Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Chapter 3

By David Kearns

The van was stopped behind a row of cars waiting to enter the front gate of Warner Robbins Air Force Base, a few miles south of Macon Georgia.
"Somebody wake up the chief before we get to the guard post," said Jeffrey Thompson causing Red Dancing Bear to spring forward into the sitting position and begin to rub his eyes.
"We're here chief, we just need to find out where it is we are supposed to take you so you can hook up with your son," said Jeffrey, who was betraying more and more unpleasantness with his tone.
When the van lurched to a halt before the guard, Red Dancing Bear leaned forward and told Jeffrey the name of his son,
"Tell him we're here to see Lt. Col. Lester Owens," said Red Dancing Bear.
"Yes, we're here to see Lt. Col. Lester Owens," said Jeffrey sweetly to the impassive guard. The guard began scanning the list in his hand.
Three vehicles bearing Air Force personnel were waved around the van while the guard, named Davidson, who was in perfect health, went through page after page of a duty-roaster for the day. He then went inside the guardhouse to check a computer terminal.
He popped back out and shook his head.
"I'm sorry, sir. I'm not showing any such officer listed here," said the guard.
"He works in Air Force Intelligence," said Helen hopefully.
"Are you sure he is posted here?" asked the guard.
"Goddamn that Lester, I'll kill him if he did this to an old man again," said Red Dancing Bear right on queue.
"Did what, chief?" asked Jeffrey with all the civility-gritted teeth could muster.
"Got stationed somewhere else without telling me," said Red Dancing Bear. The guard, who had heard Red Dancing Bear, leaned into the van window.
"Sir, was he stationed here permanently or was he only here on TDY?" he asked. "What?" asked Red Dancing Bear. Temporarily? Was he only here for temporary duty?" asked the guard.
"Maybe," admitted Red Dancing Bear wistfully.
When they got back on the highway Red Dancing Bear feigned embarrassment glazed over with sadness.
"He does this, ever since he got reassigned after witnessing what he can't talk about," said Red Dancing Bear offering the bait.
"And what was that?" asked Helen."Things he has seen in a place called Area-51." They keep reassigning him all over the country. I can't keep up with him anymore. It gives me nothing but sadness to know that a government, which is supposedly founded on truth, justice, and the American way …”
"No chief, that's the preamble to Superman, not the Constitution," interjected Jeffrey.
“ ... can just shut someone up like that. Can take over their whole life. Wipe away their identity, their history, he said.
By now Helen's goose was cooked and ready to be brought out of the oven.
Jeffrey, by this point was as anti-Red Dancing Bear as a person could be.
He gripped the wheel and turned the van slowly back out towards Interstate 75. A thought went through his mind that Red Dancing Bear only caught glimpses of, something about Red Dancing Bear's body rolled up in a carpet, stuffed inside a dumpster next to a Day's Inn off the highway near the city of Forsythe, Georgia.
For some reason Jeffrey never crossed his wife, who clearly was not about to let anyone put the old Indian by the side of the road; dead inside a carpet, stuffed in a dumpster next to a hotel.
The kids would not be a problem, thought Red Dancing Bear, they would all be on his side.
Nathan seemed pleased just to have a friend and the mother of all humanity, Heather, she was asleep. The baby; Red Dancing Bear did not know the baby's name. That would come soon enough.
He had some explaining to do first, however. There was a pregnant pause that can only follow being turned away from the front gate of an Air Force Base, a pause that begs for an explanation from whomever had brought you to the front of that Air Force Base in the first place. He knew it. It was a required step in the dance.
Red Dancing Bear would not get away without explaining the reason why his son was not listed on the Warner Robbins' duty roster.
To a man, woman and child, everyone in the van demanded to know what had befallen the son of Red Dancing Bear, now allegedly a Lt. Colonel in Air Force Intelligence.
It was a small price to pay for over one thousand miles of road between here and "out west."
Surely they would not let him starve, nor force him to sleep in the rain during the journey.
And no, Helen, now his most ardent ally, would never allow Jeffrey to kill Red Dancing Bear and roll his body into an old worn-out rug collected from a trash-pit off the side of the highway and then stuff him into a garbage dumpster near a hotel.
Red Dancing Bear calculated the story he was about to render for the Thompson family, including hotel room, food, and mileage, to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $550 , not counting sales tax.
It would be worth every penny and them some, he thought.
After all, these poor urban whites were about to lose everything, their lives, their histories, their culture and they should not be disappointed, he thought.
What better place to begin but at the beginning, the birth of Lester Owens, who had in his early days, gone by the name of Sun Cloud.

#
It seemed that Sun Cloud had been born on the Big Cypress Reservation in the early sixties, a day after an Irish Catholic President, who had been neither in practice, when you got right down to it, was shot dead in a long sleek convertible which had been traveling at precisely 11 miles per hour in Deale Plaza, Dallas Texas.
The mother had wanted to name him John even before she had learned by two-way radio, that the President had been killed.
She had been out taking pictures of marsh birds, documenting the vanishing wildlife of the Big Cypress Reservation, when she met and fell in love with a very self-satisfied Seminole named Red Dancing Bear, who frequently wandered the reservation living off the land and doing as he damned-well pleased.
During the baby's gestation period, mother and father argued over the name of the child.
Red Dancing Bear had not wanted to name the boy after the President.
It seemed a cheap thing to do. Besides he saw into the eyes of the President and the man was not whom he appeared to be.
Sara Langford could not see in Kennedy what Red Dancing Bear could divine from the photos of the man, which had been plastered all over hell and creation those years just after he became president.
That Kennedy man was a hard man, thought Red Dancing Bear.
He could be mean and uncaring, ruthless even. This is what Red Dancing Bear had found disturbing, not the man himself but the hypocrisy of a society that would lavish such a man with overwhelming and perhaps even underserved love and engender him with an almost Godlike reverence, when he was just another man; imperfect and horny as many men his age.
He did not want his son to be named John for this reason. Red Dancing Bear named the boy Tiger Lester Sun Cloud.
Tiger was a name that would remain with the boy even after his death. It was part of his name attached to his soul. It was for his royal clan. It wouldn’t matter if that part of his name were never spoken again. It was there, always.
And Red Dancing Bear had never met a man named Lester who was not pleasant, open, honest and good with his hands. It seemed to Red Dancing Bear that every Lester he had ever known was capable of fixing things and being of good spirit when he did so.
Lester was a name he liked, and the rest was added for the type of day it had been when this Lester came into the world.
There were the familiar puffy, gray white clouds floating in the breeze that day. When the sun shined directly behind them they created the image of a cotton ball on fire; a Sun Cloud. He liked the name and the boy's mother finally agreed to it.
Sara Langford gave up her career as an aspiring photographer for National Geographic Magazine and became a professor of history at a small Central Florida college in order to pay for raising the boy.
They settled southeast of Orlando were she commuted daily to earn her living.
The boy grew towards manhood while Red Dancing Bear grew more tired of urban life. He eventually moved back down onto the reservation again.
Unlike the former President, Red Dancing Bear did not try to hide the fact he enjoyed sleeping with many other women, some white, some Indian, some Latin and some black.
To Red Dancing Bear the only thing that mattered in those days was that a woman looked good and liked having sex with a man named Red Dancing Bear.
He explained, that this was all before Red Dancing Bear had discovered the Lord Jesus, who told him not to act this way.
But that conversion in Red Dancing Bear's lifestyle had come too late for Sara Langford. She would not abide such a husband and eventually felt well rid of Red Dancing Bear.
She took up with an English professor named John Owens. An owl sort of fellow that Red Dancing Bear had met once on a visit to see how his boy, Lester, had been developing.
Red Dancing Bear had been amused by this Owens, who had been nervous and overly polite.
Owens obviously lacked sunshine as well as manhood, but to his credit he did adopt the boy, Lester, in that curious white way; as though a piece of paper could convey ownership over a boy that neither Red Dancing Bear or Sara Langford nor anyone possessed.
Anyway, Owens probably was not a very affective lover due to a circulation problem, obvious to Red Dancing Bear. He felt Owen's shortcomings were a pity for the woman he had once been married to, had enjoyed good sex during their time together.
Red Dancing Bear was warned by Mrs. Thompson not to dwell on the subject of sex too much and he continued his story.
During the visit when Red Dancing Bear went to see his son, the man Owens acted guilty, as though he had been wrong for taking up with Sara, a woman that Red Dancing Bear had abandoned years before.
It was sad to see how shamelessly the urban whites gave away their manhood.
Worst of all, in Red Dancing Bear’s view, Owens was a lifelong Floridian and not even an FSU fan. He was more partial to The Gators.
Never the less, somehow, Red Dancing Bear’s son had managed to become a wonderful football player and top-notch scientist during his high school career, as well as a young man who could fix anything with a great, big smile on his face.
He ended up as far away from his stepfather as anyone could imagine, with an appointment to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The boy gained a bachelors degree in aeronautics with a minor in military and world history in 1985.
He learned how to fly a T-38 at Reese Air Force Base. He learned how to fly something called a KC-135 strato-tanker in Warner Robbins, the AWACS surveillance plane in Oklahoma City.
After brief stints as squadron commander in Weisbadden, West Germany, and Ryadd, Saudi Arabia, Lester Sun Cloud Owens, also spent some time in Miami, helping to train foreign dictators from small Latin American countries how to keep their military people in line, so that coups did not crop up every other week.
He also showed them how to keep their motor pools running, even when U.S. Congress clamped down on humanitarian aid.
Aside from Panama City, Palmerola, and Grenada, Lester also spent time in Area-51 - located in Nevada, telling civvies and airmen how to deal with having their Judeo-Christian World turned upside down by what was stored inside that air base.
When Red Dancing Bear talked about Area 51, Helen Thompson's eyes lit up like Christmas trees.
Area-51, the Mecca for the UFO fans.
Red Dancing Bear knew all about Area 51,he said. He knew all about how the government was supposedly testing alien spacecraft there, incorporating alien technologies into military applications and so forth. People, as usual, did not know the whole story about that area but Red Dancing Bear knew, he said, because Lester had told him once.
"My son saw things there he was not supposed to see. Was part of things he had not been cleared for,” he said.
"Did he see any alien space craft there?" asked Helen.
"Oh, yes, he saw many. Including the one that crashed in Roswell New Mexico and three others that the Mexican government found in the Yucatan peninsula that same year, 1947.
"My son said something called a magnetic anomaly caused the crashes," he said.
"Cool," said Nathan.
"There is a big meteor in the ocean near Merida on the Yucatan peninsula. It crashed there a lot of millions of years ago. Even today airplanes and boats going close enough to this get their compasses screwed up for a second or two from the magnetic field.
"The people in Air Force Intelligence estimate that this magnetic anomaly caused the alien spacecraft to screw up some of their inbound flights and crack up on land. They think there have been several more crashes like this in the water only the craft were never recovered," said Red Dancing Bear.
"So what did your son see that got him in so much trouble with the air force?" asked Helen.
“He saw God,” said Red Dancing Bear, speaking the truth.

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