I needed a hero and Sol came to me. Sol needed a community, and we moved to Heron Flats. The ad in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read: Live full lives. Peculiar people wanted.For sale: Grocery/gas stn/frn frmhs/cheap...
I was sitting on the toilet, tangled in the newspaper with the intention of both the obvious and finding the sports section so I could say something intelligent, or at least current, when Sol came home from Fetus Fighting that night. Instead, I found the strange ad in the classifieds.
The telephone number was in the 509 area code, which meant eastern Washington; the wrong side of the Cascades for most western urbanites. I had lived with and loved Sol for most of two years, and had progressed so far from my abject self-esteemlessness that I was given to larks. Me! I still couldn't speak face-to-face with strangers, but I could use the telephone.
When Sol came home we hooked up the conference line and called.
"Heron Flats can be likened to a traveling circus that don't go nowhere," Marguarite Weatherby said. She had placed the ad and was eager to sell. Her voice placed her between eighty-five and centennial. "It's peopled peculiarly-not with what you'd call freaks-no, by big city standards they're average. The business takes in about $25,000 a year, so you're best to be a selling artist or handy on the side if you want to make more. Summer's hot-desert Washington. Winter's no good if you're over seventy-four-glacial Washington.
"Got a dime store owned by some sort of squaw, but I made a peace pact with her so we don't compete for business; there's a tavern owned by a youngish married couple who can't or won't have offspring." She laughed like a cluster of leaves before they fall to the ground. "We got a whorehouse run by the Taggart triplets if your balls itch, but stay away from Rowena and Ranger 'cause they're a pair. Then there's Rox and Liz that have the boardinghouse, but Rox was left with a small fortune in land and dollars, so they usually room and board the occasional overnighter for free. Look on a map; Heron Flats is about five miles east of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and thirty miles north of those Tri-Cities. Are you peculiar?"
"I'm a research librarian."
"Funny," the old woman said, choking on a dry leaf laugh for at least a minute, "you sound like a man."
"Sol was a pro football player, but went bad-started dating men."
"You'll do then if you got cash. I will see you this weekend. Good-bye."
Sol and I were running from the law-not in the sense of threatening penal institutions-like Kennedy and Monroe, but less suicidal than plain tired.
Seattle liberates farm kids but oppresses lifers and I was a lifer in an ant farm; a troubled insect that doesn't dig and tunnel for the pleasure of its viewing public, but digs and tunnels to get the hell out of its narrow confines.
Sol landed in Seattle with the Seahawks, but was let go after three years. I believed him for our first year together when he told me that faggots were the first to be cut if a franchise has to pull in its draw play and money is tight. (Aghast, and not yet keen on sports, I asked him if since fags were cut, then were lesbian athletes hysterectomized when they didn't meet par? No.)
When Sol was certain that I loved him, he admitted that it was his knee. His contract had been bought, an extravagant insurance policy cashed, and he had more than a few pennies in the bank.
I knew about the pennies, liked the frowning crease across his solar plexus above his navel, and didn't deserve his love, but to this day, I don't see why he couldn't still play football. The flesh on his knee looks like a couple of blind Doctors Frankenstein worked on it, but he doesn't limp.
Professional football players, I have been told, are not masochists. Sol was. He came home from Fetus Fighting wracked (as in dungeons of fundamental torture) with pain. He bled often and didn't have a team doctor to repair him. His solace was my progress. "The most heroic man I know, Mitch," he would lie. I got stronger.
Another reason I was ready to run, was because I was tired of explaining the democratic institution of sex and love between two men. Sol's friends (I had none) could imagine only one position between a librarian and an ex-football player.
No. I had not over-indulged in steroids.
Yes. Even as a librarian, I had good penetration. (Sol had been a tight end for the Seahawks.)
It was, in fact, tight ends and good penetration that convinced me to watch and enjoy Sunday and Monday Night Football with Sol and his friends while drinking and belching beer that tasted great and was less filling.
We bought the Heron Flats grocery and gas station that weekend.
During the days, the desert surrounding Heron Flats is animated with tension. The sun pounds the grit, the purple and pink phlox, the sagebrush, and the occasional balsam root until they become fatigued and wobble in the shimmer of reflected heat as though the earth itself is about to topple with exhaustion.
Marguarite Weatherby died two days after we moved into her home and place of business, which made the population of Heron Flats seventeen, if Sol and I were included. I had read few horror stories, but knew Heron Flats already had the necessary devices: Death and a pair of innocent strangers in a drowsy rural town.
"With angry superstition," Sol warned as a fan of horror, "the townsfolk will band together and do something really weird to either scare us out of town, thinking we're a bad omen; fearing failed crops, stillbirths, and National Enquirer reporters, or seduce us into some heathen fertility land rite-maybe sacrifice us to the sun."
The sun. Sol. Christ, my lover was doomed.
"Wait a minute," I said, feigning terror. I have never intentionally faked an orgasm, but faking terror, since I was genuinely terrified of everything, was fun for once. "You picked me from among the mass of meek librarians only to seduce me and groom me for the day you and your conspirators in Heron Flats demand I copulate with terra firma. Help!"
"Ooh." Sol's 'oohs' are often salacious and inviting. "Leave it to my lover to come up with something better than mud between the toes."
It turned out, we were told later, that Marguarite Weatherby was the local equivalent to what genteel people call, A Fucking Bitch. Neither Sol nor I queried as to what less genteel people called her.
In Seattle I once saw two national and overly franchised convenience stores not only on the same block, but next-door neighbors in business. We wanted a Mom's and Pop's, or rather a Pop's and Pop's, but unfortunately, our new store was a rural reproduction of late twentieth century convenience. It looked, smelled, and felt like a bunch of chrome with digital numbers that a mad computer salvage company had thrown together-devoid of passion. Sol's first improvement was to unplug the electronic clerk. Sol's mechanical.
I was washing the front windows when I saw our first taste of indigene crossing the Main Street and carrying a pie. The streets of Heron Flats are paved, but the slightest breeze from any of the four corners coughs up a layer of gritty soil stuff that isn't exactly sand, but not quite dirt. I fell in love when I saw the approaching woman close her eyes and turn her face into the breeze for a moment, allowing the grit and wind to blush her cheeks. I suspected that she was the 'squaw' since she had come from the dime store.
"Sol..."
"Blink, Mitch. Your eyes are as big as the windows you're streaking."
She was legs. Long, beautiful appendages hooked to slender and flattering hips on top; sunk into scuffed snakeskin cowboy boots on bottom. (We found out that religious grounds demanded simulated snakeskin.) Her eyes were black, not dark brown. I tried to look away, examine one of the scars I was streaking on the window. "Sol," stunned, I knew I was drooling my words, "look at her hair." Like a good stretch minus the yawn, it ran the length of her spine. "It's as black and glossy as dress shoes."
"Not very poetic, Mitch. But, yeah..."
She stepped onto the wooden sidewalk and smiled at us. We were gaping.
"Twenty dollars says she has a voice that sounds like an electronic pinball machine and a personality to match," Sol said as the woman reached for the doorknob. Her fingers were those of a concert pianist. "New place, new start Mitch, so start new."
This was Sol's cue of support. He expected me to talk. Talk! to a stranger. I was just recently a librarian for Christ's sake; I researched and I talked to myself.
In the store, she smiled like a friendly woman in faded jeans and a tan blouse filled with darker colored breasts. Her skin was the color that stodgy mens' club Colonels, usually from England, call exotic-darker than olive, but neither black nor sunworn Native American. I smiled (because Sol stood between us) and escaped to the canned vegetables across the store.
I didn't see any string beans, baby potatoes, honeyed carrots, onion pearls, mushrooms, olives, or any stock canned goods. In front of me were cans and cans and cans of creamed corn and water chestnuts. I blinked and cursed. My lips were sealed. I could never talk to this woman.
"And this is Mitch," I heard Sol say. "Mitch, this is Nia."
"Nice to meet you, Mitch."
She was an alto, maybe a bass. There was nothing soprano or electronic about her voice. Low. Rich, like garden loam. If I had been a better student of patriarchy, I would have lusted when I looked into her eyes. Instead, I appreciated. Loved. I wanted to walk on her as do people who trust the solidity of earth.
"I baked a wild blackberry pie for you and Sol. I'm not certain where the berries were roaming in their feral state, but they were jumping around in my freezer this morning begging to be baked."
I think I laughed (out loud). Sol did, and took the pie, thanking Nia and placing it on the counter.
I oozed unglamorously with sweat. The sun yelled through the windows and made the store feel like someone had turned the thermostat to broil. "Could we offer you a cold drink?" I asked.
I instantly bragged to myself with a smile and laughed at Sol who was fast approaching. He bore a high-five as though it were a priestly blessing-Christ-a distant deity is the only one who may know why I slammed my open palm into his over the vegetable counter, but I did.
"Con-fucking-great-undulations, Mitch!" Sol's sense of histrionics is too Spartan for some. "You did it!" He turned to Nia, "Or maybe you did!" He beamed and grinned like a lunatic and scowled good riddance to another part of my past. Nia appeared frightened; Sol was oblivious at the time, which forced me to do it again.
Speak. "I, uh, don't talk to strangers," I said. "Uh, you see. You know, unless they're on the phone or, ummm, transmitting electronically. Ummm, or if I've met them three times."
Nia smiled fearlessly at the wretched and servile beast I knew I as. I felt some strength through Sol's pleasure, and wanted to tell Nia that it wasn't exclusively women that I feared, but men and children, also.
She pulled herself onto the counter and said, "Really." This was not a question. It was a boastful pair of syllables before she broiled with laughter. "Then Fuck-your-great-congregation!"
"Close, Nia," Sol laughed. "Soda, wine, or beer?" he asked, walking over to the cooler.
I don't remember which she requested. There on the counter, next to the pie, I laughed at Nia and myself. Even in my less than heterosexual mind, I associated Nia with cherry pastry. Sol was rubbing off on me, leaving curiously masculine thoughts like caked splotches of his come on my belly. I didn't know if this was good or bad, fair or unscrupulous. It was funny.
Nia told us she was Indian. "As in Bhopal, where people were chemically rendered into puddles, years back," she said with exaggerated neutrality, lending new meaning to the old saw about raining cats and dogs. She was in the United States when her family was obliterated, and she was not a titled American. "Dr. Nia We'll-stop-there-because-the-rest-is-too-hard-to-pronounce Grey, Phd." Grey was her English mother; the hard to pronounce name was that of her ex-husband who was an American-Soviet, who had been married to a second generation Japanese-Hawaiian, but divorced her to marry Nia so she could expedite her citizenship and later divorce him. "Soap Opera U.N.-stye." Her doctorate was in medical ethics, but since there were none, she moved to Heron Flats and opened the boarded dime store. "Like a woman who still had the right to her own hymen or womb."
Hi, men? Nia and Sol were like-minded, and for once, I didn't fear for Sol's safety as a retired but devout Fetus Fighter.
The three of us laughed and talked like old friends for most of the afternoon. Nia told us that she was neither frigid nor a lesbian, but she believed reverently in the ownership of orgasms. Thus far, she was the only person she willingly and gladly gave them to. "My ex-husband's sexual intrusions," she gaily said, legitimately without pain, I think, "gave me just that much more time to mentally organize my dissertation."
Without the standard degradation, I told Nia about my childhood and my maimed parents who didn't keep mirrors in the house. They told me that I was the ugly one, and the shards of glass would hurt when the mirror repulsed against my image. I warned her that Sol consistently lied about my virtues while he rescued me from my parents, so she should take what he says about me with a grain of sawdust. Sol went into his autobiographical ditty that revealed nothing.
"You two are the most normal things to succumb to Heron Flats since I've been here," Nia said. This did not bode well. "Let's meet back at my store in an hour or so, and I'll take you to the Truncated Heron for a Saturday night out." This boded worse.
Handsome but irritating, Sol went into his I-love-a-party mode. "Sure, let's meet the locals, Mitch."
I looked at Sol, the pie that had sunk some, and Nia. "Why don't we just ask Nia and her pie home for a barbecue?"
"Great," Sol said. "And then we'll go to the Truncated Heron." I
think he saw that option as a compromise. We locked the store and left. I pouted, but it
didn't work.
With Nia, our first entertaining at the farmhouse was fun. I decided other than Sol, there was at least one person of the four-billion-plus worth knowing.
"Sol, go in," Nia said.
We had walked down Main Street and met no humans. Two jack rabbits ran across the road, but had no reason to fear cars. Six stores mirrored another six down the road; one was a bookstore that was closed in the fifties, still stocked with its original inventory. Nia had always wanted to break in, but was afraid. "Too many unread books surrounding me." She cringed without a coquettish chromosome in her body, at least toward us, and leaned into Sol while we passed the building.
Sol concurred. "Unread books are the dangerous ones."
With newfound valor, I said, "Since I can read, I guess I could become a book-tamer with you, Nia." Both she and Sol applauded my courage.
"Now," Nia said to me after Sol went into the Truncated Heron, sat at the bar, and ordered three beers, "we'll salamander in and see what happens."
I backed away and stepped into the street. "Uh, you meant we'd sashay in, or meander in?" I had never entered a public place for social purposes, and I was stalling.
Nia shriveled her lips like prunes. "I meant salamander. You know, those lizards that can go anyplace, even through a fire and survive, because they are always themselves and don't have to rely on others to protect them?"
"I'm a chameleon at best."
Shaking her head, Nia took my arm like a date and we walked into the tavern.
"Hi, Mitch!" came a collective salutation. I ran.
Outside, Nia grabbed me more like a date rape than a friend and pulled me back into the tavern.
"Hi, Mitch!"
Nia pushed me out the door faster than I could run. A reverberation in the back of my mind saw people look up from their conversations, pool play, and bartending to say, 'hi.'
Without force, because I had none, I tried to sting Nia with hatred. "You are not..."
"I am." She fanned her long hair away from her neck to cool.
I looked through the tavern window and saw Sol drinking at his beer. I mimed to him that I was homeward bound. He laughed.
"This will be your third entry, Mitch." Nia twinkled, and sparkled, and shouted at me with a confident grin. "Only a Christian fundamentalist is spent by his third entry. If the strangers in the Heron don't say 'hi' again, then you can do whatever it is you do when you panic."
"You are a bona fide bitch."
"As sure as Sol is Sol."
It took a shove from Nia, but there I was, inside the Truncated Heron-neither hiving nor heaving.
"Hi, Mitch!" everyone said before they again went back to their Saturday night business.
I felt vaguely comfortable. Nia and I walked over to Sol and I offered the stool at the bar next to him so Nia could sit between us. Sol read my desperate look that was painted with a stroke of confidence, and winked.
Try trusting.
The bartender extended his hand and I shook it.
"Nia says you're not fond of talking to people until you've met them three times. Name's O'Brian, and you have every right to be distrustful of some. This is my wife," O'Brian said with a tilt of his head to the woman behind the bar, "she's trustworthy."
"Kara," she said, shaking my hand quickly before she filled an order.
I looked to Sol and Nia, who nodded at my curious glance. O'Brian and Kara didn't intimidate me, I guess, because they were featureless. The type of people who would make consummate criminals because in a police lineup all the witness or victim would see was the height chart behind the two tavern owners. They were plain to the point of uncertainty; able to blend into crowds and fixtures. And O'Brian was the first to explain the reason they had no children. He could have gallantly claimed gonads as do many husbands, but he said, "We fear that we wouldn't know we had them if our featurelessness was passed on."
Nia suspected the two to be a CIA couple who found a God. Sol suspected they were relocated witnesses of some heinous crime. I couldn't see a difference.
Even though I felt like I had been highlighted by Nia with a fluorescent yellow marker, I stole some looks around the tavern. It was authentically old English in decor. The mahogany bar, which was a monstrous display of English woodcraftmanship, came from England, via an old tavern in Seattle, after a cruise and a brief stint in a hotel in the Falklands. Kara and O'Brian polished it in spare moments as though it were a child with features.
The billiards table was the webbed-pocket variety; the dart board didn't light up when people threw real darts, and each wooden and cushionless booth had a table with a chess-backgammon-checker board inlaid.
Perched in one of the high straight-backed booths playing chess, was a duplication of the same woman. Two-thirds of the Taggart triplets, I was told.
"That's Tina and Sheena over there, and along with Rowena, they run the local bordello," Nia said.
The two women were so deep in astute contemplation, that they did not fit my image of rural whores. They looked like bespeckled and bunned biochemists.
A woman who looked like she was three Manhattans beyond Staten Island was sitting in the far corner booth. She was old. Her face was powdered white with perfect circles of rouge in the dell of each cheek. Her eyes were outlined with heavy black mascara, and her silver-gray boa matched her hair and sequined dress.
"Celeste Swanson," Nia told us. "She claims to be Gloria's bastard, and in tribute to her mother and the days of silent romance, Celeste seldom speaks. Her silence is a vow of love for the days before talkies when people used their bodies to communicate more than anonymous lust."
Sol nodded in Celeste's direction and she smiled her reply.
I drank my beer, the whole schooner without tasting it, but I'm sure it was bad. I cringed at Sol's composure, and Nia's biographies. Sol ordered me another beer. His days as a Fetus Fighter, among his many peculiarities, equipped him to comfortably accept the townsfolk as our new neighbors. My distressed shyness equipped me for nothing.
"At the billiards table are Rox and Liz, that's Rox taking a shot. They own the boardinghouse," Nia said between pulls of her beer. "They have twin eight-year-old boys named Kick and Ass."
Sol ate an egg out of a jar of greenish-brown liquid.
Rox was a wholesome and handsome woman busting out with a sense of Indian Summer. She looked like what my grandmother used to call prairie-bred (desert-bred in Rox's case); equipped by nature and character to fight the elements, feed the cattle in sub-zero weather and demand rain when mercury peaks in thermometers; bake six loaves of bread in the morning to distribute among hungry neighbors, and sling the fully hung bull with the farmhands before she put on her Sunday best to entertain the Mayor and his wife with aplomb. (The plum bothered me as a child. I always thought it rather stingy to serve only one, or that these women didn't particularly care for mayors.) In other words, Rox looked like an indispensable person.
"Your Gramma knew Rox in a previous life," Nia said, after my description. "Except for our lack of mayoral rule, that's Rox."
Liz, Rox's lover, was the prototype of the beautiful woman of current favor-tall, blonde and fair, green-eyed, high-cheeked, full-lipped, and coated with mundane elegance like a piece of wood is coated with polyurethane. A few days later, after witnessing her work and intellect, my preconceptions of Liz were stripped away.
"Liz is artistically reclined," Nia said.
"Inclined?" Sol asked, suspecting, I'm sure, that some of Nia's English-as-a-second language thwarted her description of Liz.
I huffed, because I knew Nia probably meant what she said, and because I felt good huffing about something.
Nia huffed at Sol, and said, "No, reclined. She paints frescoes on ceilings. Liz is very talented, and you should see their boardinghouse. She's been reproducing the Sistine work, but somewhat altered. God is a chesty blonde with plum fingernails, slightly chipped, and realistically sagging breasts that show she spent a great deal of time nurturing. Moses is castrated, and Christ, although passionate, is a hermaphrodite. All very unusual, but well executed."
"Executed," Sol repeated. I could tell by the hard swallow and bob of his Adam's apple that he was thinking about his balls and the fate of Moses in Liz's hands.
While the women were shooting their game, they talked about the Great Douche God sent after She told Noêl to build the ark, which was one of the few nonphallic constructions of the Old Testament, I discovered while eavesdropping.
"Didn't quite take," Liz said to Rox. "The good..." Liz finally made a shot and yelped, "There is a good!" Exultant with her luck, she missed her next shot that seemed easy. "Are the sperms and eggs of the world, none of this salt shit."
"Some odiferous bacteria got left behind," Rox agreed. She looked up briefly to Sol and me before she took her shot and sank her intended balls. "Neither of you strike me an odiferous bacterium," she said, lining up her next shot.
Sol smiled and thanked her.
After Nia made the official introductions, Liz said, "How about dinner at the boardinghouse this Monday? Rox can serve her desert fare specialty, and in the name of good hosting and homosexual pedophilia we'll offer up our eight-year-old boys."
I waited briefly for Sol to reply, but accidentally spoke instead. "I'm not used to kids, but I think I might like them." I blushed. "I mean as kids, not dinner."
All but Celeste (who supplied us with a silly grin) howled, and Sol accepted the invitation.
We were also introduced to Bram Hubble, who liked to be called Old Man (which he was) and poured his schooners of beer into the planter box next to his reserved stool at the end of the long wooden bar.
"But he seems to get some drink in him anyway," Kara assured us.
"The ozone layer has been damaged," he said after disposing of another beer, "by the passion that has been sucked from otherwise strong men and women like the mist from a damaging aerosol spray.''
OK. After one Saturday night in the local tavern, I was ready to plead with Sol for a quick retreat back to Seattle. Skedaddle. But I could see in Sol's eyes that no amount of pleading would dislocate us from our new home in desert central Washington.
The third of the Taggart sisters walked into the Truncated Heron wearing a resplendent glow, which neither of her contemplative sisters shared. She tossed me a wink and splashed Sol with a smile as she walked through the tavern to join Tina and Sheena at their chess game. A magnificent black Labrador retriever came in with her, but jumped up on one of the bar stools near me and whined.
"That's Rowena Taggart," Nia quietly said, "and the dog's name is Ranger. He has been given full citizenship in Heron Flats, but he's just a trainable dog-nothing eerie or mysterious." Nia looked as though she were about to spontaneously combust into a conflagration of laughter when she saw my confused face. "He has been trained to do special tricks."
Tricks, clinked in what was left of my mind.
O'Brian served Ranger a bowl of Okanogan Ale and took a glass of wine over to Rowena, refilling Tina's and Sheena's glasses while he was at the table. Sol looked at me through a cocked eye and I knew what he was thinking; that old Marguarite Weatherby had mentioned Rowena and Ranger.
Delicately smiling, Nia took what she must have thought was a suspense-filled draw on her beer. "I'm not passing judgment, but due to a lack of suitable men in Heron Flats, Rowena has taken up with Ranger."
"A casual dalliance, I'm sure," Sol said, matching Nia's animated effort to restrain laughter.
I glanced over at the big dog lapping his beer just two stools away from me. I had seen enough of Heron Flats for one night. "Ranger is a dog." I said this to Sol and Nia as though they may not have known, which broke their fettered laughter.
Not wanting to be added to Rox's list of odiferous human bacteria, I tried not to turn green, squirm, or show any of the standard signs of revulsion.
When Liz mentioned something more about the need for another Great Douche, Sol and Nia laughed hysterically and the three of us ran for the door-I was blank with wonder.
* * *
On Sunday, while Sol and I were deconstructing the store, Nia crashed through the door like a runaway car. "Bib is on her way!"
Over pie, after beer the night before, Nia apologized for our blatant introduction to Heron Flats. When I accepted her apology, suggesting that we would do our entertaining at home from then on, Sol became polemic. He scolded me for my narrow mind, reminding me that it was the size of a triple- A shoe, which was government issue for the spiritual lynch mob we had run from.
Sol grinned at Nia's concern over the Bib person and while I reeled with disdain (I think because I was meeting people more peculiar than I), I was determined to try on a pair of sensible mental shoes that didn't pinch.
"Bib is really very nice. If she were Catholic, her future would be filled with stigmatas, canonization, and sainthood." Nia looked over her shoulder through the window and down the street. "She is just a little backward. I should have told you last night, but..."
"Calm down, Nia. We don't have anything against country folk," Sol said. Still grinning, he added, "Hell, one of our best friends is from Heron Flats."
"No," Nia protested, shaking her beautiful head of hair, "I mean Bib is truly backward."
She didn't have time to elucidate before Bib walked into the store. She was a short, young woman, wearing overalls, and looking like someone's country mouse cousin. Her sandy hair was jaggedly cropped short-maybe with lawn edging shears-her smile seemed genuine, and one of her hands was shoved in a front pocket while the other held a small bouquet of pink phlox. A desert Joan of Arc.
She looked preadolescent and soft, neither male nor female, but forming, which is why I saw a genuine smile crease her freckle-punctuated face. She reminded me of a person who lost the owner's manual at puberty and hence, the gender specific instructions for future use. Either that, or she knew exactly what she was doing without the manual.
"Nia, Hi," she said, tentatively pushing herself more deeply into the store. She mustered courage through a deep breath and handed Sol the bouquet as though she were entreating the mercies of a rabid lion.
"Thank you." Sol stepped back submissively. "I'm Sol and that's Mitch. We're the new owners of the store."
"And delightful. Good men," Nia said. "But, I haven't told them about you yet, Bib. They met Rowena and Ranger last night."
Bib rolled her eyes and shook her head, apparently knowledgeable of the woman's and dog's relationship. She didn't speak to us at first, but I decided she was simple-not backward-uncontrived. That would be a relief, since so far, no one in Heron Flats could be considered uncontrived.
"We have been moving things around," Sol said gently. "So just yell if you can't find what you want."
Bib smiled at both of us and then turned to Nia. "?then freely speak I Can" Nia nodded, and when the younger woman turned back to us, Nia shrugged another apology. ".condom a wear Ranger makes she and sweet is Rowena"
Bib's statement could not pinch my mind since it had come from her mouth, yet Sol and I had no difficulty understanding what Nia meant by backward. What surprised both Nia and me, was Sol's reply.
".reverse in speaks who sister a have I"
Bib swooned. Nia and Sol were closest and caught her before she made a nosedive into the Hershey Kisses.
I knew that jocks have imaginations as big as they think their pricks are, and I knew that Sol didn't have a sister, but I didn't know he could speak conversational reverse.
Nia and I retreated to the counter while Bib and Sol carried on their colloquial widdershins.
Nia sighed and pulled up and onto the counter, turning her back to us with me rounding the counter for a private conversation. Every movement of her body was the core of enchantment and grace. "Like an American, Bib has screwed with my hometown religion." Nia was kind in tone, but exasperated. "She believes she was reincarnated, which is fine and fundamental to the caste of characters back home, but Bib is certain that in her most previous life, she was a vain goddess who died in, or on, a mirror."
I would have said something appropriately incredulous had I not been the only one facing the front of the store, and witness to what was walking in, brandishing a brace of dead birds.
It-he-was no less than six-feet-six-inches tall, wearing a long duster jacket that was do dirty the Marlboro Man wouldn't have considered it authentic. He boasted a red mustache that flanged to either side of his mouth, but streaked like red slashes of wounded skin down his chin, his neck, and beneath his collar to his chest. It didn't hang like excess handlebars-it was attached to his flesh, and for all I knew, it Fu Manchued all the way down to his toes.
His hands were probably rough and calloused, but they appeared downy soft because of the feathers attached to the encrusted black blood that covered them.
The terror on my face was enough to panic Sol, Nia, and Bib. They began to run with me to the back door of the store before they turned and looked at the material of my fright. Nia and Bib abruptly stopped. Sol slowed. I mentally packed my bags for the move back to Seattle.
"!Mitch" Bib yelled. "!worry Don't" I turned in time to see Bib pat the man on his stomach. Both were smiling. Nia looked sorry-agian. Sol looked as though he was wearing a pair of shoes that pinched. ".syrup of bottle a as sweet as he's and, Granger is This"
To hell with Seattle, I began to consider an Afrikaan ashram on a breezy little veld in fascist South Africa. The man did not look sweet. His belt was made of silver coins, his boots were spurred at the heel where chicken shit clung, and chew was crusted at the corners of his mouth.
Again, Nia made the official introductions, but added, "Granger, you look like bloody shit with feathers attached, and you have frightened my friends." Nia's jaws were gracefully clenched, but she looked frightening.
Granger was not enchanted. He laughed like a crazed chain gang murderer (unfortunately without the chains) until Bib said, ".Granger, you like just-too friends my are They"
With his hands full of dead birds, Granger began to sob. "Don't have many new people in Heron Flats, and I like scaring them. I like selling dead chickens, too."
Like the bitch I wished I could be, I wanted to say, "As though you have had a stampede of fools other than Sol and me cross your town for years."
Sol remained pinched, which was unusual, because he could find likable qualities in ptomaine.
Safely the furthest away, I reminded myself that Heron Flats was a new place, presenting us with a new start.
Like a man who was test-driving confidence (emphasis on con), I said to Granger, "Cc-clean yourself up, and c-come back with better plucked and drrrained, or whatever, birds, and we'll talk about buying them."
"Well curse my basil and make it grow! You spose if I cleaned up sixteen years earlier, Weatherby would have bought some?" He ran out the door with his birds, presumably to clean up, with Bib following.
Sol appeared less pinched and recovered from the shock of his sense of prejudice. Before we celebrated my outspokenness, he said, "Mitch, I promise you, we will move away from Heron Flats as soon as something weird happens."
Nia couldn't speak, she was kissing me with fresh accolades.
* * *
Sol had found his community, but even he didn't know that we had spent the past two days meeting the heroes of Heron Flats-our guardian angels.
I would have never guessed that I would become Sol's hero within the year.
Dave Swartout has written "Tutelary Angels" as a condensed character sketch of his work in progress, The Offending Angel of Heron Flats (for which he holds no hope of receiving an NEA grant). He has a Master's Degree in Political Science: Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping, and Mediation from the University of Hawaii, and is a full-time freelance writer with credits ranging from In Touch For Men to Ranger Rick. He writes and lives out of a garage in Ephrata, Washington, and enjoys bouts of writer's bliss when he sees courageous and deaf ears turned toward such inestimably qualified art critics as Senator Jesse Helms.
For more stories by Dave Swartout, click here.
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