The Titty Show: Tinkering Part 6

Note: This is a companion piece to In Absentia and the forthcoming Tinkering 8.

“Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts.”

― Aleister Crowley

The Javelina

Saguaro Junction, AZ

Kurt’s third Titty Show went down like mother’s milk, and he rapped the bar for a fourth. Treena, behind the stick, was all about the profit margin and not so much about the shitbags who frequented Saguaro Junction’s least Yelp-ed biker haven. She pulled the Everclear the Javelina’s patrons preferred to Stoli, snagged the house bourbon and the Welch’s, and put it all on ice in a chipped highball glass. It was a pussy drink, but a high mark-up pussy drink, and the meth dealer was a sweet tipper.

As she thumped the lavender concoction on the beaten wood, Treena could see Kurt wasn’t celebrating a score. He jumped as the glass made contact, and a pair of wide, capillary-blown eyes locked momentarily with hers. Kurt’s lip quivered into a brief smile, and grain alcohol and grape juice sloshed over the chipped lip.

“Shit, dude,” Treena rasped. “The fuck’s up?”

Kurt Treweiler responded with a shrug to her relatively effusive display of concern, then glanced up again. “You believe in supernatural shit?” Pool balls cracked toward the darkened rear of the joint, and Kurt again twitched. “I mean supernatural shit. Like ghosts.”

Treena considered. “Well, I was raised Catholic, so that’s kinda supernatural. Shit, you see one? A ghost?”

Kurt winced as he took half the Titty Show in one gulp. “Nah, don’t think the old dude was dead or nothing. I think this was more like weird Indian shit. Or a mirage, both of us…”

“Both of you, what, saw this weird Indian shit? Indigenous, just by the way.”

“Nah, just me,” Kurt hastened, remembering what he’d left at the bottom of Montezuma Well. “I meant I saw the old dude – both of us were there. Near, ah, near Tortilla Flats.”

“So this old dude, he was indigenous?”

“Some old white guy, maybe an old hippie – I think he might’ve doing ‘shrooms. You know, like those magic mushrooms the Indians do? Like in that movie?”

Treena had no idea what movie that might be, but the mixology course she’d taken eons ago at the Superstition Springs Holiday Inn had pounded home the economic value of a sympathetic shoulder.

“Well, you ever see Star Wars? Mom’s boyfriend took me one time, when he was clean, which wasn’t so much, so it was kinda special, you know? You remember Princess Leia, right?”

Whiny bitch almost did her brother. There were parallels Treena didn’t care to revisit. “Sure, yeah.”

“Well, you remember how after Darth Vader snatched her she sent that robot for help, and uh, Luke, yeah, he accidentally flips a switch and she appears. Well, not her, but like a recording…”

“Holograph.” She’d visited the Magical Kingdom once with Mom and Stepdad. Stepdad came out of the Small World ride with a pronounced limp, and it was the last such outing for the trio.

“It was like that. One second, we – I – see this old hippie dude on a rock, then he ain’t there.”

Treena frowned. “Like he disappeared?”

“And then he’s back. And then, he’s like Princess Leia. Flickering in and out, like I’m losing his signal. We – I freaked, but I was too afraid to yell at him or anything. You heard about the weird shit goes on out in the desert. Maybe this dude’s like the ghost of some old hippie OD’ed in the middle of nowhere; maybe he’s an alien. So I just stand there watching the old dude go in and out, and then he disappears.”

“Altogether?”

“For like a few seconds or so. But…”

“But what?”

Kurt blinked. Then he rebooted. “Well, we’re like – I’m like what the fuck?” The dealer giggled. “Like it wasn’t already what the fuck, right? So I’m, I dunno, waiting for him I guess maybe to come back or something, but instead… Oh, shit.”

“Jesus,” Treena hissed. “C’mon, dude…”

“It came back.”

**

Montezuma Well

Camp Verde, Arizona

Theron settled onto a natural limestone shelf, arranged the canvas map bag against his protuberant right hipbone, and judiciously sipped Walmart water. The pilgrimage from the camp had taken the octogenarian more than an hour, and the day was Arizona spring, with a high, clear sun.

Theron Cross had presented high-functioning Asperger’s from early adolescence, and his social deficits and regimented behaviors and interests fed the usual peer ridicule, alienation, and eventual solitude. But Theron’s very neurodevelopmental disorder had spared him the emotional bruising that might otherwise have precluded his trajectory through Stanford, Cambridge, the Smithsonian, the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and a shelf of both academic and popular works on biological, forensic, linguistic, and cultural anthropology.

And although Theron’s beautiful mind was cordoned off from the chaos and platitudes of 21st Century life, the scientist ritually sought the solace of Camp Verde, specifically Montezuma Well. Now, he snapped the flap of the surveyor’s bag and extracted the remaining item.

The bowl by best estimates was fifth period Mogollan, the classic Mimbres phase of the 11th or 12th Century, when the prehistoric cluster began cultivating maize and transitioning from foraging to larger mammalian game. Before they were absorbed by the Pueblos, the Mimbres refined the Mogollan craft of pottery, identifiable by its black-on-white motifs – insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, geometric patterns. Bowls like the one Theron now placed on the limestone “bench” largely represented what little was known of the Mimbrenos.

However, it bore neither the standard signifiers nor signature perforation of a funary bowl nor the wear, tool marks, or stains of a household vessel. The shamanic figure that capered on its curved surface wielded a pipe and what appeared to be a bell. Beneath the man was a serpentine creature that circled the inside of the bowl, head nearly touching its terminus, a series of legs forming what resembled crude stitching.

To the Anasazi, the Hopi, the Mimbrenos, the centipede was one of the most potent symbols of power, able to traverse the physical and spiritual worlds. A famous piece looted in the 1960s depicted the body of a man, arms and legs turned to the heavens, a giant centipede in his grasp, as if he were using the creature to climb to the spirit world. Where that image had informed anthropologists’ understanding of Mimbre religious beliefs, this bowl –lifted by Theron from the Smithsonian, suggested a startling additional aspect to the Mimbre lore.

Rather than ascending, the shaman figure appeared to dance laterally along the undulating back of the centipede. And in a striking departure from standard Mimbre style, the bowl’s interior was segmented into rough black and white alternating slices, the rim of each slice sprinkled with stars and sunbursts and at each juncture, the familiar and graphic motif of the eagle consuming the rabbit – the Mimbre representation of the moon. This meaning of this underlying pattern was obvious. What spiked Theron’s adrenalin was the superimposed juxtaposition of shaman and centipede traveling not just between the physical and spiritual realms but seemingly along a fourth dimensional continuum.

With painstaking care, the original Mimbre craftsman had inscribed a detailed passage in loosely-spaced 2-point glyphs in a near-black barely perceptible against its background. A few chips in the rim had left gaps in the narrative, but that complaint was moot. The last person who might have translated the communication had inconveniently taken the last centipede out of town 800-900 years earlier.

Then, in 1988, on a New Mexican res inhabited by descendants of the former Warm Springs band of the Apaches, Theron made the acquaintance of a possibly centenarian character who’d curated a half-dozen lost tribal tongues.“Victor”s database was stored exclusively in his skull but retrievable by rote. Over beers on Victor’s ramshackle porch, the cryptic but garrulous linguist rattled off nearly three dozen “extinct” languages, dialects, and variants, including – to Theron’s aspergian equivalent of delight – Mimbrenos.

Victor grunted as he turned the vessel in his tobacco-and-liver spotted fingers, then looked up, and barked twice. The old man clucked, then snatched up the transcription and began murmuring words that likely hadn’t been uttered for centuries. Finally, he looked up.

“Friend, you don’t wanna know,” Victor chuckled.

**

In the end, of course, Victor knew this white man, like all white men, would become his living shadow until he got what he wanted. The old Apache shrugged, ambled to the fridge, popped a couple more Buds, and deciphered the bowl’s inscription, incomplete as it was.

Victor’d actually enjoyed the old indaa’s company – no patronizing white guy chatter or hippie we-are-brothers horseshit – and as the professor’s van rumbled off an hour later, he felt a pang of regret he hadn’t taken more time to linger on the perils of fucking with other worlds. Especially with several key pages missing from the instruction manual.

**

Kurt Treweiler did not share his cook/supplier’s romance for the meth trade. An attempted side negotiation with a California chapter Disciples distributor had wrapped up with Chef Russell on the industry equivalent of disability, and he binged on Bryan Cranston, Wild Turkey, and ketamine over his week’s convalescence.

This bullshit desert meet was the result. Since he’d mended, the erstwhile chemist was obsessed with cloak-and-dagger crap, although in practicality, you could pretty much buy a rocket launcher or do a deal in the middle of any Arizona Denny’s any given Sunday morning.

Kurt nearly busted a kneecap and the opposite ankle on the quarter-mile from the pickup to this creepy hole in the Earth.

“Wassssup?”

Kurt jumped, nearly sliding into the drink before slicing his palm on the stone. Heart banging, he spun on his hairy, grinning little cook, who was bearing a camo backpack almost his size. A fucking nine was shoved in the sagging waistband of his oversized khaki cargo pants. For a moment, Kurt considered commandeering Russell’s cannon, shooting that grin and a couple nuts clean off, and feeding the cook to whatever shit might be swimming around in the depths below.

“Motherfucker!” he yelled instead.

“Dude,” Russell whispered hoarsely. A scrawny, chemical-stained index finger waggled across the lagoon. An ancient-looking man was perched on the ledge a hundred yards or so away, bushy white head bent over a big bowl. If Kurt’s outburst had disrupted his meal or whatever, it didn’t show.

“Old hippie, probably,” Kurt breathed. “Probably got hisself some ‘shrooms and a personal audience with the Spirit in the Sky. Fuck, man, holster that shit – old guy’s totally glassed. What you got for me?”

“Bout 1000 grams pure Sedona Red.”

Russell’s branding was based on the high ratio of red phosphorus used in his special recipe and secured after jacking a dozen pallets of matchbooks from a bank-seized restaurant warehouse and a misdirected shipment of ADOT road flares. “I told you, don’t name that shit,” Kurt growled. “OK, Walter Fucking White?”

“Yeah,” the diminutive entrepreneur sighed. He glanced over Kurt’s shoulder, then yelped.

“What?”

“The old hippie,” Russell stammered. Kurt turned.

“Where’d he go?” he grunted, peering at the canvas bag on the empty ledge across the well. Kurt scanned the arid landscape for the old man, wondering annoyingly if Russell had been sampling product like those factory retards in that cereal commercial. Russell had the nine out again. Kurt snatched the weapon from his unblinking associate, jammed it in his waistband.

“Fuck, dude,” the cook suddenly squeaked. Kurt looked back to the ledge, and felt his calves tingle under him. Kurt and Russell stared, paralyzed.

A few minutes later, as the pair remembered to breathe, Scary Garcia across the well appeared to shake something off. Kurt braced, waiting for the man to suddenly lock eyes with his, but the old dude merely slipped his empty bowl back into a canvas bag, wobbled to his feet, and retreated slowly across the brush.

“That,” Russell hollered, “was fucking awesome.”

The crack of the nine barely registered on Theron Cross’ overloaded auditory cortex.

**

Kurt‘s fingers found the Titty Show, wrapped about the highball, and brought it to his lips. “You know those creepy dolls they got at the Indian tourist stores? Look like they crawled up out of Hell?”

“Katsina,” In a lucid moment, Mom hinted at a drop of Hopi in Treena’s makeup. Plus she’d fucked a guy on the res for about six months. “They’re like spirits of things – nature and shit. They’re not all bad – they can bring rain or heal or help you get pregnant – but folks used them a lot to scare kids. They called the bad ones ogres, and they’d come around with big baskets on their backs to take away kids who wouldn’t do shit like catching rats or grinding corn. Fucked up.”

“Well,” Kurt sputtered, thrown off by the former poledancer’s sudden erudition, “it was an ugly motherfucker. Big round head, big round eyes and a round mouth with like fangs, except they were all around his mouth. And a tail, dude – big bushy tail.”

Treena’s ass came off the backbar. After a calculating tick, she located a flyer for a cerebral palsy Harley ride and a Bic from the register. “Whyn’t you draw me this thing? I got friends on the res can maybe give me some idea what it was you saw. You weren’t doing any shit, right?”

“Totally clean,” Kurt swore, setting to work.

“By the way,” Treena called halfway back down the bar. “That buddy or yours’. That little monkey-lookin’ piece of shit. Russ, yeah.”

Kurt’s neck cracked as he jerked aright. “What about him?”

“He ran out on his tab the other night, and Freddie wants to dip his balls in the deep fryer.”

“Aw, shit, man,” Kurt slumped in relief. “Yeah, man, I ain’t seen him for a week or so. Heard somebody else, Diablo dude, may be after his ass, and he got outta Dodge.”

“Diablo dude better find him first,” Treena advised.

Kurt nodded. “How much?”

“$125 or so.”

Kurt swallowed, yanking his battered roll free. “Naw, keep it for the hassle.”

Treena nodded, swiveled away, slid six presidents into the till, considered, retrieved a Jackson. “Now draw,” she ordered.

**

“Masau’u,” Frank grunted, placing the bar napkin on the cushion beside him. “The Skeleton Man. Your friend, hope he has a day job. His graphic design sucks.”

“No shit,” Treena grunted in return. The tight and cluttered living room smelled of death and pot – Frank’s cannabis-stuffed Dr. Grabow muted the pancreatic pain that was taking its good sweet time prodding the old Hopi into the next world.

In their first meeting, a cousin’s birthday party at Organ Stop Pizza, Treena quickly learned that Frank appreciated far more about her than did about his clueless pig grandson. She found his tales of gods and monsters and spirits awesome, or perhaps it was merely that the old man chose to share them without expecting the usual “toll.”

Frank nodded slowly. “Masau’u is the protector of the underworld, Lord of the Dead. The Caretaker. Taught us to raise our crops, gave us fire, warned us of the dangers of the world.”

“So he’s like a good guy, then, right? Not a demon or nothing?”

 “Something of a trickster, liked the ladies. But, yuh, you tell your friend he don’t need to worry about old Masau’u. Your friend, where is it he saw Masau’u?”

“Didn’t exactly say. I think he was doing a deal or something – didn’t want to say, and I think somebody else saw this Masau’u, too.”

Frank released an obscuring cannabis cloud. As the smoke cleared, his eyes were expectant.

“Well, he kept starting to say ‘We did this’ or ‘we saw that,’ then said he was alone. I had to guess, I bet Russell was with him, his business partner. My boss, he’s looking for Russ – he owes him some money – and Kurt paid it off. I think he just wanted to keep anybody from asking questions.”

“Smart girl,” Frank grunted. “Lucas was a damned fool, let you go.”

Treena’s eyes stung; she willed it away. “So I think you actually like told me about him one time. Masau’u. How he used to have a tail, but he chopped it off…”

“Yuh. Scared the shit out of the children, so Masau’u, he hacked it to bits and threw it in the river. That was how he created the fish.”

“Well, this is gonna sound fucking crazy, but I been thinking about it. See, Kurt told me this Masau’u had a tail. Soooo, if Masau’u chopped off his tail – fuck, that sounds batshit crazy – doesn’t that like mean…?”

What once were Frank’s lips crinkled. “You think your friend saw Old Masau’u from before the fish? Interesting. See, you think Time’s a highway got no northbound lane – just disappears when you cross the next mile marker, and there’s no goin’ back, no U-ies. Hopi language got no word for time. Cause there ain’t no highway. It’s all just here. Me, you, Masau’u, your buddy Kurt, my grandpa and his grandpa, all the fish ever swam in the river.” Frank fretted the tail of his sweater. Then he pinched the poly blend “wool” between a calloused thumb and forefinger. “Just some of us are like in the folds, you know? Between this world and the others.”

“Sooo, you’re saying what?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Frank grinned.

**

Palm Shadows, Unit 68

Gilbert, AZ

Two things occurred simultaneously.

Theron Cross rematerialized. Theron Cross dematerialized, along with an irregular three-foot section at the base of his south wall, a corresponding and adjacent patch of flooring, and an intricately inscribed Mimbre clay bowl.

Had Theron’s wiring enabled him to process irony – and, of course, had he stuck around for even a picosecond following reentry – he might have appreciated that having accomplished mankind’s first truly unique day trip, quantum law had been his undoing.