It was dark when he reached home. Having misplaced his lighter, Trask sighed, and picked a coal from the fire with tongs; accidentally dropped the coal onto his naked, sweating thigh; picked up the coal with his left hand while balancing the tongs on his head; lit the pipe; and soon the cabin smelled of the harsh fragrance of marijuana.
There was a restless tautness in Trask's chest, just beneath his bulging, rippled pectoral muscles. A wedge of mist sliced across the moon and turned black in silhouette. Suddenly the moon seemed smaller. In some distant recess of the forest, a bottling howled with a ghastly anger. Sweat poured from Trask's pectoral muscles as his headrush careened into the solemn air.
The storm had spent itself by morning and the day dawned clear. Trask wakened to the smell of bacon and coffee, and painfully forced himself to squeeze his eyes open. He rolled to his left side; and droplets of warm coffee rolled off his pectoral muscles.
“Music please!" he screamed, his rippling pectorals exploding with oceans of sweat. Trask grew tired, overcome with loneliness, rose up in his hammock and reached over to put on a record.
"Morning," Hannah said, smiling.
Trask stiffened up and tried to fight his way to wakefulness.
"What are you doing up so early?" he asked.
"Thought you would maybe want some breakfast," Hannah said.
Trask nodded.
"You've been going out so early lately..."
"I just go down to the beach for a while," Trask said.
"That's what I thought."
"I guess that makes me some kind of outlaw, you reckon," Trask shot back.
"I didn't say that. I just said you've been going out..."
"I heard what you said, Hannah. I just go down to the beach. It ain't no big thing; nothing to get all suspicious like about."
The record began skipping. Trask placed a hazelnut on his left pectoral, glazed with sparkling sweat, and rippled the sinewy steel. The hazelnut flipped onto the tonearm and the familiar chorus of "Piano Man" played on.
"...anDYOU gottus FEElin' all-RY-ut!" Trask intoned, swatting the air with his disproportional arms.
"I wasn't getting suspicious," Hannah said.
"Were you being suspicious?"
"What do you mean?"
"What time is breakfast?" asked Trask, suspiciously.
"You mean ‘was I suspecting?’"
Trask rested his arms in his lap like a sudsy armoire. "What time is breakfast?"
"What time is breakfast? We don't care about time. It's 1848, and there are no clocks here in the middle of the woods. And where did you get that thing that sounds like an angry little boy with a toy piano?"
"I meant, was I acting suspicious?"
"You have acted suspicious since day one that I've known you."
Trask located his missing lighter, took his pipe and and, placing his elbows atop his pecs of steel, drew in several deep puffs of marijuana.
"One, two, one, two," Trask said, holding in the sweet-smelling smoke using all the force of his majestic pecs of steel.
"Ooooh. Suspicious. Yowwwww."
Hannah rolled her eyes and turned to pick up the poker, then stoked the bonfire underneath the kettle. Trask watched the wisps of steam curl up around him from the kettle.
"This is real coffee," he said finally.
"Yes."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Oh, places," Hannah said. "Had it hid from you."
"You got more than this?" He exhaled. The blood gushed from Trask's elbows in torrents, frothing upon the raw bacon and leaving oleaginous swirls upon the surface of the coffee.
"None of your business," Hannah said firmly. "You let me run your life like the tart that I am or you'll be back on barley coffee tomorrow."
Trask shrugged. That's how it was. Coffee today, barley tomorrow. If that's how it is, then that's how it is. So, that was how it was. Coffee today, barley tomorrow. There you go. That's how it goes. Coffee today, barley tomorrow. If that's how it was, then that's what it is. There you go. So -- how's it going? What do you think about that? Coffee today, barley how it is. That's how it was. There you go. What do you know? I don't know, what about you? Coffee today, barley tomorrow. If that's how it was, then what do you say to that? Hard to say. Let me think about it. If that's how it was, then I'll get back to you.
The two looked at each other across the table Trask had made when they first moved into the cabin. Made of the same material as the house itself, split cedar planks, the top was scarred and pitted from the hard use. In fact the house itself was scarred and pitted from the hard use, and from the asteroids that bombarded it constantly, and from Trask's pecs of steel, which shone brilliantly in the soft morning light, scarred and pitted from hard use, as one might be unable to imagine.
"Kwonesum mamook wawa," Trask said. "Always talking." Hannah did not laugh, or fend off the comment, or fall off of her chair, scarred and putted from the hard use. Trask crossed his legs, his face sobering. "All right," he said.
"Trask, what's troubling you?"
"Nothing," he said. "There's nothing."
By quivering his perspiring pecs of steel, he coaxed the hammock into a gentle pendulousnessness. Hannah augmented the hammock's rocking with a broom handle.
"What about the Owen kids?" Trask uttered with a fragrant metallic hum. "Ness, ness."
In this spring of 1848 the twenty-mile stretch of Clatsop Plains held over forty families. Trask had seen most of them come. He had been among the first to settle on the fertile prarie, in the fall of 1843. He had been among the first to organize a neighborhood watch shortly afterwards, although there was absolutely no need for one. He had been the second to fertilize the settled prairie, after his pet anteater Ruben, followed by Henry Hunt, and Tom Owen and Tibbets, then Ruben had another go at it, followed by Tibbets, who hadn't quite finished the first time. Solomon had been there, of course. But somehow Solomon was different. You couldn't imagine that the Plains had ever been there without Solomon Smith and his Clatsop wife Celiast, a symbol of the meeting of white and Indian. They'd actually met previously in a coffee shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, but the proprietor kicked them out because the symbolic overtones bothered the other customers.
"What time is breakfast?" Trask wondered aloud, as the rocking motion caused him to drift off to sleep. He tried to imagine that the Clatsop Plains had ever been there without Solomon Smith and Celiast. "They were like a corenessness," he thought, "and such boredom could not continue."
He fought again with sleepfulness, and ultimately prevailed. The hammock was still now as he rose up again to turn over the record, but realized that his arms, which had been steadily retracting since the summer of 1845, were now too short to reach the turntable. He stared blankly for a moment at the north wall of the cabin. Fall brought deep meaning to his life. Pioneer woodsmen would come and go, but you, Trask, you would be accountable. Hannah was flipping hotcakes near the stove. Her golden calves wobbled quietly, an image that struck Trask as being somewhat of an obstacle to his continued attraction to her.
With great effort he placed the image onto the pile of images, thoughts and notions that he had needed to discard since the storm's passing – especially the absurd metaphors that peppered the morning narrative. It was time to get on his feet and face the day; shorter than the one before, but longer than the next one, long enough to fill with too many worries about the fate of his once-perfect upper body. Oh, sure, when flexed and employed, Trask's pecs of steel became magnificent vessels for the tides of sweat that his overactive glands produced. When dormant, however, they had taken to drooping with a hideousnessness that, even to Trask's limited perception, seemed uncool.
"We have it good, Lord," he said, as he slithered out of the hammock and his feet reached the split-cedar floor. "We have it good."
Outside the window, beyond the front porch, just down the walkway after the gate, next to the hedge, which attached to the outskirts of the forest which blended into the main part of the forest that continued to its outer edges way over on the other side of it, near the tips of the eastern mountains, the sun came up and floated into the pale blue sky, higher and higher, floating further and further away. The storm-grey water curled back upon itself, and soon the sand ran several hundred yards from the dunes to first water. A flight of sandpipers whirred low across the beach, as the sun became a faint speck in the lava black sky before disappearing entirely. In unison they wheeled just short of what had moments ago been water, but was now frozen solid; landed; and became scattered individuals walking stilt-legged by the glassy surface of the frozen sea.
"Far out," said Trask. "I'm glad I had real coffee today." He turned to Hannah with a delicately crooked grin, his head enveloped by a low-level electric buzzing. He stood still and waited for the buzzing to pass, but it did not.
"Those are hotcakes," he continued. "What time is breakfast, anyways, sweetnessness?"
"Soon," Hannah replied, catching one of the scorched discs on the lip of the pocket-sized frying pan. "Sometime soon."
"Ness, ness. Wonder how's Tom Owen? Maybe I'll get down up over to his place today, check on the family." Trask wondered if the buzzing was mechanical or emotional. "Ness, ness."
Trask shook his head ruefully. It was bad when a man made assumptions. It had always been bad for him, anyway. The assumptions he made, as far as he could remember, had invariably been wrong. Not just some of the time; but always. One of those things; it was the way he was. He had always been that way, as far as he could recall. He could remember as far back as his very first memory. It was bad for him then, and it had continued to be bad for him ever since. He wasn't even able to assume that his assumptions had invariably been wrong no matter how bad it was. That's how bad his assumptions were. He was in a rut. He assumed that we were going to flash back to his first memory, but we aren't, at least not right now. Some of us would like us to flash back to that scene with Trask and Henry Hunt one night back in 1844 when they were both kind of lonely. Perhaps we will. Others of us assume that if you've see one glistening pectoral muscle catch the light reflected by another, then, baby, you've seen them all. Suffice it to say, this is an assumption that Trask could neither make nor hope to make. On top of that, his story is in the past tense, so he's basically screwed. He shook his head more ruefully. "Why did we drink so much that night?" he wondered, assuming that that was the reason for the events of that night back in 1844. "What could I possibly have been assuming? And, what can I do to change this pattern of making assumptions that are invariably wrong?" Instead, Trask began assuming all sorts of wrong things again. The pressure was getting to him. He assumed that Hannah was actually a pair of mittens in El Paso. "Do these come in a different pattern?" he wondered, knowing he couldn't afford them anyways.
"I'm off to the dunes," Trask announced.
"Aren't you going to stay for breakfast?" asked Hannah. She looked up, and Trask was wiping his mouth and mustache onto the back of his sleeve with the oddly precise gesture of a bearded man.
"I should be back around noon," he said, his mouth and mustache on the back of his sleeve, and turned to leave.
"All right. You aren't working today."
"No."
Hannah nodded. "All right."
"Anything else?" Trask asked after a long pause.
"Your mouth and mustache are on the back of your sleeve."
Trask's exposed teeth chattered. "Did I do that?"
Hannah nodded.
Trask wiped his mouth and mustache off the back of his sleeve and onto his face. "How do I look?"
"All right. You aren't working today."
"No."
Hannah nodded. "All right."
"Anything else?" Trask asked after a long pause.
"No."
Trask shook his head ruefully. He had assumed that there was something else.
"You're sure?" he added nostalgically.
"Why do you always assume there's something else?"
He didn't always; only when there was nothing else.
"I should be back around noon," he said, and turned to leave.
"All right. You aren't working today."
"No."
Hannah nodded. "All right."
"Anything else?" Trask asked after a long pause.
"No." Hannah's knees rubbed against one another as her calves wobbled from the lack of the sun's warmth. She turned away. It was 8:47 a.m. In Hawaii, a seagull was snacking on a macadamia, brittle from the cold. Seagulls are notoriously light eaters.
"I should be back around noon," he said, and turned to leave. "I'm going to the beach for a while. Then I'm going over and talk to Solomon, maybe."
Hannah looked up in surprise, then nodded slowly. "That might be a good idea."
The pressure was getting to him. "Then I'd better not," he volunteered, reaching for the door.
He closed the door behind him and set off in the direction of the cracking and heaving glacier that had once been the Pacific Ocean. The steady buzzing murmured to him like the cowlpins of a jar-backed bottling. Trask screamed frantically at the crystalline matter that had collected on his front porch, scarred and pitted from the hard use. The torn skin of his elbows flapped coarsely in the 175-below-zero air. He descended the steps and moved stealthily toward the property line that Solomon had drawn with a pitch-covered trowel last April. Nature called; it was number two. Trask shook his head ruefully. He assumed that he could hold it until he set foot on the dunes and continued on, reaching the trail head at approximately 8:53. It was only a matter of time before he would have to lie down and take a short nap.
He had always to look at things carefully with his head clear, or he did it wrong. There was no reason for it that he could see; it was a difference of people. Some were quick and instinctive -- Hannah was like that -- and others had to work things out and reason them through carefully and wet their fingers and stick them up in the air to see which way the wind was blowing and run some numbers and mull it over and collect oodles and oodles of data and deliberate and cogitate and think outside of the box and leave nothing to chance and leave no stone unturned and turn all of the stones back over based on what they'd assumed was bad data and destroy, in a mad rage, the oodles and oodles of data that they'd collected before they realized that if they'd had someone else check their work they'd have discovered that they'd transposed two numbers of the correct data they'd had and collect more data and lie down and take a short nap and shake their heads ruefully, and that was how he was.
And it was all right as long as you knew it.
His footfalls gave way to sliding down the icy embankment from the top of the trail to the dunes. Soon he was deposited onto the frozen sand drifts; there would be no time for a nap after all.
From where he sat on the dunes Trask could see two of the cabins on the Plains. Several miles south of him, beyond Small Beach and the mouth of Neahcoxie creek, just to the left of Junior Miss beach and the elbow of Sumorestlie River, peeking its purple crown above Megryan Estuary, was the great headland Neahseu'sunessness.
Straining against the numbed tendons in his hypothermia-affected neck, he looked back upon the once-fertile plains, with its now-useless squares of cultivation and fenced pasturage for the flash-frozen dairy cattle.
“It's good land,” he thought. “It seemed good to me five years ago. What's wrong?”
The Earth was hurtling away from the Sun at more than one-hundred-trillion miles a second and had already broken through the outer shell of the universe. The Sun had quickly lost most of its mythological prominence among the Earth civilizations. Trask coughed mutely and stood up on the stony dunes, riven by black fissures, and squared his shoulders. The cold had reduced the rate at which his arms were retracting into his chest cavity. His pectorals, now fully frostbitten, flexed painfully. He thought of Hannah dribbling hotcake batter down the front of her dress. He made her that dress from the same material as the house itself, split cedar planks. It was scarred and pitted from the hard use, and slipped lovingly down, or up, depending on the need, which had been often.
He coughed again. Wheezes popped little cracks and pops, going "snap" behind his shallow breaths, more afraid than understanding, due to the large amounts of marijuana he smoked.
Trask did not mind the cold so much, but he did mind the newnessness of it, so he decided to return to the cabin. There'd be coffee. Tomorrow, barley. He would have a talk with Solomon some other time and Celiast maybe at the same time. When he talked to them, he didn't always have to make sense. Those things he could not say accurately they could guess at and sort of understand what he meant and Celiast would prepare him a hot compress and make him lie down. What he would give for that hot compress now.
The white settlers had given the name Neahcoxie to the white stretch of dunes surrounding the bay near the VFW post where the neon flickered brightly and wound languidly around the Clatsop plains and off to the left a little bit toward the sea where beside a bee hive, which he assumed was an auto repair manual, Trask liked to play, his antipodal arms extended and waving madly at it, with a fixed smile such as is worn by one who smokes large quantities of marijuana. This behavior traditionally heralded the beginning of Summer.
Six Clatsop villages were strung down the Plains, from Konape in the north to Coatsniffer, almost in the shadow of Neahseu'sunessness. The village of Neahcoxie was several miles north of the headland and it was near this village that Solomon Smith had first built his cabin. In time he surrendered it to his first wife Bessie, and built a new cabin in Dunkoples, the next village, until the rains came and washed it down the plains and it ended up in Neahseu'humps’ vegetable garden, adjacent to the cabin he surrendered to his first wife in the village of Neahcoxie, so he headed further up the Clatsop Plains, past the village of Jussaminit, where the white people started racially motivated fights in bars, and flung his kit bag down upon the sacred soil of Quaquawinsockee-Ockee Huburnapewt in the rumpling lavender fields of McFartang where joined the rivers Bubbo and Toffymouth into the yawning chasm of Scrotumbash Bay, held fast in squalor by the spells of the Pencil Girls of the Alsatian Vacuum Kleenex clan that had settled there several days prior, unbeknownst to Solomon, who had by this time become quite agitated and just needed to lie down, thus begetting the Ritual of the Hot Compress, which in turn founded the basis of the village where he was to eventually build his third house, the so-called Tee-Pee of Fate, which was actually a quaint Victorian charmer, 2b, 1 1/2 bath, walk-in closets galore, a double car garage and an imported Venetian chandelier in the dining room which sported a magnificent view of the Neahseu'sunessness headlands during the winter months, wall to wall carpets, washer and dryer hook-up and storm windows, only this time he'd failed to have the property inspected and as it turned out there was this underground tank that had been leaking oil into the neighbor's vegetable garden, and in addition, a title search revealed that an aggressive financial consultant had actually put up the property as collateral for a margin call on 2500 shares of a now-defunct oat bran de-flaxing concern and the backers had put a lien on the equity, as they had arranged in the loan contract, should anything go wrong, and once again Solomon left the unincorporated and thus nameless village which had up until that time been referred to as "Gumpy's Doodle," and the strange cult that had formed around the Ritual of the Hot Compress, and Solomon, now more agitated, yet blindly pursuing any kind of ramshackle homestead on the Clatsop Plains, which had become a much less attractive idea than before, secured a building permit for a more modest bungalow-style one-bedroom on a quarter-acre just outside the municipal boundary of the depressed, would-be seventh Clatsop Plain village 35 miles south of Coatsniffer called Killmenow, which only remained because the legislature had designated it as an enterprise zone in its entirety, putting more pressure on the housing market, so that when Solomon again met Celiast, after she nearly went on a blind date with Phlegmy Titsuck, a second-string tailback for the Neacoxie Ecch-eaters, he was determined to stay put, although Celiast lived way up the other end of the Clatsop Plains in the village of Konape in a rather lavish four-bedroom ranch with a stunning view of Neahsu'sunessness and where you could have a fantastic vegetable garden that produced succulent carrots and hearty string beans, and have easy access to nearby meadows where on a crisp Spring afternoon one could watch the bottlings scurrying amongst the tall sassafras leaves in their vaguely poetic mating dance, and so he would traverse the Plains he had come to detest once, maybe twice a day just to spend an hour or two with Celiast until finally he decided to sell at a loss and move in with her.
Having reached the top of the ridge, Trask looked back to the dark expanse of the frozen Pacific. "Hyas kloshe Tunam," he said emphatically. "Very good tuna." Trask stepped back a few paces, his eyes catching a glimpse of Solomon sneaking in through the back door of his cabin into Hanna's outstretched arms, slathered with hotcake batter. "Ahha, ahha, hyas kloshe Tunam," he cried, slipping back down the steep incline.
The tuna, stifled in the salty, icy blacknessness, did not respond but rather continued to respire motionlessly without the usual bantering humor that accompanied their efforts. Their faces were morose, unpleasant to see.
* * *
He came to rest on his back at the edge of the wrought-iron tree grate fellows near the property line and stared for the longest of times through the hedge up into the starry blacknessness. The moon hid nestly in the tinkling clouds, due to the absence of the Sun's illumination. Trask, having assumed after an extended marijuana smoking session that the moon had befriended him one evening, coughed and shook weakly between sobs, calling out, "Who's my buddy?"
His mind, humming enthusiastically, repeatedly viddied the image, backlit by the glow of the kettle embers, of Solomon and Hannah quietly weaving into each other's arms while Ruben sniffed uncomfortably on the porch, scarred and pitted from the hard use.
The fall had shattered Trask's left pinky clear off. He thought to apply his moist and tortured breath to the sheared knuckle, but his arms had retracted so far into his torso cavity that he was unable to join his mouth to the affected area. A muscle in his inner thigh twitched, giving him pleasure.
The nauseating Anno Domini winds brushed sneakily across the front yard of the cabin, which filled with the sounds of anxious sexual mayhem. Solomon's rising love call hurried through the rough, stout confines of the cabin.
The winsome buzzing in Trask's head momentarily obscured, he regurgitated crossword puzzle clues at an accelerated rate. "King's blank," he mumbled through the crusty traces of cerebral-spinal fluid around his mustache and mouth. "Tabula rasa. Anne of blank Days. Seward's Folly. Grease actress."
The pressure was getting to him. He felt number two coming on again and broke wind ferociously, which miraculously yet with narrative soundnessness assisted the path of the earth's movement into a new direction.
And, indeed, it was not too long, twenty minutes maybe, while Trask rested there on the frosty grass, before a new sun approached tentatively from the northwestern sky, and the moon reappeared perilously close in the whirling heavens.
"Heyyyyy, there's my buddy," he remarked happily to the moon. "What's a seven-letter word for 'Rifleman's lair’?"
Assuming that the moon was still thinking, Trask rolled to one side and rose up to his feet with modest assistance from his arms which had expanded in the new warmth. He flexed his pectoral muscles, first in unison, then separately; left, then right, then right again.
He looked off into the woods, now brightly lit by the moon's reflection, grinned squint-eyed and nodded confidently; he flexed his pectoral muscles in unison, then right, then right again. He admired them lovingly, their briny sweat now brightly lit by the moon's reflection, grinned confidently and nodded squint-eyed at the reader, and flexed his left pectoral in another macabre series of poses, unembarrased by his audacity; left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right, then right again.
Having completed this round of poses, he produced a tin of water chestnuts and placed them between his muscular bosoms.
"In case something weird happens," he began, "I'll remember you. I assume that the Clatsop have a word for this. I should never have been here in the first place. Ness, ness." Trask emitted a transparent bleat in the moonglow, his dampened chaps quaking inconsolably and the skin from his elbows drooping with plasticity in the harsh light, as he squeezed his pectorals against the sides of the can of water chestnuts. It exploded, spraying pulverized, tin-flecked nuggets of the delicacy in a shower which might have appeared oddly serene to a casual observer.
One of Solomon's slaves, the old man, emerged stumbling through the wickets of the cast iron tree grate fellows from the hedge Trask had spent all summer sculpting. He had been captured and enslaved by different tribes so many times in his long life he had forgotten his original band. All the coastal tribes were slavers, and the Chinook -- of which the Clatsops were one band -- had once been middlemen in the trade for the whole coast; go-betweens for the various northern raiders, the Nootka and the Tlingit, and even the little, bite-sized Tlingettes, and the tribes of the interior (where no one ever, ever wants to be sold into slavery, believe me) who wished to buy.
His dirty old body leaped back as Trask forcefully flexed his pecs at him.
Terror seized the old man's eyes and throat, but beneath the terror, there was a sense of excitement, and of anticipation.
Trask reached for his pipe but stopped to investigate his water-chestnut-pulp-covered, pinky-less left hand, and brazenly sucked on the palm, gurgling, "Mmmm. Hotcake batter. Yowwwww."
After a long, uncomfortable pause, he leaned closer and whispered into the old man's ear, "Kwemo nasa hotsy kitchy," and immediately they fell to the ground, entwined in rapturous carnality, the romance of the moment heightened by the intense moonglow, now a blue-tinted bath made hazy by the stirred-up dirt and vegetation on the hillside.
The minutes stretched into hours, the hours into what seemed like about half-an-hour. Afterwards Trask attempted to rise, but the old man held him wrapped in his bony legs and said, "Where do you think you're going, pookie?"
The old man coyly drooled onto a leaf while fondling his left big toe and Trask was once again aroused, and so began another round of torrid and potentially bestial whoopee.
At last the old man unleashed his final climactic moan and pushed away from Trask. Trask rose up and looked down at the shivering figure that lay at the base of the cast iron tree grate fellows. He grinned madly at the old man's almost cherubic face, slack and pale. Then without expression he grabbed the old man under the armpits and dragged him to the front porch, scarred and pitted from the hard use, and plunked him onto Ruben's mat.
Over his shoulder he called to Hannah, "All right, like, don't come out here or anything."
He walked into the house as Hannah was coming out of the bedroom. Their eyes met and Hannah turned away, embarrassed for herself, and for Trask, who turned away, embarrassed for himself, just as Hannah turned further away, embarrassed for herself and for Trask, who turned even further away just as Hannah turned so far away that she was no longer in the house, but rather she was sneaking Solomon, who was embarrassed for both of them, out of the back door, embarrassed for itself, and for Trask, who turned in a complete circle, embarrassed for itself, and for Trask and Hannah, and for Solomon who wasn't embarrassed for the circle, and only a little bit for the back door, which was too scarred and pitted from the hard use to engender anything but sympathy and a emphatic clearing of one's throat.
Solomon sneaked around the side of the cabin and lit the porch light knowing that Trask would turn and come out onto the porch to turn the light off, because he was trying to conserve electricity. Trask eventually did come out onto the porch, and saw the remains of the shirt that Hannah had been working on in the sunlight yesterday.
"So I see," he said, having come out onto the porch, as he had just done, that is, come out onto the porch, which basically had the effect of his arriving onto the porch.
"Was he drunk when he came by?" Solomon asked sneakily, referring to the pantsless, elderly waif huddled at his feet. Now Hannah, carrying the coffee pot, had also come out onto the porch.
"No, Ruben doesn't drink," was Trask's reply.
Hannah hung the coffee pot on Trask's left nipple, still erect with passion. Trask assumed that Hannah was a pair of spectacles that was handing him a lottery ticket.
"Halo itlokum," the old man muttered vaguely. "Halo itlokum. Lahook mahol." His eyes opened wide as doubloons, wide as saucers, big saucers with lots of milk for the kitties, wide as the Missouri River with the junk and debris and the steamboats, et cetera. He pointed at the moon, its horrendous glow forsaken by the entire cast. Trask's rippling pectora majoris subverted the proximate magnetic field, attracting Ruben toward the scene, and causing the coffee pot to float up into the eaves of the porch. Or whatever.
"Wake up," Trask said. He began to slap the old man's face with his absurdly protruding pectoral titties in a steady rhythm, back and forth, back and forth, based in part on a scene from another story in which he was a supporting character. Back and forth, then from side to side and forwards and backwards came the swats until eventually the old man suffered a massive subdural hematoma and various other traumas and went into shock, lapsed into a coma, and was soon dead.
Hannah buried her index finger in the folds of the old man's turkey neck to feel for a pulse. She gave Solomon a sad eye, and she and Solomon picked up the old man's body and began carrying it to the wooded patch just around from the hedge.
"Wake up, siwash," said Trask and began slapping him again as he followed alongside.
"Leave him alone for awhile," said Hannah.
Trask ignored her and continued to slap the old man with the full force of his unfettered pectora borealis.
"I think he's coming around," Trask exclaimed to the moon. He increased the velocity of the slapping and incorporated an occasional high knee-lift.
"You can stop now," said Hannah, remembering why she didn't enjoy days when Trask didn't work. She nodded quietly to Solomon who sneakily gave her a sneaky look and they lowered the old man's corpse to the ground. Solomon sneaked around for a moment and then returned with a shovel, brandishing it in a deliberate but ineffective attempt to not appear sneaky.
Uninterrupted, Trask continued his brutal pectoral assault. He assumed that this chain of events had been engineered to result in marinated pork.
"Let the games begin, siwash," he announced, "I like my odds," and reached for a tree branch for support, extending his arms to the way maximum extreme they would even go, allowing him to continue his musculaturgical brutusosity, with his pecs of steel and everything. "He should be waking up any time now," he volunteered without missing a breath.
Solomon finished digging the grave like a sneaky person and stepped back. He and Hannah allowed the force of the continued beatings to coax the cadaver into the grave.
"That looks like a good idea. I could use a short nap," said Trask as his toes curled into the mossy soil underfoot. As Trask fell to his knees he did not detect the trace of anger on Solomon's facial countenance on the front part of his head.
"You owe me. You killed my slave," said Solomon in a low tone and looked up into the heavens, where the coffee pot drifted in silhouette across the moon near the southern horizon. Trask began snoring well before he had stretched out fully on the ground next to Ruben, while dawn approached and the Plains were about to welcome the earth's new sun.
A tumultuous asteroid shower now pummeled the porch and back door and roof of the cabin. As Hannah returned to the porch, took up the half-finished shirt and brocaded the left epaulette, Solomon looked up into the fray of fiery pieces careening through the sky, and then he bent king-like to the sleeping figures at his feet.
"The Gods are hacked off," whispered Solomon into Ruben's partially severed ear. Ruben managed a snarl, and crotched his meat with his broken hoof.
Trask was dreaming.
In his dream he scamped playfully in the musty confines of a bottling coop, kicking up feathers and dung, the quixotic buzzing in his head having subsided. A string quartet at one end of the coop played a furious minuet. Suddenly the floor caved in and he was hurtling down a dark hole into the center of the earth, like that was possible. He was unafraid, but was upset that he would have to forfeit his Ecch-eaters tickets at the will-call window. An eerie greenish glow began to overtake the blacknessness, and the first sight Trask witnessnessed as his free-fall decelerated to a gentle wafting was the old man, Solomon's slave, making a sliced banana sandwich on a floating toilet seat. Trask came to rest in a pool of sugar creme.
"It's the earth's core," announced Trask. "Cadburro eggy testes." The sweet goo clung to all areas of his body except for his pectora minoras, the jagged, cord-like supporting structural tendons of his comically over-wrought pectoral musculies, which now began to rise like bread in an oven due to the zero-gravity, lifting him upwards by the bust like a marionette. At once Trask, still non-gravitational and arched upwards by the buoyancy of his zeppelin-pecs, was in the foyer of the Penthouse Magazine gift shop in Konape choosing from an assortment of latex gloves.
The clerk, a Freudian Hannah-representative whose face was covered with hickeys, threateningly approached him with a giant Q-tip. A DC-10 on a flight to Sacramento to deliver a jar of saliva roared through the shattering plate glass window. Trask's favorite pillow squeezed through the spout of the coffee pot, which was duct-taped to the forehead of the May 1995 Pet, and emerged into the air freshly laundered, and then exploded in flames. The objectified woman's face was unscathed, however, and she turned to assist a young couple in the water-sealant department.
He pleaded with someone to wake him, only to discover that it was actually one of his own morbidly over-inflated pectoral musculies by which he was still suspended in mid-air, according to the dream logic unfolding in Trask's consciousnessness. The string quartet from earlier in the dream waddled into the scene and shouted insults at him. A mediator was appointed by a long and complex toaster to frillybob the goatees. Diomistrious jujufolks cormentalized a denious akillionfarek, gormeting among the ooplion fromala lentils. Trask wanted to wake up. The young couple confessed that they had locked a computer programmer in a floatation chamber.
"Mmmmmm. Liebestraum. Yowwwww," uttered Trask instinctively, as he dropped spryly onto the white shag carpet beneath his feet, which instantaneously transformed into a metallic conveyor belt of doom and unceremoniously deposited him into a pit of carnivorous bottlings, scarfing at his face and crimping his orbal pubes in a sadistic manner. Trask screamed and woke up clutching feverishly at Ruben, who had been basically waiting around all day for this moment.
"How was your nap, Bridge?" Hannah called from the porch, rubbing the tails of the shirt-in-progress guiltily against the quilted cedar planks of the porch, which hissed and rattled from the asteroidal debris. "Would you like a hot compress?"
When Trask regained full wakefulnessness, his eyes locked with those of Solomon's wife Celiast, whose ruddy stare spoke of the tradition of her ancestors’ teachings, of their oral history, of their medicine wheel, their disdain for modern science, blah blah blah. Trask flinched slightly so as to expend some of the excess sleep energy and flinchinessness that stored up in the cavernous reserves of his pectoral muscle reservoir areas that he had there under his pecs and so forth.
Celiast (and all of her ancestors, to Trask's mind) rose to the height of the tallest trees in the forest and frothed at their mouths after the fashion of canines, ready to pounce yet savoring the attack. Nervously, but aiming to rehabilitate whatever shaky reputation he had managed to keep, Trask took out his trusty meerschaum, filled it with an obscene quantity of killer bud, and began patting himself down for a light. The tortillas of flesh torn from his forearms, atrophied and bony, flapped uselessly in the morning light, and one could not help but have pity on this bearded, indomitable spirit.