This is the story of Jenny Lee Martin, who had once been a boy named Tim, and how on a spring morning in 1950 she saved the Earth from destruction. It’s a story about niceness…
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I started this story as a tribute to the COUNTRY GIRL stories of Billie Sue Pilgrim (currently writing as Starla Ann), back in 2007. But before I could finish this, Billie Sue decided that her series would work better if she changed her young heroine from a girl who had once been a boy to one who had been born a girl, eliminating Lizzy Jane’s whole strange genesis (psychotic town elders demanding that she transition or be executed- kind of a present-day-Iran-meets-1950's-Alabama thing.) I think her sweet story is simpler and better since the change, except that it left my little spin-off suddenly no longer relevant to what it had been spinning off from, so I unpubbed the two chapters I’d posted...
But I do like this story, and even the opening references to another child’s tale of transformation that never happened seem to work okay, bit of a metafiction that sets the tone for my tall tale. And now that I've finished it here's the whole story, in four parts:
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Perhaps you’ve read the stories about the young Alabama boy who after a bizarre misadventure that would cause him to be converted---under order of a rather strange + barbaric local law---into a girl named L____ J___, would go on to have a whole series of unbelievable adventures involving everything from bank robbers to dinosaurs. Well as it turns out, at that same year (1950) and just one state up (Tennessee) from that remarkable young heroine there lived a plucky nine year old girl named Jenny Lee Martin (formerly a boy named Tim) whose remarkable tale bore many similarities to L____ J____'s life story.
Although there were some differences right from the start. For example, how when Timmy had decided to go skinny dipping in the creek on that hot June day not long after he'd moved to his new town, his clothes had been stolen not by some other kid pulling a dirty prank (as had happened to L___ J___) but by monkeys escaped from a derailed circus train.
But the most significant difference between the early years of these two conscripts into girlhood lie not in the details of their adventures, but in the subtleties of their individual gender identity- a term that psychologists would come up with some years later to describe how well a person's thoughts and feeling about if they were supposed to be a man or a woman matched the body it sat in.
While the boy that L____ J___ had been would accept being sentenced to a life as the opposite sex only grudgingly at first, for young Tim it was like a dream come true, if in a very strange and scary way (they actually seemed to be talking about executing him!). And while Timmy had made a show of protesting his girlification it was only because he feared that if he appeared to want it too much they would have denied it to him. Those crazy town elders had seemed capable of just about anything!
But when her nightmare ordeal was over and everything had returned to normal, more or less, Jenny Lee saw that her wise and wonderful father had been right. The Lord truly did work in mysterious ways. She just wished that he could be here to see now; the girl she had become.
She woke up. She didn’t know what time it was but it felt like she'd had a full night's sleep, even though a glance through her bedroom window showed that it was still dark outside. She lie there listening to the faint screek! screek! screek! of the generator windmill out to the hog trough, thinking about her old life as a boy named Tim, her new life as Jenny Lee, and all the crazy events that had led her to this...
Tim's mother had taken sick with encephalitis and died shortly after he was born, and it was up to his father to raise him. The years that followed were bittersweet for Frank Martin, the grief of losing his Louisa Mae offset by the joys of caring for his baby boy.
In December of the following year when America entered the war that had been raging across Asia, Europe and North Africa, Frank felt he should do his duty and go. But Frank Senior had told him, "We can take care of little Timothy if you insist. But the baby just lost his mama. He needs you!"
So Frank obtained a “hardship case” deferment from his draft board and spent the next four years as a Civil Defense warden, staying at home to raise his child. He did a fine job of it too. By word and by the example Frank instilled in young Timmy a clear sense of right and wrong and nurtured the virtues of compassion, fair play and self-respect.
It was by a grim twist of fate that this young father who had ridden out WWII in safety---raising his rifle only to put food on the table---would end up as a casualty of that war. Roughly two years after Japan's representatives had signed the terms of surrender aboard the USS Missouri, Frank had found a large tattered balloon out in the woods that had a crate attached to it covered in strange oriental writing. And when he attempted to open it the explosive device inside went off, making him one of the handful of victims of Japanese’s “fire balloon” program, a little known and not terribly effective weapon which had been targeting (to the extent that you can target a balloon) America’s vast expanses of forest, hoping to burn them down.
The school that Timmy had attended back in Franktown Corners was even smaller than the one here in Bowerton Springs. The sheriff had walked right into the classroom and led him quietly outside to give him the terrible news.
The next week was just a blur to Timmy. The funeral, where a big black crow sat perched on the steeple. Fat ladies drenched in cheap perfume calling him "you poor thing" and trying to feed him sponge cake. His grandfather, in his funny old-fashioned suit with the shoestring tie, bringing the boy home in his clattering old stake-bed Model A to live with him and Grandma...
Their rooster, Joe E. Brown had begun to crow. Which meant it was right around 4:45. Jenny Lee had been trying to remember the dream that had awoken her. She'd been able to piece enough of it together to decide that, sadly, it hadn’t been one of her dreams about Papa. Those dreams were special...
On her first night home after her stay in jail, and after the trial and the trip to the doctor's, Jenny Lee had lain in bed trying to get to sleep. She'd been in a certain amount of pain, and her thoughts had begun to run in negative and obsessive circles, until she managed to convince herself that Papa had died as a punishment for her being the way she was---“Not right in the head” as her defense attorney had put it---and she’d ended up crying herself to sleep…
And that was the very first night that her Papa visited her in her dreams. In a field, in a strange golden light, where the cottonwood seeds swirling through the air around them seemed to shine like stars, he asked her to please not be sad, and assured her that not only was he proud of her but her Mama was too, and their being called home to Jesus had to do with a lot of things but it was certainly not some divine judgement against her.
Jenny Lee missed him terribly. She remembered the day---just a few months before he'd died---that she had come home crying, because some mean boys called her a sissy and a stupid girly-boy and a lot worse. And Papa had said, "You know Timmy, people saying somethin' don't make it true..."
"But it is true!" she'd blurted out, to her utter horror she found herself telling him everything: How she'd always felt that something had gone horribly wrong when she'd been born a boy, and the way she got jealous of her friends Mildred and Cindy Lou for the pretty clothes they got to wear, the games they played, the fact that they were going to grow up to become wives and more importantly mommies- It all came out in an unstoppable rush, like Coca Cola out of a shook up can.
Her father got real quiet for a minute. It was the longest minute of her life, the fear that this silence meant he was trying to find words equal to his disgust, that he'd start calling her names like those kids at school had done, or like those horrible things old King Larry had said to his daughter Gonnorheal in that play they'd listened to on the radio at school (in which the people had talked even funnier than Yankees), calling her: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth!"
But finally he put his arms around her and said, "Honey, you're not wrong for feeling how you do, you're just different. When you go out in the woods, don't the trees all look different from each other? Tall trees, short ones, some going up into two big branches and others maybe a bunch of little ones, but is there a wrong tree in the forest? The Lord made this world and everything in it. And I figure he had to have made you how you are for a reason."
She looked up at him with tears in her eyes as he brushed her hair back from her forehead. If she'd had to freeze time at any point in her young life and only retain one moment it would have been right there.
Then his voice took on a tone of caution, "But I 'spect most other people aren't going to see it that way. So you have to do something that might be very hard for you. For now, and I don't know how long that'll be, you have to go on being a boy---or pretendin' to be a boy, I guess you could say---when you're at school and stuff. But some day, somehow or other..."
He reminded her that all things are in God's hands, hands so powerful they created a million mighty suns with no more effort than you would use to sprinkle salt out of a shaker, and that if you had a portion of faith even as big as a mustard seed He could answer your prayers.
But the boy she'd been had still had serious doubts. All those miracles in the Bible, none of them seemed to be very recent. And what Timmy was really afraid of was that God wouldn't want to answer a prayer like his. While such things weren't really discussed openly in 1950, he had nonetheless picked up on the belief that God got real ornery about stuff like this.
She saw that she should have trusted her Papa. As impossible as it had once seemed she was now Jenny Lee Martin, just a normal American schoolgirl and a regular part of her community. Although for this to come about it would take a scarecrow, a lion (No, not that scarecrow and lion…), an angry judge, and a doctor who dreamed each night of burning in eternal hellfire.
When she realized that she wasn't going to get any more sleep tonight, Jenny Lee decided that today would be an excellent day to take Miss Edna up on her reward.
She got up, brought in a bucket of water, put on a pot of coffee on the stove for her Grandpa, and warmed up the rest of it to perform her a morning ablutions with a soapy rag, which for people in those days consisted of more than just washing your face and hands but less than a full bath.
At the mirror in the front parlor she ran a brush through her thick jet black hair, and appraised her appearance. Would she one day be as pretty as the photos she had of her mother? She had the same fair complexion and fine features, but she also had a bit of an overbite, which she thought made her funny looking (actually this was quite cute on her).
At least she did have Mama's eyes, she thought happily. Big and dark and soulful, they shone with an incorruptible and tender-hearted character that made anyone who was not a total blackguard want to do good things themselves.
Her grandfather came lumbering down the stairs, raving about how good the coffee smelled, and that she would wind up spoiling him. She asked, "How are you today, Grampa?"
"Why, I'm feelin' right as rain and ready t’ wrassle a whole passel o’ polecats!”
Which was what he always said, but she saw how he was favoring his left leg, and doing his best to hide it. She knew the hard work of farming was getting to be too much for him, and late one night she'd heard him and Grammy debating whether to sell off a big chunk of their acreage. Trouble was, the neighbors that he would want to sell it to couldn't afford it. And Kraken Foods---the big agricultural concern that had offered to buy his entire farm on the spot---were a bunch of egg-sucking carpetbaggers that he wanted no part of.
As she poured him his coffee, she explained why she was leaving so early this morning.
"Well good for you," he smiled, "Say Hi to Edna and that Eye-tie fella for me!"
She accepted a kiss on the forehead, gathered up her school books, and started down the dirt lane into town just as the sun was cresting Squaw Peak.
With three meals on the table every day at home and money being tight, Jenny Lee and her grandfolks rarely ate at the Regal Diner. But on the day that she'd shimmied down into a storm drain to rescue Edna Miller's puppy, Edna---who owned and ran the restaurant---had promised her five free meals.
Jenny Lee had felt like it was wrong to get a reward for just doing what you should when a helpless little animal was in trouble, and she refused Edna's offer. And so a weird sort of bargaining ensued. Edna kept insisting that she be able to express her gratitude, but tried to make it more palatable to the girl by reducing her offer to three meals...
"One meal," countered Jenny Lee.
"Alright, but you get seconds and a slice of blueberry pie, and you can drop in for a free soda water any time you want."
"Done!" exclaimed Jenny Lee and they shook on it, smiling.
So here she was, going out for breakfast on a Tuesday morning, like she imagined the kids who lived in cities did before they clocked in at their schools like big factories. She was looking forward to one of Dago Tony's big fluffy Denver omelets, loaded with ham and cheese and green onions, a rare treat for her. While she had eggs for breakfast nearly every morning, they were either scrambled, poached or served sunny side up, since Grandma was suspicious of anything so affectedly high-tone and French sounding as an omelette...
Entering town on its one paved street, she walked past the schoolhouse, whose doors would not be open for some time still, then past the barber shop and then Hingley's Supermarket- which was really just Hingley's Groceries with a bigger sign, trying to cash in on the growing supermarket craze.
She passed the white wooden two-story Grange Hall. Its spacious front lawn sported a bank of a dozen picnic tables and a small band stand, and served as a park for the little village. It was here that she had been arrested by Sheriff Sweeny on the charge of deviated raiment, and her life had changed so drastically. Though it hadn't been funny at the time Jenny Lee giggled as she recalled the pandemonium of that day, with everyone running and screaming and bumping into each other...
On the day his pants had been stolen by a chattering gang of monkeys, Tim had decided to try to make his way home naked. He was pretty sure he could do it without being spotted, if he stuck to the woods and circled clear around the whole town. But when he saw the lady scarecrow at the back of Nadine Carleson's vegetable garden....
It had clouded up all of the sudden, and with the way the wind was kicking up it was pretty cold. He figured he would be forgiven if he borrowed the scarecrow's clothes for the last mile of his hike.
Ducking back into the trees he put on the dress and shawl, a thing he had always longed to do but had never dared to before (and with just him and his father in the household for most of his life he'd never really had the opportunity...). It wasn't the prettiest outfit, all kind of mismatched, but it was prettier than anything he'd ever worn, the dress with its cheerful pattern of yellow and white daisies on a field of soft green. And it fit just perfect. It felt so different, how it enclosed both legs and all the space between clear down to his ankles. He smiled at how right it felt.
"I'm Jenny Lee," she proclaimed to nobody in particular. "Tim? No, I'm not Tim. Tim was..."
Was what, she pondered. If Timmy wasn't her, then who was he?
Maybe he was like when you were making a drawing, and you kind of messed it up the first time. And then you went back over it and got everything right, just like you'd had it pictured in your head, but you'd needed something to work from to finally get it right. That was Tim. Not a waste of effort, but you didn't hang on to that middle step after you had it drawn proper.
She was skipping through the woods, imagining herself to be Little Red Riding Hood (although the ruffled blue gingham sunbonnet was neither red nor a hood), as she really was going to Grandmother's house, although it was her house too…..... When a very large and toothy lion appeared out of nowhere, blocking the trail ahead and fixing her with his huge baleful brown eyes.
Now it isn't likely that the lion was going to eat her, he had been well fed on bloody chunks of horse meat just that morning. But when the kid took off like that, a long dormant instinct came to life in his brain- the one about how when something ran you were supposed to chase it...
And chase it he did, right up Main Street and into the middle of the tables and the milling crowd at the Grange Society Bake Sale and Social, where Roundhouse Tubby and his Junction City Swing Serenaders were playing up on the bandstand. It was quite a ruckus!
The mayor, who hadn't climbed a tree in over thirty years, needed help getting down. He was furious. Everyone was furious. This event that they had all looked forward to and had taken such pains to prepare for was in shambles. And after things calmed down a bit, suddenly the sight of a boy in a flowery dress upset them even more than the great cat had!
The poor confused beast managed to avoid getting shot, thanks to the men from the circus showing up right then, just as Sheriff Todd Sweeny was drawing a bead on him, as he sat lapping up Birdie Sanders' award winning banana cream pie with his giant tongue.
Rory the lion was happy to see someone he knew, and who wasn't running around screaming like a nut. While it had been interesting, he'd pretty much had his fill of life in the wild by then. He went off with the men, riding shotgun in the jeep, luxuriating in the feel of the wind fluffing his mane...
But under the letter of local jurisprudence, it appeared that Tim would not be faring as well as Rory had. Barring some miracle, his trial was expected to last maybe an hour or two, and his date with the township's Volunteer Firing Squad would be on next Saturday.
That miracle came in the form of old Dr. Braunhemmer, who despite being a relative newcomer to the town, and a foreigner to boot, was very well respected. When they told him what they planned to do, and that they wanted him to act as the attending physician (to record the time of death and make it official-like) he knew he had to act.
He appeared as an expert witness for the defense, and ran circles around prosecutor Phil Arlen, the Mayor's nephew, who'd been a mediocre law student and had only barely passed the state bar exam on his third attempt. The doctor questioned Jenny Lee, and there in the defendant's dock she told the whole truth about herself to somebody besides her loving father for the first time.
Doctor Braunhemmer had done some serious lying on Jenny Lee's behalf. He’d figured that he had done so much lying already (to start off with, he wasn’t really from Austria…) and his past sins were so many that lying under oath to help save this innocent child would not alter his fate in the hereafter. The doctor knew where he was going.
And with a lot of impressive medical jargon and some murky X-Rays of what might have been a 1936 Studebaker he convinced the jury that Timmy couldn't be guilty of the crime of deviated raiment, because he had never in fact been a boy, but an ‘amorphously bifurcated mitochondrial pseudo-hermaphrodite’, or whatever high-flown terms he’d invented…
And then later, in Doctor B.'s office, Grandma held her hand while he explained the procedure to her. How if her body was left as she was, in a few years she would change in all the ways that boys change when they grow into men, and that she would probably end up as big and heavy-bearded as Papa had been. But if he performed this procedure thing she would not really be a girl, but she would be as much like one as was currently possible. And then later, he hypothesized, there might be shots or pills which if she took them regularly would give her body the soft contours of a woman.
"Did you really mean everything you said in court?" Asked Dr. Braunhemmer, "about your, ahem...... personality?"
"I really do! I love Papa and I love my grandpa, but I don't want to look like them, or do the stuff they do. I want to be a girl! And besides, I don't think Judge Quartelow gave me any choice."
"One ALWAYS has choices!" said the old doctor sternly, "Never forget that, Fraulein. Someone telling you to do something is never a good enough reason to do it. Listen to your heart, not to the drums and bugles and the cheering of the mob ...... You could leave this town. Sometimes leaving is the only way. You might say 'I have investments here, things I would lose if I leave zem behind..."
"I don’t really have any investments," said Jenny, but Doctor Braunhemmer didn't seem to hear her.
"Things, what are things? You can always get new things. And yes it is tough to be leaving ones friends, friends are important. But honor ......... one's very humanity. That we must never lose! To lose that …..... the cost is ...…... Oh I should have listened to that tiny voice. A conscience is nothing if you find it too late. Now in my dreams, I hear them. The screaming, always the screaming…" He trailed off, stood there staring at his hands like they were something horrible.
"Doctor B., are you alright?"
The physician suddenly remembered where he was. "Ja. I was saying. I have a friend and his wife in Chicago you could live with. I discussed this with them yesterday. They can't have children, and I know they would give you a very good home. I could drive you to the bus station up in Jackson, and give you money for your bus fare."
"You would do that for me?"
"I would do that for me! Before I would ever again- uh, before I would operate on you in ways you do not want. So please, think about this, and what it is you want. This will be the rest of your life."
She looked at Grammy, who smiled and squeezed her hand. "It's up to you dear."
That had been Jenny Lee's first encounter with the law in her new town, and it was a scary one. It just seemed plain crazy, getting so worked up over what kind of shapes the fabric covering a person's hide was stitched together into. And even if it was wrong to wear some old scarecrow's dress you could just take it off and put on britches, there had been no real harm done. At least not that she could see...
It would take a while for her to stop fearing that she might be hauled before Judge Quartelow again, for committing some other capital crime she’d never heard of. But fortunately, once she had to all appearances become an ordinary nine year old girl, people seemed to calm down considerably. There almost seemed to be some collective amnesia at work regarding how she'd arrived in their midst as a male, an unconscious conspiracy to forget that bit of unpleasantness.
Someone else might have held more of a grudge against the townsfolk here, seeing as how before the old doctor stepped in they HAD meant to kill her, which was pretty rude...
But Jenny Lee took the Gospel she'd been raised on seriously. To her forgiveness wasn't just something you did when it was easy or when you felt like it. And nor was it some duty you had to grit your teeth and slog through, but a GIFT- for the person who granted it as much as those it was directed at.
Though young, she had seen from the example of the adults around her how an inability to forgive could poison someone's soul, leaving them full of hate and suspicion and self-pity. It was up to you whether you wanted to hang onto your resentment, the bittersweet pleasures of being the aggrieved, or preferred the freedom of being comfortable in life, and having a heart that was open to the love and beauty and niceness around you...
Because there was love and niceness here. Every day these folks revealed more of their good side to her. And if they did go a bit psychotic on occasion, it was just that certain things tended to set them off. It was a small and insular world they inhabited. (Some of them had never been outside of Haymaker County, and didn't share the worldly perspective of a girl who had one time traveled clear down to New Orleans...). And so anything that was different, that seemed to threaten to overturn their sense of how the world should be, it's like it scared them in some way that ordinary physical peril never would...
This might be reason why---although they might give a neighbor the shirt off their back---they didn't immediately take to strangers. Especially strangers that were as strange as the one that Jenny Lee was soon to meet.
For here she was arriving at Edna’s diner. She crossed the establishment's small parking lot, her glossy leather Red Goose shoes crunching against the gravel. She clomped up the three steps, opened the aluminum door with the half moon window and went in.
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Japanese Fire Balloons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
All at once the whole atmosphere in the restaurant changed, becoming dead silent and extremely tense. Every eye was focused on the tall figure who stood waiting to be seated. After being pointedly ignored for a full three minutes he asked, "Excuse me?"
Forced to acknowledge him, Edna fixed him with a cold level stare. "I don't think this is the restaurant for you. It might be in your best interest if you just got on down the road."
"But I have currency. Many dollars. Or if it is preferred, Element 79-”
“You see that sign there? 'THE MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE'. Now beat it!"
The stranger's expression grew more and more horrified as his highly attuned senses repeatedly bumped up against an impenetrable wall of ill will. He didn't even get as far as reading Jenny Lee’s energies before he had to turn and flee from the diner in tears...
The lotus shaped bell above the door jing-a-linged as Jenny Lee entered the diner.
As soon as the restaurant's owner spotted the girl her face lit up, and she announced to her fifteen customers that here was the little hero who had rescued her beloved Scottish terrier Topsy, who on hearing her name spoken poked her shaggy head up from the tartaned basket she slept in by the front door, then went back to her nap, not terribly interested in the rest of the story: "You shoulda seen her! Shimmying clear down that narrow shaft and back up with my pup just as quick as a monkey!"
Jenny Lee blushed and nodded, knowing that to protest that her feat was nothing special would just spur Edna on.
The Regal Diner was the newest building in Bowerton Springs. And while Jenny Lee did have a love for the traditional styles of her region, she liked this too in a different way. It was all so clean and modern looking, so cosmopolitan (which was a word she’d looked up after seeing it on the side of the brand new Lincoln that Mayor Arlen drove…); with all these shiny chrome accents, the snazzy checkerboard Formica, the bright yellow vinyl booths awash in equanimous florescent light. To her it was like something right out of the motion pictures. Or maybe like being on some kind of spaceship.
Now everyone in town knew that when you came in alone to eat you were supposed to seat yourself at the lunch counter, the booths being reserved for parties of two or more. But Edna made a big show of ushering her to her own booth, like she was some big shot.
They passed the booth occupied by Lyle and Kyle Stuckey, who had inherited TOWED HAUL WRECKING & SALVAGE from Lyle Senior after he was taken away by the FBI for his wartime "gasoline pills" swindle. They stared sullenly at Jenny Lee and Edna as they went past.
While she tried to see the good in everyone, with the Stuckey Brothers it was pretty hard to find. There was a contemptuousness about them, a loathing for everybody and everything that seemed to pour out from their sunken beedy little eyes.
So she was glad when Edna put her silverware on the side where she would sit facing the window, where she wouldn't have to look at them when they did stuff like making fun of Spastic Augie, who wasn't right in the head. According to Dr. Braunhemmer Augie had caught syllabus back in World War One and now he had parakeets in his brain.
She was surprised she hadn't seen Augie yet this morning, calling out "Left! Right! Left! Right!" and "To the rear- HARCH!" as he did his close-order drills down the middle of Main Street in his filthy union suit. Sheriff Sweeny must have came by already and taken him home, putting him on "sentry duty" there, where he would usually stay put for a while.
If Lyle and Kyle were cruel to Augie, they were rude and insulting to everyone else. But the worst thing of all was the way they treated their old coonhound Sam. How bony and thin Sam was while they were both so ungodly fat, and the pitiful way he cringed whenever Jenny Lee went to pet him, and what that was a sign of.
But she remembered how her Papa had said that every person on Earth was a child of God, only some needed help remembering this. And that sure, some were so far gone they would never find their way back to humanity, but it wasn't up to you to decide if such was the case for them or not. She turned and waved, "Good morning!"
Lyle glared at her like this was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard. "What's so damn good about it?"
"You know, people say good morning even on the awfullest day of winter. They're not saying that it IS a good morning. They're saying they wish you will have a good morning. Or that's what I'm saying anyway. That I hope your day goes good." she smiled.
Lyle smirked and rotated his finger in the air sarcastically, but to Kyle this was a major revelation. That people who said "good morning" weren't rubbing their good fortunes in your face the way his sibling always said, but were trying to be nice. He started to say it back to her, but then saw the warning frown on his brother's face and lowered his arm.
Lyle tore his piece of toast in half, "Smart aleck! Thinks she knows everything and has to shoot her mouth off; correcting us in public like we're stupid or sumpin!”
Was that what the kid had been doing? wondered Kyle. He knew he wasn't so good at picking up on these sorts of things, so he was glad he had a brother like Lyle who really knew the score about stuff like this. He muttered in agreement, “Lousy brat!”
"I remembered you like your ketchup," smiled Edna as brought a bottle of Heinz out to Jenny Lee. She whipped out her order pad. "So what's our guest of honor having today?"
And in a short while she brought it out on a big heavy ceramic plate, with a large side of yellow grits and two big biscuits and honey. "Voila! Another Chef Tony masterpiece. What time do you have to be to school, Honey? Does it still start at eight?"
Jenny Lee nodded.
"Then you have lots of time. Enjoy."
A face smiled up at her from the omelet, fashioned from tomato slices, chunks of bell pepper and bits of onion:
.
Jenny Lee smiled when she realized it was supposed to be Tony's pet raccoon Ursula, who she loved to play with when she visited them. Tony had found the tiny starving cub and had coaxed her back to health---feeding her warm milk through the pinky finger of a rubber kitchen glove---before the Italian immigrant even knew what a raccoon was. He had been calling her his "dog-bear".
Now a year old, Ursula slept right on the foot of the bed, and followed her two-legged Daddy everywhere he went. She wore a bright calico neckerchief, and the locals all knew not to shoot Ursula.
He waved shyly from behind the kitchen window as she sang out, "Thank you, Tony!"
The big glass of milk was rich and cold and fresh, the grits light and perfect. Jenny Lee started at the edges of the omelet, saving the face part as long as she could. She was lost to the world as she enjoyed her breakfast, and didn't look up when the bell over the door chimed. But all of a sudden the atmosphere in the diner changed sharply, a tension filling the air.
The focus of all this tension stood next to the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign, waiting patiently. Where she usually would have been quick to hollar out "Ignore that old sign. Come on, have a seat up here!", Edna pretended not to notice the person. And while threading a new roll of receipt paper through all the rollers and plates inside the cash register was an intricate task, it wasn't that intricate...
Jenny Lee figured this person was a boy---she had never heard of a woman being over seven feet tall---although seen from the back like this you couldn't really tell. Big clunky work boots, shapely bare calves in black nylons, a polka-dot pleated skirt, a man's heavy blue denim work shirt over a slender frame, and a cute little cocktail hat with a pheasant feather sweeping back from it perched jauntily atop a head that rose up unusually high, and was completely bald.
When Edna moved from fixing the register to rearranging the coffee stirrers in their basketlike little holders, the newcomer called out, "Excuse me? May I be seated?"
It was a man's voice, sort of. And Jenny Lee knew that this hodgepodge of male and female clothes he wore would not endear him to the people here. Personal experience had shown her just how horribly riled up they could get over things like this.
Someone suggested loudly that the circus must be back in town and had lost one of their freaks.
"Excuse me, hello?" he called out again in his soft lilting voice.
When Edna finally decided to acknowledge him it was not with her customary cheerfulness but a cold, level stare. "I'm afraid not. I think you'd better leave."
The stranger spoke in an odd, clipped fashion. "I have been told that I am not very good at determining when people are 'kidding'. Is this exchange a sarcastic acquaintanceship ritual?"
Edna shook her head. “No, that’s not what it is. I don't think this is the restaurant for you. Or the right town either. It might be in your best interest for you to just get on down the road."
"But I'm hungry, and I see many available seats. And I do have sufficient funds."
"Ooooh, sufficient funds!" mimicked Jimmy Barnes, the rural district's mail carrier.
“Then I suggest the Wagon Wheel out on the Ridge Highway. They might serve you."
“But look,” said the stranger, and from his purse took out a dully gleaming disk the size of a sugar cookie, “In addition to currency I also have Element 79. The fellow at the historical artifacts store liked this form of tender especially. I don't understand..."
“You see that sign?” asked Edna, pointing up at a black on white placard that read THE MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. “I can’t make it any plainer than that. So just beat it!"
The stranger looked around the dining room, searching for a friendly face. His expression grew more and more horrified as his highly tuned senses repeatedly bumped up against an impenetrable wall of ill will. None of the scenarios he'd acted out during his Harmony Corps training or his three previous missions where he'd acted as old Zeta Zeta's Deputy Assessor had prepared him for the raw negative emotion of an encounter like this! He never even got to reading Jenny Lee’s energies before he fled the diner in tears...
"My God, what was that on his face?" asked Eve Stroppard, the town switchboard operator.
Edna grinned, "At the Rexall Drug in Farleyville they call that lipstick."
“More like 'its' face,” chortled Lyle Stuckey, momentarily forgetting his policy of disdaining to join in on the conversations that took place in here. He leaned back beaming, fairly amazed himself at the brilliance of his quip.
Eve made a circling motion around the area of her nose. "No, I saw the lipstick. I meant that ........ almost like he had two noses. Anyone notice that?"
“That other thing was a mole,” said Jimmy Barnes.
“With nostrils in it?” asked Eve.
Which started a debate about the stranger's face, most rejecting the extra nose hypothesis. An old codger named Somerset Frisby said that he clearly saw three noses, but Frisby was famous throughout the county for always having to top someone else's claims, and for rattling off stories about his life (“Old Battle-of-Midway Frisby, they called me...”) that would put the Baron von Munchhausen to shame.
"Him a-go like dis!" laughed Dago Tony, who had come out from the kitchen to join in on the fun. He began dancing around the room spanking his own bottom and flapping his other arm around like some crazy gay monkey, which got everyone howling, despite the fact that the stranger had in fact done nothing of the sort.
Edna was laughing at her cook's capering when she noticed Jenny Lee standing beside her, staring up at her with her fists balled tightly.
"What is it Dear? You know you don't have to ask me every time you need to use the restroom."
If there was one thing Jenny Lee couldn't stand it was people being cruel. Tears of outrage welled in her eyes as she scolded room full the adults, "You should all be ashamed of yourselves! And you especially, Edna. I might’ve expected Jimmy here or the Stuckeys to act this way, but you know better! I know you do!"
Dago Tony had started to slink off toward the kitchen-
"And you too, Tony! You read me some of your poems. The English was a little weird, but they showed me you have a good heart. Like that one that goes 'Can you tell me what is the sound/ Of when the doves they cry?' Well they're crying now, amico mio. Can you hear them?"
She stomped off toward the door. "Shame on you both! Shame on ALL of you!"
And then she was gone, the bell jangling frantically as she went flying out of the diner.
The girl's right, thought Edna glumly. It wasn't like she had never met a fairy before...
She thought of her friend Jeremy, who she’d met when she was trying to launch her singing career in Nashville nearly twenty years ago. Despite his determination to seem scandalous---all those crazy stories about orgies and séances and opium dens---he’d been a sweet and caring friend, always there for her with emotional support and numerous small loans; until Edna finally realized that her dream of stardom at the Grand Ole Opry just wasn't meant to be and caught the bus back home. And while it was true that Jeremy had tended to dress more like some dapper Kentucky squire on Derby Day (or occasionally a proper Southern belle) than the bizarre character she had just met, still Edna knew she should have been a lot nicer to that ......... whatever he was.
She cleared Jenny Lee's table in silence, feeling about two inches tall. As she passed by the Stuckey brothers Lyle caught a glimpse of the untouched slice of blueberry pie and suggested cheerfully, "Well if she ain't gonna eat that, I'll take it."
She clunked it down in front of him with a look that said ‘Choke on it!’ but this didn't phase Lyle. People were always getting themselves worked up about something he said or did, and free pie was free pie.
Clancy Smyth called back into the kitchen, "What's this about you writing poetry, Tony?"
"I'm-a don't know," droned Tony in his best puzzled-by-everything voice, before turning his back and busying himself with a sink full of dishes.
Like Edna, Tony was feeling awfully remorseful. He remembered how people had treated him when he first came to Bowerton Springs---the suspicion, all the none-too-friendly teasing---before he had managed to endear them all to him with his cheerful ingratiating Guinea peasant ways...
It had felt so good to finally be accepted that he’d gotten carried away, joining in their ridicule of the stranger in an attempt to further cement his bond with them all. But mocking that strange person had been plain wrong.
The poor creature was not at fault for his behavior, and clearly should have been under psychiatric care. Some manic disorder coupled with massive oedipal confusion was Tony's guess; but perhaps what had given him that final push into madness had been the lifetime's worth of of mockery he must have received for the deformities that marred his face...
And although she had shamed him, Tony was actually thankful to his Little Angel, for being friend enough to tell him when he was doing wrong. To remind him of all the things he'd sworn to himself as a youth, after he'd read a translation of Shelly's To A Skylark and declared himself to be a proponent of truth and beauty, freedom and love.
He just wished that his young friend hadn't outed him as a poet. He didn't want it widely known that (in Italian, French, German, Latin and ancient Greek, at least) he may have been the best educated man this side of the Smokey Mountains.
"Mama Mia!" sighed Tony.
Jenny Lee stood in the diner's parking lot looking up and down Main Street, and almost swore. While she'd been inside giving those grownups a piece of her mind, the stranger had disappeared. She tried to imagine which way the strange man might have run, but finally had to admit that she didn't have a clue. As she turned to go back inside and collect the schoolbooks she'd left inside she noticed something gleaming brightly against the white gravel of the parking lot.
It was a small splotch of liquid. A brilliant, artificial-looking blue, like the fenders on Mayor Arlen's big blue and yellow Cosmopolitan convertible. Whatever it was, it seemed to be glowing. She squatted down and cupped her hand over it, and sure enough- it lit up the dark space beneath her palm bright blue. When she touched her finger to it an intense wave of sadness swept through her, like some emotional fever chill. She wouldn't be doing that again!
Somerset Frisby gazed off in the direction the Stranger had ran, and shook his head, “I never seen anyone crying blue before.”
"You're always cryin' the blues, you whining old buzzard!" snorted Clancy O’Donnel.
"I'm talking about that crazy feller. Didja see those tears he was crying?”
“I'd be crying too, I had a mug like that...”
“No, I mean his tears! Bright blue and glowin' like they was radioactive or something. Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said Frisby. Then his whole tone and body language changed, as he hooked his thumbs through the canvas straps of his overalls and announced, “Y'know, it reminds me of somethin' similar I witnessed after the atomic tests at Bikini, where I was brought in as a consultant on nuke-ular physics by General Stevens-”
"Crying is crying," murmured Edna glumly, more to herself than anyone...
Jenny Lee stood up and looked around. Sure enough there was another spot of the shiny blue liquid, about ten feet away. And peering off in that same direction she saw there was a whole series of them---a proverbial trail of breadcrumbs, gleaming like phosphor in the morning sun---that lead up the dirt lane of Myrtle Street, away from downtown. Knowing that they had something to do with the stranger, she followed them...
.
.
TO A SKYLARK by Percy B. Shelley:
http://bartleby.com/101/608.html
HOCUS POCUS AND FRISBY by Rod Serling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9hTg8RzzeM
Peace Assessor Epsilon Tau stood with his back against a big rock, trembling. He needed to calm down. Taking a slow deep breath, he asked for the blessing of the Atom Heart Mother and reached out with his senses, connecting. He could feel the solidness of the house-size boulder behind him. The shape of it where it extended below the ground. The soil around it, a tumult of microscopic life and death and new birth .......... Beneath that he could feel the planet's brittle crust---mere kilometers thick---and then the horribly liquid mantle and core beneath...
This exercise would have quickly soothed his soul back at home, but here it just made him aware of how horribly alien this planet was. Green trees. A yellow sun in a blue sky…
The Sun ............ Even a star this small had its majesty, and the familiar roar of churning particles at its heart should have been comforting. But as he reached out across space and locked onto the blazing orb Epsilon forgot to brace himself for this tiny world's rapid rotation. Suddenly the massive boulder behind him seemed to fall away crazily, spinning off to the east. If he hadn’t been leaning against something the rush of vertigo would have made him fall over.
Epsilon Tau set off again, taking great strides in the low gravity, glad that it was only a couple of miles to his base camp, the safety and comfort of that rock enclosure full of familiar objects. He knew he couldn't conduct his mission hiding in a cave, but he needed to recoup after that horrible incident in the fooditorium. None of his Harmony Corps training or previous missions with Prime Assessor Zeta Zeta had prepared him for the raw negative emotion of that encounter.
If only Zeezee were still alive, he sighed. The tenderhearted old dykazoid---a veteran of over thirty assignments like this one---had always seemed to have some tip or other about centering. But she had been caught in a Pulsar burst during their flight here, and against all his protests that he wasn't ready for it, she'd given him a field promotion to Prime Assessor with her dying breath. And so ready or not, this mission was his alone now.
You know that you have the sensitivity for this job, and have the analytic framework. What you fear is that you lack the psychic strength, she'd said. It's there, Love. If you you can't see it's because you're looking for some silly stereotype, like you'd see in some popvid about the ancient Thundermonkeys, instead of that deep rooted certitude that comes up from within, resonating at your own girly frequency. And not borne out of the Fire Vortex---powerful as that is---but from the Mother herself...
She had sounded so sure of this, and had turned out to be right about so many things in the past that even though he'd had real doubts he'd jumped into this field assignment, honoring the final assessment of her career.
The previous day had in fact gone well---setting up his base camp, calibrating his data harvester to the rather primitive and localized media stream, making that crucial first contact with a member of the local populace---and he was finding it easy enough to follow his training, adapting it to the conditions here...
Right up until he'd hit his first serious obstacle.
I feel like an Indian tracker thought Jenny Lee as she followed the trail that her quarry had left. The strange iridescent spoor led her up Myrtle Street to the edge of Dinnehan's Orchard, where the dirt road ended, but the blue drips continued on into the regimented rows of trees. She was kind of worried that if it went on too long this hunt might make her late for school today. She hoped not. But she really needed to find this person, and apologize to him or her for that horribleness back at the diner.
While it was a crazy outfit the stranger had been wearing, she wasn't afraid that he would turn out to be crazy when she found him. Or at least not dangerous-crazy, like those "axe murderers" they showed on the covers of her grandpa's Police Gazette magazines (Or like HITLER- that crazy jabbering voice she recalled hearing on the radio when she was just a little kid, that seemed to make even the adults in the room nervous, and which she'd imagined as belonging to some hideous creature that might come climbing out from under her bed some night to gobble her up!). She suspected that this stranger was in some ways like she herself had been, with this weird gap between what sex you knew you were and the one everyone was saying you had to be. She was kind of hoping that he would be, and that they might be able talk about it some, because it was weird to think you were only person anywhere who felt a certain way…
But right in the middle of the orchard she lost the trail. The blue drips that had been showing up every few feet just seemed to stop. It was starting to look like she'd come all this way for nothing.
A tawny mule in a straw hat was chowing down on a patch of clover, his tail swishing irritably at flies that buzzed around him. While she realized that Edna's dog or Tony's racoon couldn't understand human speech (beyond a few simple phrases “go for a walk” or “Ursula want a sardine?"), Gus Dinnehan's mule seemed like a different matter.
He was clearly a smart mule, having been trained and owned until recently by the US Cavalry. And from his probing, intelligent gaze and the way his responses to the things you said seemed to run the spectrum from sympathetic to sarcastic, she’d always secretly suspected that he could actually knew what she were saying.
She asked him, "Did you see a person come by here? Tall, kinda peculiar looking?"
He raised his head and jerked it thirty degrees to the left, sputtering.
"You sure, Boy?"
He did it again, the same exact sound and gesture.
And sure enough, a short distance in the direction he’d indicated she found where the trail of spots continued, which had been hard to see due to the angle of the sun. As she set off following them she called back, "Thanks a heap, Francis!"
The equine bobbed his head and whinnied, "Wh-r-r-reeeee-heeee-HONK!"
The tail on the Kit-Kat Clock up behind the Regal lunch counter wagged left and right, left and right. It's whisker bracketted face smiled with insane good cheer as its gigantic round eyes slid back and forth to the beat of its wagging tail.
This is what it does, thought Kyle Stuckey. Over and over. All day long. Why would anyone build a clock that did that? That looked like that? It wasn't as if it was advertising anything...
Left, right. Left, right, went the eyes and the tail. Never varying. Never stopping...
And it frightened him in some undefinable way when he realized that it did this even at night, when there was no one here, its empty gaze sweeping tirelessly back and forth across the deserted diner, with its face frozen in that terrible smile.
At least he hoped this was all it did at night. But who was to say if there was no one here to witness it? Maybe it got down off the wall and danced around with all the ketchup bottles and plates and such, like that dreadful “Let's All Go To The Snack Bar” cartoon they showed at intermission down at the Bijou- lately the source of his most horrifying nightmares.
Not only did this insanely grinning totem seem to hold no meaning, but it seemed like it could rob the meaning from anything around it. From anyone who gazed into its unholy face too long. And yet he couldn't look away.
And then suddenly, as its eyes slid back across him once again he could tell. That it knew that he suspected its secret, and he was now in danger of some unimaginable retribution; that dark sorcery which he knew certain inanimate objects possessed. Like maybe turning him into a-
His communion with the mechanical device was shattered as his brother Lyle leaned across the table and slapped him upside the head with his hat. "Wouldja quit gawpin' at that damn thing? I'm talkin' to you!"
"Sorry."
"Now hurry up and finish your pie. We need to go take care of this."
Kyle hadn't really been following Lyle's tirade about the stranger, but he knew what "take care of this" meant. And while he may have missed most of his brother's lecture about why they needed to do this, that didn't matter. He was always up for getting some joker on the ground and kicking the tar out of him. It was a special feeling you got, doing that.
With one eye keeping a furtive watch on the Felix-the-Cat clock (back and forth, back and forth, back-) he hurried to finish off his somewhat smaller half of the Martin girl's piece of pie.
Dinnehan's Orchard ended at a growth of beech trees along the bank of Lucy Long Creek. The steep wall of damp dirt Jenny Lee had to shuffle down to get to the creek spoke of deep water and swift currents at certain times of the year, but this late in the spring you could cross it easily.
She peeled off her shoes and socks, and with her saddle shoes in one hand and holding the hem of her skirt aloft with the other, she made her way through the knee-deep water, the muck of the creek bed squishing up pleasantly between her toes.
There were no droplets anywhere in sight on the opposite bank, so she waded downstream, carefully scanning both shorelines. And sure enough, after a hundred yards she found the trail of spots again, along with a set of boot dents angling up the far side. She scrambled up the muddy embankment. The droplets led her to the old trail that she knew would lead up the side of Squaw Peak.
Epsilon Tau been told nothing about the society here, and had been expressly forbidden to monitor the humans’ radio and television communications- anything that might prejudice him one way or the other---until he'd actually begun to walk among them for the two to five days of his evaluation.
And while his nearest supervisor was many light years away and it would have been easy to “peek” during the tedium of his flight here, he hadn’t. He was doing everything strictly by the book, knowing how grave his responsibilities were. Knowing that missions like this one were among the most important duties of the Harmony Corps…
Too important to put in the hands of a dipthoid like me, he thought miserably. Running away like that at the first sign of conflict. A lifetime of immersing myself in NEZTOR'S LAWS OF SELF AND OTHER had gone right out the window!
His attempt to join in this village's firstmeal had turned very ugly almost immediately. Far uglier and far more quickly than he'd imagined possible. Was this planet's psychosphere really that much more unhealthy than the other worlds they'd visited? Or had Zeta Zeta been shielding him with her own powers more than she should have during those missions? If that was true he'd never actually been pulling his own weight, and was basically useless at this job. But given the nature of this job he would prefer to find out that this was the case than to face the grim implications of the former being true.
It hadn't helped that the room that confrontation had taken place in had been designed in utter ignorance of psychospiritual dynamics, a science that these people apparently didn’t have a term for (there actually was one, but his translator unit had been teaching itself English, not Mandarin...), and which had amplified the malign vibrations in the air to an intolerable pitch. But this was no excuse. It wasn't like he’d been in any physical jeopardy...
Or wait. As he focused his attention on that eating hall he could sense something along these lines emanating from there. Someone intending to do him harm. Blind rage and a thirst for violence. And lying right beneath these horrible emotions, an intense pain that was their source. Shame and fear so great that these two humans could not look at it directly, but somehow projected it onto others. The discord of souls warped by brutality and mis-channeled blan energy; chains of malice stretching back in time through the lineage of fathers and grandfathers, to where it mercifully faded, beyond the range of his perceptions...
One of these individuals had a weapon on him, a silly contraption that fired little streamlined chunks of Element 82. But to claim that this would be any reason to turn tail and flee would be self-deception. As he could have done at any time, Epsilon Tau constructed a pair of energy knots with his mind and sent them in the direction of the danger. The force-field equivalent of Chinese finger traps, they should work perfectly against the stubborn wills and brutish methods of his self-proclaimed enemies.
Most of those in the Regal Diner were content to cluck about what an oddball they’d just seen. In a town where anything out of the ordinary so rarely happened, this would be a thing they could jaw about for days...
But to Lyle Stuckey, talking and joking about it was definitely not enough. You couldn't just let something like this slide, you had to take a stand! The stranger made a mockery of everything he and his brother had learned in their youth, when all that was soft and gentle had been beaten out of them by their psycho belt-wielding Pappy.
If it was okay for that freak to be like he was, then all of their pain, and the sacrifice of huge chunks of their essential natures had been for nothing. What kind of world would it be if miscreations like that were allowed to flounce around flaunting their miscreatedness? Pretty soon you’d have people wanting to drive cars with square wheels, or deciding to walk around on their hands instead of their feet, or to marry a rutabega- and every damn one of them would be looking down their nose at him like he was the one who was out of step with everything that was right and normal! It sure wasn’t any kind of world he would want to be part of.
Lyle wasn't sure how far they would go when they caught the freak (inspiration played a large part in the manly art of ass-kicking), but by the time they were through that weirdo would definitely think twice before sauntering down Main Street and into some diner expecting to be served while dressed like that. And if Miss Smarty Pants Jenny Lee Martin happened to be there when they found him...
Well no. Even he wouldn't go beating on some little kid, that was the parent's job after all. Although throwing a scare into the brat might teach her something about minding her elders.
He gulped down the dregs of his coffee and said to Kyle, “Let’s go.”
But when Kyle tried to slide out of the booth he found himself unable to budge. He whispered in panic, “I cain't move! I'm stuck!”
"Why you fat son of a bitch! You need help gettin' up now? Here lemme-"
But Lyle discovered that his own spine and posterior were every bit as rooted to the yellow vinyl bench as his brother's were. As much as he grunted and twisted he couldn't get up. What the Hell?!
Giving it everything he had, he strained to stand up until it felt like something was about to burst inside of him. And when he finally relaxed it released all the energy he'd been expending without results, causing his knees to fly up and bang violently against the bottom of the table. The pistol tucked into the side of his boot---not some sissy derringer but a 38 that he'd cut parts off of which it might seem questionable to remove---went windmilling across the restaurant's floor.
Everyone turned to look at them. He masked his embarrassment with a defiant scowl.
Edna picked up the gun and put it on the table between them. She tilted the steaming chrome pot in her other hand back and forth enticingly, “More coffee, boys?"
Lyle wondered about the wisdom of drinking more coffee right now but he nodded, wanting to give the impression that they were sticking around by choice.
As she topped their cups off Edna pointed at the gun, “A better place to keep that would be in your pants pocket.”
“Are you crazy?! I might shoot my nuts off tryin' to draw from there.”
“Exactly,” she grinned and walked off toward the kitchen.
"Oh my Lord,” gasped Kyle when she was out of range, “What do we do?!”
“Well what we ain't gonna do, you id-jit, is to start hollarin' that we're stuck here. Folks would never let us live it down. 'Ya hear 'bout the Stuckey Brothers? They got stuck!' Hardy har har!"
“But what are we gonna dooooo?” moaned Kyle.
“You axed me that already. I'm thinkin'...”
The blue spots on the ground were getting smaller and with more and more space between them, so Jenny Lee almost miss it when---as the trail passed next to a steep dry wash---the oddly dressed person's spoor left the path and detoured up a steep dry wash.
The stranger must have been part mountain goat to have taken this particular wash, but the girl was a real good climber herself, and followed gamely, grabbing on to rocky handholds and protruding roots where she could.
Somewhere along here the shimmering splotches disappeared altogether, but it didn't matter now. She knew this rock-strewn dent in the terrain would end up at the same place the switchback trail would have taken her by a more leisurely route. The mouth of the old abandoned Lost Horse Mine. Which she reflected would be a very good place for someone to hide.
Epsilon Tau furrowed his brow, shifting the rods, cones and octahedrons in his eyes to night vision as he entered the cave. He was glad to be here, the sense of security that being inside this mountain gave him, even as he acknowledged that he wasn't going to get a lot of peace-assessing done holed up in here. How did today start out with such an epic clamboggle after yesterday's forays into human society had gone so well?
Or had they really? Now that he thought about it, those energetic shouts from passing vehicles as they swerved around him may not have been greetings after all. Universal translators weren't all they were cracked up to be, especially not in the first few hours, before they had a large enough sample of the local language to work with.
To test this suspicion he spoke the first words that had been hollered at him on this planet, which the translator circuits in his earrings had at the time informed him meant "donkey pit". The new translation was entirely different, and not nice at all!
After he had figured out that pedestrians were expected to keep to the edge of the road, or up on the "sidewalks" where such pathways were available, he had spent much of his first day on Sol 3 at that cultural artifacts shop in the adjacent geographical unit known as Farleyville.
That gentleman had been so nice---his very name meaning friend---that Epsilon Tau had blithely assumed the rest of Earth's population would be like this. And he’d felt confident that his report to the motherworld would be a positive one.
Now things didn't look so promising for the people of this little planet. Even though he'd really only ever cosigned the recommendation for the eradication of that one planet---Qo'noS---he knew that condemning whole worlds to death was about his least favorite thing to do.
Over the ridge in Farleyville, Broderick “Buddy” Phillips sat in the back room of BUDDY'S USED APPLIANCES, ANTIQUES & SUNDRIES, holding his left palm out under his right fist and dropping the six giant coins into it one by one. The heft of them, and the dull clink! clunk! clank! sound they made was very reassuring. It had been so long since he’d had anything worth keeping in the wall safe overnight he’d almost forgotten the combination.
He arranged them into a pattern on his desk, then a more pleasing pattern. Looked up at the clock. He still had an hour before he had to open his shop, so he decided to use the time responding to a rather strange letter that his old army pal George had sent him. He found a sheet of paper and his new cartridge pen and began:
Dear George,
Thank you for your last letter. You expressed a lot of concern that I might be “appalled” and disgusted by what you told me, and about this plan of yours. I can tell you honestly that I'm not appalled, although yes it did come as sort of a shock. And I'm afraid I'm a bit out of my element here regarding the "wrongness of body and spirit" you speak of, and this doctor of yours over there in Europe that you say can fix it. CAN THEY ACTUALLY DO SUCH A THING?! Modern medicine gets more amazing every year.
You expressed concern about my shop. I suppose my last letter was awfully gloomy + depressed, and I’m sorry if I worried you. Because I'm happy to report that things are looking up for me. Way up!! With one customer I earned enough yesterday to stay in business for at least another year. What was odd was that my customer sort of reminded of you and what you said in your letter. And I hope you won’t take offense after I describe him, because despite his strange behavior and the way he was dressed he was a kind and gentle person with a genuinely good soul. Like you~~~
At first I thought he was some lunatic I was going to have to chase away from the front of the store. The guy couldn't figure out how to use the door, kept waving his hand in front of it like that was supposed to open it. He was ungodly tall, and skinny as a rail, and was dressed like he'd put on men's & women's clothes at random, and then makeup- but in a really weird way. I don't know if he was a homosexual, or this other thing that you talk about, but I did know he was going to get his ass whupped running around dressed like that, especially heading toward the billiards hall, so I showed him in. I never imagined this odd duck would wind up saving my shop!
He said he was interested in "authentic artifacts", went around grabbing stuff, with no rhyme or reason to it, in a way that made me wondered if I should call the men in the white coats. But as I talked to him he was very polite, and was actually quite intelligent, except that somehow he didn't seem to know what anything was. I mean the simplest things, like a toaster. And as I explained each item to him, he would usually decide to buy it, wrote the retailer with an appreciative chuckle, Appliances, antiques, and just downright junk. It was all "fascinating" and "splendid!" to him.
But so anyway
As Edna refilled the Stuckey boys’ cups for the fourth time she sensed motion out of the corner of her eye. The man some referred to as Bowerton Springs' “village idiot” was waving merrily to her from just four feet away.
"Hmmmm,” she muttered, “He don't normally do that…"
Spastic Augie had ventured much closer to the Brothers than he usually ever came. Even with the diner's window between himself and them this seemed unusually brave of Augie. She shrugged, and waved back at him just as exuberantly as he'd waved.
Through some strange attunement of his swiss-cheesed brain Augie knew that Lyle and Kyle couldn’t come flying out the front door to get him. And as soon as Edna turned to attend to some other customer he pointed his finger and pantomimed mocking laughter, leaning back and clutching his little pot belly with his other hand.
He was finally getting a small measure of payback for all the vicious things they had done to him, like the “bath” they had given him the other week with a bucket of used crankcase oil.
"Why I'll kill that no-account simp!" hissed Lyle, the veins on his forehead bulging scarily. He scrabbled and flailed helplessly in his seat, going nowhere, while Eddie started doing jumping jacks and making poopie noises at them around his extended tongue.
Buddy Phillips drew meditatively on his pipe and blew a plume of cherry scented smoke toward the ceiling fan overhead. He continued writing his letter:
And so anyway, the odd fellow kept piling things onto the counter until there wasn't any counter left. So when it comes time to pay, I'm thinking OH BOY THIS SHOULD BE GOOD, figuring I'll be spending the next hour putting everything back. And sure enough he apologizes, saying he doesn't have any "us” dollars, which I'd pretty much figured. But then he pulls out these six giant coins like I'd never seen before. But I could tell they were solid gold~ worth at least $100 apiece!
It wouldve been real easy to swindle him he was such a babe in the woods, but I just couldn't. I tried to give him all but one of the coins back, but he went on + on about what pals we were, and damn if it didn't seem like we were. Once you got past his appearance he had a way of putting you at ease with his sincerity. And when he said these few coins were nothing to him, he had a whole trunk full of them and was glad to help me out in my time of need (which was odd since I hadn't mentioned my troubles), I believed it~~
So I'm wondering how he'll haul all this stuff out of here, but he has this silvery bag that keeps stretching & stretching, and he somehow gets it all in there. And then even though it looked like a stiff breeze could've knocked him over, he slings it over his shoulder, all 200+ pounds of it, and before he leaves he kisses me on the cheek, which that hypnotic sincerity of his made clear was just an act of friendship, but with what looked like four noses on his face it was damn unsettling~~~
That encounter made me think of you, and what you told me about yourself in your letter. I've been your friend since we were a couple of green draftees back in Fort Dix New Jersey, and so even if I'm not sure what to think about your "I was always meant to be a woman" stuff, what I do know is you're one of the most decent people I ever met and if this is what it takes to make you happy I say best of luck with it.
I've never heard of it a man being changed into a woman, so please make sure this doctor isn't a crook or some kind of nut before you go traipsing off to Denmark. What he is offering just sounds too good to be true.
For you I mean. Me I am content to stay what the Good Lord made me.
yours,
Buddy.
P.S.: Since you asked me, no I don’t think Ginger would be a good name for you to take as a woman. While it does have a certain moxie "Ginger Jorgensen" has a cheap ring to it that would make you sound like a fan dancer. That's my 2È» worth on the matter anyway. I’ll ask my wife Christine if she has any ideas ~~~
Back in the Regal Diner, Kyle muttered gravely to his brother, "You know it was HIM done this to us, don't you?"
"And how the hell could a spastic like him do this?"
“No not Augie. That big tall freak! He put th' whammy on us! Them wimmie-men, they gots th' powers!"
“What?!”
“But it's true! You know Choctaw Bobby? He was sayin' how they got two spirits!”
“Hell. You oughtta know better than to listen to anything that ig'nant heathen has to say,” smirked Lyle, “Of all the damn-fool notions! Hell, you might as well say that kitty cat clock up there done it!”
Kyle shrieked and whipped his head around to look at the clock, and then he really started carrying on. Nobody else saw it wink at him, but he swore to his dying day that the thing had.
Suddenly he was flailing and shrieking, “I just wanna go home! Just go home, go home, there's no place like home I just wanna go hooooooooooooome!"
And with these words of surrender he found himself able to leave the booth.
"Where ya goin'?" hollared Lyle, amazed that his dumbass brother had managed to do something he couldn't.
Now he too now abandoned all thought of going after the stranger, but just wanted to go out to One Eyed Lorreta's shack---that still she had back in the rushes---to purchase a do-the-job size jar of corn and go home and straight to bed with it.
Suddenly he was released as well. Hearing Kyle trying to start the truck, he bolted out the door- "Wait fer me!"
Epsilon Tau paced in the darkened mine drift. He knew he should be transmitting his first log entry about now, but knowing what it would say he couldn't bring himself to.
Though he wasn't old enough to remember the Nebula Wars, Epsilon Tau heard about them since he was a podling, and he was deeply devoted to the cause of peaceful cooperation between the planets. He had joined the Harmony Corps hoping to eventually attain a posting as a Helper on some interesting world, but he'd been aware that with his background and abilities he might very well have to spend some time as a Peace Assessor first, evaluating the spiritual essence of emerging technological civilizations and determining where---or if---they fit into the great scheme of the Galaxy. It was a role of the dice whether he’d have to or not, which he’d lost.
Being the Assistant Assessor for this sector hadn't been too bad, but with Zeezee's death he was now acting Prime Assessor, and it was now his place to decide the fate of this world, the most confusing and problematic planet he had yet been to. And may the Great Mother Eyeless have mercy on his soul...
He went over to a rock ledge in the wall of the cave and clicked on the old cathedral radio that he had purchased the previous day. The vacuum tubes warmed up, and a scary voice that called itself The Shadow was laughing spookily and talking about the ‘Evil in the Hearts of Men”. He quickly turned the knob, past the reportage of a ritual in which two men were apparently striking each other while hundreds of others cheered, until he found a musical program. It was called Louisiana Hayride.
Epsilon Tau smiled. He found the simple melodies and earnest sentiments of this region's music comforting.
A woman named Patsy Montana was introduced, and she sang a tune about a romantic love gone wrong, and how she realized she was to blame, having betrayed her mate in some unspecified way, and was begging for a chance to make things right again so they could ride their “old cayuses” across the range again side by side.
How could a people who produced music so heartbreaking, so rich with emotion and ethical nuance behave so awfully. Not just to him, that had really been nothing---but from what he was seeing in the collection of newspapers before him---to each other? He scanned one of the papers. Without using his scanner the text was indecipherable cuniform, but the pictures were of a war somewhere...
He felt her coming before he heard or saw her. Looking up he saw her small figure approaching, silhouetted against the mine tunnel's opening. She called to him in her small piping voice, "Hello? Mister- uh, Miss? May I come in?"
.
.
,
Francis the Talking Mule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_the_Talking_Mule
The Kit Kat Klock thing was based on the metaphysical-paranoid ramblings of Jean Paul Sartre,
where he spoke of the malign power of meaningless objects. He musta taken way too much speed that week...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit-Cat_Klock