p. 31-40

“Membership?” Yeats said.

“State of Utah requires a membership at a drinking establishment. Got to have it to purchase alcohol.”

“A waiting period too? Like buying a pistol?”

“See that door? Right in there. A few minutes is all.”

Yeats turned and headed for the door for his membership. A white and tan black horn pronghorn head was mounted on the wall above the door.

……………..

Mick and Dani headed north to Antelope Island, the radio played something by the Smiths, and though Morrissey’s voice fit the mood of the evening, Mick was making Dani laugh as he always had. Sheboygan jumped from side to side in the pickup bed sniffing at the wind.

“Take this exit Mick.”

“You got a dealer?” Mick said.

“It’s Utah Mick. Take a right. Now hang a left. O.K., slowly now, it’s the fourth house on the right.”

They pulled up to the curb and Mick threw the automatic into park. Dani said she would run up and see if Mia was home.

“Mia?” Mick looked perplexed.

Dani jumped out of the truck without reply and ran up to the door and rapped gently. After a few moments the porch light turned on and the door opened to a reveal a woman Dani’s age. Yeats would have classified her as a standard Mormon beauty: athletic build just like Dani, only Mia was a striking brunette with dark eyes and eyebrows. Dani and Mia hugged as they met under the porch light. Mick could see Dani gesture at the truck before they disappeared inside. Minutes later Dani re-emerged with a box in both hands and skipped down the stairs with a last look over her shoulder to Mia standing in the open doorway. Dani dropped the box over the sidewall into the bed of the truck and climbed into the cab. Mick was curious and looked over at Dani, shaking his head laughing.

“Have I got myself involved in a shady underground smuggling deal for the Mormon mafia? Who’d you meet up there?”

“My friend Mia.”

“Your friend usually have a box of beer on hand ready to go?”

“She gave us a few of what she calls her Desert Pale.”

“Your friend’s a boot-legger?” Mick gave a laugh of approval and pealed off the curb.

……………………….

Yeats had his membership and leaned into the classically shaped oak bar with his forearms crossed waiting to finish his purchase of twelve domestic beers at four dollars a pop.

“That’ll be $48 plus tax – $51.62. Kind of an expensive way to buy beer. You ever thought of buying your supply on a day other than Sunday?” The bartend said.

“I’m kinda in a pinch, thanks.” Yeats said, and put the box of beer on his shoulder and headed for the door. On the way out he eyed a red-billed, white mesh baseball hat hanging from the coat rack, embroidered with Old Style - just what a deliveryman needed. Yeats hustled back up the hill to the party laboring under the load. From a block away he could hear the noise of the crowd spilling out into the otherwise quiet neighborhood. The doorman wasn’t in sight. He knocked on the door and shouted his business.

“Beer delivery for Mr. Jerry Horowitz.”

The doorman’s voice responded from inside, only this time he sounded distracted, more of a reveler than a doorman by this point in the evening. “Come on in!” The doorman said. Yeats opened the door and was met by a now casual and half-distracted doorman caught in conversation. He waved Yeats through with little more than a glance. The house was well appointed, and on this evening filled with a crowd that looked as if they could be Earth hip shoppers at a farmers market in Santa Cruz rather than houseguests in a mansion, the front room furnished in a large red bacara rug. Yeats felt the dual scenario of opulent bravado and idealist artist. It was as if he had arrived at a protest of something important, like shutting down the School of the Americas, held in a Four Seasons, catered with lovely red wines and exotic vegetarian hors d’oeuvres. The most bohemian and seemingly self-important sat on the back porch and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and made little eye contact. Yeats moved through the crowd with the box of beer on one shoulder all the while asking for Horowitz’s whereabouts. One of the party-goers pointed towards a wall and said “He’s in the kitchen.” Yeats wandered in the direction and entered through an open doorway into a well-equipped kitchen. Horowitz stood alone, bent over a gas stove-top tending to eggs that danced sunny side up on the skillet while he hummed a tune to himself. Yeats shouted, “Beer delivery!” Horowitz turned to see who it was with the best idea he'd heard all night.

“’Bout time somebody showed with beer. Nothing but red wine all night around here. Affected bunch. How’s trading me beer for scrambled eggs?”

“Deal Dr. H.” Yeats said and set the beer on the counter.

Jerry served two heaping plates of eggs and home fries from the skillet and brought them to the table and the two sat in the breakfast nook and cracked beers and Jerry said a blessing over the meeting and meal and they clinked bottle-necks. Jerry introduced a generous amount of Tabasco to his eggs and hungrily grubbed them, taking long swills from the quickly disappeared first beer. Yeats was having an impromptu late-night breakfast with an intellectual icon he'd known for years, and now, was sharing the intimacy of a meal at midnight. He thought he better take something more from this opportunity than a full stomach, but waited patiently for a natural opening to develop.

………………

Dani and Mick parked at the end of the Antelope Island isthmus and sat atop the hood of the F-150 drinking beer underneath the starry sky. The water of the Great Salt Lake was before them smelling salty and the moon reflected off the tops of the gently rolling ripples. An occasional airplane roared in descent to the nearby Salt Lake International airport.

“What’s a Mormon girl doing having a beer dealer and using her privileges on the Sunday of all days?”

“Mick come on. You know I’ve hardly been a stickler. I was raised by Hi Olson!”

“Except for a while back, when you were confusedly trying to find your identity, you’re right. Look up Jack Mormon in the dictionary and there’d be Hi winking at you.” Mick said.

“I think he’s always figured his strong lineage gave him license to do whatever he liked, without getting excommunicated.” Dani said. An extended silence passed between the two.

“Dani.” Mick said, followed by another elongated moment of silence.

“What.” He coughed and excused himself. “What are your dreams? Remind me, it’s been a long time.” Dani remained silent and Mick remembered out loud his own days in the past six years that she knew virtually nothing of.

“We used to sit out in the desert at night. Depending on the operations going, there’d be tracers that would light up the sky. But it’d always go black. Just stars – strange, these same stars.”

The mood was still quiet. Mick reached to put his arm around Dani. She pulled away.

“Mick, I need to tell you – I’m engaged.”

There was another long pause. Mick looked off into the night.

“Yeats told me. Where’s the ring?” Danielle sighed with a look of exasperation, as if she didn’t have the energy to confront the particulars of her life, much less the energy it would take to change directions.

“Mick.” She said with an intonation that indicated she was not ready for discussion much less inquisition.

“Who is this guy Chad?”

“Mick, you left, remember? And it’s not as if we had the Cinderella story to begin with.”

“Shit. What’s Sheb think of him?”

Dani’s eyes betrayed her thoughts.

……………………………

Yeats and Jerry had nearly finished their late night breakfast and had started in on the third beer. Primed with a couple beers Yeats was now ready for some dialogue.

“Dr. H. you said a lot tonight. The whole thing about the answer being right where you live, grass-roots action and all, but I mean, how is this done exactly? How can we hope to subvert the cancerous growth of the corporate machine that destroys local business, fanning out in endless consumer sprawl? The faceless damn sprawl that chews up the countryside, the places I live, my friends and family live, giving us miles of soul-less, faceless development – big-box stores, fast food restaurants. How do we keep ourselves and others from being hit by the clone machine?”

Jerry listened to Yeats without change of expression. He took the last bite of egg and answered with his mouth half-full.

“Do you know the origins of suburbanization in America?” Yeats shook his head. “A post World-War II phenomena.” Jerry took another swig of beer before wading into a discourse in socio-historical analysis. “Like so much of our modern day – constructed by the builder generation, every GI turned family man was promised a driveway and a backyard of his own. The 50’s were about the cloning of America. The Cold War years encouraged that we think the same, vote the same, behave the same, watch the same TV programs, buy the same clothes, raise our children the same. Same – same – same – down the line. Anything other than same and you were under suspicion of being a commie. HUAC would hunt you down and put you on the witch trial stand.”

Jerry used his hands to make points at the breakfast nook just as at the public lecture. Not only his hands, but the entirety of Jerry’s body got involved with his words. Discourse for Jerry was a holistic affair. With arms wide Jerry pointed to an imaginary door-frame, outlining the ninety degree angle of the casing down to the floor and providing caption for the invisible door: “Anti-American-Communist-Conspiracist it’d read over your jail cell door. Long before Dolly the Scottish sheep, millions of Americans were cloned by our government - our politicians, our public schools – without altering a single DNA molecule. And most alarming of all – no one seemed to care. Today the internet is more of the same, same march, only now it’s globalized. For millions it has become the primary source of information, communication and entertainment. It’s also the false wellspring from which people hope and depend for meaning, community and interconnectedness - relationship. Clinton called it our new town square. A demented town square if you ask me. The culpability of the individual lies in passively accepting this stamped out, top-down, clone culture. Resistance is only a part of the antidote. Opting out of the life-cycle is not an option. To be human, to be truly and fully human, is to be a cultivator, a pagan, a country dweller who tills the land and makes the desert bloom. Living in community, helping, sharing with your neighbor.”

Jerry was worked up by this merry rant and grabbed his fourth beer. It didn’t matter that there was only one other person in the room. It might have been a Madison Square Garden rally and his delivery and passion would have been the same. He was a showman, but by virtue of his passion and utter conviction, not a glory seeker. He continued in a more staid and serious tone, addressing Yeats in the eye, putting his hand on Yeats' forearm. “We do not simply evolve into the ideal humanity over time – that’s more insipid Hegel. It’s vital to remember that we get there intentionally and yet passively without sweat effort – we coerce by actively accepting what already is – in order to realize the perfect humanity. Evolution is a real thing indeed, but it has a hard time with the qualities of mercy and humility, all of the great virtues that we have known about since the ancients. These are realized by receiving. Receiving yourself and one another. Forgiving. Yourself and each other.”

Yeats had sat quietly, almost unmoved, with a swig here and there of beer, getting the rest of the lecture in the kitchen at a wee hour. A majority of the beers had been emptied and dawn was near, arriving with rosy colored fingers that gripped the jagged ridge of the Wasatch. Yeats stood on the stoop in the chilled morning air and looked back at Horowitz who stood in the open doorway with his bare feet upon the thick Turkish rug. The sunrays had begun their first assault for a new day and were peeking over the dark ridgeline to the east. A mist hung in the trees, reminiscent of the tall-pine country of the Southeast. The morning paper would be moist. Jerry stepped from the rug onto the brick stoop and enacted a ceremony of departure. He embraced Yeats with a gentle hug, bestowing his blessing, as if upon a postulant, and left Yeats with open handed hope, “See you out there kid.” Jerry said, and turned and closed the door behind him. Yeats plodded off down the brick path to the street and listened to the birds and was pleased to see the early light of day more hopeful and life-giving than any other time, and he wondered why he saw it so infrequently.

The next morning the brothers rendezvoused on the porch of the Glasnost Coffee House still too early for admittance. Neither had slept. Yeats looked forward to drinking coffee by rubbing his palms together and pacing back and forth within the space of three strides. Mick had his face in a Salt Lake Tribune and held a convenience store coffee housed in a travel mug free with purchase. Yeats looked at Mick wanting to recount their respective evenings.

“So, she’s engaged, right?”

Mick didn’t give a response.

“Isn’t the first time a girl was engaged to a shmuck. Question is how to win her back.”

“We all get dealt a hand.” Mick said coldly with little resemblance to the question. Self-pity takes all forms.

“Yeah, like Uncle Zinn used to say, either you got the high-hand or you bluff like you do.” Yeats reminded his brother of family wisdom.

“Platitudes. I don’t want a lecture.”

“Well, shit. What you need is to get your mind elsewhere ‘till you get over yourself. A little reptilian motivation would do you some good.”

Yeats and Mick entered the front doors of the L.D.S. Temple Visitor Center and looked around like gawking tourists. Mick was uncomfortable. He hated being a tourist and it made him irritable to not be in charge of a situation.

“You aren’t going to believe these tour guides. They make me want to believe all that bullshit about gods and goddesses populating planets.” Yeats said in anticipation.

The two joined the growing line for the next tour. They looked out of place standing in the crowd of overweight tourists on their way through Salt Lake to other destinations, stopping just long enough to glimpse one of America’s more bizarre religious marvels. The woman ahead of them, reading from a guide-book, declared the facts of Joseph Smith to her husband, who stood discreetly picking his nose clean, thinking about the Burger King he was hungering for on the corner of 2^nd and Temple. He responded with a “that is really something” type remark, while his little girl was busy tugging on his hand begging for a Mormon Pioneer action figure outfitted in calico print dress and a bonnet that concealed Aryan features. She held it up to her father for inspection. He entertained his daughters request with sincere half-interest, the way so many fathers do, distracted in their own thoughts and poorly equipped for occasions of multi-task, which parenting young children more often than not requires, fortified with the platinum attribute of patience.

The two temple guides arrived as beams of energy for the crowd of waiting tourists, as if angels sent direct from the hand of the golden angel Moronai. One was a blond, blue eyed, standard, the other an exotic Pacific Islander, both stunningly beautiful. The blond asked the crowd to make their way with her through the big double doors into the next room. The walls were colorfully adorned with religious murals depicting the Mormon story, a story that looked historically cosmic, as if the 19th Century figures had been painted in the acid strewn 70's. The informative portion of the tour had yet to begin when Yeats began swinging his hand overhead, begging to ask a question.

“Yes?” The blond guide politely called on him, anticipating an easy question.

“I was wondering - are we going to actually get into the Temple itself? That’s what we paid for, right? A Temple tour.”

“The Temple is open only to baptized persons of the LDS Church. We won’t be able to enter the Temple itself, but we’ll make certain you learn plenty about it!” She said brightly.

Yeats blurted out again, this time without permission, “What exactly happens in the Temple? I’ve heard some awful strange stories, secret ceremonies and the like. Any of that hold water?” Yeats said with shameless accusation, as if he might have been drinking too much.

“Sir, Temple weddings and baptisms. Now, if you’ll all follow me.” The angel's demeanor grew cold and curt before receding behind the usual bright curtain she wore across her face.

The Temple group was led into a large theatre shaped in the way of large format movie theatres of old. The theatre darkened slowly as house lights do and a film began with introductory words about the first Mormon followers in Elmira, New York. The faces of the crowd were lit in a white-glow by the moving reflections from the screen. Mouths were agape, eyes unblinking as the crowd took in the peculiar religious story.

When the lights came up in the theatre and the concluding credits rolled, Yeats had his hand raised, again waving impatiently. The guide was in mid-sentence directing the crowd to the next room when she saw his hand. She tried valiantly to ignore him but the persistent hand won out. She rolled her eyes and called on him.

“Yes? You have a question?”

“I’m still not exactly clear what goes on in the Temple. It’s not fertility rite stuff is it? I just didn’t know how far the parallels went, if they end with the Masons or if they include ancient Greek Temple practices too. But, you are saying no, nothing like Temple prostitution. Nothing like that?”

The guides did not look amused by this question. Their sour expression said it all.

“I just wanted to clarify. I’m sort of a Classics buff, Greco-Roman era and I want to get my facts straight on this particular period. Sorry if that’s offensive.”

Yeats tried to patch things up with his scholar comment, but this wasn't some ancient, buried religious relic site to be scholared over – this was here and now weird shit.

Mick elbowed Yeats several times and repeatedly told him to shut-up and that he should show some due respect and do them both a favor. Yeats asked if he should show some respect like Mick did, herding camels over sand-dunes in a Sheik’s ride. Mick blew the comment off with a sour look and followed the tour onward. Yeats knew he had gotten to him – but that wasn’t too dangerous, it was he who could hold a dear grudge, not Mick.

Yeats stayed behind putting some cushion between himself and the miffed tour-guides and Mick. As he fell behind the group he studied the strange murals and as he studied them he noticed many unmarked doorways off the main hallway. He thought he’d find a bathroom and tried the handle of one of the doors. The handle turned and he poked his head in cautiously not sure what he’d find. What he found was a roomful of beautiful females looking back at him, Temple guides waiting for their shift. The women’s repose was reminiscent of a Victorian brothel - harlots waiting for ‘johns’ in the backroom of the bordello. The guides were reclined bare legged and barefooted eating snacks and watching TV.

“Uh, hi. I hope I’m not interrupting. I was just looking for the john. Do you happen to have a local paper handy? Classifieds.”

“Do we have a paper?” One of the girls said.

A couple of the half-dozen girls in the room shuffled around the room looking for a paper.

“Yesterday’s alright?”

Yeats was caught like a deer in the headlights looking at the gorgeous woman who offered him a copy of the Tribune. He took the paper from her half-dazed and rifled through the sections until he found the classifieds and handed the rest back.

“Thanks. Would you like to populate a planet with me?” The guide looked back matter of fact, as if this kind of question was welcome and not at all unusual. “I’m sorry. I’m probably just overcome by the whole tour. If it’s all like this, then I’m seriously thinking of converting – really I am. Keep up the good work gals and thanks again for the paper.”

Yeats said, while gesturing with the rolled up classifieds section, and then he paused still, as if at a holy shrine, to take one more long look at the room full of girls. All eyes looked back at him and they were not offended eyes but the eyes of sirens, and he thought of Odysseus, and he thought that these creatures relished their sexual appeal that transferred to power. It was their one ace in the hole as Mormon women. Yeats peeled himself away from the room, which was no easy task without wax in the ears and twine to tie him to a mast that sailed away with him. And it would not have been possible were it not for the creepiness that went along with the allure. He intended to catch up with the tour that had moved well beyond him, and as he jogged down the high-ceiling, long white corridor, he marveled again in disbelief at the strange murals that stretched down the hallway. He spotted the group loosely huddled around the tour-guides who were mid-spiel, moving in next to Mick who stood on the fringe of the circle with his arms folded.

“Where the hell did you go?” Mick said.

“I needed to find a classifieds.” Yeats gestured with the paper.

“Why?”

“Looking for a car.”

“A car?” Mick said.

“How long do you think it’s going to take to win over Dani?”

“What?”

“I said, how -”

“I know what you said. What makes you think I want to try?”

“You have to. If not for your sake, then for her sake, for Christ’s sake. This Chad guy is a capital ass.”

“Why do you need a car?”

“Given the situation I figure it’s going to be a while.”

“Be-a-while what?”

“It’s going to take a while for you to do what you need to do. I won’t leave you here to do it alone. I’m going to need to get a job in the meantime. That’s where the car comes in. I wrote up a business plan a few years back. Figured if I could get the fuel cost down, I could make a profitable venture as a cabbie. Veggie fuel. With a few adjustments to a diesel, fuel can be as cheap as 40 cents a gallon. I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing it.”

“Because everyone’s not a nut-job.”

Yeats ignored the comment and took renewed interest in the gorgeous tour guides. The tropical guide was now talking and Yeats was mesmerized. His eyes had taken on a glaze.

“I’d really like to get into her past.” Yeats whispered to himself audibly. A long pause followed, and he adjusted himself noticeably. “Was she born into this kooky religion or was she brainwashed by eighteen-year-old missionaries? The Mormons sailed to the South Pacific figuring they were the most gullible. Pretty hard to convince a street-wise Jew from Boro Park this shit is true.” Mick didn’t have a clue what his brother was talking about and gave an idle response.

………………………

Dani was in the garden. The phone rang and she managed to snatch up the receiver interrupting the last ring. Chad was calling from the Salt Lake City airport as he walked through the concourse with his monogrammed overhead-size roller-luggage in tow.

“Hello.” Dani answered.

“Hi love. Listen, I just landed, thought maybe we could meet for lunch over at the Club. Are you free?”

“Um, yeah, that’d be fine. I just need to get out of these grubby clothes, but yeah.”

“An hour too soon?” Chad said.

“No, no, I can manage that. I’ll just clean-up.”

“Great, see you there. Love you.”

Dani hung up the phone and looked down at her dirty hands, wiping them off on her cut-off Levis. She turned and headed for the shower.

An hour later she pulled into the Country Club entrance and was met by a valet. Stopping at the front desk she gave Chad’s name and membership number. Dani was comfortably accustomed to the swank environment and she wore it well in pearls and bright linens. The maitre d’ escorted her to a table on the porch of the restaurant overlooking the tennis courts where Chad waited at a white table-clothed table conversing on his phone. He promptly excused himself from the conversation and rose and greeted Dani with a kiss and pulled the chair out for her to sit. Chad was a blond-hair, blue-eyed, athletic, charming man, dressed smartly in tennis whites, replete with a v-neck sweater vest. So wannabe WASPy and all-American middle-class the Mormons strained to be.

“Hey, gorgeous. It’s good to see you. You’re more beautiful than I remember.”

“How was your trip?” Dani deflected softly.

“Very promising. I’ll tell you, the discount retail business is cut-throat. No surprise there. The Kinder edge is that we have a very loyal, like-minded team of executives. Being united reaps exponentially. Nothing like a close-knit family business.”

“Just so happens it’s a 13 million member family and growing.” Dani said with humor. Yet there was something eating at her.

“Are you O.K.? You seem a little, I don’t know, not yourself.”

“I’m fine Chad.”

Chad, satisfied with this answer, launched energetically into explaining why Kinder was such a fierce retail competitor. Such as ninety-nine percent of the management was from the Salt Lake Valley, B.Y.U. graduates constituting a majority of this, and it was a close-knit inner circle with a common purpose and a common identity that persevered like the persecuted Pioneers who had made their way across the rugged West a hundred-fifty years prior. This spirit endured, only now in the world of high-finance business.

“Speaking of family businesses, Olson and Sons has finally had it.” Dani informed flatly.

Chad met this confession with a perfunctory ‘I’m sorry’, while simultaneously leafing through the Wall Street Journal.

“Hirem just doesn’t have the energy to compete the way he needs to.” Dani said.

“And I suppose it can hardly continue as Olson and Sons without a son.” Chad quipped.

“What does that mean?” Dani said.

“Well, just that Hirem and Abigail never had a son to take over the business.”

“So?”

“So, it’s hardly Olson and Sons without a son.”

“Chad, don’t start.”

“What, babe?”

“You know damn well, what babe.” She said with emphasis on the what.

Just as the conversation was heating for explosion a waitress who knew them as regulars arrived ready to take orders.

“Hi Chad, Dani, what will you be having today?”

Chad deferred to Dani with a gesture but Dani needed another moment and the attention of the server turned back to Chad. He ordered the steak sandwich, green salad and a sparkling water. Dani settled on a chicken salad and ice tea. The server finished writing down the order and took the menus in polite manner and excused herself, relieved to leave the tense air that had settled at the table.

…………………………….

Following events at the Temple tour Yeats caught a cab to the Salt Lake City airport in pursuit of the car he had circled in the paper. He wandered around the used car lot weaving through retired rentals in excess of 20,000 miles, up for sale at bargain prices considering the relatively low-mileage. Yeats considered that if other people drove a rental like he drove a rental they should give the cars away, the way used and abused greyhound racing dogs are given away to rescue homes. But some sucker ready for a novel deal always takes them. A few odd beaters sat amidst the uniform rentals like lost mutts among pure-breds. Yeats approached the silver ’84 240 sedan, the one circled in the paper. A lime green official looking sticker was posted in the upper right corner of the windshield: $600 Cash. With startling volume a salesman intercepted Yeats from behind.

“What can we do for you today?” The salesman said putting out his hand for a shake.

“I’ve got my eyes on that Volvo. It’s a diesel?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“It runs?”

“Like a robber caught red-handed.”

“Mind if I take her for a test spin?”

The salesman asked to see a license and Yeats fished for his wallet and produced a beat-up California license with a white bend in the middle that obscured the lower part of his face and the date of birth, a mar that always made identification checkers squint. The salesman turned to retrieve the keys from the office and after no more than a minute returned with the keys and a dealer plate with magnets that he affixed to the trunk in exchange for Yeats’ license. The engine roared to life with a low diesel rumble followed by a plume of black diesel particulate. The Volvo chugged out of the parking lot for a short lap around the airport terminal. Yeats false swerved and jammed on the breaks suddenly, let both off the hands at 30 mph to check the alignment. Satisfied, he returned to the lot and the salesman was waiting for Yeats in the parking lot. Yeats asked if he took Visa. The salesman said that he did as long as it cleared authorization, and took the card from Yeats through the open window and turned for the sales office.

“Oh, and 345,647 miles,” Yeats whistled over the top of his bottom lip, “$500 is the most I can pay for that kind of life.”

The salesman said he’d go in and see about it all. Yeats waited in the still running vehicle as Beck played on the radio and Yeats repeated the refrain, “Hell Yeah” and tapped the steering wheel like a bongo drum. The salesman returned with a receipt and Yeats signed and sped off leaving the salesman in a cloud of black diesel exhaust.

He drove straight to the airport terminal taxi line-up and put the Volvo right into the line of duty, not realizing umpteen things needed doing before he could qualify as a legitimate and legal taxi. Cabbies of all kinds waited inside and outside of their taxis – most were new to the country and as always, this was one of the few jobs available. Sikhs in brightly colored refined looking turbans that contrasted paradoxically with workaday clothes; Africans with well manicured afros, wearing close fitting trousers and bright thin cotton shirts with a breast pocket and undershirts, recalling an earlier American era of style. If they worked hard the hope was their children would have better in this land of opportunity. Along with these, there was another kind of cabbie, a domestic breed. These cabbies were normally found wearing unbuttoned flannels, old t-shirts and looked as if they could do with a haircut and a shave. They sit parked at the wheel and read copies of famous but uncommonly read titles such as Ulysses, Gulag Archipelago, A History of English-Speaking Peoples, Paradise Lost, and newer titles of the Infinite Jest or 2666 ilk. Thick tomes are the common denominator for the nicotine stained fingers of these idle cabbies known as ‘The Readers’, mostly college graduate Caucasian drivers of middle-age who do not ply the taxi trade of necessity but of choice, opting out of the dominant social system that requires a structured life and obeisance to people and institutions that these ‘Readers’ would rather have little to do with. There they sit day after day upon beaded seat covers reading and waiting for the next fare.

Small groups of cabbies played cards on the curbside while others leaned against the hoods and side-fenders discussing matters that pressed. Yeats waited in his newly appointed cab and observed a maintenance worker spray-painting lines on the ground in fluorescent green demarcating buried electrical lines. He got out of the Volvo and jogged over.

“Hey, brother, you mind if I borrow your spray can?” Yeats said.

“Say what?” The man looked at him with a confused look. Yeats repeated himself. The maintenance worker looked at the can, looked at his work and handed the can over, simultaneously pulling a pack of cigarettes from his coveralls. Yeats jogged back to the Volvo shaking the spray can as he went and sprayed without pause for precision on each side and the trunk Green Cab. The maintenance worker wandered over to inspect Yeats’ work. “That cab ain’t green.” The maintenance man said.

pages 21-30

Sue Ellen came out the door with provisions for the boys’ trip, setting the wicker basket on the wood plank porch and folded her arms and waited for her goodbye. Mick and Yeats finished packing gear into the small back end of the Bronco and exchanged hugs and words of love and hefted tand climbed into the rig. Floyd leaned on the door with both elbows and gave a few parting words of advice before patting the side as if sending a horse to pasture and the Bronco departed down the lane, between the vines, throwing dust into the air. Floyd and Sue Ellen watched until they were out of view and only when the dust had mostly settled did they turn for the house and routines they knew well.

………………………..

It was late afternoon when downtown Salt Lake became visible in the distance nestled against the Wasatch Range. The Temple steeples of the LDS Church loomed above the city claimed by Brigham Young in 1849, declaring that this desert plot, situated between a dead sea and a mountain range, was the place. The pioneers laid the city out in a grid of square blocks, numbered and named according to their proximity to Temple Square. The golden angel Moroni perched atop the highest spire, peered down upon this city of religious refugees as if in protection. “This is the place,” Yeats said, as the Bronco exited I-15 onto the downtown exit ramp. Mick picked his way through relatively light traffic past Temple Square in a northeast direction towards the University that sat in look out position over the city as if in physical mimic of the role of the professor – reminders and prognosticators of things to come. The Bronco pulled into a space across the street from a row of businesses that included the coffee house Glasnost West, a left of center joint situated across the street from campus, established in the 1980s Yeats guessed. They ordered coffees and considered their options.

“Ya know, these damn college kids.” Mick surveyed the room with disfavor. “So lulled into image, fashion, music, food, - desperate junkies. They study for what? To work at a bank? That doesn’t sound like the message of a $65 concert. And the Profs, they could be as pro-commie as you like, till it comes to their own personal comfort and convenience, their own paycheck and tenure. Then they’re as right wing as Dick Cheney. Not many willing to walk with Gandhi further than to paste up a poster. It’s the human condition. We have bucket loads of good intentions without the spine or gumption to back it up.”

“A few have.” Yeats said. MLK, Martin Niemoller, Siddartha, Emerson perhaps might make the list, and all the others that are the lights flickering in the darkness.”

“Any women make your righteous list there? Probably more women have that self-sacrificial conviction – it’s what being a good mother is all about.” Mick said.

“Yeah, womb love.” Yeats said. “Since when did you get philosophical? You pop off a couple shots overseas and think you see everything clear as Slim Pickens. You’re probably overcoming the effects of the tight pants they made you wear. It’s not as easy as dropping a few bombs and firing M-50s at the natives Reagan style to win the war against anything, much less global terrorism. Mission accomplished.” Yeats stood from his chair, dropped his hands to his side limply, pushing his chest out and drawled his best George W. Bush.

“Shit.” Mick said with a laugh.

“Like Kesey used to say, affecting change happens at a local level – by everyday people. If everyday people give up hope, give up their ideals, then.” Yeats looked for his next thought.

A bearded man with thick hairy arms, gold-rimmed spectacles and a worn green t-shirt, looked over from the neighboring table. He had an amused look on his face and put his book down to survey just what he had on his hands. “Ken-pour-me-some-kool-aid Kesey, huh? What do you know about that old rogue? He was quite an experimentalist and possessed more charisma than Kennedy and Clinton combined, and a hell of a wrestler to boot, but when it comes to socio-political commentary, how about Sam Huntington, Brezinski, or Putnam? What they conceded from not getting high as merry pranksters, they made up for with years of sober academic work. In the bibliography of either you?”

Mick and Yeats stared blankly, not sure what to make of this guy. He continued,

“How about we skip the international global concern. We’re so very good at constructing grandiose solutions to the world’s problems. Criticizing those responsible, yet so miserable at identifying our own culpability. At one moment we all but castrate the Israeli’s for their treatment of the Palestinians, or vice-versa, depending on your righteousness,” the bearded man laughed, “the next moment we treat the person right in front of us with the same existentialist disdain we just got through criticizing. Talk about arm chairing. Where’s your war?” The bearded man asked straight-faced, looking at both Mick and Yeats. Miles Davis’ Apollo at the Ritz played loudly in the café.

“The usual. Fighting the powers of corruption and injustice, and in his case,” Yeats gestured to Mick, “priority number one is winning back the beautiful woman. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m headed to poach a lecture - see if there is anything interesting being said at the U.” Yeats said.

“I’ll be here.” Mick said.

“Maybe we can pick this up some other time?” Yeats said to the bearded man.

“Sure, I’m around.” The man said, and went back to his reading.

Yeats exited the coffeehouse with care for the incoming co-eds who looked ready to pose for catalogue fashion copy. He crossed the street onto the campus property that had a surprising array of ivy-strewn buildings for the mountain climate. Few students traipsed about but Yeats eyed a young woman coming his way on the single-track diagonal dirt path. He stopped her for directions and asked for the nearest interesting lecture. She said that she didn’t know any interesting lectures but pointed to the Humanities building with the Corinthian columns and broad sweeping granite stairs, observing that lecture or not it the building was worth investigating. Yeats agreed and entering the building found several other students heading for the same arched, cathedral style doorway that led into a large auditorium. He found a seat and chatted with the student to his right plying him with questions about who stood out as the best thinker and speaker on campus. “If you’re looking for a righteous lecture you’ve gotta’ hear this guy Horowitz. He’s brilliant. Wrote some famous books, gives phenomenal lectures, political science mostly, but they seem more like general knowledge: history, literature, religion, law all intertwined. He’s on sabbatical this semester but I hear he’s giving a public lecture this next Sunday night.”

Yeats departed early from that night’s lecture on the failures of the U.N. and why it must be reconstituted in the new era. He rejoined Mick at the coffeehouse. Mick was ready to go and knew where they were going. They headed north and east in the direction of the Olson farm beyond the city limits of Salt Lake. The land was increasingly swallowed by rambling neighborhoods that climbed up hillsides and north towards Ogden. Developments titled with the names of now extinct farms and threatened wildlife habitat, Elk Run, Elk Hill, Saltonstall Farm, Ute Passage Estates, and Open Meadows. The Elk were squeezed ever more each day as traditional migratory routes and grazing lands were paved over, the Saltonstall Farm was defunct as there were very few open meadows that remained in view. At this rate the brothers reckoned the only thing left of the elk, farming and meadows would be a commemorative subdivision named in their memory. Yeats suggested a more honest name such as The Elk Memorial Subdivision, The Previous Site of Saltonstall Farm, Ute’s Relocated, Open Meadows No More. “You ever imagine what this once looked like? Before all of this.” Mick gestured out the open window. In his mind he imagined Ute Indians riding painted ponies up into the hills. He imagined what they must have felt like when they saw the first signs of permanent white settlement, farmhouses, barns, windmills, corrals, silos, and crops, and eventually trains and then tractors, and much later, long after the demise, cars. Mick looked at lonesome dirt roads that snaked back through the trees up into the ridgeline that begged to be followed. Birds swooped and chirped. The wind rustled softly through the corn rows. Farmhands worked at stacking hay with pitchforks. Laundry was hung out to dry on a line. Dogs raced through the fields. A solitary man walked down a road and was greeted by a pick-up with an arm hanging out the window, stopping to share the day’s news before carrying on.

“What do you see Yeats?” Mick asked.

“I see grainy, black and white photographs laid over all this.” He waved his hand out the window as if shooing a fly.

“What?” Mick said.

“Yeah, pictures dating to the 50’s and 60’s wall-papered all over this reality. Little boys unwrapping toys under the Christmas tree - play horses and cows, model train sets. Kids playing in the sandbox with toy earth-moving equipment – toy bulldozers, cranes, Tonka-trucks, and backhoes. You know, what else are they going to do with their lives?”.

Both looked out the window at the passing landscape in real time. An earth-mover patrolled predator like over a freshly scraped hill, in the act of clearing open ground for home sites. The highway was torn up all around making way for new medians and turn lanes for future strip malls and franchise restaurants. On down a ways, Mick pulled off the highway into a field next to a row of bulldozers and earth-movers, laying in wait to grade the next field.

“Fuck it. Let’s assassinate this row of 'dozers.” Mick said.

“A little monkey-wrench operation?” Yeats said, energized.

The brothers hopped from the cab. Mick pulled a Leatherman from his belt and ordered Yeats to find a set of pliers behind the seat of the Bronco and to then climb up in the cab of each machine and find the hood release, and pull each one. Mick was back on the battle field. Yeats did as he was ordered and climbed up into the hulking machines and pulled the hood release. Within a few moments Mick lay siege to the wires within.

“See if you can’t find a socket wrench that fits the oil pan for these fuckers, and drain ‘em.” Mick said.

After completing the job they jumped back into the Bronco and drove past the now incapacitated machines, looking bright and shiny, just as they had before the sabotage. After a short way on the highway, they turned off onto a country road and no more than a mile down this gravel road, pulled into the Olson drive, scattering chickens as a dog came barking, as if this was the biggest news of the day. A wind-mill slowly turned chopping the sunset rays into pieces. Abigail Olson came out onto the porch wiping her hands across the apron front, as if interrupted from a canning job or dinner preparation. Mick and Yeats got out of the vehicle and Abigail hollered a warm hello to them.

“Mick, What a surprise! We were so thrilled to hear you were coming for a visit.”

“Hi Mrs. O.” Mick said.

“Come here, let me get a look at you. What’s it been? Four, five years? My lands.” Abigail said, and held Mick at arms length for inspection. Letting him loose she turned to Yeats.

“And you must be Yeats. I’ve heard a lot about you from Dani.”

“Pleased to meet you Mrs. Olson. I’ve heard a lot about you too.”

“Please, call me Abbey.” Abigail said, and repeated Yeats’ name aloud to herself. “That’s an unusual name.” She commented.

“My folks named me after the poet, as in: An aged man is but a paltry thing, tattered coat upon a stick …” He recited a verse and in mid-sentence was interrupted by Hirem Olson who broke through the door reciting where Yeats had left of: “Unless soul clap its hand and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.” He looked at Yeats with a satisfied smirk as if to say: You best get up early in the morning to out-rank me young upstart. And then he said: “Got something against the aged and decrepit? You best watch your tongue son – all we got around here anymore is tattered coats. Idn’t that right Ab?”

In saying so Hirem gave Abigail a playful rear-end slap-pat.

“Hirem, say hello to Mick and his younger brother, Yeats.” Abigail said. She balanced her willful husband by bringing steady respectability to the Olson family through appropriate impeccability.

“Well of course it’s Yeats!” Hirem cried, driving right back to the poem where he left off: “Nor is there singing school but studying, Monuments.” Before he could finish Abigail cut him off. “Hi! The boy’s name is Yeats, say hello.” Hirem seemingly ignored the instructions, only to discover Mick.

“Well there he is. How’re you boy? It’s been a good while since we’ve seen you. What brings you down to us? Dani’s all but married off.”

Hirem sensed a look from Abigail.

“Well, Ab, I’m just telling Mick here how it is. No use keeping things a secret.”

Abigail invited the two to come in off the porch. The house was modest, well ordered, and clean. Old books lined the walls. There was a portrait of a long-bearded man prominently displayed and Yeats surveyed the wall before pulling a book from the shelf for inspection. With the book in hand he read the brass plaque attached to the portrait of the bearded man, saying the name under his breath, “Morton Saltonstall.”

Hirem was sitting in a chair in the far corner of the room under a reading lamp with a book open in his lap, observing Yeats inspect the room.

“Son, that likeness dates to the 1880’s. Ol’ grandpa Mort, maternal side. Interesting story Mort. A Boston Brahmin, liked to listen to Emerson and joined a Transcendental group that was buying a farm in Harvard to live the utopian life. He didn’t stay long, a falling out of sorts. Ended up in general disrepute, and, long story short, wound up making acquaintance with Joseph Smith while visiting Western New York. In time, Mort, especially educated in those circles, became Smith’s closest consultant and confidante. Came out with the first wave of settlers. Three wives. Always a conservative Mort.” Hirem said, stating the opposite character of Mort. “I come from the middle wife – the favorite wife too, it comes down. Elizabeth. Liza they called her. Middle is the way.” Hirem gestured with his hand turned on end, pushing it ahead like a fish wriggling upstream. Abigail broke the family history lesson by giving a call for dinner. The four gathered around the table and Hirem gave one of his typical brief, if surprisingly sincere prayers, “Sustainer, Nurturer, Nomenclator, we give thanks for all these provisions before us, the two wandering friends that made it to our table, and the lives and hands that provided food for this table. In thanks.” As the last word was off Hirem’s tongue Abigail gave the dinner directions. “Now, Mick, Yeats, please don’t be shy. Eat all you want, there is more where this came from. And I want you to know, you feel free to stay here with us as long as you need to. Our home is open to you.”

“Thanks Mrs. O.” Mick said.

The tablemates ate and talked with ease, discussing the pertinent and impertinent alike. Any table where Hirem Olson sat was never a quiet one. Any table where Yeats sat was not a quiet one either, and if Mick found his stride, which was known to happen on occasion, it would be a difficult table to get a word-in edge wise. Abigail, though not a wall flower, said very little. After a time she began clearing off the table and brought a round of coffee to the three who were content to whittle away at issues yet unresolved and stories untold. After some time Abigail decided it was time for bed and excused herself with some final directions. “Mick, I’ll put you in Dani’s room, if you don’t mind, and Yeats, you can stay in the guest cottage.”

“You know how to use an outhouse son? Two-holer deluxe. Don’t try usin’ both holes at once. You’re a poet, you’ll find your way around all right. How ‘bout a smoke? Join me on the porch?” Hirem said, his words came in rapid fire.

“Sure Hi, I’ll join you.” Yeats said.

The two stood on the front porch and Hirem pulled out a metal cigarette box from his breast pocket and selected out two hand-rolled cigarettes. The evening was tranquil, interrupted only by the chirp of crickets, perhaps telling another encrypted verse from the universal epic poem that went on night after night without end. With one match Hirem lit the cigarette that hung from Yeats’ mouth followed by his own. The smoke had the sweet scent that Hirem referred to as sweet-tea, good for his glaucoma.

“So, uh, you lived out here a long time?” Yeats said, blowing his cloud into the breeze.

“All my life, except that is, when I was back east at school. Family passed this property down over four generations. Homesteaded well over a hundred years ago, original settlers to this valley. Family had a good bit of property. Though, most of it has been sold off by now and the family has moved on. To Salt Lake, then Nevada, mostly California and some beyond. Scattered to the wind.” Hirem said, followed by a muted whistle in imitation of the wind.

“Mick said you run a hardware store.”

“Yeah, it’s been a good thing for many years, but looks as if we’re going to close the doors. New Kinder-Mart coming to town, and I expect we just won’t compete. I can’t hardly blame the customers. The prices are unbeatably low at Kinder-Mart, and with big families and all it’s a hard thing to refuse. Besides, I’m old enough to retire and the girls don’t want to take over for their old man. Hell, Dani’s smart enough to join the ranks of the Kinder clan. What do you say we inspect your barracks?”

The two walked across the yard to a small cottage. Hi opened the door and lit a kerosene lamp. “There’s your bed. Extra quilts if you need them. Washbasin and wood-stove. I like to keep it rustic. More reliability and romance that way. Hit the rack or come on back to the house, up to you, but I’m beating the sandman to bed. Roosters will be crowing before sun up.” The two finished their cigarettes, said adieu and parted for bed.

The next morning, a Sunday, Hirem, Mick and Yeats sat at the table waiting for breakfast by talking and drinking coffee. Mick forecast the day for the Olsons, relaying that he and Yeats were going to town that afternoon. “You’ll have the morning free for me to introduce you over at the meeting-house.” Hirem said, with a smirk.

“Yeats is going to a lecture at the University and I thought I’d go out and say hello to Dani. Before that, we’ll probably just hang around the house. No offense Hi, but I don’t go for organized religion and public prayers.” Hirem knew as much, and if it weren’t for his friends, he wouldn’t have much use for Church either.

“Going out to see Dani huh? Abb, is Dani home tonight?” Hirem hollered to Abbey in the other room. She hollered back.

“I don’t know Hi. I know she and Chad are going to some kind of Ward function this afternoon. I think Chad leaves on business this evening. She should be home working in the garden, if I know Dani.”

“Mick, I can’t say I’m against a little honest competition for Dani. I’m still not sure about this Chad.”

Abigail chided Hirem for his frankness from the other room. Hirem gestured at Mick and yelled back to Abbey, “Well, I can’t say I’m certain about this one either.”

Later in the afternoon, after several hours of general reading, including from the stacks of yellow National Geographic magazines that lined the wall from 1933 onward, Mick and Yeats headed for Salt Lake. Mick dropped Yeats at the U to attend the Horowitz lecture. Inside the lecture hall the crowd noisily waited. The MC had came to the microphone and began talking over the assembled audience, lauding the credentials of the great Professor Jerry Horowitz. “A man featured on the cover of TIME magazine titled, “Far Out and Still Here!” with academic exploits too numerous to list. Recent nominee for a Pulitzer with his newly released book Still Widely Wandering. Not only an academic and consummate scholar, but also a gifted artist, a respected activist and organizer, and the regional pinochle champion and Wasatch County Fair blue-ribbon winner for exotic gourds ten years running.” There was applauding and stamping of feet, as if a great band were being exhorted for an encore performance. The MC went on, “Horowitz is an experimental and prolific shrimp farmer in the waters of the Great Salt Lake, where it is said living things cannot survive, an achievement that Professor Horowitz is rumored to be most proud of. People of the Land, I present to you Dr. Jerry Horowitz!” As with all Horowitz lectures, a musical score preceded Horowitz’s entrance.

The house lights dropped and the crisp, rasping strings of a fiddler filled the darkness. A spotlight shot onto the stage and emerging from the shadows the fiddler pulled the melancholic notes of Stille Nacht with his bow, the song that had been played Christmas morning 1914, by a lone and nameless fiddler on the trench strewn Western Front of World War I. As the fiddler played with bent elbow and dropped head swaying with the feelings of the notes, Horowitz appeared from the shadows, smoking a pipe and standing with one hand on the lectern, eyes closed as if soaking in the fiddler’s sweet- sorrow tune. The piece finished in dramatic fashion and Horowitz gathered himself behind the lectern, checked his notes, scanned the crowd, rechecked his notes, cleared his throat and began the lecture without so much as a glance at the notes on the lectern. Horowitz wore a dark shade herring-bone tweed jacket with a navy blue v-neck sweater underneath, drab olive cargo pants and red suede trainers.

“The birthday of a Middle-Eastern peasant. Summoned by the music of the lone soldier-fiddler, the soldiers from both sides crawled from their holes at the sound and made momentary peace on the frozen mud of Flanders under the star-filled sky. Music, the language and balm of the soul. If everything we have is what we can see and make sense of then we are truly lost in the cosmos. Thinking must be in cooperation, mutually informed by the heart and with the emotions. The Enlightenment made the emotions unfashionable. This is why music is always a prologue to my lectures. Music – a beautiful protest through sensuality, the light in the darkness when the rational has lost its way. Music – the language of the soul. For most if not all of these soldiers this musical Christmas cease-fire was the only redemptive act in the apocalypse of the Great War. It subverted the bellicose slogans and suggested that the men fighting and dying were more than proxies for governments, more than expendable pawns in the futile war of European nobility. The Christmas truce was a candle lit in the darkness of Flanders that flickered briefly, surviving only in memoirs, letters, song, drama, story, and hearts. Cigarettes were offered as make-shift peace offerings between the opposing trenches as each side tentatively crawled from their respective protected position, near frozen by the Continental winter. Humanity was laid bare with a momentary subversion of the power-intoxicated politicos and deranged imperial dictators that still roamed Europe. The opposing sides exchanged and venerated one another as mere fellow human beings. Beings. The proletariat, the people, are united, whether they know so or not, made subservient through nationalism, ignorance, fear and impoverishment. The nobility of largesse united too in the commodity of men for wealth.

The subject for this evening’s comments, if you are the titling kind, is what the dehumanizing effects of mega-corporations are and how the impact of global trade will cripple our humanity. To anchor my comments in reality, I will be using the locally venerated Kinder-Mart as a case study, our backyard villain and alpha-dog of discount stores and the alpha-dog of the tax-credit dog bowl too. The phenomenal growth of this particular corporation has been supported by taxpayers in many states through economic subsidies, all the while oppressing the family-run businesses that were once the backbone of American commerce.”

Horowitz grew increasingly animated and used his hands for emphasis, moving them as if he were a conductor of a large symphony, his voice rising and falling with the actions of his hands. “Sweetheart deals given to Kinder-Mart and similar corporations – abound. Family owned grocer Red McCleod saw the sales of his store in Hamilton, Idaho plunge as soon as the Kinder-Mart super-center opened on the edge of town. McCleod’s family had operated in Hamilton for seventy-five years, weathering every economic downturn, including the Great Depression. But Red couldn’t compete with Kinder’s prices and lost half his business overnight. Red boarded the windows of his store in a matter of months. Red’s story is being played out in thousands of communities across America today. Some say Red and others like him simply are not to fit to compete in the new global era of business. Others say that this new era of business has forgotten the same lesson humanity has forgotten many times before. Human-beings are not a commodity to work as slave labor under fluorescent lights of retail hell or the cloudless sky of hell building pyramids. When will we have compassion and a notion of proportion?”

Mick drove southwest from Salt Lake across the Jordan River into the setting sun towards the village of West Jordan. It was late in the afternoon and bugs squashing on the windshield made it difficult to see. The shadows shone long and slanty from the desert landscape vivid in the dust-filtered light. Mick pulled up to a hunkered and rounded adobe house with deep windows that looked like sunken eyes. The shoulder-high adobe wall circled the yard and was decorated with bright tile mosaics that sparkled in the late sun that hovered a finger above the jagged-blue horizon line. Dani crouched near the wall in the back of the garden, her arms and legs bared in cut-off jeans and white tank-top. She was every bit the ravishing woman that Mick knew from years before.

The bumper of Dani’s pickup was tagged with an array of stickers: Be the Change You Wish to see in the World and CASH on the bumper. Affixed to the rear window was the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, HOWL if you love City Lights Bookstore, NOLS, National Public Radio, the likeness of Jerry Garcia in bright palette, and Practice Humility. Mick came to the gate and looked over. Amherst had an effect on her.

“Know where I can find a good mechanic around here? She seems to be running a little rough.” Mick slapped the hood of his truck to indicate the problem vehicle.

“Mick?” Dani said, wiping loose strands of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. Her mother had called to say Mick was in town and coming out, but she didn’t know just when, and regardless, his voice was a surprise after all of these years. She stood up out of her squat to welcome the long-lost visitor stepping toward the gate with a strange unsteadiness to her legs. She was at once excited yet tentative. There was history here and the tension was palpable. Sheboygan barked on the porch of the house and came running down to the gate. Mick opened the gate and stooped to greet the dog he knew as a pup and was licked rapturously as if it had been only days since the two had seen one another.

“I was over at your folks’ place. Hi and Abbey mentioned you were living out here. I thought I’d come out and see how you were getting along.” Mick said.

“How long have you been back?”

Dani was a bit taken aback and stumbling for words, yet somehow graceful in the awkwardness, a quality of graceful manner inherited from her mother. Before Mick managed to answer, Dani fired the next question:

“And you’re living where?”

She was confused, concerned and unsure about anything regarding Mick. Where he lived, where he’d been, where he was going and why he was here in her front yard after so many years. Mick fidgeted and fumbled for words. “I returned from overseas a month or so ago and Yeats and I, we left California a few days back to visit Mom and Pop Fitz for a few days, and just sort of kept going. Found ourselves in Salt Lake.”

Mick was not one to be discombobulated, but he had become so with Dani.

………….

Bespectacled Horowitz wrapped up his lecture by saying, “The modern consciousness is dependant in great part on the thought of Friedrich Hegel, who in the early nineteenth century taught that the history of humanity is a history of inexorable progression from smaller to larger forms, from simple to complex organisms, irrationality to rationality. Every realm of thought, from theology to economics, from physics to politics has been influenced by Hegel’s notions of progress. Marxism, for example, with its theory of economic progress from feudalism to bourgeois to communism, is Hegelian in origin. Many still cling to the Hegelian belief that newer, bigger and more complex is better. Hegelianism is a hard habit to break. It may be the particular gift of this young century to see the betrayal in the Hegelian idea of human progress, by way of experiencing the downsides of complex bureaucratic institutions that turn like rusty gears. I predict it shall be the task of this century to dismantle and dissolve many of the institutions which have dominated us in the previous enlightenment-driven centuries. The wisdom that we must seek lies in the power of this short, prophetic phrase, by E.F. Schumacher: ‘Small is beautiful.’ I’ll leave off with those words, naturally I assume there are some questions – and I’m happy to give a stab at them, and know this, as a favored friend of mine was fond of saying, ‘Anyone who takes this lecture seriously will be shot, and anyone who does not take it seriously will be buried alive by a Mitsubishi bulldozer!’”

Horowitz stood patiently at the podium, waiting for the first question from the audience. As usual there was a brief lag before the first questioner roused the fortitude to approach the microphone, and as usual, after the first question broke the ice, dozens came pouring down in a deluge of wonderings and calls for specifics. After fielding several comments that began to sound more and more alike, Horowitz allowed for one last true question before calling it quits, pointing with a smile to a familiar looking face in the front row.

“Yeah, Professor, I’m on board with what’re saying, you know this train of resistance bound for glory, but how do we get out of the last station? I mean, does the movement work itself out, work itself in – practically? How do the ideas get out of this room and into my life, our lives – into our world?” Yeats stayed standing after his question and waited for the answer from the Professor. This was the guy he had met at the coffee house the first day to Salt Lake.

“The movement, the confession, the conviction of purpose, continues.” Jerry said, and gestured like an Indian sage in sign language, palm down, arm thrusting slowly forward, eyes following the extended arm into the crowd. Horowitz was momentarily entranced.

“Through every person, at a local level, wherever that is, whether a garbage truck driver, a department store sales clerk, a lawyer, or an age-group track coach, the movement continues, incrementally, steadily, one choice, one human at a time. Stalwart growth from the grassroots on up. Moment by moment, bit by bit. And it will take a lot longer than you wish, gravely long, generations even. We’ve got to endure, embracing the adversity and diversity that is sure to come.”

…………

Mick and Dani were sitting silently on the front porch. A palpable awkwardness hung in the air, the sky lit yellow by curling clouds fringed in pink against the darkening band that was the Eastern horizon that uncovered the nights avant-garde of flickering white stars. It was summertime in the desert and the crickets had their chirp.

“Would you care for something to drink? But gosh, I don’t know if I have anything to offer. Maybe a glass of water or herbal tea?” Dani said.

“Beer?” Mick said.

“I could probably find a forgotten one in the back of the fridge.”

“A little lax in your observances are you Dan? You want to take Sheboygan and drive out to Antelope Island?”

Dani grew uncomfortable with the question.

“I don’t know Mick. I’m ... It’s just that - it’s.”

“Come on. We’ll figure it out, it’s easier to do when you’re moving.”

Mick grabbed Dani by the hand.

………………

The auditorium exits spilled with an enthusiastic crowd full of energetic conversation imparted by the Horowitz lecture. Yeats overhead a couple of activist-intellectuals discuss what they called an after lecture party. Yeats, pinned in next to them amidst the pressing bodies of people bottle-necked at the exit door made out that the party would be at the Keating mansion and that Horowitz would be there. He knew he had to find a way to be there too.

A couple of hours later Yeats approached the front door of a very large white-with-pillars house on a winding road just up the hill from the University that overlooked the city lights that glowed yellow-orange in the steep distance below. A doorman in casual dress greeted Yeats in front of the four-paneled front door festooned with a carved chain of foliage and brass boar-head knocker. Yeats wrongly assumed he could fast-talk his way in as he had so many times before on similar occasions and was surprised to see the doorman holding a clip-board with the names approved for the gathering. He could see checks in red ink next to some of the names, presumably those who had arrived. Yeats craned to look at the sheet and the doorman pulled the clip-board to his chest and informed Yeats that it was an invite only affair hosted by what he referred to as ‘The Foundation,’ and that it was without question, time for him to leave. His parting line was a bit amateurish and self-important Yeats thought. “How do we know who you are? You could be a spy from the Feds or the LDS Gestapo.”

Yeats conceded easily not wanting to make an impression so he could get a second shot at the party, and so left without another word. His second plan was already formulating in his mind. He jogged down the hill to the liquor store he had seen on the way up, advertised in reddish-pink neon letters. The letters in Liquor flickered in a uneven pattern. The store windows were black, the door was locked, and a sign in front indicated that the store was closed on Sundays. Yeats silently calculated to himself. Bars were open Sundays weren’t they? He ran a block further down the street to the only establishment in sight, The University Hill Pronghorn Drinking Establishment, it advertised itself as a private club, accompanied by an official looking state certificate in the window. Yeats didn’t know what this meant and entered the dimly lit bar. Pool was played towards the back and a football game glowed on the TV above the bar. Yeats approached the bar and waited. Eventually a man with a towel over his left shoulder appeared and without enthusiasm looked Yeats’ way.

“I’d, uh, I’d like twelve bottles of beer – to go.” Yeats said, pointing to the door.

The bartend had his back turned and didn’t seem to hear what Yeats said. When he did turn around he showed a put-out expression as if you’d just told him to take out the trash.

“Got yer credentials?” The bartend said.

Yeats grabbed for his wallet and produced a California license.

“Drinking credentials. Pronghorn membership.” The bartend said, pushing back the license.

p. 11-20 Hijinks

Days later Mick stood in dress uniform before a table of several officers. A combat Colonel with deep lines of experience etched through his face and fierce eyes that had seen too much, spoke. “Look, Mick, you’ve been a helluva soldier. A helluva soldier. No denying that.” The Colonel paused, resituated a pen in his grip and wiped his brow before continuing, “but stunts like this, well shit, somebody’s got to be held to accounts. Not too much room to fuck up these days." The Colonel informed that the fellow soldiers involved, Lieutenant Anderson and Brent would each be given light sentence. Mick was the ranking soldier, and therefore would be held responsible. Mick knew that if there was one thing the military did it was to proceed in all things according to rank. Anderson and Brent would lose half their pay for forty-five days and be under certain restrictions during that time, while Mick would be discharged taking effect 1300 hour, with the case going before review committee as to specific ramifications.

Mick's response to the news was to feel a little numb and unfeeling as if he had taken a long fall and was as yet uncertain of injury. And then he looked at the situation as one would the purposeful elimination of a long annoyance. Say an old squeaky fan that ran at too low a speed to cool a room. And one day you take a baseball bat and smash it off the ceiling and throw it in the garbage can. Enough of the irritant, and it is gone with a few swipes. It was as if this had been his plan all along – to go as far as he wanted and no more. The same way he had quit his journalism job before joining the Navy. Simply write a story so far out bounds, and again, and again, and again, that he was removed. And he savored the rush to do what his gut told him to do. Not many get the feeling of living out of your heart. There are painful costs to not playing by the schoolmarm’s rules, especially when the schoolmarm had a buzz haircut and expected salutes.

He removed his trident and placed it on the table without plea and waited for his dismissal standing in a military posture, eyeing the officer in charge stoically. “You’re dismissed.” The senior officer said. Mick spun on his heel crisply and left the room. A friend intercepted him in the hall and slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Stunts like this are what made you the soldier you are Mick." Mick gave no reply. The friend continued the impromptu eulogy. “There ain’t much leeway these days, fucking system can’t absorb this kind of play Mick. But you never wanted a career did you? Came in on a lark, bored as hell with civilian life. When we first got in I remember you reciting the opening lines of The Whale to me, the summation of your reasons to enlist. Same reasons lesser men take up triathlons. Do you remember?” Mick looked over to his friend with a dry expression and recalled the words.

“Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Mick said the words with little expression. “Is that all sir?” Mick said. “Yeah, that’s all.” Mick saluted the officer and turned his shoulder on military life and headed for the light of the exterior door at the end of the hallway.

……………………………………

Mick and Yeats were somewhere in the Nevada desert at dawn, the horizon looked as far in the distance as the stars in the sky, sagebrush and igneous rock the primary landscape. A land home to jack-rabbits, lizards, vultures and nuclear waste depositories. Mick pulled the Bronco into an empty dirt parking lot. A neon pink sign matching the sunrise in an embellished way flickered. The J swung back and forth in three sparkling neon pink stopping points between Swinging and Saloon. Lovelock, Nevada was lost between the Trinity and West Humboldt Range. This was USA ranch country. Things seemed a good might clearer for folks in this part of the world. There was right and there was wrong, and it was easy to know the difference. You just knew, because those before you knew, and so on. This was the school of common sense. If you didn’t know how to tie a double-hitch, you were a dumb ass and probably never would know much. Another school, the school of the via negativa might describe the place in and the honky-tonk in specific, as certainly not a place for a man wearing a twenty dollar haircut, nor a Ralph Lauren shirt, nor tasseled loafers. It looked to be the sort of place where if one looked enough out of place they were liable to be Shepardized. Yeats claimed to have coined the term after Matthew Shepard had been beaten and left for dead hanging on a barb-wire fence in Laramie, Wyoming. Yeats had his own encounters with Better be red or gonna be dead-salute the flag-and load your weapon-no need for school-thinking has gotten pretty dangerous and overrated-you better not be a queer-America.

Mick and Yeats entered through swinging doors and straddled worn barstools and leaned in against the smooth elbow worn wood. Yeats noticed a bullet hole cracked horizontal across the mirror of the century old bar glass and the elderly woman bartend sweeping up from the previous night’s revelry. Except for the early morning news broadcast on the television, not a word was spoken between the brothers and the gray haired woman who eventually leaned the broom up and attended to them. “How can I help you boys?” “Coffee.” Mick said. “You got a pot of coffee on?” Yeats said. “Sure thing hon.” “Oh, and a plate of eggs and home fries.” Mick pulled out a four day old crossword from the newspaper folded into thirds and went to work. Yeats watched the weatherman gesture at the incoming low patterns on the television. “Yeats. Lakota Sioux holy man, eight letters." "Black Elk." Yeats said, off-handedly and continued, “Mick, I’ve got to tell you something.” Mick kept his head in the paper and muttered, "Yeah". “Danielle’s engaged. Guy named Chad. Played football at B.Y.U. – split end I think, had a brief stint in the pros.” Yeats said that from what he could tell, the guy was a regular asshole, and he didn't know what the hell she was thinking and wondered what Hirem and Abigail thought. He speculated the answer was that Danielle was 27, gorgeous, single, and childless. Not exactly the textbook life for an LDS woman. Mick said that put that way it did seem as if she were on the fast track to hell. No goddess status for her if she kept it up. But, with this news it sounded like she was sure enough working on getting it figured out. Mick said so with the same detached emotion with which he had given up his trident. He kept his eyes fixed on the puzzle.

Yeats persisted that the two of them ought to get down to Salt Lake and get an eyes-on the situation, reasoning that a gem of a woman like Danielle is in rare supply, and besides, they couldn't in good conscience let her make the mistake of a lifetime with this bimbo without at least an honest effort. On top of all this, Yeats figured he could use another field-trip to the LDS Temple. He described it as being like the ancient Greek temples: stocked with beautiful women who were nothing more than prostitutes of old, women who could appease the gods, give salvation through heavenly coitus, paving the way to the promise land. Coitus was a fertility offering, the hopes and pleas for a bountiful harvest, plenty of rain and the like. Sex drives the faithful. Yeats explained that while the Mormon Temple wasn't quite as explicit as all that, it was all the same thing really. “Humanity doesn't differ that much, just different variations on a few themes with all of the same struggles, temptations, needs and desires.” Yeats said.

Mick didn't reply, his face was still buried in the crossword, as were his feelings, cordoned deep within as he feigned disinterest. “Mick, you’ve been all over the Middle-East, Kandahar, Lahore, Medina, Al-Jawf, Beirut and places besides, but you’ve never been to Temple Square. It’s time we get your ignorant ass to the North American Mecca. I'm telling you what brother, drop dead gorgeous tour guides, from the standard tall blond-hair, blue-eyed locals to the dark exotics of Polynesia. Mick, you haven’t done your tour of duty until you’ve done the Temple tour.” Mick looked up from his preoccupation. “Yeah, what we need to do is get up and see Floyd and Mom. You see them recently?” Yeats admitted that it had been a long time.

After an hour rest at the Swingin’ J the brothers were back on the highway driving north towards the family home in the Snake River Valley. Music they liked, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, REM, Rolling Stones, played on the radio as the scenery changed from desert to mountain plateau, and after several hours the brothers had made it back into familiar territory in the Snake River drainage. They pulled into the parking lot of The Grouse Hollow Café a favorite local diner that Yeats had talked of a hundred miles out, just a truck-stop diner off the highway with good pie and open face sandwiches. As they came to a stop an incredulous look swept over Mick’s face.

“What the fuck?” He said, barely audible, surveying the Café exterior. He pounded the flat of his hand on the dash dusting the air and jumped out slamming the door behind him.

“What in the hell have they done to the Grouse Hollow?” Mick said with halting words and stalked towards the door. “Can’t they leave well enough alone? Shit.” Mick said with foment. The building was clearly under significant renovation. The door Mick approached had a hand-scrawled note in black magic marker that redirected patrons to an alternate entrance. Inside plastic sheets shielded the vacant hostess desk.

“I go away for a few years, and damn, place was perfect as was.” Mick stood in agitation before the sign that read: Please wait to be seated. Within moments the hostess appeared, looking overwhelmed by the explosion that had just blown through the door. She grabbed two menus and said, “Sir, is it going to be just the two of you?” She gestured at Mick and Yeats with her painted nails scattered with silver glitter.

“Yep.” Mick said.

“Booth or table?”

“Oh hell.” Mick considered the options. “Still have counter-service?”

“Two at the counter? Right over here.”

She pointed cheerily to two stools at a horse-shoe shaped counter, the only item preserved from the vintage 50’s diner, token acknowledgement of what was. The rest was what looked to be cheap new fixtures that imparted the same sterilized, standardized atmosphere common to most every newly built establishment in America. The two sat down at the counter and left a stool between themselves. An old man sipped on a cup of coffee down the counter. Mick looked around and said, “Where the hell are we? Perkins?”

“Hauling a load somewhere?” The old man said.

“Headed home.” Mick said.

The old man named Merle lit a cigarette. There was silence as Mick and Yeats looked over the menu.

“At least they still allow smoking. That’s a throwback.” Yeats said.

“Nope. Smoking’s banned. I’ve got special dispensation.” Merle said.

“A pocket of preservation, like McTavish and the NHL helmet rule.” Yeats said, ruminating approval.

“Yes, I spend a good part of my day sitting here in this truck-stop drinking coffee, passing the time. Used to be part diner part feed and seed store. New expansion is slated to accommodate the increase in tractor-trailers, showers, merchandising, parking spaces, fill ‘er up spots. Becoming a regular trucker’s paradise. I’ve lived in and around this area for the better part of my life, save when I was away at the wars. Things have changed more in the past three years than in the previous thirty put together. What’d you say your names was?” The old man said.

“Didn’t say. Fitzgerald. Mick Fitzgerald.”

“Yeats Fitzgerald.” Yeats said before shouting down the waitress, “Could we get a couple of coffees over here?” He pointed between himself and Mick.

“Fitzgeralds huh? They live out on County Road 7.” Merle said. “Farm I grew up on was gobbled up by developers, two decades or more ago.” Merle settled back from the counter and folded his thick forearms across his chest just beneath the pack of cigarettes stowed in the breast pocket. He continued, “Swooped in on all of us farmers unable to make a go of it in an era of monster agribusiness. These developers have eaten their way into this community like hyenas. They’ve circled us over the years, picked us off one by one, taking the most vulnerable first. Taken the best bottom lands too – now home to what I call clone neighborhoods – shameful.”

“Hits pretty close to home.” Yeats said.

“Our system runs on this make money move faster model of industry where more is actually less. Get yours today!” Merle imitated a pitchman, his face animated as if he were mad. “Would you like that biggie sized – only ten cents more – but thirty percent bigger!” He said, and then resumed his own flat voice, “Is it any wonder a huge number of Americans are overweight?”

“Fat as shit.” Yeats affirmed.

Merle self-indicted admitting that he’d biggie-sized in the past month, admitting that he can’t hardly get a pop without going big. “Most truckers wouldn’t think of commanding the Eisenhower-efficient-military-transport-interstate without a biggie in hand. It’s simply part and parcel of the American landscape.” Merle said.

Yeats laughed.

Mick had lost interest in the verbosity of his brother and new found, half-senile friend, and was engrossed in his crossword. Merle continued the tirade, “Tell you what I’d like to do. I’d like to send an airborne assault campaign against the subdivisions that have decimated the ground I call home. We’d run it like a military operation. Operation Rolling Suburban Gawdamn Thunder. Carpet bomb these lousy developers into submission. Course, we’d drop leaflets to warn the citizenry.”

“You really are a crazy man Merle. I like your style.” Yeats said, in contradiction to his nouveau Tolstoyian aspirations.

“Is this any less justified than some of the reasons our government has used to prop puppet dictators and wage war and bombing campaigns overseas?” Merle said.

“Well, I don’t know, depends who you’re asking I guess.” Yeats said.

“Oil barons propping fascist regimes in the developing world, where coincidentally there is profit to be made and the American Way is under threat.” Merle said, and paused. “Save for a few good documents early on, that sustain remarkably well given the duress - the American Way has chiefly been about profit at all costs – people and land be damned.” Merle took momentary respite with a drink from his coffee. “Same motives for the powers throughout the ages. At times it may be in the guise of altruism, as the Bolsheviks professed, but it seems to always return to the greedy motives of power hungry individuals. Jesus H. Christ.” He took another pause, this time longer and finished his coffee. Merle eyed Yeats as if he were looking for an answer and then said, “Jesus didn’t speak against greed more than anything else because he was trying to get press coverage – he knew greed was at the center of evil.” Merle accentuated the e in greed with a drawn out grin. “Buddha didn’t renounce because it fit with his emerging yoga lifestyle. He knew something. Most the rest of these religious phonies are quite motivated by greed. Take your local mega-church leader, always after another buck and more influence.” He emphasized the last word disdainfully and looked Yeats in the eye. “Hell, carpet bomb after the leaflets are dropped – and maybe a smart bomb or two for the developer trailers.”

After of few moments of silence, Merle followed his pontificating with a hearty laugh. Yeats got up off his stool and gave Merle a hug, pushing the old-man’s glasses cock-eyed.

It was late afternoon in Idaho and Yeats and Mick were back on the road with only a short drive remaining to the family farm. Floyd Fitzgerald came out of the house and the screen door slammed shut behind him. He clinched a gunny-sack in one hand and held a double-barrel shotgun over his left shoulder. He made his way across the yard to a fence rail and dropped the sack to the ground and began snatching out plastic, battery-operated, Chinese made toys, placing each one on the top fence rail. The toys sat silhouetted against the sky like plastic idols.

The farmhouse windows were lit up and looked to be the wholesome home everyone should be American-gilded-fortunate to grow up in. Old man Fitzgerald paced off from the fence putting distance between he and the sentenced toys. He turned and leveled the two barrels and muttered to himself, “Execution by firing squad still on the books in Idaho,” with a squint down the barrel the gun exploded once and then a second time. Gun-smoke drifted skyward and with a lift of the brow Floyd took accuracy appraisal. The toy line-up revealed two conspicuous gaps. Floyd broke the neck of the shot-gun and retrieved the two spent shells and grabbed two more pheasant load shells from the barn jacket pocket. As he plugged the shells into the barrel he glanced up at the sound of an approaching vehicle. Mick and Yeats had arrived. They felt the assurance of being home as they passed a sign that swung from two rusty chains: Fitzgerald Farm and Vineyard – Huckleberries, Vines, & So Forth. A trail of sunlit dust filled the yard as the Bronco pulled in. Floyd snapped the action of the shot-gun together thinking he’d have a little fun. “Off my property miscreants.” Floyd shouted. He held the shotgun in one hand, the butt resting off his upper thigh angled. The boys didn’t make out what was said, but they knew their old man well enough. Mick opened his door and as his foot made contact with gravel Floyd fired off a shot. Mick jerked his foot up and shouted out the crack in the door.

“Only got one more old man, better make it count. We’ll be coming for ya’.”

Yeats volunteered to draw out the second shot before they bum rushed their old man. Yeats opened his door and put his foot out cautiously. Dust scattered inches away.

“Shit almighty.” Reflexively, Yeats slammed the door shut. As he did Mick flew at old Floyd and they tangled in a heap, the headlights of the truck spotlighting the tussle.

Sue-Ellen stepped through the screen-door onto the porch to see what the ruckus was about. She had a kitchen apron on and keen intuition. Yeats walked past his brother and father and bypassing the stairs he leapt onto the wooden porch and gave his mother a hello kiss on the cheek and disappeared into the house. Mick and Floyd wrestled up off the dirt in playful aggression. The grappling and words made it amply apparent that Mick took after his dad. “Insolent boy. That anyway to greet your old man? Startle me by driving reckless into the yard, then break my damn back on the way to see your mother? Anything that comes in or out of that drive is on my order.” Floyd pointed down the drive tracing his way back and said, “And you’re allowed in,” his face broke to a grin. The two dusted themselves off and Floyd grabbed Mick around the neck and steered him to the house.“Hey you two!” Sue Ellen hollered from the porch with tauthority. “Supper’s ready. Get yourselves to the table – it’s hot.”

Mick jumped on the railing-less porch and engulfed his mother in a bear hug swinging her around in the light of the open door. Sue Ellen gave out a laugh of delight.

For the first time in several years the Fitzgerald’s gathered around the family dinner table with their boys. Visible from the table was a line-up of wooden toys perched on a shelf overlooking the kitchen table and just as all heads had bowed and the perfunctory supper prayer was to be said Yeats’ head popped up and he pointed, “What’s with the toys?” He said.

Sue Ellen spoke for her husband, “Your father has lost his patience.”

“Not dad. Lose his patience?” Yeats said.

Floyd stepped in to defend himself, “I got fed up with the grandkid’s Chinese made toys – only kind you can buy anymore. My gripe is not so much the fact they’re made in China, but the quality – plastic junk, and the noise, hell, intolerable.”

“So what’s the plan dad?” Yeats asked.

“Plan is to execute every last one of the plastic imposters on the property, replace ‘em with this handmade cadre of beauts.” Floyd grabbed one of his handmade toys off the shelf and inspected it with commentary. “This one here serves two purposes. Winds up and walks, kids’ll like that and doubles as a bottle opener.” He walked to the refrigerator, retrieved a beer, cracked it open and handed it to Mick. He then wound up the toy and set it walking down the middle of the table before getting blocked by the gravy boat.

“Pretty clever dad. Think the kids’ll go for it? Might take ‘till they’re twenty to appreciate spruce-wood, Floyd-made toys.”

“They’ll manage.” Floyd said.

In the midst of discussion Yeats had managed to consume a chicken wing and lick his fingers and compliment the cook. “Ma, this fried chicken is delicious.”

“Better than that vegan shit they serve down at the Berkeley commune?” Mick chided. Yeats’s mouth was too full to defend himself.

“Michael your mouth! This isn’t the Navy mess hall.” Sue Ellen scolded.

“How’s Mer?” Mick asked his mother, and cleverly changed the subject.

“Oh, you know Meredith, busy. Armful of kiddos. She and Jim have expanded the music store to include an on-line business. Meredith runs it from home.”

“Jim still teaching music at the college?”

“Yes, still doing that. But the music store downtown is taking more and more of his time.”

Floyd interrupted the catch-up conversation. “Listen boys, tomorrow, a little work to be done around the farm.”

“You going to take the offer for the south 40, Dad?” Yeats said.

“What’s that got to do with tomorrow?”

“What offer?” Mick was curious and out of the loop.

“Oh hell, some developer’d like to get a hold of the South 40 and put in god knows what.” Floyd was clearly not enthused by the conversation.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this, Yeats?” Mick said looking to his brother. “You’re not going to do it are you Dad?”

“Son, I’d rather not. You know what my stance has always been. Nothing we can’t talk about tomorrow. Your Mother and I want to know about you. You still have your wits about you after daily threat of being blown to kingdom come?” Floyd said. He had a controlled disposition despite all the inconveniences and threats the world offered in every season and aspect of life, a trait he had passed on to his son Mick.

Morning broke with color over the Fitzgerald farm. Mick skipped breakfast, stopping long enough to set Mr. Coffee to brew and read a few lines from the previous morning’s paper. He poured himself a cup to go before heading for the barn. He sat atop the cab-less, much used, John Deere tractor, trying in vein to get the engine to turn-over when he saw his father striding across the yard towards him. He wished the tractor would cooperate so that he would not have to receive advice from Floyd, preferring to have the morning alone in his thoughts, wheeling up and down the field leaving serpentine rows of planting furrows.

“Eh! Mick.” Floyd shouted twenty paces off. “We’re going to use Mr. Manassas. That things outta’ gas. I pretty well get by using him anymore.” Floyd waved from the elbow at the mule standing at the corral fence.

“The mule?” Mick said.

“Hell yes the mule. I’ll show you how to rig him up, case you forgot.”

“Get outta’ here. I haven’t been away that long.” Mick said.

Floyd said he thought the war might have robbed him of common sense and Mick rebuffed this accusation by harnessing the old mule unassisted and led Manassas out to the ankle deep loamy soil and followed in the wake of the trudging work animal.

“Haw!” Mick shouted at the mule and they made a left turn and started up another row. At the edge of the field a billboard loomed, facing towards the road, it told of the coming development: “Hoot Owl Hollow. Where life is a hoot! A Planned Community by CB builders. From the 200’s.” Mick cursed the deleterious sign and continued down several long rows as the sun rose to summer equinox heights.

Noon hour found Mick, Yeats and Floyd in the shade of the porch drinking lemonade poured from a large thumb print patterned glass pitcher. They sipped and waited for Sue Ellen’s lunch platter.

“What the hell is that billboard doing out on the east property line?” Mick asked with a riffle edging the words.

“Attempted encroachment.” Floyd said.

“County approached me about it, wanted to know if I’d mind it being planted on the property – for ‘fair’ compensation. I said ‘hell no’ in no uncertain terms. They went around me, as politicians do, slicker ’n snakes in water. Planted the damn thing right in the middle of the ditch, not two foot from the property line. Called it immanent domain, never mind the damn thing redirects the ditch water. Typical work of ignoramus bureaucrats.”

“Attempted encroachment? Sounds like straight forward encroachment to me. Let’s pull the damn thing out. To hell with those fuckers.” Sue Ellen came through the door just as Mick’s colored opinion came out. Her face went ungentle.

“Mick, unless you clean-up that mouth of yours, you can dig grub worms for lunch.” Sue Ellen levied what the three men knew was not an idle threat given her track record.

“Sorry ma, I’m a danged sailor. What can I do?” He said, throwing up his hands, looking every bit the on-duty sailor with his closely cropped hair.

“Either throw that mouth of yours overboard or go hungry, that’s what.” His mother said.

Later that evening Mick and Yeats got Mr. Manassas rigged up in the open barn door guided by the yard light. The moon took over as guiding light as they trudged out into the freshly plowed field towards the billboard on the east end of the Fitzgerald property. Once there they hitched Mr. Manassas to the billboard with intent to pull it down but underestimated the pole and the strength of one mule.

“Fuck this thing is stout. Metal pole’s half a foot in diameter.” Mick said with annoyance. The two continued working even though common sense told them they had no prayer with mule strength.

“O.K. She’s ready to go on my end.” Yeats said, holding the reigns up for his brother to grab. Mick took the reins of Manassas and exhorted the mule against the static resistance of metal and concrete. “Walk!” Mick gave the command to the mule more than once.

Mr. Manassas strained with his belly to the dirt but nothing moved except for Mick’s face first fall into the soft dirt. He came up cursing and threw a hunk of mud at the billboard that stuck for a few moments before falling, leaving a smudge on the white as if a period on the end of the night mission.

The next morning Mick’s determination for un-planting the billboard had not changed but his course of strategy had. By nine a.m. he was standing at the counter of the local hardware store waiting to place an order for ordinary items that a farmer is always in need of. A gaunt faced, flat-eyed clerk with slicked back hair arrived from the back to take Mick’s order and Mick, without hello waded into the list of needed items.

“Forty pounds of ammonium nitrate. A good ten pounds of potassium sulfate. You have a powdered form of zinc, by chance?” The clerk said he would check in the back, his nervous demeanor showed suspicion, as if he knew that any one of the items purchased alone would not be a thing out of the ordinary, simply commonplace items for fertilizing and so forth. But, all the items together certainly made for an explosive cocktail, and while the clerk knew he would never know how to do it himself, he had been around long enough, including a stint in the first Iraq, to know something about what was explosive and what wasn’t. Fortunately for Mick the clerk was a devout libertarian - a man who believed that a citizen could buy what he liked and it was just as well that a few of our citizenry knew enough to protect the country, should there ever be a red dawn.

“Oh, and a couple of bags of chicken feed.”

“You say this is for fertilizing the fields?”

“Yeah, not the bag of chicken feed though, that’s for the chickens.”

Yeats rejoined Mick at the counter after wandering the store. He was carrying a large hack-saw, admiring its sharp teeth with his thumb.

“This sucker would cut right through that pole, huh?” Yeats said.

“Right through ‘till dawn. They got a two handled one back there? We could slave all night together.” Mick slapped his brother with sarcasm as the clerk returned with the ordered items. “Interesting mix of things son. Explode if you put it all together. Your operation is safe with me.” The clerk said with a look about him that conjured creepy images of Lee Harvey Oswald. Mick didn’t entertain the strange vibe from the clerk and paid for the material, conveying his appreciation for the man’s cooperation. The bells that hung from the door jangled as they went out.

They waited until evening before attempting the re-assault of the billboard as the moon came up over the trees to the east and Mick and Yeats again trudged across the field leading Mr. Manassas who pulled a cart stacked with four barrels of ordnance. Mick carried a spool of detonation wire and Yeats carried a bushel worth of trigger pipe bombs in a rounded wicker fruit basket.

“How volatile are these things? If I dropped the basket I mean, what’d happen?” Concern bordered Yeats’ voice.

“Oh, the ground out here is soft enough, probably would just thud on the dirt, unless it hit a rock.”

“Probably thud? Shit. You mean they could blow – what if I trip?”

“Relax, you’re not going to trip. Do you normally trip for no apparent reason walking across flat ground?”

“Well yeah, sometimes I do.”

“Just carry the basket.”

Mick carefully lifted each of the four wooden barrels filled with explosive and set them in a clover-leaf around the pole and then pulled a roll of tape from his jacket pocket and gestured to Yeats for ordnance. Yeats handed him each pipe bomb in turn and each was strategically attached to the barrels. When the all-go was given, Yeats grabbed the spool of detonation wire by each handle and climbed up the ditch and through the tree line into the middle of the field paying out wire as he went. Mick put the finishing touches on the devices before retreating to the safety of the open field and gave a few last instructions to his brother before giving him the honors of manual detonation.

The anticipation that filled the air was wiped clear with the surprising boom of the detonated bomb. The explosion provided the same feeling of being caught off-guard that a high-powered rifle gives when shot for the first time. Yeats and Mick watched with satisfaction as the billboard wavered and fell, and great was its fall as it whomped with a crack and a bang half into the watery ditch and half onto the dry wash board county road. With glowing satisfaction the brothers headed for bed.

Morning brought a large breakfast courtesy of Sue Ellen. Floyd sat at the head of the table reading the morning paper with Yeats seated in the chair next to him reading section E. “Morning.” Sue Ellen said. “Morning Ma.” Yeats returned.

After pouring a mug of coffee from the carafe Mick found his spot at the table and stole a page from Yeats’ already thin section. Sue Ellen eyed her two boys knowingly. Mick read his scant portion of the paper and sipped from his mug decorated with a sailboat on waves and the name Mystic, Connecticut in white lettering within the blue water. Sue Ellen put the food down on the table and all began to eat without word until Floyd spoke. “Scare those developers away did you?” Floyd asked with an unimpressed tone. Yeats looked up from his eating and Mick kept his eyes on the paper he held in his left hand while taking bites from his fork that seemed to move on back and forth from plate to mouth on its own. Both remained silent.

“Things’ll be stirred up pretty good. Thought it through did you?” Floyd allowed for silence and neither Mick nor Yeats wanted to answer.

“I don’t know where they get it from Floyd.” Sue Ellen said with a subtle smirk that danced in her eyes.

“Well, Pops, we were clearing the ditch of obstructions. We’ve been in charge of that since we were kids. Tried to pull that billboard out with Mr. Manassas – but it wouldn’t budge. Like trying to bring down a Canadian with dove shot. Had to gauge up.” Yeats said.

Floyd brushed off Yeats’ humor wanting to get to the source of things. “Mick?” Mick was still reading the paper taking bites of food and without looking up he said in with usual brevity, “Yeats is right. Clearing the ditch.”

“I see.” Floyd said. “Authorities won’t exactly be startled. Not the first time a battle’s been waged from Fitz Farm. Ditch needed clearing.” Floyd repeated to himself and chuckled. “Did you haul it out, or is it still laying where it fell?”

“Laying right where it dropped.” Yeats said.

“Job won’t be done ‘till the ditch is cleared. Gas up the Deere.” Floyd said.

Floyd was behind the wheel of the tractor as Mick and Yeats secured chains to the billboard and jumped onto the tractor as it lurched forward and the chains were pulled taut. The three chugged down the dirt road with the billboard dragging behind leaving a gouge the width of a shoe in the gravel road.

Having disposed of the wreckage at an unofficial dump-site common to area farmers, the three Fitzgerald men sat on the porch and discussed things. They decided at the suggestion of Floyd, that it would be best for the two boys to get lost for a while and let things “blow over” as Floyd put it. Floyd insisted that he would handle things, convinced that it would all go much cleaner if he dealt alone with whoever it was that needed to be dealt with. The county already knew he wasn’t pleased with the damn billboard anyway. He pointed out that it hadn’t even been a week since Yeats got out of jail and the Navy Brass was still sorting out Mick’s case. A couple of jail birds wouldn’t make things any easier for a situation that he should have done himself. Floyd advised that they get out of town and maybe Mick should take the time to rescue back that sweet girl Danielle if he was so inclined, noting that he and his mother had always particularly liked her.