Bobby Roy 3

Bobby Roy 3

By The Leapin’ Lilliputian

from where she floated, and at the edge of the pond, as if he grew there like the birch and willow, stood this wild, beautiful Indian man, leaning on his long gun, eyeing her. He was gone in a matter of five minutes before Marjorie could confront him. She found later that his name was Wetzel.

       Countless times Wetzel saved the white colonists’ lives when all that stood between them and hell or heaven were a few minutes and a miracle. When Indian parties raided small villages, hamlets or single farms he regularly appeared in the nick of time to warn them, take up a rifle in their defense, or sometimes even parley with the leader of the thieves to turn them mysteriously from their morbid task. He saved thus, in his years in the forests of Tennessee, a woman big with child whose husband was in town having beers with friends, an old man leading a couple of Clyesdales through wooded countryside, a bridal couple in the midst of conjugating their marriage in a shady bower on a hillside above her father’s rich lands and barns, an old lady who had fallen into her rain barrel headfirst (though she sadly suffered a degree of retardation and clairvoyance that alarmed even her husband), a small boy who had wandered off into the bush in search of his puppy, Puddles, a six-year old girl whose hair had become tangled in spruce branches far from home and whose parents by nightfall had still not located her, as well as numerous groups of people in crises in municipalities of varying size and nature. Wetzel died oddly on a mountaintop under a beech tree of enormous girth and weight. He had chopped it mostly through with his hatchet when the wind shifted directions bringing the trunk and his cry of timber back upon him with a suddenness he had not foreseen. He was then in his late thirties. Poor Wetz.

       The kegs of gunpowder that Guy Fawkes delivered into the basements of the parliament in London had “brandy” clearly painted in block letters on each of them. No one knew, not even the conspirators, that this day would see the end of politics as it had till been then known. From this time forward would the trust between regent and republican only meander along. No more would statesmen’s wives meet peasant wives with the same candorum envii nor exchange small talk on the relative intelligence of each other’s children, the shape of the milkmaid’s belly, or the length of the stable boy’s saddlehorn. Trust changed then, at that very instant, into suspicion. The secretive, the clandestine, and the dearth of volunteers may be traced to this historical moment. What happened when the match struck was cataclysmic, both spiritually and temporally. Gunpowder had until this moment been unknown. It’s properties had been tested only away from public view by certain agents of the parliament, ironically, who suspected that salt peter mixed with nitrogen could generate terrible explosive power beyond all expectation and experience.

(to be continued)     

Bobby Roy 2

Bobby Roy 2

       By Whining Willy Wineglass

Here is another hero known by all. Even his name blesses me still. And ferries my soul over the Styx, if I may be allowed so cultured an allusion. Robin: bird with a red breast, eater of lawn worms. And Batman’s protegé, though this last has nothing to do with anything here. Hood. As in Little Red Riding. Pirate. A monk’s. Wonderful words, “Robin Hood!” Robin Hood fascinated me all my young years. I did not, however, spend much time reading about his adventures because in our home we had for reading only a bible, an illustrated copy of Treasure Island, evangelical tracts, a devotional pamphlet called Our Daily Bread, and record covers of the Blackwood Brothers and Mario Lanza. I did enjoy short accounts of Robin Hood’s doings in school readers and somewhere around 1959 I got and consumed a longer version of his rambles in the King’s forest, his daring retrieval of the purses of the rich, his doomed loved for Maid Marion, the embarrassment with Friar Tuck, the thrilling encounter in Shrewsbury castle where he split the arrow in two, and his sudden awful hanging. When he died all possibility for love and justice, too, died in the world

       No one who came later into my view had about him any dazzle, sheen or brightness. Erasmus remained a veritable fool. Gandhi was simply thin. Indira somehow got to be powerful despite her elephantitus. Dylan sang remarkable protest songs that nevertheless could not change anything. Eliot wrote a fine but page-bound poem alluding excessively to Hamlet that managed to coax out imitations and parodies for seventy years. Rabelais made me laugh till my gut hurt but it had hurt before I read him and remained pained in a gargantuan way long after I forgot his humor. Russell and Wittgenstein I never read though I intended to, because they were British capitalists. Heidegger made me wish to rethink truth as a path not a hierarchy, but then Neitzsche reversed that order for me making truth imperial again. Goldie Hahn was smurf-like and got Rowan and Martin to look up at the window opening and closing above them. Robin Hood and Zane Grey. They made the world a place for wisdom and wonder and after them it was all holocaust, the blackest melancholy and thin soup.

       Wetzel. Where the hell . . . . I must have encountered him in an early Zane Grey novel. Possibly Riders of the Purple Sage or The UP Trail. Wetzel might well have stepped out of Richardson’s The Golden Dog looking out as he did for the early garrisoned settlers in the New World. He was a fearless white man who became for all intents and purposes an American Indian. He dressed in fringed buckskins, wore moccasins instead of boots, carried a black powder long-rifle with which he could shoot the eyes out of squirrels at a hundred paces or mow down a marauder half a mile away escaping on horseback. He wore his black hair long and braided like Britain’s Grey Wolf. His voice was low and sweet though unused to speech because he spoke so little, being alone with himself in the woods most of the time. Every woman who ever saw him, young or old, big or small, smart or wooden, adored him, wanted to floor him. Not even excepting Marjorie Paisley, the wife of the Baptist minister in Salt Lake City, Idaho, who met the famed tracker one day by accident as she took a break from berry-picking in the hills behind her sister, Jenny’s, Tennessee acreage to go for a dip in a little secluded pool she knew of there. She fancied herself unobserved. But she looked up    

(to be continued)

Bobby Roy

Bobby Roy

       Dougmare Rimlass

Bobby Roy, the Boston Tea Party, Daniel Boone, Morley Callaghan, Woody Guthro, Robert Frost, Robin Hood, Wetzel, the gunpowder plot, Billy the Kid, the Highwayman, Wallace Stegner, Dostoevsky, William of Orange, Earl of Sussex, Christopher Marlowe, Moby Dick, and Count Dracula all had something in common and I’ll tell you what that was at the end of this story. I am employed at Revenue Canada. I recently applied for and got an interview to work there as a C2 on actual tax files. And then I was hired, and now I am employed by the government. I feel lucky that I did not end up in the mailroom since that would alert everyone to what they would consider to be my relative intelligence and I prefer none to speculate too precisely on that matter.   

        The other day I was thinking about characters I had met in my readings since I was a boy and I’ll tell you about them. Bob Roy, a Scot, defended a northern Scottish king from the British around seventeen hundred in an important battle and almost succeeded thereby in keeping his head. He had first, however, before coming to King Jeffrey’s rescue, spent many years antagonizing the regent by hunting in his forests without leave, courting his daughters, sodomizing his sons, nephews, stable boys and priests and generally depleting the revenues of the rich who lived in towns and villages in the vicinity of the castle. Oh! was he hated by the king and his officials! They set traps for him, they lured him with scantily clad maidens, and they once succeeded in briefly capturing him by sending an army to an outpost in the wilds with bags of money ostensibly to pay for the acquirement of weapons for the king’s armory. But Bob eluded them until this one hour when the King’s need was dire. The renegade took his merry men into the fray, saved the day, routed the enemy, and despite many instances of personal heroism, found himself dangling at the end of a rope when the King’s reign had once again been assured and his authority reasserted.

       About the Boston tea party I am on slightly less certain ground. On a rainy day in late November in 1793 a group of Bostonians decided that the British needed to learn a lesson. This New World was no longer to be considered British or even a British colony. They snuck aboard the Quequod, a  British ship anchored in Boston, and threw overboard into the harbor everything they could find that did not fit into their pockets. Mainly they dumped tea, which was the ship’s (and the Queen’s) essential cargo though it had secreted in its hold also rum, wine, slaves, cotton, Spanish coinage of high values (doubloons, pieces-of-eight, siver dollars), mapping equiptments, and various huge chests of beads and hatchet heads.

       After the revolutionaries sank the tea near where, if I am correct, the Tallahasseee River enters the harbor, they fled. They were led by the fearless Paul Riviere of whose fame I am sure you have heard and whose wife was shortly thereafter impregnated by Henry Willinger, the consul from Britain recently arrived in America from his residence in London for a brief set of meetings concerning, ironically, the state of relations between the two nations. The impregnation happened on the banks of the Susquehanna where it empties into the Tallahassee and is lined and limned just there with the most spectacular grove of cluster birches I have ever encountered in my travels. He took her there, while her husband was hiding from the law (home was obviously the last place Paul would go), on the pretext of attempting to win over her opinion in order to influence her spouse. She liked what she saw, plied him with local vintage, lifted her dress over her hips as she lay on a blanket in grass deep enough to screen their activities from accidental observation by passing Hurons, rocked her pelvis in a shocking and mesmerizing fashion, slid her fingers in and out of her mouth twice, and then mounted him when he threw himself down on the lawnage beside her. “Paul,” she is reputed to have whispered at some point in the proceedings, “spends too much time with his horse. He’s a regular Sir Topas!”

       Daniel Boone lived in what was then still called the Virginias and is now known as the United States of America. This was about 1650 or so. He fought against aboriginal bands that otherwise would have laid the new colonies to waste which, while not thriving yet, nevertheless already showed signs of great things to come. Without Boone these hatchling states would have died in their infancy. One of the stories attached to Boone’s long career as protector of the colonists is that of how he exchanged clothing with a milkmaid and snuck disguised through enemy lines to bring a message to General Montcalm whose whole army stood to have been slaughtered in the dark had it not been for his timely warning that the fearsome Iroquois had banded together with the Huron and intended that very night to burn the fort while Montcalm’s men slept. The gravest danger to Montcalm lay in the fact that the aboriginals had for help some turncoat soldiers inside the fort who intended to open the gates at the right time and let the mauraders in.

(To be continued.)   

      

Will Bilowich 3 (cont’d)

Will Bilowich 3 (cont’d)

       By Barking Billy Beatrice

A conceited person. Pretender to wit, wisdom, or accomplishments. A coxcomb. Like a coxcomb on a chicken’s head, dibbling and rubbering, he garbled on about his own brandishments. ‘Yeeeesss, I have written about absence, too. Yeeeesss, I and that other successful writer know absence. Oooohh ceeeeertainly, I have written fully about the unhiding of the hidden. I have a new book of poems out that makes the unhidden its central subject. I know the hidden, let me tell you. My, of course I have written about the vagaries and vicissitudes of that and that Canadian literary star’s career and he stayed at my house when he came to do a Canada Council reading in my city, organized by me last summer. He loved my house! Yeeeesss, the Canada Council has often supported my efforts to educate local westerners about Canadian literature.’

       A foolish man. A dandy. An exquisite. He wore his jeans and jean jacket with pride. He was easily hurt, though. If you forgot to mention his latest book in the bio of a magazine in which he was being published he let you know it. Say, this is outdated, he would say. This doesn’t show my Saskatchewan Blue Snow. What’s with that? And when someone would apologize for the oversight he would launch into a grandeloquence about all his life’s cultural activities and make everyone hate him thoroughly. He knew he was hated then but throve on same. In another age he would have been shot. Or whipped. He could not easily have given his sperm to offspring for a multitude of reasons, I thought, watching him from my solitude.

       He sat always in the best-appointed locations where other well-known ones would be. At readings by local writers, the guest writer would by his mark. At the conference banquet he could be found within two chairs of that eminence every time. If a woman renowned for her treatise on American noodle-making in relation to recent poetic trends in the northern states came to his city to speak he would be seen within two chairs of her at meals. He preferred to be at the center, not the periphery. Not on the outside. Not a watcher, but a watched. What a little shit.

       He enjoyed crowding with others of his sort. Other milksops and muscleless type who milled around licking each other’s behinds he especially adored. His conical head, looking like the spout of a funnel, poked its way about in and out here and there in such a literary bustle. He snuck, plied, swang, sniveled, oozed, wheedled, warbled, wibbled and performed other forms of creeping and crawling at the centre of things till he began to feel full, having maybe drunk a glass of wine and partaken of a decaf coffee.  He is the future of our great literary tradition, Canad. We have paid his way with grants, degrees and a generous university salary (commensurate with regular sebaticals). Vive la dork.  

Will Bilowich 2 (cont’d)

Will Bilowich 2 (cont’d)

       By Bucking Billy Beavis

Will was a writer of poetry. A Canadian teaching English in the western half of Canada who wrote voluminously. Poetry, and criticism about other Canadian writers. His grave intention was to promote Canadian literature and writing. This sounds altruistic but it takes little imagination to see that his future was at stake. Big interest in Canadian writing, sirrrrrah, big interest in Will Bilowich.

       Asked if he had any interest in girls, he would blush and nod and gesticulate if the person asking was of a prominence to solicit any response at all. If asked by someone beneath his dignity he simply scorned that luckless individual with a scornful look, or with a jibe concocted half of reference to Shakespeare and half of alliterative sounds, or even with a joke at the asker’s expense, usually attaching itself to an item of the asker’s apparel, or to the degree of baldness the asker had achieved since he, Will, had last laid eyes on him. Will Bilowich hated being addressed by those who stood for no increase in opportunity for Will Bilowich. He despised an inferior’s questions unless that person happened to be an attractive woman when, of course, his opportunity came in the form of his relative attractiveness to the young and beautiful, a feature of social connectedness and social sway that anyone in the vicinity with more clout that Will Bilowich would pick up on to the satisfaction of Will's vanity and strategies for success, if you will. Or it could just as readily and for the same reasons as above be a young and lovely man who was attractive to women.

Will Bilowich was a little prick. That’s what he was, a little conniving asshole of a prick who had a tall, thin, tubular (like Bert’s from Bert and Ernie), rotundular greying head with hair shaved high above his ears in a mistaken fashion move that made him look even taller, thinner and less interesting than the sum of his parts would have under normal circumstances, while clearly having been chosen by himself for the very opposite reasons. He thought the style fetching. What he needed in order to recuperate a chance at something akin to attractiveness was a look of some disorder about the head parts, and in his clothes, if for no other purpose than to mitigate the anal order of his prose and verse. Instead, he chose to give a pinched quality to the parts above his shoulders, a vertical culvert look, an exactness of cut and length of hairs, a precision of sheer cliff of cropped lawn without purchase relieved by a curried and snit-bound tiny bit of shag at the very top, a shag combed thoroughly in front of more than one mirror a day and with not one follicle out of place. Oh yawn, oh sigh, who cares. But he irritates me so and thus on I write.

       A dress would have become him. And lacy underthings. Such as a training bra. His shoulders were thin from the side and narrow from the front and back. He kept a trim stomach at no cost to himself and his digestion. He sported graceful hands that members of both sexes felt inclined to kiss, especially after a few glasses had put them off remembering the rectality of his prose and verse. He was, after all, someone of position, someone violent enough in his vanity (not in his physical demeanor; physical violence seldom tells of real violent mentality but of constraints and endless requirement of servility until the individual lashes out and hurts in order to gain some momentary rest from entrapment) to be a desirable catch for a young female or male. One does not like to think of the rectum simultaneously with entertaining or acting on the thought of kissing someone’s hand.

       He wore exquisite stockings with on them pretty designs. I could tell this sitting in my booth twelve feet away. I had chosen a quiet booth guaranteed to remain quiet because it had only one chair and no room for another. Besides which, I am relentlessly unattractive to members of the female sex and so socially at everyone’s best alone by myself, off to one side, so to speak. These were of silk or some such fragile material, and colorful, indicating deliberation and careful selection. His jeans—yes, Oh heavens! he wore jeans. One would have thought dress slacks!—were pressed and neat and absolutely clean. No possibility in their shadows of former dirt, since there were no shadows of former dirt, of Will’s having changed the oil in his car, or having crawled about behind his furnace looking for the summer fan switch. No, his jeans were faded but new. He smelled clean as if he himself had been twirled around in a dryer with Bounce. A scented cleanness he had that did not hide any spot or odor. He was, in sum, a clean, neat, sweet-smelling lady of a man who wrote much Canadian literature and criticism.

(to be continued)  

       

Will Bilowich

Will Bilowich

       By Bucking Billy Beavis

                        Billy bucko bucked and bolted

                        Because Will the beaurocrat

                        Begged him to

There are men and women who leap and creep, jump and hump, smile and wile, preen and sheen, kiss and hiss, piss and sip, snipe and gripe, flail and sail, and kill and drill if they are asked to by the right person, someone in authority over them. These don’t even have to be asked but already know what is wanted of them before the speaking of a word and they do these requirements willingly to please their masters. To make points. They got point-making agendas. These are the Sebastians of the world. Yes, they are. And the masters are the Alonzos. They, the leapers, are the seekers after trumpery.

       Will Bilowich was a fop. He did what Willy Bridmc, a respected Canadian novelist, guest writer at the literary affair of the moment, asked before Willy Bridemc (a Scot. Rrrrrollllll the ‘rrrrrrrrrr’ and rrrrrrraise yourrrrrr voice in a keening high ‘i’ sounding like “aaaaiiii” and then lower it dramatically for the “mc”) asked him to. Yes, he did. Innndeedy. Weeellll, Will would say as he set off on another errand for Willy, what good can come of this. No, that is decidedly not what he asked. Not what good can come of this but what can come of this. What will I do to make things as comfortable for Baaaaby (as in sheep’s baaaing) as possible. He had always been "Baaaby" to his mother.

       (to be continued)

Next was a Lamb (or, Blake be Damned, and Milton, too)

Next was a Lamb (or, Blake be Damned,

and Milton, too)

       By Dan McGrue

John elbowed his way to the front of the line and when he’d gotten his bowl of porridge and cup of water he walked off by himself and ate.

“Prick,” the little modest man who had been waiting twenty minutes said. Beside him, Korzanski, also waiting, agreed.

“I don’t think he stands a chance,” Korzanski said.

They also serve who only stand and wait, God thought to Himself.

“They’ll hang him for sure,” the guard said to the warden in the warden’s office, looking out over the courtyard. “I don’t think he stands a chance.”

I shouldn’t be here, John thought to himself as he ate without looking at anyone. You have to make a heaven of your hell. He put his hands in his pocket and discretely pulled at his shorts to give himself more room.

William hovered around the prison forge waiting and then when the color turned four o’clock sun at harvest he clamped the tongs on and thrust it into the water. Steam. Olive oil in a hot frying pan. Thursday the church elders met to decide things. The Father for him was Destiny. No spirits dared walk abroad. Gad, what was he thinking! The five senses and Reason! for Pete’s sake. He reached into his pocket for a hanky to blow the soot from his nostrils. Next was a lamb.  

Blah Blah Blah

Blah Blah Blah

       By Not the Goody Goody

                  Blahk shaeppe blahk shaeppe

                  Haeve yoo aeny woole

                  Yas, sire, yas, sire

                  Thre bahgs fulle

In veelage Bahgdahd teher lividen tree shaepes ant ony un ov tehms where blahk. Blahk aes a ledir hose an dae swaethaert Molly what liivis unter tae brigge naer war Woden hass hees prevaaet baethings. Unt tae godes loveden shaepes, machen non erers oevre tat. Butte, dey alsoadon luveden daer Mholly Johannesdottir, dat saeme waey tat aitch un ov usse khnoweden so guete fram ta vaery soles ove oeuren shoen. Causen tat, dey veesiten haer nichtley unt mahken mellodien taigither mit haer, laepin unt slaepin, wilde, unt mit taer eyen weed offen, wan tat aller da cristin menner amonger unes aes snorkin lude unt braethin daep ine oure sundree draemis, ne tae fer tae werkin aller tae leeves lange bis til tae nicht unes freen fraem sitche ungotlicher haerd laeborin unt cursinge bosse.

       Oner tae certaen dayye inne tae moonth ov mae, whan tat tae shaeppin laepin unt plaeyyin une seede uv ta feelde bis ta oother, caamin bis oontae dees veelage feef ove Jove’s ain raepraesaentaetaeves unt aer gangen straighten tae aere chaef wat lividen naext tae ta brigges erstweel zusprechen ov. Te saeyedin tae ihm, “Chaef ov soe feen unt grande londe, unte chaef alsoe hoo aes tae maein mensch haeraboots, and hoo aes tae bosse ov feelden unt londes fer unt weede, unt alsoe hoo aes tae bosse ov mainy feenes gaerlies unt knabben hoo waerin sitch lovenlee hoesen, graen als ooken alderwe, oder even als tae feen asshen traes tat grooen so hoch unt weede haer onter tis londe oven yours, wee willen haben tas yee geeben uns alle yoenddere deeren shaeppen zum unseren zu plaeyyin mit. Unt, uns, wee willen fer ta geeben ihn aller da moneeys und gooldener florin fer ta maakken diener herzt laepp ant also plaeyyin. Haabben yee tae shaeppen ta spaaren?

       Uppen laeppin tae chaef unt slappin ta godes untter tae loinnes unt grabbenden ihm bee tae queinten tilles tae aller shaekken unt raennen hitter und yohn. Tae aller raennen unt schraikken bis tae himmels oppe unt raennen kommen doown obber al tae feeldes tat aller tem luvveden, unt obber tae ruffes ov tae hussen unt tae bairnes. Unt, aller tae shaeppen drun! Oonlee Mholly Johanesdottir floaeten doown tae riber laffen tae erselv, nekkid un plaeyyen gaemmes mit un leetle blahkken shaep tat haer av hiden unter haer frocke. Oon uv tae trae shaeppe. Tae ooder twooe shaeppen gaein unter tae waatter unt neber saen nae maer. Unt tas endete tae laaste teeme tas tae godes cumin zum airtth fer tae gettern shaeppen tat tae so luveden, moer tan ter aenen hertzen. Undt tae chaef? Weell, ere lebendin mainny, mainny laengeden yjaren maet tae modder uv oeuren Mholly Johanesdottir inne tae shaed war tae shaeppen liveden so haeppee bis tae watter commin. Unt err waer mit haer bis deth haem aqueintede mit wass fullee.