IGNATIAN STANDOFF (1966) CONTINUED
The first nuclear powered aircraft carrier on Earth and the sole member of a class of ship that would be succeeded before she was repeated. At the start of the Ignatian crisis, LBJ ordered Enterprise (and friends) from Yankee Station to Ignatius. After we shot down the Yanqui plane, but before our people found the crew of the B-52. “Big-E” arrived off the coast in the pre-dawn, clearly visible: a large and angry sky scraper anchored and not going anywhere. Looming, clearly and deliberately visible from the capitol city.
The moment the carrier all large and nuclear powered arrived, Comrade Fidel’s tone softened considerably. “We got your boys, Yanqui” became “tragic misunderstanding.” And when the People’s Republic explained the unique challenges to search and rescue or recovery of the air crew of the ill-fated 52, Uncle Sam was not having it.
The first thing the ship Enterprise did was disgorge its air-wing–some great and gratuitous portion of it. While heavily armed jets buzzed every settlement and drove the Puffins into a murderous rage, reconnaissance planes and helicopters took pictures and film of Float Farms military men would mis-identify as SAM sites and munitions dumps under camo-nets.
Once the whole island, from gaudy capitol to humblest Float Farm, was wide awake two F-4s rose above the rest of the swarming war machines to climb high in the cloudless sky. There in the first light of dawn, for every eye to see and with the precision and artistry of hands trained for war, the pilots found the great height where their planes would leave a vapor trail–where it’s so cold and thin that the little hint of water left in jet exhaust freezes into instant-cloud.
At great height and for god and all the People’s Republic of Ignatius to see, the pilots in tandem painted a great portrait: a mighty dick in the sky (so detailed as to suggest all involved planned the demonstration ahead of time).
The mighty American sky penis loomed long, just hanged there in the still morning air a long-past-long time in the blue sky. People on urban rooftops in the island’s little bit of concrete-country and every comrade and bumpkin in the sticks all looked to the sky.
Awe came in all its flavors, for the American sky penis was mighty. Some felt shame, others exhilaration, others still titillation.
Shock and awe and discord all over the island (just as intended).
The diplomatic exchange “Give us back our airmen.” Yeah, we’d love to, but search and rescue on stilts takes time. This had best not be some Commie ruse. There is no ruse, I assure you. We are a nation infested and bedeviled by land raptors. Land raptors? Your ruse is not even clever, Commie. It’s not a ruse, Yanqui Dickhead.
Indeed, the Yanqui Dickhead (all of them) had to see with their own eyes to believe: the black and whites and 35mm film from the door of the helicopter hanging low. Some weeks ago, some somebody put a SAM-site too close to the tree line. Same several-weeks-back, another somebody else left a little gap in the razor-wire.
When the noise of aircraft rattling the firmament emptied the woods and hell and “all the devils” and every Puffin on the island swarmed–the birds fell on the unfortunately placed SAM site and those manning it (and the drunk Soviet advisor supervising it).
The Americans flew-up mid-massacre, and were horrified at what they saw but had to film. It’s like watching Siafu. No, Piranhas. Land Piranhas picking a grown human clean in a minute-and-some-change–washing over them like water.
*
NARRATIVE NOW: ROSA’S KITCHEN
*
“And every Float Farm, every town, had to ‘run silent.’ The roads were closed for weeks. People on the edge of town in the capitol weren’t even safe.” Wait, ‘silent’ like a sub? “Yeah but not really. Is she old enough to smoke?” Rosa asks mom who intercepts the joint, hits and passes it to You-You.
Todd urges on, “We are on a tight timeline, and we need to get to the meat of the story.”
“Shut the fuck up, Todd.” Language young lady, but yes Hon’, shut the fuck up and let her tell her story.
June returns to the cauldron for seconds or fourths , who cares Long Soup is sublime. All re-up on coffee and the elder continues her story.
“Yeah, it’s maybe not as professional as trained sailors. But yeah, the whole town is quiet.” Rosa whispers for effect. “No street lamps. Nobody goes nowhere they don’t need to be–life or death. And we’re out there on the promenade playing hop-scotch around squeaky boards to get our daily bread. We do this because to do otherwise?” She waits almost too-long. “Death. Whole town.” Dezzy shrieks, and the outsiders start and giggle at themselves.
Rosa scolds the bird. Her hands pantomime a ladder-climb. “Birds stacked, climbing each other like Siafu, army ants. And when they top the walkways like water?” The woman hits a big spliff. She keeps one in circulation, and her hands busy rolling the next while she tells the story. “Well, they sweep the town. The birds kill and eat everything, anything warm and moving first. They eat themselves to death. More birds sweep over the dead, eat their own, hump what’s left.”
“Oh my god.” And the teenage sociopath recoils from the bird called Desdemona. “No no, Cal. Cal, Right? No no. Dezzy’s a good girl. Right baby, who’s my good girl?” And the bird shriek-hisses and ruffles its thinning plumes and seems prepared to fight somebody. “See? She’s my sweetie. But those others, the Feral Puffins, they are devil birds.”
Rosa brings her tone down low and somber: “The worst part is the sound. The constant shrieking. They smell us hiding. Maybe they smell the chickens in little emergency cages on the tippy-top branches like Christmas ornaments? Or maybe they smell us in town, a little closer to the ground? It drives people mad if its loud and long enough. And you can’t” Rosa mimes hanging herself, gives the laugh that’s not a laugh.
The woman made of whip chord continues: “You can’t end it. People want to just dive into the birds, go quick. You can’t because if you do, you give the birds blood. You whip them up worse. You spit in the wind, you reap the bird-shit whirlwind. If sorrow or stupidity feed the birds a few whole-towns worth of people. The whole island suffers a year with three puffin mating seasons.” Oh no. “Oh yes. 1966 was one such year.”
*
IGNATIUS ’66
*
Man in a modified military uniform, winter gear (so much as the island ever had any). It still fits like his father’s clothes, but it’s got a bold addition: the Asklepian in retina-etching orange, same colored arm bands. He leads a team armed with bird-decoys and all the gear necessary to triage-and-treat some pretty hefty-injuries–all while swaying on skyscraper stilts five meters above birds made of razors and rage and hate. If necessary, PRI-SR teams can patch a half-shredded human up and keep them alive long enough for a helicopter to airlift their stretcher out and off to the capitol. Those same teams are brave and steady and tough enough to stand with their arms and ropes entwined for as long as it takes. They wait out helicopter enraged birds. Every nation invested in doing nationalism and all the hubris and posturing that comes with it has at least one kind of army-man-supreme that they’re super proud of. For the country that came-to-be on Ignatius’ back (clinging to it like lichen)–it’s the search and rescue teams that opposite-of-kill.
It’s 1966. There was the day of the sky penis, hardy har. Then there was the nightmare night where a lot of people died, and nobody even bombed us. The Seargent-Surgeon leads his team silent as daddy-long-legs on the spindly-stilt rigs. The scout signals ‘halt’, and the team stands perfect stilt-still, statue still, bamboo swaying. No twitch to them. The medics’ hands like branches, like the tip-tops of wheat stalks entwine tight–all lean on all. The wave of birds batters the stilts like iron bamboo stalks, sweeps the whole natural environment. The birds pass.
The medics march on in silence, slowly picking their way toward the place where four American parachutes met the forest canopy. All hopeful-ever-hopeful to find parachutes that found trees-not-ground.
Indeed, they’d find four Americans tangled in the trees, though spotters swore they saw a fifth chute come out of the plane late, lucky-late, in its doom-dive.
The “Electronic Warfare Guy” the chuckle-fuck who spilled coffee on his console right before somebody lobbed a telephone pole at his plane, that guy. He’s the last man out of the plane (of course).
He turns up opposite end of the island in the Southern Agriculture district 3 days later, hurt and bloody, cut and beat up but otherwise okay. He was smart enough to pick his way through the tree-tops and lucky enough to elude swarming Puffins.
*
ROSA’S KITCHEN
*
“I met him, the fifth soldier, the defector. He hid with us. Stayed right here with us during the bird rage for a few months. I loved him.” Wait, what? “Oh Cal-honey, it’s a joke, I was younger than you even. But I found him rummaging around in the boughs, trying to steal a chicken. Yup.”
The man was hungry and doing this little danger-dangle reaching for the bird, when suddenly behind him “Hey!” and a skinny girl with angry eyes wielding a rake like a spear looks at the barely-grown guy in his flight-suit jammies.
“He’d say later that I had a halo like a saint” Oh my. “Oh he was pretty too. Kind eyes. Movie man mustache that became this scrappy beard.” Delicious. “Oh my god. My mom was fuckin’ him.”
“Mom please no.” Ulysses pleads.
But Rosa ignores him, “Yeah, naw. She was creepy happy and all relaxed for a couple of months, Yanqui too. Good for you, mom.” Mom please. “No man. He filled out that flight suit pajamas, you know what I mean? And we still had the Mao-suits-like the revolutionary-onesies? We had him doin work around town in that thing, sleeves up, bottom like a peach.”
“Mom, please. I am begging you.” Todd Whispers hot in Ulysses’ ear: oh how the cuck-chair tables have turned. “That makes no sense, Todd. Mom I can’t leave the room for the uncomfortable parts or Todd will hurt me.” Correct. I will hurt him badly. “So can we maybe expedite the bit about Nana’s gentleman lover?”
“Okay. Okay. I’m a little high. So all I will say is this.” Mom please. “If the cargo gods could’ve parachuted that Air-Man in like 10 years later? You-You would be a lot prettier.”
*
Yanqui Air-man ran because he had no choice. His parachute came down between trees. Reader, you’ll note ‘between trees’ is not the same as a clearing. Nope. Not even a little bit. There’s lots of upturned and angry foliage. Little sticks that poke and scrape your tenderest bits and big branches that impale (or try to). The rest of his crew clumped near the crash site. A gust from nowhere and bad luck left the clumsy guy who knows he’s not supposed to have coffee near his console a few miles or some number of kilometers away from the rest (where the man had always kind of been anyway, even in crowded rooms or formations or with his aircrew: the part apart from the others. Alone).
Yanqui was his name, functionally, so we’ll leave his legal name behind as he tried to. Yanqui is the thing they shouted at him with thrown rocks or food scraps at the first town. The thing the people in the second town hissed as they pried his fingers from the ladder and ledge of the promenade to drop him to the dirt below. The slur the same people used as bird call afterward to sick the frenzied Puffins on him.
Yanqui Airman ran for days, and when the bird swarms blocked his way or threatened to overtake him, the man skittered into the trees. Almost got ‘got’ crouched at a stream re-filling his canteen. Found a nesting site and nearly got mauled. Air Man got covered in Puffin shit and took a hard fungal dose and the to-the-firewall (and beyond) psychedelic experience.
He crossed the island’s narrow north-south dimension, though he knew it not (for the air is salty everywhere and bird shrieks tend to drown out ocean sounds).
He found the town, G4, “right”–that is, he found it carefully. The man crept up-and-in through the trees. That’s what lead the skinny girl on bird-watch to him: the sound of shufffle-ruffling in the Kokedama-and-canvas wraps that protected winter plants. The man was on the swaying narrow walk-ways highest in the treehouse town, scavenging–hoping for something edible.
Rosa watched a long time, wondering what to do. Should she scream for help? At the trespasser? Just run up and beat him with her rake? Try to help him? The girl watches him turn toward the chickens, start bad-idea leaning out toward the nearest emergency-coop dangling like a raw nugget. Given her past experience, Rosa is convinced he’s bad, a threat.
“Hey!” Thump. The child-sentry doesn’t give Yanqui Airman time to respond or even make any command-demands. She just throttles him with the rake like a war club, one-twice-thrice, breaks the wood-of-it over his blocking arm.
The man is crying, and that saves him from further whooping. He is confessing the sins people in other places screamed at him on his journey. “Yankee dog. I’m a yankee dog. Just please” and pleading-fetal, curled and snot-sobbing with one arm up. She couldn’t hit him any more. She felt shame, uncomradely shame, as this one clearly did need the chicken he was trying to steal–so much shame that she took him home so mom could feed him and let him bathe and they could boil or burn his clothes.
Yanqui Airman, he followed in awe, for he’d been beat by a tiny biblically accurate looking creature, haloed and many-armed-and-eyed as she struck him with many cudgels. Tiny Metatron was insulted when he assumed she didn’t speak English. The little messenger that hits like a truck took him to find shelter and comfort. A long-forever-long walk in the wood to a house on stilts like chicken legs that stood above the lesser devils below. There he met a minor deity, a wood-saint offering comfort and consolation–strong coffee and stronger weed.
Before he was Yanqui Airman, he was a kid from a tiny town in Utah, and the substance-trinity of sacred coffee/weed and profane-Puffin-shit forced the doors of perception wide and dragged his tee-totaling ass through. Rosa’s mom, Lucretia, would help him come back through those doors and learn to live with them open.
*
For a season-and-some days, Lucretia taught Yanqui Airman about the pleasures of the properly organized pastoral, the country life, the simple life that is not simple. There is nothing simple about the living carpet on the Ignatian Leviathan’s back, it’s intricate weave, and the ever-turbulent biological balance about to break and rend and rip itself past shreds. Everything on the island save for the fungus (we’ll get to that soon) is non-native.
Lucretia taught Yanqui Airman to perceive the local rhythm, the balance. It’s not a nice tune, the rhythm section is quite raw. The Ignatian balance is imposed, brutally by bird beak and claw and ergotism and madness. But the great piles driven deep to hold up the promenades and the houses on chicken legs and all the care and sweat and love that went into provisioning human belly and brain and soul–the town is a literafigurative labor of a love and a lovely place to be. It’s a place that came to be in a niche decided by the island’s apex predator: a bird that would be cute if it weren’t fungal mad and ravenous. When the Brits were trying to conquer the place with people (and getting typhus for their trouble) the island was hell. But G4 in its prime is the cozy little product of a few centuries of living and dying and leaving the best instructions one can for the next generation.
Organization to the point of obsession. Every town has a Book of Tasks–a great multi-disciplinary tome that ranges from meal recipes to basic farm task and home maintenance ‘shop instructions.’ Commentaries and annotations. Records of weather, harvests, wedding-funerals and the intervals between–whole long lives tedious and glorious caught in the raw history of the town. Of course “The Book” is not a book, but an annex. And no, no one tends it like a book ghoul or that sad old knight in the Idaho James movie (though any town worthy of the name on the island has at least a modest library).
The Book of Tasks is a living reference book spread across many texts. In The Book of Southern Agricultural District Float Farm G4, one can see Rosa’s mark in modern times. There’s this story about Khrushchev that’s probably Ignatian-style bullshit that includes him working like a dog harvesting wheat to earn a scholarship to some Polytechnic or another. Well it wasn’t bullshit to a bunch of little commie bumpkins in the Ignatian ‘hinterlands’, and Rosa squared her shoulders to that task: her academic advancement. And by the time she came of age, she was an industrial/agricultural hero and locally infamous. The infamy came thanks to the persistent and unfounded murder accusations of a drunken Party Stooge who didn’t parent his son and lost his kid to the birds and blamed the girl. Why? She was there.
Rosa heard what they called her mom, and perceived what people (the dumb ones) thought of her. She didn’t care. Rosa could afford not to care because she had people–family (born and chosen) and even a few friends. She was also a reader with a rich interior world–she fed it and guarded it and nurtured that interiority same as she and hers cared for the moss-sheets and the harvest they’d hold (only if properly tended).
Knots. She studied them carefully and tied them well. Oh Rosa loves sci-fi and poetry to this day, but the woman devours practical texts, and what she cares to know ‘sticks’ on the first pass (always has). Rosa remembered rhymes to remember knots and knew as many as a sailor a century or two before hers, invented a new one. Rosa’s knot. Rosa’s web. Both inventions carry her name, and neither enriched her. But the improvements the young lady conceived of and convinced town elders and party stooges to implement increased the harvest dramatically. New Kokedama sheet configurations and adjustable rigging that allowed sun-hungry crops to be tilted like ship’s sails to follow the light during each day. New layered arrangements and rigging designs that allowed for extra growing layers and space.
Rosa grew into a woman with an eye for improvement. And for reasons personally apocryphal, the stories that grow to legends that lurk around-never-in the Book of Tasks, the town Elders and Party Stooges were happy to see her earn a scholarship to the capital oh-so-not-that-far-away. They were happy because the young woman made of whip chords was smart, scary smart, intimidating smart. She was also kind of scary and intimidating if you knew anyone who drank with the local Party Stooge because you’d heard the stories–girl had a body count. “She’ll kill again!”
Personally, I don’t believe she killed the Party Stooge’s son. I do know the party stooge was correct in his drunken prophecy, just off by a generation and ahead by four years. Lucretia killed a man in the capital in 1957 (he had it coming, don’t worry about it), and she would kill again in 1966. Yes, this one had it coming too.
*
“My mom, You-You’s grandma killed a KGB man.” Excuse me?
Todd speaks for the whole audience assembled in the mint-pink treehouse kitchen with his sudden interest.
“Oh yeah mom had that story on a rope with the rural pastoral thing. She lulled you, had you imagining frosted lense shots and domestic bliss. She’s gotta’ shake ya up. Big twist or deus-ex-machina. It’s unwritten Ignatian narrative law. Careful, she’s likely to get fish-story with it now.”
“Wow, why don’t you insult my soup too? Spit on my grave while I still live, You-You. Anyway, I don’t lie. Yes, she killed a KGB man. It was the Cold War, place was rotten with spies for a minute until some portion concluded ‘my job sucks, and this farm is pretty laid-back, can I defect?’ The party let them.”
She continues in the pre-dawn: ‘They weren’t any trouble, and the ex-KGB fit right in once they stopped lurking and reporting and started, ya know, working and participating in community. One had a crush on my mom. Little guy, big thick glasses. Super sweet, or seemed so. I guess that’s why he went after Air-Man? Mom turned him down, not her type.”
Rosa Laughs at herself: ‘As a kid I thought it was just capital-D-Duty you know? I’m still a sucker for a mural full of comrades striding toward the future. Laugh all you want, Lenin got that chin jut. What’s he looking at? What’s he smell? The future. I just smelled bird shit. So when the ex-KGB man went crazy, made perfect sense to me. Or maybe I’d seen enough crazy to expect it by then? I don’t know. But best guess I’ve got is this: the spurned little Russian guy went crazy-Ivan when Yanqui Airman was cordially invited to dance in the bed his Shostakovich-looking-ass’ I love little Dimitri. ‘Oh I think his compositions are lovely too, dear. But I’m not bedding him, and mom didn’t want that man. And if he couldn’t have Lucretia, the KGB man would throw a tantrum. He’d club and kidnap the American and go back home with an apology trophy in his mouth like a wounded water fowl: a real live Yankee Air-Man ready to be wrung like a fuckin’ washcloth for every drop of information in him. Todd’s holding the shotgun that started it in his lap. The birds finished it. We ran, into the woods. On the ground. What else could we do?’
*
Dawn in the kitchen in the narrative now. Mundane songbirds and shrieking Puffins greet it un-alike but simultaneously, and Todd gets impatient again: “The Nukes, Nana, we’re here to hear about the nukes.” Forgive him, but yes.
“That’s still a few chapters away, but you were good guests and listened well. Even Todd listened well. Nukes are on the North Peninsula.”
“I told you!” Todd gloats to no one over the bet he won with himself.
June is sitting at the kitchen table silently staring with a cig, just middle-distancing it, contemplating Rosa’s long yarn as if she’s seen-re-seen the really good film about green tomatoes. Todd is composed entirely of relief. You-You nodded off a while ago. It’s Cal, Dezzy-bird curled in her criss-crossed leg-lap on the floor that asks: “I mean, you’ll still tell us the rest right? You can’t just end on ‘we ran into the woods full of murder birds.'”
“I may have to stop my story here, hon.” Rosa points to the hair on her arm standing on end. “Here it comes.”
The quiet pop like beer bottle full of lightning being opened just a smidge–reality’s blinds peeled by a watchful eye. Then the hand that rends the window open and tosses two men and a woman in tight-pants tailored suits through–all armed.
The tired ‘missionaries’ twitch toward their weapons: “bad idea.” The Consortium goons gather the guns, and You-You wakes to see a familiar face from the docks at the head of the Consortium phalanx: “Thank you for your cooperation, Rosa. Now, if you’ll all gather yourselves we’ve got a long walk.” The man waves his sci-fi toy-looking pistol casually.
“Not the deal. We agreed that I ‘talk them tired’ and You-You and I are free at least until the Yanquis come snatch him.” Mom, why would you ever willingly. “You-You, you’ve been a ghost in a photograph on momma’s fridge for 20 years. I love you. So please remember that when I say: you know nothing about life here and you need to shut the fuck up.” No. Nothing good comes from dealing with criminal…”
“Business men. We’re business men. And women. Business people. Business beings.”
Rosa interjects: “For twenty years I get random-ass ‘how are things?’ phone calls from my estranged…” From your American Service Member son “From my estranged Yanqui…” Oh yeah, emphasize the pronunciation mom, make it sound foreign and spooky: I’m a yanquweeee devil. “Well, you call your mother under false pretenses.” Mom. Come on. “No you call and ask CIA world factbook questions while I hear all these clicks and pops on the line. ‘Hey mom how’s the harvest? What’s the ratio of protein to veggies in the Ignatian diet these days? On a scale of 1 to fucked how stable is the Ignatian regime? Really?”
“Mom. It was work. It was my job. I got to hear your stories and talk to you after I asked those questions.”
“Whatever. Take him. He’s dead to me anyway. Yanqui’s took the him out of him long time ago.”
And the Consortium trio and the fake-Missionary-trinity wait awkwardly a while longer, unsure if the fight is over “Yeah actually we’re still taking all of you for a walk.”
Todd, disarmed but defiant: “You’re just gonna disappear four Americans with no consequences?”
Tight pants is untroubled, “I think you mean dispose of one deserter and some bargain-bin private-eye’s playing spy. But no, we have an understanding with the Americans and most places where we do business. We don’t harm theirs and they leave us be.” The smug and villainous smile, the bored-with-victory shit-grin mortice-crawls across Tight Pants’ face. “We’re going to a Consortium bunker for a debrief, a deep debrief. And if we find evidence of espionage, amateur or professional, we’ll refer your case to the Ignatian justice system.”
G4 in the naked narrative now and the full light of morning. The place is sleepy, but the Book of Tasks is intact and the people are headed to work when the consortium goons perp-walk their prey politely down the promenade.
Brave ones catch Rosa’s eyes and plead with theirs. The rest cast their eyes down. Town’s people rightly fear the Consortium. You don’t talk about them or you get a visit. Simple as that. The people read. They’re educated. They know the consortium bugs everything. No one knows how. So they do what Ignatians do: endure-via-ignore. I love them. Us. But I told you. It’s a shit covered nightmare island. Beautiful. Home. Also a shit covered nightmare island.
The eight of them: Consortium trio, family trinity, You-You and Rosa on stilts set off, north for a long walk on stilts to a bunker beneath a fake chapel.
Not the island’s heart they’re headed toward, but the heart of a certain kind of dark is what they’ll find. Think bible-black but profane–grimoire ink–under the Ignatian forest green.
*
END IGNATIUS 5