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BLACK HELICOPTERS

EPISODE 25

FRIDAY the SEVENTH - 5:38 PM

          In the sudden quiet from Masty’s podium after Yvette Hall wrapped, a buzz of voices – angry, awestruck, conspiring, inspiring or simply gossiping... remained humming for several seconds, like a great, ailing refrigerator or infected beehive. Then, more language exploded like pus from this auditory boil.  Discerning Beedle might not prove the most amiable companion during whatever witches’ brew was brewing, Glenn sidled towards Anne and Rinker before the blathering barrister was aware of his defection.

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          "...maybe two?" Anne was bargaining. "You can do two, so that would be Craig and Tom Maputi? They're the instigators, aren't they? Let's just get this thing settled."

          She hadn’t used the word “thing”.

          "I can't go back with two," Glenn heard Rinker object as he rocked back and forth on his heels. "Gimme four."

          Anne pulled a little calculator out... the logo of a public television station being almost as large as the keyboard... and toted up some figures. "The numbers aren't going to be a problem, it's the people. Arnold Bissonnette is out, too alt-rightly disruptive, too close to that old David Duke mob, down in Louisiana, there.  Q-Anon people, hang Pence evangelists.  Rayna's not budging on him. What about one of the alternates?"

          "Anne..." Glenn tried to break in.

          "Just a minute," she hushed, brushing an unruly blonde cowlick out of her eyes, self-consciously brushing the sleeve of her gray suit in the event something unpleasant had fallen from her cuff. "We're almost home! Talk to Tom... Maputi's got to have a protégé he wants inside, everybody does. Check it out!"

          Rinker hesitated. "Anne, I don't think..."

          "Craig, Maputi, Brother Ecker... right?... and Maputi's alternate. No Bissonnette. Feed him some bad crayfish. That's four delegates... the offer stands for fifteen minutes. Do it!"

          Rinker flung his arms up, his dark blue suit unwittingly revealing the large, even darker ellipses of fearful perspiration as he unsheathed his i-Phone and began stabbing buttons. "I'll try..."

          "Whatever!" And she turned her back, dismissing him. "I think that takes care of the Virginia delegation," she muttered to Glenn.

          "What's the score?"

          "They're taking the media caucus… not such a bad thing, it’ll keep the talk radio clowns guessing…” she added, making sure Rinker wasn’t lingering, “but we've got the convention."

          "How's that?"

          "Ohh..." Anne said, suddenly realizing that she was still holding the calculator with the add-key down, running up the tab of delegates well into the millions. She flicked it off, returned it to her purse. "Pat O'Neraghty worked out a compromise on that Middle East thing, bringing our endangered humanitarians home from Marrakesh and Tripoli… and Yemen, and from Israeli jails in Aleppo… he says, but with honor, now that the Vikings and the Arab League… quote unquote… have taken hold of peacekeeping among those various Sunni Muslim sects so we can focus on the Republicans’ putative Putin-hugger and Democrats’ mucking up in South America again. He's downstairs with some Saudis and that Jewish guy..."

          "Morcanteur?" Glenn tried to show off.

          "No, the Israeli. What's his name... anyway we're just plodding along, running them down with the numbers. And either they don't know it, or else Tillerman's more comfortable with his role as martyr!"

          A voice interrupted from the podium...

          "Brothers and sisters… aren’t we magnificent!“

          Over the applause, Glenn wrinkled his nose and pouted... "who's that?"

          "Carruthers. Evan Carruthers. Environmental Action Network... they blow up bulldozers, save trees, stuff like that. Also with Pop Zero… he has a curious synchronicity with Ocasio, the Green Squad… and there’s also talk about the border vigilantes if the shutdown goes on and the migrants overrun Texas, but I suspect Austin's warned him to wear the white hat while he's here or go back to The Donald, which all those pipeline projects make impossible."

          "Isn't that the racist group that shot those people crossing over down in Arizona and hung 'em from their heels from telephone poles? Like Mussolini?"

          "If you believe the government's rumormongering," Anne sniffed, nodding towards the podium as if the words wafting therefrom might be valuable.

          Carruthers, with his blue Western shirt and thick, white hair, dyed almost blue, reminded Glenn of the kindly Old Ranger from Death Valley Days… not Reagan, the nice one… or one of the Grand Ol' Opry sort of drinking buddies that Catfish had flown in from Nashville and Branson by the dozens to get his picture taken with. "Without a popular move-a-ment," he began in a deep, Western twang, "without the force of a mass move-a-ment, like that of the Coalition, we face more than planetary doom... we face extermination of our entire Western cul-too-yore.  We do!  But... we are going to pervail! We will pervail!  America will pervail!"   

 

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FRIDAY the SEVENTH - 5:58 PM

 

          Andy didn't feel very prevalent as he and Rael followed Sylvester into the Bureau of Permits where Tom Jenks and the two attorneys, Hill and Goldman, were already cooling their heels. Placing a finger to his lips, Sylvester smiled at them enigmatically, whispered to Disson's secretary, then quickly entered the sanctuary of the strange little bureaucrat... slipping the door open and closing it behind him before any of the petitioners could sneak a peek inside.

          "Damn!" said Emil, "I wanted a selfie with his busted-up mug!"

          "Folks," Andy acknowledged, "...didn't think I'd be seeing you again."

          He collapsed into one of Disson's costly leather chairs, picking up a brochure on the coffee table: Security Golf Course Homesites in one of the northern burbs, exclusive to Morrow Properties... Reduced! Townhouses starting from $640,000!

          He dropped the ad like a chunk of radioactive waste.

          "Didn't think I'd see any of you either," Jenks recalled. "They made us lie face down on the cold, cold pavement out at that old base, for what must have been hours!"

          "Oh no!" cried Rael. "Are people still out there?"

          "No, that's the funny part," said Goldman. "Couple of hours ago they just started releasing prisoners... even some of those striking minwage restaurant workers snatched up for picketing..."

          "Something hopping," seconded Hill. "Jail doors flying open all over this town."

          Tom remained unconvinced. "I don't trust them. It's a trap. It's like... maybe they want the demo to go on, with everybody pissed off and ready to rumble, so they can pull off something really big!"

          "Tom, I don't think..." Leo began, wearily...

          "Oh cut it out, Leo!" Hill shook his shaggy head, removed a small silver flask from his jacket and downed a healthy draught. "You were out at Marston, too, spent half a day being kicked this way and that, and you're still with that guilty liberal's business-as-usual attitude..."

          "Well, there was provocation," the ACLU man said. "I don't know who, or why, but someone inside Dorritt Square did throw a bottle, or a rock... I don't know which..."

          "I think it was the U.N.!" Rael asserted. "Making everyone else look bad, so people trust them, keep giving them more power until they clamp down and repeal the Law of the Sea. They want the dolphins going extinct like the white rhinoceros... because, like, dolphins are more intelligent than we are?  They want people reduced to living off the land, like locusts... not that insects don’t have the right to self-determination either…"

          "Little Miss Tillerman!" Tom Jenks grunted, “her racist skivvies hanging out.  Why only white rhinosaurians… rhinostoplastish… Republic… rhino critters?  Hug a brown cockroach for Jesus!"

          "Well," Leo allowed, "whoever did do it certainly didn't stand up and identify themselves... which means they couldn't have been Movement, because the Movements boasts, left or right or just plain crazy. Always! And then the Guard went a little crazy..."

          "The Fifth Battalion?" This interested Andy. "Those nuts they had to take back from San Jose for raping all those nuns… who called them in?"

          "That," Emil speculated, "is the million dollar question. Probably, quite a few millions, billions... Trump 3.0 campaign, inciting violence as a means of publicity – that changed everything, even the Democrats once the old realities of power in the neo-liberal new normal sank in.  Let's put it this way.... suppose what we have here is not the burning of the Reichstag, or Moncada, or Mondale, or Monicagate, even, but a disagreement among pillars of the ruling class. Mayor Potter, formerly a Democrat until primary time two years ago where he had to run independent after that fourth DUI to post his thirty-eight percent, is, at least, a nominal supporter of the Conks. Governor Drummond's a Republican who might be thinking that, if Catfish runs as a third-party candidate and SCOTUS doesn’t let Trump doesn’t wipe his ass with the 22nd Amendment, the Democrats get hurt next year and a job for him opens up under deSantis or Don Junior or Little Marco – Secretary of something-or-other...

          "So someone in the CNC is dealing with the GOP? Hey!..." Leo Goldman added, "I made a rhyme."

          "Quite possible," Andy ventured, “if you consider your root terminology. Look at all those so-called conserve-vacationists in the Coalition!"

          "So, as we all know," Emil continued, "the easiest way to ensure a maximum of disruption and rotten publicity is to take all of the responsible elements... I use the term very loosely, in the present case... out of circulation, leaving a headless mob for the next election – where, if Trump can’t overturn the 22nd, it’s Stephen Miller’s to lose.  It could just be the Governor, being the Guv’nor as our fishy friend puts it, or some of those Cap City Democratic… what is it, twenty-six now?... doin’ a Jussie Smollett…”

“He was innocent,” Leo maintained.

          "Whatever.  You know," Tom remembered, "there were those couple of crazy guys in Rambo suits at Marston, you know?  Walking around in circles with this attitude... nobody knows where they came from, nobody wanted to talk to them.  Like from that church, out in Kansas, with that dead preacher?  The ones who break up soldiers’ funerals?  They were prisoners, but nobody beat them down, jokin’ and smilin’ with the Guard; I even saw one trying to chat up this news reporter, but he wasn't buying it. Some kind of undercover heat..."

          Hill masticated this information, took another swallow from his flask, smacked his lips. "Let us suppose you were an official of one faction... you, perhaps, believe another faction's out to get you by handing out harsh, unconstitutional  treatment to people in police custody. Now... if you had something to say about whether these people continue to remain in custody until something... well... embarrassing happens... well, you see where this leads! Now this just happens to be idle conversation but, as a member of the Bar, at least for the present, I was comped into one of Pinhead's parties for charity leeches last night, while you all were performing your roles as guests of the state..."

          "You sure get around, Emil, for a cheap lawyer," Goldman needled.

          "Hey, I ain't cheap... just ask the coke dealers and drunk drivers whom I make pay my fee up front, as opposed to those I let run up a tab. Conks fuck with me, I sue them.  Rayna Finch... she's got deep pockets, deep everything!" He took another pull from the silver flask. "But another point..."

          The office phone rang, cutting him off like the blade of a guillotine, slamming down upon an outstretched Vice Presidential neck. Though the Permits Bureau Five strained to hear, they could not, until the Director's secretary put down the phone, glanced at them, wrinkling her nose as if at the smell of prison perspiration wafting through the anteroom, and said:

          "The Director will see you now."

          "Hope someone brought a Cherry, or at least one of those spy-guy cellphones, this time. Tape recorder?" Andy suggested Jurassically, extracting himself from Disson's comfortable chair.

          "Somehow," Emil predicted, "I don't think that will be necessary."

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