FAUXMONT with Fred BlogZ

 NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

Steve Strether is stroking his beard as he looks down at flowers growing in front of Lou’s place on Bails lane.

“Steve, why are you looking at those weeds so intently?”

“See those pinkish blue flowers?”

“Yup, with floppy leaves.”

“Well you’re on to something. It is characteristic of Virginia Bluebells.”

“Natives!”

Diddlie told me to look out for them, Mertensia virginica, or Virginia bluebells.

“Too many names!”

“Fred, they come out around here in early Spring and soon disappear.”

“How is Lambert, by the way?”

Steve shakes his head, and looks at me.

“Fred, we lost Lambert in February, after 17 years and 11 months.”

He rubs his face with his left hand. His right is in is pocket.

“Ouch! That’s why I haven’t seen you and bel around lately.”

“Yeah, he took us out regularly.” He looks back at the ground and kicks a twig out of the way.

“So that drip you set up didn’t save him?”
“It did for about three weeks. Then he faded again, and another blood test

showed he didn’t have long.”

Steve looks up at me again.

“We had to let him go.” Steve takes off his glasses and rubs his left eye.

All he did was sleep and he could hardly get up and walk around.”

“What did he die of, Steve?”

“Kidney disease.” He puts his glasses back on, looking down at his feet as he hooks them over his ears. There’s a gust of wind high in the trees and some dried leaves float down on to us.

“Sad day for you and bel. I miss him too, I mean I don’t think I have ever seen you out here without him.”

“No you wouldn’t have. In fact he was around that time I first met you, remember? outside the Pie Shop.”

“Right! We went up to Artie’s studio and you introduced me to her … and Bounder, wasn’t he down there too?”

“Yeah, I think Bounder was pulling up daffodils or something … you know Fred, I still look for Lambert when I get up in the morning.”

“A friendly face!”

“That’s right, in fact when his tail gets going it’s as if he is speaking with his whole body.”

“I know. He had such expressive ears too. They went down when you touch him and back up again when he couldn’t feel you hand anymore.”

“Bel says she often looks for him around the house. It’s like a reflex.”

Some more leaves and twigs fall out of the nearby white oak, and land around us.

“Look at that up there.” Steve is pointing directly above our heads.

“You mean the squirrel’s drey?”

“Oh, I though it might be an eagle’s nest.”

“An eagle’s nest! where? where?”

Lark is standing next to us. We hadn’t noticed her coming along.

She is carrying something rolled up in her hand.

“There isn’t one Lark, Fred mistook that squirrel drey up there in the white oak.”

“Oh, is that the same as a squirrel’s nest?”

“The same.”

“Yeah, see them all over the place.”

Lark unrolls the papers in her hand, and gives us each a flyer announcing the Democracy Spring demonstration in front of the Capitol.

“Is Lou home?”

“I don’t know Lark.”

“Fred, you two are buddies aren’t you? I mean I thought you were on your way in, but you haven’t moved.”

“No it’s the Virginia bluebells that got this group started.”

“Well come on Steve, let’s rouse him!”

Lark starts towards Lou’s door with its big pewter door knocker and a tall window on each side like flat columns.”

The door opens before she gets to it, and he steps out.

His hair is pointing in all direction and he squints from under wild black eyebrows without glasses on. He has no belt in his jeans. He is bare foot with an old paint stained t-shirt on.

“Okay, what did I do now?”

“Looks like you just woke up!”

“Yeah, I fell asleep on the sofa last night watching the primaries. The wife is away on business. I woke up and looked outside and saw this gang approaching.”

Lark steps forward, offering him a flyer.

“Here Lou, you woke up at the right moment!”

“What you got there, Lark … You got a permit to carry those things?”

“The flyer is its own permit Lou.”

“Not where I come from, and any flyer in your hands Lark, is bound to be dangerous!”

“Well it’s an election year and I know you guys are all Bernie supporters!”

“Not me kid!”

“Lou, we need to talk!”

“Well okay Lark, but I don’t think the guy has a hope, and his program is going to be DOA at Congress anyway, if, God forbid, he should end up in the White House.”

“Lark goes in and Lou walks forward towards Steve and me, still squinting. His face dark with a day’s heavy beard.”

“Fred, Steve, what you standing out here for?”

“We are checking out the bluebells.”

Lou looks down at them on both sides of the path and spreading out at the road-side.

“We used to call them cowslip.”

“No cattle around here now.”

“No Fred, it’s been sixty years since the dairy farm was sold for real-estate.”

He bends down to examine the plants more closely, pulling out an ivy vine.

“You know, my daughter planted these before Iraq.”

He straightens up and brushes them with the sole of his bare foot.

“They spread don’t they.”

He rubs his eyes, turns and heads back inside, only to stop and turn around.

“Come in for coffee, when you’re through.”

He goes in and pulls his door to. Then he reappears, just his head, and a hand pushing his hair to one side.

“You trying to ring those bells or what?”

Lou doesn’t wait for a response.

“What do you think Steve, would you like to go in?”

“I have time, sure.”

We go through into the foyer, closing the door, and then there’s a beeping sound.

“What’s that Steve?

“I don’t know. Did you bump into something?”

“No, it sounds like a smoke alarm.”

Lou walks fast down the passage from the kitchen towards us, sliding on a small rug across the polished floorboards towards the wall. He lifts up a framed print of Vermeer’s View of Delft, at eye level. It seems to be hinged to the wall at the top. He punches a button on a recessed panel hidden underneath and then pulls his phone out of his back pocket and starts messaging.

“Go on through guys. I’ll be right with you.”

We walk over to find Lark standing in the kitchen looking at a tall ficus tree reaching for the skylight. It has some Christmas balls still hanging in it high up.

Lou is soon with us, behind the counter, and making coffee in a large glass Chemex coffee maker with brown filter paper. He is boiling water in a battered saucepan with blackened bottom and an ill-fitting lid. Sun from the skylight gleams on his polished granite counter top. Lark’s flyers lie slightly curled in front of her. She is opening a five-pound Snaz Super Store pack of sugar. She pulls a tab on top but nothing happens.

“What’s with the sugar Lou?”

“Ah, we shouldn’t be using it.”

“I know, but you got it out, so I thought you wanted it opened.”

“Well, I thought you might like some in your coffee.”

“Yeah okay … ah, thanks Lou. I pulled this tab, but it isn’t opening.”

Lou grabs the pack with a grin. Then he puts it down again.

“Excuse me.”

Lou walks out of the room. Steve and I sit down on stools on either side of Lark facing towards the stove. Lou comes back with his black framed glasses on with his eyebrows curling over the top. He squints at the counter top.

“Sorry about the strong reflection here.”

He turns back  and flips a switch on the wall under the cabinets.

“I just put in this nifty gadget to take care of …”

The switch activates a motorized shade in the skylight and the defused light evens out all over the room. He picks up the sugar packet and opens it with a pair of scissors.

“Lou we need to talk about money in politics.”

“We do?”

“See, the flyer made specially for folks around here who don’t always find stuff on line.”

“Yeah, so what about it?”

“Will you join us?”

“Ah, probably not. I mean we wouldn’t have any politics without funding.”

“Right, but funding is out of proportion. Rich people and big companies dominate the process.”

“You mean Lee Leavenworth Knox’s supporters?”

“Could be Lou, but he is only one of many with rich backers.”

“Like the Orange Delft PAC.”

“What’s wrong with that Steve?”

“Lou we both know that Orange is really the Dordrechts Group.”

“Oh you mean Platitudes for Plenty, and Prune Stone Group.”

“Steve, they are all mixed together in complicated ways.”

“One thing I can tell you is that Orange and Delft have nothing to do with CUPA, but Prune stone and Platitudes, both support CUPA.”

He starts pouring water from his battered pot over the coffee.”

“Lou, why don’t you get a kettle?”

“That’s a long story Steve, but the short version is I prefer this. For one thing it isn’t Snaz.”

“Makes a change, everything seems to be Snaz now.”

“So that’s it Lou! Prune Stone, or one of them, is paying Albrecht!”

“Yeah, he’s an activist, probably, Fred.”

“Lou, I have been wondering about the source of his income for a long time.”

“You remember that party I had a few years ago with all that speech trucked in here?”

“How could I forget a political party like that?”

“Well I went to one last month, over in the District, with more than twice that much speech. They had four eighteen wheelers parked there, fully loaded.”

“That’s what the Citizen’s United case has done Lou. Our votes don’t mean much against money like that.”

“Lark, I am no Knox supporter, but he has brought a lot of business and prosperity our way.”

“Well Lou, let’s talk about Democracy Spring! See it on the flyer I just gave you?”

Lou starts pouring coffee in the mugs he put on the counter in from of us; an orange one with a big handle and several odd ones from the Elegant Ostrich’s porcelain cartoon collection. One with a caricature of Sen. Knox sitting on top of Fort Knox juggling gold bars, mine shows the Queen of England knighting Mickey Mouse and a fourth mug with Two Washington Monuments supporting a billboard with a picture of Osiris Tarantula outside her New York boutique

Lou fills his own orange mug last and raises it as if in a toast.

“Here, drink…sorry no creamer but, there’s five pounds of sugar.“

He picks up the flyer to read.

“You mean these folks walked 130 miles?”

“Right Lou, from Philly, we want big money out of politics.”

“That’s like taking the gas out of a car!”

“It shouldn’t be Lou. The voters should be in power.”

“Lark, no one gets into Congress without the votes, one way or another.”

“I know, but once they get there…”

“They need sugar for their coffees!”

“Steve, there’s all kinds of powerful sweeteners on the Hill.”

Lark grabs the sugar bag and folds the opening over, and holds it closed. “And Lou, we want to end gerrymandering, and reinstate mechanisms from the Voting Rights Act.”

Steve looks up from his copy of the flyer with his Knox mug in hand.

“Sure I agree with that!”

 NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

I find Lou unexpectedly, outside Jake’s mansion, on my way up Oval Street to visit Diddlie. He is on his way down the sunny hill with his jacket over his arm. We stop.

“Lou! Have you seen Jake lately?”

“Yeah, remember, I had a chat with Liberty too.”

Lou takes off his aviator sunglasses and looks down at the road.

“Another dead squirrel.”

The skull protrudes from the skin and fur. Two paws are up near the flattened snout. The rest of the squashed carcass is undifferentiated fur but for the tail, and has dried enough to start curling up slightly from the road surface. Two crows call to each other. One from the utility pole between Jake’s and Diddlie’s properties, another hidden among the branches above.

“Road kill!”

“Keeps the crows going.”

“Yeah, we don’t know half of what is going on out here.”

“The Barred owl we saw last week, was hooting first thing this morning.”

“Traffic is getting heavier. These streets looked so quiet when I first moved here, Lou.”

”I think it’s getting busier and noisier every year.”

”I see more and more squirrels too. Why aren’t the foxes keeping the population down?”

“They get run down too. Saw a dead one on the side of the Parkway the other day.”

“Have you seen those big houses going up along there.”

“Yup, I don’t think there is a vacant lot within a mile of here.”

“No, they’re tearing down the small older houses to make room for more big ones.”

Lou looks up at two squirrels chasing each other past the garage doors in the granite-faced wall of Jake’s house. He puts his glasses back on.

“You know Jake and Gale are divorcing.”

“No, someone told me she had moved out West to be near Liberty.”

“Well, that’s part of it.”

The small garage door opens about half way.

“Well, look who’s here!”

Liberty Trip ducks under and walks toward us, leaving the door half way up.

“How are you doing, Liberty?”

“Hi, LouLou” She looks at me, “Fred, how are you?”

Her red jeans match her red shoes. She looks down at the road kill.

“What was that, a squirrel?”

Our shadows merge on the blacktop, covering the road kill, and then separate as I move to keep the sun out of my eyes.

“It is dangerous on our streets, Liberty.”

She looks up, pushing back the brim of her white baseball cap with the Snaz logo on the front.

“Well, guys, I guess it is. Did you hear that owl this morning?”

“Who Cooks for You? Who Cooks for You?”

“That’s the Barred, Liberty. Is it fun being back home?”

“Lou, it’s good to be back, hearing that owl and all, but it isn’t.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“Well the situation isn’t easy…my parents are splitting and I really don’t feel comfortable around the house any more. I don’t even know if it really is ours.”

“I thought you had left for good.”

“Fred, I just came back again thanks to Dad’s plane.”

“So you got a nice free ride.”

“Well, he was on the phone or computer when he wasn’t sleeping. Yes Fred, I didn’t have to pay an airline.”

We move into shade from the broad trunks of Diddlie’s white oaks, growing on the edge of the roadside ditch and not yet in leaf.

“Liberty, what are you doing out West?”

“Oh, Lou, I got a bull-shit job at a call center.”

“Doesn’t Jake have any helpful connections out there?”

“Those connections get complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, not sex or anything … well one time it might have been, but I was out of there before lunch.”

“Propositioned you?”

“Not in so many words…I could see where lunch was going, you know.”

“Oh, yes!”

“See Lou, if Dad gets me a job, at some point I am always asked to tell him, or ask him something, and that puts me in the middle of, of, you know…I don’t want any part of it…I am going to make my own way!”

“So what’s the job like?”

“Fred, it is machine-idiocy!”

“Sounds impressive, it used to take a person to be an idiot.”

“Right! Now I have the help of a computer terminal.”

“To do what exactly?”

“I sit in a big room. We are kind of warehoused. There are lots of other people in little booths. We answer callers’questions, and a lot of the questions are outside the scope of the script I have to follow on the screen.”

“So what do you do then?”

“I’m not allowed to answer, Fred.”

“But isn’t that your job?’

“No, my minimum wage job is to move the caller on to the next question on my script. That is, sell them another product.”

“So, what if the caller persists?”

“You call the supervisor, then you lose points for taking too long.”

“What are you supposed to do?”

“Don’t try to make sense of it…you can’t…the thing was kind of put together on the fly. They’re always tweaking it. Sometimes even the supervisors don’t know what’s going on.”

“Sounds like the pits!”

“You have to earn a certain number of points a month to keep the job. You get points for getting the customer to buy a new service and points for answering them from the script, and so on.”

“There’s been growth in minimum wage jobs like that.”

“Lou, I thought they did that work in Mumbai.”

“They do Fred, but poverty-stricken areas here are now competitive.”

“Liberty, can you get by on a job like that?”

“No Way,Fred, Mom has a house, I’m staying there. It’s a long drive but gas is cheap…Anyway I’ve probably lost the job by now, being here this long… it will be four days by Friday when we fly back.”

“So what brings you back?”

“I still have some stuff here, you know…I want to get everything of mine out of the house, use the free flight back and move on.”

“On to what?”

“Maybe start another band.”

“Well! Are you going to visit, or just hang out on the street?”

It’s Diddlie looking down through the bare branches and shouting to us from up the hill. Standing outside her front porch in her wide brimmed straw hat and gardening gloves like big gauntlets. She holds a leaf rake by the handle with the green plastic tines spread out in a fan above her head as if it is waving.

“Hi, Liberty waves back, and starts moving up the hill towards Diddlie’s porch, and Lou and I follow. We step across the ditch, cut through the ivy past the big trunks, step over a jagged fallen branch with pale brown lichens on the bark, and then crunch across her gravel driveway towards her.

“Lou, I thought you were going to the hardware store for me.”

“Right, you see what happened? I’ll get those half-inch screws and put them in later.”

“Yes I can see. Fred, were you coming up to see me? I thought we had a date! Where have you been?”

“Diddlie, are you our area supervisor or something?”

“Well sorry, but I’ve had a hell of a morning!”

“I called you just now Diddlie, and you didn’t pick up, so here I am.”

“Yeah I heard the phone, but I was changing the straw for Mr. Liddel.

Then saw a snake and chased him off.”

“Its way too early for snakes.”

“Lou, you can tell him that when you find him. It’s been hot lately you know. That wakes them up! And the cherries are all coming out too, and the Bradford Pears.”

“Diddlie, are you sure it wasn’t a hose?”

“Yes, Liberty, I saw a black snake. Have you ever seen a hose that moves itself across a cement floor and out into the grass? I don’t mind snakes around here. They keep the mice down for one thing. I just don’t want them around Mr. Liddel. I figured you’d see it when you were coming up through the ivy.”

“No, didn’t see anything.”

“What’s that sound?”

“What sound Liberty?”

“It’s coming from your house?”

Diddlie turns to look back at her house.

“Listen…there! Hear it?”

“It’s the Red Queen I left her in her cage and she wants her morning fly around.”

“Oh your parrot! Can we go in and see her?”

“Not right now. There’s too much going on… I was thinking of you this morning. Liberty.”

“You were?”

“I’m trying out internet banking… I don’t really trust it but the teller talked me into it last week. Any way, you know, there’s passwords and security questions and all kinds of stuff. Then, you know, I click on this and then that and then five other things but it never does what I want, and you know what?”

“What, Diddlie ?”

“I called the help number.”

“The line was busy, right?”

“How did you guess, Lou?”

“Because when ever I call those places the voice says they have an exceptionally high call volume and ‘you are now tenth in the que’ or something.”

“Well, it was six thirty this morning, so I just waited until some one came on, probably after 7. Then the line went dead. So I called back, and after another wait, they wanted to know about my mortgage payments, my auto loan, my insurance, and just kept burrowing into my business.

“Right, its called help, but it is really sales.”

“Liberty, I wasn’t getting any help!”

“The company helps itself. The call is an ideal opportunity. Diddlie, you are a captive audience.”

Oh I know! I was so mad, and I am sorry, Liberty, but I just told them to go to hell!”

“Ah right! and…ah, did you solve your problem?”

“Hell no!”

 The snow stopped a few minutes ago, an opportunity to stock up on apple juice. It is quiet and still outside, as white as any laundry detergent could make it. No breeze, no leaf rattle, no traffic, no aircraft, no birds, no water dripping from the gutters, nobody on the street, ill-defined by subtle parallel depressions curving up the hill where the ditches are buried a foot below.

The plough comes through, clearing a narrow lane and blocking all the driveways with a couple of feet of compressed snow and ice. It is Albrecht in his shiny black Hummer; an orange blade is mounted in front with “The Boss” printed on it in big black letters. He turns around at the corner and comes back the other way, widening the lane he first cleared and pushing another pile into the ditch opposite.

He stops and opens the window.

“Yo Fred!”

I climb the obstacle he has just pushed across my path and kick a footing into the top to talk to him from there.

“Albrecht, thanks for clearing the road.”

Now more people are coming out. A snow-covered Kia stops behind him with a little lime green paint showing through. I can see further down past the branches dropping white cascades onto the plowed path as the sun rises high enough to warm them. Two more vehicles are coming. The white Mercedes must be moments out of the garage. It hasn’t got a flake on its gleaming metal curves and then, as it stops behind the green Kia the windshield is covered by a deluge from branches above.

“Fred, I have got to keep moving, and I am only going in circles.”

I walk on to the Safeway when the cars have passed in Albrecht’s path. Engine exhaust settles out of the air replaced by the odor of fabric softener, which lingers in my nose like a sweet insidious disease. The Lighthouse gas station has only two pumps clear. A blue Suburban pushes slowly past the pumps with snow curling up into the curved blade like a breaking wave. Faruk mans the island with a broom sweeping clouds of flakes into the path of the plow.

It must be Daisy up ahead. I can see her bowler hat above the roofs of a few cars parked in the spaces cleared near the entrance. She enters with her shopping bag hanging empty from the end of her long arm. She has her black ski pants on and a pea coat on with yards of orange scarf wrapped around her neck so many times that brilliant sunlit color is spilling off her shoulders.

I catch her up inside looking at a wire basket full of discounted breads.

“Hi Fred, do these look like a good deal?”

“You get a lot for your money.”

“Yeah Fred, that’s what I am looking at too.”

“Might be stale though, check the dates.”

“Oh I do, I do. Have to … my budget is tight.”

“Do you have time for something at the Pie Shop?”

We walk over to the meat counter. Daisy picks up a packet of plastic wrapped chicken thighs, on sale.

“Ah, well, maybe … these have more flavor than white meat and they’re pretty good after about eight hours in the crock pot.”

I pay at the self-checkout with Daisy ahead of me. She puts her groceries in a plastic bag and winds it up into a package and then places that into another plastic bag, and puts them both in her shopping bag. We walk out together and follow a long narrow path, left by a single pass of a snow blower, all the way to the front of the pie shop.

We come to a shiny trickle across our path as sunrays heat up the black-top and snow melts. Daisy throws some snow down and steps through without slipping. Now she takes more snow and drops it into her shopping bag.

“That will keep my chicken cold.”

She claps her hand against her side to get the snow off her gloves and Mrs. Rutherford opens the door for us at the Pie Shop.

“Come on, come on, you are the first today. I only just got things warmed up here. There’s no help yet so you’re going to have to wait a minute.”

I sit down by a window and Daisy hangs her shopping bag packed with snow on the back of her chair. We look out and watch the

drips falling off the roof and icicles forming over the doorway.

Daisy is still standing by her chair. She puts her bowler on the table

with a purple paper folded and sticking up from the band,

and unwinds her orange scarf, gathering it in her left hand like coils of rope.

“So Daisy, how have you been?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Too long to tell?”

“God, no one knows it all yet.”

“Do you?”

“No, come to think of it. There’s still a long way to go, at least I hope … if I don’t loose the house that is.”

“Ouch! You mean you’re behind?”

“Oh I haven’t made any payments for two years!”

“I had no idea Daisy, I mean I thought you inherited the place.”

“I did, but there was a lien on it, then I had to borrow more to get the roof fixed and some plumbing and other stuff.”

“So what happened?”

“Bush’s financial crash happened, at least that’s what Lark calls it.

I mean I am not getting enough jobs.”

“How about the window for Jake?”

“Not really … he did give me a few hundred to get started and then I

never heard any more, and I bought a lot of glass.”

“Well, do you blame it all on Bush?”

“I don’t really know what I think … you know it’s all about greed … yes I blame greed!”

“Yup! it’s greed that makes the system go around!”

“So yes, right … you know there are laws to protect against this kind of crash but what happened? You know, Lark says Clinton repealed

something … that protection I mean … You know Clinton! You know, how did that happen?”

“It must be awkward dealing with Boyd on one side and Lark on the other!”

“Not really. You know Boyd is just following what Albrecht says. He still has to find out what he thinks himself …”

Mrs. Rutherford calls from behind the counter.

“Folks, you want coffee or tea?”

“Do you have hot chocolate?”

“If you don’t mind it out of a package. I can’t make the good stuff right now, hon.”

Daisy walks over to the counter and turns to me and asks if I want

want hot chocolate, and I do. She orders two.

“Its on me Daisy!”

I get up and move towards the counter

“I got it Fred.”

“I can pay for my own at least.”

“Its okay, go sit down.”

Mrs. Rutherford uses the espresso machine to steam the drinks into a hot sweet froth in a tall sky blue cup. I linger, contemplating the pale brown crusts undulating above a depth of fruit in two, thick, unsliced pies. They seem like sacred objects carefully centered on the shelf under the protective glass counter.

“How about a slice of cherry/peach or apple?”

“No thanks I got enough sugar here.”

Daisy picks up the two mugs and takes them back to the table.

I follow and sit down. She offers me one, handle first.

“Do you want to sit down?”
“Oh, in a minute.”

She stands by the chair I expect her to sit in, sipping, and looks around the room over the top of her mug. She holds the mug out at arms length and looks at it.

“I am just stuck on the island of my perceptions.”

“I suppose we all are in a way.”

“No, I don’t think Boyd’s perceptions preoccupy him much. He kind of looks inward, he feels a lot more than he can see.”

“Don’t you think perception can grow through conversation and discussion?”

“Well, understanding can.”

“Look at that dirty great mountain of filthy snow!”

“That’s one way to clear the parking lot, just pile it up.”

“Yeah, like debts … except they don’t melt.”

“Both national and personal …”

“You know Fred, Albrecht has come around.”

“He has? In what sense?”

“Boyd said he is following Trump for the Republican nomination.

He says Trump supports, a single payer health system, women’s right to choose, and he even said that Bush screwed up when he invaded Iraq!”

“You mean those are his reasons for supporting Trump?”

“Right, I don’t get it. I thought Trump was conservative and all that.”

“I don’t get it either. I thought Albrecht toed the Republican party line.”

“He did until he and Boyd started listening to Trump.”

“That is hard to believe.”

“I don’t believe I’ll be able to keep the house, you know, and if I was an entrepreneur I’d probably have lots of ideas … well I wouldn’t … I mean I’d be rich like Trump I guess.”

“You are an entrepreneur! Artists have to be.”

“Am I?”

“As Trump can tell you entrepreneurs go broke too.”

“No they go bankrupt! But he knows how to come out of it with money.”

“Have you consulted a lawyer?”

“Oh sure, spent seven hundred dollars I don’t have and filed for bankruptcy so the bank can’t sell the place out from under me.”

Daisy puts down her mug and walks around the table to sit so she is facing out of the window. She is facing the parking lot.

“Spending money you don’t have is not an easy trick.”

“No, Boyd said I am ‘Trumpeting’, because he made his fortune with borrowed money, went bankrupt and now look at him.”

Daisy is turning her head at an odd angle.

“Your neck hurt?”

“No, can you see that reflection?”

“What, can you point it out?”

“Well if you get it at the right angle the whole room is reflected in this window so you see the inside and outside together.”

“Don’t think I can see it from here.”

“Well I am in that position. I got a loan I can’t pay back to stay in my house I don’t own that is my home, that I can’t live in any more.”

“So you bought some time.”

“Yeah, my borrowed time has run out too. I got the letter last week.

The bank is going to sell my house in March.”

“Oh Daisy, what are you going to do?”

“Well, I have another letter from my home preservation specialist saying they are working on a settlement.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t know what they are talking about!”

“Well, what do you do now?”

“I might move into my car.”

“You have a car?”

“Sure, it’s an old Ford Taurus station wagon, curvy with a really cool back window. I drive up to Maine in it every summer.”

“You sure it runs?”

“Boyd drove it to Richmond back in the Fall.”

“Can’t you camp out with any one?”

“Oh maybe, I haven’t asked any one.”

“What about Diddlie or Artie?”

“I don’t want to ask … either one might help, but suppose they didn’t … God! how horrible! … I am thinking of having a nomad period you know. Ditch most of my stuff, like the whole house and contents, and put what I need in the car and take off out of this snow.”

“What an idea!”

“I could use public rest rooms, visit charities for meals and read at libraries, and paint in good weather.”

“What about gas?”

“Plastic.”

NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

Lambert is standing motionless, close to the bole of a big white oak, apparently lost in his own world. He isn’t sniffing the bark, or the dead leaves on the ground around him, or the straggly mint stalks or the briar spreading there, out towards the lawn. His white fur has grown over his eyes and he seems preoccupied. Long soiled white fur hangs down his sides like a ragged skirt. Steve and bel don’t groom him much but do give him an occasional trim to get the mats out. So Lambert usually has a few leaves or bits of mulch on him somewhere. Azalea leaves stick to his coarse white fur, which sticks to leaves as if it were velcro. He was rolling under the big mature azelias in front of Steve Strether’s windows as I approached. He doesn’t seem to notice me as I walk over to chat with Steve. Lambert has been deaf for the last three years, not completely but largely. He stopped barking at the time. He used to go out after meals to bark, sometimes for too long and they would go out to stop him. He still hears sharp sounds like a door slamming. He usually notices people when they get as close as I am now.

“What’s happened to Lambert?”

“He is not well. He’s been getting less responsive lately so we asked the vet to look at him.”

We both wave to Rank Majors as he passes in his car towards the shopping center.

“Did you get a diagnosis Steve?”

“Bel took him in fact. She reports that he has kidney disease.”

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it’s as if he is a person, I mean we can’t talk about anything else!”

“Lambert is a personable dog.”

“Well yes, we made him into a person with all our talk.”

“He speaks to me with his ears you know Steve.”

“You mean dog-body language!”

“Yes he’s very good at it. Where is bel by the way?”

“She has gone to pick up a bag of medical drip and needles for his infusions.”

“What kind of fluid?”

“Electrolytes apparently.”

“Is he eating?”
“No, not enough, he’s supposed to be on a special premium diet. It’s crazy … like a human patient!”

“Our pets now have specialists such as oncologists, just like us … if people can afford it that is.”

“And who is the treatment for?”

“That’s a good question. Some people keep their pets alive because they can’t stand to loose them.”

“Meanwhile the animal may suffer painful interventions and drugs and all that.”

“Yes like a person with no choices. What a nightmare!”

“Well Fred, I woke up from a dream last night feeling as if we had been talking.”

“You and Lambert you mean?

“Yup”

“What was he talking about?”

“It was hard to understand Fred.”

“Was he speaking in dog or English!”

“In English, but using an arcane vocabulary.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was pointing out different scents in the air which I couldn’t get.”

“Was he impatient?”

“No, no, no, he thought I was on to something he had missed.”

“What did he ask?’

“That is when I woke up.”

“Oh too bad!”

“Well, there is no knowing where that dream was going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it really about Lambert? It might have taken another turn you see.”

“Isn’t it funny how waking up and remembering at a certain moment makes the whole context.”

“Yes, a few moments later I might have been far from Lambert, back at school or something.”

“So you live with him even in your sleep!”

“We do, he sleeps on our bed moving his legs in dreams of his own, and farts in the night!”

“No wonder, if he eats that prescription canned stuff.”

“But he won’t Fred, he doesn’t like it.”

“Have you looked at the ingredients?”

“Yes, the label is in Spanish, and my Spanish is limited to a few words, but I think it has lamb in it and a lot of junk.”

“Have you tried a little baked chicken, with rice?”

“The vet says he shouldn’t have too much fat or protein.”

“Oh, I suppose he can’t metabolize it properly.”

“Yes, something like that. Any way, I am not going to let him starve to death refusing to eat that prescription junk. Why not let the old boy die on a full stomach?”

Down at the foot of the oak, Lambert is back with us. He’s moved slowly through the briars towards a brown hosta stalk sniffing with care and delicacy. The stalk is dried and brittle and his nose barely touches it as he moves up and down the bottom half. He misses his footing and falls back on his hind legs.

“You see that Fred? His hind leg muscles are weakening.”

“He’s recovered though, look!”

“He has, he’s moving quite well now circling out on the grass. He also sleeps about 22 hours a day.”

Rank Majors is walking towards us.

“Rank, where’s your car?”

“Left it at the gas station Fred … for an oil change …

Hey pooch!”

Lambert doesn’t respond. So Rank leans down to give his ears a rub and Lambert grunts, and falls back on his hind legs again.

“Is he okay?”

“No, poor old guy is fading out.”

A car door slams and Lambert startles. He isn’t sure where the sound came from and looks around but can’t see because he is back by the tree trunk.

“Oh! How old is he?”

“Lambert would be eighteen in February if he makes it.”

bel has parked on the driveway and comes over with a plastic shopping bag which is sagging and bellying out. She walks up close to Steve.

“I have got the stuff from the vet Steve.”

“Ouch!”

“I know … Hi Fred have you been told?”

“Yes we were talking about Lambert just now.”

“ … and about talking to Lambert!”

“Oh Steve we are really talking to our selves.”

“I am not, I talk to the dog.”

“Honey he doesn’t understand our words.”

“Bel, we both know he gets something though.”

“We made him into our love object. We aren’t talking to the wet nosed fur. We talk about the ‘dog’, Lambert, as much our idea as an animal.”

“Okay bel, he’s like a character, that’s what is so hard isn’t it? I mean he isn’t entirely fictional.”

“No he’s not. We shall have to let go the idea as well as the critter.”

“Well, not quite yet. He is still interested in the world and he’s not hurting.”

“Okay, so anyway Steve, are you going to do it?”

“Do it?”

“I mean who’s going to jab him with the needle?”

“You are!”

“I thought you were!”

“Have you ever done it before?”

“No Rank, the vet gave us a demonstration yesterday though.”

“Right, he grabbed a bunch of fur on the back of his neck and pulled it up tent-like, then stuck the needle in between the raised skin and the body.”

“That’s right Steve. I had to do it for our cat years ago. You need any help?”

“Thanks Rank, we’ll be alright.”

“We will Steve? So you are going to do it right?”

“No honey, I mean we’ll work it out.”

“Ah huh, I guess so, but I would really appreciate some help Rank even if Steve doesn’t feel the need.”

“Sure bel, just tell me when.”

“Have you got time today, like now?”

“Now Honey! do we have to do this now?”

“We don’t have to but if Rank has time then there’s no time like the present.”

“Sure we can give him a jab now. It will only take ten minutes or less once you get set up”

Steve picks up Lambert with a hand under his chest and the other under his hind legs. Steve’s salt and pepper beard covers the top of his head, which is up under his chin and Lambert’s white fury ears are sticking out at odd angles on either side of Steve’s face. We all start towards the back door and go in the kitchen. Uncomfortable as he looks Lambert doesn’t make a sound as he is carried in. Steve puts Lambert down hind legs first on the kitchen floor. The linoleum is slippery and he has trouble getting up as his front legs keep slipping out to the side. Bel comes in with a bath mat and lifts him on to that for firmer footing.

“So what do you think Rank?”

“You need somewhere to hang the bag. You got a hook on the wall anywhere?”

“Here!”

Bel opens a cupboard door next to the dryer, which has two hooks on the inside. She takes an apron off one and throws it over her shoulder. Then hangs the drip bag in place.

“Fred, would you grab that towel to put over the top of the dryer and we can work on him there.” I take a towel hanging from the oven door handle and spread it over the top of the dryer.

Steve hangs the bag from the vacant hook.

“We are nearly ready.”

“Here’s a bag of needles Rank.” Bel hands him a small ziplock bag.

He takes out one of the needles and attaches it to the bottom of the tube coming down from the bag hanging up on the cupboard door.

Then he releases a valve half way down the tube and the fluid squirts out of the needle on to the towel.

“You have to get the bubbles out of the line. Here take a look.”

We crowd around Rank, and look for bubbles in the length of flexible transparent plastic tube. There’s a tiny gap just beyond the valve, like a bubble in a builder’s level. It gradually moves down the tube toward the needle and disappears. Now the line is uninterrupted by any gaps.

“Okay folks lift the patient up here.”

Bel picks up Lambert neatly from the bath mat and places him on top to the dryer with his paws nicely aligned under him back and in front. He moves his head from side to side. He tries to stand up, but bel keeps hold of his head, looking into his eyes and cooing.

“So here goes, nothing to it, He won’t even feel it!”

“Easy for you to say!”

“Just watch Steve, pull up some fur, like this, back here on his neck behind the ears, see?”

Rank has Lambert by the scruff of the neck in his left hand and pushes the needle into the midst of the raised skin with his right, just as the vet’s demonstration was described.

“That way he can’t bite if he gets mad … just don’t jab yourself!”

He releases the valve and we can see the fluid dripping from the bag into a little reservoir where the tube attaches.

Steve’s ring chimes sound, and he lets them go on unanswered until they stop.

NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

Herman Intaglio is ahead of me walking towards the self-check out line at the Snaz Super Store, where I am buying what I first picked up as a pair of gardening gloves. In fact it is a three pack. You can pay by smart phone but neither of us has moved into smart communications, and so here we shall stand dumb, and in line. Looks like he has has an electronic Snaz leaf blower with all the bells and whistles in his shopping cart. It is vacuum packed in plastic on a red and orange cardboard backing. A suburban family is pictured with the leaf blower in action. Blond young boy and girl smile next blond Mom sitting on a low retaining wall next to a huge unblemished pumpkin, while dark-haired Dad blows a cloud of generic leaves off a perfectly even deep green lawn. His deltoids fill out his shirt and well-muscled arms are tanned coming out of his immaculate white tea shirt worn outside his faded denims. I see him from the side, his strong chin points the way for blower and leaves. No dust shown, and Mom and the kids are blissfully unmoved by the noise this picture can’t show. Even the golden retriever lying at their feet is unmoved by Dad’s powerful gadget. Bright wet nose glistens above smiling open mouth and thin wet tongue rests between his tall white canines. Every one is out on this perfect sunny fall day to smile, be happy and watch Dad blow and bag the pesky leaves, which, if left around, will ruin the carpet of lawn and turn it back into forest.

Herman turns for some reason and sees me.

“Fred, you got one of these?

“Not yet, still use a rake.”

“This is quicker, and it has this neat feature. It will vacuum the leaves and feed them into a bag, as well as blow!”

“Very useful, but I’ve been composting you know.”

“Too much of a stench Fred, and you get germs in there and critters messing. Bag them Fred. The county will pick them up.”

“They won’t stink if you only put in leaves and grass clippings.”

“Naa… I stay away from rotten vegetation.”

“Have you been away? Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Yes got a teaching gig out west for a year.”

“Where?”

“Aurora College, up in Canada.”

“Oliver! Oliver … get over here! Mommy’s phone needs charging we have to pay over here.”

The woman in front of us is calling a child of perhaps four running around the kiosk where the presiding cashier sits to help those having difficulty checking out. Oliver is imitating a siren so loud his voice distorts and he starts coughing.

“Oliver, why are you coughing?”

Ignoring the call, Oliver strips off his brown fleece jacket and leaves it on the floor in the path of those on their way out with heavily laden carts. The woman calling him grabs his arm as he comes by.

“Go get your jacket.” He tries to wrench himself free but can’t.

“Oliver, go get your jacket.” She still doesn’t let go of his arm. Oliver starts jumping up and down chanting; “Buy it, once Buy it twice, and SAVE!, It’s half price”. The jingle is playing over and over again at a nearby display of garden furniture. The woman turns her cart towards the pay station ahead of us. She begins scanning items with her free hand, but has trouble, then the light above her pay station starts flashing. The machine’s voice says, ”Please wait for assistance”, Oliver stops his chant and stands at his mother’s side staring at the machine. She turns back to the child, stroking his short brown hair with her affectionate hand and then pulls his green t-shirt down at the back where it had ridden up as he unloaded his fleece.

“Oliver, are you listening to me?”

His face is reddening as he jumps and chants breathlessly, and his shirt rides up again as he jumps.

“Oliver, What did I just say to you?”

He has turned his back distracted by an electric cart going by loaded with cartons. A flashing light turning on top of a mast above the driver’s head reminds Oliver of emergency vehicles and the siren sound. He starts up again and immediately coughs.

“Here, Oliver. Oliver, you want a Twinky? Have a Twinky honey”

She has a small packet in her other hand. The cart with its exciting flashing light has passed. It is till visible reflecting off a stainless steel refrigerator on display yards away. Oliver turns again now trying to climb the back of the woman’s shopping cart. He pulls on a low hanging strap of her purse. The purse opens wide enough for her pen, compact, keys, a notebook and three more Twinkies to fall on the floor.

“Oliver, honey, look what you have done to Mommy’s purse!”

A uniformed woman with a badge of Glitz Security Services, on duty at the exit, steps towards her and gives her Oliver’s jacket.

“Oh thank you!”

Oliver runs off down the paint and decorating isle behind us.

“Oliver get back here, do you hear me? Oliver! Oliver!”

There’s no sign of him for a few moments.

Herman bends down and picks up the woman’s compact, keys, and notebook. The pen has rolled under the cart out of reach, as have the Twinkies. He straightens up and tries to offer her the things he has picked up, but she has hurried off to look for Oliver who comes running over with a can of white spray paint.

“Oliver, give me the can.”

Oliver dances around waving it in the air and drops it. The cap falls off. She steps quickly towards him to grab the can off the floor and Oliver runs away with the cap.

“Oliver! You get back here!”

She runs after him. The woman from Glitz Security has appeared by the cashier. The cashier now walks over squashing a Twinky in her haste and swipes her card and taps the screen canceling the woman’s purchases. She moves the woman’s cart out of the way. Herman is still holding the Mother’s things. With the cart out of the way he reaches down to pick up two uncrushed Twinkies he couldn’t reach before.

“You going to buy those?”

“Yeah right Fred, and a can of paint too.”

“See if the cashier will take them.”

He tries to get her attention but she is busy with another customer.

“I guess I’ll just hold them until she gets back with the kid.”
He steps out of line with his leaf blower and lets me go ahead of him.

The pay station has shut down. Herman asks the security woman if she can start it up, but she shakes her head and points to the cashier. We have to join the other line with three people in it. There are only two pay stations because most people use their smart phones at this upscale Snaz Super Store.

The woman returns pulling Oliver along by one arm. “You want another Twinky honey? I’ll give you another Twinkey if you help Mommy.”

Oliver isn’t listening. He is still looking back towards the paint cans while stumbling forward by his Mother’s side. They stop. She squats down and puts her arm around him to corral him and uses her free hands to pull a small box out of her bag. It is sheathed in plastic with a straw held under it in its own plastic wrapper. She starts pealing off the clear plastic packaging, which curls around her fingers in strips that she stuffs in her bag, but the static cling holds them back and some of fall out on the floor unnoticed.

“Oliver you want some juice honey?”

Oliver still isn’t paying attention. He throws the white paint can cap out in front of them. It bounces and rolls under another customer’s cart.

“Oliver, why did you throw that thing honey?”

They have stopped in the long wide isle between the pay stations and the rest of the store. Customers are jammed beside them as some one pushing a cart loaded with sound proof ‘Homasote 440’ and a bucket of dry wall joint compound tries to maneuver past. She is squatting down still trying to get Oliver’s attention face to face, but he twists and turns away. The security woman joins them with the white plastic cap in hand. She bends down to talk to him and Oliver calms down. They all walk off towards the customer service counter.

“So what do I do with this stuff now Fred?”

“Here, I’ll take it over to customer service while you are in line.”

Herman hands me the Mother’s things.

The Mother has now put Oliver in a shopping cart where he is busy with the tablet the store provide with each cart to advertise and guide customers through the endless isles of the store.

I put her things on the counter next to her as she is in discussion with the service clerk. The Mother looks up.

“Oh Thanks so much, wasn’t that kind of the man Oliver?”

Oliver is absorbed by the beeps and electronic advertising voices coming from the tablet, and doesn’t look up. I tell her she is welcome and get away.

A row of turtles are sunning themselves at Miletus Marsh Park. Lined up head to stern on top of a partially submerged log with their lizard-like necks fully extended, and still as stones. The big one, with his back to us has a warm brown crumbling log to himself. Looks like a smooth round river-rock, the carapace shiny and wet, his small hind legs warming.

“That’s one, two, three, four …” Daisy counts seven turtles together on the log and points out two more swimming nearby in the sunny water that looks like rich creamy café aux lait.

“Are they snappers?”

“I think there are snappers in here. Those are Northern Painted Turtles.”

“That one has spots.”

“Yes, and you know what they’re called?

“Tell me.”

“ Spotted Turtles”

“Naaaaaaa …”

I can see a figure up ahead leaning back on a bench in his brown overcoat. He holds it open to the sun with his hands in the pockets. His straight red hair falls over his ears, and over the collar riding high on his neck against the cold breeze.

We walk on past the remains of a beaver lodge overgrown with grass and leafless bushes a few yards out in the bog.

“Look at that guy there. Isn’t it …?”

“Fred, it’s Theo Tinderbrush.”

“What is the professor doing out here by himself on a week day?”

He doesn’t notice us. He is looking out across the marsh towards the herons standing in the far shallows.

“Hi Theo.”

For a moment he looks around towards us, now only a yard away, and looks back, straight ahead. Pulls a hand out of his pocket to wave in a lazy salute. Daisy steps towards the bench and sits next to him.

“You got room for two on here?”

He pulls his hands together in the pockets, gathering his coat around him as if to make room. Though Daisy finds her place easily.

“What a great fall day Theo!”

“Yeah, sun’s out.”

The professor seems uninterested and keeps staring out towards the unmoving herons. The breeze sends ripples across the shaded light brown water in front of us. I remain standing. I didn’t know Daisy was on such close terms with Tinderbrush.

“Theo, are you still thinking about it?”

“Yeah, still thinking. Is that why you came out here all by yourself?”

“Oh, probably.”

I don’t know what she is referring to, but sense it might be confidential, so I walk on a few yards out of earshot around the other side of a thicket to see where the red wing blackbirds that just flew over us had landed.

“Fred! Hey there, where are you going?”

Holding on to her black bowler with yellow sticker in the band, Daisy shouts into the breeze, which dies down at that instant, and her voice is unexpectedly loud. I walk back around to see her beckoning me back. She pats the bench boards next to her.

“Here Fred, come sit down.”

Tinderbrush comes around from his preoccupations, and interrupts what he is saying to Daisy.”

“How you doing Fred?” Daisy turns to me as I sit down in her designated spot.

“We have been discussing Boyd.”

“Yeah, we and the rest of Fauxmont as well. Seems like I am the subject of endless speculation and gossip. I am expecting to see my picture in a supermarket tabloid.”

“Why?”

“Fred you must be the only one in Fauxmont who doesn’t know!”

“Know what?”

Tinderbrush pulls a wad of paper towel out of his coat pocket, wipes his nose, and sticks it back in his pocket scrunched in his fist.

“Fred, Boyd is demanding a DNA test to find out if Theo is his real father.”

“Why?”

“Because I was fooling around with his mother, back when ever it was, and nobody was supposed to know, ha ha.”

“You mean you and Lark?”

Tinderbrush is laughing.

“Fred, you need to catch up on your gossip my man.”

“It was when Lark was Theo’s teaching assistant up at P.U.”

“I thought she went to Glamour College with Diddlie?”

“She did Fred but after marrying Harper Nightingale she did some graduate work at P.U. with Theo.”

“Yeah, she was hot too. Too hot for P.U.”

“Theo, she dropped the course to have the baby.”

“Maybe …”

“Ouch! What do Lark and her ex have to say?”

Tinderbrush belches after draining a cup of coffee that was on the bench next to him.

“Nightingale is out of town, as usual and not answering my calls. He’s got his nose so far up USAID’s ass he’s found his anaerobic home in the bureaucratic bowel, in all that shit.”

“Theo, will you please calm down! Harper never does answer his old friends from here.”

“This is as embarrassing as hell, Fred. Lark and I have been kind of talking thanks to Daisy here.”

“Kind of talking, I thought you were …”

“Daisy, Lark is just blowing the whole thing off, just the way she blew that kid off from the start.”

“She told you Boyd wants a test. That’s why she called you. She didn’t just blow him off Theo!”

“She did, that Hispanic woman brought him up. What’s her name? You know, the one who disappeared from Trip’s place.”

“It was Juanita Ted, you are being unfair, and you don’t get it.”

“She and Boyd never talk Daisy. How did she know anything about a test?”

Tinderbrush laughs again, and mumbles to himself and the wind.

Daisy ignores him.

“Fred, have you seen Boyd since he grew his hair?”

“No Daisy, not since the fourth of July.”

“Well, he looks just like Theo.”

“He’s wearing it in the same style as mine too, if you can call it a style, when you wait four months between haircuts.” Tinderbrush runs his hands through the long hair above his ears. He gets out his phone and starts texting.

“What made Boyd get into it now?”

“Fred, when Boyd and I were together we talked about his doubts.”

“His doubts about his sexual orientation you mean?”

“About his paternity. I think it is part of his coming out and moving in with Albrecht.”

“But those are two completely different things, paternity and coming out.”

“Right, I know, but it was on his mind when we broke up. He never stopped talking about Albrecht, and he was mad at his mother because she wouldn’t discuss the question about his real father.”

Tinderbrush finishes texting and gesticulates with the phone still in his hand.

“Well, I should have talked to him before. You know I wasn’t sure anyway. I never thought about it much. Lark was sure he was Harper Nightingale’s. I had a lot of other things to think about. I don’t know how the hell she knew. How could she tell? Harper was hardly ever around, then … or now. Anyway, last month the kid texted me when I was out of town. We met over at the H Bar when I got back. Hadn’t seen him for ten years, or more probably. I mean I just remembered this weird kid with short hair.”

“You never told me that Theo!”

“No, it was a short meeting.”

“How short?”

“He came up to me and started telling me I ought to be carrying a gun. I told him he was nuts. Then he got the thing out and showed it off. Right in the H bar! What stupid thing to do! That was embarrassing.”

“Did you tell him to put it away?”

“I told him to zip it up, Daisy! He didn’t catch my Freudian drift. So I told him if he had any sense he’d throw the damn thing in the Potomac. Then he walked away and I didn’t follow.”

Tinderbrush gets up and walks over towards the thicket. The red wing black birds rise out and fly over toward the herons, reflecting white as fallen Kleenexes in the water.

“Don’t you think he was trying to impress you?”

Tinderbrush showed no sign of hearing Daisy’s question.

“Where are you all going? Stick around birds! You might learn something!”

He has his hands back in his coat pockets holding them out. Opening his coat like an obscene flasher.

Daisy gets up. “You want to walk around some Theo?”

“Oh why not?”

We walk over to the boardwalk, which takes us out into the middle of the marsh. The cattails look like fat cigars malting. Their fluff blows off like cotton smoke. Daisy leads the way, pulling Tinderbrush along with her arm in his. She is as tall as he is but he is heavy set and his coat makes him look even bigger next to Daisy, with long legs in tight blue denim that look as thin as a heron’s. I lagged behind to read the information on an illustrated text identifying cattails, and rose hips, barred owl, fox, beaver and other critters who aren’t showing themselves, and nothing about turtles. When I catch up, Daisy grabs my arm. So she now has Theo and me in tow, and we take up the whole width of the boardwalk.

“I need to book a flight to Australia.”

“Don’t be such a coward Theo.”

“No! I have friends there and the Atheists in Sydney invited me to lecture.”

“Theo, you have obligations right here.”

“I know but I am pissed off with the whole thing! Why is this mixed up young political fanatic coming after me now?”

“Well at least you’re not using anti gay epithets.”

“Daisy, I would never do that, and you ought to know it.”

“I thought I knew you Theo. That you would agree to the test, and help Boyd figure out who he is.”

“Its embarrassing, I mean I didn’t know I had a kid. What is he to me?”

“Yeah Theo, what does he mean to you.?

“A lot of trouble!”

“Maybe you should think about it.”

“Maybe … Enough of this shit Daisy!”

Tinderbrush breaks away and lumbers off back the way we came.

His big bones make a heavy tread, vibrating in the boards, and his red hair streams to one side in a sunbeam as the wind picks up.

“God! Fred, I never thought he would react that way.”

“There goes his coffee cup blowing across the water.”

“Fred, I think he’s still in love with her.”

It is a holiday. The Cavendish Pie shop is open only until noon. We sit outside in the mid morning humidity.

“How can the air be so humid yet the ground so dry?”

Bel’s question goes unanswered, bit it seems to have aroused Artie’s golden retriever, Bounder, dosing under her chair. She addresses him in Italian as she reaches down and gives him a treat.

“Is Bounder ever going to learn English?”

“Oh he knows plenty of English bel, but I have to keep up my Italian.”

“Hi Bounder, good boy!” Bounder comes out from under the chair with his big blond tail swishing and bumping against the chairs and table legs. Bel pets his head. He pants. His long thin tongue slides out the side of his mouth and seems to be in peril so near the two spiky canines. It has a nick in the side. He puts his two front paws up on the arm of bel’s chair in a friendly gesture. They look at each other face to face.

“Bounder, your breath stinks!”

His fur shines and his bared teeth glisten, benign, his mouth is slightly open and looks as if he is smiling.

“Bounder, down!”

Bilingual in English and Italian, he obediently gets back under Artie’s chair on command.

The sun has risen above the tree line highlighting the gold leaf of 2141 in the center of the rectangular window above the door. Also heating up those of us sitting outside the Cavendish Pie Shop facing Maxwell Avenue. A cement truck’s breaks hiss and the engine note descends as it slows at the light beyond the Lighthouse filling station. The huge orange conical tank turns slowly revealing the word “Dordrechts” in brilliant red, once with each revolution.

We wait for Steve, and drink hot coffee in spite of the weather. I think Artie has invited us to the studio later today. She started by inviting Steve the other evening, but Lark was present and couldn’t be left out. That is how Artie put it just now, and Lark gave Artie a high five. I had been walking along Wicket Street with Lambert and bel earlier, as I so often do first thing, and had no idea that she would be at the Pie Shop when leaving home later in the morning. Artie and Lark were already sipping and eating their crumbly muffins at a small table. I was invited too in their usual good nature. Some blackbirds are watching us from a dying Sycamore. It was probably there when the parking lot was first paved and kept in place to shade the parked mass of shiny painted metal underneath. Sparrows hop around below in the litter, dead leaves, crumbling pale brown bark and dust. Lark tosses some crumbs toward them. They fall short.

“Why are so many trees dying around here?”

“Lark, it’s the white oak borers. They are eating under the bark. You can see their tracks if you peal it off. That kills the trees.”

“But you just said that’s a sycamore!”

“It is. I guess something else is killing that one, but most of the trees in Fauxmont are red and white oaks.”

Steve has walked over with a heavy book under his arm.

“Good morning Ms. Bliemish.” He puts it half on the table and half in her hand avoiding the four cups of coffee in that small space. He moves on to get some refreshment.

“Well thanks Mr. Strether. Very formal this morning.”

Steve looks at us, grinning though his graying beard as he holds the door open for two couples to come out. They all look athletic in shorts, running shoes, and tee shirts with Snaz logos. One man has an orange baseball cap with Glitz Holdings printed across the back.

Lark looks over and reads aloud from the cover of the catalog and then Artie leafs through the pages of illustrations.

“Gustave Caillebotte.”

“Who is he Artie?”

“Lark, he was a French Impressionist.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Steve and I went down to the exhibition at the National Gallery last week. You should go Fred. Only go later. It was way too crowded and so after a quick look around he bought the catalog and we left.”

“Those reproductions are no substitute for the real thing.”

“No they’re not Fred, but there’s a lot of interesting information in here. Look at this elevation of an, ‘Apartment building, first class at 125 les Champs Elysees’.”

“So what?”

“That’s the new Paris of the 1860s!”

“Lark, Baron Haussmann redesigned the city at the time the Impressionists were working.”

“Well Steve, I do happen to remember the Eiffel Tower went up for the World’s fair, what ever year that was.”

“We’ll go back to the exhibition though. You ought to come too Lark.”

Artie opens the book to a print of ‘The Floor Scrapers’.

“A lot of his paintings don’t look like impressionist work.”

“Yeah, that one for instance, Fred.”

Steve comes out with his coffee and a slice of peach pie.

“Why don’t we move inside? It’s a little steamy out here!”

“There’s no room.”

“There is now. Those people left a table right in the corner.”

Steve points through the glass wall where Mrs. Rutherford is serving the last in the line of customers. Her assistant is carrying in a pile of fresh cookies from the back on a dented metal tray. Her left arm is bare but as she turns to put the tray down on the counter I can see her right arm is covered in dense tattoos.

“Steve, Mrs. Rutherford isn’t going to let Bounder in now.”

“Why not? She has before!”

“No Steve, it’s too crowded. His tail will clear somebody’s table.”

Steve pulls up another chair to our small crowded round table. There are already four cups of coffee on it and the book. Steve pauses while we lift our new sky blue paper cups to avoid a spill. Each printed in white with a passage from the 111th psalm,

The cups are new to me but no one remarks on them. Perhaps every one else has seen them before. I haven’t been here for months, close as it is.

Bounder is resting with his head on his paw under Artie’s chair. He stirs as Steve sits down between Artie, and bel. Artie leans over the thin metal arm of her chair to look down at the dog, brushing Steve’s sleeve with her head as he puts his plate down. The plate tips in his hand and his wedge of pie falls down next to Bounder’s paw. Peach filling bursts from the crust on impact leaving the steep escarpment of its light brown pastry with indentations of the pie tin. Bounder’s long pink tongue curls around the yellow fruit instantly, as if he was expecting a serving.

Artie raises her head and runs her hand through her hair and finds it sticky with pie filling.

“How the fuck did that happen?”

She wipes her hand on one of the napkins Steve dropped on the table trying to recover control of the plate and pie.

We all put our coffee cups back on the table carefully.

“Sorry Artie.”

“Sorry? It wasn’t your fault Steve.” He seems unconcerned about the loss of his slice and more interested in the catalogue, which he takes

it partly off the table to look at it with the bottom resting on his lap. Bel gets up, walks around Steve’s chair to help Artie.

“There’s a little more towards the back Artie.”

Bel guides Arties’ hand to the spot. “There and down further.”

Artie keeps working with fresh napkins.

“Artie that’s it.”

“I still feel yucky bel.”

“You look okay though.”

Bel returns to her chair tossing another sticky napkin on the pile of scrunched, soft and gooey paper in the middle of the table like a centerpiece and memorial to Steve’s lost pie.

Steve is looking at the print of Caillebotte’s ‘The Floor Scrapers’ and moves to put the book back on the table for all to see. We all grab our cups to make room and then put them back down close together. It’s a bit of a stretch for Artie to reach across the book.

“That’s the right picture for study today.”

“Too true Lark, its Labor Day!”

“So many of the gains of the union movement are getting lost over here. In India and China they have to start from scratch, like there never was a movement in the world.”

“Pretty sad Lark.”

“It is, Fred. That’s why I am a progressive!”

Artie gets up, speaking to Bounder in a series of rhyming Italian syllables. Bounder is licking the ground next to Artie’s chair, even though I can’t see any fragment of pie in the wet shape his tongue has painted on the pavement. Artie reaches for her coffee crowded among the others surrounding the pile of sticky napkins like a blue stockade. She tries to pick it up from above with thumb and two fingers. The cardboard squeezes inwards a bit and the coffee rises burning her fingertips. It spills down the sides and a drop falls on the catalogue. She puts the cup down again quickly.

“Look, this table is too crowded … I’ve got to go.”

“Wait Artie, I am through. Let’s go up to the studio.”

“No Lark!”

“Why not Artie?

“I mean there’s too many of you.”

“We don’t all have to come Artie.”

Steve has been perusing the catalogue in silence, and ignoring everything else.

“Here, look at this!”

He points out the print of ‘Man at his Bath’.

“You know, I think that is one of the strongest paintings in the show.”

Bel picked up her cup more easily the instant Artie made room by lifting hers. She sits back sipping her coffee showing no concern about the studio visit. “Makes a change from all the women painted after their baths!”

Lark looks away from Artie to see the picture. “Yeah bel, I’ve never seen such good a painting of a man’s ass before. Well not in art with a capital ‘A’.”

Artie ignores Steve’s observation. She has turned Bounder away from the table, where he has scented the sticky napkins. He goes on methodically licking the sweet ground where his gift fell to him.

“No Lark, I can’t deal with a crowd, okay?”

“Oh Artie!” Lark backs her chair away from the table and gets up slowly.

“Stay there, Lark. Talk to you later.”

“You want the catalogue Artie?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Will you just wait a minute Artie!”

“No Lark, we will be as crowded up there as the stuff on this table. Besides I have got to feed Cangianti and Sfumato, and then go home to wash my hair.”

She only half turns to answer Lark and pulls Bounder away from his sweet spot on the pavement. She and Bounder walk down the hill by them selves, past the Pie Shop, towards her studio at the back.

  NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

Bel Vionnet is waiting for Lambert to finish his, “data gathering”, as she calls it. His head is buried in weeds growing out of the roadside ditch; tall grass, yellow flowering Ludwigia, horse thistle and Virginia creeper. He keeps thrusting his head down deeper, with his forepaws spread wide on top of the bank. He looks bedraggled when he backs out. His soaked fur describes the rounded contour of his skull and snout. The ears are draped pathetically in long thin strands of fur, which usually stick up. His head has lost its typical angular shape with thick coarse-growing white fur like a beard and mustache around a black triangular nose.

He stares across the road and waves his nose in the air, straining his neck upward. Perhaps something interesting is wafting out of the huge new house on the Sloot’s old lot.
The broad front porch has a metal roof where starlings have lined up along its edge as if to watch the street life below. Five dormers jut out of the steep-pitched tiled roof above the five second story windows. There has been no work done on the place for months. Though the exterior looks finished in front, only the bottom half the siding is up on the east side leaving the top covered only in Snaz white building wrap. We both follow Lambert’s gaze.

“Have they run out of money?”

“That siding looks cheap next to the brick frontage, don’t you think Fred?”

“Maybe they are waiting for a delivery?”

“The thing might have been too ambitious. That is nearly a half acre of house!”

“With a white keystone above each window.”

“Yes, why Fred? They aren’t arched openings?”

“Decorative, gives it a certain look that conjures ‘dream house’ in the purchaser’s mind.”

“What Denise Scott Brown might have called a ‘Duck’.”

“Who, bel?”

“Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi are architects who wrote a famous book called Learning from Las Vegas.”

“Did they learn from Vegas, or loose a bundle?”

“Well, looking around the country, they noticed that the same basic boxy building can have multiple uses depending on what sign you hang on it. They also found a building in the shape of a duck, which was used to sell eggs. So they called buildings trying to look like something else “Ducks” and the more utilitarian ones, “Decorated Sheds”.

“In this case the duck might also be called a “self aggrandizing deceit”, bel! It doesn’t quack like a castle.”

“Fred, the real-estate market calls this a ‘residence’ no mere house or home here.”

“The footprint must be as big as Jake’s place.”

“Yes, Steve thinks Jake financed it.”

More starlings circle around the front of the house raining droppings on us. Then they disappear up into the foliage of a huge willow oak with one jagged broken limb sticking out into the sun.

“What were they feasting on?”

“I don’t see anything but metal bel.”

“Maybe its those elderberries over on the side.” Bel is pointing to a thicket just outside the silt fence.

“Any way bel, is Jake now speculating close to home?”

“No one I know is sure what Jake is doing, Fred.”

Lambert has turned again, moves to the middle of the road and barks repeatedly, looking up wind. It is Steve walking quickly along Wicket Street towards us. He gives Lambert an ear rub as soon as he is within reach. Bel warns us of an oncoming car. The car slows and stops next to us. Lark greets us from behind the wheel of her aged Corolla with a scuffed and faded Obama sticker on the front bumper.

“Have you heard? Juanita Gomez is back.”

“Where Lark?”

“I saw her getting out of Jake’s Hummer last night.”

“So she is still working for him! Where did you see her?”

“Right under the lights in Jake’s driveway bel.”

“Well, what happened to her?”

“She was deported from a Pennsylvania detention center before her case could be heard.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No, no Fred, I was passing by.”

“I thought she was in Texas.”

“Well Fred, we never knew for sure.”

“No that’s right we didn’t, but I got information from a certain source
that she was sent to Texas.”

“An unreliable source Lark!”

“Yeah, so many are, Steve.”

Bel has drawn Lambert close on his expandable leash to keep him safe from the oncoming car. He barks once, standing on his hind legs with forepaws against the car door and on that signal, bel picks him up to meet Lark through the open window.

“He’s got you well trained bel.”

“Lambert always was a good trainer … I still don’t see why they raided Jake’s place. I mean why did they come after her?”

Lark is petting Lambert’s head and he tries to lick her arm by raising his head, which moves it out of Lark’s reach.

“How did you get so wet Lambert?”

She reaches out to rub his shoulder and he licks her face. Lark splutters.

“Thanks Lambert, I think you just got my lipstick and mascara!”

Bel tries to pull him back a little but he pulls towards Lark with his forepaws and wriggles, and nearly falls into the car.

“Oh well, any way, bel, I think Gayle dropped the ball on getting her papers in to the INS or DHS or whoever it was.”

Steve steps in and lifts Lambert off the door and eases him down on the street. He gives him another ear rub while he grunts in rhythm with Steve’s moving hands. When Steve stands up again Lambert’s ears are down. He looks back up at Steve who has his hand in his pocket. He produces only keys. Lambert tries to climb Steve’s pant leg.

“Steve, what are you doing with that dog?”

“I am getting him away from Lark’s makeup bel, and … I thought I had some treats in this pocket.” He tries his other trouser pockets and cautiously pulls out a cigar caught between third and fourth finger. He seems surprised at what he found.
A sharp metallic crack and then another with more resonance makes Lark sink down in her seat.

“Oh God! Who’s shooting at us?”

“Its hickory nuts Lark”

“Yeah sure Fred, it only takes one nut case with a gun!”

Ha, ha, Lark, be thankful we can laugh! One bounced off the roof and the other off the hood.”

Lambert strains on his leash to chase one, bouncing along the road into the ditch. The leash, still in bel’s grip, brushes his hand as it goes taught under Lambert’s pull, and he fumbles the cigar awkwardly placed between his fingers. Leaves come down as three squirrels chase each other out of the hickory branches above us.

“Its not safe on the streets around here.”

Bel has put her arm up as if to protect her face from air-born hazards. “Bird poop, hickory nuts with twigs and leaves, what next?”

“You want to get in the car bel?”

The squirrel chase moves across the road on a long a thin branch into a maple across the street next-door to the construction. Lambert turns from his first pray and pounces on the cigar rolling on the ground at bel’s feet. He bites it, drops it and presses his shoulder against it, crushing its tobacco into the fresh hickory. He turns on his back and rolls ecstatically in aromatic leaf litter.

“I saw Sherman the other night. He thinks someone set Jake up to embarrass him, and gave the INS information on Juanita that led to the raid.”

“Steve, you never told me that!” Bel is grinning at her husband, and pulling on his sleeve.”

“I know bel. It was an aside. I had asked him … remember? I was telling you about the settlement on the flying ant case with Prestige U.”

“Yes honey, I remember, but you left out the important stuff!”

“I did. I still think our house is bugged.”

“Steve, who do you think is listening?”

“Wish I knew.”

“Why should they be interested in us anyway?”

“Wish I knew that too.”

“Honey, I think  paranoia is getting in your way!”

“It is, it is!”

Lark is rubbing her face with a piece of paper towel.

“Bel, no one is safe from snooping now.”

“Lark, have you got all the dog spit off yet?”

“I’ve got all my make up off. I don’t need it today anyway.”

“So how did Juanita get back into the country Lark?”

“I don’t know, do you Steve?”

“Here’s what I got from Sherman. She was released a few days ago.”

“Oh I might have guessed, it’s Shrowd working in the shadows again.”

“Sort of Fred, Sherman brought in Guillermo Visa and he got things rolling. The old lawyer had filed an appeal and asked for a stay of removal. The court gave the Government two weeks to respond. Before the Government responded, the Department of Homeland Security put her on a plane South.”

Lark leans out of her window.

“My God! That’s disgusting! What’s the hurry?”

“Lark, Juanita was treated as an illegal immigrant. They have no rights.”

“What do you mean Steve? She’s a human being.”

” Lark, you have to be an American human to gain the protection of our Constitution and …”

“Right I know, and you have to have the money to fight it out!”

“It also helps to be Caucasian.”

“Doesn’t it though, bel?”

  NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

This post was edited on 21 Aug. 2015 and republished.

 Tron Plank is running towards us in a batman outfit. Holding his arms out like wings and trailing blue smoke from one hand and red smoke from the other. When he gets within a foot of our table he tries to throw the smoke underneath and runs off with his cape trailing high above his blue shorts. Something bounces off the end of the table and releases clouds of blue smoke near my orange plastic chair. Now red smoke is rising from underneath the table, all around us. I can see Tron knocking over Jeff Petrosian in his bishop’s miter as he runs out of the white cloud Jeff is spreading. Clouds of red, white and blue smoke obscure my view of big Ben Alekhine in what I think is a knight’s costume. He seems to collide with Tron, who staggers out of all the patriotic clouds and trips into the prickly hollies around the edge of the big lawn.

This is my introduction to the Fauxmont annual fourth of July party, held on what used to be the lawn behind The Ashes, at the top of Wicket Street where it intersects Bails Lane. Lou has cut it with his heavy-duty lawn mower, weeds and all. Making a big smooth rectangle of soft thick spongy grass, clover, wild strawberry, dandelion, and other weeds too clipped to identify.

I haven’t seen Tron Plank or his father Niels since we first met on the Trip’s driveway back in the winter of 2012. I remember him making a daring run, before the police arrive, from the grasp of Irma Standov of Suburban Security Solutions.

Heidi Guderian, dressed up as the queen of hearts is standing nearby with a sparkler in each hand, talking to Pam Dirac, dressed up as a duchess. There’s young Serge, holding up his iPad mini to take pictures. He is wearing a tricorn hat with a black tail-coat and jeans over his white tee-shirt and sneakers. Tron runs by and tries to knock his hat off into a cloud of white smoke. Serge yells at him and tries to trip him.

I can see Lou sitting at one of the four picnic tables with Lark and the Planks. Two other tables are set up like ours: two saw horses and a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood covered in red white and blue paper table cloths and white stars on the blue stripe. Daisie sits opposite me, leaning forward, both elbows on the table. Her face shaded by such a wide-brimmed yellow straw hat that I can only see the tip of her nose and chin. She has gathered her long hair into one large black braid, which comes forward over her left shoulder. All her thin silver and gold bracelets have fallen down her long forearm and gather low down with countless reflections from the setting sun on their multiple facets. She idly runs the loose end of her braid through her fingers ignoring the smoke.

“Who is that bratty bat-kid Fred?”

“Tron Plank I think.”

“Tron, did you say?”

“Yes, he is staying with his Granddad and Lark.”

“Oh right, Lark told me they had some kid here for the 4^th.”

Another cloud of smoke wafts by, green and blue thinning as it passes.

Daisy takes off her hat to fan it away.

“Well at least this smoke keeps the mosquitoes away.”

“Why are all these kids dressed up in costumes Daisy?”

“They always have around here for the 4th of July. Did you see those costumes on sale at Tenniel’s Art Store?”

“No I haven’t been over there lately … Why the dressing up?”

“I don’t know. Never had any kids. Why the costumes, Helga?”

Helga Dumpty with pink denim pinafore dress is eating bear meat barbeque and sitting in a blue canvas director’s chair next to Daisy. Her thick white hair bulges out and falls down her neck, from under her red baseball cap with Snaz logo. She waves her plastic fork in the air, trying to disperse the red smoke rising between them from under the table. She knocks back the pewter lid and takes a gulp of beer from her ornamental stein showing off the gold accents of its Bavarian Crest. Having downed the beer, she points out the edelweiss banding with the sauce-coated tines of her fork. Hank’s nearly empty bottle of Augustiner Bräu marks his place next to Helga at the table. Holding his matching stein, Hank is over at the barbeque with Albrecht, getting more beer and another helping.

“Oh I think it was our generation that started it. Back when the Ramsays and Sloots were growing up.” She swallows some bear meat, “why, I don’t know.”

Daisy gets up and pulls her orange sari-like silks around her shoulders. Her long legs are sheathed in tight white jeans with yellow paisley pockets. We had been sitting together as the ruins of The Ashes cut into the sun’s sinking disk, waiting for the food line to shorten, and watching the wild Plank kid spreading red white and blue mayhem.

“Look at the line now Fred, don’t you want some barbeque?”

“Maybe some of Hank’s bear meat would be good.”

As I get up to join Daisy, Helga starts telling me that Hank brought back pounds and pounds of meat from his last Yukon hunting trip. “This is the real thing Fred. Just great!”

Her plastic fork breaks as she speaks, trying to spear something from her well-laden paper plate.

“We need some real cutlery at these celebrations!”

She turns from her plate and buries her hand and arm in a substantial shoulder bag hanging from the back of her director’s chair. Out of it comes a hunting knife in its worn leather sheath. After she draws out the blade I can see it has been sharpened so many times the stained old-fashioned steel has lost its original edge and the slightly bowed blade ends in a sharp point.

“This was my Dad’s, and this old Solingen steel holds a hell of a edge.”

Helga starts eating her bear meat with the pointed knife. Young Serge is standing by fascinated, watching her every mouthful go in off the blade, as Tron sweeps past with white smoke and knocks off his tricorn. It bounces on the table and spills Hank’s remaining beer.

“Mind what you’re doing there kid.”

“Sorry Helga, can I get you another bottle?”

“Oh hi there Serge. I haven’t seen you since you sprouted those additional inches. Stop throwing that hat around or I’ll take it away from you.”

“I didn’t throw it Helga, Tron …”

“Don’t try and blame some one else. Here put it back on and keep it on!” Helga hands Serge his hat dripping with beer. Another cloud of smoke engulfs Serge and drifts toward Helga.

“He’s a good one that Serge, polite too, not like the little delinquent spreading smoke. If he comes by me again I’ll take him in hand!”

Daisy is standing in front of Boyd and Albrecht under a white canopy, with flags draped from the top of the extended poles supporting the canvas. Barbeque is served under a banner across the front, saying “Fauxmont Militia” in big white letters on a deep flag-blue background. The yellow pennant showing the Gadsden flag logo hangs at the back of the enclosure. Boyd, empties a big bucket of ice into an inflated child’s swimming pool. There’s an orange canopy next the Militia’s with the Dordrechts logo printed on the canvas. Looking around I see that Dordrechts have supplied the orange chairs too. With their logo embossed on the back. I can barely see Daisy shouting through the low light, smoke and humidity.

“Fred! Are you going to eat or what?”

When I get over to it, I can see Boyd’s pool is full of German beers. Brown bottles of Augustiner Bräu, Lagerbier Hell, and Spaten Optimator, are sticking up out of the mountain of ice cubes. “Where did you find all this German beer Boyd?”

“Albrecht got them from a friend in the National Guard. He brought them over on a hop.”

“What do you mean a hop?”

“I mean Daisie, that is how these bottles got here from Germany.”

A shirtless man, I don’t know, standing in front of Daisy, turns with a bottle in one hand and two plates of barbeque and potato salad balanced on the other. “He means hops in the beer.”

“No, that doesn’t make sense.” The man doesn’t hear Daisy. He has walked off with his big pink belly sagging over his brown draw-string pants stained from sitting on the wet mown weeds.

Albrecht leans over from where he is basting and serving the meat. His sauce brush drips on the ground from high in his hand as if he is waving to the crowd.

“We need some clarity here Daisy. A hop is a flight, like hitching a ride on a military plane.”

Some sauce drips down among the ice and beers.

“You mean you can do that?”

“Daisy, baby, you could for sure, but for any one else, they need to be in the service and in uniform.”

“Okay Albrecht, okay, I get the picture.”

“Don’t forget what we are here for folks!”

“Independence day Albrecht, we all know that.”

“Daisy, we are rapidly loosing the liberty this holiday is about.

Why don’t you step over to the Militia Booth right next to us here and sign up for freedom!”

“Thanks Albrecht, I think I’ll eat first.”

“Be first in Freedom instead!”

“Well, aren’t you going to talk to me?” Boyd has put down his empty bucket of ice and looks over at Albrecht with irritation.

She pushes back her hat and smiles at Boyd.

“Sure Boyd, can I have one of those Beers?”

Daisy takes the hat off and starts fanning herself with it.

“What kind you want?”

“Oh just pick one for me Boyd.”

“No, you’ve got to choose. I’ll pick the wrong kind.”

“Well, I don’t know German beers.”

“Guess then.”

“Okay that one with the silvery label.”

“You want a Becks?” Boyd looks up frowning and gestures impatiently with the bottle in his hand.

“Yeah, give me that one.”

Daisy puts her hat back on and takes the bottle after Boyd opens it. We walk back to our table together with paper plates sagging under the weight of Albrecht’s generous portions. The sun has gone down further behind the ruins and the long shadows have merged into gloom with the smoke. Helga and Hank, are now sitting at the table together, two silhouettes seen against the brilliance of Heidie Guderian and Pam Dirac’s endless supply of lighted sparklers.

The first firework of the evening is like a peacock’s tail of multi-colored flashes fanning up from the ground with a deafening bang. There is a pause up on the terrace of the old house while our pyrotechnicians prepare the next display.

“Who’s letting off the fireworks?” Hank looks up with a rib in one hand and wipes his mouth with the other, full of scrunched paper napkins.

“Marshall Rundstedt is part of it. He told me all about it just now. Got some really great ribs at the Dordrecht’s barbeque stand.”

A whistling rocket shoots up above the tree line after another loud bang at ground level. As the whistle dies out the air above us is filled with cascades of burning stars in the midst of another deafening report. A series of deafening explosions fills the air with color and fire, which then subside and I can hear a lone cicada accompanying the ringing in my ear. Is it all just in my ear?

“Fred, you know what’s going on there?”

I have enough hearing left to understand Daisy. “Fireworks isn’t it?”

“No not that, I mean Boyd and Albrecht?”

“Ah, well they went west and found enlightenment.”

“You know, I saw them kissing earlier, behind the tent.”

“Yes, I thought I saw that a while ago.”

“You know I wasn’t surprised. He often seemed ambivalent when we were together, and he couldn’t stop talking about Albrecht either. His politics and all, it was so boring!”

“I think Boyd is imaginative and that complicates his life.”

“Yes he is sensitive, but Albrecht isn’t.”

“I don’t quite trust him, Fred. Albrecht maybe smart but he has no imagination as far as I can see!”

“That’s odd too. His father is an artist.”

“He didn’t get those genes. All does is repeat political slogans.”

“I think he’s a bit of a fanatic.”

“I mean, can’t he speak his own words?”

“I have heard him talk at length about his ideology.”

“In his own words?”

“Oh yes.”

“He is obsessed, and he’s got Boyd all wrapped up in it like a package.”

“Do you think they know they are in love Daisy?”

“Maybe they are in denial.”

“Does Lark know?”

“She hasn’t said anything. Neither has Diddlie.”

“I thought maybe they were going to come out tonight.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“I wonder if Albrecht is aware of David Koch’s views?”

“Who’s he Fred?”

“You know the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires!”

“Oh yeah! Lark is always talking about the way they are buying the political system.”

“Well, David came out in favor of gay marriage.”

“How will their relationship fit with Albrecht’s ideology?”

“It will set off another kind of fireworks.”

I had been walking past Diddlie’s place with time to spare. As so often happens in Fauxmont, she was outside and invited me over. We sip ice tea on her front porch. Diddlie makes her own blend out of homegrown spearmint, peppermint, bergamot and a Liptons teabag. The small porch, a couple of yards long, is to the left of her front door, which is open with the screen door shut. We are shaded under an extension of the roof supported by three yellow wooden posts, which rest on a knee-high brick wall. I sit next to her in one of the three green plastic chairs facing out, and watch crows chase a hawk out of the red oaks and a big maple beyond. A bare unpainted board supported on cinderblocks in front of us, serves as a table. A huge carpenter bee with sagging pointed black back flies in between the posts during a pause in our conversation. Diddlie waves it away with her trowel. Her bucket of tools and gardening gloves is next to her in the extra chair. I notice a pile of blond wood dust at the base of the yellow post in front of me. She breaks the silence between us.

“I don’t think there is much hope for that boring Fauxmont blog of yours unless you come to the point.”

The bee has drilled a perfectly round hole a few inches up the post from the brick wall, where the yellow paint is peeling off.

“The point?”

“Yes Fred, what are you looking at?”

“Was that the buzz of the bee’s wings or its drill?”

“I just asked you a question Fred. What are you talking about?”

“Your porch post is supporting a carpenter bee.”

“It is? Where?”

I point out the wood drillings and hole. She looks over.

“Oh well I’ll take care of that later … or not. What’s the harm of one bee? These things need repainting anyway.”

The bee returns and Diddlie watches as it flies around the porch and then zooms in behind my head resting against the wall.

I lean forward to let it pass.

“That’s the male.” She grabs my arm for emphasis. “They can’t sting. He’s just checking us out as we are so close to the nest.”

The bee is buzzing me for the second time, close to my ear. Diddlie’s grip on my forearm tightens and then loosens as she moves to hold my hand.

She is looking at me intently in an orange tea shirt with pocket and baggy carpenter’s jeans. Her hair is shorter than usual, and her brown eyes are steady.

“You should have reached your point about a hundred thousand words ago!” She is sympathetic like a gentle doctor telling her patient they need to change a bad habit.

“That far back?”

“That far, I mean in verbal terms it is a geological era … I mean how many people will read over a hundred thousand words before getting to it?”

“What are you talking about Diddlie?”

“Sex, Fred.” She squeezes my hand.

“Its not really about sex. Well, not explicitly at least.”

“That’s why it is so boring. Sex is the most interesting subject there is.”

“I find it more interesting to do, than talk about.”

“Fred! Talking about sex is doing it!”

“Okay, I only talk about sex with the one I am going to go on with.”

“I didn’t think you had a sex life. I mean you live in your head, I can’t believe you ever get out!”

“We don’t have that kind of friendship.”

Diddlie lets go of my hand and gets up from her plastic chair. She holds the screen door open for me. I hesitate to get up. It is cramped and difficult to get out of one’s chair and get to the door.

“Here, come with me.”

“Can’t we finish our tea first?”

The bee swoops in on Diddlie. She steps inside and closes the screen door on it and the bee bumps the screen with high volume buzzing trying to get through but zooms off.

“It’s okay honey, the bee is gone and I am not going to attack you. Just come on through here.” She reopens the screen door.

I get up slowly, slanting my knees to the right so as not to knock over our glasses or the pitcher, still half full and dripping with condensation, which stains the narrow board at my shins. We walk into the house past the living room. The Red Queen shrieks from her cage but Diddlie ignores her and continues down the hall.

I follow her past a pink bathroom to a bedroom door. She opens it and goes in. It is hotter than the rest of the house back here. Deep blue wall paper gives the room a feeling of nighttime, and the brilliantly colored paisleys drawn with tiny dots of orange, pink, yellow and pale blues resemble ancient galaxies, light years away, pictured by Hubble. She turns to look at me in the doorway from beside a mirrored closet door.

“Come on in.”

I step in and pause, looking at Mr. Liddell who has come out from under the bed.

“Is it hot in here or is it my fevered imagination?”

“Yes, I keep it nice and warm in here.”

Mr. Liddell is as still as a statue, sitting on the deep cream-colored shag carpet with his ears up and his nose twitching below his eyes like small dark buttons. It is hard to say where he is looking but seems preoccupied. Diddlie opens the mirrored door and more heat fills the room like steam. Mr. Liddell hurries under her vanity towards her and the open door. He leaves a small gold chain where he was sitting, before disappearing into the closet.

“Come on Fred.”

“Diddlie, where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“What’s that smell Didd.?

The red queen flies in low brushing my sleeve with a wing flap. I can smell cinnamon. The bird settles on top of Diddlie’s vanity mirror and shrieks again. The vanity has a collection of green plastic lizards arranged on it, along with some small bottles. Some lizards are dark green, some have orange backs and purple eyes. One is brilliant yellow shading into green at the tail.

“Are you into lizards?”

“Yeah, painted them myself.”

“Off to bed, Off to bed, To bed to  to bed to  to …”

The red queen stops shrieking as suddenly as she started, and seems to be admiring herself in the mirrored closet door. She turns her head from one side to the other, and grooms her wing feathers. The parrot in the mirror door takes off flying deeper into the reflected image of the paisley wall paper until it disappears along with the red queen who isn’t any longer perched on the vanity mirror.

“Why don’t you come see honey?”

I walk over to Diddlie at the closet door and we enter a small green house.

“I have never noticed this thing from the outside.”

“No one knows it is here, and don’t tell, because it will add to my property tax, if they find out.”

“It is humid enough in here to be a sauna.”

“Strip off if you want honey.”

“You seem cool enough!”

“Yeah baby, I have always been pretty cool!”

I see orchids, and geraniums hanging in pots from the roof beams, and a dense and vigorous row of marihuana plants about five foot tall growing like a hedgerow row to the right. She stands under a hanging pink geranium with a small watercolor brush in her hand and starts pollinating a huge cluster of multicolored flowers I can’t identify. Dipping the end of the brush into one bloom after another.

“I hadn’t thought of sex in these terms.”

The greenhouse extends beyond the marihuana plants. In fact it is much bigger that I thought.

“Pollen is kind of like sperm don’t you think?”

She points out another brush sticking out of a test tube rack on her potting table.

“You want to pickup a brush?”

I pick up the brush and start pollinating a row of mauve mystery flowers with purple centers growing out of crates of moss in the shade below.

“Okay, so we are distributing flower sperm.”

“Yeah doing it together Fred!”

Diddlie sneezes. “Ooooooooo, too much pollen.”

“You need a mask.”

“I had a spasm honey.”

“You might say that.”

She sneezes again and then again… I look around for Mr. Liddel, and then …

“Diddlie! where are you?”

“Down here honey, come on around.”

Walking to the end of the row of marijuana plants I find some stone steps going down in a gradual turn through a short brick lined tunnel and see Diddlie in daylight at the bottom. A pink lizard runs down the old bricks, then a big green one darts into a crevice where the mortar has fallen off and two bricks are missing. It is cooler on the steps but still unbearably humid.

As early as it is in the year, Diddlie has golden rod in full bloom in this lower greenhouse. There are long rows stretching ahead for a hundred yards or more. She steps forward and grabs my arm, and we walk down between two rows arm in arm under the sun coming in through the glazed roof. Bird droppings and dead leaves all over the glass defuse the sunrays to some extent.

“You know my Mom always told me not ‘to do it’ until the guy had walked down the isle.”

“Oh yes I understand, no sex before marriage.”

“Yeah, that’s what transactional sex is all about.”

“Were you obedient?”

“No I am not transactional. It was the sixties Fred, remember the pill and all that? What do you think?”

“I’ll bet you were, in Jimi’s word, ‘experienced’.”

“Sure, you know, people were sort of sleeping around.”

“Some were, some weren’t.”

“I wasn’t going to marry any one before trying him out and Stuart was great.”

“Is he the one you married?”

“Oh he was the one! We broke through all kinds of barriers together and he was furry too … we spent our first three days of our first date in naked nirvana.”

“Holed up at his apartment you mean?”

“I was at Glamour College, up in Vermont with Lark. We were roommates first year and then had the apartment. That was naked nirvana. His place was polluted by his rowing buddies.”

“So he didn’t take you back to his place?”

“He did. We were fucking when the degenerates came home. So we left for my place.”

“What about Lark?”

“She is civilized, hippyized, passionate and on the highest plane. She had her own things going on.”

“So why was Stuart hanging out with degenerates?”

“Most of the young guys I met were degenerate, kind of brutish and insensitive. Stuart was different. He had the strength to be sensitive. He was a mystic as well as a math major and had graduated from U. Mass when I was in high school.”

“So how did you find him?”

“Stole him from Lark. She was his date but I left with him in his Volkswagen.”

“What about your date?”

“Oh I forget his name. He was a doper, only interested in getting high with the band.”

“Some friend you were!”

“Lark was okay with it. You know she had other interests.”

“Do you mean other men or what?”

“She had lots of men, and also politics you know, demos and concerts.”

“Well Diddlie, are you still married?

“I was Mrs. Dodgson, before he fucking died on me!”

“Sorry Didd…”

“Heart attack, at thirty six. THIRTY SIX! Can you believe it?”

“That’s a long time ago. Did you have any children?”

“No, I am so sorry now, we kept putting it off.”

“Did you ever think of remarrying?”

“Stuart was the smartest person I ever met. He was making good money too, doing secret crypto stuff for the government at Arlington Hall. There’s no one else with his magic. No! I mean our magic. Like what is growing here.”

She points to the rows of goldenrod in full bloom.

“It kind of takes me out of myself, you know, to a bigger place.”

“Is it like this all year around?”

“That’s right, all year round like vivid memories to be recalled.”

“So this is where you pick your flowers!”

“Yeah!”

“You had no need to get married again with all this.”

“No … marriage was yesterday, more than thirty years ago … no! more like forty for God’s sake! ‘I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.’

She stops and yanks on my sleeve, looking up at me.

“Oh Fred! Why did you make me so old?”

 Lark Bunlush is speeding toward me on her “Specialized Dolce Triple” women’s bike, over the oak flowers and pollen that leave a yellowish sheen on Wicket Street’s crumbling faded blacktop. She brakes hard, and stops just ahead of me. Turns to tell me the news while brushing away an inchworm floating in front of her face on its invisible strand of silk.

“Did you know Jake Tripp is back at his house?”

She supports herself and the bike with one foot on the ground, one still on the pedal and her left hand on the handlebars.

“No I thought the bank was foreclosing on that property.”

“I saw him over at the shopping center last night.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Oh nothing much, just waved and got in his Hummer and said ‘see you around’.”

We can see the river from Wicket Street through the trees like fragments of milk chocolate broken up into odd shapes by intervening branches. Lark lifts her foot off the pedal and swings her leg over the saddle with a spring in her knees, and walks along with me. Her thick hair is bunched under an orange and silver helmet whose swirling design suggests flames blazing like her idealism from her head. Her brilliant yellow windbreaker shines in the sun with the Snaz logo prominent across the back in a streamlined italic typeface.

“Your outfit is almost blinding Lark.”

“Right! check it out. Visibility is the thing.”

Lark seems carried away by her enthusiasm, which is usually reserved for larger social causes. She looks toward the river for a moment, and goes on.

“This thing is ‘air-conditioned’ too, in a way at least, with this mesh insert in back for ventilation and reflective piping on front and back.” She turns to show off the lines of reflective piping converging down the back from the shoulders to waist.

“Bought it last week from Jake’s Snaz Super Store.”

She points out 2 side-zip pockets, the shifted seams for reduced chafing and zip with semi-lock slider. The zip-underflap and zip port and ergonomically shaped collar.

“Did you buy the bike there too?”

“No. Max gave me this thing.”

She pauses and holds the bike steady with one hand on the saddle gesturing with a sweep of her other gloved hand. It is almost new. I think he got it in a barter through business.”

“You are quite the consumer Lark!”

“I know, it is kind of disgusting isn’t it?”

“We do live in a commercial society, so you are pretty much in the main stream.”

“Well, the main stream is flowing in an unsustainable direction.”

“Biking is preferable to burning gas in the car.”

We move on again, more briskly through morning shadows cast by two gum trees clogged with wisteria vines, thick and twisting around the trunks like constricting snakes who have climbed and stretched from the roots into the heights.

“Biking is great exercise, even at my age, and I haven’t ridden since I was a kid. It is just so much fun.”

“Yes, you’re lucky to be so youthful. I haven’t ridden much since high school.”

“Well Fred, I think meditation is helpful too.”

“I have never been able to do it. Not got sufficient subtlety of mind, keep falling asleep.”

“Keep trying Fred. It’s a great way to drop your baggage.”

“My baggage?”

“Right, ‘baggage’, thoughts and preoccupations, that burden you through the day, or even your whole life. When a thought comes in meditation, don’t follow the train. Let it go!”
“How do you know my ‘train’ is burdened with ‘baggage’?”

“Sorry Fred, I don’t. But you might find out you are, through meditation and then drop the extra weight!”

“With out even dieting, just as easy as that?”
“Maybe, or you could always get a bike!”

“I could, that is true enough.”

“Mount up! Get out there!”

“You are full of advice today. I prefer walking at this point.”

We walk past the Macadamia estate and start down hill away from the river past the Stether/Vionnets towards Oval Street.

“Have you read Foulton Furay’s piece on Shrinkwrap?”

“No, haven’t checked the site for a while.”

“He’s written a story on Macadamia’s patio.”

“Why his patio?”

“You know he has always claimed that mandala he made out of stones gives him mystical insight into the stock market.”

“Well that is what Time magazine wrote years ago.”

“You know the photo with that article was not of his back patio but the path out front.”

“No, but I don’t remember the picture.”

“Mac never allowed any pictures of it.”

“Why, did he think some one else might use it?”

“Well, he did in a way. Fulton talked to one of the masons who built the thing. They said he gave them a detailed and complicated design. He insisted the dimensions be followed exactly; the kinds of stone, the shapes and positions were specified. He went out with his own tape measure to check. Made them do some over. Got pretty heated about it too.”

“So what?”

“Fulton’s source told him it isn’t just decorative. It is a coded map showing where Macadamia stashed the cash he brought out of Chile.”

“So much for mystical insights!”

“So much for the market. More likely it was laundered drug money hidden in legitimate assets.”

“That sounds pretty far fetched. How do they know?”

“It turns out that mason was once one of Pinochet’s agents and had some inside info. He was given a special visa and a new identity to come to America and through Macadamia’s connections he got training and work here in the Sates.”

“I thought the story was that Mac sold his estate down there for fifty million that he gave towards founding Prestige University.”

“That was the story but now it looks different. Looks like drug and weapons money. Macadamia never had a Chilean estate.”

“What? It must be easy enough to find out. Don’t they have records down there?”

“That’s the latest. Fulton’s contacts down there found nothing.”

“Suppose Mac or someone was tampering?”

“Maybe …”

“This ground keeps shifting.”

“Mac’s patio certainly has! That ground is gone for good!”

“Those masons better hide, now this story is out.”

“The last survivor died down in Florida a few months ago. He was dying in hospital outside Miami when Fulton got a tip and went there.”

“Oh, a deathbed confession! What about the others who worked on it?”

“The other two were killed in a construction accident soon after Mac’s job was done.”

“Both at the same time?”

“Yes, seems ‘convenient’ for certain people.”

We have walked all the way to the Pie Shop and Lark stops to park and lock her bike. She wants to go into the Elegant Ostrich gift shop, which has opened in a small space next door. The store is narrow, but deep with a counter far in back, at the end of the long narrow isle between displays on each side. Lark looks over gifts displayed on the walls and in three old glass fronted cabinets with the doors open. They are painted red, yellow, and powder blue. The red one is full of soaps and candles with exotic aromas. Lark picks up a small bar of soap in a paper box. It is printed like a page from a welltravelled pass port, with stamps, some slightly smudged, one light red just off center, which says ‘sandalwood’.

“This aroma reminds me of my mother, and a little wooden box she gave me with a necklace in it.”

She puts down the soap and tests the thickness of a yellow celadon bowl in the powder blue cabinet. Those on the top shelf all look Chinese with red dragons swirling across a blue and white sky. She passes up the red cabinet holding scarves, and other fabrics mostly paisleys, and stops in front of the cards displayed on an old opened roll top desk, with all the brass fittings removed. I can see some ink stains visible on the wood of the desktop and other signs of decrepit age. There is some blotting paper preserved in plastic, with ink stains and contained in its four cornered leather holder with two 1940s envelopes. I can read a local address under the names, Peto and the other Harnett, under canceled Belgian stamps. She soon chooses two cards and we stand, waiting together behind another customer at the cash register in tennis whites and orange shoes.

“So does it have anything to do with Jake’s return?”

“What, Fred?”

“The mason’s confession or what ever it was.”

“Oh sorry, I am still in sandalwood! Well, yes, looks like it to me. That story came out three days ago and Dordrecht’s started work the day after.”

“So it is Dordrecht’s again.”

“Always is around here.”

“You think Jake is doing the project?”

“Sure, Jake has keys to Mac’s house you know. A couple of dump trucks parked over there the other day and a crew dug the whole patio out with a backhoe in a morning’s work. It will be replaced with a swimming pool”

“… put in a pool already?”

“No, that’s what the guy told me this morning when I went by on my bike to check it out. He was from Hockney’s Aqua Marine Pools & Patios out of Bradford Virginia. Said so on his nice blue van.”

“Oh I’ve seen their ads on TV “Make a bigger splash with Hockney’s pools”!

“The same. You know the Fauxmont Militia recovered a drone from a big red oak near Mac’s house.”

“Yes it is all over the neighborhood. Rank Majors thinks it was illegal.”

Look, I never pass up signs of a good story … ” The orange shoes move over the black and white checkerboard floor towards the door under broad swinging hips and muscular female arms. Lark offers her two cards to the red-haired man at the cash register. He is thin with big hands and his silky long sleeve lavender shirt is tight around his upper arms. He looks at Lark’s two cards and her twenty dollar bill.”

“You got anything smaller hon.?”

His bass voice comes out from behind smiling crooked yellow teeth on a sunburned face. His broad flat forehead is peeling and his thin hair is sun bleached on top and combed straight back.

Lark pulls her metal wallet from behind one of the zips in her Snaz cycling outfit, opens it with a click, and hands him an unusual metallic Glitz credit card.

“That’s smaller alright!”

Lark takes back her twenty. He gives back the Glitz card and points out the card reader on the counter under a huge fresh cut hydrangea blossom.

The man scratches his neck below his silver earring, as big as a pirate’s, while waiting for the transaction to process. I walk slowly towards the door and she catches up with me in the midst of the sandalwood perfume.

“Oh I love that aroma Fred.”

She stops by the cabinet for a last look.

“Anyway aside from that sandalwood, did I tell you about the drone?”

“Yes, what about it.”

“Fred it was spying. I just know it.”

“So someone is trying to get a picture of the patio before the design is obliterated?”

She unlocks her bike and we stand there outside the Elegant Ostrich gift shop. The door is open, and there’s a hint of sandalwood in the air. I am looking towards the gas station as Lark continues.

“That’s what Boyd told me. He and Albrecht are living in the house shaded by that tree, but neither of them saw or heard the drone.”

“So who is behind it?”

“That’s the question.”

“This is so bizarre! That patio has been there for forty years. Why all this interest all of a sudden? Who’s got the drone now anyway?”

“The police I think, but they can’t find the camera.”

“Maybe there wasn’t one.”

“Maybe, or someone took it.”

“Look! Is that Jake talking to Faruk over at the gas station?”

“Looks just like him.”

“Is he living in his old house or just staying nearby?”

“No, I saw him pulling out of his garage as I went by.”

“You have seen a lot this morning.”

“I went by Diddlie’s, right next door.”

“I’ll bet she was hoping he wouldn’t ever come back.”

 NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

Lou and I are having our weekly lunch in the Quark Lounge at the H bar. Before we arrived, Lou had used a new app. on his phone to place both our orders, from the menu the app. provides. A member of Liberty Tripp’s old band, ‘Toxic Blob’, serves us within a few minutes of taking our seats. Though I remember her by sight, I don’t say anything because I don’t want to interrupt Lou’s reminiscences about old times at the Library of Congress, and she shows no sign of recognition from having served us before. Lou and I had student jobs, photocopying documents in the seventies. We shared memories of bureaucratic life, the monotony of clerical work even though we are in the midst of that great collection, the petty conflicts and tension between supervisors and subordinates, and also their own superiors. We were so close yet far removed from the influence of money and its direction of power, surging like an aphrodisiac rising under the Capitol Dome and out through the House and Senate sides into our lives. It was not all work though on Capitol Hill, where we watched girls in minimal summer wear decorate the sidewalks at lunchtime, on their way to local bars and restaurants; we might try to join them, if they were not already in thrall to someone more important.

All this moves Lou to what has really been weighing on him lately.

“Boris Tarantula’s design to replace the Washington Monument is dead! Buried for good by the committee on Aesthetic Crime.” Lou is uncharacteristically upbeat today.

“Oh you mean that steel and concrete thing?”

“Not just steel, his trademark rusty brown I-beams.”

“He does some selective paintwork doesn’t he?”

“Yeah maybe so! I hope it will be forgotten too with the 2016 presidential elections coming up.”

He goes on to say that the project was stopped due irreconcilable differences between Senator Lee Leavenworth Knox of CUPA fame, and those who want to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. Liberals expected Knox to lead the charge against government-funded art but he shocked his opponents and supporters.

Lou ignores the plate put in front of him minutes ago. I start eating my fries slowly, one at a time, wondering if Lou is in a new manic phase that will have a down side later.

“Lee expects liberal support by calling for increased funding for the endowment, without mentioning he also expects Boris to get a huge grant for building the replacement Washington monument.”

“I read somewhere that he has hired ‘Think Right’ to run his campaign. Well, his investors did.”

“Yes they are not through yet, either. They’ll keep pushing.”

“Aren’t they a part of Fibbonaci corp? I mean, do you think the Fib. supports this?”

“No, no, no, ‘Think Right’ is just a hired gun. The Fib. and its subsidiaries are open for any one’s business.”

“You mean there is a ‘Think Left’ too?”

“Of course, but I forget what they are called.”

“Of course?”

“Fred, advocacy is a business, also called PR!”

“So what is the idea?”

“Basically it is distraction! The controversy over the endowment’s involvement will keep the secretive NY investors, out of the news.”

“Lou that is no secret. The ‘First Amendment Association’ was named in the Washington Post way back, last year? or 2012? I don’t remember.”

“Any way they plan on huge profits from renting the advertizing space.”

“On Federal land?”

“Oh, there will have to be a workaround there!”

“Oh yes, a clause hidden in some ten thousand page legislation with a general sounding name!”

“Something like that.”

“Who conceived of this in the first place?”

“The Association have supported Boris’s project from the beginning. As far as the idea goes, I couldn’t say who thought of it.”

“This controversy has been out of the news for years.”

“I found out what is going on the other night over dinner on Capitol Hill. We got into conversation with Congressman Bean and his associate Ms Flack.”

“Really! are you guys close?”

“No not at all but my friends are.”

“Who are they Lou?”

“Oh people from my old life. We still get together once in a while.”

“Lou, I sometimes wonder about your ‘old life’.”

“Not much to it really, but anyway, Ms Flack pointed out that most Liberals don’t look at conservative media and most conservatives don’t look at the Liberal stuff.”

“Well, that’s not true of us all. I like to look at both sides.”

“I know Fred, so does bel Vionnet, but most people don’t.”

“So the ‘Think Right’ strategy for Knox is to play both sides at once.”

“The Association claims the Park Service denied them their right to speak on public land when their first idea to project advertizing images on to the obelisk was turned down. They threatened to go to court. At the same time, there was a proposal to share profits with the Endowment, but that arrangement for a Government/Business partnership was never worked out.”

Lou’s ring tones sound. He looks down and fumbles the phone in his impatience.

“Oh it is our check. I’ll pick this one up.”

He pays the bill with his thumbs in texting action.

“This app. even calculates, adds the tip and complement the server and or the chef.”

Lou has yet to start his lunch and seems to have much more to say. I ask him if he might consider going back to work as he seems so much more upbeat at the moment. He puts down the phone.

“No way!”

He takes off his thin round gold frame glasses and a deep frown fills the gap between his eyes, now partially hidden by his lowered eyebrows. He has calmed and starts his meal, but goes on more slowly.

“Anyway Fred, privatizing the monument and getting it out of the hands of what Leavenworth Knox calls “the somnambulant Park Service” was high on his agenda. He must be disappointed.”

“Yeah, so must the investors!”

Lou has abandoned his meal, pushed the plate aside and taken renewed interest in his phone.

“Right … look, here’s the official Web Page.”

Lou has brought up the page on his phone and reads: “…“the somnambulant Park Service which is still looking backward, dreaming of the ancient wilderness, ignoring the fact that America has replaced it with productive enterprises.”

After turning his phone off and setting it aside in front of the ketchup bottle he was using just now, Lou goes on to say, “and get this, Lee could also expect generous support from the First Amendment Association when his reelection comes up.”

I thought Lou was finished, but, much to my surprise, he picks up his phone again, turns it on impatiently looking for the web page and starts reading again: “This work of art will feature advertizing space for eight modern brands while also exhibiting five ads from the early 1900s for their aesthetic and nostalgic appeal. That is a symbolic total of thirteen separate screens. ‘Advertizing is the folk art of our time’”

Lou looks up and straightens his glasses. Then he puts the phone down with a soft sigh, saying to himself, “Damn ketchup gets everywhere” and cleans them with his napkin before resuming.

“You know who said that don’t you Fred?”

“Yes, they are quoting Marshall McLuhan.”

“That’s right, and there is no attribution.”

He goes on reading from his phone: “Why should the Mall be full of neoclassical relics that have no electronics and no relevance to our modern digital or cyber society?”

“How about it Fred? I mean … listen to this!” He reads some more; “The Egyptian obelisk has nothing to do with George, while our very own American artist, Boris Tarantula’s five hundred foot steel and concrete sculpture will support millions electronic tessera, each one displaying an image of our first president with embedded LEDs, and programmed to illuminate in sequences showing the many wonderful brands in American commerce.   Celebrating our greatest companies, the most productive organizations human beings have ever known. The steel construction reflects the ‘heroic materialism’ of the twentieth century’s pioneering skyscrapers.”

“You get that reference to Clark right?”

“Yes the British Art Historian Kenneth Clark. I think he was looking at the NY sky-line when he said it.”

“Right, the TV series “Civilization”! ‘Heroic Materialism’, and again no attribution! Here’s the description that is supposed to make the sell.

“Concrete rises from the base through the steel work like a ribbon, or ‘the great climb of our road to progress’, which bursts forth at the top with a spray of fifty shining chrome coated rebars over twenty feet long. One for each state shining at the highest point, reaching for the stars!’.

He hands me the phone again.

“Here Fred, check this rendering.”

He passes me the screen again and gets back to eating lunch. I see an image of the soaring structure in miniature with the chrome top shining in the sun with the flag in the background.

“For the stars, no less.”

“It will be film stars next, Lou.”

“Sure why shouldn’t films be advertized on this thing?”

The Polar vortex is back this winter breaking temperature records and pipes in a neighbor’s house. It was 0 F. when Lambert the weather proof West Highland white terrier ran out into the fresh snow and looked light brown. Four inches fell last night and it is too deep for his short legs, but it is powdery enough for him to jump through it with ease, as if pouncing repeatedly on some buried prey. Bel crunches along the side of the plowed road towards me in the silence only snow can bring, except for a crow rasping the atmosphere above us in the hickories.

When bel reached me I had been shoveling snow piled up across the entrance to the driveway by the plow as it pushed along the road in the night. Bel has on an orange knitted hat that covers her head and neck down to the collar of her red down jacket.

“Your car is all dressed up Fred.”

“Yes, with nowhere to go!”

The sun is still low and orange like her hat against the clear morning sky now filled with the roar of a jetliner coming into National Airport.

“How are you and Steve?”

“We are fine but Daisie had a pipe burst last night. It is in an outside wall. She called to see if Steve could turn off the water.”

“Did he find the valve?”

“Yes but he and Albrecht had to move the dryer out the back door to get at it.”

“What was Albrecht doing there?”

“He and Boyd were both there but didn’t know where to find the valve.”

“That’s strange.”

“Daisy tells me Boyd sent the Militia to check on her the other day. He has been attentive lately.”

“Daisy calls it intrusive.”

“I know. She has had enough of him and Albrecht too.”

“Seems as if Boyd chose the right time with this emergency.”

“Yes, maybe, but I think Daisy might have called him in her panic about this burst pipe.

“So what did Boyd bring Albrecht for, bel?”

“Oh I think they live together now. You don’t get one without the other. They share that rental house on Wicket Street past the Safeway parking lot.”

A rusting old dump truck loaded with salt and grit is scraping down Oval hill having just turned at the top with a blade mounted in front. Lambert barks at the strange sound gradually getting louder. The truck pushes snow ahead and spreads grit behind, and rattles and bumps into Lambert’s site at the bottom of the hill opposite us. He stands watching the truck push a pile of lumpy snow and ice across the intersection, which fills the ditch and piles up. Dordrecht’s name and logo is printed on an orange plastic rectangle stuck to the door. The company must have rented the truck for the storm. Lambert has lost interest in the plow. He has turned to bark at Maximillian and Diddlie who are walking towards us in the middle of the road where a layer of ice under the snow was gritted by the truck. Max is wearing a multicolored knitted coat around his long dachshund body with a gold button fastening at the front by his right ear. It looks as if it were knitted with hundreds of short left over bits of wool from many different projects. The two dogs twist their leashes as they go around and around each other, nose to butt.

Someone in a blue down parka is brushing off a snow- covered Volvo station wagon down the road. It has been half in the ditch all night with both left wheels burried.

“Who is that Fred”? bel is looking toward the car with her hand shading her eyes from the sun.

“Don’t recognize the car or the man.”

Diddlie has separated the dogs and looks down the road too. “There’s the Fauxmont militia to the rescue!” As she speaks the black Militia Hummer pulls up by the stranded car, and Albrecht gets out, also in black. We watch as he and Boyd in matching black fatigues with countless pockets, and the man clearing snow, chat and the man lights a cigarette and breaths blue. After helping to clear snow off the car and from around the front wheels Boyd brings a tow line from the Hummer. They both get down on the ground to look under the car and hook up the Volvo. Albrecht brushes off his uniform and climbs in behind the wheel of the Hummer and moves slowly toward us taking up slack in the line. The man flicks his partially smoked cigarette in an arc over the roof of his car before getting into in his Volvo while Boyd stands by watching. Albrecht stops, gets out of the Hummer and talks to Boyd. They go over to look under the Volvo again. Boyd drops his long black flash light, or it comes unfastened from his outfit as he gets up. I am not sure if he used it to see under the car. Albrecht picks it up and attaches it to his belt.

Miximillian is pulling Diddlie towards the incident while Lambert is sniffing a large snow bolder the plow has rolled to the roadside. We all start walking slowly. I am pulled by curiosity following Maximillian, but Albrecht runs over, holding both gloved hands above his head and waving us away.

“Stay back folks! Stay back!”

Maximillian barks at him with tail wagging and we stop while Lambert is still engrossed in his roadside investigations. Boyd walks up and puts a couple of cones in our path indicating we should go no further, though we are at least a hundred feet away. At last Albrecht is revving his shiny black Hummer. It must have been parked under cover last night. It pulls the car clear of the snowy ditch with ease. Boyd dashes over to unhook the cable while Albrecht gathers the two cones and puts them back in his Hummer. We all walk alongside the Hummer as the Volvo drives away with some dents and a broken right headlight.

There’s a voice coming out of the Hummer’s open window, where Albrecht can be seen, showing no sign of the cold, at the wheel with his mirror aviators on and a military style lined cap with the ear flaps up. The ‘don’t tread on me’ logo of the Gadston flag flies from a yellow pennant attached to the antenna in back.

“Hold on!” says the voice from the radio, “Patriotic Americans know the threats we live under. Yes we do. Are you going to let FEMA grab all the available emergency rations? I mean purchase every last one of them? Are you … ”

Albrecht turns down the radio, to speak himself. “You hear that?”

“What was it Albrecht?”

“Diddlie that was America’s favorite white man!”

“Oh really, and who is he?”

“Glen Gazburg, the man America listens to. Do you know FEMA is hoarding all the available emergency food rations, just buying them up?”

“No I had no idea Albrecht, but I don’t see the problem. I mean they will distribute them in a disaster.” Diddlie has pulled Maximillian up close by her feet. “What do you mean our, ‘favorite white man’?”

“I mean Diddlie that Glen is the only white man speaking up for the white race against our liberal socialist government and its Moslem president!”

Bel and Lambert have caught up and Lambert is now held close by his shortened leash. Bel is grinning. “Albrecht, Glen is not my favorite anything and the president is your president too, yours mine and all Americans.”

“Well good morning bel.” Albrecht takes off his aviators and lets them dangle loosely in his gloved fingers, with his arm extended straight out the window. He smiles. “Of course he is bel. Though I didn’t vote for him, I know that. I know how our system works, but let me say that he is taking our country down the wrong road.”

“Albrecht let me tell you that the president isn’t a Moslem.”

“Well of course not literally Diddlie, but he might as well be.”

“I don’t see any connection at all.”

“Bel you Liberals are just blinded by your ideology that’s all. It is as plain as day. His policy is handing the Mid East over to the Islamicists, the terrorists and their sponsors. He has pulled our forces out! Isn’t that right Fred?”

“He has pulled most of our forces out, but …”

“Oh come on Fred!” Diddlies’s impatience leads her to pull on my shoulder from behind and step between me, and the Hummer door. She is looking up at Albrecht and banging her hand on the door under his face. His glasses swing from his fingers so close to the back of her head it seems she will knock them on the ground in her agitation. I feel Maximillian’s leash against my ankle as he tries to get around me without enough leash to do so. Albrecht looks down at her frowning. “Easy there girl, you’re going to hurt yourself and mess up my new paint job.”

Boyd is leaning forward shivering in the passenger seat to see past Albrecht. His opens his mouth as if to speak but Diddlie starts again, and he silently releases a plume of condensing breath.

“Listen Albrecht, just get this, okay! The president is getting us out of a war we didn’t belong in. The president of all Americans is …”

Albrecht has pulled his arm in and put his glasses back on. Then he holds his hands up in mock surrender. As he does so his cap is brushed askew by a pocket flap on his arm and he knocks his glasses off too. Boyd ducks out of sight, picks them up and hands them to back Albrecht. Who then interrupts Diddlie, who had interrupted me in her haste to refute him.

“Okay Diddlie.” She bangs on his door again … “and don’t call me ‘girl’ young man.”

“Diddlie, I apologize. I would appreciate it if you would call me Albrecht and not ‘young man’.”

I look over at bel, who is trying to stifle her laughter and failing. She moves closer to me. “Fred, tell me I am dreaming!”

“I don’t think you are bel. It might be a nightmare though.”

“Well Fred, some times we have to laugh to stop from crying.”

I hear Albrecht saying in a voice loud enough to tell us all. “Boyd, don’t you just love winding up the crazy Liberals?” He eases the Hummer forward while Diddlie bangs on the side with the flat of her hand. “Stop Albrecht, stop, you are going to run over Max.” The vehicle stops. “Diddlie, will you please stop hammering on my new paint job!”

“Albrecht just let me get this dog out the way of your horrible gas guzzling monstrosity!”

“Baby this thing got that guy out of the ditch didn’t it?”

“Albrecht I am not your ‘baby’ and that was a job for a tow truck!”

“What ever you say Diddlie. Have a great day folks. Fred, remember to speak up for America!”

Bel waves with a flabby fingered hand. “Bye bye Albrecht.”

He is still moving very slowly and has turned up his sound system and opened all the windows. For a few moments Mimì and Rodolfo’s duet ‘Sono andati?’ from Puccini’s La Boehme fill the snowy quiet with a diva’s voice. Could that be Albrecht’s latest CD? Then the windows go up.

(how it should be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtfLB2a_q20)

What could look more comfortable than a healthy tabby cat stretched out in a sunbeam on a fur coat with two white forepaws crossed in front of her snoozing face? Her long whiskers arching into the brilliant yellow warmth tremble in a twitch of her snout.

What could be more uncomfortable than the thought of that cat tearing the silk lining of Daisie’s old fur coat where she has tossed it over the arm of the couch with the faint odor of camphor released from its folds?

I couldn’t get far into the room when I arrived, but can see signs of the cat’s earlier relaxation from where I stand near the couch. There are open boxes and their contents distributed across the floor. All recently arrived.

The coat lining is not shredded, but there are tiny holes in the silk lining exposed where the coat fell open on the cushioned seat. “Is that Moth balls?”

Daisy looks down at the coat. “Yes, strong isn’t it? I am going through old clothes.” She strokes the fur where it is spread over the arm of the couch. “Well I can’t wear the thing now.”

“Why not Daisie, it is only 12 degrees outside and there’s a wind?”

“Because, it is unacceptable to wear the fur of murdered minks!”

“But they weren’t murdered for you. That was probably, what? sixty years ago?”

“More than that Fred. I think this dates back to the 1930s”

It is hard to think of Daisy in that fur coat. In fact I don’t know any one who wears them. “Was it your mother’s?”

“No, one of the Canadian aunts. You remember Theophilus at the party after Derwent’s death?”

“Yes, he fell asleep on the table with his face in his arms by the punch bowl.”

She picks up a sleeve. “Well, he brought me this in a trunk when he visited.”

“So you don’t want to be seen wearing ancient dead Canadian mink fur.”

“No, not Canadian. It was war booty. Theophilus, or was it his older brother? Anyway one of them served in Europe during world war two, interrogating Hungarian Fascists of the Arrow Cross or Cross Barby.”

“No Daisy, I think that was too far east for Canadians. It would have been the Soviets wouldn’t it?”

“He was in on it somehow. He spoke the language. I mean I don’t know. It was all hush hush but sort of came out one day … we aren’t supposed to talk about it … I can’t explain it any further anyway.”

“You mean these are Hungarian fascist minks?”

“I mean Fred, that I don’t know the coat’s provenance and that is really creepy.”

“Yes a lot of people were deported and murdered.” Daisy is looking at the floor. She puts down the soft furry sleeve and walks slowly over to the front door and back. She stops close to me and looks into my face, speaking quietly. “Right, that’s what I mean!”

“So there’s a creepiness factor as well as a fur factor.”

“Ouch!” Daisy bends down and finds a small screw she has trodden on in her thick knee-length purple woolen socks.

“I think it fell out of the trunk’s hardware when I opened it.”

She picks it up and holds it, and then stands still looking back at the coat.

“Yeah, it gets more complicated the more I think about it. I mean should I even keep it? I don’t know … so shall I just leave it in that trunk … or … ?”

“He has put you in a difficult position.”

“He didn’t mean to. You know, he thought it would be nice for me to have.” She points to the boxes, “and all this stuff that UPS brought yesterday too.” One box has a big art book balanced on top. It is Vision in Motion by Laslo Moholy Nagy, with its dramatic red black and white modernist dust cover, still intact after nearly 70 years. It catches my eye, but now is not the time to discuss the Bauhaus in Chicago. “Didn’t you say you are going to a gala down town?”

“Well Fred, I am invited, but I wasn’t going to go. Now Artie wants me to go with her. That’s why these old clothes are spread all over the place. I was looking through that trunk. I mean I don’t go to galas. It’s not my thing.” She points out an old fashioned steamer trunk with tarnished brass corners, and the arched lid open. There’s a bent lock hanging from it.

The cat is awake and glances up at me looking vulnerable with one back paw in the air.

“When did you get this cat?”

“Last week, it’s not mine. I am cat-sitting for a friend.”

“No sign of separation anxiety I see.”

Daisy walks over and pulls gently on the coat and the cat moves up on to the back of the couch, swishing its tail in an ‘S’. She stands there for a moment and then starts sniffing the crack between cushion and the couch back, pressing her nose in and trying to pull the cushion away with her white tipped left paw. “She made herself at home as soon as I let her out of the crate.”

“What’s her name Daisie?”

“Her deep and inscrutable singular name?”

“No I am not up to feline metaphysics, I just mean the name you call her.”

“A cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES you know. Any way let’s say her name is Jennyanydots, one of her names that is, but I call her Dots. That’s what Val calls her.”

“Who’s Val?”

“My friend Val Eliot.”

“Dots has moved to the windowsill. She knocks a brass candlestick on the floor in agitation and then a small brass windmill. “That must be Artie she can see over to the driveway from there. I guess we really are going to this thing together.” Daisy moves toward the front door and Dots jumps to the floor and follows, getting between her feet trying to rub against her leg. She picks up Dots and lets Artie in.

“Hi Daisy, how is Val’s cat doing?” Artie pets Dot’s head and she struggles to get down. Daisy lets go with a wince as Dots’ claws come out and she jumps free to the floor. Daisy looks at her upper arm. “She didn’t break the skin but she’s pulled out all these stitches in this old sweater. Look at that Artie!” Artie is well protected from weather and claws by her unusual insulated orange jump suit. It looks like something from an Arctic oil-drilling site. Daisy shows no sign of surprise. She winds several inches of wool around her index finger as Artie goes on. “Yeah, you going to charge Val for that?” Artie greets me and asks if I am going to Frank’s shindig.

“No I came over drop off some magazines, and now this!”

Artie steps towards me, “Magazines, oh great! let’s see!”

I hand her my Trader Joe’s paper shopping bag. Artie takes it and pulls out a copy of Country Life.

“Looks like Constable on the cover. What’s this mag. Fred?”

Before I can answer Daisy grabs my arm. “Fred, thanks so much. Oh that’s my favorite Brit. Mag.! God I am so preoccupied with all these reeking clothes … So interesting to see a modern photograph of the house in Constable’s painting!”

Artie looks at the picture. “I didn’t know it had survived. It’s The Hay Wain isn’t it?”

Daisie confirms and takes the magazine and Trader Joe’s bag from Artie, who is looking for a place to put down her shoulder bag.

“So what’s with all these clothes all over the place?”

Daisy puts the mag. back in the Trader Joe’s bag and puts them on top of one of the boxes. She points out the trunk on the floor. “I opened the Uncle-Theophilus-trunk, Artie, you know, the one I was telling you about?”

“What’s down the bottom, a skeleton?”

“Well, in a way yes, Artie.” Daisy picks up the coat for Artie to see.” Dots is looking out from under the overhanging trunk lid. Artie doesn’t see the cat and puts her bag under there and the cat rushes out and disappears down the hall with a yell.

“For God’s sake Daisy, is that a Mink?”

“No, it was Dots.”

“I mean the coat, Daisy.”

“Its more like a ghost. I mean it’s haunted.”

Artie has a sleeve in her hand and she strokes it gently admiring the fur. “This mink coat would be a great nostalgia thing tomorrow night.”

“What “thing” is that, Artie?”

“Fred, it is Frank Vasari’s fund-raising gala for the PU Arts Center. It’s definitely the mink coat crowd. You know, jewels, bare shoulders, a little décolletage, phony smiles, kissy kissy, and all that.”

“Oh Artie, that’s us isn’t it? Hanging with the zillionaires!”

“Sure, anything to make a buck. Val’s going to be there isn’t she?”

“No Artie, Dots is staying here remember?”

“Oh right, right right … So who is going to represent the Mcavity Theater?”

Daisy shrugs, “Fred, Have you seen their production of The Cocktail Party?”

“No, didn’t know it was on. Didn’t know any one was still interested in that old T.S. Eliot thing.”

Artie walks over to the trunk and looks in. “Sure they are. It’s a student production. You should check it out.” Artie holds up a garment from the trunk. “Check this old cocktail dress.” She holds by a pair of narrow straps.

Daisy looks up from the coat. She is fiddling with the loose wool hanging from her sweater. “Wow, very slinky! and way too small for me.”

I was going to tell them I have to go when Daisy’s ring tones sound. She searches under various things for her phone before pulling it from her pocket too late to answer but listens to a message. “Oh no! It is the Fauxmont Militia saying they … ” There’s a knock on the door, which Artie opens. Two men in black flak jackets are standing outside with automatic weapons pointed up.

Daisy puts her phone back in her pocket. One says he’s sergeant Kurtz and asks if every one is all right.

Artie steps aside to let Daisy speak to him. “What’s going on?”

“Just a routine call Ma’am.”

“What do you mean? No-one ever called before.”

“Have a nice day Ms. Briscoe.” The two Militiamen turn and walk away, draped like dark Christmas trees, with equipment hanging from their belts and jackets.

I say goodbye and follow them back to their Hummer, and then on down the road back home.

Lou is giving a New Year’s Day party at his home for friends and neighbors. When I arrive his big living room is full of familiar Fauxmonters and people I don’t know mingling under the clerestory windows. They frame leafless pignut hickories spreading their tallest branches outside in the cold raking winter light.

There, by the punch bowl, I recognize Ernie Manstein in check shirt and khakis. He is tall with thickening waist under the line of his belt. His grey hair, is neatly cut and combed and catches highlight from above. Rank Majors is chatting with him, phone in hand. Rank waves to me and introduces us. Telling me Ernie was a founder of The Leiden Organization. Ernie describes the venture as a ‘personnel thing’ and then his ring tones interrupt us.

“Sorry I’ve got to take this.” Ernie turns and strolls over to the wall where he stands next to the mantelpiece with his back to the room.

Rank puts his own phone back in his pocket.“There’s less and less government money for contractors these days you know. Ernie has brought a bunch of people together who wouldn’t make it out there by themselves.”

“Sounds like a clever fellow!”

“Well happy new year Fred, I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

“Happy new year Diddlie, I was delayed.”

“Rank, have you got that gun on you?”

“As a matter of fact I have Diddlie.”

“Where, I don’t see it?”

“No, you are not supposed to, but I am ready if needed.”

“Oh Rank, what do you need a gun for at a party?”

“Diddlie, who knows?”

“In a crowded room like this … you must be crazy.”

“Diddlie, my training tells me where and when to use it.”

“I hope so Rank … I mean come on, this is a party!”

“That’s right Diddlie, so lighten up, will you?”

Diddlie pats his shoulder and whispers in his ear. Rank puts his arm around her shoulder and gives her a squeeze.

“Okay Rank, hands off buddy!”

“Oh Lou! Save me! Save me!”

“Diddlie, there’s no saving you now kid!”

“Happy new year Fred. How’s your drink?”

“Well filled thanks Lou. You ever heard of the Leiden Organization?”

“Sure, for heavens sake don’t take any notice of that stuff in Fulton Furray’s article online.”

“Lou, sometimes Fulton is on to something.”

“Oh happy new year Mr. Ramsay.”

“Diddlie, you got three men to flirt with already.”

She steps towards him and gets close. “Well, are you happy?”

“I am old and decaying and headed for another drink.”

He’s wearing a bright yellow shirt and deep brown thick-whale cords, with brown leather suspenders. His pants come up high on his waist and hang loosely from his shoulders is if from a hanger. He breaks off and shuffles nearer the table regarding the choices of wines, liquor and punch bowl.

“Here Mr. Ramsay, let me give you a hand.”

“A hand, what do I need a hand for?”

“You look a little unsteady that’s all.”

“Diddlie, where’s that nice tall friend of yours?”

“You mean Daisy?”

“Yeah, get me out from under these weeds. Show me that flower of Fauxmont … now she could give me something!”

“You want white or red Mr. Ramsay?”

“Oh red, but I got to have white, like piss, for god’s sake … it does the job though … unless it’s that cheap …”

Diddlie hands him a glass of white wine.

“What kind of a glass is this? God damn plastic, piss in plastic for Christ’s sake!”

“Drink up there!”

“Hank Dumpty, you fat old fart.”

“Ramsay, I am fat and happy with a brace of pheasant and enough bear meat and venison in the freezer for the rest of winter.”

Hank pours himself some bourbon. Then turns around.

“Any one need a refill?”

“You going to give me one of your birds for dinner tonight?”

“The question is will you behave yourself Ramsay?”

“The question is are you going to give me a refill Hank?”

“Ramsay you’re cut off!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just what I choose to mean.”

“You can’t make that choice … You god damn bully!”

“Happy new year Ramsay!”

“I don’t play by your rules Hank …”

A big wide faced blonde woman comes over and stands next to Mr. Ramsay with a light in her blue eyes. She wears black denim bib overalls matching Hank’s, and a white blouse with blue polka dots.

“Helga my love, have a drink with me.”

“Frank, you’re drunk and rude as usual.” She takes his arm and walks away slowly towards some chairs by the garden windows with him shuffling next to her. Diddlie is tugging my arm.

“Fred, come on over here honey.”

We go into the kitchen shaded by the magnolias outside and full of people, polished granite and shiny stainless steel. Daisy is leaning back against the counter top by the sink with a small rectangle of purple paper in her hatband. Her bowler hat is so far back on her head I wonder if it will fall in the sink. She wears a dark pleated blouse with a fine sari-like wrap that seems to drip from her tall spare body in silky purples and deep reds. The multiple facets of her bracelets flash all along her extended right forearm under the thin beam of a halogen light above the sink. She gestures to a small woman standing next to her in a gray tweed jacket, with wild and thin gray hair that looks like a cobweb. She holds her plastic wine glass by the stem in one of her tiny fists.

She says something about, “the ‘subfusc’ light in here”.

Diddlie has turned to talk to someone else for a moment and turns back to tell me the woman is an art historian but doesn’t know her name. I smell smoke.

“Is there a fire somewhere?”

“Here Fred …” Diddlie hands me a joint, fat with a long ash on the end. We are standing behind Daisy next to the stove with the range hood fan on full. The bonfire smell is drawn up across my face towards the stove by the fan in heavy strands of smoke.

“Where did this come from?”

Some one says “Colorado Springs.”

“Okay, so this is legal stuff right?”

“Not around here Fred.”

“Diddlie I mean …”

“Just try it Fred. Get out of your head!”

It is strong and some time after my toke I notice the cobweb woman is gone and the smell of smoke is gone, and there is Lou with Ernie. I didn’t catch Lou’s question.

“What was that Lou?”

“How many you had Fred?”

“More than enough I think.”

We are outside walking along the magnolia hedge toward a group of people standing in the gazebo with its chimney. Ernie is telling Lou that his company is registered in the Netherlands where his partners live. Boris Tarantula is there with Artie Bliemisch, Frank Vassari, and some one else. They all have drinks and warm themselves around the fire bowl in the center of the gazebo.

“Lou, I didn’t know you had connections in the art world.”

“Only through Ernie who collects Frank’s work.”

“Well, I have a couple of early paintings.”

“Now Ernie, I hope you will consider my work too.”

“Boris, when can I take a look?”

“Ernie bought one of Artie’s pieces.”

Artie, introduces me to Giuseppe Gloriani, Tarantula’s new agent. “Hi Fred, happy New Year! Are you a collector?”

No no, I am an interested friend of Artie’s and Frank’s.

“We are all friends here.”

“Of course, Boris.”
“Where is Mr. Guderian? You know Steve Strether introduced me a few months back.”

“I think he had a conflict Boris. I did invite him.”

“Too bad I want him to meet Giuseppe here. Giuseppe is handling all purchasing now.”

So, is that what Steve was doing up at the Guderian’s when we met him with bel and Lambert? When was it we were up there at those mansions off Boundary Circle that “top secret America built”? … All those caterpillars were falling off the trees … Poor Lou was upset about the discussion … His old faith came back to him when he grieved over his daughter’s death … “You know, sometimes I feel as if God is reaching out to me … and then …. Well, … then I don’t … How could God bring about all this? … History is the history of suffering … You know?”

“Fred, hey FRED! Are you stoned or what?”

“No I was just thinking about something.”

There’s a big red hole in the neighborhood at the site of Derwent Sloot’s house. All the big hollies have been cut down that once protected the view from his living room window from the excesses of the Trip mansion next door. I can see right across Derwent’s lot and across the Trip’s back yard and look at three stories of curtained windows at the base of Jake’s folly. A John Deer 800 backhoe with diesel breath, and orange exoskeleton is maneuvering across the bottom enlarging the excavation by clawing at the sides with its bucket. I can hear the strain in the engine note and see it in the darkened exhalations from the exhaust stack. Shiny steel extensions emerge from their hydraulic cylinders and gleam as if they are sweating, loading the bucket full of earth into a dump truck. I was wondering how the truck and machine would get out. Then the truck surprised me by coming up to the surface on a steep dirt ramp hidden from view on the near side of the hole. Concrete footings for a new house will soon be poured, and this big space will be enclosed to become a basement. The L shaped pit in the red clay is surrounded by a silt fence and beyond that, fenced off with orange netting stretched between thin metal posts. Two men with orange jackets and hard hats stand on the other side. One is smoking and looking down at the water pumped up from the bottom through a hose and pouring out beyond my sight. The backhoe has now come up the ramp and the operator walks over to join them leaving his machine grinding the atmosphere with its engine. The other man is on the phone, as he looks up into the trees.

Derwent’s house was scraped off the lot yesterday in a single afternoon and most of the remains were loaded with tremendous noise into a couple of dump trucks that evening. One of his armchairs is supported above the sticky wet bare clay on a sheet of warped plywood. Some one is sitting in it watching me through his Ray Bans, watching the action. He holds something up in front of his face for a moment, a tablet perhaps. Derwent’s bathroom sink sticks out from the last of the rubble near my feet. The man who was looking up into the trees puts his phone in his pocket and walks towards me, waving.

“Hi Fred, are you supervising today?” It is Max Plank.

“No, that’s your job Max.”

“Not until we pour the foundations. This hole is a lot deeper than it needs to be in my opinion, but this is another Dordrecht job.”

“I thought you were through with them!”

“So did I.”

“What do you hear from Sherman Shrowd?”

“We’re still talking. That’s his thing you know, talking.”

“Yes, is this job part of Sherman’s negotiation?”

“That’s one way of putting it. Sherman has shown me a blueprint I’d never seen before.”

“You mean from the Trip house?”

“Yeah, my legal problems grew out of the failure of our silt fence on that job.”

“So what did the blueprints tell you? How did he get them?”

“He’s not saying where he got them. He doesn’t talk that much … but look here’s the thing, there’s a room under the garage.”

“Is that unusual?”

“In this case it is, because the specs I saw show the space under the garage should have been filled in.”

“You should know. You built it.”

“Yes I should, and as far as I know it was filled in and inspected.”

“So what about this hidden room?”

“I think it was done in the week I was off site working over in DC.”

“Oh, you mean done in secret after the fact?”

“Something like that. I don’t know why but I was cut out of several aspects of that job as you know.”

“How about this job?”

“Ask the guy behind me in the arm chair.”

“Is he the boss?”

“I don’t know. His name is Skip and my contract says I answer to the Dordrecht’s site manager not him.”

“So who is he?”

“Like I said his name is Skip.”

“Right, so what’s he doing here?”

“He sits there watching, taps his tablet, and makes a few phone calls. That’s all I’ve seen.”

“Yes I saw him eyeing me and he may have taken my picture come to think of it. When did you get the news from Sherman?”

“About a month ago. Lark is convinced they are holding Juanita Gomez down there.”

“My God, what a nightmare! Who would be doing that?”

“I find it unbelievable but you can ask her in a minute. I just called her and she’s coming by to give me a bag I forgot this morning.”

“Max, I have to get going soon.”

“Alright Fred … No wait a minute. She’s in that Toyota parking over there, see?”

Lark gets out of the same old Corolla Max was driving when we saw him outside the Cavendish Pie Shop the other day. She is wearing a thick white turtleneck cable knit sweater, black jeans and boots, carrying a New Yorker magazine tote bag.

“Hi Lark, what you got there, the family jewels?”

Lark holds the bag open showing me a laptop inside with a folder full of papers next to it.

“Right, all my electronic gems are in there.” She gives Max the bag with one hand and takes his hard hat off and puts it on her head with the other.

“Are you going to be here all day?”

“Unless you are taking over.”

“Lark, good to see you, but I have to go.”

“Okay Fred, so do I, can I give you a ride?”

“Sure, I am going to the Metro.” We walk over to the car and Max’s phone sounds.

“Sorry about the seat! Max’s last passengers were a bag of cement and a couple of gallons of gas for the lawn mower.”

She reaches on to the back seat and hands me an old bath towel to cover up the dust on the seat.

“Boson peed back there on the way to the vet last month.”

“You mean I am now sitting on dog pee instead of cement dust?”

“No, no, that’s just for his drool. It’s newly washed and dried.”

“Boson, who’s Boson?’

“Max’s bloodhound, we were taking him to Dr. Higgs.

We should have used the van, but this uses less gas. Max bartered this heap in part payment for a job. He says the engine is great even though it looks crappy.” I could hear him yelling at us as I got in, but Lark ignored him and started up. It sounds smooth as Lark pulls away only to stop again and toss Max’s hardhat back to him through the open window.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

Lark is laughing at him, and honks twice before we turn the corner to go down Oval Street hill. She hadn’t said another word to Max. I can’t tell if he is really annoyed or playing games with Lark but she seems unruffled and amused.

“Did he tell you about the blue prints Fred?”

“Yes, what makes you think Juanita is being held in the Trip house. She disappeared in March of 2012!”

“Oh lots of things, from several sources. Look I know it’s been a long time, which makes it even scarier. I think she knows something. That’s one reason she’s in danger and also perhaps why she is still alive. Also Max was really frustrated the whole time he worked on that house with Dordrechts because stuff kept happening when he wasn’t there and no one explained it. He said the pay was so good he couldn’t pass the job up, even though he felt like it.”

“I see he’s working with Dordrechts on this job too.”

“Yeah, Sherman set that up and I pushed him.”

“You mean he didn’t want it?”

“No he didn’t, but I kept telling him we might find out something now

he knows there was more than lack of coordination before.”

“Has he told you about Skip?”

“Yeah, we have discussed Skip and I think he’s a security guy.”

“Oh! What about Max?”

“He still doesn’t take me seriously on this.”

“Alright, but who do you think Juanita’s jailer is?”

“Fred, I tell you, I am worried about your buddy Lou. Has he ever asked if he might plug a thumb drive into your computer?”

“How do you know about it?”

“Ah! So he has!”

“I didn’t say that Lark.”

“You don’t have to. I am sure he told you never to say anything; and Fred, you haven’t. ”

We are less than a mile past the Pie Shop on Maxwell Avenue and now stopped at the back of a long line of cars ahead.

“So what is this about?”

“Hope you are not in a hurry!”

“I was …”

“You see this is another reason not to buy a fancy car. Look at that new Mercedes S 550. Probably cost over a hundred $K new, and it is burning twice as much gas as I am sitting in the road like a pile of junk!”

“If you can afford one of those the cost of gas is immaterial.”

“Sure dollars are no a problem, but pollution affects us all.”

“Looks like you and Max got a good deal here.”

“It gets us where we are going, but it is strictly steerage!”

“So what else do your sources tell you Lark?”

“It’s what they don’t tell me. I mean there’s a big hole in the evidence. Can’t find any documentation showing that Juanita is really is in detention any where.”

“But isn’t it known she is being held in a detention center as an illegal immigrant in Texas or somewhere?”

“So they say, but I think it’s a red herring. I’ve checked it all out and there’s no paper trail.”

“Seems fishy alright. What about the raid on the Tripp house?”

“That is documented but they are withholding the details.”

“Why, by whom?”

“Neither INS, nor FBI will tell me much … well, ah … I have word that she wasn’t in fact taken by any government agency.”

“Who’s word?”

“Can’t say Fred.”

“Well, who’s got her?”

“Who else is there around here Fred?”

“Oh not Urban Safety what ever they are called!”

“I didn’t say that Fred.”

“You don’t have to and you didn’t, Lark.”

 NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right.  

Mishaps … happenings that is … they cause delay, disruption, and disorientation, even momentary despair but these are not disasters. Disaster is on another scale.

It is fall, cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon. Lambert has recovered from his ACL surgery and restrictions imposed by the “Cone from Hell”, which prevented him from gnawing the stitches out of his right hind thigh. Red and purple maple leaves stick to his fur after he rolls around at the roadside. He has a passion for cigarette butts and loses his equilibrium, falls into the ditch, and comes up again with a yelp shaking himself violently. Muddy water from the bottom of the ditch and wet leaves fly from his coarse white fur in all directions. Water spatters an oncoming jogger’s orange and black track suite with a Snazz logo over the right breast. Perhaps there is grit in that dispersal and that is what gets in her eyes. She doesn’t stop to get the irritant out. She keeps going, but more slowly, rubbing her eye and veering blindly from the side of Wicket Street into the intersection with Oval Street. An old chalky blue F150 comes down Oval Street hill. I notice the gun rack is full against the back window. It breaks hard and swerves to avoid an accident when I hear a loud yell from the open cab Window. It is Hank Dumpty. Coffee spilled down the front of his tea shirt.

Bel Vionnet has her hands up to her face fearing disaster. “You shouldn’t drink and drive!”

Hank Dumpty gets out of his truck, leaving it running and stopped with the door open. It is at an angle across the bottom of Oval Street blocking the way. “That stuff is god damn hot.”

He pulls his green t-shirt off over his head and rings it out over the ditch, then wipes his broad hairy protruding gut with the bunched cloth as if it were a rag. Bel Vionnet walks over to Hank.

“Sorry Hank I am sure that was painful. You dropped something you know.” She picks up the cell phone, which fell out of his t-shirt pocket as he hurriedly took it off.

“Thanks bel. It is still hot from the coffee too.” He drops it in the front pocket of his jeans.

The jogger has stopped by the truck. “Look where you’re going there!” She looks up, only a shadow inside the cave of her hood, and runs toward Hank.

“Hank, what happened to you?”

“You happened Daisy!”

“Hank, what did I do? You must be freezing! Don’t you have a jacket?”

Hank walks over to his truck and pulls out a paint-stained shearling jacket with a hole in the elbow and tufts of wool hanging from the bottom. He puts it on but doesn’t bother to fasten it. Daisy tries to do it up for him.

“Hank, where’re the buttons on this thing?”

“It has a zip and it’s busted.”

“Oh Hank, honey, get in your truck and turn the heat on.”

“The heat’s busted. I am fine Daisy. Well, I was fine until you wandered out in front of me, and I damn near ran you over.”

“I didn’t know you were a jogger Daisy.”

“I am not bel. This is my second try. I bought this outfit last year and it just stayed in my drawer until now.”

“How far do you go?”

“Last time I went through the woods on Cockroft Lane and back on Walton Street, but the light on Maxwell Avenue takes for ever to change. So now I am going once around Wicket Street. It’s only about a mile and it’s killing me.”

“What do you mean Daisy? I, damn near killed you.”

“Hank, I know. I’ve got to be more careful. I nearly fell in the ditch yesterday, like Lambert. I am ready to give it up anyway.”

“Why did you start?”

“Fred, I just thought it would be a good idea to get fit, before I get too old to even try.”

“Daisy, sweetheart, you still have plenty of time. Better look where you are going though. I’ve got to get moving up to the cabin and shoot some Thanksgiving dinner.” Hank climbs back into his truck as a UPS van comes down the hill behind. The driver gets out and delivers three cartons to the old Tripp house. Leaves them next to the side door where Juanita had let me in when I made my first visit. As Hank pulls away towards Maxwell Avenue, Lark Bunlush walks up behind us. No one noticed because we were all so interested in the happenings on the corner.

“So who is living there now?” Lark is pointing up toward the Tripp house. Some-one a few houses away starts a leaf blower. Then, as if in response, another one starts up the hill from us.

“I don’t know Lark. Let’s get away from that noise and go for coffee, on me.”

“Daisy, what happened to you?”

“Oh, I almost got run over Lark.”

“Is that why you are all spattered?”

“No she has Lambert to thank for the decorative dirt.”

Lambert has been sitting patiently at bel’s feet. He looks up on hearing his name. His tall expressive ears stand up from the top of his head like conical sections. Getting no immediate response he barks, a single sound, loud, sharp and short. Daisy bends over to pet him and his ears flatten against his head. He grunts as she rubs them, one with each hand. Daisy stands up again when Lambert breaks away.

“So, is any one up for coffee? I’ve had it with exercise.”

She starts toward Maxwell Ave. with bel and Lambert in the lead. Lark and I follow and cross the road behind them. Leaves fill the hickories with yellows as if remembering summer as they fade into fall, and gray white-oak leaves are blowing up from the road in swarms, animated by the steady flow of traffic along Maxwell Avenue. The parking lot in front of us is filling with Saturday morning shoppers maneuvering their SUVs among small cars.

“What did you say Lark?” The wind roars in my ear and her voice is carried off as a fire engine is slowed to a crawl at the intersection with its siren sweeping all other sound away.

“Fred, I said that was a pretty sickening midterm election.”

“The economy is picking up. I thought the Democrats would do better.” The sign on the door to the Cavendish says “No Pets Please”. Daisy, Bel and Lambert go in with another short bark from Lambert who is straining hard from his now shortened extendible leash. He knows Mrs. Rutherford will give him some thing. It is usually a left-over from the sandwich selection, maybe roast beef or cheese. Lark and I keep chatting outside. She steps off the shady sidewalk with a shiver and into a sunny parking space. I open the door for her.

“Fred, I don’t have time for coffee … but anyway, think about it. The stock indexes are going sky high, but who benefits?”

“I see what you mean, not the average voter.”

“That’s it Fred and they are mad at Obama who’s got only himself to blame.”

“Really Lark? I thought it was the Republicans!”

“Ha Ha, Fred, seriously though, he ditched the campaign organization that first got him elected and the oligarch’s machine just kept rolling!”

“Lark, come on in for a minute.” I open the door again but she refuses. I stand to the side as more customers go into the Pie Shop.

“The oligarchs Lark? Do you mean the conservatives.”

“You might say that, but they are not conservatives. Conservatives have been marginalized by the so called Tea Party.”

“So called? They are the Tea Party.”

“The original Tea Party was more diverse and sprang up all over the place at once. What passes for Tea Party now seldom says anything about the corporate excess, which they used to do.”

“What do you mean Lark, there is a Chantilly branch and an Alexandria branch which is emphasizing K-12 education issues.”

“I didn’t know that Fred. Are you into it?”

“Read those you agree with for reassurance and read your enemies for growth…”

“What’s that Fred? Are you quoting something?”

It is from “Lament for a National Hero” by Peter Dale Scott.

“Oh yeah the poet, the guy who wrote “Coming to Jakarta.”

“The same, Lark.”

I can see Daisy beckoning to us inside from the coffee line.”

Max Plank pulls up in a battered gold Toyota Corolla. He cranks down the window and says something that’s drowned out by wind and a horn.  Some one is honking at him trying to get by.  Max ignores them and yells at Lark to get in.

“Okay, Okay! Look Fred, the corporate state is consolidating along with militarized police and Obama’s war or journalists is keeping a lid on.” She has her hand on the car door handle but it is the driver’s side door. “Other side Kid.”

“What Max?” She is still looking at me. Werner grabs her arm and pulls to get her attention.

“Get in the other side.” The car behind Max is flashing its lights and honks again. It is a small white Lexus with the driver sitting low in the seat craning her neck to see over the steering wheel.

“Max, what are you doing here baby?”

“Get in Lark!”

The woman in the car behind leans out of the window. She has a peaked leather cap on with ear-flaps and thick gray hair spilling out from under it on the sides.

“Move your car, will you?”

“Alright lady, alright!”

Max moves on leaving Lark standing in the parking space looking at me.

“Listen Fred, our demonstrations and civil disobedience bring on the heavies, the swat teams and dirty tricksters and show their true colors.”

“Lark we can go on later. Mind that car!”

“Fred, will you join the movement to head off disaster?”

“The angry woman punches her horn as she inches up to park in the space Lark is standing in. “I am the one trying to move honey, not him. Get out of the way!”

The impatient woman moves up in the comfort of her Lexus as Lark steps off the street and back into the cold shade of the sidewalk in front of the Pie Shop.

“Get out of the way!” I can see a fat orange cat curled up in the seat next to the driver. It looks like a large round pudding until it wakes up and stretches in a distinctly feline gesture. The cat doesn’t move again but Max’s car has moved out of her way and so has Lark.

I couldn’t respond to Lark above the commotion and invited her in again gesturing towards the open door.

“I don’t have time Fred.”

She turns around. “Where’s Max?” She mops back the black strands of hair that grow in front of her thick gray mass and walks off into the crowded parking lot. I go in to find Daisy, bel, Lambert and coffee.

NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right. 

        Lou climbs down his ladder leaning over a butterfly bush against Diddlie’s roof and next to the chimney. He steps down slowly from the roof to the cement patio. I have driven over to pick him up for lunch, as previously agreed through a flood of text messages which had revised the time and place repeatedly over the last twenty-four hours. He has cleared Diddlie’s roof of last winter’s fallen leaves and twigs from a newly fallen branch. Swept them off the gentle grade onto a huge crumpled blue tarp spread on the lawn like stilled waters. He folds the tarp over the pile and weights it down with his rake and a spade.

“I’ll do the gutters after.”

He takes off his gloves and Australian straw hat with a brass kangaroo leaping through a dark sweat stain on the light brown leather band. Lou walks over and picks up his backpack to get a towel out. A northern mocking bird is furiously clucking at him as he wipes his head, but it doesn’t leave its perch next to the purple spread presented by the rose of Sharon trees. After he hangs the towel on a branch to dry, another mockingbird bird dives at him with its wings flashing their white markings in a dramatic display of offensive aerobatics. The bird settles on a redbud branch clucking at us only yards away. Lou leans over to talk through my open window.

“That bird has been after me all morning.”

“It’s too late for them to be nesting, Lou.”

“Naaah, they are just having some fun at my expense!”

“They are high on hibiscus.”

“You ever wash this thing?”

“No, it’s against my religion to wash the car.”

“No good for your paint.”

“Still don’t believe in it. If we get a clean rain, that will wash it off, besides this thing is made of fiberglass or something like that, which won’t rust.” Lou walks around the back running his finger across the back window leaving a wiggly line in the pollen, tree sap and soot dropped by aircraft landing and taking off up river. He holds up his hat as the bird makes a second approach. Lou knocks on the window opposite the driver’s side. I press the buttons to open the window and unlock the door. He tries the handle at the same time and the two actions cancel each other out.

“Let me in here. I need the cover Fred.”

He reaches in through the open window, unlocks the door and gets in.

“So I see Lou. I don’t have my air defense system up yet.”

“Fred, are we going to the H-bar?”

“Yes, unless you have somewhere else in mind. Is Diddlie coming, Lou?”

“She might meet us there. She’s out with … ah … I don’t know … She’s gone out though.”

“Good of you to clean off her roof, Lou.”

I backed the car out of Diddlie’s driveway and we coast down Oval Street past the Trip’s, or is it still the Trip’s?”

A fox runs in front of us with something dangling from its jaws. I break needlessly to let it cross the Wicket street intersection. It is mangy with a ragged tail, but fast, and agile enough to jump through a rail fence into a tangle of wisteria and holly on the other side.

“What’s that thing doing in the middle of the day?”

“Lou these are suburban foxes. They know most people are away during the day and home in the evening.”

“You think so?”

A lunch crowd fills the H-bar, but the receptionist assures me there are plenty of tables in the Quark Lounge.

“I don’t see her in this crowd Lou.”

“No, she is not here yet. Let’s go ahead. She’ll find us if she wants to.”

“It is darker than ever in here, Lou.”

“Might help if you take your sunglasses off.”

We settle opposite each other in a booth. Then Lou goes to wash up.

A gray haired man with wide hips and a white tea-shirt and khaki shorts walks past with a bandy gait. His pocket brushes the side of the table.

“Well, excuse me!”

“Diddlie, where did you come from?”

“Oh, out and about.”

She is wearing the same royal blue blazer as the first time I met her and there is a blaze of goldenrod on her lapel. She carries a small powder blue suede purse on a long thin red strap over her shoulder.

“That guy ought to be more careful!”

“Yes”

“So are you guys going to solve another of the world’s problems today?”

“I doubt it.”

“Fred, why do you get into these involved conversations? I mean what’s the point of sitting here talking about things you can’t do anything about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like all that talk about Snowden.”

“All that talk about Snowden interested me because I heard other people’s views.”

“So what?”

“So actually talking about it is doing something.”

“Its not going to change anything.”

“It changes my mind. Isn’t that important?”

“You just live in your head.”

Diddlie is looking in her purse, moving her fingers deeper and deeper into it as if to try and find something tangled in the contents.

The restaurant seems to be emptying. The big gray haired man is standing by the table with his back to me facing the room, talking to a family as they get up at an adjacent table. Lou walks around them all to get back to his seat. “Where’s Diddlie, Lou?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t seen her yet. Have you?”

“Yes she was here a second ago.”

Lou gets up and looks around. The big guy has left and I can see the family from the adjacent table walking out through sunbeams coming in the bar through the big bay window. Lou rubs his face and scratches his thick black left eyebrow and sits down again.

“I woke up from a nightmare last night with a horrible realization.”

“Do you remember the dream itself?”

“No, nothing much. I was with my daughter before she shipped out.”

Lt. Waymarsh had been killed in Iraq on Nov. 25, 2010. The waiter is standing over us asking what we would like to drink. Lou doesn’t notice and goes on.

“There is no act of torture, carnage or sadism,  I might dream about that hasn’t happened to some one … or may be happening right now.”

The waiter moves on having said something in a low voice I didn’t hear as I was listening to Lou.

“Where did that come from?”

“A nightmare, but a nightmare that’s probably happening to some one

while I am lying in a comfortable bed, or sitting here talking to you.”

I don’t want to discuss Iraq or the war. He will get even deeper into the grief he has been living with ever since Nov 2010.

“Are you getting enough sleep these days Lou?”

“Seem to be. You know I have been living under the illusion that the world was getting to be a better place since world war two.”

“There are now more people living in material comfort than any time in history. You might be right.”

“That comfort is coming at a very high price.”

“You mean environmentally?”

“That too, but I am thinking of the way our wealth has been made and continues to be made.”

“You’re thinking of economic exploitation perhaps?”

“That’s the way they say it on the left, but I am thinking about a bigger picture. I mean there’s more than one kind of capitalism. Why are we stuck with the kind of finance we have?”

The waiter is back and gives us each a paper place mat, glasses of ice water and asks if we have decided on our order. We haven’t, and he gives us more time in which we continue to talk.

“Much has changed through leveraged buy outs and the financial crash.”

“Yup, and technology has made a lot of that possible, and a lot of other things possible too.”

Lou pulls out his glasses to read the menu and puts it down again.

“I don’t need that thing. Always get a burger and fries with a side of string beans.”

“That’s right, with balsamic vinegar on them.”

“Yeah, if Mr. Hoffman still has that good stuff.”

The waiter came back again and took our orders showing his tattooed forearms below his short sleeves and gold piercings in his ears.

“Have you been away Lou?”

“No, just not been in here lately … I still don’t feel comfortable about the deal with Guderian.”

“When was that?”

“Remember, we walked up to Slips Lane with bel and met Steve coming out of Guderian’s?”

“Yes, when Lambert came racing out.”

“I don’t know what Steve was up there for but they approached me about going back to work with them.”

“You mean Steve and Guderain are in partnership?”

“No, but Steve does some consulting with them.”

“I had no idea!”

“No, well maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Any way keep that ‘entre nous’.

“Doesn’t sound like educational work Lou.”

“No, it is hush hush.”

“You mean security stuff?”

“Say no more Fred. It is all ‘close hold’ and it has a tight hold around here that’s for sure.”

“Lou, what are you talking about?”

“I am talking about something … about our country’s safety, I mean I may need a favor if you are up for it.”

“Be glad to help you out Lou.”

“Of course Fred, but I’ll tell you straight up, you are being used, and not just by me.”

“You mean right now I am being used?”

“Put it this way, once you get into contracting and subcontracting and sub sub contracting in the tech. business it is easy to loose track of what is really going on.”

“So alternative agendas creep in.”

“Hard to discern.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a memory stick to plug in your PC for a second.

Then I’ll come back with another in about a week and plug that

in, and take it away. No one should ever know the difference.”

“But everything computers do is remembered in a sense.”

“That’s true Fred, but I’ll cover my tracks and yours.”

“Artemisia Bliemisch” say white letters on an orange banner stretched over the entrance to the new Gentileschi Gallery on 7^th Street in Washington DC. They moved from P Street in the spring. Artie is now hanging the exhibition, which opens next week. The double fronted gallery windows are framed in brushed aluminum surrounded by polished black granite. Steve and I can’t see in as the windows and door are curtained with a coarse white fabric that has small gun-metal blue spirals in the weave that look like madly distorted little springs. A small fluffy longhaired calico cat is playing between curtain and window to the left of the door. She bats with a swift white paw at something crawling up the glass and it looks as if she has pulled some metal out of the curtain too.

There’s a small gap between the end of the curtain and the doorframe. We look through the glass at the cat’s gap in the curtain and knock. Artie walks distractedly towards the door in her striped railway-man’s cap. Her black tea-shirt hangs from her broad shoulders stained with drips of white and various yellow tones, which all but obscure the P.U. logo. Her white cargo pants have paint encrusting the knees. The pockets are loaded with rags, tools, and a small paint roller hangs from a loop at her hip.

Installation of her latest and most ambitious work has not left her much time for sleep. She unlocks the door and lets us in with a big hug for Steve Strether who helped her move the big pieces in the Cavendish Pie Shop’s van last week. Her cell-phone ring chimes sound with a metallic crash of something falling, many things perhaps. She looks down at the screen as if it had bitten her and then ignores the call with the flick of her finger.

Fatigue surrounds her eyes in deepening red hollows under her brows and her voice is hoarse. She takes off her hat and her black hair is cut short rising off her head in damp black tufts and spikes as she rubs. A grin lightens her face as she notices Steve’s concentrated look at the work before us.

“Oh Cangiante! you are going in the crate now.” She picks up the cat, which has lost interest in the curtain and window and seems headed for a jar full of small paintbrushes on the floor.

“She’s going to the vet at 3.” Cangiante chirps as Artie picks her up.

She says a lot more in Italian as she carries the cat to the back of the gallery where there is a kitchen, office and storeroom. We can hear yells of protest as she is dropped in the crate. Artie returns and stands next to Steve.

“Is that a new cat?”

“Steve, she adopted me this week, here at the gallery. I think she’s a Persian.”

“That flat face of hers is striking – How do you think she will get along with your black and gray kitty, Sfumato, back at your studio?

“There’s Bounder!”

Echoing barks come from the back and fill the room.

“There was no one to take Bounder today so she has been hanging out here.”

“Artie, we could have taken care of Bounder.”

“Well, I thought Diddlie could take her Steve, but she has something on today. That might be her.”

Diddlie brings Bounder in from the back, on a short leash. Artie greats Bounder in Italian and Bounder enjoys a lot of attention but also strains to sniff the exhibits. Two paintings about ten by four feet hang on the wall in front us. They are close together lengthways, all in browns that tend towards blue, yellow and gray in a vaguely cubist composition. It is called “Random Comments”. At first glance it’s as if forms in the painting have fallen off the canvas and spread across the floor in front of it. It is as if the front fell off a building into the street as rubble, with the interior of the building standing open behind the wreckage. Warm tones of oak, and cherry and deep black mahogany greet the eye in the rubble pile stacked against the bottom of the painting.

Bounder noses several thin off-cuts and tries to grab one of the longer pieces from the assemblage.

“Diddlie, I don’t need Bounder to rearrange this thing!”

“I know, I’ll hold her back.” Diddlie pulls Bounder away, waving a treat under the dog’s nose. Artie is looking carefully where Bounder’s snout has been pulled away. She mumbles a long quiet Italian monologue into Bounder’s ear and she picks something up.

“The dog’s drooled on this piece of cherry.”

“I love those impressionist brush strokes you are using Artie.”

“Are they impressionist Did.?” Artie is still holding the piece of wood with thumb and finger, trying to avoid getting wet with dog drool.

“Yeah, you know, free and fast, like Monet, Van Gogh or Degas.”

“Diddlie you are a little mixed up honey.”

“Am I?” Artie pulls a rag from her pocket to wipe drool.”

“Monet saw differently from Degas who saw differently from Van Gogh.”

“But Artie, they are all called impressionists.”

“I know, Monet and Degas did exhibit together but they were using paint in different ways.”

“That’s it Did, Degas actually completed very little compared with say, Ingres.”

“Steve, much is suggested by Degas, sometimes with pretty wild paint.”

“That’s what I mean Artie, ‘wild paint’. Like you have here!”

“Diddlie, I don’t think Degas was an impressionist at all.”

“Right, think of Monet by comparison.”

“You can’t really see Monet’s drawing Steve. It is all in the positioning of the paint strokes.”

“That’s it Artie, he didn’t do lines. He did what he called, ‘patches of color’”. Artie has finished wiping her piece of cherry. She holds it at her side and throws the rag in an old ‘Maker’s Mark’ carton near the door.

“The thing is Diddlie, just look at the paint.”

“You might say everything else comes after that.”

“Well you might say so Steve. I look at the picture.”

Steve has not looked away from the painting since he came in. He points at the assemblage in front of us.

“Okay Artie, so now the work is uncovered I guess these are two of the big paintings we moved in the van, and we must have carried this stuff on the floor packed in the old liquor cartons.”

“Steve, I spent the last three days arranging the stuff on the floor. These and the stuff in the other room.” Artie replaces the piece of cherry she was cleaning.

“Quite a nice diptych.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in those terms Steve.”

“Artie, where did you find all this highly finished wood?”

“Old furniture.”

“Okay, and a lot of paint … some of this is the original finish and some of it is faux. You painted it yourself, right?”

“That’s right and spent a long time standing at the band saw, Steve.”

“Do I see some analytic cubism here in the painting?”

“You might.”

“Maybe de Kooning as well, with Artie’s brown chiaroscuro palette”.

“If you can find de Kooning Steve, I’ll gratefully accept the compliment.”

The surfaces exposed by cutting the old wooden furniture appear at first to have the same finish as the rest of the off-cut, but a more careful look reveals layers of paint contributing their own texture. Thin pieces of resin shaped like gestural brush strokes in yellow and white stand out where they are distributed in the wood pile; some tiny, others bigger, are positioned in the middle of the tumble. All look as if they fell off the painting. The wood on the ground looks like a random pile at first, though carefully arranged from large to small, with the largest at the back against the painting, the smallest at the outer edges. The painted gestures on the canvas, are suggested in the wood pile and the colors in the wood show in the painting.

Steve is on his hands and knees looking as closely as he can at the wood and now he gets up and steps back.

“Your impasto on some of these pieces of wood leave the same impression as forms in the painting. I mean the wood looks like paint down there on the floor, and the paint on canvas looks like wood.”

“Right Steve, but notice there are no pieces of wood fastened to the canvas.”

Steve steps further back squinting at the work.

“The painting is abstract and ah … figurative in a way too.”

“Hope you can see it both ways Steve.” Steve has backed up almost into the next room, and when he notices where he is, he looks over at the exhibits there. Diddlie has already moved on and is sitting on the windowsill with Bounder lying on the floor in front of her. “Hi Steve, come join us!” Bounder lifts his head from his paws stretched out in front of him.

“Did. you better get a tight hold now.”

“Its never easy Artie as I don’t speak Italian.”

Artie tells Bounder something and turns back to the work. Her second installation, called “Neoplastic Event” is in the room to the right of the entrance. A single painting perhaps eight feet square hangs with a pile of colorful objects on the floor in front of it. This square painting is strongly reminiscent of Mondrian’s compositions with black lines dividing up the surface in primary colors and whites and grays.

Artie and I follow Steve into the next room where Bounder rushes forward pulling Diddlie up on to her feet. Bounder picks up another object in his enthusiasm, only to drop it under Artie’s glare. Diddlie regains control, pulling Bounder back to the windowsill without her black painted prize.

“I call these ‘sticks’ Steve, and the colored pieces are boards.” The ‘sticks’ are less than one by one in section, and a foot to several feet long and correspond to black lines on the painting. What Artie calls the ‘boards’ correspond to the planes of color enclosed by the black lines in the painting.

Squares and rectangles, or ‘boards’ of various dimensions are painted in the same colors as the painting and both are spread out and piled up on the floor in front of the canvas. The effect suggests that all these three dimensional objects spilled from the flat surface of the painting as in the cubist assemblage in the other room.

“Is this based on a particular work of Mondrian?”

“No, Fred it’s a Bliemisch. I am still arranging the 3D stuff.”

Artie picks up a square box of about eighteen inches by four.

“Oh luckily the paint is dry!” When Bounder picked up her black ‘stick’ she drooled on the box beneath. She wipes more of Bounder’s curiosity off the box with another rag from her bulging pocket.

“Did. let’s take this dog outside.” Diddlie and Artie go out the front door with Bounder who seems inattentive to another monologue in Italian. While Steve and I stay on looking at the work.

“Fred, Artie, is reversing tradition.”

“What do you mean, reversing?”
“There is a long tradition of artists rendering three dimensions into two dimensional pictures.”

“She is working from two-dimensional abstract paintings into three-dimensional objects.”

“Also Fred, reversing the careful organization of a painting into the apparent chaos of fallen rubble …”

… and it’s a lot of work to arrange the look of chaos here on the floor.”

“Is it an illusion then Fred?”

“Like the painting, the wood is and it isn’t.”

“How like the painting Fred?”

“I mean does the painting render form or not?”

“You mean three-dimensional form right? The brown one in the other room does, sort of, but this flat painting isn’t rendering any illusion. It does have form though.”

“Steve, I’d say the paint is a statement of fact.”

“Okay and what would you say about the wood?”

“The painted wood is what the painting wanted to be Steve, in the next life.”

“Oh! so we are looking at this new life in the here and now!”

“Do you see the flat painting like a plan for the wood.”

“Well, chaos has no plan Fred.”

“Steve you might say this is planned chaos, an illusion of chaos, here on the floor. These bits of wood are supposed to look as if they fell here randomly but in fact Artie spent hours on the arrangement.”

“The colors follow the painting exactly, but look carefully at the arrangement. It is orderly from large to small progressing out from the bottom of the painting.”

“Yes and the wood is all arranged in ninety degree angles. It couldn’t just fall into that position.”

“No the pieces would be all higgledy-piggledy.”

“Yes, we might say painted wood and painted canvas reflect each other.”