Grange Tales: The god / Beginnings - II

                1968: The Youngster
                Saturday: The New Stranger

         “Get-up-get-up-get-up-it’s-morning-it’s-morning-feed-me-feed-me-let’s-go-play,” yapped the shaggy, gray, purple tongued, double-fist-sized, tail wagging mutt using his mastery of body language in a Summer-Saturday manner which was slightly more obnoxious than was the case for the rest of the week, simply because this particular Saturday wasn’t the rest of the week.  Today’s bunion is always worse than yesterday’s.
         The two year old, wiggling mass of vexing exuberance caught the glares of his opposite, an eleven year old human with only enough morning attitude to raise one glowering eyelid and exude the unspoken word “Shut-up-mutt!” at the prancing criminal.
         After several seconds the clock radio clicked on and after the tubes warmed up an equally irritating morning voice enthused, “This is KRNG, Grange’s best ROCK station, bringing you sleepyheads the newest and best ROCK AND ROLL!  And now from the Beatles-”
         THUD!  The fist at the end of her skinny, still growing arm, thumped on the snooze button.  She raised both eyelids and looked at the time.  6:15.
         “Wonderful,” she observed, switching the radio to go-away, after which she sat up and silently criticized the birds for being work-a-holics.
         “Now-do-we-go-eat?-Now-do-we-go-eat?-Now-do-we-go-play?”
         “Graymalkin, do you know what the Vietnamese do to dogs?”
         The overgrown pup couldn’t have cared less.  “This-isn’t-Vietnam!-This-is-the-Land-Of-The-Free-the-Home-Of-Canned-Dog-Food!-Feed-Me!-Feed-Me!” he insisted.
         She glared at the insistent wiggle, then gave up, grabbed a shirt and jeans and headed for the bathroom, hoping there was hot water for a shower.

         After she finished lacing her tennies, she looked in the dresser mirror.  She combed her black hair neatly and anchored it with yellow hair combs.  She turned her ebony face to one side, then the other, checking for stray hairs.  She stepped back so she could see all of herself.  She’d heard “sloppy nigger” too many times back in Georgia and she didn’t care to give anyone in Grange the chance to voice that same stupidity.  She looked her best.  When she left her room it was neatly cared for and tidy.

         The door opposite hers was closed, but she could hear a hacking, dry cough.  She knocked.  “Grampa?  Good morning.  May I come in?”
         The cough repeated with a severity she was used to and which routinely startled visitors.  Finally she heard “Come on in Penny.”  His speech held the lilt of Georgia.
         “Morning Grampa,” she greeted as Graymalkin sprang onto the white haired man’s bed and went right straight for his chocolate colored hands.  The gnarled, arthritic, mine toughened fingers roughed the mutt’s fur.
         “Mornin’ Penny.”  She kissed his cheek.  “Where are you going today?”
         “Fishing.”
         “Tomboy!  That ain’t ladylike, young girl!”
         She laughed.  “I caught last Sunday’s dinner, remember?”
         “Umm-Umm!  I sure do recall honey.  That was good eating!”
         She became more serious.  “Grampa, how are you feeling this morning?  You were coughing earlier than usual.  Are you taking your meds?”  Three prescription medication bottles stood in a row on the chest by his bed and a steel oxygen bottle stood on the other side.
         “Yes ‘Mama’ I’m taking my meds.  And I’m talking about the ones the doctor prescribed.”  He tapped her nose with his right index finger.
         “That red clay you’ve been sneaking won’t do you any good,” she warned.
         “Don’t you figure I’m the best judge of that?  It’s my body we’re talking about, or so I thought.”
         “It’s old fashioned!”
         “Remember what the Good Book says?  ‘Bout new things and old things?”
         “I think I recall.  ‘Matthew 13:52.  He said to them, “therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old,” Matthew 13:52'.”
         “Very good.  These new medicines do help, that’s true, but so does the old ways.  Together they’s helping me.  Doc says I’m showing some of the best improvement he’s seen in years.”
         “And you’re going into coughing fits before you get up.”
         “And thus clearing my lungs out.  That coal dust stays in a man’s lungs for a long time.”
         “For a lifetime.”
         “Yet I really am coughing it up.  That’s good.”
         She didn’t look the least bit impressed.  “Grampa!”  She hugged him.
         “Go get breakfast, youngin.  I’ll be down presently.”

         She walked into the kitchen, her pole and tackle box in her hands.  “Morning Mama.  Grampa was coughing badly this morning.”
         “The doctor says he’s doing better honey.  Pancakes are almost ready.  Is he coming down?”  Mama was a stout, muscular, brisk woman with her hair in a bun at the back of her head.  She was in a bright cotton, knee length dress and sturdy brogans.  The pancake batter about to go in the pan was homemade, not a mix.  One of her prides was her skill with a frying pan and that didn’t include using anything from a factory except the frying pan itself.
         “ ‘Presently’ Grampa said.  Morning Papa.”
         Her father grinned at her and her K-mart bait casting pole.  It wasn’t fancy but she did the job with it.  He gave her a side-by-side hug.  Since it was Saturday he was in jeans, a Georgia Institute of Technology sweatshirt and tennies.  He had his Atlanta Braves cap sticking from his back pocket.  He was tall, lean and surprisingly agile and athletic looking for someone who sat at a drafting board all day, drawing aircraft parts.
         “Braves playing here today Papa?”
         “Yeah and I’m expecting them to get butchered again.”
         “Have you no loyalty to your favorite team?” she asked with mock solemnity.
         “Loyalty’s one thing, stupidity’s another.  Do you know who they just traded?”
         “Adam, I rather suspect Penny doesn’t really care.  Here’s your pancake.  There’re the sausages and the eggs.”
         “Thanks Loreen.”
         Their father led them in the table blessing.

         Penny pedaled wordlessly toward the river.  Graymalkin sat in the basket as if he was trying out for a part in a remake of The Wizard of Oz.
         A car slowly rolled toward her from the opposite direction along the gravel road, just fast enough to stay ahead of its cloud of dust, just slow enough to avoid wrecking its front end in the ruts.  Penny felt a chill go down her back.  The car was marked Grange Kansas Sheriff.  It slowed as it approached her.  Her stomach tightened.  The cruiser window opened.
         “Mornin’ Penny.  I wanted to thank you for those fish last week.  Donna fried them up and they were delicious!”  Nothing the lawman could have said would have been as great a relief as that.  She’d met too many Southern lawmen.
         “Thanks Sheriff.  I catch them over near that old mill.”
         “I had an idea.  Have you thought about starting a business catching and delivering fresh fish to folks here abouts?  Not many folks’ll take the time, even if they have it.  You’re a good... I guess I could say fisherman.”  He chuckled.
         “Don’t I need a business license?”
         “If you expect to do more than $500 a year trade.  You don’t need to get a full business license for the first few weeks until you’re sure it’ll work.  Get a tryout license from the city clerk.  They’re about $40 for three months.  A commercial fishing license’s about $20 more a year than the one you have.”
         “... You really think folks’d buy from me?”
         “Give it a try.  I sure enjoyed those catfish!  You can’t get fresh fish in the stores here.  This isn’t like Louisiana.”
         “I wonder if I could do it.”
         “Worth a try.  Now I gotta scat.  There’s scads of bad guys around and I gotta go chase ‘em.”  He drove off.  She observed that the sheriff drove slowly until he was too far away to scatter gravel at her which meant he ate his own dust, then he sped up.
         She considered.  She looked at the dog.  “Graymalkin what do you think?”
         That’s when a horn blasted at her from behind, nearly making her topple.
         “Lazy nigger you wanna get run over?  What’re you blocking the road for?”  It wasn’t a question, it was a weapon.
         She knew better than to say what she wanted to say.  “Sorry Sir.  I’ll move.”
         “What was the Sheriff talking at you about?  You in trouble?”
         “He was talking to me about fishing.”  She touched her fishing pole.
         “Yeah, right.  You’re that artist’s kid, new kid in town.”
         “Four years in Grange but we just moved into our new home.  Aren’t you our next door neighbor?”
         “Keep on blocking traffic and your next home’ll be six feet under.  Stay outta the way kid.”  He stomped on the gas and nearly lost control of the car as it danced sideways on the loose gravel.  He followed his inarticulate snarl by letting off the gas, then hitting it again more gently, just heavily enough to leave a cloud of dust and a spray of gravel.  The rocks hit the child’s garbed legs, chest, bare ankles, hands and face.  Her arm snapped up to protect her face.  Graymalkin turned his rump to the spray, cringing.
         She considered the diminishing tailgate of the rusted, dark green station wagon.  “If I ever need a heart or a brain transplant I’d like you to be the donor.  Yours have never been used!”  She pedaled on.

         Her bicycle rested against a tree near the mill pond.  She opened her tackle box, hefted her salmon egg bottle and paused.  “Lord, I know I’m supposed to love my enemies but how’s chances on me picking my enemies and dumping the rest?  Wouldn’t that make things easier?”  No archangels showed up with answers.  She decided to go on with what she’d been doing.
         Again she started to bait her hook and again she paused.  There was something wrong.  Vaguely wrong.
         The summer sky was normal.  The summer breeze was gentle and kind.  She’d been humming Summertime.  That was usual.  Something was wrong, odd, out of place, alien.  What, she wondered?  She watched the insects as they swarmed among the rushes at the water’s edge.  They were as they’d been for her four years here and probably for a few years before that.  A songbird, new to her, graced the air with music.  She could smell clover.
         What was it?  Had the friendly chat with the sheriff set off a touch of whimsy in her nature?  Had the meeting with Mr. Graztaffe soured the universe to the point that it had turned odd?  That was the best word she could think of for the change.  Odd.  Alien.  Strange.
         She asked, “Graymalkin, does everything...”  Yes.  It did to him too.  He was looking around, his head cocked, his ears as far up as he could get them, a quizzical expression on his flat, rambunctious face which matched hers.  She packed her gear and started hiking.  She had all day.  At this spot she could catch the limit in three hours, often less.  She had time.  There was no path so she walked her bike.
         “All-e All-e outs and free free free,” she voiced.  Saying so made as much sense as anything else.
         The turn-of-the-century grain mill just ahead of her was condemned property and certainly unsafe but there was a concrete staircase going up the central whatever-it-was that she’d climbed four or five times.  She did so again and looked over the rills and soft folds of the land, yet she saw nothing out of place.  Nothing clearly out of place.  Nothing obviously...
         To the north was a wood, older than the town, which looked normal.  What struck her as odd was that it looked too normal.  It looked like something from a children’s story book from the library: neat, tidy and pruned.  Natural trees never looked pruned nor neat nor tidy.  She got her bearings and then descended the stairs.  She walked her bike across the rough ground toward the peculiar woods.  She parked it against the trees and started exploring.
         The river was the wood’s boundary along the east side, extending from northwest to southeast in roughly a straight diagonal which marked nearly half of the edge of the wood.  To the north was a ravine which came close to the river but never reached it.  Some ancient tribe had dammed the side waterway and the river’d been too lazy to get upset about it.  The ravine simply blocked trees to prevent them from rampaging across the rolling hills.  It bound roughly a sixth of the forest’s edge.  The mill farm pasture outlined the remaining third.  The farm once housed the mill owner until he died.  The following ownership fight drove the mill into bankruptcy.  The trees were trying to invade the pasture but they had a long way to go before they could declare a conquest.
         She got her feet wet twice in the river where the trees were washing theirs.  She had to hold onto the trees by the ravine.  They were cowering back from the vertical edge which so terrified them.  Nothing explained the oddness, but that wasn’t the edge where she’d seen the unnatural neatness.
         It was when she stood in the pasture again eying the trees, reestablishing her bearings, that she again saw the tidiness.  She moved back and forth, casting like a bird dog sniffing for a scent, as she slowly neared the trees.
         At close range they looked perfectly ordinary.  She wondered, as she stood next to them, if there was some sort of sap or pollen they were exuding which smelled faintly odd and which was what was creating the oddness.  She reached out to brush her hand over the branch surfaces.  That was when the vague oddness became neither vague nor merely odd.
         Her hand went right through the branch.  She could see her fingers, the pink flesh of her palm, clearly through the branch’s ‘substance’.  It looked ghostly.  It looked like a double exposure with her hand looking more solid than the transparent branch in front of it.  Vague had become obvious.  Odd had become impossible.  She stared in silence, left eyebrow raised for several seconds, then she said, “Now that’s unusual.”
         She swept her arm through the insubstantial branches and realized that there was a slanting, circular hole, roughly eight feet in diameter, perhaps four feet off the ground, through them which she could readily feel but not see.
         “Hologram?”  She’d read about them in Popular Science.  “Why?  Here at the edge of a wood in Kansas?  A hologram?  Why?” she asked the silent trees.  The silent trees remained silent.
         Yard by yard she followed the tunnel through the trees, stepping from substantial  branch to substantial branch as her body passed through the insubstantial limbs.  “Lord, have I died and become a ghost?  That doesn’t match what they taught me at church.”
         Graymalkin scrambled among the roots, then yipped for help.  She climbed down, picked the pup up, put him inside her shirt, climbed back up, and told him to keep quiet.  She knew he wouldn’t.
         The trees ended in a clearing where there were dozens of broken branches which she could feel but not see.  Beneath them was ground she could see but not feel because the branches were in the way.  That wasn’t the strangest part.  The trees across the glade looked properly scruffy and ragged.  They were natural.  Thus she figured whatever was creating the hologram was in the clearing.  She swung her arms like a blind girl in a new place and her hand thudded against what at first felt like an invisible rock as large as an easy chair.  At her second touch it felt like foam rubber.
         That was when Graymalkin struggled from her shirt, opening three buttons, and sprang at something, a something she couldn’t see, but a something which supported the small dog three feet above the ground.  She could hear his teeth clattering on something.  It sounded like he was biting rock.
         “What’s out there!” she demanded.
         That was when the dog rose further into the air, looking as if a loop of belt circled his chest, lifting him.  That didn’t stop him from snarling and snapping, it simply made his efforts useless.
         “LET GO OF MY DOG!” she demanded.  The pup floated in mid air, unsupported by anything visible, and even he started to get into his head the fact that this was abnormal.  “Whatever you are, show yourself!  If you’re trying to scare us, you haven’t!  Show yourself!”  Nothing happened for many seconds as she reached out and tried to locate the rubber rock again.
         Then the scene smoothly changed.  The broken branches became visible.

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