Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 13/14

            But the Turkey Ts’ were just a part of my less-than-morphous plan. We got into the car with enough food for a gluttonous five. Connie took the wheel again. With sandwich, browns, and hot apple pie placed strategically at our respective hips, we headed north on County 5. I then hung Connie’s laminated badge back on her neck, and lisped past stiffening lips and damaged tooth.

            “You’ll need thif, you know. Nithe gefture, though.”

            She chuckled.

            “It was. The high point of my career. But, Merle, I have to do this alone.”

            “You can’t carry the bof, bofk, ow! thing by yourself.”

            “Nice try.” An inflectional eye-roll. “Box weighs about a pound.”

            “Gonna kick me out on the ed of town?

            “I haven’t thought that far yet.”

            We were now well into our Turkey Ts’.

            “Ooh,” I said. “Yer a threwloly dangerof woman.”

            “Humf!” A bit of lettuce arced onto the steering wheel from her mouth. She wiped it off with her napkin.

            “Sorry.”

            We were racing down County 5 in a car that now had missing lights and scrapes in the front and on the sides. My champagne Imno 400 now had an oddly symmetrical 3cm deep rectangular dent in the roof, not to mention cracks in the windshield and an alignment gone bad. And here Connie was apologizing for garnishing the steering wheel. She worked on the luscious center of her Turkey T. Trying to avoid all sibilants, I went for broke, telling her that I had to go as far as possible in this mission that we’d taken upon ‘oursefs’.

            “Hm,” She hummed. Like a dolphin in a school of shad. “But I carry the box.”

            “Ok. You carry the bof.”

            My plan was working. I tried to ignore the siren Turkey T that I held, taking small bites, as I depended on the distracting effect for my partner. The fact that every bite hurt helped. But Connie bobbed out of her Turkey reverie.

            “You can’t follow me.”

            “Not exafwy,” I placated, as we approached the unguarded Tenger border. “Not exafwy. I’ll be a bit behind.”

            She nodded, hummed, and finished her sandwich.

            “What if we have to go in somewhere?”

            “Then I’ll wait owfide the door.”

            “Hoo!” Connie exclaimed, sans garnish. “Outside the fort.”

            “Just outfide the for,” I acknowledged.

            “You think it’s just this stockade with a plate glass office door!”

            “Whatefer,” I told her.

            “Fort Covington is huge!” She turned with those counter-convincing eyes, but I knew that I had what I needed.

            “Whatefer. I’ll be clof by.”

            “Hee!” She munched her brown with relish.

            “If it a plate glaf door, I’ll wait by it.”

            She munched and shook her head slightly.

            “I’ll wait there,” I said, “keep an eye out, and moke a figarette.”

            Connie abandoned the food, lifted her chin and looked forward as we raced over the border. Two sturdy 6x4 plywood signs were at either side of the road. One welcomed us to Tenger. The other on the left welcomed travelers to Imno. We slipped between them with a- ‘thip!’ Connie continued to stare forward like Mona Lisa with a driver’s license. Still ignorant at this point, I was considering doing the ‘shotgun serenade’ with the Turkey T bag and wrappers. This involves flocking a small roadside tree while humming ‘Blue Moon’. But Connie beat me to the bag. I thought she was just trying to cancel my performance, through what I had determined was an anti-littering neurosis on her part, but, suddenly, the bag was out the driver’s side window and streaking at 2 o’clock high. Connie must have made use of my Imno 400’s broadcast radio antenna (optional), as a catapult. In a split second, the window was back up and she turned to me with a bright look, preening a curl on the back of her head. She was so full of surprises. It had all happened so fast, I hadn’t thought to look at the result. But that was the point of her littering demonstration. It was a gallery piece, you see. She slowed the car, looked about, and made a ‘U’ turn. Now that Connie had adhered to the ‘must litter’ law, she pulled a moving violation.

            She whipped the car alongside a road sign. I gaped in wonder. The sign had advertised storage lots that were nearby. Perhaps no longer. But it was still brightly lit. And the litter literally took the sign out of context. The sign had read ‘Public Units Available’. But now a Turkey T box was stuck over the first ‘l’, and an apple pie carton was plastered on the sign, obscuring the second, capital ‘U’. A drink cup dangled at the end of the statement, a kind of comic sans exclamation point. Now the sign read: ‘Pubic nits Available!’

            Which was the worst slogan in the history of advertising, but impressive nevertheless.

            I’d met my match. Connie was also a master litterer. We decarred silently and I joined Connie, who stood and admired her work. Then she walked up to the sign.

            “Leaf it up!” I told her. “The localf would lofe it! They’ll give us a pubic nit for free.”

            She found the bag, went up, and began peeling the trash off the sign.

            “I’m retired.”

            “You don’t retire from littering. It’s a life-long occupation. You alwayf generate traf. We’re…” I searched for the term… “just more mindful of how we get rid of it.”

            I could hear startled horned toads skittering about during my counseling session. Connie would have none of it. She finished dismantling her work, and the trash went back with us to the car. I drove. After such a display, I decided to interfere no further with this past master. I was even thinking that we could re-assemble the work in a museum later. And there are such places. Connie let me take the wheel. Now she trusted me to keep driving north. She told me that she used to believe in the pro-littering hype, but now she didn’t. This was hard to get around, and actually gave me a headache to hear, but I listened calmly. She had some important things to say. The pro-littering laws were the same in Tenger as in Imno. Littering generates work, and at a world population of only 2 billion, we have to make the place looked lived in. It also places the glom logo all over the place. The laws were specific and enforced. Signs were everywhere.

            “Recycling Punishable With $100 Fine.”

            “The Solution To Pollution Is Dilution.”

            “Spread The Trash.”

            “Think Junk.”

            “Express Yourself! Litter.”

            But, that morning, Connie turned my brain the other way. I drove, and we talked, as equals in the business. We both had been participants in “Litter for the Community” events at school, and each had medaled frequently in littering competition. This was one of the first stages in becoming officials. She had been disappearing unaccountably at times during our travels, and she explained that she had been ‘putting litter in its place’. At shops the litter is gathered in one place before it’s taken elsewhere and scattered roughly in one spot.

            It turned out that Connie had won a regional littering award, one year, for her age bracket. With the recent display, I certainly believed her. In the presentation round she’d gone past statements that once the gloms had been complete it would be the bad ones who gathered the trash and then would live amongst it. During the performance round of the tournament she won, she played a do-gooder who took all the trash upon herself and expired beneath it. And in the speech, she stated that she’d always been told that she’d never be a champion litterer.

            “Is it through that they fold you that?” I asked her, and dabbed blood off my mouth with a Turkey T napkin.

            “Well, in so many words…”

            “Hm.”

            “Well,” she said, “Not words then.” She fidgeted a bit, and found her cluster pin beneath her ass. She’d jettisoned that too, and I’d been putting it where I thought she would sit.

            “Actions,” she told me. “Gestures. Attitudes.” And she paused… “I wanted to win, okay?”

            We looked up through the windshield. The sky had changed somehow. The clouds and stars were blocked, like they’d been back during our last evening at the motel in Oak Falls, but this time the effect was immediate. We couldn’t quite see what was there in the sky before us, but could tell that it was a whole bunch of something. It certainly made its presence known, but not through any sense that I can put my finger on. I pulled the car over. Whatever it was, the ship, centered above us. Not that I can say that I saw the ship do that. I sensed it. We worked as one. Connie told me to pop the trunk, and I did. I went out and walked on the shoulder of the highway toward a field where the road curved. As Connie fiddled around behind the car I gazed up, trying to match my perspective visually with what I knew was up there, and it wasn’t working. There was just no sky. I heard a swish, looked over, and there beside me was Wingnut.

            “Dey know who you are!” I told Connie, in her outrageous get-up. She was in Wingnut’s aviator cap, goggles and scarf. She had the grey box propped on her knee, balancing it with both hands, looking determined.

            “Do they now?” She sang. “Stay back.” She lifted the box and headed across the ditch toward the field. I followed her.

            “Dey know that’s their’s, dey know what we’re doing! Dey know exafwy who we are!”

            So, why was I whispering through rigid, bloody lips as I crossed that ditch with Connie, trying to strike a balance between being heard by her and not by ‘Them’? That irony was reflected in Wingnut Connie’s face as she glanced back to me and said, “They know we’re human. So, they know that all bets are off.”

            I froze with Connie’s determination, but then trotted to keep up with her, as she tromped through the native grass in that ditch, carrying the box to the edge of a fallow beanfield. On this moonless night, I could see everything, but everything was in an enforced darkness. That was the influence of the ship. It served as an eclipse to the stars. There was no light coming from it, no glow whatsoever, but everything in its presence was revealed, in a way. You might know more about this phenomenon than I do, but I have to describe it in case you don’t. I tailed Connie through bushes and a small stand of trees onto cold dirt and harvest stubble. I stopped at the edge of that field with a bush between Connie and me. She shouted upward.

            “It’s broke! I can’t fix it!”

            The structure above revealed itself, or, we were. Everything was. Part of the ship was now resting on the ground ten meters before Connie. She plopped the box on the ground like it was some old mower. Then she addressed the structure in front of her.

            “We don’t have the gas for that. What. Do you think we’re made outta gas in Lumber City?”

            I made a mental note to share with her my admiration of her impression of an Im. And to ask her why she was talking about internal combustion. I kept in mind, however, the overall danger involved.