hellecchino and the gang

There is no story that is not true. And this is another in a long line of such stories, though, of course, it has the ring of the unbelievable about it, much as Frankenstein did despite Mary Shelley’s preface in which she said the happenings in the novel were quite possible. By about the time of this story, many people on the one side of the wall considered Hellecchino to be someone’s hideous progeny; they weren’t sure whose, though. Some things in life are destined to be a mystery. You see, this all has to do with money. And no matter what kind of wall you build, whatever happens on one side is bound to generate a repercussion on the other side. This is because life’s just like that. It’s everywhere all the time and it touches everyone all the time.
This is how it happened. . .
One day, the workers on the other side of the all-but-completed wall–it was by this time out to the west side of town, the area pretty much inhabited solely by Gyorgy Yabu and his Gang–were complaining about the state of their world. It had deteriorated considerably despite Hellecchino pointing the way to business up in China Spring and Beverley Hills. The people at this end of the country liked their China white and their hills flat. This is because, for the most part, they hadn’t traveled out there, their forebears had, and now they were quite comfortable, if only still workers. Or they had traveled out there and bitched about it the entire time, so they were not real interested in upsetting their applecart and travelling elsewhere to sell both themselves and their goods. This is what civilization had done: gotten rid of the Journeyman–unless he was a stagecoach driver or a Conestoga wagon driver or a muleskinner. Or a cowboy. A cowpoke, actually, for it was rumored that some girls had dressed up and infiltrated the ranks. Git along little doggies.
Because of this propensity toward the sessile, coupled with the insertion of the wall, people were becoming bored. That is, they were itching after a little excitement. Because they could only see what was going on on one side of the wall, they did not see that things were going on on the other side of the wall. This would not have been the case with their grandchildren, but, like praying, grandchildren took too long. No. People were wired for instant gratification.
So, they complained amongst themselves. And when the rumbling became too great, they went to Hellecchino. Hellecchino always seemed ready for an adventure. Which was why he was both liked and disliked. Like a real human being. Ambiguity was as hard-wired in a person as instant gratification. Which was why there are heroes.
They found Hellecchino right where they expected to: sitting in his rocking chair beneath the canvas tent atop the blockhouse smoking a long-stem pipe. He smiled down on them as they collected out front of the blockhouse and called up to him. He lifted his pipe from his lips and signaled they should come on up. Which they did. There was no place to sit up there but on the rooftop itself. No one wished to dirty the ass of his jeans or her skirts by being polite, so they stood around, jouncing from one foot to the other and back again and exchanging pleasantries. All the time, Hellecchino kept puffing away at his clay pipe occasionally stealing a sidelong look out of his right eye to see how his visitors were doing. He was enjoying their self-imposed discomfort and embarrassment.
Well. Hellecchino wasn’t the rude sort, so he took his pipe from his mouth and looked up into the wall-eyed folks’ faces, and said, “Y’all bored or somethin’?”
“Yup. That’s what i’tis,” said one man.
“You been goin’ up to China Spring to work?”
“We kinda like stayin’ aroun’ home.”
“Yeah,” piped up a second, “we don’t cotton to spendin’ so much time away from our wimmenfolk.”
“Idle hands and the devil and all that?”
“Right.”
“Mr. Hellecchino,” ventured one of the women, “we ain’t seein’ that much is happenin’ with the wall. I mean, it’s most built and there ain’t been no action.”
“Yore boys been tearin’ down the wall after they done built it?”
“They bored with it, Mr. Hellecchino.”
“Well. . .there’s a lot goin’ on on th’other side o’ the wall, y’know.”
“No, suh, we don’t. We don’t see as nothin’s happenin’. We’s the only ones sufferin’.”
“Been over to Beverley Hills? I hear they’re puttin’ in one o’ them iron horses. Injuns’re movin’ back out into the open range.”
“Injuns ain’t ar concern.”
“You gotta make Yabu and his boys understan’ what they doin’ t’ us folks.”
“Oh. Y’all lookin’ fer some action.”
“Yassuh,” they said in unison.
“Well. I don’t see why not. But. . .why y’all don’t do nothin’?”
“‘Cause they’s a new law up.”
“Hammered on our side o’ th’ wall.”
Hellecchino waited awhile for enlightenment but as it wasn’t forthcoming, he gave a hint as to his expectations.
“And. . .”
“It says,” said the old wife, “it says that if’n we don’ like what’s goin’ on, we kin do somethin’ about it but that if we do somethin’ about it we’re gonna git killed fer ar trouble.”
“That’s a pretty stiff fine.”
“Yas. It is.”
“Kinda takes all the joy outa livin’.”
“Yas. It do.”
“Alright. Y’all go on home. I’ll show ya just one more time how this is done. Then I gotta ’spect y’all’ll take matters into your own hands.”
“That’s all we askin’.”
“Alright. Go on, now. What’s done is done.”
Hellecchino watched the people file down his ladder and disappear in a cloud of dust as they trod the dry plains back to their homes. He took a big draw on his pipe. He looked up at the sky. He said, “Why me, Shi? Why me?” Then he set to puffing and thinking. He had to come up with something, that’s for sure. But it was tiring, people always wanting him to take action. Never themselves. Whatever was the world coming to?
Sometimes, if you don’t jump up in their faces and scare them, you can’t get certain kinds of self-important people to pay attention. Usually, like a spoiled 3-yr old, you must crack them upside the head. Some might call hitting a 3-yr old child abuse; but if nothing’s done early on, that little bastard will grow up to be a royal pain in the ass, because who the hell are you to tell him what he can do?
Sometimes, though, if you jump up in their faces, you get your face shot off.
Life’s like that. Even for a hero. But if you wait around with mounting anxiety over something bad happening, you not only miss any opportunity for something good to happen, you grow a great tuberous pair of gluteus maximi, or secretary’s butt. In the future–
No. Can’t talk about the future. This story, this life, is about now. And now ain’t got no future. A rickshaw ride in China is a wonderful sight, what with that little yellow bastard concentrating on his running legs until there’s a mighty traffic jam, at which point he begins the yelling and screaming the Chinese are known for and the squeezing into a sausage machine axle-twisting blockage because everyone’s going in a different direction to the same place. There’s a difference between paying attention to your legs and paying attention to where your legs are taking you. Besides, by five years old, legs are pretty much able to take care of themselves.
Of course, it can also be argued that if the legs had remained still, there’d have been no problem. But, then. . .why the rickshaw?
So it was that Hellecchino found himself standing outside the millinery store, leaning on a post and watching the action up the street in front of The Sevens Trading Post where Buck was drumming up business. Now, although this trading post was owned by Yabu, Bucket, Minkowski, MacDonald, Mayor, Brezina and Evananda it was run by Bucket who fancied himself the greatest trader east or west of the Pecos. These kinds of people are easy to bait–they don’t like to be questioned– and Buck was doing his bit.
“I hear, Mr. Bucket, that there’s a dealer in town who’s better than you are.” Buck was not what you’d call subtle.
“Yer fulla shit,” was the expected Bucket reply.
“No. I ain’t. I hear tell this guy kin wrangle the hide off’n a horse.”
“Yer shittin’ me.”
“Nope.”
“Shit on shinola, eh boys?” And, of course, the boys lounging around outside The Sevens Trading Post chuckled. “Where is this shithead think he can outdo me?”
“Right up yonder at the millinery store.”
“I s’pose he’s buying material for the dress he gonna be wearin.” And Bucket laughed loud and long. He had a backup chorus, too. Most people who laugh by themselves don’t.
“He ain’t no faggot,” spat Buck.
“You sayin’ he kin out bargain me?” Bucket was looking askance but very interestedly up the street at the leaning Hellecchino.
“Yep. I seen him maself.”
“Well. . .boys, it looks like another one’s ready to bite the dust.” And Bucket, as expected, hitched his pants up and strode off the boardwalk and down the street, leaving little dust devils in his wake.
“Why, if it ain’t Hellecchino!” noticed Bucket right off when he arrived at the part of the street fronting the millinery store.
Hellecchino turned around. There was no one else. Suddenly.
“Yes. It’s me,” he said, returning his gaze to Bucket.
“Listen. I hear you’re a good bargainer. Let’s see you outsmart me,” said Bucket.
Hellecchino rubbed his head just below his hat brim. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
“I ain’t askin’ fer no help. I wanna see ya outsmart me.”
“I can’t. I can’t do it without my cheating medicine.”
“Cheatin’ medicine! Never heard tell of such shit. But. . .go on and fetch it. Yore gonna need it.”
“Well. . .I live miles outside of town and I haven’t got any transportation but this leather boot. So, if you’re willing to wait a few hours–”
“A few hours, you say? Hell, buddy! Yore jest stallin’ fer time. I’ll lend ya ma horse. Go on and git ma horse, Calvin.”
Calvin ran off to do Bucket’s bidding. “Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute.” Calvin stopped. “I’m a poor rider, Mr. Bucket, and your horse is afraid of me and I’m afraid of him. Lend me your clothes and then your horse will think I’m you and everything’ll be alright.”
“Well, alright. Seems you know horses anyways.”
Bucket and Hellecchino adjourned into the millinery store, coming out a few moments later each wearing the other’s clothes. Hellecchino having short legs, Bucket’s britches kind of limped around his boot ankles. But, otherwise, there was no problem. Except that Hellecchino had short arms and had to roll up, profusely, Bucket’s sleeves. Clyde Moyen Bucket, meanwhile, looked like a poor kid who’d outgrown his clothes and his parents didn’t have any money to buy him a new set. But. All was well because, Bucket knew, all would end well.
“Now,” Bucket shouted at Hellecchino, clapping him on the back, “jest you go on and git that cheatin’ medicine o’yorn. I’m shore I kin best it. Ain’t never lost yet.”
So, Hellecchino paraded himself down main street looking somewhat like a clown following behind Calvin. Hellecchino mounted Bucket’s fine horse with no problem, it thinking he was his master. Hellecchino rode on out of town on a fast horse, in fine clothes and Bucket stood in front of the milliner’s looking kind of clownish and never saw Hellecchino again.
But this is not the end of the story. No. There’s more!
Hellecchino rode all around the perimeter of Chokepointe Piste until he arrived at his blockhouse house out on the turnpike. Buck was, by this time, waiting for him. They were laughing themselves silly. So much so, it was difficult for Hellecchino to pull Buck up behind him and ride. Ride out into the surrounding semi-desert looking for more trouble.
A good ways toward Waco, they stopped and turned the fine horse around and around as if they were looking for something. The horse, meanwhile, was smelling the air. And, sure enough, not far away they spied a single cabin with a single (but big) tree out in its front yard.
“That’s Lu Da’s place,” said Buck, pointing.
“Who the hell’s Lu Da?” asked Hellecchino.
“He’s the finest liquor maker in the country.”
“Well, then, let’s celebrate.”
And the boys rode on. But Lu Da was not at home. So they helped themselves to some liquor and rode off up behind the bluff and began drinking. The sun was high and hot and the liquor was good and pretty soon they got to giggling and carrying on like schoolgirls.
“I tell ya, Buck–I’m gittin’ to feelin’ pretty good. Pretty damn good.”
“Me, too, Kino. I ain’t had such good liquor since. . .” Buck cocked his head to one side and squinched his eyes shut.
“I tell ya,” said Hellecchino after taking another swig, “I feel like hollerin’.”
“Don’t be doin’ that.”
“Yessir, I really do!”
“Don’t be doin’ that, Kino. Lu Da might hear ya. . .and ya wouldn’t want that. Nope. He’s meaner’na badger done gone’n got hisself caught in a trap. Boy lemme tell yew! And if he’s drunk–”
“Like we are?”
“How drunk’r yew?”
“‘Bout four fifths.”
“Boy. You don’t wanna see Lu Da no eight tenths drunk. Nuh-uh. He gotta sayin’. . .gimme somma that so I kin say it raht.”
Hellecchino obliged him. Buck took a couple good belts and then leaned his head back as if it would tumble right off his neck and over his back and proceeded, very loudly and in a rich basso profundo, reciting The Litany of Lu Da.
“I am one tenth strong if I’m one tenth drunk and nine tenths strong when I’m nine tenths drunk.”
And then there was silence. Even the afternoon birds were quiet.
“Well, let’s hope the bastard’s only five tenths drunk ’cause then he’ll only be half a man.” And Hellecchino proceeded to holler. When he stopped, he looked bleary-eyed to Buck, who was somewhere off to his left.
“Did I crack the sky?”
“No,” croaked Buck..
“Well, then. . .I gotta try better.” And he did.
Just then, a huge shadow grew up over the two. Buck gulped and quickly, crookedly hobbled away, leaving Hellecchino to holler his head off, which he continued to do until his throat dried up and he stopped to take a drink.
“Ooops! All gone,” he sang as he upturned the bottle. It was then the looming bulk, like unto those huge Japanese wrestler fellows, entered Hellecchino’s consciousness. “You know, you cast a long shadow, buddy.”
“You’re drinking stolen liquor!” Lu Da boomed down on little Hellecchino.
“No. I’m drinking illegal liquor, my fine feathered friend.”
A big ham-sized hand grasped Hellecchino by the front of his shirt and lifted the unprotesting body of the hero right off the ground. Lu Da rumbled gently into Hellecchino’s alcohol-loosened face, “Not when it’s Yabu-protected liquor.”
Hellecchino’s glazed eyes bleared back at Lu Da.
“Aww shit,” he drawled. “I just can’t win, can I?”
Lu Da duly dragged drunken Hellecchino all the way back to Chokepointe Piste and deposited him in Medusi Minkowski IV’s jailhouse, by which time he was near sober for bouncing mercilessly and without contrition over every stone god put in the road. Medusi Minkowski IV was immensely pleased to have such a headache in his jailhouse and, once Hellecchino was carelessly installed in the one cell with one bed and three other drunks, he trotted down the street to Fancy Dan’s where Gyorgy and Clyde were digging into a set of ribs a finer side of which couldn’t be found even in Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City. Needless to say, both felt it incumbent upon themselves to indulge in a bottle of Lu Da’s best, dressed up in a nice machine-made bottle with a professional- looking label on it, a kind of inside joke: Bushleague’s. Gyorgy Yabu wasn’t totally oblivious to the personal slanders rampant in town gossip. Hell–for some good fishing tips he even had some two-bit Louisiana Creole Acadian write up a few damning articles. Jacques Sicard’s occasional flibberty-jibbet was welcomed by the people and nobody questioned why Gyorgy Yabu never did nothing about it. Some things are beyond explanation.
After a couple days, Hellecchino was recovered enough to appear at the barred window with the other inmates and take a look at the sunshine. It was bright out there.
“That’s one thing you can say for an adobe jailhouse–it’s cool,” observed Hellecchino. “And look’t that, will ya! They’re putting on a show for us!”
“They been at it fer ars,” grated one of the others.
“Yep,” chorused the other two.
And so it was. The open area behind the jailhouse was rocking with the banging of hooves and boots and hats. And bodies. As a group of deputies and Bucket boys were whooping it up trying to tame a wild horse. The horse, of course, was having none of it. Horse’s can be cantankerous as hell, sometimes. Stupid animals, not to realize how fortunate they are to have guaranteed shelter from the elements, guaranteed regular meals and all just for putting up with a saddle, a bridle with bit and somebody riding you all day kicking you in the sides with spurs. But, horses are dumb creatures and it took a lot to break them in. Break then down is more like it, since bucking and rearing and throwing your legs out is very tiring and sooner or later a horse is going to run out of tucker. Then, he’s easy meat, as the phrase goes.
Hellecchino watched for a time, a smile growing on his lips until he was laughing big time. He was having almost as grand a time as when he was drinking up Lu Da’s liquor all those. . .days ago. Hellecchino and his three cellmates were laughing loud enough that the cowboys outside stopped busting the bronco.
The four jailbirds stopped laughing at the silence.
“What the hell you laughin’ at?” demanded one of the frustrated cowboys.
“I’m laughing at you, cowboy. Trying to bust a bronco like that.”
“What’s wrong with this here horse?” stuck up another.
“Nothing’s wrong with the horse,” said Hellecchino. “It’s the way you’re going about breaking it in.”
“You think you could do a better job?”
“Yes. But I’m barred from it.”
Now. These were experienced cowpokes and it was kind of hilarious to them that some guy from out of nowhere without even the slightest idea of Western politesse would suggest that he could do something they couldn’t. So, they howled and slapped their knees with their hats, bringing up clouds of dust.
“Yew gotta be kiddin’ me!” shouted the first cowboy.
“Nope. I’ve got horse magic.”
This brought a further guffaw with lots of finger pointing and rekindling of laughing. Well, it was decided somehow, for no one spoke, that they’d just show this city slicker asshole who got himself caught stealing Lu Da’s liquor a thing or two.
“Awright, asshole. Why donchu jes come out hyar’n do a better job’n us!”
Hellecchino threw his hands up, shrugged his shoulders, looked at the window hangings.
That was all it took. One of the cowboys mosied his bowlegged way into the jailhouse, fished around in Medusi Minkowski IV’s desk and then approached the cell with key in hand.
“When yer done makin’ a ass o’yoreself, yer gittin’ raht back in hyar,” he said before inserting the key.
“Fair enough,” said Hellecchino.
The key turned in the lock and the iron clanged open.
“See you in a bit, boys,” Hellecchino waved at his friends.
Now, Hellecchino did have what seemed to be magic with horses. Horse magic, as he called it. But he knew how to use it to best effect. So, he just stood there in front of the horse looking at it. And the horse looked back at him. The cowboys were yukking it up good, thinking Hellecchino, this dumb fuck who didn’t know you didn’t steal from Lu Da, didn’t know what a horse was. This was, in their keen estimation, going to be quite a treat. And then. . .Hellecchino walked up to the horse and rubbed it between the eyes. The horse did that funny thing horses do with their lips and nodded. Hellecchino put his head near the horse’s ear and appeared to be leaning against its head. In actuality, Hellecchino was talking his magic to the horse. Hellecchino slid his hand down the sweating animal’s neck and then lightly jumped up on the animal’s back, leaning far over its neck. He slapped the horse’s neck, on the far side from the cowboys so they couldn’t see his signal. For, signal it was as the horse bucked a little and then let Hellecchino ride it around in a big circle just like that. No trouble at all. Hellecchino was sitting tall in the saddle and the cowboys were open-mouthed around him.
Then, suddenly, the horse came to a standstill. Hellecchino rocked his body from the hips trying to get the tame beast to move. But. . .nothing. So he climbed down and went around to the horse’s nose and stared at it in the eye. Hellecchino winked.
“It seems this horse doesn’t want to move any more. He’s dissatisfied.”
“What the hail you goin’ on about?” said one of the disbelieving cowboys.
“I can talk to horses and this one’s saying that he won’t move without a fancy saddle.”
“Ah don’t believe a word of it,” drawled another cowboy.
“Well. I got the horse magic. I can talk to horses. You saw how I rode this horse, no problem. This is what he’s saying: I no ride, I got no fine saddle.”
The cowboys looked at each other, nodded and one of them went away. He returned with a fine new saddle of tooled leather with taps and tassels and bags–and a blanket, of course. The blanket was a fine Indian blanket, Chiricahua. And Hellecchino carefully put them on the horse, who stood stock still–even when the girth was pulled up tight. Hellecchino remounted and lightly, ever so lightly kicked the horse. It refused to budge. Hellecchino tried again, indicating with his body how hard he was kicking the damned animal while, in fact, he was barely touching the horse’s sides. He leaned down along the horse’s neck and listened for awhile. Then he jumped down again.
“This horse says that he isn’t going anywhere without a bridle and mullen mouth thick and hollow snaffle bit, Kangaroo copper alloy, and lines all covered with silver. If you haven’t got that, he’ll take a draboon double, padded shanks. He says he’s got soft cheeks.”
Well, the cowboys thought this was rather outrageous but as they’d seen what Hellecchino could do, they went and did his bidding, though of course they could find no double–didn’t really know what it was, not out here in the Wild West, but they wouldn’t tell anyone of such ignorance; they just said they couldn’t find one. The Kangaroo took some time, too, since these cowboys didn’t bother with looks or feel in a horse’s mouth and used the old steel ones that rusted. Besides, these kinds of bits were good business for the bit makers as they needed to be replaced often.
Hellecchino embridled the tame horse.
He mounted the horse again, lightly flying up into the saddle.
He kicked the horse. But not too much. Only enough to make it take a few steps around in a circle. Then Hellecchino let it stop again. He got off. He went round to the front of the horse and glared into its eyes, albeit with a twinkle, and put his hands on his hips. Hellecchino stamped.
“What is it you want!?” He paused. “I’ll be goddamned!”
The cowboys were intrigued but did not show their interest, only drawling out in the cowboy way, “What is it?”
“This here horse,” began Hellecchino, staring into the horse’s face in mock disbelief. “This here horse says he won’t go any further if his rider–that’s me–won’t fill his saddlebags with crackers and cheese.” Hellecchino paused, then turned away from the horse to face the cowboys. “Sharp cheddar. And some money. Also, he says I must be in a good white shirt with pearl buttons and a vest and a big show hat like Wild Bill Hickock’s. That’s what the horse wants. And silver Mexican spurs. Picky damn creature.” The horse nodded and pawed the ground.
This was quite an order but as some of them were Bucket boys, they had a standing account at The Sevens Trading Post and Kaikai’s Hostelry, so off they went, returning amazingly quickly, all things considered, with the required horse riding gear.
When all was as it should be, Hellecchino rose up into the saddle and kicked the horse hard. Real hard. So hard, in fact, that the horse was all but in full gallop from the get-go and horse and rider stormed off, Hellecchino acting as if he were out of control on a wildass pony. The cowboys got out of the way like scared jackrabbits and horse and Hellecchino disappeared into the distance, Hellecchino’s arm waving madly.
Later, Hellecchino was sitting beneath a walnut tree thinking about what he did and figuring that soldiers would be after him or something. This time he’d really gone too far. He had to do something, that’s for sure. He looked around him and the tree and the all but barren countryside and dipped into the saddle bags for some crackers and cheese. He offered some to the horse and munched along himself.
Then he had a bright idea, just about the time the earth began to rumble with the sound of hooves.
Quickly, Hellecchino swept the ground under the tree. He took the money in the saddle bags and hung it up in the tree’s branches. He swept the area again and then settled down at the base of the tree as if he were sleeping.
In no time, four big riders reined in their sweat- and spit-spraying horses around Hellechino. They did not dismount. They were big. Real big. Meaty. They were dressed in rattlesnake brown shirts and pants and hats and rattlesnake skin boots. One of them had rattlesnake fangs worked into his kerchief. These were The Blackwater Boys. Known vigilantes for Clyde Moyen Bucket. And, thence, of course, Gyorgy Yabu. Via association.
“Afternoon, boys. What can I do for you?” The Blackwater Boys said nothing. They drew their guns and pointed them at Hellecchino. “I see.” Hellecchino got up and brushed the dirt from his jeans. “I’m going to tell you about this tree. Look here,” he swept his hand upward. “This is a money tree. See all that money hanging in there? Well, I want to sell it. I’m tired of tending it and, of course, I’ve made my millions.” The Blackwater Boys were intrigued, as Hellecchino knew they’d be. They were known to do anything for money. “It takes a day for the money to ripen. Today’s crop is mine but it’s all yours for days and months and years tomorrow. I’ll sell you this for all your horses.”
The Blackwater Boys reholstered their guns and got down from their 17-hand chestnuts and handed the reins to Hellecchino.
“What time is it?” asked Hellecchino.
One of The Blackwater Boys took out a rattlesnake skin decorated watch and opened it up. It had rattlesnake fang hands. “About three,” he intoned, emotionlessly.
“Tell me when it’s three, then.”
They all waited around, sweat dripping and staining their shirts. Then, The Blackwater Boy with the watch nodded his head and Hellecchino went to shaking the tree. He shook it and shook it til all of the money was on the ground. Hellecchino picked up the money, put it back in his saddle bags, nodded to The Blackwater Boys and mounted his finely put out pony.
“Remember,” he said. “You must wait until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Then you shake the tree like hell.” Hellecchino tipped his hat and rode off into the glancing sun.
Well, The Blackwater Boys waited around til three the next day and then began shaking the tree. They shook the hell out of it but. . .no money. They grew angry. They went into their patented petulant frenzy routine and ripped the tree up out of the ground, broke all its branches off, stripped it of its leaves and then, with their bare hands, broke the trunk up into little bitty pieces. No money.
By this time, Hellecchino was long gone, having gotten a great lead, especially considering these Blackwater Boys were without transportation. Hellecchino continued travelling through the night and into the next evening until he was in another country.

john brockman on the edge

John Brockman is an intellectual opportunist and an intellectual coward. He is also a pseudo-intellectual in that he cannot discern solid thinking and facile underlying assumptions but, instead, trumpets them as the harbingers of the future. In a few instances he may be right; but in those instances where he is wrong, his rightness is cast in a wondering light. And, indeed, he should be questioned, for it is only by questioning that anything is discovered; though he wishes not to be.
Let me look first to his intellectual cowardice. Mr. Brockman noted, in one of his Edges, C.P. Snow’s assertion–correct–that there is a gap between the sciences and the humanities that did not exist at one time. The underlying assumption–correct–is that this is not a good thing. To prove his point, he devised a test of what he figured was common knowledge science to be administered to people in the humanities. This is a kind of test designed to fail people. It is also a kind of test Karl Popper finds utterly meaningless, like laboratory simulations that will, of course, prove themselves to be true. A theory, to be proven, must be tested for its opposite, it’s untruth. Even so, Brockman only proved one half of the equation of discipline distance. I pointed this out to him and sent him a little test of common knowledge humanities questions to be published/given to his wonderfully enlightened and superior scientists to give a more rounded and more relevant result. After all, if there is a divide, it exists on both sides. Mr. Brockman kindly refused to offer up the test. I’m quite sure because his pets would have failed, as I’m sure he did when he looked at it. (I did not give him the answers.)
Here is the test:
These ten questions for scientists are commonly known facts.
1. What is metonymy?
2. Who is considered as having written the first novel–and when?
3. Why was phonetics developed–and when?
4. Who was it who said that with the coming of the written word people would forget how to think?
5. Who is Lope de Vega and what is the name of his most famous play?
6. Why are there no extant commedia dell’arte scripts prior to Molière?
7. Who is Roland?
8. What is the Annales School?
9. Who wrote Beowulf?
10. Who is famous for writing in dactylic hexameter and what are the names of his most famous works?
Notice that 1/3 of the answer to #5 is given in the question. I could not resist helping the handicapped along.
I am a writer, it is true, but I’ve been interested in the sciences since childhood, beginning my college career as a pre-med student, biology and chemistry major. So, I didn’t do too badly on Mr. Brockman’s test of how little a humanitarian knows of science. In this, though, I think I am an anomaly.
Mr. Brockman is interested in proving that scientists are the end-all and be-all of humanity, much as the Enlightenment philosophers and Encyclopedists believed that reason and rationality were the answers to everything in the world. Reason and rationality, science, can answer all questions and dispel all mysteries, as seems to be the belief of Steven Pinker as well–but more of him later. Jonathan Swift showed just how silly such an “enlightened” stance was in Gulliver’s visit to the land of the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms were huge horses: would that make them full of alot of horse sense? They, in their reason and rationality enslaved Yahoos (who now rule the New World, aka the USA). These superior beings also believed that Gulliver could not have come from some island across the ocean because they believed, rationally and reasonably, that such an island did not exist and, therefore, it did not. The Psicops seem to hold to this kind of logic as well, a truly Luddite stance.
So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut writes in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. And other novels of absurdity.
On and off throughout history, science has had a bad name. In these times, it is good that someone is around to show us that not all science is ill-conceived or put to inhumane purposes or can be bought. But. Mr. Brockman needs to be a little more discriminating in his choice of scientists to congratulate and hold up as shining examples of their art discipline. In his choice of Steven Pinker, this might be no more than running with the pack of wild popularity dogs. Steven Pinker is very popular. He is considered the leading figure in language and linguistics studies, especially via neurological investigations. Dr. Pinker is a psychologist. And Dr. Pinker is a shoddy thinker, a man who obviously did not read or pay attention to those who did read David Hackett Fischer’s Historian’s Fallacies or Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument or any of Karl Popper’s assumption-questioning writings–even though he cites Popper in The Stuff of Thought. A few examples will, I think, suffice to elucidate the ad hominem thinking that Dr. Pinker passes off as intellectual cerebration.
“[N]ear death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain” (The Mystery of Consciousness at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,1580394,00.html). This presupposes not only that there is a separation of the soul but that oxygen starvation can occur in selected, isolated portions of the body even though it involves the entire brain. Generally speaking, when a brain is starved for oxygen, it’s the entire body that suffers, not just one or two organ systems. Dr. Pinker is hedging here, for he’s never experienced a near-death experience nor has there been any scientific evidence to verify his dismissive judgment. That is, he’s not tested, with advanced technological equipment, those going through near-death experiences. Chances are, too, he’s never been on the scene. Such a statement as his is an opinion, yet it is passed off as science for no other reason than he says so. His dismissive attitude runs throughout his writing, as if to say, “I don’t believe it so it’s all pish-posh.”
Earlier in the same essay, published in Time (19 Jan. 2007), Dr. Pinker states, “Consciousness surely does not depend on language.” How unfortunate that, in fact, it does depend on language, for without language no one would know of consciousness, no one would be able to admit of it, no one would be able to talk about it. We are, after all, languaging animals: our world is described and built and adapted by our language (Cf. Humberto Maturana generally).
Then he says, “everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.” The “hard problem” is “explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation.” That is, consciousness is mysterious. Unfortunately, there are some people, notably I.N. Marshal, who do not believe consciousness is a mystery. Marshal, Zohar and others approach consciousness from a quantum mechanical viewpoint. More of his flippant dismissal of this later. Dr. Pinker only sees the brain as a computational entity; it doesn’t do anything else. But he confuses brain with mind (The Stuff of Thought, p. 259) or, rather, considers there to be no difference: brain is mind and mind is brain. Everything appears to be rationally and reasonable and solely to be found in the neural functioning of the brain/mind. He even talks of language as if it were bits and pieces that are put together according to certain rules, implying that to not follow the rules results in non-language and–perhaps I stretch the point here–stupidity. Stupidity is his forte: all his argumentation is reducing ideas he does not agree with, including Lakoff and Johnson, to the ridiculous, using pieces of their writings in order to lambaste the entirety of their theories, imparting to them ideas or beliefs that are, in reality, his conclusions based on obviously conscious misinterpretations (Cf. The Stuff of Thought in its entirety) such that the argument to ridicule is itself ridiculous.
The most amazing concept, and the most contradictory statement that Dr. Pinker makes in this essay (The Mystery of Consciousness), is that there is a seat of consciousness and it is in the “higher” part of the brain. He supports himself by citing Crick, the other half of the DNA discoverer duo. However, earlier on, he maintains that consciousness consists “of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.” He even notes that Bernard Baars “likens consciousness to a global blackboard.” So, which is it Dr. Pinker? Is there a seat of consciousness, like the seat of language in Wernicke’s or Broca’s area (now disproven)? Or is it a brainwide phenomenon? And how can consciousness be only “neural computation” when soft matter physics most assuredly plays into the matter? There are external stressors that affect a cell’s functioning on the cellular level as well as the macroscopic level: swelling in the brain effects behavioral aberrations which, I think, have something to do with “neural computation.” If a change happens on such a large scale, a comparable change will happen on a cellular level since the cells themselves are not static entities–or perhaps there is some other reason for the brain to pulsate. That is, the environment in which nerve cells operate affects their operation. Even the pulsation affects, macro- and microscopically, “neural computation.” Cells in the body react to contiguous cells, not in isolation. Dr. Pinker’s thinking seems to be quite linear and rather simplistic and very, very concrete.
The most insidious pseudo-intellectual, ad hominem argument Dr. Pinker makes results in his debunking quantum mechanics. To wit:- “Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.” Well, perhaps I’m being too hard on Dr. Pinker: Einstein thought quantum mechanics was weird, too. Einstein’s been proven wrong on this point.
Dr. Pinker further wishes to take the mystery out of language via scientific examination and neural explanation and, to do so, he posits that language is an instinct. . .a very mysterious thing indeed is instinct. Instinct is, I think, something that cannot be explained: it just is. And as it is, it is mysterious in its being. So, in truth, Pinker explains nothing and keeps language in the realm of the mysterious. But it sounds good. Wow! Language is built in. A fool might ask, “How?” and show his stupidity in thinking that debunking the mysteriousness of language by attributing it to the mysteriousness of instinct is ridiculous. . .if not mysterious.
Again, in an article for The Times (“Can’t find the words? Make ‘em up”), Dr. Pinker resorts to specious thinking in his Chinese example of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism via light in weight (qīng 轻) and heavy (zhòng 重). The implication he is making is that there is a parallel between sound and meaning that holds across the language (even though he debunks this myth in The Stuff of Thought). It doesn’t. If we look at large (dà 大) and small (xiăo 小) we find that, yes, da is the strong fourth downared tone but xiao is the sing-song third tone. Not only this but da changes its tone with usage, that is, in context. And what are we to make of inside (nèi 内) and outside (wài 外) or up (shàng 上) and down (xià 下)? They are the same tone. There are only four tones in Chinese (five if you count the neutral tone), so onomatopoeia and sound symbolism via tones is extremely limited and apparently has little to do with meaning. Dr. Pinker, here, is making a specious argument. He also does not speak or read Chinese. Generalizing from one instance to the entire corpus is intellectually indefensible. It is the one dog bites, all dogs bite kind of logic engaged in by people who are afraid of dogs because they were bitten once.
Dr. Pinker engages in just that kind of word usage in “Words Don’t Mean What They Mean” (another Time Inc. article, of 6 Sept. 2007, an excerpt from The Stuff of Thought) as, when he talks, he lays lines on his listeners, role plays, sidesteps, shilly-shallies and engages in “all manner of vagueness and innuendo.” We also do as he tells us we do, without apparent thought: assume “that the speaker is rational.” Dr. Pinker’s rationality smacks of the Houyhnhnm variety, it would seem: because they did not believe an island existed across the sea, it therefore did not exist even in the face of evidence, Gulliver, to the opposite. But Mr. Brockman finds him, Pinker, to be eminently intellectually gifted and full of astounding insight. Socrates would perhaps liken Dr. Pinker’s rhetoric to that of Critias, Polus or Callicles.
In his Language Acquisition, Dr. Pinker engages in the most egregious analysis of how children gain an understanding of how to use language given that they are not open to hearing constant repetitions of patterns: he shows us how they, children, use higher intellectual functioning to come to a conclusion. In truth, children are incapable of even the simplest of arithmetic computations. Not only do children not have this ability to logically analyze backwards from a given until they are much older, he is going about his explanation backwards, as if the end product is the cause when it is more probably the effect of child learning (Cf. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species for a different take on this).
Dr. Pinker first slides around issues by using ifs, shoulds, coulds–suppositions that assume much but prove nothing. “[C]hildren should start off assuming that their language requires the largest possible governing category, and then to shrink the possibilities inward as they hear the telltale sentences” resulting in “this subtle pattern of predictions.” Children are also supposed to “assume, by default, that languages have a fixed constituent order. They would back off from that prediction if and only if they hear alternative word orders, which indicate that the language does permit constituent order freedom. The alternative is that the child could assume that the default case was constituent order freedom.” Eh? “Constituent order freedom”? What kind of children does he know! Dr. Pinker is thinking, it seems, that children have the same mental agility as he, an adult, does and can engage in axiom-making and assumptions that go with higher inductive reasoning. He is having children reason as he would reason. This is a fallacious reasoning, one that, perhaps, Jonathan Swift perhaps might could have used in Gulliver’s Travels or any of his other satires. Is Dr. Pinker from Laputa? Or maybe Lilliput?
Everything for Dr. Pinker resides in the brain. The brain’s functioning is the answer to everything. The brain rules. The brain leaves us no choice. We are at its mercy. But it’s a mystery. Even Dr. Pinker admits it’s a mystery when he says we have an innate language instinct. Why? Because instinct is a mystery in and of itself. And so it is that Dr. Pinker is talking in circles, in tautologies. As noted before.
The brain we humans have took millions of years to evolve but the language we use evolved (evolves) in hundreds or thousands of years. So, language cannot be an evolution-dependent item. But it could be, as Dr. Deacon notes, a co-evolutionary item, à la Baldwinian evolution/selection (Cf. The Symbolic Species). But Dr. Terrence Deacon is not among John Brockman’s edge-defying scientists. Who knows why. Perhaps because he’s not colorful enough. Dr. Pinker does not like Dr. Deacon either. Actually, Dr. Pinker doesn’t seem to like anyone who doesn’t think as he does. This becomes obvious in The Stuff of Thought, especially as he cites himself 20 times, twice as often as any other writer/theorist.
But Steven Pinker is colorful and animated and popular and that’s what’s needed since Mr. Brockman is interested in selling his product. It would appear that John Brockman is not so discriminating in choosing his cutting edge scientific thinkers. Even with Richard Dawkins, who raises up that old 19th century belief that we are the top of the line, the end of the line the goal evolution has been heading toward since the very beginning, if we are to believe the closing pages of The Blind Watchmaker.

Bibliography
Brockman, John. Edge. http://www.edge.org/
Deacon, Terrence W. The Symbolic Species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies. New York: Harper & Row, Pubs., 1970.
Pinker, Steven. Can’t find the words? Make ‘em up at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2474562.ece
__________. The Mystery of Consciousness at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html
__________. The Stuff of Thought. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
__________. Words Don’t Mean What They Mean at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1659772,00.html
Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge Classics, 1969.
Toulman, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

the wall take 2

First, not everyone could follow Hellecchino’s logic. After all, the workers were losing their work and their workplaces. Eventually. That was all the future they could see or figured was important. Who did he think he was telling them it was no problem? Surely, he was a middle class or upper class man who had no inclining of what it was to work. He didn’t have a proper job. Even more, he was surely not aware of how much they, the workers, were responsible for his privileged way of life. Who’s side was he on anyway?
“Goldarnit! I do bizniss over thar, on that side o’ th’wall.”
“I know it. Me too.”
“I got fri’nds over there. How th’hell I gonna git to see ‘em?”
“Yabu likes ‘em an’ they’re friends o’ yorn?”
“I cain’t help that!”
“The damn wall’s interferin’ with bizniss an’–an’–an’ life. Ever’thang’s over there.”
“Y’don’ hafta tell me!”
“We ain’t got nowhere else to turn.”
“Where’d this Hellecchino fella come from anyway?”
“Well. . .yknow. . .I been thinkin’–”
“Aw shut up!”
The voices of the workers were many and anonymous. Of course. This wall was getting in the way. It was getting into their lives. It was right in their faces taking up their cognition so that they could look nowhere else. After all, it was right in their backyards, in a manner of speaking. They became kind of obsessed with this wall–actually, the idea of a wall as it had not been erected yet–and could see nothing but the wall. This, of course, leads to tragedy, not being able to see but one thing and letting that one thing ride roughshod over you. But, then, they didn’t know about Oedipus and Greek tragedy. Intellectual stuff was not practical.
There was a problem over at The Hotel. But nobody talked about it at The Hotel. They rode out to Hacienda loco plátano.
Yabu was out back practicing with his new fly rod. He was planning on a fishing expedition up Potter’s Creek, Missouri while the wall was being built. Clyde Moyen Bucket would be taking care of things. As per usual. You see. . .when you own everything and everybody–or think you do–there’s no need for you to do any work and you become bored so you must find something to do with yourself, your time. Gyorgy Yabu went fishing. At least, that’s what he told his wife, Linda Lu Byrd, who played dumb, for she knew he went out with his buddies fishing for more than scaly little finny things swimming about in the water. And he’d be drinking. She kept tabs on Yabu, whom she called Geo, expecting to be able to or forced to use this information to keep him in line– for her own personal gratification, you understand. There would come a time, she knew.
The wall architects rode into the front yard and dismounted in a cloud of dust. They dropped their reins and stumped around back in their tight-toed high-heeled cowboy boots, their spurs jingling and jangling. A few old crows sitting on the fence styles cawed and flapped up into the shimmering summer air, keening off into the southwest where there would for sure be some dead thing lying about good for mid-afternoon snack.
When the boys got out back, they stood and watched Yabu casting about. He seemed quite pleased with himself despite his method. His arm motion was not fluid and he couldn’t manage more than one cast, occasionally two, at a time. Forever missed the cactus he was aiming at, too. However, when you’re casting into water and don’t know where the fishies are, being on target isn’t too much of a requirement.
“Mr. Yabu, sir,” said the lead architect.
Yabu cast his fly, reeled it in jerkily and turned, holding his quavering pole up. “What is it, boys?”
“We got a problem at The Hotel.”
“What d’you expect me to do about it?”
“We thought you could help us solve the problem, sir.”
“I’m gittin’ ready to go fishin’ in a couple days.”
“Yes, sir. So we see. But this is pressing.”
“Well. . .what is it?”
“That Hellecchino character.”
“Don’t bring him up out here. This is my ranch. It’s a peaceful place. I don’t like my peace disturbed.”
“Yes, well, but sir–”
“Can’t you jest take care o’ th’ problem yoreselves?”
“But, Mr. Yabu, sir. . .Hellecchino lives in The Hotel.”
“So?”
“And you want The Hotel on the good side of the wall.”
“Yeah? And. . .”
“Hellecchino’s on the second floor front.”
“Well, cut ‘im out.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Build the wall around him.”
“Mr. Yabu, sir. . .he may not have a means of gittin’ out of his room.”
“So what?”
“Oh. Yes. I see.”
“Good.” And Yabu turned back to his casting about.
“Do we build the wall all around him, then?”
“What th’hell’s wrong with you guys! Can’t you think?”
“Well, sir. . .which side of the wall is the good side? In this case, it becomes very important.”
“What th’hell’re you jabberin’ about? The north side of the street.”
“Well, sir, if we do that we kind of make a section of the Yabu & Brownwood Causeway move over into the south side.”
“How the hell can a road move?”
“Let me show you, sir?”
Yabu put his hands on his hips, thus dragging his fly rod in the dirt. “Alright.”
The senior architect walked over to Yabu, searched around for a stick, found one and began drawing lines in the dust.
“Y’see, sir. If the wall comes down the street like this. . .and it circles round Hellecchino like this. . .and then continues on like this. . .we got part of the north side of main street on the south side of the wall.”
Yabu stared down at his curled up cowboy boot toes. He shifted his feet about kind of like a duck.
“What do you think we oughta do about that?”
“That’s what we came out here for, sir. Mr. Yabu.”
“I gotta do all yore thinkin’ for ya?!”
“Well. . .we could build a connector wall and then encircle Hellecchino in his room. Like this. . .”
“Yeah. . .but that’s alotta extra wall-making stuff an’ that means more money.”
“Yes, sir.”
The two men stood staring down at the mixture of lines in the dust. They shifted their feet. So did the accompanying crew.
“So. . .what else kin we do?” asked Yabu in all innocence.
“Evict him.”
“Evict him?”
“Evict him,” echoed the others.
“Damn! Why didn’t I think of that!? Do it!”
“Under what pretext?”
“Oh, hell. I don’t care! Just git him out! He’s fuckin’ up my wall, my enlightenment. Who th’hell does he think he is!”
“Yes, sir.”
The head architect turned and strode back to his cohorts. He nodded. They turned and all walked around the house to the front yard, mounted their waiting horses and rode back into Chokepointe Piste, pleased with their solution. Now, they weren’t responsible for their actions. This was good for their consciences. There was nothing like guilt to cause constipation, shingles and all sorts of other disgusting somatic neurotic eruptions.
It wasn’t but a couple days later that a man knocked on Hellecchino’s hotel room door. Hellecchino answered the door.
“Mr. Hellecchino?” asked the man, who just happened to be Sheriff Medusi Minkowski IV.
“Yes. That’s me. How ya doin’, Sheriff?”
“Oh, I’m fine thank you. But, y’know, ya gotta be gittin’ outa this hotel room.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
“Why?”
“Well. . .if ya ain’t’ workin’ for the city of Chokepointe Piste, ya cain’t go on livin’ here.”
“Gotta law ’bout that?”
“Yup. Just passed in the City Council yesterday.”
“OK.”
Hellecchino packed up his things and walked out, leaving Medusi Minkowski IV standing in the hall outside the empty room wondering just what it was was going on. He scratched his Stetson, shook his head, turned on his heel and walked down the stairs and out into the street. He looked this way and that. There was no Hellecchino in sight. So, Medusi Minkowski IV shrugged his shoulders, mumbled something about that being easier than he thought and ambled back to his office. There was a desk that was missing his boots. Along the way, he stopped in the architect’s office, poked his head inside the door, and said, “No problem.”
Hellecchino had walked out of town, leaving no sign of his passing. There was good reason to keep his whereabouts secret right about now. If DIY knew not where he was, they’d figure he was gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Hellecchino walked on out to Buck’s blockhouse toll booth, climbed up the ladder and began laying out his stuff beneath the rainbow-colored umbrella.
Buck stumped out of the house and stood out in the middle of the road. It was safe. Very little traffic. His philosophy, though, was sound and simple: if there were no cars, trucks, buckboards or stagecoaches coming, it was safe to cross the street.
“What th’hell you doin’, Hellecchino?”
“Settin’ up house.”
“What happened to The Hotel?”
“Oh, nothin’. It’s still there.”
“Why ain’tchu?”
“I was evicted.”
“What for?”
“Hell if I know.” Hellecchino chuckled. “Perhaps Sheriff Medusi Minkowski IV is delusional.”
“That ain’t nothin’ new!”
“I hope you’re a good cook.”
“I’m okay.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Beef stew.”
“Let me know when it’s ready.”
“Good to have company,” shouted Buck, re-crossing the road in his up-and-down sort of way.
“You’re welcome.” Hellecchino was ever polite.
Later that night, a group of workers surrounded the blockhouse and demanded to talk to Hellecchino. They were not happy campers.
Hellecchino came down from his rooftop aerie and lit a fire in the middle of the rod. The town rolled up the boardwalks around dusk, so there was never any traffic in the dark. He spread blankets on the ground and gestured for the workers to sit. They weren’t in the mood for a genteel night time chat, so they didn’t. Hellecchino sat. He signaled to Buck who rolled out a keg of beer, rattling tin cups slung over his shoulder sounding for all the world like tin bells on a lame donkey. The visiting workers sat.
Hellecchino waited til everyone had a cup of brew. He saluted them all with raised cup and took a sip.
“Ya don’t need to tell me why you’re all here. Y’all think I’m crazy. Here’s this little man come down off of Big Rock Candy Mountain with some cockamamie idea that buildin’ a wall to keep the bad out is an enlightened idea.”
“You got that right.”
“And you figure he’s disruptin’ your lives, makin’ it so you can’t do business and you can’t see your friends.” Murmurs of assent. “Well, let me ask you some questions. . .you done what I told ya?”
Nobody said nothin’ for a bit. Then some brave soul, after looking from side to side, ventured, “What’s that?”
“Move up over the top of your stores or move your stores to your homes.”
“Nah. We ain’t done that.”
When the hell ya gonna do it? After the wall’s built?”
“He build that wall, we won’t be able t’git to our stores.”
Hellecchino sipped his beer. “And if you’re living over the top of your stores, where’re your stores gonna be?”
“On this side o’th’wall.”
“Wand where you gonna be?”
“On this side o’th’wall.”
Hellecchino sipped his beer and said nothing.
“Look, smart ass,” quipped one pot-bellied worker, “we do business over there. If’n he walls us out, we ain’t got no more business.”
“More like he ain’t got nowhere to buy what he heeds,” said Buck.
The workers mumbled and drained their cups. Buck began the refilling procedure.
“How many settlements and ranchers to the south and east of you and the wall?” The gathered looked from one to the other. “You do business that way. Ain’t no wall stoppin’ ya.”
“Well. . .yeah. But what about the wall?”
“What bout it?”
“It’ll still be there, god damn it!”
“So?”
“It’s important!”
“Is it? Look,” Hellecchino sipped his cup dry, “who believes in the wall?”
“Yabu.”
“And who thinks it’s important?”
“Yabu.”
“And us!”
“That’s what he’s countin’ on,” snapped Hellecchino.
The night was silent. The moon winked out behind a cloud.
“If he’s countin’ on thaty wall being important and you decide it’s not, how important is that wall? What kind of enlightened world will it stand for?” Hellecchino held his cup up for a refill. Buck obliged him. “Ya see, ya ain’t gotta buy into his game. You make that wall into a big thing, it will be. Takes two sides to build a wall.”
“But you tole us to help build it.”
“Who else is gonna build it? If you enthusiastically go about helpin’ to build the wall, he’ll think you’re happy about it and he’ll stop it. He ain’t Ito makin’ you happy, right?”
“Well, shit!”
“Drink up, boys.”
Nobody knows how it happened, but the next morning found Hellecchino perched atop the hitching post before the house of Hacienda loco plátano. In the dawn’s early light, Hellecchino was proudly beheld in all his pint-and-magenta-and-purple majesty by an incredulous Gyorgy Yabu.
“What the hell,” Yabu muttered from behind his big plate glass window and stepped out on the porch. He took a sip of his hot coffee from his extra big clown cup as if he owned the world and Hellecchino was a speck of dust. “What the hell you doin’ on my ranch?”
“Well,” drawled Hellecchino, “I come to talk to a man who done got some enlightenment. Ain’t never met one before.”
“Well, here I am.”
“You don’t look no diff’rent.”
“Diff’rent from what?”
“From anybody else.”
“Looks is deceivin’.”
“I must say. . .tell me about your journey.”
“Up Merengue Montaña?”
“You go anywhere else?”
“Nope. Nowhere else to go for enlightenment these days.” Hellecchino waited. Yabu shifted his teddy bear slippers on the porch. “It was a jolly good time. But Merengue Montaña was larger and higher than I expected.”
“It should be. It’s the most famous mountain in the world. Was there anything interesting at the top?”
“What a silly question.” Yabu sipped his coffee. “Nothing special, ya know. After we entered the state of Roswell we stayed over night at the foot of the mountain. There was a crowd of pilgrims, of course, and in the course of conversation, we younger men thought it would be fun to put a paper bag over Merengue Montaña. The older folks thought it was impossible and laughed t us. We said he could. So. . .” Yabu shifted his teddy beat slippers about, “we brought out bamboo spoons and, each holding one in his mouth, two in his hands and two more in his toes, we began to make paste. In no time, we made it as high as the mountain. Next, we collected all the paper from the provinces of White Sands and Truth or Consequences. I figured we were going to make a hug bag but my fellow journeymen began to paste paper on the mountain sides and, in no time, we were at the top of Merengue Montaña. It was all clothed in a paper bag. Ain’t that a unheard-of thang?”
“Nah! That ain’t so unusual. Last year when I went over to Wasatch-Cache province, the young’uns brewed tea in the Great Salt Lake and then drank it all up. The entire lake.”
“You cain’t trick me! How could anybody drink up an entire lake?”
“Listen. They said, let’s make tea in the lake and they gathered up all the tea leaves, irrespective of quality, from the five neighboring provinces. In no time there was a pile of tea leaves as high as Dante’s View. Well, they put it all into the lake using their mulberry brooms with handles one hundred feet long and began to sir it up. When they was done, they blew off the froth and drank it up just like that. In fact, they drank the whole lake dry but the froth they blew off still remains and it’s known as Plain o’ Froth.”
“What a yarn! The Plain o’ Froth appears in the tale of Paul Bunyan.”
“But you don’t know the new Plain o’ Froth right beside it, which appeared last year.”
“Lie!”
“If you think it’s a lie, you just go and look for yourself.”
“Wa-all. . .I ain’t about t’ argue with ya, but. . .” Yabu sipped his coffee and shuffled his slippers, “just you listen to this! A few years ago when I went over into the western part of the country, I saw a bull lay down in the Mojave Desert and feed on the Sandwich Islands. Imagine that!–feeding himself across mountains, rivers and the sea. Some big fucking beast, eh?’
‘That’s not so wonderful. Why, when I went over to the Black Hills, I saw a drum nine miles in circumference.”
“Circum–what?”
“Circumference. Around.”
Yabu nodded his head. Smiled out the side of his mouth. “That’s ridiculous, of course. You may be able to make a ring out’n wood slats but you’re not gonna find a hide nine miles large, that’s fer shur.”
“What th’hell do you know? I’m telling the truth. I can verify it was the hide of that bull you saw laying down in the Mojave.”
“Great Scott! You don’t say.” Hellecchino nodded his head. “Well, I’ll be. How come you know all these stories? You’re so clever.”
“Oh, tall tales come easy, though I never tell outsiders my secret.”
“What secret?”
“The secret to successfully makin’ a fool outa people.”
“Shore which I knew it!”
“Well, you got your enlightenment, I got mine.”
“Aw, c’mon. We’re brothers in arms.”
“Oh, alright. But ya gotta promise not to tell anyone.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Yabu did it, spilling the remaining coffee out of his cup.
“There’s a special seed for stories anybody’d believe no matter how outrageous and unfounded. It’s called. . .” here Hellecchino leaned in conspiratorially, “Geoffrey Crayon’s Wives of old Burghers Seed.” Yabu nodded his head and waited. Then he leaned in. “Would you like to have one?” asked Hellecchino.
“Hail yes!”
“Just you wait here a few minutes, I’ll go off and get one.”
Hellecchino jumped down off the hitching post and sauntered down the trail out of the ranch. When he was out of sight, he picked up a round pebble, unlike any other round pebble beside the road, and spoke to it in all earnestness. “Pebble. . .can you believe this shit? He wants a seed of lies and I’m going to give him you. What do you think of this?” The pebble said nothing. “There certainly are some fools in this world, eh what?” Then he threw the pebble back down, slapped his hands clean and loped back to the Hacienda loco plátano hitching post and held up the pebble. “Here it is. A Geoffrey Crayon’s Wives of old Burghers Seed.”
“Where?”
“I buried it just outside your entrance gate. You hafta dig it up or it ain’t worth nothin’.”
“Hot damn! You jest wait a sec, I’ll git my shovel an’ we’ll go on down t’th’gate and start diggin’.”
“We, white man? If’n you want the secret to tall story tellin’, you gotta dig it up yourself. I can’t help you.”
“What the hell! Fer a prize like that, I’d walk acrosst Kansas.” And with that, Yabu ran round back of the house, hunted around in the tool shed and came back with a flat edge spade. “Let’s go!”
Hellecchino shook his head sadly–this man obviously hadn’t ever been on the business end of a shovel. The ground out here was hard and a pointy-ended shovel was what was needed. But, who the hell was Hellecchino to tell an enlightened man what to do?
When they got to the gate, Yabu turned to Hellecchino. “Where is it?”
“Right there, as I recall,” said Hellecchino, pointing to the right post foot.
“Here?”
“There.”
Yabu began digging. Or, rather, he jammed the shovel down onto the hard, hard earth and watched it jump right back up at him. He scowled and slammed the spade down on the ground again.
“Maybe you might try puttin’ the corner of the shovel into the ground. Gettin’ yourself a little hole.”
“Right.”
Yabu did this and, lo and behold, he began to dig himself a hole. But after an hour or so, he stopped digging. He wiped the sweat from his high brow. He leaned on the handle of the shovel.
“You shore it’s here?”
“Dig a little deeper.”
“Hell! I cain’t dig no deeper!”
“You don’t see it down there?”
Yabu bent over and looked in his hole. “No. I cain’t find nothin’.”
“Ah. Well. Perhaps it was over to this post. Yes. That’s it. I was standin’ the other way round. It’s here. I remember now.”
“Okay.”
Yabu dug into the dry, dry earth, Hellecchino reminding him to put the corner of his square spade into the ground first. After awhile, though, Yabu stopped digging and looked down into his little hole.
“I don’t see nothin’.”
“You ain’t dug deep enough yet.”
“The hell you say!”
“Well, if you want the Geoffrey Crayon’s Wives of old Burghers Seed, you’ll keep digging, even if you dig all the way to China.”
“You think the Chinese got it?”
“Could be.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“You come get me when you found the Geoffrey Crayon’s Wives of old Burghers Seed. I got business in town.”
“Alright. I’ll do that.”
And Hellecchino went jauntily on down the road to Chokepointe Piste just a-whistlin’ Dixie to a shovel counterpoint.

the wall

Buck limped across the street, calling out, “Hellecchino! Hellecchino!”
It was a bright sunny day, as per usual in Chokepointe Piste, or anywhere in the Brazos River Basin, where the rain rarely came tumbling down to cleanse the air and the land. Acid rain here was disallowed. It had been comfortably moved northward to Dallas and Houston and southward to San Antonio and Mexico. This very point allowed the PR firm of Yabu & Son–there was no son but it sounded good and made for an increase in business, for it dripped respectability–to sell tourists on the “sun all year round”-ness of the country and the temperate climate conducive to tan and wind and open range freedom. The pitch hadn’t caught on yet but what’s time when profits are involved?
So. . .Buck was perspiring by the time he reached the boardwalk on the other side of the street from The Lone Star Inn & Bordello and began stumping–rump-TUMP, rump-TUMP–along the loose boards until he turned into The Hotel, where he raised his breathless voice again, “Hellecchino! Hellecchino!”
The desk clerk dumbly watched him. Anything was a welcome break from routine. Buck peeked into the lounge. No Hellecchino. Buck peeked into the restaurant. No Hellecchino. Buck peeked into the bar-salon. No Hellecchino. Each time, he called out, “Hellecchino! Hellecchino!”
Buck ran–ker-PLUNK, ker-PLUNK–up the stairs and knocked injudiciously on the door to Hellecchino’s room. No answer.
Buck descended the stairs and stood before the front desk catching his breath. Finally, he said, “Where’s Hellecchino?”
And the desk clerk answered, in all truthfulness, “He ain’t here.”
Buck nodded and stumped out of the hotel. He looked both ways before he stepped out onto the boardwalk. It was difficult to decide which way to go, right or left. So, he turned right and continued plunking down the boardwalk toward Fancy Dan’s where he knew Hellecchino liked to indulge in lip-smackin’, finger-lickin’, chin-dribblin’ bovine costae with generous dabs of Arthur Bryant’s Masterpiece Barbeque sauce shipped direct from wild and wooly Kansas City via Yabu Transport and thus an extravagant item. Import duties made sure that any competition to the famous Yabu Cactus Barbeque Sauce remained beyond the capabilities of the common man while the ribs themselves were cheap at half the price.
And sure enough, that’s where Buck found Hellecchino, face covered in a clown-like smile of reddish-brown sauce dripping from his chinny-chin-chin down onto a checkered bib, supplied by Fancy Dan’s as part of the dinner packet. After all, rib juice and barbeque sauce stained, and stains would limit Fancy Dan’s business drastically. But, he covered his ass, Daniel Bunesci did, by also owning and operating the Italian Ristorante a la Mexicali and the Chinese laundry that conveniently did a big business removing spaghetti sauce evidence. Wives and mothers were eternally grateful. So was Daniel Bunesci.
“Hellecchino! Hellecchino!” yelled Buck, clunking up to Hellecchino’s table and plopping himself down in the chair opposite his mentor and hero.
“What’s up, Bucko?” inquired Hellecchino, smacking his lips and showering Buck with little pinpoint splatters of sauce. “Better get a napkin,” suggested Hellecchino. “Oh, boy! Another napkin, please.” He snapped his fingers, sending a shower of sauce and juice into the air.
The napkin was brought. Buck wiped his face.
“So. What’s up, Buck?”
Buck wiped his face again. “Yabu’s back in town.”
“His town. No news there.”
“No. We got trouble.”
“We’s alahs gots trouble, Bucko. It’s de name o’ de game. It’s what brings me to dis part of the world.”
Buck wiped his face. “But he’s just back from seeing his guru.”
“You mean Master Hiram Evananda?”
“You know about him?”
“Shore do, Bucko. Ain’t nothin’ I don’t know ’bout. I’m a hero, y’know.”
“An’ yore magic,” chortled Buck, wiping his face yet again.
“Oh, boy!” and Hellecchino snapped his thickly wet fingers again, again spraying reddish sauce hither and yon. “I’m finished. Bring me the handiwipes and take this stuff away.” When the boy had done his bidding, Hellecchino said, “Put it on my bill. Now. . . what is it that couldn’t wait until I finished my noonday repast?”
“Well, Yabu’s returned from Big Chief Buttons Compound out on Merengue Monta?a. An’ he’s shoutin’ and carryin’ on about bein’ enlightened.”
“What so new about that? So damned many people return from Peyote Pete’s Big Rock Candy Mountain claiming the same thing.”
“Ain’t none o’ then Gyorgy Yabu.”
“Well, now. There you have a point. What’s he on about this time?”
“It’s reported–”
“Who’s reporting this?”
“McTortle. He keeps a keen eye on these kinds of things.”
“Hmm. . .always some kind of shell game, eh?”
“That’s exactly right. How’dja know?”
“I’m a hero. I keep tellin’ ya, Buck. Don’tcha ever listen?”
“Huh?”
“What did McTortle have to say?”
“Yabu’s enlightenment is about separatin’ good from bad.”
“Wowzer! He’s got a way to tell the difference?”
“Seems so. He’s gonna build a wall to keep the bad out.”
“Oh, my. . .that’ll cost a bit.”
“Not so, Hellecchino. Master Hiram Evananda has ties to the asphalt and concrete business down the road at Ocee and he owns the grease and oil business out on Country Road 317 on the way to Old McGregor’s Farm.”
“I see. . .”
“So, we got a problem, Hellecchino. Let’s get to work and save mankind.”
“I think you’re being a bit hasty, Buck. What if mankind don’t wanna be saved?”
“Yore shittin’ me!”
“No. I’m not. We gotta wait til people start complainin’ and seein’ the error of Yabu’s ways. Y’know, if’n it ain’t in yore backyard, it ain’t worth doin’ nothin’ about. It’s the rules o’ the game.”
“Ain’t Chokepointe Piste yore backyard?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. But people tend to shrink the term ‘backyard’ to personal, private dimensions. Let me tell you a little story–”
“We got time for stories?”
“There’s always time for a story, Buck. It’s in stories that knowledge is passed along, as Wredgranny says.”
“Who’s Wredgranny?”
“An old Indian woman. An elder. A storyteller.”
“She fat?”
“Buck, I’m surprised at you!”
“Why? Ain’t all Indian old women fat?”
“You ever seen an old Indian woman?”
“Hell no. They ain’t allowed in Chokepointe Piste.”
“So, what do you base your opinion on?”
“The pitchers in hist’ry books.”
“Well. . .let me tell you, Buck. Those books are written by white men who don’t like Indians and so the pictures are what they want you to believe is the truth.”
“Go-awlly!”
“Right down the road there is the Educational Research Analysts, led by Mel Gabler, Hedda’s distant relative. Deborah L. Brezina rents the building out of which Gabler and the Educational Analysts regurgitate history. Y’see, Buck. All you know of fat old Indian women is what this organization tells you. They stereotype the Indians. Fat old women are not welcome in this part of the country, no?”
“Well, I’ll be hornswaggled!”
“That’s right, Buck. You’re the victim of political propaganda.”
“Old Indian women aren’t fat?’
“No. Not necessarily. The only thing that all old Indian women are is wrinkled.”
“Well, hell! That comes with age.”
“Indians are people.”
“Well, sure. But. . .ain’t they all got big noses?”
“You mean like Italians and Polish?”
“Sure. Like that.”
“Stereotype.”
“Ain’t stereotype something that comes outa two sides?”
“Buck. . .let me tell you a story.” Hellecchino pushed his chair back and crossed his hands over his flat belly. “To stereotype is to fix in lasting form.”
“Kinda like sculpture?”
“In a manner of speaking, stereotypes are writ in stone. Howsomever. . .a stereotype is also something constantly repeated without change–”
“Like a prayer!”
“Will you just let me get to the bottom of this?” Buck subsided, hung his head. “Alright. As I was saying. . .stereotypes come in phrases and X and factoids. . .”
“Factoid?”
“A factoid, etymologically, is ’something like a fact.’ “
“So a stereotype is something like a fact but it ain’t.”
“Exactly.” Hellecchino leaned back, looked up at the ceiling and began his story. “The blowback on stereotypes is that some people begin to believe ‘em. That is, if you’re told something enough times, you begin to believe it. Like a fox. Foxes been told they’re cunning tricksters for centuries and they believe it now. But the trap is. . .it ain’t necessarily true. Now, somehow or other, Fox got his fellow woodsy denizens to work for him harvesting his fields. Fox, of course, was wily enough to get out of most of the hard work. But, along about mid-morning, Rabbit got a thistle stuck in his paw. He started hoppin’ and jumpin’ around and shoutin’ enough to wake the dead. You know how over-excited rabbits get. Anyway. . .Fox came trottin’ down the row Rabbit was workin’ and saw the thistle. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘go on over t’ the well and put some cool, clear water on it. But don’t be gone too long, y’hear?’ Rabbit didn’t say nothin’, just hip-hopped outa the patch and through the woods to the well. Well, when he got there, he found that the water was way down in there. He dropped a pebble into the well an’ it took some time to find bottom, as it were. There were a couple buckets sittin’ on the edge o’ the well, so Rabbit figured he’d just ride one down to the water, dip his paw in the water, take a little drink, it bein’ a hot day an’ all, and then ride right back up. So, he jumped in a bucket and fell downward, landin’ kerplop in the water. It was pretty cool down there but Rabbit knew he’d better get back to the vegetable patch before Fox came a-lookin’ for him. But when we pulled on the rope, the bucket up top lodged against the pulley and. . .Rabbit was stuck down the well. ‘Holy cow paddies,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m in for it now.’ There wasn’t anything he could do but wait for Fox to come stormin’ after him. An’, sure enough, Fox appeared at the top of the well. He knew all along that Rabbit was jus’ tryin’ to git outa work. ‘Hey! What you doin’ down there?” Fox shouted. ‘I’m fishin’,’ answered Rabbit. ‘Some fine fishin’ down here.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Really. Come on down ‘fore they’s all gone. Easy pickin’s,’ Rabbit encouraged Fox. How stupid of Rabbit, thought Fox, ‘to let me go down there an’ git all the fish while he’s up here starvin’. Okay,’ he said. ‘Just jump in that there bucket,’ suggested Rabbit. Fox did and he flew to the bottom, passin’ Rabbit on the way up. Rabbit waved at Fox, smilin’ kinda big, like a Cheshire cat. ‘I’ll come back later, when the farmin’s done,’ shouted Rabbit and hopped merrily along. Well, o’ course Rabbit didn’t come back an’ there was wily ol’ Fox stuck in the bottom of the well. Didn’t take him long to figure out who outfoxed who, let me tell you.”
Hellecchino paused.
“That all?” asked Buck, sitting up in his chair.
“Yep. Old wily Fox got himself stuck thinking he was outfoxing Rabbit.”
“Did he ever git outa that well?”
“Sure did. A thirsty hunter came by and hauled up a bucket full of water–only he got a bucket full of Fox. Well, Fox lit on outa there before he got a behind fulla buckshot.”
“Didn’t git no fish neither.”
“You ever heard of fish in a well?”
“No.”
“Pretty dumb Fox, eh?”
“An’ foxes are s’posed t’be so cunnin’.”
“Yep. Fox believed all that hype about foxes being cunning and got himself trapped.”
“So that’s how a stereotype works! An’ I was right to begin with–a stereotype is somethin’ that’s got two sides. There was two buckets there at that well. Boy! Yore ingenious, Hellecchino!”
They sat quietly at the table for some time, each thinking his own thoughts. Finally, Hellecchino got up.
“Okay. I’m digested. Let’s go out into the sunshine and see what Yabu’s up to.”
“There you are!” shouted McTortle from down the street. “I been looking for you.”
Along with McTortle was a young woman, tall and willowy with long, flowing black hair, black eyes and thin but ruddy lips. She was dressed in calico. Her hips jerked right and left as she hurried after McTortle.
“Lookie there! There’s my sister.”
“You got a sister?”
“Shore. Ain’t only Mexicans got sisters, y’know.”
“She always chase after McTortle like that?”
“Nah. McTortle’s married. Harriet’s her name.”
“Might pretty lady, your sister.”
“Yep. I s’pose so. Y’want I should interduce ya?”
“Don’t think you’ll have much choice.”
The sprinting couple came to a panting halt but a few inches from Hellecchino and Buck. They leaned over, hands on knees, trying to catch their breaths. Both spit into the dry, dry road dust. Both held up their hands, as if to speak. . .and then subsided into heavy breathing once more. Finally, McTortle straightened up. “Yabu’s done done it this time,” he said. “Don’t know how much longer I cam put up with this.”
“How much longer have you put up with it so far?” asked Hellecchino.
“Oh, hell. I don’t know. Perhaps 10-12 years.”
“Where would you go if you actually ever decided to got>” Hellecchino seemed genuinely interested in McTortle’s dilemma, leaning in and peering at McTortle’s reddened face.
“Don’t rightly know. Haven’t given it much thought. My home is here. I’m kinda settled in. . .if y’know what I mean.”
“How are you, Miss Harriet? I’m Hellecchino, local hero,” smiled Hellecchino as he smiled down on the diminutive lady and held out his hand.
Harriet gripped his hand rather more forcefully than he expected and said, “You don’t look much like a hero.”
“Appearances are deceiving.”
“I’ll say.”
“Harriet!”
“Buck. . .what the hell you know? You’re drunk half the time.”
“No, I ain’t. More like two thirds’ the time.”
“And you’re braggin’?”
“Cain’t brag ’bout my leg, yknow.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t wanna talk bout it, alright? How many times I gotta tell ya, huh?”
“How come you chose Buck to be your sidekick, Mr. Hellecchino?” Harriet asked sardonically.
“He asked.” A bald-faced truth.”
“Well. . .I guess that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Huh?”
“Have I got a piece of land for you!”
“I thought you was a hero.”
“I am.”
“So, what you goin’ about sellin’ land for?”
“Seemed like a good thing to do with Yabu’s wall going up.”
“You know about that?” startled McTortle chortled.
“Yep.”
“How could you? We haven’t told you yet.” Harriet creased her brow, one line between her eyebrows, and tilted her head off to the right.
“Harriet. . .I’m a hero.”
“I’ll be damned!”
“I doubt it. You’re too pretty. Care to take a walk?”
“Where to?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not, all things considering. . .”
“You’ll take care of McTortle, right Buck?”
“Shore thang.”
“What about Yabu’s wall?!”
“What about it?”
“He’s gonna build it through town keepin’ out all the bad tings. The things he don’t like.”
“Just things?”
“No. People too, more’n likely.”
“I ’spect so. But, tell me. . .is it built yet?”
“No.”
“Well, then. No worries.”
“But we gotta keep it from bein’ built, damn it! It ain’t right.”
“Why ain’t it right, McTortle? He was given the task by his guru, Dr. Hiram Evananda, Master of the race. Surely, Yabu believes in whatever he’s told.”
“But it ain’t right, shuttin’ good people out.”
“No, I s’pose you’re right. But Yabu doesn’t consider them good people and that’s what’s important.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, people don’t have to buy into it. If he thinks it’s important, let him build it. He’ll stop sure enough if nobody else thinks it’s important. I think what y’all oughta do it take up a collection to help him finance the building of his wall. He’s precious protective of his own money, y’know. Getting someone else’s to do the job would be mighty pleasing, don’t you think?”
“Ain’t that self-defeatin’?”
“Nope. If you donate to the building of the wall, you get to know where the wall’s going before it’s gone there and so you can organize yourselves. After all, sooner or later he’s going to need supplies, right?”
“Yeah. I ’spec’ so.”
“Well. . .here’s a stack of money,” and Hellecchino dipped into his back pocket. “I want you to go on over to the real estate office and buy up a strip of land just outside of town. . .like right where the Chisholm Trail bends round to come into town. You buy up the land so it crosses that road. A half mile on either side and 100 yards wide. When you got title, come and find me.”
“Whatcha gonna do with a piddlin’ piece o’ land like that? Can’t hardly build a house on it.”
“Why you gotta keep throwin’ up blockades to success, Buck? We don’t have no need of a devil’s advocate here,” scolded Harriet, putting her hands on her shapely hips.
“I’m only tryin’–”
“You stop tryin’. You’re tryin’ to second guess a hero here. You can’t know what he’s thinkin’.”
“Yeah, but I wanna. Any harm in that?”
“I’ll tell, ya, Buck,” said Hellecchino, putting his hand on Harriet’s left hip hand, “if I tell ya what it is I’m up to, you’ll know too much. If you don’t know why I want a stupid strip of land for, so much the better. But it’s your land, Buck. And you’re already known for being kinda mindless, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the agent will just put it down to another stupid Buck move and think nothin’ of selling you a useless bit o’ land ’cause his goal is to make money.”
“Y’mean. . .what I don’t know won’t hurt me?”
“In this case, yes. Though it might be more to the point to say what you don’t know won’t hurt me and alot of other folk.”
“Damn! I never knew ignorance could be so useful!”
“Y’don’t know everything, Buck.”
“Goddamn it, Harriet! Why th’ hell you always comin’ down on me?!”
“Come on, Miss Harriet, let’s go for our walk. I’d like to see the cemetery.”
“Which one?”
“There’s more than one?”
“Sure. One for us and one for Yabu’s men and one for the Yabu family.”
“Whatchu wanna go to the cemetery for on yore first date, Hellecchino?”
“‘Cause it’s quiet.”
And with that, Hellecchino steered Harriet down the street and around the corner, despite her quiet insistence that they needed to go the other way. Hellecchino told her, soto voce too, that there was more than one road to take to get somewhere and there was no more arguing. Buck when on to the real estate office, another DIY operation, while McTortle was left in the middle of the street spluttering and turning in circles over nothing getting done to solve the problem of the wall. Finally, he scratched his head and went on home, thinking that some heroes are really weird. . .and perhaps not worth their weight in salt.
Hellecchino, meanwhile, was banking on history. And psychology. How many walls have been built down through history to keep certain kinds of people out? Hadrian’s Wall. Didn’t keep the Picts out. The Great Wall of China. Didn’t keep the Xiangnu and other northern barbarians out. Flodden Wall. Didn’t keep the Brits out. Jericho’s walls. They came tumbling down. The Berlin Wall. This one came tumbling down, too. The Israeli Roadmap to Peace Wall. It was difficult to tell whether this was keeping its own in or out. Prison Wall. Nope. No good. Prisoners still got in. The Southern Border Wall, really a huge electrified barbed wire concentration camp type affair keeping Texans in and Texans out. It weren’t no good neither. So, what was one more wall? Certainly couldn’t be no worse than Frost’s Fence!
Well, Hellecchino had a plan. As all heroes do. It had to do with logistics.
Here are some questions to consider: 1) How’s Yabu going to get his wall built?
2) What’s Hellecchino going to do with Buck’s piece of land?
3) What if Yabu makes a mistake?
4) Does it really matter?
Well. . .a few days later, Buck found Hellecchino and Harriet sitting under a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g. And he was waving a piece of paper.
“Hellecchino? Hellecchino?”
“What is it, Buck? Can’t you see I’m busy cementing social relationships?”
“But I got the land. Here’s the title.”
“Good boy. Now go build on it.”
“Build what?”
“A block house. Cinder blocks. A door and two windows.”
“One on either side of the door?”
“Yes. So it looks like a mouth and two eyes.”
“And then what?”
“Move in.”
“But I got a house.”
“This is more than a house, Buck. This is a business. When you’re done with the house, you build a little three foot high pedestal alongside of the road, one on either side of the road, and you get a pole made that’ll fit into the slots you made in the tops of the pedestals. But you don’t use it yet. You keep it behind your house, where the ladder to the top of the house is.”
“What I need a ladder to the top of my house for?”
“Because up there you’re going to build a little garden with a little table and a couple three chairs. Maybe even an umbrella or something.”
“You want me to do all this?”
“Yep. I ’spect there’ll be lotsa people wanna help a crip do himself up good.”
“I guess so. But. . .I don’t like pretendin’ and whinin’ an’ such.”
“The hell you don’t! Just gowan out’n do what you’re told for once in your life!”
“Now, Harriet, don’t be so hard on the guy,” soothed Hellecchino. “Look,” he turned to Buck, “you want to build this yourself?”
“No.”
“Well, then. . .play on your disability to get all those people who don’t really care about you to help you.”
“You think they will?”
“Anything to get you outa their hair. Besides. They’ll consider it fulfilling a debt to society.”
“Right!”
Buck hobbled off into town.
“What have you got up your sleeve, Hellecchino?”
“Buck owns that strip of land and the road running through it. He’s going to have to control traffic if he’s going to live a quiet life. So. . .once Yabu starts building his wall, Buck sets up a traffic gate and charges toll to get past.”
“So not only does he create a problem for Yabu, he makes a livin’ on his own.” Harriet smiled broadly and then kissed her hero. “My! You’re amazing, Hellecchino. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you were looking at the wall as a problem for you when, in fact, it’s a problem for Yabu. When people are the centre of attraction, they tend not to be paying attention to the periphery of life.”
“So, what happens next?”
“I think we outa get outa this heat and into some place more private and. . . comfortable.”
Some days later, there was a town meeting held out in the worker’s part of town. To be exact, in the minority meeting hall. Buck and McTortle organized it. Hellecchino was the featured speaker. It was all kind of hush-hush but that really didn’t matter as Yabu and his men stayed out of this section of town. It was considered not good section of town. Especially not one to get into at night. Even the law stayed out. Although most people saw this as a slap in the face by a big three-fingered prejudiced hand, it was actually a very empowering situation. Hellecchino had a plan.
“Because certain people don’t like you and look down on you and could care less about you, you have power,” Hellecchino began. He was shouted and hooted but he held his place, held up his hand in time and continued on. “Y’all can organize. Y’see. . .these certain kinds of people don’t do the work themselves.” Murmurings of agreement on that, for sure. And then Hellecchino laid out the plan. It was very simple.
First, they hired themselves out, the unemployed or under-employed, which was close to 25% of these kinds of people, to build the wall. Being as there were always rabble rousers and unruly teenagers who liked to destroy things, they were to be enlisted in dismantling part of the wall every night, carefully restacking the blocks and whatnot alongside the wall. This way, it would take literally forever to finish the job. Yabu’d be terribly frustrated and would turn his energies to stopping the delinquency while the workers would be employed and making some kind of living, albeit, if everything when as per usual, not much of a one. But, then, something is better than nothing. . .and there was more to come. When the heat got up, the devilish social reprobate teenagers would cool it down and leave the wall building alone until vigilance became relaxed in the face of no threat and calm–and then they’d strike again. Only this time, they’d dismantle the beginning of the wall. There’d be enough work for everybody.
The next move was to move the shopkeepers’ families up to of their shops if their shops were going to be on the good side of the fence. This would force Yabu into rerouting his wall to exclude those particular shops–or buy them. In this latter instance, the shopkeepers were to bargain for the best price possible and then take the money and run, never to work in that shop again.
A few of the old boys began chuckling over this.
“Soon,” one of them said, “he gonna be needin’ what we got.”
“Exactly,” said Hellecchino. “If you’re on the wrong side of the wall, he isn’t going to get what he wants–”
“Or he gonna hafta rebuild his wall,” said another worker.
“An’ we ain’t gotta work if’n we been bought out,” said another faceless worker.
“An’ he ain’t got no bizniss sense,” shouted out a worker woman in the back of the hall.
“Shit! He kin jest import it,” countered another.
“Buck’s got a tollgate out on the Chisholm Trail. He owns a great stretch of land that the road runs through,” offered Hellecchino.
“Damn man! We set.”
There was a chorus of approval at this point and the evening was brought to an end.
Sometimes, all a hero’s got to do is kind of look at things a little askew.

the temple & the gazebo

The sun blazed down from the sky frying the piss ants and itty bitty frogs that dared step out from under cover. The sun was so intensely insistent it had burned off all the clouds, such that northwest, west and south there was little difference at the horizon between the bleached brown earth and the bleached blue sky. In the front yard of the Saints Janus and Ananias Methodist Church the loyal parishioners, numbering about 11, were stacking the newly cut lumber in their uniformly arm-pit sweat-stained red undershirts and dusty jeans, their faces uniformly smiling through their strenuous labor. With the ubiquitous off-white Stetsons lined up on the old church steps, there were alot of red necks around. The black clad clergyman, The Right Reverend Carmel Russetpoop, counted the lumber and shouted out the amount of each stack to his equally black clad wife, Mrs. Adamantine Russetpoop, who, in her elbow length black gloves, recorded the numbers in a black leather ledger held gingerly in the crooked palm of her left hand. Despite the glaring eye of the Lord in the cloudless sky, neither of the Methodist Corps leaders were sweating. Neither wore a hat either. Perhaps the more to absorb the rays of the heat of God. For, as it is said, blessed be they who labor in the light of the Lord. If they labored in the dark or in hidden corners, no one would see their holinesses. The logic of the church could not be defeated and showed itself in all its glory in the obsessive manner in which the wood was stockpiled. Each length was in its own little stack, ends even, number of beams the same in each stack and each end was labeled in blue ink.
After many a Sunday and many a tithing, money enough had been gotten to undertake the erection of a new church, the old one to be converted into the Russetpoop’s quarters to offset the costs of their living in a rented house on the edge of town–the farthest edge from the Lone Star Inn & Bordello to escape the evil influence of those tipping spirits. The High Synod of the Method Church, back East in Ashville, North Carolina, did not deem it much worth their salt to filter down their wealth to the Bible thumpers of the frontier. Lawlessness was not their forte. Besides, God helps them who help themselves. Success alone breeds riches. Once you gain in the Lord’s name, more gain comes your way. Behind closed doors, however, Adamantine Russetpoop had other words for the Eastern establishment church. Like. . .Pharisees. Root puller-uppers. Lobster eaters. Otherwise, she carried a stiff upper lip.
Hellecchino sat atop a bar of the fence marking the road or city side of the Saints Janus and Ananias Method Church property watching and wondering at the organized manner of the parishioners and their two shepherds. There was not a wasted movement, like choreographed Dalcroze eurhythmics. A worker’s drama, in this case successful. Hellecchino imagined, too, that the actual erection of the new chapel had been pre- planned as well, down to which wall would be raised on which day and in which weather. He wondered, too, if the blessing by holy water would cause warping of the finished product or not. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!
It was a hot day. Hellecchino took out his fan and began fanning himself, not bothering to remove his battered old slouch hat, which of course needed fanning too, especially as it was soaking up most of the day’s rays. He was wont to say that this fan, so out of place in the West, especially in macho-conscious East Coahuila, was the memento of a widow he once knew, in the Biblical sense. Odd how such a relationship was blessed, sanctified and smiled upon if it was Biblical.
Just as the last piece of wood was hefted atop its appropriate pile and The Right Reverend Russetpoop had reported the final count to Mrs. Adamantine Russetpoop who had finished writing it in her ledger, a gang of cowboys rode up and into the churchyard. They dismounted in disarray. They were all obviously working cowpokes, judging from their dusty, sweat-stained clothing and great leather chaps, sans fringe. They were all obviously on a mission, judging from their grim faces. One of these cowboys did not bother to dismount but rode his dusty steed right up to the Reverend family.
“Howdy, Reverend Russetpoop,” he said, spitting a reddish brown trail of tobacco juice at the hooves of his horse. Which just so happened to be right at the feet of the Russetpoops.
“Good day, Captain Bill,” replied The Right Reverend Carmel.
“Looks like you got alotta wood here.”
“Yes. We do. It is for the new chapel, God willing.”
“You paid taxes on it?”
“What’s that?”
“Taxes. Duty. Tribute. Excise.”
“This is a religious enterprise. We are tax exempt,” shot back Adamantine, her thin lips not moving the slightest.
“A new law just passed. And you don’t qualify none no more. Only Baptists qualify. So, I’m here to repossess this wood.”
“How can you repossess what you never possessed in the first place, Captain Bill?” naively inquired Carmel.
“Mr. Yabu possessed it when it came here in his transportation buckboards. As Mr. Yabu’s foreman, I am the law east of the Pecos and am hereby authorized to seize this property. Okay, boys!”
“What possible use could you have for this wood!” snapped Adamantine, her tight lips moving enough to curl.
“The Yabu business ain’t yore business. God’s business is. Take care of your own.” And Captain Bill spat again.
A whoop went up and a line of wagons, hiding round the bed in the road that led down to the bottoms, thundered into view. They were all empty. They rolled up into the church yard, their rear ends were let down and the cowboys began loading the carefully stacked, numbered and inventoried lumber haphazardly.
The Right Reverend Carmel Russetpoop spluttered and turned red and became speechless. Mrs. Adamantine Russetpoop stood woodenly by, her eyes closed, her sparse lips parted to reveal pearly white teeth with somewhat elongated incisors as she whispered a prayer, asking for God to bring down his damnation upon these sinners. Adamantine believed in miracles. She was unaware, as most parishioners, that the saints and prophets and holy men of the great and glorious past had wrought their miracles themselves, that is, with their own hands. They knew all to well that praying was too slow.
Hellecchino jumped down from his perch, laughing and cackling away like some crazy man let loose from the asylum down the road at Moody. He sauntered over to the wagons and watched their loading by the grunting, sweating, cursing cowboys. He closed up his black fan and waved it in the direction of each of the wagons. Satisfied with the job that was being done, Hellecchino walked up to the right flank of Captain Bill’s roan and tapped the man on the leg.
“I say, old sport,” Hellecchino chimed, “what are you going to do with all this lumber? Build a backbone?”
Captain Bill turned his bushy eyebrows on Hellecchino. “Who the hell are you?”
“You haven’t heard? Don’t get into town much, do you?”
Captain Bill spat at Hellecchino’s battered brown boots but miraculously missed. “Do you know who yore talkin’ to!”
“Yes. Roaring Bill MacDonald, self-styled Law East of the Pecos and right hand lackey of Gyorgy Yabu.”
“And yore. . .”
“Nobody. I’m nobody. . .important. So, whatcha up to with this wood?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothin’. Thought I might write a book about it, though. Mr. Yabu likes his goings on to be noticed, don’t he?”
“He’s going to build a gazebo.”
“Ain’t that nice.” Hellecchino turned and nodded to the Russetpoops and the Methodist horde.
At which point, Hellecchino slapped Roaring Bill MacDonald’s mount on the rump and sent it skedaddling off across the church yard with Captain Bill holding on for pure spite. All the cowboys dropped their loads and ran around the affrighted horse, trying to wave it down with their hats. The parishioners and the Right Reverend Russetpoop family, 13 in all, stood stiffly by. Hellecchino, though, walked to each and every wagon and loosed a linchpin, patting the harnessed horses gently and clicking his tongue at them. They kind of nodded, as horses do. Hellecchino then strode up to Adamantine.
“Hold out your hand, Mrs. Russetpoop,” he said kindly, smiling a winning, charming smile. She did as she was bid. Hellecchino dropped the oily pins into her gloved hand and closed her fingers over them. “Sometimes ya just gotta take things into your own hands.”
And then Hellecchino sauntered out of the church yard and down the road back to town. The Right Reverends Russetpoop and their parishioners stared after him. Then they turned their attention to the antics of Captain Bill and his boys. Watching in wonder as the cowhands finally managed to corral and control the bug-eyed beast.
Sitting atop his panting horse, the red-faced Roaring Bill MacDonald shouted at the cowboys. “Finish yore fucking job and let’s git outa this damned place!” He rode his skittery mount up to the Russetpoops. “You know who that fella was?”
“Yes,” promptly responded Carmel. “I cannot tell a lie. It was Hellecchino.”
“I’ll fix his wagon,” growled Captain Bill.
As the last of the wood was loaded, Captain Bill ordered the wagon train to move out. Unfortunately, there was not much out to move, for as each wagon turned itself around, one of its wheels, uniformly the right rear wheel, broke free and spun to the ground. The beds of the wagons crashed to the ground, shattering their sides and spilling the lumber all over the yard, helter-skelter. Carmel shuddered. Adamantine closed her eyes and clucked. All of their work gone to hell.
Now, even the cowboys stood around, albeit on the backs of their cowponies, looking at the mess. They looked to Captain Bill who looked apoplectic. But he said nothing, only spurred his horse down the dusty road in the direction of the Yabu ranch, Hacienda loco plátano. His cowboys followed, for there was nothing else for them to do.
“Get rid of the evidence, Adamantine,” said Carmel. She walked to the wagons and gingerly dropped the pins on the ground as if they were bat guano. “All of you go home. Don’t touch anything. Leave this mess just as it is.” Carmel was shaking, for all of his well-planned and well-executed work was now gone to ruin. How long it would take to regain his composure, only his wife knew. And she wasn’t talking.
Meanwhile, back in Chokepointe Piste another kind of gathering was taking place. It was not at the Lone Star Inn & Bordello. It was not at the Cary Nation Fourth Southern Baptist Altar of the Lord Come to Gitcha Church, either. It was taking place at Fancy Dan’s, the finest restaurant west of the Brazos River, east of the Pecos, north of the Atascosas and south of the Trinity. To be exact, the gathering was taking place in the kitchen of Fancy Dan’s where Little Lulu, the rescued waif waitress, was being gathered up and shipped out the back door by a couple of roughnecks. She was struggling but there was not alot she could do against two such burly boys. Besides, she was rolled up in an old carpet which restricted her movements somewhat and allowed for a deadening of her cute little cries for help. Out in the back alley, there was also no help. There was also no help to be found on the main street, Yabu & Brownwood Causeway, as she was bundled into the back of a buckboard and driven out of town. Besides, her escorts were Yabu men. Yabu men were untouchable. Messing with Yabu men was a thorny situation. Nobody wished to be pricked.
Lucky for Little Lulu that she was wrapped up in an old carpet, for the ride out to the south of town was not a smooth one. After thrashing about for a time, Little Lulu gave up and lay still, docile and resigned to her fate–at least for the moment. And so she was easier to unload in the courtyard of the Hacienda Búsqueda Perdiz where she was summarily carried into the west wing of the main building, unrolled and then left alone. The door was, of course, locked behind her.
So it was that Little Lulu found herself lying in the middle of the floor of the richest room she’d ever been in. The pink adobe walls were hung, here and there, with black velvet paintings à la espaniola, very bright and vivid, depicting bulls and churches and dancing senioritas. To the right of the door stood a little altar with a gilt tabernacle, one door ajar. Above, on the wall, was a highly ornate, heavy Episcopal cross, its top end held slightly away from the wall so it looked as if it were looking down on the below and ready to level a blow to any blasphemous interloper. Along the opposite wall stood a porticoed bed, raised up off the floor by two steps. Its silk filigreed curtains were pulled back to reveal bleached cotton sheets and a thin blanket of pressed felt. The wooden frame was redwood. A chest of drawers and a black painted hardwood wardrobe with an inlay-onlay abalone shell design of flowers nestled against one wall. Little Lulu lay upon a prize acquisition, a Pueblo rug tagged in a raid while the owner was on his way West to partake of the gold, which he never found, being averse to the working end of a shovel. Over the windows were rough cambric curtains.
Little Lulu sat up. Little Lulu stood up. Little Lulu walked around, large eyes taking in the surroundings and furnishings. Her nimble figure tripped lightly over the carpet, her hand fluttering about her long thin neck. Cherubic face. Rose cheeks. Angel’s bow lips. Just the kind of girl to fall into the hands of a Black Bart. As she was not a respected element within Chokepointe Piste society, no one was in the least interested in her situation. Indeed, the citizenry were known to warn Dan of his good works project, noting she would take off at the first opportunity–and not empty handed neither. You know how her sort are. Nod, nod, nod.
She was brought up short in her investigation by the opening and shutting of the door. She turned. There stood Clyde Moyen Bucket, friend and business associate of Gyorgy Yabu and known womanizer. It was said that he had bedded 20,000 women, though one questioned this as there were not so many women south of the Red River and North of the Rio Grande, for Clyde Moyen Bucket (pronounced “bouquet”) would not sully himself by going south of the border where there was not only syphilis but Montezuma’s Revenge.
“Oh! Mr. Bucket!” squeaked Little Lulu in surprise.
“Yes. It’s moi,” answered Clyde in his smoothest, most debonair Spanish accent.
“What are you doing here?”
“Same thing you’re doing here, my dear Little Lulu.”
“You were kidnapped too?” she asked taking a fateful step forward.
“No, my dear,” crooned Clyde, taking a step toward the unsuspecting girl. “I live here.”
“Here?”
“Hacienda Búsqueda Perdiz.”
“Mr. Bucket, you need more Spanish lessons. Your pronunciation is horrible.”
“Perhaps you can teach me.” Clyde took another step in her direction, bringing him within arm’s reach.
“Is that why you brought me here?”
“No, no. I brought you here for a different reason altogether. I’m going to teach you something.”
And with that Clyde Moyen Bucket jumped on Little Lulu and took her down. He tugged at her blouse, buttoned to the neck, but she wrenched herself free and rolled away, leaving a couple buttons in her wake and a swell of bosom at her bow. Clyde was up in a trice and after her. But Little Lulu was slippery. Clyde stumbled against the wardrobe.
“Ah! A lively wench! How lovely. Come here my little pussy wussy. Clyde’s going to teach you the joys of 20,000 women.”
He lunged for her again. Although Little Lulu dodged him, his left hand caught the hem of her calico skirt and, as he tumbled to the carpet, she followed him down. He worked his way up her legs. To defend herself, Little Lulu hooked her legs around his neck in a shockingly spiteful thigh headlock, which of course did not bother Clyde one bit–until she twisted to one side and slammed his head into the floor.
“You fucking bitch!” Clyde shouted, jumping up. He staggered with the headache and dizziness but was not put off enough to let his prey escape. Before she knew what hit her, he shot her an opened handed slap to the face. Her already rose red cheek blushed crimson. Tears rose up in her eyes and drooled down her cheeks. Little Lulu began sobbing and screaming. Clyde only smiled. He began to back her toward the bed, undoing his buttons and digging into his drawers for the opening and his dick.
“Mr. Bucket, I’m pregnant. You don’t want to hurt the baby. . .” pleaded Little Lulu.
“I’ll fuck the baby, too. Two in the bush. heh-heh.”
His erect member flipped out.
“Oh. . .my. . .God. . .”
“You bet your sweet ass, Lulu baby,” growled Clyde, continuing his stalking.
The door burst open and an anxious cowboy face poked itself inside.
“You’re wanted at the big house, Mr. Bouquet.”
“Don’t you ever knock, Alvin?” shouted Clyde without turning round.
“Mr. Yabu said it was import’nt and I was to stop you doin’ whatever it was you was doin’. I’m only followin’ orders. Ya cain’t fault me fer followin’ orders. It’s what I’m paid to do.”
“Alright, asshole! I’ll be right there.” As Clyde did not hear the door shut, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “Get the fuck out of the house!” Alvin did. “Now. . .Little Lulu. . . you wait right here. I’ll be back.”
Clyde Moyen Bucket stuffed his failing member back into his trousers and stalked out the door, locking it behind him. He peeked through the crack for a last look at his little partridge. He’d spent a long time trying to get her in a more civilized manner but, seeing as she was resistant, he had had no choice. As he’d seen it. Then, he trounced out through the house and rode away.
Lulu sat on the bed and cried.
At the deepest moment of her wrenching sobs, the door opened and in walked Hellecchino.
“Hello, Little Lulu.”
Little Lulu screamed. Hellecchino put his finger to his lips.
“Not you, too,” whispered Little Lulu.
“No, no. I’m here to rescue you. It is my fated role in the world–at this point of time. You see,” and Hellecchino sat on the floor, cross-legged, “I was brought back from the dead by a cursed little Chinese to champion the cause of the downtrodden and misconstrued. I’m a hero.”
“Really? You’re a hero?”
“Yup.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Now, you go on home. Don’t worry about Clyde Moyen Bucket–”
“That’s Bouquet, Mr. Hellecchino.”
“Is it now? Well, smells like something else to me. Anyway, he’ll be at the Yabu farm for some time so the road’s clear. There’s a horse out in the yard. Be sure you take it and not the burro. The burro’s mine.”
“Okay.” Little Lulu got down from the bed and walked to the door. She turned around, a cute little wrinkle between her eyebrows. “What are you going to do, Mr. Hellecchino?”
“You just leave that to me, Lulu. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve yet.”
“They’re pretty tight. How did you manage that, Mr. Hellecchino?”
“I’m a hero, Little Lulu. I can do many things that normal people can’t do. Now, hurry along.”
“Okay.” Little Lulu walked out the door, turned. “Are you sure you’ll be alright?”
“Quite alright. I won’t do anything dangerous. Just what any red-blooded person would do.” Hellecchino closed the door on Little Lulu. He rubbed his hands together, looking around him with raised eyebrow.
Meanwhile, back at the Loco plátano, Gyorgy Yabu was huffing and puffing and pacing furiously back and forth before the big black empty fireplace on the black bear rug, souvenier of his hunt up north. Nobody knew exactly where up north and Gyorgy Yabu’s sense of direction was wanting, so no one ever learned where he’d been a hunting scion. Everybody knew not to ask, either. Some people were very private people. . .with certain parts of their lives. Everyone had his, her or its secrets.
When Clyde Moyen Bucket stalked into the room, Gyrogy Yabu was still huffing and puffing and pacing furiously back and forth.
“What’s up, boss?”
“It’s them damn Methodists! They fucked with my boys.”
“Really? They did something?” Clyde’s eyes rolled in disbelief.
“You bet they did!” Gyorgy stopped, turned his back to the big gaping black mouth of the fireplace and faced Clyde. “What the hell we gonna do about it?”
“We gotta do somethin’, that’s for shore.”
“We can’t let ‘em git away with this.”
“No, we can’t.”
There was a pause in the action as the two men stared at each other.
“What did they do?” inquired Clyde.
“They put a curse on my wagons. They all broke down. Damned lumber all over the place.”
“Cain’t have that.”
“It’ll get dusty and might even crack and then what’ll my gazebo look like, I ask you.”
“It won’t be half what it’s cracked up to be.”
“So go do somethin’ about it.”
“Right. Like what?”
“Linchpins.”
“Linchpins?’
“Linchpins. They cursed the linchpins outa the rear wheels.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
“You will be, you don’t git me my wood.”
“Have I ever let you down?”
“Gyorgy!” a strident, demanding feminine voice darted into the manly conversation from the kitchen.
“Gotta go. Little woman’s callin’.” Gyorgy walked off. He paused at the entrance of the kitchen. “Why would them Methodists call down a curse on a God fearing man like me?”
“The world’s full of hippocritters, Mr. Yabu.”
So, Clyde Moyen Bucket rode out to the Saints Janus and Ananias Methodist Church yard with a handful of linchpins, some grease and a couple of the boys. There was nobody around, so they set to work righting the wrongs only to find that all of the axles had broken in the fall.
“God damn!” cursed Clyde.
Just then, Little Lulu came galloping by on a sleek brown mare. She was riding bare back. The men’s horses caught a whiff of the heated mare and lit out after her, leaving the cowboys dumbstruck amidst the carnage. They all threw their hats down in the dust as all the horses rounded the bend and disappeared into the bottoms.
“God damn!” cursed Clyde. He hitched up his trousers. “Wellp. There’s only one thing for it, boys. Walk to town.”
“Mr. Yabu gone there, then?”
“Nope. But the repo man’s there. He’s got wagons, I’ll bet.”
“And some horses, too.”
Clyde set off for Chokepointe Piste with the boys tagging along behind. But they didn’t get far. Not past the bottoms, to be exact.
The bottoms are called the bottoms because they are the bottom of the land, the place where dry land dips down to where there just might be water or where there once was water. And so, they are often wet or muddy. Especially after it rains. Well, after Hellecchino solved the water problem, the bottoms became increasingly, though erratically, boggy. There was a creek nearby and sometimes, for inexplicable reasons, the water would seep away through the dry earth and get the bottoms rather soggy. When this happened, passage was impeded. In some cases, not possible.
It just so happened that between the passing of the Methodists and then Little Lulu and her trail of horses through the bottoms and the coming of Clyde Moyen Bucket, the water closed in and created a kind of swampy place. The mud was very thick, like molasses and roasted marshmallow innards. On the surface, the bottoms looked just like muddy roadway dust, but underneath. . .well, no one knew just how deep it went. After all, there was ground water somewhere down there. Clyde Moyen Bucket and his couple of boys found out how deep and suckingly sticky and virtually impassible the bottoms had become, for they were in such a hurry they did not pay attention to road conditions until they suddenly pitched forward, noses in the muck, where they flailed about yelling and screaming and cursing to high heaven until they looked like Uncle Remus’ tar babies waiting for Br’er Rabbit to come along and stick to ‘em.
After hours and hours and hours and no results, Gyorgy Yabu jumped on his horse, a scowl deep as the Grand Canyon and a face the color of a Chinese wedding dress, dug his spurs into the poor beast’s side and lit out for town. He didn’t get there either, though he stopped short of the bottoms. He sat there atop his blowing, foaming mount staring down at Clyde Moyen Bucket and his couple of boys sitting in the icky muck and he said, “God damn it!” and turned his horse around and went back to the ranch to get some cowboys to pull Clyde out of the mud. After, they spent some time fetching water from the creek and dumping it over the men until they were clean enough to return to the Hacienda and clean up properly. In the meanwhile, they also added splendiferously to the bogginess of the bottoms. No one now would be able to get into town for some time–nor back out. Not in this direction.
Before Clyde and his boys and Yabu and his boys returned to their respective roosts, they went back to the Saints Janus and Ananias Methodist Church yard and dragged lumber down to the bottoms and built a jerry-built bridge over the mud and that’s why, to this day, there’s a bridge over an empty gully, for there never was another episode of soggy bottoms. That’s why, too, the Methodist Church looks like it does: stone steps and a not very peaked roof pitched to one side, one wall being a mite shorter than the other. The ubiquitous wooden cross does not raise itself so very high into the sky neither.
From the frustration and disappointment of the day, Yabu had to take a rest, get some recuperation, so when he got back to the loco plátano, he drank a couple or three beers and sank into a California redwood, brass bound, Franklin stove heated hot tub. Clyde Moyen Bucket went back to the Hacienda Búsqueda Perdiz in a fury, scrubbed himself clean and marched into the west wing like gang busters. He was going to take out his frustration on the little wench, Little Lulu. No playing around this time.
He threw open the doors, his nostrils dilating with the upcoming effort and the fury of the past effort, to find no one in the room. He stood there looking around. The curtains to the bed were closed.
“Little Lulu!” he bellowed.
A giggle floated out of the curtains.
Clyde opened up the front of his pants, drew out his pulsating member and stomped toward the bed.
“Get ready for the fuck of your life, bitchiquita!” he growled.
He threw the curtains open and jumped on Little Lulu–or what should have been Little Lulu but was Hellecchino in drag. Hellecchino let out a high-pitched scream. There was some scuffling about that billowed out the curtains, a moment of silence and then a huge masculine howl of pain. Intense pain. And Clyde Moyen Bucket fell out of the bed onto the floor holding onto his now very red and becoming black and blue penis. He rolled around creating quite a ruckus all by himself.
Hellecchino stepped down from the porticoed bed, clapped his hands together, washing them of something untenable, and said, “Sometimes you just have to take things into your own hands.” And then he walked out.
Clyde was still rolling around on the floor when his boys came rushing to his aid, though his howling had been replaced by moaning.
“What happened, boss?” asked one of the cowboys.
“Fucking bitch bent my prick!”