David Ohle - The Pisstown Chaos

Hooker asked to be allowed a pet or two and he was given a mating pair of miniature imps. He named them Harvey and Marina. Harvey sickened and died fairly quickly and Marina ran off. "They were a fine pair," Hooker lamented to Roe. "I miss them a lot."

Later the two imps were found. First Harvey, when the Reverend fell against an office sofa, moving it a few feet and exposing the imp, long dead and completely desiccated. Hours later the same day Roe spotted Marina from his window. She was frolicking with a stinker child near the fountain.

Some mornings Hooker made a modest effort to look presentable, but usually managed to over-tonic his hair or put on a wrinkled suit. No one came to see him anyway. He had a model motor car on his desk and he liked to play with it. Lunch was always something he looked forward to. He was served a variety of things he called for, like skrada-kaka, marrow pudding, tanfy and friters, all favorites of his childhood.

"I'll stage my death," he whispered to Roe during an enema session. "Then I'll be spirited off to a hideaway in the Fertile Crescent where I will live out my days in a simple home of my own design. The public will forget me quickly. Word will go out that I'm ravaged by parasites. I'll linger until I fade from public consciousness, then I'll be laid to rest in a private ceremony. It would be an official death, not a real one. I'll be augmenting dull reality, giving it a mythical feel."

One night after hearing Hooker's screams, Roe found him nude in the bathroom, standing on his head, trying to pass a kidney stone. "I learned this trick from an old stinker," he wheezed.

When the stone failed to pass, Hooker's physicians were kind enough on that occasion to give him willy. The pain was greatly eased and the stone passed in his sleep. "Save it," he told Roe, "it may be a valuable relic some day."

Roe placed the stone in the pocket of his rags and promptly forgot the instruction. Some weeks later it would be pulled from the pocket unnoticed while he reached for a key to the china cabinet. It would roll along the floor and come to rest beneath the cabinet, never to be found or thought about again.

With scarcely a month remaining before his fatal disease was scheduled to strike, Hooker reminisced to Roe, "The people wanted a Reverend who could deceive enemies and charm friends, or vice versa. That was my public appeal. I had lain among the hopeless and desperate. I was a bum with panache, unshaven but dignified. Street-wise, blunt-talking, cynical, not happy, a long history of unemployment, a leader who'd spent time on the Purple Isle. That's what people were crying for. `What you see is what you get' was my campaign slogan. I faced the public au natureL I hung out my dirty laundry with pride, exorcised my demons in full public view. I humiliated myself for the common good. I got in trouble, I got arrested. I was always in the news. I said outrageous things. It was the politics of the actual. Now look at me. I'm all washed up."

Roe was trusted with getting the Reverend ready for travel. Arrangements had been made for the renowned pilot, Buster Knabenshue, to fly him to Bum Bay. From there he would get a ferry to the Crescent. It was thought unlikely he would be recognized, and if he were, he would be ignored.

"You may dispose of my things when I'm gone," he said to Roe, who heard the clink of cables and chains as Knabenshue's orbigator was tied to the Templex flagpole.

"I'd best get going," the Reverend said, "but I'll be back when the dust settles. You've been a good servant, Roe. I do hope your next shift is as fortuitous as this one. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, sir, and good health."

Roe's heartbeat quickened as Hooker dashed out to the flagpole with his luggage. Letting out a yodel, he belted himself into the lift harness and was hoisted up to the orbigator, where he threw his luggage into the aircraft's luggage bay and took one of the two remaining seats. "Very snazzy craft, Mr. Knabenshue," he said. And so spacious."

The craft was propelled by a galvanic motor, steam vessel, and two balsa screws more than three yards in diameter. There was, in addition to the cockpit, a sleeping area with seven stacked cots and a fully equipped kitchenette. Mrs. Knabenshue baked bread and cakes as the orbigator flew The aroma was enticing.

When the craft reached a good altitude, Knabenshue relaxed his controls and let it drift. The screws turned with remarkable quiet. The canvas wings stiffened and cut like table knives through the ozone, the metal ailerons rat-tatting like tin drums.

As the orbigator passed over a stinker refuge, Knabenshue said, "This is rich. Let's go down," and landed near a field. Some sort of fair was taking place. The stinkers were cooking nineteen thousand pounds of fattened imps over a great trench. They explained that the fire was started yesterday in fifty cords of ironwood and urpflanz brush, laid in a trench seven hundred feet long. A stinker barbecue artist was on the grounds to direct a corps of assistants in the stoking of the fire, so as to reduce the wood to the proper kind of coals.

The feast was to be given in honor of the birthday of the oldest stinker, Prester Jack, who established the first stinker settlement and ruled over it for a century and a half. It was called Arden. A herd of imps broke through the fence, legend has it, and ate all the corn. Famine ensued, until an imp was trapped in a burning barn and roasted. Prester Jack, they say, took the first bite. Then the others joined in eating the tasty meat. Thus the famine was ended.

A stinker docent took charge of Hooker and his party. "Look," he said, a thin arm thrust outward, the hand gloved in chamois, "There's no reason for you Yanks to be bored here. I can take you to our amusement park. We have the Aerial Swing, Box Ball Alleys, Automatic Shooting Gallery, Palm Garden and Cafe, German Village, Roley Boley, Ice Cream Parlor, Airchairs, and the Mystic Mesh. If that isn't enough, we have games like policy and craps, poker and spades, whatever tickles you. And the well known Doolittle girl is appearing nightly."

The smoky air was filled with the scent of barbecue. As Hooker and company ate platters of meat and urpmeal bread, they were entertained by watching young stinker males attempting to mate with the Doolittle girl, who lay on a bed of grain sacks, in a gingham dress raised to the waist. With her vaginal opening illuminated by a gel can held close, those positioned for a clear view saw the pearly pink laminations of the complex organ exude a whitish lubricant just before the first male made his attempt with a clumsy, misdirected thrust that did not achieve full penetration.

Hooker said, "I could do it. I'm getting in line."

No, no," said Knabenshue. "I don't like the look of the sky. We should fly out before the bad weather hits."

The party made for the orbigator and flew out of the area and above the coming storm. That evening, as the craft flew, Hooker and the Knabenshues passed the time playing hearts, liar's dice, and double solitaire. When that grew dull they amused one another with recitations of facts and figures. Hooker said, "Oysters lived in fluid that contained about one part salt to twenty-seven water. You could have raised them in your home."

Knabenshue said, "It has been frequently noted by orbigator pilots that the barking of an imp is always the last sound they are able to hear from the ground when they are ascending, even to an altitude of four miles."

Mrs. Knabenshue said, "Parasites can live for years in the carcasses of buried stinkers. Imps rooting through old lime pits have been infested. The parasites are brought up to the grass by worms."

A little before dawn, Hooker awoke, looked out the window, and saw the streetlamps of Pisstown. To the south was the royal blue glow of the National Canal. Schools of hagfish grazed like buffalo on the bottom. There were pedal wagons already making deliveries of urpmilk and urpmeal bread to the restaurants catering to pain du perdue enthusiasts. There was a Jake wagon piled with kegs, an American pedaling a waffle van and tooting a kazoo to attract a clientele.