CHAPTER 2.000

Immersed in twilight, Bruce came awake sightless, enveloped in slimy red and purple jointed tubules which tenderly, resolutly, immobilized him. Jointed licorice ropes, snorkeling evolutionary anomalies, odd, there did not seem to be any marine Lilipution with whom a wandering Gulliver Daddy might converse.

Grammy Linda, as Bruce’s kids tried to call her, had done some dreamwork with his disreputable Aunt Kathleen in hippy California. His Aunt was a hippy and his Grandma Linda helplessly tagged-along. They worked together at the same jobs, switched off boyfriends here and there. The Ding-Dong sisters--alas, Kathleen was a Ding Dong sister no more. She was buried next to her Aunt who a few days after the 1950 safety shots started, the Atomic Testing series at NTS. These ding dong sisters were not to be confused with the Gold Dust Twins who got along better. Some of the Old Dead Heads out to Bonneville International, ie. the Stateline Poker Sharks wistfully remembered them.

Wendover, Utah’s small graduating class of 1965, were its Wobbly scion’s son’s age mates and thier partners in crime. They had made it out pretty well. Generally the age groups stuck together and oddly enough, Jim’s had been imbued with Capital.

The age group of Kathleen’s vintage were sharp, but not fitted to heavy labor. They had taken a lucrative contract to clean the inside of the Kennecot chimney by climbing up and rappelling down into it. It had seemed an adventure that would fund a year of sky diving, scuba diving out to Blue Lake--a deep, their remote, seemingly bottomless spring. Bruce had gone speelunking there with the boys he T.A. ed for Phis Ed credit, plenty of tutors. 

The older boys, older than Kathleen but not too old, formed a spelunking club, Aunt Kathleen and Daryl and an Idaho boy who pulled Graveyard up to the Texico. They never recruited any more Graveyard shift workers. Now, with thier dreams fulfilled, past ambitions seemed attainable. Tuesday night poker up to the Stateline was a big deal, doubling, in reality, as a kind of stage set.

Actors in a much greater drama, each took the part of an internet poker player. The sooner the point players started, the bigger the weekend pot.

A rookie once raised a furor by trading SLCI and other family credits for poker points. These had included credits for probationary Anger Management. It had been an argument about grocery money gambled away at Stateline, so they could hardly stay out of it. Bruce leaked the story to the public during his Sundance Weekly Review before the Tirib and Deseret News could get their hands on it.

Bruce even had the advice of Sundance's PR guy. Sundance had a bigger stake in Stateline than the other way around, because Sundance took over a great deal of air time when ICE started prowling around and wanted to take it's Spanish programming slot back. That would be good for Kerry, who was fluent.

Kerry read off his stepfather's draft, translating as he went. Stateline needed to demonstrate that it took the family violence crisis seriously, whichever side of the language line its viewers were on. Generally, there women were too sparse out at Stateline to exploit. Bruce and Kerry traded all of their family credits they could hide from Karina for poker points.

On Tuesdays, Wendover sometimes remembered Kathleen and her friend, Rose Sharon, in earnest--equine twins, girls with sunburnt blond who people asked-- “Now, which one are you.” The old ramblers who did the towns cooking remembered the small black cherubs who once advertised Jim’s father’s favorite flour brand. It came in 100 pound sacks. Wendover used the empties for curtains when the sacks were empty, it being the Thirties and bleached them until the brown gold dust twins straw colored. The joke rendered the sunny beauty of the blond, tall, Gold Dust Twins, who worked up to the Stateline in the early Seventies, making money for College.

As a high school TA, Bruce got a Liveworks Liveboard with which to infuse the High School with his expectations. Ranch work was what they had, out to thier way, and ranch work was what their boys were suited to, otherwise they’d be too like to leave the land, that's what their fathers said about College. Bruce’s old highschool girlfriend Ramona Goshute family lived out to Ibapah and Ramona, now Karinna’s Aunt used to go hiking, the three of them, her Aunt was Ramona's younger sister, up to the Deep Cricks. Grammy Le Baron thus got her horses from the virile Ibapah lineage via the Shephard Ranch. They had more thoroughbred in them than the Henry Mountain Mustangs. The Southern Henry Mountain mustangs had crossbred with thorobreds whose breeders went bust in the depression.

One of the Shepherds’ sons used to take the Gold Dust Twins out to have a ranch afternoon dinner with his mom and dad and chironian sister. His mother had no trouble telling the twins apart. She’d have Rose Sharon for her boy, with her good eye for horse flesh. Aunt Kathleen was tall, but a a runt. Rose Sharon took a fractious, but well conformed, penny colored gelding that summer to gentle.
The Shepard family had purchased a stud with a pin in his shoulder. The easily corralled, purebred couldn’t run off with nocturnal, randy mustang mares, they had to jump in. 

Still dreaming, Bruce remained immersed in big slimy long red worms. “Gosh darn it,” he burbled into the auquamarine fluid. ‘Take me to your leader.” A voice chortled, laughed and trilled all mimsich and merry. "How may I help you?" he asked with dignified formality, doffing an invisible top hat and bowing deeply. He was perhaps dead, or scarcly alive, having slid off the bank of the Jorden into the river by the bridge where the kids parked and drowsy commutors sometimes slid off.

"Daddy, the voice sang, we don’t need anything in Dreamland, but peoples, they need houses and clothes and animals and toys and moneys and lots of things. Paul said that’s consumers do.”

“Sounds suspiciously Buddist,” Bruce observed. You must mean my Aunt Kathleen’s Paul? Is she hereabouts?

The long worms, which appertained to the voice, examined Bruce’s face and sholders. Some snapped out to inhale minnows or floated up to bring back bubbles of atmosphere. a few snorkels lingering by the surface, sipping aqua air. The unused tubules retracted ‘till they were tight as the horsehair worms that lingered in morning ditches.

The tubules clung onto Alaya’s head, retracted into her unusual orifices which closed over them. Bruce ‘s heart harked back to his misplaced infant Alaya. Bruce’s sweet dead Alaya, thier mutant nursling, who never lived to go with unwholesome boys or need a crib by her bed while still in highschool.

Emerging from the large, wet, red, mop the head of the girl spoke. The elaphantine tubules lost diameter until they were positivly budrum. He felt one, hard as horsehair.

All of a sudden, Alaya shape shifted into the familiar infant he remembered. The mimsish, oddly conformed baby curled into his arms, tender as the infant he had released her to the Reaper as she intermittantly suckled and screamed.

Now the baby peacefully picked swamp grass out of her Daddy’s hair and tore it, letting the grass float aimlessly, then picked them out of the water with her organic vacuem hoses as they swam about as she called what the grass did, making a game of it.

The Great Western American Seaway, Bruce queried his soggy brain, how long had it been dry? The small sea snorkling whip snades, when engorged, showed a fine dexterity at thier termini, like those of an elephant’s trunk. There had once been 500-600 evolving pacadermal variations, once a few with human--analogous arms and legs.

Bruce remembered from Celeste’s second grade Great Brain project on evolution, elephant related dugongs and manatees. Elephants swam island to island feeding voratiously where they landed.
Karinna felt only a sweetness in the when the machines registered a thinning of the veil in the ghost bedroom, a gentle sprite in the air that made Karinna’s milk spurt. Her first child by Daddy Bruce, one whose spirit was both Favonian and mild.

Chapter 2.001

If dead, need he worry about nutrition again? Was he to suffer a living purgatory? He prayed that somebody got to him istantly or not at all. Probably he was at the bottom Jorden River, still strapped, frantically burbling.

‘The Jorden River is chilly and cold,

Chills the body but not the soul.’

He remembered more of what happened the night before.''A mere fantasy.'' Kerry said. "Uncle Samuel ain't s'posed to be alive and even more, in a gerontocracy, electable.'' Bruce's Eclesasitiacl Employers felt it important for there to be a vital but subtile Mormon showing at public affairs such as Bruce would face that day--bodies not mouths. Sammy had promised to bring duct tape for Brucy Bud's.

Uncle Sam would flash his his fruit salad, all his fancy medals. Even Livvy understood, Great Uncle Sam. The centennial, aerobatic performer, was good to have at a meeting about whether Uncle Sam could never got older again or for Mommy to have to have no more babies with face's like her dead sister Alaya's. Then they wouldn't have to cheat on the cheap, ie. with Daddy Caleb and the turkey baster like the secret about she and Ri Ri. Caleb gave them curly hair.

Daddy Bruce joked that he supposed they ought to say, when he went to work, 'My, well, if you aren't looking far too well today.' Nobody laughed and Livvy made the "gross me out" look she picked up from Kerry her brother the goth. Daddy was a good person for the big meeting, but that didn't mean he and Sammy could go out of town on their birthday. Some of the brethren had refused the Ponce De Leon shots and cocktail.

That's all Daddy Bruce Bunny could remember floating up the Victorian heating ducts before he went to sleep the night before. He had forgotten the list of things Uncle Sam had delegated for him to do on the morrow. Bruce could not imagine Sam, despite his nanobiotic vigor, doing, for even one anomalous day, half of what he delegated to Bruce. We'll, they'd have to blame Karina today. Karinna's Bunny suit outer pj casing had been made with no pockets--it was just so she wouldn't be picking up goose-feathers all day. And they'd have to blame her for taking off the snow tires too early.  Bruce liked to leave his on all year.  It was a bone of contention between them. 

2.0002

Bruce lazily noticed a string of bubbles rise to the surface. Truth was, Bruce liked to pull over and nap at the River bend when he'd made a false start and was too tired to drive. Nothing but two skid marks through pocked grit and muck where the kids had got stuck and their tires had spun would remain. Klary kept a bag of rocks in her car in the spring when the weather was right for watching water sports, but muddy. Actually they added to their pile of rocks regularly, yet no matter how much they added, they still got stuck.  Some day they would have it cobbled.

Bruce hoped he hadn't completely drowned. He practised his lines: 'Where am I?'.

Bruce sang:

"The river Jorden is chilly and cold, chills the body not the soul."

Bruce favored that now sleety mudpuddle by the Lehi River bridge where at sunset, teens and tweens, conversed together until a parental carlight flashed, turning onto the river road, coming to retreive the tweens. Karina's Clary, feeling herself an old maid at 17, could usually be found there of an evening. Bruce felt Karina too mellow to yield strict authority over her teen-aged children or her obviously pregnant daughter and daughter in law, though she was close to them. She considered it a trade-off, and the closeness might last a lifetime, while absolute control ended at 18.

At the tawdy evening's conclusion, the senior Teens broke into couples to do the ''Nothing, the ''Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted." As their parents and grandparents had done before them, but without the water, except during an occasional flood.

When he wanted to convey authotity, Bruce would sing songs still around when he was in high school, pounding on the hoods of the kid’s cars--

'Bye-bye miz American Pie, Took the Chevy to the levee

but the levee was dry. And good old boys were drinkin'

whiskey and rye and sayin 'This'll be the day that I die', 

this'll be the day that I die.''

Coming home late from SLC one night. Bruce saw Klary's boy's car down at the river stop at 3am. He'd ordered Clary into his car. He didn't know the lad who she was with, Karina did. But more than a few of the boys nearby were certified members of the Future Poligamists of America. He and Karina were nostalgic about the days when there was usually nothing more to but to fear but a messy pregnancy.
Self-restraint, heavily preached from the pulpit, was more of a roulette wheel, round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows. Kids would disapear, some pregnant, some with AIDES.

The conference with the ward bishop down to the Church House, the examination of the boy at the STD clinic up to SLC where boys got in free. The Relief Society's teary quilt was replaced, all too often with a prom formal.  There had been a heavy international campaign. The doctors in the corrupt first world were getting richer and richer and everyone else poorer and poorer.

Bruce wondered, had his car failed to make the river bend curve. Folks said a big yellow bumper would ruin the view. The road veered to the left in a way that made it easy for a sleepy commuter to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road. Next came an icy swim in the Jordan. And thusly Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead, he didn't know how he felt about it.

Bruce imagined long procession, an aquatic version of Pilgrims' progress. Or perhaps something like Dante's accession to paradise, though Karina made an unlikely Beactriche.

The Prophet Joseph had left the world with 40 pistol balls in him. Mormon life. Carying on would surely be easier if he had lived to be an old codger--he and his Cherokee Scouts and body guards. Time to be think things over,vtime to leave more than the model to his people, time like now to inventory the relavent, glaring facts.

Bruce braced himself: A) Daddy Bruce Bunny had lost his bunny jammies, presumably while procreating in the romper room or an SLCI virtual reality pod in the buff. The details were unclear, but the patterns remained. Embarrassingly Bruce was now was robed in the Edenic trend that long ago gave Father Adam the blush. Yes, in righteousness alone was Bruce Bunny robed. Bruce looked at his feet. They were developing fur. Where he wasn't furry was pruney.

''Little seed inside the pru-en,'' Bruce incanted, ''Wat you see and wat you doin'? Wat you see and wat you doin..." A treble voice joined him,

"is it night or is it Noo-en? Little seed inside the pru-en?

The children liked to pull the blankets over their heads while Karina pulled the blankets back a little at a time, singing the prune song. If they didn't come out she'd start again--or she’d open the shades and say "Awake and rejoice, for today is a day that God has made," or "Good morning merry sunshine how are you today." This morning's plans were complicated and she was probably feeding her sister Lorena's Horses, finishing just in time to get to work where she would find her children. She liked to take her kids to her K-8.

Little seed inside zie pruen. Don't mind, Daddy, a voice twittered, very near. I been dead a long time. Here is fun.

Bruce found himself sightless. enveloped in red tubules. They held Bruce tenderly in place by what looked to be jointed licorice ropes, slimey snorkels, and there did not seem to be any maritime Lilipution with whom he might converse or negotiate.

"Gosh darn it," Bruce bubbled. "Take me to your leader, how may I help you, anyway?” Bruce worried if he was alive on the bank of the Jorden, but simply asleep. "Daddy, we dont need anything an we aren't  afraid in Dreamland and where the Dead people go, but the live people, they need lots of things, like my family needs me still."

Chapter 2.004

The long worms felt Bruces face and sholders, while some snapped out to inhale minnows or up to bring back bubbles of what appeared to be atmosphere. a few snorkels took long, long sips of air. The tubules retracted to the sides of adead girls ugly head.

Bruce‘s heart harkened back to his lost infant Alaya. His sweet dead Alaya, who died a nursling, never to go with unwholesome boys--if Dead could he find her he must tswim to land, to make reasonable inquiries. Instead a strangechead emerged from the large and noodely red dust mop. Most of the RED liqourish elephantine tubules lost diameter until they were hard as horsehair.

Then Alaya, he was sure it was Alayain some guise, appearing now in the body of some extinct Pacadermal water species He had seen analysis of crossection of bone. The reasearcher first thought he had encountered a human like land animal but there were no bone stress patterns to indicate an upright stance.

A few large and reclusive subspecites might have survived at freshwater river mouths. They lived in dreams and Si-fi. Ugly as a stranded infant dugong, had been his Alaya, something off a X-file worst case scenario. He felt some despair still at having to release his baby into a unknown scarcely fitted to even empirical adequacy.

Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. Alaya laughed-–No one touches there Daddy, not with fingers, its private.” She sighed. ‘’My daddy, I am not your Alaya now. I’m Belly big and will calve soon. When I calve, the peoples will sing my new name, the name of the people in oneness--Sirenia, Sirenia, We name our calves, but adults surrender their names to the people, minds too. I may even forget my Daddy because then we sing the thoughts of our people.'

‘'The men?'’ Bruce asked.

'We are friends with them sometimes.' ‘Lya said coyly. Bruces mind crowded with possibilities.
He was not thinking out of the box--he was out of the box bodily and possibly dead as well.

“The floundered dead sing no name
where kelped reeds line the shore,
“Deep, in hoards the sea dead sing
from Froth to froth they wail and
cry, tossed by fear, lost.”

It sounded like Aunt Kathleen. Bruce and his dowager had been reading her together at bedtime lately.
‘'I know our Daddy,” the creature said, OURS Daddy, ”And Daddy's Aunt Kathleen. I know Rigel, Livvy and CeCe. and my mommy Karina--sometimes Mommy cries and sometimes I do because Grammy might die. Grammy didnt ever know Kathleen, but we have such a big family that she thinks its a shame her dying away off somewhere, but it’s a shame only on the polyg side.’’

‘’Sometimes your Mommy cries because her sister is dead. If she had been alive she would have put her sister in a ghetto for sick people when she got old and never thought one more word about it.'’

‘'She is like your Aunt Kathleen.The professor says they, Aunt Kathleen too, are atavistic, they are chimera. Ladd’s professor too, He was the one who helped your Aunt when she died. He felt her dying.” The he swam to where his dreams were. He finished your Aunt Kathleen's Round House. He helped her when she threw up and taught her things.'’

“Daddy, Uncle Samuel says Aunt Kathleen is haunting her Yurt. Ladd and Paul want to move it. Where ever, just closer to people she loved. It is pretty as a flower and Grandpa What’s his name always remembers with Flowers. Professors Philosophers and Poets they were and friends in hundreds of lives. Bad happened to her and Kathleen isnt going back however the professor coaxes her. He even offered to be her mother.

When she died he first thing she asked for was for me, then Paul. it will be a long time before he dies. He found the secret Methusala brought from the stars. He had to swim a long way to bring it here.'’

Bruce was an adept at changing one general topic, that of his Banished Aunt’s Hogon. “Your Daddy named you once. Now A new name for my grown up girl instead of Sirenia. Millagros? It means miracle and you are my miracle'’.

‘'You named me Alaya.'’ Alaya charged. vehemenantly.
‘’You didnt like Alaya?'’

'I remember, but my Daddy, you wan’t me to keep it and be your little beehive forever. First calving is a very happy time, The professor says that all the people go into couvade . . . The land peoples,'' ‘Laya shuddered, "their eyes."

They said poor Alaya, pity Alaya. Bruce stroked his fishy's downy head and Alaya began to purr. Bruce felt despair, rembering his release of his baby girl into what? Fear washed over him and faith failed him, swallowed in his greif.

With that came a hatred of which no one spoke. The AEC and NTS, the Manhatten and Nutmeg projects. Isotopic ticking of the Maternal clock. Two of Karina's cousins had born babies the same day, all had similar deformaties. Alaya's exaggerated congenital facial anomalies seemed more comely underwater.
The cleft that had split her to her nose, cleaving her upper palate, was packed with gills. Alaya/Sirenia's, prominent split lips had elongated into a long cocks comb. her upper lips fluttered just back of Alaya’s shoulders as she swam.

There was swift commotion as the girl, as he supposed, mounted, he supposed, not the Professor, but her friend. He bolted along the human seawall and then stitched the waves as it/he/she/they took in long draughts of air.

Alaya and Posiden vented the air which noisily bubbled. Their jointed snorkel tubes obscured his view of them. “The Human people see us riding our friends they think we are dead people. We are safer when they are afraid. That’s what the Professor says.’’

Sirenia laughed. “We are the Dolphin's pets, Daddy. And sometimes we are borned as Dolphins, but when you are a Dolphin, well most of us in Sirenia are young.

The young eat and calve and are never separated from Sirenia. Those who are borned as people, well, they stay part people and some are so people that we are just dreams to them.

''A baby is borned to us and we sing. The people think we are lost from wracked boats. someimes, Sirenia said, she and Poseiden would go down deep and would use her air when she vented.

Bruce wanted to man handle Alaya forward into his time--but the bill, just for carp alone . . . there was the pool, of course, he was too old to make new pools up to the watergates like the kids did.''
Snorkeling quietly now, her tubules retracted into her head in tight coils, fluttering spirals where tiny babies bubbled. The tiny trunks rose to the surface , sipp, sipping. Bruce, ignoring her protests, examined her gravely deformed upper palate. She found gills inside, a cavity for them at the centrum of her shrunken coils.

''Are there others with coils like fingers even Daddies can't touch?'' Sirenia giggled, ''We don't have Daddys in our pod.'' Alaya sported huffily in the water at the very notion, then paddled off.

Alaya's underwater world reminded Bruce of swimming at the packed county pool--life everywhere, and bubbles. He thought, he with an industrial time machine, could transport ancient Bonneville fish for profit. He'd float the suggestion at family night.

''We eat only the Little swimmers where the Dolphins say we can graze. Yep, Only where our dolphins say because they know when their gardens need culling. The dolpins like everything to be in balance but the little scuttler with the hurty hands--they eat my hair when I fish here. Poseiden says that's why we have too many... how do you say in people?
''Well, ...hmmm...''

''Our professor is human now and he knows Latin. We tell him what things do and draw them to his mind. The never borned shows him in dreams too and then draws him to the teachings. The Professor writes down everything he remembers and then if he forgets, the never borned remind him and he puts their names in his big book.

He doesn't think, really. that we are real, He says we are interesting and that's enough. Sirenia and her sullen male swam up tothe surface and raced. then swan leisurly back. ''We got extincted so we borned ourselves with the fishes. We build up our pods, first. The never borned help us. You still be my Daddy and talk to me?''

''Yes," Bruce said, "You are my girl.''

''I be. Some of us spoke people for a long time and know where our peoples are, like the Professor and Alaya. He knows languages and teaches me so I can greet humans --I came from them so now I will know them.''

''You speak well, better than when we last spoke.'' Bruce observed.

''I am grown now Daddy. Sometimes I know how to talk, how to find my Daddy and visit Ladd. Ladd is my friend, he is a sea person and my Kathleen's Brother, whatever people think. They play with me and talk to me. Ladd in dreams, but maybe not for always.

I creep around and Kathleen plays with me all day sometimes and with her long river fishes. They are trained to help swimmers and save them from the destroyers with with the long teeth. The big river fish, well he can sting hard. A dolphin comes to fight and bite the big teeth fish.

‘'Peoples could drowned while the dolphins fougt the big teeth biter--we have to stand way back. The river fish are better for this. They just sting the big teeth hard and the big teeth remember and don't like to come back.'’

''I come to visit Celeste and Livvy. They made a picture, of me. I tell you, my Daddy', so you will believe that we are all friends. I don't want to be borned as a people ever again, so I keep my family.''
''Daddy, now you come to my house and we be friends? I missed you my Daddy. You do not like my Poseidon?''

'I'd hoped to avoid him,'' Bruce said, eyeing the overmuscled, big, bisexual male.
''Poseiden is a good swimmer Daddy, and he helps the Dolphins when the sharks come. We stolDed a spear from the humans. At night we creep, creep and creep and we watch what the people do.''

''Swim to my House Daddy, there are ten in my pod and in Poseiden's there are fifteen. We will have eleven in my pod when I calve.''

'' ‘Laily, you're too young to go with boys, REALLY, even very brave ones, not to mention cute too.” Bruce employed his fingers for the math, ''How old are these people, this Poseiden--is he...your--Friend?'' Bruce asked scepticly.''

''I will answer because I love you and you are ours Daddy.’’ Lylee hesitated. “My Posiden has been born seven times.''
''No more, no less, And you?'' Bruce asked. ''I just remember my friends. I don't study different lives and Earth history, It is better to be educated by the peoples than to die too soon, as a baby.''
''The Professor,'' Bruce hesitated.''Laily, first, am I dead?'' His adolescent, big bellied daughter regarded him, amused.

''You don't know?'' She asked. Bruce wondered what he had been doing just before he died. Greif would not spare him this query. Karen something. there had been a woman, a mother to Alaya. “When human peoples die other people come to help them. You are only dreaming, my Daddy--peoples dream and come here. When they feel better they swim home.''

''I be getting big. Soon I bring my calf to visit Mommy Karina.''

Karinna stretched. She loved her Alpine House which was of the traditional design, side by side living areas, a big divided loft for the boys and girls. The play and time out room. alternatly called ‘lya’s room, was back of the West kitchen. They had put a big 2 inch latex mat there and padded the walls with colored latex so the kids could rough-house without boinking their heads.

Karinna had been cramming in the old nursery for a 7:30 AM on-campus exam in the Custom Careers Extention Center’s Office at the Pleasant Valley Y. Bruce generally fell asleep wherever Karinna plied the keyboard and strains of Celeste’s moonlight Sonata beset him. He curled more around her and dreaming, asked a drifter he met possibly a jellyfish if it/they knew where the human infants were kept.

Karinna made the playmat up with linen when Bruce was home. Celeste thier their tween, made the room up when she had friends over, mostly cousins. It was a puzzlement to Karinna and Celeste how quickly the room could be torn to shreds. She wondered how any of them could tell if the ghost was doing something or not, one way or another--though the spook doctors said there was more paranormal activity when th children were active. The kids had quite a collection of ghost buster DVD’s and movies. If it got cold in the old nursery, once the kitchen of an Anders 3rd wife, they put on sweaters. The ghost liked old movies. “Movies about people,” she would suggest, the Goth said, in his ear.

Thier Goth’s girlfriend was going to pasture that Summer with Annie, their dad’s second and Moe, his third wife, to help with the squirts. The Goth’s girlfriend was going to also take over the books for Kerry’s tin can satillite dishes and radio repair shack. Karinna’s Dad wanted to bring the project to the States. Los dos, the soon to breed couple, liked to hang out at Karinna’s school.

Alaya’s Haunted TV, as it was called, lived in the old nursery . The shrinks at the Center puzzled. One, the Goth’s and Bruce’s shrink, a 2nd cousin on Karinna’s mother’s side, and had heard that the children believed it to be thier lost Alaya, his own cousin as well. He thus asked if he could watch movies with the kids.

The Scouts from the ward helped Kerry set up expensive looking equipment from the Utah Paranormal Society in the old nursery.

Kerry was taking a door-open nap with his girlfriend in the old nursery. This followed a door closed nap that had gone critical on them. Kerry’s girl had gotten herself pregnant, just like Karinna had before
Klary was born.

The goth caught thier ‘Lylie just as the kids burst in from a trip to Reams, but missed what Alaya said. Grammy Lebaron rolled out the feeding trough at six. His blessed Gothness employed to drive the rug rats out to Grammy LeBaron’s to Grammy and thier Aunts and Uncles and cousins in time for the little kids to ride her ponies while the biggers and grups hoed one row before dinner. The day the Goth got his driver’s licence was celebrated, with a pinata. Good news for all, la dia de l’Mama’s liberation, Mother’s Day en realidad.

“La Revolution Dentro la Casa,” the Goth proclaimed when his Ma first handed him the keys. The biggers, as Livvy called them, released the Ghost Bed Room to Karinna’s rabble at 7 PM, then romped in with their hair dripping. The girls (for the most part, iust the girls) had their hair braided or tied into ringlets with ragstrips. Prayers ensued, then the current book, the scripture verse they were memorizing that week. The big kids came in for peayer and song, then went back to the table to study.

Singing emitted from a pile of bunny tangled legs and arms ‘till the younger nidgets were carried heavily to thier beds. This week to earn snack, they were memorizing the scripture: “Ye are the salt of the earth, without which it would not be leavened.” Karinna made salt rising bread for them, so Klary Anne, made a crumbly loaf for bible supper from some recipes she found on Aisch.com.

Part Two, Chapter Three

Bruce’s heaviest
history had been with a well loved, amply fletched snake known by his
intimates as the Prez. The Prez had heavy history with everyone. As a
mere cub, he had represented Utah in the WWII Office of War Information
under Artchibald Mac Liesh and Poets. He had distinguished himself in
the Utah Writer's Project, then, married
his first wife before
going off to war with a camera and notepad.

The Prez stayed
on in Europe for the the War Crimes Tribunal at Nueremberg duration of
US Operations in Europe. He reported on the Berlin Airlift from West
Germany before called to assist the Brethryn, who in those days, had
little notion of the Mission Field.

During the Nueremberg
Process the Prez was oft seen in public with a stunning LDS companion, a
German Woman toward his intentions were unknown. A Mormon stenographer
whose formerly intended had returned to the States. She found the two
men interchageable, but in the end accepted an invitation from the Prez'
bunt brother, the Spruce Goose. A stunning woman still, by Device
rather than Devine Designs.

So Bruce now attended the
tottering Prez who enjoyed sugarless Shirley Temples with all natural
Marachino Cherries on sprees with the Sprucce Goose in Nothern
Mexico--There the Goose’s private physician gave them both, Prez and
attache', an exhaustive going over.

The Gooose's Circle
were scarcely repectabe well aged--widowers, feigned batchelors. The
Spruce Goose, was a formidable puppeteer. The Prez’s shadowy buddy of
Paper clipper buddy surrounded himself with Mormons: tough, sneaky,
smart, fine as long as they got Jesus on Sunday, and Jews Shabat on
Friday Night.

Chapter

When the Brethren
beleived Bruce was a confirmed Batcheler, on the advice of Ancient
Mentors set his cap for an Old Maid School teacher whom he then
betrothed to himself via a Deseret Tower rooftop tete a tete with first
the aging maiden herself, next a 3 way consultation with her great
ancient Uncle, Bruce's big boss, the Prez.

The Prez, in
his time, had set the matter of his German War Widow before an Mission
President and Hierophant who suggested he take her back to the states
with the last load of Paperclippers fleeing Stalin on CIA bribes, and
hand her off
to someone with a more passionate interest.

Bruce's maternal great Uncle had set him up out of Highschool with
a modest moonlight media guy out West to the Stateline. He was droll
and had a thick Dixie Drawl. Stateline was his home turf. Bruce was once
a Humanities TA with an expensive Liveboard he used for two way
communication with his studennts. Bruce fostered a Drama program at
Wendover High School and drove out for rehersals. To this, the next
year, he added an entry level position at Benny Life.

Having exceeded the age of a tree, the Prez had long since come to
detest the News.

The Prez encouraged, discovered that his
Health Manager, a
Naval Lab Tech was pliable and amusing.
Moreover Daddy Bruce Bunny was endowed, at the time, with Single
Blessedness and showed satirical talent. A War Correspondent’s Sacred
trust, quoth the Prez, was to commit the Truth, the whole Truth and
Nothing but the Truth to heavy bond paper--and giving a copy secured by a
friend who would see it into print if anything ever happened. The rest
of what he wrote depended on the public appetite for the actual.

The Prez held the Spruce Goose as financial Guarenteur of his
literary legacy, as Bruce relied on the Potash Poker Set for his. His
workaday revolved around spin.

Having so lived, having so
lied, the convolutions of the Prez once, lamentably, triggered a
scandal. A subordinate took the rap. Bruce had the tortuous tale from
the tormented confessor’s mouth. The Prez, at the insistance of unnamed
Senior Brethren, had cooked a melange of WWII and Korean war stories
down to demontsrate how a young man of Israel fought when his country
flocked like raptors to war, the sons of Helamen among them.

He found an up and comer go getter Titan to disperse the Prez’s froth
to the air of the Holy Tabernacle, which had not known such creativity
since the loss of Heber Golden Kimbel., the foul mouthed comedian who
had skinned meals for his cracked wheat. In the Prez’s case the grim
reaper laughed last, for the whole Church would have loved to kill him.
Enshrined in every
member family was that 50 dollar set of war
stories designed
to interest the Youth of Zion, firm as the
Mountains around them.

In the Second World War the Prez
said he’d spent the whole damn war pushing papers. It was more
complicated than that. The Church rumor mill imagined and imbued with
apocrypha and ephemera his long friendship with the shadowed figure the
Prez refered to as the Spruce Goose, not cooked nor stray and during the
WWII War scandle, one sorry Goose. For the Prez
had asked his
advice. He thought that since the man couldn't
keep his mouth
shut, and less than half of it was true anyway,
he was perfect
in the role to which History and fate had
called him. The man
wanted to brag? Stuffed his mouth with bragaddocio.

Bruce
had hashed the entire matter over first with the Spruce Goose. The Goose
thought the young, ambitious aspirant a leit motif--Righteous glory in
war and baseball. Yes, he had been
an athlete and his huge
frame was oogled by the sister, less for his words, the man was poetry
in motion.

The ambitious miscreant satisfied his Superiors.
The Gerontocracy dove under their desks. The Prez became the power
behind the throne for his composure was complete.

CHAPTER
THREE

The war incident had been during Viet Nam, the
unsuspected spearhead a young appointee, Graduate of an Elite
Theological where the guns were gilded and loaded. Robust, handsome,
graced with Midas’s John Waynes withthering gait the up and comer
emitted a reliable charisma. Numerable factions held out a hemp fishing
net to save the Prez if he went down. His name was not mentioned during
the affair.

Stenography school put a bland face on
preparation for Nueremberg. Well over half a Century afterward, the Prez
was begging the Old Man to beam him up. A dignified end. It was said
Moses went that way--just glitter in the form of a man that

faded out. Trouble was the pact made at Neremberg with the young Spruce
Goose, wasnt going to let his Wingman go.

Oh, the Prez
murmered wistfully, where was it written--
”We’ll all go
together when we go, every Hottentot and Every Eskimo.” Bound by a
brotherly oath to the Spruce Goose, they had vowed to conquer the bleak
and dolorous world God surely never intended for his children. With
enough money, any problem had a ready solution

Certainly
living long enough to understand his wrongs plainly, Bruce Daddy Bunny
began anew--“If you love me, he recited, keep my commandments, and
jumping Jehosephat he did love the Prez.”

The saints now
hoped to reclaim their genome from the Atomic Energy comission (AEC).
The Goose, after staging his demise, allowed two copies of his will to
surface: one on a desk in the Church Office Building's upper secretarial
sactum. The other on a startled windshied of a lowly soon to be rich
and famous gas station attendent who got all the royalties from the
movie version.

Bundt brothers, Heirophant and Goose had
nurtured the global ignorance feigned by those who had read the
Nuremberg Medical Accords when Ike declassified them in the mid-fifties
and sadly turned away, those who spun history as a potter on his wheel
needed clout--wealth, power, influence, prestige, charisma to see even
paltry justice done. The letter of the spirit of the law they would see
enforced.

The Spruce Goose had ambition and the first of
his great ambitions had been to abolish the Adversary’s sickness and
death gambit, that ancient Serpent.

The Goose imposed. He
had his own men in the world and his office and home, kept a bright and
handsome medical attache. The Contemporary press, still given to
internicine wars, was an unlevel playing field. Spin was the deciding
advantage--to this Wendover added the gadfly and the harpoon.

There the Prez, incognito, had surprize and a downhill slope. He had
the youth of Zion in his care. He had, demonstratbly, throughout 911
Olympic, and monster storm era, Mick Romney and Mr. Redford and the
Mormon Washington Caucus to protect his vulnerable flank--his unheard of
longevity. There were things so sacrosanct and devisive that even
Sundance had no comment.

Few knew the Prez as a political
animal, ignominity was the Prez’s Ace in the hole--he had one hope of
retirement--a funeral with an empty coffin. It had been 80 years since
the prez had been left as a curr in Nueremberg to assemble and prepare
the Nazi horrors for Court presentation--each old photo painted a
blurred picture, edited, it told a lie of omission.

The
American Press Corp had sruggled with the vast extent of the Holocaust
against the Jews et al. Actually, the Prez said, most, war weary and ill
just went home, despite what the journalists had seen--their mission as
a mere remnant, was to collect indisputable evidence for a massive
tribunal.

The religious boys tended to be more likely to
sign on to the project, abandoned with the cameras, the stenography. The
Prez heard and saw things that dwarfed the hate crimes at Haun’s mill.
Numbers offered no horror or solace as skeletons one by one, sobbed out
intimate tales of indifferent brutalization.

Listening to
skeletons with reedy voices was a task for Mormons, men who lied only
under direct orders, patient and scrupulous as parsons. Men to do their
duty in their time.

Neuremberg haunted. The Prez burned
midnight oil beneath his Mormon brother in his lower bunk, pouring over
stenography, copying long sections of transcripts complaining that the
future of the world, the future conventions of war, ought not to rest on
his stenograhic errors.

His bunkmate had an interest in
the German trial of Tokyo Rose and often burned midnight oil beside him.
He was a boy from Bear Lake, with family up to Richfeild who
feared the precedent they were setting in the Court. They crumpled their
originals for retrieval later, all others being dead, drunk, and
asleep. Memory of the Nueremberg testimony girded the Prez, enabling him
to steer his people through times where moral choice was constant and
briskly paced.

To keep the lid on the issues that too much
had been made of already, this was the mandate of the Prez. There were
his long companions, whose minds were vast as the Louvre, or of the lost
Libraries at Alexandria, the burned Mayan and Incan libraries. The Nazi
Book burnings, the Chinese who stuffed their matresses with ancient
Tibetan manuscripts, for these history made slow progress.

Like a invertabrate beetle climbing a sand dune. With Bruce's treatment,
which Bruce and his lobbyists had talked him into taking. the brain of
the Prez healed before the rest of the body, leaving a respectable
appearance of age. It was tricky getting the biologicals in precise
balance. He left instructions for his trainees when he went fact
finding, assigning each the appropriate doses. Bruce had adored his old
men, if he got out of his current watery predicament, he would adore
them and the mercy of thier common Diety, even more.

Chapter Two--Out to Home

As Bruce Bunny slept, out to
Bonneville International, just over the Nevada border, Gentile
Sex fiends and Jack-Mormon hypocrites were rising through the pastel morning mist, delighting themselves on Babylonian option Beauty
Bots--versatile, gamey, and 100 per cent self- disinfecting. Such bots
were concealed to all under 21,flashing among a plethora of
family theme vacation options. These were available out of SLCI, the
family friendly airport.

Business Tuesday poker nights were
restricted to the locals with notifications sent out by bot
Stateline’s Profit Sharing Social Engineers, and anyone else concerned
in the topic of discussion. The Tuesday Night Poker discussion
table, had long operated by consensus.

Bruce had
invested some of his early capital when he was the TA at the High
Schools out to Wendover, Deep Crick and Callao. There were a few of the
Brethren whose poker-faces who's poker faces could out-do Tuesdays'
best--they'd got 'em in the service. Uncle Samuel got a young start
playing with his adolescent brothers for high stakes pine nuts and
stopped by for a brief game when he had an interest.

SLCI
specialized in unaccompanied kids--the kids, with advance planning,
could get on a plane with their favorite character, in costume. Airport
Snow White led her herd of Dwarves. Costumed humans were shepherded by
Kermit the Frog. These were for the kids whose Moms and Dads lived far
away from one another.

Tuesday must have fallen on
Christmas and the group drunk when they snuck in the AI pilots. They didn’t sleep, converse and when Delta brought in it's curvaceous, deep
cleavaged autopilots Bruce got out of commercial flying and joined the
Federal Air Marshal’s Service under the President’s Office of Homeland
Security.

In an emergency, Air Marshalls were to hang back.
When the heros were done with their heroism, the Air Marshall could
fly and land the plane cheered on by a deep cleavaged, photogenic bot
who was as likely to seduce the Heros as Hijackers. They had a
vulnerability, like dragon mail, and the Air Marshals knew where it
was. It was mandatory on all bots who left the factory.

Bruce took the mail shuttle so he could get some work done, and he was a
wonder of multitasking. Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather’s Tuesday
Night fiscal grousing. He told his Stepfather he'd ought to figure
what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that what the
male-mid-life-crisis was all about? Daddy-o was stuck.

Bruce’s trip steeped in naked melencholy, he, now, a belted in,
waterlogged commuter, fussed time where time was lost. If Bruce had been
graced with additional mortal time, he’d have rather spend it all with
Karina. Maybe spend some time with siblings, cousins and old folks
dancing the moon into brilliance.

Both he and his Beloved
Karina had sold their Souls as young people, to a promise of Health that
God, let alone Harmony, had no warrant to offer. Green for his rank of
servitude to the aged Church, Daddy Bruce Bunny was fated with default
assignments.

Quietly spoken and strictly off the record,
Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Suntan--but could either
reach into his watery grave to retrieve him? How had it come to this.
He was no Winter Driver, and inexpressibly sleepy, he'd missed the
bridge and sailed off the embarkment. Kerry could take over his choose
the
news gig at Stateline for the Sundance group of stations.
But
Karina, how long would he have to wait for her to join
him.

Bunny Cry Me a Rainbow 1.101
The Prez, The Scandal

Chapter 1-1 The Lucky and the Few

Bruce's ghost child Alaya flashed silver and was gone. Bruce cried out. Karina, rubbed Bruce's forehead. Bruce of Alpine, with the girls and the cousins up for School. Karinna mother's feifdom was matriarchal property inherited from the previous owner who died with his boots on, fallen among the tall green corn inter-cropped with Amaranth in the feild. His father didn't like the property to go to his oldest son of the clans who he could see wandered the dark path into the strange woods of fanaticism.

Karina's mothers had stayed with him when he had his first heart attack, and came back when he did not show for supper. They hunted the ranch while Karina's siblings waited at table, Annie carried Karina on her hip but set her down among the rigs. Karina had seen her grandpa from her vantage on the ground, sleeping as she presumed. Her mothers were looking through the corn and Amaranth tassles for his head where he had been doing light work, hand fertilizing the late tassles.

The summer was gold, the day long, the sun aslant and brilliant, the leaves green. Karina by the dark shape she had seen the roots of the corn. She sat by him while Karina's mothers called them both. He had just overworked himself, he had said when they roused him, it was the old rheumatic sciatica. He had been treated in Britain after WWI, and had made a full recovery, but the Doctor had warned that he'd probably die of a heart attack when he died. The old man could say he had led a kindly life since the horror and mayhem of war.

The old man managed to sit up and after they checked his heart, he thought he might manage a walk to the house. Then they were gone instead he had seen, in the bright green and gold of the fields, a man who said, that he had said that in the matter of the division of his lands he should not fear to look to those closest at hand. He had collapsed again and waited without the use of his body for one of his families to bestir themselves to search for Karina, at least. He thought of Karina, the oldest child of his son at war and the young best girl friends he had thought a good match for his boy at the war.

Karina's father had been shot down and was thought to have survived the bailout but to have fallen into enemy hands. He never turned up at the hyped up media circus at the Hanoi Hilton. Bad as that was, the ones there were the lucky ones and the few.  WWII had cheated him of two of his boys. They buried a coffin with the contents of his footlocker when it came after the war, and they flew his flag on a flagpole his young boys had made.

Karina's grandpa, Annie's Pa took comfort from the tiny hand in his and looked into Karina's eyes. "Papa go to sleep in the corn" she had said, when he mother found her. And it came to his heart that these with the missing husband should indeed administer the land until their husband came home. He had seen his son working beside him among the corn--a vision he thought it, but there was something too real and he saw his body and his son said he was alive, spared, but he did not know when he could come home.

The doctor drove out after work and said he thought it had been another heart attack connected with the old trouble from the war, and that patients before the end saw spirits and received help in visions not yet explained by medicine. Her grandfather was past 90 and said they should to call his lawyer to draw up papers. Then the gripping in his chest came again. He said not to vary his schedule or mob him with family all at once. He lived a long last month.

The pain in his chest had been bad all day and Annie adjusted the
oxygen. "Be as one, he said last, and wives, let each of you cleave to 
harmony, and remain, each of righteous as Abigail."

"Now Papa
will sleep, he's tired," Karina said to her mother, causing a stifled
ripple through the family, like a breeze among the corn and intercropped seed they had spent the day gathering."

One of his sons, an old Doctor at
LDS Hospital, pulled a stethescope to his youngest wife Mag, who had 3
young children who were whisked away. "I"ll take the second watch
tonight he said, if he's still kicking--he wanted to make a hundred,
nearly did."

"Papa be fine," Karina's mother said.
"He will find Ali Baba in Heaven." She had been reading to him from the Arabian Nights.

" Honey," she had said, "Where
did you hear that?" Karina went and got the book Sherazade had
written.

Karina's Mother Annie became steward of her father's land at 20.  She had also been left a piece of land in Mexico. She was able to delegate stewardship if she chose and delegated it to Grammy Le Baron--a distant cousin of the Le Barons. She watched as avarice and zeal confused their patriarch cousins. Satan fell upon them and rode them like horses. Annie's people kept themselves apart and did marry again, refusing to give up hope.  For companionship they had one another, until they needed Annie to see to the Mexican land and Karina's mother stayed to see after the bulk of the family in Provo, where they were thought silly not to remarry, while in truth they were merely frugal.  Mag, the older Doctor's wife brought an inheritance to pay for seea big breeding horse to mix his stock with Utah Mustang stock gotten from Native cousins out by the Deep Creeks.

The family stewardship was a big ranch that once included rich land on the lower Provo River, there was a larger parcel, fortunately upriver where the big house.

Karina had married late, after she finished college, with whatever was needed for their schoolchildren. Her PaPa said she should be a teacher when she grew up, she was so bright a star in his firmament so very bright. He was a proponent of female education. Karina remembered that and she was sitting with PaPa who had drifted off to sleep when she told her Mama what her grandfather had said about her teaching school.

She had birthed her children in a previous marriage which her family passed off as her younger siblings. The sibs could pass as twins, the younger girl being swifter on the uptake than the older boy Kerry.
Karina's father had gone missing over North Viet Nam soon after she was born. Her Aunt Annie, strong, big boned kissed her young husband goodbye at Hill. They flipped coins for the privilege.

Those who thought it important that a forced abandonment of polygamy was necessary, burned out a few years before the birth of Karinna's youngest bio-baby. Burned out just past the FLDS/Yearning for Zion debacle. Karrina married the father of her Kerry and divorced him soon after she had pushed Klary into the midwife's always ready arms. She'd shared a house down to the lambing ground with Annie, then had gone up North to finish High School. Annie cared for youngest chicks in the family brood. Karina drew close to her oldest children years later, after she had her teaching degee.

Chapter Two--Out to Home

As Bruce Bunny slept, out to Bonneville International,
just over the Nevada border, Getile Sex fiends and Jack-Mormon hypocrites were rising through the pastel
morning mist, delighting themselves on Babalonian option Beauty Bots--versitile, gamey, and 100 per cent self- disinfecting. Such bots were concealed to all under 21,
flashing among a plethora of family theme vacation options. These were available out of SLCI, the family friendly airport.

Business Tuesday poker nights were restricted to the locals with notifications sent out by bot Stateline’s Profit Sharing Social Engineers, and anyone else concerned in the topic of discussion.
The Tuesday Night Poker discussion table, had long opereated
by consensus.

Bruce had invested some of his early capital when he was the TA at the High Schools out to Wendover, Deep Crick and Callao. There were a few of the Brethren whose poker-faces who's poker faces could out-do Tuesdays' best--they'd got 'em in the service. Uncle Samuel got a young start playing with his adolescent brothers for high stakes pine nuts and stopped by for a breif game when he had an interest.

SLCI specialized in unaccompianied kids--the kids, with advance planning, could get on a plane with their favorite character, in costume. Airport Snow White led her herd of Dwarves. Costumed humans were sheparded by Kermit the Frog. These were for the kids whose Moms and Dads lived far away from one another.

Tuesday must have fallen on Christmas and th group drunk when they snuck in t AI pilots. They didn’t sleep, converse and when Delta brought in it's curvacious, deep cleavaged autopilots Bruce got out of commercial flying and joined the Federal Air Marshal’s Service under the President’s Office of Homeland Security.

In an emergency, Air Marshalls were to hang back. When the heros were done with thier heroism, the Air Marshall could fly and land the plane cheered on by a deep cleavageed, photogenic bot who was as likely to seduce the Heros as Highjackers. They had a vulnerability, like dragon mail, and the Air Marshalls knew where it was. It was mandatory on all bots who left the factory.

Bruce took the mail shuttle so he could get some work done, and he was a wonder of multitasking. Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather’s Tuesday Night fiscal grousing. He told his Stepfather he'd ought to figure what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that what the male-mid-life-crisis was all about? Daddy-o was stuck.

Bruce’s trip steeped in naked meloncholy, he, now, a belted in, waterlogged commuter, fussed time where time was lost. If Bruce had been graced with additional mortal time, he’d have rather spend it all with Karina. Maybe spend some time with siblings, cousins and old folks dancing the moon into brilliance.

Both he and his Beloved Karina had sold thier Souls as young people, to a promise of Health that God, let alone Harmony, had no warrent to offer. Green for his rank of servitude to the aged Church, Daddy Bruce Bunny was fated with default assignments.

Quietly spoken and strictly off the record, Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Sundance--but could either reach into his watery grave to retrieve him? How had it come to this. He was no Winter Driver, and inexpressibly sleepy, he'd missed the bridge and sailed off the embarkment. Kerry could take over his choose the
news gig at Statelline for the Sundance group of stations. But
Karrina, how long would he have to wait for her to join him.

Part Two, Chapter Three

Bruce’s heaviest history had been with a well loved, amply fletched snake known by his intimates as the Prez. The Prez had heavy history with everyone. As a mere cub, he had represented Utah in the WWII Office of War Information under Artchibald Mac Liesh and Poets. He had distinguished himself in the Utah Writer's Project, then, married
his first wife before going off to war with a camera and notepad.

The Prez stayed on in Europe for the the War Crimes Tribunal at Nueremberg duration of US Operations in Europe. He reported on the Berlin Airlift from West Germany before called to assist the Brethryn, who in those days, had little notion of the Mission Field.

During the Nueremberg Process the Prez was oft seen in public with a stunning LDS companion, a German Woman toward his intentions were unknown. A Mormon stenographer whose formerly intended had returned to the States. She found the two men interchageable, but in the end accepted an invitation from the Prez' bunt brother, the Spruce Goose. A stunning woman still, by Device rather than Devine Designs.

So Bruce now attended the tottering Prez who enjoyed sugarless Shirley Temples with all natural Marachino Cherries on sprees with the Sprucce Goose in Nothern Mexico--There the Goose’s private physician gave them both, Prez and attache', an exhaustive going over.

The Gooose's Circle were scarcely repectabe well aged--widowers, feigned batchelors. The Spruce Goose, was a formidable puppeteer. The Prez’s shadowy buddy of Paper clipper buddy surrounded himself with Mormons: tough, sneaky, smart, fine as long as they got Jesus on Sunday, and Jews Shabat on Friday Night.

Chapter

When the Brethren beleived Bruce was a confirmed Batcheler, on the advice of Ancient Mentors set his cap for an Old Maid School teacher whom he then betrothed to himself via a Deseret Tower rooftop tete a tete with first the aging maiden herself, next a 3 way consultation with her great ancient Uncle, Bruce's big boss, the Prez.

The Prez, in his time, had set the matter of his German War Widow before an Mission President and Hierophant who suggested he take her back to the states with the last load of Paperclippers fleeing Stalin on CIA bribes, and hand her off
to someone with a more passionate interest.

Bruce's maternal great Uncle had set him up out of Highschool with a modest moonlight media guy out West to the Stateline. He was droll and had a thick Dixie Drawl. Stateline was his home turf. Bruce was once a Humanities TA with an expensive Liveboard he used for two way communication with his studennts. Bruce fostered a Drama program at Wendover High School and drove out for rehersals. To this, the next year, he added an entry level position at Benny Life.

Having exceeded the age of a tree, the Prez had long since come to detest the News.

The Prez encouraged, discovered that his Health Manager, a
Naval Lab Tech was pliable and amusing. Moreover Daddy Bruce Bunny was endowed, at the time, with Single Blessedness and showed satirical talent. A War Correspondent’s Sacred trust, quoth the Prez, was to commit the Truth, the whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth to heavy bond paper--and giving a copy secured by a friend who would see it into print if anything ever happened. The rest of what he wrote depended on the public appetite for the actual.

The Prez held the Spruce Goose as financial Guarenteur of his literary legacy, as Bruce relied on the Potash Poker Set for his. His workaday revolved around spin.

Having so lived, having so lied, the convolutions of the Prez once, lamentably, triggered a scandal. A subordinate took the rap. Bruce had the tortuous tale from the tormented confessor’s mouth. The Prez, at the insistance of unnamed Senior Brethren, had cooked a melange of WWII and Korean war stories down to demontsrate how a young man of Israel fought when his country flocked like raptors to war, the sons of Helamen among them.

He found an up and comer go getter Titan to disperse the Prez’s froth to the air of the Holy Tabernacle, which had not known such creativity since the loss of Heber Golden Kimbel., the foul mouthed comedian who had skinned meals for his cracked wheat. In the Prez’s case the grim reaper laughed last, for the whole Church would have loved to kill him. Enshrined in every
member family was that 50 dollar set of war stories designed
to interest the Youth of Zion, firm as the Mountains around them.

In the Second World War the Prez said he’d spent the whole damn war pushing papers. It was more complicated than that. The Church rumor mill imagined and imbued with apocrypha and ephemera his long friendship with the shadowed figure the Prez refered to as the Spruce Goose, not cooked nor stray and during the WWII War scandle, one sorry Goose. For the Prez
had asked his advice. He thought that since the man couldn't
keep his mouth shut, and less than half of it was true anyway,
he was perfect in the role to which History and fate had
called him. The man wanted to brag? Stuffed his mouth with bragaddocio.

Bruce had hashed the entire matter over first with the Spruce Goose. The Goose thought the young, ambitious aspirant a leit motif--Righteous glory in war and baseball. Yes, he had been
an athlete and his huge frame was oogled by the sister, less for his words, the man was poetry in motion.

The ambitious miscreant satisfied his Superiors. The Gerontocracy dove under their desks. The Prez became the power behind the throne for his composure was complete.

CHAPTER THREE

The war incident had been during Viet Nam, the unsuspected spearhead a young appointee, Graduate of an Elite Theological where the guns were gilded and loaded. Robust, handsome, graced with Midas’s John Waynes withthering gait the up and comer emitted a reliable charisma. Numerable factions held out a hemp fishing net to save the Prez if he went down. His name was not mentioned during the affair.

Stenography school put a bland face on preparation for Nueremberg. Well over half a Century afterward, the Prez was begging the Old Man to beam him up. A dignified end. It was said Moses went that way--just glitter in the form of a man that
faded out. Trouble was the pact made at Neremberg with the young Spruce Goose, wasnt going to let his Wingman go.

Oh, the Prez murmered wistfully, where was it written--
”We’ll all go together when we go, every Hottentot and Every Eskimo.” Bound by a brotherly oath to the Spruce Goose, they had vowed to conquer the bleak and dolorous world God surely never intended for his children. With enough money, any problem had a ready solution

Certainly living long enough to understand his wrongs plainly, Bruce Daddy Bunny began anew--“If you love me, he recited, keep my commandments, and jumping Jehosephat he did love the Prez.”

The saints now hoped to reclaim their genome from the Atomic Energy comission (AEC). The Goose, after staging his demise, allowed two copies of his will to surface: one on a desk in the Church Office Building's upper secretarial sactum. The other on a startled windshied of a lowly soon to be rich and famous gas station attendent who got all the royalties from the movie version.

Bundt brothers, Heirophant and Goose had nurtured the global ignorance feigned by those who had read the Nuremberg Medical Accords when Ike declassified them in the mid-fifties and sadly turned away, those who spun history as a potter on his wheel needed clout--wealth, power, influence, prestige, charisma to see even paltry justice done. The letter of the spirit of the law they would see enforced.

The Spruce Goose had ambition and the first of his great ambitions had been to abolish the Adversary’s sickness and death gambit, that ancient Serpent.

The Goose imposed. He had his own men in the world and his office and home, kept a bright and handsome medical attache. The Contemporary press, still given to internicine wars, was an unlevel playing field. Spin was the deciding advantage--to this Wendover added the gadfly and the harpoon.
There the Prez, incognito, had surprize and a downhill slope. He had the youth of Zion in his care. He had, demonstratbly, throughout 911 Olympic, and monster storm era, Mick Romney and Mr. Redford and the Mormon Washington Caucus to protect his vulnerable flank--his unheard of longevity. There were things so sacrosanct and devisive that even Sundance had no comment.

Few knew the Prez as a political animal, ignominity was the Prez’s Ace in the hole--he had one hope of retirement--a funeral with an empty coffin. It had been 80 years since the prez had been left as a curr in Nueremberg to assemble and prepare the Nazi horrors for Court presentation--each old photo painted a blurred picture, edited, it told a lie of omission.

The American Press Corp had sruggled with the vast extent of the Holocaust against the Jews et al. Actually, the Prez said, most, war weary and ill just went home, despite what the journalists had seen--their mission as a mere remnant, was to collect indisputable evidence for a massive tribunal.

The religious boys tended to be more likely to sign on to the project, abandoned with the cameras, the stenography. The Prez heard and saw things that dwarfed the hate crimes at Haun’s mill. Numbers offered no horror or solace as skeletons one by one, sobbed out intimate tales of indifferent brutalization.

Listening to skeletons with reedy voices was a task for Mormons, men who lied only under direct orders, patient and scrupulous as parsons. Men to do their duty in their time.

Neuremberg haunted. The Prez burned midnight oil beneath his Mormon brother in his lower bunk, pouring over stenography, copying long sections of transcripts complaining that the future of the world, the future conventions of war, ought not to rest on his stenograhic errors.

His bunkmate had an interest in the German trial of Tokyo Rose and often burned midnight oil beside him.
He was a boy from Bear Lake, with family up to Richfeild who feared the precedent they were setting in the Court. They crumpled their originals for retrieval later, all others being dead, drunk, and asleep. Memory of the Nueremberg testimony girded the Prez, enabling him to steer his people through times where moral choice was constant and briskly paced.

To keep the lid on the issues that too much had been made of already, this was the mandate of the Prez. There were his long companions, whose minds were vast as the Louvre, or of the lost Libraries at Alexandria, the burned Mayan and Incan libraries. The Nazi Book burnings, the Chinese who stuffed their matresses with ancient Tibetan manuscripts, for these history made slow progress.

Like a invertabrate beetle climbing a sand dune. With Bruce's treatment, which Bruce and his lobbyists had talked him into taking. the brain of the Prez healed before the rest of the body, leaving a respectable appearance of age. It was tricky getting the biologicals in precise balance. He left instructions for his trainees when he went fact finding, assigning each the appropriate doses. Bruce had adored his old men, if he got out of his current watery predicament, he would adore them and the mercy of thier common Diety, even more.

Chapter

If dead, need he worry about nutrition again? Was he to suffer a living pergatory, He prayed that somebody got to him istantly or not at all. Probably he was at the bottom Jorden River . Still strapped in and burbling.
‘The Jorden River is chilly and cold,
Chills the body but not the soul.’

Chapter Two--The Tribunal
''A mere fantasy.'' Kerry said. Uncle Samuel isn't supposed to be alive. and even more, for that reason, electable.'' Yet Bruce's Eclesasitiacl Employers felt it important for there always to be a vital but subtile Mormon showing at such mysterious public affairs as Bruce would face that morning--they needed bodies not mouths, his brother Sammy had promised to bring duct tape for Bruce's.
Uncle Sam was adept at flashing hismedals, his fruit salad. This Livvy understood, Great Uncle Sam. He was the centennial, aerobatic performer, was a good person to have at the meeting if it was about whether it was OK for Uncle Sam to never got older again or for Mommy to have no more babies with face's like her dead sister Alaya's.Then Daddy Bruce said a joke--He supposed they ought to say, when he went to work, ''My, well, if you aren't looking far too well today.'' Livvy made the ‘’gross me out’’ look he had picked up from the goth.

That's all Daddy Bruce Bunny could remember happening before his death. He had left a list of things Uncle Sam said Bruce must do. Bruce supposed himself, by the march of minutes, to be alive or conscious in some form and Bruce could not imagine Sam, despite his nanobiotic vigor, doing, for even one anomalous day, half of what he’d taken under his umbrella.
Oh well, Bruce lazily noticed a string of bubbles rise to the surface. Truth was, Bruce liked to pull over and nap at the River bend.when he was too tired to drive. He supposed he’d rolled him into the Jordan where he likely had not been noticed. Nothing but two skid marks in badly pocked grit and muck.
He hoped he had fully drowned and wouldn't wake up say. 'Where am I?'.
‘'The river Jorden is chilly and cold,
It chills the body not the soul.’’
Bruce favored that sleety mudpuddle by the Lehi River bridge where at sunset, teens and tweens, no doubt a few of theirs, conversed together. or/and whatever until they saw a parental carlight flash, turning onto the river road, coming to retreive their missing tweens. Karina's Clary, feeling herself an old maid at 17, could usually be found there of an evening, Bruce noticed,though he felt Karina too old to yeild a role of authority over her children.
When the scene found its tawdry conclusion, the senior Teens broke into couples to go on doing the ''Nothing, the ''Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted.’’ As their parents had
done before them. When he wanted to convauthotity Bruce would sing, pounding on the hoods of the kid’s cars--
'
'Bye-bye miz American Pie,
Took the Chevy to the levie
but the levee was dry.

And good old boys
were drinkin' whiskey and rye
sayin 'This'll be the day that I die',
and this'll be the day that I die.''

Coming home late from SLC one night. Bruce saw Klary's boy's car down at the river stop and he'd had it. It was 3am. He'd ordered Clary into his car. He didn't know the lad who she was with, Karina did. But more than a few of the boys nearby were certified members of the Future Poligs of America. He and Karina were nostalgic about the days when there was nothing but to fear but a messy pregnancy.
The girls had experinced shame at first, discovery was likeca roulette wheel--the conference with the ward bishop down to the Church House, the examination of the boy at the STD clinic up to SLCI--boys got in free. The Relief Society's teary quilt.

The Airport Teen Clinic wanted no ugly scenes, no calls to the police, no horror stories, no repeat pregnancies. No more girls to be sent to the lambing ground down South. Karina claimed that the only remedy would be to hose them down at say, 10 of the clock. Bruce was distracting his mind. Had his car failed to make the river bend curve. Folks said a bog yellow bumper would ruin the view. The road veered to the left in a way that made it easy for a sleepy commuter to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road. Next came an icy swim in the Jordan. And thusly Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead, He didn't know how he felt about it. Bruce imagined an aquatic version of Pilgrims' progress.

The Prophet Joseph had left the world with 40 pistol balls in him. Mormon life. Carying on would surely be easier if he had lived to be an old codger--he and his Cherokee Scouts and body guards. Time to be think things over,vtime to leave more than the model to his people, time like now to inventory the relavent, glaring facts.

Bruce braced himself: A) Daddy Bruce Bunny had lost his bunny jammies, presemably while procreating in the romper room or Airport virtual reality pods in the buff. The details were unclear, but the patterns remained. What matter remained was robed in the same Edenic manner that long ago gave Father Adam the blush.

Yes, in righteousness alone Bruce Bunny was robed. Bruce looked at his feet. They were developing fur. Where he wasnt now furry, was pruney. ''Little seed inside the pru-en,'' Bruce recited, ''Wat you see and what you doin'? Wat you see and what you doin. A treble voice joined him, is it night or is it Noo-en? Little seed inside the pruen.

The children liked to pull the blankets over their heads while Karina pulled the blankets back a little at a time. If they didnt come out shed start again--she’d open the shades and say “Awake and rejoice, for today is a day that God has made” or she’d lot at the blinding solar disk--”Good morning merry sunshine how are you today.”

Little seed inside zie pruen. Don't mind, Daddy, a voice twiitered, very near. I been dead a long time. Here is fun. Bruce found himself sightless. enveloped in red tubules. Bruce was held tenderly in place by what looked to be jointed licorice ropes, slimey snorkels, and there did not seem to be any maritime Lilipution with whom he might converse or negotiate,

'Gosh darn it,' Bruce bubbled. 'Take me to your leader.' How may I help you?” worrying if he was alive on the bank of the Jorden, but simply asleep. 'Daddy, we dont need anything or are afraid in Dream land, but the ‘‘live people, they need lots of things.'’

The long worms felt Bruces face and sholders, while some snapped out to inhale minnows or up to bring back bubbles of what appeared to be atmosphere. a few snorkels took long, long sips of air. The tubules retracted to the sides of adead girls ugly head.

Chapter--

Bruce‘s heart harkened back to his lost infant Alaya. His sweet dead Alaya, who died a nursling, never to go with unwholesome boys--if Dead could he find her he must tswim to land, to make reasonable inquiries. Instead a strangechead emerged from the large and noodely red dust mop. Most of the RED liqourish elephantine tubules lost diameter until they were hard as horsehair.

Then Alaya, he was sure it was Alayain some guise, appearing nowvin the body of some extinct Pacadermal water species He had seen analysis of crossection of bone. The reasearcher first thought he had encountered a human like land animal. put there were no bone stress patterns to indicate an upright stance.

A few large and reclusive subspecites might have survived at freshwater river mouths. They lived in dreams and Si-fi. Ugly as a stranded infant dugong, had been his Alaya, something off a X-file worst case scenario. He felt some despair still at having to release his baby into a unknown scarcely fitted to even empirical adequacy.

Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. Alaya laughed-–No one touches there Daddy, not with fingers, its private.” She sighed. ‘’My daddy, I am not your Alaya now. I’m Belly big and will calve soon. When I calve, the peoples will sing my new name, the name of the people in oneness--Sirenia, Sirenia, We name our calves, but adults surrender their names to the people, minds too. I may even forget my Daddy because then we sing the thoughts of our people.'

‘'The men?'’ Bruce asked.

'We are friends with them sometimes.' ‘Lya said coyly. Bruces mind crowded with possibilities.
He was not thinking out of the box--he was out of the box bodily and possibly dead as well.

“The floundered dead sing no name
where kelped reeds line the shore,
“Deep, in hoards the sea dead sing
from Froth to froth they wail and
cry, tossed by fear, lost.”

It sounded like Aunt Kathleen. Bruce and his dowager had been reading her together at bedtime lately.
‘'I know our Daddy,” the creature said, OURS Daddy, ”And Daddy's Aunt Kathleen. I know Rigel, Livvy and CeCe. and my mommy Karina--sometimes Mommy cries and sometimes I do because Grammy might die. Grammy didnt ever know Kathleen, but we have such a big family that she thinks its a shame her dying away off somewhere, but it’s a shame only on the polyg side.’’

‘’Sometimes your Mommy cries because her sister is dead. If she had been alive she would have put her sister in a ghetto for sick people when she got old and never thought one more word about it.'’

‘'She is like your Aunt Kathleen.The professor says they, Aunt Kathleen too, are atavistic, they are chimera. Ladd’s professor too, He was the one who helped your Aunt when she died. He felt her dying.” The he swam to where his dreams were. He finished your Aunt Kathleen's Round House. He helped her when she threw up and taught her things.'’

“Daddy, Uncle Samuel says Aunt Kathleen is haunting her Yurt. Ladd and Paul want to move it. Where ever, just closer to people she loved. It is pretty as a flower and Grandpa What’s his name always remembers with Flowers. Professors Philosophers and Poets they were and friends in hundreds of lives. Bad happened to her and Kathleen isnt going back however the professor coaxes her. He even offered to be her mother.

When she died he first thing she asked for was for me, then Paul. it will be a long time before he dies. He found the secret Methusala brought from the stars. He had to swim a long way to bring it here.'’

Bruce was an adept at changing one general topic, that of his Banished Aunt’s Hogon. “Your Daddy named you once. Now A new name for my grown up girl instead of Sirenia. Millagros? It means miracle and you are my miracle'’.

‘'You named me Alaya.'’ Alaya charged. vehemenantly.
‘’You didnt like Alaya?'’

'I remember, but my Daddy, you wan’t me to keep it and be your little beehive forever. First calving is a very happy time, The professor says that all the people go into couvade . . . The land peoples,'' ‘Laya shuddered, "their eyes."

They said poor Alaya, pity Alaya. Bruce stroked his fishy's downy head and Alaya began to purr. Bruce felt despair, rembering his release of his baby girl into what? Fear washed over him and faith failed him, swallowed in his greif.

With that came a hatred of which no one spoke. The AEC and NTS, the Manhatten and Nutmeg projects. Isotopic ticking of the Maternal clock. Two of Karina's cousins had born babies the same day, all had similar deformaties. Alaya's exaggerated congenital facial anomalies seemed more comely underwater.
The cleft that had split her to her nose, cleaving her upper palate, was packed with gills. Alaya/Sirenia's, prominent split lips had elongated into a long cocks comb. her upper lips fluttered just back of Alaya’s shoulders as she swam.

There was swift commotion as the girl, as he supposed, mounted, he supposed, not the Professor, but her friend. He bolted along the human seawall and then stitched the waves as it/he/she/they took in long draughts of air.

Alaya and Posiden vented the air which noisily bubbled. Their jointed snorkel tubes obscured his view of them. “The Human people see us riding our friends they think we are dead people. We are safer when they are afraid. That’s what the Professor says.’’

Sirenia laughed. “We are the Dolphin's pets, Daddy. And sometimes we are borned as Dolphins, but when you are a Dolphin, well most of us in Sirenia are young.

The young eat and calve and are never separated from Sirenia. Those who are borned as people, well, they stay part people and some are so people that we are just dreams to them.

''A baby is borned to us and we sing. The people think we are lost from wracked boats. someimes, Sirenia said, she and Poseiden would go down deep and would use her air when she vented.

Bruce wanted to man handle Alaya forward into his time--but the bill, just for carp alone . . . there was the pool, of course, he was too old to make new pools up to the watergates like the kids did.''
Snorkeling quietly now, her tubules retracted into her head in tight coils, fluttering spirals where tiny babies bubbled. The tiny trunks rose to the surface , sipp, sipping. Bruce, ignoring her protests, examined her gravely deformed upper palate. She found gills inside, a cavity for them at the centrum of her shrunken coils.

''Are there others with coils like fingers even Daddies can't touch?'' Sirenia giggled, ''We don't have Daddys in our pod.'' Alaya sported huffily in the water at the very notion, then paddled off.

Alaya's underwater world reminded Bruce of swimming at the packed county pool--life everywhere, and bubbles. He thought, he with an industrial time machine, could transport ancient Bonneville fish for profit. He'd float the suggestion at family night.

''We eat only the Little swimmers where the Dolphins say we can graze. Yep, Only where our dolphins say because they know when their gardens need culling. The dolpins like everything to be in balance but the little scuttler with the hurty hands--they eat my hair when I fish here. Poseiden says that's why we have too many... how do you say in people?
''Well, ...hmmm...''

''Our professor is human now and he knows Latin. We tell him what things do and draw them to his mind. The never borned shows him in dreams too and then draws him to the teachings. The Professor writes down everything he remembers and then if he forgets, the never borned remind him and he puts their names in his big book.

He doesn't think, really. that we are real, He says we are interesting and that's enough. Sirenia and her sullen male swam up tothe surface and raced. then swan leisurly back. ''We got extincted so we borned ourselves with the fishes. We build up our pods, first. The never borned help us. You still be my Daddy and talk to me?''

''Yes," Bruce said, "You are my girl.''

''I be. Some of us spoke people for a long time and know where our peoples are, like the Professor and Alaya. He knows languages and teaches me so I can greet humans --I came from them so now I will know them.''

''You speak well, better than when we last spoke.'' Bruce observed.

''I am grown now Daddy. Sometimes I know how to talk, how to find my Daddy and visit Ladd. Ladd is my friend, he is a sea person and my Kathleen's Brother, whatever people think. They play with me and talk to me. Ladd in dreams, but maybe not for always.

I creep around and Kathleen plays with me all day sometimes and with her long river fishes. They are trained to help swimmers and save them from the destroyers with with the long teeth. The big river fish, well he can sting hard. A dolphin comes to fight and bite the big teeth fish.

‘'Peoples could drowned while the dolphins fougt the big teeth biter--we have to stand way back. The river fish are better for this. They just sting the big teeth hard and the big teeth remember and don't like to come back.'’

''I come to visit Celeste and Livvy. They made a picture, of me. I tell you, my Daddy', so you will believe that we are all friends. I don't want to be borned as a people ever again, so I keep my family.''
''Daddy, now you come to my house and we be friends? I missed you my Daddy. You do not like my Poseidon?''

'I'd hoped to avoid him,'' Bruce said, eyeing the overmuscled, big, bisexual male.
''Poseiden is a good swimmer Daddy, and he helps the Dolphins when the sharks come. We stolDed a spear from the humans. At night we creep, creep and creep and we watch what the people do.''

''Swim to my House Daddy, there are ten in my pod and in Poseiden's there are fifteen. We will have eleven in my pod when I calve.''

'' ‘Laily, you're too young to go with boys, REALLY, even very brave ones, not to mention cute too.” Bruce employed his fingers for the math, ''How old are these people, this Poseiden--is he...your--Friend?'' Bruce asked scepticly.''

''I will answer because I love you and you are ours Daddy.’’ Lylee hesitated. “My Posiden has been born seven times.''
''No more, no less, And you?'' Bruce asked. ''I just remember my friends. I don't study different lives and Earth history, It is better to be educated by the peoples than to die too soon, as a baby.''
''The Professor,'' Bruce hesitated.''Laily, first, am I dead?'' His adolescent, big bellied daughter regarded him, amused.

''You don't know?'' She asked. Bruce wondered what he had been doing just before he died. Greif would not spare him this query. Karen something. there had been a woman, a mother to Alaya. “When human peoples die other people come to help them. You are only dreaming, my Daddy--peoples dream and come here. When they feel better they swim home.''

''I be getting big. Soon I bring my calf to visit Mommy Karina.''

Karinna stretched. She loved her Alpine House which was of the traditional design, side by side living areas, a big divided loft for the boys and girls. The play and time out room. alternatly called ‘lya’s room, was back of the West kitchen. They had put a big 2 inch latex mat there and padded the walls with colored latex so the kids could rough-house without boinking their heads.

Karinna had been cramming in the old nursery for a 7:30 AM on-campus exam in the Custom Careers Extention Center’s Office at the Pleasant Valley Y. Bruce generally fell asleep wherever Karinna plied the keyboard and strains of Celeste’s moonlight Sonata beset him. He curled more around her and dreaming, asked a drifter he met possibly a jellyfish if it/they knew where the human infants were kept.

Karinna made the playmat up with linen when Bruce was home. Celeste thier their tween, made the room up when she had friends over, mostly cousins. It was a puzzlement to Karinna and Celeste how quickly the room could be torn to shreds. She wondered how any of them could tell if the ghost was doing something or not, one way or another--though the spook doctors said there was more paranormal activity when th children were active. The kids had quite a collection of ghost buster DVD’s and movies. If it got cold in the old nursery, once the kitchen of an Anders 3rd wife, they put on sweaters. The ghost liked old movies. “Movies about people,” she would suggest, the Goth said, in his ear.

Thier Goth’s girlfriend was going to pasture that Summer with Annie, their dad’s second and Moe, his third wife, to help with the squirts. The Goth’s girlfriend was going to also take over the books for Kerry’s tin can satillite dishes and radio repair shack. Karinna’s Dad wanted to bring the project to the States. Los dos, the soon to breed couple, liked to hang out at Karinna’s school.

Alaya’s Haunted TV, as it was called, lived in the old nursery . The shrinks at the Center puzzled. One, the Goth’s and Bruce’s shrink, a 2nd cousin on Karinna’s mother’s side, and had heard that the children believed it to be thier lost Alaya, his own cousin as well. He thus asked if he could watch movies with the kids.

The Scouts from the ward helped Kerry set up expensive looking equipment from the Utah Paranormal Society in the old nursery.

Kerry was taking a door-open nap with his girlfriend in the old nursery. This followed a door closed nap that had gone critical on them. Kerry’s girl had gotten herself pregnant, just like Karinna had before
Klary was born.

The goth caught thier ‘Lylie just as the kids burst in from a trip to Reams, but missed what Alaya said. Grammy Lebaron rolled out the feeding trough at six. His blessed Gothness employed to drive the rug rats out to Grammy LeBaron’s to Grammy and thier Aunts and Uncles and cousins in time for the little kids to ride her ponies while the biggers and grups hoed one row before dinner. The day the Goth got his driver’s licence was celebrated, with a pinata. Good news for all, la dia de l’Mama’s liberation, Mother’s Day en realidad.

“La Revolution Dentro la Casa,” the Goth proclaimed when his Ma first handed him the keys. The biggers, as Livvy called them, released the Ghost Bed Room to Karinna’s rabble at 7 PM, then romped in with their hair dripping. The girls (for the most part, iust the girls) had their hair braided or tied into ringlets with ragstrips. Prayers ensued, then the current book, the scripture verse they were memorizing that week. The big kids came in for peayer and song, then went back to the table to study.

Singing emitted from a pile of bunny tangled legs and arms ‘till the younger nidgets were carried heavily to thier beds. This week to earn snack, they were memorizing the scripture: “Ye are the salt of the earth, without which it would not be leavened.” Karinna made salt rising bread for them, so Klary Anne, made a crumbly loaf for bible supper from some recipes she found on Aisch.com.

CHAPTER THREE

Immersed in twilight, Bruce found himself sightless, enveloped in slimy red and purple tubules which tenderly, resolutly, immobilized him with jointed licorice ropes, snorkeling evolutionary anomalies. There did not seem to be any marine Lilipution with whom a wandering Gulliver Daddy might converse.

Grammy Linda, as Bruce’s kids tried to call her, had done some dreamwork with his disreputable Aunt Kathleen in hippy California, back when his Aunt was a hippy and Grandma Linda her helpless tag-along. They worked together at the same jobs, switched off boyfriends here and there.

The Ding-Dong sisters--alas, Kathleen was a Ding Dong sister no more. She was buried next to her Aunt who died when the Atomic Testing at NTS started.

The ding dong sisters were not to be confused with the Gold Dust Twins, as some of the Old Dead Heads out to Bonneville International, ie. the Stateline Poker Sharks wistfully remembered them.

Wendover, Utah’s small graduating class of 1965, its Wobbly scion’s son’s age mates and thier partners in crime made pretty good. Generally the age groups stuck together and oddly enough, Jim’s had been imbued with Capital.

The age group of Kathleen’s vintage were sharp, but not fitted to heavy labor. They had taken a lucrative contract to clean the inside of the Kenneccot chimney by rapelling up and into it. It had seemed an adventure that would fund a year of sky diving, scuba diving out to Blue Lake-- a deep, a seemingly bottomless spring, and thier aquatic spelunking there.

They tried to form a spelunking club, Aunt Kathleen and Daryl and an Idaho boy who pulled Graveyard up to the Texico, but were doomed by fate to be less robust than thier Elders, if not by much..

With thier dreams now fulfilled, all future ambitions seemed attainable. Tuesday night poker up to the Stateline was a big deal, doubling, in reality, as a kind of stage set.

Actors in a much greater drama, each taking the part of an internet poker player. The sooner the point players started, the bigger the weekend pot. A rookie once raised a furor by trading SLCI and other family credits for poker points. These had included credits for Anger Management. Bruce leaked the story to the public during his Sundance Weekly Review. Like the price of a tank of gas, such trades were made on a case by case basis. This demonstrated that Sundance was taking the crisis seriously.

Bruce and Kerry traded all of thiers for poker points. Yes on Tuesdays, Wendover sometimes remembered Kathleen and her friend, Rose Sharon, in earnest--equine girls with sunburnt blond who people asked-- “Now, which one are you.” The old ramblers who did the towns cooking and thier successors the gold-dust twins called them. They remembered the small black cherubs who once advertised Jim’s father’s favorite flour. It came in 100 pound sacks and Wendover used the empties for curtains when the sacks were empty, it being the Thirties.

Before WWII, bleach turned the Gold Dust twins to straw color. The joke rendered the sunny beauty of the blond, tall, Gold Dust Twins, who, worked up to the Stateline in the early Seventies.

Bruce got a Liveworks Liveboard and infused the High School with his expectations. Ranch work was what they had, out to thier way and ranch work was what thier boys were suited to, otherwise they’d be too like to leave the land.

Bruce’s old highschool girlfriend Ramona whose Goshute family lived out to Ibapah and Ramona, Karinna’s aunt used to go hiking, the two of them, up to the Deep Cricks. Grammy Le Baron thus got her horses from the virile Ibapah lineage via the Shephard Ranch.

One of the Shepherds’ sons used to take the Gold Dust Twins out to have a ranch afternoon dinner with his mom and dad and chironian sister. His mother had no trouble telling the twins apart. She’d have Rose Sharon for her boy, with her good eye for horse flesh. Aunt Kathleen was a runty non contender. Rose Sharon took a fractious, but well conformed, penny colored gelding that summer to gentle.
The Shepard family purchased a stud with a pin in his shoulder. The easily corralled, purebred racehorse couldn’t run off with nocternal and randy mustang mares. The Southern Henry Mountain mustangs had crossbred with thorobreds whose breeders went bust in the depression.

Still dreaming, Bruce remained immersed in big slimy long red worms. “Gosh darn it,” he burbled into the auquamarine fluid. ‘Take me to your leader.” A voice chortled, laughed and trilled all mimsich and merry.
‘’How may I help you?” he asked with dignified formality, doffing an invisible top hat and bowing deeply. He was perhaps dead, or scarcly alive, having slid off the bank of the Jorden into the river by the bridge where the kids parked and drowsy commutors sometimes slid off.

“Daddy, the voice sang, we don’t need anything in Dreamland, but peoples, they need houses and clothes and animals and toys and moneys and lots of things. Paul said that’s what they are all about.”

“Sounds suspiciously Buddist,” Bruce observed. Do you mean my Aunt Kathleen’s Paul? Is she hereabouts?

The long worms, which appertained to the voice, examined Bruce’s wooden face and sholders. Some snapped out to inhale minnows or floated up to bring back bubbles of atmosphere. a few snorkels lingering by the surface, sipping aqua air. The unused tubules retracted ‘till they were tight as the horsehair worms that lingered in morning ditches.

The tubules clung onto Alaya’s head, retracted into her unusual orifices which closed over them. Bruce ‘s heart harked back to his misplaced infant Alaya. Bruce’s sweet dead Alaya, thier mutant nursling, who never lived to go with unwholesome boys or need a crib by her bed while still in highschool.

Emerging from the large, wet, red, mop the head of the girl spoke. The elaphantine tubules lost diameter until they were positivly budrum. He felt one, hard as horsehair.

All of a sudden, Alaya shape shifted into the familiar infant he remembered. The mimsish, oddly conformed baby curled into his arms, tender as the infant he had released her to the Reaper as she intermittantly suckled and screamed.

Now the baby peacefully picked swamp grass out of her Daddy’s hair and tore it, letting the grass float aimlessly, then picked them out of the water with her organic vacuem hoses as they swam about as she called what the grass did, making a game of it.

The Great Western American Seaway, Bruce queried his soggy brain, how long had it been dry? The small sea snorkling whip snades, when engorged, showed a fine dexterity at thier termini, like those of an elephant’s trunk. There had once been 500-600 evolving pacadermal variations, once a few with human--analogous arms and legs.

Bruce remembered from Celeste’s second grade Great Brain project on evolution, elephant related dugongs and manatees. Elephants swam island to island feeding voratiously where they landed.

Karinna felt only a sweetness in the when the macines registered a thinning of the viel in the room, a gentle sprite in the air that made Karinna’s milk spurt. Her first child by Daddy Bruce, one who had had a spirit both Favonian amd mild.

CHAPTER THREE

Born in Salt Lake, Alaya was treated there like an x-files mutant. Despair welled up remembering how Karinna and he had fled with thier child to Karinna’s Aunt Annie and Mag’s, down South of the border.

Now, Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. ‘laya laughed. “No one in our pods touches there Daddy, not with fingers, it’s private.”

CHAPTER THREE POINT FIVE BREAK

Daddy Bruce recalled how hopeless it had been to assuage his grief with work--it waited for him in shadows at the end of the day.
Chapter , no flight?

Bruce, a fussbudget both irritated and annoyed figetted.

He had arrived at SLCI International four hours before his flight’s anticipated time of departure, despite the early breakfast at Mother Le Baron’s. Bruce had, in some dismay, watched a grey mist sliding down, faraway Rock canyon.

The mist formed a great orange grey oyster shell as fanned out over Provo City. As Karinna drove Northward it drifted down first from each Wasatch canyon in turn, including Salt Lake’s Emmigration canyon. When they turned left in I-80 it mingled with the blue mist slithering up from the lake.

And the fog racung, river-like, down Toelle canyon, till it flattened by the Lake. He remembered playing with his Aunt Kathleen’s first wheelchair in thier first house there. Sitting with her and identifying the big moving vans on the freeway, in easy sight of the flat, hard blue sheet of saturated Saline water, where now the fog spread North and upward, immersing the Airport.

His mother pronounced their tiny hub metropolis tooe-lee, and called the mist tooe-lee fog, because that is what it was called it in her California childhood home. She would resent the LeBaron breakfast, be outraged that he had not spent the time with her.

She had made too few emotional inroads with his half polig children, who went with their father to buy wholesale on polig days from polig wholesalers. His children had their closets segregated, their schoolchildren did not even make their own trendy clothes but never really relaxed in them. They loved to go with their father on shopping days. He did not partake of other customs, but doggedly violated Utah’s Jim crow commercial policies.

He worked for the church and said being nosey was just his job. He was an investigator. The blue-grey and clotting mist, which Bruce referred to as zero visibility, clung low along the runways, conealing the briney wetlands, concealed to the East beneath it.
This morning, according to the Farrah Fawcett clone KSL weather lady on Karrinaís PDA. the Too-lee fog would clott, then blow out of the valley with the Great lake at its sump, revealed as less substantial than it looked by the rising of a trickster sun.

It was a prediction endorsed confidently by a cheery, insomniac, oh-so-Happy-Valley KSL news staff who dreaded bad news. The reporting of bad news, any bad news, ran contrary to the Mormon cultural ethos of stoic optimism.

KSL promised that the mist would thin over the silver Lake mirror, then be whished off by the new broom of an obliging Wind from the Northeast. the prancing, bosomy, weather lady- person, was reassuring about the cleansing early morning gusts .Bruce wanted to believe, he really did. He hated gusts as much as fog, thatís why he was using the airport. even more, he hated to be late or absent. He had a literary rondevu later in the day in San Francisco with a woman named Keats.

Bruce watched the weather while sucking on a tic-tac thus attempting to clear his pallate of the weedy taste of Hellís Bells, his mother in lawsí least redolent milk cow. He was to meet with some of his late Aunt Kathleenís friends while in Sin city.

Karinna had wrapped a bottle of hIs Grandma Mathesonís razzleberry Jam in bubble plastic for the SF editorial group. Aunt Kathleenís postumous friends,no one had been inclined to pull up his Great grandmotherís Raspberry bushes.they had spread until there were sufficient berries for all the raspberry pickers she had left behind in mortality.The Rassleberries created an impromptu reunion in the late summer and again when the pine nut cones were filled with unspilled berries at harvest. Planted by the indians only 10.000 years before, the big seeded trees had been raided by various species who preferred to consume their spoils in their nests.

Aunt Kathleen had written a net series on virulence in rodent viruses for the virology group in 1997. It described how to pick pine nuts with less exposure. The CDC was culture blind in its attempts to warn of rodent viral contaminants. She had once hit the roof when Reuters warned campers ìnot to sleep in the open. In the four corners that meant taking cover in the rich dust beneath trees and overhangs--places preferred by all species for shelter.

Bryce would prefer to give up the blanket and tree shaking method for a more sterile pitching of cones into a trash bag .It didnít matter so much to the Utah kids, but every year some in-law raised in the miission field as the Brethren called it, would lose a spleen, or have their legs go out from under them after contact with the isotope and rodent contaminated dust of harvest.

Karinna and her kids had started eating Pine Nuts right off the ground soon after they had learned to walk and her family still shook her cones from the tree onto a tarp.
The trouble was that Southern Utahís Rats were tree dwellers. It was best to avoid disturbing the fecal dust from their nests, Karrinaís mother was half Piede indian and had transmitted some genetic immunity to her offspring.

Unfortunatly their genes had been disrupted by the post WW II atomic tests. The most adaptive genes, which dealt with allergic, pathogenic and immune system disrupting contaminents.

Bruce suspected that his Alaya had been lost to an over warm, over long, and over wet summer that had produced over large, over succulent nuts. The Annazzazi--the ancient ones, built granaries far from their dwellings, these had resulted in their mass extinction. Too much rain instead of too little made too many rodent generation.
Karrina’s was of the old time kindreds, polygamous and impoverished for eight generations.

Bruce was again in the black pyramids whose black blanketed caverns all softly aflutter. In the cavernous caverns, bats sounded and sang in a register not fitted to human hearing, then a darkness that smelt of cave dust and guano. Obscure rites had once, there, quickened now plundered funerial shrines. Outside, doves, flirted, cooing , as Rilke had once seen them at Karnack.
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Thursday, August 28, 2008

*
Bunny One, Spring--06-08
Spring Condor Draft

BYE-BYE BUNNY,

NOVEL ONE,

CRY ME A RAINBOW

Part One, Alaya

Chapter One, Dreaming On

Bruce would leave aeration plans for big, glassed in bluelily ponds, externally vented to prevent damage to exhibits from the ponds’ humidity, but farther on up the Nile in an imitative newly crafted stone structure. Uncle Sam had, Uncle Samuel learned, a bit of land that the Old Man wasn’t using. His namesake Samuel was just the Ky-ote to get it out of him.

Peace was bad for his previous business. Since he liked it upriver,vSamuel Sr. was refurbishing the a Raj-era hill station of a failed British, and very dead entrepenuer. The idea was that hyphenated Mormons could slipp over the border with thier families to be quietly sealed.

Only Rosecrutions were admitted to the Rosey archives, in theory, but the property’s turn-key Mormon owners could not be kept entirely out. Matriculated Archeologists were accepted to the Bacon-Pratt Endeavor as Bruce named it.

His mother and sister twice visited on a lose lips sink ships basis. Linda, rebelled, arguing that she deserved her chance to talk about her travels in the ward, pouted and sulked and badgered her son with endless but I don’t see whys, all the other sisters in the ward etc., etc., etc.

Bruce wondered---Why had his queer dream beastie called him Daddy? She was just saying Da and had gotten to Dadu when she died. Bruce could tell when Karinna was thinking about Alaya--her eyes welled up, teared up.

Bruce mused--perhaps cognition after death shared a dream field with a discreet dream memory with fluttering tags of day. Perhaps imagination and memory were intensified beyond the veil, as by 3rd stage sleep. The Airport clinic felt that the more restorative deep, dreamless sleep should be preferred and encouraged.
Too little made children fractious, cranky, hyper, deranged thier immune systems particularly those from the lambing ground. Alaya had died there at Karina’s breast at 18 months old. Karina’s ‘‘If at first you don’t succeed. try, try again” attitude, was bewailed by Aunt Kathleen’s Provo Gathering Place and Utah County Crisis line friends. These favored family planning.

Karinna met an elderly college friend of thier Aunt Kathleen on the elderly matriarch’s Jungian Fairy Tale site. The kids called her the March of Dimes lady, an occupation that led her to abhor the pluck that brought Celeste to birth 4 months after Alaya died.
The March of Dimes lady had born 7 children im her time, seeing only 5 grow to aduthood in San Francisco’s Irish Sunset District. Livvy and some of Aunt Anne and Mag’s children came from Bruce’s Cousin, the Stork, an accomplis of the Senior, long Aunt Kathleen’s college friends, who snubbed her out of over education.

Karinna’s second birthing was a time of black humor, bitter jokes, laughter that rattled dry as tall, husked grass. Celeste, the B plan baby, swelled her belly. They lay Alaya in a family Cemetary out behind Karina’s Aunt Anne’s Sinaloan Ranch just as Karinna’s milk went dry with Daddy Bruce’s second girl baby. Celeste laid her claim to her mother’s milk as the Sinaloan Sycamores turned brown and yellow.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dreaming, Bruce sat beside his glorified ancient Egyptian swamp. He’d meant to do more with the pond. Life yielded strange smells, like the smell of acts of generation. When was now? Was there a dimension where he had comitted a genuine oversight, missed an important date. Bruce was not dressed?

He must make a note to dress and make his way to the airport soon, but everytime he woke. His lopsided heart pounding, he thought he should have done something about the alarm clock yesterday instead of leaving it to Karinna’s brother/oldest son, Kerry, the Goth, so different than he had chosen the gut blasting musical selection-- “I hate the government.”

Bruce had achieved a respectable life witout his widespread openion being known, his word having been his bond. Even his promise to the Rosey’s odiferous Lily pond would be kept. Bruce sent great Gold Carp back with Uncle Sam to eat as many mosquito larvae as possible.

The dream had sharpened his grief as time had sweetened the pond. Now Bruce scribbled a list of unfinished chores. Bruce had been a good providor, a good teacher-- He knew most everything about English except, as young Kerry had once observed, why Fish and Pharoh ought not both to start with an F.

Bruce team taught with Karinna in the last days before his first mission. They had talked about pharohs and fish, looking at Karinna’s prints for their basement hope house, carefully kept from a high school honors project and Bruce’s Egyptian chapel which she had designed with selected tomb reproductions and translated text on the walls. One thing about the offspring of pluraliry, the girl’s did know how to design, build and wire a house.

The days of his second mission--blurred in the underside of the surface tension which toppled Alaya’s sunny shelf. There Karina dawdled his second baby Celeste, and the three still missed Bruce’s land of lost content.

Bruce was restless whereever he was but in the land of retrospect he found some small peace. Though Celeste was not walking yet, the dreaming Bruce again talked himself into a ticket on a quick buddy plan to Egypt, babies under two free. Karinna said good bye to her megafamily--a teary airport business which his family refused to attend if Karinna’s family came.

Now neither young nor old. in the way, in the middle of the way, Daddy Bruce Bunny soaked in a mirrored memory of Sting -Fly springs, up with Andrus cousins in Orderville. Summer evoked a simmering passion for Bruce’s Karinna, a steamy youthful kissing cousin affair. That she had turned a blind eye to it made his mother feel that she at fault for her star son’s fatal flaw.

Karinna had been first to reject and at last embrace Bruce’s unsteady attempts. Bruce and Karinna were cousins, after all, but single blessedness eventually stuck in thier craws. Linda did not expect the silly business of her Bruce’s polyg girfriend to last, but she played along, at first.

Unfortunatly for his mother’s false pride, her valadictorian’s novia had faithfully awaited his return. She added a certificate program in Range Management from BYU’s Salt Lake Extention to her teaching credential. Karinna, when his wife, had moved in with her mother and had snagged a coveted teaching position in the Alpine primary School, where the academic and oldhippy residents were all but betrayed their pride in thier stubborn religionist holdovers.

Now, Karinna cuddled towared her husband as she wrote on her night computer. She nudged Bruce, who mumbled beggingly “Later.”

“Whatcha dreaming about, Sweetpea?’’

‘’Pregnant, Bruce moaned, such a dear thing, and to be heavy with child and so distant. . . pregnant.”

‘’Which little girl, which is pregnant?’’ Karinna shuddered, needing to know. ‘’Not Livvy.’’ Karinna suggested.

‘’Livvy? Where’s Olivia.’’

The rebellion of the Anders children and Karinna’s in-town-for school siblings and accomadating cousins lasted well past Bruce’s bedtime. Resolution of the crisis had taken considerable negotiation and diplomacy on the part of Kary Lynn and her cheeky Future Poligs of America steady boyfriend.

Karinnachecked out too saying she had a test in the morning. The kids called the on duty shrink at the Airport rec center for advice on how to manage the Emergency. The shrink on call told Karina’s oldest to give the brats thier heads. She slammed the nursery door on the insurgency so emphaticly, that the Airport shrink held his cellular away from his ear. Kary said “That was easy.”

The shrink said that with full bigger and grup disengagement it was likely that the matter would run down more neatly, like a drum banging bunny badly in need of a duracell battery change.

The trouble was that Daddy going on a trip on his Birthday day, ruined by a grant that had payed for Bruce’s tuition to some big bunnny conference in Sin City that he couldn’t even tell them anything about.

Birthdays were important, the kids argued, like Christmas, Jesus’ birthday, a serious matter. This was like the year the dogs got in the house and tipped over the tree and trampled all the presents out to Grammy LeBarons. main Ranch, the family Yuletide hub.

They would remember this Daddy Bruce bunny and his brother Sammy’s birthday that way, the day of the big important Sin City conference that even Great Uncle Sam was in on. Thier family council over whether Daddy-Uncle Bruce was allowed to go to work on his birthday should include everybody. Kerry Garth, called generally the Goth, assured his big sister that he’d his only role in the controversy to prevent violence or distruction of property.

They couldn’t just have Uncle Sammy over and sing The Circle Game and have their Carousel Cake like always? They had to know the whys. It couldn’t be THAT important.

They wanted to march into Daddy Bruce Bunny’s room and demand an explanation. It was then that they realized that one of the biggers had silently put the time out chain on the outside of the door. The little bunnies began to bawl in concert, the cousins yelling and screaming supportively.

The Goth put on Heidi, their lids closing one by one and Kary and the Goth and his girl put a kingsised quilt over their cried out charges, accidentally covering both cat and rat, grey to the point of being bluish. Their blue rat poked her nose out quizzikly and shook the blanket off her head as their California wild tabby cat began to purr.

The children slept on, their breathing slowing and deepening. Karinma checked in and slipped away, climbing in where Celeste and Rigel had fallen to sleep with their Daddy. There about the heads of the young coiled many dreams, bringing the family’s dream field to critical mass. As it happened, the thirteen year old Alaya had heard the whole thing.

The blue rat crept into her wicker basket, lined with torn rags. The youngest hangers on were mostly from nearby ranches. Annie and Meg liked to keep thier kids in school in Mexico until their Spanish was in firm. Meg’s father had been Chinese by half. His father had joined his Chinese family there after the railroads were built, bought, payed for but before they were nationalized by Mexico.

Karinna turned on her Mini Mac and cut some time for her BYU paper: Reversing Desertification. The Harmony Shrink was more interested in how Karina was doing than about desertification but said that it sounded like the issues were inseperable. True, their rug rats had been making big plans, troubling plans, to prevent their Daddy’s birthday escape.
Cars could be stuffed and unstuffed, TP hosed fom trees, but hearts required much more. Reversing the desertification of the Southwest might take aeons, depending on rainfall. Turning sand into soil was niether quickly or easily done. And angry polig children left angry. They had were not unlike ravaged soil, thier families had practiced polygamy, here and there and unhindered, for Eight generations.

Bruce’s underwived diplomacy put food on the table. Daddy Bruce’s talents were underused, though sometimes Bruce felt entitled to leave patience at the door, like muddy shoes in Winter . Six days shalt thou be Mr. Nice guy, Karina’s father often said, and on the Seventh raise holy hell.

From 7-11 PM and on weekends he who brought the Melchesedick Priesthood into his apparently disinterested family was valued for it. A child who turned the TV either up or down learned the meaning of the axiom ‘’Let sleeping dragons lie.”

Sometimes Bruce read or scribbled in the margins of the New Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, a leather journal he kept chair side. Bruce got two for one credits for his time working on the text. He read it to the children playing Checkers and Chess with Kary, Celeste and the Goth .

The New Alice physics and astronomy book was for grade schoolers, in the beginning, then got gradually more difficult like an old timey reader. The children played Clue while he worked on his book. Death with poison in the kitchen, a Black Winter Rose left on a high bookshelf? Perhaps it was the Colonel with a knife in the study? Karina plied her domicillary diplomacy by day and through Bruce’s dreaming nights. There the White Rabbit barked anxious orders in Bruce’s sleep.

There he bemoaned his fate, recited Puck the fairies’ lines from the Midnight Summer’s dream. He chided their eldest girl Celeste for chasing tacyons until she had left time behind, a velvety black all around her.

Celeste tried his patience by interposing ever more difficult postulates between her Daddy Bruce’s snores and snorts. Bruce wanted his dreams, but only told Grammy LeBaron, at first, about his visits from Alaya.

Without his guiding dreams he was never sure what to write in his Alice Book. Celeste in Wanderland was a pregnant and extinct sea mammal, a twin to his dead Alaya, who engaged in metalogues with her father. Waking was like rising to the surface of blue lake too quickly.

Knock on wood, Bruce hoped embellish the logic book Carrol had outlined before he died. Lewis Carroll had had left behind a trail of argumentative bread crumbs. These argued whether they were on the trail or not, since few passedthis way--a hungry crow.

And Poor Hansel and Gretel.--How would they find welcome at home. They had gathered no mushroom or herbs that day, sobbing, not old enough to know which were good to eat. They would surely get licked if they returned with the wrong things. They stalled-- gossiped with a wizard on the path who queried them: posed endless logical conundrums.

Whatever his Grandmother and Mothers’ snitting at Bruce’s Swiss Bank Accounts, turning to bitter ice at Bruce’s marriage to Karinna. Bruce’s prissy family bewailed their shame at Karinna’s poligs. His family said with pity, that he could somehow change them, but they threw away all the nice clothes he bought them and kept to thier funny ways.

Each member of Bruce and Karinna’s family had plenty to do to keep their mind off the lost love of his monog bigot family. The Goth was the only one who really sniped at his Grandmother. She sniped at him in return. comparing him to the deceased Great Aunt Kathleen who had once worn a bikini at Veyo hot springs.

Mother and sister rented her a modest swimsuit, but none fit her broad shoulders and the suit pulled her back, compressing her vertabrae. The hot water eased her the pain of the too small suit but did not mute the agony of her heart.

Years flew past. She paled and her rubber knees weakened until she was no more than a groaning puppet. Living a long life as though shackled in chains of gravity, their Grandmother listed her errors every time she was mentioned, and their Goth was going down a twin path to ruin.

He was no laggard, however often his Father’s detractors charged him with that fault. One day a week each of Grammy Le Barons families did the farm chores out to their grandma’s at 5 AM . A big Breakfast first, then into the saddle by six, and when they left, a big bag lunch of fresh food for school.

Grammy’s Le Baron’s bread was impressive-- thick hunks of warm brown bread spread with their Grammy’s honey from her beeswaxed hunks of farmer’s cheese ripened in her cellar or Mexican crema. Sometimes fresh picked lettuce and summer’s new-pickled cucumbers, green tomatoe chutney with cheese and butter and a big bottle of root beer.

Karinna’s job was to employ her time, patience, and diplomacy to manage the details of her family’s rewarding but complex live.

The school therapist recommeded that she find another family to do the chores or just keep them out of school for the day. It was the morning after the big rebellion and their kids weren’t fit company. It was unlikelythat they would be able to concentrate.

Bruce could be long gone when the children woke to undo the petty vandalism that would follow the meeting. Karina went back to bed and to sleep having to crawl into and then fight for her place at Bruce’s back.

The nursling Rigel howeled and kicked Livvy, who had awoken, in the back. Livvy licked back, nearly landing her little brother on the floor but Rigel clutched the edge of the bed. He whimpered and Bruce handed him back to Karinna. She opened her nursing Bra to him, hoping he would go back to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bruce thought of his dependents as industrious good fairies and paid them for big people’s work. There was poverty in the family, so they’d made a United Order and as in any such family trust, the best settled in life took the worst hit. The Order made money seem more sacred--work for the able, and to each according to their need, it all worked around to work out. Bruce left Karina with money for help if she needed help but could not expect any from Bruce’s Liberty Park bench relatives, and his Mother’s bench house, long had been the ancient shores of Lake Bonneville.

Bruce expected clean clothes in his closet, his shirts starched and pressed and his dinner ready when he came through the door. No child might interfere with his departure time. This was crucial. Puntuality underscored Bruce’s authority at his crazy quilt of jobs. It was this punctiliousness that maintained his prestige and that of his clients. Prestige that the Church turned into money. Intelligence and Diplomacy were not an easy jobs to describe or define.

The Church Organisational Behavior Specialist did a fine job. Bruce, as a personal attache to the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Bruce’s underlings called on the church fathers as well.

When Livvy was little, after thier missin, Karinna ran a morning joy-school for toddlers. There was a a cooperative joy school song for doing almost everything. and there was Gummy bag. It ate their toys at night and coughed them up in the morning. Gummy bag also did laundry--swallowing their dirty clothes at bedtime. In the morning it left them. still in gummy bag, clean and folded.

Karinna was Bruce’s Sabbath helpmeet, Karrina working hard to keep her husband’s cogs greased and running. Karina got the kids out of Bruce’s hair when he needed sleep. Karinna took the children on Sunday to her mother’s to play with their cousins and go to family church. Karina’s Mother Le Baron and her old folks visited with thier daughters, sisters and now retired cousins.

The old ranch wives did light work until their bodies failed completely. Grammy Le Baron lightened the work of the merry hands at her disposal with sayings-- ‘Many hands make light work,’ and I can’t is a sluggared too lasy to try, ‘Moderation in all things. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.’ these axioms flowed out of her,but shuddered and held the line when the fruit of her loins said ‘The Scripture that says....”

Karinna was no homebody. On weekends, for the sake of her grades, she took the kids to her mother’s to help with the ranch work all day or she’d take the ranch truck to drive out to Ibapah to visit their Aunt Ramona. So did Karina’s brothers’ wives and sister-wives, their children and their half brothers and sisters. Karinna brought Bruce a plate of dinner after Karina’s family had church and Sunday dinner afterward.

Bruce had bought a house in a patrician ward that Karinna disliked for the most part. Bruce went to the modern Church alone most weeks unless he could talk Celeste into going with. Karinna didn’t like the new hymns, the shorter meetings, the truncated version of Church History intended to play well South of the Border or in Asia.

Karrina’s alibi was an invalid Aunt and sister. They still liked to go to Church in their home ward, so she took her children to her Aunt’s Church. It was true that Ramona had an Aunt who lived near Wendover whose husband had got Horse Fever and died.

She liked to have Church at her house and it was more convenient to meet there for Karinna, they enjoyed small throated renditions of the old songs and to break bread with them.

The Apostle with whom Bruce had most to do counciled discretion in his family affairs, and if a fib was needed for the comfort of the weak in faith, so be it. In Bruce’s prestigious position Karinna’s Poligymous roots showed. This did not help him with his mudslinging, cutthroat subordinates at Bene-life. Polygamist elders were there thought of as‘Old people doing bad things.
Until Statehood came at the turn of the Century, a man of Education, Prominence or Capital was expected to support more than one family. The sadder the new wife’s story and the more ragged her waifs the better suited she seemed, Terror and tradgedy lay behind in the old world and hard work and privation in the new. Women who immigrated from the East End and Scotland’s scorched Clachan’s tfound a chance to rebuild, The mill scarrs cut deep, and there were only red petticoats and high apron Springs for those not strong enough for Weavers 14 hour days.
The principle of polygamy did level the gradient twixt rich and poor. Karinna wifely duties were preformed and so Bruce could not comolain of her. She bribed her brood to sleep after their rowdy Sabbath play with warm chocolate mixed 2 parts with Le Baron rootbeer.
Controversy surrounded its 5 percent alchohol level and the herbs her mother put in it to bring on infant sleep. To Karinna these seemed a blessing--Karinna cultivated camomile, echinachea and valerian root for the sleepybye recipe.
When the kids were asleep Karinna slipped into something nice she’d snagged at sCMI and lay down, curling her body around her husband’s slight one.
On winter nights the children built a fire in the stove. They roasted pine nuts on pie plates while their father, if he was home, snored in his chair.
He sometimes woke for Karinna’s bed time stories, but they made him drowsy and he was not long awake, Karinna’s stories made their lids droop together heavily--gravity and sleep held their heads against the Karati mat. Their Karate Master disapproved of the undisciplined freestyle kick fighting on the TV,
The Le Baron cousins took Karate from the same teacher , lowering the tuition by organising the class and producing the students with regularity.
Their Master could tell when they had been cheating, but said that if they focused on the divergences between the martial arts schools and the hand to hand TVcombat,
They would better anticipate their adversaries weakness. Karinna took Dance classes at the Y where there was a Cappadocio Master who taught African Dance Department. She did a children’s section Capaddocio toned the muscles for fighting, and coordinated the muscles for its freestyle pairing.
Karrina’s youngest brother Kerry, the Goth, lived for the martial arts. These were classes where he could make friends, battle scarred and eclectic outgroupers, He pursuaded his mother to take Drunken monkey with him. It was an art which allowed old warriors or amputee’s to fight by strategem and clowning instead of strength.
That and Tai C were taught through June in the Provo City Park, or at the Eldred Senior Center in the winter. It was the director’s idea. He had gotten the idea from the common sight of Televised oldster training in Chinese squares and parks.
Karinna helped teach the kidsclasses so they couldn’t kick her kids out. Their Uncles used their fists to work out any differences and she never wanted her children to go to violence as often as other branches of the family did. One of her cousins was confused when the Goth he swung for warent at where he swung for ‘em, and he tried more than once.
Karrina bemused her relatives when she took up the drum. The vacaros came from their houses, and those who had held down the farm during the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa counseled them to go back North for awhile.
The Vacaro took up the beat and the children began a payfull, miiroring acrobatic dance. Then Kariina took up the dance and her children crept onto the cement dance floor and joined the dance, down to Livvy, danced in clown suits,
This associated the import of the hobby somehow with Halloween and jamies and put her in the craft shack making masks a la’ Pirrot and Piroette. On the last day she read Robert Frost’s ‘The West t Ruuning Brook” and said it made her think of her first baby, Alaya, who had died.
There were Summers could be rough when the extended kith and kin met in July. arguing about land, industry, the folly of over-romanticising the mariages of the Young,
A novio or novia could settle the score with a flashy show of rancherismo and horsemanship after a long day trashing cement. August was the season for would be family members to strutt their stuff. Bruce found this distastefull, He dressed way down and found a stand of Cottonwoods where he could spread out his books and work, As long as he had money to cover his odd egg work, he was exempted from ranch and farm labor. He went on moolight rides and when it was time he worked through haying.
The Elderly brethren understood Bruce’s position and payed himfor something that was 1/3 sabbatical, and 1/3 anthropological research. He also helped them feel that the world of their childhoods was being maintained, though as authorities in the Church, they could do little more than fail to find the way of plurality distastefull in public. Still, their limos drifted through Dunfy in late July, trailed by a convoy including children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren--all anxious to show off whatever the kids up North were wearing and what they were doing. They stayed up late seeing what the A.V., Kerry the Goth could animate with his Game cube.
When they drifted off on the trampoline, in their heads coiled many dreams, tales and a sense that nothing was long ago. Keeping the Church to the old ways was one responsibility of the Brethren. If there was a danger to the Church retreat to find the way of truth deny abattle--’til the Second coming of Christ if need be.
They must also cope with the new. That was also the responsibility of men who had risen to the top of the Benificial Life pyramid of success, Bruce was the direct liason between its Presidency and Board of Directors to its parent Corporation.
The Corporation of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ waz adminitered by the poor suffering, sonambulent, Emperor and his variously sonambulent Imperial Guard. The Grailmasters, Wounded Healers. the Fisherking, Amfortas. Profuzly bleeding without end
It was not the Bretheren’s responsibilty to be young, but to think and comprend the World, for here dwelt their empire . It was their responsibility to continue to lead the weak in faith through a complex world. It was Bruce’s job to keep them in clothes, or to tell his Emperor and his aged guard when they truly had no clothes. Such matters must not come to the notice of their Devotees.
A very proprietary matter, was that the top Bretheren had many families who were no less polygamous or irradiated than Karinna’s, and that was a consolation. How could they leave their Church to men little aquainted with its fractures and failings .
Bruce’s Great Uncle Sam had been asked to arrange for the building of a temple in a remote Oasis , including the provision of electric latrines for the nomads and hay for their camels. *
Bruce’s one time novia for 16 years his wife, cuddled towared him in his restive sleep. Bruce rolled onto his back and Karinna put down pad and stylus and nestled her head on his chest. Livvy snuggled into his other side. Fourty-four, his wifely Karina resembled an Oil of Olay polygraph commercial--a before picture, Her skin had been blistered and scored by the Provo and Nortena sun,

DNA, RNA and mitrochondrial treatments for aging were endemic but controversial. Aging, once believed to be inevitable, had been broken down by Great Brains into root processes of influenced by multiple triggers and etiologies.
Bruce beleived treatments sheilding survivors from the isotopic effects of radiation their downwind born parents passed to their children.
Prevention would be cheap for the Church Insurance Company. Assistive care reqired by the decrepitude and long confinement at home or in seclution were unaffordable for the saints, even for Mormons in the first world.
The brethren feared that rapid population growth fueled by longevity might reqire the consideration of a federal one child policy, China, had outlawed longevity treatments.
The current Chinese policy, which Bruce had studied, allowed two children, in many cases, per couple. Partners wanting one child or fewer might transfer their certificate to a sibling or cousin, Thus Cinese 3 child and 4 child families were becoming less rare in the country. Childless families common wit urbanization.
Chinese couples who had a deceased or incarcerated sibling might apply to bear the one child that their brother or sister otherwise might have had.
In Utah 5 child families were fine except for poligs. Karina and her family’s size were controversial from the first overcast morning when Bruce brought his sweet Karina home for breakfast to meet his raging mother, Linda, and his father Kirk.

These gave Karina all the regard she might reserve for orphaned field rodents or a coyote pup brought home to tame.

His mother-in-law Linda sported 13 grandchildren. Linda didn’t want anyone to say she’d neglected the castigation of Bruce’s wife. The apple. she said, alluding to her wandering Bruce, never falls far from the tree. That faith sustained Linda. Linda had stood in the long line at Bruce’s reception. Dutifully Linda arranged the table flowers, displayed her mastery of turning square card tables into round ones.

Linda borrowed white table cloths to cover round table tops and the Ward’s fancy linen and crystal. Bruce, not poor, bought his jewel a showy diamond and a wedding spray of white orchids--professionally crafted bouquet. He payed for a the reception’s catered dinner.

Bruce’s mentors could not stand or even sit for long. They were elderly Church Historical repositories who might be too tired to eat once they got home from his mother’s energetic extravegansa. Her last effort for this errant son, who, she was convinced would marry other wives, having not held himself completely apart.

They came, even though Karinna was born into polygamy, and his Karinna’s family’s bright cotton dresses clashed with Bruce’s sibling’s, neices and nephew’s Casche Vally chique. Linda thought Karinna’s family absurd, giving the lie to her son Bruce’s role as a personal attache to the Brethren. Bruce endowed with his pricy medical monitoring, his injections and bloodwork.

Covertly, he evaluated and explained new technologies to the Elderly Mormon Gerontocracy who were divided about anti-aging technologies, removed as they were but scarcely, from the days of cart and horse, wagon and mule, and universal loyalty to the pricy pricipal of polygamy practiced coverty by members of the Salt Lake’s aristocracy.

Linda, Bruce’s mother, was not one to condone the plural marital practices of Karina’s families’ modern Poligs. These, having few TV’s, had missed the Romney-Hinkley-Matheson PR machine’s protective efforts. a portion of their people still adhered to the church’s early ways.

Bruce thought this ironic--few knew what aged spin doctors were capable of if their reigns were held too loosely and Bruce’s touch was light. He learned all he could of them, curious about thier days and ways. Talking about the books of his Aunt Kathleen that his Uncle Samuel had ordered him to turn into a series of movies.

Bruce’s cheif charge at his rooms in the Hotel Utah, the jewel in the crown of Mormonism, had once been a propogandist for the World War II Office of War Information, and the aura of secrecy lingered. Whatever Linda said or had not said, biting her tongue, her daughter in law, now long her son’s Eternal Companion, and his Karinna,’her family, had failed not to follow the council of the early Bretheren in the matter of their marriages.

Bruce his mother feared, would abandon the true Church in time. Her parents, undeniably, were covenant breakers. Karinna was her mother’s first daughter and child. Karinna’s mother, her father’s first wife married in the Mesa Temple, conceiving Karina almost immediatly. Surely, surely, her son’s family would stray from the Kingdom, having failed to keep himself apart from evildoers.

A faint smile tickled Bruce’s cheeks, submerged into REM sleep, drifting about in the matrix of his, his people’s past, his preceeding present and hoped-for propitious future as Bruce’s mother’s embarassing conversation peice , part faith, part folly. Bruce, her son, had been on the special Church payroll since he received a covert call to prepare the Egyptian Visitor’s Center, (EVC) in Geesa, near the Great Pyramids.

Bruce, a bachelor, had devoted his last Utah, cricket-soaked nights, to his fiance, leaving his mother to lmagine her exemplary son overseeing text selection for a Church produced virtual interactive tour of a torch lit composite Pyramid.

Karina curled about him as he worked late, even though he expected that his mother would think of a way to turn the dread secret to her advantage.

That last evening before Bruce’s departure, Karinna had promised over and over again to wait for Bruce as Bruce promised to come home and marry her again and again, the two in one anothers arms, weeping their promises into one another’s ears beneath the rising moon where the Le Baron sheep dogs whimpered in Canine compassion and frensy. While his mother fumed--she had fixed a big dinner and invited family friends, but had not told him about it.

They had no need to whisper in thier own rooms in those years. Bruce shared an East temple brick apartment block with his Brother Sam and two brethren of a single persuation.

The oversised brick apartmentblock sported ample rooms each with a bath in the years when each room held a wife and her younger family. Some of the clothes closets were bigger than the maid’s closet just off the kitchen. It had an elevator and private garage, private storage, and a big common laundry area. A memory of past opulence and familial bliss, all perched directly atop the Wasatch Fault. Eat, drink and be merry, for tommorow we die.

When he left for his mission Karinna moved into the maid’s room and cooked for Bruce’s brothers and roomies so she could begin her more earnest study for her BA in Range Management. The Master Program required that she spend time in the field, about this she fussed and bothered about it, until a professor hinted that in the fields might satisfy her requirements.

Bruce and her father payed her tuition and looked forward to her matriculation. Karina hoped to assist the poorest families in their family United Order with the restitution of their land.
Bruce dreams, drifted on blue, shallow, twilit seas, turned again in his dream to prepararation of hyroglyphics for the plaster EVC walls.
Beyond its circle the dark seemed suffused with spirit and light, with the long-lived Ra.

Then the dream shifted to brilliance. Bruce dreamed that he was again his mother’s San Lorenso, He looked down at four tiny footprints cast in the cement of the walkway to his paternal great grandparents’ door.
His mother and Aunt had proportionably big feet, and padded about the yard with the seven neighborhood girls topless and puppyish, Five year old Kathleen and two year old Linda’s feet promised they would be big girls when they were grown. Bruce cast them in plaster, renting a car and driving across the Emperor Norton Bridge.
When he took them back to his new house at Alpine at its Happy Valley North Eastern edge, Karinna and her mongrel brood cast them in clay, glased them, and baked them in the Airport Rec Center’s craft center kiln.
Bruce’s mother seemed displeased by the plaques, by Bruce and Karinna’s house, Linda did not want to remember the East Bay days when she and her older sister were girls and slept together in the girl’s bed. Later they got bunks and Linda did not want to remember that, Let alone commemorate the days when her sisters slept together in the bottom bunk.
Bruce had taken the ignored cast at the first house he remembered living in. His Dad was always working and Grandpa yelling bad words. They saved money for their new house in Salt Lake and for their new car. by living with Grandma and Grandpa,

Bruce drove right to the house and asked to take thecasts. The woman who had bought it from Linda’s mother was old and pleased. She had wondered whose tiny bare feet were just outside her back door for many years.
Linda suggested angrily that Bruce should keep the glased cast in his family if he thought her childhood had been so much fun.
Another time Bruce and Linda, having reconciled, walked to Bruce’s grade school. They climbed the fence instead of crawling under the gate as Kathleen had always done, Karrina cried when Linda rejected her grandchildren’s canary yellow glased present and called her Harmony airport inhouse MSW.
The grey haired Vetran of many familial wars thought it best for them to repeat the process, taking a cast of just Linda’s foot prints.Karinna could make a cast of these. Truly, though, Bruce did want the four foot ceramic cast, Celeste happily hung it on the West wall of their sunny kitchen.
Bruce liked to be asked to take it down. Sometimes one of Karrina’s brothers or sisters who were big took it down for them. Celeste asked sad questions about their Grandma and their Aunt who had died.
She liked to run her small fingers along the heels of their Grandma and Great Aunt’s Kathleen who was dead’s feet. Livvy put her little fingers over the round, raised toe prints.
The big kids. their mother’s brother and sisters children always had lots of work to do--work out to their Grammy’s farm on the lake, they ate dinner, did dinner dishes to do and went home to do homework.
Karina studied for her BYU classes until dinner time at her mother’s and afterwards read and sang with the littles, as Celeste had long called them.
Then, groggy, they put on their bunny jammies.
Karinna studied with her book light until Bruce came home on the nights that he did come home. Then Karinna and Bruce crept off to their love nest until the sun came up on Mt. Tymp or Rigel came crawling up the stairs in the big alpine house looking for his Breakfast.
Bruce took the platter and decided to help the kids take a cast of their feet, bake and glaze it.

Celeste and Livvy made the plaques so Karina could have them for Christmas. Daddy Caleb took them so Mommie could cram for finals. He made fancy pots for everybody. The craft lady at the airport promised to keep their secret when Livvy called him Daddy Caleb
and started to cry.

In Bruces dying dream, as he supposed he ran his fingers along his mother and aunt’s tiny feet and touched their tiny toes. He felt a heaviness for those sisters of seventy years before, sad at whatever it was that had barricaded their love. It had greived them both, but only his mother knew why--in the name of staying positive. His shrink, the second wife of a pilot friend, said that was called dumping. Dumping was when you got something off your chest and you felt better and everybody else felt worse.

His mother’s priggishness had not left room even for their helping their Aunt when she had encephalites. The Egyptian tombs revealed aeons, not decades.
Bruce’s children would turn from the carefree happiness of their childhood to an adults more cynical faith in the blink of an eye. At the edge of the abyss, Bruce looked at his aging body, into his personal abyss, and blinked.

Would Bryce, his lucid dream-self wondered, chose the path of age or some newer biological alternatives--to stay younger than the average bear. He paid the highest premium available on his medical and life insurance, having no other private place to stash his capitol. He felt self satisfied in the arrangements he had made for Karinna and his family’s medical futures, then cycled into a lotusless, dreamless sleep.

When he woke up four creatures raced toward him--a race it would appear--Dolphins and a humanoid sea creature. He seemed to have
hit his head.

CHAPTER

Daddy Bruce Bunny remembered listening to the fuzzy voices that drifted up the stairs. He’d taken his primary sleep disorder knock off drops Uncle Sam had left him a list of things said Bruce must do because Uncle Sam didn’t have time to do more than half of them. There was family protest.

Bruce supposed himself, by the march of minutes, to be alive or conscious in some form, in a coma, perhaps. Bruce despite his nanobiotic vigor, could not imagine either his Uncle or Brother doing, for even one anomalous day, all he had taken under his umbrella.

It didn’t surprize him when Aunt Kath, just as he remembered her, came wafting toward her through sunlit pools. No doubt she wanted a post mortal chat--or maybe some way back to Karina and the kids. Some releif from the long corridors of pain and power.

What Samuel and his confederates wanted was control. He'd pawn the details off on Bruce, who habitually relied on the support of Sam's civilian and irregular nephew, Bruce's Elder brother and near twin whom he still sometimes called Sammy.

Oh well, Bruce sighed, noting a string of bubbles lasily rising to the surface. He pulled over and napped when too tired to drive. No doubt a drowsy commuter had ploughed into him.

He supposed that the impact or sheer balance disorder had impelled him into a high arc into the Jordan River where he had been noticed, but with nothing but a pair of skid marks in badly pocked sandy muck.

Even if the fast train Engineer had seen him, did he want them to find himafter fifteen minutes. Yep, he was a theif, completely willing to take his soul back to Eloim, Heavenly Parents was a close approximation, according to his Kabbalist neighbor Caleb. CC was brilliant, it was Blaine’s practice to match the IQ’s of donors and adoptive parents.

Livvy and Ri-Ri were done on the cheap and knew the secret about their seed Daddy Caleb. Bruce hadshow CC the babyfood jar and turkey baster. Cost: $2.00 for a bottle of Gerbers. He and Caleb discussed whether they ought to get insurance and put in $10.00 each and picked up two Welcome to parenthood tracts. Caleb, he hoped would take care of Karinna. Something large, he suspected--must have hit him, a skidding SUV or jackniving semi. When Karina and he stopped at the river to drink during the commuter rush, she made him keep his seat belt on.

CHAPTER EIGHT --THE SILKIE

Bruce’s Uncle Samuel stood as though Aunt Kathleen’s Great Silkie from a song she used to sing hin--a seal came out of the sea onto a hut hard by a rocky shore.

An earthly nourris sits and sing
And aye she bae lily wean
little ken I my bain’s father,
far less the land he dwellis in.

I am a man upon the land
And I’m a silkie on the sea and when I’m far, far frae land
I dwell in Suelles Skerrie,

So towered Uncle Samuel at Bruce’s dream’s beddes’ feet, He looked like the Uncle Sam charicature on WWII recruitment billboards.

His old grey crown scraped the ceiling.
Bruce and his Great Uncle Sam discussed the details of the phrenetic day ahead though Bruce was too groggy to make out Sam’s words.
Uncle Sam said he had promised to fly his mother La Vell and Bruce’s mother to Geesa for burial, Bruce decided groggily, not to stop at his mother’s house for breakfast. and so he informed the old man of wars. He who had no sound advice on marriage. Could even Uncle Sam keep Bruce’s sanctimonious female relatives out of his industrious Karina’s hair? Bruce said he’d been pleased to give the pair another private tour inside the great Pyramids at Geesa. If only he could make peace between his mother’s and his own family domain,
Bruce’s Great Uncle Sam had been asked to arrange for the building of a temple in a remote Oasis, providing a clean water source via the provision of electric latrines for the nomads and hay for their camels.

Bruce’s Frequent Flyers Pilots Extended Family Support Union Sleep Pod’s siren call of privacy and deep sleep broke into Bruces reverie via his sixth grade great brain brother-in law's heavy metal oldy. ”Die for the Government.”
guilt stung Bruce as he hit the snoose alarm. He was late for his digital readiness check up--after today he'd have to pay. In fact, Bruce was grounded until he completed it. Bruce feared he would not pass and so was dragging his feet.

Bruce thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old same old family genetic taint off as something new, poorly under stood and so menacing, so in need of fresh study. He was Daddy Bruce bunny, true, but he was one rodent, one a lab rat, sick of falling prey to ceaseless experiments of opportunity.

Death had received Harmony’s white paper on modern medical protocols. The battered Middle East had plenty of experiments of opportunity. Only a few heavily exposed subjects , exposed during the rigorously set up heavily reasearched buster Jangle and upshot knothole Hydrogen tests were suitable for long term Genetic study.
His Aunt, his mother’s sister, Had been born just downwind of the most rigorous and controlled atomic war games, 23 hours after the ‘’safety shot’’. Kathleen’s mother and grandfather had seen the blast when they had gone up the canyon that morning to sleep under the stars at Wood’s Ranch.

Then the Aunt Kathleen was born. It was cold. Kathllen had woken to see jack frost fairy castles on the Great dark green canvas covered bulge of her belly--Jack frost’s ice castles settled it--the baby was to be a frost princess.

At ease in the modern era, Death followed triagulared exposures--first came a curious compound of coloform bacterial symbiotes, their poisonous by-products, the excrement of their symbiotes. Mutagenic, carcinogenic, non Mendelian changes followed.
If he mentioned anything at all about the nuclear contamination of his town, the deaths and/or chemo of his friends, his glib and blythe Airport theraoist would say, with some irritation, “Oh, but that's only in Southern Utah. “ Talk about divide and conquer. Bruce could plainly see his date and place of birth onthe bimbo's chart.
She said the ‘Oh but that’s only in Southern Utah” not as derision, but axiom. it was how people conceded Northern Utah Regional superiority. “that's only in Southern Utah.“ Like the downwinders had not migrated North to Casce Valley.
Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen had, and chronicled the scoop, They declassified the cases, some hack put together another case that got the Feds even more off the hook, then they'd snap it shut again. Few doctors had the timerity to admit that they’d seen the disease before and expected to again and to treat it.
It seemed the medical remnants who dealt with classified medical records did not promote research or treatment of disabling disease bred of radiation. They were T.S. Prufrock mermaids--Oh, that would not do at all, at all, that would not do at all.’’
His kids default physician, their geneticist, could not refer to the rec center doc. The Federal scope had been turned on Utah. The geneticist’s wife was a Nurse Midwife who enjoyed the comedy of Polig. home births. The unenviable screaming, clinging pregnancies synced, entrained, a cousin to menstrual entrainment.
At the Airport, they scutinized the kids too closely for Bruce’s taste. Their bruises would start out red, turn orange and green, and then fade slowly to olive green. All of them. Any list was bound to be augmented, then employed, to virtually any unforseeable purpose.
Irked by the entire situation. His mother guarded her profits from all claims like a Lepracaun his pot of gold. That’s how Daddy Bruce thought to dust off his phlebotomy and Medical credentials from the Army.
Connections arranged an interview with the medical advisor to the First Presidency--a long interview regarding the new life prolonging therapies with which Bruce was conversant. It was a complex matter, Bruce the traditional interegnium. The intent of the outgoing prophet was to see that the interregniam went smoothly--but what if one of the brethren, an unpopular one, arose and used genetic therapies to consolidate and maintain an unrighteous dominion? The hypothetical possibilities were chilling.

It was for this reason that God put an Angel with a flaming sword to guard the trees of the garden, lest they live forever in their sins.

No, if life would be maintained past 100, so it was time to speak of senior retirement, even of golden years of marital togetherness-- of time to relax with their posterity until death, the fool’s coming came last, at long last.

CHAPTER NINE

The downwind terrragenic effects of A.R. were most apparent at birth. Babies less obvious maladies followed a nuerocristopathic pattern. A Matheson direct ancestor, descended from a blind cigar who deducted a pittance from his pay to pay a reader.
Utah, the State, thought it its business to identify cases of birth defects, cancer, Premature aging and all ills and effects in isolated hamlets’which effected his gene pool exponentially. Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen was not among the unluckly. She lived long enough to complete her books, to educate herself, to acheive closure and calmness. She would not be an infant soul living only by what Sartre called throwness--chance.
Kathleen’s religious interests were dizreptanlyeclectic. She drew out her life and would have continued on a set tragectory Whatever had happened, she didn’t. Spending her last years with her infantilising mother would have brought out hate, rage and fear.

Bruce thought, after his infant died, that it was time to bringing his Aunt Taffy home. Sam, his brother and Uncle Samuel, his great Uncle would help her to help care for her. Bruce could administer the same blood products that Ginny provided as a lucrative cottage industry.
A sideline while she had small children, bot had been born via cutting edge genetic and hormonal treatments at home.
Bruce thought of his first child. The baby had never learned to focus his eyes and could not hear them through his misplaced ears.
There were internal misarrangements that would be fatal. Bruce would not put the child through fruitless experimental surgery and then lose it to the hospital meat grinder since, technically, it would still be premature.
Bruce had spent his days of waiting making an optimistic ly sized coffin, carving the trim on his great grandfather’s father’s treadle lathe while Grammy Lebaron and Karinna massaged it with viscous, fragrant hemp oils pressed from Annies garden patch. It seemed to help alaya’s puffy superficial cappilaries, while they cradled and sung to it words it would never hear.
They’d put it to bed with Karinna’s disabled sister and took the baby off the heart monitor while she lay next to it. She caught trouble before the monitor’s red light bleeped.
Bruce and his brother Sam had snuck the baby out of the preemie ward at children’s with the collusion ofthe ward’s nurses.
They found that many in their region would not seek the hospital at all if a baby came early malformaties and severe problems were rife.
Bruce and Sam had taken the baby directly to the Airport where Karrina’s elder sister slept in a plane while the enigmatic Uncle Sam revved the motor of the flier’s plane enthusiasticly. It was a small medical transport, not particularly different from a regular bush transport except that there was a narrow bed raised to window level so the passenger could see out.
Bruce wanted to get his baby life prolonging IV therapies not available in the US to counter Karinna’s lack of transmissable immunity and pathogenicly contaminated breast milk. It was an old belief that infant eyes didn't focus because a baby lived still in their premortal home and by understood its language, Adamic, Adam's tongue rarely heard by adult ears upon their garden world after the fall. Eventually they acquired the mortal tongue of those about them.
In the Mexican Colonias, folk beleifs had been maintained that would have been hooted at by Utah’s sophisticated bench dwellers and all who aped them without the education and cultural improvements of which a house on one of Utah’s ancient lake shores were the byproduct. For Bruce’s mother the Toelle bench house was an end in itself. She had acheived her dream and looked down upon those without her single minded, vacuous drive. Part of a familycomttent to prove they weren’t poligs.
Karinna consistanty transgressed her mother in law’s strictures--she was from a vast and vastly embarrasing family of brightly colored poligs.
She had gone to college and become a teacher. As if that were not enough, she was now making herself into some sort of scientist--always ready with some new and improved seed to provide soil restoration.
Linda had worked hard to get the weeds out of her dusty orchard. Deep roots needed less topsoil anyway.

Karina and Bruce took catastrophic family leave and gladly took their baby back to the cottage on Karinna's Aunt Annie's land. One of her half sisters gave her books on baby massage, when the baby, Alya, was six months old the massage seemedto hurt Alya and she resisted.

That’s when the complex anoemia developed and the baby died three months later. Then Bruce wished he'd become a baby doctor rather than a gerontological biotechnocrat.
They held their baby and Karinna nursed and nursed and nursed it, in the end, Alaya died. He remembered a poem that his Great Uncle , Uncle Sam’s Father, Super Gramps to Bruce and his brother, sisters and cousins. Flowers from children, condolances and comfort from t Parish nuns. These first recognised Karinna as a serious student who ought to receive preparation for college and a broad exposure to the arts of music, art and drama.
Someone dropped off a rocking chair. Karina sang and rocked and nursed her baby, Alaya, till Alaya died. A woman with a gift for the comfort of the dying sat with Bruce, Karina and AlAya. She had the sight and infrequently saw the room fill for a spirit passing one side to the next--a lamb in Heavenly Father’s embrace.

CHAPTER, TEN, THE COACH

The Pilot's association had the mandate to asses the psychological effects of radiation--same old same old. A 20 minute barrage of Health questions about how he felt about his radiation exposure, delivered by a first generation android, set Bruce to quavering, like a jelly mold. The machine, who always wore the same clothes, sat in the same chair in the same office. The hospitality staff was efficient. The staff never needed breaks to eat, drink or deficate.
She needed a differnt job. Handing out the mesh bags for children’s dry clothing at a Utah swimming pool might please her. She had been programmed to respond to children.

The Frequent Flier’s family Association passed on an offer of a more recent model, how ever the science of android development had progressed.
Then, after his baby died, humiliated, Bruce fell into his father's sullen hostility, withdrawing into prayer or silence. He hated it when his medical files were unsealed. Harmony, the parent project, had declassified them because his Uncles, his mother’s brothers had a genetic disease.
He could seal them again by Application. Karina couldn't, wouldn't touch forms refered to her baby's death, dissected by researchers whose indifference had made life a long hell for many. Karinna was sick of elderly radiation specialist with a faint German accents and a Nazi way of passing judement on her family and their ways.

He'd never accept his apology from Congress for his rheumatism, or, if he hit the jackpot, in an Aunt Kathleenish sort of way, he’d establish a family College fund. He hoped he would.
Bruce didn’t think lost lives ought to be assigned posthumus price tags and there were many thousand gone, lost from the persecution, or the cancer or fatal rhumatism, an unending, intermidable protien cascade. Karinna had sisters with this, and brother and sisters gone from cancer and lukemia.

When Karinna swelled with Celeste and Bruce needed help, he went to a mutual cousin, a Harmony shrink, who worked at the Rec. Center once a week. He was Karina's kissing cousin with the required credential and he had advanced laboratory access.

Karinna cried over it, then decided they would have the rest of their babies from a less contaminated gene pool if they could be that organized about it. Karrina’s doctor told her he thought she was through the change. Rigel proved them wrong.

During his therapy sessions Bruce sobbed. These slpashed on the walls and bounced about the room in orbs till he went home to face his mob. Bruce complained about the Federal Mental Health people, there only to produce files for a propoganda that played down the number of deaths, the population percentage, deformaties of beloved children. Bruce lost it.

Bruce’s therapist hired onto the program during a Matheson reign as governor, his administration demanded to take over parts of the Airport project. He would not allow his constituants, guinea pigs most of them, to be emotionally bisected. The mutagenic effects of virus and radiation grew geometrically* so as the children of the South married converts, or people raised to the North with tristate or four corners partners, the percentage stayed more or less stable.
It had no great preferemce for either the religious, un-dunct, or irreligious.

Better to have a Governor with roots South of Beaver. For these people would cross the line. Bruce would. The bombing was the undying wound of Amfortas. Even the Republicans knew how much blood they’d lost and had been losing since 1951. For well over 50 years.

Bruce lived on the bench, not far from Deep Throats' son with whom he had a mutual family truck garden interest. He rented a plot adjacent to Bruce’s family’s plot out on Grammy La Baron’s land.

Redford, at Bruce’s urging, had set up funds for parents who could not pay the extortionary copying costs the Freedom of Information demanded. That was the hook, the money to get confirmatory medical records, the fiery hoops required by exploitating declassification specialists, keepers of the gates.

Matheson expanded the Rec center programs started in his father’s tenure. Some intown were turned into latchkey centers. The airport had traveking children to care for, and a middle and High School pilot project, the object of poor Daddy Bruce Bunny’s complaint.

Kerry and Celeste took a listening skills class at the Rec Center and had a listening skills club at their school. They took a grant writing class at the Rec center and the United Way gave their Mom money to teach it in the Harmony system.--the State paid for Karinna to teach a class through the PTA.
Currently, SLCI Pilot Family Program's Gentile Mental health office, as the kids called it, was on the rec floor, inconveniently above the pilot rest and diagnostic sleep module. Through Bruce’s jumbled dream he heard shards of despair and desolation.

“I knew he might get ill or be laid off someday. I grew up on garden greens on bread, but I thought if we were ever poor it would be together, as a family . . .” murmuring sifted through the air filter adding sheen upon every word--these drifted around the room, ephemeral as bubbles, then the door opened and closed and the bubbles vanished.

Bruce dropt into deeper sleep in an attempt to convince himself that he had no need to go to work, he was already there. The flier's wife above was an encephalitic pet rat in a cage. His Aunt Taffy had a pet rat with encephalitis. Goofy didn’t like Gerbilaid. Bruce remembered Goofy from an early trip
to his Aunt Taffy in California. She cried and whimpered, was too disoriented to find his mouth, and at first her body spun. Kathleen put a toilet paper roll into the cage. The rat stayed in it and it stopped her spinning. The rat was smart, it could smell the gerbilaid in its water, her fatal flaw was that she didn’t know when to make an exception.

He gave a start and then went slack at the comfort of Karina at his back. His biblical father in law, the bearded patriarch, cheating the Feds. was bedding down that night, which usually meant he was at the kids Grammy.

Kerry's alarm would go off and the lad was liable to wake up to distant strains of his gut blasting CD “I hate the Government.” and be up to get his brother in law/stepfather up and as far as the shower. Kerry took jobs and gave his pay to his Gram for the garden.

Bruce dragged himself out of bed. He stood under the shower imagining, as he had been directed by his Dream Master, that his jet lag was being pulled into a watery vortex and vanishing. Bryce made a note to call Karinna and ask her to get a brother in law over there to fix it.

Bruce feared he’d just get settled for the sleep test when his Airbus was ready to float up and rush off. He could lose his sleep pod if he didn’t use it often enough. Karinna used the pod often enough, to study there while the Children ran about the center. Now, the Pater-familii were both low on sleep. They shared the pod with Karinna’s father and made glad use of it, Karinna's polig parents and he and his Karinna betimes.

Brother Le Baron had an active project going at the Stateline. The pilots and any associates they might select got their rooms gratis and Bruce had, some years before, introduced Brother Lebaron to a former Goshute Correspondence school classmate.She looked pretty enough on the two way screen,
and prettier in person.

Bruce's mother had voiced her onorous objections to his marriage to Karinna. Karina was fishy. “Ma,“ Bruce's brother Sam had argued--these particular LeBarons are 99.9% percent poligs, our genius here being the 1/1000%. If they don't mind having a fly in their soup ...or in thier ‘Moose Turd Pie--accept no substitute, look for the genuine Mooseturd incised on the bottom of the pie itself.”
Sam considered a moment and thought of his father's face, a stone wall. Then Sam went on “I had a formal introduction to our failing old Hierophant from the mucky muck Cousin President Anders himself while calling to extract my Brother and his intended from his fairest of all missions, all sugar, strawberries and cream. Sprang for a four star welcome to a premium moose turd pie family engagement dinner, did the Patriarch, but had to ask for a special dispensation to use cow patty instead, even when the recipe didn’t call for it.“
“I would have offered” his Mommy Linda pouted, “but Moose turd did sound expensive, particularly for so many.“ Bruce’s father silently assested.

Bruce’s Elder Brother was present and confirmed that the conversation had occured “Our old maid has support in high places for her bid on old bro here.” He regarded his mother with pious uncertainty.

Karina's Grandfather, the great man, teased Bruce until her face was the color of an August Dixie tomato--He said it was said down to the lambing that his Karina put on front sippered dungarees and pull over sweaters to her two room schoolroom each and everytime the computer was fixing to break down. Then he broke it worse and left Kerry and his biggest sister to finish fixing it.

Linda pouted over Bruce’s engagement. According to Aunt Kathleen' s family chronicles her sister had been a stubborn pouter since a preschooler. She tried to convert Kathleen to pouting, but failed. Bachelor Bruce's mother opined to those near and far that it was her right to exclude Karinna’s brightly colored D.I. chic from her sight with derision, even outrage.

The polygs of Basin and Desert used to know their place. Everybody complained about it--now they were every where. Bruce had even rented a house to one of Karinna’s Goshute polig sister-wives right in To-elle, in the center of town.

Linda had to listen to complaint after complaint--she owed it to her neighbors to see that her children’s lives did not raise gossip like that. Gossip about her son, that hurt, Jacob to his brother’s Esau. To be frank, the town had expected so much for him.

There was a democrat in the State house .Some commentators--right out of SLC, the Church Capital, called the polygs Utah's largest minority, out numbering all the indian tribes combined.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He was speaking into his PDA to remember to mention his reticence to attend his session with the pilot’s association children’s therapist, when a driver came up close behind him, as though he wanted him to pull over. Bruce did, figuring it was family.
As the car pulled out from behind he recognized Karinna’s second sister’s car, and my, if there wasn’t a bunny driving and another in the car seat screaming for his Daddy. His Daddy, Bruce learned when Karinna rolled down the window, was getting away. Who might this escaped felon be? Bruce gathered that his presence was required at the family hideout at his Grammy’s.

CHAPTER TWELVE
BREAKFAST AT GRAMMY LEBARON’S

There were two wings of pods in the airport’s pro-sleep center, waiting areas with baths, and a kitchen. One set aside for smokers and one for non smokers and non-smoking Mormons. Smokers and non smokers required seperate environments, like plants and mixed like oil and water, at least in Salt Lake.

Thier airport brats played noisilly , forgetting the rigidity of their clique ridden schools. The airport the kids often had lived in different countries, heard various languages, came from countries, some of them, where they helped bead gowns in vibrant colors. Bruce Anders polyg kids in thier rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes didn’t register.

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. The state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie’s and her Mexican sister-wives’ children up North for school. Only Bruce saw Karinna’s Brother until there was a row with the therapist who saw Karinna and the children, then they all switched.

The therapist, the children said, was trying to say that the kids had to leave out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her read it. She needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t be able to feed her kids. ‘Livvy said the State couldn’t make them do anything but die.

The teacher came to the sleep pod to which Karina's girls had retreated after their walk out on the scripted discussion. Kerry was sitting on the end of the long chaise lounge nearest his grandfather and thier stepfather’s door reading a comic book and drawing.

“I’m sorry,” the teacher said when she convinced the girls to open the door. She pulled Livvy to her, and buried her face in ‘Livvy’s ringlets.

“I thought it would be better if I read right out of the book, since I didn’t write it.“ Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions.

At the Y it was better, Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she had poligs in her Sociology class. Mommy said she taught her kids that regulating religious practice was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that the Founding Fathers were wise and forbade anything but equality. Thier Grammy and garampus said so too.

The Dream teacher didn’t mind if they talked about it. Like when the Goth dreamed that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them.

It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week. The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.

Bruce was a Sabbath Breaker. He was a church clerk at his home ward. He had to bow out almost every Sunday. He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures.

Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSW--
G Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better,
If the people wanted to see one of their
own denomination, the better quality of
counseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce.
Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile with polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and 4 Scoolaged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out. “Then don’t “
Her office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said don?t,
Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were much nicer.
They went to the supe and she said they both should be considered assets, not liabilities Some of the teachers didn’t know they had poligamous students let alone colleagues.

They to have a question and answer brownbagger, then decide what to do about
the offensive leaflet. So of course the kids demanded to stay. If the Government. Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. The Mormon smokers liked her immediatly but thought the should be allowed to sleep in the better pods if they only smoked in the smoker’s lounge or on one of the balconies.
At school Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of her friends, a Mormon girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins passed her the pamphlet. She was a Goth and her teacher said she should read it. She said she was sure that there was only one of the Staff who would not resist. “You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her read something else out of the leaflet. Their Mother pulled all her children and brothers and sisters out of school.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As they left with his girlfriend, whose hair was half orange and half green, put Kerry’s wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. The G. came marching down the ramp to the door of the school. What ever antone thinks, your children are ungoverned and ungovernance and Good Riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.” Saying that was a mistake. If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly.
‘Maybe,”Kerry’s girlfriend said in a whispered sneer that silenced the student body, maybe then you’ll be old enough that you’ll want to retire.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter,
so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.

at 50. He didn?t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss
their dad, alot and off and on.

the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given
for the cleanup.

Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding, Kathleen Protested to Ginny’s Dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits were for Tooele and for the valley--they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle with half of the population uncounted.

Bruce thought men who had had their children take the burden, excluding people with previous or parental exposure. Bruce cheated and sent his boys up the Canyon to picknic-- The training was important.
The more Toelle knew about what was on the site and where the better--there was a direct need to know. So Brad kept to his classroom, particularly after Alaya.
For her, grief circled high, like hunting opreys, circling, invisible in the path of the sun. Bird who cast enormous swift shadows, deep green along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus. I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.?? But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further quicken her soul.
She died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.
He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films.
he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq
Then he load on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas.
Then he started showing films of Babys--Alexande Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people.
networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget.
He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden and his hairtrigger opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thoughthere was some connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina?s youngest brother came in and said ??Daddy, there?s an atom Bomb in New York.

there could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose.
The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore.
karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.

His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.
Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen.
Each battle was a treasure trove . Buruce could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle--
it could all be done in the lab.
the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground ground.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The full moon rode high above The skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. it illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, the delay at the airport now. His computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.

She came off a little to his left politically, She said he never wanted to hear breaking news and she HATED the allgoodnews SLC station, which Bruce’s therapist thought stress reducing. The trouble was that his browsing avatar detested it. He had started her out with his Aunt’s Bookmarks--boy had that been a mistake. She was programmed to give him the best news first and she’d come up with something from Tajikistan. He could hear what she thought most important or she’d fold up her notebook and sulk.

She did work hard. Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston. She’d been researching it all night. He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening. There had been contention over his early departure. Bruce did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house. It so easily led to rebellion among thier fractious troops.

Bruce had decided to go to sleep without the younger children. He hoped they’d let his Karinna study. Karinna doubted even his singing could get them to sleep. They were riled. So Bruce hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. “Ah, he mumbled, as he rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure and wanted to go down and look it up. The best plans of mice and men often go awry. He left the house like a theif, and so his girl Livvy accused him of being. He stole himself away from them.

He would put on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months. He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no reference to the History of Britain. He hated that song. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.

He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach, this time, if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, fading as time’s river passed them both by.

The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a a guard at buckingham palace. He often wanted to ask her who did her hair. Dust could be seen on the laminating plastic. She had worn the same hairdoo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college and started his flying tutorial service. His mother disapproved, he’d probably find some old maid school teacher out there and besides, then they’d never see him.

CHAPTER ONE/EIGHTEEN
Morning slipped through bruce?s gummy lids ,tinted in subtileblues and greyscale. His Frequent flyers? Pilots? support Union sleep pod was paid for but empty. he felt a sting of guilt at having attended too many education weeks and too few of his required pilot support group. Bruce whispered into his pda to mention his reticence to the Pilot’s Association therapist whose office was on the rec floor directly above the pilot rest module sleep treatment area.

There were two. One for smokers and one for Mormons. His therapest said Smokers and non smokers didn?t mix, like oil and water. few of the non-Mormons non-smokers declined alternate assignmentto the smoker?s wing.
The children played easily together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors.
They didn?t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the teachers said something.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Fear of flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna?s Aunt Annie?s children They were up North for school
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. Mrs. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in
her family. That made them
mad--they had a gentile neigbor who lived in a big house
and screamed at his wife and children and he was even a kind of shrink oner to the Mental
Hopital. Karinna thought a good week if she didn?t have to call the police twice.
She even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was easier. The prof. didn?t dare say a word about polygamy. IF she did she
had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by
GOW-ULDS. Snakes in their heads.
It was not Gou-ulds, but a pack of cacking crows , his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.
The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker?s area could provide some rooms to flight stewars--
the pilots area was much nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, glass walls bonded carbon with painted superglue to bond the layers.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie?s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was church clerk at his homeward which he had to bow out of every Sunday to make time for his demanding therapist.
The individual and family counseling went against his nature, but Karinna?s maiden name, Le Baron, which she insisted on using, was like a red flag to a bull to the state social workers. They didn?t care where, but they wanted them in state funded counseling.
Karrina?s counselor let her read the material that printed bythe state, on working gentli with polygamist family ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and she loved the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out or tidied their desk she put together a search party.
her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--I won?t, I cant, I wont,I can?t. Her office mate skimmed the booklet--Then don?t.
Her office was shared with a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kissing was nicer.

They went to the supe and she said they should be considered assets not liabilities since they worked harder than most of the other teacher. They asked her to call a question and answer brownbagger. ?I... Karinna said, startled, will do it if I can bring ALL my children.? The Talk went well though she feared having to head for the John. Karinna was trying to send the Supe to the smoking wing.

Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. Karinna threw her over one shoulder.
“You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” One of the counselors said.

The GENTILE as Karrina’s kids afterwards called her, brandished the offensive leaflets. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Karinna said, carrying off the struggling ‘Livvy like a sack of wheat. Kerry turned aside and put in wax vampire teeth from a Halloween past.

---------------CHAPTER?
Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter, so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds.

CHAPTER TWENTY
Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated modern war, no less than he would have hated old fasioned ones.

He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rot-ci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump. His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.
at 50. He didn? say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss
their dad, alot and off and on.

the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given
for the cleanup.

Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen Protested to Ginny?s dad.

They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.
He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.

CHAPER TWENTY TWO
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC.

His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines. Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, “I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.” But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further quicken her soul.

He thought of the dog who died in the Muslim training films. It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seized from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. He used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Laden films had been made before the US invasion of Afganistan.

Then he load on the same film with pedegreed dogs, white dogs or just a yellow stray mutt . The boys thought it would work. He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas. The principal did not approve. He caught Bruce in the hall outside his lab and remonstrated bitterly. His Mother heard about it and gave Bruce double Dutch. If he wanted to remain in the community, then he needed to support its economy. It came to him clearly, a small voice saying “At what price Dadu.”

Then he showed a films of babys--Alexander Nevsky with the soundtrack by Stravinsky.
A film obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people, though Bruce did not know how. Networks and newsfeed cared more about ratings than dogs, Muslim babies, or Mormon ones, lest we forget.

Bruce had become a TA as a junior and had tied with ten other past students of the High on his SST. Yet he was odd--like when his Cubmaster had asked him to read the Boy Scout Oath and he wanted to read it first. If they had had a Second Gulf War when he was a boy he would have been a disgrace to the community. That’s what the principal said. The principal had a habit of getting personal that could not be tolerated in a town as small as thiers and was replaced. He had recieved a letter from the Reserve Officer’s Training Corp complaining about it’s low recruitment levels. The town had provided enough fodder to Death’s cart--including his Alaya.

Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thought there was no neccesary connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina’s youngest, Kerry, then known as her brother, came in and said “Daddy, there’s an Atom Bomb in New York.” The film work raised his his wages. It made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore. He taught ethics at the high, rather Socratic. It had been his discussions of options and alternatives that had had the Principal raving down at him in the Hall . The town had given him the bulk of its support, and his Mommy Linda was in the opposite faction.

Bruce was very nearly fired for his Sundance news jibe “Glow on, Glow on with peace in your heart and you’ll never glow alone, you’ll never glow a-lone.” He expected to be sued, but gave the song 3 Mooseturd Salutes anyway.

Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt Annie had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. Now they were dignified grand matrons in plurality, managing their progeny in mixed groups and tossing Ramona’s crop of blue eyed indians in with the Grandkids.
His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones’ large downwind creche. a pitiful thing, the Atom Bomb Kids. Could any argument death of one child or one Old Glow Boy acceptable.

Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs made by thier Drsert Paradise to drop on Muslim children.

Uncle Sam, the icon’s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage, Death’s leading henchman. A treasure trove, each battle. And somewhere one of many Bruces could easily turn it into lucrative, effective, and convincing training feed. With special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle-- it could all be done in the lab the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, Western ground floor of the unadorned hayshack where the doomed canine waited.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The full moon rode high above the skylight above the bed where Karinna and the kids slept. Moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians like his mother Linda pronounced it. There was scarcly enough to justify a lift off delay at the Air Complex. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, like a bad headache.

It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of his ROTC boys, the delay at the airport now. Bruce’s computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept. Taffy came off a little to his left politically, and she complained that Bruce never wanted to hear news that mattered. Taffy worked hard, she took up little space and needed less.

Bruce’s semi-android assistant allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone while his brothers, sisters, watched their children and grandchildren--thiers and those of thier many cousins played and otherwise consorted together.

Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston and a three day shindig in SF--Sin City that Sam thought particularly important. Bruce planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening, but decided that the plan was too inflamatory. He was in enough trouble at home already.

There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna to clean up his messes. His departures easily led to full rebellion among the troops.
Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and his soft Karinna. Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep if they got riled up just at bedtime. So he hit the hay at 7:30 the night before, leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Whatever trouble there had been, Bruce had missed it.

Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleep out of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure. He did not like being unsure. The best plans of mice and men often go awry, he decided. Bruce, showered in the bunk house that Kerry and his dad were putting in for the Enterprise. Then, dressed in a Federal Marshall’s uniform he left the house stealthily as a theif. So his girl Livvy accused him of being. He stole himself, thier Daddy, away from them.

Bruce dreaded putting on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months. He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no allusion to the Brittish. Darned Old Duke of York. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt poking out behind. His mother said that the purpose of the song was to teach coordination and laughed when he said then he didn’t have any.

He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, paling, her red uniform fading to pink as time passed them both by as the lightly laminated fitness and spacial acuity avatar assumed the posture of a guard at Buckingham Palace.

Bruce chatted cheerfully with the animated manniquin. He wanted to ask her who did her hair. She had worn the same hairdoo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college, hence she must like it.

The fitness center paid off--fewer downed planes, more coherent, oriented and alert pilots-- the P.R. lent by his Uniform gave the passengers confidence in the institution of Commercial Air Travel .

----------Chapter?

There were no bossy workout machines at the glorified Army airstrip at the old Wendover Radiation Testing and Firing Range or, as it was later called, The Wendover Proving Ground. Its big twin nuclear bunkers bereft of Big Boy and one for Fat Boy. They were nearly as massive as the pyramids if you counted the underground supply warrens. He knew. He had friends out that way whose Dad had been a hiking and spelunking buddy of his one time Aunt Kathleen. It was humiliating to speak of her up to the Stateline, and for a time, he failed to show for the local-only pocker night.

They’d camped up at Alpine Lake in his Ruby’s Mountains and climbed along the tunnels of caves once inhabited or relatively unexplored. His Aunt, whose personal life was such a source of scandal was in that place simply a memory of a energetic, religious and way too pretty Tomboy. They went without any equipment but a rope. The young are foolish, Kathleen’s onetime friend Kenny said, and shrugged.

Bruce liked the flexibility of loosly woven realities, the freedom of Pilot Mountain Pilots. who lined his pockets. The Fast Train made a major stop at Wendover, Nevada to Temple Square in Salt Lake . Why go hunting for forbidden delights in the Bee Sting State when in Wendover you could simply ask for a recommendation from a well informed waitress and rent a car to drive to an available and totally legal and reliably discreet location. Not that Bruce ever did. At the worst, Mommy Linda would find out about it. Kathy had written an account such a query in her journal. She had asked if there were any horny women in town. She had answered, that there were none who did it for pay. For that they would have to go on to Wells.

CHAPTER

After a foggy drive to the airport, Bruce set the big bay of windows embedded into the walls of his cubicle to current view. He dialed roof into the keypad and then when the Seagull’s view appeared on the small screen he could tap in North, North and South, East and local view. As he imagined, from the mounted videocams he could see the dry salt mist that rose from stilted houses that approached the Great Salt Lake.

It met twin freshwater airstreams that drifted down from the Casche and Toeele vallies these merged and mingled and backed up toward the runways. A readied craft could have taken off now. There were some, but they were packed.

Bruce wished he had taken the train out to Wendover. He’d be playing poker now with his high school buds, waiting for his flight’s etd to be announced over the Stateline Casino’s Public address system.

At SLCI it was easier to focus on spiritual things. Bruce set his computer’s preprogramed alarm clock--he looked up a suitable bible reading to ask his laptop to read to him the last thing before thier isight family prayer the next night. He liked to set the reading to wake him. The voice at first seemed distant, intruding into his dreamlife. Bruce liked to wake to sacred things.

Wendover was packed with Mormon pilots . It was outside Deseret , beyond Zion’s pale, on unhallowed ground. There was no graveyard or hospital in Wendover to regularise or sanctifiy the proceeding of his sacred family rites.

In Wendover the strictures of their religion, they easily collectively shed. Bruce welcomed the sight of the now ancient Cowboy Bill pointing to the “This is the Place,” Casino, now moved up the road a little, the infant Bruce and his brother Sam always had to stop at the old Stateline Casino. It had stood right there, a silent parody of Brigham Young. Who, sick with fever had raised himself on one elbow and, probably delerious, added those fated words “Drive on.”

Aunt Taffy’s day when she was a waitress At Wendover and he and his sister were 8.
She had tried Tahoe first. But the required dress, or undress required in the big casino’s put her off.
In Wendover you could cream the guy as long as you could make itlook like an accident--one less truckdriver would not turn the tide of the once small town’s history.

CHAPTER

“I think I have something on that’’ Leila, Bruce’s desktop avatar said.
Ah yes--August fifth 1973 your Aunt spilled icewater into a dealer’s lap. A few weeks later she smacked one upside the head,drinks and glass flying all over the near customers, who no less deserved it.

The house where his uncle, Taffy’s brother’s first girlfriend lived had been relocated to make room for a Casino extention. There he had had first real kiss from a nice Mormon girl whose family owned the towns favorite Grocery and a single air ambulance.

Aunt Taffy’s Brother had lived with his sister the summer he was 15 then and she 20.
The cooks all complemented her on his reliability and hard work and they became more than siblings, friends. Strange to think of the finality with which he had vowed to never speak to her again. When she saw a therapist
and with her aunt there suddenly spilled out the gruesome details of her spare the rod spoil the child and incest is best sprawling nightmare of her biker family.
She had been close to her sister in law years before--she never imagined that she would be powerless to resist creating its carbon copy as her children aged. Kathleen had tried to do what her brother;s wife would have wanted before she began to go mad as she took on a frenetic multiplication without stewardship of her race. Rather she seemed determined to create one of her own. Only his grandmother worried avout her Grandchildren, feeling that Candy was too ill to provide forctheirbproperrearing.
Bruce’s computer popped open andLeila said “fruit seldom rots on the vine.”

“Yes,” he said as she showed Bruce archived photo’s of the site which she pulled up under Enola Gay.
The archive was located somewhere either on the base or in the Casino complex, and on scteen the military and covilia photop archives were merged in 2006, and included copies of Archival photo’s dating from the time the base was a remote boy’s reformatory, one of the Mechanical Bill holding his first bottle of soda pop in his newly constructed Cold drins shack on the highway.
Mormon passengers often avoided the laregly Gentile Nevada border town. East bound Flights could be shunted to the more defensible Bonneville airport if there were some threat, like a local Goshute attempting to board.
bryce used to sing as he climbed the hardened foamy Lava bubbles. They had partly eroded so you could climb almost straight up while the sharp edges of the bubbles cut into the soles of their shoes.

His Aunt Kathleen had spent her offtime on those hills--he had read it in her journals at the U. of U. Wendover was 3-5 hours from most California destinations. Eastbound travelers often took the train to avoid degrading scrutiny while boarding at clogged Califoria airports thus avoiding SLCI completly.
The Church prefered that its pilots use SCLI but was losing to Wendover’s enticements-- proscribed card playing, and worse sins. It was said that all you had to do was register at the desk if you did not prefer to sleep alone. Bryce had never tried.

Book one--Cry me a rainbow and the circle game:
CHAPTER TWO, SIN CITY East

Wendover was in Bryce’s School district. He had been an internet TA, correcting papers and corresponding with the children and young people --in widely bejewled time stripped mineral geology of the wide and over warm earthtoned desert.
Bruce loved SLCI. He remembered when his disabled Aunt Taffy was wheeled aboard and his 3 sisters were allowed on board for a last peek at their Aunt. His youngest sister asked Taffy, when Aunt taffy called a week later, if she was still on the plane circling in the blue, and for her it remained her truth about her aunt for three years, until she visited Aunt Taffy and Uncle Brad.
Whenever they saw Aunt Kathy again it was visiting, not summer visits in the July, when everyone’s family came but a time to just visit.
And everyone said in California how nice to see her--like Aunt Taff was a photograph or a movie.
Once Uncle Bruce got them to stay by making a Barbeque --not having it would be wasting food, which was wrong. Her refridgerator didn’t have a freeser. His mommy said that all refridgerators had freesers,
Bryce peeked in and it was true. then his daddy looked.
He said some people had seperate freesers.
SCLI was near where he was a baby and Taffy was would take him for rides in his green car but Bryce got scared, captured by an Enemy soldier. She took him up in an elevator and taffy’s house was way up in the leaves. Bryce started crying because he missed his Mommy and brother so Taffy put him in his car seat and took him back to his house.
from the great complexes’ roof, on a clear or cloudy day, bryce , unable to see forever, could see that first house in West SLC. He could turn to see in all directions with a joy stick-he also could input the day and time
to change the weather or time,
anyone not miserably Jet fatigues could just push the big button labled in a cornicopea of Tongues push here to see local time and weather.
He could see from any interior skylight or East facing windows, the view from the roof observation deck. to the NorthWest, his great second grade school.
the second place where he learned that he was a two eyes egg head to the other kids, but nobody cared there, they made him the great Brain.
He knew everything they were teaching at his West SLC gradeschool kindergarden the teacher wouldn’t let him bring books to school, or even his brother sam, eiven though Sam was a first Grader. SHe told them to shut up and play dumb,or made them sit in the dunce corner and read into a tape recorder.
Now it was his wife and children who said he was too smart to be truly useful. he had married into the vast lebaron kindred with in he had more poor relations than he could count. when he traveled they took it personally, as though plastic wasn’t real money like the money in return for their stock.
they were paid for stock and extra hay in a good year, for the pine nuts that sold for 2.00 a pound.
they could only gnaw at the hand that fed them, risking their access to the grocery only in Reams plastic which his wife and children used liberally to feed his wife and children’s vast impoverished kindred.
Neither was the balance on their sCMI account which his kids used liberally ever much below his credit ceiling. He felt like he was running a private welfare system. His family was boycotting deseret Industries label cash for which most of the poor cousins qualified, so Bryce gave the brethren a talli by age and church status and the brethren.
Kirk-- We must recognise that we are killers but that we need not kill today.” 8-19-4-
sci-fib 4 am
added the amount need to his pay. Karrinna kept trying to prevail upon their own girls to sew. they were all admirable seamstresses and his sed account always included fabric and Vogue patterns for formal dresses and bridal gowns.
Their taste in fabric was pricy. That was because their cousins could all sew but only sought out his girl’s help for formals and wedding gowns which they couldn’t fit properly or afford the fancy dressy materials needed to create the proper effect.

They also helped their multitude of poor Ranch cousins with their sewing in the summers and some could not afford fabric at all. Thet still cut down unworn portions of old dresses to make new ones and saved quilt peices.
These were Karinna’s talents, but it was far easier to put the girls up to a credit card call to sed--one without patriarchal sanction.
In his girls ward and high school home made clothes were definatly declasee’ and so were ranch cousins sent up North for school.
Bruce’s balance at sCMI, sion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, as the pioneers had called it never wavered. If he payed it twice a month, the girls maxed it out twice.

Bruce was about ready to go on a sed strike or make his kids get jobs. They moved in circles where jobs were declassè. And while he was flying out so much he was in a poor bargening position.
Bruce loved his girls and dreaded their anger. Not only this, but in this argument he felt himself in the wrong. His girls were sweet and generous and he had the money.
They got their canny bullheaddedness from him, Karrina complained as she had driven him to the airport after thei childen’s well coordinated rebellion. Why the big house, the new cars, the 5th Avenue look, if he was not trying to impress? Not her. Karina had been impressed 15 years before, when she had married, as it seemed to her, not an old fuddy-duddy but ultimate respectibility at an epicenter of the mainstream Church itself.
Bruce was man with money who would not take other wives, so he said and so he likewise had refrained. Karrinna had polig roots. She wanted them to stop showing, just as Bruce’s children tried, failing to hide theirs.

CHAPTER

As cloudy light sept into SLC International in robes of grey, Bruce heard the rustling silk of Jabreel’s robes, a hyperenergetic Muslim physician and researcher who headed the pre-conference conference delegation.
The post conference confreceers had driven down from Uncle Sam’s Uinta Enclave the night before hoping to get a fresh start minus their jet lag. BRUCE had left instructions with his computer to wake him a half hour before any announced ETD. He had woken on his own, rested, blushing at his nakedness between sheets whese Karina’s feral scent lingered.
Then he had pulled on his skivvies and had gone out in search of liquid, puting a fiver in the vending machine for a fifth of aspatamine spiked Gatorade.
He glimpsed, examined, then turned away from the knot of biotekkies bound, like him, for the San Francisco Genetic Bioengineering conference with its bio-ethical veneer.
He glimpsed not only the pricy and competant Jabreel, the pricey Mormon-Muslim of Bruce’s conversion with whom his uncle Sam had had many dealings. (Not the Uncle Sam, symbol of the Union, but jhis grandmother’s brother Samuel.)

Bruce’s own Uncle Samuel had, over the years, become, in and out of the family and home town, a living symbol of the nation whose name was used in humor to cover his actual personal name, and origins.

Bruce’s Uncle Samuel was truly everywhere and nowhere. He was talking now with his disused and diseased Aunt Kathleen’s friend Ginny. his body language and the bone crushing hug Uncle Samuel gave him indicated that did not mean to speak with her at any length in present company.
His was a simple political pit stop.Unfortunatly there was a bug in the thrusters that were supposed to protect the Hindenberg’s commuters from wind gusts on take off. Fog was not really the trouble, but the public, had no patience for detail.
Uncle Sam wanted the airport administrator to release the mail flight to SFO immediatly, but that Lord of uncertain weather was balking. Neither sleet nor rain nor snow could keep him from his appointed rounds--via truck to Bonneville and then to Sacto. Why not have the conference in Sacramento. Scenic it was not.
Bruce slipped back into his cell. Session two of the pre-conference was in full swing. Ginny had her father’s talent for weather watching and uncannily timed arrivals and departures.

With Ginny’s unexpected arrival, the unofficial pre-conference conference reached a quorum and the tech croud began to speak more seriously. they were in a sitting area shaped like a mushroom, with the door lined hall Bruce’s room led off forming the Mushroom’s stalk. Surrealist shards of conversation floated too him too blurred with distance that he could not tell who said what and what they said, each word coming seperatly and mmany not coming at all. The dreary, extreme complexity of the distorted conversation sent bruce, like a bunny floating to the bottom of a very large rabbit hole asleep as he rustled into the autumn leaves at its bottom. His dream was about Alice and Wndover, somehow, though Celeste, his daughter was a little overgrown now to play the pinafored role of Alice. Which they did in the dream. She was giving him a tour of Wonderland and Looking Glass land as though he had never heard of either place or the means of getting in and out of them. The means of getting to and from looking glass land were strange, like the mirror were odd. like stepping through a seemingly stationary flow of glass.

Then he came to an extraordinaty potrait of Einstein. Why it was jist rigt Celeste said, just too too right, just his height.
Bruce’s brother called him from tthe room just beyond the portrait, he said to just step on through. Since it was Leon’s UNbirthday, The day Bruce turned 60 while his Brother Samuel had not yet turned 61,
Bruce felt that everything was quite alright then and he stepped through the portrait just to find the same brother staring down at him.
“Happy birthday bro, slug a bed, hey, Uncle Sam’s got it set and we’re ready to make like birdies and fly.”
“I can handle it,” Bruce said cheering to the news.
“Not you, Birthday Bunny-bud,
“you’re grounded by fog, the airport’s socked in. Who could fly in this. Besides every pilot in the damb joint is dead on his ass asleep or in their , you know, with women.”
“ Hey,” Bruce said, “Karinna . . .”
“Actually my wife is a polig and far past caring what anyone thinks of her,”
“Fairly spoken, my brother and in defense of the fair.” Sam said. He tended to get Shakespearean off season.
“Anyway, the poorley though of Uncle Samuel wants to beat the gusts out of here. Just to set the proper example.”
The tiny room made him claustraphobic, being only suited for sleep. though he and Karinna had often used them for trysts .stopover at SLC, but not sufficient time to drive down to see the kids.
He would have liked the kids to meet him at his parents when he passed through, only a few minutes away. His mother, however, wanted visits to be confined to designated polig only days.

Karinna had had enough of Utahs polig only Jim Crow culture and tried, but failed, not to detest her mother in law, who felt that Karinna simply did not know her place, if she knew her place and accepted it, there would be no problem. Karinna’s family problems, as his mother called her family’s polygamy, just weren’t her problem.

Now if Karinna had agreed to have nothing to do with her polig relations and had courted Bryce’s family instead she would have been better accepted, but this was entirely out of question.
Emotionally, Bruce felt drawn and quartered by the tension, but not so much so as Karinna and the children.
His children were offended when he went to see his mother at all. Family reunions were out of the question. He hoped that their anger did not propel them into the Principal, though he was sure at least some of them would take that path less travelled upon.

xCHAPTER

His deceased Aunt’s chief mourner, Ginny, Kathleen’s Ginny, had taken a fast train East in from the coast, having inherited her weather prescience from her father, savvy about just who would be waiting that morning for the fog to thin and lift., stranded becayse of a preconference confererence up to Little Rock Ranch ending the day previous,
they had splept at the Uinta Getaway, and even now knew that their pleasant rooms were being sccrubbed, made up and sanitised. A group of them, as Ginny’s informant had predicted, had driven down to the airport, arriving just after Bryce had abruptly awakened.
Bruce had a picture of Ginny’s daughter, his own biological His Aunt once removed? A parthenogenisis in Ginny’s petrie dish which had been implanted implanted by her husband Ross, too old now to father a child during one of her conjugal visits at Leavenworth, at least between the sheets. Ross received a yearly conjugal furlough. Neither were young. They had opted for a visit in the unromantic Leavenworth lab, making their baby as best they could.

Both of Ginny’s children knew how they were conceived, they watched the process from high lab stools and had peered into his parents electron microscope--it simpler to explain than the mysteries of the marital bed.
Kathy’s older brother, both son and biological father of his biological mother had watcked the parthenogenisis from a high lab stool. Ginny had been studying Parthenogenisis in insects, this being the least controversial cloning techniques, the market brisk in well recommended clinics. Discretion and a gentility born of her Mama, always the one to know the proper thing to do at the proper time.
They had done a straight cloning of Ginny’s father’s DNA when they had made their son Ladd, but the two donor method reduced the considerable risk of genetic disease in a one donor cloning.
Bryce remembered bursting in upon his parents during Street Street to tell them about something Kermit the frog had done and finding them trying to make a baby. What they were doing was plain enough, but how could that make a baby?

His outraged dust bunnies, holding down the home front while Bryce did his Globetrotting. They still beleived that the Stork had brought them this being the sobrique of Bryce’s cousin Blaine, a medical bioengineer at the SLC genome project who ran a sort of geneological service, studying the DNA of California cousins of irradiated Utah ones.
It was kept a family secret, but yes, their mysterious Uncle Sam had had a ghostly hand in getting the Stork to bring them. Karinna’s most unfortunate Arisona Strip cousins had seen much death, disability and deformities. At a certain point a caregiving mother or aunt or cousin from an irradiated genome would say, as had Karinna, “Enough, the rest are coming from the Stork.
Uncle samuel was so like the stringy old man in the Army Recruitment commercials. He was the older of their Great Uncles and reigned as the Senior patriarch at the fourth and twenty forth, and the yearly reunion of his clan somewhere on home turf. Sometimes he’d even put on his Uncle Sam westcoat and top hat.

Brigham young had chosen his people and their homeland well--there was still room for expansion in the barren wastes the press portrayed as barren--their lovely green jewel of a sion.
Grandpa What’s His Name had apparently thought to clone himself before he croaked. A neighboring officer received frequent visits from the clone, young Kathleen’s ten year old brother Ladd.
On the day of Kathy’s birth, the ancient fellow officer noticed that the place was swarming with FBI. He called Uncle Sam on a secured link.
Daddy Ross was allowed to cut the umbilicus, see that the baby’s passages were open and then they read Lad’s Daddy Ross his writes. Ginny and the baby had slipped out of the room. the agents swarmed over it, photo bulbs flashing, agents barking orders.
Ladd said it was like on the X files, but as much as he wanted tocouldn’t stick around. His job, according to the contingency plan, was to get the baby out before it started to cry. He was their one chance. No body was looking for a small boy with a pet carrier.
THE PROMISED WIND storm had taken itselfwell to the north of slc, leaving Salt lake International in a clotted mass of white fuss which suited bruce’s fussy state of mind almost furry state of mind.

CHAPTER
The airport sleeping arrangement was, for Linda, a jewel of maudlin hippocracy and tragedy. Bruce was welcome in his parents house, but as to.... the others, there were certain rules, conditions which Karina’s family needed to adhere to out of politeness.
Eating crow, Karinna’s father called Linda's rules, refering to Jim, and the black from white segregation that was struck down in the mid 19th Century.

Bruce’s mother Linda sincerely felt she could “help” Karinna if she could just get to “know” her. She emitted this tragi-comic subject whenever her polig son visited.

She boo-hooed and pouted with the regularity of a water clock “It ain’t going to work Ma, it really, really ain’t.” Sam would sing softly as though his voice were coming from offstage. The Brother thus used the Ander's airport time share though Bruce’s mother was only 5 minutes away.
Yea, it was for this purpose Karinna’s father signed on to the plan initially. The avian patriarch insisted that it was not Bruce’s irrevocable fate to be plagued by a shrew. He could not stand by and see his son in law fall victim to an ungoverned tongue.
Karinna’s Dad primarily used the 3/4 bed for conjugal time with Karinna’s mother on quick fly bys, thus avoiding the commute that cut deeply into their private time together. Bruce treasured his first wife, Karinna, and his first surviving child, Celeste. It was after the death of their first child from Leukemia.
That the Brethren made good on their threat to send them both on Bryce's second mission to Egypt's allowed them an ingress into a high dream,Mormon Rosecrution Visitor's Center
a tourist draw next to a pyramidal Temple dwarfed by their Museum and Visitor’sCenter--Sam knew of a few Airplane Graveyards so remote that only the nomads knew much about them. They
were places of death for man, woman, child and beast.

CHAPTER

Karina's baby bloated body was a momento of their early sweet times. They lived in a cottage at Aunt Annies’ back Ranch, until their first baby came and failed to thrive.
Their Mexican honeymoon shone upon them there both Bruce himself and Grandpa LeBaron had Annie Anders LeBaron as an Ander cousin. At Annie’s they had lived out months of blest seclusion waiting for the coming of the Death of their child.
Bruce and Sam built the honeymoon house at Karrina's Aunt Annies'--out beyond the houses, milk cow clover patch and orchards.
Their pod at SLCI harked back to those times because he had loaded it into the pod’s fiber optic walls. Bruce had spentmuch of their honeymoon taking pictures.He could bring up the files and the musiche'd put on sound track and far awaycrickets and croaking frog would drownd out the airport Institutional noised, and the squealing children in the rec center above.When Bruce’S Father had a fly by with minimum allowable rest time at SLCI, Karinna arranged to meet Them.
Their younger kids raced around the rec space, forbidden to recognise their Gramps in public. Brother Le Baron, as Bruce called him, and Brother Le Baron’s third wife Ramona had the best deal, she and the pater family shared a free pilot's room at the Stateline Casino in Salt City.
Ramona was, at 36, Karina's father's last always- trying-to-make-a-baby-wife. Brother Le baron liked best to rendevous with Bruce for indulgence in
guy-stuff recreations and he and Ramona got to chat with their old remote learning high school friends.

They really preferred to fly out of Salt City, i.e Bonneville. After Ramona, Brother Le Baron, disinterested in rearing as great a progeny unto sion as all that claimed Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation as explanation for the noisy rampages of his mortal seed.
His reward for wise stewardship over his herds, flocks, fields, his hired hands, his family. Heaven had challenged him with a hard working life. He prayed for the wisdom to be a good shepherd to each in his care.
The family's family campground, former pasturage was high in the mountain circs
of the deep Crick pasturage. Even there they had to work, because Karina had to work. Her paper was called “Species Identification and habitat regeneration in the Deep Creek range.“

CHAPTER, WENDOVER BILL

Wendover's almost elderly Dead Heads, its one time dopers and coke freaks, unmarriable in Kathleen's day, still owned and ran the twin Wendovers of Utah and Nevada, East and West. Canny as always they rendered free rooms to commercial pilots for any purpose they liked.

The canny clique of Aunt Kathleen’s vintage encouraged the cashing in of SLC Rec Center credits for poker chips since way long before the Harmony Mental Heath group began to run the Airport facility. As a Mental Health project, it had been modeled on Harmony’s popular 800 dollars for life Salt Lake longitudinal pilot project.
The Anders family to which Bruce appertained had been on line with Harmony since its inception in the mid nineties. Bruce was but a beardless pilot and they went to visit Aunt Kathleen so no one could blame his Mother because they’d never met his Aunt. And then they could only stay one night because
their mother had, just had to see the
Sea Lion Cave, The Columbia Gorge,
the Redwoods...

CHAPTER iii.

The light, intruded white, blue and violet
into Bruce’s dream. It seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath as he hit
the snoose on Kerry, the Goth's Vintage Heavy Metal. Die for the government . . .Karina's voice floated about the room.
Die for the Government . . .

Dreaming still he was again small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny-dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his own toddler sise, so in his dream she was a toddler too,that he wanted his Greatest Gramma to be alive again.

Bruce and Celeste huddled at her funeral and decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay still and icy in her coffin,up. They began to baul on a count of three. Bruce was three. Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took he and Celeste into his long arms.

Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change Bruce's soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms and went to find his grandma.Instead,Aunt Taffy kneeled
down and asked if anyone had changed
his night diaper yet.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious more than pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally. “Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked over innocently when the doctor mentioned something to her.

Their home town, pretentiously named after the star closest to the realm of Deity,Kolob, had changed as the reigning generations shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural mule skinning halfbreed wives, and the dregs of England.
These,given a chance to reboot in a hill studded grassy land where each could have house, pasture, garden and field.

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal Uncle, Air Force Samuel, as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--a virtual Ulysses preserved with his kindred immortals Athena and Mentor. Linda beleived God himself had preserved Samuel for the sake of his righteousness.

Uncle Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live beyond the age of a tree. He had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age the gnarled old man time, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.

Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s Generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.

Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world. Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna.

Karrina prefered no converts and no change. She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right . Brucey thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart.
One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to conform to Karrina's Ways--just to make his family happy and to retreat from a complexity that was ever expanding to a straightforward and accustomed more simple world.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him even as a boy. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle.

He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five and his reactivation was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.
True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen.
Even, Sam and Samuel in who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister? He finally had asked Ginny, who he sometimes encountered, if she could take her.
“We moved so much in those years,“She said, “I and the girls were at school. I got a job near them. Now their children are grown...“

Could his Aunt Kathleen’s fell fate fall upon the good in heart, the most righteous among them? Linda had not marveled.
In his dream he made a very cogent argument for the offensive notion that power was not righteousness. It was not possible to broach the subject of his Aunt without putting Linda or Linda’s mother into near hysteria followed by a long snit. These disturbances were all Bruce’s younger cousins ever knew of his Aunt.
They knew more about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ,

Bruce’s oldest girl Celeste had complained while they were opening presents just the every Christmas,
Celeste had asked whether his Aunt Kathleen was alive whether she could presents or maybe come for all of Chistmas. Bruce had said he might have included her earlier, but what did he know, he and Sam were just goof offs.
Even when it meant including his Karinna, yielding their long snuggles, parting from the still fertile womb from which Bruce anticipated such happiness. He wanted to settle the matter of Orson Pratt's early purchases in Egypt.
Uncle Samuel had wrestled the Church's share of the parcel from its archivists via He wanted to settle the matter and settle Karinna into his life. Then they would see about the old people, including his Aunt.
When he visited the Florida address Uncle Samuel scribbled for him on his way to Egypt, he found a young mother with children.
They played with their Alphabet Soup together and had a frosen Pissa light and gooey and lighly browned, The girl threw him a blanket and he slept late on their parlor
couch and walked on their white sand.The youngest boy, one of four or so, Ladd, was loquatious about his fallen Aunt Kathleen. She had died almost a year earlier.

His mother and grandmother said nothing, but the precocious Ladd was an onsite reporter spilling his misery into a special report just before the main news came on.
Formerly when Kathleen's uncle Samuel hiked up the bluff to the big white housewhere his energy extruded niece wrote--writing with sore hands that didn't hurt any more than anywhere else. The boy grieved for his Cassie as Bruce had once done when his mother cut him off from his good old Aunt Taff, when he was old
enough to read the last books and to singwith the last tapes that his mother sent through to Bruce and his brother Sam.

Now Bruce could write the Brethren that
he was free to marry when they deemed his mission to Egypt complete. They had pumped him for romantic detail when he confessed his affair of the heart. He hadnothing to say in his own defense. The Lord in his tender mercy deemed it time.
“It just happened, that's how it was for me,“one of the Brethryn had said, during the emotional fuss over the mere possibility that there could be a Karinna to be suceeded by the Leukeimic infant who preceeded his pretty little Celeste.
When Celeste was established, one of the Senior Bretheryn minded in his sleep that the church still had a bit of land which it maintained near the great Pyramids which the Rosacrutions maintained for a penny a year.
Upon it was an unassumig museum that the Church already partly owned, The Rosacrutions payed for its indeterminate lease of archival space and a basemented formal archive for a gross annual payment of 5 dollars and 2 cents per month.

The Church’s montly retainer seemed sufficient at the time the land was purchased from an impoverished elderly physician of undetermined confession.
Bruce’s great Uncle Sam pondered something the old patriarch his father had told him about the matter. He first had investigated the Orson Pratt purchase during the Carter Administration.
The old gentleman whose assistant he was that day said that his failing energies were insufficient to accomplish a wondrous work in the land of Mary and Joseph’s exile as he had long dreamed, Such active dreams must go to younger men now. Though not young he had promised to yeild the Church to the interregnium which would choose a new prophet. He had considered the propsition carefully--He would yeild his position at 110. The precidency and quorem of seventy should not be able to buy themselves power with lucre. The Lord would not want it.
The over-survival of a unpopular or politically extremist member of the reigning body could hold the church hostage, for centuries, hypotheticly, separating the unenthused from the Church Permanently. Presidnt Hinkly had brought the world church into the new mellenium. A WWII Reporter for the office of war Iformation, he had held the church together with his talented magnatism.
It could have as easily been held in thrall by another Esra Taft Benson, for how long? There seemed to be no theoretical end to future arrests of the aging process.
Somewherethe Prophet was restling uneasily in his unknown grave. The trend favored an intergnium after 100 years.
A chill in the room gave Bruce goose bumps as the Patriarch gased,as it seemed, past his mind into his heart and soul. Pancho Villa, leader of the Mexican Revolution, however he had sheltered the Saints, had left, by their expulsion, a deep schism in the Church when he asked them to return to safety in the North.

They had thought it best to evacuate before the expropriation of the Mexican railroad,
before roving bands went marauding after the bulk of the revolutionaries had gone on home.

CHAPTER
CHAPTER

In Bruce’s time, DNA, RNA and mitrochondrial treatments for factors related to aging were controversial everywhere. Aging, once beleived to be inevitable, had been broken down into it’s root degenerative processes.
Bruce offered himself and his wife for any available trials. At first Karinna resisted, considering the injection a form of vanity thought vain to her fundamentalist family.
Bruce convinced her that the treatments would sheild herself from the isotopic- accelerated maladies of the radiation her downwind parents had passed to their children. Karina, one of her elder sisters had died the death. They had room for
the traditional sickbed in the kitchen,
Grammy had kept her there during through icy winter days moving the big table so that she could see the garden. In the summer she moved the bed to the screen porch or outside under a net beneath a tree where peas were shucked and apples pared.
Her husband and sister wives brought the children to race around and were her comfort and her husband comforted her in rightousness, knowing that she lay listening for his car.
*

She had always loved to draw and took the art up in great fervor when it became clear that there was little else she could do in the world a comprehension that came in one miserable blow after another. Her husband’ first two wives went to have their tubes tied the day they wheeled her into her childhood room .

*

Bruce faulted himself for not spending more time with Karina’s family. He had presented at too too many education weeks and too made it to few of his required pilot support group meetings. He didnt want to go because he thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old same old off as somrthing new and menacing.

He whispered into his PDA to mention his reticence to attend his session with the family therapist. The children played easily if noisally together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors.
They didn’t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the caregiver said something nasty.

CHAPTER

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie and Maggies children when they were up North for school .

The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her do it and she needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t ne able to feed her kids. She came around the desk and knelt by the girls. “I’m sorry, she said and pulled them to her. You can’t imagine how sorry I am.’
Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that had happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions, and how it turned their Father of many great, great, great Grandfather and the bad things he did, so her Great-Grandmother took the business to Brigham Young. He said that if that’s what she wanted, he could give her a divorce and send her where he’d hardly be able to find her.
Karina thought it a good week if she didnt have to call the police on them twice. Then he’d go about how . . . or somebody said this or that about one or another of them. He’d stop only if one of his kid’s ratted on the other. Then they’d reealy hate . Their Mother said that was called divide and conquer.
At the Y Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she even had poligs in her Sociology class.
That was a serious matter with the academics, even the ones who were strongly anti-polig because it was because it was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that mention of the practice was very bad because the Founding Fathers forbade anything but equality. The Government was not to say anything about how people practiced their reliion.
When she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them. It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.

The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephews to play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony. A church clerk at his home ward Bruce was a chronic Sabbath Breaker. He had to bow out almost every Sunday.

He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures. Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSWS. Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better, If the people wanted to see one of their own denomination, the better quality ofcounseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce. Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile or Churchgoing Mormon without polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet. Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and School aged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were clenched and chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out.
Glinda shrugged, “Then don’t , what ever it is.“
Karinna’s office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said. Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl whose mother had two sister wives who ran thir farm togther. They were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were nicer.

Some of the teachers didn’t know they had polygamous students let alone colleagues. They decided to have a question and answer brown bagger, then decide what to do about the offensive leaflet.
The kids demanded to stay. Kerry said they should go on strike--then the state wouldn’t get their school money. There were lots of kids whose families were poligs and lots of lots of polig teachers. Her little Livvy yelled at the principal that she was a bigot. The principal was impressed. “And you know what that means?” she asked,
She smiled at Livvy, blithe as a viper, “I don’t favor bigotry.”she said, “in my school or anywhere.”
“But Mrs. Larson . . .”
“The letter isn’t about Mrs. Larson.”
“Mrs Larson has been here 30 years.*
Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of Glinda, once a Mormon, girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins, passed the upside down Livvy the pamphlet.
Kerry, known in sixth grade as the Goth said someone should read it outloud so his girlfriend, fair, as the goth referred to their bad goth. likewise a Goth, picked it up and began. Kerry said he figured that there was only one of the Staff who was certainly make problems.
“You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE” as the children ever afterwards called Kerry and Andrea’s sixth grade teacher. Mrs Andrewson took the pamplet and read just parts of the remainder ofit.
“ I don’t know why you need to worry yourself about it.” she said with false innocence.
“I know,” Kerry said with a cold, smooth, and bitter inference that brought bile into Karinna’s throat. “We’re kids. Kids don’t get married, not in polygamy, not in monogamy.”
His Mother favored Kerry’s notion of a strike. She’d go before she’d have them involved in a witch hunt. She’d said she’d send them to the Mexican Monks and Nun’s if she had to. They, at least, cared about the moral education of their pupils.
‘’Mrs Andrew hooted. “Our Goth in parochial schooll?”
Kerry glared in scilence. Kerry liked the Monks. He taught the boys how to build satillite dishes. They’d made more and he and his friends into the sattilite dish business. The school owned the ones they made at school, but let them use the shop after hours.
They were a Chinese order who had immigrated to Annie’s Chinese settlement while there were many children there,at the turn of the Century. Mrs. Larsen disliked Kerry not only because he had Karinna’s Aunt Annie’s eyes.
When the machiladora’s and opium businesses became endemic, more families spread out. Colonia Juares, Kerry’s father had said, had become a vice ridden sewer, bought land in Sinaloa and married his hard working Annie. He hired hands to put the land into Alfalfa production and rear stock. Annie’s older sister had married into a family that ran an herbal store and Grammy Le Baron asked her young nephews to go down and help Annie start an herbal truck farm. Mommy Karinna could teach them Botany. The Monks and Nuns from China again paused in their Contemplations to teach fleeing young Northerners.

CHAPTER ORGANIZE

Kerry and Andrea began their strike by walking out of the School followed by Lizzie. She struggled out of her mother’s arms to add her proud back to the procession. Unlike Grammy Le Baron’s tribe and Ramona and her sister’s chreches, Annie’s Children were in the states on Scholastic visas.
As Kerry, the Goth, left with his girl-friend, whose hair was half orange and half green, Kerry’s put in wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. She, the G., marched down the ramp that came down from the door of the school with Karina behind her. “What ever anyone thinks, Karina Le Baron, I say good riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.
I can have Kerry deported as a truent, and you know that if . . .” Saying that was a mistake.
‘‘Maybe,” Kerry’s girlfriend said. ‘If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly,” Andrea said in a whispered, penetrating sneer. Karinna looked at her still retreating brother helplessly. She went after them her officemate close behind her. Karina was crying. Glinda took her into what the Gentile wrote up as a Lesbian display. Kerry and Andreara turned the Lesbian display into what she might have instead called it a group display of emotion.

Kerry wondered what his favorite Monk would say about it when he went home for the summer. Wise beyond his years, which were many. and Kerry had been the first of his boys in some years to be interested in Chinese poetry and calligraphy.
Annie worked Kerry hard, too hard some said, sometimes. It was not Kerry’s destiny to be a rancher. Kerry liked being a Goth, but thought American Schools a joke. Karinna took him to BYU with her where she had prevailed upon a Chinese undergraduate to continue Kerry’s lessons in traditional Caligraphy. Kerry was a poet, a sixth grade poet,

Idiograms flapped about the room in Daddy Bruce Bunny’s dream. He combed Celeste’s long thick tow hair for braiding and Chinese idiograms came away in his comb. He started awake and breathed the quick air in its brightening, Brightening air set the rising dream into his memory.

CHAPTER

Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

CHAPTER

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter,
so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds. Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.

at 50. He didn?t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss their dad, alot and off and on. the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given for the cleanup. Then he and the boys wearing Dexterity.com moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen protested to Ginny?s dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.

He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.
Chaper two
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC.
His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, ??I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.?? But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further ouicken her soul. She
died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.
He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq.

Bruce loaded on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of crude Mustard gas. Then he started showing films of Babys--Alexande Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people. Networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget went to forget, we forget. He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden and his hairtrigger opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thoughthere was some connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina?s youngest brother came in and said ?? Daddy, there?s an atom Bomb in New York. There could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose. The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore.
Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.

His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.
Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen. Each battle was a treasure trove for historical vulures like Bruce who could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle--
it could all be done in the lab.
the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground.

CHAPTER

The full moon rode high above the skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. it illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam?s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, The delay at the airport now. His computer?s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.
She came off a little to his left politically, and she said he never wanted to hear the news that mattered. She did work hard and she took up little space and needed less. That allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone.
Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston.
He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening. There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house to deal with alone. It so easily led to full rebellion among the troops.
Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and let his studious, soft Karina follow. If they got riled up just at bedtime, Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep .
So Daddy Bruce Bunny hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . .
Burns, he thought but he was unsure. Bruce did not like uncertainty. The best plans of mice and men often go awry and so he left the house stealthily, like a theif, and so his girl livvy accused him of being all the time. He stole himself away from them.

He put on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months.
He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no historical reference.

When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.
He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, fading as time passed them both by.
The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a aguard at buckingham palace. He wanted to ask her who did her hair. It looked sprayed in with plastic. She had worn the same hairdo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college.
Thee children played easily together at the , whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors. They didn’t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the homework teachers said something.

(Chapter)
Fear of flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna’s Aunt Annie’s children they were up North for school and so their welfare was in part, under the jurisiction.
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. Mrs. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in
her family. That made them
mad--they had a gentile neigbor who lived in a big house
and screamed at his wife and children and he was even a kind of shrink oner to the Mental
Hopital. Karinna thought a good week if she didn?t have to call the police twice.
She even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was easier. The prof. didn?t dare say a word about polygamy. IF she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GOW-ULDS. Snakes in their heads.
It was not Gou-ulds, but a pack of cacking crows , his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.
The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker?s area could provide some rooms to flight stewars-- the pilots area was much nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, glass walls bonded carbon with painted superglue to bond the layers.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna’s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was church clerk at his home ward which he had to bow out of every Sunday to make time for his demanding therapist.
The individual and family counseling went against his nature, but Karinna?s maiden name, Le Baron, which she insisted on using, was like a red flag to a bull to the state social workers. They didn’t care where, but they wanted her dependnts in state funded counseling somewhere.
Karrina’s school’s counselor let her read the material that printed by the state, on working gentli with polygamist family ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out or tidied their desk she put together a search party. her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--I won?t, I cant, I wont,I can?t. Her office mate skimmed the booklet--Then don?t.
Her office was a dyke and fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kiss was much nicer. They went to the supe and she said they should be considered assets not liabilities and asked them to have a question and answer brownbagger. I ... Karinna said, startled, will do it if I can bring ALL my children.
The Talk went well though she feared having to head for the John. Karinna was trying to send the Supe to the smoking wing.
Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. Karinna threw her over one shoulder.
??You certainly know the practice is illegal . . . ?? One of the counselors said.
THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her tried something else out of the leaflet,
??I?ll be back as soon as I can-Karinna said, try to stay in one piece.?

CHAPTER
She could have strangled her Goth ?We shall certainly wait.
He turned aside and put wax teeth in they kept from Haolloweens past--she had made 20 costumns, sitting with her girls sewing and double stitching on an auntique singer.
Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys. Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain. Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds. The training films used dogs in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce still subbed out to the ROTC class at his alma mater. He got no darned credits when he cut his film out at the darkroom at his High School instead of at the perfectly good one at the rec center. He could use the big Liveboard there at the High. It was not for distribution, simply for the kids left behind with the superfund clean-up to manage. It had been believed and purported that the Chemicals were relativly harmless, but no one did now. It was just the only dance in town
and Bruce’s town, nonetheless. Bruce did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump. Even if they weren’t supposed to be involved in procreation at thier age, that had never stopped any kid he knew from tampering with the fountains of Life.
Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe-- patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--apples who no fall too far from the tree. Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out. at 50. He didn’t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss their dad, alot and off and on. the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples. He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given for the cleanup.
Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen Protested to Ginny?s dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.
He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.

Chaper
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC. His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, ‘I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.” But the sprit of his baby failed to further ouicken her soul. He died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.

He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq
Then he load on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas.

Then he started showing films of Babys--AlexandeR Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people. networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget. He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden blaming instead Laaden hairtrigger, presidential opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thought there was some connection. Karrina’s youngest brother came in and said Daddy Bruce, there;s an atom Bomb in New York. That woke him up. He flew down the stairs pulling on robe over his gament. there could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose. The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine clay dirt had sept into every pore.
Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.
His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.

Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen.
Each battle was a treasure trove . Buruce could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle-- it could all be done in the lab. The slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground ground.

Chapter
The full moon rode high above The skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. Preparing day, the moon, preparing to sink, illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, H e found the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, The delay at the airport now. His computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.

She came off a little to his left politically, and she said he never wanted to hear the news that mattered. She did work hard and she took up little space and needed less. That allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone.
Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston. He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening Hell being paved with good intention, as his Grandma Ander’s.
There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house to deal with alone. It so easily led to full rebellion.

Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and his soft Karinna. Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep if they got riled up just at bedtime.
So he hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure. he did not like being unsure.

The best plans of mice and men often go awry and so he left the house stealthily, like a theif, and so his girl Livvy accused him of being a theif. He stole himself away from them. He put on the gadgets thr idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months.

He ought to work out on the Butch machine which barked orders at him almost daly. It was like playing. the Grande old Duke of York, tesing Bryce’s except that the machine made no historical reference. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.
He made up for his lack of coordination by learning to show. He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, fading as time passed them both by.
The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a aguard at buckingham palace.
He wanted to ask her who did her hair. It looked sprayed in with plastic. She had worn the same hairdo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college. The fitness center paid-- fewer downed planes, more coherent, better oriented and more alert pilots-- the P.R. gave the passengers confidence in the institution of commercial air travel.
Rosacrutions had been burying people on the Pratt parcel centuries before Orson Pratt was born near to the dawn of the 19th Century. Orson purchased Land for the Church at a handsome sum for the times . He would have bought a larger parcel but Orson’s partners were unhappy about the exhumations neccessary to putting in a foundation.

In Utah exumations were common as pond water. Bruce’s Mormon-Danish stock held the arrangement of their people underground to fuel light conversation, and long posthumus inquests.

Bruce’s grandmother had gathered slides and intel during fact finding missions to the formerly contested province of Slesvig Holstein. In Linda’s twice great grandmother’s Country of birth, they cleaned the bones of their long dead and reused, if possible, refurbished ornate family funeral coffins.

Bruce’s first call was quietly diplomatic.
He had had his call before he was assigned a companion. Actually, Bruce had infiltrated the Rosacrutions early on. Their required reading was on a junior high level--New Eraease. That was the age at which young people interested themselves in their family practice,
The English multiligual blog had more bite to it and Bruce had signed on as an encription specialist. He’d found a leather briefcase of monographs in his recently dead Aunt

Kathleen’s shady garret on California’s Russian River, at first unaware that reading of the material was proscribed to non-members. He was more intrigued than intimidated by artifacts intimidated by curses.
The brethren had intermittantly sought access to certain papers archived by the Society of ardent Egyptologists. They claimed they didn’t horse swap with anyone.

Bruce suspected that either the church had something they wanted or they were holding out for bigger bucks. It had been his Aunt Kathleen’s hypothesis that Joseph Smith’s had a Rosecrution ancestor, at the least. includeding one or more Rosecrutions.

BOOK THREE--CHAPTER
In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.
Uncle Sam flew Bruce’s mother and grandmother to Egypt and rented them a guest house near the digs.
His mother spent hours while his Grandmother had separated careful shovelfulls of dirt from fragments of artifacts.
Celeste and Livvy were born beneath that skylight, Karinna wanted her cousin, a midwife, from home.Uncle Samuel obliged her, since he was going that way anyway.
She was as unwilling to have Rigel in the Salt Lake Birth center. She , her mother, her Aunt Annie and her Aunt Ramona had instead gathered to oversee the ministrations of a Provo midwife while their kids goofed off and listened to their sister, Kary as the called her, screamed her heart out.
The venerable midwife was 70 and wore the long, full calico dress still worn among their people when in privacy. The calico was as neccesay to Karinna’s peace of mind as a doctor’s white coat to one of the more medical pursuation.

The midwife changed into it out of her street clothes. A doctor of their people was on alert He had hospital priveledges in Salt Lake in the unlikely event that an admission was neccessary.
In Egypt the girls had shared the single bedroom apartment with their parents. Celeste was born early in the mission and Livvy in its third year.

Bruce’s mother’s bitterness came to a head when they went home she and his sisters were invited to Rigel’s birthing--the beginning of the end. His sisters brought their children and grandchildren and there was even a bit of yelling about it.
The kids said they all had poligs in their schools, so what was the big diff. These were fascinated and entertained, one might even say enthralled by Karrinna’s family.
His sister D. took a vacation down to Karinna’s Aunt said it was like a time machine and that it was as close to a visit to her great-grandmother’s house as her girls would ever have. His sister A. argued that it would be rude to leave when the baby’s head was about to crown.

Rigel was born just as his grandmother sped away in her sporty little car and the rest of Bruce’s female relatives including the babes in arms got to see Rigel spurt into the world. They even named him because he looked liked the Rigel in Farscape. Bruce couldn’t guess how long his mother’s tiff would Last.

At first he supposed his mother didn’t want to have to say that she was there when Ri was born. It lasted. Karinna and Bruce’s sisters were happy, they had missed the Egyptian births of their brother’s first two children.

No one could display righteous fury as well as his mother. D. had tipped Bruce off and he had sent Karinnna and the girls off to their Grandma Lebaron’s after they opened the bulk of their presents at home on Christmas morning, just minutes before his sanctimoniouss mother arrived.

Bruce went home alone with his family matriarch to their family’s Christmas dinner. Bruce seethed through the buffet his father’s silent, blood running in his vein.
That was the only thing that could pierce his mother’s sense of bigotry as family honor, Rigel’s birthting was the first family gathering after Bruce and Karinna spoke in Church about their adventures in Egypt--their blissful connubial mission and the grim prospects of the Church’s expansion in the Middle East.
The majority of saints in the region were Mormon wives married to Muslim or Jewish students. These found the Mormon girls presentable. They did have to convert to Judaism or Islam, but were left to attend church unless their families were very orthodox.
Most of the hyphenated Saints lived outside the region. There were third generation Mormon Jews in Israel who spoke only Hebrew--when their mothers had converted they had burned all bridges behind them in favor of Israeli citisenship for their children. The Christmas exclusion of his family made Bruce and his sisters miserable and they finally got this through their mother’s head. Their mother said that was fine,
In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.

ii.
Youth had, for the last decade, become a commodity reserved for rich men who had lived repugnant lives. Grandpa What’s his name doubted the efficacy, for his generation, of penitence.

The morning, in Bruce’s dream, seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath. Dreaming still he remained small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his sise , in his dream a toddler, that he wanted his Great Grandma to be alive again.
They decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay in her coffin, up. Bruce came just to Celeste’s shoulder. They began to baul on a count of three. Celeste knew three because she was three.
Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took him and Celeste into his arms. Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change his soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms
and went to find his grandma.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious and pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally.
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked when the doctor said something to her.
Their town, pretentiously named after the star Kolob, had changed much as the reigning generation shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural muleskinning halfbreed wives.

CHAPTER

Bruce woke again, this time with a sting of guilt at having precipitated the children’s tebellion yhe night brfore. There was the scurrying pf small feet as first Livvy, then Celeste took up strategic positions in their parents big bed.

Then Karinna came with her nocturnal reading light and computer. Rigel sucked lustily, each slurp and glurp rippling down though his little body and legs.

He was sorry about his complicity in what he expected to find when he rose--boobytraps and good natured vandelism. There had been a sweet smell of sugar and cherries, cande at their granny’s the summer before.

At issue was his lackluster showing at his required pilot support group meetings . He was dissaponting his young, who were running neck to neck with two other families for participitaton, and that was only from cheating.

The rules said that ponts earned by a child’s natural parent could not be kept out of the contest even if they were foster kids or in jail or whatever--but the feds were putting the squeese on the state to turn over more of polygamist families to stand for all the rest. They didn’t want part polig families like theirs on the big screen.

They were mostly safe because they had money and their Daddy had a secret job for the church.

Uncle Bruce wasn’t a polig, only their grandpa and some of their aunts and uncles on their mommy’s side were. The rest wern’t old enough. Their granny was, but she was their only Grammy who was, Celeste and Livvy what her house looked like, and wished she liked them. Lots of polig kids had one or more Grannies in the church and cousins and all.

Karinna had one foot in and one out, and Celeste figured she did too, because they went to church at the farm, just tneir Granny’s family.
They sang from old church books instead of the new one that didn’t have even Come, Come ye Saints in it or All Creatures of Our God and King.
They said that the King was the King of England and they wanted to encourage young Church Composers. But what about Lead Kindly Light? They didn’t have Israel, Israel God is calling, calling thee from Lands of Woe.Babylon the Great is falling . . . Well people stopped singing that because of Iraq. Daddy said that the Israeli’s got so mean because the Nasi’s scared them so bad.That’s why all their people went down to be hente, camposinos, rancheros and vacaros.
Rigel and Livvy still went to church with Bruce and his family and his mommy some, but that was because their Grandma Anders was afraid Bruce wouldn’t go to Church oltherwise. Celeste was just too cheeky for her, but could be bribed, sometimes, with a new dress. Celeste got Livvy to tell her everything Grandma said or did and if she didn’t like it, well, that would be what Celeste would say when her Grandma asked the next time.
Once her Grandmother said Celeste was too smartand too smart, like Aunt Kathleen and they’d mend their ways if they could just see how their Great Aunt. She had a grudge against Aunt Kathleen-their Daddy’s Aunt that had followed their Daddy’s Aunt right into the grave. Their grandma never got the last word when his Aunt was alive, and when she was dead, well then she cpuld have the last word for the rest of their lives.
Aunt Kathleen hadn’t even died right for her sister. Aunt Kathleen wanted to die in her own bed, when she died so to make sure, she was living with her friend who was a nurse and had a Masters in Biotechnology. She had a lab at home and if you wanted she could make a slide a show you what was going on. Bunny Bruce kmew all about looking down microscopes. Thats what his Daddy’s kids did in the war.
Only Bruce had been to see his Aunt. It was so he and his brother Sam couldn’t say they’d never been to see their Aunt as his mother loudly pronounced.
He had met Kathleen’s friend Ginny at a Conference in Florida and it was so close to their house that Ginny dragged him home with her to see his Aunt and to stay in the room Ginny’s kids and Grandkids used when she was home. Her determination was funny.which was funny-perculiar. She was small and old but energetic--like an actress made up to look old. It was a big house and Kathleen and her father had a little boy named Ladd playing around their feet. But the baby, Ginny said, was her father’s clone.

He didn’t do cloning--and the bit of his mother in him kept him from going back. He didn’t hear about the interference of his mother through Kathleen’s Florida Ward. She got a cardiac infection and an Encephalitus that creamed her heart rythums. It seised up on her and she died. His mother claimed to have just gotten there in time.
That got him right in the stomach. He didn’t know but what his mother beleived it.His mother didn’t want anyone to say that she’d died among strangers, cast out by her own.
Bruce’s Grandpa said that at the first whiff of a witch hunt for poligs the whole kit and caboodle of his kids and Bruce’s too were going to be very hard to find. They didn’t need to bring all that down on them all over some silly game at the Airport. They were OK now, but he knew well that an election could swing the way og things the other way and all the data from the Airport could be used to put their Grandpa in jail. They might get dragged to the police just because of their last name. It was only their Le Baron Cousin’s six times removed who were notorious. They were the Le Baron’s who had been to the UN. They hadn’t been read their rights and that was against United States law--even if they were foreign nationals, Mexicans. He suspected his Uncle Sam had had a hand in it. Sam had a way of tipping his hand without leaving behind anything definate or repeatable.

They didn’t have to say who their Dad was as long as he kept putting their points into the secret computer box on the web. It had a dragon on it that took the points and swallowed them after it totaled the form their daddy filled out, then thre little dragons came out with a box. It said donations on it and it saved them in a blind account. The Dads could use any computer anywhere.
The older kids Dad put in lots of money and put money into their Granny’s farm. There was a little old house in some trees where their Granny and Gramps Le Baron stayed when he had sometime, or they drove out to the Sateline resort or all the way out past Wendover to where Ramona lived on her Indian Ranch land. It was real good range land and pretty as heaven, that’s what their Granny called it.
The Dads who didn’t want the program or would rather tangle with a rattlesnake could go on out to Bonnieville International, Pilots got to stay out at the Nevada side resort free. These were kept pristine by a stable and industrious Latino community where the Mexican poligs could just fit in if they wanted. No body asked questions if it was the same woman with the usual pilot. If it was the same lady with a lot of pilots then she had to show a Valid Nevada department of Health certificate if they got a room.
It was Mexican back labor that had made a Valhalla of the Pilot Mountain, an extinct Volcano. It worked out because their Aunt Ramona lived out that way, so every time they went to see Ramona’s family they got to drive right past their Grandma Anders house and Livvy got to stick out her tongue.
They liked to climb to the top of Pilot Mountain. And see the boxing they always had on Spanish TV. Wendover had a boxing ring, right outside the State Line [two words] Casino and inside they could get boxing lessons from the best Boxer from any country where they spoke Spanish--they all had to fight the local contender--the best boxer from Wendover.

When Kathleen worked there there was alot of fighting in the bar ‘till the Sherrif’’s grey Travelall would speed up. They had a real big steer of a sherrif with a real big silver star and a white cowboy hat that made him look seven and a half feet high. Most of the problem were petty. So unless the offenders looked ready to run he’d have them do yardwork--over to his house mostly, because he didn’t get paid that much and stateline towns like Wendover were in Utah with the brawling mostly on the Nevada side.
See Photo of Cowboy Bill

CHAPTER --COWBOY BILL

Bill Lacey had looked just like cowboy Bill who still flashed “this is the place.” He had an arm that pointed to where the old Stateline Casino used to be. It made fun of Brigham Young when he, in the grip of a fever, rose up on one arm and ponted at Casche Valley and said “this is the place, drive on.”
The place for what? Big Cowboy Bill still asked the thirsty motorist and his or her fussing kids en route to the pastures of plenty.

When the real Bill got there, during the depression, it was not much of a place for very many Cowboys and he didn’t like being around even Cowboys much because he didn’t like being around people . The first war where he had straffed the hell out of Dervishes,and Tulsa, and the Germans, even though he was half German and half British and all the way Cherokee and a Bat out of hell.
The place for what? There was a boys’ reformary that had kindly built a waterworks. having an unlimited supply of labor. And Bill got the idea of what the little ribbon of aerable ground alon the highway was the place for.
It was the first stop on the Highway West to the pastured of plenty where you could get something They wanted something cold to drink.
Bill got him some of that water, and some ice, getting the ice took a bit more doing.It was hard work, but it made people happy and that was something he hadn’t been since he’d come back from the war.

There was work in California and more than half of Utah was headed that way, and what they were was dry and their kids were thirsty and cranky--if they couldn’t afford a nickel for sugar water, then a place refill for a hemp waterbag was always appreciated.
The war came on and the traffic West went way up--that’s where the road went throuh that went to the where ship yards which needed building and after that shipyards and a whole
darn Navy. And distressed pilots flying east had, in the yarwning expanse of hard salt was the first good place for a survivable emergency landing in the whole damb desert. Bill had a big glass of ice tea for more than one old flyboy with a lump on his head.

When the airforce moved in he he made them ice tea. He could do better than that by then and all the time people were building things. It was hard to get wood down from the Mountain but they had a hell of a lot of old railroad ties. The rail traffic west was way up and they let the boys out of their reformatory to maintain the ties which the piled up in Wendover.
The he woke up to find out he was the Wendover Nuclear Reservation--he even got to meet up with most of his old war buddies, the chain of command was there and they’d cimbed up it by just hanging on and there they were staring into the leathered, scorched eyes of old
Cowboy Bill. His was the place where it was all happening. They even gave him his wings back and called him an engineer. He was an Engineer, just one who’d rather feed and give water people of every color and tribe than be dropping bombs on their heads and bullets in their hearts--that was all that was left in his.

He got himself a was goo for. He got the idea from some of the old He didnt want to go because he thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old for anything but the same old same old. Men went to war and came home with easily detectable seriological anomalies. The microbiology and immunology turned into the circulating blood sort like a street party--you knew there would be a party, usually, in his Ward, it was when the corn got ripe.
You knew that there would be people there, not Gorillas or Chimpansies. Strangers stoped their cars, drawn by the smell of barbecued fresh beef. Karinna’s steers fed on the succulent grasses of his wife’s mother’s lakeside farm.
That’s how the usual malady affected the usual Vetran. And the bug found itself a nice niche, whether it was coliform bacteria bearing cute little whiskered viri accompianied by a parisite, who somehow made the others more comfortable or a fungus it was still same old, same old. Unpredictable, not without overlap, interpenatration, acting as though the villians and varmits might be capable of a crude forn of cooperative symbiosis and interdependance.

Altering the balance took alot of moneyEach time it was something new and even more menacing than the same old same old--with a new and more potent over the counter nostrum
He whispered into his PDA to mention his reticence to attend his session with the pilot’s association therapist. Her office was on the rec floor, directly above the pilot rest module sleep deprivation treatment area and he heard shards of the common wifely tale. “I knew he might get ill or be layed off someday. I grew up on garden greens on bread, but I thought if we were ever poor it would be together, as a family . . . I could go back to school but he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s got it . . .” the same old same old.”

That’s when he appreciated Karrina’s mother. Any kid or grandkid of hers could come and do a day’s work for a box of food.If it weren’t for Mother Le Grands private welfare farm, Bruce could keep his pay and not have to bail the poor crone out when too many jobs had evaporated or meet was not forthcoming in good season.
There were two treatment units. One for smokers and one for Mormons who didn’t smoke-- oil and water. Non-Mormons non-smokers declined alternate assignment to the smoker’s wing and were perplexing.
The children played easily, if noisally, together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique-ridden schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke alternate languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors in far off places. They didn’t take particular notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses. Mormons were hung up about it. When it was you who were different you learned to adjust.

CHAPTER

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie’s children when they were up North for school
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her do it and she needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t ne able to feed her kids. She came around the desk and knelt by the girls. “I’m sorry, she said and pulled them to her. You can’t imagine how sorry I am.’

Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions, and how it turned their Father of many great, great, great Grandfather and the bad things he did, so her Grear-Grandmother took the business to Brigham Young. He said that if that’s what she wanted, he could give her a divorce and send where he’d hardly be able to find her.
The girls knew that some Mormons were bad. Like her great great, great had a gentile husband who lived in a big house and screamed at his one wife and two sons and gave them lickings that Mommy would count. what kind of lickings, each time and with what. He was even a kind of shrink over to the Mental Hospital. Their Ma thought a good week if she didnt have to call the police on them twice. Then he’d go about how . . . or somebody said this or that about one or another of them. He’d stop only if one of his kid’s ratted on the other. Then they’d reealy hate . Their Mother said that was called divide and conquer.
At the Y Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was the easiest class because her prof. didn’t dare say a word about polygamy. That was a serious matter with the academics, even the ones who were strongly anti-polig because it was because it was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that mention of the practice was very bad because the Founding Fathers were wise and forbade anything but equality

When she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them.

It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week. The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was a Sabbath Breaker. He was a church clerk at his home ward. He had to bow out almost every Sunday. He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures.

Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSW--
G Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better,
If the people wanted to see one of their
own denomination, the better quality of
counseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce.
Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile with polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and 4 Scoolaged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out. “Then don’t “
Her office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said don?t,
Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were much nicer.
They went to the supe and she said they both should be considered assets, not liabilities Some of the teachers didn’t know they had poligamous students let alone colleagues.

They to have a question and answer brownbagger, then decide what to do about
the offensive leaflet.
So of course the kids demanded to stay. If the Government. Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. The Mormon smokers liked her immediatly but thought the should be allowed to sleep in the better pods if they only smoked in the smoker’s lounge or on one of the balconies.
At school Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of her friends, a Mormon girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins passed her the pamphlet. She was a Goth and her teacher said she should read it. She said she was sure that there was only one of the Staff who would not resist. “You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her read something else out of the leaflet. Their Mother pulled all her children and brothers and sisters out of school.
As they left with his girlfriend, whose hair was half orange and half green, put Kerry’s wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. The G. came marching down the ramp to the door of the school. What ever antone thinks, your children are ungoverned and ungovernance and Good Riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.” Saying that was a mistake. If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly.
‘Maybe,”Kerry’s girlfriend said in a whispered sneer that silenced the student body, maybe then you’ll be old enough that you’ll want to retire.”
Bruce drove himself to the airport, in hiz Green car--one or more of his penitent youngsters having packed his Honda with wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.

CHAPTER

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal brother Uncle Samuel as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--a carven Ulysses preserved with the immortals Athena and Mentor.
Linda beleived God himself had preserved him for the sake of his righteousness.
Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live to the age of a tree, but he had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age as any gnarled old man, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.
Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.
Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world.
Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna. She prefered no converts and no change, She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right and he thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart. One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to make his family happy.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle. He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.
True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen. In who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister?
Rigel was born just as his grandmother sped away in her sporty little car and the rest of Bruce’s female relatives including the babes in arms got to see Rigel spurt into the world. They even named him because he looked liked the Rigel in Farscape. Bruce couldn’t guess how long his mother’s tiff would Last.

At first he supposed his mother didn’t want to have to say that she was there when Ri was born. It lasted. Karinna and Bruce’s sisters were happy, they had missed the Egyptian births of their brother’s first two children.

No one could display righteous fury as well as his mother. D. had tipped Bruce off and he had sent Karinnna and the girls off to their Grandma Lebaron’s after they opened the bulk of their presents at home on Christmas morning, just minutes before his sanctimoniouss mother arrived.
Bruce went home alone with his family matriarch to their family’s Christmas dinner. Bruce seethed through the buffet his father’s silent, blood running in his vein.
That was the only thing that could pierce his mother’s sense of bigotry as family honor, Rigel’s birthting was the first family gathering after Bruce and Karinna spoke in Church about their adventures in Egypt--their blissful connubial mission and the grim prospects of the Church’s expansion in the Middle East.
The majority of saints in the region were Mormon wives married to Muslim or Jewish students. These found the Mormon girls presentable. They did have to convert to Judaism or Islam, but were left to attend church unless their families were very orthodox.
Most of the hyphenated Saints lived outside the region. There were third generation Mormon Jews in Israel who spoke only Hebrew--when their mothers had converted they had burned all bridges behind them in favor of Israeli citisenship for their children. The Christmas exclusion of his family made Bruce and his sisters miserable and they finally got this through their mother’s head. Their mother said that was fine,

Chapter

In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.

ii.
Youth had, for the last decade, become a commodity reserved for rich men who had lived repugnant lives. Grandpa What’s his name doubted the efficacy, for his generation, of penitence.
The morning, in Bruce’s dream, seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath. Dreaming still he remained small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his sise , in his dream a toddler, that he wanted his Great Grandma to be alive again.
They decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay in her coffin, up. Bruce came just to Celeste’s shoulder. They began to baul on a count of three. Celeste knew three because she was three.
Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took him and Celeste into his arms. Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change his soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms
and went to find his grandma.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious and pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally.
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked when the doctor said something to her.
Their town, pretentiously named after the star Kolob, had changed much as the reigning generation shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural muleskinning halfbreed wives.

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal brother Uncle Samuel as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--
a carven Ulysses preserved with the immortals Athena and Mentor.
Linda beleived God himself had preserved him for the sake of his righteousness.
Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live to the age of a tree, but he had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age as any gnarled old man, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.
Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s Generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.
Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world.
Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna. She prefered no converts and no change, She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right and he thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart. One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to make his family happy.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle. He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.
True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen. In who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister?

They knew more about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , Bruce’s oldest girl Celeste had complained while they were opening presents just the last Christmas,
Celeste had asked whether his Aunt Kathleen was alive whether she would make them presents. Bruce had said he might have done, but what did he know.
Even when it meant leaving his Karinna and their long snuggles, the still fertile womb from which Bruce anticipated such happiness, He could still say it was good to get away from everyone and all of it.
Could his Aunt Kathleen’s fell fate fall upon the good in heart, even upon the most righteous among them? Linda had marvelled. In his dream he made a very cogent argument for the It was not possible to broach the subject of his Aunt without putting Linda or Linda’s mother into near hysteria followed by a long snit. These disturbances were all Bruce’s younger cousins ever knew of his Aunt.
offensive notion that power was not righteousness.
It just happened, one of the Brethryn had said, during the emotional fuss over the mere possibility that there could be a Karinna to be suuceeded by a pretty little Celeste, that one of the Senior Bretheryn minded in his sleep that tje church still had a bit of land which it maintained near the great Pyramids which the Rosacrutions maintained for a penny a year.
Upon it was an unassumig museum that the Church already partly owned, The Rosacrutions payed for use as archival space for a gross rental payment of 5 dollars and 2 cents per month.
The Church’s montly retainer seemed sufficient at the time the land was purchased from an elderly physician of undetermined confession. His great Uncle Sam remembered something the old patriarch his father had told him about the matter and had looked into it during the Carter Administration. The old gentleman whose assistant he was that day said that his failing energies were wanted to accomplish a wondrous work in the land of Mary and Joseph’s exile.

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3-12-06
NOVEL ONE, BYE-BYE BUNNY,
CRY ME A RAINBOW,
Bruce’s dream. SEG 1B, PAGES 1-100, 2004-5,
The Daft Main 11-3-05
Rainbow
Part Two, Chapter One

Bruce's Alaya appeared, then swam swiftly away. Daddy Bruce cried out. Karina, math magi, nuzzled her Eternal Companion--Bruce of Alpine with the girls and the cousins up for School from Down South all the time. Karina was the daughter of a fecund polyg-matriarch whose wide kingdom was a fecund Ranch on the Provo River. Karina nudged her fatal Squueze:

“Are you awake?”

“Of course,” Bruce sang, in his sleep, “though late, late, for a very important date. No time to wait, to wait, to wait--I’m late, I’m late, I’m, I’m late. I’m late....I’m late.....” He ran down like a Victorian wind up toy.

“I Hate the Government” in ten decibles blared from the family media center. Kerry, the Goth and Marylyn Manson Fan--had set his stepfathers’ CD alarm the night before. Circus fleas hopped randomly inside Celeste’s Science Fair Project--elflocks in white satin, guitars glued with epoxy, screamed indeciferably .

''Qual azules d'los cielos en la madrudgadra.'' a sweet, high voice fell on his water sprite-ears. a maple syrup voices, sweet. Karrina’s called them squab, loved thier cooing in the day. Sweet as first light, la madrugada, the bats sung in the walls of the old house in Alpine, the clowning creatures mimicked the antics of the children, sweetened the apricot dawn by imitation.''

“I know the bats Daddy, evening and morning. Soon they will bear so they threw out all the dumb boys.''

‘’Good, where are you?’’ Bruce shifted toward the voice onto a empty, twilit shelf there he floated, just above the rocky shelf, lightly submerged.

Daddy Bruce pondered, attending. This day, was not the usual first day of the rest of his life. Death? A promising Eternity, awaited. Make it New, Make it new was carved on an Ancient Daoist Emperor’s bath.

‘’Don’t you let anybody leave you with a wooden nickel,” a voice trailed. . . no one could offer gratuities. ‘’Taint nothing like a free lunch.’’ Bruce played hard to get. His hubris was a love of 10 star New Orleans Diaspora quisine. Mormons were reputed to be cheap dates. No wonder--you had to go English to get more humble native selections than in the Valliess of the Mountains. Bruce had dignity.

Daddy Bruce Bunny, dead to the things of the world, feared judgement. A flakey family father he might be called, Bruce thought, zoot suited bunnied in aquamarine dread. Al fin--Bruce.

Bunkered Sex fiends could rise into the morning mist annd delight themselves on Specialitiy Flights---Babalonian option Beauties were wild game and 100 per cent self disinfecting. Such bots were advertised discreetly, oncealed among a plethora of family theme vacation options not available out of SLCI, the family friendly airport. It had been divided by Stateline’s Social Engineers at Tuesday Night Poker discussion table consensus. There were a few of the brethren whose poker-faces were unexcelled. Uncle Samuel got a good start playing with their brothers for high stakes pine nuts.

SLCI was a hub for Disney Flights for Kids--and the kids, by advance planning, could get on a plane with their favorite character, even in Airport provided costumes. There were flights of small humans led by Kermit the Frog, for the kids whose Moms and Dads lived as far away from one another as was possible.

The modern AI pilot didn’t sleep, converse--when Delta brought in curvacious autopilots Bruce got out of commercial flying and joined the Federal Air Marshall’s Service under the President’s Office of Homeland Security. In an emergency, Air Marshalls were to hang back. When the heros were done with thier heroism, the Air Marshall could fly and land the plane cheered on by a high cleavageed, over-photogenic bot.

Bruce took the mail shuttle. It was a place to get work done. At Stateline, Northern Nevada’s Tuesday Night Poker scene had proposed the concept of Airports as human hubs. Bruce had attended early conversations, an underage fly on the wall as Kerry came with now. The [SLCI] Services and Recreation demerits detested by the Goth, first son late marrying maternal miscreant. Kerry detested adult blather. “Out of the mouth of babes,” Karina’s mother often offered.

Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather’s Tuesday Night fiscal grousing. He told Bruce that he should figure out what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that whaat the male-midd-life-crisis all about?? His sister/mother took the change with more grace.

Bruce’s trip steeped in naked meloncholy, he, now, a belted in, waterlogged commuter, still fussed about time. If Bruce had additional mortal time, he’d have rather spend it all with Karina. Maybe spend some time with her siblings, cousins and old folks teasing the moon into brilliance. Now, his family was bound to SLCI by Medical Contract.

Both he and his Beloved Karina had NTS-tainted seed. They had sold thier Souls as young people, to a promise of Health that God had no warrent to offer. Tardiness added insult to injury. Green for his rank of servitude, Daddy Bruce Bunny was fated with default assignments. Quietly spoken and strictly off the record, Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Sundance--but could either reach into his watery grave to retrieve him?

Part Two, Chapter Two

Bruce’s heavy history was with a beloved, fletched snake known by those closest as the Prez. The Prez had heavy history with destiny. A mere cub the Prez had been in the WWII Office of War Information under Artchibald Mac Liesh, though he cut a fine figure there.

The Prez stayed on for the the War Crimes Tribunal at Nueremberg duration of US Operations in Europe, . He reported on the Berlin Airlift from West Germany.

As a European News correspondent for a Number of Papers back home, he was seen in public with a stunning LDS companion whom he did not marry. A Mormon stenographer whose formerly intended had returned to the States. She found the two men interchageable.

He had been, he confessed , extremely close to this woman, a surviving widow with two children who, like she, had survived the camps.The Prez eventually moved to European Radio and TV stations. Then he quit Uncle Sam’s service entirely, embedding himself in the service of his Religion.

So Bruce now attended the tottering Prez who enjoyed sugarless Shirley Temples with all natural Marachino Cherries with the Sprucce Goose in Nothern Mexico--when he could get away--so the Goose’s private physician could give the Prez a exhaustive going over.

All were scarcely repectably well aged--wiowers playing atx batchelors. The Spruce Goose, was a formidable puppeteer. The Prez’s shadowy Paper clipper buddy surrounded himself with Mormons: tough, sneaky, smart.

Bruce worked after the manner of his Mentor. He set his cap for a Lady Missionary and Old Maid School teacher whom he had further betrothed to himself Deseret tete a tetes by her SLC Uncle. The Prez, in his time, had set the matter of his German War Widow before an Anders’ Mission President and Hierophant who suggested he take her back to the states with the last load of Paperclipping European Scientists.

Indeed the same maternal great Uncle had set him up out of Highschool with a modest moonlight media do as an apprentice out West to the Stateline. He accepted hungrily--Stateline was home turf. In fact, Bruce once fostered a Drama program at Wendover High School and drove out for rehersals. To this, the next year, he added an entry level position at Benny Life.

Having exceeded the age of a tree, the Prez had long since come to detest the ‘News Managers’’ Genre, though he himself had coined the term.

The Prez encouraged, noticed, discovered the lad, for Daddy Bruce Bunny was endowed, at the time, with Single Blessedness and, at the time showed promise. A War Correspondent’s Sacred trust, in his day, the Prez liked to say, was to commit the Truth, the whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth to heavy bond paper--a copy secured by a friend who would see it into print if anything ever happened.

The Prez held the Spruce Goose the Guarenteur of his literary legacy, as Bruce relied on the Tuesday Night Potash Poker Set for his. His workaday reponsibilities involved spin. Every word spun to some degree, but Bruce held back.

Having so lived, having so lied, the Prez had once, lamentably, been responsible for a scandle. He had let a subordinate take the rap, to his shame. Bruce had the tortuous tale from the confessor’s mouth.

The Prez, at the insistance of unnamed Senior Brethren, had cooked a melange of WWII and Korean war stories down to demontsrate how a young man of Israel fought when his country flocked like raptors to war. He found an up and comer a real go getter type fellow to deliver the Prez’s fiction to the air of the Holy Tabernacle, which had not heralded such treatment since the loss of Heber Golden Kimbel’s monopoly on the Mormon Humor through deversity racket. Only in the Prea’s case only the grim reaper laughed.

In the Second World War the Prez generally said he’d spent the whole damn war pushing papers. Bruce knew it was a heck of a lot more complicated than that. The Church rumor mill imagined and imbued with apocrypha and ephemera his long friendship with the shadowed figure the Prez refered to only as the Spruce Goose, not the cooked goose nor even an stray sorry Goose.

The gullible believed that the up and comer had already convinced a number of Viet Nam Era Vetrans of the total veracity of stories he had overdone. The man wanted to brag? They had stuffed his mouth with bragaddocio.

Bruce had hashed the entire matter over first with the Spruce Goose. The Goose thought that the Prez might give the young and ambitious SLC aspirant a leit motif.

The tradition of alibi for those slinking about behind enemy lines was Common Law and Sacrosanct. The tales were true, the Prez had insisted during the scandal. Just as well, he really couldn’t say more than that.

The ambitious miscreant satisfied his Superiors by playing the part to its end thus scoring points toward promotion. Everyone in anyway connected were knowm, even in the inmost circles was tormented and contrite.

Allowing the remainder of the Gerentocracy dove under their desks. The Prez had laughed off the scandel and so became the power behind the throne due to inherit the throne himself.

PART TWO, CHAPTER THREE
The war hero incident had been during Viet Nam, the unsuspected spearhead man a young appointee to the Council of the Presidency--Graduate of a Biblical Seminary where the guns were loaded, however gilded.

Robust, handsome, graced with a Midas’s golden smile, John Wayne’s borrowed, wilting gait embuing a reliable charisma. Bruce’s family, his ward, Bruce wanted detail. There were factions that held out a hemp Mexican fishing net if the Prez went down.

For the Prez, the wars he had seen formed an endless loop. Recon they had called it in his day--Counter Intelligence had taken over a Central California hot spring as a retreat center, ruminating and holding forth from there.

A place to recover from the horrors of the final preludes to closure at the end of the Second World War. Stenography school put a bland face on preparation for Nueremberg. Well over half a Century after, the Prez was begging old enough the Old Man in the sky to beam him up. A dignified end for a man who had devoted his life to public service.

Trouble was that the Spruce Goose, who the Prez had painted not as a genius but as a reclusive eccentric, wasn’t agoin’ to let his Old Boy go, however Mormon he might be.

Oh, the Prez murmered wistfully, where was it written--”We’ll all go together when we go, every Hottentot and Every Eskimo.” Bound by a brotherly oath to the Spruce Goose, his Ponce de Leon, survive and vowed to conquer the human dolor that God surely had never intended for his children.

Certainly living long enough to understand his wrongs plainly, Bruce Daddy Bunny began anew--“If you love me, he recited, keep my commandments.”

The saints now hoped to reclaiming their genome. That was and had long been the aspiration of the Spruce Goose. The Goose, after staging his own demise, allowed two copies of his will to surface. He left one on the startled windshied of a lowly gas station attendent.

Indeed the man had sworn, in his humble way, to maintain the global ignorance feigned by those who had read the Nuremberg Medical accords and turned away, these had the clout--wealth, power, influence prestige, charisma to see justice a paltry justice done. The letter of the spirit of the law they would see enforced, so said they twain, renewing thier post adolescent resolve.

The Spruce Goose had ambition and the first of his great ambitions had been to abolish the Adversary’s sickness and death gambit, that ancient Serpent.

The Goose imposed. He had his own men in the world and his office and home, kept a bright and handsome medical attache. The Contemporary press, still given to internicine wars, was an unlevel playing field. Spin was the deciding advantage--to this Wendover added the gadfly and the harpoon.
There the Prez, incognito, had surprize and a downhill slope. He had the youth of Zion in his care. He had, demonstratbly, throughout 911 Olympic, and monster storm era, Mick Romney and Mr. Redford and the Mormon Washington Caucus to protect his vulnerable flank--his unheard of longevity. There were things so sacrosanct and devisive that even Sundance had no comment.

Few knew the Prez as a political animal, ignominity was the Prez’s Ace in the hole--he had one hope of retirement--a funeral with an empty coffin. It had been 80 years since the prez had been left as a curr in Nueremberg to assemble and prepare the Nazi horrors for Court presentation--each old photo painted a blurred picture, edited, it told a lie of omission.

The American Press Corp had sruggled with the vast extent of the Holocaust against the Jews et al. Actually, the Prez said, most, war weary and ill just went home, despite what the journalists had seen--their mission as a mere remnant, was to collect indisputable evidence for a massive tribunal.

The religious boys tended to be more likely to sign on to the project, abandoned with the cameras, the stenography. The Prez heard and saw things that dwarfed the hate crimes at Haun’s mill. Numbers offered no horror or solace as skeletons one by one, sobbed out intimate tales of indifferent brutalization.

Listening to skeletons with reedy voices was a task for Mormons, men who lied only under direct orders, patient and scrupulous as parsons. Men to do their duty in their time.

Neuremberg haunted. The Prez burned midnight oil beneath his Mormon brother in his lower bunk, pouring over stenography, copying long sections of transcripts complaining that the future of the world, the future conventions of war, ought not to rest on his stenograhic errors.

His bunkmate had an interest in the German trial of Tokyo Rose and often burned midnight oil beside him.
He was a boy from Bear Lake, with family up to Richfeild who feared the precedent they were setting in the Court. They crumpled their originals for retrieval later, all others being dead, drunk, and asleep. Memory of the Nueremberg testimony girded the Prez, enabling him to steer his people through times where moral choice was constant and briskly paced.

To keep the lid on the issues that too much had been made of already, this was the mandate of the Prez. There were his long companions, whose minds were vast as the Louvre, or of the lost Libraries at Alexandria, the burned Mayan and Incan libraries. The Nazi Book burnings, the Chinese who stuffed their matresses with ancient Tibetan manuscripts, for these history made slow progress.

Like a invertabrate beetle climbing a sand dune. With Bruce's treatment, which Bruce and his lobbyists had talked him into taking. the brain of the Prez healed before the rest of the body, leaving a respectable appearance of age. It was tricky getting the biologicals in precise balance. He left instructions for his trainees when he went fact finding, assigning each the appropriate doses. Bruce had adored his old men, if he got out of his current watery predicament, he would adore them and the mercy of thier common Diety, even more.

Chapter

If dead, need he worry about nutrition again? Was he to suffer a living pergatory, He prayed that somebody got to him istantly or not at all. Probably he was at the bottom Jorden River . Still strapped in and burbling.
‘The Jorden River is chilly and cold,
Chills the body but not the soul.’

Chapter Two--The Tribunal
''A mere fantasy.'' Kerry said. Uncle Samuel isn't supposed to be alive. and even more, for that reason, electable.'' Yet Bruce's Eclesasitiacl Employers felt it important for there always to be a vital but subtile Mormon showing at such mysterious public affairs as Bruce would face that morning--they needed bodies not mouths, his brother Sammy had promised to bring duct tape for Bruce's.
Uncle Sam was adept at flashing hismedals, his fruit salad. This Livvy understood, Great Uncle Sam. He was the centennial, aerobatic performer, was a good person to have at the meeting if it was about whether it was OK for Uncle Sam to never got older again or for Mommy to have no more babies with face's like her dead sister Alaya's.Then Daddy Bruce said a joke--He supposed they ought to say, when he went to work, ''My, well, if you aren't looking far too well today.'' Livvy made the ‘’gross me out’’ look he had picked up from the goth.

That's all Daddy Bruce Bunny could remember happening before his death. He had left a list of things Uncle Sam said Bruce must do. Bruce supposed himself, by the march of minutes, to be alive or conscious in some form and Bruce could not imagine Sam, despite his nanobiotic vigor, doing, for even one anomalous day, half of what he’d taken under his umbrella.
Oh well, Bruce lazily noticed a string of bubbles rise to the surface. Truth was, Bruce liked to pull over and nap at the River bend.when he was too tired to drive. He supposed he’d rolled him into the Jordan where he likely had not been noticed. Nothing but two skid marks in badly pocked grit and muck.
He hoped he had fully drowned and wouldn't wake up say. 'Where am I?'.
‘'The river Jorden is chilly and cold,
It chills the body not the soul.’’
Bruce favored that sleety mudpuddle by the Lehi River bridge where at sunset, teens and tweens, no doubt a few of theirs, conversed together. or/and whatever until they saw a parental carlight flash, turning onto the river road, coming to retreive their missing tweens. Karina's Clary, feeling herself an old maid at 17, could usually be found there of an evening, Bruce noticed,though he felt Karina too old to yeild a role of authority over her children.
When the scene found its tawdry conclusion, the senior Teens broke into couples to go on doing the ''Nothing, the ''Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted.’’ As their parents had
done before them.
When he wanted to convey jocular authotity Bruce would sing, pounding on the hoods of the kid’s cars--
''Bye-bye miz American Pie,
Took the Chevy to the levie
but the levee was dry.

And good old boys
were drinkin' whiskey and rye
sayin 'This'll be the day that I die',
and this'll be the day that I die.''
Coming home late from SLC one night. Bruce saw Klary's boy's car down at the river stop and he'd had it. It was 3am. He'd ordered Clary into his car. He didn't know the lad who she was with, Karina did. But more than a few of the boys nearby were certified members of the Future Poligs of America. He and Karina were nostalgic about the days when there was nothing but to fear but a messy pregnancy.
The girls had experinced shame at first, discovery was likeca roulette wheel--the conference with the ward bishop down to the Church House, the examination of the boy at the STD clinic up to SLCI--boys got in free. The Relief Society's teary quilt.
The Airport Teen Clinic wanted no ugly scenes, no calls to the police, no horror stories, no repeat pregnancies. No more girls to be sent to the lambing ground down South. Karina claimed that the only remedy would be to hose them down at say, 10 of the clock.
Bruce was distracting his mind. Had his car failed to make the river bend curve. Folks said a bog yellow bumper would ruin the view. The road veered to the left in a way that made it easy for a sleepy commuter to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road. Next came an icy swim in the Jordan. And thusly Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead, He didn't know how he felt about it. Bruce imagined an aquatic version of Pilgrims' progress.

The Prophet Joseph had left the world with 40 pistol balls in him. Mormon life. Carying on would surely be easier if he had lived to be an old codger--he and his Cherokee Scouts and body guards. Time to be think things over,vtime to leave more than the model to his people, time like now to inventory the relavent, glaring facts.
Bruce braced himself:
A) Daddy Bruce Bunny had lost his bunny jammies, presemably while procreating in the romper room or Airport virtual reality pods in the buff. The details were unclear, but the patterns remained. What matter remained was robed in the same Edenic manner that long ago gave Father Adam the blush.
Yes, in righteousness alone Bruce Bunny was robed. Bruce looked at his feet. They were developing fur. Where he wasnt now furry, was pruney.
''Litle seed inside the pru-en,'' Bruce recited, ''Wat you see and what you doin'? Wat you see and what you doin. A treble voice joined him, is it night or is it Noo-en? Little seed inside the pruen.
The children liked to pull the blankets over their heads while Karina pulled the blankets back a little at a time. If they didnt come out shed start again--she’d open the shades and say “Awake and rejoice, for today is a day that God has made” or she’d lot at the blinding solar disk--”Good morning merry sunshine how are you today.”
Little seed inside zie pruen. Don't mind, Daddy, a voice twiitered, very near. I been dead a long time. Here is fun. Bruce found himself sightless. enveloped in red tubules. Bruce was held tenderly in place by what looked to be jointed licorice ropes, slimey snorkels, and there did not seem to be any maritime Lilipution with whom he might converse or negotiate,
'Gosh darn it,' Bruce bubbled. 'Take me to your leader.' How may I help you?” worrying if he was alive on the bank of the Jorden, but simply asleep. 'Daddy, we dont need anything or are afraid in Dream land, but the ‘‘live people, they need lots of things.'’
The long worms felt Bruces face and sholders, while some snapped out to inhale minnows or up to bring back bubbles of what appeared to be atmosphere. a few snorkels took long, long sips of air. The tubules retracted to the sides of adead girls ugly head.

Chapter--
Bruce‘s heart harkened back to his lost infant Alaya. His sweet dead Alaya, who died a nursling, never to go with unwholesome boys--if Dead could he find her he must tswim to land, to make reasonable inquiries. Instead a strangechead emerged from the large and noodely red dust mop. Most of the RED liquarish elephantine tubules lost diameter until they were hard as horsehair.
Then Alaya, he was sure it was Alayain some guise, appearing nowvin the body of some extinct Pacadermal water species He had seen analysis of crossection of bone. The reasearcher first thought he had encountered a human like land animal. put there were no bone stress patterns to indicate an upright stance.

A few large and reclusive subspecites might have survived at freshwater river mouths. They lived in dreams and Si-fi. Ugly as a stranded infant dugong, had been his Alaya, something off a X-file worst case scenario. He felt some despair still at having to release his baby into a unknown scarcely fitted to even empirical adequacy.
Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. Alaya laughed-–No one touches there Daddy, not with fingers, its private.” She sighed. ‘’My daddy, I am not your Alaya now. I’m Belly big and will calve soon. When I calve, the peoples will sing my new name, the name of the people in oneness--Sirenia, Sirenia, We name our calves, but adults surrender their names to the people, minds too. I may even forget my Daddy because then we sing the thoughts of our people.'
‘'The men?'’ Bruce asked.
'We are friends with them sometimes.' ‘Lya said coyly. Bruces mind crowded with possibilities. He was not thinking out of the box--he was out of the box bodily and possibly dead as well.

“The floundered dead sing no name where kelped reeds line the shore,
“Deep, in hoards the sea dead sing
from Froth to froth they wail and cry, tossed by fear, lost.”
It sounded like Aunt Kathleen. Bruce and his dowager had been reading her together at bedtime lately.
‘'I know our Daddy,” the creature said, OURS Daddy, ”And Daddy's Aunt Kathleen. I know Rigel, Livvy and CeCe. and my mommy Karina--sometimes Mommy cries and sometimes I do because Grammy might die. Grammy didnt ever know Kathleen, but we have such a big family that she thinks its a shame her dying away off somewhere, but it’s a shame only on the polyg side.’’
‘’Sometimes your Mommy cries because her sister is dead. If she had been alive she would have put her sister in a ghetto for sick people when she got old and never thought one more word about it.'’
‘'She is like your Aunt Kathleen.The professor says they, Aunt Kathleen too, are atavistic, they are chimera. Ladd’s professor too, He was the one who helped your Aunt when she died. He felt her dying.” The he swam to where his dreams were. He finished your Aunt Kathleen's Round House. He helped her when she threw up and taught her things.'’

“Daddy, Uncle Samuel says Aunt Kathleen is haunting her Yurt. Ladd and Paul want to move it. Where ever, just closer to people she loved. It is pretty as a flower and Grandpa What’s his name always remembers with Flowers. Professors Philosophers and Poets they were and friends in hundreds of lives. Bad happened to her and Kathleen isnt going back however the professor coaxes her. He even offered to be her mother.
When she died he first thing she asked for was for me, then Paul. it will be a long time before he dies. He found the secret Methusala brought from the stars. He had to swim a long way to bring it here.'’

Bruce was an adept at changing one general topic, that of his Banished Aunt’s Hogon. “Your Daddy named you once. Now A new name for my grown up girl instead of Sirenia. Millagros? It means miracle and you are my miracle'’.
‘'You named me Alaya.'’ Alaya charged. vehemenantly.
‘’You didnt like Alaya?'’
'I remember, but my Daddy, you wan’t me to keep it and be your little beehive forever. First calving is a very happy time, The professor says that all the people go into couvade . . . The landpeoples,'' ‘Laya shuddered, their eyes.

They looked at me and said poor Alaya. Bruce stroked his fishy's downy head and Alaya began to purr. Bruce felt despair, rembering his release of his baby girl into what? Fear washed over him and faith failed him, swallowed in his greif.
With that came a hatred of which no one spoke. The AEC and NTS, the Manhatten and Nutmeg projects. Isotopic ticking of the Maternal clock. Two of Karina's cousins had born babies the same day, all had similar deformaties. Alaya's exaggerated congenital facial anomalies seemed more comely underwater.
The cleft that had split her to her nose, cleaving her upper palate, was packed with gills. Alaya/Sirenia's, prominent split lips had elongated into a long cocks comb. her upper lips fluttered just back of Alaya’s shoulders as she swam.
There was swift commotion as the girl, as he supposed, mounted, he supposed, not the Professor, but her friend. He bolted along the human seawall and then stitched the waves as it/he/she/they took in long draughts of air.
Alaya and Posiden vented the air which noisily bubbled. Their jointed snorkel tubes obscured his view of them. “The Human people see us riding our friends they think we are dead people. We are safer when they are afraid. That’s what the Professor says.’’
Sirenia laughed. “We are the Dolphin's pets, Daddy. And sometimes we are borned as Dolphins, but when you are a Dolphin, well most of us in Sirenia are young.

The young eat and calve and are never separated from Sirenia. Those who are borned as people, well, they stay part people and some are so people that we are just dreams to them.
''A baby is borned to us and we sing. The people think we are lost from wracked boats. someimes, Sirenia said, she and Poseiden would go down deep and would use her air when she vented.
Bruce wanted to man handle Alaya forward into his time--but the bill, just for carp alone . . . there was the pool, of course, he was too old to make new pools up to the watergates like the kids did.''

Snorkeling quietly now, her tubules retracted into her head in tight coils, fluttering spirals where tiny babies bubbled. The tiny trunks rose to the surface , sipp, sipping. Bruce, ignoring her protests, examined her gravely deformed upper palate. She found gills inside, a cavity for them at the centrum of her shrunken coils.
''Are there others with coils like fingers even Daddies can't touch?'' Sirenia giggled, ''We don't have Daddys in our pod.'' Alaya sported huffily in the water at the very notion, then paddled off.
Alaya's underwater world reminded Bruce of swimming at the packed county pool--life everywhere, and bubbles. He thought, he with an industrial time machine, could transport ancient Bonneville fish for profit. He'd float the suggestion at family night.

''We eat only the Little swimmers where the Dolphins say we can graze. Yep, Only where our dolphins say because they know when their gardens need culling. The dolpins like everything to be in balance but the little scuttler with the hurty hands--they eat my hair when I fish here. Poseiden says that's why we have too many... how do you say in people?
''Well, ...hmmm...''
''Our professor is human now and he knows Latin. We tell him what things do and draw them to his mind. The never borned shows him in dreams too and then draws him to the teachings. The Professor writes down everything he remembers and then if he forgets, the never borned remind him and he puts their names in his big book.
He doesn't think, really. that we are real, He says we are interesting and that's enough.
Sirenia and her sullen male swam up tothe surface and raced. then swan leisurly back. ''We got extincted so we borned ourselves with the fishes. We build up our pods, first. The never borned help us. You still be my Daddy and talk to me?''
''Yes, Bruce said, You are my girl.''
''I be. Some of us spoke people for a long time and know where our peoples are, like the Professor and Alaya. He knows languages and teaches me so I can greet humans --I came from them so now I will know them.''
''You speak well, better than when we last spoke.'' Bruce observed.
''I am grown now Daddy. Sometimes I know how to talk, how to find my Daddy and visit Ladd. Ladd is my friend, he is a sea person and my Kathleen's Brother, whatever people think. They play with me and talk to me. Ladd in dreams, but maybe not for always.
I creep around and Kathleen plays with me all day sometimes and with her long river fishes. They are trained to help swimmers and save them from the destroyers with with the long teeth. The big river fish, well he can sting hard. A dolphin comes to fight and bite the big teeth fish.
‘'Peoples could drowned while the dolphins fougt the big teeth biter--we have to stand way back. The river fish are better for this. They just sting the big teeth hard and the big teeth remember and don't like to come back.'’
''I come to visit Celeste and Livvy. They made a picture, of me. I tell you, my Daddy', so you will believe that we are all friends. I don't want to be borned as a people ever again, so I keep my family.''
''Daddy, now you come to my house and we be friends? I missed you my Daddy. You do not like my Poseidon?''
'I'd hoped to avoid him,'' Bruce said, eyeing the overmuscled, big, bisexual male.
''Poseiden is a good swimmer Daddy, and he helps the Dolphins when the sharks come. We stolDed a spear from the humans. At night we creep, creep and creep and we watch what the people do.''

''Swim to my House Daddy, there are ten in my pod and in Poseiden's there are fifteen. We will have eleven in my pod when I calve.''
'' ‘Laily, you're too young to go with boys, REALLY, even very brave ones, not to mention cute too.” Bruce employed his fingers for the math, ''How old are these people, this Poseiden--is he...your--Friend?'' Bruce asked scepticly.''
''I will answer because I love you and you are ours Daddy.’’ Lylee hesitated. “My Posiden has been born seven times.''
''No more, no less, And you?'' Bruce asked. ''I just remember my friends. I don't study different lives and Earth history, It is better to be educated by the peoples than to die too soon, as a baby.''
''The Professor,'' Bruce hesitated.''Laily, first, am I dead?'' His adolescent, big bellied daughter regarded him, amused.
''You don't know?'' She asked. Bruce wondered what he had been doing just before he died. Greif would not spare him this query. Karen something. there had been a woman, a mother to Alaya. “When human peoples die other people come to help them. You are only dreaming, my Daddy--peoples dream and come here. When they feel better they swim home.''
''I be getting big. Soon I bring my calf to visit Mommy Karina.''
Karinna stretched. She loved her Alpine House which was of the traditional design, side by side living areas, a big divided loft for the boys and girls. The play and time out room. alternatly called ‘lya’s room, was back of the West kitchen. They had put a big 2 inch latex mat there and padded the walls with colored latex so the kids could rough-house without boinking their heads.

Karinna had been cramming in the old nursery for a 7:30 on-campus exam in the Custom Careers Extention Center’s Office at the Pleasant Valley Y. Bruce generally fell asleep wherever Karinna plied the keyboard and strain’s of Celeste’s moonlight Sonata beset him. He curled more around her and dreaming, asked a drifter he met possibly a jellyfish if it/they knew where the human infants were kept.

Karinna made the playmat up with linen when Bruce was home. Celeste thier their tween, made the room up when she had friends over, mostly cousins. It was a puzzlement to Karinna and Celeste how quickly the room could be torn to shreds. She wondered how any of them could tell if the ghost was doing something or not, one way or another--though the spook doctors said there was more paranormal activity when th children were active. The kids had quite a collection of ghost buster DVD’s and movies. If it got cold in the old nursery, once the kitchen of an Anders 3rd wife, they put on sweaters. The ghost liked old movies. “Movies about people,” she would suggest, the Goth said, in his ear.

Thier Goth’s girlfriend was going to pasture that Summer with Annie, their dad’s second and Moe, his third wife, to help with the squirts. The Goth’s girlfriend was going to also take over the books for Kerry’s tin can satillite dishes and radio repair shack. Karinna’s Dad wanted to bring the project to the States. Los dos, the soon to breed couple, liked to hang out at Karinna’s school.

Alaya’s Haunted TV, as it was called, lived in the old nursery . The shrinks at the Center puzzled. One, the Goth’s and Bruce’s shrink, a 2nd cousin on Karinna’s mother’s side, and had heard that the children believed it to be thier lost Alaya, his own cousin as well. He thus asked if he could watch movies with the kids.

The Scouts from the ward helped Kerry set up expensive looking equipment from the Utah Paranormal Society in the old nursery.

Kerry was taking a door-open nap with his girlfriend in the old nursery. This followed a door closed nap that had gone critical on them. Kerry’s girl had gotten herself pregnant, just like Karinna had before
Klary was born.

The goth caught thier ‘Lylie just as the kids burst in from a trip to Reams, but missed what Alaya said. Grammy Lebaron rolled out the feeding trough at six. His blessed Gothness employed to drive the rug rats out to Grammy LeBaron’s to Grammy and thier Aunts and Uncles and cousins in time for the little kids to ride her ponies while the biggers and grups hoed one row before dinner. The day the Goth got his driver’s licence was celebrated, with a pinata. Good news for all, la dia de l’Mama’s liberation, Mother’s Day en realidad.

“La Revolution Dentro la Casa,” the Goth proclaimed when his Ma first handed him the keys. The biggers, as Livvy called them, released the room at 7 PM. Karinna’s rabble then romped in.. All got their baths and the girls (for the most part, the girls) had their hair braided or tied into ringlets with ragstrips. Prayers ensued, the current book, the scripture verse they were memorizing that week.

Then general singinging which emitted from a pile of bunny tangled legs and arms ‘till the younger nidgets were carried heavily to thier beds. This week for snack, they were memorizing the scripture: “Ye are the salt of the earth, without which it would not be leavened.” Karinna made salt rising bread for them, so Klary Anne, made a crumbly loaf for bible supper from some recipes she found on Aisch.com.

Bruce’s girls’ finery spread through Karinna’s great family as if by osmotic pressure. Le Baron apparel had a life of its own, romping through various ephermeral situations. Apparel came with lineage--proms and engagement parties, job and worh interviews, court apparel, but their lives were far too short--they were too often not segregated for hand washing. The idea of switching the boys off washing detail was tabled, vetoed and floored. They were willing to trade washing for diaper duty. This was also floored.

Meanwhile the most venerable polyg hand me downs, made of linen and good cotton, wore like iron. Bruce said he would not mind paying for fashion if all fripperies were capable of surviving the Goth’s, laundry day. Bruce bought hampers and tabletop washers. Denying a battle.

CHAPTER TWO

The family bunny jammies began thier odessey as 100% cotton flannel. Karinna had put in for it. When it came, Karinna, Celeste, and some of her older cousins ran them up on the center’s machine en mass.

They devised the winter strategy of eating early, arriving at the Center at dinnertime on Mondays and tying up all the machines.

The Monday fabric drop created a rumored de facto “polyg” night at the Airport Center, ala Jim Crow, some said, and there was a fuss about it by the well meaningwhich waxed and waned. Karinna was a 3rd cousin once removed to the lady at the craft room and so recieved too frequent intelligence about incoming fabric lots.

The clinitians’ policy was to discourage self-fueling rumors. The more the Jim Crow rumor was repeated, the more polygs came on Monday night for the dinner time fabric drop, since the major clans had intermarried, a man might have a wife or wives, 30 sisters and sister in laws, and 3 mother in laws all busily yeilding thier fecund bodies to the sowing, tending and reaping of Utah’s Best Crop.

Aunt Kathleen’s Blue Flu was not to be dismissed at the Airport Clinic. The kids tracked it back to the Great Basin’s beryl vallies. If an infected cow was purchased from a distant ranch it might trigger a die off in its new herd.

Unfortunatly a predisposition to the blue flu, as the dead Aunt Kathleen had dubbed it, was congenital. Daddy Le Baron’s families lost a few cows Bruce had tended after his first visit to the land of dead pharohs and simmering contagion. His hands had gotten dinged up and some of the cows had bleeding ulcers.

Meanwhile complaints about the Airport Polyg night reached the media. The Craft Room Specialist admitted on KSL’s “Called on the Carpet” that it did encourage the larger and needy families to enter the Family Night fabric scramble, straying, some said, from its All Good News policy.

Bruce did a Sundance Special Report, Live from Stateline, spoofing the SLCI crisis, Bruce awarded KSL five must turd pies for airing the segment. Then he had Kerry put on his best Utah drawl for Bruce’s microphone, having got his mother to do his hair up like a picture of a German Goth who was hung, the goth decided, because he wouldn’t cut his hair at Buchanvald, there he was, stolid, impassive.

“What’s good news for some ain’t good news to the rest of us.” The Goth, divined as it was opined, was headed great things, for a media career, and so Bruce honed the boy’s Wendover poker skills and payed for karate, dance, mime, voice and guitar lessons, as many as he could get him to. The matter having been discussed over Tuesday Night poker out West up to the Stateline--yes, they discussed the Goth’s future as seriously as they did thier own.

Out at the Stateline, bad news and what to do about it was chewed like cud by High School Alumni, Ranch boys and High School non-graduates alike. Bruce, who began his service to the State Educational System as a TA at 15, presided. Celeste liked the parking lot scene at so called Polyg night. She and Klary liked to sew.

Karinna had almost drowsed off when the computer screen thickened and mandated a twenty minute time out. Karinna cozied up to Daddy Bruce's fussy back and pulled his jammie ears. “You’re asleep, Bruce.’’ She whispered again in her monogamist husband’s floppy ears after hitting the snooze alarm. “You’re late too, you know, and for the most important of dates.’’

“at the lowest possible of rates.” Daddy Bruce Bunny mumbled back, reflexively.

Karinna warned--“Big Brother will be displeased, our Uncle Samuel indeed will be displeased.” Yet Bruce dreamt on, making small noises.

CHAPTER THREE

Immersed in twilight, Bruce found himself sightless, enveloped in slimy red and purple tubules which tenderly, resolutly, immobilized him with jointed licorice ropes, snorkeling evolutionary anomalies. There did not seem to be any marine Lilipution with whom a wandering Gulliver Daddy might converse.

Grammy Linda, as Bruce’s kids tried to call her, had done some dreamwork with his disreputable Aunt Kathleen in hippy California, back when his Aunt was a hippy and Grandma Linda her helpless tag-along. They worked together at the same jobs, switched off boyfriends here and there.

The Ding-Dong sisters--alas, Kathleen was a Ding Dong sister no more. She was buried next to her Aunt who died when the Atomic Testing at NTS started.

The ding dong sisters were not to be confused with the Gold Dust Twins, as some of the Old Dead Heads out to Bonneville International, ie. the Stateline Poker Sharks wistfully remembered them.

Wendover, Utah’s small graduating class of 1965, its Wobbly scion’s son’s age mates and thier partners in crime made pretty good. Generally the age groups stuck together and oddly enough, Jim’s had been imbued with Capital.

The age group of Kathleen’s vintage were sharp, but not fitted to heavy labor. They had taken a lucrative contract to clean the inside of the Kenneccot chimney by rapelling up and into it. It had seemed an adventure that would fund a year of sky diving, scuba diving out to Blue Lake-- a deep, a seemingly bottomless spring, and thier aquatic spelunking there.

They tried to form a spelunking club, Aunt Kathleen and Daryl and an Idaho boy who pulled Graveyard up to the Texico, but were doomed by fate to be less robust than thier Elders, if not by much..

With thier dreams now fulfilled, all future ambitions seemed attainable. Tuesday night poker up to the Stateline was a big deal, doubling, in reality, as a kind of stage set.

Actors in a much greater drama, each taking the part of an internet poker player. The sooner the point players started, the bigger the weekend pot. A rookie once raised a furor by trading SLCI and other family credits for poker points. These had included credits for Anger Management. Bruce leaked the story to the public during his Sundance Weekly Review. Like the price of a tank of gas, such trades were made on a case by case basis. This demonstrated that Sundance was taking the crisis seriously.

Bruce and Kerry traded all of thiers for poker points. Yes on Tuesdays, Wendover sometimes remembered Kathleen and her friend, Rose Sharon, in earnest--equine girls with sunburnt blond who people asked-- “Now, which one are you.” The old ramblers who did the towns cooking and thier successors the gold-dust twins called them. They remembered the small black cherubs who once advertised Jim’s father’s favorite flour. It came in 100 pound sacks and Wendover used the empties for curtains when the sacks were empty, it being the Thirties.

Before WWII, bleach turned the Gold Dust twins to straw color. The joke rendered the sunny beauty of the blond, tall, Gold Dust Twins, who, worked up to the Stateline in the early Seventies.

Bruce got a Liveworks Liveboard and infused the High School with his expectations. Ranch work was what they had, out to thier way and ranch work was what thier boys were suited to, otherwise they’d be too like to leave the land.

Bruce’s old highschool girlfriend Ramona whose Goshute family lived out to Ibapah and Ramona, Karinna’s aunt used to go hiking, the two of them, up to the Deep Cricks. Grammy Le Baron thus got her horses from the virile Ibapah lineage via the Shephard Ranch.

One of the Shepherds’ sons used to take the Gold Dust Twins out to have a ranch afternoon dinner with his mom and dad and chironian sister. His mother had no trouble telling the twins apart. She’d have Rose Sharon for her boy, with her good eye for horse flesh. Aunt Kathleen was a runty non contender. Rose Sharon took a fractious, but well conformed, penny colored gelding that summer to gentle.
The Shepard family purchased a stud with a pin in his shoulder. The easily corralled, purebred racehorse couldn’t run off with nocternal and randy mustang mares. The Southern Henry Mountain mustangs had crossbred with thorobreds whose breeders went bust in the depression.

Still dreaming, Bruce remained immersed in big slimy long red worms. “Gosh darn it,” he burbled into the auquamarine fluid. ‘Take me to your leader.” A voice chortled, laughed and trilled all mimsich and merry.
‘’How may I help you?” he asked with dignified formality, doffing an invisible top hat and bowing deeply. He was perhaps dead, or scarcly alive, having slid off the bank of the Jorden into the river by the bridge where the kids parked and drowsy commutors sometimes slid off.

“Daddy, the voice sang, we don’t need anything in Dreamland, but peoples, they need houses and clothes and animals and toys and moneys and lots of things. Paul said that’s what they are all about.”

“Sounds suspiciously Buddist,” Bruce observed. Do you mean my Aunt Kathleen’s Paul? Is she hereabouts?

The long worms, which appertained to the voice, examined Bruce’s wooden face and sholders. Some snapped out to inhale minnows or floated up to bring back bubbles of atmosphere. a few snorkels lingering by the surface, sipping aqua air. The unused tubules retracted ‘till they were tight as the horsehair worms that lingered in morning ditches.

The tubules clung onto Alaya’s head, retracted into her unusual orifices which closed over them. Bruce ‘s heart harked back to his misplaced infant Alaya. Bruce’s sweet dead Alaya, thier mutant nursling, who never lived to go with unwholesome boys or need a crib by her bed while still in highschool.

Emerging from the large, wet, red, mop the head of the girl spoke. The elaphantine tubules lost diameter until they were positivly budrum. He felt one, hard as horsehair.

All of a sudden, Alaya shape shifted into the familiar infant he remembered. The mimsish, oddly conformed baby curled into his arms, tender as the infant he had released her to the Reaper as she intermittantly suckled and screamed.

Now the baby peacefully picked swamp grass out of her Daddy’s hair and tore it, letting the grass float aimlessly, then picked them out of the water with her organic vacuem hoses as they swam about as she called what the grass did, making a game of it.

The Great Western American Seaway, Bruce queried his soggy brain, how long had it been dry? The small sea snorkling whip snades, when engorged, showed a fine dexterity at thier termini, like those of an elephant’s trunk. There had once been 500-600 evolving pacadermal variations, once a few with human--analogous arms and legs.

Bruce remembered from Celeste’s second grade Great Brain project on evolution, elephant related dugongs and manatees. Elephants swam island to island feeding voratiously where they landed.

Karinna felt only a sweetness in the when the macines registered a thinning of the viel in the room, a gentle sprite in the air that made Karinna’s milk spurt. Her first child by Daddy Bruce, one who had had a spirit both Favonian amd mild.

CHAPTER THREE

Born in Salt Lake, Alaya was treated there like an x-files mutant. Despair welled up remembering how Karinna and he had fled with thier child to Karinna’s Aunt Annie and Mag’s, down South of the border.

Now, Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. ‘laya laughed. “No one in our pods touches there Daddy, not with fingers, it’s private.”

CHAPTER THREE POINT FIVE BREAK

Daddy Bruce recalled how hopeless it had been to assuage his grief with work--it waited for him in shadows at the end of the day.
Chapter , no flight?

Bruce, a fussbudget both irritated and annoyed figetted.

He had arrived at SLCI International four hours before his flight’s anticipated time of departure, despite the early breakfast at Mother Le Baron’s. Bruce had, in some dismay, watched a grey mist sliding down, faraway Rock canyon.

The mist formed a great orange grey oyster shell as fanned out over Provo City. As Karinna drove Northward it drifted down first from each Wasatch canyon in turn, including Salt Lake’s Emmigration canyon. When they turned left in I-80 it mingled with the blue mist slithering up from the lake.

And the fog racung, river-like, down Toelle canyon, till it flattened by the Lake. He remembered playing with his Aunt Kathleen’s first wheelchair in thier first house there. Sitting with her and identifying the big moving vans on the freeway, in easy sight of the flat, hard blue sheet of saturated Saline water, where now the fog spread North and upward, immersing the Airport.

His mother pronounced their tiny hub metropolis tooe-lee, and called the mist tooe-lee fog, because that is what it was called it in her California childhood home. She would resent the LeBaron breakfast, be outraged that he had not spent the time with her.

She had made too few emotional inroads with his half polig children, who went with their father to buy wholesale on polig days from polig wholesalers. His children had their closets segregated, their schoolchildren did not even make their own trendy clothes but never really relaxed in them. They loved to go with their father on shopping days. He did not partake of other customs, but doggedly violated Utah’s Jim crow commercial policies.

He worked for the church and said being nosey was just his job. He was an investigator. The blue-grey and clotting mist, which Bruce referred to as zero visibility, clung low along the runways, conealing the briney wetlands, concealed to the East beneath it.
This morning, according to the Farrah Fawcett clone KSL weather lady on Karrinaís PDA. the Too-lee fog would clott, then blow out of the valley with the Great lake at its sump, revealed as less substantial than it looked by the rising of a trickster sun.

It was a prediction endorsed confidently by a cheery, insomniac, oh-so-Happy-Valley KSL news staff who dreaded bad news. The reporting of bad news, any bad news, ran contrary to the Mormon cultural ethos of stoic optimism.

KSL promised that the mist would thin over the silver Lake mirror, then be whished off by the new broom of an obliging Wind from the Northeast. the prancing, bosomy, weather lady- person, was reassuring about the cleansing early morning gusts .Bruce wanted to believe, he really did. He hated gusts as much as fog, thatís why he was using the airport. even more, he hated to be late or absent. He had a literary rondevu later in the day in San Francisco with a woman named Keats.

Bruce watched the weather while sucking on a tic-tac thus attempting to clear his pallate of the weedy taste of Hellís Bells, his mother in lawsí least redolent milk cow. He was to meet with some of his late Aunt Kathleenís friends while in Sin city.

Karinna had wrapped a bottle of hIs Grandma Mathesonís razzleberry Jam in bubble plastic for the SF editorial group. Aunt Kathleenís postumous friends,no one had been inclined to pull up his Great grandmotherís Raspberry bushes.they had spread until there were sufficient berries for all the raspberry pickers she had left behind in mortality.The Rassleberries created an impromptu reunion in the late summer and again when the pine nut cones were filled with unspilled berries at harvest. Planted by the indians only 10.000 years before, the big seeded trees had been raided by various species who preferred to consume their spoils in their nests.

Aunt Kathleen had written a net series on virulence in rodent viruses for the virology group in 1997. It described how to pick pine nuts with less exposure. The CDC was culture blind in its attempts to warn of rodent viral contaminants. She had once hit the roof when Reuters warned campers ìnot to sleep in the open. In the four corners that meant taking cover in the rich dust beneath trees and overhangs--places preferred by all species for shelter.

Bryce would prefer to give up the blanket and tree shaking method for a more sterile pitching of cones into a trash bag .It didnít matter so much to the Utah kids, but every year some in-law raised in the miission field as the Brethren called it, would lose a spleen, or have their legs go out from under them after contact with the isotope and rodent contaminated dust of harvest.

Karinna and her kids had started eating Pine Nuts right off the ground soon after they had learned to walk and her family still shook her cones from the tree onto a tarp.
The trouble was that Southern Utahís Rats were tree dwellers. It was best to avoid disturbing the fecal dust from their nests, Karrinaís mother was half Piede indian and had transmitted some genetic immunity to her offspring.

Unfortunatly their genes had been disrupted by the post WW II atomic tests. The most adaptive genes, which dealt with allergic, pathogenic and immune system disrupting contaminents.

Bruce suspected that his Alaya had been lost to an over warm, over long, and over wet summer that had produced over large, over succulent nuts. The Annazzazi--the ancient ones, built granaries far from their dwellings, these had resulted in their mass extinction. Too much rain instead of too little made too many rodent generation.
Karrina’s was of the old time kindreds, polygamous and impoverished for eight generations.

Bruce was again in the black pyramids whose black blanketed caverns all softly aflutter. In the cavernous caverns, bats sounded and sang in a register not fitted to human hearing, then a darkness that smelt of cave dust and guano. Obscure rites had once, there, quickened now plundered funerial shrines. Outside, doves, flirted, cooing , as Rilke had once seen them at Karnack.

Bruce would leave aeration plans for big, glassed in bluelily ponds, externally vented to prevent damage to exhibits from the ponds’ humidity, but farther on up the Nile in an imitative newly crafted stone structure. Uncle Sam had, Uncle Samuel learned, a bit of land that the Old Man wasn’t using. His namesake Samuel was just the Ky-ote to get it out of him.

Peace was bad for his previous business. Since he liked it upriver,vSamuel Sr. was refurbishing the a Raj-era hill station of a failed British, and very dead entrepenuer. The idea was that hyphenated Mormons could slipp over the border with thier families to be quietly sealed.

Only Rosecrutions were admitted to the Rosey archives, in theory, but the property’s turn-key Mormon owners could not be kept entirely out. Matriculated Archeologists were accepted to the Bacon-Pratt Endeavor as Bruce named it.

His mother and sister twice visited on a lose lips sink ships basis. Linda, rebelled, arguing that she deserved her chance to talk about her travels in the ward, pouted and sulked and badgered her son with endless but I don’t see whys, all the other sisters in the ward etc., etc., etc.

Bruce wondered---Why had his queer dream beastie called him Daddy? She was just saying Da and had gotten to Dadu when she died. Bruce could tell when Karinna was thinking about Alaya--her eyes welled up, teared up.

Bruce mused--perhaps cognition after death shared a dream field with a discreet dream memory with fluttering tags of day. Perhaps imagination and memory were intensified beyond the veil, as by 3rd stage sleep. The Airport clinic felt that the more restorative deep, dreamless sleep should be preferred and encouraged.
Too little made children fractious, cranky, hyper, deranged thier immune systems particularly those from the lambing ground. Alaya had died there at Karina’s breast at 18 months old. Karina’s ‘‘If at first you don’t succeed. try, try again” attitude, was bewailed by Aunt Kathleen’s Provo Gathering Place and Utah County Crisis line friends. These favored family planning.

Karinna met an elderly college friend of thier Aunt Kathleen on the elderly matriarch’s Jungian Fairy Tale site. The kids called her the March of Dimes lady, an occupation that led her to abhor the pluck that brought Celeste to birth 4 months after Alaya died.
The March of Dimes lady had born 7 children im her time, seeing only 5 grow to aduthood in San Francisco’s Irish Sunset District. Livvy and some of Aunt Anne and Mag’s children came from Bruce’s Cousin, the Stork, an accomplis of the Senior, long Aunt Kathleen’s college friends, who snubbed her out of over education.

Karinna’s second birthing was a time of black humor, bitter jokes, laughter that rattled dry as tall, husked grass. Celeste, the B plan baby, swelled her belly. They lay Alaya in a family Cemetary out behind Karina’s Aunt Anne’s Sinaloan Ranch just as Karinna’s milk went dry with Daddy Bruce’s second girl baby. Celeste laid her claim to her mother’s milk as the Sinaloan Sycamores turned brown and yellow.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dreaming, Bruce sat beside his glorified ancient Egyptian swamp. He’d meant to do more with the pond. Life yielded strange smells, like the smell of acts of generation. When was now? Was there a dimension where he had comitted a genuine oversight, missed an important date. Bruce was not dressed?

He must make a note to dress and make his way to the airport soon, but everytime he woke. His lopsided heart pounding, he thought he should have done something about the alarm clock yesterday instead of leaving it to Karinna’s brother/oldest son, Kerry, the Goth, so different than he had chosen the gut blasting musical selection-- “I hate the government.”

Bruce had achieved a respectable life witout his widespread openion being known, his word having been his bond. Even his promise to the Rosey’s odiferous Lily pond would be kept. Bruce sent great Gold Carp back with Uncle Sam to eat as many mosquito larvae as possible.

The dream had sharpened his grief as time had sweetened the pond. Now Bruce scribbled a list of unfinished chores. Bruce had been a good providor, a good teacher-- He knew most everything about English except, as young Kerry had once observed, why Fish and Pharoh ought not both to start with an F.

Bruce team taught with Karinna in the last days before his first mission. They had talked about pharohs and fish, looking at Karinna’s prints for their basement hope house, carefully kept from a high school honors project and Bruce’s Egyptian chapel which she had designed with selected tomb reproductions and translated text on the walls. One thing about the offspring of pluraliry, the girl’s did know how to design, build and wire a house.

The days of his second mission--blurred in the underside of the surface tension which toppled Alaya’s sunny shelf. There Karina dawdled his second baby Celeste, and the three still missed Bruce’s land of lost content.

Bruce was restless whereever he was but in the land of retrospect he found some small peace. Though Celeste was not walking yet, the dreaming Bruce again talked himself into a ticket on a quick buddy plan to Egypt, babies under two free. Karinna said good bye to her megafamily--a teary airport business which his family refused to attend if Karinna’s family came.

Now neither young nor old. in the way, in the middle of the way, Daddy Bruce Bunny soaked in a mirrored memory of Sting -Fly springs, up with Andrus cousins in Orderville. Summer evoked a simmering passion for Bruce’s Karinna, a steamy youthful kissing cousin affair. That she had turned a blind eye to it made his mother feel that she at fault for her star son’s fatal flaw.

Karinna had been first to reject and at last embrace Bruce’s unsteady attempts. Bruce and Karinna were cousins, after all, but single blessedness eventually stuck in thier craws. Linda did not expect the silly business of her Bruce’s polyg girfriend to last, but she played along, at first.

Unfortunatly for his mother’s false pride, her valadictorian’s novia had faithfully awaited his return. She added a certificate program in Range Management from BYU’s Salt Lake Extention to her teaching credential. Karinna, when his wife, had moved in with her mother and had snagged a coveted teaching position in the Alpine primary School, where the academic and oldhippy residents were all but betrayed their pride in thier stubborn religionist holdovers.

Now, Karinna cuddled towared her husband as she wrote on her night computer. She nudged Bruce, who mumbled beggingly “Later.”

“Whatcha dreaming about, Sweetpea?’’

‘’Pregnant, Bruce moaned, such a dear thing, and to be heavy with child and so distant. . . pregnant.”

‘’Which little girl, which is pregnant?’’ Karinna shuddered, needing to know. ‘’Not Livvy.’’ Karinna suggested.

‘’Livvy? Where’s Olivia.’’

The rebellion of the Anders children and Karinna’s in-town-for school siblings and accomadating cousins lasted well past Bruce’s bedtime. Resolution of the crisis had taken considerable negotiation and diplomacy on the part of Kary Lynn and her cheeky Future Poligs of America steady boyfriend.

Karinnachecked out too saying she had a test in the morning. The kids called the on duty shrink at the Airport rec center for advice on how to manage the Emergency. The shrink on call told Karina’s oldest to give the brats thier heads. She slammed the nursery door on the insurgency so emphaticly, that the Airport shrink held his cellular away from his ear. Kary said “That was easy.”

The shrink said that with full bigger and grup disengagement it was likely that the matter would run down more neatly, like a drum banging bunny badly in need of a duracell battery change.

The trouble was that Daddy going on a trip on his Birthday day, ruined by a grant that had payed for Bruce’s tuition to some big bunnny conference in Sin City that he couldn’t even tell them anything about.

Birthdays were important, the kids argued, like Christmas, Jesus’ birthday, a serious matter. This was like the year the dogs got in the house and tipped over the tree and trampled all the presents out to Grammy LeBarons. main Ranch, the family Yuletide hub.

They would remember this Daddy Bruce bunny and his brother Sammy’s birthday that way, the day of the big important Sin City conference that even Great Uncle Sam was in on. Thier family council over whether Daddy-Uncle Bruce was allowed to go to work on his birthday should include everybody. Kerry Garth, called generally the Goth, assured his big sister that he’d his only role in the controversy to prevent violence or distruction of property.

They couldn’t just have Uncle Sammy over and sing The Circle Game and have their Carousel Cake like always? They had to know the whys. It couldn’t be THAT important.

They wanted to march into Daddy Bruce Bunny’s room and demand an explanation. It was then that they realized that one of the biggers had silently put the time out chain on the outside of the door. The little bunnies began to bawl in concert, the cousins yelling and screaming supportively.

The Goth put on Heidi, their lids closing one by one and Kary and the Goth and his girl put a kingsised quilt over their cried out charges, accidentally covering both cat and rat, grey to the point of being bluish. Their blue rat poked her nose out quizzikly and shook the blanket off her head as their California wild tabby cat began to purr.

The children slept on, their breathing slowing and deepening. Karinma checked in and slipped away, climbing in where Celeste and Rigel had fallen to sleep with their Daddy. There about the heads of the young coiled many dreams, bringing the family’s dream field to critical mass. As it happened, the thirteen year old Alaya had heard the whole thing.

The blue rat crept into her wicker basket, lined with torn rags. The youngest hangers on were mostly from nearby ranches. Annie and Meg liked to keep thier kids in school in Mexico until their Spanish was in firm. Meg’s father had been Chinese by half. His father had joined his Chinese family there after the railroads were built, bought, payed for but before they were nationalized by Mexico.

Karinna turned on her Mini Mac and cut some time for her BYU paper: Reversing Desertification. The Harmony Shrink was more interested in how Karina was doing than about desertification but said that it sounded like the issues were inseperable. True, their rug rats had been making big plans, troubling plans, to prevent their Daddy’s birthday escape.
Cars could be stuffed and unstuffed, TP hosed fom trees, but hearts required much more. Reversing the desertification of the Southwest might take aeons, depending on rainfall. Turning sand into soil was niether quickly or easily done. And angry polig children left angry. They had were not unlike ravaged soil, thier families had practiced polygamy, here and there and unhindered, for Eight generations.

Bruce’s underwived diplomacy put food on the table. Daddy Bruce’s talents were underused, though sometimes Bruce felt entitled to leave patience at the door, like muddy shoes in Winter . Six days shalt thou be Mr. Nice guy, Karina’s father often said, and on the Seventh raise holy hell.

From 7-11 PM and on weekends he who brought the Melchesedick Priesthood into his apparently disinterested family was valued for it. A child who turned the TV either up or down learned the meaning of the axiom ‘’Let sleeping dragons lie.”

Sometimes Bruce read or scribbled in the margins of the New Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, a leather journal he kept chair side. Bruce got two for one credits for his time working on the text. He read it to the children playing Checkers and Chess with Kary, Celeste and the Goth .

The New Alice physics and astronomy book was for grade schoolers, in the beginning, then got gradually more difficult like an old timey reader. The children played Clue while he worked on his book. Death with poison in the kitchen, a Black Winter Rose left on a high bookshelf? Perhaps it was the Colonel with a knife in the study? Karina plied her domicillary diplomacy by day and through Bruce’s dreaming nights. There the White Rabbit barked anxious orders in Bruce’s sleep.

There he bemoaned his fate, recited Puck the fairies’ lines from the Midnight Summer’s dream. He chided their eldest girl Celeste for chasing tacyons until she had left time behind, a velvety black all around her.

Celeste tried his patience by interposing ever more difficult postulates between her Daddy Bruce’s snores and snorts. Bruce wanted his dreams, but only told Grammy LeBaron, at first, about his visits from Alaya.

Without his guiding dreams he was never sure what to write in his Alice Book. Celeste in Wanderland was a pregnant and extinct sea mammal, a twin to his dead Alaya, who engaged in metalogues with her father. Waking was like rising to the surface of blue lake too quickly.

Knock on wood, Bruce hoped embellish the logic book Carrol had outlined before he died. Lewis Carroll had had left behind a trail of argumentative bread crumbs. These argued whether they were on the trail or not, since few passedthis way--a hungry crow.

And Poor Hansel and Gretel.--How would they find welcome at home. They had gathered no mushroom or herbs that day, sobbing, not old enough to know which were good to eat. They would surely get licked if they returned with the wrong things. They stalled-- gossiped with a wizard on the path who queried them: posed endless logical conundrums.

Whatever his Grandmother and Mothers’ snitting at Bruce’s Swiss Bank Accounts, turning to bitter ice at Bruce’s marriage to Karinna. Bruce’s prissy family bewailed their shame at Karinna’s poligs. His family said with pity, that he could somehow change them, but they threw away all the nice clothes he bought them and kept to thier funny ways.

Each member of Bruce and Karinna’s family had plenty to do to keep their mind off the lost love of his monog bigot family. The Goth was the only one who really sniped at his Grandmother. She sniped at him in return. comparing him to the deceased Great Aunt Kathleen who had once worn a bikini at Veyo hot springs.

Mother and sister rented her a modest swimsuit, but none fit her broad shoulders and the suit pulled her back, compressing her vertabrae. The hot water eased her the pain of the too small suit but did not mute the agony of her heart.

Years flew past. She paled and her rubber knees weakened until she was no more than a groaning puppet. Living a long life as though shackled in chains of gravity, their Grandmother listed her errors every time she was mentioned, and their Goth was going down a twin path to ruin.

He was no laggard, however often his Father’s detractors charged him with that fault. One day a week each of Grammy Le Barons families did the farm chores out to their grandma’s at 5 AM . A big Breakfast first, then into the saddle by six, and when they left, a big bag lunch of fresh food for school.

Grammy’s Le Baron’s bread was impressive-- thick hunks of warm brown bread spread with their Grammy’s honey from her beeswaxed hunks of farmer’s cheese ripened in her cellar or Mexican crema. Sometimes fresh picked lettuce and summer’s new-pickled cucumbers, green tomatoe chutney with cheese and butter and a big bottle of root beer.

Karinna’s job was to employ her time, patience, and diplomacy to manage the details of her family’s rewarding but complex live.

The school therapist recommeded that she find another family to do the chores or just keep them out of school for the day. It was the morning after the big rebellion and their kids weren’t fit company. It was unlikelythat they would be able to concentrate.

Bruce could be long gone when the children woke to undo the petty vandalism that would follow the meeting. Karina went back to bed and to sleep having to crawl into and then fight for her place at Bruce’s back.

The nursling Rigel howeled and kicked Livvy, who had awoken, in the back. Livvy licked back, nearly landing her little brother on the floor but Rigel clutched the edge of the bed. He whimpered and Bruce handed him back to Karinna. She opened her nursing Bra to him, hoping he would go back to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bruce thought of his dependents as industrious good fairies and paid them for big people’s work. There was poverty in the family, so they’d made a United Order and as in any such family trust, the best settled in life took the worst hit. The Order made money seem more sacred--work for the able, and to each according to their need, it all worked around to work out. Bruce left Karina with money for help if she needed help but could not expect any from Bruce’s Liberty Park bench relatives, and his Mother’s bench house, long had been the ancient shores of Lake Bonneville.

Bruce expected clean clothes in his closet, his shirts starched and pressed and his dinner ready when he came through the door. No child might interfere with his departure time. This was crucial. Puntuality underscored Bruce’s authority at his crazy quilt of jobs. It was this punctiliousness that maintained his prestige and that of his clients. Prestige that the Church turned into money. Intelligence and Diplomacy were not an easy jobs to describe or define.

The Church Organisational Behavior Specialist did a fine job. Bruce, as a personal attache to the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Bruce’s underlings called on the church fathers as well.

When Livvy was little, after thier missin, Karinna ran a morning joy-school for toddlers. There was a a cooperative joy school song for doing almost everything. and there was Gummy bag. It ate their toys at night and coughed them up in the morning. Gummy bag also did laundry--swallowing their dirty clothes at bedtime. In the morning it left them. still in gummy bag, clean and folded.

Karinna was Bruce’s Sabbath helpmeet, Karrina working hard to keep her husband’s cogs greased and running. Karina got the kids out of Bruce’s hair when he needed sleep. Karinna took the children on Sunday to her mother’s to play with their cousins and go to family church. Karina’s Mother Le Baron and her old folks visited with thier daughters, sisters and now retired cousins.

The old ranch wives did light work until their bodies failed completely. Grammy Le Baron lightened the work of the merry hands at her disposal with sayings-- ‘Many hands make light work,’ and I can’t is a sluggared too lasy to try, ‘Moderation in all things. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.’ these axioms flowed out of her,but shuddered and held the line when the fruit of her loins said ‘The Scripture that says....”

Karinna was no homebody. On weekends, for the sake of her grades, she took the kids to her mother’s to help with the ranch work all day or she’d take the ranch truck to drive out to Ibapah to visit their Aunt Ramona. So did Karina’s brothers’ wives and sister-wives, their children and their half brothers and sisters. Karinna brought Bruce a plate of dinner after Karina’s family had church and Sunday dinner afterward.

Bruce had bought a house in a patrician ward that Karinna disliked for the most part. Bruce went to the modern Church alone most weeks unless he could talk Celeste into going with. Karinna didn’t like the new hymns, the shorter meetings, the truncated version of Church History intended to play well South of the Border or in Asia.

Karrina’s alibi was an invalid Aunt and sister. They still liked to go to Church in their home ward, so she took her children to her Aunt’s Church. It was true that Ramona had an Aunt who lived near Wendover whose husband had got Horse Fever and died.

She liked to have Church at her house and it was more convenient to meet there for Karinna, they enjoyed small throated renditions of the old songs and to break bread with them.

The Apostle with whom Bruce had most to do counciled discretion in his family affairs, and if a fib was needed for the comfort of the weak in faith, so be it. In Bruce’s prestigious position Karinna’s Poligymous roots showed. This did not help him with his mudslinging, cutthroat subordinates at Bene-life. Polygamist elders were there thought of as‘Old people doing bad things.
Until Statehood came at the turn of the Century, a man of Education, Prominence or Capital was expected to support more than one family. The sadder the new wife’s story and the more ragged her waifs the better suited she seemed, Terror and tradgedy lay behind in the old world and hard work and privation in the new. Women who immigrated from the East End and Scotland’s scorched Clachan’s tfound a chance to rebuild, The mill scarrs cut deep, and there were only red petticoats and high apron Springs for those not strong enough for Weavers 14 hour days.
The principle of polygamy did level the gradient twixt rich and poor. Karinna wifely duties were preformed and so Bruce could not comolain of her. She bribed her brood to sleep after their rowdy Sabbath play with warm chocolate mixed 2 parts with Le Baron rootbeer.
Controversy surrounded its 5 percent alchohol level and the herbs her mother put in it to bring on infant sleep. To Karinna these seemed a blessing--Karinna cultivated camomile, echinachea and valerian root for the sleepybye recipe.
When the kids were asleep Karinna slipped into something nice she’d snagged at sCMI and lay down, curling her body around her husband’s slight one.
On winter nights the children built a fire in the stove. They roasted pine nuts on pie plates while their father, if he was home, snored in his chair.
He sometimes woke for Karinna’s bed time stories, but they made him drowsy and he was not long awake, Karinna’s stories made their lids droop together heavily--gravity and sleep held their heads against the Karati mat. Their Karate Master disapproved of the undisciplined freestyle kick fighting on the TV,
The Le Baron cousins took Karate from the same teacher , lowering the tuition by organising the class and producing the students with regularity.
Their Master could tell when they had been cheating, but said that if they focused on the divergences between the martial arts schools and the hand to hand TVcombat,
They would better anticipate their adversaries weakness. Karinna took Dance classes at the Y where there was a Cappadocio Master who taught African Dance Department. She did a children’s section Capaddocio toned the muscles for fighting, and coordinated the muscles for its freestyle pairing.
Karrina’s youngest brother Kerry, the Goth, lived for the martial arts. These were classes where he could make friends, battle scarred and eclectic outgroupers, He pursuaded his mother to take Drunken monkey with him. It was an art which allowed old warriors or amputee’s to fight by strategem and clowning instead of strength.
That and Tai C were taught through June in the Provo City Park, or at the Eldred Senior Center in the winter. It was the director’s idea. He had gotten the idea from the common sight of Televised oldster training in Chinese squares and parks.
Karinna helped teach the kidsclasses so they couldn’t kick her kids out. Their Uncles used their fists to work out any differences and she never wanted her children to go to violence as often as other branches of the family did. One of her cousins was confused when the Goth he swung for warent at where he swung for ‘em, and he tried more than once.
Karrina bemused her relatives when she took up the drum. The vacaros came from their houses, and those who had held down the farm during the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa counseled them to go back North for awhile.
The Vacaro took up the beat and the children began a payfull, miiroring acrobatic dance. Then Kariina took up the dance and her children crept onto the cement dance floor and joined the dance, down to Livvy, danced in clown suits,
This associated the import of the hobby somehow with Halloween and jamies and put her in the craft shack making masks a la’ Pirrot and Piroette. On the last day she read Robert Frost’s ‘The West t Ruuning Brook” and said it made her think of her first baby, Alaya, who had died.
There were Summers could be rough when the extended kith and kin met in July. arguing about land, industry, the folly of over-romanticising the mariages of the Young,
A novio or novia could settle the score with a flashy show of rancherismo and horsemanship after a long day trashing cement. August was the season for would be family members to strutt their stuff. Bruce found this distastefull, He dressed way down and found a stand of Cottonwoods where he could spread out his books and work, As long as he had money to cover his odd egg work, he was exempted from ranch and farm labor. He went on moolight rides and when it was time he worked through haying.
The Elderly brethren understood Bruce’s position and payed himfor something that was 1/3 sabbatical, and 1/3 anthropological research. He also helped them feel that the world of their childhoods was being maintained, though as authorities in the Church, they could do little more than fail to find the way of plurality distastefull in public. Still, their limos drifted through Dunfy in late July, trailed by a convoy including children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren--all anxious to show off whatever the kids up North were wearing and what they were doing. They stayed up late seeing what the A.V., Kerry the Goth could animate with his Game cube.
When they drifted off on the trampoline, in their heads coiled many dreams, tales and a sense that nothing was long ago. Keeping the Church to the old ways was one responsibility of the Brethren. If there was a danger to the Church retreat to find the way of truth deny abattle--’til the Second coming of Christ if need be.
They must also cope with the new. That was also the responsibility of men who had risen to the top of the Benificial Life pyramid of success, Bruce was the direct liason between its Presidency and Board of Directors to its parent Corporation.
The Corporation of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ waz adminitered by the poor suffering, sonambulent, Emperor and his variously sonambulent Imperial Guard. The Grailmasters, Wounded Healers. the Fisherking, Amfortas. Profuzly bleeding without end
It was not the Bretheren’s responsibilty to be young, but to think and comprend the World, for here dwelt their empire . It was their responsibility to continue to lead the weak in faith through a complex world. It was Bruce’s job to keep them in clothes, or to tell his Emperor and his aged guard when they truly had no clothes. Such matters must not come to the notice of their Devotees.
A very proprietary matter, was that the top Bretheren had many families who were no less polygamous or irradiated than Karinna’s, and that was a consolation. How could they leave their Church to men little aquainted with its fractures and failings .
Bruce’s Great Uncle Sam had been asked to arrange for the building of a temple in a remote Oasis , including the provision of electric latrines for the nomads and hay for their camels. *
Bruce’s one time novia for 16 years his wife, cuddled towared him in his restive sleep. Bruce rolled onto his back and Karinna put down pad and stylus and nestled her head on his chest. Livvy snuggled into his other side. Fourty-four, his wifely Karina resembled an Oil of Olay polygraph commercial--a before picture, Her skin had been blistered and scored by the Provo and Nortena sun,

DNA, RNA and mitrochondrial treatments for aging were endemic but controversial. Aging, once believed to be inevitable, had been broken down by Great Brains into root processes of influenced by multiple triggers and etiologies.
Bruce beleived treatments sheilding survivors from the isotopic effects of radiation their downwind born parents passed to their children.
Prevention would be cheap for the Church Insurance Company. Assistive care reqired by the decrepitude and long confinement at home or in seclution were unaffordable for the saints, even for Mormons in the first world.
The brethren feared that rapid population growth fueled by longevity might reqire the consideration of a federal one child policy, China, had outlawed longevity treatments.
The current Chinese policy, which Bruce had studied, allowed two children, in many cases, per couple. Partners wanting one child or fewer might transfer their certificate to a sibling or cousin, Thus Cinese 3 child and 4 child families were becoming less rare in the country. Childless families common wit urbanization.
Chinese couples who had a deceased or incarcerated sibling might apply to bear the one child that their brother or sister otherwise might have had.
In Utah 5 child families were fine except for poligs. Karina and her family’s size were controversial from the first overcast morning when Bruce brought his sweet Karina home for breakfast to meet his raging mother, Linda, and his father Kirk.

These gave Karina all the regard she might reserve for orphaned field rodents or a coyote pup brought home to tame.

His mother-in-law Linda sported 13 grandchildren. Linda didn’t want anyone to say she’d neglected the castigation of Bruce’s wife. The apple. she said, alluding to her wandering Bruce, never falls far from the tree. That faith sustained Linda. Linda had stood in the long line at Bruce’s reception. Dutifully Linda arranged the table flowers, displayed her mastery of turning square card tables into round ones.

Linda borrowed white table cloths to cover round table tops and the Ward’s fancy linen and crystal. Bruce, not poor, bought his jewel a showy diamond and a wedding spray of white orchids--professionally crafted bouquet. He payed for a the reception’s catered dinner.

Bruce’s mentors could not stand or even sit for long. They were elderly Church Historical repositories who might be too tired to eat once they got home from his mother’s energetic extravegansa. Her last effort for this errant son, who, she was convinced would marry other wives, having not held himself completely apart.

They came, even though Karinna was born into polygamy, and his Karinna’s family’s bright cotton dresses clashed with Bruce’s sibling’s, neices and nephew’s Casche Vally chique. Linda thought Karinna’s family absurd, giving the lie to her son Bruce’s role as a personal attache to the Brethren. Bruce endowed with his pricy medical monitoring, his injections and bloodwork.

Covertly, he evaluated and explained new technologies to the Elderly Mormon Gerontocracy who were divided about anti-aging technologies, removed as they were but scarcely, from the days of cart and horse, wagon and mule, and universal loyalty to the pricy pricipal of polygamy practiced coverty by members of the Salt Lake’s aristocracy.

Linda, Bruce’s mother, was not one to condone the plural marital practices of Karina’s families’ modern Poligs. These, having few TV’s, had missed the Romney-Hinkley-Matheson PR machine’s protective efforts. a portion of their people still adhered to the church’s early ways.

Bruce thought this ironic--few knew what aged spin doctors were capable of if their reigns were held too loosely and Bruce’s touch was light. He learned all he could of them, curious about thier days and ways. Talking about the books of his Aunt Kathleen that his Uncle Samuel had ordered him to turn into a series of movies.

Bruce’s cheif charge at his rooms in the Hotel Utah, the jewel in the crown of Mormonism, had once been a propogandist for the World War II Office of War Information, and the aura of secrecy lingered. Whatever Linda said or had not said, biting her tongue, her daughter in law, now long her son’s Eternal Companion, and his Karinna,’her family, had failed not to follow the council of the early Bretheren in the matter of their marriages.

Bruce his mother feared, would abandon the true Church in time. Her parents, undeniably, were covenant breakers. Karinna was her mother’s first daughter and child. Karinna’s mother, her father’s first wife married in the Mesa Temple, conceiving Karina almost immediatly. Surely, surely, her son’s family would stray from the Kingdom, having failed to keep himself apart from evildoers.

A faint smile tickled Bruce’s cheeks, submerged into REM sleep, drifting about in the matrix of his, his people’s past, his preceeding present and hoped-for propitious future as Bruce’s mother’s embarassing conversation peice , part faith, part folly. Bruce, her son, had been on the special Church payroll since he received a covert call to prepare the Egyptian Visitor’s Center, (EVC) in Geesa, near the Great Pyramids.

Bruce, a bachelor, had devoted his last Utah, cricket-soaked nights, to his fiance, leaving his mother to lmagine her exemplary son overseeing text selection for a Church produced virtual interactive tour of a torch lit composite Pyramid.

Karina curled about him as he worked late, even though he expected that his mother would think of a way to turn the dread secret to her advantage.

That last evening before Bruce’s departure, Karinna had promised over and over again to wait for Bruce as Bruce promised to come home and marry her again and again, the two in one anothers arms, weeping their promises into one another’s ears beneath the rising moon where the Le Baron sheep dogs whimpered in Canine compassion and frensy. While his mother fumed--she had fixed a big dinner and invited family friends, but had not told him about it.

They had no need to whisper in thier own rooms in those years. Bruce shared an East temple brick apartment block with his Brother Sam and two brethren of a single persuation.

The oversised brick apartmentblock sported ample rooms each with a bath in the years when each room held a wife and her younger family. Some of the clothes closets were bigger than the maid’s closet just off the kitchen. It had an elevator and private garage, private storage, and a big common laundry area. A memory of past opulence and familial bliss, all perched directly atop the Wasatch Fault. Eat, drink and be merry, for tommorow we die.

When he left for his mission Karinna moved into the maid’s room and cooked for Bruce’s brothers and roomies so she could begin her more earnest study for her BA in Range Management. The Master Program required that she spend time in the field, about this she fussed and bothered about it, until a professor hinted that in the fields might satisfy her requirements.

Bruce and her father payed her tuition and looked forward to her matriculation. Karina hoped to assist the poorest families in their family United Order with the restitution of their land.
Bruce dreams, drifted on blue, shallow, twilit seas, turned again in his dream to prepararation of hyroglyphics for the plaster EVC walls.
Beyond its circle the dark seemed suffused with spirit and light, with the long-lived Ra.

Then the dream shifted to brilliance. Bruce dreamed that he was again his mother’s San Lorenso, He looked down at four tiny footprints cast in the cement of the walkway to his paternal great grandparents’ door.
His mother and Aunt had proportionably big feet, and padded about the yard with the seven neighborhood girls topless and puppyish, Five year old Kathleen and two year old Linda’s feet promised they would be big girls when they were grown. Bruce cast them in plaster, renting a car and driving across the Emperor Norton Bridge.
When he took them back to his new house at Alpine at its Happy Valley North Eastern edge, Karinna and her mongrel brood cast them in clay, glased them, and baked them in the Airport Rec Center’s craft center kiln.
Bruce’s mother seemed displeased by the plaques, by Bruce and Karinna’s house, Linda did not want to remember the East Bay days when she and her older sister were girls and slept together in the girl’s bed. Later they got bunks and Linda did not want to remember that, Let alone commemorate the days when her sisters slept together in the bottom bunk.
Bruce had taken the ignored cast at the first house he remembered living in. His Dad was always working and Grandpa yelling bad words. They saved money for their new house in Salt Lake and for their new car. by living with Grandma and Grandpa,

Bruce drove right to the house and asked to take thecasts. The woman who had bought it from Linda’s mother was old and pleased. She had wondered whose tiny bare feet were just outside her back door for many years.
Linda suggested angrily that Bruce should keep the glased cast in his family if he thought her childhood had been so much fun.
Another time Bruce and Linda, having reconciled, walked to Bruce’s grade school. They climbed the fence instead of crawling under the gate as Kathleen had always done, Karrina cried when Linda rejected her grandchildren’s canary yellow glased present and called her Harmony airport inhouse MSW.
The grey haired Vetran of many familial wars thought it best for them to repeat the process, taking a cast of just Linda’s foot prints.Karinna could make a cast of these. Truly, though, Bruce did want the four foot ceramic cast, Celeste happily hung it on the West wall of their sunny kitchen.
Bruce liked to be asked to take it down. Sometimes one of Karrina’s brothers or sisters who were big took it down for them. Celeste asked sad questions about their Grandma and their Aunt who had died.
She liked to run her small fingers along the heels of their Grandma and Great Aunt’s Kathleen who was dead’s feet. Livvy put her little fingers over the round, raised toe prints.
The big kids. their mother’s brother and sisters children always had lots of work to do--work out to their Grammy’s farm on the lake, they ate dinner, did dinner dishes to do and went home to do homework.
Karina studied for her BYU classes until dinner time at her mother’s and afterwards read and sang with the littles, as Celeste had long called them. Then groggy, they put on their bunny jammies.
Karinna studied with her book light until Bruce came home on the nights that he did come home. Then Karinna and Bruce crept off to their love nest until the sun came up on Mt. Tymp or Rigel came crawling up the stairs in the big alpine house looking for his Breakfast.
Bruce took the platter and decided to help the kids take a cast of their feet, bake and glase it.
Celeste and theLivvy made the plaques so Karina could have them for Christmas. The craft lady at the airport helped them and kept their secret. In his dream he ran his fingers along his mother and aunt’s tiny feet and touched their tiny toes. He felt a heaviness for those sisters of seventy years before, sad at whatever it was that had barricaded the love that had greived them both.

His mother’s priggishness had not left room even for their helping their Aunt when she had encephalites. The Egyptian tombs revealed aeons, not decades.
Bruce’s children would turn from the carefree happiness of their childhood to an adults more cynical faith in the blink of an eye. At the edge of the abyss, Bruce looked at his aging body, into his personal abyss,
and blinked.
Would Bryce, his lucid dream-self wondered, chose the path of age or some newer biological alternatives--to stay younger than the average bear. He paid the highest premium available on his medical and life insurance, having no other private place to stash his capitol. He felt self satisfied in the arrangements he had made for Karinna and his family’s medical futures, then cycled into a lotusless, dreamless sleep.

*

CHAPTER EIGHT --THE SILKIE

Bruce’s Uncle Samuel stood as though Aunt Kathleen’s Great Silkie from a song she used to sing hin--a seal came out of the sea onto a hut hard by a rocky shore.

An earthly nourris sits and sing
And aye she bae lily wean
little ken I my bain’s father,
far less the land he dwellis in.

I am a man upon the land
And I’m a silkie on the sea and when I’m far, far frae land
I dwell in Suelles Skerrie,

So towered Uncle Samuel at Bruce’s dream’s beddes’ feet, He looked like the Uncle Sam charicature on WWII recruitment billboards
His old grey crown scraped the ceiling.
Bruce and his Great Uncle Sam discussed the details of the phrenetic day ahead though Bruce was too groggy to make out Sam’s words.
Uncle Sam said he had promised to fly his mother La Vell and Bruce’s mother to Geesa for burial, Bruce decided groggily, not to stop at his mother’s house for breakfast. and so he informed the old man of wars. He who had no sound advice on marriage. Could even Uncle Sam keep Bruce’s sanctimonious female relatives out of his industrious Karina’s hair? Bruce said he’d been pleased to give the pair another private tour inside the great Pyramids at Geesa. If only he could make peace between his mother’s and his own family domain,
Bruce’s Great Uncle Sam had been asked to arrange for the building of a temple in a remote Oasis, providing a clean water source via the provision of electric latrines for the nomads and hay for their camels.
*
Bruce’s Frequent Flyers Pilots Extended Family Support Union Sleep Pod’s siren call of privacy and deep sleep broke into Bruces reverie via his sixth grade great brain brother-in law's heavy metal oldy -”Die for the government”
guilt stung Bruce as he hit the snoose alarm. He was late for his digital readiness check up--after today he'd have to pay. In fact, Bruce was grounded until he completed it. Bruce feared he would not pass and so was dragging his feet.
Bruce thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old same old family genetic taint off as something new, poorly under stood and so menacing, so in need of fresh study. He was Daddy Bruce bunny, true, but he was one rodent, one a lab rat, sick of falling prey to ceaseless experiments of opportunity.
Death had received Harmony’s white paper on modern medical protocols. The battered Middle East had plenty of experiments of opportunity. Only a few heavily exposed subjects , exposed during the rigorously set up heavily reasearched buster Jangle and upshot knothole Hydrogen tests were suitable for long term Genetic study.
His Aunt, his mother’s sister, Had been born just downwind of the most rigorous and controlled atomic war games, 23 hours after the ‘’safety shot’’. Kathleen’s mother and grandfather had seen the blast when they had gone up the canyon that morning to sleep under the stars at Wood’s Ranch.
Then the Aunt Kathleen was born. It was cold. Kathllen had woken to see jack frost fairy castles on the Great dark green canvas covered bulge of her belly--Jack frost’s ice castles settled it--the baby was to be a frost princess.
At ease in the modern era, Death followed triagulared exposures--first came a curious compound of coloform bacterial symbiotes, their poisonous by-products, the excrement of their symbiotes. Mutagenic, carcinogenic, non Mendelian changes followed.
If he mentioned anything at all about the nuclear contamination of his town, the deaths and/or chemo of his friends, his glib and blythe Airport theraoist would say, with some irritation, “Oh, but that's only in Southern Utah. “ Talk about divide and conquer. Bruce could plainly see his date and place of birth onthe bimbo's chart.
She said the ‘Oh but that’s only in Southern Utah” not as derision, but axiom. it was how people conceded Northern Utah Regional superiority. “that's only in Southern Utah.“ Like the downwinders had not migrated North to Casce Valley.
Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen had, and chronicled the scoop, They declassified the cases, some hack put together another case that got the Feds even more off the hook, then they'd snap it shut again. Few doctors had the timerity to admit that they’d seen the disease before and expected to again and to treat it.
It seemed the medical remnants who dealt with classified medical records did not promote research or treatment of disabling disease bred of radiation. They were T.S. Prufrock mermaids--Oh, that would not do at all, at all, that would not do at all.’’
His kids default physician, their geneticist, could not refer to the rec center doc. The Federal scope had been turned on Utah. The geneticist’s wife was a Nurse Midwife who enjoyed the comedy of Polig. home births. The unenviable screaming, clinging pregnancies synced, entrained, a cousin to menstrual entrainment.
At the Airport, they scutinized the kids too closely for Bruce’s taste. Their bruises would start out red, turn orange and green, and then fade slowly to olive green. All of them. Any list was bound to be augmented, then employed, to virtually any unforseeable purpose.
Irked by the entire situation. His mother guarded her profits from all claims like a Lepracaun his pot of gold. That’s how Daddy Bruce thought to dust off his phlebotomy and Medical credentials from the Army.
Connections arranged an interview with the medical advisor to the First Presidency--a long interview regarding the new life prolonging therapies with which Bruce was conversant.
It was a complex matter, Bruce
the traditional interegnium. The intent of the outgoing prophet was to see that the interregniam went smoothly--but what if one of the brethren, an unpopular one, arose and used genetic therapies to consolidate and maintain an unrighteous dominion? The hypothetical possibilities were chilling.
It was for this reason that God put an Angel with a flaming sword to guard the trees of the garden, lest they live forever in their sins.

No, if life would be maintained past 100, so it was time to speak of senior retirement, even of golden years of marital togetherness-- of time to relax with their posterity until death, the fool’s coming came last, at long last.

CHAPTER NINE

The downwind terrragenic effects of A.R. were most apparent at birth. Babies less obvious maladies followed a nuerocristopathic pattern. A Matheson direct ancestor, descended from a blind cigar who deducted a pittance from his pay to pay a reader.
Utah, the State, thought it its business to identify cases of birth defects, cancer, Premature aging and all ills and effects in isolated hamlets’which effected his gene pool exponentially. Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen was not among the unluckly. She lived long enough to complete her books, to educate herself, to acheive closure and calmness. She would not be an infant soul living only by what Sartre called throwness--chance.
Kathleen’s religious interests were dizreptanlyeclectic. She drew out her life and would have continued on a set tragectory Whatever had happened, she didn’t. Spending her last years with her infantilising mother would have brought out hate, rage and fear.

Bruce thought, after his infant died, that it was time to bringing his Aunt Taffy home. Sam, his brother and Uncle Samuel, his great Uncle would help her to help care for her. Bruce could administer the same blood products that Ginny provided as a lucrative cottage industry.
A sideline while she had small children, bot had been born via cutting edge genetic and hormonal treatments at home.
Bruce thought of his first child. The baby had never learned to focus his eyes and could not hear them through his misplaced ears.
There were internal misarrangements that would be fatal. Bruce would not put the child through fruitless experimental surgery and then lose it to the hospital meat grinder since, technically, it would still be premature.
Bruce had spent his days of waiting making an optimistic ly sized coffin, carving the trim on his great grandfather’s father’s treadle lathe while Grammy Lebaron and Karinna massaged it with viscous, fragrant hemp oils pressed from Annies garden patch. It seemed to help alaya’s puffy superficial cappilaries, while they cradled and sung to it words it would never hear.
They’d put it to bed with Karinna’s disabled sister and took the baby off the heart monitor while she lay next to it. She caught trouble before the monitor’s red light bleeped.
Bruce and his brother Sam had snuck the baby out of the preemie ward at children’s with the collusion ofthe ward’s nurses.
They found that many in their region would not seek the hospital at all if a baby came early malformaties and severe problems were rife.
Bruce and Sam had taken the baby directly to the Airport where Karrina’s elder sister slept in a plane while the enigmatic Uncle Sam revved the motor of the flier’s plane enthusiasticly. It was a small medical transport, not particularly different from a regular bush transport except that there was a narrow bed raised to window level so the passenger could see out.
Bruce wanted to get his baby life prolonging IV therapies not available in the US to counter Karinna’s lack of transmissable immunity and pathogenicly contaminated breast milk. It was an old belief that infant eyes didn't focus because a baby lived still in their premortal home and by understood its language, Adamic, Adam's tongue rarely heard by adult ears upon their garden world after the fall. Eventually they acquired the mortal tongue of those about them.
In the Mexican Colonias, folk beleifs had been maintained that would have been hooted at by Utah’s sophisticated bench dwellers and all who aped them without the education and cultural improvements of which a house on one of Utah’s ancient lake shores were the byproduct. For Bruce’s mother the Toelle bench house was an end in itself. She had acheived her dream and looked down upon those without her single minded, vacuous drive. Part of a familycomttent to prove they weren’t poligs.
Karinna consistanty transgressed her mother in law’s strictures--she was from a vast and vastly embarrasing family of brightly colored poligs.
She had gone to college and become a teacher. As if that were not enough, she was now making herself into some sort of scientist--always ready with some new and improved seed to provide soil restoration.
Linda had worked hard to get the weeds out of her dusty orchard. Deep roots needed less topsoil anyway.

Karina and Bruce took catastrophic family leave and gladly took their baby back to the cottage on Karinna's Aunt Annie's land. One of her half sisters gave her books on baby massage, when the baby, Alya, was six months old the massage seemedto hurt Alya and she resisted.

That’s when the complex anoemia developed and the baby died three months later. Then Bruce wished he'd become a baby doctor rather than a gerontological biotechnocrat.
They held their baby and Karinna nursed and nursed and nursed it, in the end, Alaya died. He remembered a poem that his Great Uncle , Uncle Sam’s Father, Super Gramps to Bruce and his brother, sisters and cousins. Flowers from children, condolances and comfort from t Parish nuns. These first recognised Karinna as a serious student who ought to receive preparation for college and a broad exposure to the arts of music, art and drama.
Someone dropped off a rocking chair. Karina sang and rocked and nursed her baby, Alaya, till Alaya died. A woman with a gift for the comfort of the dying sat with Bruce, Karina and AlAya. She had the sight and infrequently saw the room fill for a spirit passing one side to the next--a lamb in Heavenly Father’s embrace.

CHAPTER, TEN, THE COACH

The Pilot's association had the mandate to asses the psychological effects of radiation--same old same old. A 20 minute barrage of Health questions about how he felt about his radiation exposure, delivered by a first generation android, set Bruce to quavering, like a jelly mold. The machine, who always wore the same clothes, sat in the same chair in the same office. The hospitality staff was efficient. The staff never needed breaks to eat, drink or deficate.
She needed a differnt job. Handing out the mesh bags for children’s dry clothing at a Utah swimming pool might please her. She had been programmed to respond to children.

The Frequent Flier’s family Association passed on an offer of a more recent model, how ever the science of android development had progressed.
Then, after his baby died, humiliated, Bruce fell into his father's sullen hostility, withdrawing into prayer or silence. He hated it when his medical files were unsealed. Harmony, the parent project, had declassified them because his Uncles, his mother’s brothers had a genetic disease.
He could seal them again by Application. Karina couldn't, wouldn't touch forms refered to her baby's death, dissected by researchers whose indifference had made life a long hell for many. Karinna was sick of elderly radiation specialist with a faint German accents and a Nazi way of passing judement on her family and their ways.

He'd never accept his apology from Congress for his rheumatism, or, if he hit the jackpot, in an Aunt Kathleenish sort of way, he’d establish a family College fund. He hoped he would.
Bruce didn’t think lost lives ought to be assigned posthumus price tags and there were many thousand gone, lost from the persecution, or the cancer or fatal rhumatism, an unending, intermidable protien cascade. Karinna had sisters with this, and brother and sisters gone from cancer and lukemia.

When Karinna swelled with Celeste and Bruce needed help, he went to a mutual cousin, a Harmony shrink, who worked at the Rec. Center once a week. He was Karina's kissing cousin with the required credential and he had advanced laboratory access.

Karinna cried over it, then decided they would have the rest of their babies from a less contaminated gene pool if they could be that organized about it. Karrina’s doctor told her he thought she was through the change. Rigel proved them wrong.

During his therapy sessions Bruce sobbed. These slpashed on the walls and bounced about the room in orbs till he went home to face his mob. Bruce complained about the Federal Mental Health people, there only to produce files for a propoganda that played down the number of deaths, the population percentage, deformaties of beloved children. Bruce lost it.

Bruce’s therapist hired onto the program during a Matheson reign as governor, his administration demanded to take over parts of the Airport project. He would not allow his constituants, guinea pigs most of them, to be emotionally bisected. The mutagenic effects of virus and radiation grew geometrically* so as the children of the South married converts, or people raised to the North with tristate or four corners partners, the percentage stayed more or less stable.
It had no great preferemce for either the religious, un-dunct, or irreligious.

Better to have a Governor with roots South of Beaver. For these people would cross the line. Bruce would. The bombing was the undying wound of Amfortas. Even the Republicans knew how much blood they’d lost and had been losing since 1951. For well over 50 years.

Bruce lived on the bench, not far from Deep Throats' son with whom he had a mutual family truck garden interest. He rented a plot adjacent to Bruce’s family’s plot out on Grammy La Baron’s land.

Redford, at Bruce’s urging, had set up funds for parents who could not pay the extortionary copying costs the Freedom of Information demanded. That was the hook, the money to get confirmatory medical records, the fiery hoops required by exploitating declassification specialists, keepers of the gates.

Matheson expanded the Rec center programs started in his father’s tenure. Some intown were turned into latchkey centers. The airport had traveking children to care for, and a middle and High School pilot project, the object of poor Daddy Bruce Bunny’s complaint.

Kerry and Celeste took a listening skills class at the Rec Center and had a listening skills club at their school. They took a grant writing class at the Rec center and the United Way gave their Mom money to teach it in the Harmony system.--the State paid for Karinna to teach a class through the PTA.
Currently, SLCI Pilot Family Program's Gentile Mental health office, as the kids called it, was on the rec floor, inconveniently above the pilot rest and diagnostic sleep module. Through Bruce’s jumbled dream he heard shards of despair and desolation.

“I knew he might get ill or be laid off someday. I grew up on garden greens on bread, but I thought if we were ever poor it would be together, as a family . . .” murmuring sifted through the air filter adding sheen upon every word--these drifted around the room, ephemeral as bubbles, then the door opened and closed and the bubbles vanished.

Bruce dropt into deeper sleep in an attempt to convince himself that he had no need to go to work, he was already there. The flier's wife above was an encephalitic pet rat in a cage. His Aunt Taffy had a pet rat with encephalitis. Goofy didn’t like Gerbilaid. Bruce remembered Goofy from an early trip
to his Aunt Taffy in California. She cried and whimpered, was too disoriented to find his mouth, and at first her body spun. Kathleen put a toilet paper roll into the cage. The rat stayed in it and it stopped her spinning. The rat was smart, it could smell the gerbilaid in its water, her fatal flaw was that she didn’t know when to make an exception.

He gave a start and then went slack at the comfort of Karina at his back. His biblical father in law, the bearded patriarch, cheating the Feds. was bedding down that night, which usually meant he was at the kids Grammy.

Kerry's alarm would go off and the lad was liable to wake up to distant strains of his gut blasting CD “I hate the Government.” and be up to get his brother in law/stepfather up and as far as the shower. Kerry took jobs and gave his pay to his Gram for the garden.

Bruce dragged himself out of bed. He stood under the shower imagining, as he had been directed by his Dream Master, that his jet lag was being pulled into a watery vortex and vanishing. Bryce made a note to call Karinna and ask her to get a brother in law over there to fix it.

Bruce feared he’d just get settled for the sleep test when his Airbus was ready to float up and rush off. He could lose his sleep pod if he didn’t use it often enough. Karinna used the pod often enough, to study there while the Children ran about the center. Now, the Pater-familii were both low on sleep. They shared the pod with Karinna’s father and made glad use of it, Karinna's polig parents and he and his Karinna betimes.

Brother Le Baron had an active project going at the Stateline. The pilots and any associates they might select got their rooms gratis and Bruce had, some years before, introduced Brother Lebaron to a former Goshute Correspondence school classmate.She looked pretty enough on the two way screen,
and prettier in person.

Bruce's mother had voiced her onorous objections to his marriage to Karinna. Karina was fishy. “Ma,“ Bruce's brother Sam had argued--these particular LeBarons are 99.9% percent poligs, our genius here being the 1/1000%. If they don't mind having a fly in their soup ...or in thier ‘Moose Turd Pie--accept no substitute, look for the genuine Mooseturd incised on the bottom of the pie itself.”
Sam considered a moment and thought of his father's face, a stone wall. Then Sam went on “I had a formal introduction to our failing old Hierophant from the mucky muck Cousin President Anders himself while calling to extract my Brother and his intended from his fairest of all missions, all sugar, strawberries and cream. Sprang for a four star welcome to a premium moose turd pie family engagement dinner, did the Patriarch, but had to ask for a special dispensation to use cow patty instead, even when the recipe didn’t call for it.“
“I would have offered” his Mommy Linda pouted, “but Moose turd did sound expensive, particularly for so many.“ Bruce’s father silently assested.

Bruce’s Elder Brother was present and confirmed that the conversation had occured “Our old maid has support in high places for her bid on old bro here.” He regarded his mother with pious uncertainty.

Karina's Grandfather, the great man, teased Bruce until her face was the color of an August Dixie tomato--He said it was said down to the lambing that his Karina put on front sippered dungarees and pull over sweaters to her two room schoolroom each and everytime the computer was fixing to break down. Then he broke it worse and left Kerry and his biggest sister to finish fixing it.

Linda pouted over Bruce’s engagement. According to Aunt Kathleen' s family chronicles her sister had been a stubborn pouter since a preschooler. She tried to convert Kathleen to pouting, but failed. Bachelor Bruce's mother opined to those near and far that it was her right to exclude Karinna’s brightly colored D.I. chic from her sight with derision, even outrage.

The polygs of Basin and Desert used to know their place. Everybody complained about it--now they were every where. Bruce had even rented a house to one of Karinna’s Goshute polig sister-wives right in To-elle, in the center of town.

Linda had to listen to complaint after complaint--she owed it to her neighbors to see that her children’s lives did not raise gossip like that. Gossip about her son, that hurt, Jacob to his brother’s Esau. To be frank, the town had expected so much for him.

There was a democrat in the State house .Some commentators--right out of SLC, the Church Capital, called the polygs Utah's largest minority, out numbering all the indian tribes combined.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He was speaking into his PDA to remember to mention his reticence to attend his session with the pilot’s association children’s therapist, when a driver came up close behind him, as though he wanted him to pull over. Bruce did, figuring it was family.
As the car pulled out from behind he recognized Karinna’s second sister’s car, and my, if there wasn’t a bunny driving and another in the car seat screaming for his Daddy. His Daddy, Bruce learned when Karinna rolled down the window, was getting away. Who might this escaped felon be? Bruce gathered that his presence was required at the family hideout at his Grammy’s.

CHAPTER TWELVE
BREAKFAST AT GRAMMY LEBARON’S

There were two wings of pods in the airport’s pro-sleep center, waiting areas with baths, and a kitchen. One set aside for smokers and one for non smokers and non-smoking Mormons. Smokers and non smokers required seperate environments, like plants and mixed like oil and water, at least in Salt Lake.

Thier airport brats played noisilly , forgetting the rigidity of their clique ridden schools. The airport the kids often had lived in different countries, heard various languages, came from countries, some of them, where they helped bead gowns in vibrant colors. Bruce Anders polyg kids in thier rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes didn’t register.

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. The state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie’s and her Mexican sister-wives’ children up North for school. Only Bruce saw Karinna’s Brother until there was a row with the therapist who saw Karinna and the children, then they all switched.

The therapist, the children said, was trying to say that the kids had to leave out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her read it. She needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t be able to feed her kids. ‘Livvy said the State couldn’t make them do anything but die.

The teacher came to the sleep pod to which Karina's girls had retreated after their walk out on the scripted discussion. Kerry was sitting on the end of the long chaise lounge nearest his grandfather and thier stepfather’s door reading a comic book and drawing.

“I’m sorry,” the teacher said when she convinced the girls to open the door. She pulled Livvy to her, and buried her face in ‘Livvy’s ringlets.

“I thought it would be better if I read right out of the book, since I didn’t write it.“ Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions.

At the Y it was better, Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she had poligs in her Sociology class. Mommy said she taught her kids that regulating religious practice was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that the Founding Fathers were wise and forbade anything but equality. Thier Grammy and garampus said so too.

The Dream teacher didn’t mind if they talked about it. Like when the Goth dreamed that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them.

It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week. The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.

Bruce was a Sabbath Breaker. He was a church clerk at his home ward. He had to bow out almost every Sunday. He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures.

Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSW--
G Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better,
If the people wanted to see one of their
own denomination, the better quality of
counseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce.
Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile with polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and 4 Scoolaged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out. “Then don’t “
Her office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said don?t,
Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were much nicer.
They went to the supe and she said they both should be considered assets, not liabilities Some of the teachers didn’t know they had poligamous students let alone colleagues.

They to have a question and answer brownbagger, then decide what to do about
the offensive leaflet. So of course the kids demanded to stay. If the Government. Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. The Mormon smokers liked her immediatly but thought the should be allowed to sleep in the better pods if they only smoked in the smoker’s lounge or on one of the balconies.
At school Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of her friends, a Mormon girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins passed her the pamphlet. She was a Goth and her teacher said she should read it. She said she was sure that there was only one of the Staff who would not resist. “You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her read something else out of the leaflet. Their Mother pulled all her children and brothers and sisters out of school.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As they left with his girlfriend, whose hair was half orange and half green, put Kerry’s wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. The G. came marching down the ramp to the door of the school. What ever antone thinks, your children are ungoverned and ungovernance and Good Riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.” Saying that was a mistake. If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly.
‘Maybe,”Kerry’s girlfriend said in a whispered sneer that silenced the student body, maybe then you’ll be old enough that you’ll want to retire.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter,
so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.

at 50. He didn?t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss
their dad, alot and off and on.

the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given
for the cleanup.

Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding, Kathleen Protested to Ginny’s Dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits were for Tooele and for the valley--they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle with half of the population uncounted.

Bruce thought men who had had their children take the burden, excluding people with previous or parental exposure. Bruce cheated and sent his boys up the Canyon to picknic-- The training was important.
The more Toelle knew about what was on the site and where the better--there was a direct need to know. So Brad kept to his classroom, particularly after Alaya.
For her, grief circled high, like hunting opreys, circling, invisible in the path of the sun. Bird who cast enormous swift shadows, deep green along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus. I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.?? But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further quicken her soul.
She died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.
He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films.
he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq
Then he load on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas.
Then he started showing films of Babys--Alexande Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people.
networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget.
He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden and his hairtrigger opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thoughthere was some connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina?s youngest brother came in and said ??Daddy, there?s an atom Bomb in New York.

there could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose.
The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore.
karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.

His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.
Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen.
Each battle was a treasure trove . Buruce could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle--
it could all be done in the lab.
the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground ground.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The full moon rode high above The skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. it illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, the delay at the airport now. His computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.

She came off a little to his left politically, She said he never wanted to hear breaking news and she HATED the allgoodnews SLC station, which Bruce’s therapist thought stress reducing. The trouble was that his browsing avatar detested it. He had started her out with his Aunt’s Bookmarks--boy had that been a mistake. She was programmed to give him the best news first and she’d come up with something from Tajikistan. He could hear what she thought most important or she’d fold up her notebook and sulk.

She did work hard. Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston. She’d been researching it all night. He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening. There had been contention over his early departure. Bruce did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house. It so easily led to rebellion among thier fractious troops.

Bruce had decided to go to sleep without the younger children. He hoped they’d let his Karinna study. Karinna doubted even his singing could get them to sleep. They were riled. So Bruce hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. “Ah, he mumbled, as he rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure and wanted to go down and look it up. The best plans of mice and men often go awry. He left the house like a theif, and so his girl Livvy accused him of being. He stole himself away from them.

He would put on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months. He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no reference to the History of Britain. He hated that song. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.

He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach, this time, if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, fading as time’s river passed them both by.

The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a a guard at buckingham palace. He often wanted to ask her who did her hair. Dust could be seen on the laminating plastic. She had worn the same hairdoo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college and started his flying tutorial service. His mother disapproved, he’d probably find some old maid school teacher out there and besides, then they’d never see him.

CHAPTER ONE/EIGHTEEN
Morning slipped through bruce?s gummy lids ,tinted in subtileblues and greyscale. His Frequent flyers? Pilots? support Union sleep pod was paid for but empty. he felt a sting of guilt at having attended too many education weeks and too few of his required pilot support group. Bruce whispered into his pda to mention his reticence to the Pilot’s Association therapist whose office was on the rec floor directly above the pilot rest module sleep treatment area.

There were two. One for smokers and one for Mormons. His therapest said Smokers and non smokers didn?t mix, like oil and water. few of the non-Mormons non-smokers declined alternate assignmentto the smoker?s wing.
The children played easily together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors.
They didn?t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the teachers said something.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Fear of flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna?s Aunt Annie?s children They were up North for school
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. Mrs. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in
her family. That made them
mad--they had a gentile neigbor who lived in a big house
and screamed at his wife and children and he was even a kind of shrink oner to the Mental
Hopital. Karinna thought a good week if she didn?t have to call the police twice.
She even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was easier. The prof. didn?t dare say a word about polygamy. IF she did she
had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by
GOW-ULDS. Snakes in their heads.
It was not Gou-ulds, but a pack of cacking crows , his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.
The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker?s area could provide some rooms to flight stewars--
the pilots area was much nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, glass walls bonded carbon with painted superglue to bond the layers.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie?s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was church clerk at his homeward which he had to bow out of every Sunday to make time for his demanding therapist.
The individual and family counseling went against his nature, but Karinna?s maiden name, Le Baron, which she insisted on using, was like a red flag to a bull to the state social workers. They didn?t care where, but they wanted them in state funded counseling.
Karrina?s counselor let her read the material that printed bythe state, on working gentli with polygamist family ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and she loved the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out or tidied their desk she put together a search party.
her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--I won?t, I cant, I wont,I can?t. Her office mate skimmed the booklet--Then don?t.
Her office was shared with a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kissing was nicer.

They went to the supe and she said they should be considered assets not liabilities since they worked harder than most of the other teacher. They asked her to call a question and answer brownbagger. ?I... Karinna said, startled, will do it if I can bring ALL my children.? The Talk went well though she feared having to head for the John. Karinna was trying to send the Supe to the smoking wing.

Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. Karinna threw her over one shoulder.
“You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” One of the counselors said.

The GENTILE as Karrina’s kids afterwards called her, brandished the offensive leaflets. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Karinna said, carrying off the struggling ‘Livvy like a sack of wheat. Kerry turned aside and put in wax vampire teeth from a Halloween past.

---------------CHAPTER?
Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter, so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds.

CHAPTER TWENTY
Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated modern war, no less than he would have hated old fasioned ones.

He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rot-ci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump. His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.
at 50. He didn? say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss
their dad, alot and off and on.

the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given
for the cleanup.

Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen Protested to Ginny?s dad.

They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.
He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.

CHAPER TWENTY TWO
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC.

His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines. Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, “I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.” But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further quicken her soul.

He thought of the dog who died in the Muslim training films. It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seized from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. He used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Laden films had been made before the US invasion of Afganistan.

Then he load on the same film with pedegreed dogs, white dogs or just a yellow stray mutt . The boys thought it would work. He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas. The principal did not approve. He caught Bruce in the hall outside his lab and remonstrated bitterly. His Mother heard about it and gave Bruce double Dutch. If he wanted to remain in the community, then he needed to support its economy. It came to him clearly, a small voice saying “At what price Dadu.”

Then he showed a films of babys--Alexander Nevsky with the soundtrack by Stravinsky.
A film obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people, though Bruce did not know how. Networks and newsfeed cared more about ratings than dogs, Muslim babies, or Mormon ones, lest we forget.

Bruce had become a TA as a junior and had tied with ten other past students of the High on his SST. Yet he was odd--like when his Cubmaster had asked him to read the Boy Scout Oath and he wanted to read it first. If they had had a Second Gulf War when he was a boy he would have been a disgrace to the community. That’s what the principal said. The principal had a habit of getting personal that could not be tolerated in a town as small as thiers and was replaced. He had recieved a letter from the Reserve Officer’s Training Corp complaining about it’s low recruitment levels. The town had provided enough fodder to Death’s cart--including his Alaya.

Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thought there was no neccesary connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina’s youngest, Kerry, then known as her brother, came in and said “Daddy, there’s an Atom Bomb in New York.” The film work raised his his wages. It made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore. He taught ethics at the high, rather Socratic. It had been his discussions of options and alternatives that had had the Principal raving down at him in the Hall . The town had given him the bulk of its support, and his Mommy Linda was in the opposite faction.

Bruce was very nearly fired for his Sundance news jibe “Glow on, Glow on with peace in your heart and you’ll never glow alone, you’ll never glow a-lone.” He expected to be sued, but gave the song 3 Mooseturd Salutes anyway.

Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt Annie had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. Now they were dignified grand matrons in plurality, managing their progeny in mixed groups and tossing Ramona’s crop of blue eyed indians in with the Grandkids.
His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones’ large downwind creche. a pitiful thing, the Atom Bomb Kids. Could any argument death of one child or one Old Glow Boy acceptable.

Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs made by thier Drsert Paradise to drop on Muslim children.

Uncle Sam, the icon’s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage, Death’s leading henchman. A treasure trove, each battle. And somewhere one of many Bruces could easily turn it into lucrative, effective, and convincing training feed. With special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle-- it could all be done in the lab the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, Western ground floor of the unadorned hayshack where the doomed canine waited.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The full moon rode high above the skylight above the bed where Karinna and the kids slept. Moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians like his mother Linda pronounced it. There was scarcly enough to justify a lift off delay at the Air Complex. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, like a bad headache.

It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of his ROTC boys, the delay at the airport now. Bruce’s computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept. Taffy came off a little to his left politically, and she complained that Bruce never wanted to hear news that mattered. Taffy worked hard, she took up little space and needed less.

Bruce’s semi-android assistant allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone while his brothers, sisters, watched their children and grandchildren--thiers and those of thier many cousins played and otherwise consorted together.

Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston and a three day shindig in SF--Sin City that Sam thought particularly important. Bruce planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening, but decided that the plan was too inflamatory. He was in enough trouble at home already.

There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna to clean up his messes. His departures easily led to full rebellion among the troops.
Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and his soft Karinna. Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep if they got riled up just at bedtime. So he hit the hay at 7:30 the night before, leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Whatever trouble there had been, Bruce had missed it.

Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleep out of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure. He did not like being unsure. The best plans of mice and men often go awry, he decided. Bruce, showered in the bunk house that Kerry and his dad were putting in for the Enterprise. Then, dressed in a Federal Marshall’s uniform he left the house stealthily as a theif. So his girl Livvy accused him of being. He stole himself, thier Daddy, away from them.

Bruce dreaded putting on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months. He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no allusion to the Brittish. Darned Old Duke of York. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt poking out behind. His mother said that the purpose of the song was to teach coordination and laughed when he said then he didn’t have any.

He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, paling, her red uniform fading to pink as time passed them both by as the lightly laminated fitness and spacial acuity avatar assumed the posture of a guard at Buckingham Palace.

Bruce chatted cheerfully with the animated manniquin. He wanted to ask her who did her hair. She had worn the same hairdoo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college, hence she must like it.

The fitness center paid off--fewer downed planes, more coherent, oriented and alert pilots-- the P.R. lent by his Uniform gave the passengers confidence in the institution of Commercial Air Travel .

----------Chapter?

There were no bossy workout machines at the glorified Army airstrip at the old Wendover Radiation Testing and Firing Range or, as it was later called, The Wendover Proving Ground. Its big twin nuclear bunkers bereft of Big Boy and one for Fat Boy. They were nearly as massive as the pyramids if you counted the underground supply warrens. He knew. He had friends out that way whose Dad had been a hiking and spelunking buddy of his one time Aunt Kathleen. It was humiliating to speak of her up to the Stateline, and for a time, he failed to show for the local-only pocker night.

They’d camped up at Alpine Lake in his Ruby’s Mountains and climbed along the tunnels of caves once inhabited or relatively unexplored. His Aunt, whose personal life was such a source of scandal was in that place simply a memory of a energetic, religious and way too pretty Tomboy. They went without any equipment but a rope. The young are foolish, Kathleen’s onetime friend Kenny said, and shrugged.

Bruce liked the flexibility of loosly woven realities, the freedom of Pilot Mountain Pilots. who lined his pockets. The Fast Train made a major stop at Wendover, Nevada to Temple Square in Salt Lake . Why go hunting for forbidden delights in the Bee Sting State when in Wendover you could simply ask for a recommendation from a well informed waitress and rent a car to drive to an available and totally legal and reliably discreet location. Not that Bruce ever did. At the worst, Mommy Linda would find out about it. Kathy had written an account such a query in her journal. She had asked if there were any horny women in town. She had answered, that there were none who did it for pay. For that they would have to go on to Wells.

CHAPTER

After a foggy drive to the airport, Bruce set the big bay of windows embedded into the walls of his cubicle to current view. He dialed roof into the keypad and then when the Seagull’s view appeared on the small screen he could tap in North, North and South, East and local view. As he imagined, from the mounted videocams he could see the dry salt mist that rose from stilted houses that approached the Great Salt Lake.

It met twin freshwater airstreams that drifted down from the Casche and Toeele vallies these merged and mingled and backed up toward the runways. A readied craft could have taken off now. There were some, but they were packed.

Bruce wished he had taken the train out to Wendover. He’d be playing poker now with his high school buds, waiting for his flight’s etd to be announced over the Stateline Casino’s Public address system.

At SLCI it was easier to focus on spiritual things. Bruce set his computer’s preprogramed alarm clock--he looked up a suitable bible reading to ask his laptop to read to him the last thing before thier isight family prayer the next night. He liked to set the reading to wake him. The voice at first seemed distant, intruding into his dreamlife. Bruce liked to wake to sacred things.

Wendover was packed with Mormon pilots . It was outside Deseret , beyond Zion’s pale, on unhallowed ground. There was no graveyard or hospital in Wendover to regularise or sanctifiy the proceeding of his sacred family rites.

In Wendover the strictures of their religion, they easily collectively shed. Bruce welcomed the sight of the now ancient Cowboy Bill pointing to the “This is the Place,” Casino, now moved up the road a little, the infant Bruce and his brother Sam always had to stop at the old Stateline Casino. It had stood right there, a silent parody of Brigham Young. Who, sick with fever had raised himself on one elbow and, probably delerious, added those fated words “Drive on.”

Aunt Taffy’s day when she was a waitress At Wendover and he and his sister were 8.
She had tried Tahoe first. But the required dress, or undress required in the big casino’s put her off.
In Wendover you could cream the guy as long as you could make itlook like an accident--one less truckdriver would not turn the tide of the once small town’s history.

CHAPTER

“I think I have something on that’’ Leila, Bruce’s desktop avatar said.
Ah yes--August fifth 1973 your Aunt spilled icewater into a dealer’s lap. A few weeks later she smacked one upside the head,drinks and glass flying all over the near customers, who no less deserved it.

The house where his uncle, Taffy’s brother’s first girlfriend lived had been relocated to make room for a Casino extention. There he had had first real kiss from a nice Mormon girl whose family owned the towns favorite Grocery and a single air ambulance.

Aunt Taffy’s Brother had lived with his sister the summer he was 15 then and she 20.
The cooks all complemented her on his reliability and hard work and they became more than siblings, friends. Strange to think of the finality with which he had vowed to never speak to her again. When she saw a therapist
and with her aunt there suddenly spilled out the gruesome details of her spare the rod spoil the child and incest is best sprawling nightmare of her biker family.
She had been close to her sister in law years before--she never imagined that she would be powerless to resist creating its carbon copy as her children aged. Kathleen had tried to do what her brother;s wife would have wanted before she began to go mad as she took on a frenetic multiplication without stewardship of her race. Rather she seemed determined to create one of her own. Only his grandmother worried avout her Grandchildren, feeling that Candy was too ill to provide forctheirbproperrearing.
Bruce’s computer popped open andLeila said “fruit seldom rots on the vine.”

“Yes,” he said as she showed Bruce archived photo’s of the site which she pulled up under Enola Gay.
The archive was located somewhere either on the base or in the Casino complex, and on scteen the military and covilia photop archives were merged in 2006, and included copies of Archival photo’s dating from the time the base was a remote boy’s reformatory, one of the Mechanical Bill holding his first bottle of soda pop in his newly constructed Cold drins shack on the highway.
Mormon passengers often avoided the laregly Gentile Nevada border town. East bound Flights could be shunted to the more defensible Bonneville airport if there were some threat, like a local Goshute attempting to board.
bryce used to sing as he climbed the hardened foamy Lava bubbles. They had partly eroded so you could climb almost straight up while the sharp edges of the bubbles cut into the soles of their shoes.

His Aunt Kathleen had spent her offtime on those hills--he had read it in her journals at the U. of U. Wendover was 3-5 hours from most California destinations. Eastbound travelers often took the train to avoid degrading scrutiny while boarding at clogged Califoria airports thus avoiding SLCI completly.
The Church prefered that its pilots use SCLI but was losing to Wendover’s enticements-- proscribed card playing, and worse sins. It was said that all you had to do was register at the desk if you did not prefer to sleep alone. Bryce had never tried.

Book one--Cry me a rainbow and the circle game:
CHAPTER TWO, SIN CITY East

Wendover was in Bryce’s School district. He had been an internet TA, correcting papers and corresponding with the children and young people --in widely bejewled time stripped mineral geology of the wide and over warm earthtoned desert.
Bruce loved SLCI. He remembered when his disabled Aunt Taffy was wheeled aboard and his 3 sisters were allowed on board for a last peek at their Aunt. His youngest sister asked Taffy, when Aunt taffy called a week later, if she was still on the plane circling in the blue, and for her it remained her truth about her aunt for three years, until she visited Aunt Taffy and Uncle Brad.
Whenever they saw Aunt Kathy again it was visiting, not summer visits in the July, when everyone’s family came but a time to just visit.
And everyone said in California how nice to see her--like Aunt Taff was a photograph or a movie.
Once Uncle Bruce got them to stay by making a Barbeque --not having it would be wasting food, which was wrong. Her refridgerator didn’t have a freeser. His mommy said that all refridgerators had freesers,
Bryce peeked in and it was true. then his daddy looked.
He said some people had seperate freesers.
SCLI was near where he was a baby and Taffy was would take him for rides in his green car but Bryce got scared, captured by an Enemy soldier. She took him up in an elevator and taffy’s house was way up in the leaves. Bryce started crying because he missed his Mommy and brother so Taffy put him in his car seat and took him back to his house.
from the great complexes’ roof, on a clear or cloudy day, bryce , unable to see forever, could see that first house in West SLC. He could turn to see in all directions with a joy stick-he also could input the day and time
to change the weather or time,
anyone not miserably Jet fatigues could just push the big button labled in a cornicopea of Tongues push here to see local time and weather.
He could see from any interior skylight or East facing windows, the view from the roof observation deck. to the NorthWest, his great second grade school.
the second place where he learned that he was a two eyes egg head to the other kids, but nobody cared there, they made him the great Brain.
He knew everything they were teaching at his West SLC gradeschool kindergarden the teacher wouldn’t let him bring books to school, or even his brother sam, eiven though Sam was a first Grader. SHe told them to shut up and play dumb,or made them sit in the dunce corner and read into a tape recorder.
Now it was his wife and children who said he was too smart to be truly useful. he had married into the vast lebaron kindred with in he had more poor relations than he could count. when he traveled they took it personally, as though plastic wasn’t real money like the money in return for their stock.
they were paid for stock and extra hay in a good year, for the pine nuts that sold for 2.00 a pound.
they could only gnaw at the hand that fed them, risking their access to the grocery only in Reams plastic which his wife and children used liberally to feed his wife and children’s vast impoverished kindred.
Neither was the balance on their sCMI account which his kids used liberally ever much below his credit ceiling. He felt like he was running a private welfare system. His family was boycotting deseret Industries label cash for which most of the poor cousins qualified, so Bryce gave the brethren a talli by age and church status and the brethren.
Kirk-- We must recognise that we are killers but that we need not kill today.” 8-19-4-
sci-fib 4 am
added the amount need to his pay. Karrinna kept trying to prevail upon their own girls to sew. they were all admirable seamstresses and his sed account always included fabric and Vogue patterns for formal dresses and bridal gowns.
Their taste in fabric was pricy. That was because their cousins could all sew but only sought out his girl’s help for formals and wedding gowns which they couldn’t fit properly or afford the fancy dressy materials needed to create the proper effect.

They also helped their multitude of poor Ranch cousins with their sewing in the summers and some could not afford fabric at all. Thet still cut down unworn portions of old dresses to make new ones and saved quilt peices.
These were Karinna’s talents, but it was far easier to put the girls up to a credit card call to sed--one without patriarchal sanction.
In his girls ward and high school home made clothes were definatly declasee’ and so were ranch cousins sent up North for school.
Bruce’s balance at sCMI, sion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, as the pioneers had called it never wavered. If he payed it twice a month, the girls maxed it out twice.

Bruce was about ready to go on a sed strike or make his kids get jobs. They moved in circles where jobs were declassè. And while he was flying out so much he was in a poor bargening position.
Bruce loved his girls and dreaded their anger. Not only this, but in this argument he felt himself in the wrong. His girls were sweet and generous and he had the money.
They got their canny bullheaddedness from him, Karrina complained as she had driven him to the airport after thei childen’s well coordinated rebellion. Why the big house, the new cars, the 5th Avenue look, if he was not trying to impress? Not her. Karina had been impressed 15 years before, when she had married, as it seemed to her, not an old fuddy-duddy but ultimate respectibility at an epicenter of the mainstream Church itself.
Bruce was man with money who would not take other wives, so he said and so he likewise had refrained. Karrinna had polig roots. She wanted them to stop showing, just as Bruce’s children tried, failing to hide theirs.

CHAPTER

As cloudy light sept into SLC International in robes of grey, Bruce heard the rustling silk of Jabreel’s robes, a hyperenergetic Muslim physician and researcher who headed the pre-conference conference delegation.
The post conference confreceers had driven down from Uncle Sam’s Uinta Enclave the night before hoping to get a fresh start minus their jet lag. BRUCE had left instructions with his computer to wake him a half hour before any announced ETD. He had woken on his own, rested, blushing at his nakedness between sheets whese Karina’s feral scent lingered.
Then he had pulled on his skivvies and had gone out in search of liquid, puting a fiver in the vending machine for a fifth of aspatamine spiked Gatorade.
He glimpsed, examined, then turned away from the knot of biotekkies bound, like him, for the San Francisco Genetic Bioengineering conference with its bio-ethical veneer.
He glimpsed not only the pricy and competant Jabreel, the pricey Mormon-Muslim of Bruce’s conversion with whom his uncle Sam had had many dealings. (Not the Uncle Sam, symbol of the Union, but jhis grandmother’s brother Samuel.)

Bruce’s own Uncle Samuel had, over the years, become, in and out of the family and home town, a living symbol of the nation whose name was used in humor to cover his actual personal name, and origins.

Bruce’s Uncle Samuel was truly everywhere and nowhere. He was talking now with his disused and diseased Aunt Kathleen’s friend Ginny. his body language and the bone crushing hug Uncle Samuel gave him indicated that did not mean to speak with her at any length in present company.
His was a simple political pit stop.Unfortunatly there was a bug in the thrusters that were supposed to protect the Hindenberg’s commuters from wind gusts on take off. Fog was not really the trouble, but the public, had no patience for detail.
Uncle Sam wanted the airport administrator to release the mail flight to SFO immediatly, but that Lord of uncertain weather was balking. Neither sleet nor rain nor snow could keep him from his appointed rounds--via truck to Bonneville and then to Sacto. Why not have the conference in Sacramento. Scenic it was not.
Bruce slipped back into his cell. Session two of the pre-conference was in full swing. Ginny had her father’s talent for weather watching and uncannily timed arrivals and departures.

With Ginny’s unexpected arrival, the unofficial pre-conference conference reached a quorum and the tech croud began to speak more seriously. they were in a sitting area shaped like a mushroom, with the door lined hall Bruce’s room led off forming the Mushroom’s stalk. Surrealist shards of conversation floated too him too blurred with distance that he could not tell who said what and what they said, each word coming seperatly and mmany not coming at all. The dreary, extreme complexity of the distorted conversation sent bruce, like a bunny floating to the bottom of a very large rabbit hole asleep as he rustled into the autumn leaves at its bottom. His dream was about Alice and Wndover, somehow, though Celeste, his daughter was a little overgrown now to play the pinafored role of Alice. Which they did in the dream. She was giving him a tour of Wonderland and Looking Glass land as though he had never heard of either place or the means of getting in and out of them. The means of getting to and from looking glass land were strange, like the mirror were odd. like stepping through a seemingly stationary flow of glass.

Then he came to an extraordinaty potrait of Einstein. Why it was jist rigt Celeste said, just too too right, just his height.
Bruce’s brother called him from tthe room just beyond the portrait, he said to just step on through. Since it was Leon’s UNbirthday, The day Bruce turned 60 while his Brother Samuel had not yet turned 61,
Bruce felt that everything was quite alright then and he stepped through the portrait just to find the same brother staring down at him.
“Happy birthday bro, slug a bed, hey, Uncle Sam’s got it set and we’re ready to make like birdies and fly.”
“I can handle it,” Bruce said cheering to the news.
“Not you, Birthday Bunny-bud,
“you’re grounded by fog, the airport’s socked in. Who could fly in this. Besides every pilot in the damb joint is dead on his ass asleep or in their , you know, with women.”
“ Hey,” Bruce said, “Karinna . . .”
“Actually my wife is a polig and far past caring what anyone thinks of her,”
“Fairly spoken, my brother and in defense of the fair.” Sam said. He tended to get Shakespearean off season.
“Anyway, the poorley though of Uncle Samuel wants to beat the gusts out of here. Just to set the proper example.”
The tiny room made him claustraphobic, being only suited for sleep. though he and Karinna had often used them for trysts .stopover at SLC, but not sufficient time to drive down to see the kids.
He would have liked the kids to meet him at his parents when he passed through, only a few minutes away. His mother, however, wanted visits to be confined to designated polig only days.

Karinna had had enough of Utahs polig only Jim Crow culture and tried, but failed, not to detest her mother in law, who felt that Karinna simply did not know her place, if she knew her place and accepted it, there would be no problem. Karinna’s family problems, as his mother called her family’s polygamy, just weren’t her problem.

Now if Karinna had agreed to have nothing to do with her polig relations and had courted Bryce’s family instead she would have been better accepted, but this was entirely out of question.
Emotionally, Bruce felt drawn and quartered by the tension, but not so much so as Karinna and the children.
His children were offended when he went to see his mother at all. Family reunions were out of the question. He hoped that their anger did not propel them into the Principal, though he was sure at least some of them would take that path less travelled upon.

CHAPTER

His deceased Aunt’s chief mourner, Ginny, Kathleen’s Ginny, had taken a fast train East in from the coast, having inherited her weather prescience from her father, savvy about just who would be waiting that morning for the fog to thin and lift., stranded becayse of a preconference confererence up to Little Rock Ranch ending the day previous,
they had splept at the Uinta Getaway, and even now knew that their pleasant rooms were being sccrubbed, made up and sanitised. A group of them, as Ginny’s informant had predicted, had driven down to the airport, arriving just after Bryce had abruptly awakened.
Bruce had a picture of Ginny’s daughter, his own biological His Aunt once removed? A parthenogenisis in Ginny’s petrie dish which had been implanted implanted by her husband Ross, too old now to father a child during one of her conjugal visits at Leavenworth, at least between the sheets. Ross received a yearly conjugal furlough. Neither were young. They had opted for a visit in the unromantic Leavenworth lab, making their baby as best they could.

Both of Ginny’s children knew how they were conceived, they watched the process from high lab stools and had peered into his parents electron microscope--it simpler to explain than the mysteries of the marital bed.
Kathy’s older brother, both son and biological father of his biological mother had watcked the parthenogenisis from a high lab stool. Ginny had been studying Parthenogenisis in insects, this being the least controversial cloning techniques, the market brisk in well recommended clinics. Discretion and a gentility born of her Mama, always the one to know the proper thing to do at the proper time.
They had done a straight cloning of Ginny’s father’s DNA when they had made their son Ladd, but the two donor method reduced the considerable risk of genetic disease in a one donor cloning.
Bryce remembered bursting in upon his parents during Street Street to tell them about something Kermit the frog had done and finding them trying to make a baby. What they were doing was plain enough, but how could that make a baby?

His outraged dust bunnies, holding down the home front while Bryce did his Globetrotting. They still beleived that the Stork had brought them this being the sobrique of Bryce’s cousin Blaine, a medical bioengineer at the SLC genome project who ran a sort of geneological service, studying the DNA of California cousins of irradiated Utah ones.
It was kept a family secret, but yes, their mysterious Uncle Sam had had a ghostly hand in getting the Stork to bring them. Karinna’s most unfortunate Arisona Strip cousins had seen much death, disability and deformities. At a certain point a caregiving mother or aunt or cousin from an irradiated genome would say, as had Karinna, “Enough, the rest are coming from the Stork.
Uncle samuel was so like the stringy old man in the Army Recruitment commercials. He was the older of their Great Uncles and reigned as the Senior patriarch at the fourth and twenty forth, and the yearly reunion of his clan somewhere on home turf. Sometimes he’d even put on his Uncle Sam westcoat and top hat.

Brigham young had chosen his people and their homeland well--there was still room for expansion in the barren wastes the press portrayed as barren--their lovely green jewel of a sion.
Grandpa What’s His Name had apparently thought to clone himself before he croaked. A neighboring officer received frequent visits from the clone, young Kathleen’s ten year old brother Ladd.
On the day of Kathy’s birth, the ancient fellow officer noticed that the place was swarming with FBI. He called Uncle Sam on a secured link.
Daddy Ross was allowed to cut the umbilicus, see that the baby’s passages were open and then they read Lad’s Daddy Ross his writes. Ginny and the baby had slipped out of the room. the agents swarmed over it, photo bulbs flashing, agents barking orders.
Ladd said it was like on the X files, but as much as he wanted tocouldn’t stick around. His job, according to the contingency plan, was to get the baby out before it started to cry. He was their one chance. No body was looking for a small boy with a pet carrier.
THE PROMISED WIND storm had taken itselfwell to the north of slc, leaving Salt lake International in a clotted mass of white fuss which suited bruce’s fussy state of mind almost furry state of mind.

CHAPTER
The airport sleeping arrangement was, for Linda, a jewel of maudlin hippocracy and tragedy. Bruce was welcome in his parents house, but as to.... the others, there were certain rules, conditions which Karina’s family needed to adhere to out of politeness.
Eating crow, Karinna’s father called Linda's rules, refering to Jim, and the black from white segregation that was struck down in the mid 19th Century.

Bruce’s mother Linda sincerely felt she could “help” Karinna if she could just get to “know” her. She emitted this tragi-comic subject whenever her polig son visited.

She boo-hooed and pouted with the regularity of a water clock “It ain’t going to work Ma, it really, really ain’t.” Sam would sing softly as though his voice were coming from offstage. The Brother thus used the Ander's airport time share though Bruce’s mother was only 5 minutes away.
Yea, it was for this purpose Karinna’s father signed on to the plan initially. The avian patriarch insisted that it was not Bruce’s irrevocable fate to be plagued by a shrew. He could not stand by and see his son in law fall victim to an ungoverned tongue.
Karinna’s Dad primarily used the 3/4 bed for conjugal time with Karinna’s mother on quick fly bys, thus avoiding the commute that cut deeply into their private time together. Bruce treasured his first wife, Karinna, and his first surviving child, Celeste. It was after the death of their first child from Leukemia.
That the Brethren made good on their threat to send them both on Bryce's second mission to Egypt's allowed them an ingress into a high dream,Mormon Rosecrution Visitor's Center
a tourist draw next to a pyramidal Temple dwarfed by their Museum and Visitor’sCenter--Sam knew of a few Airplane Graveyards so remote that only the nomads knew much about them. They
were places of death for man, woman, child and beast.

CHAPTER

Karina's baby bloated body was a momento of their early sweet times. They lived in a cottage at Aunt Annies’ back Ranch, until their first baby came and failed to thrive.
Their Mexican honeymoon shone upon them there both Bruce himself and Grandpa LeBaron had Annie Anders LeBaron as an Ander cousin. At Annie’s they had lived out months of blest seclusion waiting for the coming of the Death of their child.
Bruce and Sam built the honeymoon house at Karrina's Aunt Annies'--out beyond the houses, milk cow clover patch and orchards.
Their pod at SLCI harked back to those times because he had loaded it into the pod’s fiber optic walls. Bruce had spentmuch of their honeymoon taking pictures.He could bring up the files and the musiche'd put on sound track and far awaycrickets and croaking frog would drownd out the airport Institutional noised, and the squealing children in the rec center above.When Bruce’S Father had a fly by with minimum allowable rest time at SLCI, Karinna arranged to meet Them.
Their younger kids raced around the rec space, forbidden to recognise their Gramps in public. Brother Le Baron, as Bruce called him, and Brother Le Baron’s third wife Ramona had the best deal, she and the pater family shared a free pilot's room at the Stateline Casino in Salt City.
Ramona was, at 36, Karina's father's last always- trying-to-make-a-baby-wife. Brother Le baron liked best to rendevous with Bruce for indulgence in
guy-stuff recreations and he and Ramona got to chat with their old remote learning high school friends.

They really preferred to fly out of Salt City, i.e Bonneville. After Ramona, Brother Le Baron, disinterested in rearing as great a progeny unto sion as all that claimed Aristotle's theory of spontaneous generation as explanation for the noisy rampages of his mortal seed.
His reward for wise stewardship over his herds, flocks, fields, his hired hands, his family. Heaven had challenged him with a hard working life. He prayed for the wisdom to be a good shepherd to each in his care.
The family's family campground, former pasturage was high in the mountain circs
of the deep Crick pasturage. Even there they had to work, because Karina had to work. Her paper was called “Species Identification and habitat regeneration in the Deep Creek range.“

CHAPTER, WENDOVER BILL

Wendover's almost elderly Dead Heads, its one time dopers and coke freaks, unmarriable in Kathleen's day, still owned and ran the twin Wendovers of Utah and Nevada, East and West. Canny as always they rendered free rooms to commercial pilots for any purpose they liked.

The canny clique of Aunt Kathleen’s vintage encouraged the cashing in of SLC Rec Center credits for poker chips since way long before the Harmony Mental Heath group began to run the Airport facility. As a Mental Health project, it had been modeled on Harmony’s popular 800 dollars for life Salt Lake longitudinal pilot project.
The Anders family to which Bruce appertained had been on line with Harmony since its inception in the mid nineties. Bruce was but a beardless pilot and they went to visit Aunt Kathleen so no one could blame his Mother because they’d never met his Aunt. And then they could only stay one night because
their mother had, just had to see the
Sea Lion Cave, The Columbia Gorge,
the Redwoods...

CHAPTER iii.

The light, intruded white, blue and violet
into Bruce’s dream. It seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath as he hit
the snoose on Kerry, the Goth's Vintage Heavy Metal. Die for the government . . .Karina's voice floated about the room.
Die for the Government . . .

Dreaming still he was again small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny-dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his own toddler sise, so in his dream she was a toddler too,that he wanted his Greatest Gramma to be alive again.

Bruce and Celeste huddled at her funeral and decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay still and icy in her coffin,up. They began to baul on a count of three. Bruce was three. Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took he and Celeste into his long arms.

Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change Bruce's soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms and went to find his grandma.Instead,Aunt Taffy kneeled
down and asked if anyone had changed
his night diaper yet.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious more than pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally. “Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked over innocently when the doctor mentioned something to her.

Their home town, pretentiously named after the star closest to the realm of Deity,Kolob, had changed as the reigning generations shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural mule skinning halfbreed wives, and the dregs of England.
These,given a chance to reboot in a hill studded grassy land where each could have house, pasture, garden and field.

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal Uncle, Air Force Samuel, as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--a virtual Ulysses preserved with his kindred immortals Athena and Mentor. Linda beleived God himself had preserved Samuel for the sake of his righteousness.

Uncle Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live beyond the age of a tree. He had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age the gnarled old man time, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.

Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s Generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.

Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world. Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna.

Karrina prefered no converts and no change. She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right . Brucey thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart.
One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to conform to Karrina's Ways--just to make his family happy and to retreat from a complexity that was ever expanding to a straightforward and accustomed more simple world.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him even as a boy. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle.

He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five and his reactivation was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.
True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen.
Even, Sam and Samuel in who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister? He finally had asked Ginny, who he sometimes encountered, if she could take her.
“We moved so much in those years,“She said, “I and the girls were at school. I got a job near them. Now their children are grown...“

Could his Aunt Kathleen’s fell fate fall upon the good in heart, the most righteous among them? Linda had not marveled.
In his dream he made a very cogent argument for the offensive notion that power was not righteousness. It was not possible to broach the subject of his Aunt without putting Linda or Linda’s mother into near hysteria followed by a long snit. These disturbances were all Bruce’s younger cousins ever knew of his Aunt.
They knew more about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ,

Bruce’s oldest girl Celeste had complained while they were opening presents just the every Christmas,
Celeste had asked whether his Aunt Kathleen was alive whether she could presents or maybe come for all of Chistmas. Bruce had said he might have included her earlier, but what did he know, he and Sam were just goof offs.
Even when it meant including his Karinna, yielding their long snuggles, parting from the still fertile womb from which Bruce anticipated such happiness. He wanted to settle the matter of Orson Pratt's early purchases in Egypt.
Uncle Samuel had wrestled the Church's share of the parcel from its archivists via He wanted to settle the matter and settle Karinna into his life. Then they would see about the old people, including his Aunt.
When he visited the Florida address Uncle Samuel scribbled for him on his way to Egypt, he found a young mother with children.
They played with their Alphabet Soup together and had a frosen Pissa light and gooey and lighly browned, The girl threw him a blanket and he slept late on their parlor
couch and walked on their white sand.The youngest boy, one of four or so, Ladd, was loquatious about his fallen Aunt Kathleen. She had died almost a year earlier.

His mother and grandmother said nothing, but the precocious Ladd was an onsite reporter spilling his misery into a special report just before the main news came on.
Formerly when Kathleen's uncle Samuel hiked up the bluff to the big white housewhere his energy extruded niece wrote--writing with sore hands that didn't hurt any more than anywhere else. The boy grieved for his Cassie as Bruce had once done when his mother cut him off from his good old Aunt Taff, when he was old
enough to read the last books and to singwith the last tapes that his mother sent through to Bruce and his brother Sam.

Now Bruce could write the Brethren that
he was free to marry when they deemed his mission to Egypt complete. They had pumped him for romantic detail when he confessed his affair of the heart. He hadnothing to say in his own defense. The Lord in his tender mercy deemed it time.
“It just happened, that's how it was for me,“one of the Brethryn had said, during the emotional fuss over the mere possibility that there could be a Karinna to be suceeded by the Leukeimic infant who preceeded his pretty little Celeste.
When Celeste was established, one of the Senior Bretheryn minded in his sleep that the church still had a bit of land which it maintained near the great Pyramids which the Rosacrutions maintained for a penny a year.
Upon it was an unassumig museum that the Church already partly owned, The Rosacrutions payed for its indeterminate lease of archival space and a basemented formal archive for a gross annual payment of 5 dollars and 2 cents per month.

The Church’s montly retainer seemed sufficient at the time the land was purchased from an impoverished elderly physician of undetermined confession.
Bruce’s great Uncle Sam pondered something the old patriarch his father had told him about the matter. He first had investigated the Orson Pratt purchase during the Carter Administration.
The old gentleman whose assistant he was that day said that his failing energies were insufficient to accomplish a wondrous work in the land of Mary and Joseph’s exile as he had long dreamed, Such active dreams must go to younger men now. Though not young he had promised to yeild the Church to the interregnium which would choose a new prophet. He had considered the propsition carefully--He would yeild his position at 110. The precidency and quorem of seventy should not be able to buy themselves power with lucre. The Lord would not want it.
The over-survival of a unpopular or politically extremist member of the reigning body could hold the church hostage, for centuries, hypotheticly, separating the unenthused from the Church Permanently. Presidnt Hinkly had brought the world church into the new mellenium. A WWII Reporter for the office of war Iformation, he had held the church together with his talented magnatism.
It could have as easily been held in thrall by another Esra Taft Benson, for how long? There seemed to be no theoretical end to future arrests of the aging process.
Somewherethe Prophet was restling uneasily in his unknown grave. The trend favored an intergnium after 100 years.
A chill in the room gave Bruce goose bumps as the Patriarch gased,as it seemed, past his mind into his heart and soul. Pancho Villa, leader of the Mexican Revolution, however he had sheltered the Saints, had left, by their expulsion, a deep schism in the Church when he asked them to return to safety in the North.

They had thought it best to evacuate before the expropriation of the Mexican railroad,
before roving bands went marauding after the bulk of the revolutionaries had gone on home.

CHAPTER
CHAPTER

In Bruce’s time, DNA, RNA and mitrochondrial treatments for factors related to aging were controversial everywhere. Aging, once beleived to be inevitable, had been broken down into it’s root degenerative processes.
Bruce offered himself and his wife for any available trials. At first Karinna resisted, considering the injection a form of vanity thought vain to her fundamentalist family.
Bruce convinced her that the treatments would sheild herself from the isotopic- accelerated maladies of the radiation her downwind parents had passed to their children. Karina, one of her elder sisters had died the death. They had room for
the traditional sickbed in the kitchen,
Grammy had kept her there during through icy winter days moving the big table so that she could see the garden. In the summer she moved the bed to the screen porch or outside under a net beneath a tree where peas were shucked and apples pared.
Her husband and sister wives brought the children to race around and were her comfort and her husband comforted her in rightousness, knowing that she lay listening for his car.
*

She had always loved to draw and took the art up in great fervor when it became clear that there was little else she could do in the world a comprehension that came in one miserable blow after another. Her husband’ first two wives went to have their tubes tied the day they wheeled her into her childhood room .

*

Bruce faulted himself for not spending more time with Karina’s family. He had presented at too too many education weeks and too made it to few of his required pilot support group meetings. He didnt want to go because he thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old same old off as somrthing new and menacing.

He whispered into his PDA to mention his reticence to attend his session with the family therapist. The children played easily if noisally together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors.
They didn’t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the caregiver said something nasty.

CHAPTER

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie and Maggies children when they were up North for school .

The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her do it and she needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t ne able to feed her kids. She came around the desk and knelt by the girls. “I’m sorry, she said and pulled them to her. You can’t imagine how sorry I am.’
Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that had happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions, and how it turned their Father of many great, great, great Grandfather and the bad things he did, so her Great-Grandmother took the business to Brigham Young. He said that if that’s what she wanted, he could give her a divorce and send her where he’d hardly be able to find her.
Karina thought it a good week if she didnt have to call the police on them twice. Then he’d go about how . . . or somebody said this or that about one or another of them. He’d stop only if one of his kid’s ratted on the other. Then they’d reealy hate . Their Mother said that was called divide and conquer.
At the Y Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she even had poligs in her Sociology class.
That was a serious matter with the academics, even the ones who were strongly anti-polig because it was because it was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that mention of the practice was very bad because the Founding Fathers forbade anything but equality. The Government was not to say anything about how people practiced their reliion.
When she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them. It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.

The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephews to play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony. A church clerk at his home ward Bruce was a chronic Sabbath Breaker. He had to bow out almost every Sunday.

He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures. Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSWS. Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better, If the people wanted to see one of their own denomination, the better quality ofcounseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce. Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile or Churchgoing Mormon without polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet. Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and School aged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were clenched and chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out.
Glinda shrugged, “Then don’t , what ever it is.“
Karinna’s office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said. Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl whose mother had two sister wives who ran thir farm togther. They were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were nicer.

Some of the teachers didn’t know they had polygamous students let alone colleagues. They decided to have a question and answer brown bagger, then decide what to do about the offensive leaflet.
The kids demanded to stay. Kerry said they should go on strike--then the state wouldn’t get their school money. There were lots of kids whose families were poligs and lots of lots of polig teachers. Her little Livvy yelled at the principal that she was a bigot. The principal was impressed. “And you know what that means?” she asked,
She smiled at Livvy, blithe as a viper, “I don’t favor bigotry.”she said, “in my school or anywhere.”
“But Mrs. Larson . . .”
“The letter isn’t about Mrs. Larson.”
“Mrs Larson has been here 30 years.*
Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of Glinda, once a Mormon, girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins, passed the upside down Livvy the pamphlet.
Kerry, known in sixth grade as the Goth said someone should read it outloud so his girlfriend, fair, as the goth referred to their bad goth. likewise a Goth, picked it up and began. Kerry said he figured that there was only one of the Staff who was certainly make problems.
“You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE” as the children ever afterwards called Kerry and Andrea’s sixth grade teacher. Mrs Andrewson took the pamplet and read just parts of the remainder ofit.
“ I don’t know why you need to worry yourself about it.” she said with false innocence.
“I know,” Kerry said with a cold, smooth, and bitter inference that brought bile into Karinna’s throat. “We’re kids. Kids don’t get married, not in polygamy, not in monogamy.”
His Mother favored Kerry’s notion of a strike. She’d go before she’d have them involved in a witch hunt. She’d said she’d send them to the Mexican Monks and Nun’s if she had to. They, at least, cared about the moral education of their pupils.
‘’Mrs Andrew hooted. “Our Goth in parochial schooll?”
Kerry glared in scilence. Kerry liked the Monks. He taught the boys how to build satillite dishes. They’d made more and he and his friends into the sattilite dish business. The school owned the ones they made at school, but let them use the shop after hours.
They were a Chinese order who had immigrated to Annie’s Chinese settlement while there were many children there,at the turn of the Century. Mrs. Larsen disliked Kerry not only because he had Karinna’s Aunt Annie’s eyes.
When the machiladora’s and opium businesses became endemic, more families spread out. Colonia Juares, Kerry’s father had said, had become a vice ridden sewer, bought land in Sinaloa and married his hard working Annie. He hired hands to put the land into Alfalfa production and rear stock. Annie’s older sister had married into a family that ran an herbal store and Grammy Le Baron asked her young nephews to go down and help Annie start an herbal truck farm. Mommy Karinna could teach them Botany. The Monks and Nuns from China again paused in their Contemplations to teach fleeing young Northerners.

CHAPTER ORGANIZE

Kerry and Andrea began their strike by walking out of the School followed by Lizzie. She struggled out of her mother’s arms to add her proud back to the procession. Unlike Grammy Le Baron’s tribe and Ramona and her sister’s chreches, Annie’s Children were in the states on Scholastic visas.
As Kerry, the Goth, left with his girl-friend, whose hair was half orange and half green, Kerry’s put in wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. She, the G., marched down the ramp that came down from the door of the school with Karina behind her. “What ever anyone thinks, Karina Le Baron, I say good riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.
I can have Kerry deported as a truent, and you know that if . . .” Saying that was a mistake.
‘‘Maybe,” Kerry’s girlfriend said. ‘If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly,” Andrea said in a whispered, penetrating sneer. Karinna looked at her still retreating brother helplessly. She went after them her officemate close behind her. Karina was crying. Glinda took her into what the Gentile wrote up as a Lesbian display. Kerry and Andreara turned the Lesbian display into what she might have instead called it a group display of emotion.

Kerry wondered what his favorite Monk would say about it when he went home for the summer. Wise beyond his years, which were many. and Kerry had been the first of his boys in some years to be interested in Chinese poetry and calligraphy.
Annie worked Kerry hard, too hard some said, sometimes. It was not Kerry’s destiny to be a rancher. Kerry liked being a Goth, but thought American Schools a joke. Karinna took him to BYU with her where she had prevailed upon a Chinese undergraduate to continue Kerry’s lessons in traditional Caligraphy. Kerry was a poet, a sixth grade poet,

Idiograms flapped about the room in Daddy Bruce Bunny’s dream. He combed Celeste’s long thick tow hair for braiding and Chinese idiograms came away in his comb. He started awake and breathed the quick air in its brightening, Brightening air set the rising dream into his memory.

CHAPTER

Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.

Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached our solar furnace one summer.

CHAPTER

Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter,
so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready.
Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep mineral water out of the fish ponds. Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds.
The training filmS used dogS in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce He subbed out the ROTC class which wa at the high school, HE cut his film out at the darkroom at the rec center or at work,and on the liveboard there.
He did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump.

Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe--
patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--aplles who no fall too far from the tree.
Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out.

at 50. He didn?t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss their dad, alot and off and on. the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples.
He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given for the cleanup. Then he and the boys wearing Dexterity.com moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen protested to Ginny?s dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.

He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.
Chaper two
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC.
His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, ??I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.?? But the sprit of his baby girl failed to further ouicken her soul. She
died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.
He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq.

Bruce loaded on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of crude Mustard gas. Then he started showing films of Babys--Alexande Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people. Networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget went to forget, we forget. He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden and his hairtrigger opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thoughthere was some connection.
He was home with his failing baby when 911 hit Manhatten. He woke up to it. Karrina?s youngest brother came in and said ?? Daddy, there?s an atom Bomb in New York. There could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose. The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine grade dirt had sept into every pore.
Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.

His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.
Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen. Each battle was a treasure trove for historical vulures like Bruce who could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle--
it could all be done in the lab.
the slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground.

CHAPTER

The full moon rode high above the skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. it illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam?s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, The delay at the airport now. His computer?s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.
She came off a little to his left politically, and she said he never wanted to hear the news that mattered. She did work hard and she took up little space and needed less. That allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone.
Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston.
He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening. There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house to deal with alone. It so easily led to full rebellion among the troops.
Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and let his studious, soft Karina follow. If they got riled up just at bedtime, Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep .
So Daddy Bruce Bunny hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . .
Burns, he thought but he was unsure. Bruce did not like uncertainty. The best plans of mice and men often go awry and so he left the house stealthily, like a theif, and so his girl livvy accused him of being all the time. He stole himself away from them.

He put on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months.
He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grande old Duke of York except the machine made no historical reference.

When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.
He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, fading as time passed them both by.
The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a aguard at buckingham palace. He wanted to ask her who did her hair. It looked sprayed in with plastic. She had worn the same hairdo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college.
Thee children played easily together at the , whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors. They didn’t notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes unless one of the homework teachers said something.

(Chapter)
Fear of flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna’s Aunt Annie’s children they were up North for school and so their welfare was in part, under the jurisiction.
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. Mrs. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in
her family. That made them
mad--they had a gentile neigbor who lived in a big house
and screamed at his wife and children and he was even a kind of shrink oner to the Mental
Hopital. Karinna thought a good week if she didn?t have to call the police twice.
She even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was easier. The prof. didn?t dare say a word about polygamy. IF she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GOW-ULDS. Snakes in their heads.
It was not Gou-ulds, but a pack of cacking crows , his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week.
The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker?s area could provide some rooms to flight stewars-- the pilots area was much nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, glass walls bonded carbon with painted superglue to bond the layers.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna’s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was church clerk at his home ward which he had to bow out of every Sunday to make time for his demanding therapist.
The individual and family counseling went against his nature, but Karinna?s maiden name, Le Baron, which she insisted on using, was like a red flag to a bull to the state social workers. They didn’t care where, but they wanted her dependnts in state funded counseling somewhere.
Karrina’s school’s counselor let her read the material that printed by the state, on working gentli with polygamist family ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out or tidied their desk she put together a search party. her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--I won?t, I cant, I wont,I can?t. Her office mate skimmed the booklet--Then don?t.
Her office was a dyke and fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kiss was much nicer. They went to the supe and she said they should be considered assets not liabilities and asked them to have a question and answer brownbagger. I ... Karinna said, startled, will do it if I can bring ALL my children.
The Talk went well though she feared having to head for the John. Karinna was trying to send the Supe to the smoking wing.
Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. Karinna threw her over one shoulder.
??You certainly know the practice is illegal . . . ?? One of the counselors said.
THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her tried something else out of the leaflet,
??I?ll be back as soon as I can-Karinna said, try to stay in one piece.?

CHAPTER
She could have strangled her Goth ?We shall certainly wait.
He turned aside and put wax teeth in they kept from Haolloweens past--she had made 20 costumns, sitting with her girls sewing and double stitching on an auntique singer.
Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.
The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying . the moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys. Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain. Bruce dipped into the Lehi trough to rise up into the clarion air on the road through Kearns to the airport/Saltair complex.
He remembered the film allegedly produced by Osama Ben Laaden and the white serin gass at first coming through A crack in A shed.and then fanning thickly out across the stable untill it warmed and began gradually to rise up over the four shoulders of the Kennecot until it dropped from the gas and was submerged by it. He mixed it with American. russians, and an endless city of
bioChemically dead Kurds. The training films used dogs in its advertisment for genocide

Bruce still subbed out to the ROTC class at his alma mater. He got no darned credits when he cut his film out at the darkroom at his High School instead of at the perfectly good one at the rec center. He could use the big Liveboard there at the High. It was not for distribution, simply for the kids left behind with the superfund clean-up to manage. It had been believed and purported that the Chemicals were relativly harmless, but no one did now. It was just the only dance in town
and Bruce’s town, nonetheless. Bruce did not approve of gassing dogs of any nationality. far less did he approve the use of boys, just on the cusp of their oat sowing years, to the storage dump. Even if they weren’t supposed to be involved in procreation at thier age, that had never stopped any kid he knew from tampering with the fountains of Life.
Bruce hated war, He had a small militay contract to make a film for training the Rotci kids in protocals for Biochemical monitoring and managment of theToeele dump--His class was told that their work was top secret but perfectly safe-- patriotic even.
His mom had been so proud, of her boy--earnimg 12.00 an hour--Doing what?--Being in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. She counted on Bryce settling down in Tooele and having a bunch of grand kids--apples who no fall too far from the tree. Like her kids.
He did not say that he had only Six more months, before he was biochemically maxed out. at 50. He didn’t say that his maligned Aunt said that meant that the Senior/Junior/classes, even at by foutry, would be maxed out at fifty.
THEIR DAD was already maxed out and he had didn?t want anyone to know. He was a boichemical time bomb. Then they?d be shucking pease with annie in Sinaloa. They?d miss their dad, alot and off and on. the government sure as hell didn?t ask him his opinion Super fund clean up was lucrative, and there were sites all over the desert. He was the biochemical Ethics ROTC club--and he took samples. He had little confidence in the moonsuits they were given for the cleanup.
Then he and the boys wearing dexterity moon suits, which were much newer, they helped Buce inspect them for microtears. Some asshole with too many G forces to his credit. threatened to cut off his funding but Kathleen Protested to Ginny?s dad.
They maintained the moonsuits in case of a leak in a buried tanks--they were leaking, so he patched the tanks. The suits where for Tooele and the valley--but they had moon suits for only 1/3 of the population of Toelle.
He thought more men who had already had their children should work out there at least once a month. Bruce cheated and sent his Bows up the Canyon to picknick-- He just could not think it right, except in an Emergengy, need to use boys just ready to seed their first.

Chaper
It was the loss of his first baby that bothered him most about ROTC. His grief circled high, like hunting opreys circling high above thrir prey. Bird who cast an enormous swift shadows deepgreen along treelines.
Bruce was a beleiving man and, when his baby failed to thrive a desperately praying one. He thought himself akin to the man who said to Jesus, ‘I beleive, but help thou my unbeleif.” But the sprit of his baby failed to further ouicken her soul. He died screaming in pain, hen was too weak to lift his head from the bed.

He thought of the dog who died in the muslim training films, It died, just like it did in the other Confiscated films seised from cutting tables from many clandestine training films. he used the films in class, then had the boys guess where the clipps were from, then had the boys guess where the clips were from. They started at the top of the current list of enemies-- but, no, the Ben Ladden films had been made after the invasion Iraq
Then he load on the same film with pedgreed dogs, white dogs or some yellow stray mutt . He had silent films that demonstrated the use of Mustard gas.

Then he started showing films of Babys--AlexandeR Nevsky, obviously not Mormon. God would protect his people. networks cared more about ratings than dogs, Mormon babies, Muslim ones, Lest we forget. He had been scandalously unsure of the Crusade against the Brilliant Laaden blaming instead Laaden hairtrigger, presidential opponent.
Had Bush really beleived that his rich Arabian ally was neccessary to the cooking up of the 911 Kama Kasi attack? Kathleen thought there was some connection. Karrina’s youngest brother came in and said Daddy Bruce, there;s an atom Bomb in New York. That woke him up. He flew down the stairs pulling on robe over his gament. there could be no sane reason for working so hard on the films when they could be so easily recut and used for any baned purpose. The film work raised his ROTC wages, but it made him feel like fine clay dirt had sept into every pore.
Karinna had a brother or sister well fitted for any use under the sun. Her mother and Aunt had been in a dead heat all through their major reproductive years. now dignified grand matrons in plurality, they managed their progeny in mixed groups.
His was not the only baby worth keening over among the crones? large downwinf creche.a pitiful thing, any mention of that. the deaths of hundreds of babies could make the death of one more acceptable.

Uncle Sam had missiles , Yes, and these fed kids, yes they did. Anything for a paycheck among the saints and there were paychecks in the making, in the dropping, in the replacing of missiles. No time to consider the undesirability of bombs to drop on muslim children.
Uncle Sam, the icon?s, greatest talent was in murder--clean murder, no collateral damage. He felt himselves among deaths lead henchmen.
Each battle was a treasure trove . Buruce could easily turn it into lucrative and convincing training feed. He was just getting into special effects, no need to even physically simulate battle-- it could all be done in the lab. The slow blue mist lay heavy against the dry, western ground ground.

Chapter
The full moon rode high above The skylight above the bed back where Karinna and the kids slept. Preparing day, the moon, preparing to sink, illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcly enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam’s fault, H e found the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, The delay at the airport now. His computer’s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept.

She came off a little to his left politically, and she said he never wanted to hear the news that mattered. She did work hard and she took up little space and needed less. That allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone.
Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston. He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening Hell being paved with good intention, as his Grandma Ander’s.
There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karinna with a spirit of contention in the house to deal with alone. It so easily led to full rebellion.

Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and his soft Karinna. Karinna doubted she could get them back to sleep if they got riled up just at bedtime.
So he hit the hay at 7:30 the night before. leaving karinna and the kids to come tumbling after. Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleepout of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . . Burns, he thought but he was unsure. he did not like being unsure.

The best plans of mice and men often go awry and so he left the house stealthily, like a theif, and so his girl livvy accused him of being all the time. He stole himself away from them. He put on the gadgets thr idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months.

He ought to work out on the Butch machine which barked orders at him almost daly. It was like playing. the Grande old Duke of York, tesing Bryce’s except that the machine made no historical reference. When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.
He made up for his lack of coordination by learning to show. He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, fading as time passed them both by.
The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a aguard at buckingham palace.
He wanted to ask her who did her hair. It looked sprayed in with plastic. She had worn the same hairdo since Bruce had gotten his flying licence at the end of college. The fitness center paid-- fewer downed planes, more coherent, better oriented and more alert pilots-- the P.R. gave the passengers confidence in the institution of commercial air travel.
Rosacrutions had been burying people on the Pratt parcel centuries before Orson Pratt was born near to the dawn of the 19th Century. Orson purchased Land for the Church at a handsome sum for the times . He would have bought a larger parcel but Orson’s partners were unhappy about the exhumations neccessary to putting in a foundation.

In Utah exumations were common as pond water. Bruce’s Mormon-Danish stock held the arrangement of their people underground to fuel light conversation, and long posthumus inquests.

Bruce’s grandmother had gathered slides and intel during fact finding missions to the formerly contested province of Slesvig Holstein. In Linda’s twice great grandmother’s Country of birth, they cleaned the bones of their long dead and reused, if possible, refurbished ornate family funeral coffins.

Bruce’s first call was quietly diplomatic.
He had had his call before he was assigned a companion. Actually, Bruce had infiltrated the Rosacrutions early on. Their required reading was on a junior high level--New Eraease. That was the age at which young people interested themselves in their family practice,
The English multiligual blog had more bite to it and Bruce had signed on as an encription specialist. He’d found a leather briefcase of monographs in his recently dead Aunt

Kathleen’s shady garret on California’s Russian River, at first unaware that reading of the material was proscribed to non-members. He was more intrigued than intimidated by artifacts intimidated by curses.
The brethren had intermittantly sought access to certain papers archived by the Society of ardent Egyptologists. They claimed they didn’t horse swap with anyone.

Bruce suspected that either the church had something they wanted or they were holding out for bigger bucks. It had been his Aunt Kathleen’s hypothesis that Joseph Smith’s had a Rosecrution ancestor, at the least. includeding one or more Rosecrutions.

BOOK THREE--CHAPTER
In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.
Uncle Sam flew Bruce’s mother and grandmother to Egypt and rented them a guest house near the digs.
His mother spent hours while his Grandmother had separated careful shovelfulls of dirt from fragments of artifacts.
Celeste and Livvy were born beneath that skylight, Karinna wanted her cousin, a midwife, from home.Uncle Samuel obliged her, since he was going that way anyway.
She was as unwilling to have Rigel in the Salt Lake Birth center. She , her mother, her Aunt Annie and her Aunt Ramona had instead gathered to oversee the ministrations of a Provo midwife while their kids goofed off and listened to their sister, Kary as the called her, screamed her heart out.
The venerable midwife was 70 and wore the long, full calico dress still worn among their people when in privacy. The calico was as neccesay to Karinna’s peace of mind as a doctor’s white coat to one of the more medical pursuation.

The midwife changed into it out of her street clothes. A doctor of their people was on alert He had hospital priveledges in Salt Lake in the unlikely event that an admission was neccessary.
In Egypt the girls had shared the single bedroom apartment with their parents. Celeste was born early in the mission and Livvy in its third year.

Bruce’s mother’s bitterness came to a head when they went home she and his sisters were invited to Rigel’s birthing--the beginning of the end. His sisters brought their children and grandchildren and there was even a bit of yelling about it.
The kids said they all had poligs in their schools, so what was the big diff. These were fascinated and entertained, one might even say enthralled by Karrinna’s family.
His sister D. took a vacation down to Karinna’s Aunt said it was like a time machine and that it was as close to a visit to her great-grandmother’s house as her girls would ever have. His sister A. argued that it would be rude to leave when the baby’s head was about to crown.

Rigel was born just as his grandmother sped away in her sporty little car and the rest of Bruce’s female relatives including the babes in arms got to see Rigel spurt into the world. They even named him because he looked liked the Rigel in Farscape. Bruce couldn’t guess how long his mother’s tiff would Last.

At first he supposed his mother didn’t want to have to say that she was there when Ri was born. It lasted. Karinna and Bruce’s sisters were happy, they had missed the Egyptian births of their brother’s first two children.

No one could display righteous fury as well as his mother. D. had tipped Bruce off and he had sent Karinnna and the girls off to their Grandma Lebaron’s after they opened the bulk of their presents at home on Christmas morning, just minutes before his sanctimoniouss mother arrived.

Bruce went home alone with his family matriarch to their family’s Christmas dinner. Bruce seethed through the buffet his father’s silent, blood running in his vein.
That was the only thing that could pierce his mother’s sense of bigotry as family honor, Rigel’s birthting was the first family gathering after Bruce and Karinna spoke in Church about their adventures in Egypt--their blissful connubial mission and the grim prospects of the Church’s expansion in the Middle East.
The majority of saints in the region were Mormon wives married to Muslim or Jewish students. These found the Mormon girls presentable. They did have to convert to Judaism or Islam, but were left to attend church unless their families were very orthodox.
Most of the hyphenated Saints lived outside the region. There were third generation Mormon Jews in Israel who spoke only Hebrew--when their mothers had converted they had burned all bridges behind them in favor of Israeli citisenship for their children. The Christmas exclusion of his family made Bruce and his sisters miserable and they finally got this through their mother’s head. Their mother said that was fine,
In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.

ii.
Youth had, for the last decade, become a commodity reserved for rich men who had lived repugnant lives. Grandpa What’s his name doubted the efficacy, for his generation, of penitence.

The morning, in Bruce’s dream, seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath. Dreaming still he remained small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his sise , in his dream a toddler, that he wanted his Great Grandma to be alive again.
They decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay in her coffin, up. Bruce came just to Celeste’s shoulder. They began to baul on a count of three. Celeste knew three because she was three.
Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took him and Celeste into his arms. Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change his soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms
and went to find his grandma.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious and pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally.
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked when the doctor said something to her.
Their town, pretentiously named after the star Kolob, had changed much as the reigning generation shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural muleskinning halfbreed wives.

CHAPTER

Bruce woke again, this time with a sting of guilt at having precipitated the children’s tebellion yhe night brfore. There was the scurrying pf small feet as first Livvy, then Celeste took up strategic positions in their parents big bed.

Then Karinna came with her nocturnal reading light and computer. Rigel sucked lustily, each slurp and glurp rippling down though his little body and legs.

He was sorry about his complicity in what he expected to find when he rose--boobytraps and good natured vandelism. There had been a sweet smell of sugar and cherries, cande at their granny’s the summer before.

At issue was his lackluster showing at his required pilot support group meetings . He was dissaponting his young, who were running neck to neck with two other families for participitaton, and that was only from cheating.

The rules said that ponts earned by a child’s natural parent could not be kept out of the contest even if they were foster kids or in jail or whatever--but the feds were putting the squeese on the state to turn over more of polygamist families to stand for all the rest. They didn’t want part polig families like theirs on the big screen.

They were mostly safe because they had money and their Daddy had a secret job for the church.

Uncle Bruce wasn’t a polig, only their grandpa and some of their aunts and uncles on their mommy’s side were. The rest wern’t old enough. Their granny was, but she was their only Grammy who was, Celeste and Livvy what her house looked like, and wished she liked them. Lots of polig kids had one or more Grannies in the church and cousins and all.

Karinna had one foot in and one out, and Celeste figured she did too, because they went to church at the farm, just tneir Granny’s family.
They sang from old church books instead of the new one that didn’t have even Come, Come ye Saints in it or All Creatures of Our God and King.
They said that the King was the King of England and they wanted to encourage young Church Composers. But what about Lead Kindly Light? They didn’t have Israel, Israel God is calling, calling thee from Lands of Woe.Babylon the Great is falling . . . Well people stopped singing that because of Iraq. Daddy said that the Israeli’s got so mean because the Nasi’s scared them so bad.That’s why all their people went down to be hente, camposinos, rancheros and vacaros.
Rigel and Livvy still went to church with Bruce and his family and his mommy some, but that was because their Grandma Anders was afraid Bruce wouldn’t go to Church oltherwise. Celeste was just too cheeky for her, but could be bribed, sometimes, with a new dress. Celeste got Livvy to tell her everything Grandma said or did and if she didn’t like it, well, that would be what Celeste would say when her Grandma asked the next time.
Once her Grandmother said Celeste was too smartand too smart, like Aunt Kathleen and they’d mend their ways if they could just see how their Great Aunt. She had a grudge against Aunt Kathleen-their Daddy’s Aunt that had followed their Daddy’s Aunt right into the grave. Their grandma never got the last word when his Aunt was alive, and when she was dead, well then she cpuld have the last word for the rest of their lives.
Aunt Kathleen hadn’t even died right for her sister. Aunt Kathleen wanted to die in her own bed, when she died so to make sure, she was living with her friend who was a nurse and had a Masters in Biotechnology. She had a lab at home and if you wanted she could make a slide a show you what was going on. Bunny Bruce kmew all about looking down microscopes. Thats what his Daddy’s kids did in the war.

Only Bruce had been to see his Aunt. It was so he and his brother Sam couldn’t say they’d never been to see their Aunt as his mother loudly pronounced.

He had met Kathleen’s friend Ginny at a Conference in Florida and it was so close to their house that Ginny dragged him home with her to see his Aunt and to stay in the room Ginny’s kids and Grandkids used when she was home. Her determination was funny.which was funny-perculiar. She was small and old but energetic--like an actress made up to look old. It was a big house and Kathleen and her father had a little boy named Ladd playing around their feet. But the baby, Ginny said, was her father’s clone.

He didn’t do cloning--and the bit of his mother in him kept him from going back. He didn’t hear about the interference of his mother through Kathleen’s Florida Ward. She got a cardiac infection and an Encephalitus that creamed her heart rythums. It seised up on her and she died. His mother claimed to have just gotten there in time.
That got him right in the stomach. He didn’t know but what his mother beleived it.His mother didn’t want anyone to say that she’d died among strangers, cast out by her own.
Bruce’s Grandpa said that at the first whiff of a witch hunt for poligs the whole kit and caboodle of his kids and Bruce’s too were going to be very hard to find. They didn’t need to bring all that down on them all over some silly game at the Airport. They were OK now, but he knew well that an election could swing the way og things the other way and all the data from the Airport could be used to put their Grandpa in jail. They might get dragged to the police just because of their last name. It was only their Le Baron Cousin’s six times removed who were notorious. They were the Le Baron’s who had been to the UN. They hadn’t been read their rights and that was against United States law--even if they were foreign nationals, Mexicans. He suspected his Uncle Sam had had a hand in it. Sam had a way of tipping his hand without leaving behind anything definate or repeatable.

They didn’t have to say who their Dad was as long as he kept putting their points into the secret computer box on the web. It had a dragon on it that took the points and swallowed them after it totaled the form their daddy filled out, then thre little dragons came out with a box. It said donations on it and it saved them in a blind account. The Dads could use any computer anywhere.
The older kids Dad put in lots of money and put money into their Granny’s farm. There was a little old house in some trees where their Granny and Gramps Le Baron stayed when he had sometime, or they drove out to the Sateline resort or all the way out past Wendover to where Ramona lived on her Indian Ranch land. It was real good range land and pretty as heaven, that’s what their Granny called it.
The Dads who didn’t want the program or would rather tangle with a rattlesnake could go on out to Bonnieville International, Pilots got to stay out at the Nevada side resort free. These were kept pristine by a stable and industrious Latino community where the Mexican poligs could just fit in if they wanted. No body asked questions if it was the same woman with the usual pilot. If it was the same lady with a lot of pilots then she had to show a Valid Nevada department of Health certificate if they got a room.
It was Mexican back labor that had made a Valhalla of the Pilot Mountain, an extinct Volcano. It worked out because their Aunt Ramona lived out that way, so every time they went to see Ramona’s family they got to drive right past their Grandma Anders house and Livvy got to stick out her tongue.
They liked to climb to the top of Pilot Mountain. And see the boxing they always had on Spanish TV. Wendover had a boxing ring, right outside the State Line [two words] Casino and inside they could get boxing lessons from the best Boxer from any country where they spoke Spanish--they all had to fight the local contender--the best boxer from Wendover.

When Kathleen worked there there was alot of fighting in the bar ‘till the Sherrif’’s grey Travelall would speed up. They had a real big steer of a sherrif with a real big silver star and a white cowboy hat that made him look seven and a half feet high. Most of the problem were petty. So unless the offenders looked ready to run he’d have them do yardwork--over to his house mostly, because he didn’t get paid that much and stateline towns like Wendover were in Utah with the brawling mostly on the Nevada side.
See Photo of Cowboy Bill

CHAPTER --COWBOY BILL

Bill Lacey had looked just like cowboy Bill who still flashed “this is the place.” He had an arm that pointed to where the old Stateline Casino used to be. It made fun of Brigham Young when he, in the grip of a fever, rose up on one arm and ponted at Casche Valley and said “this is the place, drive on.”
The place for what? Big Cowboy Bill still asked the thirsty motorist and his or her fussing kids en route to the pastures of plenty.

When the real Bill got there, during the depression, it was not much of a place for very many Cowboys and he didn’t like being around even Cowboys much because he didn’t like being around people . The first war where he had straffed the hell out of Dervishes,and Tulsa, and the Germans, even though he was half German and half British and all the way Cherokee and a Bat out of hell.
The place for what? There was a boys’ reformary that had kindly built a waterworks. having an unlimited supply of labor. And Bill got the idea of what the little ribbon of aerable ground alon the highway was the place for.
It was the first stop on the Highway West to the pastured of plenty where you could get something They wanted something cold to drink.
Bill got him some of that water, and some ice, getting the ice took a bit more doing.It was hard work, but it made people happy and that was something he hadn’t been since he’d come back from the war.

There was work in California and more than half of Utah was headed that way, and what they were was dry and their kids were thirsty and cranky--if they couldn’t afford a nickel for sugar water, then a place refill for a hemp waterbag was always appreciated.
The war came on and the traffic West went way up--that’s where the road went throuh that went to the where ship yards which needed building and after that shipyards and a whole
darn Navy. And distressed pilots flying east had, in the yarwning expanse of hard salt was the first good place for a survivable emergency landing in the whole damb desert. Bill had a big glass of ice tea for more than one old flyboy with a lump on his head.

When the airforce moved in he he made them ice tea. He could do better than that by then and all the time people were building things. It was hard to get wood down from the Mountain but they had a hell of a lot of old railroad ties. The rail traffic west was way up and they let the boys out of their reformatory to maintain the ties which the piled up in Wendover.
The he woke up to find out he was the Wendover Nuclear Reservation--he even got to meet up with most of his old war buddies, the chain of command was there and they’d cimbed up it by just hanging on and there they were staring into the leathered, scorched eyes of old
Cowboy Bill. His was the place where it was all happening. They even gave him his wings back and called him an engineer. He was an Engineer, just one who’d rather feed and give water people of every color and tribe than be dropping bombs on their heads and bullets in their hearts--that was all that was left in his.

He got himself a was goo for. He got the idea from some of the old He didnt want to go because he thought it was bull-pucky to try to pass the same old for anything but the same old same old. Men went to war and came home with easily detectable seriological anomalies. The microbiology and immunology turned into the circulating blood sort like a street party--you knew there would be a party, usually, in his Ward, it was when the corn got ripe.
You knew that there would be people there, not Gorillas or Chimpansies. Strangers stoped their cars, drawn by the smell of barbecued fresh beef. Karinna’s steers fed on the succulent grasses of his wife’s mother’s lakeside farm.

That’s how the usual malady affected the usual Vetran. And the bug found itself a nice niche, whether it was coliform bacteria bearing cute little whiskered viri accompianied by a parisite, who somehow made the others more comfortable or a fungus it was still same old, same old. Unpredictable, not without overlap, interpenatration, acting as though the villians and varmits might be capable of a crude forn of cooperative symbiosis and interdependance.

Altering the balance took alot of moneyEach time it was something new and even more menacing than the same old same old--with a new and more potent over the counter nostrum
He whispered into his PDA to mention his reticence to attend his session with the pilot’s association therapist. Her office was on the rec floor, directly above the pilot rest module sleep deprivation treatment area and he heard shards of the common wifely tale. “I knew he might get ill or be layed off someday. I grew up on garden greens on bread, but I thought if we were ever poor it would be together, as a family . . . I could go back to school but he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s got it . . .” the same old same old.”

That’s when he appreciated Karrina’s mother. Any kid or grandkid of hers could come and do a day’s work for a box of food.If it weren’t for Mother Le Grands private welfare farm, Bruce could keep his pay and not have to bail the poor crone out when too many jobs had evaporated or meet was not forthcoming in good season.
There were two treatment units. One for smokers and one for Mormons who didn’t smoke-- oil and water. Non-Mormons non-smokers declined alternate assignment to the smoker’s wing and were perplexing.
The children played easily, if noisally, together, whatever the rigidity of the cliques at the their clique-ridden schools. At the airport the kids had lived in different countries, spoke alternate languages, helped bead wedding gowns in vibrant colors in far off places. They didn’t take particular notice the poligs in their rainbow old fashoned dresses. Mormons were hung up about it. When it was you who were different you learned to adjust.
CHAPTER

Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. the state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie’s children when they were up North for school
The only thing they detested was the therapist trying to talk to the kids about leaving out polygamy when they grew up. The State was making her do it and she needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t ne able to feed her kids. She came around the desk and knelt by the girls. “I’m sorry, she said and pulled them to her. You can’t imagine how sorry I am.’

Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in her family, way back, during the Persecutions, and how it turned their Father of many great, great, great Grandfather and the bad things he did, so her Grear-Grandmother took the business to Brigham Young. He said that if that’s what she wanted, he could give her a divorce and send where he’d hardly be able to find her.
The girls knew that some Mormons were bad. Like her great great, great had a gentile husband who lived in a big house and screamed at his one wife and two sons and gave them lickings that Mommy would count. what kind of lickings, each time and with what. He was even a kind of shrink over to the Mental Hospital. Their Ma thought a good week if she didnt have to call the police on them twice. Then he’d go about how . . . or somebody said this or that about one or another of them. He’d stop only if one of his kid’s ratted on the other. Then they’d reealy hate . Their Mother said that was called divide and conquer.
At the Y Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she even had poligs in her Sociology class. That was the easiest class because her prof. didn’t dare say a word about polygamy. That was a serious matter with the academics, even the ones who were strongly anti-polig because it was because it was contrary to to the Constitution. She said that mention of the practice was very bad because the Founding Fathers were wise and forbade anything but equality

When she did she had SGI nightmares. She?d dream that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken by GO’ULDS. Snakes in their heads everyone of them.

It was not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week. The kids rackett drifted down the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles. Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk. The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower, where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting.
Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.
Bruce was a Sabbath Breaker. He was a church clerk at his home ward. He had to bow out almost every Sunday. He wixh they weren’t so laid back. The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures.

Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron, was a red flag waved at a bull to the State social workers. They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling. There were poligs with MSW--
G Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better,
If the people wanted to see one of their
own denomination, the better quality of
counseling they received and the more likely they were to listen.

It was easier, even for Bruce.
Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile with polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.
Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and 4 Scoolaged siblings and she adored the brats.
When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks. She flew down the hall and onto the playground. She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.” Karinna was shaking and her teeth were chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out. “Then don’t “
Her office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said don?t,
Her officemate was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were much nicer.
They went to the supe and she said they both should be considered assets, not liabilities Some of the teachers didn’t know they had poligamous students let alone colleagues.

They to have a question and answer brownbagger, then decide what to do about
the offensive leaflet.
So of course the kids demanded to stay. If the Government. Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots. The Mormon smokers liked her immediatly but thought the should be allowed to sleep in the better pods if they only smoked in the smoker’s lounge or on one of the balconies.
At school Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of her friends, a Mormon girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins passed her the pamphlet. She was a Goth and her teacher said she should read it. She said she was sure that there was only one of the Staff who would not resist. “You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .” THE GENTILE as the children Ever afterwards called her read something else out of the leaflet. Their Mother pulled all her children and brothers and sisters out of school.
As they left with his girlfriend, whose hair was half orange and half green, put Kerry’s wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. The G. came marching down the ramp to the door of the school. What ever antone thinks, your children are ungoverned and ungovernance and Good Riddence to bad rubbish. That’s what I say.” Saying that was a mistake. If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly.
‘Maybe,”Kerry’s girlfriend said in a whispered sneer that silenced the student body, maybe then you’ll be old enough that you’ll want to retire.”
Bruce drove himself to the airport, in hiz Green car--one or more of his penitent youngsters having packed his Honda with wadded up Newspaper.
La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy. A pondorous inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench. Grinding the against the silver mist.

CHAPTER

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal brother Uncle Samuel as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--a carven Ulysses preserved with the immortals Athena and Mentor.
Linda beleived God himself had preserved him for the sake of his righteousness.
Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live to the age of a tree, but he had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age as any gnarled old man, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.
Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.
Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world.
Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna. She prefered no converts and no change, She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right and he thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart. One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to make his family happy.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle. He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.

True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen. In who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister?
Rigel was born just as his grandmother sped away in her sporty little car and the rest of Bruce’s female relatives including the babes in arms got to see Rigel spurt into the world. They even named him because he looked liked the Rigel in Farscape. Bruce couldn’t guess how long his mother’s tiff would Last.

At first he supposed his mother didn’t want to have to say that she was there when Ri was born. It lasted. Karinna and Bruce’s sisters were happy, they had missed the Egyptian births of their brother’s first two children.

No one could display righteous fury as well as his mother. D. had tipped Bruce off and he had sent Karinnna and the girls off to their Grandma Lebaron’s after they opened the bulk of their presents at home on Christmas morning, just minutes before his sanctimoniouss mother arrived.
Bruce went home alone with his family matriarch to their family’s Christmas dinner. Bruce seethed through the buffet his father’s silent, blood running in his vein.
That was the only thing that could pierce his mother’s sense of bigotry as family honor, Rigel’s birthting was the first family gathering after Bruce and Karinna spoke in Church about their adventures in Egypt--their blissful connubial mission and the grim prospects of the Church’s expansion in the Middle East.
The majority of saints in the region were Mormon wives married to Muslim or Jewish students. These found the Mormon girls presentable. They did have to convert to Judaism or Islam, but were left to attend church unless their families were very orthodox.
Most of the hyphenated Saints lived outside the region. There were third generation Mormon Jews in Israel who spoke only Hebrew--when their mothers had converted they had burned all bridges behind them in favor of Israeli citisenship for their children. The Christmas exclusion of his family made Bruce and his sisters miserable and they finally got this through their mother’s head. Their mother said that was fine,

Chapter

In Florida, Bruce’s Aunt Kathleen knew little of her family, only a silence of soul, She wrote, and ticked off the years in a sunny room where Grandpa What’s His Name lay in the next bed grieving words he had written and not written, tapping augmentation and self castigation into his computer.
He had flown Kathleen to Ginny after a vascular accident because his wives had died and Ginny traveled a great deal. They had had a big liveboard with the screen halved so they could pass pages back and forth.
They shared IV pumps and Oxygen machines and saved Ginny the bother of moving from room to room constantly. It was a sunny room that looked out over the water and down at their whitestone beach. He had moved Ginny’s mother into that
big room to die.
The old man moved or died just before Kathleen died. When Ginny’s son Ladd was not home to chirp about the house, Aunt Kathleen lay immersed in a silence Bruce had encountered only in the solemn, pillaged vaults of Kings,
Grandpa What’s his Name had been one of the last of the officers who had accepted DNA treatment. He said he ought to be dying in some Geriatric brig for war criminals--age and pain were light penance for what his words had done.
Uncle Samuel had been one of the most adventurous, and he seemed to be increasingly ageless. He mellowed with the shots’ help like a bottle of Apple Beer kept too long in the cellar,
He would have preferred to die with his generation, he claimed, but he hoped to first dismantle what Eisenhower had warned would rise like the creeping tumors of Neeurofibromatosis--the Military Industrialcomplex. He himself had bring it into being.
Ginny’s father wanted only to be left to his own silent contemplations. He no longer beleived words could mend all wrongs.

ii.
Youth had, for the last decade, become a commodity reserved for rich men who had lived repugnant lives. Grandpa What’s his name doubted the efficacy, for his generation, of penitence.
The morning, in Bruce’s dream, seemed fragrant as dried fruit with a pantry snap-back of Fels Naptha soap. Bruce thought drowsily that he should patent that smell. Bruce drew it in in a deep breath. Dreaming still he remained small.
He gave the sweet, sharp air another Bunny dry snuffle, telling his 11 year old Celeste, who had shrunk to his sise , in his dream a toddler, that he wanted his Great Grandma to be alive again.
They decided that crying might wake Supergrandma. who lay in her coffin, up. Bruce came just to Celeste’s shoulder. They began to baul on a count of three. Celeste knew three because she was three.
Uncle Samuel stooped down to their level and took him and Celeste into his arms. Bruce, still dreaming, was wondered whether his Uncle Sam could change his soggy, smelly pants--like Aunt Taffy or Mommy or his Daddy could. Mommy was busy with all the food for the pot luck so he wriggled out of Uncle Samuel’s arms
and went to find his grandma.

Their Cedar City physician, suspitious and pussled, told Uncle Sam that he did not seem to be aging internally.
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?” Bruce’s mother had asked when the doctor said something to her.
Their town, pretentiously named after the star Kolob, had changed much as the reigning generation shifted. It has seen 10 generations since it was founded by a band of buck and muleskinning half breeds and their plural muleskinning halfbreed wives.

Bruce’s children’s indifferent Grandmother saw her regal brother Uncle Samuel as a sort of family Titan, a Greek Hero--
a carven Ulysses preserved with the immortals Athena and Mentor.
Linda beleived God himself had preserved him for the sake of his righteousness.
Samuel hoped, he had told Bruce, to live to the age of a tree, but he had seen more than one tree that looked rhumatic and as weary of age as any gnarled old man, like a bristlecone pine.
The Bristlecones were relics of ancient, wet forests. Then drought had killed the young trees. leaving the old to watch aeons pass from their soggy heights.
Samuel had declined a long, caged sleep behind an industrial chic partition, whether right or wrong, he left moral to the Salt Lake VA. His orders were to seek out the best gerontological care available. Grandpa What’s his name told Bruce that that was what Sam got for allowing anyone to outrank him.
Consigned were the commonfolks of Samuel’s Generation to the sonambulent path to the mass corporate embalmer. Sam wanted nothing to do with modernity’s obscene rigors of extreme age and death.
Even the Church had given up the family or Releif Society washing and anointing of the dead. Gone were the indignities these forced on converts raised up out of the world.
Better to leave the care of the dead to jackdaw Funeral Directors. Bruce and the Samuels thought the Church could do with fewer converts and more tradition and thought he’d gotten a deal in his pretty Karinna. She prefered no converts and no change, She shared her husband’s world, which, since she adored him, all thought right and he thought it right to share her more traditional world with his Sweetheart. One wife was all he cared to have, but otherwise, he did all he could to make his family happy.
Uncle Samuel retained the guff which sleepers remembered as being the way of him. He was one who had left home at 17 and scored a 5x7 patch of brass and silver fruit while slinking around the jungle. He had planned to retire at 45. Fourty five was a long time ago and his wingman of long ago had long been consigned to the Earth.
Bruce’s Uncle Samuel prefered to preserve the work of his hands, to keep the blood that had once flowed in his mother’s sell’s viens well governed.
True, it flowed in the veins of lesser men, Linda admitted--coming onscreen. In who, what, why his mother and Grandmother would simultaneously squak, pout and whine, bring up my sister?

They knew more about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer , Bruce’s oldest girl Celeste had complained while they were opening presents just the last Christmas,
Celeste had asked whether his Aunt Kathleen was alive whether she would make them presents. Bruce had said he might have done, but what did he know.
Even when it meant leaving his Karinna and their long snuggles, the still fertile womb from which Bruce anticipated such happiness, He could still say it was good to get away from everyone and all of it.
Could his Aunt Kathleen’s fell fate fall upon the good in heart, even upon the most righteous among them? Linda had marvelled. In his dream he made a very cogent argument for the It was not possible to broach the subject of his Aunt without putting Linda or Linda’s mother into near hysteria followed by a long snit. These disturbances were all Bruce’s younger cousins ever knew of his Aunt. Bolstering the offensive notion that power is not always righteousness.

It just happened, one of the Brethryn had said, during the emotional fuss over the mere possibility that there could be a Karinna to be suuceeded by a pretty little Celeste, that one of the Senior Bretheryn minded in his sleep that the church still had a bit of land which it maintained near the great Pyramids which the Rosacrutions maintained for a penny a year via Orson Pratt.

Upon it was an unassumig museum that the Church already partly owned, The Rosacrutions payed for use as archival space for a gross rental payment of 5 dollars and 2 cents per month.

The Church’s montly retainer seemed sufficient at the time the land was purchased from an elderly physician of undetermined confession. His great Uncle Sam remembered something the old patriarch his father had told him about the matter and had looked into it during the Carter Administration.

Member Since: 8/26/2008
February 2009-10, 12-7-9
Today's post

Chapter Two--Out to Home

As Bruce Bunny slept, out to
Bonneville International,
just over the Nevada border, Getile
Sex fiends and Jack-Mormon hypocrites were rising through the pastel
morning mist, delighting themselves on Babalonian option Beauty
Bots--versitile, gamey, and 100 per cent self- disinfecting. Such bots
were concealed to all under 21,
flashing among a plethora of
family theme vacation options. These were available out of SLCI, the
family friendly airport.

Business Tuesday poker nights were
restricted to the locals with notifications sent out by bot
Stateline’s Profit Sharing Social Engineers, and anyone else concerned
in the topic of discussion.
The Tuesday Night Poker discussion
table, had long opereated
by consensus.

Bruce had
invested some of his early capital when he was the TA at the High
Schools out to Wendover, Deep Crick and Callao. There were a few of the
Brethren whose poker-faces who's poker faces could out-do Tuesdays'
best--they'd got 'em in the service. Uncle Samuel got a young start
playing with his adolescent brothers for high stakes pine nuts and
stopped by for a breif game when he had an interest.

SLCI
specialized in unaccompianied kids--the kids, with advance planning,
could get on a plane with their favorite character, in costume. Airport
Snow White led her herd of Dwarves. Costumed humans were sheparded by
Kermit the Frog. These were for the kids whose Moms and Dads lived far
away from one another.

Tuesday must have fallen on
Christmas and th group drunk when they snuck in t AI pilots. They
didn’t sleep, converse and when Delta brought in it's curvacious, deep
cleavaged autopilots Bruce got out of commercial flying and joined the
Federal Air Marshal’s Service under the President’s Office of Homeland
Security.

In an emergency, Air Marshalls were to hang back.
When the heros were done with thier heroism, the Air Marshall could
fly and land the plane cheered on by a deep cleavageed, photogenic bot
who was as likely to seduce the Heros as Highjackers. They had a
vulnerability, like dragon mail, and the Air Marshalls knew where it
was. It was mandatory on all bots who left the factory.

Bruce took the mail shuttle so he could get some work done, and he was a
wonder of multitasking. Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather’s Tuesday
Night fiscal grousing. He told his Stepfather he'd ought to figure
what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that what the
male-mid-life-crisis was all about? Daddy-o was stuck.

Bruce’s trip steeped in naked meloncholy, he, now, a belted in,
waterlogged commuter, fussed time where time was lost. If Bruce had been
graced with additional mortal time, he’d have rather spend it all with
Karina. Maybe spend some time with siblings, cousins and old folks
dancing the moon into brilliance.

Both he and his Beloved
Karina had sold thier Souls as young people, to a promise of Health that
God, let alone Harmony, had no warrent to offer. Green for his rank of
servitude to the aged Church, Daddy Bruce Bunny was fated with default
assignments.

Quietly spoken and strictly off the record,
Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Sundance--but could either
reach into his watery grave to retrieve him? How had it come to this.
He was no Winter Driver, and inexpressibly sleepy, he'd missed the
bridge and sailed off the embarkment. Kerry could take over his choose
the news gig at Statelline for the Sundance group of stations.
But Karina, how long would he have to wait for her to join
him.