Each store had an opening made of wood and glass with a large jewel-cut stone in the center. The Wegs would tug upon this stone with some effort, and each yank was followed by the sound of divine twinkles, surely meant to advertise their arrival. A string of nimble illuminations, much like the comforting stars, which dappled the sky at The Nine Sticks, were delicately wrapped in the branches of tall flappy green trees lining the walkway on either side of the cobblestones. Each tree did not grow from the ground, but was stuffed into a box of dirt, lined with gray dock wood.
But the most amazing of all the sights appeared in the very center of the cobblestones. A strange green pool of water was raised into the air and dribbled in arcs around its base to a lower pool, filled with flat brown circles. The circles had pictures carved into them. Snickerdoodle wanted very much to see the pictures, but the water was in motion, thus making it difficult to see down into the lower pool clearly. Without knowing he was doing so, Snickerdoodle drew nearer to the dribbling water and stepped right into the path of a Weg.
Then Snickerdoodle was airborne, trapped in the claw of the beast who had unwittingly stepped on his barrette. Snickerdoodle had never seen a human’s face before, only their long bristly legs, while hiding between craggles of rock or bushy undergrowth with his mother. Yet he knew, in the twinkles of the tree lights, in the whir of the storm, his body held fast by the creature’s pressings, that this was one of them, and it was more terrifying than he ever could have imagined. Rows of flat dirty brown rocks snapped open and shut in the center of its face, and beyond them a dreadful cavernous black hole contracted. Atop its head, a thousand black fronds, moving as one in the wind, snaked over Snickerdoodle’s chip bag and wound round his cap head.
The Weg then stretched its terrible black hole even wider and screeled at him so loudly his whole chip bag body vibrated and crackled. Then using both its claws, the Weg crumpled him into a ball and tossed him high into the air over its shoulder. Spiraling through the sky faster than he had ever tumbled in the wind, Snickerdoodle bounced off another human’s head before hitting the ground with a short pop! It was then he knew he’d lost the blue barrette limb altogether. It took him just a moment to uncurl his crunched-up torso, before a vicious breeze caught him just right, and sent him sweeping across the cobblestone, cap over coffee stirrer. This time, he blew right into the opening of a store filled with Wegs.
Petrified, Snickerdoodle could not think what to do next, for there was no wind to catch here on the inside, and one of his limbs was now gone. Surely he had only seconds before another Weg reached down and did him further harm. But then, between the cage of shifting legs, he caught sight of one of the illuminated trees not ten feet away, and decided the very next time he heard the twinkling of the store opening up, he’d roll along the floor until he reached it. Perhaps the Wegs might think the same wind that had blown him into the store would also pull him out. He waited, heard the sounds, and rolled quickly.
With each turn of his bag, he kept his focus on the tree. And just when he was sure he was out of the store, he hit something. Something hard. Something he could not see at first. For he had not blown out of the store at all, but into an area that faced the Cobblestone yet was surrounded entirely by glass. No matter which way he rolled away from the store, he would strike the glass. Glass, much like the bits his mother collected, but not green or brown. This was clear. And not bits, but a wall of glass. It towered far higher than the length of a Nine Stick, and was the like of which he had never seen, and in his heart he knew it to be an obstacle that rubbish creatures the weight of a pickleball could never penetrate.
Realizing his fate, and that more movement would certainly attract the Wegs lumbering past the glass on the outside, Snickerdoodle Bunkum tucked himself low into a corner of the enclosure and did not move for many hours. All this time, he could do nothing but watch the Cobblestone Street and berate himself for ever letting Pocky convince him to come here.
This was a terrible place. Large, noisy, confusing, and dangerous. Wegs, hauling strange items back and forth, which made no sense. Their children, howling freakishly, until food stuffed into their jaws made them quiet again. There was a little comfort for him in the sound of the rain. It hit the glass in a way that reminded him of droplets rebounding off the splintered dock at home.
Time passed. There were a fewer Wegs on the street now, and those that remained snapped open brightly colored wings to lift over their horrid heads. Did the water pain them? Would it dissolve them over time? Snickerdoodle had almost forgotten his fear, watching the Wegs shout to each other and slip on the walk. They acted as if this was the first rainstorm they had ever experienced. It was quite funny. A few flashes of lightning more, and it sent the Wegs into even more of a scurry up and down the street.
In a particularly bright wash of lighting, movement at the base of a tree caught his attention. It was his mother. And it was also his father. Without thinking, Snickerdoodle, who could not stand, rolled over to the panel of glass closest to where they were hiding outside. His father swiftly lifted his syringe extremity, as if to warn his son to stay still. It was too late. A Weg stepped into the glass enclosure, picked him up, and tore Snickerdoodle into three pieces. It carried him to the outside and carelessly tossed his parts into the street. Instinctively, Snickerdoodle dragged what was left of his functioning cap head, a third of his torso, and one limb closer to a wall where he might be safer. Perhaps his father could help him recover his other parts, if only he could find his parents now.
But something stopped Snickerdoodle from looking for his father. The Wegs were screaming. All of them. Every Weg. Those on the street and those in the stores. It was the first moment Snickerdoodle knew something was wrong on the Cobblestone Street.
Hundreds of his kind. From all directions. Codswallops. Leaping out from the branches of flappy trees. Clambering out from between sprays of sea grass planted in dirt boxes. Plunging down from Weg rooftops. He even saw one rubbish creature inventively wriggle up from a crevice in the cobblestone, where it must have been hiding for half a day.
Snickerdoodle was utterly astonished. Perhaps even more shocking than the appearance of so many of his kind all in one place was the fact that they no longer tumbled to and fro, nor caught the wind to fashion their travel, but were instead chasing the Wegs. This time, they wanted the humans to see them and know they were there.
And though he never knew what the word war meant when his father would accidently mention it in his presence at home, only to be sourly hushed by his wife, Snickerdoodle was convinced that he was seeing one now. Seeing a war. And the Codswallops, with boundless intention, were hurting the Wegs very badly. Poking Weg eyes with their pointed plastic limbs, slicing Weg necks with razor sharp can tops, and stuffing up Weg mouths and ear holes with the very bundles of glass bits he had seen his mother tie up so many times.
The urge to move, to stand, to find his father in the chaos and help the others was very strong, and Snickerdoodle used what was left of his ripped bag to push himself away from the wall and into the action. But a Weg who seemed as large as the sky spotted his movements. Its face twisting with hate, it lunged at him. Another flash of light and a deafening crack of thunder, and Snickerdoodle saw his father trip the Weg by throwing himself under its feet. Snickerdoodle never felt so much love for his father as in that moment.
The Weg fell forward, landing only a foot from Snickerdoodle’s mangled torso. The creature’s pointed chin struck the cobblestone first, exploding in spray of shattered bone and gummy red liquid. Using his head and only limb, in a series of eruptive jerks and drags, Snickerdoodle heaved himself closer to the fallen Weg’s hideous, momentarily lifeless face.
All, around them, he heard the frenzied shouts of the Wegs and saw explosions of red light. Though he could not discern their language, he could detect their broadcasts of panic and pain to each other; clearly the sound of beings unhappily comprehending their end. The flickers of firelight danced across his chip
bag body now, and a new wave of Codswallops scuttled past him in a fury, their low shadows blackening the stone.
But Snickerdoodle would not be distracted from his enterprise. Finally reaching the Weg’s face, Snickerdoodle wormed up a nostril, contracting and contorting, expertly revolving his body so the coffee stirrer took the vanguard. With full knowledge that this was a journey from which there would be no return, and fueled with his newfound sense of true Codswallop purpose, Snickerdoodle Bunkum pushed on until he reached the Weg’s soft brain.
J.C. Raye is a professor of communication at a small community college in the Garden State. For seventeen years she has been teaching the most feared course on the planet: public speaking. Witnessing grown people cry, beg, freak out, and pass out is just another delightful day on the job for her, so she does know a little something about real terror. J.C. has won numerous artistic and academic awards over the years for her projects in the field of Communication and Media, some at the national level. Seats in her classes fill quicker than tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. Her most notable lectures include How Not to Be Awkward in Public and Practically Painless Speaking. When not teaching or writing horror, Ms. Raye creates disturbing short films for her friends using found family footage. She also loves goats of any kind.
From the Bluff
by
Jan Rittmer
Back in the ’60s in my big house at the top of Clay Street hill, I would stand in the bay window of our bedroom, coffee cup in hand, looking out over the tops of the oak trees in the park, over the white-veined church steeples to the river beyond, never wishing to live anyplace else. On sunny days the river glittered like the sequins on my blue satin formal; on cloudy days it lay in its valley, gray, flat, remote. But always at night, looking over the thousands of lights of the cities, I saw it as a magnetic black hole, a sinuous absence defined by the lights along its shores. Car lights whizzed nervously across its four shadowy bridges like tightrope walkers running the last few feet to safety.
The river’s magnetism is obvious. Towns grow long beside its bank, unwilling to expand over the bluff. People try to keep the river in sight, building houses that stare blankly at the prairie but open wide in every possible way to the river on the other side. My friend, a contractor, built his home so that each room overlooked the river, even installing an interior window between the master bath and the bedroom so he could see the river as he stepped from the shower.
Those who grow up with the Mississippi sliding past their door have trouble leaving its valley. When they do, they do it like supplicants to an oriental court with their heads bowed. When they return, they approach on their knees, forelock to the ground. In the ’60s, I met young Chris, who, as part of a cliché for the ’60s, despised everything his wealthy parents represented. He had fled our valley for the Ganges, and with help from Indian and Tibetan wise men, searched for peace and balance. I first met him after he returned home. He became a deckhand on our company’s towboats. “I was happy over there for a while,” he said, “But I became obsessed with a need to come home. It wasn’t until the plane circled over the Mississippi, and I felt a pull downward, like pulling extra g’s, that I realized it was my river that had been calling me back.” For two years Chris brought his newly serene personality to the raucous, dirty work of tow boating; he made his considerably less-centered mates uncomfortable. Oh, Chris was nice enough, but they felt as if he knew something they didn’t, and he never bothered to explain. Then there was my neighbor, Richard, who moved from the town of Clinton, just upriver, to live on my bluff. When he was a boy he would head for the Clinton riverfront to walk the railroad bridge and spit in the water. He swam the slough across to Beaver Island, where he built a hideaway and learned how to smoke a pipe. On the river he ran into old Gus, who taught him about boats and fishing and eventually gave him a green jon boat and motor of his own. As a kid Richard explored every turn of the local backwaters in that little boat. Later, after med school and a stint in the Navy that took him around the world, he married and opened a practice in Tucson. Eventually, though, he gave it up and came home. Years later (when he was somewhat mellow one night) he admitted why: “It was those damn Arizona aquifers,” he said, looking out his living room window towards the Mississippi, “Real estate agents kept talking about aquifers like they were invisible underground rivers. I needed to come home to a real river.”
Looking downstream from my window on Clay Street, beyond the most distant bridge, downstream below Smith Island, in my mind’s eye I could see the stretch of river I remember most vividly, the five miles or so between the Illinois shore and the main navigational channel that the river charts call Andalusia Island. That one name encompasses dozens of small, unnamed islands, laced by sloughs and backwater, forming miles of secluded, quiet places. I’ve seen those gray-green waters so smooth they seemed two dimensional, mirroring willows drooping from the bank, clouds scudding across the flat surface, and filtering blue sky to a murky green. But I knew that beneath the surface, catfish curled in a gnarl of tree roots, and ancient sturgeons slid stealthily along the bottom.
At other times these same waters vibrated with life. Dragonflies darted and hovered like tiny cobalt drones. Catfish leaped from their hiding places; a frog belly-flopped smack in front of a turtle that was up on a log, sniffing the sunshine. At these times the surface of the water was ragged with comings and goings, landings and departures, concentric circles bumping into each other, interrupting the wake of a mallard hen and her ducklings.
On the other side of the islands, out on the main channel, is a different river, less natural but also crowded and vital. On a summer day these stretches were very busy, and even more congested on weekends. Pleasure boats ranged from pontoons slogging along to cruisers with sleeping quarters for eight, from canoes to flat little speedboats snarling and splatting by. All vied for space, dodging each other. I knew this river because it was there where much of my family’s life took place. Out there on the main channel was where the giant towboats pushing fifteen barges rumbled by, and our smaller harbor boats skated around to help them, all of us hoping to make a living while struggling to avoid the foolhardy water-skiers who played there, believing their bravado would keep them safe.
On the Iowa bank there was a mixture of summer cabins and short stretches of trees that were interrupted by occasional boat-launching ramps with cars and trailers clustered around them.
There were also factories and barge terminals transacting the serious, hard work of the river. Lining the Iowa side of the islands were trees with fleets of huge steel barges tied to them, sharing space with beaches lined by pleasure boats. Frequent visitors to those beaches furnished their favorite island playgrounds with tire swings, picnic tables, and even an occasional two-hole outhouse. During the day, families picnicked and swam; at night, campfires blazed and radios blared. The crisscrossing searchlights of passing towboats strobe-lit these all night parties.
Upstream from there, closer to my home, the river divided the Quad Cities in ways mere state boundaries could not have done. Chambers of Commerce slogans not withstanding, there are two sets of cities on opposite shores. People measure each other like feisty kids on opposite sides of a toe drawn line. Even men fishing in the turbulence below the dam—one in the shadow of the Davenport Bank Building, the other in the lee of Rock Island’s Modern Woodman’s office—eye each other suspiciously across the water. When a towboat or an excursion boat distracts the fishermen by pushing out of the lock, the disruption reinforces a sense that the river makes strangers of the two groups.
During the summer, competing cities call periodic truces: They give homage to the Mississippi by convening with others to bring tribute. There is a jazz festival, fireworks, a cardboard raft race, Catfish Days, Steamboat Days, River City Days. The towns of Port Byron and Le Claire act out old rivalries by stretching a rope across the river in a hotly contested tug-of-war. There was a Crappiethon, now abandoned (possibly because people pronounced the name
in embarrassing ways), and a lighted boat parade. One upriver community actually celebrated the plague of short-lived insects that regularly infests all river cities with an annual Shad Fly Festival. But when the summer hoopla is over, all go their separate ways.
The river towns on both banks exist because of the Mississippi. Early settlers came because of the valley’s fertile soil, and many of them arrived by riverboat, at first settling almost arbitrarily on one bank or the other. The towns needed a reliable water supply and an easy way to swap farm produce and minerals for manufactured goods. Early settlers mined the river for sand and gravel and its banks for lime to make cement. Later, lumber from the logging off of the great Minnesota and Wisconsin forests floated downriver in acre-sized rafts to become buildings, and houses like the one I lived in, as well as mansions for great lumber barons like Young, Lamb, and Weyerhaeuser.
Many fortunes have been made on the river, but the boom and bust of logging and the dramatic rise and demise of gilded steamboats illustrate a pattern: Only hard, dirty work on the Mississippi has yielded a lasting living. The oldest companies still move sand and gravel. But the river always seems to encourage schemes for making easy money. Those schemes have been like the shadflies: numerous, succeeding briefly, but born and dead in an instant.
Even today the Mississippi sustains the Quad Cities. At night, searchlights still bounce off the windows of the Clay Street house. During the season, the view from there still includes several big tows bringing coal, fertilizer, and petroleum to exchange for barge after barge of local grain, each fifteen-barge tow carrying the year’s work of more than a dozen farm families.
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