by Gregory Hill
The new owner has erected an eight-foot chain link fence around the property and topped that with razor wire, and has apparently been acquiring a large collection of non-working vintage vans for a couple of decades. His flag pole features a confederate flag flying at half-mast and an American Flag flying upside down. There are surveillance cameras everywhere.
I’m betting our little Jim Jones has a deep-freeze full of human heads.
Inside one of my host’s unstable houses, there’s a nookish room containing a library of neoconfederate print-on-demand fantasy fiction. Notable titles: The South Rises Again, The South Rises Again: Part II, and Jane Austin and Zombies Slay Lincoln The Day Before He Issues the Proclamation of Emancipation.
Downstairs of this house, I find an old-fashioned basement bunker chock full of bottled water, flashlights, boxes of beef jerky, and case upon case—I’m talking about hundreds of cases—of canned cat food. The cat food can be explained by the presence of a tiger chained to the floor at the top of the staircase that leads into the basement bunker. I scratch the cat’s ears as I exit the house.
The compound includes a black-windowed cinderblock building, which I enter. Judging from the dusty pile of junk in the corner, amongst which are a postal scale and a Pitney Bowes machine, this was once the town Post Office. The back room is filled with vigorously growing potted pot plants. Neoconfederate survivalist stoners. I’ve seen it all.
*
I went thru all nine of the broken-down vans, expecting at any minute to find one filled with Russian tweens handcuffed to webcams. Thankfully, they only contained thousands and thousands of flattened two-liter bottles of Neon Green, the caffeinated carbonated beverage preferred by video game addicts and X-treme athletes everywhere.
After much poking around, I found my host in a tiny tool shed that was actually an enormous outhouse. Our man was seated upon the left hole of a double-hole two-by-twelve plank, reading a pocket-sized edition of the Koran. He was shirtless and marshmallowy with birthmarks all over his chest and an onyx ring on his left thumb.
Curiosity implored me to peer into the unoccupied hole, the one on the right. There was a light coming from it, that’s why I peered. A rope ladder led to its depths. Let me repeat. A rope ladder dangled from the second hole of a two-hole outhouse.
At the bottom of the pit there was a person holding a flashlight. I couldn’t actually see the person because he or she was silhouetted by the light and all I could make out was the top of his or her head, which appeared to be covered with hair.
I dislike saying “her or him” and “he or she.” Henceforth, when gender is uncertain, I’m going to employ the term thon. English is a wonderful language but it could use a little gathering around the waist.
So help me, I thought, thon better not be a Russian tween.
At this point I finally did pinch myself. This was precisely the kind of dream an asshole like me would have, complete with disturbing symbolic imagery. Man on toilet taking a dump on flashlit figure below. The flashlit figure represents Veronica, of course, and we all know who’s the asshole on the assplank.
The pinch did not wake me up, and so down I went.
19
I dangled at the bottom of the rope ladder, breathing as little as possible and with no intention of setting foot on the mush below. It wasn’t as stinky as I’d expected. More of a loamy scent, I’d say.
As I lilted gently on the ladder, I came face to face with the human at the bottom of the outhouse. She was grey-haired, wearing a pair of belly-high fishing waders and a crocheted bikini top. She had a canvas shopping bag over her shoulder and she was wearing a blindingly bright headlamp. She was scratching her shoulder with her left hand, which had an onyx ring on its thumb. No handcuffs anywhere.
She was at least sixty years old, with her hair done in a pair of Willie Nelson braids. Her skin had that spotty looseness that happens to old people.
I confess, the situation challenged my sense of adjudication. I’m not a prude. Ask Veronica or any of the other three women I’ve slept with. Then again, I’ve never sat on a plank of wood and read the Koran while taking a dump on a half-naked woman.
I looked more closely at my surroundings and I relaxed, a little. The two halves of the outhouse cellar, as it were, were separated by a plywood partition. Which is to say, nobody was being shat upon after all; this was an entirely different chamber from the one into which the Koran-reader was, shall we say, feeding Rumsfeld.
I held my hand in front of the woman’s headlamp so the light reflected back on her face. She looked awfully content. The matching onyx rings suggested that she and the shitter were married, presumably in a self-officiated black mass ceremony. What were these kooks up to? Whatever it was, it was deep, complex, incoherent, and certainly fed by paranoia.
There was no way I, as a referee, could possibly contribute to this chaos. Nor could I assist the underdog. I didn’t even know for sure who the underdog was. As for avoiding a blowout, good luck, kids. This one out had been blown beyond retrieval.
I ascended the rope ladder, exited the outhouse, and satisfied my need for mischief by piling up the weirdoes’ entire supply of beef jerky in front of their pet tiger.
Back to the road, and maybe I should stop snooping around so much.
20
Before I owned my current shitty sedan, I owned a different shitty sedan whose life was taken by a miniature poodle and a cellphone. This was several years ago, a Sunday morning, and I had no eggs so I got in my car—which, like my current car, had a broken air conditioner—and drove to a convenience store, this being one of those occasions where I prefer driving a car to riding the bus.
On the way home, a poodle marched and haunched down smack dab in the middle of the road, directly before my front bumper. In order to not crush the creature, I braked to a hasty stop. The dog was unharmed and the eggs did not slide off the passenger seat. I checked my rearview mirror, found no one coming, and waited for the dog to get out of my way.
The dog opted to remain where it was, lapping water out of a pothole. It had rained the night before. The dog didn’t have a collar. It did have a purple Mohawk. I was about to open my door and shoo the thing away when a pickup piloted by an uninsured text-messaging hillbilly plowed into my trunk at forty miles an hour. I ended up with egg on my face and a second-degree concussion.
The hillbilly truck driver exited his cab, and, still texting, leaned in my window and called me a fucking pussy for not driving over the dog—which was now being held in the arm of a one-armed man with spaghetti sauce dripping down the front of his shirt and the lower half of his body concealed by the weeds in his lawn—and then got back in his truck and drove away. As for me, I walked home, and then took a bus to the high school basketball game I had to work that night.
By the time I got to the gym, the concussion had settled in. It was like being drunk, except it wasn’t remotely pleasurable. The inside of my head had grown noticeably larger than my skull. With each step, my starchy brain politely requested that I lie down. It became hard to keep up with the game, or anything else. Is it still halftime? Why, then, did I just whistle the school mascot for a backcourt violation?
It wasn’t all bad. The disorientation led to one of the most bizarre games I’ve ever worked. Amongst the fragments I recall, I forced one of the home team’s cheerleaders to play point guard for the entire second half.
As a consequence of the poodle-induced car accident, I own a different shitty car with a broken air conditioner and I’m a swearing enemy of distracted driving.
In honor of my dead car, as I continued west on Highway 36 toward the town of Last Chance, whenever I encountered a texting driver, I’d remove thon’s phone and place it just in front of the left rear wheel of thon’s car. If time ever revs up again, your phone is toast, pal! Call it my calling card. Call it justice.
On to Last Chance.
21
This impossible dead-time world is a delusion generated by my own uns
ettled mind. I’m on a journey within my own subconscious. That explains everything.
Then again, if this dead-time is a product of my brain, none of this is happening; I’m either in a coma or I’m in a mental ward. Which means that I’ll either wake up in the aforementioned tornado recovery scenario with Vero—who, it will turn out, will not have recently ridden the pony with The Blad, who, it will turn out was merely a figment of my insecure imagination—at my side, or, at any minute, the electro-shock therapy is going to bring me back to reality. In either case, I’ll lose my status as the World’s Adjudicator and revert to my old life as a holier-than-thou freelance basketball official.
I find this distressing; in spite of the inconveniences and the cuckoldry, I’m growing accustomed to my life as a superhero.
22
I’m on Route 36, sitting atop a hill that drops directly down to a kind of valley. At the bottom of this valley rests Last Chance, a kind of town. This hill is a skateboarder’s dream. The pavement stretches into a mile-long half pipe whose slope falls midway between “harrowing” and “deadly.” Drop in at the top, and when you reach the nadir of the dip you’ll be doing eighty. Don’t stop now! Let that momentum haul you four hundred yards up the other side. And then down and up and down andupanddown until you come to a table-spun coin clattering halt at the intersection of Route 36 and Highway 71.
From my current point of vantage, there’s nothing to distinguish Last Chance from any of the other towns I’ve encountered on Route 36. Except for this wonderful hill. It overlooks the town and it overlooks this oceanic landscape of grass and powerlines and patchy blue western sky. Turn around. In the eastern sky, fifty miles distant, the backside of the hellfire storm is lit by the setting sun so the clouds become Olympian cauliflowers drizzled in the lusty orange of Louisiana hot sauce.
Let us address the name of this town. “Last Chance” obviously refers to a scarcity of goods between here and somewhere else. As in, look at your map. Not a lot out there, is there? No matter which way you go, it’s a long ways away. So come on in, fill yer tank, buy a plastic bottle filled with potable liquid, and best of luck with the rest of your trip.
I’m sure there are towns in Montana and Nevada and Wyoming and several other states to which “Last Chance” could be more appropriately applied. I’ve never been to Death Valley, but that’s a place that would merit a name like Last Chance. That is, if it wasn’t already called Death Valley.
“Last Chance,” though, might be overstating the matter. It’s only thirty-five miles from here to Byers, and twenty miles in the other direction back to Abila. Short of a traumatic medical emergency, you are unlikely to suffer any serious consequences if you, for instance, fail to fill up your gas tank as you pass thru town.
To conclude, Last Chance’s moniker is either:
A) A marketing gimmick dreamed up by some late-nineteenth century townsfolk.
Or,
B) It’s the name that a grateful group of exiles applied to the one place in the world where they could settle without persecution.
If we go with option B, and Last Chance is a long-established community of fringe-types, it would explain the presence of the neoconfederate compound I visited yesterday.
Pure speculative conjecture: Our neoconfederates, Jim and Jane Jones, were born in the town at the bottom of this hill. There they were indoctrinated into the Cult of the Last Chance (For Redemption). Upon passing thru the Blood Ceremony of Adolescence, they found that the townsfolk have a thriving relationship with Shirley Jackson’s stone-tossing-sacrificial story, The Lottery, which they took to be a primer on the management of fertility and corn harvests, to the point where the members of the Cult of the Last Chance (For Redemption) increased the frequency of public sacrifice from The Lottery’s once-per-year to once-per-week, which, in a town of 200 souls, could be charitably described as “short-sighted.”
After they were wed in a charming outdoor ceremony which concluded with the ceremonial beheading of the town’s dentist, Jim and Jane expressed their discomfort with the venerated tradition of sacrificing fifty-two random townspersons per year, not to mention the consequent need for the women of the community to beget as many children as physically possible in order to keep the town’s population from collapsing beneath this strident exchange of death-for-corn, to the point where most women—that is, the ones who weren’t randomly chosen to be stoned to death—found themselves dying in their late forties in the midst of birthing their twenty-first child.
Since their society frowned on anyone who expressed discomfort of any kind, Last Chance (For Redemption)’s council of elders banished the rebellious Jim and Jane Jones to a nearby ghost town where they participated in their own, less extreme and more prophylactic, version of the Cult of the Last Chance (For Redemption).
This concludes my moment of contemplation. I shall now follow Route 36 downward to Last Chance where I will poke around in some buildings and then continue to Denver and My Reckoning With The Blad.
But first, I turn for a fond, final look back east. Ahoy, hellfire storm lit like drizzled cauliflower. That storm is the only thing in this world that Vero and I could be simultaneously gazing upon. Turn away, Narwhal. Descend the hill to Last Chance and thereby bid goodbye to the last remaining sensory conduit between you and your almost-fiancée.
I shall do so. But first, I implore you, Well-Illuminated Pompadours of Water Vapor, while I am away, please be judicious to my beehive-bedecked Blad-boinking buttercup.
Hold the phone. I think I saw something.
23
Plans have changed. I’ve reversed course, turned my back to the sun, and I am now chasing my shadow. Denver will have to wait and so will The Bladster. Here’s why.
As I stood on the cusp of Last Chance and gave the hellfire storm one final, metaphorically-loaded look, an orbic white-blue glow began to emanate from within its blooming dark billows. The orbic glow grew brighter and brighter, and larger and larger. Strictly speaking, “large” is an exaggeration. At its largest, the glow took up just a tiny portion of the upper edge of one particular cloud that was forty miles away, but, goodness. It was something.
After expanding for several astonishing moments, the glow began to collapse and, in doing so, sent out seven crooked fingers of light, each of them splintering like water flowing down a black-lit gulley of some fluorescence. A gazillion electrons following paths of least resistance. Like water, or, more precisely, like lightning.
This occurred miles and miles away and I saw every detail and cherished every moment. The fingers of electrons traced outward from their shrinking blue palm like a firework designed by the wizard Mithrandir. The radius of the fingers expanded and then all at once they stopped growing. For a moment, the completed lines, drawn welder arc blue in the grey cloud, paused, their image complete. And then it all faded away.
The whole thing took maybe five seconds, maybe half a minute. I’m not much for temporal estimates at this point. Had it not burned itself into my retinas, I would not believe it had happened at all.
Denver, The Blad, Last Chance, you’re behind me now. I’ve got to go back. I’ll return to my hellfire storm and stand directly underneath the cloud that begat the lighting, for therein lies some mysterious, breathtaking shit. I know this to be true, just as sure as I know I’m alive.
I mustn’t lose track of that cloud. I won’t; it’s the one that resembles a young Henry Fonda.
*
It’s impressive what a little motivation can do for a fellow. I mean, I was motivated before, but that was evil motivation. Motivation to crush, destroy, humiliate The Blad, and thereby improve my self-esteem.
The flash of lightning in the Henry Fonda cloud provided an entirely different species of motivation. It was an excuse to exit my narcissistic state of woe and actually, maybe, start to get a grip on the malfunctioning world around me.
I walked thirty miles before I slept, I passed the Jones compound without turning my head, I looked in no car
windows, I stopped one time for food and water and slumber at the Abila grocery, and now I’m awake and marching again.
My eyes are fixed upon the cloud, ready for another burst of lightning. There’s been just the one, so far. My legs are athrob, the kind of throb that means you’re getting stronger. My feet are healthy. I keep several pairs of socks in my backpack and I change them after every meal, pilfering new ones as necessary. The knees are great. I swing my arms as I walk, maximizing my inefficiency like the Funnercise fellow used to recommend.
I’ll cover the remaining twenty miles before lunch. I barely notice the thickness of the air anymore. I can walk like normal. Only difference, when I really get to marching, my thighs swell and stretch at my trousers. Hulk strong. Hulk crazy.
I’ll pick up some sweatpants at the next farmhouse.
Ten miles later, I found some grey sweatpants in a dresser in a house that was serving a delicious baked ziti. The sweats do the job—so loose, so cool. I’ve discarded my tie and dress shirt and am now wearing an oversized t-shirt decorated with the silk-screened portrait of a NASCAR driver. Clad thusly, I march forth, hellfire bound, drawn by hope.
Hope is a goddamned complicated thing. Before hope entered the plot, I was happy to point guns and pull triggers and walk a hundred and eighty miles so I could pull a prank on a man who had nearly convinced my girlfriend that he was superior to me.
Upon taking care of my business with The Blad, I had planned to head to Hollywood to get Lauren Bacall’s autograph. Think of the havoc I could have wreaked in Tinseltown. Think of it.
