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. 

There are no sidewalks in Fauxmont and no street lights. The sun has gone down behind the tree line. A huge white cloud high in the West is still brilliant while I stand in deep shade. Willow oak leaves are swirling around in freshening evening gusts. Diddlie’s porch light is on and she sweeps, muttering in frustration as I go by.

“Why don’t you wait until the wind dies down?”

“Why don’t you come over here and help!”

I walk over through thick ivy, spreading on long vines across the driveway absorbing dead oak leaves under its own.

“Okay, here I am.”

I stop and stand behind her, as she works under the porch roof. Her sweeping action is erratic. She accidently bangs the broom into her new wicker table, with glass top. She gives up, and leaves the broom handle stretched across the width of the porch leaning against the table and turns to me.

“Fred these things get everywhere and blow into my house when ever I open the door, and track into the kitchen. The Red Queen is eating them during her fly around, and I don’t know what they’ll do to her. I’ve never had such problems before. We had that drought though August and September. That didn’t help either. Damn it! There they go, blowing right back in here over the wall.”

“Why don’t we sit down on your nice new comfortable chairs by the table, and enjoy the whole windy spectacle?”

“Aha, and just let these things go all over the place?”

“Might as well, sweeping isn’t getting you anywhere is it?”

“Ah, no it isn’t Fred.”

She turns away and goes in with her broom, followed by a few more leaves, letting the screen door slam shut. A car passes with its lights on. Something runs across the road in front of it, but I can’t tell what. It crunches among the dried leaves in the ivy, too large to be a squirrel, a cat, or a fox perhaps. Two doves are roused and fly out into the trees like shadows out of a slingshot. Diddlie is back with a bottle of wine and two glasses. The screen door slams shut again.

“Lou said he would fix that months ago. I have to get after that man.”

She puts the glasses and bottle on the table between us.

“Sorry, we drank half of this last night.”

“I’ll take what’s going Did.”

“Okay, you pour, I am going to get a sweater.”

I pull the cork, only about a third in, and pour two glasses of refrigerated Pinot Grigio. I can still hear something moving in the ivy between me, and the road. Diddlie returns with one hand in the pocket of her white cable stitch cardigan. She comes around the table and sits next to me.

“Well?”

“Well, its getting dark.”

“Well, don’t you want to know who I drank that wine with last night?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“Oh my god! Don’t you ever get excited about anything?”

“Sure.”
“Like what for instance?”

“Like my new copy of the catalogue from the Delacroix show in Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis? Is that where you’ve been?”
“No, that’s why I bought the catalogue.”

“Oh good grief, why don’t you get going and see it Fred? I mean don’t you feel you are missing out? Don’t you get excited about anything?”

“You keep saying that.”

“Saying what?”

“Asking if I get excited about anything.”

“Well, do you? It’s hard to tell you know.”

“Well I am very excited about the idea of Macadamia losing the election. His winning would be a real disaster I think!”

“Okay, it is an election year. So I’ll tell you Fred. Lark and an old friend of ours came over last night. A guy we used to know at college.

It was hysterical!”

“I’ll bet you drank more than half that bottle.”

“Oh you better believe it. We drank our way back to our twenties,

and smoked our way back into the sixties.”

“Sounds perfectly delightful.”

“Delightful! It was absolutely wild. We had some help from the Stones, and that guy Augie likes, the jazz guy…ah, Ornette Coleman, and Lark danced topless in the kitchen. Do you believe that?”

“Sure, I’ll bet I know who you were with too.”

“and how would you know that?”

“Because a couple of weeks ago I found Lark in the H Bar with Niels Plank and her old lover, August Carmichael.”

“Oooooo, so you met our sex object!”

“Your sex object?”

“Okay, well I am telling you, even with his beautiful blond hair all short and grey, and his kaki pants and polo shirt and a lot of mileage on him, he’s still hot.”

“Okay, what was he doing at Glamour College in 68?”

“He was reading his work to our poetry class. I think professor Lang wanted him for herself. I mean he was young, cute and innocent, well seemed like it. Don’t even know how she found him. Lark wasn’t in that class and she got him.”

“That could be problematic!”

“No not at all. He was kind of shy at first. I still love his deep sexy voice though.”

“Oh yes, his effect on Lark was easy to see.”

“And you know what Fred? He’s intellectual, I mean he is more intellectual than you, but he is alive and exciting!”

“Well, this corpse here was not unmoved by the quality of his mind or his physical grace.”

Diddlie giggles and falls silent, sipping wine and then shaking my arm and pointing over to the table beyond her reach, to indicate her glass needs refilling. I pour. We say nothing. The wind is up and it is darker. Another car goes by with its lights on and we can see leaves blowing through the light beams. I get up and walk out from under the roof of the porch.

“Hey where are you going?”

“To see if that big cloud is still there.”

“What big cloud?”

Diddlie runs out to join me.

“Where?”

I point to the Eastern sky but the light has dimmed and the cloud has moved. It is one dark shape among many. We start walking through the dark to the road.

We walk up to Wicket Street and keep to the middle of the road, so as not to fall in the ditch, and keep on into the evening light. Diddlie has her arm in mine.

“You know, Theo is procrastinating over helping Boyd find his true Father.”

“I am told he is still interested in Lark.”

“Oh wicked! Who said that? Well he’s going to have a long wait.”

“Why?”

“Because Augie has done his gig in New York and he has come back to live with Lark.”

“Live in? I thought he was more of a troubadour.”

“No she has proposed to him.”

“What about his wife?”

“They lost her in an accident quite a while ago.”

“They?”

“Yeah Augie has two grown kids, one, the girl, is teaching college the other, I think, has a startup in silicon valley.”

The wind is in the hickories and we are pelted with the last nuts of the season.

“You heard Max is with Nadia now, right?”

“Yes, so she ditched Chuck?”

“Oh Chuck, he’s a hunk, but he’s a hunk of boredom.”

“What kind of boring?”

“Like business boring. All he talks about are his deals and his money and all this financial stuff, like ‘short selling’ what ever that is.”

“Well Nadia was taken with him.”

“Yeah, she’s taken his money, or a bunch of it at least.”

“Have you spoken to Chuck since?”

“Yeah, he called me trying to find his wife.”

Another gust knocks twigs and branches out of the trees. We walk more slowly, snapping twigs and crunching acorns under foot as we go under the red oaks.

“So you know him quite well.”

“No not really.”

I can see a flashlight in the distance. It seems to wink with the owner’s movements. Diddlie says something.

“What? The wind carried your voice away. You have to face me when you speak.”

“I said, look, fireflies!”

Diddlie is tugging on my arm.

“No, I think its some one coming.”

“Oh look, there’s two of them.”

We walk on in silence. Diddlie trips on a fallen branch trying to catch her balance by holding on to my arm, but I trip too and we collapse together slowly on to the ground, she on top of me.

“Oh Sweety, are you alright?”

“Mind your sweater Did, it’s caught in the twigs.”

We disentangle ourselves from the broken branches and twigs and sit in the road.

“Why did we walk into this storm?”

“I thought you wanted to go for a walk.”

“No, I thought you did. You led the way.”

“It’s not a storm, just autumnal gusts to clear the leaves out of the forest canopy.”

“Well, there’s no stars and no moon, just wind dust and god dam skinny little leaves in my house.”

“There’s people coming up soon.”

“And I thought we were going to have a romantic evening under the moon and stars with wine…Ha!”

We are engulfed in swirling leaves for a moment, then the air is still and quiet enough to hear an acorn hit the ground nearby.

“Wow, that was kind of fun!”

“See, enjoyment was my object to begin with!”

“So what were we talking about?”

“Chuck Newsom I think. Did you tell him where his wife had gone?”

“I told him to call Lark and gave him her number because she found out the day after they took a night flight out of Dulles. She found out when she saw his stuff was gone, and Niels, yeah, Niels told her about Nadia months ago.”

“He did?”

“Well you know Niels was on the building site a lot, working with Max. He’s such a dumb-ass, and he drinks way too much and he didn’t even realize the sensitivity of it. He just says stuff.”

“Ouch!”

“Yeah. Ouch! Lark left me a real scared message on my answering machine. I lost my cel phone and I was out looking for it over in Lou’s yard.”

“Look its bel and Steve!”

Steve shines his flashlight up from under his chin so we can see who he is, with a strange effect of illuminating his nostrils.

“Why are you two sitting in the middle of the road?”

“We fell here.”

Diddlie sings into the night.

“Why don’t we do it in the road?”

(https://www.google.com/#q=why+don%27t+we+do+it+in+the+road+beatles)

Steve stoops to help Diddlie up, but she doesn’t move at once.

“So sweety, here’s your chance!”

“Okay guys, are you sure you want an audience?”

“Yeah, cold, gritty and exposed.”

“Oh where’s your sense of adventure Fred?”

Diddlie takes Steve’s hand and gets up.

Bel embraces Diddlie.

“Bel why are you wandering around in this storm?”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know, ask him. He brought me out here. I was just trying to sweep leaves off my porch.”

I get up and drag the fallen branch to the side of the road as Steve shines his flashlight and kicks some remaining bits of wood out of the way. Another gust blows dust in our faces.

“Fred, this was a dumb idea. Lets go back to my porch. Steve, bel, you want to come sit on the porch?”

“Fine, we’re right with you.”

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 don’t recognize Lark Bunlush when I get to the H Bar early to meet Lou for our weekly lunch. The place is nearly empty and smells a little stale, seems darker than usual too. Lark’s head looks different. Her hair is bunched up at the back. It always used to hang from her head in a thick grey spread like a lampshade. She has a small black lock combed back from her forehead in single vivid stripe above the left eye. She is sitting next to Niels Plank. I don’t know the other guy, and move to the right to say hello to Niels.

Before I can order a drink from the bartender arranging his stock at the other end, Lark turns towards Niels and me. She introduces me to Augie Carmichael, on her left and to Niels. She is wearing sunglasses and her face looks puffy.

“Yeah, how you doing Fred? I remember you from somewhere.”

“Probably around the neighborhood. The Trip’s driveway perhaps.”

“Why don’t we move to that table Lark?”

“Sure Augie. Lets get away from TVs and election scandals.”

Augie helps her off her stool and brings her drink over to a nearby round table with lots of chairs where we all sit down with room to spare. The sun hasn’t come around to the bay window yet and we don’t have to arrange ourselves to avoid the usual glare in our aging eyes.

“Fred, Augie and I … We go back a long way.”

Augie offers a powerful well shaped hand in greeting.

His hair is cropped short all over and his high forehead is tanned. He looks at me with watery blue eyes under thick lids.

“What you drinking Fred?”

“Bass Ale please.”

Augie goes to the bar and brings back a straight pint glass with a thin head spilling over the brim as he puts it on the table in front of me. He fits his arm around Lark’s shoulders in one easy movement as he sits down. He speaks in a low gentle voice with his face close to hers and puts a finger on the bridge of her nose where the pink and yellow frames rest.

“When are you going to come out from behind those shades baby?”

“Not yet.”

“So how far back do you two go?”

“We lost our virginity together Fred and have been inseparable ever since.”

Niels swigs his beer, takes the glass from his mouth and coughs.

“That’s heavy shit! You never told me that!”

“Well, I had no reason to discuss it.”

Augie devotes himself to Lark.

“We started a publication, I think it was called Shrinkwrap, you remember?”

“It still is honey.” She put her forefinger on his lips.

“Are you still writing for our word-child?”

“Yes, sometimes, I sold it and now it’s a website.”

Augie sips his beer. We are all silent for a few moments. I can hear thebartender working with glasses.

Augie puts down his beer and moves his face close to Lark’s ear.

“Hey, you still know that other girl, ah, Diddlie, what was her last name?”

“Drates, Augie … after me, you had her and all the other hens in her coop!”

“Well okay, those were the pretty birds of the Glamour College cage, and you had some on the side too. I know that, but we were solid.”

“Right I know, I know, we are solid.”

“Yeah we are! It was right before you and Diddlie were sharing that dude from Princeton, who had such a high opinion of himself.”

“Oh right, we had some fun with him!”

Niels belches and leans forward to look at Lark.

“But you just said your are inseparable.”

Augie has moved back from his intimacy at Lark’s ear and on the bridge of her nose, where soft reminiscence flows, as if Niels and I aren’t here.

He looks up into the distance, through the gloom of the bar room to the walls and beyond:

“But for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections

Which, be they what they may

Are yet the fountain light of all our day

Are yet a master light of all our seeing.”

(http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html)

Lark grabs his forearm, “He is still quoting Wordsworth!”

“My first love, British romantic poetry!”

Augie returns his gaze to our party and to Lark. He holds up Lark’s hand clasped in his, to salute the poet. His sleeve falls down his arm revealing his watch mounted on a silver bracelet jeweled with blue green turquoise.

Niels stands up, swaying a little and raises his nearly empty glass and addresses the beginning of the lunch crowd as they gather at the bar.

“This is Doctor Augustus Carmichael, my brother, with a Phd in English from Berkeley and he is a poet and Viking spirit warrior, and …” He mutters something I can’t hear.

“Hey Niels, I don’t have Phd, I am ABD.”

“I don’t care if you are ABC brother. You told me to read and contemplate the poets, back in the day, when you were a Prof.”

“Yeah, visiting writer gigs, for a few extra bucks. There’s too many academic egos in that game, kind of crowding out the art.”

“Well, shit, artists have bigger egos than anybody.”

“Right Niels, but that’s art not the academy, its endowment, its new buildings and its bureaucracy and politics, AND underpaid adjuncts doing too much of the teaching.”

Niels, growing unsteady, spills the last drops of his drink down his shirt as he sits down again.

“Niels, what have you been reading?”

“Shit, I don’t know, the Bible I guess.”

Augie is looking at Lark and now at me.

“Our souls have never parted. You know what I mean Fred?”

“Sort of, I mean, have you been in touch over the years?”

“We are never out of touch, out there in the ‘soul space’.”

Lark waves at me, from across the table.

“Fred, that’s where the action is.”

“Okay Lark, I don’t get it though.”

Augie puts his hand on my shoulder, and looks into my face.

“I’ll tell you Fred. I was driving East from Tucson last week and came thru DC on the way to a reading in New York. So I am walking down the Mall on a little nostalgia trip and who comes up out of Smithsonian Metro as I walk by? This one here!”

He moves back and gives Lark a big smooch and knocks her glasses askew. Niels gets up for another beer, but stops, steadying himself on the back of Lark’s chair and facing me.

“See Fred, my bad ass Dad took off with Nadia Brazoff. When was it?

Last week or something, right Lark?”

“I don’t know, that creep didn’t tell me!”

“Hey the dude was too busy!”

“Shut up Niels! I didn’t know where he was and went down to the Mall to check out the Buddha show at the Sackler.”

“The Buddha show?”

“It’s called the ‘Body of Devotion’ Fred.”

Augie lets go of Lark’s wrist.

“The Cosmic Buddha’, interactive exhibit, real heavy technology too.”

Niels has half turned away, but is still listening.

“That’s pretty awesome cosmic shit Augie!”

“You see Fred, the cosmos sends me here at the precise moment when I am needed and sets up a rendezvous.

‘Whether Buddhas arise oh priests, or whether Buddhas do not arise, it remains a fact and fixed and necessary constitution of being, that all its elements are lacking ego…”

(http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/bits/bit-4.htm)

Niels goes to get another drink at the bar. Lark grins, “The Three Characteristics, Hinayana! I’ll bet Fred is thinking coincidence!”

“Well that’s what it is! We are not in control. We perceive coincidence all over the place. That’s how it is!”

“So you and Max have split.”

“He’s split to Bulgaria with Nadia Fred, I am still here.”

“That’s different Lark. What’s in Bulgaria?”
Augie’s voice deepens with his more confidential tone.

“Roses! Doesn’t that make sense Fred? Not quite so red roses. You see what I mean?”

“Right Augie the Soviets are history.”

Lark puts her hand up in her hair and twirls a few strands in her fingers.

“Max thinks it’s a business opportunity.”

“To Max, everything he does is a business opportunity.”

Niels spills some beer sitting down again next to Lark.

“He’s getting his romantic rocks off in Thrace!”

“What do you know about Thrace, Niels?”

“Remember, you turned me on to the Oddessey.”

“Did I? I haven’t lived in vain!”

Augie looks down at his lap.

“Oh! The corny rose red petals of romance.”

Lark grabs Augie head in both her hands and brings herself up so their noses touch.

“Fucking, you mean!”

“Well that’s all part of business, my long lost love.”

My ring tones sound. It is a text from Lou. “Sorry can’t make it. See you at the party.” I can’t think what party he means but forget it for now.

“Shit, I’ve known Augie since about eighth fucking grade. You were working for Daddy Max.”

“That’s right, I was doing some carpentry and some readings around DC about that time. It was Nixon time, and the hippies were still hanging in Georgetown, the war was driving us insane, and grass was green all over.”

“Yeah I remember you guys smoking the profits up at Great Falls, thinking me and Werner didn’t know!”

“I told you it was a bonfire Niels, and we all saw the smoke over across the rocks.”

“What ever you say Augie, my brother!

“Niels have you finished building that property down by the river?”

“No way Fred, we have fucking six months to go on the Newsom place.It’s a goddam city!”

Lark is in the midst of a long drink and puts her glass down suddenly. Takes off her glasses and rubs her red eyes.

“That’s where your father went to hell!”

“Well, he split with Mom when I was like, fucking snot nose three years old.”

Lark is trying to get up from her chair.

“Lark, Lark, Lark, stop.” Augie embraces her and she leans into him from her chair, as he leans towards her.

“Augie listen man, Nadia had her cantilever spread for Max at every fucking opportunity. It’s like the finest piece of engineering since fucking Howard Hughes got hot Jane Russell rigged. I am telling you. Now the old man is selling our company to Dodrechts. Me and Werner are staying on as co- directors.”

“I always thought he would leave the company to you two, not sell it.”

“Fred, I got no complaints brother. The selling price takes care of all three of us Planks plus we brothers get stock Dordrecht options, good pay, golden parachutes, the whole package. We are happy as pigs in shit.”

“Niels, there’s another part of the package, you left out my man.”

“What’s that Augie?”

Lark is roused again, breaks out of Augie’s embrace and takes up the front of Niels’ shirt in her fingers, getting behind a couple of buttons, and closes them in her fist.

“Supulveda! you greedy little shit!”

Niels has his hand around Lark’s wrist, to pull back and save his shirt front from tearing.”

“Okay Lark! Okay! God, what’s the big deal?”

“What do you think happened to the Williams and the Scroggins and the other families who used to live where the Newsome place is going up?”

“We bought them out Lark, we bought…”

“Like hell…”

Augie gets up and stands behind her chair. He puts an arm under each of her armpits and lifts her up out of her chair. She raises her knees to her chest and Augie moves her into the vacant chair next to him, on the other side, away from Niels.

“Okay, put it here. Put your ass in that chair.”

Lark doesn’t struggle, and allows her self to be lowered into the chair.

“You are going to get us kicked out of here, manhandling me like that.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time!”

“Okay people, let’s settle down now, okay?”

“We’re cool Niels, we’re cool.”

“Yeah, okay so who is Supelveda?’

“Fred, he’s got a ‘rent-a-cop’ business, I forget the name. They have a contract with with Dodrechts. He put together a bunch of Israeli Russians, or Mafia or Russian mafia, I don’t know which, maybe both and a few ex narcos.

Lark interrupts Augie. She bangs a fist into her palm repeatedly as she speaks.

“Yeah, and dogs, and mace, and all these guys are over two hundred pounds, ugly, violent, lowlife, rapist, thugs!”

“Supelveda is a bad ass hombre. You know, ‘Guerra Sucia’, and all that.”

“I get it Augie, ‘Dirty War’, right?”

“Fred, I’m talking about what went down when Macadamia sold his estate to the Chilean General, and Juanita …”

Lark bangs the table again, now with the flat of her hand and spills the drinks.

“I published some of that story and I got more I can’t substantiate, Juanita is too scared to talk and those dope dealing rapists got away with it thanks to my government, thanks to Nixon!”

Augie has his arm around Lark’s shoulders again. He gently pulls some gray hair off her face.

“Ease up, will you, you’re spilling our fun all over the table.”

“What about the blood those creeps spilled? Look what we have done since 9/11. The anniversary was last month right? Three thousand people from all over the world were killed in New York, and more of us in Pennsylvania and here in DC.”

“Lark! Lark! Stop!”

“No no no, I am going to finish; since 9/11 we have killed how many mothers, fathers, and children, brothers and uncles and grannies, over there? How many? Where’s their memorial? What about that? What about the bloody Saudis who made it all happen? What about that?”

“I hear you, okay?”

Augie voice pours into Lark’s ear, his lips touching her hair. Lark is still agitated. She pushes Augie away, and gets up, her face is wet. She walks slowly towards the restrooms. Augie is soaking up the flood on the table as it drips on the carpet and the aroma of hops keeps memories flowing. Niels sits back in his chair staring into the air, one hand up on the back of his neck.

“So Niels, is Max past the trouble he was in with Judge Grackle and the subpoena to Fulton Furay for his sources?”

“Oh Sherman got that shit settled Fred. Shit, I don’t know about Fulton. Maybe he is still fighting”

Augie looks over at me with wavy lines deepening along his brow.

“You know about that?”

“Not the details, I just know it sounded serious with that incident in the parking lot, and all.”

“Yeah, it was serious Fred. It was dead serious. You know big money speaks in many voices. So the money starts talking and moving under Shrowd’s direction. He draws the map. You know who am I talking about?”

“Oh yes, Sherman Shrowd, attorney at law.”

“Right he’s the man, and all that stuff got smoothed out in a deal,you know.”

“Well, sort of. I never could figure out whether Jake’s house went into foreclosure or not. Beside, what did the Planks have that got Newsome, Jake Trip and Macadamia involved?”

“You’ve got it Fred!”

“I mean what else happened?”

“Don’t ask me Fred, don’t ask.”

“It was Newsome and Sherman Fred.” Niels leans forward bumping his glass but it doesn’t spill. “Sherman makes shit go away and other shit happen. That’s his thing. Shit, Max and Werner built Trip’s place. That’s where it all started.”

I look at Augie.

“Don’t ask me!”

Lark walks up behind Niels and puts her hands on his shoulders. She whispers in his ear, and kisses his cheek. Augie has finished wiping the table with a pile of paper napkins he got from the bar. He looks over at Lark and Niels.

“Urpsky dirpsk!”

Lark sits down again between Niels and Augie where she was before, and holds Augie’s hand in both of hers.

“Urpsky dirpsk!” Lark’s last syllable merges with her laughter and theyboth continue laughing uncontrollably at their in joke.

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. 

Mr. Hoffman has put TVs in the H Bar for the first time. Three big screens one at both ends of the long bar and one in the middle. They run political commentary with subtitles and the volume down. One can rent wireless headsets for $5.00 or get a lifetime usage for $100.00.

Albrecht is sitting with me chatting about the upcoming election. I had remarked on the dismal coverage I think we get at election time.

“Fred, my friend, don’t get distracted by the prevailing goofology.”

“So you are not impressed either.”

“Look Armand has got the media’s number and he dials it up every chance he gets.”

“He knows how to get attention alright.”

“That’s his thing and theirs. He is a celebrity candidate. Now Hillary is stuck in the stone-age giving wonk headed speeches, and also spouting vague liberal platitudes that no one cares about, and that’s what is covered.”

“Yes, what they say is news.”

“No it’s not news Fred. It is nonsense and as old as the hills, and that’s what the repeating media keep repeating.”

“Isn’t this the trap, what ever some one in the news says, becomes news, while important issues get buried with skillful PR.”

“That’s why we, in the Macadamia campaign, are way ahead. We have it all on line, a two way street, we talk and tweet, and America talks back!”

“I think you may be a little too far ahead, the TV age isn’t over yet.”

“Fred, go to the ‘Think Right’ web site. That’s where right thinking people go for real news.”

“Wait a minute Albrecht, look at that headline on the TV!”

Albrecht looks up at the nearest screen and reads aloud to me. “

“ Dr. Sardanapalus dead in yacht scandal”

“The news anchor appears and tells the story:

“Presidential candidate, Armond Macadamia’s doctor and confidant of a lifetime, Dr. Sardanapalus, has died on Mac’s yacht, Nineveh, in Biscayne Bay, Florida.”

We see a picture of his three decker yacht, with black hull and white superstructure and red funnel.

“That thing looks like an old fashioned steam yacht doesn’t it?”

“Fred, our man is a conservative!”

The TV commentary continues in white letters across the bottom of the screen. Some words drop out in the lightest parts of the image.

“Our special corres…., Leticia Lantern .. …. at Biscayne Bay with Gordon Byron, Macadamia’s campaign spoke…..”

Gordon Byron appears on screen in an open neck white shirt, khakis and aviators, and a white baseball cap. He is holding the brim against the breeze.

“Gordon, your comment.”

“I can tell you this about the Dr.’s tragic death. Doctor Sardanapalus died in the owners suit with a nurse in attendance after he had a seizure.”

“How long had they been friends?”

“He met Sar when he was married to Teresa, Countess Guiccioli. That was over forty years ago.”

“What about the story on Shrinkwrap saying he had the three naked underage girls with him.”

“That is mischievous fabrication. Just dirty politics, trying to tarnish Mr. Macadamia’s reputation during the election campaign by going after his close friend.”

“Well Gordon, Fuzzy Leaks reports he was romping with naked under age Asian boys.”

“Leticia, why do you repeat these lies?”

“Gordon, the public deserves an explanation.”

“Look, if there were naked girls or boys in there then they were directed by a Martian and two Vulcans.”

“Okay, thank you Gordon, This is Leticia Lantern reporting from Biscayne Bay Florida.”

Steve Strether is standing by the empty stool next to me on the other side from Albrecht.

“Fred, this any one’s seat?”

“All yours. What you got there, a tablet?”

“Yup, I was sitting over there and didn’t notice you guys at first.

“Look at this link, bel sent me.”

He taps the link and hands me the tablet.

It is all in French, but Steve translates from the news item in ‘Photo Français Delacroix’.

“This picture is said to have been taken by one of the Sardanapalus girls with her smart phone as the seizure began, and shortly before his death.”

“Here Albrecht, have you seen this?”

We all look at the picture together.

The Dr.’s face is partially hidden by one girl’s elbow. He is obviously naked. The lower part of another girl is visible stretched across his groin and there is a red sheet wrapped around her lower legs. The picture also shows she has a prominent birthmark on her left buttock.

“Well guys, that old man could be anybody. Besides, you know … it’s the French.”

“Know what Albrecht?”

“Fred, sex is their thing. I don’t believe it is real anyway.”

“Why not?”

“The wallpaper in the background of the French picture is nothing like the walls of the owner’s suite in that old boat. I am sure it is all polished teak.”

“Albrecht, it makes sense they would take a picture to show no one killed him.”

“Steve, that picture doesn’t show much.”

“Well, it looks like a rerun of the Leticia Lantern show is up next on TV.”

“The weekly Leticia Lantern show is brought to you by Spong Products.”

We hear two tones of a gong, and then the voice over says,

“When it comes to your beloved seniors,

you can’t go wrong with Spong!”

Two more gong sounds. A trim woman in a leotard smiles at the camera and turns away to get on a rowing machine. She tells us she is 72 and still ready to row and ready to go, then rows vigorously. The camera pulls away.

Leticia appears sitting across from her guest, Gordon Byron.

“Gordon, welcome back to the show, here in Key Biscayne.”

“Always glad to be here Leticia.”

“Gordon, why doesn’t Mr. Macadamia come on the show himself?”

“He doesn’t do TV appearances. We think the medium distorts rather than shows the American people what they need to know.”

“Really Gordon, do you feel distorted right now?”

“No not at all. I do occasional appearances on TV for Mr. Macadamia, when he feels it is necessary.”

“and why is your appearance on my show necessary at this moment?”

“Because Leticia, we respect, your show, is the right place to raise and settle important questions when there is no other way.”

“What’s your question Gordon?”

“Why is the tragic death of this great doctor being covered with garbage instead of real reporting?”

“Well Gordon it is a sensational story, and we both know that’s what the audience wants!”

“Leticia, we both know that good reporting is fair and balanced. Where is the coverage of Dr. Sardanapalus’s services to Syrian orphans and his long running practice in Calcutta, for instance?

“Gordon, let’s look at this clip from CBS News.”

They run a clip from Sixty Minutes, saying it aired in 2010.

“We are here at the famous Sardanapalus Clinic in Calcutta to talk to Dr. Gupta, the founding director.”

“Doctor, how long were you director?”

“From the beginning in 1991 until 2002.”

“And how long did you practice with Dr. Sardanapalus here?”

“Oh never here. He wasn’t practicing here you see. He was our consultant.”

“Okay, were you in regular consultation?”

“Ah, no, I have never spoken to him.”

“Right, so what is the connection between this clinic and the Dr.?”

“Oh, well, you see, he donated the funds to start us up and keeps the clinic going.”

“So the Sardanapalus Clinic is named after the donor.”

“We are going to take a break now for this message.”

The voice over says.

The Liticia Lantern Show is brought to you by Spong!

“Here is a new Spong product you have to have!”

We see a picture of a wheel chair with a blond woman sitting in it. “This chair has hydropneumatic suspension, just like a luxury car! Spong helps you gently out of your seat when the time comes!

and it costs less than you think.”

We see the blond woman pull a lever on the side of the chair and the seat slowly tilts up at the back and down at the front while the cushion also moves forward from the back. The blond woman gets up slowly into the arms of a younger woman with the close attention of three children who clap with joyful expressions on their faces.

“You see! when your favorite seniors need a little help.

You can’t go wrong with Spong.”

A group of healthy looking ‘seniors’ in front of a bed of roses in full bloom, all wave from their chairs, with perfect ad-ready smiles.

A two-tone gong sounds.

“The sound of success is Spong!”

“Here we are, back with Gordon Byron” says Leticia, and the camera zooms in. Her face fills the screen, showing her unblemished complexion and perfectly aligned moist white front teeth under her deep red upper lip, in an unforced smile.

“Gordon, on Slur.com, Mac has said that certain sections of this country are going to have to get back in their place.”

“Yes we put that out, in September, as things were heating up!”

Yes Gordon, and when asked, who do you mean by ‘certain sections’ on local tv. You said, ‘We all know that don’t we folks?’”

“Correct, that is the right answer for that demographic in that part of the country.”

“Okay Gordon, and who are you talking about now?”

“We are talking about a situation where things are just out of line.”

“Who is out of line?”

“Well, Hillary and Trump are both out of line. Saying they are going to retrain people or bring back those jobs from over seas. Retrain for what jobs? Those jobs are taken by technology!”

“Are you coming out against technology?”

“We are against job loss what ever the cause, and the lies being spread about it.”

“Okay Gordon, getting back to those ‘sections of the country’. You were quoted on the blog, ‘Think Right,’ ‘that the over educated sections of the country are going to be wiped out by the Macadamia campaign, which speaks real plain English, not Spanish, not Chinese, but American English’ ”

“Yes that was a direct quotation. English is the nation’s language.

The Constitution wasn’t written in Portuguese or in French or Spanish.”

We interrupt this broadcast with a statement from Mr. Macadamia.

Here’s our special correspondent Glen Gazburg in San Clemente California.

“This is Glen Gazburg on the tarmac at Mr. Macadamia’s estate here in San Clemente.”

The screen shows a group of figures walking away from the camera towards a waiting helicopter. Glen has his back to the noise and backwash from the rotors, but he is not easy to hear.

“Mr. Macadamia never does TV appearances, but he said to me, on the record, just moments ago, that he ‘is heartbroken at the loss if his fine old friend.’ Back to you Leticia.”

Thank you Glen, now back to our tape of the Calcutta interview with Dr. Gupta.

“Doctor, tell me, who was the donor?”

“I don’t think it was Dr. Sardanapalus’s money. No, it was donated in his name by the American, Mr. Macadamia.”

“Ah Leticia, Leticia just wait a minute. That interview is a gross distortion of the truth.”

“Gordon, that’s what the record shows.”

“I respect this show too much to let that go by. Of course Dr. Sardanapalus didn’t talk to Dr. Gupta. Dr. Sardanapalus was in regular contact with the doctors in the operating room, and at the bedside through Sard-Surgical, our own video link.”

“Thank you Gordon, that is the last word on today’s show.”

Albrecht gets up and pays his tab. He turns to Steve and me before walking out.

“Fred, like I said, don’t get distracted by the prevailing goofology.”

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. 

 Theo Tinderbrush pulls up at the Hadron Shopping Center opposite me just as I get out of my car. We are both heading for lunch. I follow him out of the heat and the sound of helicopter rotors beating the humid air over head. He gallops down the steep cool stairs to the entrance of the Emperor Babur Restaurant, in the basement, under The Ab. and Cheek Fitness Center. Hundreds if not thousands of different colored strings hang across the windows on either side of the Bose Gallery’s glass door at the bottom of the stairs. Unsurprisingly the show is called, “Strings Attached”. Under the announcement I am told in Copper Plate Gothic Bold, ‘reading Buddhist scripture inspired the artist’s interest in pain and attachment’.

Indranil, the manager is standing to the right under the pointed arch at the entrance to the Emperor Babur. When he sees Theo he walks out and greets us with his palms together, and a bow.

“Ah Mr. Theo, are you having the buffet today?”

“As always.”

Theo shakes his hand and Indranil then shakes mine with a brilliant smile under his thick black moustache. He turns and points out a table then leads the way.

“Please, this way.”

Walking past occupied tables in the busy dining room, I can see Frans Banning Cocq sitting across the room by the wall with Albrecht. The top of his head is bald with long strings of light blond hair falling from the back over the collar of his red tee shirt.

Albrecht doesn’t notice us although he is facing this way. Theo puts his brief case down on his chair.

“I left Boston about five hours ago and haven’t had a bite to eat since.”

“Not even peanuts?”

“They don’t do free peanuts any more.”

“Your case looks heavy.”

“Yeah, conference materials.”

We go back to the Buffet in front of the bar. Theo opens the top of the first chafing dish and yellow scented rice fills the air with saffron.

“So Fred, what’s new in Fauxmont?”

“I haven’t seen a copy of the neighborhood newsletter in over a year.”

“Haven’t you got the web address?”

“No, I used to get a copy in the mail.”

Theo loads his plate of rice with dhal, curried goat, and now butter chicken.

He is about to close the lid on the chafing dish,

“You doing any of this?”

“Always Theo.” He leaves it open for me.

“Fred there hasn’t been a paper news letter since 2014, now it’s an email attachment or you can see it on FoxmontHood.org.”

“Sounds Hiphop!”

“No, Macadamia! Albrecht has put a link in there to the Armond Macadamia campaign site.”

“Albrecht is sitting over there, look.”

“Yeah, is that the militia guy with him?”

“I thought Macadamia’s campaign had folded.”

“That’s what the media say, but I checked out the link and ended up on Shrinkrap.”

“Albrecht for Macadamia? I thought he would be for Trump!”

“Fred you have to get on line! Shrinkrap has a piece saying his campaign never did fold. It reorganized.”

“So where did that story come from?”

“Who knows? So much info out there is simply mistaken or designed to mislead. One thing about air travel, it gives me time to browse on my tablet.”

“Theo, Mac is tied up in the Axel Ensor deal in Europe.

“I saw that too, about the tower in Brussels … by the way, I want to talk to that Militia guy, ah, what’s his name again?”

“Banning Cocq.”

“I should have remembered. You know, Daisie told me that’s the name of one of the leaders in some painting by Rembrandt.”

“I think she’s right, it’s called the Night Watch.”

“Well she’s our local Rembrandt, she ought to paint him.”

“She could use the commission.”

“Any way, being a militia guy, he is snuggling up to Macadamia. I’ll bet that’s why he is lunching with Albrecht, you know, getting his ‘troops’ in line!”

We return to our table and the Hispanic waiter with a turban offers us a wine list, which we refuse. Theo requests tea. The turban serves us both aromatic tea he calls Masala Chai. The waiter turns to serve others.

“I thought Chai was Russian!”

“Fred, it is also Hindi and Turkish and some other languages use it too.

“I don’t see how Armond Macadamia can run Theo. Mac is getting old. I hear he needs Jake Trip to take care of business for him.”
“Fred, he doesn’t have to do much he can’t do from his office. For instance his campaign is using Fibonacci Corp’s enormous PR databases to identify various constituencies.”

Theo’s red hair is graying, his gut keeps him back from the table.

“You sound pretty cynical today.”

“Not at all! My researches on the web led me to Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, you can catch it on You Tube. I’ll send you the link if you are interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s) It’s about Edward Bernays, called the father of Public Relations.”

“Not a well known name.”

“No, given his extraordinary influence, he should be up there with Einstein and Freud, household names.”

“So famous, and so little understood!”

“Iconic”

“Come to think of it what was his influence?”

“He realized that most people react emotionally and intuitively, not thoughtfully when it comes to voting and buying products.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I think it is historical fact. Just think about all the successful promotions in our lifetimes?”

“Well yes, our candidates are presented just like products.”

“Way back in 1952, Eisenhower reluctantly did a series of tv spots for his presidential campaign. He felt it was beneath him to do ads, but said he  “Its time for a change” in various contexts. (https://www.c-span.org/video/?188176-1/eisenhower-answers-america) Sound familiar?”

“You notice how successful modern candidates have all run on change?”

“and the more things change Theo, the more they stay the same!”

“Change is a wonderful slogan. Makes you think things will get better, if the pitch is right.”

“Okay, so what is Mac offering.”

“His whole campaign is on line, no tv spots.”

Oh so the Fib. can craft messages precisely to relatively small groups.”

“Individuals even!”

“The Republicans have chosen. Isn’t it too late?”

“He is running as an Independent, a sort of post party candidate, with a variety of messages, a lot of nostalgia centering around strength.”

“Military strength…”

“What else?”

“American soaps are big and emulated all over the world. American Hiphop is catching on too, I have heard both Christian and Moslem Rappers. How’s that for power?”

“Yeah, but that is soft, commercial and cultural power.”

“Oh yes, military power is sexy.”

“Profitable too.”

“Well, young people all over the place love rap …”

“… and it gets the extremist Mullahs excited too, goes against their ideas of purity and all that.”

“They too have learned to tell people what they want to hear!”

“Yup, and they are huge online.”

“Interesting how jazz, rock, British Pop and now hip hop all came out of our poorest black population and took off!”

Our waiter refills the teacups and offers more Naan, which Theo is glad to have.

“You think Mac is stealing Trump’s thunder then?”

“Partly, he is banging the war drums. War is where men prove themselves, and women do their duty at home, gory glory … you know!”

“Right, the oldest play in the book…”

“ … and it works Fred. It just keeps on working!”

“Wars are great for the party in power.”

“Oh yes! You can call the opposition traitors!”

“Though it didn’t work that way for Lyndon Johnson.”

“It may have been good for Mac’s generation but not now…the heat has gone out of it. It’s cooled off, do you really think it will fly?”

“Look what Bush did after 911.”

“Yes, if there is another attack, maybe Mac has a point.”

“I’ve seen a variety of his posts on line showing Mac as a sort of Col. Sander’s fried chicken figure, friendly, avuncular, with flowing white hair, selling Southern fried prejudices and taking a dig at illegal immigrants. He takes a dig at Wall Street for Liberals like us. For conservatives he points to eight years of Obama’s socialism, and his cowardly foreign policy. Appeasing the Iranians instead of getting in there and taking them out. It all depends which segment he is messaging. He’ll be a kinder gentler more thoughtful Trump.”

“Yeah broader appeal … maybe he is on to something.”

“So, we must all be pretty unhappy with the status quo.”

“Look at the insurgent candidates from right and left. Now we are called consumers rather than citizens. At the same time a lot of people are losing jobs to technology, so they can’t consume as happily as ‘When America was Great’.”

“We are so attached to our possessions, not to mention our beliefs.”

“Oh I know, look at all the Snaz Self Storage places Jake Trip has opened around town.”

“Yes, he is sponsoring Laticia Lantern’s Spin Show’ now, ‘Keep your dreams and memories safe at Snaz Self Storage!’

“That is all Mac’s capital at work.” Theo wipes his mouth and drops the napkin. “I don’t even remember my dreams.”

“You don’t have to. Our commercial tv culture provides endless ways to remember and realize them.”

“Yeah, some kind of Nirvana! reality tv is the bottom of the barrel tough.”

“It is no more real than other shows.”

“Well right, but if we all start thinking about reality there is no knowing what might happen.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Yes, and therefore unlikely!”

“Are you still working on this sir?”

“All through thanks, nothing left to work on!” Theo backs up his chair to pick up his napkin from the floor. He strains to lean down but can’t reach over his own bulk.

“I will get that for you sir … see, no problem.”

Our waiter stoops down easily for the napkin and flips it over his shoulder, then takes away our plates. We are the only customers left in the place.

Indranil is walking over to us.

“Mr. Theo, Mr. Fred, did you enjoy your meal?”

He puts the check on the table for us in a lotus leaf shaped leather folder, skillfully tooled with a rendering of the Emperor in yellow.

 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. 

Branches in the huge southern red oak, in Diddlie’s yard, are waving violently as if stranded there and anxious for rescue. One massive bough grows out over the road with a sharp angle where it was trimmed, now growing back like an arm bent upwards at the elbow. Now, animated by a gust, it might be shaking its fist. While the white oaks are strangely still, across Oval Street and beyond, at bel and Steve’s place. The rain holds off until I reach his house. Bel lets me in, but doesn’t close the door. A brilliant flash of lightning is followed at once by thunder, and the sound of a tree coming down nearby.

“I can’t see anything. It’s like trying to see through frosted glass. Look at this rain!”

Having stepped in, I turn around to look outside with bel.

“Did it hit us?”

“No Steve, I can’t see where it went down.” Bel steps back as the wind blows rain in the front door. Leaf bearing twigs from the sweet gum at the roadside, land outside in front of us. Steve steps forward to close the storm door, when a drenched critter turns up to the left of the doorway, and takes shelter behind an azalea, under the limited protection of the overhanging roof.

Bell opens the door again. “What’s that?”

Another gust blows rain and leaves in and Steve pulls the storm door to. Bel puts her hand over his on the door handle and pushes it open again after the gust subsides.

“I can’t tell, Steve. Is it a possum?”

The rain slackens as suddenly as it starts. There’s a moment’s sunlight. I can’t see past them at the door but hear drips, and running water, and then mewing from outside. “It must be a cat.”

Steve steps outside into the saturated sunlit air. “It is a cat. Who’d have guessed?”

“Will it let you pick it up?”

Steve picks up the dripping animal with his hands behind the front shoulders. It hangs from his grasp like a wet tabby rag, mewing from its wide-open pink mouth. Bel leads the way back into the house.

“Come on Steve, we can dry it off in the kitchen.”

“Does it have a tag?”

“I don’t see one Fred.”

“Maybe it’s got a chip imbedded.”

Bel has got a towel around the cat and tries to dry it off squatting down on the kitchen floor.

“Fred, I think this thing has been wild for a while. She is in bad condition. Lots of mats and look at that torn ear.”

Steve puts a heavy old-fashioned glass ashtray on the floor, and pours some milk in.

“Ouch! Steve, get me the gardening gloves will you. This cat is wild!”

Bel has it wrapped up in the towel like a mummy, but a forepaw has escaped and thrashes back toward bel’s hands holding the towel. It is hissing and getting angrier the longer she holds it.

“Maybe you should let it go?”

“Well Fred, close the door, would you? And we’ll see.”

I close the door and bel lets go of the towel. The cat lets out a screech, which seems to come from the center of its body. It hisses and frees itself of the towel, and turns towards us for a moment, with its ears down. Now it runs behind the dryer and goes quiet.

Steve opens the door and offers the gloves to bel who stands up but doesn’t take them.

“What’s going on?”

We all look towards the dryer and the sound of claws on the metal venting pipe. The cat has climbed on top of the dryer from the back. Its ears are up and its wet tail is snaking in the air behind it.

Steve moves towards her with the gloves on, but the cat jumps down and escapes through the open door and down the hall toward the bedrooms.

“So much for the milk and hospitality!”

“We might as well go and sit down. It will come out eventually.”

“Steve, she’s probably got flees and ticks and…”

“I know but do you really want to search the house for that terrified animal right now?”

Steve leads the way into the living room. Painted cranes fly across a silk sky and settle onto a marsh depicted on three Chinese scrolls hanging over the fireplace.

Imagery from the gardens of paradise woven into the prayer rugs is subtly changed, rendering tanks, aircraft, and bombs. Yet they are not obvious, the stylized images of war have the same character as the garden images. Steve notices me looking at his Afghan war rugs.

“I did a double take, looking at the patterns.”

“These rugs are woven with the blues.”

“They weave art out of pain, Steve!”

“It’s the woolen blues!”

“Sometimes I don’t feel we should be treading on them.”

“Why not bel? They are rugs.”

“But Fred, they were made for prayer. Now we have them, and we just tread on them. Doesn’t that make you think?”

“Well, yes it does…but you appreciate them too.”

Steve looks up at bel and me.

“I think they are like a lot of other religious objects in that respect.”

“Such as, Steve?”

Rememeber, Pierro Della Francesca’s Baptism, for one. We kept going back to it in London.”

“Oh, how could I forget? We must have spent all day in the National Gallery.”

“We did bel, I mean that painting used to hang in a Church to inspire the faithful.”

“That’s right, part of an altarpiece in Sansepolcro.”

“Yup, Pierro’s Tuscan hometown.”

“We buy sacred objects and they become commodities.”

“That’s the art business Fred.”

“And business is secular, so what is left but aesthetics?”

Steve’s ring tones interrupt us. He takes his phone out of the pouch on his belt and looks down at the screen.

“It’s a text from Artie. She is stuck down the street behind a fallen tree.”

“So that’s where it fell!”

“Fred, looks like it fell right outside that vacant house below Macadamia’s place.”

Steve is texting back. Bel gets up and goes down the hall.

“I am telling Artie we can walk over to her.”

“Steve! Come here honey, look at this!”

Steve gets up and walks down the hall. “Fred, come on back.”

I follow him down the hall and see the cat asleep in the middle of their bed.

Steve walks out towards the kitchen.

“I’ll bet she drank the milk too.”

The cat wakes up and jumps off the far side of the bed and crawls underneath.

“Has she Steve?”

“YUP! We have been adopted.”

Bel is smiling, and she bends down, pulls up the bedspread, and looks underneath.

“That animal is used to living in a home.”

Bel and I walk back towards the kitchen where Steve is setting up a litter box using an old plastic dish washing bowl.
“What are you going to put in it?”

“Bel, we have some sand in the shed. I’ll use that for now.”

As soon as he has poured sand in the bowl we go out to find Artie. It is a short walk. The tree fell around the bend from the Strether’s on Wicket Street. It has fallen diagonally across the road missing the power lines by a miracle. The trunk is about eight feet thick at the base and the bark is covered in ivy and Virginia creeper growing over that. It is hollow and blackened, and broke off in a jagged fracture near the ground.

“There she is!”

Bel has found a way under the blockage where a huge branch holds the trunk several feet off the ground. We all duck under the fallen oak. Artie is standing by a small red pickup in a black slicker with the hood up. Her yellow shoes and white sox shine against the black wet road, which makes a dazzling reflection as the sun comes out again. Two thick boards stick out beyond the bed with a rag tied to the ends. Something else lies in back of the truck draped in a blue tarp.

“Did you guys bring a saw, Steve?”

“No I don’t have anything big enough for this.”

“We need Hank Dumpty. He’s got everything.”

“Right bel, so have Albrecht and Boyd.”

Steve has his phone out again. “I am trying Hank first, Fred.”

The sun goes in. A gust of wind brings rain down from a maple above and the leaves pull against their stems showing their light undersides as they dry out.

“Well, start her up and see if you can turn around and come the other way.”

“Wicket is one way bel. Besides I may be out of gas.”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No Fred, the gas gauge is broken.”

“That makes every trip a gamble!”

“Well, it stalled about ten minutes ago after I stopped and texted Steve during the monsoon.”

“When did you last fill her up?”

“I didn’t, this is a friend’s.”

I look in the driver’s window.

“How old is it?”

“At least fourteen-years-old … see, stick shift, hand crank windows and a cassette deck.”

Steve walks over to look at the truck.

“Paint work is in good shape Artie.” His ring tones sound, and Steve looks down at his screen.

“You have to turn around. Hank is up in Pennsylvania.”

“Okay Steve, say hi to Hank for me.”

“I don’t think you’ll have any problems going the wrong way. The cops never come around here anyway.”

“What about the Militia and Urban Safety Solutions?”

“Safety Shmafety… to Hell with both of them!”

“Hey, if you don’t see me at your house, come with gas and a posse!”

“You can coast most of the way Artie, down Bails Lane and Oval Street, so saddle up.”

Artie gets back in the truck and it starts. She turns around and heads back around Wicket street the wrong way.

The truck stalls with a shudder in Steve’s driveway and he excitedly pulls down the tailgate before she gets out of the cab. He loosens the tarp and now I can see what I came for, “Dr. Tulp’s Stone”. I had seen it before with Steve, in her studio, back in the winter of 2011, and that’s why he asked me over for the installation. It is one of Arties’s old carved stone pieces, covered in varying thicknesses of translucent resin. It gives the carving a painterly quality as you see the contours softened by resin.

“So Steve, where would you like it?”

Steve points out a spot to the right of the house where he has laid an oval gravel bed on the grass and stacked some big flat stones to act as a plinth. He gets a hand truck from his shed. Artie sets up the two boards to serve as a ramp, while bel and I watch. They both climb up into the truck bed and ease the sculpture onto the hand truck. Artie has two bungee cords to hold it in place as they wheel the sculpture down the ramp to the driveway and over to its plinth.

“It is all yours Steve, Steve, and thanks, I don’t know any one else who likes it.”

“You now, I always find a feline quality in this, Artie.”

“Well Sfumato had just moved in with me when I worked on it.”

Steve walks around the piece gesturing as he speaks and wiping his face on his sleeve. The sun is out heating the ground and humidity fills the air in sunlit columns of light coming through the trees.

“My eye is drawn along from this lower area, evocative of haunches and curved tail, up to here, where the two bumps suggest a cat’s ears. This topmost point suggests a cat’s snout when seen in relation, but overall, I think it is just the smooth undulating flow of the thing.”

Bel walks over to look more closely.

“This resin covering the stone is kind of smoky in places and here on top I feel I am looking through frosted glass.”

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. 

We are in an underground room. Hard to say how big, as it is full of IT equipment in rows of racks, like wired and winking library stacks. The ceiling seems low. The air-conditioning is brisk.

“Sir, this way please.”

The voice comes out of the cold air.

“This way? Which way is that?

“Hurry up!”

“Have you seen a white rabbit down here?”

I look around for a person, or speakers, also for a camera, but see nothing.

“Don’t look for me, look down.”

Looking down, on command, and I see a row of dot-like amber diodes in the floor lighting up in sequence and suggesting a direction to the right. New ones come on ahead as I followed them. The floor is zinc color with countless tiny holes in it like the bottom of a fine sieve.

Diddlie’s white rabbit, Mr. Liddell, ran off again this morning as she was changing the straw in his hutch. She called me asking for help but I was out in the garden. So she ran down the hill and found me, complaining that I didn’t carry my phone. She wouldn’t stop to regain her breath. She waved a string bag in the air and insisted we go looking for him immediately. We started searching in the field of golden rod up by The Ashes where he was found once before. Then Diddlie and I lost track of each other. I went looking in the garage. She explored the weeds calling out to him. Now I am following lighted diodes like bread crumbs dropped in the woods.

I can see someone, way down the aisle between the shelves of servers, by an orange metal door. Waiting for me, in black t-shirt and grey cargo pants. He carries his phone in one hand and his side arm is holstered in black fabric on his belt. He says nothing and opens the door.

“Have you seen Diddlie’s rabbit, Mr, Liddell?”

“No.”

“I chased him down under the car and he disappeared in the grease pit.”

“They would have caught him on the monitors just like they caught you.”

“What monitors?”

“You shouldn’t be down here.”

He guides me through the orange doorway and then I remember seeing this guy before. He used to sit at the site of Derwent Sloot’s old house while they built that huge new Macmansion. We climb three flights of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell. Now I notice LEDs in the steps too, but they are not lighting up. There is a flat screen built into the wall at each landing, which emits light but has no picture. They look like windows on to a brilliant void. At the top-most landing, two flat screens face each other on opposite walls of unfinished poured concrete. Each displays a picture of a gilded mirror and they reflect each other into a mirrored infinity. I think there’s a small Dordrecht’s logo in the bottom right corner, but it is so faint I am not sure. These mirrors look the same as those I saw years ago in Jake’s foyer. He pulls down an attic ladder, set into a high concrete ceiling, with a length of dirty white clothes line attached and hanging down about chest high with a knot in the end.

“That seems rather low tech!”

“It does the job.”

“Where’s Diddlie?”

“Who?”

‘Did she find Mr. Liddell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she is looking.”

“Go ahead.”

Looking up I can see an old brown Bakelite household light fixture, in the plaster ceiling of the room at the top of the ladder. I climb up the first four or five steps and pause. The floor above is now at eye level. I can see small grey dust ball on a parquet floor, and a dead fly’s thorax hangs in a cobweb stretched between the floor and the chipped white kick board. There are tiny spots on the floor, perhaps droppings from undisturbed spiders. I hear something like claws running on the wooden floor, but it’s too late to see anything.

“Keep going!”

I climb on, and cough. There’s a lot of dust in the air. I step off the top of the ladder into the narrow hallway of a house. There’s an open door to my left admitting daylight from an old sash window with faded green drapes, shredded at the bottom, by cats perhaps. The walls of the small room are a light brown nicotine color and the smell is unmistakable. A single bed sags under the window with a faded scarlet eiderdown stretched from the bottom up to and over a flattened pillow at the head and reaching down to the floor. I pull up the bottom of the eiderdown at the middle of the bed and look for Mr. Liddell. He runs out at the head of the bed and down the hall. A thread hanging down from a raised corner of the eiderdown catches on his ear. He takes it with him and the attached cobwebs too. He is much too fast for me. Stan is now standing in the hall closing the hatch with a handle let into the top. It has a small parquet covered lid which blends perfectly into the floor of the hall, as does the hatch after it is closed. The fit in the old floor is precise. I can barely see the outline of the hatch in the irregular pattern of small gaps between the worn parquets.

“That never happened.” He steps away from me.

“What do you mean? You must have seen that rabbit as well as I did.”

“There’s no rabbits in here.”

Stan walks down the hall and comes back with a dirty corn stalk broom. He taps the floor with it as if stenciling. Instead of ink he spreads house dust. Then he sweeps carefully over the top of the hatch in circular motions to spread the load from the broom into all the cracks, and leaves the excess dust lying around. Now the hatch’s outline is concealed.

Stan points down the hall.

“Go that way.”

“Yeah, alright. Are you coming?”

“I’ll be a while.”

I walk down the hall and find Diddlie sitting in the kitchen trimming stems of goldenrod to fit into different size vases. Two big earthenware ones are on the floor at her feet, other smaller glass and some white porcelain reflect the yellow blooms all over the table.

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah, I caught him just now, see.”

She has put Mr. Liddell in the string bag and tied it to a chair leg. He has settled down with his eyes closed and ears held down by the string squares of the bag.

“He’s going to chew his way out of that you know.”

“No way, it’s made of fishing line or something indestructible.

“Isn’t this a great crop, Fred!”

“This isn’t your kitchen.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Can’t you see, I am preparing these flowers for display.”

“It is too early for goldenrod you know….Why, haven’t you been looking for Mr. Liddell?”

“Well, for one thing he is right here, and for another I had to harvest these early flowers some time, and thought I might find him in among them.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Have a seat honey.”

“I call this my harvest house, because I always do my flower arranging here, ever since I found that really good stuff.”

“Is it Rank’s house?”

“No.”

“I don’t get it. How did he get from the grease pit to this room?”

“How should I know? I saw him run out of the back of the garage though. He escaped through that gap in the boards. So I figured he would come in the house. He likes it better than my place.”

“Well, I was looking for him in the garage. I saw Rank in there, as he stepped down into the old grease pit to work on a car.”

“Oh, he’s always working on that old thing, and you know what?I have never seen it run. I don’t think he can even start it.”

“Well, where did Rank go?”

“Did he start it?”

“No, he dropped something though, and it seemed to bounce down into somewhere way below him in the pit, and he went after it. Maybe he didn’t know I was there. I said hello, but no one answered. Then I saw Mr. Liddell looking at me from under the car, right at the top of the steps down into the pit. That’s when I went after him and Rank.”

Diddlie puts her scissors down. She bends to tickle Mr. Liddell’s ears. Then reaches into a big pile of golden rod on a threadbare blue tarp spread on the floor, and puts more blooms on the table.

“So what’s down there?”

“A big server farm. What is it for? I mean I was amazed. Who’s is it?  Some company’s installation or what?”

“Oh so that’s where it is!”

“What Diddlie?”

“It’s dead people’s data.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when you die all your data lives on after you, down in there.”

“Oh you mean there’s a cloud down there.”

“Yeah, but an underground cloud, like for the dead you see.”

“A data ossuary?”

“No, that’s for bones!”

“Is that what he told you? Dead people’s data lives on?”

“I figured it out for myself. I mean it’s obvious when you think about it!”

“I don’t follow you Diddlie.”

“Well, Lou once told me that old data are valuable and that it is all being salvaged.”

“Did he explain who is doing it?”

“No but he said some of it is going on around here.”

“He never told me that.”

“You know Rank is weird too. He once asked if I have a vacuum cleaner. Then he took the bag out, which was nearly full and put a new one in from my cupboard; but he didn’t throw the old one away. He said he needed it!”

“What house are we in now?”

“The Ashes of course.”

“This place isn’t as ruined as it looks.”

“No, some of the rooms are okay. There’s no water in the faucets though.

“I wonder if that old Ford Torino is still in the garage here.”

“Well, I don’t know what kind of car it is, but it is there.”

I can see people and a black SUV outside the dirty kitchen window through the space where the blind has broken. They are in black uniforms and one has an automatic weapon. Someone slams the door of the SUV and Diddlie turns to look too.

“Oh look Fred, it’s Rank, out there with our Militia! Come on Mr. Liddlell, we have to go.”

She puts a few small stems of flowers in the back pocket of her jeans where they wave as she bends over and unties the string bag from the chair leg. She picks up Mr. Liddlell in her arms, and I follow her out to the hallway. She leaves all her flower work, and runs surprisingly fast down the hall, past the hatch and the old bedroom and through ruins of the old sunroom and onto the terrace in back, where they let off fireworks on the Glorious Fourth last year.

“Come on Fred, you have to move much faster or I’ll miss Mr. Fawkes. Oh God! I am late for Mr. Fawkes.”

Diddlie leads the way, racing back with Mr. Liddell to his hutch in her carport.

 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. 

Light rain drips from the Arrowwood Viburnums blooming outside on the patio. It is cool. I need a jacket. Overcast low light days and rain keeps Fauxmont’s chilly streets black and shiny. The Shrinkrap news site, tells me that Snaz Inc. was bought for $95 billion by Ensor International the secretive Belgian conglomerate owned by Axel Ensor. The new company will be called “SnazE’. He’s known in the tabloids as “The man of many masks.” He is said to be negotiating a deal with Armond Macadamia for a Macadamia/Ensor tower in Brussels, two hundred stories high. Axel wants to call it Ensor/Macadamia. According to a wire story quoted by Shrinkrap, Macadamia is running for president as an independent, and has lost interest in the project.

The rain lets up. I turn off the computer to go shopping and when I open the door, a Carolina wren flies out from among the drenched blossoms, as if to take advantage of the break, like me.

I run into Daisy at the Safeway in her yellow polka dot boots, engulfed by a brilliant orange plastic poncho.

“Hi Fred, our stomachs growl together!”

“Daisy! It’s a rumble.”

She is standing out of the rain under the covered entrance and turns from the bulletin board covered with old business cards, and other ragged papers fastened by thumbtacks and in one case a long pin. When available tacks run out, a single tack may fasten several messages at once.

“You got a spare thumb tack Fred?”

“Sorry, I don’t carry.”

“Yeah, well neither do I”

“You might try the internet instead of this thing. I don’t think any one reads it anymore.”

“Well, my old PC died, and I never did get a smart phone. Can’t afford one now. You know any one who needs a dog walker? I am going into business…see.”

She points to a generic dog shape, cut out of purple paper, hanging from the bottom of the board by a single rusty tack positioned like the eye of the dog. She has typed her phone number on to a lot of thin strips coming off the dog’s back like long shaggy extra thick fur. The same tack holds down the bottom of a flyer offering a reward for return of a lost ferret; with an email address not a phone number.

“How about ferret walking?”

“No, wombats were enough. It’s just pet dogs from now on.”

Her long arm reaches out of the poncho and some water drips in through the arm hole. She shakes the whole thing, then takes off her bowler and shakes the rainwater off it. Her shopping list falls from the hatband and blows out into the parking lot. I try to pick it up before it is too wet, but a black Humvee, though it breaks hard, runs over it. I am too late.

“This thing may be pulp by now.”

I hand her the soggy paper and can’t help noticing it is a check, or the dripping remains of one.

“Fred, you should be more careful. You ran out way too close to me!”

Boyd Nightingale is standing next to us in a black Stetson and fatigue jacket, with Militia patch.

“I did?”

“Yeah! I don’t know why you didn’t see me!”

“Oh, I did, sort of, I wanted to get a piece of paper that fell out of her hat band before it was turned to pulp.”

Daisy is holding her soggy check in one hand, and has grabbed my arm with the other. She looks into my face frowning and then whispers in my ear.

“My God Fred! I don’t know if this is any good now.”

I start to reply but she shakes my arm.

“No no no, forget it, forget it!” She puts the paper in her purse and goes into the store. Boyd goes after her but soon comes back out.

“What’s up with her?”

Without giving me time to answer he walks back to his Hummer and gets in and I go into the store.

After picking up our groceries, Daisy and I start back to Fauxmont and there’s Boyd sitting in the monster of his aspirations, engine idling, waiting for us outside the entrance. The window is open.

“Hey guys! You want a ride?”

“Boyd, what are you doing?”

“Daisy, I couldn’t miss you in that orange thing while I was gassing up. Thought you might like a ride home on such a rainy day.”

The rain has started again and it is getting heavier.

“Thanks Boyd. Daisy you get in front.”

Daisy pushes past me.

“No Fred you get in front.”

Daisy opens the back door as I get in the front. After climbing in she takes off her bowler and puts it on the seat next to her, then flips her poncho over her head, and over the back of the seat. Her long black hair flies up and falls in wet strings and she smoothes them out with long thin fingers.

Boyd takes us on a roundabout route via Bails Lane and then down another lane I have never seen before, called ‘Mid Off’. It is even narrower, steep, and unpaved with huge potholes full of water like little ponds. Parts of it have washed away as it becomes a stream in heavy rain. The Humvee’s big tires roll slowly over exposed tree roots, fallen branches and through the potholes, splashing muddy water. Gravel rattles under the fenders.

“You’ve got to see Chuck’s new place down here by the river.”

Daisy is holding on to the side of her seat as the vehicle tips into and out of the next hole.

“Chuck’s who?”

“Chuck Newsome, Daisy, don’t you remember?”

“Oh maybe, is he that giant blond guy? Kind of looks like Carl Sandberg, only he’s about 7ft tall?”

“He’s not seven, he’s only six nine.”

“Yeah, big difference, so he’s the one you mean, right?”

“Right, he is helping Senator Lee Levenworth’s, ‘Jobs for Americans’, campaign and he’s a great guy. Albrecht met him out West back…ah, well a few years ago, at a CUPA event.”

“Is he still married to that Hungarian trophy?”

“He sure is, Nadia Brazov, the beautiful Transylvanian.”

“I thought she was Hungarian.”

“Her mother was. Her father was from Transylvania, Rumanian I think.”

“That’s not a Rumanian name.”

“No, well, I don’t know…Russian maybe.”

We arrive at a building site on a long gradual curve, where the road levels off and drains through the gravel bed. We seem to be on a mansion size peninsular jutting into the river. I can’t see anything on the right at first but a field stone retaining wall. The mansion comes into view further around the bend, and we keep going with the river on the left. Further along the building looks more finished. The first floor in dressed granite blocks like Trip’s, but the next three stories are half timbered, mock Tudor, with huge black painted beams, like glowering brows above all the countless leaded diamond-shaped windows.

“It’s the house of seventy gables!”

Boyd stops outside the driveway as the rain slackens again. We look at the approach to six garage doors. Some faint shadows appear for a moment, then grayness. All deep brown teak with elaborate ironwork. A huge rusty steel I-beam sticks up from a raised concrete island in the middle of the driveway at its widest. Thin stainless steel spirals grow out of the sides about fifteen feet up rising vertically like big conical blossoms, shiny and wet.

“You should see that thing at night!”

“Is it some kind of antenna?”

“No Fred, It looks like one of Boris Trarantula’s sculptures.”

“Yeah Daisy, Chuck commissioned it for the house. At night the red white and blue lights come on and reflect off it. Those spirals move in the wind. It’s pretty awesome! And you know what?”

“What Boyd?”

“Each one of those spirals has the entire constitution of the United States engraved on it.”

“Hard to read though.”

“Well yes, but our guarantee of liberty is still there.”

“So that’s where he met Nadia! Artie told me about it years ago. Nadia used to work at Osiris Tarantula’s boutique, as a model or something.”

“Nadia is still pretty hot Daisy. Chuck went for it and got it!”

“Oh Boyd…it, being his sex object!”

“She is sexy Daisy, I mean that cantilever is…you know what I mean Fred?”

“Boyd, I am pleading the 5^th on that one.”

“You never used to be so obnoxious Boyd!”

“What do you mean? I am just enjoying life!”

“Can we go now please Boyd?”

“Daisy, you called Nadia a trophy, not me.”

Boyd doesn’t move. He is looking at the wine red two door Porsche Panamera parked in one driveway and a hot pink Humvee with gold tinted glass parked under the porte-cochere. The massive double front door is also teak with brass work and a split Chippendale pediment. Nadia’s Hummer is even bigger than the one we are in, with a white cover over the spare tire and two gold jerry cans, one mounted on each side.

“Well I guess Nadia is here, that’s hers.” Boyd is pointing towards the entrance.

“Chuck says his house will be half a mile long when it’s done and he’s going to jog his five miles a day inside, all winter.”

“Well, Nadia is going to burn a tank of gas just getting out the driveways!”

“No way Daisy, that vehicle has a huge tank, custom job all the way.”

“Why is the house British style Tudor and the port-cochere is supported on Ionian capitals?”

“You’ll have to ask Jim’s architect that one.”

“Boyd this is worse than Trip’s place…I mean it is just a half mile mishmash.”

“Oh get off your high horse. You sound like my Mom. Have some fun Daisy!”

We drive further around Chuck’s massive curving folly, past the driveways and there’s a dock on the left, with two barges loaded with building materials. No one is around to unload though.

“Boyd, you sound like Albrecht’s mouthpiece, “Get Back JoJo”

“Hey, I’m back baby, I, am, Back, in the driver’s, seat!”

“I just don’t understand. It seems disgusting to me. That place is like an old movie set. I imagine Nadia climbing out of that pink penis she drives, to a rank of courtiers in gold brocades and jeweled turbans playing a fanfare on squeaky tin horns.”

“Not with Jim. No, those things would be solid gold trumpets trombones and tubas.”

“Let’s get out of here Boyd!”

“Honey don’t take it like that. This is a huge development. Down here used to be real poor, old shacks and lean-tos. Now look, multimillion dollar property.”

“Development? What happened to the people who used to live here? I mean what developed in their lives?”

I turn to see Daisy is looking down at her arm, moving her multiple gold and silver bracelets up from her wrist. She unfolds the soggy check and presses a Kleenex against it to dry it out.

“…and Boyd, don’t ‘honey’ me, okay?”

Boyd adjusts his navy blue American Glory baseball cap with a flag on the front and the words curling over and under it in a flourishing script. He drives all the way around and joins a new paved road with no name. He must have noticed me looking at the label on the back of his cap.

“Fred, you like my hat? I can get you one.”

“Sure Boyd, I see it is made in Sri Lanka.”

“Yeah, Ensor International finds good cheap labor!”

“But what about American jobs?”

“Fred, what can I say? You know, life is complicated.”

 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?”