Merlin of the Magnolias

by Gardner Landry

“This is an antique deck of the Tarot. Cut them.”

  With deer-in-the-headlights eyes, Tite cut the big deck of cards into two stacks. Nico van Rompaey finished the cut, putting the bottom stack of cards on top of the other stack, and departed with a chipper “Good day!” He smiled and exchanged pleasantries with the server as he walked toward the doorway of the famous old Amsterdam huis.

  Tite flipped over the first card on top of the deck. It read “Wheel of Fortune.” He turned over the second card. It bore the image of a skeleton in knight’s armor wielding a large scythe. The numerical value of the card was thirteen and the name under the image read “Death.” He hesitated, then decided to take a third and final card from the stack. He turned it over. It was The Fool, and its value was zero. He realized he was having a difficult time breathing. He glanced around the room and felt a sudden urge to get out of the building immediately.

  • Fifty-nine

  On the shop floor of Hephaestus Tool and Machining, Merlin, Angus McQuirkidale, and shop foreman Victor Martinez put the finishing touches on the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser. Angus had decided the VCR needed only two electromagnets to operate efficiently, so they joined each quarter arc of the apparatus together such that the two arcs opposite one another had electromagnets attached to ensure the current would flow clockwise. The arcs were fabricated to overlap and touch one another, so the circuit would not be broken, but Merlin added metal clips to the places where they overlapped to ensure contact. They connected the four quarters of the plywood base using latches on the top and bottom of each piece. A single power cord and inlet connected each of the magnets, and Victor Martinez plugged a long, heavy three-pronged extension cord into it and then plugged the other end into a power source at the shop wall. He returned to the group and said, “Well, who wants to do the honors?”

  Angus looked at Merlin and motioned with his hand toward the on/off switch. Merlin returned the gesture with a solemn nod and moved toward the switch. He took a couple of breaths with his broad thumb against the switch and gave it a resolute flip. The thing whirred to life, emanating a low hum. A blue light on the VCR indicated the circuit was complete. Angus touched a voltmeter to one of the metal arcs; he read it and gave a thumbs-up. Merlin felt a kind of electricity start at the base of his spine and run all the way up to his giant coconut of a head. He stood in awe as he beheld his brainchild at work. Angus smiled at Merlin’s delight in the fruition of the project. The only one who wasn’t in on the euphoria was Victor Martinez who, after a silent interlude, stepped back and addressed Angus: “Well, boss?” Angus refocused and looked at him. “Anything else?” Martinez asked.

  Angus returned to his usual businesslike mode and responded, “No, I think we’re good.” He then asked Merlin, who was still entranced by the device, “Shall we box it up?”

  “Oh!” Merlin said, returning to the moment. “Yes, of course! And thank you, Mr. Martinez!”

  Martinez was relieved to have a pressing task as he found the whole enterprise kind of embarrassing, and he didn’t have a clue what this perplexing device was for and what the big goofball was going to do with it or why his boss was so pleased.

  After the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser was placed in four heavy-gauge cardboard boxes and Merlin departed Hephaestus, Victor Martinez said, “Boss, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why’d you decide to help him make that thing?”

  With a twinkle in his eye, Angus said, “How many art cars have we helped design and fabricate back here?”

  “Well, plenty, over the years, I guess.”

  “And the people who have the ideas for them, you wouldn’t exactly call mainstream, would you?”

  “No! For sure not!”

  “They are on the periphery, so most of the world isn’t set up for people who think like they do to get along smoothly, and more than that, to feel like what they are doing matters.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then they see their art car come together and get cheered by thousands of people in the parade every spring—and I’ve seen this—it’s like their eyes come to life.”

  “Yeah, but boss, this thing wasn’t a car. It didn’t move. It didn’t even have any moving parts!”

  “I know, but when he flipped that switch, and I confirmed that it was working, I saw the same look in his eyes that I see in those art car artists during the parade, and that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.”

  Angus’s phone rang, and he excused himself. Victor stood in motionless silence until someone from the back of the shop called to him for help.

  Lindley rode her bike down a cross street that intersected with Merlin’s street. As she crossed, she saw an SUV on the street in front of Merlin’s house and Merlin and the driver at its rear hatch. She wheeled her bike in a loop and headed toward the McNaughton house to see what was up. When she arrived, Merlin and the driver were unloading what looked to be heavy two-and-a-half-foot-square cardboard boxes from the vehicle’s cargo area. She glided to a stop a few feet away from them and asked, “Do you need any help with that?”

  Merlin jumped, surprised that someone was observing his activities at close range, but when he saw that it was Lindley, he relaxed a little.

  “Oh! Lindley! What are you doing here?”

  “I saw you guys unloading, and I wanted to see if I could help.”

  “Oh, no. Thank you! We are just stacking them here inside the gate right now. I’ll use a hand truck to deal with them in a few minutes.”

  Lindley noticed Merlin seemed even more flustered and out of sorts than he had been when he tussled with the teacup Chihuahua at Tellicherry. His glasses were on kind of sideways, and he had ripped his shirt in the box-unloading process.

  The driver stood next to Merlin and said, “Well, that’s it.”

  Merlin fumbled for his wallet and a few bills fluttered onto the street as he found a suitable tip amount. The driver thanked him, and Merlin and Lindley picked up the errant bank notes.

  Seeing him so rattled, there was only one errant note on Lindley’s mind, and it was the one that fluttered away from him at Tellicherry, which she had kept on a hunch. Merlin seemed in a hurry to move the boxes toward the garage at the base of the observatory, but he stopped and looked Lindley in the eye and said, “If you can arrange it, try not to be here—here in town—during the weekend of the thirteenth.”

  “The thirteenth?” Lindley queried.

  “Yes, it would be advisable to be a good hundred and fifty miles away from here by sunset.”

  “On Friday the thirteenth?” She visualized Merlin’s scrawl on the scrap of paper he dropped at the Indian restaurant.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s next Friday!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier, but I think there may be some kind of disturbance.”

  “There’s a hurricane the weather forecasters say is heading straight for the Gulf right now.”

  “Another good reason to depart for a while. It would be a good weekend for an Austin or Hill Country trip.”

  “What is it, Merlin?”

  “I can’t really talk about it in detail. Please just take my word for it.”

  “Okay.”

  Merlin picked up a black backpack that seemed to be rather heavy and said, “Bye, Lindley.” She stood still and said, “Bye, Merlin,” and watched him as the curb tripped him on his way to the front gate of the McNaughton residence. He righted himself before he hit the ground, then turned and waved goodbye to Lindley as he closed the gate and shuffled toward the base of his watchtower. Lindley was befuddled, but concern for Merlin took precedence over her confusion regarding his warning, and she watched him until he began to open the garage door at the base of the observatory. Before he could turn to wave goodbye, she hopped on her bike and stood as she pedaled to gain speed.

  • Sixty

  Over the days leading up to the negative energy event, Merlin rehearsed and re-rehearsed his moves for the critical night. He knew that, just the way
the astronauts had only one opportunity to land the unpowered space shuttle orbiter, there would be but one opportunity for the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser to be in place and operative at the moment of the event’s energy discharge. With the gravity of a NASA commander of that most leaden of interatmospheric gliders, Merlin went through his checklist.

  The VCR was obviously functional, but he made a special note to remember to bring the heavy-duty document clips to ensure an unbroken electrical circuit. He appraised the dimensions of the two-and-a-half-foot-square boxes and considered the VCR’s transport to the spot on the far side of the Bayou Boughs Country Club golf course. He rummaged through the garage beneath the observatory and found an old, somewhat rusty red Radio Flyer wagon. It was just wide enough for each of the four boxes containing the components of the VCR to fit when stood on their sides. There was even a little room left for extension cords in the wagon’s bed.

  Next, his thoughts turned to logistics. The Betancourts’ house was on the BBCC golf course. He had a key to the house’s side gate because he sometimes fed the Betancourts’ dogs when their owners were out of town. The wagon would be ideal for getting the gear there as that part of the trip would be over pavement and sidewalks, but from the home’s back fence, he would need to traverse a considerable amount of grass as he crossed fairways and rough to arrive at the spot behind the sixteenth green. He could try to arrange the route as much as possible on cart paths, but that wasn’t feasible as the most direct way to ground zero was over the course itself. Any way he looked at it, crossing grass was in the cards. He went back to the garage and continued to pick through its dust-coated contents. In the area with hunting gear, he found goose decoys and a couple of plastic decoy sleds. One was cracked down the middle, but the other seemed to be intact. The Radio Flyer would suffice for the first part of the trip, and he could drag a decoy sled containing his equipment the way he and his grandfather had when they prepared to shoot the honking avian behemoths in nearby coastal prairie rice fields when he was growing up.

  Merlin was so focused on his mission he didn’t go out to forage during the last few days leading up to the event, opting instead for home delivery from his favorite nearby restaurants and cafés. By the time the day of the event had arrived, the accreted pile of takeout boxes and containers rose precariously above the rim of his recycling bin like a new island forming from active lava flow.

  No breezes caressed the observatory on the morning of Friday, August 13th, and thick humidity gripped it the way Merlin had handled himself during one of his many vivid waking dreams featuring Celtic goddesses and buxom mythical warrior queens. Bone-roasting heat headlined the afternoon and held on into the sunlit early summer evening. During the day, he checked the Agglomerator. Nothing had changed. It continued to register the same precise time for the event. The purple haze indicating a possible Sasquatch/Bigfoot nexus also remained, and, if anything, the color had become more saturated on his monitor screens during the final days prior to the predicted moment.

  He also checked the weather. There were a couple of tropical depressions—one traversing the Florida Straits and one headed for the Yucatan Channel. Even if they made it into the Gulf of Mexico, they could end up anywhere along the coast, or dissipate completely. Besides, Merlin reasoned, the height of storm season was at least a couple of weeks away in late August and early September.

  Finally twilight arrived, and night fell on the city. Although the evening was almost moonless, the familiar orange glow of urban light reflected from the undersides of low-passing cumulus clouds. And finally, after all the preparation that was almost more than Merlin could think about, the moment of his departure was at hand. He dressed for the weather—a blue fishing shirt and beige cargo shorts made from strong but lightweight material. For footwear, he considered the dampness of the golf course after the sprinklers had done their work and chose the same water shoes he had worn on the fishing trip with Shep in Louisiana.

  He descended into the garage. His setup was waiting for him in the little red Radio Flyer wagon. The sled itself presented a bit of a problem, but Merlin solved it by looping marine twine through rings at the left and right sides of the fore and aft of the sled so he could wear it like a large backpack over the smaller black nylon military-grade tactical backpack he was already shouldering. As he pulled the wagon away from the garage—with the sled on his back like a giant inverted rectilinear tortoise shell—he thought of the image of the man bent forward under the burden of a huge bundle of sticks lashed to his back on the album cover of Led Zeppelin IV. But for Merlin, the sled was more unwieldy than heavy, and he leaned forward only slightly as he balanced it to walk with the Radio Flyer in tow.

  On his way to the Betancourts’ house, Merlin was worried that he would be noticed and questioned. What he didn’t consider was that the neighborhood was so accustomed to his eccentric walkabouts with gadgets adjuring him to sometimes angle his person one way or another, like a jet crabbing in a crosswind, that seeing him pulling a child’s Radio Flyer wagon while hiking with what looked like a small boat on his back would raise nary an eyebrow. Even though he tensed as he saw a Bayou Boughs Patrol car approach during the walk, his concern was unfounded. He recognized the officer at the wheel, who slowed and gave him an amiable hand wave of greeting as he passed. His relief after this interaction invigorated him and caused him to quicken his pace; the Radio Flyer clacked resolutely over the uneven tree root and heat-buckled sidewalk.

  His entry into the Betancourts’ property was equally uneventful. They were at their home in Jackson Hole for the summer, and their two Weimaraners had flown up with them on the family’s plane. A couple of motion-activated security lights switched on, but other than that, no alarm sounded. Merlin maintained his quick pace past the home’s motor court to the rear of the property. He opened a little gate in the midst of a tall hedgerow that gave onto a fairway of the Bayou Boughs Country Club golf course.

  He needed to stash the Radio Flyer, but he didn’t want to leave it at the Betancourts’ house. He unbuttoned one of the big front pockets of his cargo shorts and pulled out his night vision goggles. He secured its elastic straps to his head and peered through the lenses. There was a thicket of bushes and trees on the far side of the fairway, and he thought he might hide it there. Then an idea flickered to full flame. He could load the sled with the VCR and tie the wagon to his back with some extra twine he had stashed in his backpack. He quickly rearranged his gear. He unharnessed himself from the decoy sled and placed it on the ground.

  He placed the four boxes containing the VCR inside the sled and looked back at the wagon where he saw the extension cords, and an image flashed in his mind’s eye. It was of an antique photograph of Pancho Villa, jaunty with twin ammunition-filled bandoliers slung across his body from both shoulders, making an X on the Mexican revolutionary’s torso. He grabbed a long, coiled orange cord and unwound and rewound it to fit him; he donned it on his left shoulder, forming a sash to his right hip. He did the same with a yellow cord of equal length, forming a sash from his right shoulder to left hip, creating a Day-Glo X across his massive torso. He felt like a warrior primed for battle.

  Merlin pulled more twine from his backpack. He held the free end in his teeth and cut a length of it to secure the wagon to the upper part of his back using his tactical backpack’s shoulder loops to help hold it in place. He untied a loop on the decoy sled and ran the line through a loop at the top of his backpack before retying it to the sled.

  In a couple of minutes, he was ready, the VCR on the sled behind him, and the wagon secured to his back with its front wheels by his ears. It was uncomfortable, but comfort was the last thing on Merlin’s mind. The mission was underway. He gripped the twin extension cord bandoliers and gave them a tug to ensure they were secure. He flipped his night vision goggles down in front of his eyes and set off across the sprinkler-wet turf for the far side of the back nine.

  • Sixty-one

  Dawn of August 14th broke mild and c
lear in Amsterdam, and Tite Dûche was already having coffee in his hotel suite. He looked through a glossy folder detailing the particulars of a Ferrari rally in which he had been invited to participate starting on Monday on the Amalfi Coast. The cars would then be moved to other scenic drives in Italy during the week for the event to continue.

  There was a welcome reception scheduled for Sunday near the rally’s starting point. For Tite, the rally shimmered with glamor and prestige. All drivers received their very own custom-made leather racing outfits emblazoned with the logo and colors of the fabled Italian performance car maker. He found the jackets with their diagonal zippers and high, notched collars particularly appealing. He was almost as excited about wearing his tailored-to-fit leather race car driver outfit as he was about the rally itself.

  Half an hour after finishing his coffee, he settled in the spacious back seat of a large black Mercedes sedan heading to Schiphol Airport. He checked his phone for updated information regarding the trip. His midmorning flight to Naples was on time.

  • Sixty-two

  Merlin was watching the clock. Everything was in place and a mere five minutes remained until the energy showdown behind the sixteenth green. He had stumbled a couple of times during his walk, but he made it to ground zero unharmed, his night vision goggles performing their wartime best to help him navigate through the darkness. He set up the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser, locking each of its quadrants and fixing metal document clips at the places where the now complete steel rings’ arcs overlapped and joined together. The exact spot for the event was in a relatively flat area, so there was no worry about the VCR sliding toward the bayou. Additionally, as Merlin had calculated, the end-on-end joined-together extension cords reached a power outlet at a shelter covering a bathroom, outdoor water fountain, and ice dispenser near the fifteenth hole’s tee box with a few feet to spare.