[log in to unmask] wrote:

>     So, what happened? Metallica? Or Sesame Street?
>
> Don't mess with...
> Twybil

Media is a plausible culprit. Overload of superficial information. High 
speed overload of noise to signal... loss of human quality in the 
transmission. A lack of enough hugs. Over population. I remember a book 
in the 70's about how media exposure was forcing a rapid and radical 
transformation of Eskimoe culture to the worse. The other day it occured 
to me that we are our own Eskimoes. Too much disconnected information 
drives us nuts.

A friend recently told me that his family was railroaders and when as a 
kid on reunions he went to visit them the men had all lost at least one 
arm. Prosthetics hanging on the walls like deer heads.

][<en

Twybil missed this story the last time it was outed:

Pheasant Hunting

Nobody around here was clear as to what had started the friction. It had 
flashed out in bursts and spasms for two decades. Diana Peafold told us 
one time when we visited with her at the coffee shop there was that 
thing that Jeff -- he had had a few too many Rheingolds -- mumbled about 
a broken sled and ice in a stream busted through.

For miles he had to pull his wet brother in a goddamn blizzard. We don’t 
remember shit but Jeff sure seems to be more than pissed. Slush slugged 
in his boots. Frost bit toes, a slight molded depression we could see 
ourselves in the flesh of his nose. Always like this with the elder 
brother. Some years the fight would break out without any obvious reason 
like sun spots. Solar flares, local flares, the flares between brothers 
ignited by a volatile blend of potions of hatred and love.

When the brothers built a bonfire, as they were wont to do on the farm 
in the late fall, it was a blast. Even long-bearded Dale Skinner the 
rabbit hunter with his beagle Molly and his fiddle Denver would come out 
of the woods. The hermit would play real good as long as there was a fat 
joint kept stoked between his hairy lips. You gotta love an old fart 
with a toothless smile! It was blues and cruise...

Varnish on old chair legs would melt as it turned carbon black then 
evaporated in the flames. Hard cider flowed into their deep cups from 
the tapped barrel. Fire reached up orange and yellow to flicker and 
burst into the otherwise still blackness of the Milky Way. Brothers 
would dance like half-crazed bohunks on speed, swung their life-weary 
arms to the wail of Denver. The ends of their seared hair stood out in 
tangles of impish invitation. Ladies pranced midst them with their 
haunches and bellies shaken the almighty. Screech of a demented owl. 
Bodies flailed legs akimbo. They all of them smell like smoked compost, 
organic, rank with hog sweat and greasy burnt chicken flesh.

Half the town of Chipfinn laid out in the alfalfa and timothy come along 
sun up of the third day. The other half broke down in cluster of bunched 
gaggles of rusted pick-up trucks and flat-tired bicycles between the 
farm gate and the security and loan. Only the mules knew the way to the end.

There was nothing ever different with the annual Simpson brother’s 
bonfire until this year. Like hot coals hidden nestled in a bed of white 
ash. You can wait forever to get to the bottom of your brotherly love or 
you can just walk right on over there with your bare feet and see for 
yourself.

Some ways never change and some change so quick they come at you and are 
gone through before you even know. No turn back, no way to turn around 
in a slow world, no time to turn quick enough in a fast one.

They had walked the lower east side of Johnson’s Ridge with Val’s hunt 
dog, the elder bitch blue tick Pinkie all mornin’ in the rain. Until 
they got a good pace away the pup Xerox yelped, caged in the back of 
Val’s truck. They were about to turn left and follow up above the stream 
bank to the side of the hedgerow. You could hear Xerox’s yelps mellow 
out behind as they moved. “Good fat birds in them bramble like to hide 
at the end,” says Jeff.

It was a cold half-ass dribble down from the north from them bold 
black-swirl clouds... the kind that make the heart race to be alive 
before the storm. Val saw it, so did Jeff, and Pinkie must’a smelled it. 
Poor Pinkie should’a been left home on the rag rug before the cast-iron 
wood stove and she knew it. A piss-poor old hunt dog with arthritis had 
no business out in this weather. But there was no storm, leastways not 
any rain storm to speak of, and the hunt sucked. Four hours for two 
chuckers and one hen, two of them flown off past the farther hedgerow 
across the wide field without even so much as a wing clip. For Val it 
was a waste of good shot.

“You got to take your safety off if you want to hit any barns,” says Val 
to Jeff who fumbles with the mechanism of his shotgun trigger. “I can’t 
remember if it goes in or out,” was the reply. “Don’t lay your pervert 
troubles on me, bro. I got me own problems.”

“You want to hunt or just be a sarcastic asshole?”

A male cock pheasant just then flew up in front of Val in a line 
straight out. He lets loose once, pumps then twice and blows the tail 
feathers and ass off the bird before it has a chance to get three yards 
out. Bloody hamburger meat. “Hey, Quick Draw, not much to eat on that 
one. It ain’t even worth soup.”

Pinkie lazily fetched the carcass of head and wing. “Is that dog on 
strike or just a dead walker?” Val bends down to gently wrestle what 
looks like a feather duster out of Pinkie’s wet mouth. “Good dog, 
Pinkie, good dog. Don’t listen to the dickhead.” He stuffs the mess in 
the pouch on the backside of his hunt vest.

“And by the way, fuck you!” Val says as he turns away from Jeff. They 
walk on to follow Pinkie in her slow zags and sniffs and false points, 
their legs pull down by the growth of the wet field as they push ahead. 
Their pant legs and boots wet.

“Goddamn, Pinkie. Find the bird, Pinkie.” On occasion Val will blow the 
whistle that he keeps on a lanyard around his neck. It hardly seems to 
have any effect other than to disturb nature. “Goddamn it Pinkie get 
your lazy dog-food snarfin’ ass back over here before Jeff here shoots 
yo wiggly ass full’a buckshot!”

A body don’t half mind goin’ through hell if there is at least a goal to 
reach. It helps to have a sign post here or there to explain the trail. 
No trespass hammered to tree trunks they see plenty of but that is not 
the sign they look for. Absent appropriate notification the worse life 
is to be bored with long empty stretches of unexplanation. The brothers 
burn through on their long walk as they look out for a goal. If there is 
no goal then one might as well be pissed-off at the next closest 
asshole. Thus the love of brothers.

Jeff nearly jumps out of his oranges and his skin when Val shoots the 
apple tree behind him. He turns and falls to the ground in one motion. 
“Fuck shit, Val! What the fuck?”

“I thought maybe you was hungry, Jeff. If you can’t get soup you can 
leastways get apple sauce. How’s your tongue workin’ these days.”

Jeff laughs now, the tension flown out, “You remember that time Roach 
tied his brother up in the apple tree and left him there?”

“How can anyone ever forget? Roach was a schizoid mother fucker!”

“I heard he got it in Afghanistan.”

“No shit, how?”

“Sniper. They say he never knew what hit him.”

“So much for bible thumpers, but if I gotta’ go don’t tell me.”

“I promise I won’t say nuthin’”

In this world we can have almost any thing happen to the two brothers 
while they walk along in the low hills on a pheasant hunt. It is, of 
course, with the bred birds planted out early in the day a contrived 
affair not much unlike a round of golf with firearms. They could be out 
to shoot pink-plastic flamingoes or newspaper cut-outs of the president 
taped to an oil drum

An F-16 can drop down low over the ridge to hit the afterburners and 
blow a loud roar up over them as it passes out over beyond taller hills 
towards Ohio. They can stand there to wonder what the hell that was all 
about. They can stumble on a weed field booby trapped with explosives 
and blow their legs off. They can be charged by a white Rhinoceros 
escaped from a local game farm and Jeff gored while Val weeps over his 
brother’s limp and trampled body, “If only I had thought to kick the 
shit out of this cocksucker when he was alive!” They can find themselves 
surrounded and ambushed by a tribe of acid laden nudists with machetes. 
That should be an adventure of interest. They can be held hostage for an 
exorbitant ransom of golden eggplants. That makes no sense. Forced into 
white slavery on a cabbage farm where they live on a diet of sauerkraut 
and raw soybeans. Val’s cell phone can suddenly play a tune from 
Nirvana, a reach out.

Jeff drinks water from a plastic bottle then blows his nose on a wad of 
paper towel kept in his pants pocket, “You have been a lazy worthless 
fuckin’ jackass all your life, Val.”

“I love you too, Jeff. Leastways I’m not a sissie-hippie scumbag.”

When you walk around in the field all day with a shotgun it gets heavy 
and after a while you forget if it is you that is dazed and lost from 
the inside out, or is it the walk that does it... or drugs in the water?

For every man there has got to be a way to get to no place, to jump up 
quick and zoom over to that invisible place with no identity and a loose 
packet of cat tranqs. May not go there never, may never act on the need, 
but it is to know that the journey can be made that keeps the man sane.

Val can see a shiny red pick-up truck parked in Bobby’ O’Laens Chipfinn 
auto lot on Route 79 and say to himself, “Hey, I’d like to get that 
shiny red pick-up truck and drive. Drive and not stop. Never stop until 
the Pacific swallows me. Tell that goddamn salty bathtub I’m on the way. 
It better open up and yawn wide open. I’m gonna’ drive that shiny red 
pick-up truck until it never quits. It gonna’ swim an squish wipers an 
hump whales all the way to Toyota!”

It was like this that the two brothers in the mid afternoon did not know 
what direction they were faced.

Pinkie knew which way was home and had returned to Val’s rusty piece of 
tired-old-junk late-model oil-burning spring-busted Chevy pick-up truck 
where she slept dry beneath her fifth son Xerox. But Val and Jeff they 
had stopped to lend too much attention to Pinkie. It was just them out 
there.

“Where the hell that lazy bitch go,” asked Jeff when he realized they 
had wandered around in dry corn in three circles. It was like they could 
have been kooks with multi-universal crop rotation.

“Don’t know, Jeff. Mind she might have dropped in a hole and died. You 
might have to kick the birds from here on out.”

Jeff then stepped up on a mound of dirt where he rose up above the corn 
and that is when it happens. He sees Val there in a damp spot of plushy 
ferns plain as could be imagined with his stumpy legs and a grin like a 
drunk bear with a black n’ red checkered coat beneath his orange hunt 
vest. Val smiles wide, shows teeth, then gives Jeff the bird.

The large cock flies up between them clean. They can see the eyes like 
black magnets that pull in all the flickers of firelight to the center 
of the universe. All one-hundred and ten percent of the Milky Way stops 
dead right here right now. They raise their barrels at each other and a 
foot above then fire, pump and fire. This time Jeff holds his safety off 
and is gonna’ go for it from the hip. Val, quick as he is, never quite 
so quick to be faster this time than Jeff, they both get it. Right then, 
right together. No way in hell to deny it.

Just like hunting fancy chickens it is. They never say nuthin’ about it 
then, hardly took more than an instant to see each other where they 
could have been. No place in a hurry. They never say nuthin’ that night 
neither at the bonfire. They dance and jump and howl and spin around. 
But I tell you between us that the bonfire has never been the same after.

Gabriel Orgrease 06.28.05 Mastic Beach, NY

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