I don’t wanna do this.
*******
No really, I do not want to do this. Take me off of your list.
*******
Well you have to, that’s how it’s written, we don’t know how to do it.
*******
I do not like anything about this. I do not like people. I do not like talking. I do not like talking to people. Especially not anyone who would read this garbage, offense intended.
Now I’ll tell you what I do like. I do like privacy. I do like all four of my walls intact. I do like when a bunch of idiotic knucklefucks don’t come around harassing me about release waivers for their hallmark movie.
Take me off of your list.
*******
Fine. We’ll do it. Me and the cats. We don’t want your grumpy ass around here stinking the place up anyway, might as well put a sock in it if you know what I mean.
So there we were, the world outside was whistling and snapping and watching for warnings, all the while I’m sitting there on the commode, butt-naked, and I’ll tell you why.
*******
Do not tell me why. Bill, I’m serious, I do not want to know why. I do not give two fucks about why you insist on scarring the retinas on what little imagination I have left. I already had to sit through this presentation once and I’m not interested. Please remove me from this group.
*******
Well what if we talk about the Horse Lady then, you sure didn’t have a problem being sweet on her. She used to cut my mother’s hair, small town socialites run the show around here and she’s about as feisty as they come. It used to be a pretty booming town, Dawson, world renowned for its mineral water, even have one of the few wooden baseball parks from when the Pirates would come here for spring training. But that was over a hundred years ago, then something happened to step on our pure supply, probably coal related knowing Kentucky, but hell, my whole family came from the mines, it’s the best job in the state.
Not me, I’m a navy man myself, blown enough bridges and britches across the world to fill the library of this podunk town, but it’s where I grew up. I’ve seen it change a few times over the years, and not for the better as economic instability knocked over a small business here and there, but nothing like this. Nobody thought this could ever happen here though, they normally just go right around us, well I guess it did miss my toilet seat but it looked like somebody just flipped the rest of town upside down in a snow globe from hell, which I love by the way, and the cats love them too.
Snow’s not the problem though, it’s the ice storms, and we got hit with a big one just weeks after the tornado, long before our roofs had a chance to grow back their shingles and here’s another flood of winter storm damage for insurance companies to deny. And you know FEMA’s about worthless, unless you know how to work the system like my piece of shit neighbor, Jerry, you hear that Jerry, you fucking suck. That entitled son of a bitch didn’t even have any damage and got a
whole new roof and appliances, while I know people whose home blew away and they’re still on their third application but encouraged by rumors that everyone gets denied the first two times.
But thank LBJ for all the freelance volunteers helping out, they’re the only ones getting anything done around here, the government never was worth a shit and these big non-profits just stuff their own purse as they only share propaganda and photo-ops. They come from all over the place, church groups and boy scouts and college coeds, and some are here on their own volition like our snarky puppy over there. Most of them are in travel trailers or sometimes here in the lodge, except for this one guy who’s been camping out there in a flimsy little tent all winter long, through like a foot of snow, I can’t tell if he’s crazy or insane.
Best I can tell he just goes around doing stuff like this all the time, I don’t know what he does for money but I do know he has got the most fascinating wardrobe, insulated coveralls with three plaids and a pink flamboyant scarf by day, then as he’s tending the best fire this place has ever seen he zips down into this pair of hipster skinny plum corduroys that he’s been altering himself with flared bottoms leftover from his last pair.
He’s like some kind of stylish transient or something.
*******
Bill, what the fuck. That was the one thing you weren’t supposed to say yet. You know the title callback is everyone’s favorite part, you know we’ve been waiting until the right time to self-reference it, and you know that it wasn’t even you who said it, it was Cowboy. What the fuck man.
*******
Oh ho, so now Mister Don’t Use My Real Name is some kind of continuity expert all of a sudden, perhaps you’d like to join us before I misremember your outfit as fruitier than his.
*******
Fuck you Bill.
*******
And then there was Mr Sour Grapes over there, a pastel lumberjack who looks like a grown-up version of Simon the Ice King, a hairy-ass hermit crab who somehow gets his kicks from helping people he hates. Always bebopping around in his stand-offish fashion while secretly hoping we’ll try to pry his story back out of him.
*******
I do not bebop. I do not secretly hope anything. I publicly hope that you idiots will leave me alone. I am quite content to not turn another page on a chapter of my life I’ve put behind me. For a whole pitch of nonsense about living in the moment it just seems like an endless throwback loop of inside jokes. I get it, the funtime butterflyman is so cool, popular enough to have more devoted friends than readers, which is the only way he could talk us into saying half the bullshit that comes out of my mouth. No, I said “My mouth.” I said “My mouth,” not my mouth. What the fuck. Am I on fucking autocorrect? Take me off of your goddamn list.
*******
Well if you’re not going to play nice for the team then me and Sprinkles are just gonna have to fill in the blankety-blanks for you.
*******
Alright then, whatever, let’s just get this shit over with. I had been milling around the lodge for a week or so, mainly cutting trees by myself on the edge of town, by myself, the way
I like it, I like to cut trees, by myself. Each day is like its own little puzzle out here, each tree with its own unique set of challenges and calculations to overcome in order to break it down without killing myself. Been a couple close calls already, grape vines and power lines and several unsmashed houses always jumping in the way, started thinking maybe I could use another eye when Fruitbag Funnyshorts starts unsoliciting me into helping him now that his off-brand band of kumbaya dipshits took off on him.
He’d already talked his way into juggling three chainsaws around town, one from the park’s maintenance shed even, hell half the rangers still think he works here the way he’s always hanging about and poking his nose in the fire. Claimed to be second in command at the makeshift headquarters, yeah right, what kind of two-bit operation would put this joker in charge of anything stronger than the coffeepot, but then sure as shit we show up there and he’s got a clipboard and everything. The roads were still a wreck, street signs mangled in with the rest of the toppled debris and houses dropped right in the way, he’d figured out how to get around pretty good and seemed to know people all over, of course he stuck out more than the thumb he rode in on.
*******
That was my friend’s house, the one in the middle of Hall Street, now that lady has got some cats let me tell you. That’s why it sat there so long, the cats were like “Fuck no, we ain’t going outside again,” and who could even blame them, so the volunteer coordinator herself took a sandwich out there and whispered all of them precious little kitties to safety. But then all of a sudden there was another emergency trapped inside the deathtrap, little Buttercup’s ashes.
She just didn’t know what she would ever do if Buttercup didn’t make it out in one jar, so you know our boy got a crew and condemned them to digging through the rubble, which for some reason included an abnormal amount of NKOTB shwag scattered about, and then wouldn’t you know it if they didn’t
excavate her just as the demolition crew rolled up. Now isn’t that just a precious little story with all the right scruff and everything.
*******
If I’m doing this I have two rules, no cats, and no more fucking cats. I mean it Bill. I do not have time for this shit. I would not run into a burning building to save a human, let alone a cat who I don’t give half a fuck about, and I’ll be good and God damned if I’m gonna put my neck on the line for a pile of charbroiled kitty litter. If this is where the world is headed then I might as well pack my shit and head back to the wilderness.
We did get into some brown and sticky situations though, ya get it, we were cutting trees. Some gnarly fucking trees. The whole place was pretty busted, woodlines were pickup sticks, upturned walnuts pinned houses to the ground, broken tops swung haphazardly with every aftershock. Way too sketchy for me and this guy to tackle alone, we might as well toss it in the boom truck and crane stack, which ends up on his clipboard somehow with a sticky note claiming us Team Special Teams and dumb enough to do for free what you could never pay us enough for.
We did get treated to the local greasy spoon occasionally, caught the eyes of old-timers curious of the unknown celebrity who checks in with every table and always has a new pitstop sponsor, and then again just an hour later at the lodge buffet where we’re finally too stuffed to flirt with the day shift, but maybe after dessert.
*******
Which is when I come in. Normally I get here and go right to sleep on the couch, but with all the chaos and everyone still shaken we often end up sitting around the fire into the wee hours. We’re all from the same small town where everybody knows each other’s cousin, and probably slept with half of
them, but somehow it took all of this to bring us all together as the family we already were. I don’t know how he does it but my boy has squirmed his way right up in there, he’s the one that introduced half of town to each other, he gets more calls at the front desk than the park does and everybody knows if you need help with something he can make it happen for a handful of snacks.
Like Susie, the Horse Lady, they met right here by the fireplace on New Year’s Eve. She had just gotten free of the hospital from all her trauma and there was the slightest blip on the forest service radar but everyone was still on edge, so they evacuated all the rooms and brought them in here just before the ball dropped. She swore up and down that North Carolina was rolling up the good stuff and smoking it right out front with the rangers, not impossible I guess considering the unlikely friendship he had sparked with officers of the law he hardly believes in, but I do imagine they bonded over an equal and opposite readiness to jump off their respective deep ends of the horseshoe.
Dawson has a pretty diverse range of politics for such a small place, God, guns and coal, reds and blues and whatever color a lot of squished up libertarians make. Our boy doesn’t seem to adhere to any of that stuff but somehow always finds something in unison with any ideology, most often a common ground of distaste with the government’s idiocracy, it was a no brainer before the collapse but now even the faithful are ready to revolt.
He says that most of time those closest to him don’t fully understand why he feels called to do half the stuff he gets into, save the water over here and feed the people over there, can’t you let them figure out their own problems that have nothing to do with our privilege at home, if you wanna risk life and arrest there’s plenty of oppression right here to join in on. So that’s an upside to the spin the tornado has put in his path, no matter what your stance is on the rest of it anybody can get behind disaster relief, except maybe a traveling purveyor of impermanent settlement and doomsday rhetoric, though they
might even start to see that the dots actually connect on the constellation that is his map of the stars.
About like him and Cowboy, now there’s an unlikely pair but also obviously destined to ride together, a clean-up man for Katrina and a protest rebel found flying the single second amendment sign among streets full of aggravated nonviolence, turns out they’d even been right across the corner from each other during all that stuff in Minneapolis. Both on a spiritually guided tour with interwoven overlooks, seems they might take different buses to get there but also must have the same driver pointing out the sights along the way.
Cowboy was driving that day though, when him and Susie roused our boy from his tentside slumber party, crawled out of the bedroll and into the day's mismatched outfit. He might be a lot to take in for the senses, definitely not from around here yet simultaneously more at home than anyone you have ever met, but it’s hard to hate on his curbside cup and bowl routine when he constantly gives everything he’s got to a town full of total strangers. Stranger than most anyway.
*******
I’d say. Any place that adopts the likes of him must have a few screws loose, but still not as many as that other dumbfuck, Devil Beard or whatever they called him, think he must have crawled from the seedy underbelly of the romanticized street scene our proto-agonist insists on fingerpainting. Two sides of the same tossed coin but you couldn’t make heads or tails out of whichever grift it was that had chased him into town.
It’s Cowboy’s fault really, that he ended up camped with us anyway, when he first scavenged his way into our story he snuck into Cowboy’s little shanty shack across town and had bunk beds built by the time he came home from second dinner.
So Cowboy, being the kind-hearted sucker for a sob story that he is, lets his stowaway stay for a few days while he got him all geared up for a crew cut, and guess whose crew the strays get stuck with.
*******
DB was not even that bad. A bit eclectic maybe, but who isn’t, at least anyone worth writing about. A little less stylish and a lot more transient, but who could ever compete with the embellished ambience of someone stroking their own pen?
That is to say, I wouldn’t have adopted him or anything, which I’m still dead set on for the good son, looked up the legalities even, gonna put my foot down and make him stay the summer to help me run the boat shack. Until the damn TV advertised Adults Adopting Adults and now apparently there’s a German prince looking for an heir and all of a sudden my VA benefits aren’t the only chocolate cake in town, no more television for you mister.
*******
You can have them both. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. Honestly they do work pretty hard and halfway know their shit, and happy enough to hear themselves talk with the clients so I don’t have to. It’s pretty easy to get new customers with the rates we charge, just gotta sign on the dotted line to release us of any liability from doing more damage than the storm did, I’d give it fifty-fifty with this bunch of numbskulls. I give them grief but we actually did do a lot of good work for folks, plenty of big bad trees that the real volunteers wouldn’t touch, and anything involving city hall was even more of a clusterfuck.
Dawson sits right on the edge of three counties, most of it in the one that was handling all of the paperwork and FEMA checks, while across the invisible fence was the same category of carnage with none of the red tape to put it back together.
But what the fuck do we care? Tweedle Dumb doesn’t believe in borders and the other one doesn’t believe in common sense, and I don’t believe in giving a fuck, I just want to cut trees and fix stuff, so now it sounds like another job for the rogue band of renegade repairmen.
She’d give us a clipboard full of house calls to size up and delegate to the appropriate pile, looks like half of these roofs were already in bad shape before the big blow off, maybe that one hundred dollar insurance check was an overcompensation after all. Some still had enough coverage to stack up a material list and just needed a few idiots to put it in, others were hung out to dry in the rain so we did whatever we could to rummage through piles of leftover houses and figure out how to make something work. Say what I will, but those two sure could turn a whole mess of nothing into doing the trick.
Still not as smooth a move as the municipal magician, a sleight hand of God that has predetermined code changes and grandfathers to out. You’re still allowed to build back on the exact same foundation with an insurance check unadjusted for the last decade of lumbered inflation, otherwise be prepared to jump through more flaming hoops than a pyrotechnic poi spinner. Outdated infrastructure needs a revamp, lot sizes are no longer adequate, town council’s vote is tax value over fixing the income of riffraff, that is one way to take out the trash I guess. Many with nowhere to go but a mobile home windsock while the street sweepers ordain new models only, fifty grand the minimum ticket price for reentry into the neighborhood you grew up in, but at least you weren’t one of the poor souls trapped under the broken brackets of the government housing crisis.
At least there will be plenty of good old American jobs in the aftermath, stockpiles of wood and insulation and drywall and shingles, plus all the chemicals and conveniences to make skipping a second thought easy. And we’ll need employees to move all that, from dockworkers to truckers to the rest of the fuel economy that orders-in the important stuff, the rest we can cut down from our children and dig out of the ancestors, a grave prospect but just think of all that hard-earned Kentucky coal.
Seems quite unlike me to give a shit and more likely your so-called author filling my mouth with a hot load of extended vocabulary, especially a sentence as dumb as this one, and all because he wants me to mention his affordable floorplan with
a ground-up footprint and plenty of manual labor to ensure an early retirement. When is this madness ever going to end?
*******
Hold your horses Mister Sore in the Saddle, it looks like your asshole side’s starting to show a bit but I gotta guy who can patch those up for you real nice. Should match that fancy hat-on haircut you let Susie fingerstyle in her shop downtown, she offered my boy the upstairs apartment as a home base but he kept a foot on the sidewalk for fear of a cutthroat trimjob. I always worry about him out there in that tiny little tent, but I bring him snacks and treats and he says it’s plenty warm once he gets all nestled in, the worst part is when he climbs out into his snowcapped cappuccino.
On some of the late nights me or one of the rangers would give him a ride home to the campground, during one of the ice storms I tried to talk him into staying here, but nah, he should be alright, so Ranger Smith takes him up there and they shine flashlights around and speculate on the big oak limb wiggling right above his tent, should be alright, then a waterfall of peril glimmers from their periphery as this huge-ass cedar sheds its frozen fronds and falls over not more than fifty feet from my boy’s pillow, they look at each other in shock and awe and, eh, should be alright.
*******
Oh yeah, that was a good one, I heard it thud in the trailer but thought it was just the fucktards doing something stupid out there. Not that it was even all that big compared to some of those we’d been cutting, we were way over our heads with most of them but just kept figuring it out one cigarette at a time.
I’d been cutting up north for a few years so I’m not a total schlep, and Dingleberry made it through a Samaritan’s Purse training course that wanted him to agree to diligently spread their propaganda and promise not to chainsaw from a ladder,
so he gave them a ridiculously fake name and a non-physical address and then we cut every one of those trees they couldn’t with a ladder and a chainsaw.
Hate to admit it but he really was a damn fine rope man, he would run up the rungs and tie the ladder off first thing, next he’d throw his hand-carved counterweight through the tightest crotch way up there, then Cowboy scored twenty feet of flexible conduit to get us out on the farthest limb and from a distance it looked just like he was reeling in the big one.
As a matter of fact, Cowboy had to come film us take out one of the real tricky ones for posterity’s sake, which meant he didn’t see how we were going to survive it. Or that other one, broken off and dangling over the power line, then a pickup of bystanders stopped to watch the show so we told them to call 911 and ask them to hold, it turns out they were emergency responders anticipating their own eventful afternoon.
There ain’t nothing like the exhilarating thrill of bringing a wooden beast down to Earth, thousands of pounds of brute force that could all go sideways at a moment’s notice, you get your notch and backcut and tap in a wedge as you nudge it to safety, but you never really know what could happen up there.
And that’s on a normal day, but all of these had widowmakers swinging overhead and we were too young to be married, let alone call it quits.
Luckily our hourly rate allowed us to take our sweet time, no need to rush to the finish line when we could grab a coffee instead, free refills for the allstars at the onestop, smoke two cigs before we smoke two cigs and maybe now we’re ready to cut it out like a bad habit. A complex order of operations as mangled branches make plinko pinballs on their way down, better hope there’s a limb left to hide behind and that Junior guns the four-wheeler just in time to yank a near disaster far enough into the future for close comfort.
And then there was that big fucking walnut at Linda’s house. Holy shit. That was nearly one worth writing a dumb book about. I even saw the treehugger offering some tobacco and a request that we made it through in less pieces than the firewood pile.
He was generally on the conservation end of treework, once in a pinch of prayer he’d even saved a few lives, but this was an extraordinary circumcision that was well worth every elongated measurement. These trees weren’t destined for long leaftimes of celebrated livelihood, they were halfway blown down already and even the brick houses couldn’t stand up to grandmother wolf’s wrath. Little Pink Riding Pants could find more conflict in the Peace Corps than his wardrobe, but even he felt good about me climbing into this boobytrap and letting the aces and eights fall how they may.
It was laying across the roof at a forty-five, big old fat one, and completely hollow halfway up, all splintered and barber chaired and this thing might just explode when we try to cut it through the rest of the way. And then there’s all that weight pushing down on the house, but if we just start sawing limbs from up there the whole thing might sling up and catapult me to the moon.
Gonna take a few extra coffee breaks for this one, which she made us with a tray of sandwiches and snacks. She quickly assessed his counterculture and my lack of it and declared us homies, an original hippie from back in the day, so she got our head right and toasted our last meal.
Slowly but surely we zipped a limb over here and zapped one over there, kept it on kilter and waited for it to go haywire, but we somehow managed to make it look like we knew what we were doing. Good thing too, three neighbors and a twelve pack stood watch as I straddled the limbless trunk that had stabilized at forty-four degrees, ladder ratchet-strapped below me and my legs locked around the bronco, cut off a ten foot chunk that dropped just enough dead weight to blow out my backside and I miraculously held onto dear life. It was fucking awesome.
*******
I knew we’d find a little treehugger deep inside you if we poked around enough, it’d be a shame to let all that hardwood go to waste out there all alone. But they were just hauling it off
and burning it in a pile outside of town, a butt-ton of beautiful board-feet gone up in smoke while a natural gas infrastructure gets reinstalled after Samaritan’s Purse bursts a main line and halts the progress of aggressive regression. Some said it was unsafe to do-it-yourself, embedded glass and insulation made for bad kindling or improving a broken home, but I know our rebel alliance was stacking up logs for a secret sawmill and piling up caches of illegal tender for heating the resistance through the dark times.
We couldn’t even keep the flame in here alive with the unseasoned woodsplitters on the government dime, it would be all smoldering and smokey until my boy clocked into a five second shift around the fireplace and wiggled it all into an effortless upright sparkle party, and boy we had some good times sitting around in here, let me tell you.
*******
Well when the hell am I going to get to talk? You two have been back and forth bickering for more pages than I’ve ever read in my whole life, except for the good book, which this is certainly not, starting to doubt I’ll live long enough to see the end of it even if I am doing pretty good for an old fat man.
*******
I knew you couldn’t keep your mouth shut for an entire chapter. We only had a couple paragraphs left and I was going to finally take that nap while my boy adventured on along, but now we’re gonna have to hear your whole life story whether we like it or not.
*******
Well hell Bill, I was gonna keep it short and sweet like the missus, but if you insist… I’m just messing with you, I ain’t here to talk about me for once, he was starting to think you two had lost the objective and sent me over here to adjust your
perspectivity. He was fixing to push to the point of a halfway decent wardrobe change when Hippie hopped in with a proper wordsmith for a cruise to town for fresh cigs. That’s about the only thing the boy will let you give him, besides a hard time, or maybe letting you stuff his face once a week when you re-up on supplies, seems like he pretty much runs on just coffee and tobacco.
American Spirit Organic Roll-Your-Owns if you ever find yourself wanting to share a gift of gratitude with the man who has it all, all he wants anyway, and even if you do catch him during a frequent phase of quitting, he’ll still appreciate the evergiving token between energy transfer partners, plus at this rate he’ll probably be a smoking fatty before too much longer.
Claims it’s a traditional method of exchanging vibrational harmony, a conduit of intentional intermingling, a saturated sponge capable of capturing the essence of feel-good moments and spreading them into the world. A stronger brew of prayer filtered into the fire, or an offering of unconditional love for the honor of harvesting natural abundance, or perhaps even a heartfelt handshake between two two-leggeds. The customary gift of introduction or departure from sacred ceremony, or a medicine man’s FEMA trailer, or any elder really, or even a firekeep who gives all he has to the people, including this page from his playbook, one that if he ever did decide to re-enter capitalism would more than likely fetch the going rate of one turquoise pouch of rolling-papered pleasure, probably just a coincidence. Simultaneous solicitations for free book sales and emphysema encourage a reread of a prior prose and a promise that even his fictional experience of spiritual understanding truly did happen as sparks flew through his own connection to this sacred medicine.
So there we are standing in the cigarette store where he’d finally tracked down the elusive brand of hippie culture when another addict of fine apparel tugged upon the threads of his smarty pants, a golden shower of compliment for standing out in a crowd and a pretty solid affirmation that he’s not the only idiot in town. A pink and purple plaided scarf tied together his hand-stitched patchwork as a crisp new pair of patterned flats
convinced the casual observer that maybe this guy wasn’t as dirt poor as he pretends to be. It all came out of an abandoned donation pile of course, and even then he’s reluctant to take on additional baggage, but some finds are too good to pass up, especially when it’s just being shipped off to the lowest bidder.
The Second Disaster, and it’s not his fashion sense this time, an unholy hell of religious tax exemptions that flooded the streets with black plastic trashbags full of another man’s treasure. Good stuff, bad stuff, definitely ugly stuff but the boy might like to keep that one, and simply way too much stuff to stuff anywhere but in a dumpster. People needed clothes, sure, they’d lost everything, myself included, but we also lost our closet and dresser and there’s only so many dirty t-shirts we could cram under our borrowed bed.
Spent his first days volunteering to unpack three tractor trailers of leftover liquidations, then the call came in that the trailers were being repossessed, so they refashioned the line of clothing connoisseurs and packed it all into a different set of trailers up the hill, then into a big leaky circus tent next to a dilapidated forestry house that was also jampacked with bags of unmarked misfortune, which then had to be resorted and moved again down the hill to an even bigger tent that required a diesel generated heat source, not to preserve the perishable style of last year’s latest trends, but the tent itself would get damaged in the winter weather without a constant flow of petroleum to grease the wheels of the rental agency that cost the taxpayers ten thousand big ones for each month of this altruistic operation.
And we’re not even to the juicy bit yet. His controverted personality often takes issue with the misuse of funds, which to him probably means any delinquent distribution of wealth, but although he doubted his stomach would agree with the plan of attack he also had to admit that he had no more room for this garbage on his plate either, well maybe just that plaid thing over there, but that’s definitely the last one.
So the inundated park found a company that specializes in removing leftover donations from the open hands of the overwhelmed, they’d even pay the generous donation centers
for their loss, twenty-five cents a pound for well-sorted brand new clothing that would then be shipped off to other areas of crisis to be resorted and placed in leaky tents.
Seemed all kinds of sketchy to our dude, on every level really, up to and including the reimbursement of government funds that the park had spent housing folks by decree of the governor and in association with FEMA, but at least he could feel like he’d helped cover the rental fee of his own footprint, that is until the campsite received an eviction notice and final warning of no more freely loaded dinner plans.
*******
Now that one did piss me off. Everyone that works here absolutely loved these guys and adored them for all that they were selflessly doing for our community, but my boy remained unphased by the evacuation order and assured us it wasn’t his first rodeo roundup, it was going to take a lot more than the National Guard to shake off his bad habit of helping people. He knew he could always stay at my house, had his own room and everything, but he insisted that he was more comfortable cradled by the Earth, recharged by the root note of planetary harmony.
Sounded like some more of his Indian hippie hoodoo but I looked it up and it’s real science kinda thing, the Schumann Resonance, 7.83 hertz, a frequency we’re apparently built to tune into but everything we build disconnects us from, and he was a pretty good argument that something out there sure was keeping him more grounded than most.
He liked staying at the park though, living among the very community that he was growing close with, knowing who was going through what and being able to jump into wherever he could to help. People were always looking for this or that, from moving stuff into storage to ripping out the ruined drywall to just hanging out with folks who needed someone to talk with, everyone had been through so much and sometimes it was just nice to have a friend.
Like Sammie, those two got pretty close playing video games and taking cigarette breaks, and I don’t really want to risk a HIPAA violation or anything like that, so I’ll just leave it at Sammie was in very poor health, confined to a wheelchair and considering hospice care, so just having someone who was truly present in every moment meant the world to them both.
But then he got that damn dog, she was a sweetheart but she would give poor Sammie the rollaround, then on that first day she took off into the woods and had all of maintenance out there searching for her. They looked all damn day, calls over the radio reported deep in the tree barks, Sammie’s out in the parking lot hollering around, then one of the guys scoops him up next to the woodline for a cruise about but they leave his chair, so the ranger rolls up and Sammie’s abandoned vehicle implies that he’s crawled into the forest for whatever fate had in store, so now the whole park’s freaking out and there’s no walkie in the van and Ranger Danger’s sniffing for skid marks and this whole place is a fucking riot sometimes. Good thing the National Guard has teenagers with guns here to protect us.
*******
It was really dumbfuck number two that got us kicked out anyway. Like you said, we had a pretty good thing going here for everyone involved, and all it was costing you guys was a couple extra plates off the buffet and having to associate with some treehugging lumberjacks from time to time, but then our other unknown associate was a little too much in bad taste for the lords of the land.
He could do the same shit and say the exact same thing as the snappy dresser but his total lack of social finesse stuck out like a big thumb in a sore hole. Hitchhiked to town, carried only one bag, dug in the dumpster, bullshitted and carried on, claimed to be allergic to cocaine and every time he did it broke out in handcuffs, but you believed him when he said it. Musta been on the run from something, might not be as severe as felony littering but he was onto some kind of sketchy scheme, or maybe he stumbled into an opportunity to turn over a new
leaf and live a life of service to humanity, but the leaves here had already been turned more than enough, so they’re gonna have to ask you to make like a tree.
Gave us twenty-four hour notice during a literal freezing rain storm, you’ll never believe it but I was fucking pissed. If they don’t want my God damned free labor risking my fucking life to save their asses then I can just pack my shit and hit the damn road. But the fucking cucumber over there all relaxed in the mudbath figures it’s for a reason and refuses to let another government eviction get his panties in a wad, plus he already had insider trading deals worked out for everybody and their mother to sneak out secret to-go orders just to keep his big mouth from yapping.
The tactics employed by employees of the state might not meet the mandated guidelines of the cafeteria, though they did succeed in rolling the bad apples downhill. Me and the dandy lion head to town to meet up with one of the groups of college kids somebody thought it wise to put us in charge of, Mister Inspirational Quote over there constantly spewing all kinds of nonsense and now the bosslady even wants to hire him to be her campaign manager. I don’t know what kind of credibility you can hang onto when your chief of staff doesn’t use money, or a phone, or a car, or a washing machine, although he does own the superlative of the most resourceful as he catches rides into town and promises to be capable of figuring out his own way home, but still not as shady as Dingleberry.
So we pull into our meet-up spot and here is a brand new caravan of traveling cowboys dishing out delicious red beans and rice, and some fireside cowboy coffee, a morally christian outfit but they were most impressed by Buster’s busted fedora, they recognized a well-adventured accessory of unspoken peril and lamented on the obvious novicehood of someone’s shiny new boots and hat. May have properly judged his cover story but an undeveloped character slipped past their radar as Devil Beard talked his way aboard the convoy and wormed his way into somebody else’s book.
*******
Quick, we gotta end this chapter. He ended up staying out at the house in my boy’s bed for a few days and I had to run him around town to pick up bags he had stashed all over and I just dropped him off at the cowboys and now I gotta lock the door before I turn around and the cat came back.
But this wasn’t Cowboy Cowboy, he’d already vamoosed after pegging my boy a Trendy Vagrant or whatever it was he said, he’s probably halfway to Florida for hurricane relief by now. Simon and Garfunkel ended up staying quite a bit longer after they moved to the outskirts of jurisdiction, nobody really wanted them to leave but we all knew that winter break would eventually come to an end. My boy broke camp and prepared for a prolonged departure of hugs and tears, he probably does this all the time breaking hearts wherever he goes, no plan for a ride out yet but he says he doesn’t have to worry about that part, and then the next day a tree client just so happened to be driving straight through his hometown.