David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

In the seating area, Kenny and Sherry count their green money. The paper is of such poor quality that the bills stretch and sag like wet dough.

Sherry finishes counting. “I got four hundred.”

Kenny has eight hundred. “Altogether that’s twelve hundred.”

A bright spotlight cuts through the dark, illuminating someone skulking down the aisle of the seating area dressed as Lee Harvey Oswald the day of his arrest in Dallas. The latex Oswald mask is slightly askew. He takes a seat near Kenny and fidgets nervously.

Thirty new arrivals dressed as Dallas police officers circa 1964 storm into the seating area. One of them leads the rest to the stage. Stage lights flare.

An officer shines his flashlight into the audience, face after face, until the beam settles on Oswald. “There he is! Get him!”

Oswald shouts, “This is it!” He pulls a.38 from his jacket and points it at Kenny. “I’ll kill him if you take one more step, you hear me?”

The officers freeze in place.

One of them announces, “He’s armed and dangerous, ladies and gentlemen. He just killed the President.”

A rolling sigh from the audience.

Oswald says, “Let’s go, the three of you. You’re coming with me!” He ushers them up the aisle at gunpoint.

The bright sun dazzles outside the theater. Oswald has on sunglasses. He looks at his Timex watch. A pedal car with a papier mâché body modeled after a 1961 Dallas police cruiser pulls up. An officer hops out, pulls his gun, partially hidden behind the paper car. His nametag says Tippet. “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” he warns.

Oswald pumps four rounds into the officer, who falls dead without firing a shot, then hurries his hostages into an alley. “Let’s go! Into that alley.”

Kenny has had enough. “Come on, man. The show is over. Leave us alone.”

Joe says, “This is an act, right? This is your job, right?”

Oswald lowers the weapon. “It is, yeah, but I have to do it.” He raises the weapon. “So move!”

He directs them through alleyways, in and out of abandoned buildings, across empty streets and eventually into a manhole leading down to the lamplit ledge of the sewer canal. Now and then they have to dodge or step over large rats. They pass dimly lit cells, occupied beyond capacity with new arrival prisoners passing time languidly, reading books by candlelight, playing harmonica, cleaning fingernails.

They come to an open, well-lit plaza with a modern, clean, glass-fronted bakery. They see the tour boat dock in front and tourists disembark to visit the bakery.

The tour guide speaks gruffly through a bullhorn: “From this ultra-modern bakery come ten-thousand loaves of brown bread every twenty-four hours. This facility, along with the water purification plant we’ll be seeing up the line, provide all the bread and water our prisoners need for good nourishment.”

The last of the tourists enters the bakery.

Oswald waves his weapon. “Okay. Let’s take the boat.”

In the boat, Oswald controls the rudder and fingers his weapon while Joe, Kenny and Sherry pedal. The boat moves at a fair clip until it passes out of the sewer tunnel into the bright sun.

A slight variant of an earlier occurrence in Kenny’s rig. Kenny is drowsy, Joe and Sherry asleep. A highway sign looms in the headlight beam: WELCOME TO KANSAS. In his groggy state, Kenny doesn’t immediately grasp that something is wrong. But when he does, he snaps to alertness, applies the brakes, stops. Joe and Sherry wake up. Kenny backs up, past the sign for another look.

“How’d we get turned around?”

Sherry yawns. “We were in Texas when I fell asleep.”

“And going due south,” Kenny says. “How in the fuck did we end up in Kansas?”

“I told you this would happen,” Joe says. “It happens all the time. People don’t remember is all.”

Kenny shakes his head, truly puzzled. He attempts to turn the rig around on the narrow-shouldered highway, temporarily blocking both lanes.

The DeLorean tops a hill going at least a hundred and ten, Moe at the wheel. Kenny, Sherry and Joe run from the rig. Moe applies the brakes and screeches fifty yards before crashing into and under the rig and burning alive in a fireball.

In the crowded Bones Jangle. The skeleton dances and the lounge lizard, in a silk pongee suit, knocks back a black, syrupy drink. When the skeleton stops dancing all attention turns to the stage.

Sultry music welcomes Moe into the stage lights in a tight silk jumpsuit. He begins a striptease, but a few minutes into the act, the lounge lizard leaps up, charges toward the stage, pulls a.38 snubby and shoots Moe in the stomach.

Moe falls, mortally wounded.

We fade to black.

David Ohle’s novel, Motorman , was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972 and rereleased by 3rd Bed Press in 2004 with an introduction by Ben Marcus. Its sequel, The Age of Sinatra , was published by Soft Skull in 2004, followed in 2008 by The Pisstown Chaos . In 2009, two novellas, Boons and The Camp were published by Calamari Press under one cover. He has edited two nonfiction books, Cows are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers (Watermark Press, 1991) and Cursed From Birth: the Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr. (Soft Skull, 2006). His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review , the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Missouri in Columbia, and currently both fiction and screenwriting at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.