Lolly wandered off, already marking up the text. Copyboys these days have it too easy, Iffy thought. That mean old bastard Ronkowicz had used him as a human pocket for a year. Just had to follow him around carrying his pens and notebooks and vodka. Sometimes, he toted a bowling ball all day. Ronk didn’t bowl; he was just a dick. Besides, Iffy thought: what he went through was nothing compared to what Ronk went through. Columnists would throw copyboys out the window back then just to gamble on the bounce. Now there were newspapermen.

The newsroom took up the whole second floor of the Braunce Building. Rows of desks–wooden and metal mixed together–in an open bullpen with small offices along the walls for the editors. The offices had doors on them so the editors could choose to yell at the reporters privately, or masturbate. The assignment desk towered in the northeast corner; under it was no carpet, as the assignment desk was made out of electronics purchased out of the backs of trucks–police scanners and telexes and fax machines and two stock tickers–and wired up by people with no background in engineering, so there tended to be fires. In the middle of the room, there was a glassed-in cube partitioned into two: the Editor-In-Chief’s office and the room where the daily budget meeting was held.

Gabe Gooseman was the Editor-In-Chief. He liked the glass walls; they made visitors uncomfortable. It kept meetings short. WHAP WHAP against the glass with his palm twice. Outside in the bullpen, Iffy turned around. If you worked at the Cenotaph long enough, you learned to recognize when Goose was WHAPping for you. Lolly Tangiers was in there with him. The office was soundproof, but Iffy was good at reading lips.

“Did she really not have a pencil?”

“No pencil whatsoever,” Iffy mouthed back.

“You’re coming with me?”

“Nrrr.”

“Did Here And There tell you to?”

Black Eyes did not answer Cannot Swim, partially because she was a dog and partially because Here And There had told her not to tell Cannot Swim anything. The sky had just turned from black to purple; it was the very first moment that could credibly argued as morning. The stars were still there, and so was the moon. All night’s trappings. He slipped on his moccasins and threw his tunic over his head, stretched, muttered “Dammit” under his breath. He had snuck out of the kotcha carrying his clothes to let Throwing Knife sleep, but he had left his satchel inside. The door was made of bearskin, and it was thick and creaky so he pulled it away from the kotcha’s sloped redwood frame juuuuuuust enough to edge through, fetched his bag, and back out to stand besides the 100-pound dog that came up to his waist where he balled up his fists and stamped on the ground juuuuuuust a little bit when he realized he also needed his rifle, which was back in the kotcha and so he took up the leather flap once more and–

“You’re making more noise trying to be quiet than if you just did whatever you’re doing.”

Cannot Swim said, “I’m sorry, honey,” but the Pulaski word he used for “honey” means “afternoon with perfect weather.”

It was too dark in the kotcha to see, so he leaned over and kissed at where he thought her face was. His smooth chin bonked her nose. This was not a low-probability hit: Throwing Knife had a powerful nose. Had her culture taught her to feel bad about it, she would have, but the Pulaski all had great bumpy honkers and so hers was barely noticeable in a crowd.

Cannot Swim felt around for her belly, which swelled the leather blanket on top of her, and rested his hand on top of it, and then kissed that, too. He sat down on the bed next to her, just where Here And There had been last night, if she had really been in the kotcha and he didn’t dream the encounter. He tried not to think of Here And There.

“Today?”

“Maybe.”

“If it’s tomorrow, then it’ll be raining.”

“I don’t think the baby cares,” she murmured.

“Is it kicking?”

“No. The baby’s asleep. Like everyone else, because it’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s not. It’s first thing in the morning.”

Throwing Knife put her fingertips over his mouth. There was silence in the kotcha, in the village, in the valley. He did not know why he felt so loved when she told him to shut the fuck up. It was the way she did it, he guessed. Cannot Swim kissed the fingertips on his mouth, and they brushed down his chin and neck and chest; she rested her hand on his thigh.

“They sleep?”

“Babies before they come out?”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty much all they do.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“That the baby is sleeping?”

“There is a seven pound human being inside of me. I am exquisitely aware of everything that’s going on, trust me.”

“Okay.”

“You’re having the next one.”

Cannot Swim was 97% sure that she was joking, and that men could not have children. Maybe 96%. The Pulaski shared a view with Sparta, and the Incas, and modern-day Orlando, and every other tribe of humans, and that was there were two knowledges: one was for all, and the other was for women. The boys were taught to wash their dicks and the relationship between cum and pregnancy; that’s about it. It’s different for girls. They learned from their mothers, and their aunts, and their older cousins, and for everything else there was Limping Leg.

That was her village name. The Pulaski had three names: family, village, and secret. Your parents gave you your family name when you were born; it usually had to do with the weather or the time of day. Limping Leg’s family name was No Moon At All. Your peers gave you your village name. Her right knee didn’t have enough cartilage in it. Just one of those things. Your ancestors knew your secret name, and so did the Turtle Who Once Was And Will Be Again. It was  might be written as a birth mark on the sole of your foot, or found along the path of a great adventure, or never come along at all. Some Pulaski preferred to not know their secret name, for fear of revealing it to someone who would use it cruelly. Limping Leg did not know her secret name.

Sometimes, she wore a brace of thick bearskin. The leather did not bend; this locked the joint in place to give her relief, but it also did not breathe and so became very stanky very swiftly. Mostly, she used her stick. There were carvings its whole length: wolf, coyote, fox, turtle. She needed the support. She took a lot of walks. The roots and berries necessary for her medicines lost potency quickly once picked, and she could not send anyone else for them. Limping Leg was not keeping secrets, but choosing the right plant was more an art than science. A flowering fruit from this part of bush was an effective short-term birth control, but one from that part would sterilize you. Dosages were important

Limping Leg eased menstrual cramps, and she helped the pregnant women shit–the leaf that the Pulaski usually made into a laxative tea caused miscarriages–and she programmed a diet based on the month of conception. Women who conceived in April couldn’t have trout, pregnancies that encompassed the summer required a shit-ton of citrus, that sort of thing. When it was time for the child, she and the woman’s mother and aunts would walk around the lake to the kotcha where Pulaski women gave birth. . Family names were bestowed right there, standing at the edge of the lake. Limping Leg would hold the child up towards the seven mountain peaks that formed the eastern border of their world, and the women would sing the naming song.

Men were forbidden. The Pulaski women said it was unlucky for males to be present, especially the father. This, the women said, would anger the Fox With Teeth For Eyes. It could enrage the Eagle Who Brought The Rains. It might piss off the squatch. A man’s appearance at a child’s birth was a curse upon the babe, the women said. Several stories were regularly told to the village boys about babies emerging with their feet on backwards, or immediately trying to eat everyone in the tribe, or on fire.

(Limping Leg was fairly certain that this belief had been dreamt up by one her predecessors as an efficient way to keep the men where they could do no damage, which was nowhere near the proceedings.)

But this tabooification of male participation in childbirth led–subconsciously, but inexorably–to all the Pulaski men actively avoiding any knowledge of the process of pregnancy. Also, the Pulaski did not employ any gym teachers, so there was no health class. Cannot Swim knew that he put a baby in Throwing Knife via fucking. He knew that part. Kid grew in the belly. Got it. Then, she and half-dozen women would go to the other side of the lake and when they came back he would be a father. He understood the general plot, but was thoroughly fuzzy on the story beats.

Men couldn’t get pregnant. Men couldn’t have anything to do with that nonsense. Cannot Swim knew this. It was female magick.

But Here And There was female, and her magick was weird and confusing and often rather aggressive. Once, she had murdered him several times in a row just to prove a point.  Her magick was disorienting, and what would be more disorienting than a man becoming pregnant, Cannot Swim thought?

He had a lot to learn about women.

“How does a man on his third marriage know so little about women?”

“I understand women completely.”

“Where you sleeping lately?”

“Couch,” Iffy Bould said. “But it’s not my fault. She started drinking again.”

“Why did she start drinking again?”

“I make her fucking miserable.”

When Lolly Tangiers laughed, she choked on her beer. They were at Daffodil’s, which was on the Downside of Little Aleppo and overlooked Graziano Square, which was the only public space in America to be named after golden-age boxer Rocky Graziano. There were nine other bars surrounding the square, but Daffodil’s was the only one with a window clean enough to surveil the park through. Daffodil’s theme was “surprise S&M” but Iffy had slipped the bartender a tenner to avoid being lassoed and beaten sexually out of nowhere. Still, he kept an eye on the bar in the glass’ reflection.

“Uncle Punchfucker,” she said.

“Something we can print.”

“Cousin Punchfucker.”

“How about the Condor?”

“Condors don’t beat people up.”

“Neither do bats.”

“Yeah, but Batman comes out at night. Like a bat. Whereas condors are non-nocturnal.”

“Diurnal.”

“So it doesn’t pop and it makes no sense.”

They needed a picture. Little Aleppians instinctively distrusted eyewitness accounts, mostly because Little Aleppians instinctually lied to reporters. Lolly had a Nikon with a big flash on the table in front of her, strap around her neck because it was the kind of joint where you should have at least two points of contact with your valuables at all times. Iffy had a Kodak Disc 4000 because it was 198- and people toted around Kodak Disc 4000’s. It was the first camera he had ever been able to figure out. One button, and a built-in flash, and it fit in your coat pocket. Little cord that went around your wrist. He loved it.

“The Downsider,” she said.

“Huh.”

“Downsider,” Lolly said as she tabled her mug and sat up straight. “Don’t see him punching anyone in the Reserve, do you?”

“The Reserve’s gated. He couldn’t get in.”

Iffy’s tie was yellow, and out of fashion. About four or five years too wide. He used to have a mustache when everyone else did, but didn’t now that no one else did. A reporter should look nondescript, he thought. Blend in. If you blended in well enough, people would forget you were in the room. No new clothes. Half the job was talking to folks who couldn’t afford new clothes, so if you showed up to a crime scene in a pair of fashionable slacks, it looked like you were showing off. The best way to get people to talk was to make them think they had more status than you. Best reporters in the world were taxi drivers and bartenders, Iffy thought. You’d confess to killing Kennedy to a cab driver.

“Of course he could. Superpowers.”

“He doesn’t have superpowers.”

“He’s 11 feet tall.”

“He’s 6’4″ or something.”

“Jumps off six-story roofs and back.”

“He doesn’t. I have three eye-witnesses that said he has some sort of pulley-deal.”

“Just say grappling hook.”

“That fact has not been corroborated by any evidence, and is therefore not a fact yet.”

“Why’d you ask me to come with you on this?”

“You’re the only copyboy with a camera. This is not a mentor-type situation. I’ll never forgive you for the pencil fiasco this morning.”

Lolly was glad it was not a mentor-type situation, if he was not lying. She had several men enter themselves into mentor-type situations with her when she was at the Harper College Semi-Daily, and it always turned out the same.

“You can’t hit on me.”

“I’m not hitting on you.”

“Currently. But you can’t in the future.”

“I don’t wanna hit on you”

“Not even a little?”

He finished his mug and set it down too hard, but just a little, and slid it towards her.

“Copyboy. Another beer.”

The streams were named Farthest From The Hills, The Middle One, and Nearest To The Hills. (It sounded better in Pulaski.) They were fed by small lakes that gathered on what would one day be named Mount Faith, and cave systems within the rock. Every 18 days, the mountain gorged itself on the rains and then sluiced it down its western face in tiny gulleys and brooks; at the foothills, the uncountable became triune–running almost dead south, and the water so cold–to unify again in the lake.

Each Pulaski had their satchel, and some knelt and some bent over at the waist to pluck the shiny rocks from the water. They stood on the western banks so that their shadows would not shroud the telltale glow, and they were not careful. Saw a glimmer? Grab the fistful of pebbles and polished shale and weedy greens, shake the water off, throw it in your bag. The Pulaski had little use for gold. Loud Fingers liked it. Not quite a stone, he thought. You could pound it flat and it would still gleam, and so Loud Fingers wrapped it around button-sized rocks to make eyes for the creatures he embroidered on the tribe’s tunics. No one cared one way or the other. which annoyed him. He thought it made his designs pop.

The Whites loved gold. The Pulaski had known that since Wanders Away returned. He had wandered away one morning, and came back two years later with wild stories about mountains made by men, and machines powered by fire, and hookers. Wanders Away had maybe a million stories about hookers. But he also had a Winchester rifle and a Bowie knife made of steel. The hunters saw the value in these objects, but the elders did not; they argued in favor of the traditional weapons that they had used all their lives. The hunters’ argument was “Tradition shmadition” and they came home deliberately empty-handed from the next few hunting trips until the elders gave in.

They will trade the weapons for the shiny rocks in the streams, Wanders Away told them. They call it “gold,” he said. The Pulaski did not have a special name for the substance. It was a rock. So it was shiny? The one next to it was big. A big rock is more useful than a shiny rock, common sense dictated. You could peg a rabbit with a big rock, and that’s dinner. Shiny rock does you no good if you’re hungry. Shiny rock, big rock, jagged rock, smooth rock. Rock’s a fucking rock, the Pulaski figured. Wanders Away attempted to explain the gold standard, and basic monetarism, but after not a long while gave up and just said, “They trade the rocks for guns and let’s talk about something else.”

So they loaded up Wanders Away with the rocks they now knew were called gold, and sent him back into America to buy them more rifles and ammunition, also knives. The nearest White settlement was a day’s walk. The cynics in the tribe began to suspect he wasn’t coming back after a month, but a sizable contingent–mostly his family–plead for patience, but after a year, even his mother was forced to admit the obvious, and a boy whose family name was High Noon was sent into what the Pulaski now knew was called America. When the boy returned, he was a man and he was called Talks To Whites, and when he had a son, he taught him the White language, and so the boy was called Talks To Whites, as well. It was confusing for a while, but then the elder Talks To Whites was murdered by the Whites he had taught his son to talk to, and no one was confused anymore.

He had stood before the tribe the night before. When he and Cannot Swim returned from the recce up the pass, they walked straight into the village, past the communal hearth and into the storehouse where fruits dried. By the door was the Gathering Drum. Talks To Whites picked it up and began beating it; anyone–even a child–could summon the tribe with the Gathering Drum and speak to them. If you did it for a dopey reason, everyone would make fun of you for the rest of your life.

There was a wide plain in between the hearth and the kotchas, and the tribe–five not-at-all-distinct families, 150 strong in total–sat to hear Talks To Whites and Cannot Swim. (Mostly the former; Cannot Swim was afraid of public speaking and let his cousin do all the talking.) Some children attended, fidgeting, while the younger ones ran around by the lake playing grab-ass with the dogs.

“We need to hide the gold,” Talks To Whites said. The Pulaski did not, in general, lead with a joke.

“It’s almost dark,” Fell In The Fire said.

“First thing in the morning.”

“What about breakfast?”

“Before breakfast.”

“Not even a quick bite?”

“No. This is of incredibly pressing importance,” Talks To Whites said.

Cannot Swim was standing a few feet behind his cousin.

“We could eat on the way. It’s an easy walk.”

Talks To Whites turned in confusion.

“That’s not helping.”

There was a discussion about breakfast, and it was decided that the tribe would head to the streams first thing in the morning, but it would be acceptable if individuals wanted to scarf down some fruit or whatever on the way out.

“Why are we hiding the gold?” Hairy Legs asked. (Compared to, say, a Greek or some other Mediterranean, Hairy Legs was downright sleek, but his calves were hirsute for a Pulaski, so his friends mocked him for it.)

Talks To Whites threw up his hands and said,

“Now you ask that? After the breakfast discussion?”

It was not the Pulaskis’ fault they did not take America seriously. They’d not met her, not for real, not in person and living color; they were not the Wampanoag who saved the Pilgrims from winter only to be repaid with syphilis and smallpox, and they were not the Iroquois whose land was sold without their participation, and they were not the Seminole dead in their swamps, and they were not the Cherokee on a death march. Their men had not been slaughtered, and their women had not been raped, and their children had not been sent to the Indian Schools to have the savage beaten out of them. The hills kept them safe. America was someone else’s problem.

“Elders, men, women: listen to my words,” Talks To Whites said. “You sent my father, who was also called Talks To Whites, to the White village to learn about them and trade with them.”

Now the tribe was very quiet. The Pulaski did not speak of the dead.

“Did he ever bring back any friends? Like, he met a real cool guy and wanted to introduce him around? No. Why? Because these people are dangerous. All they do is shoot each other and spit. They do not treat strangers with respect and honesty. They believe that the land they are on belongs to them. More importantly, they believe that the land everybody else is on belongs to them.”

“Tell them about the smell,” Cannot Swim added.

“Still not helping,” Talks To Whites said without turning around.

“What is that smell?”

“Crack.”

“Inside? Just ‘Hi, I’m in a public place smoking crack?'”

“Apparently,” Iffy said.

“Spiffy.”

“You’re not smoking crack? I thought all the kids were nowadays.”

“We’re not,” Lolly said. “I mean, some of us are. I think my friend Gavin is. Pretty sure he’s the one who stole my speakers.”

Graziano Square had a triumphal arch on the southern side: it was supposed to look like the one in Paris or Manhattan, but topped out at 14 feet and was therefore not overly inspiring. Poems had been written about it, but not good ones. There was a statue of Furlong Christy on the north side, peering through the rangefinder on his theodolite. In between, there was crime. Drug dealers and muggers and guys who liked fucking park benches. Dude selling stolen first-baseman’s gloves. There were gangs of suspiciously handsome teens that danced at each other for control of turf; they wouldn’t fucking stop singing. Marionette carvers who had been blackballed by the guild. The prostitutes were neatly placed about the park: cis men here, and trans women there, and someone named The Rowboat–who was genderless and had a terrifying underpants area–was by the phone booth.

“Now, you wanna be a reporter?”

“Wanna be a great reporter,” Lolly said.

“Well, you gotta be a reporter first before you can be a great reporter. Tell me, reporter: why don’t the cops arrest everyone in this park?”

“There’s too many bad guys.”

“Nah. Cops got cars and shotguns and a big van to chuck folks in. That’s not it.”

“Everybody in the square is armed.”

“They’re not. The stick-up kids are, but most everyone else just got a knife. Everyone in here,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, “got a knife. Not the weapons.”

Lolly was wearing brown corduroys and Stan Smith sneakers, the ones with the bright-green schwop across the heel, and a cream-colored blouse she thought was elegant and had spilled beer on. Her first day at the Cenotaph, which was the Monday following her graduation from Harper College, she had worn a business suit. This was 198-, and so women could purchase business suits and wear them to the business office to do business, just like the fellows. There were shoulder pads, and peaked lapels, and colored tights with geometric shapes sewn into them, and everyone in the building–including the janitorial staff–mocked her relentlessly until she went home from lunch and threw on what everyone else was wearing, which was cheap slacks and a stained shirt. (Except for Goose. He wore a suit to work, but everyone was pretty sure Goose was born in a suit. Barry Cho says that he once saw Goose loosen his tie, but no one listens to Barry.)

“The cops are getting paid off.”

“The cops are getting paid off by way bigger. This is small potatoes, plus a pain in the ass. You know Boone’s Docks?”

“I keep telling you that I grew up here,” she said.

“Precinct sends one guy over on Tuesday. All the smugglers over there pass the hat around and pay him. Easy as can be. Here? You’d be chasing down each hooker individually for, what, a hundred bucks? That sounds fun.”

“So tell me, Cronkite.”

Iffy snorted.

“Cronkite was an actor. The reason open criminality is allowed in Graziano Square is because you can only do two things with a problem. You can fix it, and thereby eliminate it, or you can quarantine it. Cops can’t get rid of crime and they know it. Little Aleppo cops aren’t stupid. They’re lazy and corrupt, but not stupid.”

“You can get rid of this problem,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Legalize drugs and prostitution. And that would get rid of the muggers, too, because no one would be wandering around in the park with wads of cash.”

“What about the guy fucking the park bench?”

“He’s not hurting anyone.”

The guy fucking the park bench was, in fact, hurting someone: he had been hurled at drug dealer who sold Saint Paul (you shot it and sat up all night writing letters to Ephesians), breaking the dealer’s leg and the benchfucker’s clavicle. Next, the bench which had been so ruthlessly and regularly fucked was SCHRONCHED out of the concrete bankings it was laid into the ground with and BRAK brought down on the head of a hooker called Silly Willy, and now there is a great and panicked scattering of scoundrels and the door to Daffodil’s bar SLAPS open; Iffy is fumbling with his Disc camera, and Lolly is sprinting across the street and into the park, and he calls after her “HEY!” but she’s 22 and her legs are faster than her brain. Iffy can see the flash of her Nikon POP and then farther away Pop and then farther again pop. He trots in after her and steps over Silly Willy to ask if she got the shot.

“How’d you get her away from Throwing Knife?”

“Her decision.”

“Throwing Knife’s?

“The dog’s.”

Black Eyes trotted alongside Cannot Swim, and so did Talks To Whites. The three were moving quickly. They wanted to be atop the pass before the White got there and had already lost time making sure everyone went to the streams. Cannot Swim’s rifle clattered across his back at any pace faster than an amble, so he held it in his hand. The sun was in their eyes, so they could not see the way forward but knew it was there.

“You remember Groucho Marx. Cigar, mustache, walked all kooky. Real funny guy, unless you were married to him, ha ha ha. Groucho didn’t get his due. When he died, I mean. It was just a few days after Elvis left the building, and that was unexpected and Groucho had been old for a real long time at that point, so when he said the magic word for the last time, no one much noticed.

“Huxley. Aldous Huxley. You read Brave New World in high school. Maybe you read his drug books in college, I sure did. Our boy Hux died in ’63. C.S. Lewis went in ’63, too. He wrote about dragons and magic, and he wrote about Jesus and faith. Sometimes, he wrote about all that stuff all at the same time. The two of ’em kicked off the same day in 1963: November 22nd.

“It was weeks before anyone besides their wives and agents noticed they were dead.

“You don’t remember Roger Peterson. I bet his friends called him Pete. Just 21 years old when he bought it in a plane crash. He was married already and had a baby on the way, cuz it was 1959 and folks familied up real quick back then. Pete was the pilot and the weather wasn’t so good in Iowa that day. Cold as hell and storms romping and stomping all over the sky. Funny story: Pete wasn’t actually qualified to fly in those conditions.

“But he took up three passengers. Musicians. Guy named Buddy, and a guy named Richie, and another fellow called himself the Big Bopper.

“Now, the readouts and reports and all that whatnot said that the plane hit the ground at about 170 miles an hour, which is full-throttle for a little prop plane like that. Wing first, then it did some cartwheels. That means Pete had put her in what’s called a death spiral. Happens a lot in low visibility. Plane starts to tilting, but you can’t tell just by looking. Gotta trust the instruments over your eyes. Tough to do. And when you tilt a plane’s wings without increasing the throttle, you lose altitude.

“So you pull up, right?

“Don’t yank on that stick, flyboy! Gotta level out your wings first or you’re just gonna corkscrew all the way down. You won’t know nothing’s wrong until it’s too late to make it right.

“Those four men, none of ’em even 30 years old yet, they got tossed outta that little single-prop called a Beechcraft Bonanza and all of ’em died on impact, and only three of ’em got a song written about ’em.

“Poor Pete. Imagine getting overshadowed during a storm, ha ha ha.

“So now that I told you all about death getting ignored, I’m gonna talk about lumber.

“This is all gonna tie together, cats and kittens. You know your old pal Frankie Nickels likes to paint a backdrop before she lets the players on the stage. Just step back and lemme work, okay?

“The past was built outta wood. The farmers are always crowing about how we’d starve without ’em, but a shovel needs a handle and those oxen need a plow. Some men made their fortunes in the mines. Most just toiled. But those mines would’ve collapsed on themselves without support beams. Wanna build a city? Need some wood. Carry goods between said cities? Better getcha some wood for them wagons! Maybe you just wanna sit in a chair and read a newspaper. C’mon, I don’t gotta spell it out for you.

“And boats, too, and the piers and docks they interfaced so wetly with.

“Rich folks’ church was made of brick, and real fancy hotels. Forts, I guess. They was made of stone, not brick, but you get my point. Otherwise, the past was built outta wood, but America was made outta trees. Lucky us, ha ha ha.

“50 percent. That’s what the Arboreocidalists over at Harper College say. Half of what we call America nowadays was wooded. Spruce and ash and maple and pine. Hardwood trees. Good for making into stuff.

“Just sitting there! Didn’t have to till trees, or worry about the rain or locusts. Weren’t required to hunt ’em. You could just walk right up to one and cut it down. Never-ending forests’ worth, from sea to shining.

“Now at first, getting your lumber was a local affair. You wanted a house? You walked into the woods, cut you some trees, and stacked ’em on top of each other. Call that a log cabin. A guy in a famous hat was born in one. Might be the most American house there is, the good old log cabin. Terrible syrup, fine accommodation, ha ha ha.

“But nothing stays local, not in this country. By the middle of the 1800’s, the population was growing and cities were expanding to the point where it became more efficient to have someone else cut down the trees, shape ’em into planks and beams and boards and whatnot, and ship all that to you rather than doing the lumberjacking yourself.

“So you had what were called sawmill towns.

“You got Roseburg up in Oregon, and Scotia right here in California. Norwick in Pennsylvania. Peshtigo in Wisconsin, too.

“All these towns were alike in a couple real important ways. First off, they were near forests. Tough to be a lumberjack without a forest. You’re just a guy walking around in a plaid shirt at that point. Two: they were on rivers. Even better, they were where a few rivers meet. We call that a confluence, cats and kittens.

“Now, Peshtigo wasn’t at a confluence. It was just on one river, which was also called the Peshtigo. And down that river, about 60 miles away, was Green Bay. Chop a tree, chuck it in the water, collect your money. Simple.

“Understand this: Peshtigo was a lumber town. It was a one-horse town, and that horse was a one-trick pony. You got a sawmill right on the banks of the river, and then you got some houses and bars, and then you got the forest. Wasn’t much to it. 1700 folks lived there, and around 800 of them worked directly for the lumber concerns. Rest of ’em ran the bars, I suppose. Chopping trees is thirsty work.

“And, man, those boys built up that thirst in 1871! Working so fast clearing those forests that they didn’t have time to remove the branches they cut off the trunks. Just left ’em there on the ground. That mill made something besides lumber, too. Sawdust. Piles of it. Looked like sand dunes. Plus, it had been real dry that summer. So dry, in fact, that the Peshtigo River was too low to carry away the timber. The men just stacked it up real high and waited.

“Wouldn’t have to wait long, ha ha ha.

“It’s October. Hasn’t been so much as a drizzle since July. The air is like sandpaper. Little fires all over the place, which is to be expected. Heat lightning and all. Fires even take out the telegraph lines, so by the 4th, Peshtigo is cut off from Green Bay. Cut off from everywhere else, too. They had a newspaper called the Peshtigo Eagle. Few days later,  they reported a strange yellow haze that erased the sun. The paper printed in the morning. That would be the last edition for a while.

“A low-pressure system opened up over the town. Nine o’clock, roundabouts. No one knows for sure. Lots of things no one knows for sure about that night.

“The sky roared. That’s what the survivors said. Like a furious locomotive, and all at once, and the world went black.

“But then it lit up real quick.

“There was nowhere to run to, baby. There were places to hide. A couple families lowered themselves down into their wells. Folks had wells back then. They didn’t burn. No, they suffocated. Fire sucked all the air out. Root cellars. Nothing to burn in a cellar, but that didn’t matter. When the air’s 600 degrees, nothing matters.  Gets so hot that the flames start feeding themselves. Called a firestorm. Imagine a giant tornado made out of heat.

“Only place to go was the river. If you didn’t keep dunking your head under, your hair would set ablaze.

“There was a Catholic priest in town, guy named Pernin. Father Pernin said the Mass at St. Mary’s. He managed to get the tabernacle out of the church. Tabernacle’s, like, a holy container for the eucharist. Father Pernin, he set that tabernacle in a wagon and pushed that wagon into the river. Next morning, they found it downstream.

“And the fire had not consumed it.

“They called that a miracle. 1500 people dead, but a cookie jar didn’t break. You take your miracles where you can get ’em in America, cats and kittens.

“Lots of folks got buried without their names. Wasn’t enough left alive to identify everyone, and plus all the records had gone up. Mass graves. Maybe that was for the best, since there wasn’t enough wood left to build coffins out of. You gotta stand back and marvel at that sort of irony! Only God gets to tell jokes that funny!

“Peshtigo wasn’t the only town that got hit. Fire was the size of Delaware. Twelve towns got burned, but Peshtigo got it the worst. 80% of the town, dead and gone before the morning’s light.

“And you never heard of it. Why?

“Well, about 240 miles south of little Peshtigo is a great big city. It was called Chicago. It’s still called that. And on that October night in 1871–the 8th, to be precise–Chicago was on fire, too. 320,000 people lived there. 300 died.

“Which is sad and all, but nothing compared to our lumberjacks up in Wisconsin.

“Didn’t matter. Chicago was where rich folks lived, and famous folks, too. Power and influence and whatnot. Lots of newspapers. There was even a tidy little story about a lady named O’Leary.  Hoo, boy: death, destruction, and an immigrant to blame! Can’t pry that off the front page with a crowbar!

“And so that one-horse town got its thunder stolen by a cow.

“But now you heard the story. I know it’s a sad one, but most stories are. The true ones, at least.

“You wanna hear some music? Frankie Nickels Show is supposed to be a music show, but I digress sometimes. Sometimes, we all remember too hard. Luckily, we got rock and roll. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll play something loud if you turn your radio up. That sound good? I thought so. Sounds good to me, too.

“Turn it up too loud. Here we go.”

You would think Los Angeles would make a more dramatic entrance. New York you had to take a bridge to get to, or a tunnel; you had to disobey earth’s ground rules just to go in and see a show. Ever driven to Las Vegas? It’s around a corner. It’s just desert, desert, desert and then you bear left around some mountains and there she is in front of you shining like a pimp’s rings. Not Los Angeles. You just sorta realize you’ve been in her for twenty minutes.

“Like a loose asshole.”

“No asshole is that loose.”

“You’re a very sheltered person,” Big-Dicked Sheila said.

“From that? Okay. From assholes that loose, I am glad to have been sheltered. AAAAHahaha!”

Tiresias Richardson was in the passenger seat of the 1961 Lincoln Continental, and she was performing the ancient rite of drunks with access to car windows: she had her arm extended all the way, and she’d put her palm vertical and cup the wind in it, then flatten it into a wing and go SHWOOP SHWOOP up and down. At regular intervals, there was jazz handing. It was 72 degrees and sunny, because it was Los Angeles and that is the law. The top was down and her lazy curls flumpered around in the car’s slipstream.

Route 77 had exited into the parking lot of a bowling alley named Chicky Boom’s in Alhambra. From there, they took the 10 until they hit the 710, and then back on the 10. Neither woman noticed getting onto the 110, but they did and nothing looked familiar at all, so they took the 405 and man was that a mistake. About a half-hour later, Tiresias noticed Sheila squinting at the road signs.

“Are you too drunk to read the signs, or are you too blind?”

“I haven’t been too drunk to drive since I got my license.”

“Why won’t you wear your glasses?”

“They make me look too smart.”

“Yeah, but then you start talking and solve the problem. This! The 101! Go north!”

Convertibles the size of boxing rings do not swoop gracefully; it listed ten degrees as Sheila swerved across three lanes in the space of 100 feet. Tiresias did not whether she was too drunk to be frightened, or had just gotten used to Sheila’s driving. She would, Tiresias somehow knew, never be in a crash. Sheila didn’t get into accidents, she caused them.

They were on the 101 and the radio was still picking up KHAY from Little Aleppo. Lady Halberd was the deejay, and she was playing one of those lost British Invasion bands only she knew about: The Hammersmiths from Leeds, who were rougher than the London boys, and their big hit was “I’ll Teach You To Love Me,” which was far more a threat than a promise the way Paul Brears sang it. He died the following year. Had an idea for a song while he was in the tub. Fetched his guitar. Shouldn’t have plugged it in. When the tune was over, Lady Halberd told her listeners that she didn’t know Paul, but she did have a torrid affair with the Hammersmith’s bass player, Dicky Figgs, after he had joined that new wave group called Starbust 21. We were both so skinny, and so were our ties, she said. According to Lady Halberd, she was no more than two sexual steps from anyone in the music industry. None of her stories could ever be independently confirmed, and some conflicted with others, but they were still good stories. She wasn’t under oath or anything, everyone figured.

“Why is this still coming in?”

“Wally explained it to me. The car and Little Aleppo are quantumly entangled. It’s spooky. Tangled and spooky.”

“So, you didn’t understand what he said?”

“No. So, I went to Madame Cazee.”

“What’d she say?”

“It’s magick.”

“Okay.”

“She knows a lot about cars.”

“Hollywood! One mile!” Tiresias yelled out and jabbed her finger towards the sign. The off-ramp was on the right, and the Continental was in the left lane so Sheila spun the wheel and EEEEEEE across all the three lanes. Tiresias slid the length of the bench seat into her, and as she unsmushed herself said,

“One mile! We have a mile!”

“But now we’re here. We’re ready. We can fucking pounce on our prey.”

“Sweetie, we need to drink less while we’re here. I don’t know any cops here at all.”

“We’ll meet some, I’m sure.”

“Sheel.”

“Sure, sure. Drink less. Are you talking about in the car or at all times?”

“At all times, I think.”

“You’re a goddamned Nazi whore.”

“Sheel.”

“I can live without beer if I have every other form of alcohol.”

“We were already quitting beer. It’s Los Angeles. We’re on diets.”

“I hate this fucking place so much.”

They got off the 101 onto Santa Monica Boulevard, down by Western. Taco joints and laundromats and palm trees sprouting from the sidewalks at even intervals, their roots covered by metal grates to protect them from the local arboreal black market. Trees are expensive, and you don’t need a great big machine if you have three guys on meth, so the city guards her trees jealously. A group of postal workers, all women, had chased a man into a phone booth, the glass jobby that Superman used to hang out in, on the corner of St. Andrews.

“You think he was sticking his dick out through the mail slot?”

“No, you’d just close the flap real hard for that. Unless you were into the dick,” Sheila said.

“Is this how you meet men?”

“Yeah. I yell into their mail slots ‘Show me your dicks!’ and then I make my choice. Yeah. That’s how I meet men.”

The female postal workers breached the phone booth, and then the man.

“I guess we’ll never know what happened,” Tiresias said.

“Another Hollywood mystery.”

The sidewalks were wide and unused; there were so few pedestrians that someone had written a song about the fact. Packs of feral child stars swarmed bums and tourists, chowed down. They chittered at each other in their private language and kept the teeth as totems. Smelly fatties in superhero costumes. Crust punks leaned up against storefronts; they were accompanied by crust dogs. Scientologists, too. (The Church of Scientology had not taken hold in Little Aleppo. Members had been dispatched to the Main Drag to administer personality tests, but all of them were quickly poached by local cults. After a couple dozen folks from the Sea Org disappeared, the CoS stopped sending people.)

“What’s the address?”

“I dunno. Something something Santa Monica Boulevard. What’s the difference between a boulevard and an avenue?”

“Of where we’re staying.”

“Is it a legal thing?”

“What?”

“The difference between–”

“Tirry, where are we staying?”

“I figured we’d find a place. But we should do that soon. I gotta take a shit the size of a couch.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I might need two or three toilets. What?”

The Continental, which had been doing 30 in the lane nearest the concrete median, was now idling at the curb.

“You made no arrangements at all?”

Tiresias was a firm believer in living in the moment, which was why she was so often late with her rent. She had also been reading a self-help book titled The Wish, which was like The Secret, except you just wished for stuff. And she was bone lazy. Tiresias was admirably tidy, which you would think a trait associated with preparation and detail-orientedness, but it actually worked to her disadvantage as she would obsessively dispose of scraps of paper, and she wrote things down on scraps of paper. There’s a lot of daydreaming. Basically: the worst person in the world to put in charge of an adventure.

There was something Tiresias could look at that was not Sheila’s face, she was sure of it. No clouds, fuck, and all the homeless had been eaten. No coyotes, either, and she had been promised coyotes. Bring me my damn coyotes, she thought, and belched an alto note, and when she looked right: it was two floors, and the roof was aquamarine and the walls were white and the doors to the room were orange. An el-shape around a pool with chairs no one wanted to steal. Four rooms in the little part of the el, and ten on the long axis. There is a catwalk along the second floor. Big window, door, big window, door, big window, door, and so on. 28 in total.

One room was available, at least; the neon sign in the office window read NO VACANCY, but the first word was dark. Usually, lights are turned on to welcome guests, but not the NO VACANCY sign. The office window took up the whole wall that fronted onto Santa Monica, and there was a man in there. He was behind the front desk and in front of hideous wallpaper. Above the office window was white stucco with the motel’s name in ten-foot high loopy aquamarine script.

Tiresias turned back to Sheila, smiled her big smile–the one she saves for emergencies–and waved her arm at the building.

“Gotcha.”

The motel was named The Tahitian.

“You really thought I didn’t have a place for us to stay?”

You hear a lot of lies cutting hair, and Sheila had gotten good at spotting them. Sometimes, it was the little things: a detail left out, or too many; a trailed-off sentence; twitchy eyeballs. Other times, it was completely fucking obvious and, quite frankly, maybe even a little insulting.

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“Where’s the lie? There’s no lie. How can there be a lie when we’re in Los Angeles? It’s The Tahitian.”

Sheila was still not having it.

“The Tahitian! Like the movie theater.”

Nothing.

“From back home! I do a show there on Saturday night. You’re fucking the owner. Sound system’s alive. The Tahitian!”

“Yeah.”

“You pull the car around while I go in the office and obtain the room that I reserved.”

“That you reserved.”

“Ages ago. I can hardly remember it was so long ago. OkayyouparkthecarandI’lltakecareofthereserv–” and Tiresias was out of the Lincoln and hopping across the sidewalk trying to get her sneakers on. She waved back at Sheila, who had already driven off to find the parking lot. Her knuckles were white on the wheel and she was thinking about Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, and whom Sheila was indeed fucking; Tiresias wasn’t lying about that. They hadn’t been going out long, but this was already the second time she had snuck out of the neighborhood on Gussy without saying goodbye. Sheila had never been in a stable relationship, but she was pretty sure they included no fleeing whatsoever. It may be the kind of personal flaw that one saw a professional about, Sheila thought, and made a mental note to call Madame Cazee and get a recommendation for an Angeleno psychic.

Tiresias was taller than the man behind the front desk. Cash register, guest register. He smelled like whiskey that needed a shower.

“Firenze.”

“Venezia.”

“What?”

“I thought we were listing Italian cities.”

“My name. Firenze.”

“Just the one name?”

“Yes.”

“That’s so wild. My friend I’m with is a one-namer, too. I mean, she’s got a title, but I don’t know if that counts.”

“Were you the ones for Room 114?” he said portentously.

“My, you said that portentously.”

“I do not consort with adverbs.”

“Good advice for writing and for life.”

Tiresias tried out her “Ain’t I cheeky?” smile, which worked all of the time. Firenze collapsed behind the desk, got to his feet, both pretended he hadn’t.

“Yes,” she said. “We’re the ones for Room 114.”

The key was attached to a plastic palm tree with the motel’s name and phone number written on it.

“Your tab’s covered.”

She was a better actress than she gave herself credit for, so she didn’t say “What the fuck are you talking about?” Instead, she said,

“As it should be.”

Firenze rotated the guest register, and pointed to a spot along the left margin; there was a coffee mug full of pens.

“Sign, please.”

Big loopy DOROTHY GISH in blue ink. Tiresias drew a heart over the “I” in Gish, smiled, recapped the pen, back in the mug, key in the pocket, Firenze went down again. Out the side door that led to the pool and the rooms. There was quite a bit to process about that encounter, she thought. Had she actually made the reservation? If so, she had now had the problem of blackouts to worry about in addition to inscrutable conversations with innkeepers. That someone else, unknown to her, was footing the bill also struck her as irregular. If Tiresias had ever seen The Manchurian Candidate, she would have thought of the scene with Angela Lansbury on the train, but she hadn’t and so she didn’t. Also, she was a Little Aleppo girl and that kind of interaction with a business owner was perfectly normal there. The fact that she wasn’t in Little Aleppo didn’t occur to her. And Sheila–who was already cranky–would no doubt ask a billion questions that she couldn’t answer, and she truly, truly needed to take a shit.

Sheila stood on the diving board in her leather pants. She looked like an album cover.

Tiresias waved the key around over her head.

“Told ya!”

“I have a billion questions.”

“And I have to take a shit, so let’s hit the room that I reserved and that we now possess. 114!”

Sheila hopped down and picked her purse (which was more properly a satchel) off a lounge chair and joined Tiresias. Last room on longer side of the first floor. Right next to the parking lot and the stairwell. The door required a little bit of shoulder. Burnt umber, and mustard yellow, and too much maroon. Blackout curtains for the front window. Black velvet painting of Eliot Gould over the bed. Teevee with rabbit ears. Bathroom was in the back, and before Sheila could say…

“There’s one fucking bed?”

…Tiresias was in the bathroom and Sheila threw herself on the queen-sized without taking off her shoes, and FFT POP she lit a Camel without checking to see if there was an ashtray in the room and FWOO called out something to Tiresias that was quickly forgotten as Sheila lit nine or ten more matches and dug in her purse for incense and lit that, too, and there was name-calling for a little bit.

Ten minutes later, Sheila had her shoes off and so did Tiresias; both were sitting on the bed with their backs against the wall–there was no headboard–and each had a can of Arrow that had gone warm hours ago. They were quitting beer as part of their Los Angeles diet, but there were still eight or nine left in the case and throwing them away would be wasteful.

A casual knock on the door. A man in casual slacks. Sport coat, checked. Bald head, roughly planet-sized. Tiresias did not invite him in, and he did not enter, just looked in at Sheila, then back to Tiresias.

“Not what I expected.”

“We’re full of surprises! AAAAHahaha!”

“Mr. Buttermilk wants this done quickly.”

“Then that’s what Mr. Buttermilk gets.”

The man handed over a briefcase. Halliburton Zero. It was gunmetal gray and looked like it should be handcuffed to a guy in an unremarkable suit. Sheila peered around Tiresias’ ass; she had no idea what was going on, but she always wanted a briefcase like that.

“Everything you need is in there.”

“Awesome, possum.”

He left, and she shut the door and started to say something but Sheila leapt to her knees on the bed and put her finger out and whispered-shouted, “Shut the fuck up,” and they were both quiet and still until they heard a car in the parking lot start up and drive off.

“Gimme,” Sheila said. Tiresias handed it over, and then sat on the bed next to her. POP POP the locks open and now the case; the top stays up with no prop, well-balanced, and Sheila catalogs the Zero’s contents.

Several 8×10 black-and-white photos. Snappy-looking blonde, early 30’s. In an evening gown, a soft-lit promo pic, riding a horse, another on a horse, fucking the stable boy, fucking a different stable boy, fucking both stable boys.

Sheet of paper with an address on it. Typed.

Sheet of paper with a map to a large house. Drawn.

Sheet of paper with a phone number. Hand-written.

Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 revolver. Unloaded.

Box of ammo. Full.

$5,000 in manila envelope. Hundreds.

“Huh,” Tiresias said as Sheila gently placed everything back in the briefcase and closed the lid. She turned to her friend and did not punch her dead in the face, and Sheila is still to this day proud of that. She did–calmly and with love–place her hands on her friend’s upper arms, and squeeze as hard as she could.

“Your improv training is going to get us killed.”

“Ow.”

Sheila had been sitting, and she scrambled up to her knees so the two women were eye-to-eye, and also for better leverage on Tiresias’ arms.

“You just ‘Yes, and-ed’ us into a hit. We’re hitmen now because your first instinct when confronted with bullshit is to agree with it and make it bullshittier. So we’re hitmen now.”

“Hitpeople.”

“Are you talking about gender politics right now, Tir?”

“A little.”

Sheila nodded, and then shook the fuck out of Tiresias.

“We need to focus, Tir.”

“Vodka?”

Sheila nodded, and thought about shaking her some more–desperately wanted to–but let her go. Tiresias fetched a half-empty liter of Lubyanka from the tiny fridge under the teevee. There was a screenplay in there when they first opened the door; it had potential, but the second act was a mess.

“Glasses or bottle?”

“Bottle.”

She passed it over and Sheila took a long tug, and then another, and handed it back to Tiresias, who drank and then said,

“We’re supposed to kill the lady, right?”

“What?”

“Not the horse.”

“We don’t kill the horse.”

“I mean, I don’t want to kill the lady, but I’m absolutely not killing the horse.”

“I will fucking shake you again, bitch.”

“This is not all my fault. Numerous points along the way, you could have stopped me.”

Sheila fumbled for her cigarettes, a handful fell onto the maroon comforter. She grabbed one; Tiresias did, too. The ashtray was in between them–they were both sitting cross-legged–and it had the motel’s name in glamorous script that matched the building’s facade, and under that was written The South Pacific, east of the Pacific. In Sheila’s mind, she had already stolen it, and then something crossed her mind; she leapt up and snatched the ashtray off the mattress, dumped its contents towards the garbage bin, grabbed her purse and the briefcase and Tiresias’ backpack and the room key and her keys, and then yanked the larger woman off the bed and out the door.

“Why are we fleeing?”

“Because the real hitmen could be here any second.”

Now Tiresias did not need to be yanked along and began running towards the Continental, but realized that running looked suspicious (and both of them had left their shoes in the room) so she downshifted into a stiff-hipped trot like those race-walking weirdos from the Olympics. The car had power locks that sprang up and she slid in the passenger seat, barely getting the massive door closed as Sheila punched it out of the parking lot.

“We forgot the vodka.”

“We’ll get more,” Sheila said.

“And our shoes.”

“Also available for purchase.”

“What do we do?”

“I dunno. I need to think.”

“We’ll find a bar.”

They were headed west on Santa Monica Boulevard–towards Hollywood, towards Beverly Hills, towards Venice, towards the ocean–in a 1961 Lincoln Continental. After just a few blocks, Sheila pulled over and they put the top down. Hitmen be damned, it was a top-down kinda day in a top-down kinda city. There was a briefcase on the seat in between the two women, and they were headed west on Santa Monica so very far away from their homes in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

No one on the Main Drag paid any attention to the monks. Little Aleppo had seen far stranger. Escaped zoo animals gallivanted down the street to cheers at least once a month, and there were always men with bloody noses wearing tuxedos at eleven in the morning, and it was an odd day when you did not see at least one naked person moseying along the sidewalk. There was Iguana Don, who was never seen out of his skintight green leather suit, and a biker gang called the Kiss My Dicks. Various pedestrians were on leashes: children who wouldn’t do what they were told, and perverts who enjoyed being told what to do. Little Aleppians did not stare at weirdos: first off, because the weirdos might be aggressive or–even worse–friendly; and second, because the weirdos might be partnered up with pickpockets who would use your distraction against you.

(The one abnormal activity that locals paid attention to was when workmen started humping large glass panes around; it surely meant a car chase was imminent.)

It was sunny and the clouds were high and innocuous. Business was going on everywhere: selling and buying and appraising and fencing and trying to include the extended warranty. Senegalese music skipped from the speakers outside Randy’s Record Barn; it was good morning music; it was sidewalk-bopping music, and not too loud but the sound carried all the way up to Town Hall–just barely–which fronts Mount Faith, where St. Sebastian’s Monastery is accessible via a brambly, crumbly goat path.

“How do we do this?”

“Walk? You should have learned how in high school.”

“Our robes,” Brother Lopsang said. “How do we walk down without tearing up our robes?”

“We take them off,” Brother Yup answered.

“We’re gonna walk through three miles of pricklebushes and thorns in our underwear?”

Brother Yup untied the simple knot in the rope that bound his brown robe tight to his waist. He pulled the whole heavy garment over his head, and Brother Lopsang looked away in horror. Then back.

“You’re wearing clothes.”

“Yeah, we’re walking down the hill. Of course I’m wearing clothes.”

He was in the jeans he had worn when he came to the monastery. Their cuffs were flared. Long-sleeved tee-shirt advertising The Snug from back on their first headlining tour. His everyday sandals with his everyday thick gray socks. Brother Lopsang clapped her hands in front of her.

“So.”

“You really didn’t think about this? We meditate for hours. You had more than enough time to think about this.”

“I’ll go put something on.”

“Yeah.”

“Wait here.”

“Duh.”

They were standing outside the monastery, right by the massive double doors which had a human-sized cutout at which supplicants made their cases and were admitted within the walls. Brother Lopsang set her canvas bag–Brother Yup had an identical one–down on the soft ground and disappeared into St. Sebastian’s. There was a rock, flat and lowish, that the supplicants sat on when they were denied entry for the customary three days. Brother Yup sat on it, dug in his bag. Half an uncut loaf of bread from the bakery. He ate it while his skin felt the sun rise.

It was almost ten by the time the two hit the Main Drag, having replaced their robes once they emerged from the foothills. Off to the west was Crater Street, where Brother Lopsang used to live when she was named Karen Blitzstein. She did not look over. Brother Yup was smiling, and nodding at everyone he passed.

“God bless you. And you. You, too. Don’t think He forgot about you down there.”

He pressed his hands together in front of him.

“Bless you, sister. Bless you, mister. And your dog. Bless your dog.”

“Don’t do prayer hands.”

“It plays.”

“It doesn’t. You’re indicating.”

“They love prayer hands.”

“It’s a bit much,” Bother Lopsang said.

“It only looks weird because you’re not doing it, too. Give it a try.”

“Absolutely not.”

“More fun than it looks.”

Brother Lopsang reached over her shoulders and flipped the hood of her robe up over her head. Her brown hair was a year long; she had buzzed it all off down the scalp when she entered the monastery, even though all the other monks told her she didn’t have to. Some gray had come in with brown.

“Good morning. God bless you. Peace be unto you. What a lovely tie.”

“I’ve never seen this side of you. I don’t like it.”

“We’re emissaries for St. Sebastian’s. We should let the people know that we love them, and that they’re welcome in the monastery.”

“But they’re not welcome in the monastery. That’s the point of a monastery.”

“You know what Brother Finn teaches about monasteries?”

“Nope.”

“Buildings are not necessary for a monastery; just monks.
But the monks will get very cold at night without buildings.”

“He was truly wise.”

Brother Yup swung his overpacked canvas bag from one shoulder to the other.

“At least take the hood off. You look like an axe murderer.”

“You didn’t know me before I came up the hill. Maybe I axe murdered.”

“Not a chance. You don’t have the hips for it.”

“What do hips have to do with it?”

“With axe murdering? The hips are everything. That’s where you generate your power.”

Brother Yup watched the door, and Brother Lopsang worked in the gardens. The Tchotchke Run had belonged to Brothers Alph and Leon for a while, but Alph hadn’t come back the last time. A bar got him, the Aardvark Lounge on Peel Street. They had some Buddhas left over, and neither wanted to carry them back up Mount Faith. It was almost four in the afternoon, and so they needed to get going, but there was a healthy hum coming from the Aardvark, and the monks thought that a drunk or two might buy a Buddha, and one did, but he also bought drinks, and a good deal of the reason was Alph was at St. Sebastian’s in the first place was vodka. Long story short: Alph doffed his robe a few hours later, went back to his law firm the next day, passed out and shit himself at a meeting the day after that, and now he lives in India, or maybe Nepal or the Yucatan. Somewhere a white person would find holy.

But the Tchotchke Run must go on. Hand-carved Jesuses, and mini-prayer wheels, and Buddhas that dispensed cigarettes from their bald heads when you pushed on their chubby bellies. Giant dreidels made of smooth mahogany. Fertility statues with curvy curves, and ones with scowls and freakish erections. If you had some idolizing to do, then St. Sebastian’s made your idol. A few shops in Little Aleppo carried the pieces; they took them on consignment, and sent up special orders: a desktop crucifix with Christ in a gorilla suit, etc. There was no road to the monastery, and so: the Tchotchke Run.

“I can’t do the Tchotchke Run. I can’t even spell it.”

“You can spell ‘run.'”

“Usually.”

“Then you’re halfway there. And you don’t need to spell tchotchke.”

“Oh, no. I never engage in an activity I can’t spell. It’s why I don’t eat cantaloupe.”

“You can’t spell cantaloupe?”

“Deceptively tricky word.”

“Brother Yup.”

“Abbot Costello.”

The abbot was standing over the monk, who was lying on the grass under an improvised tent of bedsheets. The door to the monastery was in the middle of the southeastern wall, and those walls were two stories and brick. Brother Yup watched the door. A few initiates went out in the mornings a few times a week to pick berries which still grew wild on the slopes, so he let them out and then back in again. A supplicant banged on the door about twice a month. It was a cheesecake assignment, to be honest.

“The other brothers work all day.”

“So do I. That door’s never been so watched.”

“You are slothful.”

“When did that become a sin?”

The abbot wore robes so humble that you got itchy just looking at them. The Sebastianites used to wear the tonsure, but none did anymore except the abbot. The monks could find no Biblical reason for the haircut, and also they just didn’t want to cut their hair like that. The female brothers were the most vociferous about the point.

“You’ll go over to the workshop and pick up the bag they have for you, go down the mountain, deliver the geegaws, collect the money and orders, and come back. Very easy. Even you could do it.”

“I cannot leave my post. I have a duty.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“What if someone knocks?”

“Then the door will be answered by whoever’s closest.”

“You’re talking about anarchy. What you’re describing is sheer anarchy.”

“It isn’t. First thing in the morning, you and Brother Leon will leave.”

Brother Yup was so outraged he vaguely thought about sitting up, but successfully fought off the urge.

“No.”

“You can’t just say no. I’m the abbot. This is stringently hierarchical organization.”

“Not Leon. No way.”

“What’s wrong with Brother Leon?”

“He won’t shut up and the only thing he talks about is God.”

“He’s a monk.”

“Doesn’t mean he can’t be a well-rounded conversationalist. No Brother Leon. You said yourself how easy the job was, so let me take someone else. I’ll take Brother Lopsang.”

“Fine.”

“And she’ll take Brother Leon, which means I can stay on my post. Listen!”

No one knocked on the door.

“I could’ve swore I heard footsteps.”

“You and Lopsang. Leave first thing in the morning. Wear a set of earthly clothing for the hike up and down so your robes don’t get torn up.”

“Ooh, yeah. Thanks. Wouldn’t have thought of that.”

The older man started to turn to leave.

“Abbot Costello?”

“Brother Yup?”

The monk WHAPPED his palm against the great oak door.

“She better be in the same shape as I left her when I get back.”

“The door to the monastery is not a girl.”

“No, she isn’t. This here’s my lady.”

The older man turned to leave, left.

Saintly Dunbar’s was small and on the west side of the Main Drag right about where the Upside became the Downside. They sold old-time religion at Saintly Dunbar’s: everything was terrifying. All the Christs’ eyes followed you around the store, and into the bathroom, and sometimes to other shops as you went about your errands. Dunbar was skinny and had a gray vest and ears like doodleslappers.”I see you’re looking at my ears. They jus’ like doodleslappers, ain’t they?” he would say to almost everyone that walked in. No one ever knew what the fuck he was talking about. Yankees figured it was a Southern expression; Southerners thought it was something native to Little Aleppo; folks who grew up in the neighborhood would just agree with him for the sake of expedience.

The monastery made low-interest saints for the shop. You could get a statue of St. Peter or Paul anywhere, but if you wanted St. Bubbalicious, the patron saint of uncomfortable dinner parties, then you had to go see Dunbar. Gangulphus the Meek, patron of book thieves? Mordecrumb, who was the patron of catch-and-release fishermen? Only Dunbar had ’em.

“What happened to Alph and Leon?”

Brothers Yup and Lopsang smiled, dopily, and then covered up their mouths with their hands.

“Vow of silence. Gotcha. Wow,” Dunbar said. The icons were exchanged for cash; the whole transaction took less than a minute; the two monks backed out the door, both doing prayer hands. When they were back on the sidewalk and the door had closed behind them, Brother Yup said,

“Wow, that totally worked.”

“Told you.”

“I wonder what else we can get away with? We should tell ’em we took a vow of getting paid double.”

“In and out. I wanna get back up the hill.”

She threw up her hood again, and they headed south. The Tahitian was open again, Brother Yup noticed. It was shut up the last time he came down. He wondered if they still made John Wayne movies. He hated John Wayne movies. Cleaner, all of it. And more storefronts open–no darkened entryways bracketed by plywood windows at all, actually–and far fewer drunks and junkies laying between parked cars. Even a skyscraper. Comparatively.

“That is an affront.”

“Tower Tower?”

“Its name is Tower Tower? That’s stupid even for this neighborhood.”

“Its real name is the Gildersleeve Spire.”

“Ugh.”

“Right. Guy who built it is named Tower Gildersleeve,” Brother Lopsang said.

“No, he’s not.”

“You’re right. His real name is Gary Spumanti.”

“He just makes all sorts of terrible decisions, doesn’t he?”

Tower Tower was 12 stories tall–18, according to the elevator–and mixed offices with condos; the building also mixed modernism with post-modernism: the lower half was poured concrete with razor-slit windows and faceless facades, and the upper half was stainless steel that looked like a crysanthemum trampled in a stampede. The architect was trying to evoke a torch, and succeeded in one fashion: the polished metal was folded in on itself so many times that it created an amplifying effect with the sunlight, essentially turning the building into a death ray. A special anti-shine polish had to be created. You still couldn’t look directly at it in the afternoons.

“When did they build it?”

“After the earthquake.”

They came to Why-o Terrace and turned west and there was Tobacco Flo’s. She had glass devices for smoking tobacco out of, and plastic, and carved wood pipes, which were to be used for tobacco. Everything else in the store was for pot smokers, but the gadgets you could actually smoke pot out of were only for tobacco. There was a sign about it on the counter and everything. The monks entered, and Flo asked about Alph and Leon, and they did their mime routine, and then the exchange and out the door. Flo had the brothers in the warehouse make her Buddhas with secret compartments in their bellies. Big enough for about a quarter. It was the perfect piece of merchandise for her clientele, she thought: stoners loved Buddha, and they loved stuff they could put their weed in. She moved a dozen a month.

“We should stop for lunch,” Brother Yup said.

“Nope.”

“But I want pizza. There’s no pizza at the monastery. And no one will deliver.”

“You’ve tried?”

“They just hang up the phone once you say ‘goat path.'”

“Since when do we have a phone?”

“There’s one in the abbot’s office. Rich guy took the orders a while ago. Brother Cab. Good guy. Obsessed with ice skating. Anyway, like I said: he took the orders, but he needed a phone. Big Wall Street guy or something?”

“How can you be a monk and a Wall Street guy at the same time?”

“By paying for a complete restoration of the monastery’s walls.”

“Yeah, okay,” Brother Lopsang said.

They were the same height, and roughly the same build: identical but that his head was exposed and hers was not.

“More of a rebuild. The original walls were put up by the brothers. Pious men and women. Turns out masonry cares not for your piety. The place was falling apart. Anyway, he had the phone company run a line up just for him.”

“They’ll do that?”

“They’ll do anything you want if you pay ’em enough. It’s like Brother Finn wrote:”

 What good is money?

All it can buy is food,
Shelter,
Safety,
Status!

What need has a man of any of these things,
Except to survive?

Stay away from money, trust me on this one.

“He was ahead of his time,” Brother Lopsang said.

“Truly.”

Seven more stops on or near the Main Drag all the way to the Downside, and then a quick walk back up; they watched the banks turn into check-cashing places going south, and the liquor stores turn into wine shops coming north. Brother Lopsang had agreed to pizza; Brother Yup was fairly running. It was a little before two, and they made a right onto Robin Street to go to Cagliostro’s. They would share a half-pepperoni, half-cheese pie. They would order a pitcher of soda. She knew this because Brother Yup had been talking about it for almost ten blocks. There had, around block six, been a discussion of calzones, but that was abandoned as ludicrous almost immediately. Brother Lopsang had only seen the man once, but she recognized him coming out of the coffee shop across the street from the pizzeria. He was balding and tall, white, and his nose was too small for his face. Maybe he had it fixed, she didn’t know. He had a name, but she wouldn’t say it or think it. Let him keep his fucking name. He came in and plead guilty and then they took him out again. She had not read the papers or watched the teevee news, and the cops had not shown her a picture of him, so when he came in to the courtroom was the first time she saw what he looked like. The judge gave him ten years, but ten years had not passed. It was barely three. He was wearing a business suit. Maybe he was a businessman.

Brother Yup was ten paces beyond her when he noticed she had stopped. Brother Lopsang’s hood was up and it rotated with the man across the street; a fixed relationship between two points. He disappeared around the corner, and she stood there, just another broken-hearted monk on the sidewalk.

He put his cowl up just like hers and said,

“Come.”

They go back to the Main Drag, and up a little bit, and then across the street onto Widow’s Way; halfway down, there is a doorway jutting out into the sidewalk about eight feet, black and windowless. The outside curtain is made of rubber that is flat like soup noodles and thick. There is another of these barriers halfway down the corridor, and then a final one at the true entrance to the Morning Tavern. They’ll let anything in but sunlight at the Morning Tavern. No one blinked at the monks, but the bartender made them take down their hoods and show her there weren’t shotguns hidden in their blowsy sleeves. She had fallen for that trick before.

“Brother. Sister,” she said.

“Oh, we’re both brothers. It’s a long story based in a minor ecclesiastical debate that lasted seven years and turned violent. Trust me, you don’t wanna hear it,” Brother Yup said.

“Okay. Hello, brothers.”

“Howdy!”

Brother Lopsang tight-lipped a smile.

The Morning Tavern is long and narrow, with a bar along one side and tables the length of the other. The bathroom bears grudges. There is a jukebox the size of the American Dream, and more chrome than the Surgeon General would recommend for indoor use. The darts for the dartboard had not been given out in a very long time. There was a stain on the ceiling that looked like your national hero, no matter where you were from: the British saw Churchill, and Brazilians saw Pele. (This feature helped smoke out a Soviet spy in 1978 when a man going by the name of John Cornfarm looked up and said, “Man, that stain looks exactly like Lenin.” This raised suspicions, but someone in the crowd asked, “Do you mean Lenin or Lennon? Commie or rock star?” and everyone figured he’d say John Lennon, so everyone lowered their suspicions, but he said, “The Commie,” and all the suspicions were now on the ceiling alongside the stain that had started all this bullshit. It was a storied stain.) There was a disco ball that hung from fishing wire; it was lopsided, and could not spin.

“Wow, I haven’t been in a bar in forever. I don’t even know what drinks cost nowadays.”

“Depends on what you want, Brother.”

Brother Yup had been holding the money the two monks had collected on the Tchotchke Run. He dug in his pocket and came up with a ten.

“Is that enough for two shots of Braddock’s and two pints of Arrow? And the proper tip, of course.”

“It is, Brother.”

He pulled the rest of the money from his deep pocket, counted it, drew off about a tenth of the pile, put that back in his robe, laid the cash on the bar.

“Is that enough to buy a round for the house?”

“Enough for several.”

“God bless.”

The bartender rang the bell behind the bar, and Brothers Yup and Lopsang suddenly had so many new friends. When the scrum had died down, and their backs were no longer being patted, they turned back to the bar and towards the bottles behind it.

“Why did you do that?”

“Two reasons.”

“Okay.”

“Brother Finn teaches us this lesson:”

Let the Lord guide your every step:
So only drink while seated.

“You looked like you needed to sit down a while.”

“Maybe.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Vow of silence.”

The two monks clinked their beers together, drank.

“Second reason?”

“I never want to have to make the Tchotchke Run again.”

“You’re a deeply lazy man.”

“No, no. I’m spiritual.”

The brothers were bought drinks. Multiple plurals of drinks, and they were tossed out at dusk shitty like the rest of the patrons, like the rest of the saints, and they wandered the neighborhood looking for flashlights. They were bloody and laughing hysterically when they hammered on the front door of St. Sebastian’s around nine o’clock. There was no answer, and the two monks curled up on the ground outside the monastery walls and slept in their robes among the juniper and sage and thistle covering Mount Faith, which is one of the seven hills overlooking Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

The Kools were on the counter before Iffy Bould reached it. Two packs, soft, and the same amount of matchbooks atop them; their front covers had “Holly, Wood, and Vine” written on them, along with a phone number, and on the back was a drawing of Lady Justice with her blindfold on her forehead, and she was winking. The slogan read Let us explain what you were doing.

“What happened to the turtle?”

“What turtle?”

“Used to be a turtle on the matchbook. If you drew him right, you could go to art school,” Iffy said.

“Fuck I know about turtles? Fuck turtles. Cowards.”

Esperanza Guillaume hated. This may have been the result of owning a liquor store in the shitty part of a shitty neighborhood for 20 years, or she may have been like this as a child. No one knew, and no one bothered to ask, as they knew this would get them cursed out by Esperanza. She hated the drunks who feigned sloth on the sidewalk waiting for her to open in the morning, and the last-minute assholes who couldn’t decide between two $4 bottles of wine as she yelled “WE’RE CLOSING, SHITEYES!” late at night. The kids with fake IDs who thought she was stupid. The cops who stopped in and smiled as pints of whiskey disappeared into their pockets. The whores who drank banana schnapps. The stick-up boys who thought the idea of robbing her came to them first. God help you if you asked to use the bathroom.

“Cowards?”

“Hiding in their fucking shells. Fight like a man.”

There was no bulletproof glass separating Esperanza from the customer at 792 Liquors, and she had a .38 in a holster on her left hip. Her name was stitched on the gun belt in flowing white cursive, and after her name were check marks. Many of them. No one bothered to ask. Short, gray hair and enormous eyeglasses and smoker’s wrinkles that radiated around her mouth.

“You don’t see me hiding.”

“You’re not a turtle.”

“Because I work hard.”

“Forget I brought it up.”

“No, now you got me worked up over those lazy motherfuckers.”

Iffy tossed a fiver on the counter, grabbed the Kools. One in the inside pocket of his checked sport coat. A little raggedy; elbows with a bit of shine. The other WAP WAP WAP against the back of his hand, and then the cellophane spirals off. His nails are very short because otherwise they clack against the keys of his typewriter, so he has to dig the foil up with his fingers, and he rolls the detritus up into a tiny ball that refuses to stay a tiny ball and springs back to form. Esperanza hands him his change, a buck, and holds out her hand palm-up. Iffy gives her the trash, and she puts it into the basket under the counter. FLUP FLUP his middle finger flicks the underside of the pack and two brown filters emerge. Takes both, offers one. Esperanza takes the smoke with her left hand, right slides the ashtray in between them. FFT POP is the sound of the match, and even though they are inside and there is no wind, Iffy cups his left hand around the flame as he lights her cigarette and then his own. Shakes out the match. In the tray. Kools go in the hip pocket of the jacket. Matches, too.

“Whaddya hear about the guy?”

“Which guy? No guys around here. I ain’t been laid since Ford.”

“Huh.”

“That’s a fucking drought, when you stop counting by years and start going by presidents.”

“You know who I’m talking about. The big guy.”

“The one beating the shit out of the muggers? I see him, I’m shooting him.”

“Why?”

“He put my little cousin Marielito in the hospital. That kid’s no mugger.”

“What was he doing when the guy beat him up?”

Esperanza blew out a plume of smoke FWOOO and hacked once, twice.

“Oh, he was mugging someone. But he’s not a mugger.”

“You’re talking about the dichotomy between action and character.”

“I’m talking about that big fucking lunatic kicked Marielito’s jaw into his fucking shoulder. Who’s that painter that doesn’t know how to paint?”

Iffy tapped his ashes into the tray.

“Picasso.”

“That’s what he looks like. The boy’s all fucked up.”

“Still at the hospital?”

“You know how you can get beat so hard you start pissing blood?”

“Sure.”

“He’s crying blood. The boy is fucked the fuck up. Yeah, he’s still at the hospital.”

“I might go talk to him.”

“You doing a story?”

“Apparently.”

“Good. You find out who this asshole is.”

Two speed freaks walked in–the door went BZZZZ–and split up as to examine every single label in the store more efficiently. They smelled like ammonia and scams. Iffy walked towards the door, turned back, said,

“The Aleppo Avenger.”

“Fuck you talking about?”

“Guy needs a name. Can’t sell papers without a name.”

“‘Aleppo Avenger?’ Get the fuck out of my store with that. Fuck is he avenging? He’s running around the Downside punching poor people.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“Take a six-pack of Arrows with you if you’re going to see Marielito.”

Iffy nodded, veered off to the nearest cooler, grabbed a sixer with its cardboard carrying case.

“Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh. Cans.”

Iffy nodded again, replaced the bottles, hooked his fingers through the plastic tabs of the six-pack. He walked out BZZZZ onto the Main Drag, and Esperanza stubbed out the Kool and watched the speed freaks speed.

Before the Whites, there was no alcohol in the valley that would become Little Aleppo. There were intoxicants, surely–the leaf of the peregrine maria tree, and the psilocybin cybelinus mushrooms that grew from squatch scat after the rains–but neither the Pulaski nor any of the tribes that preceded them had fermented the fruits which grew bountiful all around them.

After the Whites, there was alcohol fucking everywhere (and the valley had been named Little Aleppo). There was whiskey, because it was America, and there was tequila, because it was California. And beer, of course, steam beer so-called because the fermenting tubs were placed on the roof of the Büntz Brewery and cooled by the breeze from the harbor; this threw up great pilpations of steam, smoke signals for the thirsty. The beer was light and sweet and around 6% by volume, but people could handle their booze better back then. Men drank while they worked, and women drank in the home, and children drank because they worked because the past was terrible. Working women, too, tippled. The first business in Little Aleppo was the mine that carved out the Turnaway Lode, and the third was a hardware store, but the second was a bar. The fourth through 19th were also bars. Upscale with paintings on the wall and ladies you could rent, or a plank across some barrels where you’d get punched in the asshole for speaking French. Taverns, saloons, dance halls, hoocheries, bierhausen, nominal restaurants, grog huts, and the long-ago ancestor of Beer-Cooler Ethel, Goat-Bladder Murph, who would squirt a penny’s worth of rotgut into your mouth right on the sidewalk. Finding water that wouldn’t leave you shitting out your ears might take a while, but you could always get a drink.

Temperance came to Little Aleppo by rumor; it was some story a guy at the bar told. Large women with hatchets destroyed saloons on occasion, but they had almost always been drinking in said saloons up until the destruction began, and the weapons were not produced out of principle, but because motherfuckers were talking shit. A man’s drinking habit was not cause for public policy, the neighborhood thought, and neither was a woman’s. The kids should probably cut down, the neighborhood further thought, but again: not the government’s business. Little Aleppians believed that the government which governs best is the one which stays on the other side of the continent.

But America snuck in, and on January 17, 1920, Prohibition became the law of the land. Locals had a rather Jewish feeling about the Volstead Act, in that they thought it would pass over them, but the neighborhood awoke to the sound of crashing glass and shouting men. The LAPD (No, Not That One) was rousing innkeepers and bartenders and boozeslingers and my God even Goat-Bladder Murph! The cops were pouring the alcohol into the Main Drag, some of it, and carrying off the rest. Sharp-eyed residents noticed that they were carrying off a lot more than they spilled. These same observant folks also saw that several establishments, the newly-opened Irving Club included among them, were not party to such molestations. Later that day, those watchful locals made the barrels and cases and kegs going into the Irving, via the back door, and carried in by the same cops who had carried them out of the other joints.

Not that the Irving was a joint. Shit, it was swanky: the chain on the toilet was gold-plated, and all the glasses were clean instead of just most of ’em, and immensely-stemmed women sauntered about selling cigarettes and cigars and hits of ether and zip guns and pocket Constitutions. Stylish. The fellows wore tuxedos and the skirts wore dresses. Scandalous. The public casino was in the back: roulette, craps,  blackjack; the room upstairs was for poker, and more exclusive. Salacious. There were private dining rooms that for some reason had beds in them. Spectacular. The Irvettes did the can-can, which was some Parisian shit. Billy McGlory didn’t get into that. When the girls kicked real high, everybody could see their underpants. What more was there to think about? The one thing Billy did know was that Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to a bartender.

Some months before the Volstead Act went into effect, this conversation took place:

“We got a visit today.”

“Santa?”

“It’s September, Billy.”

“Who the fuck came to see you, Sean?”

“Chief of Police from C—-a City.”

“Royster came? In person, like?”

“He did.”

“Why didn’t he call on the telephone?”

“He did, but we kept pretending we had a bad connection and hanging up on him.”

“Tactical decision.”

“We figured no good could come from talking to him. So the bloated fucker shows up in his fancy dress blues. The man’s enormous. It was like the ocean walked in.”

“And what’d he say?”

“That we gotta shut down all the booze. All the bars, liquor stores, whatever. You gotta see the stack of fuckin’ legal documents he threw at us. Fat as he is.”

“You didn’t bring ’em over?”

“No. Oh. Should I have?”

“Jesus, you’re fuckin’ thick sometime. Send somebody down with ’em when you get back to the station.”

“Okay. So, what do we do?”

“As we’re fuckin’ well told, brother. Prohibtion will be the law of the land, and we are solid citizens. We’re a nation of fuckin’ laws, Sean.”

“Sure.”

“So you and your boys are gonna shutter every fuckin’ gin-joint in this neighborhood.”

“What about the ones we own?”

“Except for those.”

That was a conversation that took place some time before the Volstead Act went into effect.

In ’33, the 21st Amendment nullified the 18th, and America swore to never do anything that dumb again. The country kept its self-made promise for almost four years, and then made marijuana illegal so as to have work for the new government employees hired to prohibit things. Booze was back, anyway, and well-regulated this time. Prospective purveyors needed something called a liquor license. You had to apply, for fuck’s sake, and the government–of all fucking people–was allowed to turn you down. You couldn’t sell beer next to, or within, a school anymore. No more ratfights in the basement. Jesus Christ, you had to pay taxes. What’s the world come to when you have to pay taxes?

“Gimme one of those.”

“The cigarettes or the beer?”

“The cigarette. I’m on duty. And it’s nine in the morning,” Fancy Delaware said.

“Lots of people drink at nine in the morning,” Iffy Bould answered.

“Who?”

“Alcoholics.”

Fancy Delaware had a blue ballcap on; it had a yellow cartoon ox on the front, and was pulled down to the tops of her sunglasses, which were black and she thought she looked bitchin’ in. They were the ones whats-his-face wore in the movie where he danced in his underwear. She had a butt-chin and a white coat and blue scrubs and neon yellow sneakers. People who wear scrubs every day tend towards outlandish footwear.

Iffy wore brown lace-ups that needed a shine.

FFT. POP.

“Thank you.”

FWOO

“Any time.”

FWOO.

They were standing behind the dumpster on the far side of St. Agatha’s parking lot. Iffy was used to meeting sources in secret: Town Fathers in Foole’s Yard, and whistleblowers at Harper Zoo, and assassins the Town Fathers had hired but neglected to pay in The Tahitian. Iffy always wanted to tell them, “We don’t have to be so dramatic. Just call me,” but everyone thinks they’re in a movie and so passwords and dead drops were involved.

There was no subterfuge this morning, however: Fancy was on her way to the dumpster for her twice-daily smoke break when she saw him slouch up. She didn’t like to smoke in sight of the hospital.

“The guy.”

“There’s quite a few. Which one?”

“The one who’s been giving you extra work.”

“The Muggerfucker?”

Iffy snorted a puff of used Kool out his nose.

“Is that what you’re calling him?”

“Yeah. That asshole’s a real asshole. You gotta see these kids.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said and looked at his notebook. “Marielito. Shit, I didn’t write down his last name.”

“I can’t tell you it’s Germain.”

“I won’t write that down.”

He wrote it down.

“There were two more waiting for me this morning when I got in. You ever see a donkey stomp a coyote to death?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to. These kids are fucked up.”

“Kids?”

“16, 17. They’re committing street crimes. You grow out of that in your twenties. Ever see an old mugger?”

“Age leads us to indoor felonies, I suppose.”

“Right. You want to sit down while you rob someone. Some of these poor bastards are going to be sitting a lot for a while. Maybe forever. He literally shoved a guy’s leg up his own asshole.”

“Sure.”

Fancy took off her sunglasses; her thick eyebrows were just as black, but hairier.

“Lit-uh-ruh-lee. Let me say it all doctor-like: patient presented with left leg inserted in rectum up to the middle of the tibia and fibula.”

“I don’t think your knee is supposed to bend that way.”

“I know it’s not. I learned that fact at medical school. The human knee is incapable of that motion. I got all sorts of books that prove it.”

Iffy copied down her words in shorthand. It was 198-, and he was a reporter, so he knew shorthand.

“How’s Marielito?”

“He’s fucked up.”

“People keep saying.”

“That motherfucker the Muggerfucker punched his jaw into his shoulder.”

He looked up, and the Kool that was dangling in the corner of his mouth dropped its ash in response.

“Wait, he really did that? I thought Esperanza was making things up.”

“His jaw. In his shoulder. His mandible worked its way through his neck and into his fucking shoulder. Again: something that medical school had assured me was impossible.”

She put her sunglasses back on. Fancy preferred the night shift. It was simply more interesting, but she forced herself to take a week of day shifts every month. The real world happened during the day, she thought, and she knew that she could drift from it if she was not careful. Her eyes never did quite adjust to the sun, though.

“Did you put it back?”

“The jaw?”

“Yeah.”

“Not me. They called in specialists. Team of them. They said they never saw anything like it, either. Well, first they said, ‘What the fuck kind of neighborhood are you running here?’ and then they said they never saw anything like it.”

“Rude.”

“Surgeons.”

“Sure.”

Fancy clocked her butt to see how much she had left FWOO and said,

“You have to do something about this.”

“Me? I’m gonna write a story.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. Write the real story.”

“Some would say that the real story is a man taking back the streets for law-abiding citizens.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Playing devil’s advocate.”

“Don’t. Devil’s got enough advocates.”

He nodded, and did not write that down in shorthand in his notebook.

“This guy’s an asshole. He’s the bad guy, If. Get the story right.”

She stubbed out her Kool with her

“I didn’t tell you Marielito is in Room 402. Don’t walk back with me.”

Fancy Delaware flapped her white coat like a stork’s wings as she walked across the parking lot of St. Agatha’s and back to the Emergency Room entrance, new glass doors fixed into the old masonry with the department’s motto chiseled above: Quid hoc fecisti, ut tibi. SWOOSH the doors withdrew for her and then SWOOSH they clapped shut behind her, and Iffy Bould counted down from 30; when he was past “one,” he crushed his cigarette under his brown lace-up and carried his notebook and a six-pack of beer towards the story–whatever the fuck it would turn out to be–in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

At first, there was nothing.

Next, there was something, but very little of it.

Stars ignited

Planets formed.

Then, Cannot Swim opened his eyes and Here And There was sitting on the edge of his bed.

“MOTHERFUCKER!”

He didn’t say “motherfucker.” There’s no word in the Pulaski language that directly translates to “motherfucker.” What he said sounded kind of like “ri’znizh’ki” and meant something like “owls shit in your mouth and you enjoy it,” but it had the connotation of “motherfucker.” The Pulaski did have a word that directly translated to “motherfucker” but it was used to address a man who was married to your mother but wasn’t your father. Like a second husband. It wasn’t a curse word, and it certainly wasn’t something you’d yelp in surprised fear when the shaman showed up in your kotcha in the middle of the night.

“Oh, good. You’re awake.”

“I wasn’t. Why are you here?”

“And There.”

“What?”

“Hello, cousin.”

Here And There and Cannot Swim were most probably cousins. Everyone in the tribe was related–there were technically five families, but there was a lot of interhumping–and it was probably true that they were cousins, but Cannot Swim did not know exactly in what way. He knew they weren’t cousins like he and Talks To Whites were cousins: their mothers had been sisters. He also knew that he had never corrected Here And There when she called him “cousin.”

“Hi.”

“Cool out tonight.”

“Mm. Which is why I’m under the blanket. You could be, too.”

“I don’t think Throwing Knife would like that very much.”

“I meant your blanket in your kotcha,” Cannot Swim said, and turned over to look at his wife. She was lightly snoring, she sounded like a happy cat, and her left leg was kicked out from under the bearskin that covered her enormous belly. The Pulaski slept on low wooden platforms, just a few inches off the ground, and their mattresses were made from the same bearskin as their blankets, but shorn of fur. More leather for a pillow, rolled up into a tight cylinder. The bed took up almost half of the floor space; the Pulaski spent little time in their kotchas. Sleeping, fucking, staying out of the rain every 18 days. Otherwise, they were outside.

The only sound was Throwing Knife. She went schWOHz and snorted a little. When she was not pregnant, she slept in total silence. Cannot Swim found that hard to get used to when they moved in together. He would watch her in the dark and wish for just a little plurp or muhhf or something. She looked dead. He wanted to poke her, and did once. He did not do that again. Ever since she started showing, though, she slumbered with more volume. He secretly liked it.

But she was a light sleeper.

“Why is she still sleeping? She wakes up when the dog farts. And, holy shit, why is the dog still asleep?”

In a few hours when the sun rose over the Segovian Hills and blessed the valley, you would be able to see the white in Black Eyes’ muzzle. She slept inside now, where it was warmer and she had a blanket to lay on. Throwing Knife had made fun of Cannot Swim for this: dogs were not pampered in the Pulaski village. They drank from the lake, ate what was tossed to them, and slept on the ground. Cannot Swim agreed with her 100%, and then laid the blanket out, anyway. He had figured out that trick in the short time they had been cohabitating, and was proud of himself. Throwing Knife let him think he had gotten away with something. It wasn’t like she was getting rid of the dog: Black Eyes had heeled up on her right side nine months ago and refused to leave. She had done the math and it said that the dog took up her post the morning after the conception, but Throwing Knife refused to believe the math on account of she didn’t want to.

So Black Eyes was at the foot of the bed. She was a 100-pound lumpish shape in the dark, unmoving.

“I drugged them.”

“What? You drugged Throwing Knife? She’s fucking pregnant!”

“I didn’t drug her. It was a joke.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I drugged you.”

“Motherfucker, you did, didn’t you?”

And now they were atop the pass in between the fourth and fifth peaks of the mountain range that separated the Pulaski’s valley from America. The stars were in their hair, and the wind from the Pacific snapped at their ears, and prickles of grass shot up between the bare, too-long toes of Here And There’s wide, flat feet. Cannot Swim was also barefoot; he shivered in his breachcloth.

“You couldn’t let me put on my shoes?”

“You’re not really cold.”

“I absolutely am.”

“No, you can’t be. We’re not actually here. This is just a dream.”

Cannot Swim was a foot-and-a-half taller than Here And There, and he took a deep breath because he had never struck another member of his tribe before out of anger, and he instinctively knew that he should not start with the shaman.

“Here And There?”

“Yuh-huh?”

“Cousin?”

“Yeah?”

“With all due respect?”

“Oh, of course.”

“Completely unfuckingnecesary. All of this, the entire thing. If you have something to tell me, you could’ve told me at dinner.”

“Oh, no. No, no. I need to discuss shaman shit with you. Can’t do it over a meal while you’re sober. Shaman shit is for the middle of the night with your mind all greased-up.”

He ran his fingers through black hair, which was loose and to his shoulder blades. Throwing Knife braided it every morning, very early, just as the sky is pinking up and the world is quiet and thoughtful. When she was finished, he would braid her hair, which was the same length and shade. It was his favorite time of day.

“I want a straight answer.”

“Man, are you talking to the wrong person.”

“Am I dreaming, or did you drug me?”

Here And There also had black hair, but hers hung to her waist and was shot through with seven vertical white stripes like an overachieving skunk. All the Pulaski had dark eyes, but there was no distinction between the black of her pupils and the corneas. She was the only member of the tribe to have freckles. They splotched winglike around her nose. She had a smile you wished she’d point somewhere else.

“Both.

And now they were back in the kotcha on the bed.

“Neither.”

And now they were atop the pass.

“What does it matter? Stop breaking my balls. It’s magick.”

And now they were standing on the surface of the water in the middle of the lake where the Pulaski fished. Cannot Swim looked down, at Here And There, down again, back, and then up at the sky with his eyes tightly shut.

“We could go back to the pass.”

“Are you sure?”

He did not look down one tiny little bit.

“Yes. Yes. The pass sounds great. I’m up for the pass.”

“You’re gonna stop asking stupid questions?”

“I’m just gonna listen.”

“Oh, no. This is a conversation we’re having, cousin. I welcome your input.”

They were back on the pass, and the stars were back in their hair, and Cannot Swim stomped the ground several times before peeking downwards. He poked a rock with his toe suspiciously. He had never been up here without a rifle before, and definitely not at night. For good reason.

The culls began in earnest in 1920. Little Aleppo had profiteered the living shit out of the federal government during the First World War One. No substandard was too sub, no price was too inflated. The sailors who docked at the Salt Wharf had a buyer for the trash fish they used to use as chum, Hognosed fluke and Tierra del Fuegan flipperdicks and spaghetti mackarel; the garment shops turned out uniforms made from wheat shavings and human stubble; a carpenter named Alan Lamp made a quick buck selling the Army wooden bullets. The neighborhood was making money by the trenchload, slowed only by the still-dirt trail that connected it to America. Trucks had taken over for horses, but not entirely, and it was still not safe to make the journey at night. People still did, and most made it, but more than occasionally the morning would find a truck sitting empty right in the middle of the trail. The merchandise would only be touched if it was food.

Before 1920, there were forays. Hunting trips. Heavily-armed ones, but still just men ambling about the woods while drinking. Couple even nailed a squatch, swear they did, but there was just blood and grass when they got to where the downed corpse should be. Drunken ninnies with rifles, most. Gunther Hundeschreier even made a trip: he was the biggest big game hunter, and he was game. He left from the Irving Club at dawn, accompanied by six porters in native garb. Native to where was not obvious: one guy was in a grass skirt, and another had paint all over his face, and one was a Sherpa. Gunter was in all-khaki: pressed shorts, and a shirt with all sorts of pockets, and tall boots with laces, and one of those hats where you button a side of the brim up and leave the other floppy. He had an elephant gun–must have been five feet long–that he made sure everyone watch him load, then he shouldered the cannon and he and his porters marched towards the Segovian Hills. He handed the gun off to the Sherpa when the crowd could no longer see them. The rifle, badly rusted and occupied by a family of shrews, was discovered in 1972; the hat was never found.

After 1920, though, Little Aleppians got serious about carving their road to America, and they also became much more heavily armed due to all the surplus war materiel coming back from the Pacific part of WWI that everyone has forgotten about. The Browning M1917 is a water-cooled full automatic that shoots 30.06 shells at a rate of 500 a minute and at a range of 1,500 yards. Properly maintained, a Browning M1917 will fire for several hours straight without needing repair. It made killing very easy; the only tough part was carrying all the ammunition. The Town Fathers paid for a militia, but they didn’t pay a lot, so the militia was not well-regulated. Estimates put the number of human dead, from carelessness or drunkenness or falling off the mountains, at about commensurate with the number of squatch deaths. Men outnumbered beast, so it was a game of attrition. If you ever find yourself in a game attrition, try to be on the side with the machine guns. In 1922, the hills were declared clear, and construction begun on not only Christy Canyon, but also on Skyway Drive and Biscuit Court and Gitcheegoomee Way and a hundred other concrete tributaries tracing upwards. The machine guns were locked away in the armory.

They were hurriedly fetched from the armory in 1923 when it came to be known, bloodily, that the hills had not been cleared. The last stand of the squatch was called the Battle of the Main Drag, and there are still one or two buildings with bullet holes in them from that day, but they blend in with all the other bullet holes made since then, so the historic ones are tough to find.

And then the Whites lived everywhere in Little Aleppo. (The Blacks and Hispanics and Asians, too. The hills were not segregated, mostly because the homes were so spread apart or tucked away that no one had to see their neighbors.) The final foot of tarmac was laid on the crest of the pass in ’24, and then there was the world and there was America, but not in that order. No more horses. Just cars and trucks and even buses. Motorcyclists zoomed over, and died a lot. Move your product inland in a tenth of the time. Commerce, baby.

The road was for the merchants, but the streets were for the people. Mostly the rich, lazy, or weird people; it was a pain in the ass getting from your house on, say, Mount Fortitude to the Main Drag, and it was completely impossible without an automobile. There were mansions–Harper T. Harper built his Roman-ish villa up on Mount Charity, and so did the Braunce family, and also the Boones–and writers had shacks where their editors would lay in a month’s supply of whiskey and cigarettes and lock them in. The monastery is on Mount Faith. The Observatory went up in the 30’s high atop Pulaski Peak, and the 100-foot-tall antenna went up on Mount Lincoln. During the Second World War Two, fallout shelters were dug into Mount Booth. (No one in the neighborhood was informed of these shelters; they were suspiciously light on concrete and supplies, but chockful of the Town Father’s families and they all had pools, too.)

The artists lived on Mount Chastity, which is the mountain directly north of Pulaski Peak; Christy Canyon divides them. It is the steepest of the seven hills, and therefore the toughest to climb and descend, which means it was inexpensive to live there. Artists can smell cheap rent from across a continent, and Chastity filled up with creative types: drunken painters, and drunken novelists, and drunken guitar players. Barkeeps can smell artists, too, and so The Colonel’s opened up. Everyone was positive that Evelyn Wood had never attained the rank of colonel, mostly because the Army wasn’t letting women in at the time, but she’d throw you right the fuck out if you didn’t call her Colonel, so no one poked about into her story too hard. You could also get groceries, and all the mail for the mountain was delivered there, and small home goods, too. When there were puppies or kitties to be given away, they were placed in a cardboard box on the counter. The Colonel’s was more of a general store.

You’d be shocked how many of your favorite records happened because of The Colonel’s. It was where Kate Skye met Arnie Delviking. She had all those songs, all those whispers of songs sitting there in the living room of the pad she was renting from a friend of a friend of the guy who cut her hair. The place came with furniture, but she moved every stick of it into a back bedroom. Better acoustics. She wrote her lyrics in green pen. She had a thing about it. They were in a composition book with a crease down the front from where she folded it up and carried it around in the back pocket of her bell-bottom dungarees. She had these songs, these little whispers of songs, and she played them for Arnie after they got drunk at The Colonel’s and went back to her bare bungalow. She sat on the hearth in front of the unlit fireplace, and she played guitar like it was a magic trick. When she was done, they smoked a joint and fucked, and then Arnie–who used to write hit teenybopper singles at the Brill Building before dropping acid and moving Out West–drove Kate to his place, where he had a small recording studio and called up muscians who owed him favors and he sat at the piano while she sat on a stool. Arnie arranged ’em, and Kate sang ’em–twice, maybe three times–and the pickup band picked up what they were laying down. Took three days. Kate called the album The Fireplace Sessions, and it went Gold. Kate went on tour, got famous, married poorly, then well. Arnie built a bigger studio on Hyperion Lane.

He called it Virgin Studios–thought it was clever, being on Mount Chastity and all–but received an angry letter from some rich asshole in London, and gave up trying to be clever and just called the place Hyperion Studios. There was a small parking lot out front, and then the lounge and the offices and the little kitchen where rhythm sections had screaming matches, and behind that was the studio proper. It was built into the hill itself: the builders plugged the whole structure into an existing cave. This gave the room a resonance that was tough to find in recording studios not built into mountains.

Muggley, Finch, and Bowels laid down Spinner Topper right there in that room.  Sold two million. The drummer was in the corner behind wooden curtains, and the bass player sat by the pianist, and Muggley, Finch and Bowels were in the middle of the space equidistant around one suspended microphone. They would smoke joints and harmonize. By their next album, they were also snorting cocaine and harmonizing, which may be why they named the album Carbonated Underwear Vs. the Jukebox Pirates of Titan. It did not sell as well.

The Snug’s first album didn’t move, either. This made Arnie Delviking ecstatic. He had met poorly-behaved bands before–Keith Richards had once thrown a ladder at him–but The Snug was special. Most bands grew into their arrogance, but The Snug’s entitled dickishness existed fully-formed at their inception, like gods bursting forth from Cronos, but instead of gods there were insane demands and spontaneous tantrums and poorly-timed OD’s. The poorly-timed OD is what separates the wheat from the boys, Arnie thought. Anyone could overdose, but only a true Rock Star would choose to do so while performing at the Grammys, or signing a desperately-needed new contract.

None of them had been in a recording studio before, which didn’t stop them for one instant telling everyone what to do. Johnny Mister insisted on turning his Hi-Watt amps up as loud as they’d go, which Arnie explained was not the way to do it; Johnny countered by taking a shit on the floor. Holiday Rhodes was 99% finished with the lyrics. All that was left to do was to pick out the exact right words, and also the order they went in: 99% finished. He spent most of the sessions hectoring the drummer, Rut Morgan, who was replaced on the second record after losing all of his limbs in a high-stakes poker game. He was probably going to be fired, anyway, but Johnny and Holiday were glad for the excuse. Bassist Dave Ronn sat on his stool and didn’t bother anyone, drinking steadily until he flopped off his stool; the roadies would prop him against a speaker cabinet, where he would continue to not bother anyone.

“Arnie?”

Arnie hit the button on the mixing board that turned on his mic into the studio.

“Johnny?”

“We need a marching band.”

“I’ll check in my office.”

“Oh, they wouldn’t fit in there. Don’t bother checking,” Johnny said. He had taken acid, and was now earnest.

“We can’t get a marching band.”

“I need one.”

“Well, it’s two in the morning. So that’s going to be a barrier. Marching bands are almost exclusively found in the daytime.”

“They call that circadian rhythm.”

“And you can’t afford a marching band.”

“They’ll do it for art, man.”

“They won’t.”

And Johnny took another shit on the floor, this time earnestly.

Hyperion Studios is still there, and Arnie still owns it. Spends more time retelling old stories for rock and roll documentaries than recording lately. The big room hasn’t changed, not a baffle. During tours, Arnie points out the stain on the carpet and say, “That was Johnny Mister.” Young musicians come by to hang out and smoke dope, and they ask him for advice. He tells them to go back in time and purchase a bunch of real estate in the early 70’s. “Worked out great for me,” he says.

“Raspberry?”

“No, thank you.”

“They’re ripe as hell.”

“I’m good,” Cannot Swim said.

“I didn’t put drugs in them.”

He said nothing. It would have been dramatic if a shooting star passed overhead, but none did.

“Okay, yeah, there’s drugs in them,” Here And There laughed and popped a plump berry in her mouth.

Pulaski Peak was behind her; its summit would not be smoothed down and colonized for 50 years, and it was jagged and no human being had ever stood atop it. There was no reason to do so, and every reason not to even think about trying. The hill that would be called Mount Chastity was behind him. Its summit was nubby and sawed-off and covered in gentle grass where Pulaski Peak’s was rocky. Nobody had been up there, either.

“What will you do in the morning?”

“Oversee the hiding of the gold. Then Talks To Whites and I will go and speak to the White.”

“That should work. They seem reasonable.”

“Well, what should we do?”

“I’m not the one to ask. Shamans aren’t good with tactics.”

“Why don’t you use your magick?”

Here And There had several laughs: the low heheheheh she used on purpose, and the sudden BWA that leapt from her when a laugh was forced from her. She went BWA! and a shooting star crossed the sky, finally.

“You don’t use magick. And it’s not mine. But besides that: great idea.”

“You don’t use magick? What do you do with it?”

“Entice it into a temporary alliance. Try not to annoy it. Be elsewhere when it gets cranky. But you can’t use it. Magick isn’t a tool.”

FWOMP there was a neat campfire in front of them, with a log pleasant for sitting.

“I mean, sometimes it’s a tool. But you don’t wanna press your luck.”

She flattened her tunic under her tush as she sat, then patted the empty space next to her. Cannot Swim flattened his tunic the same way, joined her, extended his hands towards the fire.

“Go with your cousin tomorrow. Take Black Eyes, too.”

“She won’t leave Throwing Knife’s side”

“She will. Take her. Pay attention to your cousin. He cannot be objective about the Whites. Their language is in his brain too deeply. His father taught it to him at too young an age. He sees the world as they do.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. Are there any raspberries without drugs in them?”

“No, but I have some blueberries like that.”

He held out his hand and said, “Please,” and she filled it. The blueberries that grew near their village were the size of popcorn kernels from an upscale movie theater. Cannot Swim chucked a few back, chewed, swallowed.

“No, wait. I drugged the blueberries, too.”

“When I was a boy, my father told me to stay the hell away from you.”

“You should’ve listened.”

The fire popped and sizzled and was the only source of light. It played across Here And There’s forehead; she had tucked her hair behind her ears and her face fractured, came back together, rebroke in the hopping, yellow glow.

Now the fire leapt outwards, not evenly, tendrils and branches that climbed over each other; the radius of flame was increasing and SHWAMP it was all around Cannot Swim and the shaman, all seven hills and now the valley to the west and America to the east: fully involved and here goes the sky and there went the sea; the fire took it all but would not die out. The two Pulaski sat and burned forever.

“Can you see the future, cousin?”

“No.”

“Me, neither. Maybe there’s a trick to it.”

And now the fire is back where it should be, a tool to be used, and the two Pulaski sat in the cold night and wished they knew what tomorrow would be like.

The middle of the night’s got its own economy, heroes, political third rails. It’s a whole different place than daytime, which is why it takes so long to get there. There’s that first little bit, the couple hours after evening when folks fuck and drink and watch teevee and wash the children, and then there’s the final squeezings, that inky-purple patch that morning people and joggers claim as their own–because they’re greedy fucks, morning people and joggers–but between them is the middle of the night, which is ruled by cannot.

Can’t have a fancy wedding at two in the morning. (And bear in mind we’re not speaking of Las Vegas here, just normal locales.) Fan belt’s not getting replaced; shit, the bus isn’t coming by for hours. Translators and stenographers are of little to no use; piano tuners, even less. Your options for ethnic foods are severely curtailed. Art museums, pick-your-own apple farms, pool supply stores: no, no, no. You could not adopt a pet or a child in the middle of the night, at least not legally. The teevee went off at three. Draculette signed off–“Good night, boogers. Try not to die.”–and then you were on your own. You could get a drink, or a burger, or stabbed, but that was about it and some folks couldn’t even get out for the stabbing. Look up next time you’re walking through the middle of the night: always a few lights burning with the curtains drawn.  Listen, too, and you’ll hear the same voices. Babies crying out hungry, and dying men calling out lonely. Bong-induced coughing fits.

And the AM radio. AM radio lives in the middle of the night, and that’s when Mark Lake did his show on 770 KHAY.

He had competition, too. Draculette and the Late Show ruled the ratings because all the other stations literally stopped coming in clearly around eleven at night, and the FM stations from over the hills got crackly, as well, but the AM powered up at night. FM and teevee are line-of-sight transmitters, but the AM signal gets bounced off the ionosphere and back down to your car radio. When the sun goes down, the air cools and this sends the ionosphere hurtling upwards, increasing the stations’ ranges. It’s just trigonometry, but it brought in all kinds of sounds to Little Aleppo at night. The super-station blasting 150,000 watts from Tijuana, with that scratchy-voiced guy who seemed far too excited about introducing a Dion record. From New York, even: Jews pretending to be Italians, and speaking quickly as a magic trick. There was KJRC from El Paso, and they only broadcast about Jesus and never, ever played a Chuck Berry record, not even once, and you could sense it immediately upon setting on the station; you could listen for only two minutes and know–comprehend in your soul, dig?–that not only did these motherfuckers not play Chuck Berry records, these motherfuckers probably didn’t even own a Chuck Berry record, and by golly what kind of way is that to live? It was understandable to pray to Jesus in the middle of the night, but no one could bear being lectured at about Him at that hour. It was too late to rock and roll, and too early for Jesus.

So Mark Lake didn’t play records. There were recordings, but never records. Mark played stuff he’d get sent. Servicemen, and folks who served, but just not in uniform, and government contractors. Their names and ranks were never revealed.

“It might be as dangerous for you to know their names as it would be for them to be known,” Mark would say. He had a voice from the West: all his consonants got clipped and dropped and swallowed, and the vowels flattened out, and there was almost no nasality. His jaw did more work than his lips did; they sounded thin, and just along for the ride. In stories from his childhood, he would always mention the desert. He never mentioned which one.

“Caller, you’re on The Middle of the Night with Mark Lake. You got Mark.”

“Hey, Mark. Big fan.”

“Uh-huh. What’s your name?”

“I wanted to talk about the Silurian Hypothesis.”

“Oh, yeah. Fascinating stuff. Love to. What’s your name, caller?”

“I’d rather not give it to you, Mark. My safety is paramount on remaining anonymous. I know too much about this.”

“About the Silurian Hypothesis? That there was a lost society of reptile-people around 350,000 years ago? How could any knowledge about that put anyone in danger?”

“The amphibian-people.”

“Oh, okay. That makes sense.”

“Very jealous of the reptile people. It’s like an inferiority complex thing with them.”

“I can see that, sure. Now, caller, how did you come by this information?”

“Working for the amphibian-people.”

“In what capacity?”

“Plumber.”

“Okay.”

“They have specific toilet needs that we as primates don’t take into account when designing buildings. I had to do a lot of modifications for them. They secretly own every racehorse. It’s like how that one company sells every brand of glasses? The amphibian-people own all the racehorses.”

“There’s a lot that never added up about horse racing that, with your contribution, now makes more sense. Why are you coming forward now?”

“They like to purge their human support staff every few years, so I felt my life was in danger.”

“Purge?”

“Eat.”

“Of course.”

Mark’d hang up on you, but he wouldn’t tease you. He took the confessions of the weird, and he had his vows just like a priest. No screeners. You called, and he answered. This was, he often told his listeners, the way of nature. The Lord meant for us to screen our calls, we would’ve been born with secretaries. You called, and he answered, and you could tell your story. He’d poke at it a little, edge it towards the juicy chunks, slap it back in play when it rambled towards the railing, but it was still your story. You could tell it on the radio, late at night.

Workers from Dulce Base had called in, with a strange clicking sound in the background like a tape recorder running. Folks had the wrong ideas about aliens, they said. They were time travelers. The gray ones with the necks and the big eyes? They were us from a million years from now, and all of them–there were currently 411 at Dulce Base alone–had broken the timestream getting here and had no way back; they were hellaciously pissed about it, hence all the anal probing. A sizable portion of the Defense budget went to entertaining them.

Fran Kukla called in every month or so. She had discovered what she called the Moving Mountain, which was a mountain that moved. Fran wasn’t great at naming things, but she could spot the fuck out of a mountain.

“It’s in Utah, Mark. I’m in Utah, right outside of Provo, and Moving Mountain is here. I’m looking right at it.”

“This is exciting news, Fran. I’m glad you call me first with these things, it really means a lot.”

“Oh, thank you, Mark.”

“Now, Fran, do you perhaps have a camera on you?”

“I do not, Mark. You’re just going to have to take my word for it. I could describe it for you if you’d like.”

“Yes, please.”

“It looks like a mountain.”

Fran was good at spotting mountains, not describing them. She and Mark would talk for a while, and then she’d hang up and call back in four or five weeks with Moving Mountain in her sights, this time in Mobile, Alabama or somewhere.

Lights in the sky hovered, zoomed, changed direction impossibly fast on The Middle of the Night with Mark Lake. Drexian warships loaded for bear play peak-a-boo behind skyscrapers in Chicago, Hong Kong. A case was made to give voting rights to maple syrup. Squatch still lurked in the hills and hallucinogenic mushrooms grew from their scat. Most of the Senate were cyborgs; most of the House were androids; the Supreme Court were all secretly related to the Royal Family, and also reptile-people. Virtually everyone is a reptile-person, if you think about it. Reagan (who is also obviously a reptile-person) set up a task force called Glorious-28, which was supposed to take a census of alien life on earth, but ended up collaborating with the Drexians and infiltrating the Department of the Interior.

“Oh, sure,” Mark would say. “Department of Interior doesn’t belong to us anymore. Not for a while.”

The world was shadowy, but a shadow needs a subject. There had to be a reason, Mark’s callers demanded. Someone did this. Someone is responsible. The world wouldn’t have done this to itself, after all. The world was too messy and confusing to be random; hell, it was too damned random to be random. There had to be someone behind all this. Moriarty’s out there. Satan dwells. Amphibian-people gonna getcha.

“Mark, I agree with the last caller. February clearly doesn’t exist.”

“The evidence is there. However you wish to interpret that evidence? Well, that’s up to you. But I do agree that there is strong, strong evidence that the month of Febraury is fictional.”

“It’s a way for the government to get an extra four weeks of work out of us for free.”

“It’s amazing it’s gone on this long.”

“It’s the Big Lie theory.”

“Absolutely.”

“I actually called to talk about Operation: Full Moon.”

“Yes, yes. The Navy’s experiments into weaponized lycanthropics. I hear that they’re still working on it.”

“Me, too. My sources say that they’ve been successful and turned several sailors into werewolfs. I had one question, though, Mark.”

“I have many questions. But go ahead with yours.”

“Sure, okay. Uh, why the Navy? I don’t understand how it helps you to have a werewolf on a boat.”

“The Navy has people who leave the boat.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. They have guns and everything.”

“Huh. Okay. That’s good information, thank you. But it does bring up another question.”

“Questions tend to do that around here.”

“Would the werewolf sailors still have their guns?”

“Now, that’s interesting. It depends. Were your sources specific that they had been changed into werewolfs, and not wolfmen?”

“Quite specific, Mark. I pinned him down on it.”

“Then they would need some sort of custom weapon.”

Mark Lake took your calls until there wasn’t any more night left, picked up the phone himself and let you tell your story. He’d add yours to his, and the listeners would place it with theirs. You weren’t paranoid, Mark’s patience said; the world was stranger than it seemed, but you were not. His show was called The Middle of the Night because that is the only time it could exist, and it was on AM radio broadcasting live and strong from Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

For Art Bell.