Chapter 5

(c) David A. Kearns

Jeffery Becomes a Man …Again.

Two hours later Jeffery Thompson was smoking a joint poolside with two gorgeous exotic dancers. He wasn’t sure how this had happened and by this point he didn’t care. They were clad in bikini bottoms and T-Shirts that read “The Stables at Tom’s Roadhouse”
“See, he’s so completely full of shit. And the goddamned arrogance is enough to make you want to vomit,” Jeffrey said squinting as he prepared to take a second blast of smoke into his lungs
The one named Trina caressed the hairs of his neck just beneath his ear with her expensively manicured nails.
“I like this fur he’s got down here. It feels cool. Dawn, do this down here beneath his ears. Close your eyes and picture your daddy’s beard.”
“All I can picture is Eddie’s back.”
“Ewwwwww, total buzzkill, bitch! Why’d you do that to me?” This sent both women into peals of laughter.
As they rolled their heads back into the bushes for a private conversation, literally behind Jeffery’s back, Trina grabbed him in the jeans, right in the crotch.
“Fucking Red the Roadside goddamned Indian. Should have killed him, rolled his ass up in some dumpster somewhere….just like in that movie… can’t remember which.”
“Fort Apache, the Bronx.”
“What?”
It was Red Dancing Bear, framed in silhouette from the lights of the house and the pool behind him, like some all-knowing dark God, wandering the halls of imagination, present like a phantom the moment someone thinks about him. There was a single glowing orb located in the center of his ghostly shade. It was either one of his chacras coming into orgasmic alignment or the lit end of something smokeable. The air around him was thick with smoke but was it opium, tobacco, or more Jamaican marijuana? Perhaps it was all three bound tightly in a deadly stick of mental rape. Perhaps he would now force-feed it to Jeffery, his newfound psychological hamster.
“Fort Apache the Bronx. That was the movie you’re talking about. Where the serial killing hooker was rolled up in a carpet and thrown into a dumpster, remember? Where Paul Newman and that other cop sort of threw that kid off a roof? C’mon Jeff, don’t tell me they’ve even taken away your memories of movies? I mean, that’s history you used to love!”
“Well I think your memory of movies is a little rusty. You may have some of that scene wrong, Red. But I take your point.”
“Movies, like thoughts now, are all derivative. There is no original essence in any of them. Doesn’t that concern you Jeff? You’re a scientist. What do you think it means? When there are no more original thoughts or concepts, yet, somehow, somewhere, all this new technology is coming into being.”
“Look man, I got no clue…”
“Yes, and now you are angry with me again. Anger in place of answers, in place of reason and logic.”
“…and I would just like to know, how the fuck you are doing all this to me? How is this happening?”
“The truth is happening, Jeff. Your mind is being infected with it, and it hurts. Fortunately I have provided you with a temporary salve to numb the blow.”
Jeff was about to say something threatening, but Red Dancing Bear cut him off.
“And you’re not bred for killing Jeffery, face it. Your kind has long ago ceased to need to kill which is why you can only do so now, at the touch of a button, or behind a video screen.”
“I can take care of myself, thank you very much, Red.”
“Yes, the presence of these fine young women here shows me that there is still something of the man left in you, and this is good.”
“Now hold on just a god damned minute there, Tonto.”
A tongue was then in Jeffery’s ear. That would be Dawn. Trina was fumbling with his belt buckle, digging those expertly manicured nails between folds of skin and his elastic waistband.
“But you still have a very long way to go, my white brother.”
The belt buckle came undone and the confined beast was released to assume its stalwart salute to the world. This was immediately covered in Dawn’s warm generosity as Trina’s hand went to work on Jeff’s chest hairs with her lips as she hiked her T-shirt over her enormous, perfect breasts. They smelled like honey and pool water.
Jeff’s eyes rolled back in his head.
When he opened them again he was amazed to see the demonic face of Red Dancing Bear glowing in the lit end of whatever it was that he had been smoking.
“Take a hit of this, my white brother.” His voiced echoed a sinister demand in those black dotted orbs. “Or else” the eyes seemed to say, from the bottom of a bat-lined cave. Could Red Dancing Bear make Dawn bite down on what remained of Jeff’s manhood with one strong mental pulse? Probably.
Jeff sucked, just as Dawn was sucking, just as Trina was sucking and licking his pectorals.
The smoke was thick as paste. It hummed into his lungs with the animal musk of the women, who began devouring Jeffery like warm, moist vampire angels. The voices of at least 100 people partying inside the house mingled with the strines of “Can’t You See?” by Marshall Tucker. The crickets in the pine trees rimming the patio sang in tune.
Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, Red Dancing Bear was gone with his evil stick of death-weed, and Jeffery Thompson – beaten down, corporate engineer Jeffery -- became every raging animal in the mammalian order, over and over, and over.
“That shit will make you fuck like a white jackrabbit, my brother,” he heard Red Dancing Bear whisper from across the patio. “Just never you mind about anything else right now. I’m taking care of your family for you. I got your back.”
Jeffery awoke in the middle of a flesh pile of four other warm bodies sleeping soundly in a huge quadruple bed. He lifted the cool sheet to count the legs and torsos. Two honey brown strippers and the lesbian journalist were all breathing at the same rate. But someone in the pile, not Jeffery, had a whirring snore, which began about an hour ago and showed no signs of letting up. Jeff gingerly removed a leg from the pile, then his hip.
Bright sunshine filled the room, blasting into every last dark cavity of his mind.
“What we do here, we do in the name of all humanity.” Jeff heard somewhere in the back of his scattering dreams. The voice, of course, had belonged to Red Dancing Bear. Who else would say such a thing?
He reached to place a toe on the brown shag carpet but retracted it to get better view of the land. There were used condoms, and pizza crusts littering the view like bomb shrapnel. Someone left a pack of Camel filters on a nightstand. Jeff lit one, dragged the essence of the clarifying tobacco into his lungs.
Someone else was stirring. That troublesome, additional head that Jeff had tried to ignore. That had been the snorer, some 19 year old boy Jeff now remembered. He had a tattoo on his arm, a Celtic Cross with two eagle feathers behind it. Strangely, the lesbian journalist began spooning Jeffery. She kissed his neck and reached her hand around his midriff to catch hold of his….
Ugggh. Things were about to get weird again. Where was home? What had happened?
Jeff got off the bed and negotiated the minefield of pie-crusts and unmentionables searching for his clothes which he found, one item at a time. Peering through the window out into the pool area he could see his pants draped across a wrought iron, green patio chair.
He had to get to that and put them on before he ran into Helen. Damage control, that was the answer now. Damage control, then get the hell out of this nut house.
Just before he could reach his pants he heard the voice.
“Amen, brother. Amen.” It belonged to Red Dancing Bear, who was sitting beneath the patio overhang before the living room, fresh as a daisy. Clapping his hands.
“Bravo. Bravo Jeff. Welcome back to the land of the living. I gotta tell you, you and pizza boy made me proud to be a man, just watching you handle those women was something well beyond expectation.”
“Well you’re certainly pleased with yourself this morning, Chief. Anything you want to admit to me? Like where my kids are? Where’s my wife?”
“They are sleeping soundly in a guest bedroom. Your wife thinks that you and I got into a long philosophical discussion, which we did, and that we went out to a local strip club, which we did. What she doesn’t know is that two strippers came back with us; what she doesn’t know is that half the people that closed the place also did too. Some of them can be seen this morning gathering their things preparing to leave. Included in that bunch is a very confused Catholic priest. In all, that was a good evening.
“Where’s your friend Fred, the American Confucius?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, he’s around. He’s here somewhere.”
The answer was evasive.
“What’s wrong? What is it you’re not telling me?”
“Well among other things, Fred’s time has arrived. I didn’t see it coming but then, that’s the way of things these days. The world is catching up faster than we can escape. We’re running like the plains Indians now, trying to outrun, to hide in the hills and mountains.”
“Escape what?”
“C’mon Jeffery. After everything we talked about last night. You still have to ask?”
“So the aliens are coming for him?”
“Well, not exactly. As a matter of fact, it’s a member of the United State’s Marshall Service that will head up the task force. See, Fred has a tax problem. A big one. At least that’s what they will tell him. Then, as he searches his memory and his records, and as they are confiscating everything, taking this house and everything he owns, killing all of his files with viruses so he can’t even defend himself in court, he’ll blow his brains out with a snub-nose 38.
“Goodbye American Confucius. He’ll sit in this chair right here when he does it. Blood will get all over that cheese head hat, which he will also be wearing in strange salute to absurdity. Then his exotic tropical fish will die of anoxia and starvation after the power is cut off.
“We’ll have to get out of here. We don’t want to have your children see all that. Aside from which we have to stay focused.”
“Well where is he now, going to get the gun?”
“Oh, no, he’s getting a shower right now. I haven’t told him but the signs are there.”
“What signs?”
“Well a phone message from Agent Bluefield of the U.S. Marshall’s service in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for one thing. Plus a couple of his e-mails. These folks mean business.”
“You dug through his phone messages and his e-mails? What kind of friend are you?”
“This is wartime, Jeffery. We have to be prepared to do whatever is necessary to fight the enemy. Even if the enemy is working through our friends. History has been altered. There it is.”
“Why?”
“Because as enemies go, the more intelligence they have, the more dangerous they are. The enemy can’t really afford to have someone like Fred living and breathing, preaching the word when there are people smart enough to listen to him, now can they? People like you and me?”
“You’re saying that our being here, is changing history?”
“I’m saying our being here, has already happened. History is now changed and they know we are here. We have to move on, back into the protective cover of the woods, the camouflage of the open road. Its randomness of infinite probability will shield us for a time. They can’t see us there. Plus, I still have to get to see Lester.”
“I’m not buying this shit. I think you should stay here. Last night for me was…”
“A breakthrough as a man? Yes it was. And as far as I can tell, Jeff, you don’t really have a choice in the matter now, do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
Red merely lifted his huge paw to reveal a VCR tape, with one word written in red permanent marker on the label “Jeffery”
“You….”
“Oh yes I did, Jeff. Oh yes I did. If there are any vinyl albums in his collection you would like, I suggest you take them. He’s not going to use them where he’s going and they’ll be wasted in an FBI storehouse. We have to move. They’re watching us now, and above all, we have to protect your daughter who is the mother of all modern humanity."

No one spoke or said a word now. They were miles down the road. The creepy uneasy feeling Jeffery was feeling rose to the top of his head like panic’s light bulb. But it was too late; he had been corralled; a young mustang kicking at the ropes around his slender ankles, a look of fury in his glistening eye.
And Helen wasn’t talking yet either, which was good. That was a showdown that would have pain in it, and they didn’t need that right now. Better to let them wonder. Better to let them heal for a while with the numbing calm of the open road.
They had taken Georgia Highway 400 back to 285 and from here, wound their way round westward toward I-20. Thence they would pass through Birmingham, Tupelo, on toward Memphis. Maybe Red would spend a day trying to convince them Elvis had been an alien. Although, he sensed they were more mature than that now. A lot had happened. Perhaps that could be used as a diversion.
Red Dancing Bear’s ass ached from sitting and they weren’t even to Alabama State line yet.
“When the need or desire of one human being to overcome another becomes more than a need, becomes a reality, posterity, and history must listen, must try to understand what reality itself is saying through the lives of the conquered and the conqueror, alike,” Red Dancing Bear said.
“Shut up Chief. No more of that shit right now.”
“I’m just sayin’ is all.”
“What you’re saying has been said. Darwin said it. Those who followed Hitler as an historical argument have said it.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes sweetheart?”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” mumbled Red Dancing Bear.
“I have to pee.”
“Okay honey. Can you hold it for a little while? Daddy’s making some good time here.”
“I really got to go, Daddy.”
“Okay honey….say Red?”
“Yeah?”
“What was all that gibberish you and American Confucius were talking about back there, about her being the mother of humanity?
“You mean Heather?
“Yeah.”
“She has a name, you know, Jeff. Don’t you think you should use it?”
“C’mon, no more deflections. What did you mean by that?”
“Sometimes you can look into the future and just know that certain things are true. They say that all of us are descended from one common mother. They, and by that I mean those them, that they who say, you know the uh…”
“The experts. The scientists. The far advanced in their fields.”
“Right, those folks. They have been able to determine the common ancestry of all humanity from one mother living in Africa some 250 thousand years ago or something.”
“Right. I read about this. They were using mitochondrial DNA.”
“Yes, and as a matter of fact you got the information from a special on the Discovery Channel but that’s okay. But in so proving that, they came to the realization that something in the Bible was correct, which was pretty embarrassing for science but it was an important fact; that we are all descended from a common Eve.”
“So Heather is the next Eve.”
“Right.”
“Then who is Adam?”
“Or, what is Adam.”
“What?”
“Or what?
“No, I mean you tell me.”
“I’m saying Adam may be a what, and that’s what we have to guard against. That’s not something we can let happen.”
“What?”
“Exactly. Consider our common Mother, Jeffery.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Now, did she have an Adam, per say, a single Adam that she mated with?”
By now Jeffery had learned to avoid the obvious answer.
“I don’t know.”
“The wisest thing you have yet said, and so too, with science. The jury is still out, and will remain so for all time, but that is beside the point. The point is, likely not. It is likely that the common ancestry of all humanity has three of four male lineages, three males that she was likely sleeping with, or her daughters slept with, which is even more likely. And unless those three were brothers, that’s good for the genetic variations that those lineages provided, otherwise, human beings would be thought of as the universe’s answer to inbred Appalachians.”
“But back there in that dim distant past, you realize of course that our Eve probably more resembled a monkey, and was in fact, more monkey than human.”
“Yeah, I’m down with that. I can relate. I’m not one of these whacko fundamentalists.”
“Yes, that’s good Jeff. But you have to admit that we don’t really resemble our simian ancestors so closely today.”
“Yes.”
“Well, how do you think that happened?”
“Oh, wait. Let me guess, some sort of alien sponsored cross breeding program that genetically engineered us? Is that what you’re saying chief?”
“Jeff, maybe I have asked you this before and maybe I haven’t but take a look over in that field over there.”
Jeffery looked off to his left and witnessed the rolling fields of flowing soy, interspersed with rows of cabbage.
“So what?”
“Look a little further, Jeff.”
Beyond those rows of agriculture sat a rolling green hillside dotted with cows. Some were standing chewing cud. Others were lying down in the afternoon heat.
“Yeah, so?”
“Do you suppose those cows can smell all those crops?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it occurs to them to amble on over into the farmer’s product and start chomping on them?”
“Probably not.”
“Do you think the cows can see that fence in front of them or if they can even realize it’s there and what it’s for? Do you think they can rationalize the relationship between the fence and the crops and the whole operating scheme of the farm?”
“No, chief. You got me. I don’t suppose they can work it all out in their little cow brains. No.”
“Because, if they could, that moment for those cows, that moment of realization would be a cold dark moment, upsetting everything they have been bred and led to believe their entire lives.”
“Come again?”
“Because they would be able to see the inner workings of the farm Jeff. C’mon, brother, walk with me in the garden here. They would see that they were being farmed too, that they were a product, that the farmer considered them more a product than an entity worthy of dignity. They would realize their sense of security was false. They would be able to project, to extrapolate into the future, Jeff, what those fences meant for their fate. They would be able to detect the swing of the ball-peen hammer, or whatever device they use today, long before it occurred.
“You ever notice, Jeff, you never hear the word stampede being used anymore unless it’s used talking about humans?”
Jeffery sat in silence thinking about what the chief was saying. He reached over to turn on the radio dial.
“No, Jeff. Not yet.”
“Why not yet? I’m going to turn on the damned radio, will ya? What’s big damned deal?”
“Jeff, let’s continue my little talk here about the farmer for a moment before you sample the wonders of modern media.”
Jeffery seemed tired of humoring an old Indian named Red Dancing Bear. The same said old Indian would have to choose his words very carefully at this point.
“Fine Chief, go ahead with your thunderously apt illusions and scintillating conversation. I just can’t wait to hear what you have to say next, I am waiting for…”
“Jeff, I get it. Please, allow me to continue without the benefit of your barbed sarcasm.”
“Fine, go for it.”
“Okay, I will.”
“Please do. No…”
“I will Jeff. If you would kindly shut the fuck up.”
“Consider me shut and fucked up.”
“Fine. As I was saying, Jeff, The Farmer has his ways of calling the animals into the barn, correct? Certain sounds. When he imagines that one of his heard has wandered a-field, he sends his representatives out on horseback, and before they reach the wandering stray, they begin with their cries and whistles to gain the attention of the wandering animal, yes?”
“Your point is well taken.”
“In that?”
“I have no fucking clue what in God’s name you’re trying to say with it.”
“So too with our common Farmer, the one now searching for us. Events have transpired to alert this Farmer to the fact that we, the livestock, are fleeing him, down corridors of the intellect that he would rather we not stray into. There are those among us who have been anticipating a major corralling event, a gathering of the heard for stock inventory.
“I have been waiting my whole life for this event…”
“Yeah 157 years is a long time..”
“ …and now that it is here, I am also fortunate enough to have found you, and to have found this little girl in the back seat who is…”
“…the mother of all humanity..”
“But now, the Farmer knows what we are about. He knows we are dangerous to him.”
“Why?”
“Because we can see the fences you and I. We see they are there. And if we can see them, then we can also figure out how to tear them down. It will require great sacrifice on our parts, all our parts. We will be asked to give up some things and adopt ways that in a normal day and age, in a normal world, would seem criminal, cruel and murderous. But we must make those sacrifices.”
“Go back to the part about seeing the fences. All I see are the fences in that field.”
“Tell me you don’t see the fences in your life, Jeff, sapping your will to cross into the furrowed garden and eat like the man-beast you are. You drive to and from your job. When you get there you satisfy yourself that you are earning a living. In the back of your mind you know that all your efforts in a day will be spent creating but a small part of something, that will either spy on your fellow man, kill him, or will be used to poison the groundwater beneath what was once the land of the Ais, Mayaca and the Seminole.”
“Hey, we have enemies, Chief. Life’s a bitch. In case you haven’t noticed they have taken to bombing our government buildings, our cruise ships, our offices, our embassies, assassinating our religious figures, holding ambassadors’ children hostage.”
“Yes, enemies. Like maddened beasts of war you and your enemies trade shots across CNN. The fires of hatred burned into both your religions, pitting you against each other, so that the true enemy goes undetected.”
“What?”
“This thing you call religion, what does it hold as a basic tenant?”
“That there is one true God.”
“Bullshit Jeff. You’re an Episcopalian? I am guessing, a follower of Christ?”
“Yes.”
“And what did this Christ believe when it came to saving the world?”
“That they had to follow him.”
“Bullshit. Too easy…”
“Would you stop cursing Chief?”
“Alright damn it but you make me mad with your obtuse answers. You know what I am getting at.”
“That crap about turning the other cheek, no doubt, that garbage about…”
“Loving your enemy. Yes. Not spying on him. Not bombing the shit out of him. Not even passively surveying him by watching his market transactions. No, according to this Christ, the best way to change your enemy is to love him to destruction; love him until the enemy inside him dies, and the friend and brother emerges. It means putting down the metal detectors and welcoming him through the airports with open arms.”
“Yeah, that will happen.”
“Hey, pal. That’s your religion; the religion that you supposedly aspire to every Sunday, punctuated by weeks and weeks of making bombs and components for spy satellites. That’s you, Jeff. Those are your fences. Love your enemy, until the boss tells you to complete that assignment that will get you and your group of cubical buddies paid, for killing him. That’s your life. That’s how f’d up you are. Not me.”
“You and your buddies are the mindless cattle, the yoke beasts upholding the entire structure of the power that is steamrolling the world with destruction.”
“Hey I don’t make any excuses for defending my country and getting paid something for it.”
“Fine. That’s good. Be a man. Accept things as they are. Just don’t call yourself a Christian.”
“Why not? I believe in God.”
“You believe he’s there, Jeff. You just don’t give a shit about his opinions, opinions that would have long ago, allowed you and every other human on the face of this earth to see the common enemy from the outside, the real vicious beast that needs to be destroyed. The beast of Nothingness, the zombie Farmer who means you and the entire planet ill.”
“I can’t help it if some rag head whacko reads the Qu’ran and decides he has to kill all of us.”
“Then if you would at least have the guts to act as a man, and defend yourself on those terms without congratulating yourself every Sunday before Christ, who thinks you, and everyone like you, are assholes. Then at least your mind would stop fighting itself.
“What was it Abe Lincoln said?”
“I suppose you were even at the Gettysburg address.”
“He said, ‘A House Divided cannot stand.’ So, too, with your mind. Can’t you see, the Farmer actually wants you to stand there every day in front of the mirror and ask yourself, who the hell am I, anyway? And he wants you to walk away from the mirror empty handed every time, without the slightest idea. If you can accept that you’re more interested in your own wealth, you’re on personal materials and the safety of your family than you are any bullshit religion, your mind will stop fighting itself and one fine day when you look in the mirror and ask the question, you’ll come away with an answer. I am Jeff, avionics software engineer, son of Steve, taxidermist, son of Winthrop, meteorologist, son of Nelson, merchant seaman, and so on. Broad vistas of history will open up, and the Creator will communicate to you through the lives of your ancestors, as was meant to be. A connection to the ground beneath your feet will be forged, and you will be forced to love nature and find a balance.
“You’ll be forced to find a new way to make a living as anything but what you are. Anything you do that destroys Earth will become abhorrent to the touch. You’ll find that in defending you and yours the best way is to understand your brothers around you, first, preventing needless conflict before it sparks. The planet itself will teach you that, yes, the best way for you to live is by loving those whom call you their enemy, until they can no longer summon the hatred, since it no longer exists in their hearts.”
“Sounds great Chief. Sounds great. Yeah.”
“But all of these lessons now are really beside the point because the Farmer that I spoke of is attempting to find you and I and this family.”
“Why’s that? Explain that bit of psychotic paranoia again?”
“Because the waves of thought that we have set in motion have repercussions in the future that they have detected. Now they must find us an neutralize the threat at the source; the time in history before they have propagated at all.”
“And I am riding around the southeast on my vacation with a paranoid delusional in my car.”
“Which is why I love the randomness of the open road.”
“You mentioned that before. What do you mean by it?”
“Each one of these cars passing us is an eventuality; a rolling set of odds and outcomes. Every second of time a car drives down the highway, probability sets crowd the front bumper like bow waves deflecting off into either direction, port and starboard. Greater than fifty-fifty odds follow the car down the centerline, along its forward direction of travel. But those wakes, of 20 percent chances, 10 percent chances ricochet out to the sides, are collecting in waves in time-space off the reflected waves from other cars. Between these four lanes are huge standing waves of randomness and probability, which make it difficult for anyone to track us within recorded history.
“You can’t be serious.”
“It is true. These roads are like the rambling brooks that escaped convicts use to throw the scent of bloodhounds.”
“And there are bloodhounds after us?”
“If you wish. I am happy with that analogy having escaped enough prisons and been chased by enough bloodhounds in my time.”
“You were in prison?”
“Yes. I have been imprisoned many times in my life.”
“Anything violent?”
“Certainly. I am a man, aren’t I?”
“Give me a for instance.”
“When I was much younger and the blood was up, I did violence to my fellow man. Yes, I have even killed him. But those days are over.”
“You were acting in self-defense?” Jeff Thompson asked hopefully.
“As you wish,” Red Dancing Bear said, thinking that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor under the very pretense.
That brought a moment of silence as Jeff considered the fact the chief admitting to having a violent past, and the fact he didn’t want anyone listening to the radio right now. Added to the hasty retreat from the home in Alpharetta and the fact he was capable of blackmail all added up to bad news.
In Tupelo, Mississippi they got off the two-lane blacktop where two major sections of highway had not yet been joined by more asphalt laid over a wider area. The verdant land steamed around them. The kids slept in the sweltering van until the dewy moist beads of perspiration and the sun’s pulsating incandescence dragged them back to reality.
They stumbled into the cracker-box roadside convenience store with the dusty wood floors.
Jeff had a smoke. His first in a while. Helen followed the children inside the store.
“That crap you were talking back there, Chief,” began Jeff as Red Dancing Bear leaned on the side of the van and ate an egg salad sandwich out of a plastic triangle shaped container.
“Yes?”
“You’re serious about that stuff?”
“Jeff, let me ask you something. Some of the black projects that come through your office, how do they make you feel?”
“Nervous.”
“Why?”
“Well, we’re not supposed to talk about them. They relate to National Security and even mentioning them means I could be tripped up.”
“You mean your periodic polygraphs?”
“Exactly. You have to take those, otherwise…”
“You don’t get promoted, yes. I have heard of this process. Your regular promotions, each requiring a performance review and a polygraph examination, are directly linked. Should you fail to get promoted, your standing among your peers diminishes. Your whole social standing then, by chain of events, is linked to the polygraph examination and …”
“And should they ever ask me have I ever revealed any classified information…”
“Let me ask you something else, Jeff.”
“Shoot.”
“If you were to find that as a black op, under the auspices of National Security, the company accepted an Air Force contract hauling loads of Jewish or native American citizens, such as myself to unknown locations for ‘processing’ would that…?”
“I fail to see any comparisons between Nazi tactics and …”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“I am merely providing you with a hypothetical as a means to answer your question and yet you cannot even play along.”
“I’m not in the mood for goddamn games right now, Chief.”
“So too, you answer my response with deflection and profanity when it doesn’t suit you, or when the response opens up areas of thought into which you would rather not travel …”
“Please, and what was the damned question anyway?”
“ …so much so you cannot even remember your initial line of inquiry. Very interesting…”
“Hey chief I’m not some specimen in a zoo, what are you saying here? And be specific.”
“I’m saying, Jeffery, you are far more brainwashed than you realize. I’m saying the vacant look on your wife’s face is in direct response to her defenses from you. She has subsumed her personality to such an extent she scarcely exists anymore, other than as an organic extension of your will; a life support system to the family you no longer notice. It’s in response to the fact you have become such a compartmentalizing, rationalizing machine at their behest; maintaining a social structure which only exists in facsimile of human interaction, that the only way to deal with you is mechanically, like a robot. The only encouraging news is, you have noticed how artificial your wife has become and you begin to wonder why.”
“Hey Chief, don’t hold back. Why don’t you really let me have it. You know, don’t filter when you damn me with faint praise like this. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. Try to bring home the money, try to provide for college, for the future and you get nothing but kicked in the goddamned teeth.”
“More anger when a point is scored. Jeffery, you should be thanking me. That you can realize your situation; that you note with alarm the fact your wife is disappearing means there is hope for you. You must reveal everything you know about what they’re doing. Unburden your heart, Jeff. I am here for you my brother.”
“Negative kemo sabe. That job is the only thing we have going for us. Plus….”
“Plus you don’t know what they would do to you if you attempted to leave them.”
“Plus, no, now, damn it Chief, it’s not like that. I was going to say, plus…”
“Jeff, listen to yourself, sputtering there like an old Buick, ‘plus, plus, plus….’ You are dangerously close to becoming a mental patient. Funny, that you have all the trappings of sanity and none of the substance. While I, society’s outcast, a wandering Indian who doesn’t know precisely how long he has lived, and believes himself a ripe 157 years old, I am really the grounded one.”
“Hey you old Native American gasbag, I’m grounded!”
“Jeff…”
“No you just shut the fuck up for a minute…”
Jeff grabbed at the sandwich in the chief’s hands with alarming fluidity. Red Dancing Bear swirled to conceal the sandwich and found himself pinned against the side of the van.
“Jeff..”
“No, you shut up… gimme that.”
Jeff pried loose one of the chief’s hands and managed to grab the sandwich container, which squished sending a glop of egg salad out over the chief’s hand.
“See that chief. You see that!”
“Yes Jeff.”
“That shit didn’t just happen in a vacuum, I paid for that, pal. And some…”
“Jeff, you need to let go…”
“No, and some fucking chicken somewhere, you asshole, gave up the time…”
“Jeff ..”
“And the energy to crap that egg out of her. And now…”
“Jeff.”
“No, you eat it, Chief. And now, a human being is going to derive sustenance, as is the natural order…. Eat that shit now, goddamnit! Eat it you smelly old excuse for a gasbag, psychoanalytic Indian!
The children and their mother emerged from the store to witness Red Dancing Bear, with egg salad smeared on his face, chunks of egg dangling from his horsetail hair in clumps, walking toward one of the ill-kept restrooms. Jeff was dousing Red with shots of foaming Coke from a plastic bottle he was shaking. All that was left in the bottle were brown foamy bubbles. There was a gravel powdered hole or two in Red’s shirt. Jeffery’s elbows were covered in white marl dust and he was bleeding slightly from scuffs on each.
“Hey Chief what about this? Huh, try this shit in a vacuum. Whoops, hey how’d that happen? Must have been the aliens pal, they must have done it, hey!”
“What happened?” asked Helen innocently.
“Nothing,” Red said. “Jeffery is growing as a man, and there is some pain to be expected in that, pain for all of us.”
“Crazy old bastard…”
“Glad you have sufficiently deflected our conversation Jeffery, that you can pass your next polygraph. Rest assured all those state secrets you know are safe and you have maintained your post for another six months.
“Hey, fuck you, Chief.”
“Jeffery, the children.”
“Have them get in the car, honey. We’re going to leave his ass here.”
“I heard that.”