Ohnstad sighed. “Must admit, no evidence against it.”
I thought it better not to choose in this matter of golems or Druids. Taking a quick inventory of Sheila, I couldn’t see much Huron in her. She looked more Irish than Indian. Like Esther, she spoke with animation and gusto, yet I sensed more vulnerability. Her long auburn hair was a jumble, her body hard to guess at because of baggy trousers, and her large green heavy-lidded eyes not unlike those of a Bassett hound. I felt a twinge that Esther hadn’t inspired.
“These sets are terrific,” I said. “You’ve out-Coopered Cooper.”
“Thanks. I have to admit, you’re looking at my best work. It’s sort of a convergence—everything I’ve done has been leading up to this. That’s why I was defying the diva, not my usual style. Divas think everybody else is in the service industry. Usually I let them think I know my place.”
“Know your place?” interjected Ohnstad. He looked perplexed. “You’re pretty adept at letting others know their place, or where their place is not!”
She looked at him askance as if to say, Shut your trap. To me, “Thor doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Again I thought it best to change the subject. “The trees and plants in these sets are so intense. Where do you get your inspiration?”
“Thor makes fun of me, but I’ve been taking adult seminars in Plant Spirit Medicine. Every plant has a spirit of its own—you just have to intuit it, speak to it. When I did these sets, I felt the painted trees and plants were speaking to me and thanking me for bringing them to life.”
Thor shuffled toward the set, as if he needed a moment for recovery, turned to us and said, “It’s just one feature of her complex personality, Jack. Sheila subscribes to many New Age notions. Let’s see if I’ve got them all—vibrational healing, channeling, rebirthing, pyramids, alchemy, astrology, Zen Buddhism, auras, multiple chemical sensitivity, shamanism, psychics, I Ching, vegetarianism, and not drinking water with food. Did I get them all, pet?”
“Dowsing, you left out dowsing. Thor thinks everything boils down to money and matter in motion. Esther and I try to convince him there must be something more out there and in here.” She pointed to her heart. “In here!”
“Plant Spirit Medicine, what’s that?” I asked.
“Better than telling you, let me show you sometime, Jack. I’ve got a day off next week after the opening. Let’s all go on a hike. I’ll introduce you to some plants.”
“Great idea,” said Ohnstad, “but just the two of you. No time for botany. I’ve got money to make.”
— Chapter Five —
TO THE KINGFISHER CASTLE
Next morning, recovering from another night of complex kabbalistic sex during which I managed to achieve the sacred number of three, I got a call from Tarbox. He had intercepted on his sheriff’s cell phone a message sent from one alien spaceship to another. These aliens had already mastered the English language, for they had no discernible accent. They spoke of “colonizing” humans and had set up a laboratory to that end in Kingfisher Castle.
“That could explain the strange lights coming from the turret,” I offered.
“Yeah, this is our big chance. Me and the posse are gonna catch ’em in our nets ’fore anybody else gets abducted. Thought you’d like ter come along, cover it for the press. I’m available for an interview and photo op.”
“What are you going to do with these aliens once you’ve caught them?”
“Me and the posse disagree on that. I say we exhibit ’em at the fair. They say we sell ’em ter Steven Spielberg. We agree they gotta force the Cardiff Giant ter stop having sex with our women and return ’im ter the Farmers’ Museum. We’ll need to feed ’em sumpin, so we’re bringing frankfurters and sauerkraut.”
“Good thinking,” I said.
That evening, after sunset, I met with Tarbox and his posse of locals at the Otsego County Jail on Main Street—a charming Second Empire edifice with copula, mansard roof, dormers, molding, and trimmed white-shuttered windows. Tarbox didn’t fit here.
The volunteers were from the Local Alien Abduction Focus Group, the LAAFG. They carried large nylon nets attached to modified fishing rods. We embarked on the Chief Uncas with lights out and engine turned low until we were about one-eighth of a nautical mile away. Then Tarbox turned off the engine and silently we cut through the water to the small estuary where the castle stood, looking spooky in the moonlight.
“Sure enough,” whispered Snodgrass, second lieutenant of the posse. “Lights in the turret. Dem’s aliens!”
They had been watching official police videos of swat teams but had all the coordination of the Keystone Cops. As an embedded reporter, I was carrying a video camera but hardly knew where to point it. Everyone had a different notion of which way to go. One tripped on his own net as he leapt off the Uncas, another fell headfirst into the water, two collided as they rounded the turret from opposite directions. Tarbox approached the entrance with an old boom box. He started blaring the coded electronic tones of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
We made our way up the winding staircase. I admit I was nervous about the outcome but well, next to an evening of miniature golf in Muncie, this was high adventure. We could hear the muffled sounds of surprised aliens speaking what sounded like the local upstate dialect.
“Who the Sam Hill are you?” one of them shouted from above. “Friends or foes?”
Tarbox led the charge into the upper chamber with Snodgrass and the rest of the posse flailing nets toward a group of six aliens with surprisingly hominid features—to the extent one could make them out in the dim light cast by lanterns. And the lanterns themselves were surprisingly low-tech for aliens, the sort you might pick up at a Kmart.
There were shouts and screams. “Get that one,” ordered Tarbox, mistaking a member of his own posse for an alien. The nets flew this way and that until the whole posse was wrapped up in its own nets. The aliens were standing about, looking down quietly at wriggling humans and scratching what looked like ordinary craniums. I was free of nets and continued recording.
One of the aliens approached Tarbox, entangled in nylon and helpless.
“Say, aren’t you that pig farmer Barry Tarbox?”
“County sheriff,” he snorted. “Now why don’t yah help me out of dis here net and let’s strike a deal. You tell the Cardiff Giant ter stop having sex with our women and yah stop colonizing us. Obvious yer aliens ’cause yah look just like us—in fact, you there, yah look exactly like Sam Fuller from Herkimer College. You couldn’t pull dat off without advanced pod technology. Sign this form!” He pushed a piece of paper through the mesh. “We’ll give yah some sauerkraut and yah go back ter the Andromeda galaxy. No shit.”
“But shit’s what it’s all about, Sheriff Tarbox.”
“Huh?”
“Did you say colonizing?”
“Yeah, I intercepted yer messages.”
By now our eyes had adjusted to the dim light. Sam Fuller, the respectably dressed spokesman for the aliens, seemed to have a eureka moment. He was quite articulate for a community-college instructor in remedial English.
“I think there’s been a mistake. This is as embarrassing for us as it is for you. You there with the video, kindly shut it down.”
I complied.
“I hate to disappoint,” continued Sam, “but we’re not alien colonizers. We’re the Local High Colonics Recovery Focus Group, the LHCRFG. Colonics, not colonizing, Sheriff Tarbox. To be a member, you’ve got to show proof of hospitalization.”
“For what?” I asked.
“I suffered electrolyte depletion,” said one group member.
“I got my colon perforated and caught septicemia.”
“I came down with amebic dysentery.”
“It turned me into a homosexual,” said another.
I knew something about colonic irrigation but had no idea there were high colonics recovery focus groups. “Why are you holed up in this castle?” I asked. By no
w Tarbox and the other trapped members of the posse were beginning to take Fuller seriously.
“Good question. Well, the best light I can cast on it is this: We feel a collective shame at having permitted twenty or more gallons of water containing herbs, enzymes, wheat grass extract, and harmful bacteria to be inserted into our rectums by technicians who didn’t know their own asses from holes in the ground. For the past two years we’ve gathered here and there in dark private places to talk it through. Dark because we can still hardly look one another in the eyes. Private because we’re afraid of being bugged. This castle is the ideal place. No electrical outlets. No frills. I guess you could say it’s a self-punishing environment . . . just what we need.”
“Barry,” said Snodgrass, “this makes sense to me. Why don’t we just bugger off and leave ’em alone?”
“We’ll let you out of your nets on one condition,” said Sam. “You must keep this to yourselves. The last thing we seek is publicity. We’ve got a full membership already and a waiting list. We can’t take any more applicants. Meanwhile, we’ll clear out of this castle. There’s a rusted mobile home full of muskrats on Gulf Road that will do just as well.”
Sailing back on the Chief Uncas, I asked Tarbox if he still wished to sit for an interview and photo op. He blinked and grunted, his dreams of glory at the Otsego County Fair now deferred at best.
“Let’s just say this was a trial run. The giant’s still at bay. Probably more abductions goin’ on. Me and the posse stand firm. We’re goin’ ter take back Otsego County. Cain’t you see? We just need a little more practice with our nets!”
— Chapter Six —
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
Tabby: “Tabby and Harris here once again, coming to you live from Cooperstown, New York, home of the Cardiff Giant. Lots has been going on here for your Thursday morning Cream of Wheat. We’ve just received an exclusive report that Kingfisher Castle was scene of a caper last night involving colonizing aliens and members of the Local Alien Abduction Focus Group, the LAAFG. But nobody’s talking. We’re fortunate to have with us an alien abduction expert, Dr. Albert Ockham of New York University. Why, Dr. Ockham, are group members denying this caper took place?”
Dr. Ockham: “I’ve spoken with group leadership. They are denying that they are in denial, which can mean only one thing—they are in denial. To their credit, it could well be that denial of denial has been pre-programmed through digital chips implanted against their will by the aliens. No one has yet stepped forward to deny neck-chip implants. I conclude that something very strange happened last night at Kingfisher Castle. Certainly there’s no denying there’s no evidence against it.”
Harris: “We invite our viewers to cast a vote on the question, Did members of the LAAFG confront colonizing aliens last night at Kingfisher Castle? Results later in the show.”
Tabby: “Now then, for what’s coming up in Cooperstown for your Thursday evening happy hour. It’s the gala opening of the Glimmerglass Opera and many celebs will be there. Hazel Bouche will sing the role of Cora in Last of the Mohicans and Martial Gaudi will be singing Natty Bumppo. There are rumors of a sizzling romance between these operatic superstars—rumors we can neither confirm nor deny. But do take note that neither superstar is denying the rumors. The opera is based on a true story by James Fenimore Cooper, a local.”
In room 227 of the Otesaga, Esther and I laughed our way through the coanchors’ drivel. “I thought they fired anchors when they reach a certain age—the women at least,” said Esther, on her second helping of whitefish. “Tabby’s bouffant dates her. She thinks she’s Jackie O. Those Chiclets hurt my eyes.”
“So snarky, Esther,” I said. “What’s your take on Harris?”
“Have you been to the Bronx Zoo? He looks like a warthog.”
“So my competition is a crone and a warthog. Maybe I don’t need to work so hard.”
“They want us to cast a vote. Shall I call in a ‘yes’?”
“Do it. Sheriff Tarbox needs a plurality.”
I left Esther in bed munching on toasted challah and closed the bathroom door behind me. I observed myself nude in the bathroom mirror. This isn’t something I often do, deeming my physical person a tagalong that requests minimal upkeep and the occasional gifts of chocolate and fresh air. Not quite six feet tall and fairly slender, I’ve received the occasional compliment, gratifying to someone who never works out. But I have asymmetrical features that emerged from an indiscriminate Midwest gene pool of English, German, Scotch-Irish, and the unscrubbed peasantry betrayed by my surname Thrasher. Not enough of a narcissist, you might say. I got up the courage to make an inventory. My rear end bore baseball bat bruises, my right arm displayed Reuben’s murderous gouges, my upper torso boasted scratches and hickeys inflicted by rough kabbalistic sex, and my legs had suffered abrasions by teeth and elbows at Kingfisher Castle.
“At this rate I’ll be hamburger in a week,” I said through the door.
“Kosher hamburger,” replied Esther. “You know, Jack, our zivvug was much improved last night. We’re not even partzufim but you aroused my mayim nukvim.”
I was a quick study and knew what she was talking about: Our coupling was in the same league with the supernals and I stirred her female waters.
“You are some nukva,” I replied. Frankly, my improved performance was owing to fantasies about my upcoming initiation into Plant Spirit Medicine, whose priestess seemed to have a more direct line to my yesod—or zayin, if you’d rather. I must say that Esther’s application of Kabbalah to everyday life seemed much more literal and numerological than the Kabbalah we find in Lawrence Durrell’s novel Balthazar, where this esoteric Jewish religion is enmeshed in spiritual mystery and ennobling. The great scholar Gershom Scholem established the central role of mysticism in Judaism. Doesn’t everybody know this much? But I was willing to play along with Esther for the nonce, since one rarely encounters the Kabbalah of Everyday Life in Muncie, Indiana. And there was no hint of suffocating piety in this adventurous woman.
That night, Thor, Esther, and I drove to the opera house for the gala opening. On the exterior balcony a brass ensemble blared Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
“That damn noise is triggering a migraine,” said Thor, rubbing his temples. We sat in the benefactors’ row next to Bittner, the composer, and awaited the curtain.
Yes, we waited. And waited. 8:20. 8:30. 8:45 p.m. The audience began to get impatient and thumped feet on the floor, shaking the entire aluminum box. Finally, over the sound system came an explanation. “We regret the delay. Miss Bouche begs to inform you that, being an Aries, she will be unable to sing the role of Cora until Mars is in declination to the orbit of Uranus. Happily, her attendant astrologer tells her that this will happen at exactly nine thirteen Eastern Standard Time. Until then we suggest you review the synopsis to be found in your programs.”
This announcement wasn’t well received. The booing and hissing of nine hundred spectators was unseemly but every bit as understandable as the communality of feeling that attends a lynching. Holding his head in agony at the clamor, Ohnstad shuffled up the aisle and out. Esther and I joined in the stomping and shouting. The uproar was all the more remarkable because the median age of this audience was roughly eighty.
At 9:13 p.m., the curtain rose and Cooper’s story as revamped by Bittner began to unfold. Sheila’s powerful sets and costumes quelled the mob for a time. Here were trees that looked like tortured giants, shaped boulders to rival Stonehenge, and a great waterfall worthy of Hudson River Valley painters. The Last of the Mohicans is, as you know, a story of miscegenation. The bad Indian, Magua, abducts and tries to seduce Cora—of mixed blood herself, so why all the fuss? Hazel Bouche seemed in good form and the audience was ready to forgive. Sitting next to Bittner, though, I noticed the composer flinched whenever Cora took center stage.
“What’s the matter?” I whispered.
“She’s shifting keys and getting the words all wrong!”
&nb
sp; As the opera wore on, the other performers seemed taken aback whenever they sang alongside Cora. Bumppo, Chingachgook, Alice, Tamenund, Uncas, and Magua began stumbling and losing their way. Bittner pulled his hair, seeming to lift himself out of his seat. “She’s changing everything!” he seethed.
When the time came for doomed Cora to beg the Delaware chieftain for her freedom from the rapacious Magua, the conductor laid down his baton. Over the sound system came the announcement: “Miss Bouche informs management that, owing to the recent declination of Mars relative to the orbit of Uranus, as it were, she will be unable to die this evening. Instead she will be treating us all to a happy ending. Since Cora will not be killed, Uncas and Magua have no reason to die either. In light of these last-minute changes, the orchestra is substituting the wedding march from The Marriage of Figaro for the tragic aria to have been sung by Cora and Natty Bumppo. Instead of dying at the hands of a Huron, Cora will be marrying Uncas.” Uncas was the good Indian.
There was loud booing at this fortunate turn of events. Bittner pitched forward in a faint and was taken out on a stretcher. But I must say that Mozart’s wedding march was worth a lifetime of cacophony by Bittner.
Just as the curtain calls began, there was such a round of thunderclaps that Hazel Bouche, beaming through her elaborate curtseys, apparently misheard the boos as bravos—in a final triumph of astrology over all.
— Chapter Seven —
THE STORM
Having survived a night at the opera, patrons staggered to the reception tent for champagne. Sheila emerged from backstage in a funk, no wonder. I accompanied her and Esther to the reception, glad to be in the company of both women without Thor looking over my shoulder.
The thunderclaps were getting louder and distant lightning more intense, but this performance of Mohicans had put mere natural calamity into perspective. Everybody drank champagne and refrained from throwing rotten fruit at the cast.
The Cardiff Giant Page 3
