Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

By Kelly Hennessy

Part epistolary novel laced with flights of magic realism escapist fantasy, part bellettrist polemic debating a shopping list of culture war topics, Last Refuge of a Scoundrel is an unusual, multifaceted and densely textured book meant to linger on your palate long after you put it down. Much of the action revolves around a bitter, protracted homeowners association dispute in north San Diego County, alternately, hilarious and enraging. It's a novel of ideas, ever strumming the "as above, so below" riff and its obverse, as well as the never-tiring theme of the individual against the collective, and a less cartoonish construction of the meaning of patriotism. Will the reader be surprised by how and where the protagonist at last finds his refuge?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640823242

Book preview

Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

Kelly Hennessy

Copyright © 2017 Kelly Hennessy

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-64082-323-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64082-324-2 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is lovingly dedicated to Debra Lynne,

Bricklin, and Lewis (a.k.a. Sneegee), all I had

left after the metaphorical gunsmoke cleared.

Book One

Conditions Conducive to Crisis

Hardly an Auspicious Beginning

We’re All Gonna Have High-Tech, High-Paying Jobs

Alan Kraft Hatteberg was a husky tow-headed twelve-year-old boy in the sixth grade in 1964. He was seated in his assigned desk chair with its hinged lid at the Saint Rosarita Elementary School in southwest Denver near the Platte the first time he encountered Orah Byrd, well over three hundred years old by then and growing sillier by the hour.

It was a springy late morning with the windows cracked, and looking out over an alley separating the grade school from the parish hall and priest’s residence across it, Al was busy checking test answers of some sort before time was called. Suddenly, there was fluttering in his peripheral vision, and a warbling outside diverted his predeficit syndrome attention.

Al beheld Bakewell Orah Oothoothala Byrd, the informally designated 727 of flewbyrds, hatched on Christmas Day in 1588 at the tip of Tierra del Fuego. At first, it seemed to subliminally pulsate and spasm about the boy’s visual field. Chameleon hues of rich plumage cover the bird’s lean fuselage, and its magnificent beak looks to be titanium coated. Its wingspan appeared to be yards across, though young Al didn’t realize until later that Orah could use its innate shape change parameters to scale down or size up at will.

Strangely, Al was reminded of the devout neighbor boy who lived a couple of doors down on Decatur, claiming he saw Jesus hovering in the clouds above the old brick factory on South Federal Boulevard, assuring a successful Calvinist destiny. Was young Al a budding apostate on a downward trajectory with this elderly yet clearly vigorous flewbyrd in front of him?

Suddenly, the bird commenced to sing a bit like some ribald pirate doggerel in a throaty high tenor, its beady eyes aglow with casual mischief. It sounded like faint strains of Muddy Waters’ backup band tuning up just below the threshold.

In days of old when knights were bold and rubbers weren’t invented, men put a sock around their cock, and babies were prevented.

To Al Hatteberg, it seemed like one of life’s moments bracketed by the absolute value goalposts of algebra he’d be studying in a few years at the Jesuit College Prep School in north Denver near where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Now as Orah Byrd mesmerized the young speller, the faintest stirring riffs of a saxophone-like horn set up to play in crazy unheard-of intervals and range wafted up the alley. An even larger flewbyrd hove to, truly a 747 by contrast to the singer, even though that model of plane lay in the future.

Resting between arpeggios and scales, the 747 of flewbyrds cradled under one wing a tricorporate horn of otherworldly construction and beauty. It was the bird’s priceless, beloved beakaphone, and alien Tones hailing from the Pleiades assisted Orah Byrd in its design and futuristic construction back in the eighteenth century when the two flewbyrds still lived down in South America. The horn’s bells reminded Al of a giant fancy three-hook fishing lure with the prongs spaced 120 degrees apart from one another. Far from being uniform in appearance, each of the beakaphone’s bells varied subtly as to length, curvature, and finish.

The tenor-sized bell looked like rose-tinted brass, highly filigreed and interlarded with raised veins of a quartz-like substance that roiled and swirled around it like a nascent space-age barber pole. The bell Al construed as the alto one exuded a simpler elegance, alternating with subtle blues and greens in an eggshell (what else?) finish, sporting a carriage work of latticed keys that resembled those on an autoharp made to accommodate nimble talons and wingtips.

The third bell wasn’t exactly saxophonish to Al’s sharp eye. It rose from the instrument’s base at a forty-five-degree angle, sort of like Dizzy Gillespie’s eccentric genius trumpet designed for greater projection. Yet this brasswind-leaning bell was scalloped and roughly the diameter of a marching mellophone with a diaphanous, clear lacquer finish incongruously engraved with cowboy action designs and classic Old West motifs.

At this point, alley cabaret singer Orah Byrd stuck its beak partway through an inward-opening pane in the school room and fixed Al with its beady yet kindly eyes.

I’ve been looking for you, little wolf from the forest primeval, designated to foment rebellion among birds for a lifetime eternal. Amen. My name’s Orah, little wolf, and this here’s my granddaughter Bertha. We’re all friends from way back. Your line used to help me and Bertha on the Underground Railroad and when there was still living room in the Old West. We all built wagons and carts and the makin’s for line shacks done up prefabricated. Bertha and I spotted you on a flyover in your backyard a couple years back, buildin’ a clubhouse in the corner near a Catalpa tree. Very enterprising, little wolf. You’re a striver and competitor whose life will involve a bitter, unremitting struggle for housing.

Al somewhat glumly remembered the clubhouse. Mom had burst into his bedroom one morning with the epic, rousing declaration.

Bruce Barfson pooped in the clubhouse! she’d exclaimed.

I never did anything mean to Bruce , thought Al, though he accidentally beaned the kid with a jagged rock later on. He stood up suddenly in the ole flight path. Al felt terrible about it too, afraid the cops were gonna come yank him out of the bathtub and trundle his ass off to jail.

As if the sneak-attack pooping incident wasn’t enough, Al found out later that young Barfson had poured sand from the clubhouse floor down little Kathleen Hatteberg’s plaid pantaloons. He’d laughed when the cartoon-like image riffed through his head, but that chuckle almost turned to tears since the paterfamilias lurked within earshot.

Want me to belt ya one? demanded one William Thomas Hatteberg, six one, two hundred elbows, fulla glowering menace.

Just one, asshole , thought his son compulsively. That’d be like asking some cholesterol glutton to eat just one Lay’s potato chip. Impossible dreamer. Munch, munch, munch a buncha Fritos corn chips. When you come up for water, Bill Beltcha-One, also known as Tommy Notunes, will be giving you his trademark signature thousand-yard stare from the greatest generation, hard-ass eyes aflame with Homo hostilis retribution, someone who just won’t let a kid be a kid, Mr. Squid. It’s not polite to smack your lips, but ya can’t help it with Fritos corn chips.

Al flashed again on Bruce Barfson, whose old man was a mean Denver cop. He was the little son of a bitch living across the alley down toward Alameda in a spooky brick number later turned into a Vietnamese restaurant, the less-than-savory cooking odors of which permeated the laundry on the clothesline of Al’s mom years later after he’d moved away to San Diego.

Al’s attention, distracted really for just a popcorn kernel intermission, suddenly returns to the flewbyrds as the 747 called Bertha sidled up to its presumptive grandmother, Orah.

There you are, Grandma. Here I thought you were up sky-trolling for pies cooling on window ledges to pilfer a slice with your greedy beak.

The 747’s voice was a throaty Gerry Mulligan baritone, and it was stern if also demure for a bird of such majestic presence and mass.

This time, I brought along some turquoise rings and bracelets to leave as just payment, Bertha continued. There’s a strawberry rhubarb cooling a few blocks away on Shoshone or Tejon. What’re you doing nesting here, Grandma, trying to corrupt supple, impressionable youth like an avian Socrates or some such philosophist?

I’m coming, Bertha. Just cool your jets a worm’s length. I’m talking to this here little wolf, Orah replied, preparing to take its leave and carve out a generous pie slice with its talons.

You’re in rara avis territory today, little wolf. There are only seven of us flewbyrds in existence across the known universe. The ancient ones, Beaka and Beakatha, hatched one fall in the tenth century and were nurtured and raised by monks who didn’t think they had immortal souls. Then Beulah and Oglethorpe, the only male flewbyrd, showed up in Madagascar around the middle of the fourteenth century. You better look up the Mozambique Channel in your geography textbook, little wolf, Orah admonished Al. Then it put a bow on its revelation. Yours truly entered this world on Jesus’s birthday in 1588, and remnants of my eggshell repose in my nest’s museum if scientists want to carbon-date ’em. Bertha hails from South America too. Its jumbo egg hatched April 19, 1747, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The seventh flewbyrd hatched in the Jewel eight years ago, and she’ll become your mate someday, little wolf. We all know you as the unruly timber wolf Yikes W. Smyce, the 727 proclaimed.

What’s the W stand for? queried Al Hatteberg of the departing flewbyrds.

Wolf or Wapiti, Mr. Smyce, gentleman’s choice, said Bertha, snatching up its amazing beakaphone. Wapiti’s where you’ll meet the friskers, but that’s another story, for by then you’ll be running a severe deficit of love and zest.

Excuse me, Mr. Hatteberg, did you just subvocalize something about a wolf? Because that ruse has been tried down the ages, and there aren’t many wolves left here in metro Denver.

The speaker was Mrs. Edmonds, sixth-grade teacher at Saint Rosarita School. One time, she made Al write the Ten Commandments ten times each for the egregious sin of standing in a cardboard box while holding the hall door open for some of his classmates—as if there wasn’t enough homework already.

Too bad they hadn’t been calculus integrals , Al reflected, maybe he’d have a career track job today .

Sorry, Mrs. Edmonds, Al replied, improvising. I was just remindin’ myself that our neighbor Mrs. Wolf might pick me up today because my mom has to take our car to the filling station to get an oil change ’cause my dad’s on a business trip for two weeks in Tampa, Florida.

Actually, Mrs. Hatteberg rarely drives anymore by then, the family owning but a single car, bucking a sixties trend and Beltcha-One Bill staunchly maintaining that a woman’s place is in the home. Besides, Al was a born long-distance walker who also rode the Denver public transit buses all over the county. There really was a Mrs. Wolf though, who was a neighbor and friend of Al’s mom when they lived on Canosa in a starter house before his little sister arrived.

All in all, Mrs. Edmonds employed a much-lighter touch than the nuns. The school’s eight grades alternated in successive years between habit-clad penguins who took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, if not unremitting kindness to children, with so-called lay teachers of more worldly character, though the latter always deferred to or agreed with the Sisters of Charity in matters of doctrine and procedure, all being ducks-in-a-row good Catholics.

Some of the nuns would shake ya until your teeth rattle or your cranium felt like a gallon can getting its base and pigments blended at the paint store. Mrs. Edmonds was the softer side of Sears by contrast, seldom if ever even yelling at kids.

Check out that dress , thought Al, looking back at a grainy black-and-white group photo of Saint Rosarita teachers decades later. Roughly homespun and utilitarian, her collar buttoned at the neckline, her dress could’ve danced right out of the Buffalo Bill historical museum in Cody, Wyoming.

Most kids probably don’t often ruminate over their teachers’ home or family life. Was Mrs. Edmonds a fastidious housekeeper? Were lingering cooking odors trapped in her domicile, like radon gas in Al’s basement? Did she have uncouth boys at home who’ve suffered anomalies with their gastrointestinal tracts? Was her husband, Mr. Edmonds, perhaps a martial fartist?

The instant breakfast drinks popular at the time sure can make that happen , thought Al.

A reasonably curious person may indeed pose these questions, if only to oneself, pursuant to that memorable school day’s egg-laying particulars. For soon after Al Hatteberg’s contrived malarkey about getting a ride home from Mrs. Wolf, a quintessential tattle brat named Rebecca Bowlegs approached the teacher’s desk with one of her histrionically delivered revelations.

Mrs. Edmonds, she declaimed, Bryce Reese stunk his pants!

Nothing much happened the rest of the day. Mrs. Edmonds mumbled something to the tattler, who returned to her assigned seat. At the epicenter of the blast radius sat young master shitebreeches Bryce Reese, roughly in the middle of a class of thirty-five or so lower middle-class white kids, though his face was probably redder that day. A strapping farm city boy, Bryce wore the placidly friendly mien of an elk or moose who mingled well with the herd. He was an altar boy, marble player, holder of a paper route.

The Reeses lived across from the small park ringing Hudson Lake in a large split-level house. They were a very nice family with younger siblings, a brother and sister. Their devout, personable father was probably a church usher too, Al tried to remember years later, the mom no doubt a textbook homemaker also active in the parish. Why didn’t the young man simply walk-don’t run—up to Mrs. Edmond’s desk, ask to be excused, then amble on home with the squishy mess contained in his underpants?

Why is there air? asked comedian Bill Cosby on a vinyl long-playing record album from those anarchic days.

At the very least, you’d expect a protracted visit to the lavatory—with teacher’s permission, of course—to effect an impromptu damage control strategy with soap, water, coarse beige paper towels, and toilet tissue aplenty, depending on fecal output, for sure. Yet ’cause of butt-crack inertia, humiliation, lassitude, and resignation (or a potpourri thereof), a model lad who could’ve played opposite ole cookie Charlie Wooster on Wagon Train episodes was summarily reduced to stewing in his own shit, clad probably in light-tan khaki trousers to filter the redolence, all the rest of the live long day, Ray.

Young Reese made the best of his plight during lunch recess on the playground, shunned by his peers for the most part. Al thought he spotted those two flewbyrds Orah and Bertha, partly concealed in a tree on the convent lawn, passing a smoking twig of some type back and forth, placing it in their beaks for a few seconds with obvious relish as it grew progressively shorter. A decade or so later, Al’s mom would call it the barnyard manure smell whenever it was detected rising from the Hatteberg basement, much to her son’s and his friends’ amusement.

How would they deal with a natural disaster of this magnitude in twenty-first-century public schools? Al later wondered.

First, they’d send in a hazmat team in full nuclear, biological, and chemical battle regalia, isolating poor Reese while the rest of the class practiced Cold War duck and cover drills under their desks. It was followed by a tricked-out version of the once-familiar bookmobile, spewing forth six or eight crisis counselors with social science credentials to debride the children’s mental wounds caused by the fact that shit happens in dis heah cruel girl world. Moreover, the school would no doubt fear lawsuits brought by irate parents claiming intentional infliction of emotional distress upon their offspring, evidenced by the fact that traumatized Saint Rosarita kids now wore wooden clothes pins that pinch their nostrils together due to a neglectful teacher’s inaction and so on.

The episode left a lasting impression on Al Hatteberg, who empathized with a classmate while fearing for his own ass. These kids had to sit still for hours on end, listening, memorizing, writing, reading, whispering, eating at their desks, nail-biting. With all that tisket-a-tasket multitasking goin’ down, a telltale turd or two might tumble down a pant leg unbeknownst to the bombardier, or so Al and perhaps some other kid now and forevermore feared, even causing the occasional trickle of nervous sweat in one’s butt crack to trigger a false alarm. Al even considered using some of his mom’s Ice Blue Secret roll-on deodorant down there as a preemptive strategy before school. The way kids’ minds work—and this in a day years before their ambient society was in shit up to its armpits. Yet the Cosmic Jester continued to dog husky blond Al Hatteberg then and now and how. Perhaps he or she was a friend of Orah Byrd the Cawthlerine.

As risible fate would have it, a year or so later, Al took over Bryce Reese’s newspaper route as a substitute carrier for a couple of weeks while the family went on vacation. One afternoon, he was tooling the fat-tired paper bike over on Vallejo or Umatilla, a fair stretch to the family homestead just off Federal, when his roiling viscera heralded numero dos gaining in the home stretch. Knowing he’d never make it, Al cast fate to the wind and massively evacuated his bowels on the fly, riding a one-speed steel kludge with coaster brakes down Exposition with a full load and a few spare papers in the dual-canvas carrier sack. Being alone, it felt strangely exhilarating, even refreshingly atavistic, even when the mashed-potato poop, due to the action of pedaling the bike, worked its way up and over the waistband of Al’s jeans in a sort of perverse capillary action.

So here’s to the refreshment of dipping one’s haunches into the melted chocolate of life, unencumbered. You won’t always be sitting in a warm classroom, the stern Saint Rosarita pastor Father Waggoner often lectured the kids.

Al made it home without anyone stopping him to ask for directions. Shucking off his husky jeans and underwear, Al hosed them down in the backyard by the old cement incinerator he’d nearly blown up with aerosol cans last summer, then he hung the garments on the clothesline to await a more thorough washing by his beloved mom.

When the Reeses return, Al and Bryce divide up the loot on the living room rug after collecting from subscribers and deducting expenses. Mr. Reese looked on approvingly, and Al felt a muted sense of honor that his classmate had entrusted him with the paper route. A sanguine and resilient boy, Bryce seemed to have recovered from his brown-cloud accident in the sixth grade.

For his part, Al Hatteberg studied the social psychology of denial and continued to brood over the metaphor’s broader, extended implications. It’s possible to live long enough to wake up thirty, forty years after being a slowly boiled froggie in high school biology class, only to find your ambient society has collectively shit its own pants, all the while insouciantly maintaining it smells like strawberry parfait to its own citizens and the rest of the world alike. This has happened to a people called the Merrycans in a place called Nanny Copsville. Read all about it.

So whether you’re a malleable lad or lassie in the throes of a cunning, devilishly successful thought control apparatus or a legend-in-its-own-mind empire that sorely needs a trimming, heed the throne room maxim of Al Hatteberg’s mom and perhaps your own: it’s better to go when you gotta go than to go and find you’ve gone.

Bryce Reese stunk his pants

Then he asked Orah Byrd to dance

Orah Byrd said, I’d love to.

—Al Hatteberg, chanted doggerel used to summon 727

Resplendent in his vestments, if a bit hung over, Burpee Waggoner bent over a table in the sacristy and proceeded to break wind in a continuous invective stream worthy of those party gag flatulence tapes sold in tasteless novelty-item catalogs. Al Hatteberg was one of his lucky shavetail servers in cassock and surplice and figured Padre Burpee just wanted to get it all out before the big show began.

Father Waggoner was caporegime at Saint Rosarita, a lower middle class, mostly white parish on the rough-and-tumble west side of Denver where Al was a no-neck in the late fifties, early sixties. The pastor as wagon master dovetailed nicely with Reverend Waggoner, and there were a few palpable relics of the Old West still afloat even in the city limits, including a real and naturally weathered prairie schooner on a corner lot near Al’s house at Exposition and Eliot, also starring Lucas McCain in The Rifleman .

Speaking of gunslingers, Father Burpee was a portly, bespectacled Mister Generic, hold-the-electric-hair, dour, and surly as Newt Gangrene after misplacing his Preparation H. He reminded Al of a department store salesman you’d instinctively avoid, the kind who makes you feel stupid if you don’t buy his store’s brand of suit. Parish children flocked to Father Burpee (not). Al must’ve shown potential acumen as a young particle physicist along with his altar boy talents because he thought Waggoner exuded all the interpersonal warmth of a decaying proton.

Menacing as the nuns were, who could shake ya till your teeth rattled, they assured kids that Father Burpee had special tools in store for those incorrigibles still unrepentant after rosary flogging.

Remember that old bestseller about 365 ways to cook hamburger? After the heaven-and-hell hard sell, Father Burpee in his bully pulpit found as many ways to wheedle and extort donations from folks whose kids would’ve been a hell of a lot better off with tiny acorn trust funds, although charity doesn’t always begin at home. Yet just as all roads lead to Rome, Burpee’s rap line litany always harked back to Mammon on a stick.

It was a watershed event at Saint Rosarita’s when boxes of the year’s tithing envelopes awaited parishioners on card tables at the back of the church. This may strain the reader’s credulity, but Father Burpee actually published a little booklet containing the names of every man, woman, and rug rat in the church, followed by the amount of their annual contribution. Talk about peer pressure cooker, hold the cabbage. You’d thumb through it till you found some worthy dude who chalked up $637.83 (big bad dog dough in them days) juxtaposed against some headed-for-below bosco who only sprang for sixty-nine cents all year.

Burpee played the percentages like a racetrack wizard. He would’ve made a killer Internal Revenue Service agent in a more worldly incarnation. He even issued a blustering challenge to his cowed flock, offering to pay the bills of any slacker who couldn’t find a way to make ends meet and still cough up the requisite 10 percent (of gross or net, Al never found out).

Al often thought to himself, I’d spend an extra year in purgatory (what the hell?) if one a them working-stiff bozos’d had the guts to call Burpee’s bluff. When he came over to bless the Hattebergs’ new house on South Eliot, perhaps he expected the parents to take out a second mortgage to pay his stipend. And he used the fine church linen the women from the Altar and Rosary Society spent all afternoon ironing as throwaway hankies.

Thanks for everything, Father Burpee Waggoner, one wagon you always fell off as master blender in the shaming peer pressure distillery. You helped make one Alan K. Hatteberg the guttersnipe apostate he is today (hold the jelly belly doughnuts), a flinty, lone-wolf, jazz-metallica maverick on the fringe who does not suffer fools gladly, secular or clergy. Amen.

Yet the image of sublime ritual becoming industrialized continued to assail him. Al remembered the communicants devoutly kneeling before the altar rail, awaiting their manna. The servers flipped a long white cloth over this barricade, under which the faithful placed their hands to form a sort of mini-trampoline to catch an errant wafer should it fall or miss its mark on an outstretched tongue. An altar boy holding a golden plate with an attached wooden handle accompanied the priest while the latter ministered individually to his flock of communicants, the boy positioning the paten, as it was called, at Adam’s apple level as a hedge against gravity, backed up secondarily by the chorus line of manual mini trampolines.

Many times in church, Al compulsively envisioned the brusque, impatient Father Waggoner performing a fast-food version of the communion ceremony. Starting out with a host roughly the diameter of a forty-five-rotations-per-minute single record popular in the day, Burpee orders the kneeling faithful at the altar rail to present their pearly gate toothies in perfect alignment. Then with a practiced whip snap of his wrist, the priest flips out the flat bread like a Frisbee in such a way that the material is evenly abraded off onto each communicant’s dentition, a sort of toothless circular saw blade dissolving like a cough drop.

All this industrial imagery takes hold even as Al further riffs on the parallel changes between mass server and restaurant wait person, as in Hello, my name is Cami, and I’ll be your server tonight. Christ on a crouton, Christ on a crutch, food for the soul is fodder in the clutch. Then another batch-processed row of devotees kneels en masse, and the Frisbee whines like a chop saw blade, saving serpents to be fruitful and multiply in the Everglades. Sacrilegious and lovely, the way you look tonight, these kids’ imaginations were in flight.

One time, some unknown Saint Rosarita students trampled a bed of flowers or otherwise encroached on the landscape of a corner property at the other end of the block from the parish complex. The homeowner called Father Waggoner and raised holy hell; maybe he or she was even a Protestant whose afterlife would lack both plant chlorophyll and beatific vision. The enraged Burpee assembled the entire school in a basement auditorium that used to be the old church. The angry priest meted out a blistering civics lesson with his tirade, calling the kids guttersnipes and many other cross names.

You never really got the feeling Burpee even liked children, many of the group photos evince fearful little mugs on the verge of scalding tears, while Burpee stands there striking a heavy-hitter pose in his black beret—a Prussian regime putatively superior to that of public school heathens up the hill a quarter mile or so on Tejon. He was married to a cleric who, given the broad net of his ascriptions and one-size-fits-all assignment of culpability, could return in a welcome future incarnation as a Department of Homeland Security or transportation safety administration bureau(c)rat—this after America had fully morphed into Nanny Copsville by the century’s end.

One Saturday, Al stayed overnight with a classmate named Lenny Richman, an outgoing, popular boy whose family lived off Mississippi near Athmar Park. The boys made crank telephone calls and practiced music, trying to learn Beach Boys and Trini Lopez songs. Al admired Trini’s signature Gibson semihollow body with the Fender-style headstock, and around ten years later, his favorite guitar became the Gibson ES-335 in the hands of blues masters, like Freddie King. That’s because he perennially missed the love boat as far as girls with soft dual cutaways and tobacco sunburst eyes.

Next morning, Al goes directly to church at Saint Rosarita with the Richman family, who subsequently has left the parish or perhaps acquired a competing heathen faith before young Lenny graduated from eighth grade. At Sunday mass, Al sat next to Lenny’s dad, and in the course of another (yawn) bloviating Burpee sermon culminating with demands for money, Mr. Richman systematically plucked tiny balls of lint from his trousers and casually dropped them in the equally bored boy’s lap.

Was it a neosimian grooming ritual akin to great apes picking lice from one another’s coats? Al wondered later at university. Was the churchman perhaps thinking of Lent, woolgathering his belly button lint? Did he have a wack job sense of humor, or was it a taciturn man’s subtle way of dissing his own kid’s slightly nerdy, unathletic friend?

These were questions just as cogent and weighty as the baloney Burpee Waggoner sliced in his bully pulpit with little of life to cherish and equally stingy drams of love in his heart either for himself or his cowed flock. Goin’ through the motions, you got to do the locomotion. Come on and shake your hips now, gospel shouters. Turn your cerebrum to clam chowder with me ’n’ Father Burpee.

By the time Al Hatteberg was around sixteen, a sophomore at All the King’s Men Jesuit High School, his parents could no longer force him to attend Mass at Saint Rosarita. Mom tearfully bursts into his basement lair one Sunday, wailing that she and Tommy Notunes were responsible for his immortal soul. Al hurled a pillow at her and told her to get out. The doughnut jelly days of wine and roses were thereby rolled over in the clover for one ex-altar boy.

One time during the midsixties, the South Platte overflowed its narrow course running through Denver, and the new Saint Rosarita church was flooded to the nines with river water, floating debris and cloying mud everywhere. Al could hear the water rushing from a mile or more to the west at his parents’ house. A story, perhaps apocryphal or even Noah’s Ark-ish, soon circulated that Father Waggoner had used a rowboat to rescue the Eucharist from the Tabernacle as the floodwaters rose. Whether true, false, or merely proffered as a clever public relations ploy to further enhance Burpee’s action hero status, this vignette crowned the prow of Captain Waggoner’s ship of conscript labor garnered from (you guessed right) the pew rows of his cowed flock.

For weeks, they shoveled, cleared, collected, cleaned, removed dirt, and consumed Burpee’s stringy roast beef and green beans as sole recompense, no break on the tithes. Al’s dad, Bill Beltcha-One, his faith inaction coiled into a tightly wound spring, spent the post-flood weekends like nearly every other one, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching sports events on television, occasionally asking his spouse to boil him up a hot dog. No junkie in Baltimore ever raised a tourniquet vein faster for the needle than Tommy Notunes reached for that Chesterfield pack upon exiting Saint Rosarita church, dry or flooded. If you had to choose between flood or health insurance, what would it be? Feel lucky, punk?

When he wasn’t waterskiing down the South Platte or playing Michael-row-the-boat-ashore, Burpee perhaps tired of listening to adolescent boys in the confessional, enumerating sins of ham slamming and flagpole shimmying like supple fingers on a skin flute abacus. Impressive as these stats no doubt were, it was a miracle the priest didn’t publish them as an appendix to the aforementioned tithing booklet. Another definitely fictitious story made the rounds, perhaps spun by newly anointed apostate Al Hatteberg himself. Some young smartass slunk into the tripartite closet with its two sliding panels controlled by the priest, enabling one sinner to confess in mono while the other waited in the on-deck circle on the priest’s other side. When it was his turn to confess, the punk ordered a double cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry shake. Al himself harbored little doubt that if it’d actually gone down, Burpee would’ve sprung out of that center cubicle like a jack-in-the-box and pounded the living shit outta the miscreant. Unhappy religionists export mirth and misery in equal parts, a gift that keeps on giving till the oncogenes turn on.

O s in Gozhaloga Are Long

For Al Hatteberg, the northwest parts of Denver would forever be linked in emotive memory with All the King’s Men Jesuit High School, the old Elitch Gardens amusement park, and his beloved maternal grandparents, Joseph and Alma Kraft.

They came from the border regions between Germany and Russia, as Al recollected, born around 1900. After crossing the Atlantic, Alma grew up on a farm in Sterling, Colorado, with lots of siblings who ended up in places like Minnesota and Chicago. Joe worked for a spell on the pampas of Argentina as a gaucho before settling in Denver. Once there, he always worked for the railroad and never wanted to retire—quite unlike his grandson, who ended up with no remunerative occupation from which to retire save for that of permanent temporary before dropping out of the workforce altogether by 1987.

Joe was a carpenter and metalworker on coach interiors of passenger trains, and he got called up now and then to work as an emergency cook after a train wreck or derailment. He was a versatile, personable guy with two daughters and a plump, nurturant missus who lived on Downing near downtown Denver and held his job all through the Depression as (p)luck would have it. Joe built young Al a splendid little birdhouse, a bookcase, the treasured wooden tool chest that now reposes in his furnace room office, and a couple of cool Steel strongboxes, as Joe Kraft called them. With his grandson, he shared his good humor, skill with hands and tools, as well as a hearty disdain for the big shots of this world.

Joe and Alma Kraft were renters their entire lives, which Al didn’t find remarkable or ironic until years later when he and Darby faced what almost became a life sentence of tenancy in San Diego’s crummy, overpriced apartments. You sure didn’t have to worry very much about credit or background checks in those less-intrusive days. Anyway, the only skeleton in the grandparents’ closet would’ve been young Al locking himself in one, wearing his Halloween costume, sending poor Grandpa Joe down to the roundhouse in lower downtown to fetch some tools to remove the door hardware, freeing the forevermore claustrophobic trick-or-treater. The old folks probably owned a Model T or A back in the day before cars became tits-’n’-ass magnets, but aside from occasional weekend excursions to the Front Range with their lively daughters, they mostly rode the city bus later on or cadged a ride with their sons-in-law, those being Beltcha-One Bill (Tommy Notunes) and rotund Uncle Raleigh of Edgewater near Sloans Lake.

Al’s best times with the grandparents took place when they lived in a duplex around Twenty-Ninth and Yates. Their German landlady occupied the adjacent dwelling, but everyone got along famously, with Joe and Alma growing Swiss chard in the long, narrow backyard. With north Denver sporting mature trees and sedate block after block of captivating brick homes of all sizes and configurations, Al found in it the benchmark against which to measure the scorched, cookie-cutter suburbs of stucco claptrap rental housing he came to occupy in the fool’s gold paradise of San Diego, to say nothing of the all star cast of troglodytes who lived in ’em.

One weekend, Al’s dad and Joe Kraft were talking about a colored guy up the street with a Cadillac hearse in the driveway. Al knew the house in question, one of the largest on the block. It was straight outta the Addams Family , though far from dilapidated. It had three levels and probably a basement too; must’ve been at least 3,500 square feet on a half-acre lot. He’d once spotted the coffin wagon in the driveway too, imagining a slight flutter of its side window curtains as he passed.

Last week in the grocery store, Al teased his little sister Kathleen with the story that a big black man with a stick lived in the spooky house, whose occupation was to discipline errant, unruly children. He informed the impressionable little girl that when kids used the bathroom in the black man’s house, belts came up out of the toilet and slapped their butts crimson while they sat on the throne. He even convinced poor six-year-old Kathleen that Eric Burdon singing House of the Rising Sun with the Animals was really one Joe Blackman recounting his exploits punishing annoying little brats. As if these el warpo fantasies weren’t sufficiently recondite, Al even remembered the name of the black man’s dog before shaking his paw.

So while his dad and grandpa chatted, Al walked north on Yates to make two new acquaintances. The Caddie sat in the driveway, but in front of it near the single garage was a shiny black Rolls Royce sedan from the fifties, Al guessed, truly a ride to drool or die for, with wide bands of bobby sox white on the tires and awesome chrome ornamentation, trim and badging. More striking even than the vintage car was the magnificent black dog Gozhaloga, who stood on his hind legs, putting the finishing touches on the Rolls Royce’s hood with a fine gossamer polishing cloth. Sinewy, Doberman-style muscles rippled beneath the animal’s short, sleek coat as he worked with paws that possess a near-prehensile versatility in handling objects. He was a Platonic archetype or idealized cartoon rendition of a dog, endowed with limited yet robust shape change parameters winking in and out of phase just below the threshold, bursting to actualize. Al spotted a chauffeur’s cap and open pack of peppered beef jerky on the ground by the driver’s side door.

Emanating from the front porch was a natural overhang reverb, and Al soon picked up a bluesy refrain that reminded him of Bertha Byrd’s exotic beakaphone riffs from last spring at Saint Rosarita. White teeth gleaming like a fluorescent lamp, Joe Blackman sat on an armless rocker, playing an ebony Epiphone SQ-180, an Everly Brothers–inspired acoustic that resembled a scaled-down jumbo with a cool tortoise shell pickguard like a drooping moustache that covered a good portion of the instrument’s upper and lower bouts. It sounded like it was tuned lower than standard too, perhaps in C seventh, a very melodic, creativity-inspiring set of intervals.

Joe Blackman’s voice was a smoky, brandy cask baritone as he picked up a thread of the flewbyrd’s taunting doggerel. In days a old when knights wuz bold an’ rubbers twarn’t invented, menz puts a sock aroun’ dere cocks an’ dem babies beez prevented.

When Mr. Blackman put his guitar aside and rose to shake hands, Al beheld a tall, middleweight gentleman in his midthirties who was very dark skinned and had unique, variegated features suggesting an infusion of Native American or perhaps Asiatic blood. Even decades later, Al would continue to marvel at Joe Blackman’s ageless quality and vigor, with nary a wrinkle, pouch, or bit of entropic sagging.

Maybe being friends with Orah Byrd rubs off salubriously on people of all colors , Al hoped. He didn’t see any other kids around either—never a bad sign.

Gozhaloga, git yo’ wooferton ass over heah an’ shake with a young massa Yikes of the Smyce lupine clan. They make a good line a timber wolf, Joe added with a neighborly wink.

Al feared large dogs, especially since Bruce Barfson’s bowser Cinbru jumped a six-foot wooden palisade fence with ease and came after him in his own backyard. A German shepherd police dog, its name was an amalgam of his sister Cindy and the young clubhouse crapper himself. No respect for territory in that family. Al chased Cinbru away with a handsaw. But Gozhaloga put him at ease, shaking paws and even sharing a stick of beef jerky with a friendly foreleg on the boy’s shoulder.

Was Gozhaloga selectively bred to be a chauffeur, and how does he do with a manual transmission? asked Al.

His line be whupass slaver fighters, got dey start on the Underground Railroad back inna 1830s, Joe explained. They jus’ call it a underground road at first. Rail part come later on, figuratively speakin’. Anyhow, this wooferton’s ancestors usta distract de slavers and they slobberin’ hounds, allowin’ my people de opportunity to escape upta Illinois. Smyce wolves helped too, and Orah an’ its granddaughter Bertha ran aerial reconnaissance for the fugitives, better’n any Secesh balloon fulla Johnny Reb’s hot air. Joe smiled at the recumbent dog. As for Gozhaloga’s wheelman aptitudes, he been bioengineered by Bakewell’s friends the Tones, usin’ de latest genetic algorithms. Shape change scrubbers make this fella look like a submissive Puerto Rican in livery, ferryin’ de big shot inna back seat all aroun’ de town. Saves a colored man the trouble o’ drivin’ while brown.

This proved quite a package to digest for slowly maturing Al, whose dad said that most of the people of color lived over on the east side by Stapleton Airport or down in Five Points. When he was little, perhaps the result of watching lotsa Popeye cartoons, Al used to fancy that black folks had sliced American cheese cleaving to their upper palates whenever they opened their mouths to eat, sing, smile, or shout. He thought of something to reply after a minute, not wanting Joe Blackman to think he was a dumbass cracker out of Deliverance .

My cousin’s gettin’ married. She might live above a funeral home while her new husband goes to vet school, said Al, thinking of Uncle Raleigh’s older girl and looking at the Cadillac hearse, still parked behind Joe’s awesome Rolls sedan.

Well, I hope the lucky groom achieves success and relieves the sufferin’ a many animals, young Mistah Smyce, Joe Blackman replied. That funereal motah coach belongs ta them flewbyrds. A coffin wagon’s been used in the fugitive slave era as a means of smugglin’ and concealment an’ such. Only makes sense those flewbyrd’s own one today, seein’ as how Orah and Bertha Byrd had ’em a cartage an’ hauling company in the Old West after helpin’ ta pioneer the Underground Railroad.

How come they call Orah and Bertha flewbyrds, Joe? Al asked as suddenly as the question popped into his head.

Well, son, I’m just a custom home builder who plays a little guitar, so I don’t understand all the physics involved. You’d have to communicate with the Tones ’bout that. Orah told me they got this special way ta ‘warp the matrix o’ spacetime,’ as I remember that byrd called it. Said it be like pullin’ a rubber band back with its talons then ridin’ it somehow back ta where it started out from, all in de blink of an eye. Flewbyrds go by so fast seem like they already in the past tense by the time a fella first sees ’em, Joe explained, the whole ordeal seeming quite a feat of acceleration for a young man grounded in homemade chugs and vicarious driving thrills at the yearly auto show in the Denver Coliseum.

Al knew Orah and Bertha could indeed haul ass in eccentric paths like flying saucers, and they could wink in and out of sight at will, using something avian schoolteacher Bertha called their light-warping parameters, which also somehow extended to objects they held or operated, like Bertha’s beakaphone and Orah’s beloved two-tone Nash Metropolitan. Still curious about the Underground Railroad after reading about it in the encyclopedia, he now wondered if all this invisibility could’ve somehow been used to help the slaves escape up north or into Canada. He also wanted to know how wolves fit into this fantastic scenario, so he asked Joe Blackman to expatiate further.

Orah’s been friends with wolves for centuries, datin’ back ta when it flew up to the woods of northern Minnesota an’ wasn’t prepared for the cold, bein’ from South America and all. They got it some rum from a Saint Bernard dog, then Orah bed down in the wolves’ den in a cave till it gotten its strength back. They all been fast friends ever since, an’ now Orah even be settin’ various lupine ones as has evolved further up in businesses, the ones that be best with their shape change parameters, Joe Blackman declared as the story became even more convoluted.

Young Al found this truly astonishing, thinking only of Orah’s aerial reconnaissance potential in spotting game or hunters while aloft on behalf of its new pack of friends from the forest primeval that many folks in present-day Wyoming find to be fundamentally evil due to the predatory ways with which nature endowed them.

So anyhow, Joe continued, back when Orah got interested in abolitionist causes aroun’ the 1820s, she be askin’ for help from both some wolves an’ the Tones you been hearin’ about, my young friend. The Tones provided Orah with somethin’ called a field mobile dimensional transformer, you kin set that suckah up anywhere’s on dis earth or even over the water if you’s so inclined. They used to set the pickup coordinates by a large tree where a special message got carved by the first escapee so’s the slaves that come afterwards’d know where ta congregate. Between ’em Orah and Bertha had so many ways o’ distractin’ an’ aggravatin’ them slave catchers, the wolves’d get de chance ta lead the ‘railroad travelers’ to their point o’ disembarkation. Joe chuckled while Gozhaloga, recumbent upon the rich lawn, stretched out his forelegs and seemed to be enjoying the story thus far.

You read the history ’bout other escapin’ strategies, I’m bettin’, ’cause you’re a curious lad an’ sharp too, Joe went on. "One time aroun’ 1831, they was chasin’ one a my ancestors who done run off down in Ole Miss from some mean ole cracker’s plantation. The slave catchers almos’ had that boy by the short hairs when he found the portal thanks to a Smyce wolf then plain ole disappeared.

One a them yokels on his tail opined it was as though he done ‘vanished on a underground road,’ an’ that’s how the name got its start. Except folks start callin’ it the Underground Railroad after a spell on accountin’ their fascination with de trains back then. The portal by that tree transported my granddaddy up ta Chicago. That’s where my people’s from. That was always one a Orah’s favorite cities, but they let some o’ the others escape ta Indiana an’ Ohio, some more up ta Canada, dependin’ on their wishes. Orah an’ Bertha with Smyce wolves liberated scores o’ slaves from their Dixie prisons, young fella. You be sure an’ take whatever magical avenues as opens up ta ya in this life, hear?

I haven’t figured out just where I want to escape to or from yet, Joe, Al replied, which caused this most fascinating individual to laugh with jolly commiseration.

Don’t sweat it, my young frien’. Most folks in this system never figure out they’s been trapped all along, this after their whole lives done passed ’em by fast as a flewbyrd flies.

Finishing up his tale, Joe Blackman reached into his pocket and extracted a slim and wicked nine-inch stiletto from tip to tail, carefully opening it and locking in place its glinting stainless steel blade. The handle was ebony with crinkly silver-metal filigree at either end and the middle part inset with a tiny yet fierce likeness of Orah Byrd with its magnificent wings outstretched for both fight and flight. With a sly wink at Al, Joe Blackman flicked the finely balanced tool into the grass between his talented dog’s front paws.

Hey there, Gozhaloga, show this fine little wolf what my great grandpappy carved on the tree ta show them other slaves where the freedom portal be situated. Show ’im your doggie woodcraft capabilities, big fella. Joe chuckled.

The great, sleek black dog of indeterminate breed picked up the stiletto in his jaws then ambled over to a thick-barked shade tree near the spooky old behemoth of a house’s front porch. Balancing on his hind legs, Gozhaloga held the knife incredibly between his paws and addressed the tree trunk with near-prehensile dexterity. The rest was like watching a replayed subroutine of some sort on home improvement television, using time lapse photography. A few wood chips and shavings seemed to fly off and hang suspended in midair for an instant before fluttering down to the lawn. The dog’s tail swished contentedly as he carved away.

In no time, Gozhaloga Blackman woofed that he was finished. It sounded almost like he’d grunted, Run row. Then Al realized he’d actually vocalized, Done, Joe. Al and Joe stepped forward and beheld a precisely rendered one-by-six-inch rectangle of capital letters, carved not too deeply into the bark so as to damage the tree yet still quite legible at eye level. The message reads: DAT WOOF DONE HEP’D ME HEAH!

His otherworldly handiwork complete, Gozhaloga somehow pressed the metal bar atop the knife’s rear-handle section, which permitted that business end of a blade to close and fold neatly. With it resting back in his jaws, Gozhaloga loped over to Al and gave him a really cool present, pressing the stiletto into the astounded boy’s hand.

Orah wanted you to have that as a memento of your visit, says she be talkin’ to ya soon, Joe Blackman declared then added, Don’t be lettin’ your cute little sister play with that bad boy now.

It seemed like Al had been visiting with Mr. Blackman for hours, and he realized he’d better be getting back to his grandparents’ duplex, especially since out-of-state company was expected. Never one to overstay his welcome, Al excused himself and shook hands and paws with Joe Blackman and Gozhaloga, saying he’d always treasure the stiletto, which indeed proved to be an ideal weapon for the Latigo y Daga self-defense strategies this noncombative individual would be compelled to study decades into his future.

Al told Joe Blackman he wanted to bring over his National triple-pickup, solid-body electric guitar to show him next time. That got Joe’s attention, who opined that it was a superb instrument, comparable to a Les Paul, which Al hadn’t seen too many of yet, although he’d one day own seven of the latter out of his eventual museum of sixty-eight axes. On the way back to Joe and Alma Kraft’s modest rental, he thought some more about the human-animal synchromesh and cross morphing, though he wouldn’t have known what to call it then. The subject had become more prominent and fertile in his imagination, extending beyond the well-thumbed werewolf archetype in literature, for example. No doubt enchanted by the heyday of scouting, Al still felt he could glean the underlying animal essence of sundry classmates from kindergarten on.

Before Al walked back down Yates, Joe Blackman told the lad he’d be leaving soon on a train trip but that he’d see him when he got back. Al thought some more about the rescue wolves who’d fought the slavers, wondering if he possessed any fierce albeit latent lupine attributes. He liked the ground round his dad bought at Haug Brothers Market downtown (you didn’t have to stab it with your steely knives and still not kill the beast back then), and once he thought about comforting a delicate duck of a boy in first grade named David Christopher (Davey the Bearer of Christ) who, ever on the verge of tears it seemed, succumbed to the stern-visaged nuns and desiccated wading pool ambience of Saint Rosarita and left that universally religious school after the first year.

For his entire eight years of elementary school, Al had befriended a very poor and skinny youth who resembled a hungry, hunting fox questing after his next meal with haunted, alien saucer eyes. He was pursued relentlessly (in Al’s mind’s eye, Technicolor movie, that is) by a burly fur trapper named Ryan who lived around the corner and with whom Al once had an extended tussle in real time that ended with an enraged Al dragging the trapper by one leg like a travois out his friend Milton Linnaeus’s front door then down the sidewalk to be unceremoniously deposited in the street.

There were also exotic hybrid creatures with hooves and antlers in his class, featuring both cartoon and bovine archetypes liberally sprinkled among the girls; gazelles came only later. Dovetailing most auspiciously with his visit to meet Joe Blackman and Gozhaloga, however, Al now knew for sure there was indeed a family of wolves residing in his southwest Denver parish. They called themselves the Slaughters appropriately enough, and Gerald was in Al’s grade and class of thirty-five or so. They were poor—lean and hungry too—precocious athletes and fighters with quick fists. They lived across the street from the public junior high school heathens, in front of which Al had once kissed a smooth, lip-splitting rock hurled by one of the unseen Toughies McBrutal. It had required emergency attention and freaked out his poor mom, who thought at first he’d been scrubbed with lipstick and was making sport with her at the door.

One day, Al took Gerry Slaughter his homework after he’d been sick a spell. The whole pack was present, and damn if the close interior of their modest frame house didn’t take on the friendly discord and asymmetry of a de facto wolves’ den. They were all smiling, affable, and nurturant, especially the she-wolf mom, and they made young Al, who otherwise possessed a nerdy and unathletic self-image, feel like a cherished, fully accepted conspecific. The dad even bought him an ice cream cone once at the A & W Drive-In after a Little League game.

You acquire objective self-awareness in some of the most unlikely venues in this zany life , Al came to realize from his parochial playing field in the 1960s.

It seemed unusual that he couldn’t discern an animal essence beneath either of his parents, though he frequently saw imaginary steam coming out of Bill Beltcha-One’s ears with his uncontrollable temper, often resembling an enraged cartoon bull getting ready to charge or, in his dad’s case, to start swinging.

Back with the grandparents, Al met Alma’s sister Catherine, a roly-poly, self-absorbed, and fully inflated caged canary visiting from Chicago with her hubby, George, a dead ringer for one of the mopey regulars on the Peyton Place television series his mom was always watching. George struck him as a brooding, uptight fellow perhaps in hock to a loan shark and planning a difficult second-story job. Al also met his second cousin Frankie from Chicago, an instantly likable nerd with whom he got on famously, neither boy being inclined toward macho posturing or gratuitous displays of one-upmanship. Al couldn’t resist showing Frankie the stiletto, claiming he’d purchased it across the street at the Meadow Gold Dairy, where Joe and Alma bought their ice cream and 7 Up. This might seem as far-fetched today as Johnny carrying a musketoon to class, but the store actually did retail cheapo hunting knives cum sheath that even minors could buy. This wasn’t an illegal switchblade, after all, and the Nanny State hadn’t yet come into its full putrescent blossom.

When the aforementioned Uncle George walked in and spotted the stiletto, he launched into this stale vaudeville song-and-dance rap line to the effect that it commandingly and unequivocally presaged Al’s future career as a gang member—probably another quintessential Chicago gun grabber to boot, the adult Al would’ve concluded. Even as a twelve-year-old, he rarely suffered fools gladly and was driven at times to challenge out-to-lunch adults.

It’s only a tool, and it only means I’m a lone wolf who could never even skin a rabbit. I don’t know anything about any gangs, and I’ve never done anything worse than spray whipped cream on Grandma’s kitchen ceiling, he added, to Frankie’s amusement and Uncle George’s frowning dismay. This dour, interloping straw boss is not the boss of me , Al thought to himself. Besides, his parents would not unduly disapprove or forbid ownership of the implement, though it’s doubtful they would have believed how he acquired it.

Soon all the adults cleared out save for the grandparents. It was the summer before the 1964 presidential election pitting Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson. In the fall, Al’s entire seventh-grade class together with the teacher would ridicule him for supporting Barry because he has more education, which must’ve played second fiddle to working-class populism and religious indoctrination at Saint Rosarita. Maybe Al picked up on Goldwater’s nascent libertarian streak, or he was just repulsed by another wack job Texan holding court on the crapper after JFK lost his head in Dallas the year before.

Whatever the case, Al and Frankie stayed up half the night on the couch bed, howling with laughter over one convention or another of Merrycan Demopublican Republicrats. The easily caricaturized facial features and vapid rhetoric seemed less suavely polished and scripted than today’s, and most folks hadn’t gotten totally novocained out yet by the medium and its rawness of live events on a cathode ray tube. In the next room, Alma groused to Joe that he smelled like a brewery, which set the cousins off with more hysterical laughter. Al couldn’t remember seeing Joe Kraft drinking in the house. Maybe he had a secret stash or keg under the floorboards. Whatever gets you through the night is all right.

After they’d all passed away years later, including his parents and older brother, Al took to speculating often about whether your dead relatives can briefly return and visit with you through the medium of your household pets, for instance. Intimate contact fur to flesh restored primeval emotions of unconditional love and nurturance grasped like a precious jewel, if only for a few sand grain nanoseconds of eternity. For Al and Darby Hatteberg, their relatives would have to sit a spell en purgatoire before that hypothesized reunion.

Nearly fifteen years would pass before Al again encountered Joe Blackman after marrying the seventh and littlest flewbyrd Cheeptha Malone, a 707. This was after one Garibaldi M. Symington journeyed from Madagascar on an interdimensional cruise ship to live with the couple. In high school, Al befriended one Don Sheridan, a north Denver native and connoisseur of its myriad enchanting homes. Sheridan concurred with Al that Joe Blackman’s house was spooky tooth central, and they often spotted an old Cadillac ambulance out front when they tooled by the place, well warmed with Coors, before moving out to San Diego in the late seventies. No more hearses or Rolls Royces shining in the driveway though.

One night, they stopped so Al could check on the tree, which seemed to have moved relative to the front porch in the interim between adolescence and indefinitely protracted adolescence, though a few carve marks could still be discerned under the humming streetlight. Who knows? Maybe Joe Blackman and Gozhaloga had materialized through the dimensional transformer, and that’s where Al himself was now headed in a handbasket.

Boustrophedon—it’s Greek to us: Turning as the ox turns. We are World War II cannon fodder replacement trash. Throw us away, USA.

Al’s earliest memories find him bawking like a chicken to annoy the craggy sitter. He must’ve been ten or eleven to Al’s two or three—a couple of radon and asbestos heads growing up in a Denver basement, spawned in ’44 and ’52 respectively. Come and meet Mike the Bike as in He’ll pedal your ass all over town with his runaround, then and now. Michaeli Archangelo was thrown a booklet of Mass Latin by dipso padre Burpee Waggoner and ordered to kick his memory into overdrive, the better to serve reciting his Suscipiat.

Funereal role models, who painted the world flat black, complemented Mike’s harsh parental discipline in his lean Denver brick abode. He was a west side boy (303 spankings, West 4-4662); his attention deficit disorder manifest before that jargon came into vogue and prone to mix it up with other no-necks in the hood. The old man used to give him allergy shots with a humongous ole glass syringe while little Al cringed to witness. Show him a hypodermic needle to this day, and he sees rattlesnake fangs.

If you’ll indulge us a slight detour, friend reader, we gotta unload a steaming parcel of psychobabble—Mike the Bike’s specialty and, by trickle-down osmosis, Al’s own until he summarily disowned it upon