First Pages: 

LEFT

Book One

 We float in the monstrous hover lover eight hundred and sixty-three and a half feet above the waters of the Pacific aiming our faces eastward with severe laser understanding and minds capable of a broad, sexy sweep, directly at the confluence of two great rivers that arrive first from mountains then from deep semi-aridity that confounds, one flowing north and one south to meet at a famous delta and then an amazing, internationally renowned bay, and we can see everything. There, in front of our slippery hovering ship, is a continent and the edge of it. First California and then the rest of North America and the Atlantic just over the horizon and more of all the world. We live and love a universe. A hand directs our gaze at sea and the land’s edge and inward to the two mighty rivers. We understand and we know that one arrives from the right, over there, and the other from the left, up there. South and right, north and left, left and right, and geography interdigitates with politics and social swerving. Southern California more right than any other. And Northern California, especially along the wild-sweeping bay, evolved left to a much greater degree. Contained within dichotomies and poles, opposites, nether and ether, ups and downs, lives our story. Within this tale we cradle the world, the natural and the human universe, and we are at play, swimming in the wonders of it. Left and right, up and down, the known and the unknown. Our humming hold in the hover lover excites us, we see the water and we spy the land, the mountains and the rivers and the people being, we spot there and we appreciate here, and finally we grasp all there is to know. 

Mitchell Barstow and Patricia Banks our lovers and the principles of the story.  Don’t worry, they’re coming, they’re coming.  But right now, they kiss under a live oak, stunted scraggly leaves resistant to drought. No doubt. Busting out. They will be here soon, not under a moon but in the middle of the afternoon. We hear their footfalls, holding hands, dreaming of the sweet future, and a redolence of this future, and a palpability. They can see it all. Theirs, understand, is rosy. They’ll leave the river at some point, perhaps make the bay, maybe head east. It doesn’t matter. In love, always in love, no shortage of it. Shh, shh, they’re on their way. A sweet, fine, sad way. God, I can’t believe he made the decision to join. I don’t know . . . I thought for sure he’d, well . . . Well, we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves.  

- - -

 And oh, that’s just beautiful, that is simply great:  Let’s see, a love story between a simple American boy and girl from a small American county from a family of patriots.  Yes, the boy joins the military, the Army, but why?  And the boy ships off to Iraq – of course!  And if he wasn’t my cousin, believe me we wouldn’t be reading this story right now.  Oh, yes, and I’m the big shot in the family raised by the falutinists who went back east.  Okay, fine, Ivy League education, live in Boston, a farmhouse in Vermont just as the artist dreamed about as a child.  Now all of this, my damn cousin.  And, let’s see, a young man is in a Humvee in the dry desert, doing his simple thing like defending freedom and democracy and all of that rot, and a rocket propelled grenade, et cetera and so forth, cousin in hospital, father and husband, young simple American lad, knocked out of his shoes and socks.  But he dies there?  That’s too simple, too easy, far far too simple and easy.  And the Time of the Wars of Terror is more complicated than all that.  Love, yes, I enjoy the aspect of love.  Tragedy, well, the only reason I would write about a family member:  it would have to impel me beyond my means and measure, would compel me to putting down the work in progress and start anew.  Because I knew the kid, I camped with him that one time, in the Sierra, his first trip, just the two of us.  And I thought, sure, he was shy.  But I also thought he possessed a nice, special quality, a kind of leadership even, quiet and easy.  Good hands, I said that.  I thought he would play quarterback.  Wrong there, but whatever.  And straight A’s in middle school, when we went on that camping trip, encouraged me to suspect that we might have another brilliant family member ready to escape the redneck simplicity of scary counties on the fringes of California’s urban culture.  Oh, no, not that everybody has to be a yuppie.  That’s not what I’m saying.  But that California will throw townies at you harder than most states.  They’re wilder; more western; used to the big spaces. And so I looked at Mitch, the young man of the tale, and saw him going places.  I wasn’t prepared for the D’s in high school.  I missed entirely that his quiet shyness would deepen, would worsen.  And then joining the Army, well, that wasn’t even on my radar screen, so to say.  It was then that I lost Mitchell.  I didn’t stop caring, no; but I paid attention only from afar. 

            And yes, I doubt seriously that I would write a novel, a fictional account of my cousin, if he died in that Humvee explosion.  He was innocent.  Oh, and friends do die, jesus do they die:  family members and friends.  A Purple Heart – those still exist you know.  You get the medal.  And it was during the last half of his tour:  you always hear of those stories:  the guy who had a week to go in ‘Nam and then the helicopter crashed.  It’s hard to handle those types of stories.  Mitch?  Mitch made it home, fine, he saw his wife again and his child for the first time.  Unfortunately, the insidious, secret complications of our Terror Age took over the reins of the story, shocked even a mind able to handle complicated digressions, convolutions of theme and tale, horrible twists of fate whether read about in the newspapers or experienced firsthand.  Experienced first hand now, all of us, during a time when escape is farcical and ignoring reality a sweltering, overbearing joke.  All of us touched and no degree of separation exists for even the most sheltered or enshrouded.  Damn, the entire mess includes the wealthy and the poor, this time, in our time.  Peace?  Peace is going to the restaurant or the mall and ignoring the explosions here and there about you; peace is flying in an airplane and saying “fuck it,”; peace is an absorbing fatalism and embracing the odds, really, that anything will happen to you; peace is pre-emptive action around the world; peace is now accepting a life that has irrevocably and irretrievably changed.  Be as the French woman on Air France whose plane was grounded for the second time.  You shrug your shoulders and you say this is our world now, what can we do?  No, no, that’s not giving in or giving up, that’s how you do it.  Like the Israelis in their crowded cafes you take your chances.  And you hope that some day, one day, the angry and the pissed off and the disenfranchised will go away. 

And for you and yours, for your family and friends, for my family and friends, for Mitchell and Patricia, you hope some oddball will invent an anti-bomb device for public places, like a massive airbag, an airbag at each table, a personal airbag that pops from a vest or a sweater, or some vacuum anti-explosion device whose hyper-sensitivity sucks the explosion out of the room as soon as the air is compressed and the deed is about to go to blow.  No, no, some will still have to die:  but it will improve the numbers. 

Meanwhile, let’s tighten security, have Homeland all over it, let’s have big guns in public spaces, let’s pre-empt the hell out of shit, right?, left?, and let’s go to the mall and ignore the problem.  Much of sanity exists in burying problems in the deep recesses of the mind.  Goodbye problem, hello video games.  Let go!  Let go and play the odds with the rest of us, it’s life as a video game, dodging bullets and bombs, whirling our batons, jackbooting our way through the day, cracking down on thugs and the insane, typical criminals and typical crime is so, is so passé.  What?  Armed robbery and grand theft auto?  So lame!  Shows a lack of imagination.  You’ve got to have a cause and the suicidal will; you’ve got to join some martyrdom operation, some sect or spasmodic group, you’ve got to wreak havoc and find yourself an A-bomb, yeah, if you had any balls at all.  Peace?  Peace is a big gun and an aggressive attitude, peace is an all-engrossing ha-ha. 

Poor Mitch, dammit Mitch, you would have been safer in Baghdad.  Think of your wife and child, Mitchell, think of your own flesh and bones.  It wasn’t your fault, I know.  It is impossible to see the future.  No matter our successes and our fears, we live like rats in a maze.  The prize is there somewhere, down there, at the end of the right and proper road.  Some find the cheese and some do not.  Even the Buddhist cannot ignore peacefully the life we’re living.  No one is free or exempt, nobody sails untouched, unscathed, unafraid.  Some find the what what and some do not.  Playing the odds during exciting times.  No matter what you think you know you don’t know what’s around the corner.  Left, right, left right, the tether of our story, here today:  It is marching, whether in time with the others or not it doesn’t matter:  It is marching, whether you obtain the prize or not, at the end of the maze we are confronted with our own mortality.  Peace?  Damn, there’s that fucking word again.  Peace is an elusive state of mind. 

- - -

 Patty’s mother, Elizabeth Banks, once proudly began to make a quilt for her unborn daughter.  Elizabeth, they say above average at five feet seven, was born in Redding, California and moved down to Colusa when she married Milton Banks.  Patty would carry her mother’s same height and her black hair, her green eyes.  Stare at the mother and see her widening hips:  know this, Mitch, your young highschool sweetheart will spread the same.  But will retain her striking simple beauty, the shine from those eyes, curves showing in those jeans and that blouse.  Elizabeth began the quilt when pregnant with Patty.  The project, like many grand notions, went incomplete.  And then, inspired, she decided to finish it for Patty’s First Communion.  A few more squares were added.  Elizabeth always held her belief in the Quilt, knew that one day it would be finished.  Okay, okay, said she, on Patty’s sixteenth, I’ll have it done.  No?  A few more squares, the work intricate and beautiful with Life interrupting.  Fine then, high school graduation and it shall be completed.  Elizabeth Banks originally from Redding with her jet black hair once again missed her deadline.  Yet the quilt grew, stored in the closet.  A quilt of Dreams, representing Hope and a project’s promise.  Accomplishment and achievement and some form of honest human task.  Though the Quilt had always remained in Elizabeth’s closet, near the Singer sewing machine, in a box on a shelf, the family – husband Milton, daughter Patty, the eventual younger brother and savant Stuart – knew about the unfinished quilt.  It would become a family joke.  It would go on vacation trips and the one time over Christmas to Palm Springs.  A summertime Cascades cabin on Lassen’s slope under the towering Ponderosa and a few more squares interrupted by crossword puzzles and games of cards.  Elizabeth swore up then down that when Patty got married – to the eventual Mitch, of course – she would finish the quilt.  Jumping ahead of ourselves slightly (before pulling back) we know that though the mom made a valiant effort, the quilt did not find completion by their runaway wedding next to a pink whorehouse in Nevada.  And before this time, smiling, Elizabeth relinquished the project to her daughter’s efforts.  And thereafter steady progress was made.  By this earnest, careful, intelligent, hard-working woman of a simple American county who yearned for the world, Patricia Banks.  A tenacity she bore to thought and action.  The world might swirl about her crazily, yet Patty held fast and strong.  It would be her glue that held Mitch together.  And it would be Patty’s mission to finish the Quilt before her own daughter, Isabella, was born.  Isabella born in that June while Mitch with his Purple Heart was still at war.  Warmaking by supreme accident and praying to come home.  In one piece, we might say.  In order to hold our love story together.  The Quilt in Patty’s care would be finished by June and thereupon is the proof of Patty:  an idea or a sighting ahead, and the meeting of the goal intended.  May we all be so lucky and carry to the same loads of fortitude, sharply executed.  The Quilt remained a family joke. 

- - -

Colusa County is next to Glenn County which in turn neighbors Butte County, the poorest county in California.  Officer Andrew Mortandy arrived at Colusa Elementary School for the assembly in which he was to participate.  The day was very much unlike other days in California:  it was cold and overcast, a scent of winter in the rigid atmosphere.  He was to address Kindergarten through 3rd for Personal Safety Week.  The overall gist of his presentation, along with a host of Don’t Talk To Strangers material, was that police officers were their friends.  Friends to help them through need and emergency.  He was going to offer an example that included dialing 911, complete with Margie Sanger, the activist dispatcher, holding a quick conversation.  Tomas Woggins, of Mr. and Mrs. Terrell Woggins from Meridian, was six years old.  He was a good kid who didn’t need much to pay attention to his elders, teachers or parents.  But a cop!  He was darn impressed that a policeman showed up in his school.

            His school there at a crossroads, in the Central Valley, along the Sacramento River, quite and proper on the river.  Nearby is the confluence with Butte Creek, a large enough body of water that spills (one might sexily say cascades) out of the mountains from a juncture of Lassen National Forest and Plumas National Forest, and slips easily down past Bidwell’s land and the town of Chico eager to find the Sacramento which is its ticket to the sea.  Mr. Woggins’s dad was a farmer in Colusa County, the county in which the two Tracy brothers killed themselves in a double and accidental homicide that affected wives and daughters and sons in addition to their parents, whom we knew, and spread-out aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews.  I went to the last family gathering and we’re supposed to be jovial and clean and liptight about that Moment.  The Woggins family knows the Tracy family, as all others in this wide, spread-about land.  Terrell Woggins works for DripCorp, a firm that specializes in the transportation of water.  They make irrigation piping, fittings, hydraulic pumps, sluiceways, and have worked intermittently on the many canals and aqueducts that flow like veins through California as its bloodlines.  Perhaps I should say lifeblood.  You know what I mean. 

            Woggins doesn’t farm.  But he lives on a farm.  Terrell drives a Ford F250 and hauls a boat trailer occasionally to Lake Berryessa.  His wife Teresa proudly calls herself a homemaker.  She loves Mickey Mouse and one of their rooms in the 1920s farmhouse is decorated in Disney Mickeys from floor to ceiling.  They make an annual trip to Disneyland.  Terrell is unabashedly supportive.  Teresa knits her brains out:  she’ll be knitting something during family gatherings; knitting while you have a conversation with her.  She has made small hats for each and every newborn cousin. 

            Tom catches the bus out on Highway 20.  The bus takes a right turn on Highway 45, which runs along the bends and curves of the Sacramento, through Knights Landing and Grimes and Sycamore and on to Colusa.  Colusa is a hot, dry town usually, and the streets lay out in a grid against the flat, expansive earth.  One-story houses contained gracefully and thankfully in the shade of mature trees.  It seems like a nice place to live for the visitor, if you’re not a big city type. 

            Colusa’s Post Office is an okay size.  The Post Office in Glenn is one square room.

            Tom caught the bus that day and sat on the bench and he stared out the window with casual absentmindedness.  He didn’t listen to his friend Big Bill that day.  He was still thinking about the weekend.  It was a Monday deep into October.  Some trees out here lose their leaves; some do not. 

            Mr. Woggins likes his coffee black.  Teresa likes it heavy with cream and sugar, almost like dessert.  Tom eats Fruit Loops for breakfast and does not yet drink coffee.  Their morning, this is how it looks.  Dad leaves for work before Tom catches the bus.  Tom walks to the end of their dirt driveway and hangs a left at the mailbox.  He walks three mailboxes down to the bus stop and catches the bus there with Big Bill and Sandy Colfax.  Sandy is in the same grade as Tom.  Sandy doesn’t pay attention to Tom.  Big Bill’s name found him because he is in a broad, extended family that includes five Williams, all smaller than he.  Big Bill and Tom wear their hair in crewcuts, as YMCA members and camp counselors from the ‘40s.  America’s grand, classic period still lives in certain nooks and various crannies of this good modern land.  We are a nation presently at war.

            Over the last 10 days - Officer Mortandy won’t mention this during the assembly - 31 American soldiers have been killed over in the desert boggery of Iraq.  A transport helicopter was shot down by the resistance yesterday.  The press now calls them guerillas.  They’d hesitated to use such language up till now.  That type of language makes the struggle official.  It is worrisome.  “Quagmire may not be used,” a writer mentioned at a conference, referencing the entrenchment in Iraq, “Because Iraq is a desert, and we cannot evoke jungly terms or other wet insanities.”  Somebody in the audience, for which this writer was the keynote speaker, asked him what term should the reporters, journalists, and fiction writers be using instead of quagmire.  He replied “We should all be using ‘quicksand.’”  And then he left the podium in a huff, effaced by a heckler, holding the middle finger for the cameras and the print media and the gleeful conservative radio guys.  Over the ensuing weeks quicksand appeared seventeen times in order to describe the harsh realities of this war and our dying young men and the belligerent insensitivities of the current administration in Washington.  No names are mentioned because history applies the oily massage and the ointment.

            Tom Woggins sipped from a plastic Calistoga water bottle.  Tom is a contemplative young boy.  He was thinking about his cousin, Mitchell Barstow.

            Mitch Barstow is originally from Yuba City.  He is the oldest son of Cathy Barstow, married to Mitch Senior.  Cathy is Teresa Woggins’s older sister, both having bore the maiden name of Maxwell.  Percy Maxwell is their father.  Percy is Mitch’s grandfather.  Mitch had been stationed in Fort Meade, Maryland, and had recently married his highschool sweetheart from Colusa, Patricia Banks.  Patty or Trish, depending on the year.  And, to make matters even more dramatic, had found that his sperm lived longer than five days.  Patricia became pregnant, through poignant tears because Mitch received orders that have jarred him from his casual enlisted man’s existence, and the families are both rejoicing and worrying.  Tom thinks of his cousin on the bus because Mitch is being sent to Iraq.  Yellow ribbons and all, up and down this state except for the yuppie, lefty city of San Francisco and the rest of the Bay.  Tom’s classmates think he is cool because of his cousin.  Yellow ribbons and all.  You should see those American smalltown downtowns.  For the patriotic it is a good time to be alive.

            At 7:34 in the morning on the next Saturday after the Monday of this question, the police responded to a 911 hang up call.  Somebody dialed and then the phone was hung up.  Most of us know the drill at this point:  I learned this one in college when I called for the fun of it from the dorm and then disappeared when the heat became too intense.  I hid in the back of a girlfriend’s closet, underneath a pile of clothes.  But, this particular hang up call, yes, we’ll get to that.   Let’s bring Tom to school and the assembly and the cool cop in full uniform.

            This is a story about uniforms.  This is a tale of running away from the responsibilities of the uniform.  There are questions and worries.  An American child is born.  A wedding planned.  Patricia is devastated and she feigns being proud of her military boy.  She smiled wanly at the barbecue.  Mitch’s mom and dad will tell you with wet eyes and red faces how damn proud they are of their children.  Only Percy is holding back.  He is angered.  He is angered because he doesn’t believe any longer.  He stopped believing after being sued by Monsanto.  None of his friends or neighbors buy their seeds from Monsanto, after this particular incident.  Don’t do with Monsanto’s seeds what you have always done with seeds, farmer, or be sued down to your very underdrawers.  The wan smiles and one angered grandpa.  And dammit, let’s get Tom to school.

            The bus pulled up to Colusa Elementary School and the kids disembarked either screaming or quiet and nothing between.  They filed into the building.  After settling into their various classrooms, teachers led the smaller children holding hands and the larger in tight lines down to the auditorium.  Officer Andrew Mortandy was not nervous, but he was playing with a seam along his uniform trousers as he spoke with Laura Lane, the principle of Colusa Elementary School.  Effervescent gurgling was the milling sound of entering and seating students.  Laura Lane sat upright in her chair.  Officer Mortandy did the same.  He mentally went over his outline, rehearsed his opening statement, and smiled at the children, many of whom looked at him appreciably.  Six-year-old kids think cops are the top.

            Big Bill took a seat with his class.  Tom did not see him in the audience when Mrs. James’s class entered.  They filed in and sat in the sixth row, in metal fold-out chairs, the same ones Mr. Banters uses for his band class.  Tom sat next to Sandy and he looked at the police officer on the stage.  At this point, Tom did not have a thought one way or the other.  He neither looked right or left.  If asked, he would reply that he didn’t know what he was thinking about. 

            Mrs. Lane, in her business suit, stood at the podium and cleared her throat into the microphone on purpose.  The jibbering children began to quiet.  Mrs. Lane waited, scanning the room.  And, as the school both respected her, liked her, and feared her, silence fell over the cafeteria cum auditorium.  “Good morning students and teachers,” Mrs. Lane began. “Today is our assembly with Officer Mortandy of the Colusa Police Department for our wonderful and successful Personal Safety Week.”  She said the last three words as if they’d been repeated a hundred times, as they had the week before gearing up for the excitement.  Children made signs with construction paper and magic markers.  There were ribbons and American flags.  There were drawings with cops under oak trees next to tilty houses with yellow ribbons.  Children signed the drawings.  Children saluted the police officer and offered him a warm welcome. 

            Mrs. Lane concluded her quick opening speech, reminded the students of good behavior, and then turned the podium over to Mr. Mortandy.  He stood and walked to the microphone.

            Sandy offered Tom a piece of gum.  Tom looked over, his meditation broken, and without much facial expressiveness declined her kind offer.  Sandy shrugged her shoulders, made a face of “Fine, suit yourself,” and turned her head forward as the policeman began to speak.  “Personal safety is something all of us have to think about,” he began.  And he planned on shocking and scaring and then comforting the young people.  Mr. Mortandy cleared his throat.  He continued, bravely for him, and in doing so covered all of the hot, current, standard and germane topics.  Yes, there was a version of Don’t Talk to Strangers, wherewith he painted a daunting portrait of a long, sleek car pulling up to the curb and a man rolls down the automatic window and asks the little girl if she wants a ride.  Officer Mortandy pointed to a small girl in a blue dress with a white, frilly lapel, and he asked her to stand.  “Now, if a strange man with a shifty look asks you to come with him, what are you going to do?”

            “Scream,” said the little girl without hesitation.

“Well, there’s no need for that now,” he faltered, “I mean, well, that’s one way to deal with the problem, I suppose, better than, you know, getting in the car with the guy, But, what else could you say?”

            “I’d say, ‘No thank you, I like to walk.  I have to go now.”

            “Very good.  You see, boys and girls, you have to be careful these days, even here in wonderful, clean, safe Colusa County.  Especially now that we are at war, you never know, with our men and women over there and all.  So, we want you to know that the police are here to be your friends.  Let there be no question in your mind.  When you see one of us, say ‘There goes a friend.’  And it doesn’t stop there.”  Andy Mortandy continued, displaying facial expressions that led the children to believe that this was a discussion of great seriousness, and that not listening would lead you to your doom and peril.  He covered disasters like a brush fire, or farm accidents, or a boy falling into the mighty Sacramento, a river that appeared laconic there, but whose tug and pull and dangerous murk was not to be underestimated.  He reminded the assembly of Sarah Miller, who was playing by the river and a rope swing while her older brother splashed about with his father in an innertube, and who poor girl and America (God) Bless her Soul slipped off the wooden, jutting pier and fell into the brown, insistent water.  When father and son looked over they couldn’t see Sarah.  They panicked and splashed about in the shallows.  “And here, now that we all have cellphones, is when you should call your friends.  Do you,” he pointed to a small boy in corduroy overalls seated in the front row, “know what to do in an emergency?”

            The boy looked around.  He stopped chewing his gum.  He blurted out, as he’d remembered last year’s Personal Safety Week assembly well enough, “Call 911!” 

            “Exactly!” Officer Mortandy said.  “You call your friends, it’s as simple as that.  Whenever you notice a problem, give us a call and talk to the nice lady and we’ll be right over to help.  That’s what we want to do, call 911, and.  .  .  .” 

            Just then the good cop recalled a seminar he’d attended in Salt Lake where professionals from the industry offered demonstrations of new child-safety electronics.  ID tags and radio collars and even embedded microchips that could be implanted underneath the epidermis, an exciting array of fine electronics, technology to the rescue, so that supermarket child stealers would be thwarted and busted immediately, kids like cars with Lo-Jack, children never leaving the radar screen; the seminar had gone on to include child surveillance tips, cameras in teenager bedrooms turned on when the parents go out, computer activity recorded, porn sites thwarted, all the activity of the household downloadable to the mobile phone that daddy gazes upon during intermission of the combined version of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, three and a half hours long with two intermissions – daddy can download the temperature in every room, see which lights are on and which doors remain locked; he can show mommy what Junior is doing in the family room, what channel he’s watching on the television, the tv recording every action and movement upon the remote control, the tv turning off with groaning reproach after two hours; and if anyone attempts to snatch a kid from the street or from a department store in London, the child’s movements are tracked by Interpol and the FBI and all remaining remnants of the KGB.  On the tip of Mortandy’s languid tongue was all of this information and more.  But he held it back, contained, for he hadn’t prepared to talk about it, though a part of him felt moved to implore the teachers to discuss electronic tracking devices with the children’s parents.  He decided, though, to stay with the script.  He cleared his throat.

            “And what do we do if someone brings a gun to school?”  He said the word gun as if he’d whispered about the devil, naked, and the children gasped.  They were young.  Any older and they would understand that guns were routine.  He repeated the refrain:  “We – call – 911.” 

            He had decided long before his moment in the limelight to avoid discussing domestic disputes.  Though he did tack on toward the end, “If there are any problems at home, feel free to give us a call.”  He fumbled his notecards and cleared his throat once more.  He eased uncomfortably into his peroration, saying “This is a dangerous, dangerous world, kids, teachers; especially during a time of war; if you see any terrorists, any bad people lurking about with oil drums, any suspicious activity, give us a ring, because, this is all about your personal safety.  We care about you, and we are here to help.”

            The children clapped politely and the good cop returned to his seat.  Laura Lane had a few matters to discuss, administrative whim wham, something about obesity and exercise, a reiteration not to worry because cheeseburgers and fries would still be served in the cafeteria, and soda machines would remain; however, they were going to introduce Snapple machines and again, not to worry, for their juices in fact are no better for you than Coke.  And she thought to herself, gazing over her charges, “Anyway, fat kids consume more stuff and our country thus benefits.  During, you know, this time of war.”

            The assembly concluded and the cacophonous chatter reached its standard pitch as teachers led the children from the hall and back toward their classes.  Mortandy gazed over the loud scattering and he daydreamed about his hero, the governor of the great state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who came all this way from a Nazi past, from Austria, and who wowed the nation with his wit and his muscles and his bikini underwear and his interview in Oui, to which Mortandy had masturbated more than a few times (his father’s collection), gazing at advertisements from the 70s with general interest and great wonder, and who, this great man, had become governor of the wealthiest state in history and who starred in the leading role of “Kindergarten Cop” and Andy thought that he could do the same, get the kids to shut up and stand in straight lines.  However, he held his tongue.  And while he held his tongue he contemplated a constitutional amendment that would allow anyone, of good and upstanding quality, who had been born on foreign soil of Nazi parentage, or whichever form of primogenitor, to be allowed into the United States Senate and, most important of all, to be allowed access to the presidency.  Here were his contemplations contained as the hall emptied and grew quiet and as Mrs. Lane interrupted his reveries with a matter of business to discuss.  He turned his head quickly, he acknowledged her from his fog, and he followed her to the main office.

            Tom sat in the family room not eating a quarter pounder but dreaming of one.  A cartoon was on the television.  It was a calm and mild Saturday in November.  The cartoon was one of the better shows on television, created by the geniuses who’d stumbled upon “South Park” and who now wanted to also include a cartoon for a younger audience, with less subterfuge and no curse words or references to mature subjects.  The cartoon was called “Hydrocarbon Man.”  Tom watched intensely and attentively.  His sister, upstairs in her room where she would remain until three in the afternoon, was reading a book.  She was reading James and the Giant Peach.  Teresa Woggins entered the family room, prepared to piss on Tom’s parade.

            She stood in the doorway to the family room.  Terrell was a good man who was doing well with DripCorp and who believed in the future and who considered it honorable to hang a flag on major national holidays and therefore the family had a flat screen tv.  Next to the impressive flat screen tv were the various game consoles of the last two years, an X Box and a Sony PlayStation.  Nobody seemed to mind in this household one way or the other that Sony was hurting and involved in deep restructuring and that there was a struggle to get the engineering department to shake things up for the better.  A bag of sea salt and vinegar chips on the coffee table, next to a can of pop.  Tom ignored the glaring fact that his mother was standing in the doorway surveying the scene.  He knew what was about to come, a repeat of many Saturdays before.  On the screen Hydrocarbon Man transformed into a NASCAR prototype and he raced toward a school.  Hydrocarbon Man was going to save the day.  Two disconsolate and maladjusted teenagers wearing trenchcoats marched toward the high school.  They were laden with loaded weapons that they’d casually snatched from their respective fathers’ basements.  They were going to kill a few jocks.  And then rape and kill two girls who’d turned them down for Homecoming.  “Nobody ignores us,” Trenchcoat One said to the other.       

            “Damn straight,” the reply.  Neither were nervous and neither appeared spaced-out or mentally slow.  In fact, they’d obtained blueprints of the school and their plan was masterful.  They’d bragged in Shop to a girl wearing braces that they could fuck shit up if they wanted to.  The girl in braces told the Vice Principal, a woman with frizzy hair who used to be a drummer in an all-girl rock band in Los Angeles, who in turn called Hydrocarbon Man.  Hydrocarbon Man had a web site and a 1-800 number and a cellphone, therefore it was relatively easy to reach him in the case of an emergency.  Tom, watching at home, easily related these facts to Officer Mortandy and his 911 service.  Tom grabbed a fistful of sea salt and vinegar potato chips and he chomped away, growing wider and fatter by the moment, a good American child, and he chased it with some pop while his mother watched with words on her tongue and thoughts on the brain and Hydrocarbon Man began to save the day by shooting the young boys in the necks with tranquilizer darts.  When the struggling young boys in trenchcoats fell to the pavement in front of the school, struggling and wiggling, Hydrocarbon Man pressed a button on his wrist and from his waist a load of gloppy, black, oozing oil flopped forward and covered the two kids and their weapons with funk.  Hydrocarbon Man was about to get the girl – the Vice Principal above mentioned, whose breasts pointed noticeably outward and the creators showed just a wee bit too much nipple to be modest – when Mrs. Woggins spoke up in earnest.

            “That’s it, then,” she said.

            “Mo-om, it’s almost over.”

            “No, it’s over now.  You’ve already done three hours of tv and I know you’re going to watch some tonight.”

            “Dad said I could.”

            “Dad doesn’t know you’re wasting your life away.”

            Teresa walked over to the remote and clicked it off. 

            “Let me play Helicopter Down in the Desert, mom.”

            “No, you may not.  Go outside.”

            “I’ll go outside later.”

            “Well, I don’t care what you do.  Your time in this room is over.  Please, move on.”  Teresa had read a report about childhood obesity during a time of war and imperial conquest.  “Now,” she emphasized. 

            For Tom this was an emergency.  Teresa waited in the family room for Tom to leave it.  He sulked and went upstairs to his parents’ bedroom.  He sat on the edge of the bed, the edge of the bed where he reads his father’s Playboys.  An emergency for Tom and he wasn’t thinking straight.  He picked up the phone on their end table.  He dialed 911.  It rang.  A woman began speaking into the phone.  The address of the caller appeared on her computer screen.  She asked if everything was all right.  Tom quickly hung up the phone.  He poked his head into his sister’s room and she was reading on her back.  Seeing him, she turned over on her side, her back to the door.  Tom turned around and went to his own bedroom.  He sat on the edge of his bed and he didn’t know what to do with himself. 

            It was ten minutes before the police knocked on the door.  Mr. Mortandy himself stood in front of the door under the shaded, wisteria-worn portico.  “Is everything all right here, ma’am?” he asked.

            “Yes.  .  .  Why?” Teresa said. 

When the police officer and the parent realized that a child had dialed 911 because he was peeved at having the television turned off, the one laughed and the other retained a facial coloring that exhibited mortification.  She couldn’t wait to tell his father. Mortandy shared the story with his colleagues and the dispatcher who took the call, friends all.  And a small piece – in the same place where it was revealed that a one Walter Weever had killed a pedestrian while driving smashed during the middle of the day, the pedestrian on a sidewalk, a hit and run initially because the drunk Mr. Weever panicked, and then he was found easily the next morning seven driveways away with a smashed-up car in the garage; and in the same place, the police blotter, where there was a report of the Tracy brothers shooting each other, though there was a front page story and a few follow-ups, too – appeared in the paper about a local 911 call and responding officers found everything to be a-okay.  A house near the river and under the spread of large trees.  Yellow ribbons tied to those trees.  American flags and not simply at the courthouse.  And an electric blue flicker from screen magic that allows the world.

JUMP: