Jus be who you gonna be at all times…
“Son Thomas” Mississippi Delta Blues Man.
I never trusted a man ain’t got a little outlaw in him…
My Grandpa… John Fred Arthur
used to tell me that in his many stories after he had a few
swigs of Four Roses whiskey when he took me fishing...
and like the quote above… he was who he was at all times.
In the throes of a restless tumult, the squeaking bed springs woke Poke Abney at two thirty a.m., and he stared into a fearful abysm of darkness for an extended time, an impenetrable turbulence walled up around his mind. Unabated, a venomous phantasm uncoiled down and lashed at his spirit and poisoned his mind at will.
A suffocating odor of smoke, liquor and vomit hung in the stale air of the tiny room. He could smell the sour stench of his sweat-soaked nightshirt from his battles with these amorphous nightmares that constantly haunted his dreams. His body convulsed as he heaved several times. He grabbed the pillow and jerked it over his face as he gasped and coughed into the hollowness of it, the timbre in the tiny room like a cave. The coughing jag finally subsided. Almost exhausted he dropped the pillow to the floor. He lay still for a long moment as his eyes finally adjusted and held on the lazy spin of the ceiling fan. Two mangled blades from their collision with the arm of an enraged drunk and an empty bottle of stumphole whiskey had thrown it out of kilter and it squeaked and wobbled with a low whirring hypnotic motion.
This cold night in the year of our Lord nineteen sixty-two, the dread had returned. A dread that had seemingly come like a plague out of neither time nor any known space. It just appeared, infesting that darkness between eternity, fear, and nothingness. A dream which had long haunted him had come back with a vengeance after almost a year and now occupied the total confines of his fitful slumber.
Only this time, the dread had come back with a voice. A voice that seemed to come from the clocked depths of darkness and dread.
A pestilent, low seething voice of vehemence which spoke in tongues and rampaged through his rage-tangled soul and on beyond any fury and chaos he could have ever imagined. The voice, in a short time, had tattooed his soul with the irreparable lacerations of an unfathomable degree of mental degradation. A constant battle escalating in his mind over the last few years, the dream had been devouring his brain akin to an undulating muckle of maggots on steroids. He’d wake in the wee hours to screams from demons and faces he’d never known as they caromed through the minacious tunnel of his recurring nightmares. Whenever this stygian violence broke upon him, he would flail convulsively, sweat soaked and screaming like a hellhound for someone to excise him from the flagitious images that flickered in the dark corners of his mind. His dark thoughts rattling around caused his emotions to moil up inside, and at times, would sear his brain shut of any logical thought. As if he were estranged from his own soul, the main focus of this heinous nightmare encompassed a finality of the deepest human, iniquitous and unavoidable deed. Late into the next morning he laid in pain from his self-flagellations, his soul macerated by the ravages of such dreams. Contusions not only to his physical being but to his tattered soul as well.
Shucking these dreams from his soul was something he had never been able to accomplish. The unrelenting bombardment of his thoughts had lain over his soul like a foul cloth and had now grown to an uncontrollable state. Poke figured the only way out of this inexplicable purgatory he had mentally fallen into was to follow his first intuition.
He had long known that he had to do something and now he finally made up his mind as to what that would entail. Over time he had reckoned exactly how he would go about such an atrocious task.
With a gasp he pushed the covers back and sat up on the edge of the bed and with a cringe settled his bare feet to the frigid and curled linoleum. He rubbed his hands hard over his face and head and yawned vociferously. He pushed up from the squeaking bed with a lurch as his foot kicked an empty whiskey bottle that skittered across the uneven angle of the floor. He turned and bumped off the door-facing into the tiny bathroom. He squinted with a grimace when he flipped the light on. At the toilet he stood and peed when suddenly his body jerked into a bone-jarring cough. Letting a string of phlegm drivel from his lips he braced himself with one hand against the wall. Noticing a red splotch in the phlegm, he leant closer to the bowl. He examined the spot of blood and shook his head. After a long thought he drew back with some concern and slowly thumbed the lever and flushed the toilet. With a grunt he flipped the light switch off and pushed back into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed. With a deep sigh he laid in the coil of darkness and started to cough uncontrollably.
###
Of a pale first light, a late winter dawn seeped its way into the valley of the creek-bed. Poke shook tobacco from a small cloth sack into a rolling paper he had laid on the porch banister and made a cigarette. He licked the rolling paper and his nostrils flared when he inhaled the gelid morning air. He put the cigarette to his mouth and rolled it into the corner of his scabby lips with his tongue. With a slight shiver he loosely stuffed the rolling papers and tobacco sack back into his sleeveless shirt pocket. With a wince he shifted his weight from his bad leg to the other. He lit the cigarette and stood smoking on the weather buckled slatboards of the front deck of his single-wide house trailer, the condition of the rotted wood leant more toward a sinking raft than a porch. Poke drew in a lungful of smoke and as he blew it out noticed his belt was looser than he remembered the last time he had thought about it. Huh, he grunted. My weight seems to be fallin’ off for some reason.
The trailer is a dim structure backed up in the lee of slate gray cliffs to either side of a meandering trickle of water known as Gobbler’s Creek.
A rail-thin hunchback, Poke blew out a plume as his body jerked into a spasmodic smoker’s cough. A progressive by-product of having smoked since he was six years old. The ravages of an infrangible habit now consumed much of his daily thought after a last declaration from old Doc Wilson up in Oxford.
Smoking is going to kill you sooner than your drinking if you don’t stop, Poke. All these years I’ve known you and your momma and daddy you’ve always asked me to be honest with you. Well… either way, drinking or smoking your days are numbered. The Doc let out with a sigh and lowered his bifocals and with a deeper concern in his compassionate stare, raised an eyebrow and nodded his head.
With some hesitation and deep thought Poke stared at the floor for a moment then asked in a low raspy smoker’s voice, How long, Doc?
After a solemn moment of silence, the Doc said, Two, maybe three months if you’re lucky, Poke. If you stop both maybe six months.
Poke sat and thought for a time, emotions flecking his placid expression and he finally replied, Well Doc… at this point in the game, that shit ain’t gonna happen. Looks like I gotta play the cards I been delt. It don’t make much difference to me bein’ it’s this far down the line. I still got time to do what I got to do. Then his voice broke with almost a whisper, Two months is more than enough time to take care of the son of a bitch.
Doc Wilson leant forward and turned his head and put his hand to his ear as if to hear better and said, I don’t understand what you’re sayin’, Poke.
Poke sat motionless for a time as his eyes along with his thoughts, drifted past the doctor and out the office window to the expansive cotton fields across the gravel road where dark fieldhands were hoeing the crops, and in the stillness of the moment he whispered… If this is last call you don’t need to understand Doc.
Poke wiped the blade of his disfigured nose from a car wreck several years back across the back of his freckled hand, then wiped his hand on his pants leg. He looked about and noticed a coolness had slipped in unnoticed like some silent creature of the night. Squinting, his darkly sunken eyes traced the tree line on a far ridge with a discerning lynx-like scrutiny. He blinked one eye shut and fanned the smoke from his face and spat a piece of tobacco over the railing; cocked his head to the side and noticed a dim crepuscular cast of light through the leafless limbs of the trees. He listened to their choral whisperings the gentle breeze brought for a long moment. With a tremulous motion he raised an arthritic finger and slowly traced the deep scar that cut diagonally across his face. Poke at one time had resembled the plane but handsome quality of one of those Hollywood B-movie stars of the late thirties and early forties, but the ravages of time and self-inflicted circumstance had not been a close friend over the last several years. He sighed and took a long drag off the cigarette as his expression crumpled with a deeply serious thought, You son of a bitch, he mumbled. Poke had lived an anchorite existence all his adult life and talking and answering his own questions aloud was just part of his life that he depended on for survival. His dreams had started to eat into his waking hours. He shook his head and shivered again.
The slightest scent of a strange foreboding odor drifted gossamer on what little movement of the wind there was. As he thought for a time his eyes flicked to different parts of the moss-covered ridge overhanging the dark creek. The thick moss now turning brown cast an eerie shadow deep against the walls, the major growth cantilevered out on a dead tree trunk, seemingly defying the laws of gravity. He took a deep drag from his cigarette and blew it out as he noticed clots of fog the color of day-old cream creeping up the creek bed toward him. The creeping fog shut the blue sky from sight and now totally engulfed the neighvertical slate walls to either side.
The whole of the trailer resembled that of a derelict houseboat that lists hard to starboard and sinks at the far end into a sea of winter-dead wisteria, honeysuckle, and kudzu. Upon first glance, a perturbing tangle of vines cover the walls and deck like some landlocked kraken that slithered up from the dark bowels of a turbulent netherworld and now rests in ambush beside the front door. Many a night the creature had literally reached out and seized Poke in his state of inebriation and clung to him ever harder with his struggle to free himself. Most times late into the next morning, often bordering on noon time as the reality of the insufferable heat and exhaustion from his struggles set in. After he woke, he would lay there paralyzed for an hour or so gasping up at a cloudless sky. A searing sun stung his inflamed eyeballs even through closed lids. Several times over the years he had been so sunburned he had to go to the doctor, full relief only coming a month or more later after his skin had peeled from his face, chest, and arms.
Over the years lichens had taken to the sun-bleached surface of a north facing wall blushing it with a dull grayish-green hue. Except for a thin serpentine tangle of smoke from the canting chimney pipe loosely wired to the roof with a strand of rusty barbwire, one would think the place had been abandoned decades ago. In the low light of the overcast a vague mysterious aura haunts the little structure with a sepulchral quality.
Poke noticed a light flutter of tiny snowflakes just starting to fall and glanced up to see a kettle of turkey buzzards lazily circling low against the hammered gray sky. He watched their wings titter on the thermals, Huh…somethin’s done happened, he mumbled. Maybe a dead deer or hog? Maybe some hunter done shot one and ain’t kilt it clean and it run off in the woods and died, he said blowing out a plume of smoke. He hadn’t heard a single hound bay in the woods all morning. Hum… somethin’ ain’t right, he mumbled.
Poke had lived alone most all his life save a few events he calls mistakes of the flesh when he took in mendicants of the female persuasion. These misadventures befell him when he over-drank and the desire of said flesh would rush over him, and he would fall victim to flights of fantasy and bizarre subversions. After four to five months of self-flagellation with Rosey Palm and her five sisters, a man needs some new acquaintances. Two or three weeks later, on more than a few occasions, these fantasies found him in line at the local health department waiting for the nurse to holler, Next, and when he stepped forward, she slapped him in the ass with a syringe full of penicillin. After a few tries at family life which lasted all of four or five days save one, he finally gave up the idea. Shit I can live a hell of a lot freer without this shit, he repeatedly told himself. Hell… a hard dick ain’t got no conscious and it cost ya all kinds of aggravation and a lot of money to boot. Why buy a cow when you can rent one at will? He asked aloud. In these lonely years Poke had taken the art of talking to himself, question, and answer, to a whole nother level.
He pulled a pint of Four Roses whiskey from a back pocket of his overalls, and gap toothed, gnawed the cork from the bottle. He spat the cork over the rail and tilted the bottle skyward bothhanded and gulped down a long swig. Lowering the bottle, he shook his body and gave out with a blubbering exhale and wiped his mouth backhanded. He held the bottle up against the light and checked the remaining whiskey and tilted it up again. His Adams apple jerked the amber liquid down his throat, and he belched and wiped his mouth again. He flipped the bottle over his shoulder into the huge tangle at the end of the deck like he had done a thousand times before. The bottle disappeared into the twisted vines with a whooshing noise followed by a piercing crystalline explosion. Poke cast an agitated eye back over his shoulder at the gray jumble of tentacles. Huh, he grunted. He glanced up at the buzzards once again and with a shiver turned and limped back through the trailer door, the rickety screen slapped shut behind him.
An hour or so later Poke came back out and looked up to see the buzzards still circling, their iridescent feathers reflected an opaline luster in the gray light, their huge wings sliced the air like fine honed steel in their silent and patient vigil. Poke thought for a time and took a second glance up at the buzzards and held his stare on them for a beat. For some reason he couldn’t think of at the moment he figured they might just be watching him. Watching him close as if dissecting him before he was even laying on the side of the road dead. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he mumbled, Humm… somethin just ain’t right. He noticed they had descended in their hypnotic ballet with the lower thermals rising up the face of the slate cliffs from the creek bed.
Buzzards ain’t gonna wait all day for the gut wagon to show up. They’ll be lightin’ on whatever it is here ‘fore long, he mumbled aloud.
He reached back in the door and grabbed his coat, baseball cap and rifle. Pulling his coat on he flopped his cap on the back of his head and limped off the deck and leaned the rifle against the rail. He laid his cigarette atop the railing and moved toward a small shack to check the deteriorating condition of the old wood on the door. He leant closer checking the military style hasp and lock he had bought home from his tour of duty in Viet Nam. The lock was of a special military design and had not only a key but a combination to open it. Locks had always fascinated him. Poke’s great Uncle was a lock and gunsmith of sorts and when Poke was younger, he would tinker and play for hours at a time with the old gun parts and locks in his uncle’s workshop. Locks never bothered Poke unless they were the lock on the cell door, he was being caged in. The locks on the doors of the cells at the Sheriff’s office were no problem to open. The few times Poke had been put in jail, he would wait until the Sheriff got drunk and passed out, then he would finagle the lock tumblers and just walk out the back door like he was taking a Sunday stroll. Poke’s ability to work with the intricacy of the locks was the reason the Army had assigned him to a bomb disposal unit during his tour of duty. This lock was just one of many acquisitions he had traded from a shady supply sergeant for cigarettes.
He pulled a ring of keys twisted together with a piece of baling wire from his pocket and inserted it into the rusty lock. He leant close and squinting, thumbed the combination and opened the lock. He looked around as he twisted the lock and pushed the door open. He quickly stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He fumbled for a flashlight on a workbench and snapped it on and the tiny room came to life in the dull light. Dusty cobweb-shrouded shelves were filled with pipe and end caps and wire and cardboard boxes of nails and screws, nuts, ball bearings, and a peculiar looking box of telephone pole staples. The long staples sticking up out of the box resembled bent and twisted rusty spider legs. A good size black powder keg sits tied up in a clear plastic bag on a corner shelf. Next to it are several electric cooking timers. Poke pulled a weird looking object from a shelf and set it on the workbench. A thick metallic looking circular device, resembling some sort of a polished aluminum collar. He studied it closely from several angles. The apparatus is hinged and opens into two half circular pieces. He thumbed a small door bolt he had screwed to the side and opened the piece. Then he reached to a top shelf and pulled down a crescent shaped sickle blade. The dull light glistened off its scalpel-sharp edge as he rotated it in his hand. He took extra care not to cut himself and placed the sickle blade into the fold of the apparatus and closed it and thumbed the bolt shut and set it aside.
He leant and groped in the darkness under the bench and withdrew a large mouse trap. Examining it for a time he set it in the center of the bench. He took up a pair of tin snips and an empty tin can Bushes Crowder peas came in and cut the can in half. Pulling a match from his pocket he lit a small acetylene torch at the corner of the bench and soldered the bottom half of the can to the hammer wire of the mouse trap. Twisting a short piece of tissue paper, he made a wick and pushed it through the hold-down loop and gingerly set the hold-down wire in place. Poke poured water from a jug into the tin can. He reached a candle from a box and took out his pocketknife and cut a short link and trimmed the wick. He lit it and melted a tiny pool of wax and set the candle in it and let it cool for a moment. Carefully tying a piece of bailing twine to the hammer spring he threaded it through the hold-down loop and knotted it. Ever so slightly he lifted the hold-down wire releasing the full tension onto the twine. With his forefinger he positioned the trap close to the candle with the twine just over the flame. After a moment the twine gave way with a loud snapping noise and the trap exploded and sprayed the water, extinguishing the candle and fanning a wide pattern against the wall behind. Poke picked up the flashlight and closely scrutinized the spray pattern of the water. A sinister smile crept across his lips, and he reached up and touched the scar on his face. Perfect… he whispered.
He reached for the bag and stopped dead still when he thought he heard something outside, he snapped the flashlight off and stood in the darkness. His eyes flicked back and forth with his thoughts as he listened. Was it a slight breeze that justled leaves against the side of the shack or was it an opossum rooting in the fallen leaves? Poke snapped the flashlight on again and placed the collar device in a black cloth bag, then the mouse trap and candle and tied the string closed and placed it on a shelf under the workbench. He snapped the flashlight off and cracked the door a bit. He then pulled the door open and stepped out. He twisted the key locking the door and slipped them in his pocket. Turning he checked the roofline.
Poke had cobbled the shack from oddments he’d pilfered from abandoned farms around the area. He’d overlaid the roof and sides with tarpaper to keep the moisture out best it would, but he noticed several places where the tarpaper had leaked over time. He’d double planked the walls with old slats he had gotten from several collapsed barns. The roof is a menagerie of rusting metal signs he came by from shuttered stores in abandoned dust covered towns that had been taken by the ravages of time, evidenced by riots of kudzu vines and lack of interest by those who’d left. He’d bent the rusted signs over the gable of the roofline and nailed them with horseshoe nails. He’d sealed most of the roofing with tar he had dug from an abandoned gravel pit over in Tallahatchie County.
Clabber Girl Baking powder, Hadacol dietary elixir, Garrett snuff, Miss Dollie’s “Sho-nuf” Chill Tonic, Nehi root beer, Orange Crush and Grape Soda, RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, Planter’s Peanuts, Mermaid Sardines, Lucky Strike cigarettes, the smiling face of Little Miss Sunbeam Bread. Wild and haphazardly laid up in a dizzying patchwork with no specific design or intention, just whatever fell to hand when the avalanche of creativity crashed down upon him. As with his own life, nothing about the little shack was plumb. Poke raised one quizzical eyebrow at his assessment of the creation. It’s good enough for who it’s for, he muttered with a chuckle.
Poke never liked hunting. But he had kept a rifle his daddy had left when he was killed, a Winchester model 70 30-06 close at all times due to a few run-ins with several of the local backwoods’ families. Poke had tried to keep his practice of bomb making as close to the vest as he could. He never talked about it to anyone. He had held true to his practice of bomb making so he could eat during the winter months and whenever he needed some meat. Whenever the notion fell upon him, and the thought of hunger popped up he’d make short pipe bombs and set them out in the depths and most swampy parts of the Shadow’s as booby traps for wild hogs or turkeys or whatever other animals came along. Poke made a point of only setting his bombs in the Shadow’s because no one ever ventured into that netherworld. But as in life there are always a few exceptions to every rule. His face grew still and darkened when he thought of one incident he’d rather forget. One of the bombs killed a man who had obviously strayed into an area where he had set three bombs. Poke never reported the event to the Sheriff. And no one he knew was about to go into the Shadow’s to find the guy even if he had reported it. The thought of the man’s death had haunted him over the years, but he always told himself, Don’t wake no sleepin’ dawg, it might bite ya.
He plucked his cigarette from the railing and hauled his rifle over his shoulder as he moved, smoke curled in the vortex over his shoulder and behind him as he headed down the burnished clay path. He noticed the snow was getting a little heavier as the chamfered leaves crunched under his footfall. He followed a tree line fronting taller pines leant from the constant wind whistling through the gulleywash of the creek and disappeared.
Some thirty minutes later Poke stopped and took in a deep breath, his heart thumping against his ribcage. With a grimace he shifted his weight to his good leg. His heavy breathing plumed like a horse in the air when he exhaled. The climb up the steep switchbacks of the pathway seemed to be getting a little harder to traverse in these latter days of his forty ninth year. He took in another deep breath and glanced up at the sky. The vultures still circled, silhouetted against the gray. The snow clouds had taken the sun most of the daylight hours the day before and the overcast had ebbed into a chilly late morning. A pewter sky seemed to leach into everything, the cliffs, the leafless trees, the bubbling water in the creek, the distant valley, even the soul of the land seemed to be drenched in an ashen gray. Due to the venturi effect created by the slate cliffs a slight wind had picked up down in the creekbed with an eerie whirring noise. He licked his lips as the snowflakes were forming larger and tickled slantwise across his face.
Huge slabs of limestone had snapped off the face of the cliff over the years due to the harsh elements of the seasons and had fallen away. Each had slid down the wall and stuck standing upright into the mud and gravel of the creek bed like huge, serrated razor blades marshalled in rows akin to wheeled equipment found in most military compounds. As if God had reached down and metered each row out exactly to the inch where the razor stones stood at attention. The bleached bones of several animals lay scattered around in between the slabs like fallen pieces of ivory, a surreal collage from the mind of a demented artist. The animal’s fate of falling off the ridge onto the jagged edges. Maybe some fell to their death in flight from a predator, Poke thought. Or maybe a mistaken turn at full tilt in the dead of night.
He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked down through a stand of leafless saplings dotting it’s scalloped gray face to see a man’s body lying face down. He held to an oak sapling and leaned over the edge and looked closer, the man’s body lay like a fractured rag doll that had been soaked in scarlet dye. The buzzards had let down and were now fighting over the most advantageous position on the man’s body. They squabbled and tore at the man’s clothes and flesh while attacking one another in the intervals.
After a time, Poke moved so’s to see better and sat on a rock at the edge of the cliff and laid his rifle down beside him. He pushed the small cloth sack of tobacco and rolling papers from a shirt pocket and made a cigarette. He took a kitchen match from a coat pocket and struck it along his pantleg and lit the cigarette and inhaled a deep draw and shook the match out. He squinted and fanned the smoke from his eyes with a cough. Placing his forearms on his knees he leant forward to see the body better. He divined that the man had bled out since a severed arm lay a couple of feet away from the body. He noticed two buzzards were fiercely battling over the arm trying to dislodge it from the frozen water.
Poke wondered, was the arm severed on impact with the stones or was it cast down beside the body after the body had been thrown off the cliff. He remembered seeing a deer that had run off this very cliff and was cut clean in half by the slate razors as if someone had taken a giant machete and whacked it in two.
Who is this, he was wondering? He studied the body best he could from the distance. He took a drag off the cigarette and flipped it over the cliff’s edge and pushed up standing, still staring at the body. He stutter-stepped backward and winced from the pain in his bad leg. What the hell, wonder how a man could get his ass in such a fix?
He glanced up and noticed the snowflakes were increasing in size. As if the world had abruptly altered overnight, he looked around, Somethin’s done changed and it might not be for the better, he thought. He picked his rifle up and turned, giving the body one last glance, and limped back down the path the way he had come.
It was some twenty-five or so minutes before Poke came out of the underbrush and labored across a sand bar stepping into the creek and crossing to the slate rocks. Several buzzards rose in flight at his appearance. He picked up a piece of driftwood and slung it as best he could at the remaining birds. They leapt into the air and were gone over the short tree line. He was cautiously navigating the serrated formations when he heard a loud rustle come from a canebrake behind him. He snapped around to see a Paint horse emerge with its saddle twisted off to one side of its body.
He saw the horse was under some stress as it nervously pawed the sand, a wild glaze in its eyes. He slowly moved to it as he recognized it and the silver inlaid saddle and bridle. The horse neighed loudly and shook it’s head up and down and backed away. Poke slowly moved closer.
Whoa now, boy, he said softly. By Gawd, what the hell’s done happened here?
He kept talking in a soothing tone as he inched forward.
That’s better ole buddy. Now just settle.
He gently took up the reigns. The horse neighed lowly, and Poke rubbed it on the forehead between the ears as he looked down to see it was bleeding from a deep cut on its left front leg.
Settle now, boy, he whispered.
Poke slowly eased around to the other side of the horse and loosened the girth and pushed the saddle back upright on the horses back. He led the horse to a sapling at the edge of the creek and tied the reigns off. His eyes narrowed from the snow brought brightness as he turned studying the body.
Poke shook his head with a bit of disbelief when he realized who the man was. Something cold touched him deep in his soul and made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He hesitated for a moment and thinking took grasp of his thoughts as to the bizarre image before him. He cautiously stepped closer.
I’ll be gawdamn. Yo uppity shits done finally caught up with you, you sorry son of a bitch. You done got what’s been coming to ya for a long time. World’s a sho nuf better place now you got yo ticket punched, he whispered as he looked back at the horse.
The silent snow falling slantwise was now cresting everything. Poke squinted one eye and glanced up, the buzzards circled low overhead again, winged reapers, dark and ominous, silhouetted against a white virgin background. Ain’t gonna give up are ya, you som’bitches.
The buzzards had dug the intestines from the posterior of the body, and they now strung like a drooping light wire across the rocks. Like a giant frozen purple worm.
Poke moved across the sand to the arm and leant looking closer. It was purple with bloody shredded flesh hanging out from the ripped cloth of the long sleeve. Poke noticed that the buzzards had worked the arm over pretty good. He looked around at the blood-spattered rocks. The arm was now frozen into a thick hard tegument of ice several inches thick. As if some ancient glacial body had slowly crept over this creekbed and entombed the arm centuries ago.
The complete scene was one of some hedonistic surreal domain, a sacrificial arena where these buzzard overlords had final say. He noticed decomposition hadn’t set in due to the cold front that had come through two days before and had frozen everything solid.
He stepped closer to the body to see that the face and head were split over the edge of a serrated slab as if someone had hit the man in the face with a very sharp ax, just to the left of the nose. The left eye had been dislodged upon impact and the eyeball hung slaverous in a stringy gelatinous crimson. Beneath it, a pool of congealed blood had drawn an army of ants and beetles, now dead and frozen in their tiny crystal crypts around the pool of blood. With some measure of concern Poke surveyed the body and slabs closely. He noticed the body and head were frozen solid to the slate razors. Poke stepped back and turned, checking the tree line once again.
This ain’t no place you need to be buddy if some asshole is lurkin’ about and shows up outta nowhere, he mumbled low.
He stepped in between two slabs next to the body and felt for a wallet or some kind of identification. He pulled a hand tooled leather wallet from a back pocket, and without checking its contents, stuck it in an inside pocket of his coat and stepped back. He noticed the edge of one of the taller stones had completely penetrated the man’s body and cut clean up through the leather material of his thick sheepskin vest. The protruding stone gave the body the bent and hunchbacked appearance of an old man who had succumbed to the ravages of toil and hard labor. With a building trepidation he glanced over his shoulder, his eyes tracing the tree line. He stood listening to his heart thump in his chest and the faintest cyclonic whir of the wind tumbling the falling snow.
He nudged at the arm with his boot and noticed it had frozen solid when it stiffly flopped over palm up. Grasped in the bloody fingers was a clump of long red hair that looked like it had been ripped out by the roots, droplets of blood increasing the intensity of its color upon closer examination.
Poke leant and half sat on a log to ease his bad leg for a spell and rolled another cigarette and blew smoke out and fanned it from his face. Gotta watch my back. Bunch of cagy sons of a bitches, he mumbled. He looked around, his eyes searching for any movement to see if anyone might have snuck up unnoticed. An expression of speculation fixed his face and narrowed his eyes as he turned and scrutinized the woods. His eyes flicked up to the leafless tree line rimming the jagged cliff walls and back down to a thick stand of willows running out of sight with the creek bed. Since childhood he had known that a couple of the local families that live in the area would have members out deer hunting this time of year or out to kill whatever came to hand. It was common knowledge in the county that a certain clan of these notorious backwoods’ folk were indiscriminate killers with no conscience. If it moved, they kilt it and that included two-legged prey as well if it come to that. The Shadow’s keeps its own dark secrets and many a man has lost his life trying to pry open that door to those very secrets. Some unknowingly died by unfortunate mishap. Others died from outright meanness and vile intention by those families that guarded this territory. Poor souls just being in the wrong place at the wrong time when they ran upon family members. Over the years Poke had heard tell, and he was more than sure the story was true, about these people and their unbridled malice, that of burning and scalping one of the members of a rival clan deep in the woods. They had left the body nailed to a tree and burning. And more than once on his forays into the Shadow’s Poke had been witness to the grizzly sight of a few human skeletons in the deep woods that had been scattered by animals. This was not to mention how many unknown bodies and other gruesome treasures lay at the bottom of Two Mile Lake. Poke had witnessed from the thick underbrush surrounding the lake several instances when these families would bring something wrapped in tarps and weighted down and paddle them out to the middle and rolled whatever it was over the gunwales and without a sound leave the way they had come. Poke had run crosswise with several of those family members over the years and he knew it was sudden and unavoidable mayhem if any of them was to show up now. We don’t need no shit this mornin’, he mumbled softly as he scanned the woods.
He squatted and noticed a talus of ice and snow had gathered along where the ice covered the arm. He studied it at length and blew out another plume. Half hidden with frozen mud, sand and debris caked to it he noticed a ring on one finger. He looked around and finally found a large stick and stabbed the ice around the arm. He dug and gouged the ice and finally pulled the arm free. Three huge diamonds crested in a heart shape configuration of rubies sparkled dull in the gray light. He sunk to his knees and leant closer. The fingers on the hand had swollen and the ring was firmly stuck in the skin. He reached and pulled the arm closer and with some effort managed to straighten the fingers. He pulled a thick strand of long red hair from the fingers and let it fall to the sand. Then on second thought he studied the red hair for a moment with more than a passing curiosity. Huh, he grunted. He reached down and picked the hair up and folded the strands several times and pushed them into the pocket of his coat.
He tugged on the ring with all his might, but it wouldn’t budge. He sat back on his haunches thinking for a time, his eye’s narrowing as he closely scanned the tree line again.
Poke flipped his cigarette into the creek and lifting his cap scratched his head and made a face reckoning what the hell would be the best way to wrest the ring from the finger. After a few moments he reached and pulled his knife from his pants pocket and opened the serrated blade. He pulled the arm up on one knee and placed the knife at the point where the finger was attached to the palm and started a sawing motion cutting into flesh and bone. The blade caught in the bone and when he pushed harder the blade slipped and cut his index finger and he dropped both the arm and his knife and mumbled aloud, Gawdammit all. He examined his finger and wiped the blood on his pants leg. He picked the arm and knife up and started the process once again.
After a time, a sharp cracking noise like cannon fire echoed from beyond the tree line and several crows cried out in alarm as they flushed from the snow laden branches. Poke snapped around and stopped dead still, an expression of deep concern blushed across his face, his eyes piercing the underbrush at the edge of the creekbed for any sign of movement. He listened to the well-nigh silent sounds of the forest for a long beat. He could faintly hear in the distance long icicles snapping off the face of the slate cliffs with the upper wind. A chorus of chime-like sounds tinkled echo-like as they cascaded and bounced down the face of the rock. Musta been tree limbs snapping off with the weight of the new snow, he thought. He turned back and finished severing the finger from the palm. He held the finger up to see was it still draining blood. A gnarled and purple arthritic old witch’s finger, the nail chipped, and dirt crusted.
His bad leg was starting to ache from the cold and with great effort he pushed up standing with a bit of a stagger. Gathering his balance, he limped to the creek and dipped the finger in the water and tugged on it again. The ring didn’t budge. With a huff he held the finger out at arm’s length as if it could hear what he was saying, Tace Mingo, you ornery son of a bitch. He took the finger and rolled it bothhanded in his palms as he blew into his hands for a long moment. The finger thawed a bit and he tugged with all his might again and it finally relinquished the ring. He examined the ring for a moment then tossed the finger toward the far side of the creek. The finger made a thudding noise when it crashed to the ice and slid off into a deep swirling pool with a slight splash. Poke’s index finger was throbbing from the cut and the cold, and he laved his hand in the frigid stream.
He checked the tree line once more and slipped the ring and knife into his pants pocket. He picked his rifle up and giving the body one last long study noticed the snow had crested several inches thick over its entirety. Poke held his gaze on the body for a length of time when something stirred deep within his soul. He shivered as his expression deepened with the thought of what could have been. Welcome to death valley, you son of a bitch, he said aloud, his breath pluming in the air. The prostrate figure now resembled a bizarre piece of cemetery statuary sculped from the cluttered mind of an extremely eccentric artist.
With a shake of his head, Poke broke his thought from the body and glanced up and saw the snow had already softened the weather chiseled angularity of the cliff face. Drifts of snow had banked along deep diagonal fissures fracturing into horizontal shelves. Leafless sprigs had sprouted from bird cast seeds and stuck up through the snow from the crevasses like thin bony witches’ fingers. The wind had picked up a bit and the snow was beginning to fall at more of an angle. The whims of nature’s ragged artwork had, over the years, sculpted a zig-zag design all the way down the face of the cliff and he knew the snow would eventually cover any tracks or evidence that he had ever been here. He glanced back up at the jagged palisade and lifted an eyebrow, a thought curled the corner of his lip. He started to move when he heard the high lonesome cry of geese hidden in the clouds, he stopped, listened. Their shrill call beckoned memories of long ago from deep within. Their honking, fading with their journey south, yet somehow their call, haunting as if lost somewhere in time. As if they understood the clocking of the universe, of eternity, time to move on. He stood for a long moment, the profound silence, a medicinal ointment upon his soul.
The low moan of the daily train whistle pulling out of Hattie’s Knob faintly called out through the snow. Poke’s grandaddy had been an engineer on the Illinois Central Railroad and when he died, he left Poke his railroad watch. Poke pulled the chain on the watch and pushed the little button on the side and the cover flipped open. He checked the time, 12:45 on the nose, he said aloud. He snapped the cover closed and slipped it back into his watchpocket.
He moved toward the horse and noticed the snow was falling heavier. He pulled his cap down and shuffled his coat about his body as a gust of wind spun tiny tornadic flourishes of snow and leaves across the sand and up into the air in front of him. He took full scale of the high cliffs and the wonderland of snow in the creekbed, an illusory quality one might see in one of those 1940’s winter paintings by some unknown artist.
Reaching the horse, he untied the reigns and he and the horse were consumed by the slantwise snow as they disappeared into a section of the woods fronted by giant bamboo cane, tall as a three-story building.
“In this book I am a bystander and I know it.”
John Steinbeck’s comment on East of Eden.
----------------------------------------------------
I to have known from the very start of this novel,
that I am only a bystander to the souls of these
characters and the depth of this story. Writing is,
a lonely task and sometimes can be overwhelming,
and destructive to the writer… yet writing can also
be a wondrous and exhilarating adventure into
the depths of the human psyche. Fame and fortune
have no realm here.
It is simply, one on one with your soul and the vast
imagination of your mind.
SOUTHERN RAPTURE is without extravagance, magnificent, presented with a soulful iatric quality, penetrating and weighty with moral purpose. In light of what is happening in our society today with the black and white situation, and the political atrocities that have been born out, this is a most timely piece of writing. Joseph Tidwell’s Southern pathos oozes from every word as if you were standing right next to his characters, becoming an integral part of the story; as if each character is carved in intaglio, sculpted from the boundless quarry of his imagination. With an underlying fierceness of authenticity, he delivers with a jarringly poetic voice - visceral and spellbinding. – Tim Cavin
SOUTHERN RAPTURE is a very timely, yet ageless chronicle of ancient wrongs, hardships and redemption told with an elegant and excitingly fresh voice. Add the name Joseph Tidwell to that list of Cormac McCarthy, William Gay and Agee. – Tom Novack
SOUTHERN RAPTURE is an extraordinary novel of profound Southern sensitivity. With Joseph Tidwell’s ability to convey a work of such unusual beauty leaves no doubt that he is on his way to becoming one of the South’s true storytellers. An emerging talent to be watched. – Lawrence Dockery
The pages of SOUTHERN RAPTURE seethe and tumble with a deep human quality, a timeless dignity accompanied by philosophical shades of meaning, beauty and pain. Tidwell’s writings traverse very high and sometimes difficult planes. He delves into the piousness, bigotry, hypocrisy, and corruptness of the human soul. Joseph has created a delicate sensibility, an almost verbal music and photographic imagery in the writing of this new novel. – Ashton Rim
# # #
It’s been said that the Mississippi Delta runs from the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis all the way down to Catfish Row on the banks of the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. There is no other place on the face of God’s green earth quite like this delta land. In many places it is a monumental space beyond comprehension, physically, mentally, and spiritually, and at times can be overwhelming on a grand scale, especially in the insufferable noonday heat.
Picking cotton is a simple and terrible work. Yet, in all and each private and silent heart, there is a quickening of the spirit that races through the human soul at this time every year. A tension of reluctance to start as if one were going to take from the land, its very soul, but the backbreaking work is still there to be done.
And, after all the bloodsweat work and prayed over crops have punctured the good dark earth and risen to full height, when the cotton bolls have fully opened and spill forth their precious gold, the people are drawn back to the land by some unseen holy magic, their very lives, dreams and hopes cresting upon the outcome of this new crop - the climax of one more year’s heart-wrenching labor which yields so little at best to so many, and quite often, in the end… nothing at all.
There quivers and vibrates an engulfing tenderness deep within the heart and soul, and all about the closeness of her being drifts an aura, a majesty, a beauty, a radiance of impeccable wonder that dwells nowhere else but within the heart of the souls that inhabit this precious land... this is... the Mississippi Delta.
MY LAND- MY PEOPLE
Tommy Jo Blain
In my cottage on Theroux Plantation
May 30, 1962
Mercy Springs, Mississippi
It’s only dawned on me since I’ve gotten older exactly how much I truly love this land and the wonderful people who inhabit it. An obsessive passion for the people and the land listing toward neurosis would be closer to the bone. There ain’t no place on the face of God’s green earth quite like the Mississippi delta. Least not any place I’ve ever seen. You had to be born in and of the land to hear it. It’s like a gentle zephyr constantly stirring in your heart, an ancient plainsong which hovers o’er this wonderful dark earth, a deep and mysterious melody which hovers o’er these wonderful souls.
When I got old enough to help daddy and the others pick cotton, after we got through each day, and everybody had left I would stand out in those endless fields all by myself and watch the dust trailing up behind their old trucks as they disappeared into the wobbling heat waves shimmering the far horizon.
Alone.
You ever really known that feelin’? That true to the soul feelin’? I ‘spect everyone has at least once or twice in their life. I mean truly alone, without the net of some numbing agent, no crutch, no hand to hold you up when you fall. It’s not an easy feelin’ to deal with and it takes a good deal of getting used to. But as I see it in this time now, the images of the land and surrounding towns are of a repetitious, vague, wraith-like remembrance tumbling back in my mind. Faded and crumbling into the decay of an endless alluvium mantel that once lay rich and fertile over this sanctified ground like a golden shroud are the skeletal remains of towns and other small communities spotted across this grand old delta. Places now swept away by an indolent and heartless time along with the people who once toiled with the hardships of this parched earth. Past images, flashing like dead bones of the old crumbling in the mind, now seems somehow mysteriously contemporary, becoming clearer with each passing thought, haunting the galleries of my mind. The formidable townscapes of what used to be have fallen asunder with the erosion of hope as these rich and powerful palimpsest cover their malicious debacles in the name of progress; impenitent illusionist, pious and fraudulent in their hypocritical display of virtue have ravished this land… this very juncture in history. With a pigheaded inflexibility they clove to the strictures of their own accommodations, their blind cupidity outweighing any sense of dialectical reasoning.
And the bleached bones of faded dreams by the ones who tilled this soil are yet silhouetted against the dying light. Their hags-breath of frustration still cries out across this flatland shriller than all music of man. Only a few souls left to recount the truth of what marked an ineffaceable time in the rape of, not only this once boundless portion of earth, but the common people who dwelt upon it as well, a history written in blood and sweat and years of hard labor and the low whimper of tears and sorrow and nocturnal devotions.
Every land embraces its own jurisprudence, but the fortunate? ones of having been born into this silver-spoon proprietary don’t play by any system of laws except the ones they fabricate for their own devices. Their oblivious self-deception, their underlying treachery and garrulous prevarication has defiled the land and the lives of the people embedded here with their ignorance of a great and complex human condition. Their insentient attention and noctambular approach to the problems of this disadvantaged populous is an atrocity of extraordinary magnitude. This marl, variegated with the souls of centuries, this very clay from which we have all risen and will rise from in the future and fall back to in the end, has deliberately and unscrupulously been devastated and manipulated for advantageous profits of a god unknown to those who do not hold covenant with the land.
Bein’ alone can heal ya or it can kill ya. Bein’ alone can mean bein’ alone in your mind and it can mean when there’s nobody around. Bein’ alone is a scary experience… especially in your mind. I’d wade out into those chest high cotton plants, walk across that snowy plane, bucking through the rows not down between them. I could feel the strength of the land bearing up through the plants as I forced my way between their thick stalks. I could feel the strength of the people who had toiled over this precious ground as if their hands and arms were reaching for me up out of the earth itself. And I would stand for a long time and just listen to what the earth was tellin’ me, what my soul was tryin’ to tell me, what the universe was whisperin’.
The wispy azure above and the rustle of the wind through the plants and the sound of the good dark earth compressing under my footfall always set my mind in a tranquil mood. The big clods bursting with a rich dark moisture, the moister of life and birth and new beginnin’. But it also makes me think of the old and the past and death as well. It’s a moment like no other I have ever experienced, probably never will experience again in this lifetime.
To this day it moves me to my very core, a passion of unrest; oft times it seems like the loneliest place on earth, then again, at times, the most peaceful place in the universe. Both can be a real good feelin’ at times. Yet a healin’ place culminatin’ in my deepest inner sanctum. A deep inner peace you carry with you for the rest of your life. Like your first love or your first kiss, you never forget it. I can be smack dab in the madness and hysteria of any large city in the world and when I think of this land, these people, I immediately become calm. That’s what this delta land does to the soul… calms it.
I’d watch that red sun boil down on the horizon and my mind would be racin’ with thoughts of the past crashin’ into the thoughts of an unknown future. Livin’ in the moment is a hard thing to do for most people. Most people seem to let their ego’s get in the way of the moment, like some other trivial thought is more important than this very precious moment of life. And I would think of all the souls and life, man, woman, and beast that had toiled and lived off the soil of these fields; of all the life that depended upon this fertile loam and knowin’ all of them had seen the same sunset vanish below the treelike like I was witnessin’ at this very moment. But I’ve always known I was seein’ it different, not quite the same as they saw it. I knew I hadn’t come close to loosin’ what they had had to give up in life. And I understood then and there, standing in between those endless rows of cotton, in that frightful first realization, that I had been given a great gift in life. An indelible responsibility had been etched upon my soul when I was born into this land. Something my soul could not ever get away from. Something my soul has never wanted to get away from. It had been placed in my heart by an unseen, unknown love for this land.
A lesson in something about life by all those who had passed before me that I had not known, would never meet or see other than read their fading names on a flat headstone layin’ in some weed-patch cemetery, and I felt sad, and yet I felt happy at the same time, in a strange way, that I had been lucky enough to even touch the same ground those great souls had trod over the centuries. And knowing that I could make a difference, however slight, as far as I was concerned, their life’s accomplishments would not go unappreciated.
I am deeply humbled by what this unsung populace has had to endure… deeply. And now, with the knowledge of their obligatory debt that they have had to pay due to their unfortunate encounter with life in this horrendous increment of time, in their lament and deep harmony of dread, I have come to understand their meaning of life, the misfortunes of their emotional, physical, and spiritual worlds. Yet I also have acquired a greater appreciation for the sweetness of love and passion that is interwoven into the adagio of their life’s song; that of seeking an inward peace that underlies one of the greatest oppressions ever lain upon any human being. And even though the glories of their life’s accomplishments be deposed by the ignorance of some unconscious overlord, they are still the kings of their own souls and are bound up with a moral fiber that is imperishable. They have all, out of a severe necessity, performed their virtuous life’s tasks and carry the shield of ‘journeymen of grief’ with a quiet vigil of hope and transformation which oft times borders on rage. A pardlike spirit haunting these lives, tracking them with predator stealth in the disguise of age, sickness and misfortunate that will in the end commit their flesh back to the dust. Back to the high court where death keeps its pale vigil of beauty and decay, fading into the cobwebs of memory like a cloud which has out wept its rain. Most never understanding the vagaries of chance… such is the breath of life.
The sunlight reflectin’ off the stony slabs angled over their graves speckle the tree line of the distant hill and speaks volumes to the heart of anyone who truly listens to what they are sayin’. I could feel their soul’s drifting past, whisperin’ their sacred stories to me with the smell of the new turned earth lingerin’ on the wind, a thousand emotions swirlin’ in my heart at once.
Life and love are about happiness and loss, a woman and a man are far more than just a physical body to do hard labor for other uncarin’ beings. I’d pick up a handful of dust and hold it close to my heart and think of all those people who had been, simply worn out by this land.
You can see it in the horrid condition of their dwellings, equipment [what little there ever was of that] and animals, even their own physical beings, after an all too short a time, were torn down by the physicality of their forced labor. I could feel the sweat and blood and life in that dust. It’s like my hand would be trembling with life, the dust siftin’ out between my fingers. I could feel the pain and toil of every soul that ever worked this land, poundin’ right there against my heart, cryin’ out for understandin’, cryin’ out for the slightest recognition for this terrible task they were forced by their heritage to effectuate.
Into a lifetime of this cruel labor for other’s profit they focused so intensely their minds, their bodies, their spirits and their strengths on acquiring the simplest and needed things like food, clothin’, shelter and other everyday expenses that they scarcely had time for themselves. And, not long into the life of everyone who works this soil, the plainness and repetition become merely an unconscious endeavor, this daily arduous toil regressing into the simplest motion passed forward from father and mother to son and daughter: ploddin’ through life without a choice or plan for the future hope of a better life.
Waste!
What a terrible and wrongful waste of humanity by those despotic lummoxes (who own the land) in the pursuit of their piffling blind greed. But yet, have they not wasted their own life’s time by wallowing in their egregious pursuit? And now, does not time waste them in the idle boredom of their last long frail days of discontent; an agonizing loneliness of time to ponder even the slightest nod of recompense that might have changed the lives of so many for the better.
Memories, cryin’ out so as not to be swept up and lost on the winds of the non-carin’, aimless future. The delta is the only place I ever found where you can feel your soul pound against the good dark earth, a lifetime for many, and if you listen close enough, underneath it all, you really do love what you hear, an ancient harmony, a divine harmony, a mellifluence unto the heart and soul that is never to be stilled.
They’ll never be able to take that from my heart and soul, all those wonderful and tragic memories, like skeletal gossamer puppets, they dance above the far horizon in the stifling noonday heat.
A picaresque dramedy navigating
the farcical potholes in the life of Millard T. Lippenpool III
and his multi-cultural merry band of misfits…
Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of his or her soul –
is bonkers to the bone…
INTELLECTIONS AMID MAZY CONTEMPLATIONS,
IMPECCANT, AMUSIVE AND EXCITING MIRTH
The inmates ARE truly running the asylum…
Galveston Island and Austin will never be the same…
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Nietzsche
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials…
Lin Yutang
Millard T. Lippenpool III… “Quixotic Knight Errant.”
Art, invention and nincompoopery are his raison d’etre… of course this goes along with an extremely relaxed approach to any vague resemblance of what is known as honorable self-discipline. A cross between “Ignatius J. Reilly” from A Confederacy of Dunces and “The Dude” from the Big Labowski. Millard suffers from a ravaging case of Ergophobia. He harbors a deeply rooted aversion to anything even remotely related to or sounding like the word WORK.
SYNOPSIS:
Palace of the Oleander Moon
JEAN LAFITTE’S FORTUNE DU JOUR
IDLENESS IS THE MOTHER OF LECHERY
GET A JOB YOU BUM
YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS: ZERO
This ticket entitles the holder to one free
PINK POON WEDGE
(The world-famous house drink)
compliments of Misa Dusselldorf’s Bar, Grill, Grocery and Spa.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Contrary to popular belief, there is one eloquent, dynamic ingenious slob still unconsciously basking about the jocose catacombs of a very twisted, goofy and downright weird world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Bizarre would be a terribly inferior word to describe Millard.)
The one and only ‘Quixotic Knight Errant’… a thinker, a stinker
MILLARD T. LIPPENPOOL III/BOI/DMR - (III) Esquire (BOI) Born on the Island (DMR) Director of Manure Research, is Galveston’s own nincompoop contrarian, slob extraordinaire, madcap artist/inventor, paragon of lunatic street philosophers and dialectical reasoning?, iconoclast, galactic surfer dude, goof-off, ideologue, a wacky off-key musician who skips to an outrageously different drummer and has his own wacko band “Fatal Mabel and the Prosecutor’s”, an enlightened (albeit a dreadfully dull glow) shabby-chic gastronome and brewmeister (Creator of the now, world famous ‘BALD DONKEY BEER’ sold nowhere but Galveston and Austin), altered delusionist, a pugnaciously knuckleheaded free thinker/compositor and sometimes avant-garde pamphleteer/fabulist; is a purveyor of a very eccentric Quixotesque logic: Idleness is the supreme expression of Liberty.
A lovable Archie Bunker, a perverse Mother Teresa, a twisted Oliver Hardy and a heavy dose of Francois Rabelais all rolled into one; Millard has oft times been mistaken for an inebriated, giant garden gnome who falls into an orgasmic state of lachrymosity over a simple event such as a bowel movement or the negligible success of one of his goofball harebrained inventions. Over time Millard has become expert at taking the simplest of problems and dividing them into many little complex and unsolvable inconveniences in his daily life as he trips over one gargantuan buffoonery after another. WORK? ... holy shit!
In his oblivious fog, Millard has cast himself headlong, at a staggering angle of passionate disagreement, against what seems to be the entire modern world and the dialectical imperialism so ravenously groped after by the immoral majority of its numskull inhabitants and their heinous obfuscation of social and judicial equality.
Millard has formulated, actually pilfered a credo: Yol bilen kervana katilmaz. He who knows the road does not join the caravan.
A fashionista of legendary dimension (in his own mind) Millard’s sagacious view of his superb taste in life and wardrobe seems rather evocative and groundbreaking. In Millard’s own words, “en vogue at all times,” which is in direct opposition and cast a dismal light upon his creative process in general, and Millard is sure to feel the slings and arrows flung from the chaste lips of creatividad de la madreherself for the folly of his severely tainted canard.
Tarnished Elvis sunglasses sit askew under a dented “Lawrence of Arabia” pith helmet crowned with flames and a Rolls Royce hood ornament super-glued on top. A dead caterpillar of a mustache splayed cheek to cheek, lies plastered flat with sardine oil. A Spanish style sateen cloak with an airbrushed likeness of Honore’ de Balzac crested in the middle, displays beneath the rendering a slogan/motto: LIVE FOR INVENTION. And below that in smaller letters reads, “If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”
The cloak cascades over Millard’s beer gut and tattered pair of voluminous boxer shorts fringed with gold ruffles and lends to a comfortable, unencumbered mobility set in full concert by his albatross-like waddle. A fading “Funky Chickens Racing Team” wife beater top supplies a very airy summer feel and ping-pong paddle-like cowboy boots of Millard’s own “genius design,” supply ample relief from his swollen, gout-ridden feet.
Between fits of genius? invention, excursions of misdirected delusionary nincompoopery and gazing too long into the creative mirror of his life’s illusion, Millard stumbles through a succession of life’s battles against society’s most flagrant abusers, like some disheveled knight flailing at the void with a tarnished silver spoon for a sword and a potato chip bag over his head.
After all, a deranged world society such as we cohabitate (like any benign family) tolerates and even admires and encourages eccentricity tittering on the fringe of such an uncommon lunacy.
Residing on the top floor of the abandoned OLEANDER MOON HOTEL, Millard lives with his gathering coterie: Tallulah B. Peckerwood, a frazzled and psychotic pet rooster he won in a cow-turd throwing contest at a county fair up in Mississippi. Maria Minestrone, (a never-ending work in progress, both mentally and physically) a life-size ventriloquist dummy who is Millard’s alter ego and social advocate/terrorist with a jealous streak. And, Rexene DuBois, Millard’s dulcinea/live girlfriend, a saxophone playing, concrete truck driving six-foot five inch ex-marine transsexual and Galveston’s own Miss Sand Crab Queen. Rexene is an Adonis with E-cup implants, a pink boa, skin-tight shorts, pink combat boots, a Mohawk haircut with a queue down her back and a tilted tiara.
Rexene has long thought, as have Millard’s ludicrously odd menagerie of street friends/freaks that he should cut the starving artist/inventor crap and (land the big one) get a real job.
He does… but, unable to stop his screwball spiral toward oblivion, Millard flops and fumbles, tumbling ass over teakettle out of control, crashing through a plethora of harebrained adventures and jobs, each one more bizarre than the last.
In addition, all this is compounded by his daily life puzzling “Fortune du Jour,” from the plastic pirate fortune-telling machine chained to a rusty drainpipe in front of the Balinese Room on Galveston Beach. A life without a daily fortune from his buddy (the stuffed pirate in the plastic box) is no life worth living. For all of Millard’s endeavors, be they mental, physical or spiritual have, as has his life, crumbled into full-blown disasters.
Yet, in his oblivious little world he manages to survive them all including an unscheduled trip to the loony ward at the Texas State Mental Hospital up in Austin and finally being thrown out on his ear because they deemed him too crazy. Of course, this was after he blew up the sardine and fish guano processing plant where he was night manager, and he approaches each event with his own eerie rationale.
With his symmetry and balance flopping severely out of control, his life’s timing mangled and terribly disjointed, Millard titters on a very shaky wire somewhere in his vacuous cloud between creative genius?, and being utterly lost in the constricting tentacles of his own psychosis. Laissez les bons temps rouler (Let the good times roll)
Idleness is the supreme expression of liberty.
Palace of the Oleander Moon
*Cast of characters*
MILLARD T. LIPPENPOOL III/BOI/DMR
(Esq. III– Born on the Island BOI – Director of manure research DMR)
Galveston’s own nincompoop contrarian, slob extraordinaire, madcap artist/inventor, paragon of lunatic street philosophers and dialectical reasoning, goof-off, ideologue, a wacky off-key musician who skips to an outrageously different drummer (his own), enlightened (albeit a dreadfully dull glow) shabby-chic gastronome and brewmeister (Creator of the now, world famous ‘BALD DONKEY BEER’ sold nowhere but Galveston and soon to be Austin), altered delusionist, a pugnacious absurdist and sometimes avant-garde pamphleteer; is a purveyor of a very eccentric Quixotesque logic.
REXENE DuBOIS
Millard’s girlfriend, a saxophone and saw-blade playing, concrete truck driving, six foot five inch ex-marine transsexual with a Mohawk haircut and a long platted pigtail under her tilted tiara. She is Galveston’s own Miss Sand Crab Queen and wants to start a film production company with her best friend Pinky DeVow.
MARIA MINESTRONE
Millard’s life-size ventriloquist dummy and alter ego, social advocate/terrorist with a jealous streak. He is constantly refining this dummy as parts keep falling off.
TALLULAH B. PECKERWOOD
Millard’s frazzled and psychotic pet rooster he won in a cow-turd throwing contest at a county fair. The fowl hates Millard and attacks him every chance it gets.
VELLONA HELLYOUSAY
Vellona has delusional dreams of becoming an investigative reporter for the Galveston County Daily News and is Millard’s devout archenemy. (His personal pain in the ass.) But Vellona and Millard are lovers unknown to each other when they have a jump in the hay one night after a masquerade party when they got drunk and took off everything except their masks.
MISTER WISTERIA
Mister Wisteria owns Mister Wisteria’s Little Shop of Obscuria, Oddities and Floral Delights and sells sex toys under the counter.
HALLELUJAH GOMEZ
Is an ex-pro football player who was a lineman right out of high school, where he was a star player for the Port Lavaca “Fighting Sandcrabs”. At six foot ten and close to four hundred pounds he never went to college. After an ankle injury and bad knees, he retired from the Chicago Bears, and is now a co-headliner with Mona “The Lips” Tubbs as a drag queen at Misa Dusselldorf’s bar, grill grocery and spa.
PINKY DeVOW
Rexene’s best friend and owner of Pinky DeVow’s Exotic Pet Emporium, Bait Shop and Liquors R’ US. And soon to be a film producer with Rexene.
MYSA DUSSELLDORF
Disillusioned émigré with a chemical/drinking problem, raunchy attitude and owner of
Misa Dusselldorf’s Bar, Grill, Grocery and Spa. She resembles a cross between a flaming Danny DeVito in drag and a live cabbage patch doll.
SMOOCHIE DURDLEDUNKIE
A bagpiping unicyclist and a frail little fart of a man -- Misa’s love of her life – at this moment anyway. He resembles a derelict piece of jetsam that was cast up from the bowels of the surf as if the ocean had gotten seasick and barfed him out onto the beach. He is the drummer for two of Misa’s favorite local bands, Fatal Mable and the Prosecutors and The Masochistic Alter Boys – an ex-bluegrass Christian group that had been sucked into voyeurism by a couple of ex-Nun’s who had hooked down on the Strand.
MONSIEUR TOULOUSE QUEBEDEAUX
Octogenarian milquetoast plant manager for O.D. Toll’s Fish Manure and Sardine Processing Company. Mr. Q also becomes Millard’s part time squire in the meanderings of this Quixotic – farcical drama.
PAULO DeVULGA
Bungling - excommunicated Mafioso from New Yorkand new owner of O.D. Toll’s.
MONA “THE LIPS” TUBBS
DeVulga’s dippy blonde girlfriend and trapeze artist with her little flying pig, Muffy.
THE RIGHTEOUS REVEREND Lo’LANDUS DASHWOOD
Ex-used car salesman, ex-convict, infamous purveyor of spiritual fertilizer, a bombastic bloviator, a deceptively false prophet, white supremacist, provocateur of misguided information, and self-proclaimed evangelical messiah. A bible thumper with a sure-fire plan on how to get your ass through the gates of heaven…just send in that money. Jimmy Swaggart can’t hold a candle to this farcical clown/hypocrite. Him and Tootsie meet the day he gets out of prison and later get married, and she backs him to start his church. Of course, she sees him as a stooge she can make more money with.
TOOTSIE LaBELLA FONTAIN
(AKA – Grace, Hope, Faith, Charity or Prudence – Dashwood)
Owner of a topless bar in Houston, the Cristal Pistol. She meets Lo’Landus the day he gets out
of prison. She’s a chubby over-the-hill titty dancer. They fall in lust at first sight and Lo’Landus
tells her about his idea to start a church. She likes the idea of making more money and tells him
she will back him to get started in the church, but he needs to set it up in Houston or Dallas
where the suckers are abundant. The Cristal Pistol has been a very good investment and is doing really well, she drives a Lamborghini Countach. Of course, Lo’Landus sees her as an
open money pit.
RUDOLPHIA VASELINO
Flaming wrecker driver (a converted 1957 Nash Rambler), Elvis impersonator and soon to be masseur at Mysa’s Spa, who can’t keep his turban on straight and is constantly swatting at the dangling duct taped material.
THE “8’s” MOTORCYCLE CLUB
A gang of beach loving Dykes on Bikes from San Francisco and Millard’s unlucky number.
GYPSY
Millard’s psychedelic jalopy of a Cadillac hearse convertible and art car which at times can be mistaken for a rolling flower and windup sushi garden.
Galveston Island & Austin will never have to worry one little iota about staying WEIRD as long as Millard T. Lippenpool III and his merry band of goofballs are around…
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