Gringo, a short story.

Peter Simpson was going out in style, or so he thought walking to the beach at 3AM with his tripod mounted camcorder, a bottle of champagne and assorted pills in his shirt pocket. This short Baja cove, deserted in the daytime, was at night what Peter estimated to be the perfect door to oblivion at sea. He would start the camera at low tide in fifteen minutes, stand in front of it and strip naked, drink half of the champagne bottle while downing in a precise sequence a cocktail of pills that he had patiently researched on the Internet. Then he would declare a short happy statement for his friends and family and a longer more angry one for his insurance company. Soon after he would collapse at the water line and let the rising tide take him into its warm embrace, rolling him like a clump of kelp in full view of the recording instrument. Three hours later, the tide would recede and haul his floating carcass with still enough tape left to capture a pink sunrise on the sea of Cortez. Then some passerby would discover the tripod, steal it, open the carrying pouch and read the message within.

“You can keep the video camcorder, but if you bring the tape inside to Allen Waterhouse at the Gringo Gazette, you will be given $100”

Followed precise instructions on how to get there and MUCHAS GRACIAS with a twenty dollar bill for a taxi ride to San Felipe.

Only, Peter had forgotten that it is difficult to film anything at night without a decent light source, even though his Sony could produce some halfway decent greenish footage at very low levels of illumination. The champagne drinking scene would do fine under his keychain flashlight, but any hope of a crisp looking beach was out of the question. He was hoping for the moon to throw in some light but in his moment of doubt there was only the vast Milky Way above, glittering like a wedding veil but incapable of showing any interest for the illumination of a tired earthling’s last hour. Peter slowly scanned all four horizons for a moon to rise, briefly catching a falling star arcing towards Arizona to the North. The sea was calmer than expected, another source of concern. He did not want to be found dead by an early morning sea shell collector, one of the little old retirees living in the trailers around town. He wanted to be had for breakfast by a one thousand pound male shark one thousand feet away at sea. His other fear was warm champagne. Peter had a horror of warm champagne and all these thoughts were distracting him from the job at hand, going through the stage door of life with adequate panache. So it needs to be said that at precisely 3:15AM the cork slid up and popped towards the stars.

The first speech went flawlessly, included every loved ones plus a few more last minute friends that sprang to his exalted mind surfing on three Qualudes taken earlier. It ended with cheerful thanks, winks and goodbyes for all. He then walked back two feet and gurgled down a good deal of champagne with two more ominous looking pills. Those would give him about ten minutes before “lights out”, time to do the insurance thing. Holding the small flashlight near his chin, he knew that his facial expression would be scary while he slowly towards the lens, filling the viewfinder with nothing but his face.

CAPITAL LIFE AND HEALTH, you bastards, I plan to work very hard on getting each one of you assholes a ticket to hell. I hope you roast there for your duplicity and grand thievery. I have paid you every month for forty years to get protected by you in the event of a bad health break. As you know very well the bad break was just last year with the discovery of my advanced leukemia. And you had the gall to refused me the bone marrow transplant that could have saved my life. You did that because I was supposed to have declared it as a pre-existing family malady when I first applied for insurance. The contrary, you said, disabled my policy, …five hundred fucking payments to you later. When my lawyer said in court that at the time of my subscription my father was still alive, you pulled a fine print on me, you criminal bastards. According to you I was suppose to report to you any meaningful change affecting my original application for insurance coverage. I was to write to you a registered letter stating my father’s death from leukemia when it occurred seven years later. So I lost in court along with the rest of my savings. I lost, and now you LOSE, morons…hopefully along with a lot of your clients. This video will hit YouTube in two days and I hope it gets two million viewers. Let it be remembered that my last words to you are FUCK YOU FUCK YOU fuck you very much!.

Peter’s last words sloshed as he was he started a drunken path to the tide’s edge, showing in a manly way his buns to the feeble light. Peter had started to show his buns at age three and never really stopped, a minor irritant for his friends who still loved him dearly. An agronomist, he felt that nudity was a concept that was as valid for man as for other animals or petunias. No, the moon had not risen yet, but a fisherman was walking to the beach with a wheelbarrow swinging a powerful lantern. The forbidden technique would yield a formidable catch with just a simple net. The last time Lorenzo had fished the cove this way he had counted 73 surf perches, enough proteins to keep his five kids rosy-cheeked for two weeks. This time he had taken a larger net along with a duffle bag. When he saw the artist making a solitary movie of himself running naked, he respectfully put down the wheel barrow to observe. These strange gringos were so crazy yet so rich that it could not be all that bad. Maybe he should observe and learn something. But then his strong catholic upbringing made him run to the road above for now. He sat wondering if maybe he should be fishing the next cove to the south. Time passed, the moon was high and the fisherman had already eaten his sandwich along with a few hot peppers. With the gringo now probably gone , he would go fishing and make himself forget the strange sight.

The water had risen fast towards Peter’s open mouth. He had collapsed in the sand and his beige carcass was already rocked by the pounding surf. The salt water gargle had shocked his senses and made him vomit. The Quaaludes in his bloodstream made him so disoriented that he managed to roll further into the blackest of seas, his body fat keeping him afloat on his back till he was out of sight. The fisherman only saw the camera and was now checking the cliff for other signs of the man. After setting up the lantern on a rock, Lorenzo made a first throw of the net and bagged fifteen wiggly perches. By 5AM his duffle bag was so full he could not push it up the hill, deciding instead to follow the beach to a better path uphill. Walking by the tripod, he thought of taking it home. The gringo forgot his camera, and yes, there is an address there in the bag that mamma will read. I will bring it to him and make him happy, as no doubt. there’s a reward attached, a REGALLO!

Riding atop the fish bag, the tripod and case were on their way when the fisherman saw the beige carcass of the naked man, a few hundred meters to the south. He was alive but strangely moaning and moving as if he had a giant bellyache. He would not respond, even when in desperation Lorenzo twisted a jalapeno pepper into his mouth. Borracho borracho, must be that huge bottle I saw . This is one drunken-sick gringo and I better take him somewhere

The ride up the hill was done in stages as the man’s clothes, his camera, tripod and case went first, the duffle bag second and the man third, coiled in the wheelbarrow like a hermit crab in a tin can. Lorenzo would not go to the authorities, not with his clandestine catch! He would take him to Yolanda who had a way with drunkards that no one could fathom. She provided services of the sexual kind, but only on Saturdays as she was also a devout Christian starting Sunday after an early confession. This was Monday morning and a pink sun was showing over the Baja crests. Lorenzo arranged some clothing over the man and pushed to wheelbarrow to Yolanda’s back door, triggering a salvo of barking doggies. The matron instantly came to the door wearing nothing but her Chihuahua and a kitchen knife. QUE PASA!

Peter came to in a strange bathtub surrounded by shimmering luminaries. He had a giant headache and his mouth was full of foul tasting herbs. Yolanda had tried her medicine on him. She was not there but he could hear spoons and smell coffee brewing. Wearing a purple dress of shiny texture, Yolanda appeared with hot compresses and a coffee pot. Oh the pobre borrocho has woken up. This will do you good mister!. She poured him a cup of black coffee and Peter took it as if it had been a normal morning with Priscilla, his assistant at the Agronomic Institute.

Lorenzo wanted the one hundred dollar really bad but did not know what to think of it. One does not feed one’s family with fish alone. There was a need for rice, cooking oil, shoes for the eldest and mamma need to have a tooth removed. She insisted, after reading the entire message ten, twelve times for her illiterate husband. You must go, Mio, go to the Gringo Gazette. Take the money for the taxi and the cassette and just go. The man wants you to do that very bad very badly.

Allan Waterhouse was always late for work on Mondays as he spent his weekends caballing for all sorts of desperate causes. A failed lawyer but a brilliant reporter, he always latched on with passion to any story with at least one orphan, a beaten dog or a robbed widow. Lorenzo waited till noon in the hall, munching on dried shrimps from a cellophane bag bought with the money left after paying the taxi to San Felipe. He tilted his cap back and felt good, having fished well, saved a life now being about to make real money, over one thousand shiny pesos. Allen showed up, met the man and looked around for a suitable way to view the cassette. Only then did he read read the message. Oh it’s from Peter Simpson, for God’s sake, you should have told me that before senor!

The meeting lasted ten minutes more or less, and when Allen came out of the office he had five crisp twenty dollar bills for the worried fisherman. This is a terrific video, and please stick around as we want to do a story on my friend’s death. But it never occurred to the newsman that Lorenzo spoke no English. When a half-hour later Waterhouse came to the front door, notepad in hand, Lorenzo was nowhere to be found. By that time he had already bought a large bag of apples, ten pounds of rice, several jalapenos, two cakes, a new mop for mamma and rubber boots for himself, pushing all of it in the trunk of a taxi while munching on a new bag of dried shrimps. Abundance.

By Friday, Peter was alive and well and living in Yolanda’s bedroom, spoiled crazy, fed fajitas with sour cream, massaged and hand-washed three times a day. His left side was a bit numb but enough of him had come back from the near dead experience to create for Yolanda a different Saturday opportunity. She adored her mustachioed gringo and had washed his pants, bought for him an embroidered shirt to be worn Saturday night at the ejido party. Just think, she would show off her own caballero, hand-fed all week and white as sheet. Before that first outing, Peter had had time to reflect on his life. This woman treasured him, made him laugh and extracted confessions like peas from a pod. He had told her all of his sorry life, insisting that only a very costly operation could possibly extend it. Yolanda had a way with words. Stay right here with me and I will make you healthy, Peta. He like “Peta” and would not be shy to adopt it as his new name, Peta Anonymous.

The first 1000 viewers came slowly, a one-month trickle at YouTube. But then, banzai!, a health-care scandal story on TV showed the acceptable part of the video. Needless to say the original on YouTube quickly climbed to a viewership of over one million after it was aired. Allen Waterhouse was in great demand, appearing on the CBS morning show as the last friend of that poor mister Simpson on the entire planet Earth. Shares of Capital Life and Health plummeted and various memorial services were held for the victim who committed the colorful suicide on YouTube. Policies were canceled so fast that to handle the paperwork Capital had to get assistance from Girl Friday in Phoenix . The claim adjuster for the Simpson policy was fired noisily and committed suicide by jumping off the steel and glass headquarter building. His boss took an early retirement and died when his brand new Winnebago blew a tire and rolled into a Colorado river. It would seem to the untrained eye that some black magic was in the air, the ghost of Peter Simpson acting out its promise. By then viewers had reached twenty million. A sociologically inclined pollster had opined that 22% of these were interested in the health-care issue, another 31% just wanted to not miss-out on a hot video and 47% accessed the site to see the cute but deceased behind of Peter Simpson, their new posthumous folk-hero. Out of these, plus or minus 3% 19 times out of 20, 26% thought the whole thing was staged.

It was only a matter of time before this brouhaha descended into the sea of Cortez. Ten months later, Yolanda had closed shop to all her married men clientele in San Felipe, not without creating some concealed anger. She had married her own in the Guadelupe church, wearing a shiny white gown, a fiery red smile and a shiny white man at her arm. After burning all those candles, she had her won the heart of a real man, one smart enough to have to have mastered Spanish in six months, started his own Instituto Agronomico in the village, and be voted as the best dancer of pasodobles at the Ejido. Peta helped in getting new drought-resistant seeds to the local farmers and thanks to an Arizona irrigation technique boosted the output of all three local greenhouses. Slowly the married men forgave and oriented their libidos to newer ladies of the night arrived from the poor southern provinces. Simpson was determined to have the bone marrow transplant and precious few months were left for him to do so. He had shaved the mustache and grown a mop of hair that he died blond, pulling it into a ponytail that Yolanda favored very much, especially when she adorned it with her amulets on Saturday mornings. This ritual followed the spirited and dog bark punctuated love-making that filled Peter with benevolent endorphins than all the Quaaludes in the world could not match. Yolanda had bought a fresh batch of candles, this time for the quadruple purposes of imploring the madona to keep Peter healthy, keep him undiscovered, keep him happy, and…keep him her own! This is about the time when Peta, out of plain curiosity, googled his name on the Internet, finding twenty-two thousand odd links to his name and to Capital Life and Health. He also on that same morning discovered betting web sites that were making a brisk business with his name, proposing that the death was faked and that the truth about his death would come out at one point in time. Only 3 out of 10 registered betters waged that this would come out before the end of the present year, either with a body found or a real live person. Interestingly, 6 out of 10 were of the opinion that the truth would not come out in the same period, a secret wish, perhaps based on the popularity of the man. At the bottom of one such table, Peter scratched his scalp itchy from all that peroxide and read: The real Peter Simpson to come out alive before the end of the current year, 0.1 One better out of ten, those were good odds thought Peter with a giant smile on his face.

In order to feed his waning popularity with the talk shows, Allen Waterhouse had further pushed his investigation into Peter Simpson’s death. His coverage of the case had already made the Gringo Gazette famous and help promote him to editor-in-chief. After covering in Phoenix the debacle of a hated insurance company, he needed to milk that story further from a historical standpoint that only Lorenzo could provide. A taxi driver came to the rescue when he read Allen’s note in the front page of the Gazette: We are looking for anyone who on February the 26^th saw a short man with a green cap and a funny nose. He was seen munching on dried shrimps around the Gringo Gazette office on Avenida Juarez. The tadi driver had had a passenger like that and remembered quite exactly the location of the dilapidated casita where he had taken him. Always quixotic and with a flair for trailing story sources, the newsman had sleuthed his way to Lorenzo, his wife, and then to Yolanda and her still new and very blond husband. Preceded by an embarrassed Yolanda and trailing Lorenzo with several barking dogs at his ankles, he walked into the kitchen where his friend Peter was dieing his hair by the kitchen sink. Allen ate up the Peter Simpson story like taffy, laughing hysterically and then, standing up like the president of a republic, proposed himself as the honored donor of bone marrow. This, needless to say, was accepted wholeheartedly by a nervous and relieved Peter who had fully recovered his zest for life. He had a plan to get the money for the operation. Insider trading, a practice neither practiced much nor terribly frowned upon in Mexico. Besides, the betting web site was in America. With the economies of Yolanda and several of the farmers of the Ejido, he registered and placed several anonymous contracts on the probability that Peter Simpson would come out of hiding before the end of the year.

It took another six months to find out that the leukemia had receded, that the operation had been successful beyond any expectation. Concurrently with the operation, Yolanda had liposuction, all her moles removed and a complete facelift. Lorenzo now has traded his wheelbarrow for a pickup truck hauling a fishing boat with an outboard engine. Mamma has had new molars implanted and shoned five crowns in front part of her mouth. All the kids now have shoes, a somewhat ironic reality since they now live in a house with soft grass all around it. Playing barefoot in their previous junkyard was indeed a real hazard. As for Waterhouse who was also in with the anonymous bets, he bought a new printing press made in Switzerland. The Instituto has a new wing for farmer education and Peter imported Priscilla from America because of her encyclopedic knowledge of seeds, seed-related people and good American coffee percolation. All the dogs now have each month a flea treatment and a grooming in Ensenada. No one, absolutely no one seems to have wondered why a new tree-lined street in San Felipe was named Calle Simpson. Right behind the new wing of the Instituto Agronomico, that short street was full of shiny new trucks when their farmer owners were inside learning about fertilizing techniques, their hats aligned near the door on a series of brass hooks.

Not that they did not try. Several of the millions of viewers of the new YouTube video had researched the location of that beach. Posts were alive with heated debate sprinkled with names like Coco Beach in Costa Rica, Nha Trang beach in central Vietnam, Omaha beach in Normandy. The same pollster had concluded that 22% of these were interested in the man Peter Simpson’s agenda, another 31% just wanted to not miss-out on a hot video and 47% accessed the site to see the disturbingly amusing full frontal view of Peter Simpson’s naked body, their resuscitated folk-hero. Out of these, plus or minus 3% 19 times out of 20, 26% thought the whole thing was staged.

And they were right, in a perverse way. Lorenzo was now so familiar with the video camera that he had been named Director of the new video. It must be said that strangely he did not feel sinful seeing a naked man through a viewfinder, as if so many layers of glass protected his faith. Of course no YouTubers could read any of these credits. Posted anonymously, it showed a man walking out of the water naked, shaking his grey hair and wiping his brow just a few feet away from the camcorder lens. While slowly drying himself with a towel, he announces to all : “Hi folks, I am Peter Simpson and I am cured of Leukemia, no thanks to Capital Life and Health. I just want to thank from the bottom of my heart the millions of friends out there that made this possible. And also the thousands of others who help enlighten the owners of policies that stood naked like me, having no protection whatsoever in spite of their faithful premium payments. Yes my death was faked, but only accidentally. I owe my life to sheer luck and to the help of a country that has universal health care”. This threw off the few viewers who were hinting at Baja California. Google noted a huge traffic to universal health care and countries like France and Burundi were now suspected of harboring Peter Simpson. Americans were truly bewildered by the large number of these socialist countries, as their hunt for Simpson slowly faded into the background. That was good. Secretive farmers in Baja are more secretive than secretive farmers anywhere else. And they all needed new tractors to service their enlarged lands. That was good too. No one was to mention the other operations to anyone. Peter had always dreamed of an improvement for his recessive chin and aquiline nose. And Yolanda was yearning for purple contact lenses and a higher bust. Lorenzo wanted a second boat and his own fish hatchery. Allen wanted to acquire the Gringo Times. It had to happen.

On the familiar betting web site, Peta read:

Peter Simpson to be discovered and identified before the end of the current year, 0.7 Seven out of ten betters …..Jiminez cricket!, those are good odds thought Peter to himself putting the rest of his money on the opposite option.

C A N T A M A R, Part 1, A novella by Jacques Poirier

Note: Part 2 and Part 3 are to be sent directly as an eBook to those who were pleased with Part 1

(If the type is too small, use your mouse wheel in conjunction with the Ctrl. key to make it bigger )

Chapter 1 - Desirée

Werner was locked up in a bookstore, an obvious accident when the owner had to leave the premises in a hurry, not having noticed the self-effacing middle-aged man crouching in the psychology section. This man’s life was going nowhere as he was looking for that magical self-help book to give it meaning, down on one knee to scan through the titles on a lower shelf. The unusual silence soon made him realize his peculiar situation, but that did not seem to disturb him the least. He was into a recurrent depression that made him shun all contacts with other people. He was probably incapable of mouthing three words into a spoken sentence. There was no question of calling anyone on the phone, of course. And the idea of gesticulating for help to a passerby filled him with horror. His defeatist mind had made him a prisoner till morning. Had he looked around he would have seen the panic bar on the back door. He would have been out with a simple push.

Werner had spent his adult life pondering things from every possible angle. This had left him with no direction of his own, no clear personality. He would tend to agree with every point of view, understanding its genesis, empathizing with its author. If the latter was a candidate in an election, he would want to vote for him. But then he would give his opponent the same consideration, ending up in a personal quandary with nagging migraines. Ever since Werner was old enough to carry pocket change, he would need to flip a coin to make decisions. Any decision, choosing a breakfast cereal, job hunting, dating… or choosing a book to read as he was presently doing. These habits had darkened his spirit and ruined his life to the point that he contemplated ending it. Earlier on that same day he tossed a coin. Heads, he would hang himself, tails he would see a shrink.

The outcome saved his life, but then just thinking that he would need to make an appointment and verbalize what his problem was gave him a giant headache. He chose the bookstore. He was surrounded with the best collection of books in the entire town of Eureka, northern California. He had the time, the quiet space and the will to draw a new course of action. He intended to use the opportunity to give his miserable existence meaning and direction.

At around midnight, he had scoured through thirty books from which a dozen were chosen and neatly stacked on the table next to a dozen girl scout cookies found by the cash register. He had set up the table and chair in an area hidden from street view but well lit nonetheless. He already knew that he was about to perform a magic trick, one that would produce a new synthesis, the decisions for a new life, the creation of a vastly improved Werner Finestone. He removed his vest while elaborately taking a ballpoint pen from its pocket. At last, he could feel actual words gurgling back into his throat, the depression receding like a dirty tide. Good books had often had that effect on him, but this moment had an ecstatic quality to it.

In a soft but excited voice, almost ceremoniously, he wispered: "My new life will be...in the town of …." In front of him was a large Rand McNally's World Atlas open to the index page. His eyes tightly shut, he raised a fist tightly wrapped around the ballpoint, spearing the page with a blue smudge tapering off from the word Cantamar MX. He would go there on the next train, bus or plane and he would start a new life, one free of all past connections. That would constitute the best possible suicide, terminating his past life once and for all. But then he would need a new different and better life.

And he would need a new name. So he then opened Who's Who In America. Again with the help of the hovering pen he first extracted the name William (Bill), and then the surname Trusset . He liked Bill Trusset immediately and decided it was time to clothes that fellow properly. What better book to do that than "The History of Clothing and Fashion" by Leon Vuitton . After the smearing the book on several pages, Bill was satisfied with a red scarf, an aviation leather jacket, a pair of short safari-style pants with multiple pockets, tan colored boots and a simple black cotton T-shirt. Two coffees later, at the crack of dawn, Bill Trusset had a full identity, a lexicon, a set of clothes and a mission. In the span of a few hours, his state of mind had gone with a vengeance from regressive/analytical to aggressive/synthetic. The jargon of psychosomatic medicine was now useless, the cure had worked its magic. Bill stood straight as he walked gingerly to the back of the store. The plastic skylight looked promising if he could dismantle one of the three steel bars. Climbing there using steel shelves was a cinch. Grabbing the central bar to test it, he wondered how they were attached. A good job to saw it off having no appropriate tools, he thought, … unless of course he could loosen a fasterner” He then removed a tile to peer inside the suspended ceiling cavity. There he caming nose to nose with a canvas bag. Finding it strangely out of place, Bill slid a hand inside it to retrieve a small part of its content, a pile of one hundred dollar bills. Thanking his angel, he stared happily into the sky while stuffing his coat with the entire stash, still balancing himself by hanging on the skylight bar. Lowering his gaze, he saw the rear steel door and its panic bar. The latter clicked open with a gentle push of his excited hand, revealing a back alley fragrant with magnolias. He walked away gingerly to Eureka’s Main street, crossing a few horny cats.

The street was bare and the bus terminal had a defective neon that flickered reyhound into the pink fog. On a wall map, the lone cashier plotted the route to Cantamar MX, proposing:

"We can take you to San Diego. Then you're on your own since our bus line takes the inland road to Mexico City through Mexicali. It's not covering northern Baja where you are heading. I suggest you check it out with our people in San Diego. They're bound to find you another carrier ". Bill paid the ticket with a hundred dollar bill. "Keep the change, but tell me if there is a clothing store near your San Diego Greyhound depot?" Bill loved the sound of his voice, assertive with bold tones.

The soft whirr of the diesel engine put Bill into a sleep so deep that five hours later the driver had to shake him gently by the shoulder: "Sir, you need to transfer to another bus. This is San Francisco". It was late afternoon. Bill had time to buy his complete new accoutrement before his connection. He was happily stuffing a red ascot around his neck in the depot's rest room when a young man with a lisp volunteered with an envious voice: "This looks zooooo good on you". But Bill had already defined his new program through a random search in "The Sexual Dictionary" by Doctor Ruth Wurtheimer. This slick stranger was certainly the wrong sexual object at this time.

The right object however did materialize in the next bus link to San Diego, an attractive brunette whose name Desiree probably offered a hint as to why her gaze was fixed on Bill's muscular thighs, the safari pants bulging where she appeared to be trying hard to not look. Bill was in seventh heaven, a new life ahead of him with no ties to his easily forgotten troubled past. When she asked him questions, his recent reading spree provided him with all the fiction he needed to build great conversation. By the time they reached Los Angeles, Desiree knew all about Bill's career moves, his love of a specific type of sea algae, his passion for complex Margarita recipes ...and his amorous moves in tight quarters. Not that they were the first to make love in the tiny bathroom a Greyhound bus, but they probably had been the first to enjoy the thrill of orgasm over a specific railroad crossing two miles south of Fresno.

At that happy moment Desiree had one foot in the stainless steel lavatory. Bill was pushing hard on the ceiling with his free hand to insure the stability of the configuration. The reader is free to imagine the other details of that arrangement. Werner used to say that love is better in its very beginning, the overwhelming reason why one has to start all over often. He had lost count of how many new loves he had lived through, just remembering that they all felt wonderful in their infancy. Depressions and migraines always sprouted after two years with the same partner. However Bill had already forgotten Werner, so very happy to be the new lover, with Desiree the new love and Greyhound the new facilitator. Cantamar would be the new nest, full of promise. Under his aviator jacket pulsed the heart of a very new and charismatic human being, one so charming that Desiree just melted like butter under the San Diego sun.

It was rather hot and the bus to Mexico was not a good idea. Somewhere in his recent memory was the word Woodie , those station wagons favored by surfers in the fifties, with their quaint wooden side panels and smiling front chrome. The used car lot had one for sale, corner of 5^th St. and Boardwalk. Desiree liked that car, eying the space inside where they could fit a foam mattress. That purchase took a bigger chunk of cash than expected. But soon they were sailing through the border crossing while singing Guantanamera to the top of their lungs, happy lovers in transit with not a care in the world… except perhaps to find a nice side road with no prying eyes. Life was good for Bill Trusset and Desiree Minsky, a French-Russian expat with a taste for adventurers. She was originally headed for the Los Angeles Boat Show, hoping to find a wealthy sailor with a port of calling in the warmer latitudes. Desirée was very happy with her own memories, spending a lot of energy mostly trying to replicate the better ones. Fifty-foot saiboats with electric furling jibs and handsome captains provided many of those.

She did not expect what came up next. Bill's face had darkened when he suddenly made an abrupt turn towards the Tijuana Airport. Parked in the departure section, he looked at Desiree in the eye, handing her three crisp one hundred dollar bills. Slowly he said "Quand on aime, il faut partir". Then in halting English, unsure of her French, he translated: ”When in love, one must leave!” Desiree had understood the first time, recognizing the famous Blaise Cendrars maxim. Love does go downhill from day one. So why not cut it off when it is still good, manufacturing wonderful chest expanding memories. She lowered her gaze and took the money. The Boat Show tomorrow with a slow cruise to Bora Bora, Hell! why not!. With the change from the purchased plane ticket to L.A., she would get drunk and eat an entire pollo asado.

Other women would have burst out cursing or crying. This girl was different, thought Bill with a tinge of regret when starting his car. He drove westward to the Cuota, the toll highway to Rosarito following the scenic coast to Rosarito, Cantamar and further south, Ensenada. How would he have explained to her that not only did he not have a house there, but he had actually never been there and knew nothing of the place? There was no need to flip a coin. The woman had to go. Besides, he was already enjoying the evanescent perfume of lost love, rolling in it as pleasurably as he could, the vintage Woodie throttling down the four-lane highway used by American surfers and retirees wishing for wide open spaces .

Boy I think love that Desiree like the Pacific, endless and open on all sides, sensitive to all breezes like a good sail. And what a typhoon she was with her tight little white leather skirt raised up to her waist. The passion in the bus over the tracks had already been sealed in the mason-jar of his mind, labeled like precious jam, to be savored for years. But still within reception of the San Diego radio, he was distracted by the sordid news of a decapitation, that of a police chief who had dared threatened the Tijuana drug cartel. Even in distant Eureka he had heard of the border zone troubles, the hijackings, the robberies, the murders, the hostage taking. All of that fueled by US guns shipped to Mexico added to a seemingly unending American appetite for drugs, mostly crystal meth and cocaine. He needed to source out a Glock 17 self-loading handgun for his own personal protection, an item his hovering ballpoint pen had smeared just a day ago. But he 2008 Gun Almanac did not list sources in Baja California. Mexico does not allow its residents to carry handguns. Bill went back into Desirée and felt so much better all of a sudden.

Chapter 2 - Trudy

Trudy had graduated just a month earlier from the Sacramento Police Academy, Magna Cum Laude, the only woman in a class of 17 cadets. She could deal with all flavors of male arrogance, including that of her new boss Clarence. When she chose the Eureka Police Force as her first employer, it was more for the great outdoors around that town than for the dour face of Captain Clarence Hornsby, a throwback to very ancient times before the Internet. Hornsby drove the patrol car at precisely 60 mph, city or country, night or day, whether going to a crime scene, a funeral or a donut shop. “We need to get noticed. They need to see we’re working hard for their taxes…” he told the baby-faced girl sitting across the propped-up rifle between the bucket seats. “…taxes for this new patrol car… your salary…(biting on a toothpick)…Sausage MacMuffins…”

Noticing no effect on the woman’s face, he changed the subject to the job at hand: “This citizen claims his bookstore was vandalized overnight. No break-in traces, no robbery, just a bunch of books defaced and what not. We get some weird shit in this town!”The brakes screeched in front of the bookstore. He walked in with Trudy following with the attaché case, his unlit cigar gleaming with fresh saliva, eyebrows twittering as they did at the onset of any new job. Those were few and far apart in the quiet northern California town. When the owner rushed forward with new details of the break-in, Clarence declared with some satisfaction: “I think I did mention to you over the phone that in our Police annals, no one robs a bookstore for ideas. They do it for the money. The fact that you just found out to have money missing proves my point. Where was that cash sitting anyway?”

The owner pointed to the rear of the store and motioned them to follow. There, with a strange grin, he pointed to a suspended ceiling tile sitting askew. “I had stashed there $20,000 over the years. You know how it is. Banks go under. Life is hard.” Pivoting slowly towards Trudy, the Chief pontified slowly, in an educated monotone:

“An obvious inside job. No thief would dismantle an entire suspended ceiling looking for money. This bad guy knew what he was doing. He went for the jugular. He knew exactly where the money was”

Then abruptly turning towards the owner: “Who knew about this except you?”.

“No a soul..” answered the victim with sad conviction “No employee, no family….I just can’t believe I lost my life savings!..” There was a long silence to respect his pain, after which the owner went on: “And I don’t talk in my sleep. I only puta little money there about once a month, when I pull in a good day, usually after my older clients get their Social Security checks”.

The cigar rested dead center under his mustache. Clarence had the whole crime scene figured out, standing back for all to appreciate his uniform-clad majesty:

“This is really very simple, Sir. You see, you have a skylight right to the left of your hideout. Someone had been spying on you from the roof, possibly looking for a way to cut through the steel bars below it. Upon seeing you place a wad of bills there, a freaky piece of good luck for him if you ask me, the robber decided to go for the prize money. He hid in your store Monday night, did his dirty deed and fled through the back door, not even bothering to put the ceiling tile back. Let’s do fingerprint work and catch that bad boy before all the money is spent.”

Grabbing the case from a disbelieving Trudy, Clarence had the tools of the trade neatly spread on a table, like a mother showing her daughter how to bake a pie crust. That table was the same one that Werner/Bill had used. The bookstore owner was holding up the twelve books: “You might want to fingerprint these too”. Clarence looked dreamily at the blue ballpoint smear of the first book, not interrupting the deployment of the fingerprinting kit.

The new recruit’s head was spinning. To herself: “That’s just too much fluke for a robber!. And why did he spend all that time inside the store…the cookie crumbs…and those defaced books?!? And how will we catch him? Where is he? With a loot like that why would the robber stay in boring old Eureka when he could sail the seven seas?”

Chapter 3 - Rita

Rosarito. “A sombrero of golden lights” thought Bill excitably as he watched the western sky, a central orange sun glow with jutting on each sides the brightly lit roads leading into town. In the back the electric night blue of the Pacific with a Mexican moon was smiling to the south, seemingly right above his ultimate destination, a small coastal town with the singing name of Cantamar. It felt good to have made it to safety, crossing the border on a green light with the word Pase across its face. A random red light means you have to stop for inspection. He had no paper. The car title had Desiree Minsky as its owner. But he was free, as free as thousands of other refugees from justice living in Mexico.

Bill thought a decent Margarita should seal the deal. The bartender did not agree with the recipe, mostly because there was not a trace of melon extract in the entire town at this time of the year. Bill settled for a Hemingway with 3 full measures of Cuervas, 3 tablespoons of Triple-sec, a splash of Mexican Cointreau (called “Contro”, the contraband passing the taste test only if one already reaches over .17 in blood-alcohol). The rest of the sixteen ounce glass was filled with orange juice and sour mix. Bill added the splash of lime juice from a pitcher that a young lady pushed in his direction. The bar was decorated by four similar young ladies, but this one took the prize for latin beauty. Rita mouthed her first question before Bill had raised the gold colored concoction to his lips. “Americano?”

“I guess you could say that, young lady. And what gives me the pleasure of your company”.

Rita, her lovely breasts heaving as she spoke, looked as though she was indeed having a lot of pleasure with this new company. Three other girls standing behind her were ready to take over if she was to show a drop in her pleasure with the gentleman wearing a red scarf around his neck. “I am here for your pleasure”, she said through a smile. “Well Cheers, then” responded the smiling man as he downed a good third of his glass. Then with a flourish of his hand over his chest, he added for the young woman’s enlightenment:

“I am an ex-American, an ex-husband and also an ex-policeman. You could say I’m a triple-ex, like your beer!”

Rita giggled “You meeennn…Dos Equis… only TWO-exes”

“ OK OK… I was not a real policeman, just a private investigator. So I qualify for Do Equis.”

At that point the barman was peering into everyone’s glass, stopping at Bill’s own fast emptying mug. Bill looked him in the eye and said:

“Hey amigo. Did ya ever do Cervezas Margaritas, y'know, with a coupl’a beers thrown in the pitcher? Make it a large one with Dos Equis”. The bartender knew that one. He proceeded to prepare it as Bill turned to the young ladies, looking them over thoroughly as if they were four pastries at a local Panederia. He imagined himself making love to each one of them as most men do without thinking, then he tried all four at once as much fewer men do. This does require thinking. But he was not getting excited. Something was amiss, not working.

His love for Desirée was probably too recent, still glazing his eyes, trivializing those Mexicans hotties to the point of irrelevance. Dropping a hundred dollars with the bartender, Bill walked to the smelly caballeros where the plumbing was whining loudly . While staring at the mothballs in the urinal, another dark thought had entered his mind: what if after carefully redefining himself with the random attributes, what if he fell into a pattern that very soon all the polices in the world could smell out, the dumb dogs that they are with their big wet noses. The boozing and womanizing would help do that, creating witnesses that have a chance to mount a full inventory of birthmarks and twitches. On the way out, he slipped out unseen through a back doorDesirée had just saved him from a first step in that direction.

He needed to fade out of Rosarito, which he did in spite of his blood-alcohol level. He did not expect the roadblock on the south edge of town. The militarios were inspecting for drugs, letting him through as a Yankee surfer that was good for the local economy. But Bill was now so affected he stopped the car by a beach to let his heart rate drop. Tijuana is where one can get a fabulous face-lift for $1000. Maybe an extra $1000 could give him the nose of Cyrano and the chin of Kirk Douglas. Cantamar was now only minutes away to the south. Should he drive in with his existing Finestone face, or better should he drive the 40 kilometers back to Tijuana, get a face-lift. Only later would he introduce himself to the Cantamar crowd with his new face, after spending a month in a cheap motel for the scarring to subside. This problem decision appeared so insoluble to the newly depressed Bill Trusset that he felt the need to toss a peso in the air. Head he would get a face-lift. Tail he would drive on. The coin twirled under the moon and fell to the ground… sticking vertically in the sand of Popotla beach. Bill did not pick it up, but walked back to the car where rolled himself up in a ball on the passenger side, comforted by fresh sensations of Desirée. She might not like a Kirk Douglas chin, he thought. Then a first migraine in two days: how the devil could he possibly get in touch with her again? The man was souring slowly, a Werner recurrence to be sure, one that Bill dreaded. Sleeping with Desirée could have cured all that, biting his lips in disgust.

Chapter 4 - Maxine

Eighteen years operating the only labeling machine at the local garment factory. This was a record that Maxine Goodman was proud of. As the oldest employee, she was also the prettiest, often asked to model the elegant chemises that her employer sold all the way east to Neiman-Marcus and Ralph Lauren. With stability, strength and snobbery on her family crest, assuming she it such a crest, Maxine was not popular with the girls, and she took great pride in that fact. Those peasants could not comprehend her greater aesthetics and sensibilities. Brand names were her mantras, her smallish salary well invested in a few clothes that were all of the best cut, all fancy labels that were mostly meaningless to the average local woman. She had lived alone for several years with her Chanels, Dona Karans and John of New York, sitting between a stack of fashion magazines and a pile of Woman’s Wear Daily . She subscribed to this newspaper but also to the local theatre where she would take herself and her beautiful clothes for their periodic airings.

At one of these theater première she was sitting near a man who was laughing at all the right places. Maxine knew that this can be difficult to accomplish with Shakespeare. So she tagged along for security, laughing with him with barely a noticeable delay. The experience made her feel good, ‘with it’ as they say. The man complimented her for the costume she was wearing. No male had done that before, except perhaps Mister Goldstein at Purchasing. The old fart had wanted to get it on with her since day one. But this theatergoer had class, thought Maxine, good hair and good pants, also wearing a great tie, all silk, probably French. They had fixed seats for the entire season, a chance to meet again and have several glasses of wine together during intermission. Werner did not have a car, lived at a hotel like a transient, had an obscure job as an agent for some government agency. But they looked good together, enough for several rumors to float around town. Old maid Maxine had a live-in boyfriend, probably a CIA agent. He had been seen wearing a gun belt by Clara, the receptionist of a local doctor. Werner had severe migraine attacks. His past was muddy. He read strange books and watched the History Channel on TV. But Maxine just adored him, buying him a bicycle for his birthday since she needed the Nissan Sentra to go to work. The seamstresses giggled behind their industrial sewing machines when Maxine paraded to the front office, carrying a batch of newly embroidered labels, her head high in total self-esteem. Werner could not decide on marriage, creating a slight cloud in the house that Maxine had bought and paid for years ago with her small salary. Werner could not decide on anything anyway, always fussing over everything including the kitchen sink. He did dishes well. Almost too well, re-rinsing and wiping until bedtime.

But they looked so good together entering the theater every month. Or even shopping for veggies at the supermarket, the tall man pinching and probing for the perfect lemon while she scanned the horizon for noteworthy labels rarely worn by other shoppers. That she could handle well, her companion’s fussiness and alien tastes. The dark cloud only became a full-blown thunderstorm when she found the note on the fridge:

“My darling, I need to make some deep changes in my life and unfortunately, you are one of them. My headaches need addressing before they drive me insane. I need to find my soul. Please do not wait for me but be happy”

After downing what was left of a Grand Marnier bottle, she pursed her lips and said out loud:

“The fool, the fool! He’ll come back. How far can he go on a bicycle anyway?”

The anger went away in a few days. No one was to know of his disappearance. She even bought herself a nice ring, telling everyone at the plant that she was engaged.

Chapter 5 - Harold

The 60-foot boat was magnificent, a modern schooner with radar and polished mahogany throughout its interior, twin staterooms and marble tiled galleys with gold plated faucets and trim. Twin Bubbles had an immaculate teak deck with blue canvas director chairs, the European good taste that Desirée prided herself with. She had chosen a boat at the boat show. Not a captain, and to her that was beginning to look like a costly mistake. At the Marina, Harold had told her that he had made his fortune in the first Internet bubble, doubling it in the recent housing market bubble. But something was wrong for Desirée. Her experience of rich guys did not click with this 35-years old dude who tended to brag too much. She was slow to strip down to her bikini, already planning her escape at the Galapagos Islands. She would make it to the Marquesas on another boat, with a captain that did not give her the creeps.

She was at the helm while Harold showered, the auto-pilot on the blink according to one of the crew. The Mexican coast was visible and the sun shone brightly. Billy Billy where are you mon amour? All of a sudden all the men still hanging in her Rolodex were of the anal retentive and phony kind. Only Bill Trusset had charmed her without putting handcuffs on her. He had let go of her like a fish too small to eat, the ones you drop overboard with compassion. My kind of guy, she thought as her eyes filled with tears and her breasts heaved with aching love. Then she saw it, the boat’s manifest, the photos of it’s christening, an older man breaking champagne and younger Harold holding on to a mooring. Then she saw the Post-It note, handwritten by the owner Jeb Spadafora, an Exxon executive:

Show the workings of the boat to Harold. He’s my driver and a good sailor. He might captain to ship from time to time.

The crewman to which the note was addressed was a likable sailor she had noticed as he was repairing the auto-pilot on the rear deck. She called him and asked: When do you think we’ll make it to Galapagos?

The man gave her a pinched look and a strange grin: We’re just sailing to Ensenada for a spin. On the way back we’ll stop at the Marriot Marina in San Diego to pick up the boss. Then it’s back to L.A. before nightfall. There's a party tomorrow for the top management.

It was 9AM and Harold cried out through the ceiling hatch in the shower:

Désirée, come shower with me baby!

Jerrold

THE WRITER’S BLOCK Jerrold was a Vietnam Vet in trouble, living alone with his ghosts in a 3-story house inherited from a patriotic uncle who died of an aneurysm. With several mortgage payments late, my friend had decided to quit his pot and beer, put the past behind and start a new life. We knew he wasn’t serious, but we were wrong. He truly wanted to become a writer and solve all his problems creatively. As an ex-military ambulance medic, he would have indeed a lot of stories to tell, the missions, the whistling bullets over his head, the shell exploding around all night why he was fumbling in the dark to find more of that morphine for the dying around him, in defeat of his goal of saving all the wounded, pilots fished earlier from their sinking aircrafts still smoking from a recent hit, others so peppered with shrapnel as to be inoperably lost. Then there were the drugs, the cries, the crap, the lies and the VD infested whores of Da Nang. A lifetime of stories to tell as we all thought approvingly. But Jerrold only wanted to write poetry, a million miles from Vietnam in spirit. I can’t say I blamed him! Two months and several threats of foreclosure later, Jerrold had still not written a line. But neither had he hit the bottle or so much as sniffed a joint. He was clean but awfully stressed and miserable. A writer’s block weighing a ton was crushing his spirit and making him more than a little insane. What I learned later while talking to his family would amply prove that last point. This veteran has a sister that described what happened to him on New Year’s Day 1999. Jerrold, she said, had wanted to be a writer as far as she could remember. He had bragged to her that one day he would live off his poetry, pay off the mortgage and take her to Greece to show her the birthplace of western civilization. That new year day Jerrold popped a fresh sheet into his Smith-Corona. Staring at it he noticed that his reading glasses were dirty. He went to the kitchen and doused them in rubbing alcohol, rubbing them for ten minutes with paper towels from a dispenser near the stove. An hour later he still hadn’t written a word, preoccupied with several spots moving about the page. This was due to a retina defect that had no cure, most probably the result of a documented concussion suffered in Vietnam. Jerrold had chosen to start his new life as a poet on that day precisely, a rock-hard new year resolution. He became so upset with this Vietnam reminder that he went to the bathroom, took a syringe and shot morphine into one of his buttocks. The drug was from a secret stash he had gotten from another vet who had died recently, probably his only friend left. Staring into the mirror and still seeing those virtual flies, he decided to drain that eye and wear a makeshift eye patch, this after dousing the entire area with more alcohol. His training as a Marines medic had shown him that technique for the safe removal of a damaged eye in combat. He then went back to his typewriter and felt his elbow acting up again, a bursitis that had prevented him from sleeping well for several years. This was not the day for aches and pains, or so Jerrold thought as he was tempted to do some more morphine. He did and then went to the basement and proceeded to amputate off his right arm. From a careful reconstruction of events, it seems that using a set of knives and saws he kept for garden work he methodically cut the skin, muscles and bone above his elbow. Those tools were equally doused with much alcohol from the large bottle. Stopping by his bedroom where a pillowcase was turned into a competent bandage, cauterizing the entire site carefully and capping the stub with a clean Styrofoam cup. He then went back to his typewriter, slightly drunk from the fumes and proud of his newly-found decisive attitude. He was to start his real career, finally, after a detour in Vietnam and another one in procrastination. When typing with one finger, the left hand is almost as good as the right one he was now missing. And a problem eye that’s been removed is one problem less. But the page was whiter than ever, staring at him, pure as snow. This is when the ten-ton writer’s block hit him. He could not make himself type the first letter of the first word of his first poem. And he was aching to get going as much as aching from the morphine losing its effect. That’s when he climbed to the attic and pulled a dusty Scrabble game box, sat on the floor and threw seven letters that he arranged into the word SNEPPAH. He put those letters into his left shirt pocket and grinned: modern poetry, randomness, fractality…that would be his karma, his art…He had found himself! That word sounded magical to him, and he could not wait to type it on his machine downstairs. He threw four more letters that formed the word TIHS and stuffed them in his right shirt pocket. He was on a roll. The spell was broken as he felt himself to be a full poet with two great words to his credit. He was smelling success already. No one would know of his scheme. They would see total creativity and interpret his micro-haiku in every direction, no different than what critics do all the time with modern paintings. At that precise moment Jerrold smelled something other than success, as black smoke was spilling upstairs from the trap door to the attic. When he tried to climb down, a wall of flame came up to meet him. The Omaha Fire Department later found that the fire started in the kitchen by the stove as they detected traces of alcohol sub products there with even more in the basement and in the bathroom. Had he set the house on fire? They knew about his mortgage problems. Other than his veteran status, what saved Jerrold from criminal pursuit was the fact that both his legs were amputated that same week. Trying to escape the fire through the attic window, Jerrold jumped forty feet to his concrete driveway, shattering both femurs into splinters. A nurse told someone that when they brought him in his hair was half burned away and the bandage on his fresh stump singed with melted Styrofoam. He was under treatment for over a year at the Veteran’s Hospital. His mind was at peace. No more mortgage payments, no more pains, and the tiny wood squares in his shirt pockets, seven on one side and four on the other. He would have his poetry career and all the good stuff that comes with literary success. Of course, the old wood house had burned to the ground. When his sister Lilly took him out of the Vet, he insisted on being downtown near where some vet buddies hanged around and sipped cheap Thunderbird from paper bags. He would try to change their patterns by the sheer force of his poetry. This is when Lilly called me in Santa Fe. Something was very wrong with Jerrold. I had to go there and see if I could help. After his release, Jerrold became a permanent fixture on the corner of Main and Melrose. Every morning Lilly, a waitress, single mom and once an aspiring writer herself, she had to push her brother’s wheelchair downtown otherwise he would scream and raise a riot in the small apartment building where they stayed. At least until the Veteran’s Administration could find him a permanent home. There he would laboriously pull the letters out of his pockets and lay them out on the plastic tray attached to the chair. After several long minutes the words SNEPPAH TIHS would appear, and he would then raise his head and relax with a sigh. It turns out that his other eye had gone bad after the loss of his left eye. A sequel of his exposure to flames, we were told. Lilly had put a jar in the tray with 2-3 dozen of yellow pencils to sell. Jerrold could in this way help with the rent. He was scary, wiggling three stumps to attract readers to his two-word poem, sometimes chanting those bizarre words as if to conjure the sale of a pencil. I saw all that and my heart just broke. I can certainly identify with writer’s block; in truth I too once dabbled in modern poetry. But I have all my limbs, my eyesight and my mortgage still. What I did then was not right for poetry. But the results were good for Jerrold and his sister. Let me just say that if you went to Main and Melrose in Omaha on a sunny day, you would see a man with a neatly cut goatee sitting in a shiny motorized wheelchair, holding in his only hand a few pencils. He is beaming in his sunglasses as citizen after citizen bend down to read two scrabble words glued to a tray on his lap. Literally all of them react the same way: they smile from ear to ear, sometimes mumble a few words of sympathy, then they stuff a one, a five or a twenty-dollar bills into our friend’s pocket. After they leave without taking a pencil, many turn back still smiling for a last look. At the end of the day, his flannel shirt has two huge breasts, hard from the stuffing down of all those bills with one happy finger. Gone is the VIETNAM VET NEEDS YOUR HELP sign crudely lettered by Lilly. As far as Jerrold is concerned, Vietnam never happened. He is now a recognized poet, appreciated and supported by his fellow men. In truth this man of letters now earns a good living, enough to send his sister on a cruise every year, twice to Greek islands. His mind is now too altered by anti-psychotic drugs for him to travel with her, but he makes enough money to give some away to his buddies with dry throats who take good care of him. Finally, at sixty, he is living of his art, his poetry. When I was asked to glue down those letters for him, I used a poetic license that some could view as an unethical breach of trust. It’s not that SNEPPAH TIHS didn’t sound right to me. It does have a little bit of a poetic aura to it. But when I was about to position the letters, I accidentally aligned them backwards, creating two different words that the reader will agree give so much more clarity and meaning to the whole affair. I changed for the better my friend's and hid sister Lilly’s fate. Bystanders after approaching that prosperous-looking triple amputee with a giant smile below dark shades, as they get closer now read what I set down with Crazy-Glue on his lap-held tray: SHIT HAPPENS Jai Poirier, Edited in May 2022 from a 2007 original.

Mulvey Road, a Short Story

Chapter One

The aging heavy equipment repairman turned farmer wore his hearing aid only on Sundays. The noise from diesel engines had rendered him partially deaf. He hadn’t been to a church since he had been accused of puncturing all the tires from all the cars in the St Paul’s Lutheran Church’s parking lot, all that during the one hour service promoted towards the local trout fishing vacationers. The large sign said, in Times Roman Bold characters :

“Jesus liked to fish too”

Out of town families are

welcomed to our 10AM

Sunday Service

They had no proof. Circumstantial evidence at best, in the form of his late arrival and a long screwdriver dropped in the aisle. It needs to be mentioned that the latter was a long model with a point that had turned bluish from probable sharpening over a stone.

On Sundays Archibald Foote took 2 AA batteries from his refrigerator and slipped them into his hearing aid before leaving his house pedaling towards Upper Jay; there Tim Devine would sell him a tree foot length of breakfast sausage, a bag of potatoes, a large box of Milk-Bones, a real bone and assorted cuts of meat. His vegetable garden provided the rest while his rusty Flyer got him back before 5 pm except on rainy days when he got splashed if not sometimes blinded by speeding traffic. The summer cabin crowd were getting larger, driving larger SUVs every year at higher rate of speed, especially going down the hill in front of Foote’s property. In the old days, Mulvey Road was narrower and had several sharp turns discouraging such excesses.

The Highway Department had unwittingly played a series of dirty tricks on the forced cyclist, the first one when they removed his driver’s licence for advanced deafness. He had not responded to an ambulance siren at an intersection and had apparently caused the premature death of a tourist that had been rescued from a near drowning a little earlier. Then they built a straightened and wider highway in front of his farm. That new speed promoting creation was actually built 40 feet closer to Foote’s one bedroom house. The fill material used in the new roadbed contained a large amount of clay, making the ground shake anytime a truck hit the spring bumps and potholes. And since more and more cars looked and behaved like trucks, the old guy’s bed was a bowl of shaking Jell-O that did nothing to help him sleep, with or without a well developed sense of hearing.

Parts of old Mulvey road had been left in place when its demolition and removal was judged to be either too costly or too pointless as was the case near the Foote’s property. There a section of the old road described a thousand feet arc starting at Foote’s house, passing behind Foote’s barn, entering Foote’s pine grove and ending abruptly on a sand pit that had supplied the asphalt plant during the highway construction period. Part of that pit was on the farmer’s land and he was often seen bulldozing around in what the locals called the passion pit, a place of sin and secrets where jalopies filled with young people were seen since the thirties, long before birth control pills. Sordid tales still oozed from the sands and modern day lovers had long found better smooching grounds.

Archibald sold sand by the truckload and had gotten a revenge of sorts by eating away at the old highway’s supporting sand dunes, leaving a deep gash in the landscape that no one had really seen. The old road was closed to traffic with heavy concrete cubes and a chequered sign. Only an attentive plane passenger could guess that someone had been illicitly profiting from crown lands. Archibald had not seen an airplane over his property in years.

When on that spring morning the State Police Helicopter hovered over the area, Foote was not wearing his hearing aid. His big C5 Caterpillar blade was pushing a ton of sand towards the old highway when the shadow from the Scorpion two-seater swiped at the sheer 50 wall of sand dropping from where the old pavement was crumbling. A rush of blood to his head made him feel warm while a silent laughter rose inside him, as if he had just gotten close to being caught. He had felt that before when entering the Church service, having stuffed something inside his trousers.

Police were looking for a Mark Marshall, a youth that had a reputation for general troublemaking and car thefts. From the air, it appeared that this large bulldozer was trying to fill the immense gash at the end of the old road. Puzzled, the pot bellied inspector leaned and asked the pilot, a Highway Officer in charge of speed control and emergency service:

Y’a know what’s going on down there?

Yesseri mister Parker, I certainly do:, sand pit during the day, passion pit at night, ( laughter) I was there.

I see. ( after a pause ) Would Marshall go there?

Let’s just look around for green Ford vans, not yellow dozers. I figure Marshall has ditched the car the moment he got down from his cocaine high. We’re liable to see it in some of the lumber roads I’ll show you.

That night Archibald Foote went to bed wearing two fresh batteries in his hearing aid set at HIGH. It seemed that all of a sudden he enjoyed the speeding cars, sleep or no sleep. In the village, Tim Devine had noticed genuine joy on the old guy’s face. He also noticed that he bought more and better supplies. Obviously a happy turn in his life, possibly an inheritance.

He did have a rich sister that had left the area after an unwanted pregnancy in the forties. She had left home in shame. Yet she had later dated and married a highway contractor that made a fortune under the Eisenhower years building highway 87 from Canada to the Catskills, a part of the Interstate System.

Any news of little Elly, your sister? I heard she did good in Albany.

How come you know her, you nosy butcher? , had questioned Foote with humourous eyes.

Hell I took her to the pit a couple of times, when I bought my brand new Hudson Terraplane.

Good thing she left the area! She’d be making sausage today.

After adding a pair of Boston steaks to his shopping cart, Archibald Foote left the store with a frown. Maybe he was THE ONE. Forty years earlier someone had made his sister pregnant. In those days, these things were not brought out in the open. Devine has probably never heard about it. Still the thought was disturbing enough to distract Foote in his careful cycling by the roadside, his basket brimming with goods. Just as he turned the last curve before his house, he wandered past the white line as a large SUV was swooshing by with such speed as to create a pressure wave that unbalanced the man into the ditch, head over wheel and steaks flying into the spring mud, oranges and a box of cigars scattering in the countryside.

Yet although bruised and muddied, the man was not angry. He rinsed the meat in the wet part of the ditch and packed everything in his windbreaker tied into a knot, walking by his skewed bike to the house where his dog would greet him, awaiting his Sunday night Steak Special. As he crossed over to the driveway of his house, the old faithful Labrador should already have been there.

……..

Summer had drifted into the woods with burrs sticking to one’s pants and baby black flies learning to eat with knives and forks on one’s skin. Three FBI agents walked towards Pine Creek, an area where a dam had created a lake deep enough to conceal many cars according to local sleuth in the different police forces. Gary Beauchamps, the Upper Jay’s unique constable started a long monologue scanned by the FBI trio slapping flesh and removing burrs from their gray no-iron pants.

Just because fifteen of our tourists and their families disappeared doesn’t mean we’ll find their cars here. But I guarantee that when we open the vane, it wont take an hour before we get to the bottom of the lake.

Beauchamp was raising a rusty but imposing box wrench that had to weigh at least 50 pounds. These tourists had come to settle into their cottages or rented motels a month earlier. All had disappeared on one evening, only three days after kid Marshall had stolen the mailman’s van with a right hand steering column. A vehicle like this would quickly be spotted over a large area. US Postal had a web site for used delivery cars and trucks. Serial numbers in a database almost excluded reselling of stolen vehicles. This one had to be hidden along with its criminal driver.

After only a few turns of that huge tool, the vane was already ejecting a plume of water. With the water level dropping fast, a green metal object was emerging fast and Beauchamp yelled excitedly: We got the Van…! That’s the one, call the others..call the others.

Agent Parker was scouting the north side of Mulvey Road when the call came in from Beauchamp. The helicopter had a different pilot who did not hesitate, after the loud radio call, to make a steeply banked turn over Foote’s sand pit. After all, with three FBI agents sent from Washington, performance and punctuality were a normal attitude. A serial killer had robbed and killed these families and disposed of their cars. Lake Champlain was too far away. It would have been impossible to dispose of the cars and bodies , drive back to Upper Jay 25 miles, and start over with fourteen other tourist families and their cars in the course of the same night. Looking down at the sandy cliff, Parker whined to the pilot:

Gee’s , ya want to drop us to our deaths? This peaceful area’s got enough of those ……already!

The pilot was smiling as Parker appeared distracted. Something had changed in that sand pit. He could not quite put his hand on it. Something was different from the last time. When the helicopter came to rest on a large granitic mound near the dam, the three FBI agents had removed their coats and were sitting on the edge of the damn, laughing hysterically at Beauchamp and his fifty pound box wrench. The policeman was squatting near a shiny green Coleman camping cooler retrieved from the pond. Parker was angry at his deputy sheriff, but he managed to launch another wisecrack:

Smallest van I’ve ever seen! …Let’s go back to square one. First no one found the cars, no one found Marshall or any other bodies, no one saw anything on the night of the crime, no one called for ransoms, shit! This has got to be the spookiest disappearances ever…

Parker went into a reverie wrapped into the smoke of a freshly lit Kent while the FBI shirts nonchalantly dropped sentences like:

We see plenty of those back at Langley’s. Serial killers. Or just ordinary Joes that want to do big stuff. One undertaker would drive entire families to false cemeteries to bury their dead. Once there, he would kill all of them and take their money after stuffing them in one hole in the ground. We need to look at each and any one of your citizens. One of them had something against tourists. We’ll get him sooner or later if your black flies don’t kill us first. Parker and Beauchamp had went over that hypothesis several times together, nailing the donkey’s tail on Foote every time, but rejecting him as too feeble and incapable of murdering fifty people in one night. Besides he had been seen working in his sand pit that evening. He had a solid alibi.

Yet the sight of these fifty cars around the white church with all tires flat was still vivid in their heads, thinking that had the pastor not decided to take things in his hands they would have caught and convicted him. The latest twist of their scenario involved the help of much younger Mark Marshall, an athletic man capable of scaring any cop when high on crack cocaine. After all he had disappeared just a day or two before all the others. Beauchamp had been the butt of jokes and putdowns from his obese and red-faced boss. The green cooler incident had removed from him any desire to participate in this unlikely brainstorming that was now alive with speculative chatter of Parker with his three outside guests.

…………

August had several heavy rain episodes that had attacked and sometimes washed down roads and river banks in Essex County. When Charley Briddle of Public Works went to get a 12 foot detour sign with stand and flashing lights at the depot, he was surprised to find it missing. Deciding to settle the matter before a car would collapse a soft shoulder and end up in the Ausable river, he went to the police station, actually the living room of the private house where his friend Beauchamp lived. His boss Parker lived in Plattsburgh and only came down when absolutely necessary, or also when he felt like torturing his deputy. Briddle saw the blue sedan with 1001 E on the license plate and police equipment; he entered the living room without knocking as was his habit. Beauchamp wore his habitual sad dog eyes and said without turning his head towards his visitors:

At least you I know why you’re here! It’s that washout on highway 86 near Foote’s property. I just got a call. Let’s go.

In a small town, the Public Works people do everything. Surveying, permits, road surveillance, debris and dead animal clearing and even in some case traffic police work if a large accident occurs. No wonder Charley Briddle was naïve enough to think of a Mulvey Road detour, closing the new road where flood conditions had taken off half of the pavement. After all this was customary. Using the old road as a belt around obstacles, fires or accidents was customary, and Briddle had no way of knowing that Mulvey Road had a treacherous gap in it stemming from sand extraction below and near it . He had driven the Upper Jay dump truck several times to the sand pit but never went deep enough to realize that behind a natural bend the old road was surgically cut into the sand pit, providing a vertiginous vertical drop to the bottom of that same pit.

The two men turned back towards town after deciding to create that detour. They flagged down the only car to warn its driver of the difficulty ahead ; few people except fishermen and campers used that highway so that this was not a true emergency. The men had relaxed and quickly got to the junction of Mulvey road, across the highway from Foote. They then walked around the concrete blocks. As they inspected the old road, Beauchamp mused:

This old road is so good we wont even need to lower the speed limit from 50MPH.

Damn good thing since we’re completely out of road signs with these friggin floods and robberies!

Briddle had answered cheerfully, adding:

Lets just create that detour immediately before the road falls away completely. I figure I can drag these cement cubes to the new road with my winch.

Jeep owners are proud of their front bumper winches like Mercedes owners are proud of their brand name hood ornament. After much grinding noises, all three blocks were moved in the new road, their tops reunited with a heavy steel cable from which hung chequered highway signs. A perfect job where all that was missing was the word DETOUR, preferably in reflective letters. That sign being dearly missing, Briddle thought of asking Foote for some paint and a panel of sorts. He suddenly remembered the aging labrador, horribly crushed under the wheels of a tourist who never bothered to even slow down after the accident. He had picked up and delivered the carcass to its owner who was running around his farm waving a large piece of red meat, wearily calling the dog’s name. Briddle had learned from the folks in upper Jay that the old man had suddenly gone weirder and weirder, suspected of killing pets with poisoned meat concealed in the camping grounds by the river. The FBI investigation had been rotated to a national team since no one and nothing could point to a locally plotted crime. The rich families had posted a reward averaging $25,000 each and several false leads had developed in Florida because of similar Postal trucks. Now TimDevine only sold potatoes and beans to the old man who came only once or twice a month, not talking to anyone. Inspector Parker had given him a thorough shakedown and decided that the old fool didn’t have the brains to be a quality criminal, one that could do 16 murders in 3 days. Before leaving Upper Jay for the last time, Parker had said in a low monotone:

Beauchamp, this is national FBI shit! You don’t have the class for TV stuff. Before they do a police video in Essex county, you would need to import a few high class criminals from Chicago, New York or L.A. – Here you have more trouts than tramps and frankly you’re more pencil pusher than euh! police officer. Don’t call me unless you get a hold of these out of town bad guys…or, what’s his name,…Nick Marshall!

Beauchamp used one of his large shoulder to break into the barn as the door was jammed by growth of tall grass at its base. There he was hoping for a board and a can of paint since no one answered the door of the house, although the red bicycle was leaning against the first step of the front staircase. He did not need to find any of this since there was a beautiful reflective sign shining with five large letters on an orange background, very professionally spelling DETOUR in the middle of two large lights and a small solar panel. Briddle followed in and immediately cried:

There’s my emergency detour sign, this guy stole my sign…What the…!!!!

Briddle, fearing a possible accident, was attaching the detour sign to the concrete cubes and very professionally Beauchamp reported the crime to his superior like he always did, over his cell phone. Paker had another job in Plattsburgh and managed to collect a police chief salary while not even being present in Essex county, doing detective work in Clinton County. Beauchamp was secretely hoping that the obesity of his boss would bring on an early death. Beauchamp would then automatically be promoted to police chief with a good pay raise. This was worth putting up with the put downs and wiseracks.

Public works material, worth $3400. , suspect known to police for having been a suspect in two other situations….

OK leave it to me. I’m in Clintonville, just 12 minutes away. I know the little retard so just leave him to me.

Public property crimes were often reported in the County or State Gazette, and Parker did not want to miss out on this one. A piece of cake, he thought. Foote would collapse under his questioning. He lit another Kent forgetting that one had been resting in the car’s ashtray when the call came in on his cell phone. He also lit his roof strobes and thought about the siren and laughed.

That fool is as deaf as one can be. Ha Ha.

Parker was fast approaching Ausable Forks his tires squealing pleasurably in every Adirondak curve. His face was red, his knuckles white and his heart was green. It was good to be a speeding cop in this gorgeous nature full of retarded people and white tail deers. Having a dumb and loyal assistant like Beauchamp was also part of the charm.

Briddle had scrupulously removed every branch and twigs that had grown at the entrance of Mulvey road , some of it through the pavement. Drivers would barely slow down and enter the detour with smoothness and confidence. Beauchamp was now walking around the house and sheds, stumbling upon a crude flat stone standing vertically against the fence. In white paint he read.

PAL

DIED

12 /3/ 2004

Briddle looked up and saw Beauchamp running excitedly towards him. At almost the same time the police car was heard.Parker could not resist the temptation to hit Archibald Foot in full patrol car regalia.

He buried his dog the night of the murders. And you said…a tourist probably hit him and drove away. There’s sufficient motivation don’t you think, coming from a guy who had a history of hate towards tourists? That sinister detour could be our answer!

OK WHERE IS HE interjected Parker before his car was into a full stop. Beauchamp said, looking at the house:

I dunno Chief Parker sir…He’s nowhere to be seen and yet his bicycle is at the front door.

Parker was standing with a bullhorn in front of that staircase, his enormous shape bobbing like a buoy in the tall grass.

You moron, there’s no more bicycle here than snowballs in hell. Your guy has fled…fled this way…check it out…tire tracks from this puddle…there! I’m so fucking brilliant I should be an FBI agent.

Parker was already entering Mulvey Road with sirens blaring and tires on fire. As he drove towards the pine glade in a slow arc, Briddle and Beauchamp were staring at each others face…

He was pedaling away as we entered the tool shed. Musta been hiding somewhere. Shit we look like nitwits!

Beauchamp ushered to Briddle who responded…Let’s go, in my car…

Parker was doing 120 mph when he became airborne at the road cut. Coming out of the pine grove’s green shade, the pavement dropped gradually in such a way as to make it impossible to see the 75 feet of missing pavement that dropped into the sand pit 50 feet below. Parker had his large head against the side window thinking out loud:

OK OK I GOT IT….When I flew over this place last spring the sand was much higher the second time around. That’s because of all these buried cars that the rains have uncovered recently….Damn it I’m so smart I’m so smart I’m so smart it’s scary!

The little frail man tiptoed behind a large granit boulder to stay away from view. The Jeep stopped short of the edge and Briddle tied a cable from his rear bumper to around a few large pine standing on the north side. One never knows. This chunk of pavement can follow the Parker’s car whose roof strobes were still eerily flashing in spite of the condition of the car, a giant crumpled beer can that was burning brightly in a cloud of black smoke.

Underneath , the remnants of several other cars, mostly SUVs poking sadly through the sand while several suitcases and trunks were littered about. One aluminum canoe appeared bent in two, as if to more easily conceal it, a large green van had been towed aside and used as a storage locker for more suitcases. The large Caterpillar had been working these grounds feverishly and looked poised to cover the victims as soon as the dry weather returned.

The winch was happily pulling up a line hooked up to a red bicycle that had fallen into the Ausable creek. Thanks to the huge water swell, the poor man was probably being carried away to Lake Champlain by now. The men were friends. Both had the mutual respect of two overworked civil servants whose performance was not recognized except by each other. Briddle said coyly, clutching Beauchamps hand with two of his own:

Congratulations for your promotion.

And you for the prize money we’ll share. How much is 25 times 15 ?

had said Beauchamp before they both returned to Foote’s house to complete the investigation ; the FBI where on their way with the reward money. It would be needed very fast…

………………

Old Archibald Foote never knew he liked driving so much. He was heading towards the Hudson Bay town of Chisasibi where his skills had been appreciated 30 years earlier as a earthmoving equipment repairman. He would have a c lassroom of 14 Cri Indians and a large hall with full size mechanical devices. He entered Chief Diamond’s front yard in his blue sedan with 2 NY State plates saying FOOTE - .

We don’t need those here, do we?

Said Foote. The chief responded:

Not unless you want to snob us.

The plates were laying on a pile of garbage under the starting rain and some black gouache was being washed away, revealing 1001E as the original number.

….But get these holes blocked on your roof.

Some people might think you’re an ex- Police. Officer.

(to be continued)