David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

The assistant appeared with a bucket of water, a chunk of floating soap, a starch bar, and bad news. "Well, Roe, I hate to tell you this, but the deposition won't do you any good. The charges will stick, the wig said. You'll appear before her right after you eat some starch and wash up. More bad news… this wig is a strict Hookerite. She doesn't listen to reason and she has no pity. I think your goose may be cooked. I'll be back to get you in ten minutes."

The words of the chief wig were intended to educate as well as rebuke and frighten. "Privy dipping is nothing to laugh at, Mr. Balls. You could be hanged for this. We could strip off your flesh and drop you in a tub of vinegar. Or we could let you off easy and send you to the Ice Palace for a public spanking."

"That would be my choice, the latter."

"These public spankings are conducted for a reason, and that reason is best exemplified by the words of Reverend Hooker, to wit, 'Humility is the mother, nurse, foundation and bond of all virtue.' You understand that?"

"Yes, Miss."

"But this is far too grievous for a spanking. I could send you to the prison at Permanganate Island. I could say, `Off to the Purple Isle with you.' Do you want that?"

"Not at all, not at all."

"What did the Reverend's Book say about all this?"

"I don't know," Roe confessed.

"'We die that we die no more!'"

"Yes, I've heard that. I just didn't remember."

"As the chief wig in this area, I say you will move yourself and all your possessions, lock, stock and barrel, to the town of Witchy Toe. You'll be leaving tonight." The wig turned to an assistant. "Do we have a job for him there?"

"Yes, we do. He'll be working for the Reverend."

The job awaiting Roe was folding parachutes at the Reverend's Parachute Company. Some of them were intentionally folded so that they would tangle, it was explained in training, and the jumper would experience a fatal fall. Chutes with this intentional flaw were specially made for one of the thrill clubs in Pisstown, whose members, thirty or forty at a time, would jump from an orbigator. Most of them were victims of parasite infestation who wanted to be put down in an exciting way. Certain chutes failed, usually a third of them, others didn't.

"It's Russian roulette with a twist," the trainer explained, "The thing is, we don't want the chutes getting mixed up. Because of their intended use, we won't be putting labels on them. Once they reach the end of the line, no one can tell which is which. The ones who survive can then look forward to the thrill of the next jump."

During this shift, Roe lived in a frigid, tin-roofed lean-to behind Zeus Bologna Company and worked long hours at the parachute factory. His supervisor, Mr. Enso, a proud and proper Hookerite, often tried to convert him. "All right, Balls. You're a good worker. I'll grant you that. But you're the only one here who hasn't joined up. Why don't you go on down to the Templex and put your Jerry Hancock on the dotted line?"

"I would, Mr. Enso, but my grandmother would never approve."

"Your grandmother?"

"It would kill her to know I'd become a Hookerite. Sorry, I can't do it."

"Go back to work, you uncooperative shit, you!"

"Yes, sir."

On Mondays, the only day the P.P.C. was closed, Roe would sit in Witchy Toe's Hooker Park and feed starch bar pieces to banty imps. Several of them would perch on the back of his bench and stroke his hair as he fed them. Aside from this small diversion, Roe's life had become a dreary, humdrum drag, a damper on his already guttering spirit. Then the Chaos came. It was small-scale, but violent and disruptive. Factories were shut down, including the P.P.C. People wishing to be reasonably safe remained behind locked doors, venturing out only to get whatever food and water was available. The starch bar factory fast became a charnel house. In great numbers the severely wounded and the sick-andtired were taken there and left to die. There were so many, a five-acre meadow east of town was commandeered for use as a burial pit.

When winter came, this Chaos, like others, lost its momentum for a time. The carnival came to Witchy Toe for its winter engagement in the midst of the period of relative order, of the type that always foreshadowed a period of intensified Chaos. Shops were doing business, the streets were being cleaned, the corpses burned. Vendors offered Jake by the glass, starch bars, gel cans, matches, candles, bundles of urpflanz and limited supplies of Willy.

Roe ventured out for the first time in months. He went into the post office and stood in line at the General Delivery window. "Anything for Balls?"

"We've been closed for a while, my friend. But that name, Balls. I remember that. There was something for you. It looked like shifting orders to me." After a half-hour's search through seven or eight mail sacks, the clerk found the orders. "Here they are. I was right, it's from the shifting office."

Roe opened the crisp, white envelope by sliding his thumb along the seal, cutting himself slightly. "I hope it's an up-shift for a change."

The order read:

SUBJECT: Order to Relocate

Dear Mr. Balls,

The Reverend requests that you report to the Balls summer estate on Square Island by Aug. 10. There you will serve under the head of mining operations. Additional instructions will be conveyed to you upon your arrival.

Your faithful servant,

Reverend Herman Hooker

Roe took the orders with him into the street and bought a glass of Jake from a vendor. "Looks like I'm going to the old Island place," he said. "It's more or less home. Hallelujah. Now and then the shiftings make sense."

The vendor filled a glass with water and stirred in Jake powder. "All we got is water. No urpmilk. Big Chaos. But the ice house opened up yesterday, so the water's cold."

Roe drank the first glass down and asked for another. "I'll leave right away. I'll take the pedal tram tonight. But may I ask you something?"

The vendor served the second glass. "Certainly, ask away."

"It says I'm to work in a mining operation. I wonder what they're mining."

"Probably teeth. They're finding veins of them all over the place. Hooker needs gold for all those altar pieces, the gold thread in the vestments, all that."

"Teeth mining? I hadn't heard of it."

"You will. You will."

An urpf anz farmer who lives one mile north of Pisstown informed this correspondent that a demented imp spent the day with him on his farm. He saw it several times, chasing down his diminutive rat hound. He claims the animal is of prodigious size and of a gregarious nature, even playful. "It didn't want to eat my little hound. It wanted to play with him. " The imp had a brass bell tied around its neck with a cord, presumably to warn of its approach. After a few minutes, the farmer says, the little hound sensed the imp's intentions were benign and joined in play delightedly chasing, then being chased.

The Reverend campaigning near the camp at Witchy Toe, has been hypnotized by steel. A barber started to shave him, but the moment the blade touched the Reverend's throat, his muscles relaxed. He was thought dead. After thirty minutes had gone by a client of the shop gave him a snapping thump with a middle finger on the bridge of his nose and this revived him. The Reverend later said, "I have often fallen into a hypnotic state in the barber's chair. The little snip-snip of the scissors, the gentle touch of the comb, the pleasant shock of warm shaving soap, the sweet smell of the tonics and talcums. It all comes together and puts me in a state of reverie. So, go out and vote on voting day with confidence. Have no fear about your Reverend's state of health. "

A crazed stinker female has taken up residence under the Bum Bay swing bridge. She is a slinky woman who comes at children from a low ditch under the bridge with mud caked to her hair. Because her hand is usually palsied she straps a plaster model of a hand to her wrist to alarm her natural enemies: boys with switches, girls with sticks, old men with rods. Sometimes she picks young men up from the spot where they stand and carries them off She kills them after kissing them, then rides to the nearest town and dumps the bodies in front of the Guard station or the Templex.