Cry Me a Rainbow, Part 2, Chapter One

Bruce's deceased eldest daughter Alaya appeared, then swam swiftly away.  Daddy Bruce cried out. Karina, math magi,  nuzzled her Eternal Companion--Bruce of Alpine with the girls and wasn't that Rigel darling and little Lizzy feisty. So many cousins up for School from Down South all  the time.

Karina was the daughter of a poly-matriarch whose kingdom was a now soggy Ranch on the Provo River. Her neighbours down the road still owned their houses and submerged and Bruce had decided to buy them out. The old Marina was submerged. She also learning fish farming. 

Karina nudged Bruce: “Are you awake?” She asked,

“Not now, but soon. Bruce sang, sleeping, “I'm late, late, for a very important date. No time to wait, to wait, to wait--I’m late, I’m late, I’m, I’m late. I’m late....I’m late.....” 

  “I Hate the Government”  in ten decibles blared from the family media center.  Kerry Garth, a Goth--had set his stepfather/brother-in-law’s CD alarm the night before. Circus fleas hopped randomly inside 13 year old Celeste’s Science Fair Project--igniting their terrerium with a low blue glow--fleas in ellflocks and white satin, guitars glued on their front sections with with epoxy, they ranted for 90 seconds.

 ''Qual azules d'los cielos en la madrudgadra.'' a sweet, high voice fell on Daddy Bruce’s watery. At first light, la madrugada, the bats cooed, the clowning creatures mimicked the antics of the children, sweetening the apricot dawn by trilling they could outdo the thunder and sometimes the children's racket. They fattened on huge Provo Mosquitos. Kerry and his grandfather had built bat houses to reduce the mosquitos and sold them to family on a sliding scale. That was about the time he came home from the war with his timid wife Eva, without religion and unsure of her place, and their East-German children.

“I know the bats Daddy, evening and morning. Soon they will bear fruit so they threw out the boys.''  Sweet, sweet, sweet  Karina’s squab cooed in the faint, rising glow.

‘’Where are you?’’ Bruce shifted toward the voice onto a empty, twilit shelf. There he floated, just above a rocky shelf, lightly submerged, walking  on water.

Daddy Bruce pondered. This day, was not the first day of the rest of his life.  A promising Eternity, awaited.  "Make it New, Make it new," he reminded himself, was carved on an Ancient Daoist Emperor’s bath.

"Don’t you let anybody give you  a wooden nickel,” his Uncle Samuel's voice echoed, the man unseen. . . . Today no one could offer Bruce gratuities.  A watery grave had its advantages.

"'Taint nothing like a free lunch..." Sam yelled from somewhere.

"Oh sure.’’  Bruce’s  hubris was a secret love of 10 star New Orleans Diaspora quisine. And while his job was no picnic, his answering machine was full of would bees wanting to explain one cockeyed proposal after another. You had to go English to get more humble native cullinary selections than in the Valliess of the Mountains, but then there were emigrants. Nowhere more appreciated than Utah if they could cook. Bruce snubbed his suitors. 

 Daddy Bruce Bunny, dead to the things of the world, feared his family's judgement.  A flakey family father,  Bruce thought himself. The family jammies sported zoot suit bunny tie-dyed aquamarine chic. Someone must have put bleach in the wash instead of home soap. This morning he would take neither the Road through Kearns around the Kennicott Prominitory at Salt Air, or a straight shot to SLCI. Such bots were advertised, taped out with tape that just said "A Bonneville X offering, 21 and over only." that teased the imagination. A plethora of family theme vacation catalogue options were only available out of SLCI, the family friendly airport.

SLCI was a hub for Disney sponsered Kiddy Flights. The kids, by advance planning, could get on a plane with their favorite character. The Airport provided costumes.  There were flights of small humans led by Kermit the Frog, and an elegant Miss Piggy, for the kids whose Moms and Dads lived as far away from one another as was possible.  There were Primary Children Songster flights.

There were How Planes work flights for the mechanical crowd.  For an elevated fee to cover extra staffing big bird and company would serve Coo--kiees and milk to the Sesame Street Enthusiasts.

Bots stood like manniquins when off shift, modelling WWI and II WAC and Wave uniforms off shift. WWII memorabilia, as much as what covered the WWII Bonneville walls, historical plaques and displays.

Stateline Sex fiends would soon be rising into the morning mist, delight themselves on Specialitiy Flights. Untried Babalonian option Beauties tasted of wild game and the bots were personable and 100 per cent self disinfecting. He did not plan, this morning to wake up. "Wake up, Bruce," came from somewhere. 

2.000

Stateline’s Old Dead Head Social Engineers at Bonneville International Airport’s Tuesday Night Poker discussion table had organized and laid h’orderves for the twin Airports poker Saturnalia. They set the walls to Saturn's spot. They put on a background tape and a fake poker night home movie. Not that they couldn't have a meeting and play poker simultaneously. 

The brethren with unexcelled poker-faces represented Salt Lake’s opinion.  Uncle Samuel represented the AAF, the biggest interest in the state, had played endless games of poker with this brothers using pine nuts for chips.

Daddy Bruce signed off on the Brinks AI dominated view of modern Aviation. The AI pilot didn’t sleep or converse. Delta brought in curvacious autopilots and Bruce joined the Federal Air Marshall’s Service under the President’s Office of Homeland redundancy an agency vague in function. Since Bruce had nothing  to do but stroll up the isle a few times a trip, he could get something done. 

In a 911 repeat, Air Marshalls were to hang back.  When the heros were done with the heroism of which the American male was uniformly and the Mormon male particularly skilled, the Air Marshall would manually fly and land the plane, cheered on by a high cleavageed, photogenic bot.

So went the protocol.  The war itself mired and stalled while the Masters of International law tried to reduce cynycism and try, tried to make its accords stick.

Instead, much as Hitler’s Third Reich, G. Dubb the II’s empire spread, and spread until the center would not hold. Food production ground to a halt.  Drug money came easily, but there was little to buy. All but dedicated home-gardeners were priced out of the market. They needed to eat what they grew and reared. Post 911 "prefereered minorities’’ never took to agriculture as the spurned Mexicans, farmers by habit, once had, millions of them.  Now they sold food South. The embittered public never beleived the propaganda that the average Joe would flock to take up the agri-sector jobs abandoned by deported Mexican laborers.

Mexican Truck drivers, still insulted, sought Southern markets while the South of the border workforce moved into the merchandise production and sales sectors. The cyberadicted did not flock to take up domestic or business work.

Utah did well as a breadbasket. Thousands of Returned Missionaries and their converts, still bilingual, readied to meet their convert families at SLCI, with a celabratory Ward Dinner to follow. At Stateline, Northern Nevada’s Tuesday Night Poker scene celebrated the concept of Airports as hubs. Jackpot became the top sellers of Cyber companions and employees in a complex multileveled industry. 

Bruce had attended the earliest conversations about the future of the twin Airports and the bots.  An underage fly Daddy Bruce was, as a local boy, a fly on Stateline’s wall.  It was here he had first learned most about the Gold Dust Twins--his one time Aunt Kathleen and her best friend Rose of Sharon.  The memories of their old buddies, faded Bruces’ Mother’s implausible exaggerations. 

Good Mormon girls, they had been--inseperable tomboys.  Rose of Sharon was a horsewoman, as her prototype had been--a tireless stable shoveler, horse trainer and exerciser. Kathleen  speelunked.  

Her Uncle Samuel had quite a bit to do with her training and she was a good teacher or simple companion, able to climb the steepest slope with steel nerves that never cramped as the originals had done. Kerry’s Aunt was his favorite model and he loved to train her to the secrets of the Mountains.  The  SLCI Services and Recreation credits he gained were detested by the Goth, the first son of his late marrying maternal sister.  The bots were more than machines, less labor intensive to rear and train than children, but not to be exploited.

The friends grew to bots of mythical stature, bosomy, manic waitresses, since the joke had always been that no one cpould tell the difference between the girls anyway. Bruce could tell.  

2.000

Kerry detested adult blather, whilst the Grammy he had grown up calling Ma preferred his tendancy to go on and on. “Out of the mouth of babes,” Karina’s mother often offered when he offered something wise. Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather Bruce’s Tuesday Night fiscal grousing--he could grouse his way from Liberty Park clear to Wendover.  Kerry told Bruce  he should figure out what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that what the male-mid-life-crisis was all about?His sister/mother took the change with more grace.  For her, menopause was a happy, long anticipated chance to get on with her life.

Bruce had planned the night before that soggy morning to take the Mail Rhumba-Shuttle out of SLCI, following a mandatory theraputic and overmonitored nap.  A supposed belted in, waterlogged commuter, Bruce fussed on and on about time.

If Bruce had had more mortal time, he’d have rather spend it all with Karina--time like the old times with her siblings, cousins and old folks teasing the gibbous moon into brilliance up to Sting-fly springs. Both he and Karina had NTS-tainted seed typical of the native genome. They had sold their Souls as young people to a promise of Health God had no warrent to offer. 

Green for his rank of servitude, Daddy Bruce Bunny was fated with default assignments. Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Sundance--but could either reach into his watery grave to wake him, help him now? 

dream. SEG 1B, PAGES 1-100, 2004-5, 

The Daft Main 11-3-05

Rainbow

Part Two, Chapter 

  “I Hate the Government”  in ten decibles blared from the family media center.  Kerry, the Goth--had set his stepfather-brother-in-law’s CD alarm the night before. Circus fleas hopped randomly inside Celeste’s Science Fair Project--igniting their terrerium with a low blue glow--in ellflocks and white satin, guitars glued on their frontsectionswith with epoxy, they ranted for 90 seconds.

 ''Qual azules d'los cielos en la madrudgadra.'' a sweet, high voice fell on Daddy Bruce’s water sprite-ears. a maple syrup voice.  Sweet as first light, la madrugada, the bats cooed in the walls of the old house in  Alpine, the clowning creatures mimicked the habitual antics of the children,  sweetened the apricot dawn by imitation.

 “I know the bats Daddy, evening and morning. Soon they will bear fruit so they threw out the boys.''  Sweet, sweet, sweet  Karina’s squab cooed in the faint, rising glow.

 ‘’Where are you?’’ Bruce shifted toward the voice onto a empty, twilit shelf. There he floated, just above a rocky shelf, lightly submerged, walking  on water.

 Daddy Bruce pondered. This day, was not the first day of the rest of his life. A promising Eternity, awaited.  "Make it New, Make it new," he reminded himself, was carved on the Emperor’s bath.

 "Don’t you let anybody give you  a wooden nickel," a disembodied voice trailed. Today no one could offer Bruce gratuities.  A watery grave had its advantages. "It 'taint no free lunch," it said.  

Oh but there were. Bruce’s  hubris was a secret love of 10 star New Orleans Diaspora quisine.  You had to go English to get more humble native cullinary selections than in the Valliess of the Mountains. Bruce snubbed his lobbyists with dignity by shunning wine of all vintages.

 Daddy Bruce Bunny, dead to the things of the world, feared judgement. A flakey family father, Bruce thought, his jammies sported zoot suit aquamarine chic. This morning he walked on water,submerged. Al fin--for the worldly Clown-Daddy Bruce.

 Chapter 2.003, out to the Stateline

This morning he would take neither the Road through Kearns around the Kennicott Prominitory at Salt Air, or a straight shot to SLCI.

Statelined Bunkered Sex bots could rise into the morning mist and delight themselves on Commuter Speciality Flights---Babylonian option Beauties tasted gamey but were 100 per cent self disinfecting.  

 Such bots were advertised discreetly, concealed among a plethora of family theme vacation catalogue options not available out of SLCI, the family friendly airport. They were WWII memorabilia, as much as what covered the WWII Bonneville walls and historical plaques and displays. but looking  more lively.

Stateline’s Old Dead Head Social Engineers at Bonneville International Airport’s Tuesday Night Poker discussion table organized and h’orderves for the Western Airports Saternalia.

Then there was Tuesday night poker. A few of the brethren's poker-faces had been perfected while fulfilling their military obligation. Uncle Samuel, who sometimes rode out with Bruce and Kerry, got a good start as a poker player, playing with this brothers for pine nuts.

 Chapter ---2.004

SLCI was a hub for Disney sponsered Kiddy Flights. The kids could get on a plane with their favorite Disney character. The Airport provided costumes for the dwarves shepherded by Snow White, actually a Stewardess. There were flights of small humans led by Kermit the Frog, and an elegant Miss Piggy. These were most popular with the kids whose Moms and Dads lived as far away from one another as was possible.  There were Primary Children Songster flights for the Primary Crowd.

How Planes work flights enthralled for the mechanically-adept crowd.  For an elevated fee to cover extra staffing big bird and company would serve Cookies and milk to the Sesame Street Enthusiasts.

 This being all well and good, Daddy Bruce was ready to sign off on the Brinks automated developments in modern Aviation. The modern AI pilot didn’t  sleep or converse. When Delta brought in its curvacious autopilots Bruce joined the Federal Air Marshall’s Service under the President’s Office of Redundant Security, an antiquated agency, vague in function.  That was the beauty of the job.  Since Bruce had nothing to do but stroll up the isle a few times a trip, and put out a few doobies, he could actually get something done. 

 In an Emergency, Air Marshalls were to hang back.  When the heros were done with the heroism of which the American male was uniformly and the Mormon male particularly skilled, the Air Marshall would manually fly and land the plane, cheered on by a high cleavageed, photogenic bot. So went the protocol, though, actually, 911 never bothered to recur.  The war itself mired and stalled while the Masters of International law tried to reduce cynycism and try, this time, to make its protocols and accords stick.

 Instead, much as Hitler’s Third Reich, G. Dubb the II’s empire spread, and spread until the center  would not hold. Food production ground to a halt.  Drug money came easily, but there was little to buy. All but dedicated home-gardeners were priced out of the market. They needed to eat what they grew and reared. Post 911 ‘’prefereered minorities’’ never took to agriculture as the spurned Mexicans, farmers by habit, once had. 

The embittered public never took to the notion that the average Joe would flock to take up the agri-sector jobs abandoned by deported Mexican laborers. Mexican Truck drivers, still insulted, sought Southern markets while the South of the border workforce moved into the merchandise production and sales sectors. The cyberadicted did not flock to take up complex kitchen or research work.

 Utah did well as a breadbasket, it had thousands of Returned Missionaries and their converts, still bilingual, ready to meet their convert families at good old SLCI, with a celabratory Ward Dinner to follow. At Stateline, Northern Nevada’s Tuesday Night Poker scene celebrated the concept of  Airports as human hubs. They became the top sellers of Cyber companions and employees in a complex multileveled industry. 

 Bruce had attended  the earliest conversations about the future of the Airports and the bots.  An underage fly Daddy Bruce was, a local boy, a fly on Stateline’s wall.  It was here he had first learned most about the Gold Dust Twins--his one time Aunt Kathleen and her best friend Rose of Sharon.  The memories of their old buddies, marbled Bruces’ Mother’s exaggerations. 

 The friends grew to bots of mythical stature, bosomy, manic waitresses, since the joke had always been that no one could tell the difference between the girls anyway..  

 Good Mormon girls, they had been--inseperable tomboys.  Rose of Sharon was a horsewoman, as her prototype had been--a tireless stable shoveler, horse trainer and exerciser. Kathleen  speelunked.  

 Her Uncle Samuel had quite a bit to do with her training and she was a good teacher or simple companion, able to climb the steepest slope with steel nerves that never cramped as the originals had done. Kerry’s Aunt was his favorite model and he loved to train her to the secrets of the Mountains.  The  SLCI Services and Recreation credits he gained were detested by the Goth, the first son of his late marrying maternal sister.  The bots were more than machines, less labor intensive to rear and train than children, but not to be exploited.

 Kerry detested adult blather, whilst the Grammy he had grown up calling Ma preferred his tendancy to go on and on. “Out of the mouth of babes,” Karina’s mother often offered when he offered something witty or wise. 

 Kerry was annoyed by his Stepfather Bruce’s Tuesday Night fiscal grousing--he could grouse his way from Liberty Park clear to Wendover.  Kerry told Bruce  he should figure out what his trip was and get into it--wasn’t that what the male-mid-life-crisis was all about?

 His sister/mother took the change with more grace.  For her, menopause was a happy, long anticipated chance to get on with her long awaited life. A third life, teasing the moon into brilliance up to Sting-fly springs was attractive.

 Both he and Karina had NTS-tainted seed. They had sold thier Souls as young people to a promise of Health that God had no warrent to offer alone.  Green for his rank of servitude, quietly spoken and strictly off the record, Bruce had Heavy History with both Harmony and Sundance--but could either reach into his now watery grave to retrieve him? Bruce cycled from reverie into REM.

Karinna stretched. She loved her Alpine House which was of the traditional  design, side by side living areas, a big divided loft for the boys and girls. The play and time out room. alternatly called ‘lya’s room, was back of the West kitchen.  They had put a big 2 inch latex mat there and padded the walls with colored latex so the kids could rough-house without boinking their heads. 

 After dinner, before the kids meeting, Karinna had been cramming in the old nursery for a 7:30 on-campus exam in the Custom Careers Extention Center’s Office at the Pleasant Valley Y. Bruce generally fell asleep wherever Karinna plied the keyboard and strain’s of Celeste’s moonlight Sonata beset him.  He curled more around her and dreaming, asked a drifter he met possibly a jellyfish if it/they knew where the human infants were kept. 

 

Karinna made the playmat up with linen when Bruce was home. Celeste thier their tween, made the room up when she had friends over, mostly cousins.  It was a puzzlement to Karinna and Celeste how quickly the room could be torn to shreds.  She wondered how any of them could tell if the ghost was doing something or not, one way or another--though the spook doctors said there was more paranormal activity when th children were active. The kids had quite a collection of ghost buster DVD’s and movies.  If it got cold in the old nursery, once the kitchen of an Anders 3rd wife, they put on sweaters. The ghost liked old movies.  “Movies about people,” she would suggest, the Goth said, in his ear.

 

Thier Goth’s girlfriend was going to pasture that Summer with Annie, their dad’s second and Moe, his third wife, to help with the squirts. The Goth’s girlfriend was going to also take over the books for Kerry’s tin can satillite dishes and radio repair shack.  Karinna’s Dad wanted to bring the project to the States. Los dos, the soon to breed couple,  liked to hang out at Karinna’s school.

 

Alaya’s Haunted TV, as it was called, lived in the old nursery . The shrinks at the Center puzzled.  One, the Goth’s and Bruce’s shrink, a 2nd cousin on Karinna’s mother’s side, and had heard that the children believed it to be thier lost Alaya, his own cousin as well.  He thus asked if he could watch movies with the kids. 

 

The Scouts from the ward  helped Kerry set up expensive looking equipment from the Utah Paranormal Society in the old nursery. 

 

Kerry was taking a door-open nap with his girlfriend in the old nursery. This followed a door closed nap that had gone critical on them.  Kerry’s girl had gotten herself pregnant, just like Karinna had before 

Klary was born.

 

The goth caught thier ‘Lylie just as the kids burst in from a trip to Reams, but missed what Alaya said. Grammy Lebaron  rolled out the feeding trough at six. His blessed Gothness employed to drive the rug rats out to Grammy LeBaron’s to Grammy and thier Aunts and Uncles and cousins in time for the little kids to ride her ponies while the biggers and grups hoed one row before dinner. The day the Goth got his driver’s licence was celebrated, with a pinata.  Good news for all, la dia de l’Mama’s liberation, Mother’s Day en realidad.  

 

“La Revolution Dentro la Casa,” the Goth proclaimed when his Ma first handed him the keys. The biggers, as Livvy called them, released the room at 7 PM.  Karinna’s rabble then romped in.. All got their baths and the girls (for the most part, the girls) had their hair braided or tied into ringlets with ragstrips. Prayers ensued, the current book, the scripture verse they were memorizing  that week.  

 

Then  general singinging which emitted from a pile of bunny  tangled legs and arms ‘till the younger nidgets were carried heavily to thier beds.  This week for snack, they were memorizing the scripture: “Ye are the salt of the earth, without which it would not be leavened.”  Karinna  made salt rising bread for them, so Klary Anne, made a crumbly loaf for bible supper from some recipes she found on Aisch.com. 

 

 Bruce’s girls’ finery spread through Karinna’s great family as if by osmotic pressure.  Le Baron apparel had a life of its own, romping through various ephermeral situations. Apparel came with lineage--proms and engagement parties, job and worh interviews, court apparel, but their lives were far too short--they were too often not segregated for hand washing.  The idea of switching the boys off washing detail was tabled, vetoed and floored.  They were willing to trade washing for diaper duty.  This was also floored.  

 

Meanwhile the most venerable polyg hand me downs, made of linen and good cotton, wore like iron.  Bruce said he would not mind paying for fashion if all fripperies were capable of surviving the Goth’s, laundry day.  Bruce bought hampers and tabletop washers. Denying a battle.

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

The family bunny jammies began thier odessey as 100% cotton flannel. Karinna had put in for it. When it came, Karinna, Celeste, and some of her older cousins ran them up on the center’s machine en mass.  

 

They devised the winter strategy of eating early, arriving at the Center at dinnertime on Mondays and tying up all the machines.  

 

 

The Monday fabric drop created a rumored de facto “polyg” night at the Airport Center, ala Jim Crow, some said, and there was a fuss about it by the well meaningwhich waxed and waned.  Karinna was a 3rd cousin once removed to the lady at the craft room and so recieved too frequent intelligence about incoming fabric lots.

 

The clinitians’ policy was to discourage self-fueling rumors. The more the Jim Crow  rumor was repeated, the more polygs came on Monday night for the dinner time fabric drop, since the major clans had intermarried, a man might  have  a wife or wives, 30 sisters and sister in laws,  and 3 mother in laws all busily yeilding thier fecund bodies to the sowing, tending and reaping of Utah’s Best Crop.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aunt Kathleen’s Blue Flu was not to be dismissed at the Airport Clinic.  The kids tracked it back  to the Great Basin’s beryl vallies.  If an infected cow was purchased from a distant ranch it might trigger a die off in its new herd.

 

Unfortunatly a predisposition to the blue flu, as the dead Aunt Kathleen had dubbed it, was congenital.  Daddy Le Baron’s families lost  a few cows Bruce had tended after his first visit to the land of dead pharohs and simmering contagion. His hands had gotten dinged up and some of the cows had bleeding ulcers.

 

Meanwhile complaints about the Airport Polyg night reached the media.  The Craft Room Specialist admitted on KSL’s “Called on the Carpet” that it did encourage the larger and needy families to enter the Family Night fabric scramble, straying, some said, from its All Good News policy. 

 

Bruce did a Sundance Special Report, Live from Stateline, spoofing the SLCI crisis, Bruce awarded KSL five must turd pies for airing the segment.  Then he had Kerry put on his best Utah drawl for Bruce’s microphone, having got his mother to do his hair up like a picture of a German Goth who was hung, the goth decided, because he wouldn’t cut his hair at Buchanvald, there he was, stolid, impassive.  

 

“What’s good news for some ain’t good news to the rest of us.” The Goth, divined as it was opined, was headed great things, for a media career, and so Bruce honed the boy’s Wendover poker skills and payed for karate, dance, mime, voice and guitar lessons, as many as he could get him to. The matter having been discussed over Tuesday Night poker out West up to the Stateline--yes, they discussed the Goth’s future as seriously as they did thier own.  

 

Out at the Stateline, bad news and what to do about it was chewed like cud by High School Alumni, Ranch boys and High School non-graduates alike.  Bruce, who  began his service to the State Educational System as a TA at 15, presided. Celeste liked the parking lot scene at so called Polyg night.  She and Klary liked to sew. 

 

Karinna had almost drowsed off  when the computer screen thickened and mandated a twenty minute time out. Karinna cozied up to Daddy Bruce's fussy back and pulled his jammie ears.  “You’re asleep, Bruce.’’ She whispered again in her monogamist husband’s floppy ears after hitting the snooze alarm. “You’re late too, you know, and for the most important of dates.’’ 

 

“at the lowest possible of rates.” Daddy Bruce Bunny mumbled back, reflexively. 

 

Karinna warned--“Big Brother will be displeased, our Uncle Samuel indeed will be displeased.” Yet Bruce dreamt on, making small noises.

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Immersed in twilight, Bruce found himself sightless, enveloped in slimy red and purple tubules which tenderly, resolutly, immobilized him with jointed licorice ropes,  snorkeling evolutionary anomalies. There did not seem to be any marine Lilipution with whom a wandering Gulliver Daddy might converse.  

 

 

 

Grammy Linda, as Bruce’s kids tried to call her, had done some dreamwork with his disreputable Aunt Kathleen in hippy California, back when his Aunt was a hippy and Grandma Linda her helpless tag-along.   They worked together at the same jobs, switched off boyfriends here and there. 

 

The Ding-Dong sisters--alas, Kathleen was a Ding Dong sister no more.  She was buried next to her Aunt who died when the Atomic Testing at NTS  started.

 

 

 

 

The ding dong sisters were not to be confused with the Gold Dust Twins, as some of the Old Dead Heads out to Bonneville International, ie. the Stateline Poker Sharks wistfully remembered them. 

 

Wendover, Utah’s small graduating class of 1965, its Wobbly scion’s son’s age mates and thier partners in crime made pretty good.  Generally the age groups stuck together and oddly enough, Jim’s had been imbued with Capital.

 

The age group of Kathleen’s vintage were sharp, but not fitted to heavy labor.  They had taken a lucrative contract to clean the inside of the Kenneccot chimney by rapelling up and into it. It had seemed an adventure that would fund a year of sky diving, scuba diving out to Blue Lake-- a deep, a seemingly bottomless spring, and thier aquatic spelunking there.  

 

They tried to form a spelunking club, Aunt Kathleen and Daryl and an Idaho boy who pulled Graveyard up to the Texico, but were doomed by fate to be less robust than thier Elders, if not by much.. 

 

With thier  dreams now fulfilled, all future ambitions seemed attainable. Tuesday night poker up to the Stateline was a big deal, doubling, in reality, as a kind of stage set.

 

Actors in a much greater drama, each taking the part of an internet poker player.  The sooner the point players started, the bigger the weekend pot.  A rookie once raised a furor by trading SLCI and other family credits for poker points.  These had included credits for Anger Management.  Bruce leaked the story to the public during his Sundance Weekly Review.  Like the price of a tank of gas, such trades were made on a case by case basis. This demonstrated that Sundance was taking the crisis seriously. 

 

Bruce and Kerry traded all of thiers for poker points. Yes on Tuesdays, Wendover sometimes remembered Kathleen and her friend, Rose Sharon,  in earnest--equine girls with sunburnt blond who people asked-- “Now, which one are you.”  The old ramblers who did the towns cooking and thier successors the gold-dust twins called them.  They remembered the small black cherubs who once advertised Jim’s father’s favorite flour. It came in 100 pound sacks and Wendover used the empties for curtains when the sacks were empty, it being the Thirties.  

 

Before WWII, bleach turned the Gold Dust twins to straw color. The joke rendered  the sunny beauty of the blond, tall, Gold Dust Twins, who, worked up to the Stateline in the early Seventies. 

 

Bruce got a Liveworks Liveboard and infused the High School with his expectations.  Ranch work was what they had, out to thier way and ranch work was what thier boys were suited to, otherwise they’d be too like to leave the land.

 

Bruce’s old highschool girlfriend Ramona whose Goshute family lived out to Ibapah and Ramona, Karinna’s aunt used to go hiking, the two of them, up to the Deep Cricks.  Grammy Le Baron thus got her horses from the virile Ibapah lineage via the Shephard Ranch.  

 

One of the Shepherds’ sons used to take the Gold Dust Twins out to have a ranch afternoon dinner with his mom and dad and chironian sister.  His mother had no trouble telling the twins apart. She’d have Rose Sharon for her boy, with her good eye for horse flesh. Aunt Kathleen was a runty non contender.  Rose Sharon took a fractious, but well conformed, penny colored gelding that summer to gentle.  

The Shepard family purchased a stud with a pin in his shoulder. The easily corralled, purebred racehorse couldn’t run off with  nocternal and randy mustang mares. The Southern Henry Mountain mustangs had crossbred with thorobreds whose breeders went bust in the depression. 

 

Still dreaming, Bruce remained immersed in big slimy long red worms. “Gosh darn it,” he burbled into the auquamarine fluid.  ‘Take me to your leader.”  A voice chortled, laughed and trilled all mimsich  and merry.

‘’How may I help you?”  he asked with dignified formality,  doffing an invisible top hat and bowing deeply.  He was perhaps dead, or scarcly alive, having slid off the bank of the Jorden into the river by the bridge where the kids parked and drowsy commutors sometimes slid off.  

 

 

“Daddy, the voice sang, we don’t need anything in Dreamland, but peoples, they need houses and clothes and animals and toys and moneys and lots of things. Paul said that’s what they are all about.”

 

“Sounds suspiciously Buddist,” Bruce observed. Do you mean my Aunt Kathleen’s Paul?  Is she hereabouts?

 

 The long worms, which appertained to the voice, examined Bruce’s wooden face and sholders. Some snapped out to inhale minnows or floated up to bring back bubbles of atmosphere. a few snorkels lingering by the surface, sipping aqua air. The unused tubules retracted ‘till they were tight as the horsehair worms that lingered in morning ditches.  

 

The tubules clung onto Alaya’s head,  retracted into her unusual orifices which  closed over them. Bruce ‘s heart harked back to his misplaced infant Alaya. Bruce’s sweet dead Alaya, thier mutant  nursling, who never lived to go with unwholesome boys or need a crib by her bed while still in highschool. 

 

Emerging from the large, wet, red, mop the head of the girl spoke. The elaphantine tubules lost diameter until they were positivly budrum.  He felt one, hard as horsehair.

 

All of a sudden, Alaya shape shifted into the familiar infant he remembered.  The mimsish, oddly conformed baby curled into his arms, tender as the infant he  had released her to the Reaper as she intermittantly suckled and screamed. 

 

 

Now the baby peacefully picked swamp grass out of her Daddy’s hair  and tore it, letting the grass float aimlessly, then picked them  out of the water with her organic vacuem hoses as they swam about as she called what the grass did, making a game of it. 

 

 The Great Western American Seaway, Bruce queried his soggy brain, how long had it been dry?  The small sea snorkling whip snades, when engorged, showed a fine dexterity at thier termini, like those of an elephant’s trunk.  There had once been 500-600 evolving pacadermal variations, once a few with human--analogous arms and legs.

 

Bruce remembered from Celeste’s second grade Great Brain project on evolution, elephant related dugongs and manatees. Elephants swam island to island feeding voratiously where they landed. 

 

Karinna felt only a sweetness in the when the macines registered a thinning of the viel in the room, a gentle sprite in the air that made Karinna’s milk spurt.  Her first child by Daddy Bruce, one who had had a spirit both Favonian amd mild. 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Born in Salt Lake, Alaya was treated there like an x-files mutant. Despair welled up remembering how Karinna and he had fled with thier child to Karinna’s Aunt Annie and Mag’s, down South of the border.

 

Now, Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the  snorkeling end of each tubule. ‘laya laughed.  “No one in our pods touches there Daddy, not with  fingers, it’s private.” 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE POINT FIVE BREAK

 

Daddy Bruce recalled how hopeless it had been to assuage his grief with work--it waited for him in shadows at the end of the day. 

Chapter , no flight?

 

Bruce, a fussbudget both irritated and annoyed figetted.

 

He had arrived at SLCI International four hours before his flight’s anticipated time of departure, despite the early breakfast at Mother Le Baron’s. Bruce had, in some dismay, watched a grey mist sliding down, faraway Rock canyon. 

 

The mist formed a great orange grey oyster shell as fanned out over Provo City. As Karinna drove Northward it drifted down first from each Wasatch canyon in turn, including Salt Lake’s Emmigration canyon. When they turned left in I-80 it mingled with the blue mist slithering up from the lake. 

 

And the fog racung, river-like, down Toelle canyon, till it flattened by the Lake. He remembered playing with his Aunt Kathleen’s first wheelchair in thier first house there. Sitting with her and identifying the big moving vans on the freeway, in easy sight of the flat, hard blue sheet of saturated Saline water, where now the fog spread North and upward, immersing the Airport. 

 

His mother pronounced their tiny hub metropolis tooe-lee, and called the mist tooe-lee fog, because that is what it was called it in her California childhood home. She would resent the LeBaron breakfast, be outraged that he had not spent the time with her.

 

She had made too few emotional inroads with his half polig children, who went with their father to buy wholesale on polig days from polig wholesalers. His children had their closets segregated, their schoolchildren did not even make their own trendy clothes but never really relaxed in them. They loved to go with their father on shopping days. He did not partake of other customs, but doggedly violated Utah’s Jim crow commercial policies. 

 

He worked for the church and said being nosey was just his job. He was an investigator. The blue-grey and clotting mist, which Bruce referred to as zero visibility, clung low along the runways, conealing the briney wetlands, concealed to the East beneath it.

This morning, according to the Farrah Fawcett clone KSL weather lady on Karrinaís PDA. the Too-lee fog would clott, then blow out of the valley with the Great lake at its sump, revealed as less substantial than it looked by the rising of a trickster sun. 

 

It was a prediction endorsed confidently by a cheery, insomniac, oh-so-Happy-Valley KSL news staff who dreaded bad news. The reporting of bad news, any bad news, ran contrary to the Mormon cultural ethos of stoic optimism.

 

KSL promised that the mist would thin over the silver Lake mirror, then be whished off by the new broom of an obliging Wind from the Northeast. the prancing, bosomy, weather lady- person, was reassuring about the cleansing early morning gusts .Bruce wanted to believe, he really did. He hated gusts as much as fog, thatís why he was using the airport. even more, he hated to be late or absent. He had a literary rondevu later in the day in San Francisco with a woman named Keats.

 

Bruce watched the weather while sucking on a tic-tac thus attempting to clear his pallate of the weedy taste of Hellís Bells, his mother in lawsí least redolent milk cow. He was to meet with some of his late Aunt Kathleenís friends while in Sin city. 

 

Karinna had wrapped a bottle of hIs Grandma Mathesonís razzleberry Jam in bubble plastic for the SF editorial group. Aunt Kathleenís postumous friends,no one had been inclined to pull up his Great grandmotherís Raspberry bushes.they had spread until there were sufficient berries for all the raspberry pickers she had left behind in mortality.The Rassleberries created an impromptu reunion in the late summer and again when the pine nut cones were filled with unspilled berries at harvest. Planted by the indians only 10.000 years before, the big seeded trees had been raided by various species who preferred to consume their spoils in their nests. 

 

Aunt Kathleen had written a net series on virulence in rodent viruses for the virology group in 1997. It described how to pick pine nuts with less exposure. The CDC was culture blind in its attempts to warn of rodent viral contaminants. She had once hit the roof when Reuters warned campers ìnot to sleep in the open. In the four corners that meant taking cover in the rich dust beneath trees and overhangs--places preferred by all species for shelter.

 

Bryce would prefer to give up the blanket and tree shaking method for a more sterile pitching of cones into a trash bag .It didnít matter so much to the Utah kids, but every year some in-law raised in the miission field as the Brethren called it, would lose a spleen, or have their legs go out from under them after contact with the isotope and rodent contaminated dust of harvest.

 

Karinna and her kids had started eating Pine Nuts right off the ground soon after they had learned to walk and her family still shook her cones from the tree onto a tarp. 

The trouble was that Southern Utahís Rats were tree dwellers. It was best to avoid disturbing the fecal dust from their nests, Karrinaís mother was half Piede indian and had transmitted some genetic immunity to her offspring. 

 

 Unfortunatly their genes had been disrupted by the post WW II atomic tests. The most adaptive genes, which dealt with allergic, pathogenic and immune system disrupting contaminents.

 

Bruce suspected that his Alaya had been lost to an over warm, over long, and over wet summer that had produced over large, over succulent nuts. The Annazzazi--the ancient ones, built granaries far from their dwellings, these had resulted in their mass extinction. Too much rain instead of too little made too many rodent generation.

Karrina’s was of the old time kindreds, polygamous and impoverished for eight generations. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce was again in the black pyramids whose black blanketed caverns all softly aflutter. In the cavernous caverns, bats sounded and sang in a register not fitted to human hearing, then a darkness that smelt of cave dust and guano. Obscure rites had once, there, quickened now plundered funerial shrines. Outside, doves, flirted, cooing , as Rilke had once seen them at Karnack.  

 

Bruce would leave aeration plans for big, glassed in bluelily ponds, externally vented to prevent damage to exhibits from the ponds’ humidity, but farther on up the Nile in an imitative newly crafted stone structure. Uncle Sam had, Uncle Samuel learned, a bit of land that the Old Man wasn’t using. His namesake Samuel was just the Ky-ote to get it out of him.

 

 Peace was bad for his previous business. Since he liked it upriver,vSamuel Sr. was refurbishing the a Raj-era hill station of a failed British, and very dead entrepenuer. The idea was that hyphenated Mormons could slipp over the border with thier families to be quietly sealed.

 

Only Rosecrutions were admitted to the Rosey archives, in theory, but the property’s turn-key Mormon owners could not be kept entirely out. Matriculated Archeologists were accepted to the  Bacon-Pratt Endeavor as Bruce named it.  

 

His mother and sister twice visited on a lose lips sink ships basis.  Linda, rebelled, arguing that she deserved her chance to talk about her travels in the ward, pouted and sulked and badgered her son with endless but I don’t see whys, all the other sisters in the ward etc., etc., etc.

 

Bruce wondered---Why had his queer dream beastie called him Daddy?  She was just saying Da and had gotten to Dadu when she died.  Bruce could tell when Karinna was thinking about Alaya--her eyes welled up, teared up. 

 

Bruce mused--perhaps cognition after death shared a  dream field with a discreet dream memory with fluttering tags of day.  Perhaps imagination and  memory were intensified beyond the veil, as by 3rd stage sleep.  The Airport clinic felt that the more restorative deep, dreamless sleep should be preferred and encouraged. 

Too little made children fractious, cranky, hyper, deranged thier immune systems particularly those from the lambing ground. Alaya had died there at Karina’s breast at 18 months old. Karina’s ‘‘If at first you don’t succeed. try, try again”  attitude, was bewailed by Aunt Kathleen’s Provo Gathering Place and Utah County Crisis line friends.  These favored family planning. 

 

Karinna met an elderly college friend of thier Aunt Kathleen on the elderly matriarch’s Jungian Fairy Tale site.  The kids called her the March of Dimes lady, an occupation that led her to  abhor the pluck that brought Celeste to birth 4 months after Alaya died.   

The March of Dimes lady had born 7 children im her time, seeing only 5 grow to aduthood in San Francisco’s Irish Sunset District. Livvy and some of Aunt Anne and Mag’s children came from Bruce’s Cousin, the Stork, an accomplis of the Senior, long Aunt Kathleen’s college friends, who snubbed  her out of over education.

 

Karinna’s second birthing  was a time of black humor, bitter jokes, laughter that rattled dry as tall, husked grass. Celeste, the B plan baby, swelled her belly.  They lay Alaya in a  family Cemetary out behind Karina’s Aunt Anne’s Sinaloan Ranch just as Karinna’s milk went dry with Daddy Bruce’s second girl baby. Celeste laid her claim to her mother’s milk as the Sinaloan Sycamores turned brown and yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

Dreaming, Bruce sat beside his glorified ancient  Egyptian swamp. He’d meant to do more with the pond. Life yielded strange smells, like the smell of acts of generation. When was now? Was there a dimension where he had comitted a genuine oversight, missed an  important date. Bruce was not  dressed?  

 

He must make a note to dress and make his way to the airport  soon, but everytime he woke. His lopsided heart pounding, he thought he should have done something about the alarm clock yesterday instead of leaving it to Karinna’s brother/oldest son, Kerry, the Goth, so different than he had chosen the gut blasting musical selection--  “I hate the government.”

 

Bruce had achieved a respectable life witout his widespread openion being known, his word having been his bond. Even his promise to the Rosey’s odiferous Lily pond would be kept. Bruce sent great Gold Carp back with Uncle Sam to eat as many mosquito larvae as possible.

 

The dream had sharpened his grief as time had sweetened the pond. Now Bruce scribbled a list of unfinished chores.  Bruce had been a good providor, a good teacher-- He knew most everything about English except, as young Kerry had once observed, why Fish and Pharoh ought not both to start with an F.  

 

Bruce team taught with Karinna in the last days before his first mission. They had talked about pharohs and fish, looking at Karinna’s prints for their basement hope house, carefully kept from a high school honors project and Bruce’s  Egyptian chapel which she had designed with selected tomb reproductions and translated text on the walls. One thing about the offspring of pluraliry, the girl’s did know how to design, build and wire a house.

 

The days of his second mission--blurred in the underside of the surface tension which toppled Alaya’s sunny shelf. There Karina dawdled his  second baby Celeste, and the three still missed Bruce’s land of lost content. 

 

Bruce was restless whereever he was but in the land of retrospect he found some small peace.  Though Celeste was not walking yet, the dreaming Bruce again talked himself into a ticket on a quick buddy plan to Egypt, babies under two free. Karinna said good bye to her megafamily--a teary airport business which his family refused to attend if Karinna’s family came.

 

Now neither young nor old. in the way, in the middle of the way, Daddy Bruce Bunny soaked in a mirrored memory of Sting -Fly springs, up with Andrus cousins in Orderville. Summer evoked a simmering passion for Bruce’s  Karinna, a steamy  youthful kissing cousin affair.  That she had turned a blind eye to it made his mother feel that she at fault for her star son’s fatal flaw. 

 

Karinna had been first to reject and at last embrace Bruce’s unsteady attempts. Bruce and Karinna were cousins, after all, but single blessedness eventually stuck in thier craws.  Linda did not expect the silly business of her Bruce’s polyg girfriend to last, but she played along, at first.

 

Unfortunatly for his mother’s false pride, her valadictorian’s novia had faithfully awaited his return. She added a certificate program in Range Management from BYU’s Salt Lake Extention to her teaching credential. Karinna, when his wife,  had moved in with her mother and had snagged a coveted teaching position in the Alpine primary School, where the academic and oldhippy residents were all but betrayed their pride in thier stubborn religionist holdovers.

 

Now, Karinna cuddled towared her husband as she wrote on her night computer. She nudged Bruce, who mumbled beggingly “Later.”

 

“Whatcha dreaming about, Sweetpea?’’

 

‘’Pregnant, Bruce moaned, such a dear  thing, and to be heavy with child and so distant. . . pregnant.”

 

‘’Which little girl, which is pregnant?’’ Karinna shuddered, needing to know. ‘’Not Livvy.’’ Karinna suggested.

 

‘’Livvy? Where’s Olivia.’’

 

 

 

 

The  rebellion of the Anders children and Karinna’s in-town-for school siblings and accomadating cousins lasted well past Bruce’s bedtime. Resolution of the crisis had taken  considerable negotiation and diplomacy on the part of Kary Lynn and her cheeky Future Poligs of America steady boyfriend. 

 

Karinnachecked out too saying she had a test in the morning.  The kids called the on duty shrink at the Airport rec center for advice on how to manage the Emergency.  The shrink on call told Karina’s oldest to give the brats thier heads.  She slammed the nursery door on the insurgency so emphaticly,  that the Airport shrink held his cellular away from his ear. Kary said “That was easy.”

 

The shrink said that with full bigger and grup disengagement it was likely that the matter would run down more neatly, like a drum banging bunny badly in need of a  duracell battery change. 

 

The trouble was that Daddy going on a trip on his Birthday day, ruined by a grant that had payed for Bruce’s tuition to some big bunnny conference in Sin City that he couldn’t even tell them anything about.  

 

Birthdays  were important, the kids argued, like Christmas,  Jesus’ birthday, a serious matter. This was like the year  the dogs got in the house and tipped over the tree and trampled all the presents out to Grammy LeBarons. main Ranch, the family Yuletide hub. 

 

They would remember this Daddy Bruce bunny and his brother Sammy’s birthday that way, the day of the big important Sin City conference that even Great Uncle Sam was in on. Thier family council over whether Daddy-Uncle Bruce was allowed to go to work on his birthday should include everybody. Kerry Garth, called generally the Goth, assured his big sister that he’d his only role in the controversy to prevent violence or distruction of property.

 

They couldn’t just have Uncle Sammy over and sing The Circle Game and have their Carousel Cake like always?  They had to know the whys.   It couldn’t be THAT important.

 

They wanted to march into Daddy Bruce Bunny’s room and demand an explanation. It was then that they realized that one of the biggers had silently put the time out chain on the outside of the door.  The little bunnies began to bawl in concert, the cousins yelling and screaming supportively.

 

The Goth put on Heidi, their  lids closing one by one and Kary and the Goth and his girl put a kingsised quilt over  their cried out charges, accidentally  covering both cat and rat, grey to the point of being bluish.  Their blue rat poked her nose out quizzikly and shook the blanket off her head as their California wild tabby cat began to purr.

 

The children slept on, their breathing slowing and deepening.  Karinma checked in and slipped away, climbing in where Celeste and Rigel had fallen to sleep with their Daddy. There about the heads of the young coiled many dreams, bringing the family’s dream field to critical mass. As it happened, the thirteen year old Alaya had heard the whole thing.

 

The blue rat crept into her wicker basket, lined with torn rags.  The youngest hangers on were mostly from nearby ranches.  Annie and Meg liked to keep thier kids in school  in Mexico until their Spanish was in firm. Meg’s father had been Chinese by half. His father had joined  his Chinese family there after the railroads were built, bought, payed for but before they were nationalized by Mexico.

 

Karinna turned on her Mini Mac and cut some time  for her BYU paper: Reversing Desertification. The Harmony Shrink was more interested in how Karina was doing than about desertification but said that it sounded like the issues were inseperable.  True, their rug rats had been making big plans, troubling plans, to prevent their Daddy’s birthday escape. 

Cars could be stuffed and unstuffed, TP hosed fom trees, but hearts required  much more. Reversing the desertification of the Southwest might take aeons, depending on rainfall.  Turning sand into soil was niether  quickly or easily done. And angry polig children left angry. They had were not unlike ravaged soil,  thier families had practiced polygamy, here and there and unhindered, for Eight generations.

 

 

Bruce’s underwived diplomacy put food on the table. Daddy Bruce’s talents were underused, though sometimes Bruce felt entitled to leave patience at the door, like muddy shoes in Winter . Six days shalt thou be Mr. Nice guy, Karina’s father often said, and on the Seventh raise holy hell.

 

From 7-11 PM and on weekends he who brought the Melchesedick Priesthood into his apparently disinterested family was  valued for it.  A child who turned the TV either up or down learned the meaning of the axiom ‘’Let sleeping dragons lie.” 

 

 Sometimes Bruce read or scribbled in the margins of the New Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, a leather journal he kept chair side.  Bruce got two for one credits for his time working on the text. He read it to the children  playing Checkers and Chess with Kary, Celeste and the Goth .

 

The New Alice physics and astronomy book was for grade schoolers, in the beginning, then got gradually more difficult like an old timey reader. The children played  Clue while he worked on his book. Death with poison in the kitchen, a Black Winter Rose left on a high bookshelf? Perhaps it was the Colonel with a knife in the study? Karina plied her domicillary diplomacy by day and through Bruce’s  dreaming  nights. There the White Rabbit barked anxious orders in Bruce’s sleep. 

 

There he bemoaned his fate, recited Puck the fairies’  lines from the Midnight Summer’s dream.  He chided their eldest girl Celeste for chasing tacyons until she had left time behind, a velvety black all around her. 

 

Celeste tried his patience by interposing ever more difficult postulates between her Daddy Bruce’s snores and  snorts. Bruce wanted his dreams, but only told Grammy LeBaron, at first, about his visits from Alaya. 

 

 Without his guiding dreams he was never sure what to write in his Alice Book.  Celeste in Wanderland was a pregnant and extinct sea mammal, a twin to his dead Alaya, who engaged in metalogues with her father.  Waking was like rising to the surface of blue lake too quickly. 

 

Knock on wood, Bruce hoped embellish the logic book Carrol had outlined before he died.  Lewis Carroll had had left behind a trail of argumentative bread crumbs. These argued whether they were on the trail or not, since few passedthis way--a hungry crow.

 

And Poor Hansel and Gretel.--How would they  find welcome at home. They had gathered no mushroom or herbs that day, sobbing, not old enough to know which were good to eat. They would surely get  licked if they returned with the wrong things. They stalled-- gossiped with a wizard on the path who queried them: posed endless logical conundrums.

 

Whatever his Grandmother and Mothers’ snitting at Bruce’s Swiss Bank Accounts,  turning to bitter ice at Bruce’s marriage to Karinna.  Bruce’s prissy family bewailed their shame at Karinna’s poligs. His family said with pity, that he could somehow change them, but they threw away all the nice clothes he bought them and kept to thier funny ways.

 

Each member of Bruce and Karinna’s family had plenty to do to keep their mind off the lost love of his monog bigot family. The Goth was the only one who really sniped at his Grandmother. She sniped at him in return. comparing him to the deceased Great Aunt Kathleen who had once worn  a bikini at Veyo hot springs. 

 

Mother and sister rented her a modest swimsuit, but none fit her broad shoulders and the suit pulled her back, compressing her vertabrae. The hot water eased her the pain of the too small suit but did not mute the agony of her heart.

 

Years flew past. She paled and her rubber knees  weakened  until she was no more than a groaning puppet. Living a long life as though shackled  in chains of gravity,  their Grandmother listed her errors every time she was mentioned, and their Goth was going down a twin path to ruin.

 

He was no laggard, however often his Father’s detractors charged him with that fault. One day a week each of Grammy Le Barons families did  the farm chores out to their grandma’s at  5 AM .  A big Breakfast first, then into the saddle by six, and when they left, a big bag lunch of fresh food for school.  

 

Grammy’s Le Baron’s bread was impressive-- thick hunks of warm brown bread spread with their Grammy’s honey from her beeswaxed hunks of farmer’s cheese ripened in her cellar or Mexican crema.  Sometimes fresh picked lettuce and summer’s new-pickled cucumbers, green tomatoe chutney with cheese and butter and a big bottle of root beer.

 

Karinna’s job was to employ her time, patience, and diplomacy to manage the details of her family’s rewarding but complex live.  

 

The school therapist recommeded that she find another family to do  the chores or just keep them out of school for the day.  It was the morning after the big rebellion and their kids weren’t fit company. It was unlikelythat they would be able to concentrate.

 

Bruce could be long gone when the children woke to undo the petty vandalism that would follow the meeting. Karina went back to bed and to sleep having to crawl into and then fight for her place at Bruce’s back. 

 

The nursling Rigel howeled and kicked Livvy, who had awoken, in the back. Livvy licked back, nearly landing her little brother on the floor but Rigel clutched the edge of the bed. He whimpered and Bruce handed him back to Karinna. She opened her nursing Bra to him, hoping he would go back to sleep.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Bruce thought of his dependents as industrious good fairies and paid them  for big people’s work. There was poverty in the family, so they’d made a United Order and as in any such family trust, the best settled in life took the worst hit.  The Order made money seem more sacred--work for the able, and to each according to their need, it all worked around to work out.  Bruce left Karina with money for help if she needed help but could not expect any from Bruce’s Liberty Park bench relatives, and his Mother’s bench house, long had been the ancient shores of Lake Bonneville.  

 

Bruce expected clean clothes in his closet, his shirts starched  and pressed and his dinner  ready when he came through the door.  No child  might interfere with his departure time.  This was crucial.  Puntuality underscored Bruce’s authority at his crazy quilt of jobs.  It was this punctiliousness that maintained his prestige and that of his clients. Prestige that the Church turned   into money.  Intelligence and Diplomacy were not an easy jobs to describe or define.

 

The Church Organisational Behavior Specialist did a fine job. Bruce, as a personal attache to the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Bruce’s underlings called on the church fathers as well. 

 

When Livvy was little, after thier missin, Karinna ran a morning joy-school for toddlers. There was a a cooperative joy school song for doing almost everything. and there was Gummy bag.   It ate their toys at night and  coughed them up in the morning.  Gummy bag also did laundry--swallowing their dirty clothes at bedtime. In the morning it left them. still in gummy bag, clean and folded.

 

Karinna was Bruce’s Sabbath helpmeet,  Karrina working hard to keep her husband’s  cogs greased and running.  Karina got the kids out of Bruce’s hair when he needed sleep. Karinna took the children on Sunday to her mother’s to play with their cousins and go to family church. Karina’s Mother Le Baron and her old folks visited with thier daughters, sisters and now retired cousins.  

 

The old ranch wives did light work until their bodies failed completely. Grammy Le Baron lightened  the work of the merry hands at her disposal with sayings-- ‘Many hands make light work,’ and I can’t is a sluggared too lasy to try,  ‘Moderation in all things. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.’ these axioms flowed out of her,but shuddered and held the line when the fruit of her loins said ‘The Scripture that says....” 

 

Karinna was no homebody.  On weekends, for the sake of her grades, she took the kids to her mother’s to help with the ranch work all day or she’d take the ranch truck to drive  out to Ibapah to visit their Aunt Ramona. So did Karina’s brothers’ wives and sister-wives, their children and their half brothers and sisters.  Karinna brought  Bruce a plate of dinner after Karina’s family had church and Sunday dinner afterward.  

 

Bruce had bought a house in a patrician ward that Karinna disliked for the most part.  Bruce went to the modern Church alone most weeks unless he could talk Celeste into going with.  Karinna didn’t like the new hymns, the shorter meetings, the truncated version of Church History intended to play well South of the Border or in Asia.

 

Karrina’s alibi was an invalid Aunt and sister. They still liked to go to Church in their home ward, so she took her children to her Aunt’s Church.  It was true that Ramona had an Aunt who lived near Wendover whose husband had got Horse Fever and died.  

 

She liked to have Church at her house and it was more convenient to meet there for Karinna, they enjoyed small throated renditions of the old songs and to break bread with them.

 

The Apostle with whom Bruce had most to do counciled discretion in his family affairs, and if a fib was needed for the comfort of the weak in faith, so be it. In Bruce’s prestigious position Karinna’s Poligymous roots showed.  This did not help him with his mudslinging, cutthroat subordinates at Bene-life.  Polygamist elders were there thought of as‘Old people doing bad things.

Until  Statehood came at the turn of the Century, a man of Education, Prominence or Capital was expected to support more than one family.  The sadder the new wife’s story and the more ragged her waifs the better suited she seemed, Terror and tradgedy lay behind in the old world and hard work and privation  in the new. Women who immigrated from the East End and Scotland’s scorched Clachan’s tfound a chance to rebuild, The mill scarrs cut deep, and there were only red petticoats and high apron Springs for those not strong enough for Weavers 14 hour days. 

The principle  of polygamy did level the gradient twixt rich and poor. Karinna wifely duties were preformed and so Bruce could not comolain of her.  She bribed her brood to sleep after their rowdy Sabbath play with warm chocolate mixed 2 parts with Le Baron rootbeer. 

Controversy surrounded  its 5 percent alchohol level and the herbs her mother put in it to bring on infant sleep.  To Karinna these seemed a blessing--Karinna cultivated camomile,  echinachea and valerian root for the sleepybye recipe. 

When the kids were asleep Karinna slipped into something nice she’d snagged at sCMI and lay down, curling her body around her husband’s slight one.

On winter nights the children built a fire in the stove. They roasted pine nuts on pie plates while their father, if he was home, snored in his chair. 

He sometimes woke for Karinna’s bed time stories, but they made him drowsy and he was not long awake, Karinna’s stories made their lids droop  together heavily--gravity and sleep held their heads against the Karati mat.  Their Karate Master disapproved of the undisciplined freestyle kick fighting on the TV, 

 The Le Baron cousins took Karate from the same teacher , lowering the tuition by organising the class and producing the students  with regularity.  

Their Master could tell when they had been cheating, but said that if they focused on the divergences between the martial arts schools and the hand to hand TVcombat, 

They would  better anticipate their adversaries weakness.  Karinna took Dance classes at the Y where there was a Cappadocio Master who taught African  Dance Department.  She did  a children’s section Capaddocio toned the muscles for fighting, and coordinated the muscles for its freestyle pairing.

Karrina’s youngest brother Kerry, the Goth, lived for the martial arts. These were classes where he could make  friends, battle scarred and eclectic outgroupers,   He pursuaded his mother to take Drunken monkey with him.  It was an art which allowed old warriors or amputee’s to fight by strategem and clowning instead of strength.  

That and  Tai C were taught  through June in the Provo City Park, or at the Eldred Senior Center in the winter. It was the director’s idea.  He had gotten the idea from the common sight of Televised oldster training in Chinese squares and parks.

Karinna helped teach the kidsclasses so they couldn’t kick her kids out.  Their Uncles used their fists to work out any differences and she never wanted her children to go to violence as often as other branches of the family did.  One of her cousins was confused when the Goth he swung for warent at where he swung for ‘em, and he tried more than once.

Karrina  bemused her relatives when she took up the drum. The vacaros came from their houses, and those who had held down the farm during the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa counseled them to  go back North for awhile.

The Vacaro took up the beat and the children began a payfull, miiroring acrobatic dance. Then Kariina took up the dance and her children crept onto the cement dance floor and joined the dance, down to Livvy, danced in clown suits, 

This associated  the import of the hobby somehow with Halloween and jamies and put her in the craft shack making masks a la’ Pirrot and Piroette. On the last day she read  Robert Frost’s ‘The West t Ruuning Brook” and said it made her think of her first baby, Alaya, who had died.

 There were  Summers could be rough when the extended kith and kin met in July.  arguing about land, industry, the folly of over-romanticising the mariages of the Young, 

A novio or novia could settle the score with a flashy show of rancherismo and horsemanship after a long day  trashing cement.  August was the season for would be family members to strutt their stuff. Bruce found this distastefull,  He dressed way down and found a stand of Cottonwoods where he could spread out his books and work,  As long as he had money to cover his odd egg work, he was exempted from ranch and farm labor.  He went on moolight rides and when it was time he worked through haying.

The Elderly brethren understood Bruce’s  position and payed himfor something that was 1/3 sabbatical, and 1/3  anthropological research.  He also helped them feel that the world of their childhoods was being maintained, though as authorities in the Church, they could do little more than fail to find the way of plurality distastefull in public.  Still, their limos drifted through Dunfy in late July, trailed by a convoy  including children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren--all anxious to show off whatever the kids  up North were wearing and what they were doing. They stayed up late seeing what the A.V.,  Kerry the  Goth could animate with his Game cube. 

When they drifted off on the trampoline, in their heads coiled many dreams, tales and a sense that nothing was long ago.  Keeping the Church to the old ways was one responsibility of the Brethren. If there was a danger to the Church retreat to find the way of truth deny abattle--’til the Second coming of Christ if need be.

They must also cope with the new.  That was also the responsibility of men who had risen to the top of the Benificial Life pyramid of success, Bruce was the direct liason between  its Presidency and Board of Directors to its parent Corporation. 

The  Corporation of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ waz adminitered by the poor suffering, sonambulent, Emperor and his variously sonambulent Imperial Guard.  The Grailmasters, Wounded Healers. the Fisherking, Amfortas.  Profuzly bleeding without end

It was not the Bretheren’s responsibilty to be young, but to  think and comprend the World, for here dwelt their empire . It was their responsibility to continue to lead the weak in faith through a complex world.  It was Bruce’s job to keep them in clothes, or to tell his Emperor  and his aged guard when they truly had no clothes. Such matters must not come to the notice of their Devotees.  

A very proprietary matter, was that the top Bretheren had many families who were no less polygamous or irradiated than Karinna’s, and that was a consolation.  How could they leave their Church to men little aquainted with its fractures and failings .  

Bruce’s Great Uncle Sam had been asked to arrange for the building of a temple in a remote Oasis , including the provision of electric latrines for the nomads and hay for their camels. *

Bruce’s one time novia  for 16 years  his wife, cuddled towared him in his restive sleep.  Bruce rolled onto his back and  Karinna put down  pad and stylus and nestled her head on his chest. Livvy snuggled into his other side.  Fourty-four, his wifely Karina  resembled an Oil of Olay polygraph commercial--a before picture, Her skin  had been blistered  and scored by the  Provo and Nortena sun, 

 

DNA, RNA and mitrochondrial treatments for aging were  endemic but controversial.   Aging, once believed to be  inevitable, had been broken down by Great Brains into  root processes of influenced by multiple triggers and etiologies.

Bruce beleived treatments sheilding survivors from the isotopic  effects of  radiation their downwind born parents passed to their children.

Prevention would be cheap for the Church Insurance Company.  Assistive care  reqired by the decrepitude and  long confinement at home or in seclution were unaffordable for the saints, even for Mormons in the first world. 

The brethren feared that rapid population growth  fueled by longevity might reqire the consideration of a federal one child policy, China, had outlawed longevity treatments. 

The current Chinese policy, which Bruce had studied,  allowed two children, in many cases, per couple. Partners wanting one child or fewer might transfer their certificate to a sibling or cousin, Thus Cinese 3 child and 4 child families were becoming less rare in the country.  Childless families common wit urbanization.

Chinese couples who had a deceased or incarcerated sibling might apply to bear the one child that their brother or sister otherwise might have had.

 In Utah 5 child families were fine except for poligs. Karina and her family’s size were  controversial from the first overcast morning when Bruce brought his sweet Karina home for breakfast to meet his raging mother, Linda, and his father Kirk. 

 

These gave Karina all the regard she might reserve for  orphaned  field rodents or a coyote pup brought home to tame.

 

His mother-in-law Linda sported 13 grandchildren.  Linda didn’t want  anyone to say she’d neglected  the castigation of Bruce’s wife.  The apple. she said, alluding to her wandering Bruce, never falls far from the tree.  That faith sustained Linda. Linda had stood in the long line at Bruce’s reception.  Dutifully Linda arranged the table flowers, displayed her mastery of turning square card tables into round ones. 

 

 

 

Linda borrowed white table cloths to cover round table tops and the Ward’s fancy linen and crystal. Bruce, not poor, bought his jewel a showy diamond and a wedding spray of  white orchids--professionally crafted bouquet.  He payed for a the reception’s  catered dinner. 

 

Bruce’s mentors could not stand or even sit for long.  They were elderly Church Historical repositories who might be too tired to eat once they got home from his mother’s energetic extravegansa.  Her last effort for this errant son, who, she was convinced would marry other wives, having not held himself completely apart.

 

They came, even though Karinna was born into polygamy, and his Karinna’s family’s bright cotton dresses clashed with Bruce’s sibling’s, neices and nephew’s Casche Vally chique. Linda  thought Karinna’s family absurd, giving the lie to her son Bruce’s role as a personal attache to the Brethren. Bruce endowed with  his pricy medical monitoring, his injections and  bloodwork.  

 

Covertly, he evaluated and explained new technologies to the Elderly Mormon Gerontocracy who were divided about anti-aging technologies, removed as they were but scarcely, from the days of cart and horse, wagon and mule, and universal loyalty to the pricy pricipal of polygamy practiced coverty by members of the Salt Lake’s aristocracy.

 

Linda, Bruce’s mother, was not one to condone the plural marital practices of Karina’s families’ modern  Poligs.  These, having few TV’s, had missed the Romney-Hinkley-Matheson PR machine’s protective efforts. a portion of their people still adhered to  the church’s early  ways.  

 

Bruce thought this ironic--few knew what aged spin doctors were capable of  if their reigns were held too loosely and Bruce’s touch was light.  He learned all he could of them, curious about thier days and ways.  Talking about the books of his Aunt Kathleen that his Uncle Samuel had ordered him to turn into a series of movies. 

 

Bruce’s cheif charge at his rooms in the Hotel Utah, the jewel in the crown of Mormonism, had once been a propogandist for the World War II Office of War  Information, and the aura of secrecy lingered. Whatever Linda said or had not said, biting her tongue,  her daughter in law, now long her son’s Eternal Companion, and his Karinna,’her family, had failed not to follow the council of the early Bretheren in the matter of their marriages.  

 

Bruce his mother feared, would abandon the true Church in time.  Her parents, undeniably,  were covenant breakers.  Karinna was her mother’s first daughter and child.  Karinna’s mother, her father’s first wife married in the Mesa Temple, conceiving Karina almost immediatly. Surely, surely, her son’s family would stray from the Kingdom, having failed to keep himself apart from evildoers.

 

A faint smile tickled Bruce’s cheeks, submerged  into REM sleep, drifting about in the matrix of his, his people’s past, his  preceeding present and hoped-for propitious future  as Bruce’s mother’s embarassing conversation peice , part faith, part folly.  Bruce, her son, had been on the special Church payroll  since he received a covert call  to prepare the Egyptian Visitor’s Center, (EVC) in Geesa, near  the Great Pyramids. 

 

Bruce, a bachelor, had devoted his last Utah, cricket-soaked nights, to his fiance, leaving his mother to lmagine her exemplary son overseeing  text selection for a Church produced virtual interactive tour of a torch  lit composite Pyramid. 

 

Karina curled about him as he worked late, even though he expected that his mother  would think of a way to turn the dread secret to her advantage.

 

That last evening before Bruce’s departure, Karinna had promised over and over again to wait for Bruce as Bruce promised to come home and marry her again and again, the two in one anothers arms, weeping their promises into one another’s ears beneath the rising moon where the Le Baron sheep dogs whimpered in Canine compassion and frensy. While his mother fumed--she had fixed a big dinner and invited family friends, but had not told him about it.

 

They had no need to whisper in thier own rooms in those years. Bruce shared an East temple brick apartment block with his Brother Sam and two  brethren of a single persuation.

 

The oversised brick apartmentblock  sported ample rooms each with a bath in the years when each room held a wife and her younger family. Some of the clothes closets were bigger than the maid’s closet just off the kitchen.  It had an elevator and private garage, private storage, and a big common laundry area.  A memory of past opulence and familial bliss, all perched directly atop the Wasatch Fault.  Eat, drink and be merry, for tommorow we die.

 

 

When he left for his mission Karinna moved into the maid’s room and cooked for Bruce’s brothers and roomies so she could begin her more earnest study for her BA in  Range Management.  The Master Program required that she spend time in the field, about this she fussed and bothered about it, until a professor hinted that in the fields might satisfy her requirements.

 

Bruce and her father payed her tuition and looked forward to her matriculation.  Karina hoped to assist the poorest families in their family United Order with the restitution of their land.

Bruce dreams, drifted on  blue, shallow, twilit seas, turned again in his dream to  prepararation of hyroglyphics for the plaster  EVC walls.  

Beyond its circle the dark seemed suffused with spirit and light, with the long-lived Ra. 

 

Then the dream shifted to brilliance.  Bruce dreamed that he was again his mother’s San Lorenso,  He looked down at four  tiny footprints cast in the cement of the walkway to his paternal great grandparents’ door.   

His mother and Aunt  had proportionably big feet, and padded about the yard with the seven neighborhood girls topless and puppyish, Five year old Kathleen and  two year old Linda’s feet promised  they would be big girls when they were grown. Bruce cast them in plaster, renting a car and driving  across the Emperor Norton Bridge. 

When he took them back to his new house at Alpine at its Happy Valley North Eastern edge, Karinna and her mongrel brood cast them in clay, glased them, and baked them in the Airport Rec Center’s craft center kiln.

Bruce’s mother seemed displeased by the plaques, by Bruce and Karinna’s house,   Linda did not want to remember the East Bay days when she and her older sister were girls and slept together in the girl’s bed.  Later they got bunks and Linda did not want to remember that, Let  alone commemorate the days when her sisters slept together in the bottom bunk.  

Bruce had taken the ignored cast at the first house he remembered living in.  His Dad was always working and Grandpa  yelling bad words.  They saved money  for their new house in Salt Lake and for their new car. by living with Grandma and Grandpa,

 

Bruce drove right to the house and asked to  take thecasts.  The woman who had bought it from Linda’s mother was old and pleased. She had wondered whose tiny bare feet were just outside her back door for many years.  

Linda  suggested angrily that Bruce should keep the glased cast in his family if he thought her childhood had been so much fun.  

Another time Bruce and Linda, having reconciled, walked to Bruce’s grade school.  They climbed the  fence instead of crawling under the gate as Kathleen had always done, Karrina cried when Linda rejected her grandchildren’s canary yellow glased present and called her Harmony airport inhouse MSW.  

The grey haired Vetran of many familial wars thought it best for them to repeat the process, taking a cast of just Linda’s foot prints.Karinna could make a cast of these. Truly, though, Bruce did want the four foot ceramic cast, Celeste happily  hung it on the West wall of their sunny kitchen.  

Bruce liked to be asked to take it down.  Sometimes one of Karrina’s brothers or sisters who were big  took it down for them. Celeste asked  sad questions about their Grandma and their Aunt who had died.  

She liked to run her small fingers along the heels of their Grandma and Great Aunt’s  Kathleen who was dead’s feet. Livvy put her little fingers over the round, raised  toe prints.  

  The big kids. their mother’s brother and sisters children always had lots of work to do--work out to their Grammy’s farm on the lake, they ate dinner, did dinner dishes to do and went home to do  homework.  

Karina studied for her BYU  classes until dinner time at her mother’s and afterwards read and sang with the littles, as Celeste had long called them. Then groggy, they put on their bunny jammies.   

Karinna studied with her book light until Bruce came home on the nights that he did come home.  Then Karinna and Bruce crept off to their love nest until the sun came up on Mt. Tymp or Rigel came crawling up the stairs in the big alpine house looking for his Breakfast.

Bruce took the platter and decided to help the kids take a cast of their feet, bake  and glase it.  

Celeste and theLivvy made the plaques so Karina could have them for Christmas. The craft lady at the airport helped them and kept their secret. In his dream he ran his fingers along his mother and aunt’s tiny feet and touched their tiny toes.  He felt a heaviness for those sisters of seventy years before, sad at whatever it was that had  barricaded the love  that had greived them both. 

 

His mother’s priggishness had not left room even for their helping their Aunt when she had encephalites. The  Egyptian tombs  revealed aeons, not decades.  

Bruce’s children would turn from the carefree happiness of their childhood to an adults more cynical  faith in the blink of an eye. At the edge of the abyss, Bruce looked at his aging body, into his personal abyss,

and blinked.

Would Bryce, his lucid dream-self wondered, chose the path of age or some newer biological alternatives--to stay younger  than the average bear. He paid the highest premium available on his medical and life insurance, having no other private place to stash his capitol.  He felt self satisfied in the arrangements he had made for Karinna and his family’s medical futures, then cycled into a lotusless, dreamless sleep.

 

CHAPTER, TEN, THE COACH

 

The Pilot's association had the mandate to asess the psychological effects of radiation--same old same old. A 20 minute barrage of Health questions about how he felt about his radiation exposure, delivered by a first generation android, set Bruce to quavering,  like a jelly mold on the CHristmas table with kids jiggling it this way and that.  

 

The machine, who always wore the same clothes, sat in the same chair in the same office. The hospitality staff was efficient.  The staff never needed breaks to eat, drink or deficate.

She needed a differnt job. Handing out the mesh bags for children’s dry clothing at a Utah swimming pool might please her.  She had been programmed to  respond to children.  

 

The Frequent Flier’s family Association passed on an offer of a more recent model, how ever the science of android development had progressed.

Then, after his baby died, humiliated, Bruce fell into his father's sullen hostility, withdrawing into prayer or silence. He hated it when his medical files were unsealed. Harmony, the parent project,  had declassified them because his Uncles, his mother’s brothers had a genetic disease.  

He could seal them  again by Application. Karina  couldn't, wouldn't touch forms refered to her baby's death, dissected by researchers whose indifference had made life a long hell for many.  Karinna was sick of elderly radiation specialist with a faint German accents and a Nazi way of passing judement on her family and their ways.

 

He'd never accept his apology from Congress for his rheumatism, or, if he hit the jackpot, in an Aunt Kathleenish sort of way, he’d establish a family College fund. He hoped he would.

 Bruce didn’t think lost lives ought to be assigned posthumus price tags and there were many thousand gone, lost from the persecution, or the cancer or fatal rhumatism, an unending, intermidable protien cascade. Karinna had sisters with this, and brother and sisters gone from cancer and lukemia.

 

When Karinna swelled with Celeste and Bruce needed help,  he went to a mutual cousin, a Harmony shrink, who worked at the Rec. Center once a week. He was Karina's  kissing cousin with the required credential and he had advanced laboratory access.  

 

Karinna cried over it, then decided they would have the rest of their babies from a less contaminated gene pool if they could be that organized about it.  Karrina’s doctor told her he thought she was through the change.  Rigel proved them wrong.

  

During his therapy sessions Bruce sobbed. These slpashed on the walls and bounced about the room in orbs till he went home to face his mob. Bruce complained about the Federal Mental Health people, there only to produce files for a propoganda that played down the number of deaths, the population percentage, deformaties of beloved children.  Bruce lost it.

 

Bruce’s therapist hired onto the program during a Matheson reign as governor, his administration demanded to take over parts of the Airport project.  He would not allow his constituants, guinea pigs most of them, to be emotionally bisected.  The mutagenic effects of virus and radiation grew geometrically* so as the children of the South married converts, or people raised to the North with tristate or four corners partners, the percentage stayed more or less stable.

It had no great preferemce for either the religious, un-dunct, or irreligious.

 

Better to have a Governor with roots South of Beaver. For these people would cross the line.  Bruce would.  The bombing was the undying wound of Amfortas.  Even the Republicans knew how much blood they’d lost and had been losing since 1951.  For well over 50 years.

 

Bruce lived on the bench, not far from Deep Throats' son with whom he had a mutual family truck garden interest.  He rented a plot adjacent to Bruce’s family’s plot out on Grammy La Baron’s land.

 

Redford, at Bruce’s urging, had set up funds for parents who could not pay the extortionary copying costs the Freedom of Information demanded. That was the hook, the money to get confirmatory medical records, the fiery hoops required by  exploitating declassification specialists, keepers of the gates.

 

Matheson expanded the Rec center programs started in his father’s tenure. Some intown were turned into latchkey centers.  The airport had traveking children to care for, and a middle and High School pilot project, the object of poor Daddy Bruce Bunny’s complaint. 

 

Kerry and Celeste took a listening skills class at the Rec Center and had a listening skills club at their school.  They took a grant writing class at the Rec center and the United Way gave their Mom money to teach it in the Harmony system.--the State paid for Karinna to teach a class through the PTA.

Currently, SLCI Pilot Family Program's Gentile Mental health office, as the kids called it, was on the rec floor, inconveniently above the pilot rest and diagnostic sleep module. Through Bruce’s jumbled dream he heard  shards of despair and desolation.

 

“I knew he might get ill or be laid off someday.  I grew up on garden greens on bread, but I thought if we were ever poor it would be together, as a family . . .” murmuring sifted through the air filter adding sheen upon every word--these drifted around the room, ephemeral as bubbles, then the door opened and closed and the bubbles vanished.

 

Bruce dropt into deeper sleep in an attempt to convince himself that he had no need to go to work, he was already there. The flier's wife above was an encephalitic pet rat in a cage. His Aunt Taffy had a pet rat with encephalitis. Goofy didn’t like Gerbilaid.  Bruce remembered Goofy from an early trip 

to his Aunt Taffy in California. She cried and whimpered, was too disoriented to find his mouth, and at first her body spun. Kathleen put a toilet paper roll into the cage. The rat stayed in it and it stopped her spinning.  The rat was smart, it could smell the gerbilaid in its water, her fatal flaw was that she didn’t know when to make an exception.

 

He gave a start and then went slack at the comfort of Karina at his back.  His biblical father in law, the bearded patriarch, cheating the Feds. was bedding down that night, which usually meant he was at the kids Grammy.

 

Kerry's alarm would go off and the lad was liable to wake up to distant strains of his gut blasting CD “I hate the Government.” and be up to get his brother in law/stepfather up and as far as the shower.  Kerry took jobs and gave his pay to his Gram for the garden.

 

 

Bruce dragged himself out of bed.  He stood under the shower imagining, as he had been directed by his Dream Master, that his jet lag was being pulled into a watery vortex and vanishing. Bryce made a note to call Karinna and ask her to get a brother in law over there to fix it.

 

Bruce feared he’d just get settled for the sleep test when his Airbus was ready to float up and rush off.  He could lose his sleep pod if he didn’t use it often enough.  Karinna used the pod often enough, to study there while the Children ran about the center. Now, the Pater-familii were both low on sleep.  They shared the pod with Karinna’s father and made glad use of it, Karinna's polig parents and he and his Karinna betimes.

 

Brother Le Baron had an active project going at the Stateline.  The pilots and any associates they might select got their rooms gratis and Bruce had, some years before, introduced Brother Lebaron to a former Goshute Correspondence school classmate.She looked pretty enough on the two way screen, 

and prettier in person.

 

Bruce's mother had voiced her onorous objections to his marriage to Karinna.  Karina was  fishy. "Ma," Bruce's brother Sam had argued--these particular LeBarons are 99.9% percent poligs, our genius here being the 1/1000%. If they don't mind having a fly in their soup ...or in thier ‘Moose Turd Pie--accept no substitute, look for the genuine Mooseturd incised on the bottom of the pie itself.”

Sam considered a moment and thought of his father's face, a stone wall. Then Sam went on “I had a formal introduction to our failing old Hierophant from the mucky muck Cousin President Anders himself while calling to extract my Brother and his intended from his fairest of all missions, all sugar, strawberries and cream. Sprang for a four star welcome to a premium moose turd pie family engagement dinner, did the Patriarch, but had to ask for a special dispensation to use cow patty instead, even when the recipe didn’t call for it."

 "I would have offered” his Mommy Linda pouted, “but Moose turd did sound expensive, particularly for so many."  Bruce’s father silently assested.

 

Bruce’s Elder Brother was present and confirmed that the conversation had occured "Our old maid has support in high places for her bid on old bro here.”  He regarded his mother with pious uncertainty.  

 

Karina's Grandfather, the great man, teased Bruce until her face was the color of an August Dixie tomato--He said it was said down to the lambing that his Karina put on front sippered dungarees and  pull over sweaters to her two room schoolroom each and everytime the computer was fixing to break down.  Then he broke it worse and left Kerry and his biggest sister to finish fixing it.

 

Linda pouted over Bruce’s engagement. According to Aunt Kathleen' s family chronicles  her sister had been a stubborn pouter since a preschooler. She tried to convert Kathleen to pouting, but failed. Bachelor Bruce's mother opined to those near and far that it was her right to exclude Karinna’s brightly colored D.I.  chic from her sight with derision, even outrage.

 

The polygs of Basin and Desert used to know their place. Everybody complained about it--now they were every where. Bruce had even rented a house to one of Karinna’s Goshute polig sister-wives right in To-elle, in the center of town.  

 

Linda had to listen to complaint after complaint--she owed it to her neighbors to see that her children’s lives did not raise gossip like that.  Gossip about her son, that hurt, Jacob to his brother’s Esau. To be frank, the town had expected so much for him.

 

There was a democrat in the State house .Some commentators--right out of SLC, the Church Capital, called the polygs Utah's largest minority, out numbering all the indian tribes combined.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 He was speaking into his PDA  to remember to mention  his reticence to attend his session with the pilot’s association children’s therapist, when a driver came up close behind him, as though he wanted him to pull over.  Bruce did, figuring it was family.

As the car pulled out from behind he recognized Karinna’s second sister’s car, and my, if there wasn’t a bunny driving and another in the car seat screaming for his Daddy.  His Daddy, Bruce learned when Karinna rolled down the window, was getting away.  Who might this escaped felon be? Bruce gathered that his presence was required at the family hideout at his Grammy’s.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

BREAKFAST AT GRAMMY LEBARON’S

 

 There were two wings of pods in the airport’s pro-sleep center, waiting areas with baths, and a kitchen.  One set aside for smokers and one for non smokers and non-smoking Mormons. Smokers and non smokers required seperate environments, like plants and mixed like oil and water, at least in Salt Lake.  

 

Thier airport brats played noisilly , forgetting the rigidity of their clique ridden schools. The airport the kids often had lived in different countries, heard various languages, came from countries, some of them, where they helped bead gowns in vibrant colors. Bruce Anders polyg kids in thier rainbow old fashoned dresses and high top shoes didn’t register. 

 

 Bruce’s Fear of Flying counseling was free. The state threw in marriage and family counseling for Karinna and her Aunt Annie’s and her Mexican sister-wives’ children  up North for school. Only Bruce saw Karinna’s Brother until there was a row with the therapist who saw Karinna and the children, then they all switched.

 

The therapist, the children said, was trying to say that the kids had to leave out polygamy when they grew up.  The State was making her read it.  She needed the money or she’d lose her house and wouldn’t be able to feed her kids.  ‘Livvy said the State couldn’t make them do anything but die.

 

The teacher came to the sleep pod to which  Karina's girls had retreated after their walk out on the scripted discussion. Kerry was sitting on the end of the long chaise lounge nearest his grandfather and thier stepfather’s door reading a comic book and drawing.

 

“I’m sorry,” the teacher said when she convinced the girls to open the door.  She pulled Livvy to her, and buried her face in ‘Livvy’s ringlets.

 

"I thought it would be better if I read right out of the book, since I didn’t write it." Miss. Larson went on about the horrible things that happened in  her family, way back, during the Persecutions. 

 

 At the Y it was better, Karinna had poligs in all her classes, she had poligs in her Sociology class. Mommy said she taught her kids that regulating religious practice was contrary to to the Constitution.  She said that the Founding Fathers were wise and forbade anything but equality.  Thier Grammy and garampus said so too.

 

The Dream teacher didn’t mind if they talked about it.  Like when the Goth dreamed that Bruce and the Bretheren had been taken  by  GO’ULDS.  Snakes in their heads everyone of them. 

 

 It was  not Go’ulds, but a pack of cackling  crows, his, who ran off their after-church energy in the rec certer once a week. The kids rackett drifted down  the air ducts that the smoker’s area came back up as a bunch of army talking , rabid, Gentiles.  Only the Goth was old enough to hear that kind of talk.  The non-smoking pilots area was nicer than their dark interior rooms a floor lower,  where the smokers slept, but the new rec area directly above was insulting. 

 Bruce assumed that allowing his neices and nephewsto play wild play wildly on the Sabbath  constituted sabbath breaking down to Karinna?s  Aunt Aniie’s in the now mostly Mormon Sinaloa Asian Colony.   

 

 Bruce was a Sabbath Breaker.  He was a church clerk at his home ward. He had to bow out almost every Sunday.  He wixh they weren’t so laid back.  The individual and family counseling went against his nature, worse yet against his mother and sister’s natures. 

 

Karinna’s maiden name, Le Baron,   was  a red flag waved at a bull to  the State social workers.  They didn’t care where, or which day of the week, but the State and the Governer Matheson wanted them in State subsidised counseling.  There were poligs with MSW--

G Governer said as far as his thoughts on the matter went, the more MSWs the better,

If the people wanted to see one of their

own denomination, the better quality of

counseling they received and the more likely they were to listen. 

 

It was easier, even for Bruce.

 Karrina’s counselor let her read the material printed by the  state, on assuring that everyone receiving state pay was certified Gentlile with polygamist ties had sent bile rushing into her mouth. Karinna flew down the hall to the toilet.   

 Her father had three wives and she twenty cousins and 4 Scoolaged siblings and she adored  the brats. 

 When the shift changed and her roomate found that she Karrina had not logged out on a leaflet for the scholl talent show, or tidied their side by side desks.  She flew down the hall and onto the playground.  She asked Karrina’s brother Kerry if he’d seen her.

 

 Glinda, her officemate found her sobbing with her head between her knees--”I won?t, I cant, I wont, I can?t.”  Karinna was shaking and her teeth were chattering so hard she scarcely could get the words out.  “Then don’t “ 

Her office mate skimmed the booklet--”I won’t either,” Glinda said don?t,  

 Her officemate  was a dyke who fondly remembered her first kiss from a girl--they were both twelve and had kissed boys but decided their kisses were much nicer. 

 They went to the supe and she said they both should be considered assets, not liabilities Some of the teachers didn’t know they had poligamous students let alone colleagues. 

 

They to have a question and answer brownbagger, then decide what to do about

the offensive leaflet. So of course the kids demanded to stay. If the Government. Her little Livvy made a grand show of it--yelling at the old men of the air that they were Bigots.  The Mormon smokers liked her immediatly but thought the should be allowed to sleep in the better pods if they only smoked in the smoker’s lounge or on one of the balconies.

At school Livvy got so angry that Karinna threw  her over one shoulder and hauled her out. One of her friends, a Mormon girl with a polyg Granny and tons of polig counsins passed her the pamphlet.  She was  a Goth and her teacher said she should read it.  She said she was sure that there was only  one of the Staff who would not resist.  “You certainly know the practice is illegal . . .”   THE GENTILE as the children Ever  afterwards called her read something else out of the leaflet. Their Mother pulled all her children and brothers and sisters out of school. 

 

 

 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

 As they left with his girlfriend, whose hair was half orange and half green, put Kerry’s wax teeth in and turned around to snarl at the Gentile. The G. came marching down the ramp to the door of the school.  What ever antone thinks, your children are ungoverned and ungovernance and Good Riddence to bad rubbish.  That’s what I say.”  Saying that was a mistake.  If thats what you want then we’ll just stay, thank you kindly.

‘Maybe,”Kerry’s girlfriend said in a whispered sneer that silenced the student body, maybe then you’ll be old enough that you’ll want to retire.”

 

 

 

 

 CHAPTER  FOURTEEN

 Bruce drove himself to the airport, one or more of his penitent youngsters having emptied his Honda of wadded up Newspaper. 

 La niebla fria, the mist which was more beautifully described in every language but english, was layer ofheavy.  A pondorous  inversion layer ran his hand over the fog that filled the Lehi trench.  Grinding the against the silver mist.   

 The freeway was at 100% visibillity, but lehi was blanketed with a Blue tinted laveneder ruffled mist, blue Frilled and Low-lying .  the  moon glased mist which looked like it had heap of into  a mass grave of pillsbury Dough boys.   

 Hot mist rose from Hot spring puddle on the grounds of the point of the Mountain.. Uncle Brad studied it, paddimg around the spring too blue, bleached  our solar furnace one summer.    

 Aunt Kathleen and Brad had taken him to see the greenhouses Brad had made at the point of the mountain. it was for the prison, so they could grow vegetables and sweet apples in the winter, 

 so Brad took Leon and Bruce just as the fruitbasket fruit was ready. 

 Some fish they had made ponds for were named Gourami and were in ponds made  of recycled Pioneer Brick to keep  mineral water out of the fish ponds.