“It’s your hangin’ day, Billy Smith,” said the sheriff through the bars. “Since you’ve been here, Billy, I’ve learned you ain’t such a bad boy. I was wrong before. We was all wrong, and I think we owe you an apology. I don’t want to see you beg and squeal and scream. I don’t want to see you kickin’ and dancin’ on air. I reckon I’ll just have to close my eyes when the time comes.”

Billy didn’t seem to notice the sheriff. He was standing on his bed, his face level with the window of his cell. The early morning rays of the sun shone in on him, bathing his face with a holy light. He stuck an arm through the bars and held his hand up toward the sky. A beautiful bird landed in the palm of his hand, singing a melody ever so sweet, a song so pure it was like the voice of God in falsetto.

“Them birds love ya’, don’t they, Billy?” said the sheriff with reverence in his voice.

“Yes,” answered Billy, “I should have been an ornithologist. I never dreamed that one day I would be just like a bird in a cage, singing for my supper, wishing I was free.”

“Well, Billy, you won’t have to do no singin’ today. This here bag of sunflower seeds is on the house. I throwed in some bread crumbs, too, and some gravel for your gizzard.”

The sheriff walked over to his cluttered desk and picked something off the top.

“I drawed up this here certificate to present you on the scaffold. It testifies that you, Billy Smith, are the cleanest, most well-behaved prisoner that we’ve ever had the pleasure to hang. In plain words, a model condemned man. And looky here,” said the sheriff, beaming as he held the document up to the bars, “it’s been signed by the governor. He says he’ll personally attend your funeral and see to it that your widow don’t go without, like so many widows do.”

“Let me see that,” said Billy. As the sheriff handed it through the bars, Billy grabbed his arm and yanked him close. Then he grabbed the sheriff by his hair and jerked him around so that his back was against the bars. Using the edge of the certificate like a knife, Billy drew it across the sheriff’s neck, cutting his throat from ear to ear.

“Ow! That smarts. Leggo!” demanded the sheriff.

“You better open this door, sheriff, or I’ll open it with your head.”

“No! No!” cried the sheriff. “You’re gonna hang. You’re gonna hang.” Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang went his head against the bars, and pop went the lock as the door swung free. Billy grabbed a gun first, then he rummaged through the desk, looking for beer nuts and traveler’s checks. As he went along he kept popping little odds and ends into his mouth, until he looked like a chipmunk with overstuffed pouches. In the back of his mind somewhere, Billy asked himself, “Why am I doing this? Pa will kill me this time for sure.” But his introspection lasted only a second. He found a tube of bright red lipstick, tasted it, tried some on, pursed his lips in front of a mirror, and then wiped it off. He tried to stuff a harmonica into his mouth but failed. He broke into a medicine cabinet and rubbed himself down with ammoniated spirits. “Now I truly feel like a polar bear,” he confided to himself as he tried mugging in the mirror again. Then he burst out with a laugh — the kind of raw, husky, liquor-laden laugh that a cowboy makes when he’s just heard an outrageous lie. But it was just one lonely laugh, the sort that keeps to itself, that runs away from home and wanders the streets at night, never to return.

Billy went over to the open cell where the sheriff lay. Using two six-shooters, he blasted holes into the floor around the body. The noise was deafening. “Dance, damn you, dance!” shouted Billy through the smoke. The body was motionless. A little songbird flitted in through the window. It landed on the sheriff’s head and went hungrily for the eyes.

Billy reloaded and ran out into the street, brandishing his weapons. “Look at that big chipmunk!” exclaimed an elderly woman. Billy shot at her. He started to fire wildly in all directions. The town got angry. Blam. Blam. Blam. Kapow. Kapow. Kapow. Bullets flew every which way like a storm raging in Hell. The blazing sun bore down, relentless, seeming to curse the name Billy Smith.

“We hate you, Billy Smith,” yelled everyone at once. Click, click, click was his reply. Out of bullets. He stood up from his crouching position and turned to run. Blam. Blam. Blam. Kapow. Kapow. Ack ack ack ack ack. They shot him in the back with everything they had. He turned to face them once more, caught a bullet in his teeth and collapsed to the ground where the dust ran red. His riddled body quivered like jelly as they continued to fire – muskets, Gatling guns and cannons spewing flames, echoing like thunder in a mad symphony of death.

“Give up, Billy Smith,” blared a loudspeaker. A German biplane strafed him mercilessly for several hours and then dropped a bomb. The carnage went on for three days and three nights with searchlights swiveling, hand grenades exploding and red-hot barrels bending like licorice. Finally, they stopped. “Come out with your hands up,” warned the loudspeaker.

When the smoke cleared nine days later, nothing was left but a radioactive crater filled with molten lead.

I was floundering in the wake of an apocalyptic bender last Tuesday morning when the intolerable mewlings of my dog, King Midas, awakened me. Due to an oversight on my part, he’d been locked out of the house for several weeks and was desperate to get back in. I touched a match to the pilot light in my head and groped my way to the front door, pausing only once for an unpleasant but very necessary side trip to the washroom.

I was going to throw a paperweight at the dog, but when I opened the door my senses left me. Midas held in his mouth the limp body of a tiny old man. He was bluish white, with a hopelessly bald head and a long, jaggedly trimmed white beard. His eyes were a bottomless black with undulating swirls of iridescent color floating across their surface. They were the eyes of a gnome — that rare breed of diminutive hobos who sleep in abandoned cars and subsist entirely on peyote buttons. He was dressed in a snappy purple suit with silver trim. He wore a wide, diamond-encrusted belt from which hung a beautifully wrought silver dagger of Sumerian or possibly Bolivian design.

The little guy was still alive but obviously the worse for wear. Innumerable tooth marks discolored his neck where the dog had grabbed and shaken him like a rag toy. His neck was probably broken. He rolled his eyes downward and flailed his arms in a silent attempt to retrieve the conical hat that lay crumpled on the doorstep. I kicked the hat away from the porch, thinking it might be a bomb. I told Midas to drop the little man, but like most dogs, he had a mind of his own. A nasty tug-of-war ensued, in which I became the victor and Midas a very sore loser.

The gnome could hardly find the words to thank me. Instead, he begged me not to touch him or take him inside. His accent was strange and very hard to understand. He blubbered something either about burning alive or being turned inside out. I knew he was delirious and unable to comprehend the extent of his injuries. Ignoring his pleas to be left alone, I carried him inside. I laid him on the sofa and took his boots off. His feet were ice-cold.

“So this is the way you would have it,” he said bitterly. “To diminish like a candle, such a long and lingering death. Just as my uncle said it would be.”

“Shut up,” I said, slapping him a few times to sober him up. “You need rest, pal. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. Now go to sleep.”

“Not sleep, but death,” he moaned. “My feet are growing numb.”

I looked at his feet. They were gone, melted, nothing but a damp spot on the cushion. I shrieked like a little girl in spite of myself, and ran to the washroom where I became violently ill. When I was able to return a few minutes later, half of him had melted away. I bit my lip and tried to pretend everything was okay. “Nice weather we’re having,” I said in the most vacuously cheerful voice I could muster.

“Yes, I’m dying,” croaked the old man. “I don’t care what happens to the dagger. I got it at a dollar store in Philadelphia. But will you see that my wife gets the watch?”

“What watch?”

With his one remaining arm he tugged at a chain in his breast pocket. Out fell a watch that no doubt had once been a priceless heirloom. It now looked like a refugee from a surrealist landscape. As I took it in my hands, the numerals slithered out from beneath the watch crystal and vaporized in midair, hissing. The misshapen timepiece slipped from my grasp, sputtered on the carpet like dry ice and then vanished.

“Please see that she gets the watch. I stole it from her a few years ago and she’d be glad to get it back.”

“But who –”

“Frost. Jack Frost’s the name. But that probably wouldn’t mean anything to a numskull like you.”

He clenched a fist. His thumb snapped off and slid across the floor like an ice cube. “Would you do me one last favor?” he whispered almost inaudibly.

“Yes, of course. Anything.”

“Kill the dog.” With that he closed his watery eyes and rapidly sank into a slushy mess. Soon, nothing was left but a large, gooey stain with steam rising from it. Of course, the cheap little dagger was still there, but I threw it in the garbage. Suddenly I remembered the hat. I ran to the front door. The hat was still lying in the grass and was only slightly mushy. I wrapped it in aluminum foil and stashed it in the basement freezer.

I had every intention of selling my story to the highest bidder and furnishing the hat as irrefutable evidence. But such was not to be. Our city had a power failure on Thursday when, as luck would have it, I was away on a business trip. Needless to say, the freezer defrosted. Inside, all I found was 20 pounds of rancid calves’ brains and a nauseating chocolate-colored swill that knocked me out cold when I got my first whiff of it. Now that the freezer’s been drained there’s really nothing left but a thin red line around the inside, sort of like a bathtub ring, and it seems no amount of cleanser will take it off.

You probably think I’m a fool for not taking some pictures when I had the chance. Or maybe you think I’m a damned liar and that none of what I’ve said is true. Yeah, that’s probably what you think. Well, I’m not going to try to change your mind. Now that King Midas sleeps with the fishes, only a tiny widow woman with icicles hanging from her eyes would believe me.

The rough-hewn sign read, “Welcome To Mosesville, Home Of The Twelve Tribes, State Football Champs 1989.” On either side of the sign stood a totem pole which featured twelve crazy-looking faces. A grey-haired man stopped his car, took a picture of the totem poles, lit a cigarette and then drove on towards town. He pulled into the first gas station he came to and inquired, “I was told I might be able to find here a Miss Helen Slenderhoof, daughter of Felix Von Peckerpuss, alias Doctor Helmut Fink.”

“She no come here no more,” said the swarthy hunchback from behind his black veil. “She kaput. Vamooshka. Fräulein a-go-go.”

A sneer of impatience came to the vistor’s face. “Look, my name is Karl Trouzerpantz. I’m a hunter of Nazis. But you are in no danger. I hunt only the Nazis and their spiritual counterparts, the Saudis.”

The gas-station attendant’s eyes widened in amazement. “You don’t believe me?” asked Karl. “I will show you.”

He opened the trunk of his car. It contained a small arsenal: rifles, handguns, boxes of ammunition, a couple of peashooters, and also a burlap sack labeled BAIT. “Ten thousand dollars in gold Krugerrands,” explained Mr. Trouzerpantz with a smile. “All Nazis are driven mad by gold. If you had been one I would already have caught you scratching at my trunk lid, howling like a hungry jackal. Now if you’ll tell me where the townspeople are hidden, I’ll give you a baby dinosaur.”

The attendant suddenly ran back inside the station and jumped, screaming, through a trapdoor behind the cigarette machine. His echoing cries faded into the darkness below. “Suicide,” thought Karl. “How refreshing.” He flicked his cigarette into the hole that might as well have been a bottomless ashtray. He had heard of such things.

Karl got back into his car and drove into the seemingly deserted town. On the outskirts was a barbershop. A faded sign posted outside read, “Haircut: $87. Shoeshine While You Wait Forever: $27.50.”

Beyond that place, the street widened until it reached the town square. It was laid out like a genuine Bavarian beer garden, complete with lush, ivied trellises and repugnant statues of Cupid. The fountains were, in fact, flowing with beer. That, along with the scattered piles of discarded lederhosen and black lingerie, was a telltale sign of a recent drunken orgy. Karl shuddered in disgust. He couldn’t bring himself to step out of the car for a more thorough inspection. No doubt Helen Slenderhoof was gone from here and well on her way to some other playground for the rich and filthy rich. No doubt her stereo was playing John Philip Sousa marches at full blast. No doubt she was making love at that very moment, giggling in the arms of some fascist gigolo while the world went to hell.

Karl took a stick of gum from his pocket and chewed it fiercely. Tears came to his eyes and he drove away.

I checked in just after sunset. I wasn’t feeling well but that was normal. An old man behind the desk handed me the keys to room 314 and went into a coughing fit as I headed for the stairs. They creaked all the way up to the third floor and stopped. I passed a fat bimbo in the hallway. She wore a baby blue circus tent and fuzzy golden slippers. She had a bewildered look on her face, as if she couldn’t find her way back to the room filled with straw. Under one arm she carried a funny-looking dog. Who knows, maybe it was a goat. It kept licking at her arm as if the arm was a large stick of butter. I could tell they were made for each other.

The room was about what I expected. Just a room. Not immaculate but not filthy. Cheap but not disgraceful. The sort of room where newlyweds have to stay when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Or the room where a failed man goes to blow his brains out when he wants to be discrete about it. I had a gun but I wasn’t about to use it on myself.

I loosened my tie, lay down on the bed and listened. I could hear the stairs creaking again as Bimbo went down to the lobby. She was probably married to the scarecrow behind the desk. The goat was probably their child. Listening, I thought I could even hear the old man coughing again three stories below.

The curtains in my room were open so that the lights of the town shown in across the walls and ceiling. The various configurations of neon sent streaks of color into the room, flashing, flashing, on and off. Gleaming cars turned corners onto the well-lit boulevard only to turn again and disappear behind other corners. The whole scene was like a living jungle of light shifting around my room. I lit up a cigarette, smoked it slowly, finished it.

Sometime later I woke up, realizing that I’d drifted off to sleep still fully dressed. My watch said 10:30. I called room service for food and then went to splash some water on my face. I stared at myself in the mirror above the sink. A cockroach skittered out from beneath the mirror and looked at me, twitching its antennae. Before I could smash it the thing ran down to the floor and disappeared.

“Room service,” said the voice through the door. It was a girl about 21-years-old. Behind those pouted red lips she was pale, pale with stringy yellow hair. I paid her. “Thanks,” she said with a stringy yellow voice. I took a few sips of the stringy yellow soup and then shoved it aside in disgust.

Outside, the neon lights were still going strong. Cars continued to appear around corners, glide down the boulevard, turn out of sight. Like clockwork, no surprises, no intermissions, just the same show over and over. The only human sound was the guy coughing downstairs. By now he’d probably locked his wife in the basement or given her some knockout drops. She wasn’t the sort of thing to be trusted roaming loose at night.

I started to sweat. I lit another cigarette but that was no good. The smoke tasted lousy. When I ground the cigarette out on the floor I saw another cockroach, or maybe the same one. I trapped the little bastard under a drinking glass and watched him try to get out. There, I thought, you can stay there till you starve.

I stayed awake the whole night staring at the wallpaper. I stayed awake till my watch said six o’clock. It was still dark outside. I went to splash water on my face for the hundredth time but by then it wasn’t doing much good.

At nine o’clock in the morning it was still dark. I felt for the gun tucked in my belt. What it could do for me now, I didn’t know. After a while I stopped looking out the window to see what was going on. I just lay there on the bed, sweating. Finally, I went to sleep.

When I woke up nothing had changed. I looked at the cockroach under the glass. It was alive. I ordered up some food and tried not to look at the blond who brought it in. I tried to appear impatient. Actually, I was scared. I was already too afraid to leave the hotel, even to go across the street to see a movie. I was afraid that the girl in the ticket booth might be the same one who handled the room service here, afraid that everyone in the theater would look like the old man, or his wife.

It stayed dark outside. I stayed inside. Several days went by. All I did was eat or take showers and wait for the cockroach to die. Several times I thought of killing it myself.

Later, I awoke from a violent dream to find myself on a sofa in the lobby of the hotel. How I got there I could not remember and will probably never know. I asked the man at the desk if there’d been any messages for me. He started coughing uncontrollably but managed to shake his head no, no messages. I started up the creaking stairs again. I could feel myself slowing down, each step getting harder to take. By the time I was halfway up I had decided to order up a case of scotch and try to drink myself to death. It wasn’t until I reached the third floor that the creaking stopped and I started to laugh, laughing all the way to my room, laughing even after I’d shut the door and looked at the cockroach again.

Much has been made of Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic. Yet Christopher Columbus was not the first greaseball from the Old World to drop socks in the New. Also, there’s the little known matter of cannibalism aboard his ships, which has never been adequately addressed. The code of silence was breached only once by Vasco de Sectomy, ship’s cook, nicknamed the Crisco Kid, who wrote that the several crewmen he prepared were beyond help and tasted like old laying hens. His request for a junior officer was rebuked. However, his recipe for “long pig” remains closely guarded under lock and key in the Library of Seville. No one except Pope Kasmir the Omnivorous has seen it, though a very determined Betty Crocker was turned away in tears several years ago.

But truly, at this point I’d rather cut my own heart out with a broken bottle than breathe one more word about Columbus.

Long before the so-called Age of Discovery, before the Inquisitors racked up their first heretic, before that German cockroach Gutenberg cradled his first umlaut, before Joan of Arc’s heavenly body went up in a blaze of glory, before Henry VIII beheaded his way into our hearts, all manner of pimple-faced poets and star-crossed golliwogs were prancing in the foam on our shores, naked and alone, glistening in the moonlight like great silver carp. Some came in peace. Others came in pieces. Many came to either eat or be eaten. They all had one thing in common. They died. Who were these people? What did they smell like? Was flatulence a problem for them? Did they drink beer?

Going back at least as far as 800 or 1,000 B.C., men with swords of bronze and balls of iron have been drawn inexplicably, oft times inexcusably, to drop their shorts here.

Along the Northeast coast can be found a number of huge magnificent and beguiling stone phalluses (called phalli) left behind by a sexy breed of swingers who flowered but for a season in this rugged land: The Jasonites. To know them is to love them is to know them. Surely the long ocean voyage at close quarters was the inspiration for their refreshingly frank sculptural monuments. Ancient mariners often manned their vessels in the nude for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. As such, strict discipline aboard ship was of paramount importance. Every man from First Mate down to the Fudge Packer’s Apprentice knew the sting of the Captain’s paddle.

No sooner had the Jasonites invented chaps than they discarded them as a landlubber’s luxury. Filled with resolve and assorted nutmeats they sailed their delicate boats of balsa wood in search of the Golden Fleece. Abalone inlay graced the handrails. Erotic subjects done in filigree played tag around the ship’s compass. Sails of crushed velvet whispered aloft, secured with silken cords. The Jasonites thrived on a diet of Rocky Mountain oysters and honey until, at last, naked and alone, they took their first feeble steps in the New World. Shyly they shivered in the frosty silence of the dawn, like fawns awakened in the Garden of Eden. Then, with growing eagerness, they reached out to gather the flowers of Spring.

But, alas, naked and alone, they perished in a senseless bloodbath as hordes of brutish savages slaughtered them and ate their livers (which tasted like the finest venison).

Certain sites in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, after years of strenuous excavation, have grudgingly yielded several ancient samples of caramelized stool, carbon dated to 90 B.C. (plus or minus 2,000 years). These curious remains are the last will and testament of the Yodelians, a large, asymmetrical Aryan race who fled hygienic persecution in their native Switzerland. Distantly related to Sasquatch, they were also ancient cousins of the Samuelites, forefathers of our very own Uncle Sam. All relations aside, they were otherwise notable for the pleated bony plates, fringed with undulating frills of cartilage, that bisected their brain cavities. It was not uncommon for the backs of their abbreviated skulls to contain a handy storage compartment where a fragrant sachet or amber trinket could be kept and treasured in privacy.

Somehow these yodeling yahoos found their way to the New World, where they eventually yodeled their way right into the stew pot, summarily butchered and simmered by a band of Algonquins after a bitterly contested Ping-Pong match during which numerous spouses and children had been wagered. The Yodelian chowder went over very well after the game. Weep not for them. Before the invention of toilet paper any colonization attempt was doomed to failure anyway. Truly sore and sorry was any bottom that learned this lesson the hard way.

The Celts were a swarthy, hotheaded, hopped-up rabble of midgets with such prominent brow ridges that their eyes could not be seen without a flashlight. Many appeared quite effeminate and were only two or three feet high in their spikes. But they were utterly fearless mariners who could travel 3,000 miles in an open boat with nothing more to sustain them than a barrel full of sweet baby gherkins. They steered by the stars. They were fond of saying that Ursula Major will get you 10 and Ursula Minor will get you 20 (a fact which, ironically, modern astronomers corroborate).

Staggering heaps of pottery shards at Celtic settlement sites attest to the sorry state of marital affairs in everyday life. Obviously Mr. and Mrs. Celt spent all their spare time throwing things at each other.

If we were to judge solely by the portraits of their women found on pottery fragments we might incorrectly deduce that the modern horse had already been introduced to the Americas by this time.

Skeptics maintain that the Celts lacked the means to construct the massive stone temples found scattered along the last remaining segments of Route 66. How could such ugly, tiny people move rocks that weighed countless tons? The fact is that once the honeymoon was over the Celts settled down to a lifetime consumed by endless drudgery, every waking moment (aside from spousal target practice) totally devoted to the moving of huge stones to sacred sites. What determined the sacredness of a particular site was the number of Celts killed in the process of moving the stones there.

If we eavesdrop with our imaginations we can hear the beating of pagan drums, the creaking of rotten vines and crude hemp ropes stretched beyond all reasonable safety parameters, and lo! the sudden snap of breaking bones, punctuated by screams and heartfelt bickering.

There was no such thing as old age in this culture. By the age of 20 a man was so bent out of shape that he looked like a human swastika. When he fell downhill he’d cartwheel all the way. By the end of his truncated life the average Celt was a toothless patchwork of multiple ruptures and festering fractures swathed in bloody homespun bandages, his brave frame marginally supported by a tattered tangle of leather harness straps and trusses cinched so tight that body parts withered and fell off in coarse blackened chunks. Often these piecemeal wayward body parts were all that nourished them as they crawled their way the last few miles to their own graves. This practice of self-consumption is a unique anomaly in the wide world of cannibalism. Why they left is certainly no mystery. That they held out so long is what astounds us. Theirs is a lasting legacy of unspeakable pain and suffering.

The Peckerwood Filter Kings were an irascible, irreverent, irritable, totally irrelevant, slightly iridescent race of aristocrats descended from glowworms. It is believed they were first disseminated here in migratory bird droppings. Mercifully they all died. That they were inedible should come as no surprise.

Lastly we highlight a culture known only as the Bong People. The words despicable and malodorous come to mind, but they really weren’t people so much as zombie-like drones, clad only in chain mail loincloths, who had a talent for showing up unannounced and uninvited. They subsisted on a diet of leprechauns and peyote buttons. Their ocean-going rafts were made of old rolled up Persian rugs stuffed with dried camel dung and deviled eggs. Nevertheless they managed to reach these shores with an immense cargo of a highly concentrated form of Turkish taffy known as Snag, which was distributed freely to all native peoples. By this insidious means, in just a few years entire tribes had perished, decimated by the ravages of rampant tooth decay. A few tribal remnants rallied their forces and in an epic battle on what is present-day Coney Island the Bong People were slowly gummed to death and sent to hookah heaven.

Everyone was delighted to find that when properly dressed and seasoned, the Bong People had the appearance of richly marbled beef. But the smoke produced by the fires that cooked them was very black and greasy, and their roasted flesh was a gamy disappointment reminiscent of rancid salt pork (scholars believe it could possibly have been improved slightly by marinade). The Native Americans who ate them had dysentery for weeks afterward.

I’ve been retired for a number of years. Lean a little closer. I say I’ve been retired for a number of years. Did you hear that? Good. Yes, I was a doctor. “Doc” they used to call me. I’d be sitting near the fireplace with my head in a brandy snifter when someone would sound the alarm: “Doc, come quick. Luke, he bahn hurt bedt.”

“Get outta here,” I’d say. “Go on, get outta here!”

Then I’d try to throw the brandy snifter at ‘em but my head would stuck fast inside of it. If there was time I’d drink a little Irish coffee to sober up. Then I’d wash my feet and embark on the next train for New York so I could pick up my doctor’s bag at the pawn shop. But if it was a real emergency, like when Luke got lost in Gecko Cavern, I’d grab whatever I could find in the kitchen and go.

It was generally a good thing when I didn’t find my doctor’s bag. I never could figure out what most of that stuff was inside there. A lot of those little glass vials with powder in them were labeled with a skull and crossbones and that always made me feel superstitious.

Anyway, by the time I got to that cave most of the town folk were there singing church hymns. They all looked pretty scared. Spotted corn fever had taken its toll the previous winter, so the fear was still hanging in their watery gray eyes. We all knew that come Spring (God willing that Spring did come), the Dry Burlap Rash would be the weight of worry on our minds.

By and by a black preacher man by the name of Nubi Nixon leads me to the mouth of the cave. “Have a care, Doc,” he says. “That place is chock full of geckos!”

He puts boney hand alongside his face and rolls his eyes around. I take a big look into the dark of that cave. Then I rear myself up like a jungle beast till my rib cage just about busts and I yell, “Sa-tan, begone! Sa-tan, begone!”

We hear an echo and a couple of geckos come skittering from the cave. The crowd murmurs. It starts to drizzle. Women folk are holding paper fans and bits of rhubarb over their heads. Lightning skitters in the far distance. I take another strong look into the cave. “Luke,” I yell, “get outta there! Go on, get outta there!”

Now I’m still wearing that brandy snifter, you see, but no one says a word. Not a thing. It starts pouring rain. The crowd goes deathly still. A couple more geckos scurry out and a dog gets one. I turn toward the crowd and shake my head slowly, “No.” I wipe my brow. But then, out of the dark comes this shape, slowly comes this shape, pale like Luke and slow, an awful lot like Luke. And here he comes blinking and crying but he’s all right and only missing one pants leg. Everybody’s cheering. They rename the town after me and all that. I don’t mind much.

Sometimes I’d be staying for as long as a week when somebody’s down with fever. Folks really can’t afford that kind of living. So they’d pay me whatever they had: sometimes a barrel of salt pork or a sack of dried grasshoppers, or one time even a gourd shaped like a lady’s behind. A freak of nature it was; worth a lot to the right buyer.

“Alas, we have nothing,” they’d say sometimes.

“No matter,” says I, “the kindness and generosity of your lovely daughters has more than recompensed me.”

Then the folks would yell, “Get outta here! Go on! Whoever heard of a doctor with a brandy snifter on his head? Charlatan! Pedophile!”

All I know is my daddy wore a snifter on his head and his daddy before him. Can’t all of us be wrong.

Way back then, the main medical problem was keeping people from using that good old folk medicine on themselves. I’d come to treat a man for gout and he’d be lying on his stomach with a pumpkin tied to his back and inside the pumpkin was a big snake. It got so that when a fellow had gout folks would say, “He’s got a pumpkin on his back.”

“Basil,” I’d say, “that snake’s no good for you.”

The fellow would look kinda hurt and say, “That snake was meant for you, Doc. I know it isn’t much to go on, money-wise, but it’s a lot more snake than you’ll find anywhere else.”

“Well, Basil, thanks, but I don’t like to see you with a pumpkin on your back.”

“Doc, I chewed a possum tail nine times and it just won’t do.”

“Did you spit on the grave of a Chinaman?”

“Of course.”

“Did you whistle up the leg of a pregnant mule?”

“I sure did.”

“Basil, better call a preacher. You’re not long for this earth, so I fear.”

Just then the snake rises up, looks right at me and s-s-s-says-z-z-z, “Go on, get outta here-s-s-s!”

I didn’t argue.

CONFIDENTIAL:

General Sternwood

Department of Diminishing Returns

Camp Squanto, Massachusetts

SUBJECT:

Five-year deregulation program

Operation Overbite

Dear Jake,

My recent unofficial visit to Camp Suzie convinced me that the present five-year program, now in its sixth and final year, is in trouble. Jake, they were shocked as hell to see me there last Sunday morning. If I had arrived any later, I’m sure the whole place would have been whitewashed and spitshined.

For starters, no guard was posted outside the compound. I had to honk the horn for 15 minutes before anyone let me in. It was Commander Moss himself who opened the gate and he was still in civilian underwear. Now this was well past eight-thirty; Sunday school had been over for an hour. I was wearing regulation skivvies, of course, but the man still failed to salute. He then stated that if I paid a two dollar toll he’d let me through, no questions asked. Jake, I had to look up at the flagpole to make sure I was in the right country. Moss maintained that the regulations manual never specified as to the public display of undergarments. I checked his facts. I can hardly believe it but he’s right. I’ll be damned if there’s a single sentence in the book which details a mandatory code of dress. We should rewrite the whole shebang, starting with the introduction, “Why We Serve” (the obvious answer — “Because it’s there” — doesn’t fool them anymore).

According to the list Commander Moss gave me, 47 percent of the camp personnel were absent without leave, 35 percent were missing in action, and another 5 percent never existed. A brief investigation, which involved poking around inside the perimeter bushes with a cattle prod, brought that last figure down to an acceptable 3 percent. It can only be hoped that the other figures are the result of gross clerical incompetence.

Among other problems at Camp Suzie, the living conditions are substandard. Everyone’s fed well enough — the Red Cross sees to that — but where are they supposed to sleep? We promised them a row of barracks four years ago. Well, Jake, they’re still living in abandoned boxcars and running around with shoeshine kits. Out of pity, I paid for a shine seven times that day. If only you’d seen the look on those men’s faces when I tossed a quarter up for grabs.

As I continued the inspection I began to realize that, although Moss is the highest ranking officer on base, he’s not the man who’s running the show. The Chaplain, Sergeant Lemmus, is a very charismatic character to whom all personnel exhibit an unusual degree of loyalty. Mass is held every night in a secluded area that he designates as his “invisible church.” All who attend are required to wear “invisible robes,” and from what I hear it’s quite a ceremony. You’ll laugh if I admit this, but the man disturbs me. When I said, “See you later,” he just smiled and shook his head no.

Now Jake, I’m aware that Operation Overbite is a pet project of yours, but I can’t beat around the bush. In this case I can only advise to terminate with extreme prejudice. There’ll be other five-year programs, you wait and see. Meanwhile, deregulation is not the answer. What we need are fewer chaplains and more shoeshine kits.

Who can pass up a garage sale? I know I can’t. Mostly they’re just tangled heaps of useless junk which no one without serious mental problems would want. Yet, everything I have was purchased or stolen at garage sales. It used to be that only gypsies or Scotsmen would dare to be seen picking through piles of rags and button boxes. Nowadays, even the very rich will pick diligently through piles of rags and button boxes, pausing only to raise a monocle and inquire, “Is this Scotsman really for sale?”

The garage sale is a tradition which goes back to long before the invention of the garage. In the Elizabethan Age, noblemen and peasants alike would gather under brightly colored tents to barter:

“I will give you this fine goose for that old Gutenberg Bible.”

“Nay, this is a signed original, the only one of its kind. I will not part with it for less than two fine geese.”

“‘Tis a pity I have but one goose. But take a gander at yon maiden. I offer you the hand of my daughter, if such be fair trade.”

“What? My Gutenberg Bible for that? Surely you jest!”

“Nay, do her looks startle you? ‘Tis but the pox, which soon will pass. Let us bandy no more. Take my offer, oh merchant of Venice.”

“Oh, fudge! Behold, while we have haggled your goose has laid waste to my wares. Begone with your goose and your geek daughter! I don’t know what came over me, wanting to sell this rare first edition for a couple of smelly birds.”

Truly, Gutenberg would have rolled over in his grave. Except for a few plague years, the Renaissance fairs were so successful that they soon surpassed in popularity other social gatherings such as witch burnings and hangings.

After the invention of the garage, some aspects of the sales changed. It became harder to find a rare first edition and it became harder to get the owner to part with it at an absurdly low price. But bargains can still be found today. A friend of mine recently bought an antique milk pail for five dollars. Unknown to the previous owner, inside the pail were five long-lost copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls made a unique decoupage covering for the outside of the pail, with enough left over to do a suitcase and a lunch box.

A number of art objects are rediscovered at garage sales. If it hasn’t been used as a dart board or a place mat for too many years, an old master can go for millions at auction. I once finagled a painting away from widow woman in Missouri. I thought it was a Rembrandt. She thought it was a Van Dyke. In fact, she did have a genuine Van Dyke, but that was on her chin (and not for sale). I told her, “You know, I like this old Schickelgruber. I’ll give you a few bucks for it. What do you say?”

The old lady parted with it very reluctantly and only on the condition that I call her once a week to tell her how it was doing. I called her a week later and said, “Hey, I just sold your painting for ten million bucks. How about that?”

She’s probably still standing there in Missouri with the telephone glued to her ear. I was only joking at the time, but the real joke was on me because the painting was a Rockwell, not a Rembrandt. I couldn’t get more than four million for it.

Garage sales mean very many things to very many people and very few things to a few other people. Even a couple of other people that I forgot to mention before have some kind of opinion about sales in general. But don’t let them boggle you. Follow my example. Wherever there’s a stack of old newspapers, a bushelful of chipped procelain or a lampstand made out of petrified French bread, that’s where I’ll be. Unless I’m somewhere else.