More Pedal Tones

More Pedal Tones

         Bullets of rain shot so forcefully from the dark clouds above that they curled up the corners of the dead oak leaves carpeting the bike path. Black, brown, and red, they appeared as burnt survivors of a liquid holocaust. Flat on their backs they lay, thousands of them, hands and feet all stretched toward Mecca. He sped forward on his bicycle, but then put on the brakes. He didn't want to slip on the oozing slime, the spent life force.
         Hi Ho! The New Age Lone Ranger to the rescue on his shiny silver velocipede! But just as his rubber wheel waded into their misery he had a change of heart. He became Genghis Khan astride his rip-snortin' steed of death and destruction. He rode roughshod over the pathetic victims.
         "Save yourselves! I fly from this scene of despair. I retire now to the dank, dark warmth of my cave and will tear these filthy wet rags from my tired body and let the lamia run her poisonous tongue all over my stinking corpse!"

*************

         The lamia wrapped her serpent tongue like a lasso around his waist and dragged him to the swamp. She held him under the murky water until his writhing ceased. When finally he was drowned, she licked her ruby lips and heaved a sigh of vengeful contentment—Poena was victorious. He would sink forevermore through the bottomless bog and the methane bubbles of his putrefaction would percolate to the swamp’s slimy surface as a constant signal of this grand act of retribution.
         Rising from the cesspool’s edge, she surveyed the rot and decay of the dusky green and misty world around her. Soon she would people it with the corpses of other proud dark riders who polluted her sphere with their arrogance, but for now she would watch him—HIM! The Foulest of the Foul, The Vilest of the Vile—she would watch him sink. His shadow beneath the putrid pool's surface shrank—from distinct human shape to fuzzy blob to dot to pinpoint—but it never completely disappeared. She cast a spell. His diminishing sunken shadow was mirrored in a phantasmagorical gray and violet cloud which slowly ascended to the canopy of gnarled live oaks arrayed about her pool of DEATH. Her sighs grew into shrill laughter.
         But far, far below, at the bog's bottom—for its bottomlessness was but a sham—the dark rider’s face plunged into the muck and pushed…and pushed and pushed and pushed, like a fœtus seeking freedom from the furnace of a hungry monster’s womb, until he broke through to the Other Side of this madness into which he’d been plunged. And boy oh boy, was he happy about that, because now...

         …he pedals down back country apple cider roads, the late October air—on the cusp between mild and raw—kissing his face (cheeks blush, red as apples.) Freed from the lamia and her lariats and greedy for air, he squints and his jaw drops low and he sucks in all he can: the smell of wood smoke, the cruel scent of decay, the unmerciful procession of time. He pumps his varicose veined legs harder and harder and inches uphill slower and slower. Still, his chest does not explode, his heart does not sink—the beat within him stays regular, rhythmic, rote.
         It’s like rowing a boat. He crests the hill, a fortress peak crowning ancient orchards. Twisted limbs reach out from the unknowable sea, beckoning him…Sail on! He totters, then plunges. Wan sunlight 'scapes from behind yon gray clouds while cold droplets prick the ruddy flesh of his face. Again he squints and squeezes out the tears induced by downhill speed. His boat bobs up and down, it weaves side to side. Arm muscles flex. Taut sinews unspool from pulleys lubricated with sweat. He raises the oars and lets his craft freefall. From apple orchard zenith to swamp bog nadir. Now he rows past the swamp and its secrets (He hath tarried too often in the swamp and hath endeavored to plumb its sacred mysteries) and then past a wide open field of dry yellow straw and stacked stones, forgotten ancestral sites of extreme unction and burnt offerings—ah, but today's too mild to think of death, too mild, even, for thoughts of Incurable Sickness.
         It’s so silent now and he finds himself hemmed in by the whispering hills.
         The WIND!!! The Wind cometh!!! It spills over the crest of one hill and down the slopes—the hasty hush hush hush of warm shouts from another sky—distant, brave and bold; this sky makes all things plain, there’s nothing to conceal—snowballing, tumbleweeding across the field, mounting and vaulting walls of tension, murmurs and rumors—begging for climactic finale as it nears the road's verge. It has gathered and piled and herded along all the debris of this bittersweet season, the dry detritus from the trees, proud last week in their glorious finery of yellow, scarlet, and gold, now quivering ashamed in their nakedness.
         The wind has collected an acre of leaves now and shoots it all into the road and across, in front of him, before his very eyes—eyes pestered by grit and bugs and burst blood vessels—eyes growing dim with the fine dust from the broken cloth of the once-regal arboreal vestments, dust to dust……….a sea chanty pipes in his ears, the rolling pile of leaves leaps up and breaks and crashes on the sea-road, back country apple cider seawater; the wave recedes, then redoubles and advances again, rears UP!!......His schooner plows the watery leaf main and the salt leaf stinging drops rake across his apple cheeks, the sharp edges of soft water…….he is blinded by the glare: he sees the equatorial dead sun, becalmed; and he is deaf: he hears the chainsaws and backhoes and tin whistles and squeezeboxes, and he is numb: he feels the blunt bayonet tip of October nostalgia; he pulls alongside an atoll and tumbles out of his craft to assess the damage.

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         He’s undergone a severe hemispherical brain shift. No longer must he be impaled on the horn of creativity or the horn of practicality. He can pry open the rusted icebox door, remove his frozen heart and toss it into the furnace.
         The shore is within sight. He swims out to a coral reef and watches sky meet water—a water spout spins toward him like a genie summoned to grant wishes.
         This genie happens to be the great-great-grandson of a dust devil he once saw forty years ago in the middle of the road in front of his childhood home. It had materialized out of nothingness, on a dry, dusty summer day, when life had the irreplaceable sweetness of not being weighed down with the gravity of one’s immortality. A sudden whoosh of wind came down the middle of the road, right up to that little no-account boy, and then skidded to a comical stop and did a little dance for him…a dance of sabers and veils, curtsies and flourishes, and much slapping of foot soles, without, however, the customary smashing of cheap crockery.
         ‘Twas his first private drama. He didn't understand. He'd been tutored with benevolent coercion to believe in an extra-terrestrial omnipotence which loved him so much that it was going to punish him for unknowable offenses—and to display its erratic wrath would kill thousands in earthquakes, floods, and plagues. And yet here it was taking time out of its hectic schedule to put on a little whirling dervish show just for him—he was all alone on this quiet day of fantasy and longing, just him and the cicadas and the blue jays and box turtles—just for him it whipped around in a miniature tornado of dirt, dust, gravel, bubblegum wrappers, popsicle sticks, and straw. It hopped to the right, it hopped to the left, it grabbed him by the arm, went do-si-do. Then, without even a goodnight kiss, it disappeared into the day and childhood disappeared into the night. Had he any foresight then, he'd've become an ardent nonbeliever of the bullshit dogma foisted upon him and took up instead a simple faith in the fact that the living world from which he sprang could always be counted on to put on a free show of humor, beauty, and awe for even the most destitute among its inhabitants…especially for the most destitute.
         The dust devil had told him secrets, but he'd long since forgotten them. The genie now in front of him is fresh out of wishes and spins off toward the horizon. He dives off the reef and the burden of his void drags him deep below the choppy waves to hold communion with ravenous albino scumsuckers.
         Burning issues consume him from within, but his entropic mind can only ever complicate things further. A spider's web is immaculate in its symmetrical geometry and catches food to sustain the spider’s life. But his webs are a sticky mess that convolute upon themselves in fractal frustration and only catch him and starve him.
         Back on the bike now, salt water drips from his body, naked but for a cloak of scarlet red and royal purple road rash and gashes from coral reef crashes. Seagulls nip at his sun baked skull and sand fleas harass his crotch. Eyelids gone—alkali victims—pump pedals furious now—inches forward, so many miles to go—slowly, slowly, not at all surely—seeks darkness to wrap around his headache—ice to numb his soul ache. Wants to attract what he lacks, but seems repelled by a magnetic force blowing into his face from down the bike path. He’s about to topple over when a globe of intense white light bowls into him.
         It’s HER again! The luscious lamia's lariat loops once more about his abdomen and she cinches it tight. She yanks him violently from his leather perch and slams him to the ground.

*************

         "Listen closely, you goddamned filthy piece of carrion!! Did you hear me?!"
         "Yes, ma'am."
         "I want to tell you a bedtime story, my dear, how does that sound?" Now she licked her lips and ran a slender hand up her flanks and across her breasts while emitting a raspy moan, either of delight or disgust.
         "Yes, mommy."
         "It was the final stretch home at day's end. Perfect darkness had not been fouled by the moon. Only then did the rain let loose. It came down in sheets, driven in frantic directions, like schools of fish which synchronize their uncertain dashes to and fro, by sudden and powerful gusts of wind. Wind-strewn leaves carpeted the bike path and aided only by the feeble beam of his headlight could our hero detect the edges of the path and often did he wander off the edges onto bumpy ground. He could have run into gullies or he could have slid down the embankment into the swamp.
         "The wind whistled and I would have wept, but I listened...for the ominous sound of wood straining, for forces and counterforces flexing...of celluose ligaments leaning and lurching, breaking free...one hundred years of energy imprisonment, heaving sighs of relief heavenward…hydration duties done...dead wood deciding to lay down on the wet ground to rot, mandated by wind, by time…fate didn't create this tree...
         "Ahhhh…it was such a heavy sound—a rumble and a crack and a sharp splitting...the sound of substance which only a thousand pounds of wood could make.
         "He sped along in animal fright—a pulse of heat ran through his body then the cold cringe of blood that wants to stay unspilled—a giant's hand of wind swatted him from the side then from behind then from the other side. He pedaled at odd angles and he tore along over the bumpy ground then over the wet leaves on the paved path...bumpity bump bump, white knuckles in wet leather gloves gripped rubber pads and he heard his DEATH slipping from the heights just far enough away. Thud! Crack!! THUDDDD!!!! and twenty smaller thuds as the main trunk of the tree crashed to the path twenty feet behind him and the dead branches branched out in explosions sending chunks his way and that way and every lost way down the dark night's highway.
         "He turns around to see, not Lot's wife, but a chunk of the tree sailing towards his face. It hits him and our hero is down once more. He falls from his bike and rolls down the embankment and into the bog.
         "The rotted chunk of wood hit his face with a wet slap. Wood fibers, stringy yellow worms, infiltrated the pores of his face, went up his nostrils, into his eye sockets, burst through the taut tympanic membranes of his inner ears, then exited the back of his skull without leaving a trace of their visit.
         "When he finally broke through the haze of the concussion which had waylaid him, he was stretched out on his back on the mulch of the embankment below the bike path. He was inclined with his feet up toward the path and his head below toward the swamp. He was gazing up at a face of blinding feminine beauty. She was upside down in his inverted universe. It was the Lamia of the Swamp. She had flowing light brown hair with white flower petals and bits of vividly green moss interspersed throughout. It flowed down from her regally shaped head and spilled over her alabaster shoulders onto her smooth small breasts. She was submerged below her navel in the murky swamp and the chill of the water raised goose bumps on the creamy flesh of her slender arms and made her tiny cherry nipples into sharp pinpoints surrounded by a ring of tiny red bumps. From one of the bumps a short black hair emerged. He noticed this detail and remained transfixed on it for almost a full minute. Then he wandered up to her face and stared directly into her placid eyes of steely blue. She blinked several times but otherwise remained calm, serene. He looked above her head and saw off in the distance a cliff of basalt towering above the darkened plain a thousand feet. The top of the cliff was edged with pine trees which towered yet another two hundred feet toward a sky into which now rushed dark clouds shaped like inverted anvils. These clouds issued forth skeins of gold and thunderous lightning. At once the pine trees caught fire and began toppling down the cliff side. One enormous tree hit the ground and skidded toward the place in which our hero and the Lamia reposed, emitting loud hisses as it skimmed over the dark surface of the swamp. The red and orange of the fire backlit the Lamia as she began to open her mouth. A thin black forked tongue jutted out and wet her puffed and glossy red lips with brown slime. Then her mouth opened wide and a black adder came slithering out. It was five feet long and it wrapped itself twice around our hero's neck and then stared with its black oval eyes into our hero's eyes and said:

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         ""Would you like to hear a bedtime story?"
         "Our hero tried to speak but his throat was clogged with moist rotted wood. He spit most of it out and then replied:
         ""Yes, mommy."
         ""There was a tree which stood in Phrygia, from ancient times until just twenty minutes ago. It was the Tree of Union. It came about when Jupiter and Mercury paid a visit to Earth for a holiday. They wandered the Phrygian countryside knocking on doors looking for hospitality. They were turned away from all the inhabitants with the sole exception of Baucis and Philomen, two poor peasants. As a reward, the two gods drowned all of Baucis's and Philomen's neighbors and transformed their hovel into a splendid marble temple with a roof of solid gold and agreed to grant whatever wish they may have. The peasant couple wished to be allowed to serve as priests to the gods in the beautiful new temple and further, they wished to die together so that they would never be alone. The wish is granted and when it is time for the elderly couple to die they are changed into trees, one an oak and the other a linden, both growing from a single trunk.
         "The adder paused and then hissed menacingly in our hero's face.
         ""But your impudence…your thoughtless behavior on your bicycle tonight has brought this eternal Tree of Union crashing down and—"
         ""But, but—," the thoughtless cyclist tried to impudently interrupt the serpent.
         ""SILENCE!!!" the serpent demanded.
         ""The gods are furious! They are perplexed and they are beside themselves with grief. You must right your wrongs and you must do it very soon."
         ""But how?" the disgraced hero wondered.
         ""Keep your filthy mouth shut and I will tell you how. But first you must listen to another bedtime story."
         ""Okay," the night rider agreed.
         ""WHAT???!!!"
         ""Yes, mommy."
         ""That's better." And then the serpent dragged our hero underwater toward the Lamia. Even in the murk of the swamp the whiteness of her legs shone through brightly. The serpent wriggled up between the two legs and slowly but obstinately nudged into her vagina, pulling our hero behind him. Once inside the serpent uncoiled himself from our hero and said, "Follow me." They swam in the darkness for ten minutes. Finally, they broke through the water's surface and climbed onto a slippery, muddy river bank. Our hero panted for breath, but the serpent admonished him, "Come, we can't rest yet!"

(to be continued...)