The California Tales: A Novel

By Mathew Kinsella

Exhibit-A

To dream the im-poss-ible dream to fight the un-beat-able foe to run where the brave (or wise) dare not go -From the Broadway production of The Man of La Mancha, music by Darien and Leigh, 1965

Gracing the awesome coastline of California like a set of stained glass and adobe rosary beads, the 18th-century chain of twenty-one old Spanish missions offer the modern tourist a window into the history of the golden state at once colorful, quaint, often romanticized and just possibly not as benign as the tourist literature would lead us to believe.

Investigating just that possibility, three amateur researchers have uncovered an historic mission artifact that, proven authentic, could shaken the golden state to its foundations.

Nor would the repercussions end there, cautioned research director Brother Kolbe. Not by a long shot.

At the state capitol in Sacramento, the governors Mission Affairs Department, and entrenched bereaucrazy representing the vested interest of the church, civic groups, university and private concerns, is naturally interested in the discovery. With real estate totaling in the multi-billion dollar range, including treasure troves of priceless relics and artwork, the Mission Affairs Department is somewhat hesitant at relinquishing control of their flock of iconic golden geese.

Exposing the scandalous mission hullabaloo to the light of day may very well, researcher Samara Del Rio smiled with a perfectly beatific malfeasance, induce a state of anarchy.

This my quest, to follow that star

no matter how hopeless, no matter how far

Along with Sam, ostensibly the team sociologist; Franciscan Brother and linguist Kolbe McCeanna and computer technician Felicia Bonaventura have tracked the legendary article to the derelict ruins of a minor auxiliary mission, Mision Estancia San Micmac, abandoned deep in the cathedral redwoods of Californias rugged pacific coast foothills. Exhibit-A.: as Sacramento knows, the notorious artifact is a legendary mission document lost since the colonial era, and thought to be a Spanish translation of aboriginal petroglyphs, entitled Las Cuentitas Primaveritas de Isla Califia.

Past as prologue, a highly divisive work of folkloric Outside Art, colonial-era historians date the slim manuscript to the year 1561. Spakespearean scholars, however, citing key internal references to The Bards colonial-era play The Tempest, insist that the text is no older that the year 1611. Anti-Stratfordians, of course, call the Spakespearean theory leaky as an unstaunched wench. Adding to the debate, pre-Columbian archivists at Villa Poggio Gherado in Canterbury, England claim tevidence supporting a composition date of 1348. Equally divided, modern pundits dismiss Las Cuentitas as nothing more than psychosocial gibberish and third-rate poetic doggerel anyway, or else venerate the document as instrumental to a radical psychosocial transformation. Either way, if birds of a feather flock together than the infamous manuscript resembles a traditional book to the extent a penguin resembles an ostrich. [Embedded in translation throughout the plot of The California Tales], Las Cuentitas represents an extraordinary multimedia-literary genre suppressed censored and banned since the 1960s as irredeemably subversive to the status quo. During its brief hayday in the sun, the tempestuous genre was known as Prosperos Salient Heliotropic Articulation Grids: pSHAGs. And, particularly threatening to the dominate paradigm, pSHAG poetry, (or poemetry), was known, rather tongue-in-cheek, as Teleothanantological Neuropeptidal Algorithms: T.N.A.s. Moreover, reputedly encrypted within a Prospero SHAG TNA are the sole surviving fragments of the theoretical Archetypical Tale: the mother of all manuscripts, the lore at the core. Archetypical Tale theorists insist that this so-called consummate communiqu is simultaneously primordial and pansophic, pro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469101118

Mathew Kinsella

Born and raised in a large Irish-Italian family in Staten Island in New York City, after a tour in the United States Marine Corps during the Vietnam conflict, Kinsella acquired a nursing degree from Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, and joined Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers caring for the homeless and poorest of the poor. Currently, he’s sequestered at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Lake in the Jersey Pine Barrens, working at the epic continuation of The Tales.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Mathew Kinsella.

Cover photo by A. Mandolyn Nelson and Wikipedia.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

61003

Contents

RIDERS ON THE STORM

- PRELUDE -

SAM’S PROLOGUE

The

California

Tales

SIEMPRE ADELANTE

FORWARD

- ACT 1 -

- CHAPTER 1 -

- CHAPTER 2 -

- CHAPTER 3 -

- ACT 2 -

- CHAPTER 4 -

- CHAPTER 5 -

- CHAPTER 6 -

- CHAPTER 7 -

- CHAPTER 8 -

- CHAPTER 9 -

- CHAPTER 10 -

- CHAPTER 11 -

- CHAPTER 12 -

ACT THREE

CHEERS!

THE WINDTALKER,

BY WAY OF AN INTRODUCTION

Manzanita Wine

Pinus attenuata

Partruition

Altar Ego

Eli Lamma Sabacthani

Rock Soup

Tanoak Knoll

Naked Love Pome To The Crazy Sky Thunder

Garibaldi ‘Kinch’ DeGuffe

PROLOGIA

Lambertiana, The Sugar Pine Fugue

Canada Malpaso

The Big Sur River Expedition

Tunica Adventitia

Summit Run

Cooper’s Cabin

Junior Brown

FORWARD

Variacione Primero Tematico Por Neruda

Concerning Granite and Cypress

Mision Mulege

La Higuera Mision

Sally Lightfoot

Ofendido Burriqueta

Tematico Variacione Por Neruda Secondo

INTRODUCTION

Ripe, A Tentative Index

Pet Peeve Pudding

Doonesbury Donuts

Civil Servant Slop

Massengill Mimosa

Corralitos Cider

Jitterbug Perfume

LET THE RIVER CARRY THE LOAD

The Tree House

Paddle to the Sea

Bonny Doon Breach

Puer Aeturnus

Sassafras

La Verdad, La Verdict

FOR-WORD

Saint Clare’s Altar Window

Triduum

Maundy Thursday

Circus Circus

La Lacrymosa

Myristica

The Triumph of Flora

Spring Garden Arboretum

Biomes, Trysts and Pulverized Haiku

Ars Arborvitae

Sparkle

FORWARD MARCH

The Caduceus

Decimatio, Consort

Three-Penny Common

Sky Pilot

Song of the Idiot Savant

Primum Non Nocerum

Entertaining Angels, The Skid Row Shuffle

Tuck

GAGGLES AND PARLIAMENTS

TO EACH THEIR DULCINEA

The Disenchantment of Dulcinea

- CHAPTER 13 -

- CHAPTER 14 -

- CHAPTER 15 -

- CHAPTER 16 -

- CHAPTER 17 -

- CHAPTER 18 -

ACT THREE CONCLUSION

THE GATELESS GATE

GLADRAGS

STELLA

SIEMPRE ADELANTE

FORWARD

THE ASSISI UNDERGROUND

PRELUDE: CONVERSIO

SCHERZANDO CON ANIMA

The Adobe Aubade

In Antiphony, Purgio

High Noon

Overture: Illumination

La Junta de los Doce Pasos

IN REQUIEM: UNIA

PIANISSIMO DIMINUENDO

EPILOGIA

Endnotes

001.jpg

THE

CALIFORNIA

TALES

Las

Cuentitas

Primaveritas

de Isla Nueva Califia

O, Las Tres Campanas y

El Campanario Desamparado

A Zarzuela verismo grande

favola per musica dramma en giocoso

peregrinatio pro dei amore

A working holiday

touring the Pacific Coast Highway

Null Imprimatur Obstat

Archbishop Breoshaight ni’Mhaedoc, O.U.

Abbes, Friary of Chille Daoire, Nua Laighnach

TCT 9.1, First Edition 1991

Manzanita Wine Press, Santa Cruz, California

Por los bisnietos

For the great-grandchildren

Especially

Che, Jyoti,Ty, and Forest

Elizabeth, Owens, Paloma

Preston, Ethan, Eanna, and Kya

Ama Et Fac Quod Vis!

With a debt of gratitude

to Pat Vidiksis, Dale Wilburn, Ros Marinas,

Paul McHugh, Dawn Garcia, Tommy Kinsella, Lark O’Rielly,

and Clann Ceannselach without whom I may very well

still be eating from the dumpster behind the Santa Cruz Taco Bell.

Por la ayuda majestosa con El Espanol: Juana Vidrios, Mariel Barcelona, R.N.

y Doctor Alberto Ballesteros, MD, muy muy gracious

And to all the support staff at Xlibris: Dora, Jade, Riki, Sam,

Brian and company, thank you

RIDERS ON THE STORM

A Brief Introduction

By Paul McHugh

San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Wouldst thou make these tales, O Muse, live for us

in all their many bearings.

—Homer

How do you separate the poetry from the life and times of the poet, the man from his music? What were the personal motives and circumstances that prompted the poet to put pen to paper, plume to pulp, to, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, bare the underwear of his soul in public? When can we say, as literary critics have pondered since the days of Homer’s Odyssiad, now we understand the essence of the poet’s craftsmanship, now we grasp his spirit’s marrow, blood and bone?

I propose, posit, we may indeed know the fullness of his composition when extreme circumstance rends the cloth of the ordinary, and the poetry of his soul stands revealed in all its naked brilliance.

I met the poet and author of The California Tales, Matty Kinsella, in Liscannor Bay, County Clare, Ireland. Literally. Or is that littoral-ly. It was a slate gray autumn day as shaggy storm seas heaved to shore. The Chronicle assigned me to cover the International Kayaking Championships, featuring the hair-raising storm sea and surf competition. Kinsella, as I learned, was captain of the ragtag assemblage of California Nortenos serving as the first ever United States Team to compete in this daring display of brinkmanship.

Now here is the revealing image. This short, stout, bearded and burly ex-marine, Matty stood in the seething shore break doing his best to help a teammate achieve, and let’s not forget survive, victory. The United State’s best hope that raw day, Eric Hanscom of the University of Coastal Santa Cruz, had just paddled into utter exhaustion in back-to-back heats of the final round of competition. The narrow landing zone in the boulder-strewn seawall, treacherous an hour ago, was now hopelessly inundated by the rising tide and vicious undertow.

Yet there’s your man Matty—stripped to his emerald green and gold jockey shorts, up to his tree-trunk thighs in the frigid heave and wash of the North Atlantic, plump buns mooning the serrated stone teeth of the seawall. Laughing through a mouthful of brine, in one great bear hug he snags Eric in the Perception kayak barreling through the maritime mayhem. In all the howling whirlwind-driven Irish mist, the poet’s vitality, strength, and levity were obvious. But even more outstanding was his courage and kindness.

Just like his writing.

- PRELUDE -

Hirunda Rondine

Song of the Mission Micmac Swallow

Canto Jondo de Las Golondrina

Paraphrased from the sole surviving written account

of the pre-Columbian Uto-Nahuatl language

of the San Gabrieleno tribes

by Friar Jeronimo B. Cassotto, OFM

Mision Asistencia Los Angeles, 1841

Quic noit noivam humaliwo

suyapo’osh tomol wene’mu

quic secat peleblich ibi urusar aguet

ecbal Acagchemem, seja Chinigchinich:

Somewhere beyond the sea

on the shore waiting for me

my lover stands on golden sands

watching the ships that go sailing.

[sic]

SAM’S PROLOGUE

The famous [California] Dream is still here, if only to be betrayed,

as potent and insistent as the coastline.

—James D. Houston

A three-week vacation touring the golden state of California, all expenses paid! Retired Detective Joy Brogan laid the deal on the table and kicked back on the heels of the restaurant chair. Seems to me like an offah, Brogan’s Brooklynese surfaced, ya cant refuse.

Contemplating the proffered once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation, Delores Murphy shuffled the glossy tourist literature strewn across the restaurant table and, smirking at Joy, extracted a satellite map of the Pacific Coast.

Huddled waiting for a reply with Brogan around the rustic red oak table, the body language of the five-member proposal committee ranged from fidgety impatience to slouched indifference with one stone-face measured disdain.

Clearing space in the clutter of half-eaten dinner entrées, empty margarita pitchers, laptops, cellphones and sealed manila folders, Delores unfurled the GPS map, comprehensively augmented by an atlas of highly classified topographical ordinance surveys, and traced the historic route of the golden opportunity. Following the coastline on the map for six hundred and fifty miles, thirty-nine little sea green mission bell icons delineate El Camino Real Occidentales: the aboriginal hoof paths adopted by the pioneering Spanish missionaries, which would become California’s awesome Pacific Coast Highway 1:

San Diego sunshine!

LA glitter liberality, warm sandy beaches, sunshine!

Maybe a side trip across the Straits of Steinbeck to gorgeous Yosemite, emerald Lake Tahoe, aeolian Mount Shasta.

Back to the sunshine at the Sonoma Valley vineyards, then north to the cathedral redwoods (and other notoriously lush greenery) of Humboldt and Jefferson County

Ah yes, sylvan Sonoma! Tapping her foot in three-quarter time to the restaurant CD of ambient dinner music, currently an amusingly apt flamenco rendition of Judy Garland’s "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," Delores backtracked to the iconic mission bell in the vineyards. Two hundred wineries within a day’s proximity, plus or minus, each replete with a lavish tasting room more generous than the last! Resisting the urge to guzzle her own Almaden Golden Chablis straight from the teardrop-shaped bottle, Dee sipped the restaurant’s ceramic cup in her best imitation of ladylike etiquette. Pre-ordered by the committee, the Almaden label is vintage Californian of course. Haphazardly refolding the map into the atlas, Dee scowled like the hellacious cynic she is.

In vino veritas, in wine is truth. Yes, copious carafes of al-Madeen’s educated grape would constitute an expense account necessity if she accepts the offer on the table because the three-week holiday is also, as in primarily (Moire Delores Rose ain’t as vapid as she projects), a shameless sales pitch hype marketing ploy bait ’n switch. All expenses will be—better be—covered since the happy little lark in the golden park of opportunity is more specifically a working vacation, and, judging by the three voluminous manila folders, a rather odious assignation of euphemistic corporate headhunting at that.

Nonetheless, dressed for the offbeat restaurant Delores made an equally shameless show adjusting the faded denim bib top of her farmer jane Levis, barely containing her lavender sports bra with lacey delusions of Victoria Secret grandeur. Cradled in the cleavage formed by the cramped 32C lycra brassiere, Dee absently jangled her tin dog tags, languidly leaned forward—and lunged across the table. Formerly ensconced under the protective elbow of the handsome committee courier, she snatched the foremost sealed manila folder.

OPERACION A.U., Dee squinted at the label, POR ORO Y DIOS. The latter she recognized from the tourist literature. The brazen sixteenth-century slogan lured Spain’s rapacious conquistadors and missionaries (if there was a difference) to the fabled shores of the New World. For Gold and God.

The chagrined committee courier, Bobby OD Cassotto snatched the folder right back.

Full Dysclosure—The Blue Adobe Restaurant and Saloon, off the beaten track of the international culinary scene of New York City, was the only night light on the seedy industrial waterfront of the Rosebank District as she deboarded the number 39 crosstown bus from the Saint George Ferry Terminal. Relatively empty for a Friday evening, the funky inconvenient venue was also selected, Delores more than suspects, due to the Southwest cuisine (oddly displaced, yet given an excellent review in the Village Vanity), along with the indiscriminate mix of Wild West and Mexican motifs—oh-so-clever machinations by the proposal committee commissioned to whet her appetite for the operation.

Moreover, indicative of the extremely unusual expense and preparation invested in a mere proposal meeting, the two dinner tables bordering their river view window niche sit starkly empty, despite a peevish slosh of patrons milling about the sawdust and peanut shells carpeting the adjacent replica of a Wild West saloon. There, occupying the barstool nearest the front door sits the Blue Adobe’s erstwhile hostess: a six-foot tall bikini adorned lime-green barrel cactus. Sporting a spangle-embroidered sombrero, which Dee still can’t decide whether it is gaudy or gorgeous, around the hostess’s prickly neck dangles a flashing neon gold sign, advertising Thirty-nine Brands of Tequila. It was going to be an interesting night, one weigh ore duh udder.

Appraising the current dinner music, a latin-rock riff she recognized from Carlos Santana’s Shaman Nine CD, (G minor, 6/8 time, tempo-a-capo), Dee forked at her entree lacklusterly. Tangy Veracruz Tamalada is her favorite Latin American meal, and arriving direct from a gig at the Electric Ladyland Recording Studio in Greenwich Village, she was famished; yet tonight the tamales taste like Mojave Iguana broiled in balsamic vinegar. Dee stirred aside the steamed banana leaf husks, helped herself to a barely touched plate of soupy green chili relenos (not polite to talk—or reply—with one’s mouth full), and, anything to avoid eye contact with the increasingly fidgety committee, she scanned the joint ostentatiously, feigning interest in the decorative motif.

In what has developed into a Mexican standoff (no racial slur intended), confronting the proposal committee over the begrudgingly sparse details of the proposition, her hesitance (awlwright, obstinance) is not over the working aspect of the holiday. Until sufficient details are forthcoming she’d hold out as long as necessary before formulating a decision. Her ambivalence is otherwise. A gut feeling. Intuitive.

She choked down another bite of chili relenos, dropped the fork in the plate, and reached for the neck of the Almaden bottle. Her lower abdomen rumbled like a locomotive with a mezcal-crazed stoker and no engineer. She knows the ulcerous undertones all too well. In the quasilegal underworld of professional agent provocateurs an intuitive sixth sense often makes the difference between a successful operation and a jail cell, if not worse. The five-dollar word for the vaguely ominous intuition is adumbratious. From the Latin adumbratio, denoting a portentous sign or prophetic foreshadowing, such as the series of coincidents since the bus ride tweaking her innate Irish, if not all-too-human, proclivity to inane superstition.

Her hand wavered at the wine bottle, betraying a telltale tentativeness. Goosebumps conspicuously dimpled her bare extended arm, and not because of the drafty restaurant window. The prickly gut feeling hit her tonight, and hit her like an adobe brick, when she encountered Corinne the Accursed Barrel Cactus right after the cross-town bus ride. The GPF-ing map sealed it. Dee brooks no tolerance for natty numerologists or occult fruitcakes, but what were the odds of the odd number thirty-nine recurring three times in one hour? Bad news came in threes, and thirty-nine is thirteen times three.

Conversely, she strummed the half-empty bottle with her fingers, the repetitive golden theme (i.e. golden state, chablis, tequila sign, opportunity) must be a good omen, no? Therein lay the rub. Short of a postgraduate course in teleothanantology, how do you differentiate a meaningless coincidental cowinkydink from a fortuitous Jungian synchronicity, a beneficent nod of the Fates from malfeasant fairie-folk mischief? Either way, the Blue Adobe is giving her an acute case of the adumbratious heebeegeebees.

The dining room is warm and welcoming enough. Wrapt in an aroma of fresh stoneground corn tortilla, the decor was done in lively pastel earth tones, all turquoise blue, green, salmon, and sepia. Flickering oil lamps underscore the stucco simulated adobe walls, festooned with a veritable rogue’s gallery of artwork, portraits, photos and bric-a-brac. Framing their river view corner table hang two antique movie posters. To the left is the gorgeous actor Antonio Banderas playing Ernesto Che Guevara to slutty Madonna’s Evita. To the right is a montage of regal Marlon Brando in the 1953 Wild One, the 1973 Apocalypse Now and of course Streetcar Stanley. Beneath Brando dangles a hefty authentic-looking longshoreman’s pig iron grappling hook, the well-worn ash handle imprinted with the inexplicable initials, HCM.

Panning out, on the right side of the capacious arched doorway to the saloon hangs a black ’n white print of Picasso’s minimalist Don Quixote, with Sancho Ponza, Dapple, Rozinante and windmill in tow. To the left; the irrepressible Mexican-German surrealist Frida Kahlo’s exquisitely gruesome Lo Que Me Dio El Aqua: What the Water Gave Me. And bridging the transom is an old-fashioned wild west shop sign for the Santa Fe Undertaker, J.J. Peachum, Proprietor—someone’s idea of humor, Dee guessed.

Absently swirling the wine bottle, Dee turned toward the two curious pieces of artwork decorating the walls over the empty dinner tables. The first is a laminated copy of Henry David Thoreau’s 1848 Treatise on Civil Disobedience. Imprisoned for protesting the flagrantly imperialist Mexican-American war tax, Dee knew that Thoreau, walking the talk, wrote the Treatise from his Concord, Massachusetts, jail cell, and that the tract profoundly influenced the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Pasted to the bottom of the parchment is juxtaposed a morose quote by no less than President Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War was God’s revenge on the United States for the Mexican-American War.

Over the other table is an old-fashioned eight-by-ten sepia-tone photograph, like a daguerreotype or stereopticon, with an inscribed brass plaque below. Matted in a matching brass frame, the photo was taken inside a partially demolished Mexican hacienda, featuring an incongruent Teutonic-looking young blonde nurse bent over the bedside of a grievously wounded scruffy brown peasant. Sporting a set of iconic bandoliers across his chest, a flowing black moustache and broad sweeping sombrero awfully similar to Cactus Corinne’s in the saloon, a caption in the lower right corner of the photo identified the wounded man as Hefe Ejercito Libertador: none other than the brutal bandito—slash-revolutionary hero Francesco Pancho Villa. Affixed below the photo the brass plaque reads:

Nurse Nana McCeanna

Xalapa, Veracruz, 1912

The Blue Adobe’s original proprietress

Completing the randy rogue theme, the uniform white linen window curtains feature diminutive cedar-red depictions of the shamanic imp ubiquitous to Southwest tourist traps: the humpback horned cloven-hoof pre-Columbian Mesoamerican incarnation of the hyperfertile Hellenic flute-playing satyrical demi-god Kokopelli, who alone gives Dee the unmitigated willies.

Steadying her hand around the bottle of golden opportunity, miffed dram by futile dram, Dee augured the omens futilely. Santana’s coincidental Shaman Nine riff wasn’t helping. Nor, over the bar, did the trailworn leather holster, replete with a crude yet nasty set of Colt six-shooters dangling from a sun-bleached longhorn steer skull. A sage tumbleweed following the waitress Bimbo Buns down the aisle would not have surprised her. Downing a gulp of white wine straight from the bottle, Dee caught the telltale etiquette faux pas a moment to late. A rustle rounded the table. The wily committee coyotes, detecting a breach in her defenses, circled for the kill.

Sew knot fer nutthin’ear, sistah, tell us whatcha dinkin, pressed Tall Tony G, fidgety leader of the Rosebank branch of the organization. She uses the term loosely. With Tall Tony the Gravedigger arrived the diffidential file courier Bobby OD Cassotto escorted by retired NYPD Detective Joy Brogan, (the good cop-bad cop routine). Sporting matching goofball Blues Brothers fedoras and impenetrable Rayban sunglasses, the trio represent a shadowy cell known only throughout the organization, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, as The Brighton Height Bombers. Each inconspicuously wears, as is she for the occasion, a popular mass-produced Galway claddagh signet, two hands holding a single crowned heart. Bronze pinky ring, belt buckle, cufflink—uniformly etched in the underside she’s sure is an identical emblem: an archetypical tree of life, a placental arborvitae. Carved in the tree would be the initials ELF.

More curiously yet, flown across the Atlantic to lead the glib posse, from the ELF’s Affinity Cell (also known as Alpha Cadre) at the Chille Daoire Motherhouse arrived the closest thing she had to friends in the ELF’s upper echelon, carrot-top Stephan Ceilidh Dunn Laoghaire, an elementary school teacher and vice president of the Gaelic Athletic Association; and Reverend Rothar Frangipani, OCD; biding their time appraising Bimbo Buns over a French cigarette and Cubano Habenero respectively. Additionally drawn across the arborvitae of Ceilidh (K-Lee) and Fran’s claddaghs would be a barbed alder pikard, the fierce spearhead embossed 1798.

Down the hatch, down the rabbit hole goes Alice! The hell with it, Dee swigged the much-too-smooth chablis elixir, slid the bottle away, and helped herself to Ceilidh’s powder blue cigarette pack of potent, and probably Amsterdam doctored, French Gauloise. Lighting up, she used the acrid smokescreen to avert her anything-but-poker face away from Tall Tony G and, what is amounting to, the multimillion-dollop proposition on the table. Thirteen years freelancing for the ELF, she’s never seen a proposal committee (aka PC Fireteam) as large as five, a fireteam obviously co-missioned [sic] expressly for her benefit. The Alpha Cadre doesn’t want a reply to the California proposal; they want an unconfockingditional commitment, a vow, one preferably signed in blood. The question is, whose blood?

Affecting engagement in the closing bars of Santana’s shamanic incantation, Dee closed her eyes and swayed in rhythm to the shearing guitar and throbbing congas. What is so vital about this operation to warrant the presence/pressure of the majordomos, and the expense of the extensive arrangements? How does California, with more ELF cells than you can smack with a Chicago police baton, concern the besieged Manzana Malajestosa junta? More importantly though, why her?

Beneath her cover as an innocuous studio keyboard musician, Moire Delores Rose ni’Mhurphaigh is nothing more than a foot soldier 0300 grunt (and proud of it) in the guerilla war against the absurd idiopathy and voracious ecological rapine perpetuated by the Paradigm of the Predominant Delusion—church, state, corporation, mass media and university alike, capitalist to communist, first world to third. Or, in ELF parlance, The Combine, the massive agribusiness threshing machine that One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey compared to the inexorable juggernaut of despotic powers that be.

Strategically placed on her left middle finger, Dee twirled her own heavy bronze claddagh ring, an honorarium from Frangipani years before. Previous ops earned Dee the Department of Hopeless inSecurity’s latest version of the scarlet letter: a volatile capital T, Terrorist, an unrepentant extremist tree-hugging ecoterrorist. She wears the brand as an insolent badge of honor, Brigid be blessed, mna na hEireann, albeit badly tarnishing.

Not that Dee considers herself any of the above. Labels, Fran preached, belong on merchandise, not people. As a free agent (awlwright, mercenary) she subscribes to the Marxist principle of organization. Groucho Marx, that is. I wouldn’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member. Nevertheless, following her previous shenanigans, Dee was inevitably disowned by her church, country and, oddly other than her corporate executive brother, shunned by the clann. Exiled, post-ops, to one safe house after the next, her current digs across town, exchanging weekend docent duties for room and board in the basement of the Edgewater Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, were looking less like a respite and more like a conniving setup.

Bienvenidos, compasina

Welcome to the Hotel California

You can check out if you like

but you can never leave

The wretched dinner CD cycled to The Eagles’ lyrically challenged 1972 pop-rock ballad Hotel California. Obstinately avoiding Tony G’s question while she weighed her options, or rather anemic lack thereof, Dee stopped swaying, twisted in her chair toward the river view window, and parted the Kokopele print curtain with Fran’s butter knife. The sooty, smog-grimed windowpane gratuitously returned her reflection, exacerbating the fledgling crow’s feet radiating from her peat brown eyes, the stubborn silver streak at the temples of her three-quarter waist-length obsidian black mane, the edentulous gaps between molars.

At thirty (something), accelerated by two decades in the subunderthecounterculture, she is holding her compact voluptuous own. But the cow ain’t gunna milk the chickens. The three-week California contract, inferentially pivotal to the ELF’s international ecolutionary struggle, was clearly a make-or-break golden opportunity. Omens aside, if she plays her cards correctly (in this case Tarot cards), maybe she can parlay the nefarious albeit necessary business side of the deal into a rather comfortable early retirement and, dare she dream, a life and family of her own. Tick-toc goes the biological clock.

Operation AU is all that, or else she is being played like a fiddle, orchestrated, turned-out, royally conned into a merry stroll down the yellow brick primrose path, an eminently expendable bagman dupe stoolpigeon, a Das Glasperlenspeil pawnette. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Pressing her nose to the Blue Adobe’s lanceolate window, Delores peered through the reflection. Beyond the decorative wrought ironwork barring the window then past the sheltered bus stop lit by the harsh amber crime-deterrent streetlights of Pete Seegar Terrace flowed the desiccant olive drab water of the Dutch Kill Van Kull: the riparian blight dividing New York City’s crassly misnomered Rosebank district from Allen Ginsberg’s nowhere Zen New Jersey.

On The Waterfront, jangling the chain of her dog tags, Dee scowled at the far riverbank bitterly. EXXON, TEXACO, BP, CITGO, UNION-CARBIDE… Colonizing the far shoreline a tumorous malignancy of massive oil tanks and refineries spread like mutant toadstools, not to slur toadstools, fueling the greed and plunder of the military-industrial combine. VALERO, GETTY, MOBIL’s winged horse Pegasus, SEVEN SISTERS, PUT A TIGER IN YOUR TANK. Trying to decide who is more villainous—OPEC, the evil oil executives or the gluttonous public—Dee recoiled from the windowpane sharply enough to kink her neck. Superimposed on the blistered paint of a rusty defunct CERTO’s ESSO refinery wavered an image. Rationally the smudged horror is only an optical illusion, Almaden and Amsterdam Gauloise enhanced perhaps. Yet the explanation rendered the visage no less harrowing. The image is a sooty face. The facial expression is one of ineluctable accusation. And the face is hers, behind iron bars.

This is the place. Now is the time. You are the one. The ELF Manual of Interior Ecology prescribes a daily soul-searching-shearing-making inventory of one’s complicity with panglobal despoliation, but this is ridiculous. Rubbing the back of her neck, Dee snatched Ceilidh’s linen napkin off his lap and wiped the gombeen window, vacating the ominous illusion posthaste. Mentally visualizing the most fortuitous route through her decision, east via the number thirty-god-dam-nine metro bus to the Garibaldi Safe House, and she is outta here. Delores has left the building, the operation, aggravation, and just possibly an irrevocable golden opportunity.

West then, she mentally sailed off on the chilly December ebb tide of the Kill Van Kull. Leaving behind the armpit of New Jersey and Rosebank’s trashed wetlands, she dashed through the carcinogenic sickly-sweet stench of the Arthur Kill Sanitary Landfill (final resting place of the World Trade Towers), and was out Lower New York Bay to open water! South around Tierra del Fuego and Dee was in California role-playing Gidget with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the Malibu surf, quaffing Irish coffees over beatnik jazz with Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Japhy Ryder at Cafe Fergazzi in North Beach, San Francisco, paying homage at the chocoholics’ Mecca, Ghiradelli Square, as well as Psychedelphia Haight-Ashbury. Perhaps even impose upon the ELF sympathizer at the San Mateo NOAA radio station Pablo.G. for a paddle around The Rock: Isla de los Alcatrace, the Federal Penitentiary of Alcatraz where the 1969 insurrection by Native Nations and AIM, the radical American Indian Movement, galvanized her sympathies to the counterculture.

Beach Blanket Babylon, Dee just might, post-op, go native. What, after all, is worth returning to at home, even if she could? Picturing herself a tainted undesirable amid the ultraconservative impoverishment and perpetually overcast drizzle of the shanty Irish Waisffiord Slobbs, Dee shuddered. To forever dwell in some heroically imagined past long gone the way of the great bog elk, peat fyre, and pennywhistle is not Dee’s concept of a sunny retirement, a cheerful reverie contingent, of course, upon a successful outcome to the undisclosed and presumably odious business aspect of the working vacation.

Running plum short of procrastination material in the Mexican standoff with the fire team, Dee squared her chair to the table, extinguished the Gauloise butt in Ceilidh’s Cuernitos margarita, and chomped into a bowl of Blue Adobe bread pudding smothered in Cuervo lemon sauce—not one wit hungry.

To dream the im-poss-si-ble dream

To fight the un-beat-a-ble foe

To run where the brave, (or wise), dare not go.

B-flat, 9/8 time, tempo di bolero; working her last nerve, the sardonic dinner CD cued a Cuban-jazz version of La Guesta Imposible, The Impossible Quest, Darion and Leigh’s hit song from the 1965 Broadway musical Lost in La Mancha. Captivated, nonetheless, by the impressive saxophone, an ephemeral swallow’s flight of trills and grace notes, Dee tensed. Under the table, gently yet persistently nudging her knee, it was only Ceilidh’s hand, but before she caught his drift, the heel of her hand quivered a deft precise Shaolin inch from his fey nose.

Pay attention was all Carrot-Top Ceilidh was inferring, nodding toward Reverend Frangipani. Dee tweaked Ceilidh’s nose all the same, angled her chair to face His Reverence, and folded her hands in her lap primly. Casually attired in a Pemberton shirt, khaki slacks and ubiquitous Cubano Habenero, Dee had never seen Athair Rothar Frangipani, chief chaplin to the ELF as well as the International Green Party and UNESCO, without either his Dyscalced Carmelite habit or Knight Hospitaler scrubs. Well, actually, she had, but that’s another tail, she meant story. Rarer yet, in a preliminary concession from a proposal committee inducing (aka coercing) a volunteer, Fran slid manila folder number 1 under her nose: Operacion AU, the working aspect of the happy little holifockingday. Standoff Round 1, for what it was worth, went to Dee.

Hunched over the cluttered table, stroking his sun-bleached tawny silver (and luxuriously soft) beard as if he were extinguishing a brush fire, the invariably composed Frangipani laid the deal on the line. "Dearest Moire Delores Rose, we have arranged for you as, ahem, Samara ‘Sam’ Del Rio, to join (ELFspeak for infiltrate) and influence (aka subvert and disrupt) a hopelessly amateur research team studying California’s chain of oulde Spanish Missions. This historical research team TAU INC got their improbable mitts on a legendary (aka inestimably priceless) mission artifact that, proven authentic, could shake the Golden State to its foundation."

Ceilidh, interjecting eagerly, sidled between Dee and Fran. Nor do the chain reaction domino effect panglobal repercussions end there. Not by a long shot.

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.

Redolent in his signature Old Spice cologne and a bright green Gaelic rugby shirt, Ceilidh scowled at the haphazardly folded map and flipped the crumpled mess over to a macro view of the New World, (aka the Western Hemisphere). Lined in cinnabar-red highlighter like the imprint of an immense drunken crow claw a matrix of highways and byways connected the western occidental branch of El Camino Real to the older oriental east coast branch and, by implication, the domino effect.

More little tarnished sea green mission bell icons, suspended from shepherd’s crooks like bilious question marks, dot the map at Santa Fe, New Mexico; San Antonio, Tejas (better known as the desecrated Alamo); St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans; and across La Florida Paschal to the pivotal city of Saint Augustine, marked Milestone Cero, 1565 AD. North from St. Augustine on the Atlantic Seaboard, El Camino Orientale swoops through Georgia, terminating at a triple-cinnabar-circled bell on an island off the coast of South Carolina so minuscule Dee needed to squint to read the name. Mision Santa Elena, 1573, ruins, (currently the Parris Island USMC Recruit Depot). On the flip side of the map, Dee recalled another triple-circled ruin in California’s rugged coastal foothills. Mision Estancia de Exaltacion de Sancta Crux, also known as Mision Micmac.

South of the border on the map, the cinnabar crow claw crosses Mexico from Mulege in Baja to Veracruz in the Yucatan, then deep into South America and across the Caribe’s Sea to the prime culprit Cristobal Columbo’s original port in the decimated Arawok’s Barbados. North the talon extendes as far as St Louis, Missouri; the total graphically demarking the astonishing network of original Franciscan missions to the New World and, presumably, the repercussive effects of the controversial TAU artifact.

To fight for the right,

without question or pause

To be willing to march into hell,

for a heavenly cause.

Red-nosed Ceilidh, enduring menacing frowns from the table for disclosing too much dissuasive data, forged ahead all the same. Probably needless to say, Dee, The Combine, represented for our purposes by the California Governator’s Mission Affairs Department in Sacratomatoe—an entrenched bureaucrazy of lobbyists representing the vested interests of the church, civic groups, university archeology departments, corporate and private concerns—is naturally a wee hesitant at relinquishing control of their iconic flock of golden geese. (Enough with the gold!) Hence the dolts are rather unctuous (aka cutthroat) about TAU’s alledged artifact.

Folding and unfolding his hands over the map in a child’s game of church and steeple, Ceilidh smiled with a perfectly beatific malevolence. With real estate totaling in the billions if not trillions of dollars, exposing the scandalous mission hullabaloo to the light of day may very well induce a state of anarchy.

All right! Fran shouldered Ceilidh aside. Furthermore, Delores Rose, hold on to your hat. ELF, TAU, and the Mission Affairs Department, MAD [sic], ain’t the only players (predators) nor most diabolical (diabolical) in the high-stake glasperlenspeil game. Not by a long shot.

Pow! Dee wasn’t wearing a hat, but the ramifications weren’t lost on her. Twirling a lock of her raven’s mane into a tight twist, Dee gazed over Fran’s tonsured pate to the steer skull and six-shooters at the bar. News headlines bristle with polemic diatribes over the disputed Mexican-American border issues, illegal immigration, and sanctuary movements. Viva La Reconquista! Meurte Las Cucarachas! Reaching critical mass, the front line in the ideological struggle is the hemorrhaging border of the Rio Grande and bleak Sonoran Desert. South: the shiftless Papist Espanics and Mestizaje. North: industrious Anglo-Prots and their manifest destiny. Capitalism versus Carpe Manana.

MAD, reflecting on the acronym for the peacekeeping policy of the nuclear powers during the cold war era: Mutually Assured Destruction, Dee pulled her hair back from her face and fingered the inscription stamped in her dog tags. If she understands Fran and Ceilidh correctly, the territory marked on the map by the old missions represents roughly one quarter of the United States, but generating, she guestimated, half its obscenely gross national product. How would disrupting that much wealth affect not only the United States’s Pan-American hegemony, but also the balance of world power? What price tag can you put on that? This TAU group can not be serious. Nor the ELF. What the hell is so inflammatory about these sappy old mission tourist traps to ignite such a political firestorm?

And I know, if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest

That my heart, will lay peace-ful and calm

when I’m laid (maybe sooner than later) to my rest

Retired Detective Joy Brogan, much too cute and vital to be either a cop or retired, had slipped her left arm around Dee’s bare shoulder and, breaking the spell of Ceilidh’s implications, pulled Dee persuasively closer. Concealed beneath a fabulous Armani tweed vest and ensemble, Joy’s shoulder-holstered F-4 Taser pressed into Dee’s right breast. "Forget the mission nonsense, Ms. Del Rio. It ain’t our business. The historic artifact in question is only an antiquidated Spanish document, containing nothing but mynde-bending psychosocial gibberish and third-rate poemetry anyway. What we want is duh article ipso facto. And acquired covertly. Capisce?"

Brogan removed her arm and unsealed the second manila folder, producing a flurry of preliminary offers, provisional bids and promissory notes for the old manuscript with more zeros than Dee could count. Contractual offers include rare book dealers, undisclosed moneyed bibliophiles, antiquity collectors and one particularly prestigious offer on Old English letterhead executed in, what else, a gold font:

Sotheby Christie and Duval, Auctioneers

Division of Folklorica and Outsider Art

London - New York - Montreal - Browns Mills

Joy continued, Brokered on the auction block to the highest bidder, with no lack of keenly vested interests with very deep pockets, TAU’s historic mission manuscript, should it prove, as we believe, authentic, is a gold mine to make the 49ers Mother Lode look like a Babbalooey piggybank. Like I said—Joy pinched Dee’s cheeks like an Italian mommadella—an offah ya cant refuse.

Not that either TAU or MAD, Fran commented wryly, see it that way.

Exhibit A: opening the first folder, Dee found a bubble-wrapped bootleg DVD on top. Compiled, Ceilidh explained, by the ELF’s rogue propeller-head hackers, the DVD included a decades-old photocopy of a microfilmed mimeograph carbon copy of the long-lost historic hot tamale. Dee grabbed the nearest laptop on the table, Brogan’s pencil-thin state-of-the-art IBM Osborn Chronos, and popped in the disc. Vanity be dammed, she reached into her Levis bib top and donned her Franklin reading glasses. Her eyes, nonetheless, refused to focus on the screen. If birds of a feather flock together, then the TAU manuscript resembles a traditional book to the extent a penguin resembles an ostrich.

The first page of the re-enhanced copy displayed the strikingly illuminated leather jacket of a slim nine-by-twelve tome, semi-lanceolate as the Blue Adobe windows, and secured by three wrought-iron hasps. A footnote on the photocopy, citing colonial-era historians, estimates the original could date to AD 1561. Shakespearean scholars however, speculating on key internal references to The Bard’s colonial-era play The Tempest, insist that the tome is no older than the year 1611. Anti-Stratfordians, of course, called the Shakespearean theory leaky as an unstaunched wench. Further complicating the issue, Pre-Columbian archivists at Villa Poggio Gherardo in Canterbury, England, argued that elements of the manuscript could be as old as 1348.

As gaudy-gorgeous as Pancho Villa’s sombrero, encircling the cover are three concentric forest-green borders, each an elliptic oval expanding from one to three inches wide, containing an intricate floral knotwork bestiary in ambergris and milk white. Alternately embossed and extruded, the three-strand-entwined borders weave through nine strange glyph-embedded glass beads like eddylines in a rocky river, converging, with a disorienting Moebius twist, on the shimmering title—that may as well be Greek as far as Dee, despite a rudimentary grasp of vacation Spanish, can decipher:

Las

Cuentitas

Primaveritas

de Isla Nueva Alta Califia

The binding appears handsewn.

Facsimile next: the creature opens, or rather articulates, right as well as left, forming a triptych. As the text, and presumably the plot, unfolds, each page of the triptych also opens vertically both up and down; until laid before you is a nine-page origami tic-tac-toe board.

Concluding the introductory facsimiles