by Steve Vernon
“Maybe you ought to get your ears cleaned out.” The Prophet replied. “I think you might have misheard something somewhere along the way.”
I guess that he was still upset over what Bigfoot had said to him – but I wasn’t going to give up on trying to convince him to think differently.
“THEY’RE YOUR FRIENDS!” I shouted.
“WHO FREAKING CARES?” The Prophet shouted back.
He blared that last sentence at the top of his Magic Winnebago lungs – which were awfully freaking loud. In fact, he blared that last sentence so very freaking loudly that I am pretty sure that his blaring had left big fat purple bruises in the back of my eardrums.
“Friends don’t hurt each other’s feelings,” the Prophet went on. “Friends don’t leave friends out of the action. And friends don’t call other friends WINNIE!”
I couldn’t believe what he was telling me.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “Bigfoot is practically your brother and Coyote – well, he is almost like a sister to you, now isn’t he?”
The Prophet thought about that.
“I had a brother once,” he said. “His name was Tecumseh. Maybe you’ve heard about him. He had a whole lot to do with Canada winning the War of 1812.”
I knew that The Prophet had something to tell me. I knew it was something that he felt he had to get out of his system before he could get around to even thinking about helping Bigfoot and the Coyote. I even knew that I had to keep my mouth shut just long enough for him to tell me his story and then we could maybe get on with it.
But that didn’t mean that I had to like it.
“He sounds like a really good guy,” I said, trying to kid him along into agreeing with me. “Your brother, I mean. Tecumseh.”
A part of me wished that it was Tecumseh who was here to help us right now – rather than his brother, The Prophet.
“Tecumseh was a REALLY good guy,” The Prophet said. “Everyone said so. That was the whole problem. Nobody really ever seemed to notice me. It was always Tecumseh this and Tecumseh that. He was always the handsome one and he was the brave one and he was the one that everyone listened to.”
Are you freaking kidding me?
I had heard just as much of this story as I could put up with.
“ARE YOU FREAKING STUPID OR SOMETHING?” I shouted. “BIGFOOT IS GETTING EATEN BY A GIANT PURPLE DOG AND YOU ARE SITTING IN HERE HOLDING YOURSELF A GIANT PURPLE PRIVATE PITY PARTY?”
“You don’t understand,” The Prophet began to explain. “That isn’t how it was.”
Only I wasn’t going to put up with one minute more of his cry baby explaining.
There was a time for a talking and a time for just doing SOMETHING!
“OH BOO-HOO, BOO-HOO, BOO-HOO-DE-DOO-HOO,” I went on, just as loud and sarcastic as I could get. “POOR ME. NOBODY LOVES ME. POOR, POOR LITTLE OLD ME. EVERYBODY LOVES TECUMSEH. NOBODY LOVES ME.”
“Yeah? Is that so?” The Prophet asked right back at me. “I guess you wouldn’t know a thing about holding regular private pity parties – would you mister-my-Dad-has-died-and-I-don’t-know-what-to-do-about-it?”
At which point The Prophet opened all of his doors – even the refrigerator door.
“You can get out and walk home anytime that you like,” The Prophet told me. “If you’re going to shout at me like you’ve been doing.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
He wasn’t budging.
Coyote and Bigfoot were being swallowed by a giant blue amoeba death-dog – and this reincarnated Shawnee holy man was stuck on a few hurt feelings.
I had to do something.
But what?
So I came around from another direction and I decided to hit him with an unexpected heartfelt apology – even if I didn’t really feel much sorry for him at the time.
“All right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
I’m sorry doesn’t always cut it – but sometimes a simple heart-felt apology will go a long way towards settling any particular dispute.
The Prophet wobbled his doors a little and let his engine run a little softer, like he was thinking about what I was saying.
“So what happened to him?” I asked. “Your brother, I mean.”
The engine came to a full stop.
I sat there and I waited.
There wasn’t anything else that I could do.
“He died,” The Prophet finally said. “At a battle outside of a little place called Moraviantown. Even then he was a big man. He had to make a big deal out of EVERYTHING he did. He even shook the hand of each one of the British soldiers before he marched into a swamp. He was shot in the chest, defending that swamp. What a lousy reason to die – over a stinking lousy piece of swampland.”
I saw a few more sad streaks of windshield fluid running down the front of his windshield. The big old Winnebago shook a little – rocking on his suspension and I guess that was his way of sobbing.
I heard a bird singing overhead.
I let that bird sing on a little while The Prophet just sat there and sobbed and stewed in his own juices.
“All this time,” The Prophet went on. “I just wish I could have a chance to tell him I am truly sorry for what happened. I wish that I could have a chance to help him do EXACTLY what he was trying to do.”
Finally I knew just what I had to say.
“You told me that you’re my friend, now didn’t you?” I asked, trying very hard not to shout. “I didn’t mishear that, now did I?”
The Prophet ground his gears just a little in a show of frustration.
“What?” I asked. “Don’t you have any answer for me?”
That brought on a little more gear-grinding.
He spun his wheels a little bit in the mud.
Then underneath all of that gear-grinding and wheel spinning I heard five tiny words, barely beeped out.
“Yes,” The Prophet said. “You ARE my friend.”
“Well – friends don’t ever let their friends down,” I said, trying very hard not to raise my voice. There was a time for getting mad and there was a time for getting your own way done. “I asked you for help. You told me no. You told me to get out and walk.”
I didn’t even bother mentioning that I was a HECK of a long way away from my home.
“They are my friends,” I said. “And you are my friend. And you need to help me help my friends, my friend.”
I think I might have sprained my tongue on those last three or four sentences but it seemed to do the trick.
For a moment The Prophet just sat there saying nothing.
I sat there saying nothing right along with him.
I didn’t even dare breathe.
For all either of us knew Bigfoot and Coyote had already been swallowed by that giant purple death dog.
And then all at once The Prophet slammed ALL of his doors at once – including the fridge door – which shocked me right back into breathing – not to mention almost catching my finger in mid-slam – where I had been quietly reaching for a can of grape soda.
“Well?” I asked.
“Get in and drive,” The Prophet said. “My friends are in trouble.”
“You want me to drive?”
“Somebody has to drive,” The Prophet said. “It is the way that the magic works.”
I nervously sat behind the steering wheel.
“Squeeze that steering wheel just a little,” The Prophet told me. “And then lean in just as far as you are able to.”
I squeezed the wheel. I felt it squeeze back just a little. It felt as if the wheel were made out of some magic sort of super-sticky fly paper. I felt it pull me in, just a little – like The Prophet was trying to swallow me whole.
For just a half of an instant I was scared that The Prophet was still angry and that he would swallow me and then all three of us – me, Bigfoot and Coyote – would be stuck out here in
the backwoods of nowhere-at-all-in-particular. Maybe years later some archeologist would stumble in here and somehow dig up my remains half-buried in the steering wheel of a giant pink magic Winnebago travel home – and then he’d write a paper on how my Batman backpack somehow caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“Don’t be afraid,” The Prophet told me. “Just push in a little bit with your imagination and then let her rip.”
So I pushed.
I felt that steering wheel pull me in like it was made out of sped-up quicksand. I felt the spirit of that great mystical pink Winnebago wash over me and then all at once I was grinning through the steel and chrome bumper and squinting out of the big machine’s headlights.
And then the Prophet let it rip.
Chapter Twenty Two – The Prophet to the Rescue, Sort Of
Have you ever heard the sound of a jet plane getting set to take off? Do you know how the roaring noise will build and build and build until it feels as if your ears had been poured full of screaming sacred sea monkeys?
The sound that The Prophet was making was way louder than that.
The Prophet took off with me holding on to the steering wheel for dear sweet life.
I know that I was supposed to be driving. I know that was how The Prophet’s magic actually worked – but that didn’t help one single bit from me feeling like I was nothing more than a horsefly glued feet-first to the top end of a speeding locomotive speeding along on a railroad built straight down the mouth of the Grand Canyon.
The engine was roaring out loud. The wheels were spinning like crazy souped-up hamster wheels. Trees crashed to the ground and I am pretty sure that one or two of them actually uprooted themselves and hiked their bark up around their knotty old kneecaps as they scampered for cover.
Old Shuck got about half of a blink’s worth of time to see us coming straight directly at his big purple squatty old self.
And then we hit – the three of us – me, in a giant pink Winnebago ramming smack-dab into the middle of a giant purple Death Dog.
Now why don’t you try telling me just how many times in your life you might expect to use a sentence like THAT???
We made a sound like we had just hit the world’s largest rubber super ball bouncing hard against Old Shuck’s grape-colored hide. It was a little like hitting a gigantic elastic band. Old Shuck’s body sort of stretched in and around the oncoming magical Winnebago. The big death dog made a soft wet what-the-freak sort of sound as he spit Bigfoot out into thin mid-air.
Bigfoot hit the windshield of the Winnebago and he sort of flattened out across it like the shadow of a thin and runny steam-rolled fur-pancake. Bigfoot’s eyes were about as wide as giant Frisbees and his lips smeared against The Prophet’s windshield, leaving long slug-like tracks of Bigfoot spit smeared across the window glass.
I’m not saying it was pretty.
“HANG ON!” The Prophet roared.
I’m not sure if The Prophet was talking to me – or if he was actually talking to Bigfoot who was still hanging off of the windshield, trying his hardest not to die.
It might be he was even talking to himself.
“LET GO OF MY FREAKING WIPER BLADE!” The Prophet roared. “YOU BIG STUPID HAIRY WANNABE-WOOKIE!”
That time I was pretty sure that he was DEFINITELY talking to Bigfoot.
We powered straight ahead, driving directly into Old Shuck.
“We’re going to flatten him out like a toad in the road,” I yelled.
Only I guess it didn’t work that way with giant purple Death Dogs.
The deeper we drove into Old Shuck’s body, the more his body stretched out – until we were driving into nothing but a sea of deep rubber purple. It was like that Death Dog was made up of some kind of a giant elastic amoeba. I began to worry that he was going to swallow us up inside of himself and then crawl off into some deep and funky cave to hibernate while he digested about five tons of mystical pink Winnebago along with the spirit of a reincarnated Shawnee medicine man, a nine foot tall Sasquatch, a Coyote trickster and a seventeen year old boy.
Namely, me.
“I am Tenskwatawa,” The Prophet roared defiantly. “I am the brother to the mighty Tecumseh. I am the Open Door and I am the Arrow – and you, tiny little purple funny-smelling dog must yield before my power!”
Well that sounded all right when you roared it through a mystical pink Winnebago bumper – but it just did not seem to impress Old Shuck all that much.
In the heart of the deep purple forever that Old Shuck had grown and stretched into – something went SPROINGGGGGGG!!!
It sounded as if King Kong had jumped upon a pogo stick deep in the belly of Moby Dick – while old Moby was swimming through the bottom basement level of the Marianas Trench, trying to digest the Olympic-sized trampoline that he had recently swallowed. I felt my bones and my body wobble like they were made out of half-chilled purple Jell-O.
And then we snapped on back.
The last thing I saw was Bigfoot bouncing backwards off of The Prophet’s windshield and right back down into Old Shuck’s windpipe while we were simultaneously flinging backwards at about a thousand and a half miles an hour. It happened just like one of those cartoons when somebody runs into a giant rubber band and then suddenly snaps back.
We snapped directly back through the woods of Nova Scotia. I saw the Atlantic Ocean splash below us like a rain puddle seen from the top of a tree. We flashed over Europe, straight through France – which I could tell because I caught a very brief glimpse of the Eifel Tower.
I saw something else too.
Just as we passed over Nova Scotia I looked down and I saw a search party hunting through the Cape Breton woods – looking for me and Warren, I guess. I’m not exactly sure just how it was that I spotted that tiny little detail out of all of that landscape that was flashing on past. It might have been some sort of magic, it might have been just pure dumb luck – heck, it might have been I made the whole thing up in my imagination.
I saw it and then it was gone.
Meanwhile, we kept on gaining altitude.
Little details kept popping out at me.
I saw a flight of snowy white Norwegian storks go migrating past, in reverse
Over Russia, I saw an SU-25 Frogfoot close support aircraft – and don’t ask me how I knew what sort of a plane it was because I just KNEW was all – whip past us for just long enough for the Russian pilot to shake his head in complete and utter disbelief.
I figured that any moment now I was most likely going to see angel wings – and maybe they’d be attached to me.
I could feel a tickle of polar fear crawling up and down my spinal column like a drunken parade of centipedes wearing ice cubes in place of shoes.
And then all of a sudden everything got quiet and still. Do you know that feeling when your ears pop and sound sort of drowns itself out for just a half of a half of a second? Well, it was just like that – only I had the feeling that the ears of the whole wide world had just collectively and simultaneously popped.
And just for that single half of a half of a half second I could swear that I could hear somebody talking.
It was Warren.
He said to me – “Don’t you worry, Adam. Everything is going to work out just fine. Just you wait and see.”
And then my ears re-popped and I blinked really hard and everything was back to the way it had been – and I can’t even tell you if the whole thing really happened.
By that time we had reached the Himalayas and those huge goat-peaked mountains looked like nothing more than herd of poorly-maintained speed bumps.
“All right,” The Prophet yelled out. “That’s far enough!”
We screamed a huge hairpin U-turn around an orbiting satellite, knocking the television reception out of the state of Hawaii as we laid a white-water speed trail directly across the entire left half of the southern Pacific Ocean.
At the height of our flight
I saw a fully-grown comet shoot past.
“Did you see that?” I asked – looking at the comet.
“Did I see what?” the Prophet asked, looking at something else.
I guess he was too busy achieving a near supersonic velocity to bother looking around or listening to the seventeen year old boy who was spiritually inhabiting the vicinity of his headlights – but I swore that I saw the Raven riding on top of that high-flying comet – grinning directly at me and laughing like he was watching the most funniest thing that he had ever witnessed in the whole wide world.
That might have been my imagination too – only I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
“Hold onto your seat-bone,” the Prophet warned. “Things may get a little rough.”
We roared back into Nova Scotia.
The pine trees blinked past like the shadow-spokes of a bicycle wheel spun against the sunrise. I was stuck there in the headlights of The Prophet, pretty certain that we were going to plow into the Nova Scotia landscape like a poorly driven meteorite.
And then everything slowed down, all at once.
“You can get back up now,” the Prophet said.
I leaned back and I felt myself rising up from out of the spiritual essence of that giant pink Winnebago, like I was rising up out of the deep end of a lukewarm swimming pool.
I was sitting in the driver’s seat and the steering wheel unpuckered itself from the squeeze of my grip like a hand stuck full of dried maple syrup.
I stepped out and we were back where we had started from.
We were back in Nova Scotia.
The only thing that had changed was that Old Shuck had Bigfoot swallowed right down to his ankles.
All I could see was a pair of big fat furry feet sticking out from between that big purple dog’s lips.
“You want me to take another run at him?” The Prophet asked. “I think I softened him up the first time.”
He was game to try it again, but I shook my head no.
“That didn’t work before,” I said, letting go of the steering wheel and stepping back out of the Prophet. “I think I am going to try something different.”
I untangled myself up from the driver’s seat.
