Making History




Gregor lived in a house beside a vast, rambling abandoned factory. He lived there with his wife, an invalid who spent her days in a room on the second floor staring out the window at the horizon. A local girl came in three hours a day to care for her. At other times it was Gregor who answered the bell, or did not answer the bell, according to his mood. Mostly he answered the bell and the errands resulting from the answering were simple ones – two eggs fried and toast, a glass of orange juice, a trip to the library run by an old crone three fields away on the bank of the river. Occasionally he would be required to listen to his wife’s chronicle of aches and pains but he didn’t mind. When they were young she was beautiful, ravishing and he loved her with a great passion. Now they were old Gregor loved her in the way an old man loves his wife – a way having more to do with agape than eros.

The factory had once processed sugar beets. Financiers had decided they could buy sugar  cheaper from another country. The old beast – evil smelling and belching clouds of stench laden air - had limped on for a decade or two and then slowly ground to a halt. Afterward neighborhood boys had occupied it as their fort and castle for a generation but now even they were gone – off to join the army or dig in the mines or get drunk in seaports and sleep in alleys. Bats slept their days away in the lacing of the high roof girders but other than they and insects who live everywhere, no living beings entered the building, excepting Gregor.

The girl came at seven in the morning and as soon as she came into the house Gregor, after a polite good morning, left through the same door she had entered and walked across the yard into the front door of the factory. This led him onto the main floor, a vast area as long as a football field. After walking this, the hollow sounds of his footsteps hitting the concrete floor echoing off the walls and ceiling, he came to spiral stair made of dark, rusting metal. This he climbed slowly for it rose four stories and there were many stairs. At the top there was a foyer leading into a large room, once the office of the factory manager. The rest of the building was crumbling to ruin but oddly enough, because it was under a section of roof covered with steel still proof against the snow and rain, the office was in good shape. The outer walls were concrete, then insulation, a surprising amount for the construction techniques of its day, and then wood paneling, peeling in a few spots but essentially sound. The floor was covered with linoleum, worn and in the corners peeling back but still serviceable. The only furniture was a gigantic oak desk sitting in the very center of the room. The floor was clean and the corners free from cobwebs. In one corner were a mop, a pail, a broom and a dustpan.

Each morning Gregor walked directly to the desk, sat down in its chair and began to work. And what would an old man be doing working at a desk in an abandoned factory, you might ask. He was writing a history. Most likely it was a history which no one but himself and a few friends would read but Gregor was of the opinion who read it or who didn’t read it was of no matter. It was necessary that he have something to do, otherwise he would go mad. Even if the writing of his history was only an avoidance of madness then that would be enough.

At seven fifteen in the morning the sun poured in a long bank of windows on the east wall so there was no necessity for electric lights which was good for there were none. Sometimes in the evenings when his wife had gone to sleep for the night he came back carrying with him two storm lanterns. These provided more than enough light for night work and Gregor had a love for the yellowish light they produced. But the supply of kerosene was limited so he could not come at night as often as he would have wished. Beside the desk were three tall wood filing cabinets jammed with papers. The desk held a computer, covered when Gregor was not there by two layers of plastic sheeting. He did not trust the roof.

Gregor had money and not the script issued by the present regime which gave you the right to stand in long lineups, an activity rewarded in the end with things you did not want but had no choice but to take unless you wanted to starve – half rotted cabbages, mouldy rice, bread so hard it would break the teeth of a rat. Until the authorities shot him through the head’ Gregor’s son was a successful thief. Besides being a successful thief he was a careful man who saved a portion of his profits in the form of small gold ingots, one quarter of an ounce a piece. Several plastic buckets of these ingots, wrapped in plastic, were hidden in secret places only Gregor knew. Twice a year he took some out and traded them for script on the black market. The amounts of script he was given for the gold enabled him to buy on the black market – food, clothing, tools, computer gear, paper, etc.

What kind of a history was Gregor writing? A dangerous kind or at least if you were associated with the government you would consider it dangerous, not because it was anti government in any narrow sense but because it considered governments to be small islands of human effort floating upon a great sea of human energy. He was writing a history which included as many things about the human beings as possible. And what was his training? He didn’t have any which meant, of course, that he was the perfect person to write such a history. There were official historians who worked in an old building in the center of the nearby city, but they were bought and paid for. They often spent a lifetime ‘writing’ the official history of a small section of ‘historical events’ assigned them. The wise ones, by various subterfuges, managed to make sure their histories were not published in their lifetimes. The unwise were often arrested, tried and shot. It was not that the authorities objected to anything they said, especially since what they said was so guarded and obscure as to be incomprehensible, but that they said anything at all. Reality was something created by the government and if this was so then a historian publishing was tantamount to treason. Treason was the catch all charge in those days. Even thieves were convicted of treason rather than stealing.

When the present government took over power there remained remnants of the old elites which they systematically eliminated. This was the government language. They did not kill people, they eliminated them, a much more scientific and hygienic term denoting a passionless objectivity which did not exist. In actuality these people were killed by thugs and sadists who thoroughly enjoyed their work. After this period of wholesale slaughter, the government, very wisely if you have read Machiavelli, rounded up most of its thugs and sadists and killed or eliminated them. They were not the kind of people who would succeed at the next stage, that of ‘pacifying the people’ and they were not the kind who went off quietly into retirement. They were replaced by more moderate types who beat and tortured people only on the direct request of government ministers. This was heralded by the government as a return to ‘due process’ and trumpeted as a triumph in ‘the fight for the rights of the people’.

But there were many of the old elites left and even some who had morphed from being an enemy of the people to being their tribune and protector. The later were to be found in government offices and on the whole to be avoided. The former lived quiet lives most often in the rural areas where they farmed and raised animals. They kept a low profile and the government, other than spying on them in a desultory sort of way, left them alone. These people were the source of most of Gregor’s information.

Private vehicles were not allowed in or near the cities but some exceptions were made. By astute bribery Gregor recieved a permit for his motorcycle under the pretence that he used it to do Christian work in the outlying areas well known to be in need of an input of Christian energy, for they were, on the whole, wild, wooly and lawless. This, of course, was a fiction. He drove his motorcycle around the country all summer talking to people.  In the fall he organized his recordings (he took no notes rather recording with a machine hidden in his clothing). Through the winter he added new chapters to his book. He had been doing this for twenty years. All of his informants knew he was recording but most thought it for an anecdotal history the compiling of which was a private pleasure. Only a few old friends knew the real scope of his project and he trusted them implicitly.

As a cover, behind his house were two small barns housing sheep and goats. During the warm season these creatures roamed about grassy fields fending for themselves but in the winter they were brought in. Two hired men looked after them, slaughtered, made cheese and supplied the meat and cheese directly to a store for members of the government only. Officially Gregor did the work himself and there were no hired men. He made the monthly deliveries to the store himself and signed all receipts, bills of laden and other documents having to do with the business.

Yet one September, five years into his project, he was paid a visit by an army officer, a young man of twenty-five. There were rumors the young man told him, that he was constructing a history. It was forbidden, the young man told him, for private citizens to write histories. Such things were reserved for the proper institutions funded and overseen by the government.

No, no, Gregor replied, there was a misunderstanding. He knew very well it was forbidden to write histories and would not even dream of doing such a thing. Probably there was some misunderstanding of his summer activities. He went about the countryside on his motorbike doing good work among the rural people using some small amounts of money raised among his good hearted neighbors. This work involved talking to people in the villages, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in Inns and Hotels. Perhaps people watching this activity from the outside misconstrued what he was actually doing.

Ah, said the young man, this was indeed possible but he had in a dossier at his office a copy of a report that Gregor was overheard in a certain Inn in a certain village, speaking of politics before the Great Change and the young man wondered if he was doing Christian work what he was doing speaking in this manner.

Unless he was given the village and the Inn and the date then Gregor found it impossible to answer such a question in detail but in general he was an old man often talking to old men and it was only natural that they occasionally spoke of events which occurred in their youth. He realized that the officer, being a very young man, would have no direct experience of this yet if he consulted his memories of the conversations of his uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, he would see that what Gregor was saying was true. But this kind of talk about the past indulged in by the older generation was very different than the construction of histories, very different indeed. Rather it was the sharing of personal reminiscences from the past, the most natural thing in the world for those who actually lived the sad days before the Great Change.

After a few similar exchanges the young officer left, leaving behind him a copy of the regulations dealing with historical public discourse. Gregor thanked him profusely saying that although he knew the general drift of the law he had never seen a copy of the regulations and would treasure them dearly. Perhaps, he said, the next year before going off on his rounds the officer would like him to submit an itinerary but the officer said this would be unnecessary and made a joke about the filing cabinets already being filled to bursting at which they both laughed, Gregor perhaps a little too robustly.

When the officer left Gregor’s wife’s bell rang and, as it was afternoon and the girl gone, he went upstairs to see what she wanted.

“Who was that?” she asked when he came into the room.

“Just a friend,” replied Gregor.

“Do you think I’m so dumb that I can’t look out the window and see the official car in front of the house?” his wife asked.

“Ah. Well, I didn’t want to disturb you, dear. It was an officer from some Directorate or other who came to explain the new rules for pig marketing. Apparently the Directorate is concerned piglets are being sold on the black market and shipped to the north where it is against the law to have pigs. I, of course, informed him that no such thing was going on here. We are the most law abiding farm in the whole district I told him, which is true. All of our piglets are accounted for and grow to slaughtering size here on the farm and the meat delivered to the proper store as is required and expected.”

“Then why did the car have on the door The Ministry of Information?” his wife asked.

“Because it is that institution which deals with providing the public with all information, including that concerning pigs.”

His wife looked suspicious but as she had no knowledge to contradict what he said she said nothing.

“Please get me a glass of orange juice,” she said.

“Of course,” said Gregor and he went off down the stairs.

It was after this visit by the officer that Gregor moved all his files, etc out of the house into the old factory. He also took the precaution of creating a code for his book and even created a computer program which translated his prose into the code. After typing his summer recordings he translated them to code and destroyed both the recordings and the original prose.

“You are becoming an paranoid,’ an old friend in a village one hundred miles to the north told him.

“Perhaps,” Gregor replied, “but that young man was very intelligent and I don’t think he believed a single thing I told him.”

This was true but as well as not believing a single thing Gregor told him, the young officer didn’t care that he was lying. In his experience everyone was lying. The file was a routine affair which was not expected to turn into an investigation and he saw no reason to make it otherwise. So what if the old bugger was writing a history? Who cares? Let him write all the histories he wanted. No one would publish them anyway and when he died the papers would be dumped into the garbage along with the rest of his personal effects. He had bigger fish to fry and they included building a base of people well disposed toward him. Some day the old bugger might be of use. Every year after his visit, Gregor received a Christmas card from the young officer. On the front was a picture of himself with his wife and three children.

On the eve of the twenty-first year of writing his history Gregor’s wife died, of a heart attack, apparently, although it was unsure for there was no autopsy. Gregor found her one morning cold in the bed, her face arranged in repose as if she were sleeping. The death of her son was her death really. It was after that she took to her bed and never left the second floor. She was a maternal woman and when her only son died she had little to live for. There were no grandchildren. The daughter in law, after her husband’s shooting, moved away and they lost contact with her. Gregor was of little use to her, an old man who disliked personal reminiscing and seldom spoke a word excepting if they had to do  with historical subjects. In the last ten years he had sat for an hour a day in her room in the afternoon but most of that had been spent in silence. When they did talk usually it was her wife speaking of her childhood in the province she came from far off to the east and Gregor listening.

She was buried from the local church for she was a believer. The old neighbours who remembered her came and a smattering of relatives not too far off to make the ceremony. She was laid to rest in the churchyard on the left side of her son. When the time came Gregor would be buried on the other side. Gregor was surprised how much he missed her. He would wake in the morning and be halfway up the stairs before he realized she was gone. He dreamed of her when she was young and beautiful and they were making love. Sometimes, in the afternoons at the time he once visited her he would allow his mind to construct imaginary conversations with her. This always ended in his weeping and he would end this by lying down and taking a nap.

Much of Gregor’s history had to do with gruesome events – massacres, torture, mass starvations, etc. When he gave chapters (digital copies in code with a separate decoder) they would often say to him after they had read it, “Why so gruesome? Why so tortured?”

“Because so may died,” he would say, “and the ones surviving carry in their bones the memory of all that brutality. What do you want, stories of heroes?”

This would insult his friends and he had few enough to begin without insulting them but in this he was relentless. It is often this way in the world – it is friends wanting to protect us who can do us more damage than the enemies who want to destroy us. Some of his friends dropped out of the readings and avoided him thereafter. He couldn’t blame them. The real possibility of being strung up in a jail cell and beaten to death was not something to be taken lightly. The pressure in families for its members to avoid anything implicating was enormous. Most of the friends he still had left he met in out of the way places, places they had a legitimate reason to be in, in other words an alibi. Gregor was sometimes followed as just about anyone was who moved about on a regular basis but he was an expert at detecting shadows (very easy for the most part for they were amateurish and lazy). His method of dealing with them was to veer off his planned itinerary and lead them on a merry goose chase through the outback using the tent and food he carried on the bike to avoid talking to anyone. After a day or two of his playing the lover of nature in mystic union with streams and forests, the followers would disappear. Sleeping in a cramped car and eating bread and cheese they bought along the way from farmers was not enjoyable to them.

Twenty-five years after starting his project Gregor finished the first book. He envisioned three books but as he was already old and creaky and as it took him twenty-five years to complete the first he considered it unlikely he would finish more than a few chapters of the second. He was not discouraged by this but rather was happy he had managed to complete at least one book and would have, if lucky, time to do some work on the second.

Then things changed completely.

His Christmas card sending army officer raised a rebellion in the west of the country, succeeding in taking over all the western provinces and then moving on and taking the capital. Strangely there was little blood spilt in all this because the old guard had lost the support of the population and when the officer and his troops appeared before a town the local militia charged with defense would throw down their arms and join the uprising. When he arrived at the capital the rulers had deserted it in favor of melting into the rural areas and the officer led his forces through the main streets to the cheers of the populace.

Two months later Gregor received a letter from M. Kafka. He knew M. Kafka in a sort of way as a friend of a friend of a friend. He admired his writings and occasionally would give a copy of one of his books to an old friend whom he knew would enjoy it.

The letter asked for a copy of his history book. M. Kafka had backers both in the government and among private financiers and intended to publish it along with several other ‘new’ books of history. If Gregor wished the book would be published anonymously or under a pen name.

Strangely this request threw Gregor into a terrible crisis. He had never thought such an offer to be even remotely possible and had always thought of his project as a kind of private solace. The possibility of it being published widely and read by many thousands astounded and flattered him but it also made him think deeply about exactly what this would mean. He no longer thought the facts of history, even when they had long been suppressed and distorted, could lead to a ‘freeing’ of anyone. He had come to the conclusion, as had the Greeks many years before, that the terrors of history were both cyclical and inevitable and could not be avoided by cerebral epiphanies, no matter how desirable and individually satisfying, among the intellectual elites. He had also came to the conclusion that all histories were ‘used’ by someone. In other words, leaving aside the odd bookworm reading an old history for his own pleasure, and the rippling effect that such a pleasure could have on the people around him, they were pushed by people who had a purpose in mind and that purpose had to do with authenticating a new ‘view’ which was the foyer of, the introduction to, a new tyranny.

How he lamented that this offer had not come some ten years before when he was still possessed by the sureness of his historical intent! It was rumored that M. Kafka had connections to the new regime. It was said that the book would be published illegally but that those arrested by the authorities for doing so would be protected and used as a wedge to destroy the legitimacy of the judges, a pack of murdering gangsters if ever there was one. This would be a desirable effect thought Gregor but then there would be no shortage of books which could achieve it as well or even better than his history. M. Kafka’s own works would be a much better choice and since they were imaginative and mythological, they would be less open to the fermenting of a ‘new’ round of thought control which in turn could lead to a new round of demonizing and murdering. He realized what they would do with his book. He had lived too long to have illusions about the endless human capacity for vengeance, self-righteousness and self-justification. To tell the truth about the suffering of those now dead was a noble thing but to have that truth distorted to justify the visitation of more suffering upon the living was not worth it and he knew in his bones that this is exactly what would happen. No guessing, no apologetic, Pontius Pilate-like washing of the hands; he knew.

It took Gregor two weeks to transfer all the files and computer paraphernalia to the old factory’s concrete floor. He was an old man and could work only an hour or so at a stretch. At the end, instead of carrying an armload of files down the spiral stair, he tied them tight with string and tossed them over the balcony and loaded them into the wheelbarrow at the bottom. He made a great pile in the center of the main floor.

Gregor met in the early morning, one bright August day, with the two brothers who did the work on the farm.

“I have made arrangements with the authorities (bribes in other words) for you to deliver the produce yourself and sign yourself,” he said. “They will not make difficulties. They pay for the last shipment when you make the next. They decide how much so you don’t have to worry about that. Cash the check at the bank leaving a small amount in the account and work with cash. That’s what every one does. Just keep a record of how much they give you and all the expenses. The tax bill goes to the bank and you pay it there. It’s not difficult. You just have to make sure you record things as they are paid in and out so you don’t get confused. The old records are in the office in the barn. If you get mixed up about something, consult them. There is a yellow file in the file drawer listing the gifts given to the people at the office. No cash excepting for the Director once a year. The rest are by the month in produce. With all these takeoffs it’s a wonder anyone in this country produces anything. But it is the way it works and if you are diligent in the payments you will have no trouble. Occasionally someone lower down tries to squeeze. Tell them you will see and then report it to the Director. He will take care of it.”

“And your salary?” asked the older brother.

“Split half of it between you and put the rest aside. I may contact you with an address to send it to and I may not. If you don’t hear from me then it is yours. As well, eventually I will make an arrangement to transfer the title to you. We will create a little fiction of a payment to me so the relatives cannot claim fraud. But we will have to see how things go generally before the details can be worked out.”

That evening, after the brothers left, Gregor loaded the motorcycle trailer. Then he crossed the field to the factory, entered through the main door and walked to where the pile of files and computers were in the middle of the floor. He doused the base of the pile with gasoline and then threw a lighted match onto the gasoline soaked paper. Whoosh!

Three years later the brothers received a notarized transfer of the farm’s title into their names. Included in the envelope was a copy of a fictitious receipt signed by Gregor for the sale price. He never sent an address for his half of the manager’s salary, so the brothers got to keep it. This was no doubt because the last of his dead son’s ingots, glued to the inside of the rear motorbike tire, was more than enough to keep him wherever he went and for however long he lived.

There were rumors; there always are. But since Gregor contacted no one from his past life they were mere tales made up by those who like to pretend they are in the know.

He died very far away in an obscure place living among people who measure time in millennia rather than historical epochs. He died peacefully and without the slightest regret.







 

Harry and Frederick

Harry and Frederick




He was a kind man, no doubt about that. He had a high forehead running into a collapsing hairline and it was wrinkled with concern.

“Perhaps if you fill in a new 714-233?”

“I already did that.”

“With no results.”

“With no results.”

“Perhaps you could appeal.”

“Filling in the new 714-233 and waiting meant the time for appeal on the original 714-233 elapsed. The regulations allow for an appeal only on the first 714-233. No appeal is allowed on the second.”

“Dear, dear.”

Harrington Bringwater was weary but he was used to being weary. It seemed to him that he had been weary for many, many years but as he was only twenty years of age then it could not have been that many. He thought of his grandmother who was eighty-three. If she had became weary at the age he was now she would have had sixty-three years of weariness. But he doubted that this was the case for grandmother even in her old age seemed a tireless woman. If she wasn’t in the garden digging she was in the kitchen cooking or on the porch knitting. Every stitch of clothing he wore was made by his grandmother, even his underwear. Underwear she made out of the better parts of old flannel shirts she bought at the second hand store. Winter underwear she double layered; summer underwear was only a single layer. Even then on hot days, like today, the summer underwear was warmish.

“I could give you a food bank voucher,” said the man behind the desk.

“That would be nice,” said Harrington.

The man made out the voucher and Harrington left.

He walked to the food bank rather than use the bus ticket the man gave him along with the voucher. The bus ticket would take you all the way across town and, if your errand was a quick one, back again. The walk to the food bank took only thirty-five minutes.

Since it was Monday morning the food bank was almost empty but, unfortunately, so were the shelves. The woman at the front desk gave him the small box you were allowed to fill. But Harrington’s grandmother had taught him from the time he was a little boy what to choose, what to stay away from. Rice, flour, sugar, molasses, lard first. No boxes; no processed. They got their vegetables from Nan’s garden which was big enough to supply them all year, with the cold storage. Luckily that day there was bulk rice and lard so he loaded up mostly with these two. No sugar so he took two middling sized containers of molasses. When the woman at the front looked in his box she raised her eyebrows. Unless they knew him they always did. A young man his age usually took boxed junk – macaroni dinners, hamburger patties.

The walk home with the box used to be tiring until he learned his trick with the two ropes. He cut holes in the cardboard with his jackknife, threaded a rope through on either side and slung the box onto his back as if it were a backpack. It took an hour to get home from the food bank. Halfway there he lowered the box to the ground and had a rest. The spot he chose was on the riverbank where the river slung itself east in a wide meander. Sitting here you could see across to the corn fields on the other side, fields surrounded with chain link fence topped with three rows of razor wire. Harrington often wondered why the razor wire. Everyone he knew, including himself, slipped through holes they cut in the fence at the very bottom where you were hidden by long grass. Every July and August since he was nine he and one of his pals made the trip four or five times a season bringing back bags of corn they ferried across the river in an ancient canoe. His grandmother frowned when she saw them in the porch the next morning. She was an ethical old woman but then one had to eat, ethical or not. She frowned but said nothing and when he came back the following evening the corn was gone, stored in the cold cellar in the basement.

At one time people got jobs in the cornfields, hoeing and picking. But machines did all that now. The people who drove the machines were from the outside. They came for the work and then went away. None of the corn went to the local markets anymore. It was loaded onto boxcars and driven west where it was processed and then loaded onto ships and sent across the ocean. The Company who owned the cornfields nobody had ever heard of before. Some said it was owned by rich men in another country where the corn fetched high prices and there were whole buildings filled with agents ready to buy it. But not all the corn went this route. Sometimes the papers were filled with stories about corn thievery, not the penny ante kind he and his friends indulged in, but the derailing of whole trainloads with vehicles suddenly appearing and a small army of thieves emptying the cars. His Righteous Rigorousness threatened dire action. He said he would burn whole counties, hang the ringleaders but this was bluster for the most part because His Righteous Rigorousness hardly had a pot to piss in when it came to enforcing anything. His old tracked vehicles had engines whose pistons sloshed around like a spoon stirring gravy and even if he managed to patch up enough for a punishing expedition anyone in front of them disappeared like ghosts so there was no one to punish. Once, some years ago, when they burned empty houses, it so angered people that they dug holes in the roads and spent all night shooting at the trapped vehicles, ping ping, the bullets bouncing of the armored plates. This scared the daylights out of the soldiers who escaped on foot the next morning. When they came back two days later with bulldozers the vehicles were all gone. Not a single bolt or sparkplug remained - all cannibalized and carried off to God knows where. But this didn’t stop His Righteous Rigorousness from taking to the screen once a month, banging the oak table he was sitting at and shouting so loud spit flew out of his mouth like he were a human rainstorm.

When he arrived at the house his grandmother was washing the front steps. She did this once a week excepting, of course in the winter when the water would freeze. She looked into his box and patted him on the head.

“Good for you!” she said. He took the box into the kitchen and put the things away in the cupboards.

Two of Harrington’s uncles lived in the house along with he and his grandmother. The uncles were simple. Even if there were jobs for them, which there wasn’t, they would not have been able to work. For them to do anything sustained they needed someone at their side telling them exactly what to do. But they were big and strong and did all the heavy work in the garden and around the house with their mother, Harrington’s grandmother, directing. They were kindly, gentle men but sometimes they did become difficult. Once in a while, Harry, the oldest, managed to buy a bottle of bootleg whiskey. When he was thoroughly soused he would sit up late on the back porch singing old love songs at the top of his voice, so loudly that no one for many houses around could sleep. If any one tried to stop him he would become violent which was a problem for he was very large and had tremendous strength. His mother, Harrington and the neighbors had learned, through trial and error, the best thing was to leave him be. He ran out of steam around two in the morning and stumbled off to bed. The next morning he apologized to everyone.

“Don’t give me that!” his mother would say to him. “If you were really sorry then you would stay away from that rotgut booze.”

However there were enough people around to listen sympathetically to his apologies that he spent the whole day going from house to house. The women would give him coffee and pie and Harry would do his best to explain to them how it seemed that he was taken over by another man when these things happened but he was sure that it would never happen again and so on. As they were kind and motherly women of good heart his hosts clucked sympathetically and gave him another piece of pie. Harrington thought Uncle Harry got two things out of his occasional bouts – firstly he got drunk and sang love songs which he dearly loved to do but was too embarrassed to sing when he was sober and secondly the next day he received pie and sympathy. Harrington did not begrudge him. A man who, because of his condition, had never had and never would have, sexual relations with a woman, had to have an outlet of some kind. Even God would not be so cruel as to deny him that.

Frederick, the other Uncle, never got drunk and sang love songs. This was because he was an obsessive masturbator and his obsessive masturbation left him no energy to indulge in such goings on. Frederick had his own room on the second floor which in turn had a bed with creaky metal springs. No amount of lecturing from his mother had any effect whatsoever on the noisiness of his masturbation technique. Although Harrington had never actually seen his Uncle in the act, a fact for which he was grateful in the extreme, from the sounds which came from his room several times a day Frederick had no concept of quiet, mewing pleasure. The bed springs creaked so loudly it was hard to imagine that Frederick was accomplishing this act in his bed alone. They sounded so loudly, so piercingly that it seemed as if three or four people were involved thrashing about in a great fire of mindless pleasure. His arrival at ejaculation was accompanied by a rising crescendo of bear like grunts which one could easily hear at the very end of the garden in the back, some one hundred feet away from the house.

When he was a young boy Harrington was mortally embarrassed by these daily gallops of Uncle Frederick. Adults would not mention them to a young boy but his fellow children brought them up in the eternal one upmanship of childhood, at least his enemies. But Harrington was a robust boy and by the time he was twelve no one would dare mention his Uncle’s activities in his presence. Among his intimate friends, however, those who were like members of the family, the occasional mention of Uncle Frederick’s romps was allowed, indeed even welcomed, as comic relief. Frederick himself never spoke of what he did in his room and his mother reached the point where she was accepted it as a great, unstoppable force of nature and ceased trying to reform him. Besides Frederick in the past few years (he was now fifty-five) had slowed down considerably so that now there were even occasional days in which the bedsprings did not sound at all and instead there came from Frederick’s room the sound of loud, bear like snoring.

Form 714-233 was an application for government relief. Anyone could make one as long as they were eighteen or over and unemployed. However whether the application was accepted was another matter. This, as far as Harrington could make out, was entirely arbitrary. The rules said that it was a rigorous rational process and that it was as if the details were fed into a great omniscient computer which made an objective and Godlike determination but everyone knew this was untrue. The truth was that there were so many slots, so to speak, and when they were filled that was that. The available slots were taken up by people who had some advantage  - someone inside who spoke for them, relatives with influence, etc. Perhaps twenty percent of the people who applied received. The rest were sent to an appeal which merely a formal second denial. No one was allowed to know who sat on the appeal board or indeed if there even was any such thing as an appeal board. Harrington suspected there wasn’t. The appeal board was a fiction, a bureaucratic placebo.

Harrington did not mind this himself. If it were up to him he would make his way on his own. But he could steal so much and there were others to consider. His grandmother received a small pension but his Uncles were considered ‘undesirable’ and thus not eligible for any government funds. In fact in his last two speeches His Righteous Rigorousness had suggested that the government might soon place special taxes on people such as his Uncles who HRR considered to be ‘superfluous’ and a ‘hidden tax on successful production’. HRR said that the state had suffered long enough from the ‘invidious excursions’ of these ‘undesirable elements’ and the time may very well have arrived when they would be ‘incised from the political body’ as one would incise a useless growth from one’s own physical body thus protecting its health and vigor. HRR became incensed when he spoke of issues like this. His face reddened; his eyes became filled with aggressive fervor. He sometimes moved his hands about as if he were strangling someone or at least throttling and shaking them about.

Harrington and his grandmother watched these speeches together. His Uncles were not allowed to watch for HRR scared them. They had a limited capacity to understand what he was saying but the aggression and frightening gestures were clear enough even for them. And Uncle Harry knew that he and Frederick were what HRR called ‘undesirable’. He had friends in the neighborhood who told him all about HRR.

“Mother, he’s a bad man,” Harry said one day at the breakfast table.

“Don’t talk about him, Harry, dear,” his mother replied. “Bad things happen to people who talk about him. Promise me you won’t.”

Harry promised but a week later he was still calling HRR a bad man and his mother told him some of the nasty things which happened to people who did so and then he stopped. When Harry was gone Harrington said to his grandmother, “You scared the shit out of him, gran.”

“Exactly,” replied his grandmother.


A year after this Harrington’s grandmother received a letter from the Directorate of Internal Hygiene. The letter said that she, as the legal guardian of ‘two of the unfit’, was required to attend at a certain address in one months time to register them with the Directorate. Failure to do so, the letter said, would bring ‘immediate enforcement activity’ which she would no doubt wish to avoid by complying.

His grandmother showed the letter that night to Harrington. Fortunately Harrington, an astute and no nonsense lad, was ready or at least ready enough.

“We’ll have to go,” he said.

His grandmother didn’t put up a fuss as he thought she would. Eighty some years living in the same house meant far less to her than the safety of ‘her boys’.

HRR was the power in the clusters as they were called, the large centers with remnants of productive capacity still hanging about them. But he could project his power outside the clusters only to a very small degree. Harrington had contacts in places to the north, which nominally paid taxes to the center but largely ran their own affairs. There were, even in these far places, a HRR administrator, etc. but he was essentially powerless and reliant on the tolerance of the local people for his survival. Survival is the word for many unwise HRR administrators who tried to enforce directives from the center had completely disappeared and were never seen again. ‘Bogged’ was the term used for these disappearances, presumably because the officials in question were weighted and dropped into one.

“Where are we going?” Harry asked when they were on the boat sailing up river.

“On a nice trip, dear,” his mother replied.

“No bed, no bed,” Frederick said, a kind of chant he had taken up now and again ever since they left the little dock outside town.

Harrington was seated in the stern with the boatman, a grizzled man who seemed to be able to see in the dark.

“Mom will get you a bed when we get there Fred,” said Harry, “so be quiet and stop going on like that.”  

Abomination



The long black lines had appeared one morning and slowly worked their way across the far green of the prairie, moving from west to east. At first they seemed almost imaginary, perhaps even a malfunction in the Hibson’s eye - five or six of them moving steadily forward until they created uninterrupted streams from horizon to horizon. Then the five or six became ten or fifteen and then more until they filled in a broad river of black Hibson estimated to be miles across, a swath in which they completely obliterated all but their own colour as if they were a single strange, sinuous animal driving its dark body across a sea of green.

“What on earth are they?” he asked the elder when he arrived back in the tiny village.

“They are the beginning,” replied the elder and then, refusing to answer any more questions, sent him to work in the summer garden.

“They will come from the east carrying with them the high mountain berries. Their devastation will be as a single devouring maw moving eastward. Death will be their marching call and they will spread it about them like an ink stain until the earth shrugs its shoulders and annihilates them and they become a memory, no more. True men will see them as an abomination, a stink. “Gaia,” they will cry out and Gaia will hear them. The green will devour them. Gaia will open herself and consume them as if she had suddenly become a giant mouth of grinding green.”

This was the text the elder read before the evening meal. The younger men were astonished. They had read Devastations of course, for it, along with the entire body of the Sacred Text, was the basis for all learning in the community but they, along with their teachers, had thought it a metaphorical extravagance, a dark meditation from the time when the ancient teachers, in their search for learning, ingested drugs and drove themselves into the beyond by dreadful fasts and sensory deprivations. To have it quoted in the dining hall, at the end of a clear, delightful day of sunshine and soft breezes, was extraordinary.

The next morning Hibson thought he would be again sent to the garden but no. He was told to climb onto his mountain pony and go off like he did every morning of the warm season searching and counting the high grazing sheep. Except that today he was given new instructions.

“Bring them in dear brother,” the foreman told him. “In through the high pass where they will out of sight from the plain as soon as possible.”

They sent four mounted brothers to accompany him. “Take the low trail to the edge and then herd them from the south,” said the foreman. “The elders want them gone by dark. Your packs have extra provisions. Don’t come back until the animals are all through the pass. Let there be a last man who goes back when the main body has been driven before you. If the stragglers run they must be shot. There must be none left on the face of the mountain.”

“Why?” asked Hibson.

“Because the evil ones will see them you dolt!” said the foreman. “ And what the evil ones see they lust after.”
 
Try as they might it took them longer than one day to herd the sheep through the pass. Sheep are creatures of habit. The sun was high, the grasses long, the mornings without chill. That they were being driven from their traditional high pasture months before the usual time confused them. But the brothers rode hard, even shooting their pistols into the air until, by the end of the second day, the great bulk were through the pass and crossing the rocky ravines leading to the lower pastures in the north. Hinson sent his four companions to follow and herd while he turned back to search for stragglers. He drove for the edge and made it by nightfall. He camped in the lee of a giant boulder, and, after two long days riding, slept like a dead man until the hot sun roused him in the morning.

“Do not show yourself!” the foreman had told him. “The evil ones can sense presence from hundreds of miles away and will come with sharp teeth to devour its flesh and blood. They are wild beasts. The cougar, compared to these, is a kind mother to all. Beware!”

Taking his instructions to heart, Hibson snaked on his belly around the boulder until he came to a twisted shrub growing from a crumbling run of stone. He inched himself forward until, parting the leaves, he looked down onto the prairie. The black river had broadened. It stretched from east to west as far as he could see. It seemed to Hibson very strange that he could see how vast was its movement, how almost endless its parade, and yet he could not hear it. It made no sound at all; it was like a great beast stuck dumb. Its body was not all attached to the ground. Small specks flew above it like the birds of carrion the teachers claimed followed armies in the times of war and hatred. Eaters of the dead, the Text called them, devourers of souls.

When he brought his glass to bear he could see the flying specks more clearly. They were strange creatures indeed, giant dragonflies flitting from one place to another above the heads of the great marching throng.  Sometimes fire erupted from their bellies, blue and yellow fire. Clouds of smoke suddenly erupted from the earth. The dragonflies dove into these clouds more fire spitting from their bellies and then they suddenly rose and moved on. The dead lay on the ground; the living moved on. Sometimes the dragonflies landed. They sat on the ground, great wings partially folded while figures did things to their bellies and then they flew off once again.

“They are of the Devastation. Brothers and sisters, listen. I tell the bold truth which rocks to the core. They are merciless; they have no heart; they revel in cruelty; they devour as the beasts devour. Gaia hates them. Gaia will crush them like a dog crushes bones.”

Devastations, 6, 11.  

Yet Gaia didn’t seem to be crushing them right now. The broad river of the evil ones flowed in a seemingly unending torrent and above them the dragonflies flitted and spit  fire. There were also crawling things like fast moving spiders with two mouths full of terrible revolving teeth smashing everything. They twisted and turned and destroyed in packs like mad dogs, cutting paths through the throngs. But there were not enough to change anything essential. A temporary stoppage, a brief scattering was all they could manage. When they moved on the throngs closed ranks as if they had never been. The dead were stripped. Those coming from behind trampled their bodies or tossed them out of the way into a hollow. Perhaps when darkness came they would be devoured thought Hibson.

“Oh they are vicious snakes! In the darkness when they think Gaia is not watching, they devour their own. Oh how hideous they are Brothers and Sisters. They are like ten day carrion, foul and covered with bloated insects.”

Devastations, 25, 11.

Hibson could not bring himself to shoot the uncooperative stragglers. Instead he roped three mother yews and trailed them along behind him, lambs in turn following along behind the mothers. Occasionally small groups came from out of the tall grasses or from behind outcrops and joined the procession. By the time he reached the pass he had a herd of fifty or so. Hibson left his companions to guard the pass to prevent the sheep from retracing their steps and rode down into the village, reaching it on the fourth day.


“What did you see?” asked the foreman.

“A great river of black moving from west to east,” Hibson replied.

“Ninny! I know you have a glass.”

“It is forbidden,” replied Hibson.

“And so is fornication. Yet the village is filled with children. What did you see?”

“Flying dragonflies shooting fire. Spiders with two mouths with great flat teeth grinding and crushing,” said Hibson.

“They are, strictly speaking, not creatures at all,” said the foreman. “They are made of metal by servants of the dark, in a place now flooded by the sea. Gaia has arranged this in her anger and disgust at the abominations of the evil ones. You will remember Devastations, 4, 10. “The sea will scour the shore. Gaia will raise the water and cleanse abomination, leaving the rock as white as washed wool, as white as scrubbed bone.” What else did you see?”

“A great spread of brown coming from the south east.”

“Ha! Just as the elders say. That would be the rivers backing up and spreading. What you saw is coming from the Irgle, no doubt. Do you know what the Irgle is?”

“Gaia’s spittle.”

“Ha! That would be one way of putting it. When I was a boy we called it her stream of pee. Gaia drinks rains in the mountains and pees it out onto the plains. Watch you don’t repeat these things to the novices. They will be scandalized and report you.”

“I’m not that stupid,” Hibson said.

After looking at him suspiciously for a moment the foreman replied, “No, you aren’t. But I have to be cautious. Some of you young men are incredibly dense. How far had the brown spread?”

“One third of what I could see, coming from the south.”

“Well it won’t be long now,” said the foreman.

“Until what?” Hibson asked.

“Until it washes away the evil ones of course. What else?”

“Drowns them?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t they move onto higher ground?”

“I doubt it. They are too busy killing one another. By the time they wise up it will be over.”


The next day the elders sent Hibson back to the edge to observe. They sent a cage of homing pigeons with him so he could send back messages.

1st day: Brown half way up. Black river moving to the northeast.

2nd day:  Brown over halfway. Black river moving directly north.

3rd day: Black river overtaken. Chaos. Spiders and dragonflies abandoned.

4th day: Water in front and behind Black river. A great circle gathered on high ground being slowly eaten away.

5th day: Everything is water. Bodies floating.


Perhaps a dozen rafts reached the rocks. There they were met by the Elder’s Purity Guard. The survivors were helped off the rafts, given a drink of clean water and then lined up against a rock face and shot dead.

“They were of the dark side, servants of evil, abominations,” the foreman said to Hibson who said nothing in reply.

“They were a bacillus,” said the foreman. “They had to be stopped dead at the edge of the water.”

Unlike the foreman, Hibson had witnessed the executions. Those who ran, rather than wait for the bullets, were chased down and bludgeoned to death with iron bars. The white robes of the Purity Guard assigned this task became splattered with blood. The commander ordered them to strip naked and toss their clothing into the waters.

The foreman was still talking. “To allow them to mingle with us would have brought contamination. Thank goodness we have the steel of the Purity Guard who did not flinch at such a gruesome task.” After saying this he looked at Hibson but Hibson refused to meet his eye.

Some of the survivors were children. Most were with parents or relatives who held them close and spoke words of comfort to them as the Guard raised their rifles. But there were a few unattached who ran. The guard used their iron bars on one, a girl of about ten years of age, for what seemed to be an eternity before she stopped moving.

When the foreman was gone Hibson got up and walked across the field to where his ponies were hobbled. They snorted when they recognized who he was and came to nuzzle him. Each of the six he rubbed about its furry ears and kissed on the forehead. Then he laid his own forehead between the ears of his favorite, a dappled, shaggy creature with immense, intelligent eyes and wept silently. Large, hot tears rolled down his cheeks and fell from his chin onto the pony’s head.

“No, no, no, it was a terrible sin,” he told the pony. “He is a liar; it is he himself who is the abomination.”


 

M. Frost

Genuine simplicity arises from integration; but there is another form of simplicity – the pseudo simplicity of the role player, the poseur. The first bears fruit which is its own reward; the second, self invented as it is, bears no fruit and has for its bloom rancor, bitterness and death.

In the end he was rejected,
Found wanting,
His love, kisses,
Without issue,
Drained of fervor.

It was then Death drew back the curtain to reveal
The lunar landscape;
Dry, empty and barren.






M. Frost


Horace, they say, was the favorite poet of the Emperor Augustus, for he was a moralist and moralists are much beloved of Emperors who favor the simple minded doctrines of hard work, domestic virtue and mindless patriotism. They distrust intelligence and intellectual inquiry and rightly so for discontent, political and otherwise, follow quickly in the wake of freethinking. Love your gods; love the Emperor; love your family; produce profit; join in when the barbarians have to be put down. Keep the empire revenue flowing and the legions marching.

But there were no Roman Emperors in the woods of New England, just dirt poor farmers scratching a living from the meager soil and back woods universities, students and faculty arguing arcane philosophies now deep in the ash cans of cultural history. So what’s a young and ambitious lad to do? Off to England of course where the pope of literature is an American, by God, and edits the poems of another American and even bullies the Irishman into dropping the Georgian cobwebs. Faint praise he gives but even faint praise from the elusive spider puts one on the map, is this not true? Depends on what you mean by the map.  

Then, of course, there was doggerel for the New Emperor almost fifty years later. An old man addicted to applause, mumbling inanities. Drag the statue around from one spot to another, the white haired beloved courting topical fame for in his heart he feared he would have no other. The crowds at the end like Sinatra’s, coming for the historical occasion, not caring whether he missed the notes or forgot whole stanzas.

Now is the year 2010 in the mountains of Switzerland. It’s the week before Christmas and corridors of the private clinic are festooned with holly and spruce branches giving off a delightful forest scent in a place which usually smells of formaldehyde and nasal spray. Doctor Uri Kalenkin, a specialist in Geriatics, a large headed man with a long thin body, finishes his walk to the end of a wide corridor and enters a private room. In the corner of the room is a very old man sitting up in a stuffed chair. The doctor crosses the room and sits on a straight-backed chair beside him.

And how is M. Frost today?” asks the doctor.

“Miserable, as always,” replies the old man with no particular passion. M. Frost is a very ancient man. The bulk of his emaciated body is hidden beneath the folds of a thick terrycloth bathrobe under which he wears a set of double knit wool pajamas. Around his neck are wrapped two wool scarves, one black, one blue. On his head is an enormous fur hat with ample side flaps down and the string tied tightly under the chin. And yet the temperature in the room is ten degrees above average temperatures in the clinic which are, in turn, higher than normal.

There are two bright blue eyes staring out from a wrinkled chamois almost unrecognizable as a human face. One is reminded of reptiles – crocodiles, tortoises, snakes. The bright blue eyes gaze steadily upon Doctor Kalenkin who is looking through the window off over into the mountains in the far distance.

“Have you received an answer?’ the old man asks.

“I’m afraid I have,” replied the doctor.

“If you are afraid then the answer must be no.”
 
“He says it would be counter productive. No one has ever done more than two heart transplants on the same person and this would be your third. Counterproductive is the term he used.”

“If it produces a few more years for me then why call it counterproductive?”

“Perhaps he thinks you wouldn’t make it through the operation. Perhaps he thinks the strain on your other organs would be too much and you would die within weeks anyway.”

“If his fees are paid then why does he worry about such things? Let me worry about them. Or you even.”

“Well, ….”

“Well, what?”

“There seems to be a problem with the fees.”



"How?”

“I made informal inquiries through the usual channels. It seems the program officer has changed. The new one is a much younger man than the man we dealt with for many years. By the sound of his voice I would say he isn’t thirty. He didn’t recognize your name. I had to repeat it twice. He had never heard of you. Of course when he brought up the file he had everything – your history, your ongoing participation in the program, etcetera. I filled him in on some of the personal details you never find in files. He said he would get back to me.”

“He phoned three weeks later. He didn’t have much time. His whole organization was in turmoil. There were drastic cuts. As he put it, there were heads rolling all over the place. No more transplants he said. And, on top of that, a procedure had been initiated which would eventually move you to a clinic where the fees were cheaper. But he is not even sure of that. There is a faction in his department who think the older clients should be simply shucked off and left to fend for themselves.”

“So that’s the gratitude I get from those bastards. All those years of supporting them on the public stage and this is what I get.”

“Times change, M. Frost. The man I was speaking to was not even born when you left your native country.”

“What does that have to do with it? They owe me and the debt has nothing to do with individual persons. It’s a state commitment you might say.”

“That well may be but even state commitments must be overseen by somebody. And over him or her there is a boss and maybe a committee. They get orders from on high about resources and they have to make decisions.”

“Work for them, do you? Weasel apologist.”

 “You know very well I don’t work for them. I am merely pointing out there is a real world out there.”

“One which wants to dump me in the garbage can.”

The doctor did not reply to this. M. Frost didn’t care if he replied or not.

“Perhaps you would be so good as to have Doctor Frankle come see me,” he said.
Doctor Frankle was the Clinic Director.

“Certainly,” said Doctor Kalenkin.

M. Frost closed his eyes. This was how he dismissed people these days. Once he used to shout at them to go away but closing his eyes saved energy. The doctor smiled, rose to his feet and left the room.



Doctor Frankle was a relatively young man to head such a prestigious clinic – thirty-seven. He always dressed in a conservative business suit, the uniform of the Swiss professional classes. He was plump and the suit tailored to hide his belly, which it did very skillfully. M. Frost did not like Doctor Frankle. He disliked his professional cheerfulness and his insincere smiles. The doctor liked to look at the good side of every situation even if the patient he was talking to was minutes away from dying. M. Frost thought Doctor Frankle to be a rolly polly clown like the ones from his childhood, weighted at the bottom so that no matter how hard you hit them or tried to knock them over they bounced up immediately, smiling their silly clown smile. However, Herr Doctor Frankle was the Clinic Director and had to be dealt with.

“Surely there are special funds,” M. Frost said to the Doctor as soon as he sat down.

“Not in cases such as yours,” replied the Doctor.

“And what are ‘cases such as mine’?”

“Citizens of a foreign country are not eligible for special funds.”

“So you bastards are going to let me die.”

“M. Frost, you are a very, very old man and if you die one can hardly say the Clinic is responsible. There is such a thing as nature, M. Frost and it plays itself out, it runs its course. Most people your age would have died a long time ago.”

“You are disappointed I have not followed a more average path, Herr Doctor?”

“Of course not. You are a marvel, M. Frost. The Clinic treasures you and has treasured you for many years.”

“And perhaps it could find a way to treasure me for a few more.”

“There are no funds, M. Frost. Your benefactors refuse any extra funding whatsoever. They pay your monthly bill but only after a lot of detailed haggling. There is no money for transplants or expensive intervention surgery.”

“Do they tell you why, Doctor?”

“No. And I do not ask. What they fund or do not fund is none of my business. It would be presumptuous for me to try and make their decisions for them.”

“Well, then, let me ask this – do you agree with them, do you think their decision the right one?”

“To be frank, yes I do.”

“Why?”

“Your benefactors’ organization has been hit with deep funding cuts, M. Frost. They have to cut to balance the books and funding a transplant for you, a very suspect procedure, one our surgeon refuses to condone or perform, is out of the question. I must say I think this a sensible decision, one I would make myself if I were in their place.”

“There are many heart surgeons in the world, Herr Doctor, and they do not all live in Switzerland. Contacts of mine tell me there is a Delhi surgeon who will do the whole thing for ten thou plus expenses, perhaps another ten.”

“That’s just the surgeon, M. Frost. The charge for the room and aftercare would be ten times that.”

“Not in Delhi.”

“You are in Switzerland, M. Frost, not Delhi.”

“A mere plane ride over the mountains, dear Doctor.”

“I am afraid you are living in the world of make believe, M. Frost. I cannot join you there for I have a Clinic to run. You will have to excuse me. I have to get back to my work.”


Most men, especially very, very old men like M. Frost, would give up after such a succession of rebuffs. But not M. Frost.

There was a cleaner who mopped M. Frost’s room every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, usually in the afternoon around four o’clock. He and M. Frost were both gregarious men and while the cleaner mopped they talked about many things and over the years had become friendly. The cleaner was Gypsy and M. Frost asked him one day if he knew someone who would drive him to Delhi. The cleaner replied he knew somebody who would drive anyone anywhere if the price was right. M. Frost had money in gold coins in a safety deposit box in a bank in a nearby city. After much discussion he and the cleaner made an arrangement.

Of course the Clinic would not allow M. Frost to leave the premises but security at the Clinic was minimal for the patients were either very old or dying or both and hardly needed a vigorous security presence to keep them in line. As well, it was assumed that M. Frost was more limited in his movements than he really was. For many years he refused to walk to the dining room, taking all his meals in his room. The reason for this was not immobility but because M. Frost found the sight of sixty-five old people eating their meals depressing. And although he seldom walked outside his room, within he walked regularly for some hours a day, back and forth, back and forth, like a prisoner in a cell.

So it was not difficult for M. Frost to slip out of his room in the middle of the night and be let out a side door by one of the cleaner’s cohorts. He crossed a section of darkened lawn (it was at the back of the building where the Clinic was economizing on outside lights), slipped through a hole in a hedge, which was exactly where he was told it would be, and climbed into the front seat of the car awaiting him there. The next day he emptied the safety deposit box, paying his driver one half of the agreed upon sum and storing the rest in a money belt around his middle.

His driver was a small man the size of a twelve year old but his gray hair and wrinkled face showed his true age of sixty-two. He drove very fast and very skillfully along the tertiary highways he and the cleaner had agreed were the best for a very old man who wished his traveling to be anonymous. The driver did not speak any language known to M. Frost which was just as well for the excitement and intense activity preceding their trip had exhausted M. Frost. He let down the back of the passenger seat and slept most of the way. They ate from two coolers full of ice, drinks and sandwiches in the back seat. Occasionally the driver stopped on the shoulder of a deserted road and they went into the woods to urinate and defecate.

Every night the driver pulled off the road in a place he thought likely and they slept in the car, that is the driver slept, for M. Frost, free of the responsibility of driving, spent most of the day sleeping. While the driver was sleeping M. Frost felt the need to ‘stand watch’. They always parked under trees. He spent the night looking out the windshield and through the leaves at the stars burning in the night sky. The driver slept the sleep of the dead. He didn’t move a muscle during the whole performance which usually lasted six hours. He breathed so silently through his nose that several times during the night M. Frost, his fears getting the better of him, held a hand mirror up to his face to see if he was still alive. Fortunately, each time, he was.

There were borders to cross but none of them presented a problem. The driver took care of everything, speaking a tongue to the officials which M. Frost assumed was Arabic. Papers were looked at but only in the most cursory fashion, partially due to the one hundred dollar bill folded into M. Frost’s passport which the officials extracted with practiced fingers and slipped into their pocket.

The farther south they went the warmer it got. M. Frost abandoned his winter hat after the first day and took off his inside overcoat on the second. By the time they arrived in Delhi he was down to the clothes a man would wear in a New England autumn.

The driver dropped him off at the entrance of the hospital. He wanted nothing to do with Indian medical officials and was gone before M. Frost went through the front doors. What a crush of humanity in that busy lobby! By the time he reached the desk M. Frost was feeling overheated for the first time in thirty years. He opened the top two buttons of his wool shirt to let in a little of the turgid Indian air.

Doctor A (M. Frost was not allowed to know his full name) was an excellent surgeon. Three months after the surgery M. Frost stood outside the hospital doors once again. Precisely at the appointed time his driver pulled up and he climbed into the passenger seat. The return journey was much faster for there was no reason for secrecy and they drove the main highways.

Unfortunately M. Frost died of heart failure during his second night back at the clinic. When Doctor Frankle was informed he refused to allow resuscitative procedures to be employed. “He’s as old as the Himalayas for Christ sake. Leave him alone,” he told the night doctor in charge. This had nothing to do with the fact that M. Frost’s benefactors had not paid the last month’s bill or that he had received an email the day before informing him there would be no more payments on the account of M. Frost. The email’s sender, a junior bureaucrat recently hired, expressed his opinion that it was technically impossible for M. Frost to be still alive and the old man who had in some way assumed his identity was a scurrilous old rascal, no doubt a Gypsy con man. His sources told him (and oh what sources these people had, thought Doctor Frankle, all of them misinterpreted) the clinic was ‘infested’ with Gypsies and the Director should exert himself to get rid of them.

M. Frost, who in death looked more like an ancient mummy than a man who had recently died, was laid to rest in the pauper’s patch, as the staff called it, a piece of land off from the main cemetery. M. Frost’s grave was deep for he was first in what the workers called a ‘column’, that is a very deep hole, which when fully filled with one as flat as possible coffin after another, (as the occasion demanded) held fifteen corpses encased in plywood boxes covered with inexpensive cloth. At the foot of this collective grave was a limestone slab where the carver’s apprentice chiseled in the latest addition. M. Frost would, no doubt, have been proud to know that his name was first on the list. That none of his accomplishments followed his name is understandable for the staff at the Clinic had assumed his grandiose claims of fame to be an old man’s ravings, the product of an aged, diseased mind.  




 


M. Hopkins

M. Hopkins



The neighbours considered M. Hopkins a moody, morbid man who stood silent for long periods studying the roots of trees on the river bank and sat in his garden all afternoon reading and smoking a long stemmed pipe. Granted, if met on the street he was unfailingly polite and cordial but that, most likely the neighbours thought, was a bit of play acting learned by morbid men to ingratiate themselves with their fellows. He lived in a cottage at the end of Gardon street.

In truth it was not play acting for M. Hopkins was a deeply cordial man but he was also old and sick and had little energy for gossip and street corner conversations. He had, as he told the woman who did his cleaning once a week, six good hours a day and he needed them for his ‘project’ as he called it, the bringing to the press of a book of poems. Mrs. Williams, the cleaning lady, was sympathetic. Although she liked a good jaw herself she was imaginative enough to comprehend why this very nice old man kept to himself. She even defended him to the face of one of the more vicious hags who held court in the mornings outside the corner store.  “What do you know about poetry, Meg Spicer,” she said to her, “when you can’t even read and write?” This shut down Meg’s jawing at least until Mrs. Williams left. Then she started in again on how some persons thought themselves above others, lording it over them with their princely ways, when everyone knew it was the good and simple folk who were the chosen of the Lord and if they had good hearts he didn’t care if they could read and write.

The cottage had a small study overlooking the garden. The garden was a simple affair – a hedge along the back for privacy, a willow tree for shade, a patch of bright green grass bordered by flowerbeds. Mrs. Williams’ nephew, a twelve year old, cut the grass and tended the beds. Or at least he pretended to tend the beds for no matter how often M. Hopkins showed him which were desirable plants and which were weeds, Anthony grew confused in the midst of his weed plucking and, taking the tack of not pulling what he wasn’t sure of insisted upon by M. Hopkins, he in truth weeded perhaps ten percent. Mr. Hopkins did the rest in the cool of the evenings, fifteen minutes at a time. He didn’t mind. If he had not been not sick he would have done it all and the grass as well.

On the fourth Sunday of every month, at three in the afternoon, Bill Evans came walking up the street and knocked at M. Hopkins’ door. Bill was a rumpled man wearing a suit which had seen better days, shiny at the knee and elbows and too big. In the wind the excess fabric drifted this way and that giving the impression that Bill was a sailing ship rather than a walker, an impression which with a strong steady wind at his rear was partially true. In contrast to the voluminous nature of his clothes he sported a shaved head with no hat. This was unfortunate for Bill was not one of those men who have slightly dark skin which browns evenly in the sun but was a Celt with blotchy skin which the sun made even blotchier. His head had seven or eight shades of colour like a piebald horse.

“Come in,” shouted M. Hopkins for he and Bill were on intimate terms and there was no need for formalities at the door. When he came into the study Bill sat on the chair opposite M. Hopkins, between them a small tea table filled with everything necessary for an afternoon snack. Bill walked ten miles to arrive at the cottage and M. Hopkins thought the least he could do was to have refreshments ready so the man could restore himself before they went to work.

Bill was a big eater. He had three sandwiches, six cookies and two cups of tea before he opened the briefcase sitting beside him on the floor. From it he took out laptop computer and, after clearing a spot, placed it on the table.

“So what’s the plan, Bill?” M. Hopkins asked.

“The plan, dear man,” said Bill, “has finally settled into a coherent pattern. We are about to sign a deal with XY corporation for digital publishing, and with AB corporation for paper and ink. Digital release first and then when pressure builds, paper and ink. I have made arrangements with certain key persons for reviews. Eminent persons with large followings in the poetic community.”

“And what about timing, Bill?”

“Ah now,” said Bill, “that’s quite another thing isn’t it? The timing, as you can imagine, has to be just right. A mistake in timing and the whole thing could blow up in our faces, so to speak. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”


"Not really,” said M. Hopkins. “I know little about the publishing world but then again I have every confidence in you, Bill, and I am sure you are right.”

M. Hopkins brought his chair around the table to sit beside Bill and together, Bill doing the typing, they began editing the twenty-ninth poem in his collection.


When Mrs. Williams came to clean on Wednesdays M. Hopkins went into the garden to get out of her way. M. Hopkins thought it would be unpleasant for Mrs. Williams to do her work with someone looking over her shoulder. He went out to the garden even when it was raining for there was a gazebo with a steel roof to keep off the rain. There he sat reading and smoking his long stemmed pipe for three hours, usually from one until four. When she was finished Mrs. Williams came out with tea for both of them and they had it in the gazebo using an old bench for a table.

When she was seated and had poured the tea, Mrs, Williams said, “So, is the time approaching?”

“Definitely, Mrs. Williams. Bill assures me the necessary elements are gathering. It’s a delicate business apparently. Things have to be just right.”

“What things?”

“The markets. They must be allowed to reach a point where they are just so. It takes an experienced man like Bill to know. He has studied the markets for many years. His track record, he tells me, is splendid and impeccable. Soon he says but we mustn’t be impatient and jump the gun. Bill has seen many disasters arising from people jumping the gun. He seems a hardy man, healthy and robust but when he mentions these poor unfortunates his face screws up in anguish. Although he likes to pretend otherwise, Bill is a man of empathy and feeling.”

“I’m sure he is,” said Mrs. Williams but there was something in her tone to voice saying the exact opposite. “You are sure he is the man for you?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” said M. Hopkins. “Bill is the salt of the earth. He’ll get the job done, no doubt about that.”

No doubt he would, thought Mrs. Williams, but exactly what job was another matter. She knew Bill for he grew up three streets down in her old neighbourhood. She, like M. Hopkins, knew nothing about the publishing business but she did know something about human nature. She had a sneaking suspicion that Bill knew as little about the publishing business as she did and wondered why M. Hopkins had such faith in the man. One day she got out of M. Hopkins that Bill had been about to publish the book for more than ten years now. Ten years! “And have you given him money all the way along?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” said M. Hopkins. “There are expenses and they must be paid.”

On that day Mrs. Williams did not press further. M. Hopkins seemed tired and she didn’t want to distress him.

Later that week, however, she phoned a few old friends and asked a few questions. The information she received wasn’t good. Bill was a shyster who ran a dozen confidence games, publishing being only one of them. It was the usual grim tale. He chose the weak and unworldly and stuck to them like a leech until he bled them dry. He was careful to stay just inside the line which would land him in trouble with the law but there had been a few times he had stepped over and had been charged. But Bill got off because he could hire expensive legal talent.

Mrs. Williams was at a loss for what to do. She had no confidence she could explain all this to M. Hopkins who was an otherworldly man if ever there was one. Yet she could think of no way she could bring pressure on Bill to make him back off and even if she did she wondered if this would be good for M. Hopkins. That Bill would ever find a publisher for the book was an illusion, yes, but if that illusion were taken away, what would he be left with? Despair probably. Despair and hopelessness.

One day at the supermarket, Mrs. Williams ran into an old acquaintance, a woman she once sat on committees with when their sons attended the same school. The woman was a bureaucrat of some kind, perhaps a social work administrator.

Mrs. Williams explained M. Hopkins’ situation, leaving out all names, of course.

“But nobody does that any more,” the woman said. “This is the computer age. He should have someone set up a web site or a Blog and publish the poetry there. If he wants he could hire a consultant to promote it for a set fee. Other than if you are some kind of poetry bigwig, an eminent professor connected to the committees and grant people, you will never get a printed book of poetry published. And even if he did, who would buy it? Nobody knows his name; he’s not plugged in.  No, he should self publish on the web.”

Mrs. Williams wrote down three names of computer consultants dictated by her acquaintance. She phoned them all that very afternoon. From what she was told two thousand dollars would set up and maintain a site and plug it into the places where the poetry readers were. M. Hopkins had told her, in an unguarded moment in the kitchen at the cottage, that he had paid Bill more than twenty thousand dollars, so far.

But when she brought it up the next week with M. Hopkins he would have none of it. Bill had a computer so why would he hire anyone else? No, Bill was his man. After the long trail they had walked over the past ten years things were looking up and this was not the time to be giving up on the important leads Bill had told him he was following just that week. He thanked Mrs. Williams for her concern and interest but he thought it best to stay the course with good ole Bill.

That Saturday night Mrs. Williams was at the pub with one of her girlfriends when a woman walked in the door and sat at the next table. She looked familiar and Mrs. Williams asked her girlfriend to turn surreptitiously and see if she recognized her. She did. She was in their grade seven and eight class years ago. She was a cop now, a detective. Cassie knew this because she was married to her first cousin and saw her now and then at family gatherings. When Cassie went off to sit a while at another friend’s table, Mrs. Williams got up and walked to the table where the woman was sitting alone. The woman recognized her and asked her to sit down.

The detective knew Bill, oh yes everybody downtown knew Bill. He was a slippery one the detective said, very slippery. One of her pals worked the fraud squad and every year they took a poke or two at Bill but they could never nail him. The detective didn’t like Bill. A crook who steals cars or cigarettes and insurance pays for it - well it’s not nice but she couldn’t work up a moral fervor over it. But Bill pretended to be people’s friends and then took their money. He befriended the weak minded and then betrayed them. The detective didn’t like that. She wouldn’t mind giving Bill a swift kick in the balls. He was scum as far as she was concerned.

Mrs. Williams described the situation with M. Hopkins, again leaving out the names. The detective sighed and shook her head. “If he has given over that much this guy must be on the simple side, is he?”

“No,” said Mrs. Williams. “On the contrary, he is a very intelligent but gullible. I think he has been protected from the world somehow over the years and doesn’t see the obvious things right in front of his face. I’ve seen some of his poetry. Now I’m no expert but it seemed good to me. Very serious and skillful.”

“And he won’t take the advice of your friend to publish on the web?”


 “No. He says he will stick with Bill.”

The detective sipped her beer and thought about this for a while. Then she said, “We could try leaning on him. Bill, that is. We could squeeze him a bit and see if we can get him to bugger off.”


Bill, of course, did not walk ten miles to get to M. Hopkins’ cottage on Sunday afternoons. This was a ploy to appear impoverished and self-sacrificing in the service of M. Hopkins. He had a cab drop him off a block away. As well his suit was a costume. He usually wore expensive designer suits but M. Hopkins was a spiritual man who would not have been impressed with expensive and flashy. A suit bought from a thrift store was just the thing for M. Hopkins. The bald head was his own but on other occasions he wore a natural human hair wig. He had several with different hairdos and varied them to suit the occasion. He thought the concentration camp look of his bald head would appeal to M. Hopkins and he was right. M. Hopkins felt for him. This was a man who has suffered he said to himself. That a person had suffered was important to M. Hopkins for he saw himself as a great sufferer and a fellow sufferer like Bill was his brother. He felt a communion with him right away.

But the detective wasn’t fooled by the suit and the bald head. She recognized him as soon as he stepped out of the cab. She climbed out of her own car and came across the street. When she came up to him she said, “Hi, Bill.”

Bill looked at her suspiciously and asked, “Who are you?”

“You don’t recognize me, Bill?”

“Never saw you before in my life,” Bill said.

“That’s wonderful,” said the detective. With that she kicked him in the back of the knees. When he went down she kicked him twice in the stomach, then bent down and picked up his briefcase and walked to her car. When she was driving away Bill turned to see the rear plate but there was a blank spot where the plate should be. He had the wind knocked out of him and with struggling to get his breath he found it impossible to identify the car’s make. It was little and blue or pink or something like that. Later when he contacted his lawyer he told him not to bother contacting the police. He would just make a fool of himself with a description like that.

The briefcase was a worn old thing also bought at a thrift store but the Mac laptop was new and top of the line. The detective stopped at a bridge across the river three miles away and tossed them over the rail. Of course Bill had lots of money to replace it but still it was a two thousand dollar hit. An expensive afternoon.

That day Bill phoned and told M. Hopkins his mother had been taken to the hospital unexpectedly and he would be unable to come.

“Is there anything I can do?” M. Hopkins asked.

“No,” said Bill and punched the end call button.

That’s the last M. Hopkins heard from Bill. Bill didn’t want to risk running into the ‘Nazi woman’ as he called her to his friends (if you could call barflies you buy drinks for your friends). “A real bitch,” he said, “a ball buster.” His friends nodded sympathetically but their real sympathies lay with the ‘ball buster’.

M. Hopkins was very disappointed when Bill disappeared but after a time of mourning, so to speak, he went with Mrs. Williams one Monday morning to see a computer consultant, a bright, chipper young man who knew his business. Within a month he was set up and taking computer lessons so he could service the site himself.

Fallon

       Fallon

   When Lonergin arrived at the Fallon airport he hired a taxi to drive him to the hotel in the center of town. From what he could see out the cab window it seemed an average little mill town, tucked into a fold in the foothills and surrounded by lush green meadows and verdant forest. A tributary river, carrying runoff from that section of the foothills some five hundred kilometers to where it flowed into the big river running north, split the town into two equal sections. Strangely the houses along the banks seemed the same as those farther in. “Where are the houses of the rich?” he asked the cabbie.
“Ten Kilometers north,” replied the cabbie.
“Out of town?”
“O yes,” said the cabbie. “Taxes.”
“And outside on the south?” asked Lonergin.
   “That’s where I live. Can you guess?” The back of the cabbies hand resting on the steering wheel was brown. Darker in the summer perhaps but even in deep winter it would be brown.
   “I don’t have to,” said Lonergin. The cabbie laughed. “There are small farms out there, going way back. With a little farming and occasional work in town, people survive.”
   “And the mill?”
 
 “Only town people work at the mill.”  The mill, out of town and to the west, was hidden by series of small hills. These hills protected the town from the stench in all weather excepting that blowing a direct east wind and that was rare. Today the wind was from the northwest and all you could smell was freshly cut grass, moist air carrying the scent of water from the river and the rich forest smell coming from the fully leafed trees both in the town itself and the woods surrounding.

   Lonergin felt a little depressed. In the past ten years he had been in so many of these little towns and they were all similar, all depressingly the same. He came, unannounced, with a briefcase full of authorizations, his mind full of barked verbal orders from his superiors, to put out fires, to squeeze things down so they wouldn’t cause problems, so everything would appear normal, happy, running with the smooth precision of oiled machinery. Lately he found himself doing his job with all his usual cool efficiency but his heart wasn’t in it. In the fall he would apply for a transfer. When the leaves came down he would get an internal job, stay in the city and perhaps revive a few of the hobbies he had abandoned years ago.
   When they retrieved his bags from the trunk the cabbie offered to carry them but Lonergin waved him off. The cabbie shrugged and Lonergin paid, him adding on a generous tip. He didn’t like other people carrying his bags. He could bloody well carry them himself. He wasn’t a Lord or a rich magnate, just a bureaucrat and a rather lowly one at that. But when he checked in at the desk he allowed the skinny young bellhop to carry his bags to the elevator and then into his room. How would the poor bastard make a living otherwise? The bellhop’s skin was brown too and he had a long, thin, elegant nose you would think would be perched on the face of an English aristocrat. Perhaps it was. There were a lot of remittance men out this way in the old days.
“Do you live in town?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Where, then?”
“On a farm to the south.”
“Cattle?”
“Some. Pigs and chickens too and a big garden.”
“Is there money in that?”
“Not much but there’s food in it. We eat well.”
“Well, that’s half the battle, isn’t it?’
“Yes it is, sir.”
   Lonergin tipped him three times the going rate and the boy left smiling. They never queried his expense accounts. If he had a larcenous mind he could have made lots of money out of it but he couldn’t see any reason to bother. He made far more than he spent, the excess going into investments handled by a brother-in-law. Very conservative, very balanced investments, half of it government bonds. He already had enough to live in some warm country for the rest of his natural life, so why bother skulking about to pile up even more? His wife was a bureaucrat too. She made more than he did. The kids were grown and into lucrative professions, one a medical specialist, the other a businessman. It was ludicrous really. Money came to them like they were sponges absorbing water.
   He watched a movie before going to bed. A space opera. Formulaic, granted, but well done with good actors and a good script. He was happy when the corner was turned and the good guys won without too much bloody annihilation. When it was over he read his book for an hour and went to bed.
   The meeting was set up on a phone call from the Big Boss in the city. That’s the way it was always done. It sent a message to whomever that lack of cooperation would bring out the big guns, that the investigator was the voice of power and authority. Lonergin was grateful for this method of procedure. It meant he didn’t have to convince anyone of anything. He just had to ask questions.
   The mayor was a rolly poly man. He sat behind a gargantuan desk in an oversized chair, behind him a window overlooking the river. He wore a three piece suit, tailor made, containing enough material for two or three lesser men. He was telling Lonergin his version of the history of the town, the usual highly edited edition told by mayors, full of mercantile wonders and heroic members of the Chamber of Commerce. Lonergin was an old pro at listening to this sort of thing. He listened with one part of his mind while another part wandered about the back streets looking for other faces and other stories. He thought of the bellhop. He thought of the cabbie. He thought of the woman who served him bacon and eggs in the hotel restaurant. He thought of the young woman who knocked on his door just before he went to bed and asked him if he would like to have ‘a good time’. He didn’t. Professional sex was far too sad an affair for him to find pleasure in.
   The mayor was a verbose but ignorant man. His language never rose above the deep fried rhetoric of tourist brochures and town council resolutions. His syntax was tortured, his thought without leaven and he was totally humourless. His smile never touched his eyes and not a single thing he said had even the slightest whiff of the genuine to it. He took himself very seriously and assumed through a fog of ponderous, bright, highly upbeat projections, that everyone else did so as well. In short he was a pompous ass. But Lonergin neither liked nor disliked him. To him the mayor was like a cow in a field chewing her cud, with the exception that the cow, as lowly as many might see her to be in the hierarchy of creation, was at least engaged in the performance of an act having behind it the full force of her animal nature. When the Mayor came to a pause in what Lonergin judged to be a far too long oration, which, if allowed to continue, would not only consume the morning but poison it as well, he broke in.
   “Is there a union at the mill?”

   “No,” said the Mayor. His face took on an expression of deep displeasure as if while speaking with a man he had assumed to be a sympathetic gentleman, it had suddenly been revealed to him that he was conversing with an unsavory character.
   “Not so unusual in this day and age, is it?”
   “People around here settle things through the family.”
   “What family?’
   “We like to think of the town as one big family.”
   “You may like to think of it that way but is it true?”
   “I think so.”
   Lonergin took his eyes away from the mayor’s face and looked out the window. It was mid morning. The bright sun was lighting up the surface of the river in a great display of sparkling and reflection. He studied this for a while. The mayor was pretending to look at the papers on his desk but he was really studying him surreptitiously to see what was coming next. Without removing his eyes from the river Lonergin asked, “Did they tell you why I am here?’
   “Yes.” the mayor replied.
   “Five young men murdered within a single year. Rather unusual, isn’t it? Perhaps you have an opinion on the subject?”
   “Not really,” said the mayor.
   “OK, if you don’t have an opinion on that subject perhaps you have one on another. Five young men murdered and yet no one charged. In fact, according to the reports forwarded by your Chief of Police, not only are there no charges but there seems to be no evidence or suspects either.”
  “The police do the best they can. We don’t have the big bucks out here like they do where you come from.”
   “O, I don’t know,” said Lonergin. “On my walk from the hotel it seemed to me that this is a prosperous little town.”
   “And it stays that way by not wasting money on useless investigations.”
   “Useless? Isn’t that a strange word to apply to a murder investigation?”

   “Well, perhaps useless isn’t the right word. What I mean is we have limited resources and we must use them judiciously.”
   “Yet surely you are aware that in a situation like this you can apply to the central government for extra funds. Five murders in a single year for a town this size would almost certainly qualify. Yet you haven’t applied. Perhaps you could tell me why?”
   “If a gang of thugs outside the town want to kill one another why should we waste money getting too excited about it?”
   “So you think the murders were committed by outsiders against outsiders.”
   “Exactly.”
   “Why?”
   “My Chief tells me that’s where the body’s were found.”
   “Bodies can be moved, Mr. Mayor.”
   “The Chief tells me they were killed where they were found.”
   “Did he? It seemed to me from the reports that that was a matter of opinion rather than investigative fact. In the reports there seemed to be a great scarcity of investigative fact, almost as if the Chief didn’t have time to find any.”
   “Well, he is a busy man.”
   “And you too are a busy man, Mayor.”
   “Yes.”
   “Good. Then you will be pleased when I tell you that an investigative team arrives tomorrow to give you a hand. To take over the investigation in fact. When do you come into the office in the morning, Mr. Mayor?”
   “About nine.”
   “Keep the first hour open then for the team. For the next two weeks or so.”
   “Well, I don’t know…”
   “Do what you like then. If they want to speak to you they will simply walk in and order anyone present to leave. It’s up to you.”
   “Well of course then. I’ll keep it open.”
   When Lonergin reached the door he opened it and turned. “Why are you convinced these murders are revenge, the settling of debts, whatever, among the outside people?”
   “They are lawless ruffians. None of them have a pot to piss in. You always find high murder rates among those kind of people.”
   “Then why is it,” asked Lonergin, “that before these five murders, for a period going back twenty years, was there not a single murder among them?”
   “These things go up and down,” said the Mayor. Lonergin stepped into the outer office and closed the door.
 
                                                               
   The Police Chief, in contrast to the mayor, was an exceedingly thin man. So much so that at first Lonergin thought he might be ill with a wasting disease. When the investigative team arrived he had them look into it. The Chief was actually in robust health. Apparently even as a young man he had been cadaverously thin. He had a sad face filled with successive lines of rumpled skin. There was a blue black bag under each eye. He had a long, thin nose which reminded Lonergin of the plows the old people used to turn sod. His eyes were round like saucers, watery and pale blue and surprisingly kind and sympathetic, surprisingly to Lonergin for he had expected something else. He sat behind a modest wooden desk with not a thing on it but a small bowl of jelly beans. From this bowl, every few minutes or so he took a few jellybeans and popped them into his mouth. He offered the bowl to Lonergin, as a substitute, perhaps, for a glass of scotch. The Chief didn’t drink. To be sociable Lonergin took a few and tossed them into his mouth. They were truly delicious jellybeans.
   
  “The reports, Chief.”
   “Are lousy, I know.”
  Lonergin was taken aback. The chief smiled. “You didn’t expect that, did you?”
   “No.”
   “They were done by a Lieutenant on the Mayor’s orders. I just signed them.”
   “You could have refused.”
   “I have seven children. They eat. But I also have a conscience. It eats too if you don’t pay attention. There are sub reports, you might call them, put away where only I know where to find them. They are not much better than the official reports for almost no follow up was done. The bereaved were interviewed for form’s sake. There were no suspects because the Lieutenant was ordered not to look for any. But there is some physical evidence which didn’t go into the official reports and a much better detailing of the condition of the bodies - when they were found, time, place etc.”
   “Autopsies? I didn’t see any reports in the files.”
   “That’s because none were done. I know that’s illegal but the town refused to authorize payment for them.”
   “And the bodies now?”
   “Cremated a week after death.”
   “Christ. Did the relatives give permission?”
   “No. It was just done. But in my reports there is a very accurate summation of the condition of the bodies, the immediate surroundings, approximate time of death and some physical evidence.”
   “Such as.”
   “Shell casings. A footprint in one case. Threads of fabric in the victim’s hand in another. I gathered all that surreptitiously, sometimes going back to the scene at night when no one was there.”
   “Why?’
   “Because I wasn’t in charge of the investigation.”
   “Who was then?”
   “The Mayor and the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant is the Mayor’s son-in-law.”
   The Chief rose from his desk to pour them coffee. When he placed the full cups on the desk Lonergin asked him. “Who and why?”
   The Chief popped in a few more jellybeans. “I really don’t know, at least in a concrete evidence based sort of way. I have hunches. I have intuitive leaps. I have educated guesses. But I don’t have knowledge.”
   “Give me some of your educated guesses, then.”
   “OK.” The Chief opened a desk drawer and took out a package of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
   “No.” said Lonergin.
   He lit the cigarette with an old time zippo lighter. He reached out with a long leg and pulled over the waste basket for an ashtray.
   “Two years ago the outsiders figured they were not being given a very good deal. Low class jobs. None on the police force. In fact not a single one as an employee of the town. And none at the mill. That’s were the real money is. Even a labourer at the mill, with overtime, makes as much money as I do. I suppose they figured if they didn’t do something it would go on that way for ever. So they decided to do something. They looked around them and came to a conclusion – a very intelligent conclusion but also very dangerous. The outsiders come into town to buy everything – food, hardware, booze, building supplies, farm supplies, everything. There are ten thousand people in the town but the outsider population is perhaps twice that amount. Some of the younger one’s who had been away to the university decided to set up a co-op. They held meetings and started the process of registering the co-op with the central government. Apparently they planned to set up a general store carrying practically everything. With volunteer labour they started to renovate an old barn about twenty klicks from here. They were about half done when the first murder occurred but they kept going. After two and three things slowed down to a crawl and after the fourth, a particularly grisly torture murder, they stopped altogether. It’s still out there on the 1169 if you want to take a look. Some say it would have been burned down but the outsiders, at least I’ve been told so, guard it around the clock carrying shotguns.”
   “So that’s why. Now who?”
   “The Mayor’s son-in-law. But he is on a leash and the holding end of the leash is held by the Mayor and four or five of his pals. Now I say this and am 99% sure of it but there is absolutely no proof that will stand up in a court of law. The bodies are gone. No autopsies. The physical evidence I gathered will never convict anyone. It might give an intelligent investigator who knows the situation a good idea of what happened but it will never convict anybody. But I doubt if it will matter anyway.”
   “Why do you say that?”
   “Because they tortured the last guy before they killed him. Somebody gave the family pictures of the body before it was cremated and a detailed list of its wounds. The outsiders are on the bottom end of the social scale but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. They have their clods like all groups of people do but there are many among them who are resourceful, ingenuous and intelligent. What would you do if someone tortured your son, killed him and then set it up so they could not get caught?”
   Lonergin didn’t say anything.
   “You know what you would do but you just don’t want to say you being a law abiding government official. You know what you would do, don’t you?”
   Lonergin took a long time to reply but the Chief waited patiently. Finally he said. “Yes. I know what I would do.”
   “Well, I think that’s what the outsiders are going to do.”

   The team arrived the next day and set to work. The Chief gave them the sub reports and drove them around the gravel roads to interview the victims’ familiars. They worked for three weeks out of a room in the Police Station. But it was as the Chief had predicted. They arrived at a fairly accurate picture of what happened but had no evidence which would stand up in a court of law. The Lieutenant and a suspected cohort had lawyers at their interviews and said practically nothing. The Mayor refused to be interviewed and without solid evidence they couldn’t force it. The Mayor’s pals were even farther away. They were ghosts moving across the far edge of a field in the twilight. The team wrapped up its work and flew back to the city to file its report. Lonergin decided to stay another day.
   He was woken by the phone beside his bed at five in the morning. “This is Phil Gillis,” the voice on the other end of the line said, “the Chief. There’s a body at 506 Compton you should take a look at. I’ll send a car.”
   When the car arrived Lonergin was in the Lobby. First light was beginning on the eastern horizon but the town was still dark. When they came to the house the Chief was on the porch smoking a cigarette. There were two police cars in the driveway and the Identification van was at the curb. When Lonergin came up the stair the Chief, sitting in a lawn chair, offered the empty one nearby with a gesture of his left hand. Lonergin sat down.
   “It’s the Lieutenant, of course,” said the Chief.
   “Right,” said Lonergin.
   “Do you want to go in and see?”
   “Yes.”
   “Did you ever see this sort of thing before?”
   “Once or twice.”
   “Probably not like this though. They were vengeful. People have nightmares for two years after seeing something like this. A lot of times it doesn’t even hit people for two or three weeks. It takes time to sink in. Then they wake up at night hollering, covered in sweat. Still want to see?” Lonergin shook his head.
  “You are a wise man. There are enough terrible things we have to see in this world without volunteering for more. I look because I’m a cop. I have no choice. When I was young I should have went into the gardening business with my uncles but at the time I had fool ignorant notions about noble heroes and so on. By the time I realized they were fool and ignorant it was too late. Five kids and twins on the way. I should have worked flower beds and used contraception.”
   Two identification officers came out of the house carrying plastic cases. They walked over to the van, loaded the cases and drove away.

   The Chief waved his cigarette towards the departing van. “They’ll find a few things. They are pretty good and they always do. But it won’t be of any use. There won’t be anyone to match it to. The guys who did this are already gone. We will ask questions but no one will answer them. Remind you of another situation? That’s just what it will be like.”
   “Won’t it matter that he was a cop?”
   “Not really. There will be a little of that but not much. Everyone in the force hated his guts. They all thought him a sadistic son of a bitch. He would have been fired years ago if he wasn’t the Mayor’s son-in-law. He was killed because he deserved it. Just about nobody who knows anything about all this will really care if the killers are never caught.”
   “What did they do to him?”
   “Probably when he got off shift yesterday morning at eight and climbed into his car they knocked him out with something. He lived in this house alone. How could anyone live with a man like that? They drove him home and into the garage. He always kept the door opener on the dash of the car. Took him down into the basement and strung him up by his hands with his feet a few inches off the floor. They duct taped his mouth. When he woke up first they castrated him. They duct taped his genitals onto his forehead. Then they shot out first his ankle joints, then his knees, then his hips, then his elbows and then his shoulders. They let him hang there for a while I suppose then they shot him through the head three times.”
   “Just like the last outsider.”
   “Just like the last outsider.”
   “What a horrible way to die.”
   “And what a horrible way to make someone die.”

   The murder of the Lieutenant terrified the suspected cohort. He left town and then, after some sober afterthought, never came back. But the Mayor refused to leave. The Chief provided him with a twenty four hour bodyguard. “Do your best but don’t get too close to him. Do you know what I mean?” he told the guards and they all nodded. Even the dull witted ones nodded.

   Lonergin was back in the capital when the Mayor was killed. It was on a September day with a nice fresh breeze coming in the window one of the night cleaning staff left open. When the Mayor arrived he found it so refreshing that he decided not to close it. They shot him through the window with a 222, a rifle with a flat trajectory, and as the window was open, there was no glass imperfections or glare to cause sighting problems for the shooter. The shot was well aimed. The slug entered the back of his head at the joint of the spine and the skull. The slug was hollow point. It broke into four parts rattling around the inside of his skull chewing up his brain as if it had been placed in a blender. The Mayor wasn’t the sort of man to have regrets. This was just as well for the way it turned out he was given no time to have them.

   There is a co op now operating on the 1169. It does a good business. Most of its customers are outsiders but it does a sprinkling of business from townies who come out for the bargains. There are now two outsider police officers and three outsiders have just started to work at the mill.

   Lonergin decided not to tell his wife about the details of the murders. So when he began to wake at night hollering, flailing his arms about, he told her it was the return of childhood nightmares. After the third night of this she demanded he go to a psychologist and he did. The psychologist, who considered himself to be a radical shaman type of healer, told him he was a spoilt bureaucrat, a soft and useless creature and thus easy prey for malignant furies. He suggested Lonergin sell his sailboat and give the money to the poor. As Lonergin did not have a sailboat he was unable to follow this advice. Instead he bought a membership in a gym and took up weight lifting. After three months of pumping iron the nightmares went away and he was able to leave the guestroom and rejoin his wife in the connubial bed.

   Chief Gillis retired early, a year after the Mayor’s murder. He and his family moved to a farm outside town where they breed sheep and Lamas. At first the kids complained bitterly but they stopped when their mother bought them three horses and they started to play hockey with the outsider kids on the local pond. The new co -op is just down from their farm which pleases the Chief for since his retirement he doesn’t like going into town. He finds the streets too crowded and the faces too innocent and imbecilic. Saturday mornings the Chief can be seen at the coop hovering his hawk’s nose above the tool displays while his wife does the grocery shopping. Saturday afternoons he sits on his front verandah drinking coca cola and eating jelly beans. Old friends from town, out for a drive in the country, sometimes join him there along with people from around the neighbourhood. Everybody gets along. Sometimes they even sit down together at the Chief’s table for supper and have a delicious meal of fresh pork and garden vegetables.