Chickie Bird doesn't answer but Rumiocho squawks his "Right on!"
"Hear that?" Harry rasps. "He says 'Right on.' The fuckin bird's hipper'n all you pukes. Hey, Parrot? I'd steal your ass if you didn't belong to friends o' the fam-bly har har har…"
Although Awful Harry isn't the biggest of the brood, he's potentially the baddest. He told me he was a security guard five days a week, keeping things tame in a Marin County shopping mall, so he requires five times as much wildness on the weekends as his Angel's recompense and right. He isn't tall but he's heavy and hard. When he walks he swings a hard heavy gut around in front of him with the efficient ease of a sumo wrestler. When he talks he comes off halfway halfwitted, except for his eyes betraying a malicious mocking intelligence. A quickness. In his intimate moments he admits to being a four-point student for the first two terms of his one unfinished year at Cal… claimed he kissed it off because the academic pace was too pokey for him, sneered up at me rattling out the window – "Is that all the faster you can type up there?"
Mickey Write comes driving in eyes the scenes goes driving right back out.
The reporter from Crawdaddy that I completely forgot was coming calls from the airport to say she has arrived. She will be driving right out as soon as she rents a car, get right into our in-depth interview. I tell her not likely, fill her in on the unforeseen scene and warn her what to expect. Oh, great she loves it, can't wait, hopes they won't leave before she finds her way out. I'm able to picture her by the sound, by the plumage of her voice over the wire, preened like a pea hen, fluttering with excitement. I give her directions to Mt. Nebo and she flutters off, instructing me to watch out and sit tight till she arrives.
In a way I can do both. By now I can picture the scene without getting up, just by the sounds: Tinkering at the bikes, barking after the stick… the mama hen clucking her brood with her across the lawn so they can examine the famous hitchhiking Chickie Bird who's lying under the apple tree with the portable record player balanced on the provocative pink midriff which set up the scene yesterday on the cabin porch that eventually got my strung-out and hung-over jail partner, Rampage, punched by hard and heavy Harry.
I hear the record end. I hear the needle kick automatic back to the start of the 45. I hear Janis Joplin screech Piece o' My Heart for the sixhundredth time in the last seventytwo hours, it seems…
Their hot black shuttle car comes swinging in the drive, no, goes past the drive squeals a stop, backs up and then comes swinging in the drive…
Remember: Psalm 73; the dosed ducks; the gate left open the cows crazy in the blueberries, Ebenezer charging the Harley; the crumpled opalescent horn; Dobbs and Rampage to the rescue and the surreptitious evacuation of the women and kids…
Beneath the curtain, Awful Harry sits down on the lawn beside the girl, gets leaned comfortable against the apple tree so he can concentrate on the extensive collection of Mad mags he brought in his fancy saddlebags. I remember Old Bert saying Harry was an anthropology major.
The hen and chicks, scratching and pecking around. Tires spitting gravel, the black shuttle heads off to town to pick up the trailer they've decided to rent. The dust provokes a din of coughing and spitting… the hen squawking for cover. Harry sees me and waves his magazine and starts to get up. I sit back down. The sound of a typewriter is a powerful repellent…
"Hey, Lucifer!" It's Old Bert up from his snooze, hollering at the youngest prospect. "Go get everybody ready to roll. We been fuckin hangin around here buggin these people three fuckin days. It's time we got in the wind."
Pinktummy has finally put on another record, electrically enhanced Beatles claiming the Magical Mystery Tour is coming to take us a-way. But when it's finished, nothing happens. Just the Fool on the hill with his eyes turning 'round…
Bootheel in the gravel. The tall stooped guy with the cast on his leg goes lurching by toward the toilet, dour.
The paper shears on my desk looks like a weapon.
That measured laugh, always the same length, precisely the amount of hammering it takes to pound one ten-penny nail into a dry pine plank.
Hanging from the highest limb of the apple tree are the three God's Eyes Quiston and Caleb made out of yarn at Camp Nebo. The eyes aren't moving a wink in the thick hot air, but they likely see the world spinning around as well as any Fool's.
Turns out they can't roll quite yet. They've got to wait for the black car to get back with the trailer. Why? Something about they've decided they are going to have to haul the bike of the guy that laid 'er down coming off the freeway, the president. His hog. Back to Frisco. His head is hurting and he's going to fly. Lengthy bitching and back-rapping about this: "Ya say fly mumble mumble he's gonna fly? Candy ass I calls it mumble grumble I don't give a fuck he is president!"
More tinkering. Random exclamations through the heatwaves: "Duty calls!" "A-men!" "I'm gonna rip off that bitch you don't keep her dressed!"… voices from a time-impacted playground, the kids never heard the bell ending recess, now they have all become man-sized and whiskered and hung over. "Truck it! The word for the day is 'Truck it!' " Because the trailer idea fell through – too much hassle to hook a tow-rig to the black shuttle's rear bumper. Now the plan is to use Joe Blow's credit card to rent a refrigerated truck and truck the extra bikes home. Why a refrigerated truck? All I can think is it's to keep the cruel summer heat off the wounded machines, but that doesn't make any sense…
The prospect called Reject peeks in to ask, "You seen Old Bert?" I tell him not in a while and he goes farting off. Yesterday's chili.
"I'm so damn proud! To be here! To-day!" – followed by that sharp, insinuating snigger, more a planing, now, than a hammering. I picture pine chips falling in white curls around black boots.
Somebody knocks on our big farm bell. I yell out my window "That bell's an alarm bell! For fires! Nothing to be played with."
"With us," Harry hollers back from the other direction, "anything's to be played with."
A loud chongk! It's a hunting knife being thrown against the pumphouse.
I hear Dobbs's voice from down at the cabin porch. He's reading from Grandma Whittier's big Bible, very loud, about all the trouble Paul had with the Corinthians twenty centuries ago. If I was him I'd tone down and consider the trouble Rampage had only yesterday.
One of the Harleys pops to life, roisterous and husky, a machine in rut. The black car revs, honks twice, leaves. Another bike is stomped awake.
"Hey, everybody! let's hear it for seriousness."
Everybody: "Hawr hawr hawr…!"
Visiting Jenneke, that Danish delight, up from her rest, standing in the cookhouse doorway half-naked but with such a toothache that nobody dares come on to her, yet… glares at it all shaking her head – never seen barbarism like this in Copenhagen.
The tall guy with the cast comes lurching back, buckling his belt. Dobbs hollers up from the cabin, "Hey tell us the tale of your accident?"
Without halting his lurch the guy says, "Screech. Crash. Hurt. Hospital."
Jenneke decides to put on a short kimono and take some of her stale pastry down to feed the ducks.
"I'm so damn proud… to be here…"
More bikes are racketing now, the majority of them, grunting, coughing, roaring – "Let's go go go-o-o!" Then they all shut down. It's Awful Harry that's holding them up. His brakes after all. Completely fucked.
The black car is back with the trailer. What refrigerated truck? Nobody told them about no fuckin refrigerated truck.