April 5, 2010
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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.
