by David Ohle
Buoyed by all the publicity, Wallace has put his energies and his brother's influence into organizing Frogmen for Hooker, already boasting ten thousand members and growing. Those joiningget a miniature pair of frog feet for attaching to a key chain, to wear in a lapel, or hang in a window as a lucky charm. In addition they get a free copy of the Reverend's Field Guide.
Unable to find employment after his release from Permanganate Islam a Pisstown stinker, whose identity is unknown, wandered aimlessly from one place to another, blown about like a leaf in the wind. Having landed in Witchy Toe one cold day he was taken into custody and placed in the lockup where he had access to the stove. That night he heated the poker red hot, placed the end against the wall and threw himself against the point. The instrument plowed its way into his abdomen, searing the parts entered. Another wayfarer occupying the cell with him was asleep when the drastic action took place, so it is not known how long the stinker survived
A strange creature of the deep beached itself on Square Isla nd a little over a year ago. Nearly seven feet long with a high, flattened body tall fins, a three-tentacled mouth encircled with sharp teeth and a 'chopped-off' appearance, the specimen has been called a hagfish. Held in captivity for study it has demonstrated the ability to breathe through its eyes, see through its skin and tie itself into knots. It can live without food for more than a year and when it is afraid it hides in a globule of jelly-like material secreted into the surrounding water. The creature has five hearts, each beating in a different rhythm, and each controlling separately the head tail tentacles, muscles and liver. Fearing there may be more of these things in the waters around the Island authorities have urged people not to wade in the shallows, where one of them may be watching for feet, or to dawdle long enough for a bite to be taken and blood sucked from a tender calf or ankle.
It was little reported in the press, but Reverend Hooker rrcently had a narrow escape from death. The well-known aviator, Peter Knabenshue, nearly took off the Reverends head when the screws of his orbigator suddenly spiraled downward in the vortex ofa whirling wind As Knabenshue lost control of the aircraft, it took a dangerous tilt to one side and swooped over the crowd plucking off the Reverend's hat.
William Parker Yockey adolescent Hookerite leader, was out campaigning for the Reverend yesterday He told an audience at Pisstown, `As the Reverend has said many times, the shifting policies are intended to stimulate business and at the same time achieve long-term prosperity focal and personal Its a beautiful concept. You may be moved down the street or across the Bum Bay Straits. Think of it also as a cure for boredom, a way to perk up the citizenry a way to give the people new energies, new jobs, new children and spouses. Sure, some will win, some will lose. YouV have upand down-shifts, you71 have side-shifts too. And in five years, another round of shifting will come along. "
He was asked how long it would be befog someone tampers with the process and arranges self-advantageous shiftings? Yockeys answer: "The tide ofsocial change will rise so rapidly that such persons will drown, their voices hushed "
And what does side-shifting entail? Yockey says, "These individuals may find themselves in a kind of social limbo for a while, out of the game as it were. They may undergo long periods of waiting, but isn't waiting good for the soul? Isn't it what life is all about?"
And with all the intermixing that comes along with the shiftings, he was asked, "What about the spread of parasites?" Yockey had a ready answer for that, too: "It will serve to weaken the parasites by spreading them thinly. "
At home again and in charge of the family estate, Ophelia was in a funk much of the time. There were hundreds of things to do. Caring for the kitchen drain alone was a timeconsuming occupation. A drain could kill, she knew, and so treated it with respect. She washed it with scalding water and lye soap, poured cupfuls of caustic soda down it every day and at night treated it with chloride of lime. None of this, however, reduced the strength of the cadaverous stink that persisted in rising from it, along with the sound of digging.
"There's a stinker down there," she told the yard man. "Id like you to get busy and dig him up. Well take him to the Rest Home."
"I don't want any part of that business," the yard man said, fussy after being awakened from a nap atop a peat pile in the potting shed. "I told your grandmother, I said, `If a stiff comes up on this property, I'll play no part in getting rid of it.' When that happens, it's time to call in a professional disposal service. I suggest you do the same."
Rather than hire a service and squander the money her grandmother had left behind for maintenance, Ophelia took a shovel and pick and began excavating beneath the main house into the mystery tunnels. After pushing through the first dark, narrow passages, her further investigation disclosed branching, hand-dug tunnels, leading nowhere. She crawled into one of them, thinking she heard digging, and found the stinker she suspected was there.
Startled by Ophelia's candlelight, the stinker dropped his wom spade. "Look at me," he said. "I'm exhausted, dirt-covered, half naked, half dead, and I'm just digging these blind tunnels."
Ophelia pinched her nostrils dosed and tried to speak in a calm voice. "You come out with me. I'll have my servant dean you up and fit you with some of my old clothes. You'll be sent to the Rest Home. They'll take care of you there very humanely."
"You don't like my smell, do you?"
"That's right, I don't, but I understand how difficult the stinker life can be. When you get to the Rest Home, your needs will be taken cane of. I'm trying to be nice to you. I've been listening to the chum-scrape, chunk-scrape of your shovel for months and listening to the cook complain about the stink making the draperies smell."
"You got any urpmilk?" the stinker asked.
"Sorry, no."
"All right, then. Another time I came up in Istanbul. The Turks packed me in resin, wrapped me in loth and sent me by canal boat to the demarcation port on the other side of the Bosporus."
"I respect them for that. You do have your sympathizers. Now, for the last time, come out with me. You need to get to the Rest Home. We can't properly care for you here."
"What time is it? Is the sun up or down? I don't like to go up in the bright of day."
"Don't be afraid. The sun is going down."
Persuaded finally by the promise of an outdoor hose-bath, the stinker hobbled into the evening light. "Get me a walking stick before I fall."
Ophelia found a broken rake handle in the potting shed. The yard man, squatting in a corner and moving his bowels into a slop bucket, said, "Good God, that thing stinks."
"I'm going to hose it off and pedal it over to the Home."
"Not soon enough," the yard man said, wiping himself with a handfulo f peat.
When Ophelia hosed the stinker off, the few pieces of rotted clothing that were intact washed away. -- - - - ---- - - - -- -
The butler said, "I'll get some hand-me-downs and help the poor creature put them on."
"Please get my Q-ped out of the garage."
"Yes, as soon as I can."
Ophelia struggled to make eye contact with the stinker, who kept turning away. "You're the third one we've dug up this year," she said. "Do you have a name?"
"I forget. Chuck, maybe."
The stinker leaned against the potting shed and continued his laments as Ophelia clipped his long fingernails with the yard man's pruning shears. "After floating up under the Great Salt Lake I was nearly cooked in the hot, stagnant water. Everything tastes salty now."
"You don't say."
"Then there was my coming up in the Heritage Area, so depressed all I did was lie in the gutter like a log of driftwood. People spit on me. In the mornings, if I felt enough hope, I'd go over to the Red Cross kitchen and get some urpmilk, then go right on back to my gutter. If it rained, I floated down the street. Later, in Pisstown, I built myself a cart and sold toilet goods. I would roll the City Moon into a cone and call out to pedestrians, 'I got petroleum jelly, I got witch hazel, Pearly Pink tooth powder, floating soap, ta
lcum by the pound. I got it all.' Then, when I came up in Bum Bay, I always shopped at the Hookerite Market on Gravesend Avenue. I was on a pedal bus going there one day when I was bitten by an enraged American. 'You stiff! You stiff!' he screamed, then stepped on my foot, injuring my plantar wart. Not finished yet, he pounced on me and bit me in the face. I tell you, the punctures almost drained what's left of my life away."
"Why do you go on and on like that? None of it is of any real interest to me."
"All those years of frosty discomfort, alone, trying to dig our way out. We like companionship. We like camaraderie once we find it."
"You'll find that at the Rest Home, I'm sure."
"Will they have urpmilk there?"
"It's very likely."
"That's good. That's good."
Red rolled the Q-ped out of the garage. "Here it is, Miss. I've oiled the chains and greased the sprockets."
"All right, Chuck," Ophelia said, "You look more presentable. Let's get you to the Home."
As Ophelia pedaled out of the estate grounds and toward the Home, the stinker's bare, tattered feet went round and round with the pedals, but the legs were too weak to contribute much to the effort. "Thank you, Miss. It's good to be up on the surface, walking my body around again."
Just ahead the Rest Home was the picture of warmth and comfort. Gel cans burned in every window, Hookerite Sisters of Charity waited at the curb in starched whites to grect new arrivals.
Ophelia patted the stinker on the shoulder. "The Sisters will take good care of you." She stopped pedaling and let the car coast to a stop. "Here we are. There's the Home."
One of the Sisters approached the car carrying a tall glass of urpmilk. She unstrapped the stinker's feet from the pedals and helped him out of the car. "Here you are, my friend. Have a drink before we go in and get you situated."
"He came up under my house, Sister," Ophelia said. "His name is Chuck, he thinks."
"It's quite an act of kindness to bring him here. We'll look after him as long as we can."
"And then?"
The Sister whispered, "He'll be put down humanely."
The stinker drank the urpmilk in a few eager gulps. "Oh, that was good."
"Goodbye, Chuck," Ophelia said. "I'll come and visit."
"Remind me to tell you about the time I came up under the Indiana prairie in the middle of a grasshopper plague. The crops were ruined. All the animals were eaten. It was the worst famine you ever saw."
"I will. I look forward to hearing that."
Ophelia watched him being escorted safely into the Home, then applied her aching legs to the short but uphill pedal back to the estate. When she arrived, both the butler and the yard man were waiting at the entry gate with fresh news.
"I was in the persimmon orchard today," the yard man reported. "I could hear digging. There's another one coming up there. I'm afraid there's one under the breezeway, too."
Ophelia went inside and fixed herself a bowl of urpmeal while Red lit the pellet stove in her bedroom.
"I'm going to sleep late in the morning," she instructed as she spooned the last of her urpmeal from the bowl. "Plan on a late breakfast. After that, I suppose we have some digging to do."
"Yes, Miss, as you say."
"Have Peters lay out picks and shovels, galoshes, and pairs of gloves."
"Yes'm."
"We'll start with the one in the orchard."
Seven.
A neighborhood in Bum Bay lay in awe and wonderment yesterday until the hagfish, which had gushed from a storm drain with a burst of water, had spent its force and crumbled into the gutter. The yellow, surous mist, which came in plumes from its mouth, condensed above the startled onlookers and the sun beat down through it with multiplied ferocity.
In yet another hagfish incident, a worker was hauling a dead one in the bed of his van, strapped, he thought, securel; encircled by rings of inch-thick iron cable. But it rolled off at a narrow turn and hit the pavement in such a manner as to break open and release the same choking, surous gas. Three are deadly including the worker and two bystanders.
Moldenke, the touring stinker, has filed a deed to purchase certain properties in the afterworld. Local legals say the properties do not exist. Moldenke says they do, at the edge of the city and that he has seen them as recently as two nights ago. "They are vast. Their earth is black, rich and fecund; "be told the City Moon. "It has arable soil, surprisingly rich in nutrients. A white cabbage grows there in profusion. "With a wink to one of the Guards, the wig asked Moldenke, "This afterworld of yours. Do the wicked on Earth continue in their wickedness there, and the good in their goodness?"
Moldenkes answer: "Yes, in churches and nice homes. The wicked get worse, the good go bad, only the indifferent remain the same. The average Joe can't understand it. "
He went on to detail his inaugural other-world astonishments: "The first morning I awoke feeling more rested than I had in years. My first surprise was that there wasn't enough fire there to roast an imp. It seemed to have burned out long ago, and a cool drizzle has since turned everything into a slimy, black tar. I saw familiar faces, old friends, generations in single file, squeezed along in a narrow passageway. There are no children there, no animals, an absence of clouds, no urpflanz, the sun is very dim, the nights long, dazzling and bright. "
Asked when he first had intimations of the afterworla he said it had started with a talent show, when he offered his belly to all comers for punching and for charity. Five hundred contestants stood in line for the opportunity. He laughed through the first 1,000 punches, complained ofa bellyache at 1,500, spat blood at 2,908 and at 3, 000 had to be taken to the Templex clinic, where he `passed away" with a burst abdominal cyst.
He told the paper, "They said I was dead all night long, then I woke up in the morning. No one has offered me a proper explanation yet. That's when I first saw the afterworld, when I passed away.'When I woke up, I kept all the memories of the place. It's a real place. I intend to build a retirement home on the land once I find a court to recognize my deed. "
Everyone knows the old saying about a snake in the grass. Only a few weeks ago the Reverend stopped to visit his brother, Wallace. They had a very pleasant chat on the patio. Wallace explained his method of brewing '*sert" tea, which had none of the tannic bitterness of tea brewed in tin pots, then announced that it was his day to cut the lawn and suggested the Reverend pass the time with a booklet called "Ice Yachts of the Future" while he finished the task.
After a short time, the slashing sound of a sickle was drowned out by the younger Hooker's crs "I'm bitten! B n bitten!" It seems that poison from the fangs of a copperhead adder, hiding in the grass, might possibly end Wallaces peripatetic career. What happened was, his sickle struck a stone and fell from his grip. As he reached into the grass to remove it, the snake struck at him, getting its fangs into his hand In a later release to the press, the Reverend is quoted as saying, "Some degree of mental function has been lost, but Wallace will live. His coma lasted only a few hours. Now hes sitting up and taking hot liquids. "
Hookerites have become a law unto themselves. They load their canal boats with Jake and float downstream, bailiwick to bailiwick. At each port they are spoiled with handsome pies baked by admirers and fellow travelers. These houseboat dwellers are not stifled by convention or limitation of any sort. They lie nude in the sun atop their boats if they wish and pass their money ashore for anything they want, with no barriers. Their lives are utterly without responsibility and their lawless practices have caused them to be dreaded by shore people and other boatmen. When they are not stealing, eating, drinking or sleeping, their time is spent playing liar's dice or cut-throat euchre. Bloody quarrels are frequent during these games and sometimes a murder is hidden by the waters of a muddy canal. Fortunately many Hookerite boats are run down by steamers in the night, owing to the entire crew being asleep or drunk and no light being shone.
At the Reverend's imp farm, Roe served as a lookout, quartered in a
watch-tower so high that, had it not lain beyond a curtain of persistent haze, he would have been able to see the wavering glow of Bum Bay. A wooden cistern atop the living quarters collected rain when it came, generally in stingy amounts. The water that dribbled from the faucet was tinted green and had a faintly noxious odor.
With so much time on his hands, Roe was able to play his saw for long hours and still keep an effective eye on the Reverend's imps, who roamed freely over a vast area of damp willow thickets, open meadows of vetch, mallow and wild berries. They were a breed of manipulated imps with the capacity to re-grow muscle. In his "welcome to the farm" speech, the Reverend had told the new arrivals, "Think of it. Just imagine it. Ham, rump roasts, tenderloin, chitterlings, all for the taking, with no pain or discomfort to the imp. In a few days, the meat's all grown back. What could be more providential?"
Roe was told to watch for poachers, who had been seen among the herds with cleavers and wheelbarrows. They were an of breed band of third-stage stinkers, different in appearance than others. The first time Roe looked, he spotted them in his binoculars. They were short, flat-headed, musclebound, and had hard, white skin that shed flakes. If one of them stood still long enough, falling flakes would pile up like snow. There were about ten of them, working as a team. They would encircle the altered imps, tie their legs and cleave as much meat as their wheelbarrows would hold.
While playing a tune on his saw a few foggy mornings later, Roe was thinking he needed to oil the blade to stop it from rusting, when the first poacher to approach the tower did so in a little handmade pedal car with rusted tin can headlamps and a painted-on grill. It was a mystery how he wasn't stung to death by the wasps in the sumac along the ditch-bank.
"You up there. What's that sound? It grates on the nerves. I've been hearing it for miles. It makes me sicker than I am. What do you hope to gain by doing it? Those imps aren't providing the way they were before you moved in here and started your assault on the peace and quiet we like around here."
