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Blake was giving orders. “Take this elk fat and mince it before it gets too warm. When you’re done doing that set it near the fire, but don’t let it burn, okay? If you can, burn a lot of birch and maple without adding too much spruce wood, then collect those ashes and boil them. Let me know when you get that far, and I’ll tell you what to do next. We’ll have soap. I know Abe can heal us with some ease, but washing up with soap will help is in more ways than just keeping us from getting sick. Oh, and add a bunch of water to the deer fat before you heat it. The fat will float up and the garbage will sink. Got it?”
Jason nodded.
Lars had gotten up in the early hours of the morning and was just waking in his bedroom. When he appeared, his hair was disheveled and there was a gaunt look in his eye, but he was otherwise dressed and walking around. “I would say ‘good as new,’” he began, “but I don’t feel as good as new. That was something else, let me tell you what.” He sat beside Abe on the bower-leaf couch opposite the hearth. He watched Jason working out the ash problem for a bit, then he began to narrate the prior evening’s adventure. Abe listened intently:
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It wasn’t two shakes of a lamb’s tell after you all sprinted out yonder. In fact, I could still hear your footsteps, and you were all running! If you remember, I had just switched on the radio—say, by the way, did you find any pieces of the radio or antennas? I’m hoping a birch tree don’t know nothing about no shortwave transceiver electronics, though I don’t have my soldering iron—what’s that? It’s intact?
Well, I’ll be…
I’ll be the horse’s uncle to that monkey’s uglier red-headed woodpecker. The spruce tree was holding them, you say?
Well, that doesn’t surprise me one bit. Is there anything to eat? I’m starving. And thirsty as hell, you know. Magical healing takes a lot of water, I’m guessing. Thank you, Umezawa. And thanks for laying hands on me. You’re better than a holiness preacher from the swamps of Arkansas, I do declare. Elk? Elk tenderloin? For breakfast? Don’t mind if I do.
Anywho…
I turned on the radio, you know, and I was just setting it up to tune down to the two-meter band, where I figure they’re transmitting, getting things ready for this morning, right? Man, my kingdom for a waterfall graph, but oh, well, we’ll just have to depend on the scanner to catch them in mid-transmission. Waterfall graph? Well, it’s a broadband visual, uh, so, like, on a screen, the receiver part of the transceiver will show you the entire spectrum that you want it to. So, like two meter shortwave is, like, a hundred and forty—you know how a radio station is, like, 101.3 FM? And you set your radio to it so you can listen? No? Spotify? No one listens to the radio anymore?
Huh. Do you know what a radio station is? Right. Do you know that it has numbers? Shoot. Okay. So anyway, it’s just math. You take your three hundred and you divide the two into it, for two meters, and you’re going to get a hundred fifty, right? Wait, is my math right? Two-one hundred fifties is—no I don’t know why three hundred, Umezawa, it just is.
So, down below there is going to be the one-forties: there’s your typical two meter frequencies. I have no idea if they’re down there or just above it in the one-fifties, or even the one-sixties, like the FBI guys.
The radio signal. The radio signal! The numbers, Umezawa. So, like I was saying, if I had a waterfall graph, I could see with my eyes every modulation of every radio frequency my antenna could hear, and then I could real quick-like dial in the receiver to listen to that particular frequency, and we’d be in business.
But I don’t got one of those, so it’s all moot. No, not mute, moot, like a practice court in France. No, Jason, not a practice tennis court—listen here: you kids are getting on my nerves. I’m teaching you this for a reason! Moot. Moot! You go through the motions of reasoning out certain situations, not for any real effect, you see, but just for practice. That’s what moot means.
I was a janitor. Why do you ask?
Well, what did they call it at the last place? Vice-president for physical plant engineering, that’s what it was. That was at a little religious school down in Alabama. It was an all-black school, and it’s closed now. Funny that: the place before that was at a little religious school near New York City. It’s closed now, too. I was a janitor with a library, you could say. I just wandered around all day with rings of keys, checking behind doors where big, ugly machinery was chugging away, watching valves, and directing repair crews to the busted parts on those same old machines. Mid-century stuff: boilers, regulators, impellers, the like. Surely, you have such gear in big old post-war buildings in Japan!
College libraries are pretty cool. They have federal money to blow on all sorts of stuff, so they—yeah, I started out at a school in Chicago, little Catholic school on the west side. I played football in high school, and they gave me an academic scholarship to come play football for them. They weren’t allowed to give out athletic scholarships, but that’s what it was. My high school GPA was just over the wire for an academic scholarship, and they just dumped money all over me because I could catch a football over the middle—yes, football, not soccer—I could catch a football—take it up with the Brits. I know they call soccer football now, but they’re the ones who called it soccer in the first place. No, I don’t know. What I do know is that I can do a lot more with my feet and a ball than just kick it, so yeah, American football is real football.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Right, so the effect was that I never showed up to class. As long as I was catching passes over the middle—the athletic director’s son was quarterback. Did I mention that? As long as I caught his passes and knocked down a few linebackers on the way to the end zone, I didn’t have to know what the gross domestic product was. Don’t make me explain touchdowns and linebackers. Goals and defensemen, okay? Does that help? You know, I know soccer rules and such; why can’t you learn football rules?
So, like I was saying, as long as I knew the football field, I didn’t need to know what the earth’s magnetic field was. I also wanted to play the field, know what I mean? And it was easy, when you’re six-foot-one and a hair under two hundred pounds with a low, low body-mass-index. The defensive coach’s daughter and I hooked up on regular occasion, and my buddies warned me she was in college looking for her M-R-S degree, and—
Ugh, I swear, don’t you kids know nothing? M-R-S: Missus. She was looking to become Mrs. College Boy. She wasn’t there for a degree any more than I was, to be honest: she was hunting for a husband. Boy, howdy, boys, she could really let off a—
Uh…
You know? As fun a tale as that could be, because we’re in mixed company, let me just tell you that we enjoyed each other’s company so much that she informed me one day toward the beginning of my senior year that she was preggers. Pregnant. With a baby. So I finished off the football season, quit school, married her to make the kid legit, and started working at the school as a janitor. They gave me a few bucks extra to boss around school kids who were doing on-campus employment to supplement their scholarships and whatnot, but it was enough to get me and Jennifer a small apartment for Katelyn to be born in, and giddyap with life, you know?
Giddyap, like getting a horse started. Ain’t you ever seen a Western? Yeah, cowboys say giddyap.
Life as the vice-president for physical plant engineering can be a little monotonous, opening doors and staring at valves all day every day, and yelling at college freshmen, so I’d take the access tunnels over to the library and read the periodicals. That was what I was getting after a little while ago: colleges have to spend federal dollars on specific things, not just presidents’ salaries, so they would order in all sorts of stuff: the standard scholarly journals and the weird stuff. I started out reading the archaeology periodicals, soaking all that in, you know, but tucked in there were lots of implied questions.
For example, back in the day, the pyramids were all the rage, and they were making all sorts of discoveries about the economics of how they got built, but all underneath that was the assumption that we don’t know the mechanism. Every six months, it seemed, someone else came up with some hidden technology or other that was the answer to the riddle of getting those big stones up those steep ramps. Well, don’t you know, there was some adjacency to the weirdo journals, where they’d take up the question and answer it with either aliens or global world conspiracy, or some such.
Yeah, so I said global world. So I was nearly dead twelve hours ago, too.
I got to reading the weirdo stuff, with all its speculation, rumor-mongering, the crazy logical leaps, and the sheer impossibility of The Illuminati. For me, it was a hoot. I mean, what did I care? Jennifer was still smoking hot. I had an easy job. And the stuff being published was just reasonable enough to suspend disbelief. “Aliens built the pyramids.” That’s an easy leap to “the government is hiding the aliens who built the pyramids.” And that’s hokey stuff, right? But it’s just as easy a leap to the Fermi Paradox, right? So, the likelihood of alien visitation is sky-high, right? There’s no conclusive evidence that they’ve visited. But there’s the pyramids over yonder in Egypt, staring us in the puss.
Stuff like that. For years. I heard it all. If there was a conspiracy about aliens in the salted snack industry, well, I knew it backwards and forwards. There isn't anything on God's green earth that the sad and lonely don't have a grand-unifying-conspiracy theory connected to the Medieval Era Third-Temple World-Zionism zealots and their tattoos. A cigar is never a cigar, my friends: a cigar is a crashed alien landing-craft hidden by allies in the inner hallways of the Pentagon. I tell you what.
The overlap to the transceiver is easy-peasy, smoke and queasy. The same fellas who dedicate their lives to outsmarting the global conspiracy also operate amateur radio stations. Now, again, there’s a little something to it: if the global conspiracy is real, and we’re living evidence of its powers, both in terms of shooting down commercial airliners, and building bionic men, and in terms of changing the nature of the human mind with a puff of gas, well, the earth’s magnetic field don’t care who’s handing out licenses: you modulate the signal, send it out, and, if you got your ears on, you can hear that modulated signal from the other side of the world at the speed of light. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you. Listen to me, man!
That birch tree: it ain’t right in the head.
I ain’t even kidding: it ain’t right in the head.
I was fiddling with the programming on the radio, for just a second or two, as I was saying a lot earlier, when this birch limb reached out from the wall of the bower directly across from the counter there and slapped the transceiver out of my hands. I figured in all the commotion that it busted it all up, being that it was so important to me. I’m glad to hear the spruce caught it. That helps explain a little bit.
While the birch was whipping me, a larger spruce branch was near at hand. I couldn’t hardly tell, being whipped around so much as I was, but it seemed to me to be watching the birch branch, like a referee might watch a linebacker—might watch the fullbacks on a free kick, you know? Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if there was some sort of arrangement made in the bower itself, like a collective thing, you know, that I done in the birch sapling, so a birch tree got to get some sort of positive retribution, but only up to a certain point. The Good Book, for example, wouldn’t allow for more than thirty-nine lashes, and that was good enough for God, so, you know, the same for me and the birch community.
Be that as it may, I think, and I believe, that birch tree meant to kill me, and would have, too, if you all hadn’t tumbled in when you did. Maybe the spruce intervened; I don't know.
I didn’t even cry out: seemed to me to be a done deal, and fighting and screaming wasn’t gonna do no good nohow. Boy, but that thing spun me around something wicked! It was the Tilt-o-Whirl and the Wonder Wheel down at Coney Island all at the same time. And the beating! I met a missionary from Ethiopia once, and he showed me these welts he got from the government, like he was beaten by a transmission cable across the back: these one-inch welts all crisscrossed all over his back. Talk about respect. Yeah, that’s what it felt like. That’s what I looked like all over?
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Well, anyway, I wished I was dead, that’s for sure.
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At this point, it seemed to Abe that Lars had finished the bulk of his tale, so he said, “You told me you dreamed a dream to beat mine. What was it?”
“My dream? Abe, man, I can’t even begin to tell you right now, mostly because it faded away, as dreams do. If I can remember, I’ll tell you. All I can tell you now is that there was a great big elm tree in South Carolina.”
“The Great Elm!”
“Later,” said Blake. “The day is wasting. We have much work to do.”
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