David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

Joe claps. “You better clap. You have to clap.” With all the clapping, Sherry and Kenny don’t hear him. He shouts, “Clap! I’m telling you. It’s the law! Believe me, we don’t want to end up in the sewer.”

Kenny says, “Fuck no.”

Kenny and Sherry clap half-heartedly.

A female new arrival skates to the booth and the paddling process is repeated.

The paddle strikes high, hitting her a glancing blow to the head and spraying her face with iodine. She falls, sliding across the ice, head bleeding, ear torn.

On the street outside the Ice Palace, Sherry says, “That was the weirdest thing.”

Joe says, “I’m remembering details now. They play by different rules here. The last thing we want to do is break one. That’s when they take you in for surgery. The problem is, the rules change all the time. They print the new ones in the paper. You gotta read the paper every day.”

Joe stuffs a few yellow bills into a paper machine and pulls out a City Moon . He looks at the headline: COMPULSORY WORK FOR NEW ARRIVALS.

Kenny scratches his head. “We gotta get jobs? All I know is trucking. Trucking is what I know. You see any big rigs around?”

“Forget all that. Whatever they tell you to do, you do.”

“They dump money from planes but we work anyway?”

“I told you. Different rules.”

As they enter the Terranova on the right side of the ticket booth, Moe exits on the left side.

Down a dismal street, Moe walks along, past one closed and boarded-up shop after the next. Just as the moon slides out of the sky and the sun rises he comes to a neon sign depicting a dancing skeleton holding a glass filled with white liquid.

Moe, dazzled by the light, ducks into the Bones Jangle Lounge.

At the far end of a long, narrow space, a human skeleton hangs on a stand at the rear of a small stage, bathed in a lurid red light from a spot above. Its mechanical dancing and the syncopated jangle of its bones provide lively ambient sound.

Down the center of the space is a series of eight raised tables, each with four sets of pedals. New arrivals sit drinking something thick and white while they pedal and chat. Some of them watch the skeleton dance.

Along one wall is a series of dispensers. Moe stuffs yellow money into one of them and from a hole an alien hand slides him a white drink. Drink in hand, he sits at one of the tables and pedals.

The lounge lizard, seated there in shabby clothes, looks half dead and slightly alien. He shows a horizontal scar on his chin and some scaling on his face. He says to Moe, “Nice suit. You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

The skeleton stops dancing and a comely young new arrival woman slithers onto the stage in a beaded costume and begins a seductive dance, stripping as she goes, which gets Moe’s attention.

The lounge lizard says, “My suit’s at the cleaners. It’s a lot like that one. We’re men of taste.” He raises his glass for a toast, but Moe is distracted by the dancer, who has stripped to a thong, one large enough to support a huge cock and a whopping set of balls.

Moe has a sip of his drink. His lips pucker. “Yeah, men of taste…. What is this stuff?”

“Sour sheep’s milk. The aliens think we like it.”

In the lobby of the Terranova, Joe plays his saw near the derelict candy counter for a group of new arrivals, his hat full of yellow money.

In the seating area, Kenny and Sherry sleep sitting up. Sherry’s head rests on Kenny’s shoulder.

The sidewalk in front of a dilapidated department store. The usual queue of new arrivals has formed. A few mannequins in rotted, moth-eaten, fifties fashions remain standing in the display window. Others have fallen. Among them are two hungry dogs fighting over a dead rat. Moths flutter all about. A couple of swallows fly around feasting on the moths. Some of the new arrivals in the queue watch this museum-like diorama with passive interest. Others read the City Moon.

The toy department. A smaller queue of new arrivals waits in line amid spider-webbed shelves of dusty fifties toys. One arrival at a time approaches a mechanized alien, inserts a forefinger into its rubberized mouth and waits. Momentarily, the person winces with pain and withdraws the finger with a blood drop on its tip. The machine’s arm extends a small manila envelope.

Sherry steps up to the machine, goes through the process, gets her envelope, followed by Joe, then Kenny.

Outside, new arrivals stand around sucking blood from the ends of their fingers, opening envelopes and reading work orders.

Kenny looks at the work order. “What’s a honey wagon?”

Sherry looks at hers. “What’s an E-train, Joey?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

Moe works in a grasshopper mill, a windowless hangar-like building on the outskirts of town. A cavernous, warm room, actually a huge incubator. Thousands of football-sized grasshopper/alien eggs lay row upon row under lights.

Moe, in white smock and rubber gloves, operates a set of pedals near a vat of eggs soaking in a soapy liquid. The pedaling activates an agitator in the vat, washing the eggs.

Tiring, he stops to rest, looks down into the vat while absent-mindedly picking at a large pimple. When he finds a loose part, he lifts it, the pimple bursts, spilling all sorts of pus-like spew into the egg vat.

A loud buzzer goes off, then an ear-piercing alarm.

Moe holds his ear and cringes, his pimple deflated but still dripping.

The bad part of Witchy Toe. The unpaved, muddy alley is lined with the backs of eight-story tenement houses. Though not a soul is to be seen outdoors, the din and commotion of crowded living spills loudly from rear tenement windows.

A pedal wagon with eight metal drums in its bed and a rear-mounted hand pump turns into the alley, Kenny at the pedals. He has on a brown uniform, a rubber apron and rubber boots. The wagon stops at the first tenement house. Kenny unstraps himself from the pedals and climbs out of the vehicle. He lifts a heavy metal manhole cover with difficulty and looks in. He sees feces, tampons, pet frogs, a snake, bugs, tissue paper, and a random selection of things that find their way down a toilet. He drops one end of the hose into the tank and begins working the hand pump, sucking sewage into the drums. The odor is so ghastly his eyes water. As he pumps, he spots the money plane in the sky.

In the cockpit, the alien pilot is saying, Roger there, tower. How many bundles for Witchy today? Uh-huh. I hear ya. Only four. That’s a hell of a cutback. Tough times, folks, sorry. Here comes some yellow rain.

In the alley, Kenny watches the plane descend. Its bomb bay doors open and four bales of money drop out. Three of the bales break apart as they should, but one continues to fall intact. Alarmed that it might land on him, Kenny abandons the pump and steps away from the wagon just as the bale of money splashes into the septic tank, dousing him in a shower of sewage. “Dumb fucker!”

He shakes his fist at the plane, which falters in its climb, the engines stopping and starting. When they stop altogether, the plane drops like a stone. Kenny sees a parachute in the sky and a distant fireball.

An E-train station. New arrivals pedal the four-car train slowly along a dark, underground passage.

In one of the cars, Sherry, in a blue uniform, moves down the aisle collecting yellow money from passengers. Quite a few of them exhibit subtle alien features, or the scars of radical surgery. She places handfuls of the money in a leather pouch carried over her shoulder. “Okay, folks. The harder you pedal, the less you pay. Come on, put some muscle in it, now. Let’s get where we’re going in my lifetime…. Next stop, Arden Boulevard. Arden Boulevard next stop. We change drivers here. You got five minutes to rest.”