WAKKO

                                                                                                                 WAKKO 

 

     Wakko is out on the prairie.

     Music blows through the syllables of "prairie".  The word has more vowels than consonants and it escapes through them, barely holding its shape on a breath before ghosting out on the wind.

     What's a bone whistle?  Have you ever seen one?  Bone whistle: An American koan. Starting to tantalize in early childhood, never seen but never forgotten. You were supposed to want one, and it was supposed that without any coaching from a living soul, one day you'd make one, or discover one. You weren't supposed to get out of boyhood without satisfying that national urge.

     During the time Marty was identifying with objects as the true elders of his tribe, a bone whistle seems particularly self-aware or tragic.  How did he know to want something that was not shinny, if you stop to think about it?  And the farther from childhood he gets, and Marty is entering his sere fifties, the more he can look back and think he was just a bone whistle back then: A shrill piper scavanged from the bone yard. One note passing through old bones.

     Where does the prairie begin and where does it end?  That's almost like asking where the world ends and begins. Either you deal in real estate con or else you trail off into metaphysics.   Because the prairie is flat there is nothing to stop you from considering them to begin in the Artic and to tail off in the deserts of Mexico.  That is how the wheather works on them, Armegeddons tromping up and down without obstacle, the world ending with a bang, and tortured in between by dust devils and tornadoes, hailstones and lightening and other curses and plagues, none of which have a satisfactory natural explanation but beg for superstitious ones.

     For seventy-seven days a few years ago an assembly of clap board buildings sitting on a dry patch of land about twenty miles  outside of Wakko occupied that  point in the prairie where its first solemn syllable takes a sharp dog-leg into shriek, yodel and infinity.

     Holed up inside these flimsy buildings dubbed the  "compound" by a media that disenterres words that have hallowed historical crimes-this one mouldering with the raj and other colonial adventures-was Daniel Sorish and his offshoot Danielians.  They were  accussed of illegal trafficking in arms, and then, of murder, when they repulsed a sneak attack by ATF officers by shooting three of them dead, and mortally insulting the ATF which had to plead to recover the bodies left twisting in the wind.

     The compound was surrounded by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, armed to the teeth, albeit, legally.  They had planned to invade, but they were forced into a siege, trying to out wait Sorish, gnashing their teeth and gathering an army. There were sharp-shooters who lurked about patient, scrupulously neat guys who believed in inner discipline, in a martial code and in retribution, guys with off-putting etched cheekbones and thin, prissy noses, trim side burns and clipped mustaches.  They had professional pride and impersonality written all over them.

     To a man their eyes were beautiful, the whites perfect, their perfection seeming to rise into blue, to alpine purity, towards spiritual distances and horizons, not a thread of red vein in them.  They seemed blind to anything in the temporal foreground.  It was impossible to catch their eye, like an eagles, or an angel imagined, the force of outward attention, of explicit sight un-smirched by vision and dream scrim, repelled entry.  Their irises glowed like diodes. They spent days and nights gazing across the ratty, weedy grounds through the crystal ball of their scopes, outside their bodies in a suspended, astral plane.

     And they brought in tanks with their Jurassic metabolisms and their paunchy, beer swelling, blue-collar crews who prattled on about logarithms of over-time, dollars in gang-banging orgies. They wore cowboy boots with toes as pointed as Florentine court jesters, fat men holding their meaty forearms far off their hips as if they had six-guns strapped to their fat arses, mincing along in pointed boots.

     And two helicopters, one a Huey with priapic cannon in front. Hearing them whine into life caused a kind of epiphany or avid hysteria.  They were so certain, so committed. If only they could think or we could not.

     The two pilots were lanky, at ease and laconic.  They wore safari suits of some kind, old empire, tailored to fit, and adorned themselves with iconoclastic touches. Tennis shoes some days or huaraches, baseball caps.  They were hip, lay back, practically on vacation, all expenses paid.  Existential- military after all, twenty years behind the philosophical edge-patterning themselves on dope smugglers, the idols of the ATF.

     And, of course, with all their cynical un-health, the media. Playing cards, drinking proudly before noon, involved in the project of making character out of ruin. The print media anyway. The television journalists had been impressed from local stations and this being their big chance for a national audience they radiated a toxic, puerile enthusiasm.  Annealed in make-up, they seemed like some kitsch idea of how you should look the moment after losing your cherry.

     And then, as the stale-mate dragged on, during the last forty days of the siege, they beefed up the intelligence corps by bringing in Marty Sokol, left wing apostate, famous bantam weight realist, bald-headed, sledge-hammer-forehead intellectual tyrant, expert on terrorism, rhetoric swinger, doctorate in psychology and opportunist.

     Marty had testified on the psychology of terrorists before a congressional committee.  He was tapped directly by the Attorney General's Office. He was one of the architects of forensic psychology.  He had embossed business cards with a phone number which was answered by a receptionist just ditsy enough to sound corporate, giving an institutional resonance to a business that really consisted of her, a fax machine and a few partners. The firm was called Proactonics, a name born without navel or fingerprints and which Marty thought sounded as steely threatening as a CIA front.    The partners never showed up in El Cabron where the office was located, but were hooked in by Fax and cellular phone and a swashbuckling ethos of hype.  Marty drove a forest green 60's vintage Mercedes convertible roadster with a customized holster for a snub-nose 38 built into the door paneling. He had a permit to carry the gun ushered through by the District Attorney's Office in LA. All the partners had hand guns, one of them wore a shoulder holster. They all had sports cars and were middle-aged and had only spent time together deep in the San Gabriel Mountains taking a twelve-hour crash course in shooting and reality offered for five hundred dollars by a former commando in the Israeli army.  He knew how to titillate them all right, these business men. Beefy forearms, gleaming bald head, plenty of testosterone, but Israeli, you know, with mystique and not outright stupid.

     Marty was a tenured professor at the community college at El Cabron with all the rights and stigma that confers, but the bucks and nods came from the business. For two thousand and expenses he would go anywhere in the country, reviewing the testimony and dossiers on the plane, and after an hour's meeting with a defendant, testify to his competence to stand trial in capital cases.  He had never found anybody incompetent yet, it would be his last pay day.  Besides, enough sob stories.  Being retarded or fourteen did not in itself mean you were not bad.

     And the people you got to meet when you jettisoned your guilt.  Powerful men and weird women.  And vice versa. Guys with enormous heads like mastiffs, public faces.  And their consorts.  Women who crackled with electric charge, with an absolute inhumanity.  Greed and hysteria, better than biology. 

     He had been invited to inner sanctums, country clubs, steak houses, cabin cruisers, even into the bowels of the FBI building, the basement firing range, which had an aura of deja vu from all the facsimiles of such dead serious rec rooms that had appeared on the screen.  A strange place indeed, somehow permeated with the ambience of a bowling alley, Marty was not quite sure why, not just the long alleyways you fired down but some slightly briny and stagnant miasma of impotence, a fetid body odor clinging to men hiding out a bunker safe from the sexual juggernaut:  A tepid emotional cesspool which the sting of cordite did not cover.  

     He was handed the ear muffs, oversized, plastic affairs,  flamboyantly nerdish which more because of their anti-macho than in spite of it, made him feel like a cold blooded technician of death.  Donning them he was immersed in a reverie, almost a swoon.  Probably this was a first time thing; redundancy must ultimately confer immunity, but given the nature of the targets-hallowed kitsch they were, not simple black circles but human outlines, i.e. bad guys, hoods-Marty was blasting away from inside a comic book fantasy of thugs and dames, a glitzy, seductive stage set of the arch-typical American Sodom that supposedly died with the sixties. Boy, it was like being a kid again and pitching a tennis ball against the garage and day dreaming heroics.

     But, finally, down in the gallery, Marty had to admit his overly erudite relation to firearms. He had come to them too late, and though dedication might give him a serviceable fluency, the best he could ever hope for would be a conspicuous precision, a textbook rote. Gun culture might be the last stronghold of American populism, its laconic essence: Every man pulls his pants on one leg at a time and, oh yeah, can have a second asshole installed. Marty could not treat his weapon off-handedly. It was so saturated with moral and religious implications that its actual weight and temperature, its object autonomy, always startled him.  It had a competitive reality. It dragged a great shadow of death with it. What did this make Marty, but American as a second language?

     Marty up in the airplane on his way to Wakko. Window seat, dueling annihilation, knowing the genius of airplane crashes is de-materialization from already un-christened flights, leaving at the most a flake of fingerprint or a tooth to evidence the extinguished life, the rest disappeared into thin air. 

     And no reason Marty should think his dubious presence would spare flight 485 from less than destiny hinging on a fizzling microchip and the massive hubris of flight become humdrum. Still, he donates some quality time to keeping up his wing tip, looking out the window and purifying his thoughts.  Actually, dumbing them down until they have all the viscera of Jimminy Cricket: the best he could do, brushing his teeth and changing his under-wear and thinking harmless, puff-ball thoughts.  He had no Bible to address the whirlwind.

     At this altitude there were few signs of man below. Personally, Marty was sure he had not left a trace. If you looked out over the southwest landscape you could not help thinking that man was not the issue. As far as Marty was concerned, had man never set foot on this continent, trod those eroded gullies and alluvial canyons, if this almost moonscape was one in actual fact, it would still be named America.  The name fit. The United States was harmlessly abstract and marmish. But America. Don't let the sun set on your ass here, stranger.

     The airport?  San Antonio, if you say so. Could have fooled him. Could have flown in a big loop right back to Los Angeles. Until he is past the city limits in the rented car on the sleek highway that will take him to Wakko.  He has the window down because Marty is a man. Along with anger, he is victimized by nostalgia and sentimentality. This is the way it was to drive when he was a kid, before air conditioning in cars. The wind boiling in. That's travelling. Wind, not air. And the heat, the infusion of smells, the sensory disorientation, general excitement and flirting with disaster.

     Wakko is a magnet town. Draw a circle with a seventy-five mile radius with the court house as a hub and you have corralled a million people, consumers, each and every one. Waiting for them in Wakko are shopping malls and cineplexes with what they want to buy. Who'd a figured it?  Marty, knifing through the landscape on the quantum worm-hole highway sees a flat semi-desert country scratched by county roads that never merge with the highway, roads cracked and scaled as old leather, leading to trailer parks off there which look as heat-stroked and time abandoned as junk yards, the same bowel-pleasing senility and moral lassitude. Or, some roads possibly ending at moldering ranch houses surrounded by giant oaks whose well of shadow beneath their crown makes then look like they are floating. And then there are sheds and cabins way, way out there, fifty years out there easy. They make no sense except maybe a dream sense. If you had dream sensors like infra-red scopes for night vision, maybe you could trace the course of the gulches and coolies where the dream phlogiston flowed, maybe for no more than one night in a century and leaving these cabins high and dry.  

     A half mile before reaching the perimeter around the compound which in turn was about a half mile from the buildings themselves, Marty had to pull over and park his rental behind  two lines of cars parked on the weedy soft shoulders of the country road he was following. There was only a goat trail wide enough for a pedestrian left open.

     He walked between the columns. There were some impressive brutes in this formation, real storm-troopers with shit-kicking tires and suspension systems on steroids.  And seraglios on wheels, vans with tinted glass and floor to ceiling shag carpet.  Goosed-up pickups with rifle racks.  And some old clunkers too, with their hoods tied down with rope, spider-web cracks in the windshield and pie-bald fenders.

     There were many of those American sports models with the names of predators. Locals or ATF?  Check the bumper sticker.  Confederate flags. Maybe, maybe not. "You can pry my weapon from my cold dead fingers". Still not definitive. "If you're close enough to read this you're queer". ATF, he'd bet. "Smile when you say that", local. Maybe a warning, some counties around here required adults to carry guns.

     Here was an old one, "Honk if you love Jesus".  Rural as tumbleweed.  On a pick-up with a camper "Our daughter is among the angles". Then on a real piece of Americana, a guzzler with a two-paned windshield. "Keep it in your pants or in the family".

     Come on, Marty. You getting sardonic on us?

     "Lemonade, mister?  Two tow-headed kids behind a card table, possibly twins.  Sitting suspicious, crafty, smarmy watch behind them, their stage-door mother, in a moo-moo or an oink-oink, whatever she could fit in, straining the aluminum timbers of a deck chair, inert as a sated python with curiously rabid, baby blue eyes. Both kids in little cowboy outfits, cute as the dickens, with their long stringy hair, washed and curried.  Mom had the look of a cat breeder, rancid, someone rotted out by an infantile vision of glamour. The kids were nearly albinos and they looked malnourished. Kids have Rumplestiltskins ability to turn hot dogs, peanut butter, etc. into lumens, but the alchemists’ stone for them is emotional sustenance, which these kids lacked. 

     He was almost hag-ridden by conscience to buy a Dixie-cup of the sludge in the salad bowl, it was not hard to imagine mom blaming the kids if her investment in their moral education did not pay off, not hard to imagine at all. Marty could picture, no, had to picture, the two tots in mom’s clutches, their little boots dangling.

     The little girl was sizing him up with what is known as a child's sad wisdom: Her gem-stone eyes were settled on him in vacant trance while an index finger probed her mouth.

     "Home made" she said.

     Country flies dragged themselves through the sugar slurry that had spilled over the bowl, apparently in insulin shock.

     "I was afraid of that."

     There were dozens of tables and stands set up. The siege had turned into a flea market.

     One guy in ripped jeans, biker boots with motor cycle chain for a belt, speed-freak thin and manic was selling rock and roll tapes, and prominently displayed he had a David Sorish band T-shirt, "Bad Ass for Jesus".

     "Yeah, I got it. It's boot-leg, man. This shit is practically evidence. Do you comprendo, this is real.  It's like a basement tape, none of that bullshit corporate polishing up. It's his message. It’s got defects. Gospel truth. It’s fucked up, it's beautiful. Twelve bucks. Two for a saw-buck."         

     "You're shitting me, right?  Saw-buck? What are you? Amish? Hamish?  Saw-buck.  That's picturesque.

     "I'll kick your ass."

     "I'm with the FBI. You ever used drugs?  Ever, like today? I'll give you a nickel for the tape. You ever heard of copy right or profits from a criminal act. Five."

     "Ten."

     "What about accessory?"

     "Eight. You don't look like a cop."

     "Do I look like a tourist? Go ahead, study me. Ask yourself. Why is this guy here talking with a cartoon like me?

     "You're full a shit."

     "Trouble with guys like you, you don't know what's good for you. That's one trouble. Second problem, you don't understand marketing. I'm taking this tape for five and a tip. Take it or leave it."

     "Take it and get scarce."

     "Tip: Change your act. You ain't cool, and worse news, you aren't even topical. Keep on like this and you better hope there's some ground swell of nostalgia to preserve specimens like you, like there is for the gila monster."

     Where was the Psy Ops trailer?  Behind him he heard the guy's whining voice, "You ain't the first to get it for five, G-man.  G- man in a pig's ass".  What a bizarre. Here was a farmer and his family. The farmer's big sunburned wrists stuck out of his homespun shirt, muslin maybe, buttoned clean up to his neck so it looked a bit clerical. Long, stringy neck, jutting Adam's apple stuck in his craw. His wife seated on a rocking chair with one chapped hand balled on her apron, the other stroking behind the ears of a yellow bitch made dreamy by the attention.

     The farmer was selling everything. Tractor, plow, harrow, seeder, harvester, chickens, pigs, cows, weathervane, rocking chair, milking stool, manure smeared high boots, four poster bed the children had been conceived in, and a framed needle-work reading "There's no place like home".

     "That there is a gen-u-ine John Deere tractor, I done had it only the four year and it runs today just as good as it did the day I brought her home, pleased as punch I were. It were spring and the good earth were rich with promise, and I took her out to the lower forty where the top-soil runs an honest twelve foot deep and feels like a woman's breast in yer hand. And I run her that first day and the plow turned over them black clods with as clean a stroke as a boat cutting through water. Yup. But the banks has taken it all from me now and I is forced to evacuate the land where my grand daddy first planted our deep roots, on account as I am in arrears and thar ain't no use for tobacco no more what with them keeping it out of the hands of children who is the ones as most enjoy it, there never agin bein' anythang as satisfying as larnin' how ta hold down yer smoke without turning green as chicken shit, lest it be playing veternary behind the wood shed with a spring lamb. I ain't a grevious man, but I reckon the gov'ment outer to keep itself from meddling with our children.  Sell her to you for twenty-five thousand."

     "The spring lamb?"

     "Huh?  Naw. I'm talking about that damn near brand new John Deere 450 horsepower tractor, what the economic down-swing has pre-served in near per-fect condition."

     "That's a little rich for my blood."

     "Well, so it is, and to be honest with you, it is more'n I paid for it myself, but I figgered as I was owed some com-pen-sation fer all my heartland tears what have soaked into it as the banks has consolidated all the quaint family farms into characterless factories growing junk food trees and valium poppies, and fer the passel of gass-o-leen I have poured down its hungry throat, which all on its own must have bought some A-rab not less than two blond whores, if you will pardon my European."

     "What would I do with a tractor?"

     "I don't rightly know, but it 'pears city folk have some use of these things as they show up ta buy rusty hoes and horse-drawn plows and all, an I don't see as how there'd be any less use fer my tractor. And as you ain't got no practical use fer it anyways, ya'll save on gass-o-leen, making this a smart investment."

     His wife joined in from the rocker.

     "My goodness, isn't this some weather we're having. Landsakes, don't it just beat all. You just run along. You just make yourself at home.  Can I get you some biscuits?  Tapes I knitted myself?  I got forty minutes of me chortling , that tain't something to sneeze at, why bless you."

     "Got to run."

     "Puppies. Ever blessed one of 'im already named "Yaller" and just bound to die in a way will tear at your heart strings."

     Then there was a table some Indians had set up selling turquoise jewelry, crystals and small vials filled with colored liquids.

     "Great spiritual power in the turquoise", one of them said to Marty in the uninflected monotone he had always heard Indians use.

     "You wear them and they help to balance the chi forces of the body.  The crystals tune the astral aura."

     "What about the bottles?"

     "Perfumes.  Indian women use natural products to produce these scents. They give her aroma therapy to raise her consciousness and relieve stress."

     "No thanks."

     "O.K. You are a smart consumer. What about this?"  He held up a thing-a-ma-jig, it looked a little bit like a proto sports racket or a cargo cult imitation of an antenna. A fly swatter?  A couple of feathers appended from it, the American Indian products logo.

     "Didn't you just say I was a smart consumer?"

     "That's why I'm showing you this. It's a Dream Catcher. You use it in your Vision Quest. Talk to your totem. Set up a sweat lodge.  We were here a long time.  We'll teach you how to live at peace with the land, flush out your toxins. We got charts, why bring in the Tibetans? Listen, you into pain?  We have a medicine man speaks to men's groups, he knows the old ways, staring at the sun, hanging by your pectoral muscles from a yew tree. They found that was good for breast cancer, Indian knows that for a long time. What about peyote? We can get it legal, part of our religion. Rugs?  What are your politics? You like to see natives humiliate themselves, makes you sad about the human condition, little frisson of superiority, feel saintly and guilty and wise beyond your years?  We have girls and boys, beautiful innocent kids, no hair on their legs either sex, seem eternal, old-young faces, maybe a little autistic, cover all bases. Anyway, you can't catch their sad animal eyes, they suffer for the whole race.  These kids will do a dance for you at the opening of a mall.  It'll make you sick at heart.  We cut a deal with the Red Necks Benevolent Society to send over some obnoxious fellows to raze at them. The dance is pathetic, believe me. They make it up, they got feathers pasted to their ass and they look like turkeys."

     Marty shook his head.

     "I am not a liberal."

     "Hold it. White man takes our land, rubs salt in our wounds, John Wayne, tobacco store Indians, it's been a trail of tears for the Native American.  Would you sign this petition? We need fifty thousand signatures so the politicians can feel the ground swell.  It's for a casino.  It'll be a beaut, employ our people.  They will return to the reservation, all of them, some who discover they were Indians in past lives with the Dream Catcher. Hey. Hey. Don't walk away from this one. This could be a chance for you. You got dark hair, big nose, maybe you got some Indian blood in you.  Hell, you look more like an Indian than Chief Spring Water who's setting up the deal.  He's returned to the old ways. Listen, we've hired the Genealogy Wing of the Klu Klux Klan to trace Indian Paternity, these guys are arguing it might be as simple as shaking hands, it might be an aerosol.  But hold on, We've got the Anti-Defamation League, too.  We're playing two sides against the middle. Wait a minute. What about this petition?  Lets us hunt rare species in the old way, stampede prong-horn antelope over cliffs in Cherokee Blazers."

     And what in the hell was this?  Were they hanging white males in effigy?  Nope. It was a Gay Men's Health Disaster booth selling complete American male archetype outfits. They were hanging on a rack. They were complete as the wardrobes in museum dioramas.  Not only did they catch Marty's eye, somehow they caught in his throat as well. He felt a sad lump in there. Here were all the rigs from children's books and old movies. Buckskin with fringes from the days of the frontier trappers and explorers, and cowboy's chaps, ten gallon hats and pointed boots. A train engineers stripped overalls, Marty had always wanted those, and the little canvas hat with the cloth covered bill. Loggers cork boots and broad red suspenders, and for a fisherman, rubber boots and yellow slicker, a wool watch cap.  There were farmer's overalls too, carpenter's tool holsters.  Aprons for butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.

     You could not even think of buying these things unless you were gay. Or maybe small ones for the kids on Halloween. The only ones missing were police uniforms and business suits. But no wonder. There was no irony there, no camp, no kitsch. Cops and suits were proliferating like mad.

    

Scene. A big silver trailer. Wired to a portable generator which makes that total place erasing sound generators make, swallowing up these- ever- so- haunted sounds of the summer doldrums: the sanity testing shrill of cicadas, and in the pauses between their scale climbing hysteria, the incongruously liquid note of a bird, and in the far, far peripheral(on the edge of another time) sounds of human activity, a disembodied voice, often a name floated on the still air, sirening and sad as the shades.

     At the foot of the short flight of wooden stairs leading to the trailer's door, a man is smoking with neurotic, fretful intensity.  He has big, long-lashed eyes, white skin with the rose hue of good circulation, and such thick black hair it looks waxed. He is wearing black slacks, white poplin shirt with nacreous circles of sweat under the arms, and tie loosened at the open collar and pulled askew.

     "Psy Ops?"  Marty grunts, the guys beseeching, melancholy eyes put him on edge.

     "Psychological Operations, HDQ."

     "Excuse me?"

     "Headquarters, Psy Ops. Are you a reporter?"

     "No."

     "I meant a journalist. Really, I have only the greatest respect for the entire profession, even food critics. Especially food critics. Why should they always be under pressure to prove they're really journalists. Not to trivialize human tragedy, but nobody has said anything new about war since the Iliad. If we're talking here just about professional standards, you food critics come up with more original stuff every time you come up to bat. "

     "I'm not a food critic."

     "You mean, not yet.  You haven't had the grub here yet. But a critic, none the less. You have an aggressive manner, or maybe it’s just confidence, or bluff, or maybe it's just me. Let me apologize. I've been here too long and I've become strange. The cigarette?  Ah, the cigarette of course. You fellows don't mind when the French do it. But, look I'll snuff it out. Anything for a friend. I mean, no big deal really. I do not identify with the habit, anyway. Yes, I have little to live for, but in spite of its objective lunacy, I do have my pride, and I refuse to stand up for cigarettes. I insist I have more important things to do. Where do you think you're going? You can't just waltz into Psy Ops. Fucking A."

     "Listen. I've been sent to work here."

     "Well, sink me. You must be Marty Sokol. Oh god, a psychologist and shrewd judge of character. I'm humiliated. Can't we be friends, Marty? I'm not a pervert. O.K. I'm not a killer, but I'm not queer in the other way. I'm just sensitive. It's been forty days, damn I wish you were a food critic. I'm Naiman Azerbigiian, continuously, I'm afraid."

     Marty takes the offered hand.

     "Is Charles Buchanan inside?"

     "Click."

     "Click?"

     "Yes, Martin. Click. As in Click Buchanan. One assumes his mother retains the privilege of addressing him as Charles.  Among men, he is Click."

 

Interior of trailor. Solid, life threatening cold. There is a table-top sized plastic board propped on metal folding chairs leaning against one wall. Red and black wax pens have been used to draw x's and circles and arrows over most of it. There are inky blots where in frustration someone has smeared over some strategy whose dead line passed without result. A few of those smiling yellow have-a-nice-day emblems are stuck to the board. A coffee making machine sits on a card table along with a clutter of styrofoam cups, bottles of powdered cream substitute and plastic swizzle sticks. There is a give-away calendar from a feed company. There is a tall, sloppy pile of newspapers and magazines. Metal waste baskets overflow with fast food containers. But, the electronic hardware is impressive. Several PC's, fax machine, duplicator, telephones, modular phones and walkie-talkies, and various black boxes whose functions are not immediately apparent to Marty. 

     Actually, nothing much is immediately apparent to Marty, who has been blinded by the glare outside and has to wait for his eyes to resolve things in the comparative darkness.

     Naiman Azerbigiian brushes past him.

     Naiman: I couldn't stop him. Damn security and full speed ahead. By god, nobody knows who he is, but he's eager to be here. I found him first and he's my friend. Tell us how it goes with the Union. We hear a Negro is playing with the Dodgers. What next?"

 

     A horse fly lands on Marty's arm with the unconscious weight of bird poop and just glues itself there, sluggish with cold. Marty disgustedly flicks it off. It skitters along the floor.

     "Hey, easy, easy. Geeze, do you think he might have hurt him, Click?", and a guy with long, rusty colored hair and beard, no more than five-five if that, with a pot belly and strong , square little hands, moved quickly to where the fly had landed.

     "Oh, boy, I think he's had it." And squashed it with his boot. "I hate to put them down that way but they have too much spirit to take a splint. Real thoroughbreds. And why, why you ask do we breed the best?  Right, Click, he has the right to know?  Because here in Wakko we have the best bull shit. That's our secret."

     Charles "Click" Buchanan had swiveled in his desk chair.  He is a tall, rangy man with ice blue eyes that seem to not have pupils, a chiseled face that is handsome without a touch of pretty, square jaw and lean almost hollow cheeks with long creases that run from the corners of his eyes over his high cheekbones to the corners of his thin lipped, slightly downturned mouth.  The face of the ideal military officer; certain, pitiless, but without the despoiling by appetites to make it cruel or unjust. His fore-arms are corded like bridge cable. His body has the flat, anatomically etched musculature of the naturally strong.  His army days have given right angles to all of his postures, but it does not completely clothe his physical genius, which comes out both as presence and ease, a feline somnolence and luxurious equilibrium. 

     Click:  Who are you?

     Marty: Marty Sokol.

     Click: You're late. Expected you yesterday.

     Marty: I'm not a fireman. I have a life to wrap up.

     Click: You shouldn't have gone to the trouble. We've got this thing pretty much under control.

     Rusty: Oh, yeah?  How do you figure that, Click? I mean, what do you mean by control?  Looking at it through the eyes of the Attorney General, granted you don't enter that brain without being smeared by shit, but starting from there, it must look like dick-head is pretty much calling the shots.  I mean, he's home sweet home, while we're nowhere else but Wakko, as they say out here."

     Click: Stow that, Rusty.

     Naiman:  For God's sake, Rusty, you'll scare the kids. Anyway, I for one am glad to see you. The more the merrier. Come on Click, new blood, at the least.  You'd be wanting to hear our strategy.  It's exquisite.  Of course, we've had time to polish it.

     Click: This operation shouldn't answer to a woman.

     Rusty: You need a better excuse than that, Las Vegas is a dyke.

     Naiman: Lesbian

     Rusty: No, Professor PC, there are lesbians, Marlene Dietrich is an example.  Extremely sexy, always with dynamite legs which they do not have to shave, smooth as silk. Smooth as driven silk. In high heels usually even in the shower, glass doors and they press their titties up against the glass when they're soaping their butts, every damn time when they know you're imagining them. But diagnostic, baby, they spend hours licking their own cunts like cats. And then there are dykes, so named because their faces can turn back a flood."

     Naiman: You've arrived too late. General, you've lost your command.

     Click: Grab a chair, Marty. Take a load off. There's coffee over there.

     Naiman: I beg to differ, but there is black puss over there, and the more you drink, the more you're dead.

     Rusty: You guys just blowing off my proof?  You live in a  dream world. Little wife and a picket fence. Hello.  Hello. Great big dykes in great big boots trampling your electric trains. Wake up and smell the Tampax.

     Click: This is the situation. At a distance of four hundred and twenty-seven meters we have Daniel Sorish and approximately ninty-three of his followers. This includes no less than seventeen dependent minors. They have taken up position in a compound, so named to describe the method of its construction. Think no more about that word, the media will not let go of it, or the image of those buildings floating in the heat waves they have branded on the minds of the civilians, but it will not get in the way of our mission. What they don't know, but we know, and what drives our actions, is that the major building was a barn that they partitioned using standard 8' by 4' quarter-inch fir ply bought at a House Depot for $12.75 a sheet.  We have the invoices, paid for in cash and removed to the premises in a 1986 Toyota "Your Humble Servant" pick-up, we know by satellite recon, not the "I Went to UCRA" Mitsibushi as we first thought. Damn Good Year tires, with no less than 10,000 nor more than 12,000 miles wear on the tread, with a margin of error of 250 miles, or .05 per cent, which ever comes first.

     Furthermore, we know in one of the added buildings they have dug a cellar in which are stored ordinance, including thousands of rounds of ammunition of various calibers, and a variety of delivery systems, including M-16's and a 50 caliber water-cooled machine gun, a howitzer, grenades and we suspect a Polish built, East German distributed "Vas ist Dost" bazooka. Technically, none of these weapons are illegal to own, although you’re required to file an Environmental Impact Statement before discharging them into a populated area, however, Sorish is wanted for illegal arms trafficking, namely selling a pump action, sawed off shot gun to a federal agent who was operating under deep cover as an Eagle Scout.

     While carrying out their official duties of serving this warrant on the aforementioned Daniel Sorish, having waited according to protocol until he had returned from a supply run to the Piggly Wiggly where he obtained salsa and chips and ice cream, and re-inserted himself among the collateral civilians at the compound, a squad of Federal Agents appropriately equipped with AR-15 automatic fire assault rifles with a muzzle velocity of 3500ft/second and accurate to only one hundred yards due to the tumbling motion imparted to the bullets by the barrel, which converts them into a virtual buzz-saw when they encounter flesh so that in spite of their small caliber with the advantages of velocity that maintains, upon impact each single bullet of a burst of 360/minute, or six per second removes a full half pound of flesh from the target, thus spoiling their whole day, but not disturbing the clement conditions of the Geneva Conventions on Warfare's prohibition against dum-dum bullets, which does not apply to a nation's internal disputes in any case. To continue, this squad dressed in the new ninga basic black commando fatigues with face black on their foreheads to cut down chances of detection in East Texas, did attempt as SOP to enter the compound through a second floor window, there being no chimneys of  consequence, just vent pipes, when the compound somehow alerted, opened fire on them, which fire was returned at the rate of 350 rounds per minute for three minutes, times four agents producing 2250 discharges as specified and guaranteed by Federal Contract 11-603, Winchester-Colt U.S. Army, dated 5-7-65, each bullet costing $27.15, figuring in inflation and cost of living rises.

     That is where we find ourselves today, Mr. Sokol.  Since the Justice Department has seen fit in their infinite wisdom to try to second guess us on the ground, I have no choice but to welcome you aboard and I hope your time with us will be pleasant. I'm not a hard man to get along with, the other two over there are queer as three dollar bills, so you'll have no trouble fitting in with/to them if you brought some Crisco, a joke, they're not worth three dollars. I trust you will respect the mountain of intelligence we have gathered during this assignment and humbly add your part with some appreciation for procedure and not let politicians run this war, I mean this operation."

    

     A child's whispering voice fills the trailer hugely magnified so the susurrations of esses sizzle in the cold air.

    

     Child's voice: It ain't really that dark. It ain't never as dark as it could be. Like down in a cave. I ain't saying it ain't dark enough.  It's plenty dark. I don't need it no damn darker. I didn't mean to say that.  Excuse me, I'm sorry. I swear it is plenty dark, don't forget I'm just a kid.  I bet you'd have no trouble making it dark as a cave if you set your mind to it, and I'm powerful appreciative for your courtesy keepin' on that sliver of light.  What's that?  A mouse.  Damnation.  What if it's a rat.  I never should a killed no mice, and I'm sorry for it now.  Listen, I'm turning over a new leaf.  I'm puttin' that behind me. I'm gonna say a prayer right now for all of 'im I killed, though it weren't my idea anyhow.  It was Tom's all the time and I was just talked 'inna it.  Well, it was my idea to clip their little heads with the wire shears, but I'd a done somethin' else there'd been anything else left to do.  Dear Jesus, I recommend into your safe keeping them mice I have killed and I am askin' you to forgive 'im all the gnawing and whatever else counts as sins to mice.   Damnation, but it makes more noise.

     They ain't never gonna find me.  Be buried here forever, find nothin' but a skel-ton trying to peek out the door.  They gonna be sorry for being so dumb. I'd rather played cowboys and Indians anyhow. Hide and seek is plain boring.

     Now I lay me -down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep...Nothin' sadder than dying I reckon.  "Specly in the case of a kid who ain't even ten yet. There'll be a powerful gnashing and wailing of teeth. And me having never really ever gottin' the chance to do nothing bad, they don't most of 'im know about the mice and such. Never get the chance to kill nobody or outlaw or go to jail and bust on out. My mom'll be sad her boy never got a chance for no excitement, just up and died playin' hide and seek.

     Rusty: Is that reception? You could hear a flea fart. Am I delivering or what?  Click.  That's better than intelligence.  I believe we're talking insight.  That s-23 chip is totally awesome. Did you pick up on the hissing consonants? What incredible amplification. I got to say, the kid's almost ten, either he's got a slight speech defect or he's on his way to being a lisping fairy.

     Click:  Where's the carton?

     Rusty: Who the fuck knows where it is? We couldn't exactly tell them to put it in Sorish's bedroom. Probably in some closet.

     Naiman:  Which same closet, presumably, the ten year old faggot has yet to come out of.  Marty, this operation labors under an exalted ambiguity. We supply the children with milk, but we bugged the crates. Actually, supply is an understatement. Either the children grow gills or they drown.

    

Enter a Federal Express Delivery man, sporting their boutique-military uniform. Navy blue with speed stripes and abbreviated epaulets, all crisply pressed. His skin is coffee au lait in color, whole cream by the way and two tea spoons of sugar. He is happy and imbued with a cause.

     Fed Ex: Good afternoon, gentlemen. How's it going?  Rusty? Give it a rest, one night, it'll help the rawness and the tendinitis in your left hand. Naiman, have a beer. Just once in your life.

     Click: How you doin' Shaka?

     Fed Ex: Good to go, fire in the hole, livin' it and lovin' the rock and roll.

     Rusty: Just say "Can't complain" otherwise we'll blow your  head off. Come on, Click, you're FBI, let's bust the son-of-a-bitch.

     Fed Ex: OK. I'm gone. You guys are no fun. Yo, Naiman, one day you come get down with me and my homies, hear?

     Naiman: Stop picking on dead white males.

    

Rusty flashes a Buck knife and goes towards the packages. Click looks at Shaka who laughs and covers his eyes and pretends to feel his way out the door.

     Naiman: See what kind of luck you brought us, Marty.

     Rusty: Whoopie.  More toys. One, yes, oh goody, two cam-corders, I can't believe they got this right. Click, you've got some pull. Have to pay you more respect. They got the VCR and, I think, yup, here they are: Cartridges. Cartridges galore.

     Naiman: We're going to exchange videos of ourselves.  We're trying to humanize this. I know what you're thinking. But I don't think it was my sloppy idea. I think it was Sorish. Besides being a manipulative shit he has discovered another art form for himself: Postponement pornography.

 

                        THE VIDEOS

Taken outside the trailer for security reasons. The first ones are simple, one of the four of them sitting on a chair talking into the camera, his stream of consciousness patter suddenly cut short, and then with an abrupt jerk, taken up again when the camcorder restarts.  The talking heads look off camera for prompts, because the air time seems endless and Sorish has provided a list of questions to which he wants them to speak.  By the end of the week, however, they have become comfortable in front of the camera and catch each other in impromptu moments that do not make it over to Sorish, but still what they call Wakkowood develops, a sense of on-camera moments and opportunities, a casual slide into the time entranced eye of the camera. Before events over take them, a style and consciousness is beginning to evolve, a Bohemian juxtaposition outside events and an ironic self awareness, the camera debauching and shaping the flaccid, desultory medium of life.

      Click:  Hello, Daniel (Stiff, aborted wave of his hand)

I am Charles Buchanan. Well. Huh? (Looking off camera) Oh yes. I am with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The FBI.  One and the same. Ah. To tell the truth even inside the department we just call ourselves the FBI, the initials.  Everyone knows us that way. Sometimes we call ourselves the Bureau. We often do. An agent..I mean a guy will say. No, hold on there, let that stick(cut. Suddenly Click is jerked to new head position) It's on?  Daniel. I'm back again. Good to be here. Anyway, you might find this hard to believe, but we don't like to be called agents either.  We do not like the word.  But in talking to the public, well, it's a habit.  They expect us to use that word. But, you're not the public, so I'll let you in on this: We just call each other by name. Drop that agent tag off completely.  I'm just Buchanan around the office. The public has the impression we're just a bunch of sour pusses, but that's a mis-perception.  A lot of joking goes on around there.

     Off camera: Gag me with a roto-rooter.

     Click: What? (cut)

Resume.

     Click: Of course it's not a sit com. By the way (dry chortle) Daniel, I just thought of something.  I'm Click. I'll bet you did not recognize the name Charles. I hardly recognize it myself.

     Off camera: Oh blow me.

     Click: (Fast jerk, obvious cut) Now we're going to try a little something here.  I'm not so sure we have this down, but Rusty is going to try to focus in on these photos of my family.  I don't know how this will come out, but we're trying, Daniel.

     This is my wife, Cheryl-Lee. Can you see that?  My hand in the way? Excuse me.  We've been married twenty-eight years. College sweat-hearts. The photos a little bent, I carry it in my wallet. It's not that recent. Taken, my lord, can't be. Twenty-five years?  Where were we?  Look at her hair, she hasn't worn it long like that for years, not since Tommie, er, Tom now.  My lord. Here are the kids. Sue Ann, Tom and Linda. On her tri-cycle.  She's a sophomore in college now.  Or was when I last saw her. (Starts shuffling the photos in front of him) My, how the time flys.  What?  Oh, yeah. (Looks at camera, looks away, gets puzzled and sad)  I was born in Madelaine Missouri, it's a small town about seventy miles from St. Louis, give or take a mile, but back then the road was pretty bad, just a narrow strip and I didn't see the city til I was ten.  To tell the truth the only things that stick with me about that day was packing up the Ford to make the trip. I reemember that car in detail.  Little back window and a split windshield. The stuffing coming out from above.  And we had ham sandwiches for the ride, but I don't know why we went, but on the way back, me and my sister slept on the back seat together, the windows were rolled down. It took something to get us to sleep, we wrestled back there and my sister liked to get me sick by chewing up her food and then opening her mouth, but we were pretty worn out, I guess.  Oh lord, she must have finally just fallen back in a corner and mom took a blanket and stuffed it around us, right up to my sister's chin. The way she slept, like my kids did, just fall out, her mouth open, she'd gotten  her two front teeth first, truth be told, she's always been a bit bucked toothed, top lip like a bow, wheezing a bit while she sleeps.  The windows half-way down, probably not going much more than thirty back then on the pot-holed road, the wind smelling of the heavy green in the fields, and the dirt smell below and the dust.  The dust, boy, but as a kid that dust put a spell on me.  I'd belly down on the ground just to look at things resting there. Like table legs or corn or poplars, could never quite get it, but it had the look that they were lifted up by a hand, like balancing a flag or ridding a kid on your shoulders.  And the wind, with a  cold edge, that was perfect and sad, to have the smells ridding on distance, slipping away, that's sad and sweet.  Tell the truth, I didn't want to fall asleep and lose it, I just kept jerking myself awake when I began to drift, but I didn't stand a chance, I just keep slipping into it, my mom and dad in the front seat, they were talking, I'm sure I couldn't make out a word, just the voices, but I heard my mom say it then or a thousand times or maybe only once but it was the perfect sad thing she said, because she did not think I could hear, so I knew her without me there, like I had never been there,  she said "They're asleep" and I wasn't, but when I would be I would slip right into the whole river we were pushing through, slip right out of the car into it.  Headlights miles ahead on the straight road, falling out of the black sky, drifting down slower than snow-flakes, all the way down from heaven.

 

Rusty slides into frame with bogus look of worry on his face. "You OK, Click?  How many fingers am I holding up?  We're gonna trash can this one.  Nobody but us is ever gonna know. I want you to get some rest, take some aspirin. Two shots of whiskey and then go fuck a professional."

 

                        Video of Jarold

Rusty: Greetings, Daniel. You probably don't know me, that's why I carry...just kidding. I'm Jarold Harrison. Anybody calls me that I know I owe them money. Call me Rusty. That's what I get for having red hair. Let's see.  I'm pretty much the technical guy. I'm the guy who hijacked your telephone to us. Don't blame Click.

Let's see.  Let's see. Oh yeah. I'm not with the FBI or the ATF, did I have to tell you that?  Do I look inbred enough to be with the ATF? No, just joking. I couldn't think of a bunch of guys I'd rather spend the majority of my life with than these party animals. Hey listen, just between you and me, keep this under your hat, but listen, for old Rusty, I wasn't old when this began, but could you speed this along? I mean, help me. I even have to sneak beers. Just joking. I'm paid by the hour, 15 cents plus expenses.

     As I was saying I'm just on a contract.  I'm a civilian.  I'm from the East Coast. I belong in New Jersey. What am I doing here?  See there (holds photos to the camera). These are my cats. That's Luloo-Bell, the black and white one and this is Candy, the tabby. My girls. They miss me.  They're mad at me. I write but they don't answer, and when I call all I get is a message machine saying they can't come to the phone, but I know they're listening to me and washing their whiskers. I don't want to think about what they've done to the furniture.

Good talking to you. Toot-a-loo.

 

                        VIDEO OF NAIMAN AZERBIGIIAN

Naiman:  Daniel, my name is Naiman Azerbigiian.  Az-er-bee-an. That's an Armenian name. I have given up hope that anyone outside of my family will ever pronounce it correctly.  However, we are as American as apple pie. What is so hard about that name, anyway?  My family has been in Monterey County for more than a hundred years by now. We are farmers. I'm the first Azerbigiian to go to college. For a hundred years we have raised vegetables and fruits.  My great grandfather planted our first apple trees. We have peaches and cherries too, and we raise spinach, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, tomatoes.  You name it, we've grown it.

I worked on that farm from the time I was a boy until I went to graduate school.  That's something people don't seem to understand. I helped to fertilize those fields.   We had chickens and cows. I can not get people to understand.  My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father and my self have all wadded through manure and guano in hip boots. We're not just passing through. Why is it so hard for them to say Azerbigiian? Just take the time instead of throwing up your hands and laughing like it's just too much.  Nobody has trouble with Steinbeck.

     Sorish. Is that a Hungarian name? I hope you had an easier time of it than I did. Sometimes I think I made a mistake going to college. To this day my dad calls me college boy. He's never going to take what I do seriously. I make him feel he's ignorant when I'm around. What other defense do I have? The man has hands like baseball gloves. He's seventy-five and he doesn't have a grey hair.  His laugh makes the windows shake. What can I show? My kids? I don't stand a chance. He fed them grapes and peaches, apricots and almonds and rode horses with them. I make sure their shoes fit.

     Here I am, Daniel Sorish.  I just want you to know I don't think it's such a bad idea going back to the farm. I think I should never have left.  We're Americans, Sorish. Farmers. I'm not trying to push you off. Not every farmer is a tow head with freckles. I know I look like everybody's nightmare of the Internal Revenue Service.  But there is no reason I must personally resent every film about space aliens masquerading as people.  This should no longer be my problem.

 

                        VIDEO OF MARTY

Background. Because this tape was made soon after his arrival at Wakko, it was really more for the benefit of his peers in Psy Ops than for Sorish with whom he had had minimal contact. Less than a manifesto, but an attempt to establish his place and expertise. It was possible to embarrass him by re-playing it later.

 

Marty:  Marty Sokol. Ph.D. I don't care if you have a problem with that. I've been in hot places before. You think it's hot here. Try the Mojave Desert. Pure and simple, without irrigation California is a desert. It's a place. Not just a concept. I don't know why Texas is the way it is, but don't give me that it makes better men. Take it like this: You can park your car on any road in the San Jacquin Valley walk off ten feet, and where are you? Dust and hot air and bare little hills. Could be Texas. Get it? Same nothing and nowhere. Same kind of place everybody lives their lives and nobody vacations in. I hope we have that established. A place.

          I'm here for the duration. This government spent ten years in Vietnam for no reason any one has ever come up with. It incinerated a hundred thousand Japanese in a split second and the pilot lived with it, named the plane for his mother. I want you to think about that. Remember the Indians and the buffalo. I work for the government and I come from California and I have a PH.D, but don't think we're cracking. This government has crushed whole nations into dust. We're still serious.

 

     This is a recording of the first conversation Marty participated in with Daniel Sorish.  As much as possible, complete records where kept of all interactions with Sorish. For this purpose all conversations were recorded and copies made and sent to Washington every week with an accompanying report.  In addition, the entire trailer was bugged, including the bathroom. This was open knowledge.  Marty asked Click what the point was in bugging the bathroom. This conversation too was recorded, to wit:

 

Click:  The entire trailer has listening devices installed so our record of the proceedings here will be complete. Since the whole trailer is equipped that way then number 1, all of it is equipped, or number 2, the whole trailer is not equipped that way.  But our reports specifically state the trailer is so equipped, and therefore number one applies.  Either condition number one applies or condition number two applies.

 

Marty: But we can't talk to Sorish in the bathroom, and if we want to conspire, all we have to do is leave the trailer.

 

Click:  Correct.  But you will agree that by definition, such hypothetical conspiracy would not be included in the reports.  Our duty is to provide complete intelligence, in fulfillment of which number 1 applies.

 

                Tape of First Conversation including some annotations.

 

Click: Hello.

Voice: Hello.

Click: Daniel?

Voice: No.

Click: No?

Voice: Uh huh. No.

Click: Is Daniel there?

Voice: Now where else is he going to be with you guys out there?

Click: Could he come to the phone?

Voice: Who is this?

Click: I'm Charles Buchanan of the FBI.

Voice: Well, lah-de-dah.

Click: OK. We've got the cameras he was interested in. We'll let you deal with it when he finds out you delayed delivery.     

Voice: What cameras are you talking about?

             (jumble of voices on Sorish's end)

Sorish: Click? This is Daniel.  Heard ya wan'ed ta talk with mah.

Click: Daniel. Good. Who was that on the phone?

Sorish: One a mah brethren. Truth be told, Click, they ain't any of 'im too partial to ya'all seen' as how you got 'im cooped up here til Kingdom come. They's each and ever one of 'im free men, same as you, and like free men ever where, they don' like bein' con-fined. I've been of a mind to let ever one of 'em voice his opinion of you and yer FBI, but I'm responsible for their souls and don't want to hear them cursing and what not and setting back all the good work we done.   

    

     Sorish's voice is broadcast to the entire trailer.  Marty asks Naiman

Marty; What's he speaking?

Naiman: Good question. We sent some tapes to a linguistics professor at Harvard. Several of the usages are apparently confined to a region between Dog Piss Creek and Skunk Patch Hollow in the Ozarks. But only some. And besides, there is nothing to indicate Sorish ever passed through there long enough to get infected. The best the professor could come up with was Jethro on "The Beverly Hillbillies", more or less. A soupan of Gomer Pyle thrown in and Chester on "Gunsmoke". The mystery is that Sorish is not old enough to have seen any of these shows, so we are left with the theory that he picked this up from adults who had modeled their accents on these shows.

 

Sorish: Word is ya got them Videos we dis-cussed.

Click: That's a roger.

Sorish: And a VCR.

Click: Affirmative.

Sorish: Yew boys are bettern' Santy Claus. I kin hardly wait. Ah Click?

Click: Yes?

Sorish:  Are ya really bettern' Santy Claus?, and this being Jew-ly and no where near Christmas? Are you really that good?

Click: What do you mean?

Sorish: I mean, Click, I got a passel of children here ain't been naughty and they all wonder if they're gonna get what they put down on their list?

Click: What's on their list?

Sorish: Ah, Click, you know how children is.  Why they just keep reachin' for the stars. A poor child don't have a chance of it ever happenin', don't it beat all but he keeps wishing fer that little red bi-cy-cle with the bell ye can ring, the one 'at goes whirr-ring, and he got it all figured down to the playing card he's gonna clothes pin in the spokes make believe he's got a little engine rigged up. Don't try talkin' him out of it, don't try saying, mebbe next yar, ‘cause they don’t have a sense of time like a-dults like you and me what can sit for close to ever getting no where.  He don’t unnerstan’ that. Ya can't just tell him, now ya can't go out and play 'cause some one's like to take a pot shot at ya.

Click: We've discussed this before, Daniel. We'll arrange for safe passage for the children.  You know that.

Sorish: Yes I do, Click, but like I was sayin' it's tough to explain to a child that he's gonna be left with strangers and raised as an orphan.  It's tough for them to unnerstan', them just bein' children and lovin' their parents. And it ain't easy tellin' their folks about that deal ya generously offered to 'im where they gets to shrug off the burden of child rearin' in favor of an easier life in prison, seein' as they has made the mistake of lovin' their children right back and don' always see havin' them around as so onerous.

Click: I told you all parents are guaranteed safe passage, anytime. Anytime. Day or night. Just call.

Sorish: So ya have. But look at the predic'ament yew've put me in. Here's what ya told me to sell to my brethren, who must be only about half as stupid as ya think they is, and maybe four times as normal. Think of this pitch and poor Daniel Sorish ya en-joined ta deliver it. My brethren, the Fed'ral Gov'ment says ya all can leave tomarra and throws in three square for ten to twenty years and all ya got to do is give up yer children, denounce yer religion and confess that ya hate America.

     But bless children's sweet hearts, I can't give 'im a day in the sun, not one measly day, and I can't promise them a future you and yer boys ain't in, but they's so innocent their little hearts  just keep yearnin' just like nothin' has changed.  Mister Santy Claus they is all sayin' to ya Click, can ya send us some Disney Car-toons we kin watch? They's a video store in Wakko, Click, ya could rent 'im and I'd never tell the kids Santy just rented 'im, honest, and would ya pa-lease turn the 'lectricity back on so's we might wartch 'im.

 

Marty: You've got the power shut off?  What's that about?

     Click looks at him with disgust: Marty is already losing it.

 

Sorish: Who's that?

Marty: Daniel, I'm Marty Sokol. I just got here.

Sorish: A Texas welcome to ya, Marty. I hope yer journey was pleasant and I sure hope ya kin help clear up this mess we're all in.  I think an eye from the outside kin see how foolish we has all been about thangs. I hope ya pay him some mind, Click, he sounds to me like he makes some sense.  Don't it jus beat all, Marty, that they done cut off the power to a hunnerd people so's we got to re-sort to candle light and no Frigidaire or fans even?  And what for? To a new-comeer who don't know how we've become tooth-ahces that don't quit, it has got to appear strange that grown men who are paid out of our tax dollars sat around and came up with that plan to punish us for not being so good as to come out of our home with our hands up. To someone who ain't seen us grow old toget-her like old dogs pullin' on the same bone, it must look plum foolish, now don' it Marty?

     Click is shaking his head at Marty in angry warning. Naiman is shaking his finger naughty, naughty.  But Marty knows he just might be the man to break this stalemate.

 

Marty: It does, Daniel. At first glance a stranger has to ask what's if for? But listen, Daniel, I'm coming on the scene at a late date.  I've got to show a little respect for those who've been here for some time. You can appreciate that, so I have to ask you.  How did it come about?

     Rusty grabs his head and looks up to heaven. Naiman rolls his eyes in a petit mal. Click kicks back and puts his feet on a desk and his arms behind his head.

 

Sorish: I hope you got an ear for listenin' 'cause there's sure some who don't. Like I've said for maybe a thousand times now, weren't none of us doin' a thang but tendin' to our own lives when the gov'ment made up its mind to trespass.  I'm praying for ya Marty, I'm gonna say a prayer for ya right now, what I should a said fer Click 'fore it was too late to do no good. Ya remember Click what a fine fella ya was at the first and how hopeful we all was we could work thangs out, and now, Lord have mercy, but you sound testy as a wet hen.  I miss all that hope ya brought in with ya, all of us out here eatin' canned beans for most and dealing with children ott'er have time in the out-a-doors without a care in the world, we all miss ya, way ya was with all that good heart in ya 'fore yer job got the better of ya. 

Jesus, this here is Daniel Sorish callin' agin' on be-half of a new soul has come our way, a pilgrim by the name of Marty.. Excuse me Jesus, please hold the line.  Marty, what's yer Christian name, Lord requires some formality on a request, it proves our sincerity.

 

Marty: Thank you, Daniel, but we're getting diverted here. I meant...

 

Sorish: Marty, it flys in the face of common horse sense to keep Jesus dangling on the line, give me yer name so's I can pass it along.

 

Marty: (hesitantly, quietly. That "Christian" is proving hard to swallow) Sokol.

Sorish:  Pardon?

Marty: Sokol. So-kol.

 

     Naiman hugs himself and blinks his eyes flirtatiously.

 

Sorish: So-kill. I think I got it. Ya another one of them Ar-gen-tines like Aspirin-John.

 

Naiman: Armenian. No harder to say than American. You manage that.

Sorish: I hope ya ain't. I don't reckon what prayers I said fer him have had much e-fect. It's that proud Spanish blood.

Jee-sus, sorry to keep ya waitin' but it's all in the service of yer humble servant Marty So-kill, a pilgrim, dear Lord, a wanderer and lost soul in the prairies of yer blessed America, and lookin', to keep the light alive in his heart, in this spot of fierce contention.  Dear Lord, he wants to keep his faith alive, Lord I know it and feel it in him , but he has been placed in the lion's den, a bunch of sorrier rascals has never been gathered on one dry acre  'afore: Dry gulchers, four flushers and practiced sinners, including the famous Charles Buchanan, Jarrold Harrison and Knee-man Aspirin-John, each and ever one of them guilty of hypocrisy and trespass and prey to fantasies of lewd women while they sit there day after day far from where they belong, if they belong anywhere outside today's Sodom, DC.  Lord, protect him and guard the good in his heart like Ya would a match struck in a gale, fer surely he will be tested.       

             

     Camcorder and blank video tape were sent to Daniel Sorish's compound via the complicated and much ritualized route agreed on by the two sides. A push cart was wheeled half way down the rutted dirt roadway to the compound under the limp drape of a white pennant by a grunting and puffing agent conspicuously unarmed, and conspicuously reluctant: Nervous, over-weight, harried, harmless, laughable. Bred to be the butt of barrack pranks.  He stops numerous times to catch his breath, dramatically  sopping up sweat from his face and neck with a big white handkerchief, and takes the opportunity to whine into his walkie-talkie that this was far enough, god damn it, far enough.  After finally abandoning the cart his step is levitated and jiggling. He hurries back to safe harbor, his back tingling from the beads of hidden rifles trained on it. For a transfixed five minutes the cart sits in the noon-day sun its white banner dangling, then a door opens in an adjacent building and out come two Off-shoot Danelians looking absolutely, astonishingly, glaringly normal. They wait by the door which has closed behind them until their eyes have adjusted to the dazzling scorch, and then looking for all the world like a coupl'a guys who are missing their first cup of coffee, they shuffle out to the cart, creaking on rusty joints.

 

                   VIDEOS FROM SORISH TO PSY OPS

 

     The "set" is a sheet nailed to a wall. Two bales of hay

Have been pushed against it to serve as a bench. The electricity has been turned back on, at least for the filming, but no one knows how to light a set and there are bleaching glares and stark shadows.  A naked bulb over hangs it all, and just beyond the tiny glacier of white sheet, lurks that abyssal darkness which may be the manifestation of amnesia or mortality, and which required the camera to discover for the modern eye.

 

Sorish: This is Tiffany. (Sorish has his back propped against one of the bales and his legs stretched in front of him. He seems at home in his common law established "castle").  Come on Tiffany. (An enormous, obese woman moves shyly into camera view. She must weigh at least three hundred pounds. It is embarrassing to look at her.  Something cruel is unleashed by the sight, and it is impossible not to stare.  Rusty, viewing the video in the trailer:  “Thar she blows. Get out the harpoons."

 

Sorish: Say hello, Tiffany.

          (Tiffany covers her face with both hands and shakes her head ‘no’.  She is wearing a pair of sweatpants, little else would be available to her, but the alluvial masses of lard show through like potatoes in a sack).

    

Sorish: Hey ya two. Go to yer mom.

          (Two children scurry onto camera and bury themselves in their mother's pulpy legs).

Sorish (cont.) Here is Scot and Anastasia. Ok, kids, turn around.

          (They turn around but do not know where to focus their attention, on Sorish or the camera. This is not a big mystery to them, they just seem to be awaiting instruction. They have been videoed before.  The major point of it escapes them, but the drill of being kids for the camera is familiar to them).

 

Sorish (cont.) Scott. Say howdy.

Scott (five or so):  Howdy, pardner. (Makes a "cool" sweep with his hand and then hooks his little thumbs onto his belt, which has that eight inch extra dangle of a belt with added holes punched for a small waist, and his pants are pursed to keep from slipping down.

 

Sorish: Ya too, Anastasia. Now, jes' repeat after me. Howdy Click.  Howdy Rusty. And buenoz dioz, mister Aspirin-John.

          (Anastasia whispers syllables of shadowy imitation, the last name accompanied by a spray of spittle she begins to enjoy)

 

Sorish: That's a mouthful for a little girl.  How old are ya, honey. That's it. How many fingers ya got up?  I can't tell. Tiffany, how may fingers she got raised?

 

Tiffany: She's three, but I don't know how many fingers she's got up.

          (Anastasia, in a self-induced trance that seems already traduced to Marty, starts swaying in front of the camera. Then she hops a step, makes a knobby curtsy, and then with the sumo sturdy steps of a three year old, returns to her mother)

 

Sorish: That there may well a been fer you, Aspirin-John. She must be partial to Span-yards. Scott, I jes' know yer older'n yer little sister.

 

Scott: I'm five and three quarters.

Sorish: Ya look ever day of it, young fella. When ya grow up, what ya gonna be?

Scott: Ah'm gonna be a cowboy.

Sorish: And what if there ain't no horses no more, what ya gonna do?

Scott: Shucks, there'll always be horses.

 

Sorish gathers the family around him.

 

Sorish: Now, Tiffany, we ain't gonna be impolite and ask a lady her age, but could ya tell them FBI folks where ya's from?

 

     Tiffany has a nearly infantile mouth.  Her voice is tiny, frightened. She is like a fairy tale: A little girl swallowed by a giant.

 

Tiffany: Butte, Montana, I guess. As close as anyplace else. I'm sorry, but we moved around a lot. I hardly remember. I'm awful sorry. There's not much to tell.

 

Sorish: Tiffany, honey, I know how shy an private ya are. But we're in a terr'ble fix.  We is surrounded by men whose hearts is hardened agin' us , and though shamin' ya'd be the last thang in the world I'd ever do, I want them fellers out thar to know who we all is in here, and I want ya to be counted. Will ya permit me to tell them fellers some a what ya told me so they can't figure that what they're a doin' is jest agin me?

 

          (She nods. While he speaks she begins to silently cry)

Sorish: Tiffany was born in Butte, Montana but she didn' stay thar much past her sixth birthday what was celebrated with a cup-cake as she remembers it, given to her by her mom.  And she remembers that cup-cake.  She ate it 'bout as slow as any one ever could, took all the icing clean offin' the top and put it aside fer later like a dessert to itself, and then she folded down that li'l yalla bloomers them thangs have, folded it on down careful and ate the cake nearly crumb by crumb usin' two fingers to do it, and she saved that li'l piece of yalla paper what has them folds in it look ta her like...What'd ya call that thang, Tiffany? Come on, hep me out.

 

Tiffany: A too-too.

 

Sorish: Yes, indeed, a too-too, which is a thang ballet dancers wear, now ain't it Tiffany, ain't that what yah told mah?

          (She nods)

Sorish:  Saved that li'l too-too fer years, 'cause ya see Tiffany's pop had already lit out and she wasn't act'ly celebratin' her birthday a'tall, but was missin' him and that's why the mem're sticks like glue.  I know ya'all ain't got time to think about the heart of a child, so I'm gonna tell it ta ya fer Tiffany's sake so's it won't be all rushed over like it was the first time. But ya see a child ain't got no compre-hension why their daddy leaves 'im and gets ta' thinkin' it must a been somethin' they did what drove him out.  And 'cause she couldn't come up with nothin' exact, Tiffany figured out it was 'cause she wasn't as purty as her daddy wanted his li'l gurl ta be.  And there been more than just one of 'im what lit out since her daddy left, ain't that so, Tiffany?

          (She nods sadly)

Sorish: Tiffany remembers some li'l curtains hung up on the winda. Child's got strange memory what fix on one thang ain't got no im'port'ance fer anyone else and has been lost fer years now and ain't no one even ever knowed it, li'l white curtains what was fine cotton enough the light come right through, and they had some holes in them but they seemed fine ta her.  And she remembers her daddy had mustachios and his finger-nails was black-grimed unnurneath, and he had boots what must a gone most to his knees and had wunnerful holes and brass catches fer the leather laces, remembers all that what she saw 'fore six 'cause she never saw hide nor hair of him agin’.

     Am I boring ya fellers?  I s'pect I am. Ye ain't got the time to pause fer Tiffany and them private memories is hers alone and lost will be gone forever. Ya boys ain't sentimental slobs, ever one a ya is a pro'fessional, and I'm jest wastin' yer valuable time with these here stories about Tiffany here who ya don't know like I do and couldn't find no place in yer hearts to love.

     Tiffany, honey, we done made enough 'pology to them gentlemen. Honey, yer pain is not forgotten. Are ya God's child? Do you believe that, Tiffany? Do you know that?

          (Tiffany nods, crying)

Sorish: God will never leave ya Tiffany and He will never stop lovin' ya. He knows yer beautiful because he loves ya.

           

     Sorish also sent videos of his rock band. His own crew had filmed them at bars and county fairs where the band had performed.  The lighting in the bars was dismal. From time to time feedback produced an ear shattering banshee wail. The camera work could produce a hint of sea-sickness: stomach-churning free-falls into close-ups and then warp drive retreats to far sightings of the band from vantage points submerged in "ambience", where the camera jostled for position with blocky silhouettes looming in front of the lens for minutes at a time.

     Included in the package was a poster-sized blow-up of the photo that was pasted to the cassette. Supposedly, the band was going to look its best for this shoot. It was professionally done and undoubtedly a couple of rolls were shot and they had chosen this photo to best represent themselves.  So, either this was just the best they could do or else prettiness or health or promise was not the point.   Every iota they projected or that the camera intuited in its witchery was without glow. Here was a group of skinny runts with big pointy boots, thick leather belts with large buckles, black T-shirts with the bands logo stenciled in white-a cross with a spread eagle above it-their faces misted by emptiness and snappish, reflex meanness.

                  

              TRANSCRIPTION OF TWO SONGS FROM THE TAPE            

                           The Beast

I see red foam a-breaking;

I see the beast rise from the waves.

I see chaos and destruction,

Look like the time has come to pray.

The sinners gonna pay, the rich have had their day,

I see the beast is on the way.

 

I see signs in the heavens,

I see the moon has turned to blood,

A third of the stars is fallin',

The Lords children is squashed down in the mud.

Prophesy is fulfilled, the wordly is killed,

I see the beast is on the way.

 

I see Sodom and Gemorrah burning,

I see the lustful consumed in the blast,

I see the boastful and mendacious,

Writhing in the boiling lake at last.

The final days has come, His will be done,

The last is now the chosen who has won.

 

I see the world bathed by fire,

I see Jerusalem descend from the sky.

Everything was taken from us is returned,

And who what took it from us

Must eat crow and die.     

The world has been cleaned,

We have been redeemed,

What's ours is ours forever more.

 

                             GONE BOY

 

Mamma said to dad that day,

One day that boy will ride away.

Way he like that wooden horse'

You know he'll leave in due course.

 

Daddy he went down they say,

Working in the fields for dirt pay.

What little was left behind,

Gave the widow no peace of mind.

 

But you was her favorite child,

Wiped your tears though you was wild.

Clothed and fed and kissed your rosy cheek,

Read the Book and told you to be meek.

 

Chorus: Mama said to dad that day, etc.

 

Pretty you were and the apple of her eye,

When you left she like to die,

No one left to wipe her tears

Down through all the lonely years.

 

Chorus

 

Out you went to the Cheyanne lands,

Robbin folks with a gun in hand.

People knowed just who held the gun'

They'd always say, it's the good lookin' one.

 

Chorus

 

Cheeks like roses, lips like cherries,    

Never got the chance to marry.

Laid low by nineteen,

Best die young, so it seems.

 

Chorus

 

But when the bullet pierced your heart,

Was of your mother that you thought.

Standing outside her window at night,

Seeing her face, the rocking horse and the light.          

    

Mamma said, Hear that lonesome whistle blow,

One day my boy will surely go.

Hear that whistle in the night,

I will lose my heart's delight.

 

Posse caught you on the railroad ties,

Lone and free 'neath heaven's starry skies.

Was there you made your stand,

And but a boy, died a man.

 

     After 3 am.  Phone beeper goes off. Marty is on watch, opens connection:

 

Marty: Marty here.

Sorish: The new man. Give ya the graveyard shift. I woke ya?

Marty: No

Sorish: Ya sound a mite sleepy.    

Marty: I might have nodded off for a while.

Sorish: Sorry to rouse ya.

Marty: No problem. It's what I'm here for.

Sorish: I reckon it might be.  Rest of us been at it a long time.  I ain't ex-actly slept in a coupla months. I don't figure to recommend it.

Marty: Tell you the truth, Daniel, I'm a little insomniac myself. Sorish: That's a hard row to plow. But I tell ya, true religion is the only cure fer drinkin'.

Marty: I don't drink.

Sorish: That ain't the way to face it down, Marty.

Marty: I said I was an insomniac.  I can't sleep. Insomniac means you can’t sleep.

Soris: Ah, well, so it do.  'som'niac. I mis-heard ya. I wasn't pre-pared to hear such a 'sonniac from the gov'ment. Me and my flock, we is people of the book. It tears upon the ear to hear such dead talk as the gov'ment passes out to its citizens. It is re-freshin' they have sent us a scholar to con-verse with. Seems ta me ya is a man a the Book yerself.  So-kill. I wouldn't be a 'tall surprised to find the Lord was workin' through ya as he has done fer yer kind since the beginnin'. Just got ta believe it again. Hear how them books is act'ual speakin'. How’d ya get tangled up in this mess? 

Marty: I volunteered. I'm hoping I can do my small part to untangle it, if we can ever cut to the chase.

Sorish: Well, sure we can Marty, us both bein' 'somniacs. What is keepin' you from the sleep of the innocent?

Marty: Oh, worries.

Sorish: What are ya worried about?

Marty: The usual things, if you insist.  Bills, things to get done.

Sorish: That ain't the u'sal things, Marty. They ain't rally the thang a'tall. What keeps a man awake is fear a dyin' and hope a dyin', them two thangs rubbin' again'st each other like a squeaky hinge.  Regret and remorse, them's the rubs.

Marty: What do you regret that finds you awake in the wee hours?

Sorish:  I got a world of regret. My flock’s in 'mediate danger.  But could I a led them diff'rent? I believe the Apocalypse is on us. I see fire when I close my eyes.  It's in Scripture, it has all been written.  I can't sleep knowin' it's me what brought them to this pass. 

Marty: Daniel, they are not wanted, the women and children face no charges.  They can walk out free anytime you let them.

Sorish: I ain't holdin' 'im here. Yer askin' me to drive 'im off, and I can't do it.  I love them too much to drive them into what's waitin' fer 'im out there. Ain't nobody loves 'im out there once they have turned from Jesus, when they has made up their minds in favor of the world out a fear or dis'pair and lost faith in the love of heaven for 'im.  I know what's left when God ain't in the world and all's ya do is hang by yer nails over the black pit.  Ain't I seen a thousand lonely deaths and legions more headed that way?  Think a the widow what waits alone settin' up her room just perfect, frettin' over some little thang  that put just right will stop the flood.  Think a her, fin'ly, pulled out 'cause a the smell after a week bein' dead. She had lived so small by the end her passin' don't disturb all the dead thangs she’d collected around her. No more’n a glass of spilt water what now has dried up with nary a trace.

     And the drunk at the end of an alley found frozen in the morning, been drivin' into the last corner, just squeezed out of all the reach of heaven, been squeezed out a family and friends to that one brick wall, a man there was no room left for in the whole world.  And the child can never be reached, pulled out of yer hands by cancer and ya ain't got a word of farewell fer 'im, ya can't make head or tails of it and ya watch the hand of darkness close around 'im and can offer no comfort but a toy or two what is feeble against the size of his goin' and all's ya can do is let him slip away into the darkness like his life wasn't nothin' but a small thang only part way tried, but that it don't hardly matter but fer it stabbing yer heart. Ya can’t see this child in his innocence what is big as an angel, that what is his is what God has put there and ain't been no lifetime to cake it over so ya have to scrape at it agin' to let that light blaze on ya, but is all there just a glowin', God's love just a short time away, no time away, bringin' him on back.

     What wud ya do with my flock but forget 'im once they was no longer a problem to ya?  Leave 'im to wander off and be lost and ta lose memory of God's love. Because ya can't feed nor water the soul but are sick and afraid when ya touch up agin' it. Ya can't neither forgive the sinner nor believe in sin. Ya can only hate the incestualator what have lain with his daughter in all the torments of Hell, 'cause ya do not know how the soul will turn to damnation, will search out the road to damnation, if it cannot find salvation.  The soul will have God at any price, even his wrath even to feelin' the lash constantly upon his back, just so's it knows the whip is in God's hand. The soul must be found by God.  But ya despise my lamb who suffered the loss of Jesus and the slipping away of his own soul and did the only thing left to stab his heart, to grab once agin' in solid struggle the body of his eternal life what has become jes a ghost.

     You and the gov’tment will turn from my flock ‘cause ya can't see no beauty there. I'm the one must quench their thirst 'cause I am stuck seeing the beauty there, the soul of 'im, Marty, which is nothin' but beauty in 'im like it is in everyone, a soul what ya don't believe in and can't see, but it's there, and is left to me to satisfy, the soul which ain't a thang more than the stitch the needle of beauty makes in thin air. The hand of God stitchin' us together out of the nothing we has been plunged into, feelin' his heart through his hand what pierces us as he drives the needle.

     This beauty is an awful thang what can hardly be borne even fer a minute, we is so shot through the heart by it, and the storm it stirs up in us what is filled with demons of all the be'trayal to that beauty what we have done and how we have turned from it.   I won't let my flock wander off to where the size of their sins what was held up before them trembling in awe and they saw them in the eyes of God, sins big enough to catch his eye and to foment his anger and his pity, I won't let them go to where such sins as these is no longer beautiful and they fade and is gone.  

 

     Meeting between the negotiators and the leaders of the action teams.

     The leader of the FBI SWAT teams has an average face, a face that actually seems to suffer by being a composition of unremarkable features. It does not look like a face destined for leadership.  Nothing catches the eye, and so, presented with the fact that he is in command of two score of heavily armed men, Marty takes the time to search the face for something to set it apart.  But the best he can do is to conclude that averaging out the American face one comes up with a stubborn to obdurate visage, not beautiful, not ugly, neither morose nor elated, leaning slightly towards block-headedness, whose main power must be its literalness making it immune to dreams and irony.

     On the other hand, the leader of the ATF team has a face which seems the result of being extracted at birth by forceps.  It is stretched out and a little skewed.  He talks out of the side of his mouth, which seems conspiratorial or wry or confidential, perfect for a man leading other men in raids, at least fulfilling an expectation for the kind of rough character and stony language required.  He has a flat face with virtually no profile and small eyes which are at least angry, at least relentlessly alert and quite possibly just down-right paranoid.

    

ATF: I got less patience for that little son-of-a bitch now then I had before. He's got no business singing about the Lord with a rock and roll band. Far as I'm concerned, he's ungodly.  And I can't see as how all your talking has brought him any closer to surrendering.  He's playing us all for fools.

FBI: You've got to admit, Click, except for a string of broken promises everything we've heard doesn't add up to much.

Naiman: That's not quite true.  He's opened up considerably since we started. There's a bridge of trust being built.  After all, he's not going to stay there forever.

ATF: Why not? He's got you giving him milk and video cameras.  I'm wondering what other pressures you plan to put on him. Maybe you ought to ship over some air conditioners.  It must be hot in that barn. What about women?  He's got to be growing tired of that harem he's shacked up with.

Click: There's a hundred people in there and most of them are women and children. We don't want them hurt. We've talked him into letting some of them go. The longer we wait, the more he releases.   

ATF: He hasn’t released any for a month.  He's playing with us. Let's us jest get him out of there. I'm tired of sitting here and talking to a killer. He's got nothing to say to me except I give up.

FBI: Click. You've done a hell of a job. I don't believe any one could have done better. But you're dealing with a megalomaniac. He's enjoying the attention.  We've made him world famous. He's getting everything he wants.  We have the means of getting him out without hurting anyone.  We've given him every chance. Let’s get the job done.

Click: Washington wants this to end peacefully. There's press everywhere.

ATF: Well, god damn Washington. Haven't we all seen this movie before?  Come on, Click, this is the second war in my short lifetime Washington is telling me to lose.  Let's not leave our dead twisting in the breeze this once.

FBI: Ok. Ok. Click we're not hard-asses. We want you with us on this. But I have to tell you if you're not with us we'll have to go around you.  This doesn't look good for the agency and we have voices in Washington saying so.

Click: What are you telling me?

FBI: I'm saying we all have to be on the same side on this one.  We're here to get him out.  All of us. If you can't budge him, then step aside and let us pass.

 

     Later.  Caucus of Psy Ops crew.

 

Rusty: It's a cool idea.

Naiman: Exactly. An idea, but not a plan.

Marty: Basically, it will put us back on square one. 

Rusty: It's got light. It's got action, it's got bang for the buck. A rock concert, Click, tell me I'm wrong. Bet there isn't one of you went over to the 'Nam who doesn't think they were gyped out of all the cool stuff happening in the 60's. I know my audience. The grunts are gonna love it.  Nobody wants to think they're swatting mosquitoes in the boonies while everyone else is partying.  It'll get them off our backs.  Wakko, ‘92. Yes.

Click: We have to do something.

Naiman: It's stupid.

Rusty: Oh yeah, yeah, it's that all right. And you might add vulgar and gross and immature, but just where the hell do you think you are?  This is America, Sherlock, we're surrounded by it all the way to the Mexican border.  Let's give 'im what they want.  

Click: What will you need?

Rusty: Speakers, huge mothers, two megaton range, amps, arc lights, generators.  We can rent this stuff in San Antonio all from one company, I'm sure of it, and they can bring it out in a semi. Leave it to me.

 

     A few nights later the compound has been circled by the enormous speakers used at rock concerts and rock and roll is blaring at the buildings while intense search lights play crazily on the wall. The phone rings.

 

Sorish: (has to yell to hear himself) How long does this go on, Click?

Click: You tell us, Daniel. How long does it have to go on?

Sorish: We got kids here.

Click: I'm glad you're thinking about that.

Sorish: I'm askin' ya to turn if off.

Click: I appreciate that.

Sorish: Well?

Click: You tell us, Daniel. When's this over?

Rusty: Hey, Daniel. You like rap? We've got some juicy ones for three A.M. or so. Yo, bra, fuck da whore.  It's got a back beat, you can't lose it.

Sorish: Shut her off, Click.

Click: Talk to me about a shut down to this whole mess.  Talk to me about that.

Rusty: Call us back, pardner.  Those are directional speakers, we can hear the crickets back here. So, don't call too late or you'll wake us up.

 

     The connection is broken.  Rusty looks for someone to high five with but no one seems too enthused.    He turns on the bugs and scans them for a voice.  All that can be heard is the music being blasted at the compound, until one of the interior mikes picks up a faint, ragged patch of song from somewhere in the compound, buffeted by the barrage from the speakers.  He adjusts some knobs, filtering out the rock, and now it is possible to hear the voices desperately straining to sing "Shall We Gather By The River" above the storm.  Everybody in the trailer looks a little hang-dog.

 

Rusty: Yo, that's corny. OK?  C-O-R-N-Y.

 

     He turns the bugs off.

     Two days later in trailer.

 

Click: And I have your word on this, Daniel?

Sorish: I give you mah word.

Click: I've got this written down, and I'm going to repeat it to you, and I want you to repeat it after me and then I want you to take an oath to it. I also will send it over for your signature.

Sorish: I'll do that.

Click: Here goes. I, Daniel Sorish...

Sorish: I, Daniel Sorish

Click: Do solemnly swear...(after each pause Sorish repeats the phrase) that within seven days of speaking on the Jerry Empire Show, I and all members of the Off-Shoot Danelians will leave the compound and surrender to the authorities. To this I do solemnly swear, being of sound mind and body, in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior of the World, so help me God.

 

Rusty: Jesus H. Christ, that's damn near English you've got him talking, Click. 'Course he probably doesn't understand what he's saying.

 

        TAPE OF JERRY EMPIRE SHOW FROM THE NATIONAL BRAODCAST

 

Jerry: Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, this is Jerry Empire.  Tonight we have a special show.  Tonight we answer our country's call.  There are times when duty calls, there are times of crisis.  And when those times arise we must step up and be counted.  This is one of those times. 

     There is a time of trouble in Wakko right now.  Federal Peace Officers have been deployed to bring about the arrest of one Daniel Sorish who has taken up fortified positions along with his Off-shoot Danelians in a compound not more than ten miles from the county courthouse.  Shots have been fired in anger and blood has been spilled.  The siege, for siege it is, is now is now in its sixty-eighth day.

     Tonight ladies and gentlemen, conceding to the combined majesty of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department of the United States of America, we are answering their pleas to broadcast Daniel Sorish over our air-waves. What you are about to hear does not necessarily express the views of management or of this station.

     Daniel Sorish, can you hear me?

Sorish: Loud and clear, Jerry.

Jerry: Daniel Sorish, do you have something you wish to tell the American people?

Sorish: I do. I come here tonight to clear up some mis-con-ceptions what they have of me and my brothers and sisters in Christ, and to warn 'im of the bad times is here at the end of days. I'd like to begin with a prayer to Almighty Gawd.

Jerry: Daniel. Just hold that prayer for a minute while we break for a word from our sponsor.

          (Jerry's voice dripping with folksy sincerity)

     Friends, travel can be lonely. You been driving all day, the sun is already goin' down and the kids are restless and Mother is losing her patience.  It is time to rest. But where will you go?  Night is comin' on and you are in a strange place. Folks, let me recommend the place I stay whenever I am travelling.  I'm talking about Motel 11. Where you're always welcome, day or night, rain or shine.  Where folks are friendly and the rooms are clean. Why friends, it's like you're back home again.

     Remember, this is Jerry Empire saying, Welcome back to Motel 11 Come on by, we'll leave the door open for you

Jerry: OK, Daniel Sorish. Talk to the American people.

Sorish: Brethren', I'd like to lead off...

Jerry: As many as fourteen million of you nation wide.  That's right, fourteen million listeners throughout the country.   And I'd like to welcome aboard our new listeners at KCUD in Cour d'Ungulate, Idaho. Beautiful country up there, Alpine lakes and great skiing.

Sorish: Let us pray together. Lord it's me agin' and I'm askin' ye to wake up yer chosen people.  I know ya love this land and was never a time in my life I didn't know I was blessed fer livin' in America. Ya have given us a bounty.  If'n it had only been the early mornin' what I ain't seen now in 'bout two months, when there's a chill to the air and ever thang has got pearly of dew and but the one bird has begun ta sing, and I'm walkin' through yer spirit is laid 'crost the land, Lord, as ya bring everthang up outer the night and all in great peace, and if'n I had never had a coupla eggs sunny side up and the yellaw not all dried out, some pepper on it but hold the cat-soup, never could get behind cat-soup fer an egg, and a side of country fries and bacon, if I'd jest had one mornin', if I'd just woked one time as an American and knowed it, had the chance to know what a special place in yer heart I had 'cause I was American in the promised land and I had never swum in yer crecks when I was a boy and had sunned myself out on the rocks, and Lord, if there had never been no Chevy Mako with a V-8 engine and 485 cc generatin' 500 hundred horse-power and zero to sixty in three point five seconds of speed or the Homelite 2 horsepower chain saw, and Lord I had to walk yer roads by foot and cut yer trees like a beaver, Lord it would have been enough. It would a been too much.  Just one minute as a American even stripped down buck naked, jest to know yer love and consideration  Lord, I would a been a thousand times blessed and mah cup runneth over.

     But, Lord, there is wolves among yer lambs.  They's ones would gather together all yer bounty fer their own and leave none fer yer people. Lord, they sickin' the baby and tear it off the young mother's breasts, they pour alcohol down the throats of our men and put drugs in their veins.  Lord, they are eatin' yer lambs and gettin' fat offin' it.  They has thrown families out of their homes. They done taxed us when we had work and then throwed us out ta starve when they found folks in foreign lands who’d work fer next ta nothin'.  They done stole our birthright and are off sayin' as what they are is American and what they have left fer dead wasn't never nothin' but trash anyway. And worse a all, Lord, they have turned us agin' ourselves so's we taken to lookin' up at these thieves and killers and admirin' 'im and become ashamed of ourselves and apoligizin fer takin' up room and hatin' one another fer being' what we is, and not wantin' ta see the other what looks like us.

     I know dear Jesus that we have sinned and now yer judgment is upon us.  All this was told to us in Revelations and it must come to pass.  But, Jesus, reach down and touch yer righteous, open their eyes that they won't miss the signs and be lost.  Let 'im know the end of days is at hand and through yer love  their sins is forgiven and they will be saved, and that after the rain of fire that purifies, ya will restore to us these United State of America what has always been ours. Restore it to us clean and righteous and proud agin', through Jesus Christ. Amen.

 

Jerry: Sandra from Epiphony, Kansas.

Sandra: Daniel?

Sorish: Yep, Sandra.

Sandra: Daniel, do you think UFO's are on our side or against us?

Sorish: Near as I can make out, the real ones is on our side. But, I reckon' the bad one's is prob'ly from no farther away then that SAC base in Nebraska.

Sandra: I was in bed when it happened.  Summer time, you know.  You ever been to Kansas?

Sorish: Just as fer as Oklahoma.

Sandra: It just gets so hot here. It was hot, and I was sleeping in my birthday suit. When it gets that hot I'll take a cold bath, you know, just take my time and soak and just pour the cold water on my head. I got long blond hair falls clear below my shoulders and blue eyes. When I'm done I'll just walk back to the bed still dripping and let the fan in the AC just blow over my body.  It's the only way to get cool. My hair don't dry off for a half hour at least. It's real long and curly, full-bodied I guess you'd say. Where was I?

Daniel: Darlin', I don't know, but I'm all ears. Ya was goin' on about UFO's, wasn't ya?

Sandra: Silly me.  I was abducted.  It was like a search light came in through the window while I was lyin' there all naked and I couldn't even cover myself up even though I thought someone was looking in through the window. And they just floated me out the room.  I just went clean through the roof and I could see my whole apartment building below and then I was inside a room.  Must have been inside their ship. They had me on a table and it was then they started to do things to me.  Nasty things. I couldn't fight them.  I couldn't move.  They weren't little like I've heard but were really tall, I think they must have been over six feet tall, and they were hairless and grey and smooth like metal or more like plastic with big green eyes. Just the strangest eyes you've ever seen, kind of beautiful really, just so peaceful and calm, like a big cat's. And one of them spoke to me or communicated with me telepathically, he had a wonderful smooth voice, very soothing, with an English accent, very educated sounding.  And he said his planet was dying and they needed to have babies with us or they all would disappear and they'd picked me because I was so healthy.  I was ripe for a baby, he said.  And it would be healthy because I was so healthy.  Kansas farm girl, I guess, though I've never lived on a farm a day in my life, but I've got that blond hair and blue eyes and maybe that's what he meant or maybe, well, I'm a little over-weight, and he was so slim, dapper you'd say, I must have looked healthy to him, and of course he wouldn't know I was thirty-eight or that doesn't seem old to them or maybe they just know better, you know, have ways to tell that this one is just ready to have a beautiful, healthy baby and you could count on her to save a planet from dying.

     But nothing's ever come of it. Could it be it just takes longer. I'm almost forty now, what if it waits too long to be born?

Sorish: That was an Angel, Sandra.

Sandra: An angel? How could it be an angel? Do you really think it could have been?

Sorish: I know it was, and' he was announcin' to ya that yer gonna have a baby. He was givin' ya the word.  Ya see, honey, there's few would take an angle serious if he come down with wings and a halo. They've had to work out a diff'rent style fer the times.  God's love reaches to the stars, but it weren't til recent that we knowed how fer that is and how great that love's got to be to reach clear acrost all that space with promises and redemption fer us all, and to hear yer prayers fer a baby and answer ya with a sign.  He's always been there but we've got so smart now we ain't hardy gonna believe, after makin' it so lonely up there that someone with but the wings of a swallow could never cover that distance, though them's what wrote the Bible was close enough ta God to know he could arrive by foot.  So, God has made allowances 'cause He wants ya to believe and He ain't gonna put ya under the dis'vantage of trying ta listin' ta some feller don't have the means to buy a pick-up truck.     

 

Jerry: This is Michael from...Michael has asked that we don't say.  Michael, you're on the Jerry Empire Show and here's Daniel Sorish.

Michael: Mr. Sorish.

Sorish: Yes, son.

Michael: Mr. Sorish..ah nothin'.

Sorish: Go ahead, son.  You just go on ahead. I'm listenin'.

Michael: You're in a tight spot there, ain't you?

Sorish: Well, Michael , we is and we isn't .  It's a open fact that we's locked in so tight we can't scratch, but where ever ya is, no matter yer  buried in the grave, God still finds ya and rains down his love.

Michael: I been worried about you all. You got you enough to eat?"

Sorish: We're doin' fine by the grace of God.  Don’t forget, He fed a multitude with just five small fish, and the children of Israel weren't left to starve in the desert. 

Michael: I don't know about all that, but I'm glad you ain't starvin' or nothing.  You all been beatin' up bad? Are you all hurtin'?

Sorish: No, child.  We ain't hurtin', God bless ya. Are ya hurtin', son?

Michael: No sir.  I was just thinking 'bout you.  I was scared it was diffr'ent and you was huddled down there and hurtin' and was trapped so you couldn't get away.  I..I reckon I'll say good-bye then, you don't need..

Sorish: Now don't ya go leavin' me, Michael. It's yer prayers that sustain us.

Michael: Don't figure I got much more to say.  I wisht...

Sorish: Go ahead, son, ain't no shame in tears.

Michael: I wisht I was with you.

Sorish: Ya are. Yer in my heart right now.

Michael: I am? I..I ain't doin' much, just listin' on the radio.   There's near a hundred of you all, ain't that right?

Sorish: Right around there.

Michael: A hundred.  I can't hardly imagine all that.  A hundred of you all together.  I've took to listin' to the radio night times.  He ain't gonna know 'bout it anyway.  I got all the lights cut off and times I hear him pull up, I'll shut her off.

Sorish: Yer daddy, son?

Michael: Yes sir.  He’ll back some time later once he's got his self a bit o'cheer and a hope for tomorrow like he says. 

Sorish: It's pretty dark out there son.

Michael: Yes sir, it is. We're all the way to the end of the trailer park and ain't nothin' past us but open ground.

Sorish: And yer're alone off there in the dark listin' to the voices come a thousand miles.

Michael:  Yes sir.

Sorish: Yer daddy gon' wake ya up when he come in tonight? Michael: Yes sir, he's gonna do that.  If he comes back.  He been saddled with me since my mom run off.  I was six and now I'm ten and all them years he's had sole responsibility for me and it wears on him, him being a man still in his prime. So every chance he gets, it's only natural, he looks out for himself and enjoys his own privacy what he can't get at home with no brat like myself whose got a lot of the ways of his mother. I guess I got her eyes and her skin, way she was when he first met her and he didn't see all that self-pity and starchy ways was in her eyes, and what he can tell has already been planted in mine. Way I look at him just reminds him so much of how she ragged on him and got to makin' him feel he wasn't worth so much as one thin dime, and most especially after she'd got what she pure deserved, same like me, a couple of good cracks across the mug, that's the time he sees that kinship the most, if I can't help being like a girl and havin' tears and snivels and all and look at him like he was some kind of monster when it's my own stand off ways and meanness to him that brought it on.

Sorish: Michael. There is a man what is a man but ain't a man like that.  He's got the love of a father fer ya but won't never hurt ya that way.  And he is a son his self, a son like you.  He's the son of God, but he called his self the son of man, too.  Ya have a father in Heaven who loves ya and will never hurt ya and he knows what yer sufferin'. And he has promised ya a day when yer father will be forgiven and the two of ya will love each other. On that day yer daddy will stand tall and he will look at ya with pride and he will thank God fer His mercy in bringin' ya into the world to save him, and turn him back onto the road of goodness.           The Bible is filled with stories of people who laid in darkness jes like ya and God told 'im their sufferin' the darkness was not empty, but even if it spread out fer a million miles in ever direction, it wasn't never outside of God's heart, and when yer most alone is when God's holdin' ya most tight.

 

Jerry Empire: Our next caller is Joe from Pallas de Oro, California.  Our production staff has asked me to announce that all our lines are full, so please be patient. We will get to as many of you as possible. Go ahead, Joe.

Joe: Am I talking to Daniel Sorish?

Sorish: Yep, ya are.

Joe: You tired yet, Daniel?  Carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? Add to that the tons of bull(bleep), I'm surprised you're not gasping for breath. You nearly broke my heart with that last one, Daniel, yes suh, you did. Poor kid off in some trailer park, wind whistling through the tumble-weed. My, but you're a wizard with the American idiom.  Idium, Daniel, that's the Latin plural for idiots. A wizard.

Sorish: Sounds like ya had one too many or one too few, Joe.

Joe: Oh, I sure have, one, two, ten, a million idiots too many, and then the hair that broke the camel's back. You. A light weight, but coming after a life-time of feathers piling on, I’ve had it. It's seven-thirty out here, Daniel, must be night in Wakko by now, oh it must have been night for hours by now, to be generous. Actually, it's been night there for years.  You're kind of a creature of the night. Not a nightmare, just a pest, a mouse or roach coming to look for table scraps when the lights are out.

Sorish: I don' know if yer drunk or sober, but I believe yer wastin' folks time just throwin' out insults. Jerry, I'd 'prec'iate the next call.

Jerry: Daniel, we have a policy of toleration here. Of course, we don't stand for swearing, but, well, it's the voice of America and we try..

Sorish: What're yur talkin' about? I've heard ya cut off folks left and right.

Joe: Tell him, Jerry.

Jerry: Well, Daniel, I suppose I've been testy at times, but I feel that's a short-coming of mine and..

Joe: Daniel, it's time for a little lesson in economics. I pay Jerry Empire. He works for me on my network and if he cuts me off I plunge him into darkness. So, god bless him, Danny, but tonight he believes in free speech and tolerance.

     Last week I got a call from the Justice Department.It must have been about this hour.  I remember because then as now the sun was just beginning to set over the Pacific and I thought to myself as the phone rang, that's its high time that I cranked down the awning over the picture windows or moved outdoors to the patio.  On the other end of  my private line to which I did not think they had access, I take my hat off to them, we are in better hands than their publicity would lead us to believe, was the dulcet voiced Attorney General herself.  Wonderful pipes the woman has, I mistook her for the First Lady, not Eve, Daniel, but the other fair muse of American politics. Their voices could abort babies.  Asking if I would donate some air time to you. And I said yes, and the rest is feces, or history as you will. I said yes. And why, you ask? No, not because I am contemplating another merger, they know better than to screw with that, I got poop on them they couldn't dig out from with a steam shovel, and advances promised for their biographies in the seven figures.  No, Danny boy, I did it because I know my audience. Even a idiom would by this time.

     You got any idea how many tapes a network receives from rag-tag bands want to be stars? Or letters with publicity photos of girls with a lot of hair who know they're perfect to play the bitch on soap opera? An avalanche. By now I know who is listening.  Legions of Idioms. There's an ocean out there of sludge and yeast and rising out of this creative fermentation is the American public. 

     If ten of them got together and learned to think, then the jig is up. But I don't waste sleep over that. I'm worth five billion dollars and counting and it's all based on athletes who take drugs and parents who diddle their kids. They rush onto the airwaves to be saved.

     So, was I surprised to hear that some twerp in Wakko wanted his chance at fame? I didn't drop my drink. And I said yes, because I know my audience, and there's nothing they like better than to see one of their own gone to media heaven.   

Sorish: Ya 'bout done now, Joe?  Ya got yer money's worth?

Joe: I think so. I'll think I'll mix up a sundowner and call it a fiscal cycle.

Sorish: Joe, ya just did get yer money's worth, got it to the penny, and that's all ya got. They got a machine ain't got a heart or soul can add up ever word ya'll ever speak and know it and charge ya fer it or credit it ta yer account, and not a word'll slip by it and rise toward heaven. Ya done found yer price, Joe, and it don't much matter if it's one dollar or a billion, considerin' that what ya have lost out on don't have a price. Ya don' believe don' believe there's any good ta folks. And I'm gonna say somethang more, but it ain't fer ya 'cause I know ya ain't about ta listen'. It's fer them ya done smeared yer contempt on and what think they deserve it 'cause they ain't got that house by the ocean what ya got and think one like ya must know somethang, and mostly about what they is worth.

     Brethren, the Bible says it's harder ta put a camel through the eye of a needle then ta get a rich man inta Heaven. The rich man gains the world but loses his soul. Ya heard it here, ya know what it sounds like. There ain't nothin' in the Bible gonna hold the atten'tion of a rich man.  It don't mean much to the man what always has his belly full to read that Jesus fed a multitude on a few loaves.   That's a miracle that spread like wild-fire among the poor.  Now, there's many a wise man what has spoken on that miracle and said it weren't bread nor fish a'tall what Jesus was feeding the people that day, but was his spirit.  And I reckin' them wise men has it about half right, because it was Jesus what knew when a person is poor then everthang in the world has spirit in it, and there ain't never a time for a poor man but he don't live in the spirit of God.  He ain't never gonna have the chance to live in a world where God has left, everythang what is there around him is caught up in the strength a God. Poor man can't pay no one else to tote no barge nor left no bale, but has to set his own shoulder to the chore, and feel on his back how much power it is what has put such ponderable weight into ever piece of the earth, feel his self how fast the grains of sand add up until ya must consider them and God's grace in giving ya the chance to complete the task, and His great love what has said when the world was created that He saw it and said it was good, and if it be ya who will change it, it will be by His permission and everthang ya move ya will feel in your bones and sweat that in God's eyes this rock is good and that all his muscle and inten'tion which is mighty and mighty again and what took that rock out from nothin' by His strength alone, that the weight in that rock is how much He meant fer it to exist, that He fought that hard against nothin' because He wanted that rock to be all that bad.  It's the poor man feel God's muscle everwhere up to today, feels how the muscles in God's back is bunched up with the work and feel the ropes down along His arms stretched up taut as He pulls out from nothing all the whole wide world.

      

Jerry: Our next caller is Rick from Paradise Valley, Arizona. Go ahead Rick, you're on line with Daniel Sorish.

Rick: I want to love you.  But my heart isn't strong enough.  There was a time my heart could pull my head along. It doesn't have the muscle anymore. I've poisoned it. You're giving me some heartache, Daniel. I haven't been in love for years. I owe it to my wife and kids, but I don't see much point to it.  I think I love you. If I still could, I would. I’ve been to shrinks, Daniel, my wife sends me. They had me on some anti-depressants. I guess I'm a hard nut to crack, a hostile witness, I've been called.  I thought I wanted to test you out, Daniel. I don't want to test you. The shrinks didn't get it. My bad, I didn't have enough respect for them to not play games. It's the best they can do any way, coach you on how to play the game, but by the rules I'm doing all right. I make a bigger income than most. I'm a big guy, got a bit of a belly on me, but I carry it well. Wear stone ground blue jeans, look like a prosperous horse rancher.

     There have been episodes. I went to Confession. I visited a prostitute. I cried on her breast, that's about all I did. I told her I'd pay to send her to college or a doctor. I wasn't drunk, but I proposed marriage. I wanted to help her. She said not to worry. She was kind. I kissed her hands.  One day I just drove into the desert.  Stayed there through the night.  Scared hell out of my wife, or almost did. She didn't call the police or anything, too embarrassed. She knew it was within my means to do something strange that was best never made public. But the best I could tell the shrinks was I wished they'd never have invented the car. They thought I was jerking them around. But, I don't think we've stood much of a chance since the horse went out of our lives.  No way to die now with crepe soled limos. There hasn't been a death that mattered since they replaced that clip-clop of the dray on sweaty cobblestones. That was when three a.m. meant something.

     I don't like what I've done to my children. Hardly a real emotion in them I didn't taint with my sarcasm.  Last night I went off about abortion, surprised everybody, how worked up I got. My just being contrary was expected, if I were to say anything at all, that is. Sometimes I'm sympathetic, but that can be worse. It makes everybody so sad they think their worries are fatal. I went on and on about miracles.  Because I've seen the magma under the crust. Vietnam. Ninety per cent of the time, ninety-five per cent of the time, it was no different than pulling a shift at some factory. They put up this big factory on this little acre of poetry and started belching out death, and I punched in my card.  But, it was beautiful too, I can't forget that. The horror, the terror, it's the stuff of creation. We're made of murder, no less a risk will hold us. We're made to choose beauty over peace. Love over happiness. 

     You're there, Daniel. You're right at the doorway to the flames. I've seen the elements transformed, no, transubstantiated, I've seen that, seen them rip through the veil with all the force of their creation.  I love you, every one of you. My heart's weak. It doesn't do you a bit of good.  I got a clear eye, it's been peeled for a long time. I got the picture, you and a bunch of yahoos out on the prairie eating bad food.  Blest, every god damn one of you. Blessed. 

Sorish: And God bless you, Rick. Rick?

Jerry: He's no longer with us.

Sorish: Rick, ya have seen the stars afire in the sky what He has sowed with His Hand, and fer ya and us, there ain't no turning back. He has cast them out, each one brighter than a Angel, a million at a toss, skittering them through the universe and ever one of them a storm of fire and together in their millions wheeling and twirlin’, make a tornado of disaster, belching fire and gas. He has put the blaze in ya. No turnin' back now. Ya have been touched by the hand what made ya and ya have felt his love and all its power.  Ya know ya is a piece of His creation and He made ya with a full heart and there is no ending to it.  It will not stop. His love's too great to be timed to an ending. Yer death can't do it. Ya can't shut the door and put yer foot agin it to keep Him out. 

     Do ya think He has grown tired? What has been given to a million lost souls before ya ain't even drained a drop off the honey He has left. That great heart is pressin' on ya, a heart made of fire and pity, but if ya turn from that love ya will feel its leavin ya.  Ya will feel that great power and sweet attention pullin' back from ya and with it ever gift it gave ya and ya will know then and forever, all the space emptied out fer ya what before it had filled, a love what needed a universe just to hold a part of it, that much blackness ya will feel. You love us through God’s fiery Revelation and with that you bless us.

Jerry: Listeners, it's been some ride, but our times about up.  Once again, I want to apologize to those of you who could not get through.  As I've said before, many call, but few can be answered.

 

     Marty rotates graveyard shifts with the others. They will pull an over-night and then have several nights off.  The motels in Wakko are filled with media people and Federal Officers. After a couple of weeks Marty tired of the incestuous submersion in Wakko angst, and searched out a motel about thirty miles to the west of Wakko along a country road as much in the middle of no where as any place he has ever been.

      His first nights there were haunted by ghosts surfing the winds that kick up after dark and jam with old metal signs and dry grass.  The arrival of the bleaching pre-dawn was hailed with relief and renewed agnosticism.

     The first night he called his wife.

 

Elaine: Yes?

Marty: It's me, sweetie.

Elaine: Jesus, Marty, it's eleven-thirty, I thought somebody died.

Marty: Sorry. It's one-thirty out here. I..I'm lonely..

Elaine: Oh, Marty, it's been a tough day. I've got to work tomorrow.

Marty: Kids OK?

Elaine: They're fine.

Marty: The dog?

Elaine: The dog is fine.  He's getting a rest from your forced marches.

Marty: I thought Abie was going to walk him. She seemed happy to do it.

Elaine: Kids are fickle. What was she going to say? Anyway, I'm sure she meant it at the time, but basically he's confined to the backyard. I don't think he minds as much as you think he does. The walks are for you. He's an old dog and would rather sleep.

Marty: He's an Alsation. They're all legs, like a wolf.

Elaine: I've heard that, Marty, but he's an old wolf now and I don't have the time.

Marty: What did you do today?

Elaine: I worked. This is a Tuesday. A Tuesday. What can you say about a Tuesday, honey?  I'm not Shaharizade.

Marty: Of course. Anybody call?

Elaine: Some phone solicitations. My mother.

Marty: What did she have to say?

Elaine: You are absolutely desperate. The exact same things that bore you to death when you're here.

Marty: You in the bedroom?

Elaine: Eleven-thirty. Yes, and I should be asleep.

Marty: I could name everything in the house.

Elaine: You wouldn't dare. Where are you, anyway?

Marty: I'm in a god-damn motel. What are you wearing?

Elaine: I hope you're joking, Marty.

Marty: Miss me?

Elaine: Of course.

Marty: It's not of course. Nobody's walking the damn dog. It's easier when I'm not around.

Elaine: Stop feeling so sorry for yourself.

Marty: I miss you. I'm in a god damn motel. Is anybody watering the roses?  Has anybody watered the roses?

Elaine: Marty, you're getting abusive. Go to sleep.

Marty: I planted those roses. Do you know I paid two hundred dollars for the Infanta Isabell?  I've been here weeks. How long is that? Enough to forget those roses. That's a lifetime.

Elaine: I will water them.

Marty: That's all I leave. Roses. I need a shop. I'm too considerate. I think I'm going to start a pig farm. Run a few head. Thirty. Big shitters. No, I'm going to start sculpting boulders. What the hell are you wearing?  I'm in a motel outside of Wakko.  You know you have a mole right over your ass?  Who else knows about that mole?  That mole is a hundred miles into you. I get there sometimes, lots of white light along the way. Almost lost, and then there I am at that little island of ours.

Elaine: It's Tuesday here, honey. I got all your clothes washed weeks ago. I'm sorry, they're all folded up in the drawer.  But I miss you too.  Only, it's still Tuesday. You remember Tuesday, don't you?  I don't have to be a widow, that's all your fantasy. Just come on home again and kvetch about the suburbs. Everything is just how you left it, God have mercy on us all.

 

           

                    

     Marty was out the door early into the dawn with all its maidenly virtues, beating the sun over the edge of the plains, stepping out into sweet meditative stillness and dew, away from the dry rot feel of his room, his eyes, rheumy and vulnerable and raw, daubed by the light as if it had wafts of turpentine in it, and his steps on the grainy tarmac slightly caustic to his drowsy ears.

     And then the best part of his day which had a mythic, lyric drift to it and which continued until the outskirts of Wakko when the sun had gained the high ground and begun its bombardment and reality hardened around him.  First, folding himself into the interior of the rented car, that in spite of its unadulterated plastic lining was still redolent with morning car ambience, the slightly chemical coolness, the back-chilling seat covers, the cozy, encapsulated privacy holding its charge of ruminating movement.  All familiar and welcome and deeply ingrained.

     Then the drive itself, long shadows, romantic, Tarot card lit roadways running in planetary arcs.  He cups his hand around a mystified fly skidding up and down the windshield and looses it into the jet stream:  this abutment of transparencies, of souped up air and still air, of this palpable engineering of time and distance, this injection of velocity and direction into reverie, this was American philosophy.

     And the fable just kept unspooling.  Because he had found a diner right out of the collective unconscious.  And it might be mom's apple pie to the majority or to a cabal of copy-writers, but it was bacon and eggs, pepper and the smell of coffee to Marty, and he no sooner drew back the door, than he was in the bosom of his American family.

     His American family; that’s what threw the switch for Marty off in nowhere on the plains.

     Without asking, with all the Florence Nightingale empathy of a truck stop waitress anywhere, he was no sooner slumped on his stool in the workingman's hibernating-bear posture, than a mug of black coffee was in front of him, thick and runic as pitch.

     And after a short period of grace that seemed to honestly respect the fell and cantankerous in manhood, came "mornin" as a blessing and welcome, and then "What'll it be" which would always make Marty look at his hands and forearms resting on the counter, serious and heroic, and yoked to the traces leading back to the gainful heart.  It was as if every truck stop waitress who had ever lived was really asking what are you going to make out of it, the day and your strength which I trust and appreciate.  And he wished like hell he was not a university professor and had never finessed his way out of labor, never shrugged off the world's ennobling weight in favor of mental graft.

      Later, it became "the usual" when he was part of the masonry of regulars: two eggs, scrambled easy, bacon crisp, side of home fries, drop biscuit.

     He peppered his egg from the shot-glass heavy shaker freeing that old incense, feeling Rose's eyes on him with their happy studiousness, memorizing his quirks in that penetrating but merciful look of a woman who is losing her heart to you. They were lovers by then, he and Rose, the waitress, by the time it was “the usual". Because Rose, who fell short of beauty not by any lack in a standard catalogue, blond hair, blue eyes, etc. but because each thing lacked an apparitional glow, was simply one to be up to the task, whatever it might be, equal to the hard scrabble, and threw herself into it.  Life had been tough enough on her to show that half measures and a wish exerted against the friction of what is, amounted to squat.   So, grab your kit and get on over.  This law was in her bones, and made her practically erratic because  as a woman of cold-blooded world weariness, a veteran, once the decision had been taken, supposedly based on a column of figures-the job he held, the neatness of his clothes, his choice of words, but each of these actually placebos, while beneath, it was the shape of his hands and the tone of his voice that moved her, hardly a pragmatic way of looking at the world-she was in it heart and soul, and no looking back, two kids and two marriages before thirty, and her lack of gleam the result of rough use. 

      They kissed in front of her trailer about an hour or so before sunset and did not really break again until the sun was rising and she had to go to open the diner, not even to climb the few stairs to the doll house sized door-by that morning, maybe he was entitled to a smidgin of the local accent, a contagion of tongues, in which case for the first time that dialect took poetic wing, to utter "the few stars to her trailer"-stumbling like people in a three-legged race, and undressing in far separated flurries when they came to realize they were still wearing shoes or shirt.

     How powerful the attraction was. With time to reflect, Marty, who has never stepped out on his wife before, concludes it could be no less than a resident grief in his flesh impossible to separate from his tenure in life itself that propelled them.

     A grief the antimonies in Wakko brought to solemn expression rather than fatigue.

     By now he should have outgrown images of perfect, all consuming sex that are the male conception of love, and up to a point he had.  They had been relegated to certain alienating visual snap-shots of his wife, adolescent, brine soaked private  peeks at her nether garments or a hidden ogle at her in the everyday dorky falling into an unmonitored sluttish pose, tush in the air, nose in the dresser kind of stuff, the atavistic stir in it pretty surprising since usually such sights washed him with husbandly fidelity:  He would see the marks of aging or sexual expenditure and trust that she had through children and redundancy given him her all including even the mystery. 

     But when the sex kept in this light almost through deliberation reaches the level of a marriage rite, not an ecstasy any more but some absolute affirmation of conviviality, a truce, a sympathy, a resignation surrendering most of their lives to what was shared, then the sex could be satiric, slap stick, hysterical, absurd or impossible.  Just then, where love? What left unspoken in a lifetime?        

     Marty found that would be Wakko, where the heavens scrapped bottom. 

     When she left she told him "I'll see you at the diner, but there won't be a chance to talk, So, I'm, tellin' you straight out, I expect you back here tonight.  I've plumb given up on what ust to be the worst struggle of my life.  I can't see any light 'tween love and lust any more and I am not gonna torture myself with all the broken hearts I give myself decidin' this was the one or the other.  This is me right here, don't you treat me like I was a ache in your conscience, just let's be good one to each other."

     Then she sat back down on the bed for a minute, took up his hand in both of hers, kissed it and cradled it in her lap.

     "We got us more luck than we hardly deserve, you be thankful for it, you hear?"     

     Life with Rose outside of the bed might prove unbearable. Could he really think to eat hamburgers or casserole night after night, talking about, say, brothers in jail or a mother with arthritis?  He was spoiled for that.  But, he was married.  He was not going to be more sophisticated about this than he had to be, and he had not thought it out beforehand, but Rose qualified as the perfect mistress, that is, as the antidote for his wife, and all contained in the Wakko cul de sac. But, he will never stop loving Rose and be quit of Wakko. Here is no cul de sac. Here be the edge, the lip spoke to god’s ear.  From the empty plains has begun the parsec spanning voyage of love that is the soul’s eternity.  

     Marty dragged his butt to work to be useless and blank-headed for his twelve hours, not getting the looks or comments such transformations usually provoke because after all these weeks everyone in the trailer is on auto-pilot.  Mostly, Marty drifted peacefully and stupidly along in a soporific state of sleep deprivation and cock-eyed unbalance: He had fallen asleep tangled up with Rose for so many hours his center of gravity had shifted to a place somewhere between them and he wobbled a bit when he left their bed, trying to find his sea legs. And his center of physical concern was shifted also, to include an extended Rose:  Disentangling numb limbs from beneath her without disturbing her sleep, which seemed sacred and mysterious, he witnessed her body in the Orphean spindrift of dreams. 

     Use her?  Lord, but they jumped each other's bones.  He was shaken to the marrow.  He was a bone whistle.

    

 

     Click’s team had each been provided with beepers and for the most part only one at a time was on night shift.  The others could be roused if necessary and gather inside an hour, a scene which was more wish than threat.  Sorish called at least once a night, he was having trouble sleeping.  The call might come at three a.m., whenever the claustrophobia and passivity had built up to bursting.  Meanwhile, who ever was on duty could make a ghostly passage through the compound by means of the bugs planted in the milk cartons. There was not much to hear. They were not digging an escape tunnel, and Marty found the disembodied passage spooky and a bit sacrilegious.  Once, he had happened on two lovers who must have closeted themselves among a stack of crates.  The two voices in the black made him sad. They could have been speaking from the grave. He had no right to listen, and he realized too that the whole thing was being recorded and shut the machine off. 

     For the most part he nodded off where he sat, or else he would retire to the cot Click had requisitioned. 

      

     The phone rang. Marty hobbled over to do his job.

 

Sorish: That ya tonight, Marty?

Marty: Yes.

Sorish: Ah knew it would be.

Marty: It's Tuesday, or Wedensday. I'm always here on Tuesday-Wedensdays.

Sorish: It's Tuesday?

Marty: That's no good, Daniel. There's a clock ticking and everybody's on it but you. It's September fifth, two days have passed from when you said you'd walk out. It's not going to work. They're not listening to us anymore. You want to be vague, fine, but you're not talking to anyone who matters. September fifth, 3:56 a.m. You're asleep on the railroad tracks, and your dreams aren't going to matter.  Get off the tracks.

Sorish:  I'm glad it's ya, Marty.

Marty: Doesn't matter who it is anymore. You broke an oath to every one of us. Save your breath. No matter who you bullshit it won't hold that train up.  Get your people out of there.  At least let them go.  You're a shepherd, get them out of there.

Sorish:   I'm thinkin' of doin' jes that, but thar's a few more thangs I want ta do.

Marty: You're talking to yourself.

Sorish: Ya don' trust me no more, do ya?

Marty: I'm a man yelling fire. Do you hear me?  And it doesn't matter if I love you or hate you, the house is on fire and you've got to get out.

Sorish: It matters to me, Marty. Do ya love me?

Marty: Stop playing.

Sorish: I ain't playin', Marty. I love ya. I whisht ya loved me.  I'd welcome yer love. Can ya love me?

Marty: Fire. Fire. Fire.

Sorish: Ah know that, Marty. But I'm worried about ya. I am worried about leavin' ya the way ya is. I'm worried fer yer heart.  This here terrible thang ta happen, Marty, where are ya gonna be if'n ya ain't loved me 'fore it happens. How ya ever gonna know where ya was in it?  How ya gonna know it wasn't part yer doin'?   ‘Cause I love ya I don' want ta leave ya in danger of bein' shut off from God.  Tell me ya love me Marty, it'll be what saves ya later.

Marty: If I could have made things different I would have. You still can.  You could wake your flock right now and just walk them out. If you love me, then do it.  Help me. Save them.

Sorish: It ain't a time fer ta be clever. Hardly ever such a time, clever ain't clever by half enuf ta ever matter.  Marty, I know ya is closed ta me, but ya is goin' aginst yer own heart. Knew it from the start. So, jest fer ya I'm gonna set this riddle on ya.  Ya ain't gonna thank me fer it now, and maybe never, but I'm passin' this on ta ya special 'cause I know yer the one made ta recieve it.

     If it come upon ya one day without even yer askin' that ya loved everone-this is God's grace, Marty, but I know ye got trouble with that, so's even if ya got ta believe that such joy is madness and one day ya just broke down and all at oncet ya was flooded over with love fer everone, and ya was here, Marty, jest the way it is, that the love was shinin' through ya upon everthang but ya was still here in these United States jes like ya sees them now, people still livin' jes the same and the greed round about, this one hatin' that one and this one oppressin' that one, and the child turned agin' his  father and mother and they agin' each the other and ever one of 'im livin' in such loneliness and hate they will hurt each other out of fear. If ya was to wake one day in love with all of them jest as they are and this country jest as it is, Marty, how would ya live that?  Who ever in the world is ya gonna be when ya start ta live in love?

     Marty, ya ever heard the name Sojourner Truth?

Marty: Yes.

Sorish: I ain't never heard a more beautiful name. Ah been prayin'  and she has come ta pay me a visit. She come ta give me a piece more a the truth.  Marty, she got one of them Negra faces ya wouldn't hardly think belong on a woman but ya look oncet agin' and ya ain't never seen nothin' more a what it is ta be a woman and tote babies into this world as this world is than what is in them faces, knowin' what a woman must do ta protect her lamb and jest all the strength what was needed ta decide she would and she'll stick ta that decision.  Ain't no less than that needed, oncet ya know ya is goin' ta live fer love, ya better have one a them faces like that, maybe time come and ya will, but fer them it's already set up or else they don' knowed it since childhood and has grown to it, but there it was and now I've come to find out that it don't stop with the one child, that's what Sojourner Truth is sayin', but it pushes on out and oncet it is lain on ya it is fer all God's children. That love in her done set her ta free her fellow man, ta risk all danger and be a pilgrim forever on the earth 'neath the guidance of that love.  She done followed the North star.  She known ta look ta heaven, but see her face, was one hard work ta move that love through the mud and storm and the dogs and trackers, a face what could clench up with all the strain of dragging that love through this world.

     I know when I saw her, I had some of it wrong. It ain't meant fer us ta keep out the storm. Them's as feel the love comin' down don't want no roof between them and Heaven, no matter the hail and tornado.  We don't never want nothin' between us, our faith ain't in tin and tar paper. We are forced to wander.

     Marty, my brother, if ya will love us, if ya will love us, just as ya are in this world, wanderin' and bare-headed beneath the stars, then Marty ya is home. The stars up there will be a map fer ya and all yer wanderings will lead to Him.

    

     Sorish and his flock did not budge.

     The attack team leaders came to the trailer again.  This time ATF and FBI were accompanied by a lawyer from the Justice Department.  He looks pampered, like a spoiled ten year old or a catamite.  He has a polished apple gleam, and is numinous with a certain kind of intelligence Marty has either never known or has forgotten since he met Rose. What is it?  Conservatism?  Satanism? Righteousness?  Victory?  No, it's the computer: The computer has made computation hip. Mechanics is colonizing the celestial. The angelic empyrean, the twilight meridian between human and divine has been digitalized.

     Why did Justice send him?  Is this kid a slap in all their faces?  Let's take this out of the hands of the entrails readers. This kid can clean it up. He's antiseptic. If Justice can trust the end game to a kid, it shows pretty clearly they're through listening to the melodrama.

    

    

ATF; This is a courtesy call.  We're going in.

FBI: We've got approval, Click. This is John Lynch of the Justice Department.  He personally brought the OK from Las Vegas.

Jarold: You work for that dyke?

FBI: He's a Federal Prosecutor.

Jarold: And now he's making that our problem?

ATF: You are an asshole.

Jarold: And you're a moon-shiners son slash brother, that's incest, not pure-breeding.

Click: Alright, let's hear it.

    

     Lynch opens a sandel-wood colored brief case. Removes letter.

 

Lynch:  Gentlemen, I read directly from the Attorney General's letter: Jayne Las Vegas, Attorney General United States of America, Department of Justice, Box 132, Washington D.C. 20210.

Federal Agent Richard Craft, Chief of Operations, Wakko, Texas.

     We at Justice have reviewed your plan and do approve the commencement of action to remove the Offshoot Danilians from their compound at a date you deem fit and prudent.  It is to be emphasized that the plan of action hereby authorized is the one you presented to us in your brief of 8-25-1992. As stated: The force applied to dislodge the Offshoot Danilians shall be sub-lethal and every precaution shall be taken that no child shall be harmed. To this end and after consultation with law enforcement experts from around the country, we do authorize the use of C-114 gas as irritant to be delivered by armored vehicle and do stipulate that Apache Assault helicopters are encouraged to patrol the area to assure immediate succor for the children when they accomplish egress.

     To this I do affix the seal of the Attorney General of the United States.

 

AFT: You got that Click?  We got everything we wanted.  I'm gonna be sure they get all the succor a body can handle.

Click: Dick, what's all the talk about children?

FBI: That's how we finally got her off the dime.  We guaranteed we'd do everything in our power to protect the kids. 

ATF: It's time somebody protected those poor lambs. 

FBI: That's enough.

ATF: No it isn’t. Seems Click, that your over patience has allowed a continuing situation of child abuse to go on under government auspices.

Click: What are you talking about, Richard?

FBI: Now listen Click, it's not doing those children any good to sit in there month after month.  When you get right down to it that's a clear form of child abuse in itself.

ATF: As is corn-holing the little shits.

Click: Corn-holing?

ATF: While you watched, Click.

Jarold: Wait a minute, doctor, isn't this a clear case of wish fulfillment by six fingers there?

Click; Richard?

FBI: It's the only thing that would move her. Consider the context, we never meant to undermine your reputation. I'm afraid that was unavoidable collateral damage.   But look at our situation. She was stone-walling us. They were afraid the whole thing would disintegrate into an Emerald Gulch or Sore Knee. They might have waffled for ever.  You know how Washington is.  They'll do anything for kids when the camera is turned on.  You know the mind set there.  We're doing what we're doing for the sake of our children.  It works for them.  This time it worked for us.

     We only hinted at it. Just put the bait out there. OK, in such a way we knew she'd go for it, but we said we heard it from the locals. We didn't have absolute proof, but before they holed up in the compound town’s people noticed signs of abuse.  Bruises, sullenness, acting out, whatever. And we had no reason to think these things would lessen under conditions of stress. But we never mentioned that you'd been bugging the place, so you're off the hook there.

Click: We send them copies of the tapes every week.

FBI: What can I say, Click, But you got my word we're not scapegoating you. We’re all looking for a way out. And we found one for Washington.

Click: Lynch, do you know anything about C-114?

Lynch: It's a mucous membrane irritant that promotes nausea and difficulty in breathing and is used as a sub-lethal means of crowd control and for clearing fortified positions.

Click: Do you understand that it violates the Geneva Accords? You can't use it on a foreign enemy, and that in an enclosed area it can cause asphyxiation and death, that the elderly and young are especially at risk?  Did you make this decision knowing that?

ATF: Lay off, Click, you could say the same of bug spray. It will clear them out with nothing worse than red eyes.

Click: Do you understand there are at least twenty children in there under the age of twelve who are especially vulnerable and that as a result of this siege the windows have been boarded up to block the sight of our snipers? Do you understand all this?

ATF: What are you, a virgin?  You're just a dirty old man like the rest of us, Click, up to your eyeballs in the same stink.  This isn’t an orphanage. You want to hear a god-damn story, what about the kids of the four agents they wasted? You want to play them some music?

Lynch: I am not in a position to say what the Justice Department knows or does not know about the properties of C-114.  I can only assume that they weighed the alternatives in arriving at the decision I have relayed to you.

Click: C-114 is highly flammable.  If there is any spark the place will explode like a wheat silo. They will all be cremated.  Even a bullet striking metal or a muzzle flash could do it.

Lynch: Firstly, Mr Buchanan, it is not the United States Government which has put these children at risk. I think it is important to understand that the responsibility rests squarely on other shoulders. Case after case has verified the basic tenant that when the government is acting in a legal manner to enforce the laws of the land, the onus for casualties lies with the lawbreakers.  But, let me assure you, the welfare of the children has been our paramount concern. You do understand that, Mr. Buchanan, our paramount concern. That should set your mind at ease, and of course, we expect your cooperation. And because we have satisfied your questions and very legitimate worries-we are prepared to view them that way, though other distressing interpretations are possible-we expect your whole-hearted          and quotable agreement to this plan and indeed, a public display of enthusiasm.

Click: I've always been a team player.

Marty: Me, too. But, why me? So I'd talk Sorish into giving up? I don't think so. That's not how I make my living. People hire me to put the nail in the coffin. There are real dilemmas out here.  Ambiguities. No getting around it: Bona fide ambiguities. And ambiguities, just the twenty-five cent word which sometimes is the absolute best fit, the word by itself is political suicide. That's when they call me. The word man. The BS artist. The man with the qualifications to say screw all the words, just ready, aim, fire, and later to argue the egg-heads into silence, to give the right boilerplate to the act, to stupefy or bore, or accuse thinkers of abstraction.

     It's supposed to go smooth. You depend on me for that. Ok, I dropped the ball. Let's not do it smooth. We got the language, brothers. I remember when I first learned I had the freedom to drop "ing" off my words. I remember the spot, it was a hillside. I discovered right on the spot that it was natural to me to talk that way. I was just a kid, and it's when my hands and knees were covered with dirt scaling that hill that I knew this is my place, and I'm its.

     Brothers, it's bullshit. It's a pack of lies. That's us. We know. We got the stuff.  We’re still kickin'. We still got a brain in our head, we still got a lick of sense. We got the dirt of this place on our hands. We got our ear to the rail, we hear it talking.  We got to walk it like we talk it. So, let's not kill anybody.

     Come on brothers. Give me your hands. I want your hands.   That's what we got to do, because we know it could go the other way. Just don't let anybody out of the circle.

Jarold: You just leave him alone. It's been a long wait. Don't touch him. He's through now.

Naiman: God bless you, Marty, from one relativist to another, God bless you from the bottom of my heart as I hope to one day know it. You're a hero, I believe that, you're not just coping out and saving your own conscience. I'm going to believe that because it’s the best part of me to do it. That's the best I can do.  Thanks for that. I'm going to hang on to it.

Click: You know it's about certain that if this action is prosecuted they will all die.

Lynch: Of course we do. But we believe this administration can absorb the blow. We have plausible deniability, and what the President cannot afford is being held hostage. We convened focus groups to get a cost benefit read on the possibility of total annihilation versus waiting. The results indicated that only if the President's daughter were in the compound and was burned until her eyeballs boiled out of her skull and the flesh sizzled off her arms would anyone doubt that he could still feel their pain. Just because you're part of the club-and you are Mr. Buchanan-I would add that if his wife were in there, then 70-30, they're still for it.

ATF: Click, I'll just bet you right now one hundred dollars, right here and now, that some of those bastards make it out. What do you say, Click, I give you two to one.

 

     Click is not a young man, though still physically impressive, and when he rises from his chair he seems weary as an old man, as if the scale of middle-age tipped during the last few minutes, and it is with even more effort, like a large beast brought down ugly by repeated small arms fire, that he collapses onto his knees in front of Lynch.

Click: I am begging you. We'll stop the milk. We'll do whatever you ask. I am begging you. Don't kill them.

ATF: Oh no, oh no you don't. Fuck you, Click. Fuck you, Click. Get up you son of a bitch. You are in this, you are in this.

FBI: Come on, Click. We're going to forget about this. Lynch is going to forget this. Twenty-five year career. The best. That's why he was chosen.  That's why we chose you, Click. The best. Terrible strain. Click, you're going to get a rest now. You just bear with us. Just get up, and you leave this to us. You did a hell of a job. It's over now.

 

     In the afternoon Naiman finds Marty outside the trailer.   

 

Naiman: Back to academe?

Marty: I suppose so. It’ll be hard to get back in stride after this. What about you?

Naiman: I'd like to visit the farm if I get the chance.  Not that it's ever a family idyl. But it's the place I'd most like to be.  I think I’d welcome a certain amount of old style crap, you know, just get goaded in the old way as if I didn't have a life to answer for yet.

     By the way, in my own famously suspect manner, I really appreciate what you said. In fact, I'm probably the only one there who recognized a crisis of will when it was happening. I didn't know either of us could possibly have it in us. Either faith or back bone.

Marty: Thanks.

Naiman: No, no. Please, thank you. What do you think about Click?

Marty: Well, I was surprised.

Naiman: Are you worried about him?

Marty: Do you mean do I think he's cracking or that he's mending in a way that means he's through with the Bureau?

Naiman: But exactly. Both, either. The spectacle.

Marty:  I was shocked. I don't know. It's not really on my mind right now. You know. Tomorrow. Remember?

Naiman: I think he's going to be all right. I think he's going to make a complete recovery. And I think the Bureau is going to leave him alone, at least for a while. No more touchy assignments, of course, and I do think they'll retire him at thirty years, oh no doubt. But I don't think they'll ever bother him about this one. Never a need to mention it. Too embarrassing for everyone.

     But I believe, if we cast eyes upon Click after tomorrow, we shall find him become beautiful. You and I, we won't sleep too well, and we're going to look quite droopy and tired. I think there will be an ashen tinge to my olive hue, I really do.

     Marty, do you think I'm an odd egg?

Marty: It's a big country.

Naiman: So, you do.

Marty: I don't give a damn right now.

Naiman: Admit it. You think I am. I think you are.

Marty:  Listen, I'm not in awe of the Bureau, maybe because I'm just a conceited ass, but I don't think they make many mistakes in personnel.  You might want to disabuse yourself of the idea you're such an odd ball.

Naiman: So, you're not going to help me. And after I helped you. Let's face it, the only thing that mattered in there was the fall of Charles "Click" Buchanan. Your little outburst did not mean squat. So, rejoice. There never was a damn thing you could have done. And me, Marty, old Aspirin John, you're not going to admit I had no vote?  Come on, you can give me that?

Marty: I'm tired of this, Naiman.

Naiman: Sure, it's petty, but that's the point. Not that it's the issue for anyone at all, but do you think I'm going to gain by the proportion of the disaster tomorrow?  Hell no. It's complete vanity on my part to accept responsibility. It's social climbing, Marty, so why in hell shouldn't I be absolved as fits my status. We're talking nearly history now, my friend, it's so obvious I'm trespassing.

     You have a nick name, Marty?

Marty: Yeah. Marty.

Naiman: Get real, dude. Marty is not a nick name. I don't have one either. I actually thought of giving myself one, but it wouldn't have worked. They all curdled in the presence of Azerbidaan. Gruff Azerbidaan, nope, Scruff, Tiff, Bluff, Scrap. No, no, no. I could have tried Naiman "Apricots" Azerbidaan, but that's just admitting defeat.

     Let's see. Blitz Sokol. Spark Sokol. Switch Sokol. Not quite.

Marty: You made your point.

Namiman: No, I didn't. This is not our story.

Marty: It is our story.

Naiman: No, in our story the horse is charging us.

Marty: Maybe, but that's still the story. I think that's the real story.

Naiman: Oh, of course it is. That's the

real story, that's why you're who you are, because you know where the real story is, the sad, true story, but doesn't that make it just so unfair the way this thing turns out. You get a little bit more stooped over in spite of the story being for your benefit, and Click simply becomes more Click. Better looking than us already, stronger, a head taller, broader-shouldered, a man in everyone's eyes, and after tomorrow's crucible, even more noble, suffering will render him august. Violence does him good, he will emerge a king.

     He is going to weather the storm. He will still know right from wrong. While you and I are too corrupted to ever have the complexion of a brain that cleanly metabolizes sugar without corroding into mind. When those hundred souls are ash, Click will emerge with his cheek bones more burnished, and people will see a saint in him, while you and I, for whom righteousness is a circle jerk of idiots, for us tomorrow is not going to end.  Because we know we got what we wanted, for me to be with the Turks, to look for once in the mirror and see these olive hued features as talismans of empire instead of victimization, and you, the same for you, although you will look for the residual merry Cossack, the high water marks of the conqueror in you.

     We're going to pay for this, Marty. But what I wanted to say is, it's really not our fault.  I think we can trust our words; we don't need to double check the tapes.  We got what we wanted when Click caucused with us or asked if we'd like a cup of coffee.  That's all we came for, no further test of mettle. I swear to you, Marty, we do not want this slaughter, we don't need it, and nothing we did was meant to secretly urge it on so we would be welded to Click in the fire of the event.  Our cup was already full when he deigned to stomach our names.

     (beat)

No?   

 

     The last night the entire negotiating team stayed in the trailer. They looked at each other furtively, like guys in a porno video store. Without giving the actual day or hour they had made it clear to Sorish that an invasion was in the works and nothing he could say at this point would postpone it.

     That last night they had nothing to say to each other and Rusty switched on the eavesdropping bugs and together they floated through the compound.  Marty and the crew hovered in the sacred penumbra surrounding sleepers. Rusty had cranked up the volume, and they heard the asana of a hundred bodies breathing their life breaths. These would be their last breaths. They heard this great communal breathing as a baby in the womb hears the sweet vents of his mother's lungs, a tide mighty and soothing, a great hollow entering their consciousness but already filled with love and message and majesty. Nothing but life. Nothing but life.

    

     With typical bureaucratic originality, they attacked at dawn. A tear gas belching tank was driven through the flimsy wall of the compound and at a rate of hundreds of cubic yards a minute, fumigated the buildings. After that came tremendous flames and the sequence of events is shrouded in smoke and confusion. 

     But testimony to details is not needed to know a hundred Americans were killed and cooked notwithstanding media circulating the wildest stories of mass suicide being carried out by fire coincidentally at the exact time that flammable gas was injected into a wooden barn filled with hay.

     What is not widely known is that the bugs in the building continued to work even after the temperatures were beyond human endurance.  There are places machines have gone that have been veiled from human senses.  Cameras have penetrated the atomic and the nano-second. Down there or in there or out there, are energies, active forces, the actual stitching of time emerging from nothing.  The bugs which Rusty had chosen with all the  freedom of a government budget and the enthusiasm of a technology fanatic had been developed for use in space exploration and studies of volcanic fissures on the ocean floor to monitor seismic events, and had a tolerance for climates ranging from Mercury to Pluto. It was discovered that a small readjustment made them sensitive to sound waves, not exactly in the manner of an ear-drum, but more in the way of the inner ear that hears thoughts. The air borne word was not picked up until it had entered matter,  and there in its subterranean trip through the molecular glue, the bugs filtered it back out.  Somewhat like a stethoscope placed on a breast of dirt.  Adam's breast, if you will.

     Here is what they heard as flesh burned into smoke:

 

I love you. Thank hands and lips to have been a fulcrum to give thanks for you. I waded in cool water and my feet were golden in the mineral water and looked like they belonged to someone else, oh gift, but I felt them and was grateful to those stranger's feet that were mine, oh gift, that they were mine and I could walk in cool waters.  Thanks for my breast that grew out of my heart to nurse my child, my heart, a spring that runneth over, a fountain.  Thanks for the hair that tousled in the wind, that rose on my nape, that fell heavy when wet.  Ears for sound of rain, your voice, music. Throat for laughter, for song.  First light, I reach for a flower on the green lawn.  First light, a blade of bright beneath a closed door.  First sight, first thanks, complete joy.  Awakening. 

     Then pops of hollowness as the flesh bubbled and boiled, gaps of silence which were flame gouging at the body from inside, axes of silence hacking away at arms and torsos, ripping open the chest.  The flesh is bubbling away from bones, dripping fat and suet.

     FOUR SQUARE AND DELIVER, STAND FAST. NEVER FAR FROM YOU. I HAVE HELD.

     And then even the bones split cracked, burst.

     I HEAR

     And then as they returned to ash and dust and the flames were sixty feet tall and the black smoke rose ten thousand feet in a column before unraveling,

     YOU ARE MY OWN, MY DEARLY BEGOTTEN, AND IN YOU I AM WELL PLEASED. GO FORTH AND SHINE.

 

                   CODA

 

     Marty finds Rose.  She sees him from behind the counter and walks out to where he stands at the door to the diner. The TV in the diner is showing the flames and smoke billowing out of the compound.  Outside the tall plume of black smoke is visible in the florescent white air.  It is windless and the smoke rises in a column until it reaches the jet stream where it is torn away in crepe shrouds.  Most had thought death left less ominous sign; that either they or the heavens had become used to it.

     Rose no sooner gets to Marty than he collapses to his knees and buries his head in her lap. 

Marty: I thought..My mother ..Through all of it..She always ..she led me to believe..In her eyes..that I was the beautiful one.  That it would be...there was never to be, do you see in the sky?, there would be birds each time. They would remain, all that. There was so much left if you returned to it. For those that returned, the birds you see, how they were. And that what hadn't been, it was all going to be, it was promised by me to her.  Because I was possible, then the roof of it all, over it all, the sky, songs must move through it. But only because, like birds, they had the wings for it to be there, to soar there, in it, the way it was. Love.

     Rose walked him away from the diner. He leaned against her. Above loomed the smoke like the cowl of Death.

              

      

     Rose, I'm going to have to go..back..home..back.  Rose. Just back.

     Rose, we were open. Rose, I believe, we spilled out. We spilled into the sky, you and me Rose, maybe, we're, maybe for that, we deserve, we could get some, or I could. I need, it could be considered, because, what's up there, remember?, all that wind knocking on the trailer, isn't it like, that space is just night, just more night and it could use, it doesn't have , until us, it could use what we, sticks and stones, by now, us, even you, you're so pretty Rose, but we know, by now, sticks and stones and mud, what we are, we know by now, could use it , what we can make Rose, out there, what we can make from sticks, what spilled Rose, our love, all the way to the Milky Way.

     Rose, once he ran along the rocks in a stream until he was just, until it was nothing but his heart beating and his lungs, just his heart and the stream, all of it, the rocks the stream the sun  and his heart together.

    

     Marty has a dream. He dreams it before sleeping.  He turns on the radio to the weather station and drifts away on the river of air flowing across the nation.

     There is a storm system brewing over Bakersfield, but it may not result in rain, the not unkind, young and perfectly sincere voice tells any who are listening, reporting a falling barometer and a system of thunderheads and gaseous cumulous rising over the Grapevine, where Marty knows by now the clouds  have disappeared into the night, except when flashes of high heat lightening illuminate the heavenly drifts for an instant above the bulked up hills of the ridge marking the southern wall of the Central Valley.

     The voice tells of fog moving in to blanket the coast.  Fog upon Eureka and a small boat advisory, invisible, steely combers are thundering on the empty shores, fog tangles in the pine needles.  The silent quorum of trees silently drip.

     Marty travels with the voice across the landscape hanging above towns that will have rain tonight, where eaves will drip, the empty street outside the grocery window will shine quicksilver, a cat will scoot across an empty parking lot pocked with black puddles.

     Oh sweet loneliness.

     A wind from out of the Northwest will visit Paso Robles by early morning bringing a cooling front.  The orange grooves will stir, and the branch of a bush will scrap a window, and a message of regret will arrive, some restiveness: a wandering spirit who touches each leaf, each petal, as if grief struck, tries the garden gate again, and who ripples the puddle as if to shake out the face which does not reflect back, that has been lost there.

     Oh soul.

How many have been dumped into the sky, the bag-full of their lives shaken out, this bag filled with the touch of wind on leaf, the fall of rain, and return of the fog.  Empty bag turned inside out into nothing, this collection of a lifetime blown on the wind.  Bag of emptiness amassed, how huge it is, this inconsolable loneliness that would love everything. All the proofs and eagerness for your own arrival that you collected but that only emptied you into the endless reach. 

     Finally, Marty sleeps and the steady night watchman's voice goes on, touching San Luis Obespo, Alhambra, Taylorsville, Antelope Valley, Stockton, small clusters of lights winking out, the bed-side lamp turned off, the porch light turned off, around the odd colored street lights a cosmos of insects circle endlessly, and the nation sleeps, and its dreams pour skyward into a Heaven filled with wandering souls and emptied of God.