David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

One of Hooker's Guards came into the cafe out of the cold. A crust of ice had formed on both his epaulets, just above the obvious bulge of a pistol in a holster abreast of the armpit. After conversing briefly with the rude man in the back booth, during which the subject seemed to be Ophelia, he came to her booth.

"He says you bother him. Are you looking to do some time at Permanganate?"

"I was just reading the newspaper. What have I done to bother him?"

"He wanted to kiss you. You spurned his advances."

"Hasn't he heard? It's against the law. And that isn't the only reason."

"He has heard. That's the Reverend himself."

"It is him. Now I see. I'm sorry."

The Guard returned to the Reverend's booth for additional consultation, after which he beckoned to Ophelia with a wave of the arm and the Reverend said, "Come on over here, you..

A kiss from the Reverend seemed the better of the choices facing her and she went to his booth.

"Let me give you a big juicy smack on those pretty lips, Honey Pie," the Reverend said. "I'll hand you a ticket to the best show in town."

"The Moldenke show," the Guard said.

She leaned over, closed her eyes and waited. After a few moments, the Reverend's dry lips, along with the spiked hairs that surrounded them, passed across hers, then returned, this time with protruding tongue, which he forced into her mouth more than once in rapid succession.

When it was over, she opened her eyes. The Reverend was holding out the ticket. "Here, Honey. Enjoy the show. That Moldenke is something to behold. He and I were friends for a while."

"You'll like the show," the Guard said. "Moldenke says things you'll find hard to believe. He'll play tricks on your mind."

The Reverend stood up to leave. "Excuse me, now, Honey, but my Q-ped is waiting."

"Come with me," the Guard said. "We'll take a pedal cab to the show. It's at the Radiola Theater."

The closer the cab approached the Radiola, the more elusive the theater became in the frozen night-mists that had settled over everything. Without visible landmarks to steer him in the right direction, the stinker cabby circled the same blocks, re-crossed the same intersections over and over again. His apologies and excuses were effusive. "My vision is going. I can see nothing in this fog. You mustn't hate me. I've taken hundreds of fares to the Radiola. I beg you to believe we're getting closer."

"Stop!" the Hookerite said. "Let us out. We'll find it on foot." To Ophelia, he said, "Pay him a buck or two."

Ophelia paid the fare without complaining.

There was no one on the street to ask directions of, but Ophelia eventually spotted the white beam of an arc light searching the sky. "That's the Radiola," the Hookerite said. "It has a searchlight on the roof."

Crossing a soggy, abandoned lot overgrown with urpflanz, then navigating muddy, unlit alleyways for almost an hour, Ophelia and the Hookerite finally came to the theater. A red arrow under a flickering bulb angled downward, indicating the entrance.

The Hookerite said, "This wasn't always a theater, you know. It was a school, back in the time of Sinatra. Have you heard of schools?"

"I've read about schools in books I have. It's good that we don't need them now. They would be useless, wouldn't they?"

"This one was closed after the first Chaos. It was the wise thing to do. Don't you agree?"

"It seems reasonable."

"Follow me. I've been here before."

Once inside, they were in an ink of darkness. Ophclia followed the Hookerite to reserved seats in the front row as the host took the stage. "Ladies and gents, let's welcome Moldenke to Bum Bay. Call him a stinker, a death traveler, call him what you will, but one thing we know for sure. Moldenke's been gone and come back and all he wants to do is tell us how it is over there."

With a stinker's gait and using a cane, Moldenke took his place center stage. He wore black rags and a wide-brimmed white hat that kept his face in shadow. When he turned his head to assess the size of the audience, Ophelia observed an inch-long tube of flesh protruding from just below his ear. It had the general appearance and shape of an infant's finger, but lacked a nail. In the end of the tube, a small hole leaked a clear, gelatinous fluid. To Ophelia the protuberance looked like some kind of shunt, or drain, not a natural growth, something done surgically. -- -- - — - — -

"I don't recall that the place had a name," Moldenke began. "It may have been illuminated from within, like a lantern-bug. Stars? Moon? I don't know. I never looked up much. We were mostly focused on what was in our own bailiwick. At first I lived in Bailiwick 246. That's not far from Indian Apple, a heavily populated city. There was anywhere from a hundred to a thousand of us, depending. The bailiwick population fluctuated fiercely. Everyone lived in a trailer.

"My neighbors were the Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius. If we opened our respective doors at the same time, they would bang together. The trailers were side-by-side and front-tofront all the way to the end. If I wanted to go down to the well for a bottle of muddy water, I had to walk sideways about a half mile. It was so narrow a passage that if you met somebody coming the other way, one of you would have to crawl under a trailer till the other one could pass.

"Beyond my bailiwick, there was nothing but wide, open spaces. I guess it was best to live as near the well as possible. This one wasn't a very good one, though. The water was foamy and mud-flecked, but it satisfied thirst enough and didn't rot your teeth like some of the waters in some of the bailiwicks.

"That's what would start a bailiwick, drilling down and getting water from anything you could tap into. Sometimes old swimming pools underneath would have water in them. But it tasted like bile. And sometimes, little pieces of bone might get sucked up in the pump and land in your sink. Somebody would get lucky and tap into a frozen-over reservoir. And that bailiwick might last a few years, maybe a hundred. Some of them, they would go dry in six months. Or they would drill into a big cesspool and get nothing but a gush of sewer water, mixed with alkali and radium. So, when somebody drilled a good, clean well, the trailers would come.

"Holly Island had a lot of bailiwicks because of all the swimming pools down below to tap into. That's also where they were digging up frozen heads. It seemed that anyplace where there were a lot of swimming pools, you'd find a lot of frozen heads. The surface soil on Holly Island was soft and dark, mostly rotted cloth, straw, old ground-up bones and worm castings. It looked rich, like the best soil you've ever seen, and it was loaded with worms, but nothing would grow in it except urpflanz, brambles, touch-me-nots, and camphor bushes.

"When the water source went dry and it was time to go look for another one, we all got together and helped one another move our trailers. We moved in three groups, one behind another, like a train, the ones in front pulling, the ones in back pushing. It was hard work and it took forever. But what are you going to do when the well runs dry? We did try to train boar hogs to pull the trailers, but that was a failure. No matter how many of them you hitched up, you couldn't get any organized pull out of them. It was pandemonium. We gave up on that project.

"Later on I stayed in Bailiwick 212, which formed over an old hand-dug well fed by a natural spring, which was a lucky find. It was where the old town of Harpstring had been. That was before the Chaos I think. It was just some old wooden buildings where some early stinkers lived. They told me the Harpstringers used to grow grain and eat big pancakes. Then came the hundred year drought. Nobody could farm anything. If they could raise any grain at all, the grasshoppers would eat it. So the hardy Harpstringers ate grasshoppers. They roasted them, boiled them, ate them raw and pickled them."