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The full moon rode high above The skylight above the bed back where Karina and the kids slept. it illumined the moving rivers of too-lee fog. as Californians pronounced it.There was scarcely enough to justify a delay. Bruce detested delays and he felt one coming on, Like a headache.
It was all his Uncle Sam?s fault, the jingoism and ribaldry of boys, The delay at the airport now. His computer?s avatar prattled on about the news she had surfed up as he slept. She came off a little to his left politically, and she said he never wanted to hear the news that mattered. She did work hard and she took up little space and needed less. That allowed him to save his perks for vacations and weekends alone.
Bruce had a 5 am departure for a three day bio-ethics conference in Boston.
He had planned to check in at 8:00 the previous evening. There had been contention in the house over his earlier than usual departure and he did not like to leave Karina with a spirit of contention in the house to deal with alone. It so easily led to full rebellion among the troops. Bruce had decided to go to sleep with the younger children and his soft Karina. Karina doubted she could get them back to sleep if they got riled up just at bedtime.
So he hit the hay at 7:30 the night the morning before, leaving Karina and the kids to come tumbling after.
Ah, he mumbled as the rubbed the sleep out of his morning eyes, the best plans of mice and men . . .
Burns, he thought but he was unsure. he did not like being unsure. The best plans of mice and men often go awry and so he left the house stealthily, like a theif, and so his girl livvy accused him of being all the time. He stole himself away from them.
He put on the gadgets the idiotic airport security medical unit made him attach every few months.
He ought to work out on the Butchy machine which that barked orders at him. It was like playing The Grade old Duke of York except the machine made no historical reference.
When he was a kid he was always the idiot left halfway up the hill with his butt in the poking out behind.
He wanted to ask the cybernetic Gym Coach if she liked her job, if she liked working graveyard shift and whether she minded wearing the same shabby gymn suit, year after year, fading as time passed them both by.
The faded fitness and spacial acuity avatar looked straight ahead like a a guard at Buckingham palace.
He wanted to ask her who did her hair. It looked sprayed in with plastic. She had worn the same hairdo since Bruce had gotten his flying license at the end of college.
The fitness center paid-- Fewer downed planes, more coherent, better oriented and more alert pilots-- the P.R. gave the passengers confidence in the institution of commercial air travel.
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There were no such perks at the twin airstrip at the old Wendover radiation testing and firing range with its big twin nuclear bunkers. One for big boy and one for fat boy. They were nearly as massive as the pyramids if you counted the underground supply warrens. He knew. he had a friend out that way whose dad had been a hiking and spelunking buddy of his one time Aunt Kathleen. They’d camped up at Alpine lake in the Ruby Mountains and climbed along the tunnels of caves often inhabited and then relatively unexplored. His Aunt, whose personal life was such a source of scandal still.
They went without equipment mostly. They took a rope. The young are foolish, Kath;een’s friend said, and shrugged. Bruce liked the flexibility of loosly woven realities, the freedom of Pilot’s who felt their flights were at risk could make unsceduled landings there, then fly on for rest and emotional repair before taking to the air again. The fast train took only an hour from Wendover, Nevada to temple Square in Salt Lake . Why go hunting for forbidden delights in the bee sting state when in Wendover you could simply ask for a recommendation from a well informed waitress.
Kathy had written an account such a query in her journal. She had asked if there were any horny women in town. She had answered, levelly, that there were none who did it for pay. For that they would have to go on to Wells. Bruce decided to get another 40 winks since there was a posted delay. From his cubicle he set the big bay of windows embedded into the walls of his cubicle to current view.
He dialed roof into the keypad and then when view appeared on the small screen he could tap in North, North and south east and local view. As he imagined a dry salt mist rose from the Great Salt Lake. It met twin freshwater air streams that drifted down from the Cache and Toeele vallies these merged and mingled and backed up toward the runways.
A readied craft could have taken off now. There were some, but they were packed.
Bruce wished he had taken the train out to Wendover. He’d be playing poker now with his high school buds, waiting for his flight’s etd to be announced over the Stateline Casino’s Public address system.
These set off his computer’s programed alarm clock--he looked up A suitable Bible reading to ask his laptop to read to him the last thing before family prayer the night before. He liked to wake like that. The voice at first seemed half dream, but eventually the voice seemed closer and more real. Wendover was packed with Mormon pilots . It was outside Deseret , beyond Zion’s pale, on unhallowed ground. There was no graveyard or hospital in Wendover to regularize or sanctity the proceeding of his sacred family rites.
In Wendover the strictures of their religion,they easily shed .Bruce welcomed the sight of the now ancient Cowboy Bill pointing to the “This is the place,’ the infant Bruce and his brother Sam always had to stop at the old Stateline casino. it had stood right there Aunt Taffy’s day when she was a waitress At Wendover and he and his sister were 8.
She had tried Tahoe first. But the required dress, or undress required in the big casino’s put her off.
In Wendover you could cream the guy as long as you could make it look like an accident--one less truck driver would not turn the tide of the once small town’s history.
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“I think I have something on that’’ Leila, Bruce’s desktop avatar said.
Ah yes--August fifth 1973 your Aunt spilled ice water into a dealer’s lap. A few weeks later she smacked one upside the head,drinks and glass flying all over the near customers, who no less deserved it.
The house where his uncle, Taffy’s brother’s first girlfriend lived had been relocated to make room for a Casino extention. There he had had first real kiss from a nice Mormon girl whose family owned the towns favorite Grocery and a single air ambulance.
Aunt Taffy’s Brother had lived with his sister the summer he was 15 then and she 20.
The cooks all complemented her on his reliability and hard work and they became more than siblings, friends. Strange to think of the finality with which he had vowed to never speak to her again. When she saw a therapist
and with her aunt there suddenly spilled out the gruesome details of her spare the rod spoil the child and incest is best sprawling nightmare of her biker family.
She had been close to her sister in law years before--she never imagined that she would be powerless to resist creating its carbon copy as her children aged. Kathleen had tried to do what her brother;s wife would have wanted before she began to go mad as she took on a frenetic multiplication without stewardship of her race. Rather she seemed determined to create one of her own. Only his grandmother worried avout her Grandchildren, feeling that Candy was too ill to provide forctheirbproperrearing.
Bruce’s computer popped open andLeila said “fruit seldom rots on the vine.”
“Yes,” he said as she showed Bruce archived photo’s of the site which she pulled up under Enola Gay.
The archive was located somewhere either on the base or in the Casino complex, and on scteen the military and covilia photop archives were merged in 2006, and included copies of Archival photo’s dating from the time the base was a remote boy’s reformatory, one of the Mechanical Bill holding his first bottle of soda pop in his newly constructed Cold drins shack on the highway.
Mormon passengers often avoided the laregly Gentile Nevada border town. East bound Flights could be shunted to the more defensible Bonneville airport if there were some threat, like a local Goshute attempting to board.
bryce used to sing as he climbed the hardened foamy Lava bubbles. They had partly eroded so you could climb almost straight up while the sharp edges of the bubbles cut into the soles of their shoes.
His Aunt Kathleen had spent her offtime on those hills--he had read it in her journals at the U. of U. Wendover was 3-5 hours from most California destinations. Eastbound travelers often took the train to avoid degrading scrutiny while boarding at clogged Califoria airports thus avoiding SLCI completly.
The Church prefered that its pilots use SCLI but was losing to Wendover’s enticements-- proscribed card playing, and worse sins. It was said that all you had to do was register at the desk if you did not prefer to sleep alone. Bryce had never tried.
Book one--Cry me a rainbow and the circle game:
Chapter two, sin city
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Wendover was in Bryce’s School district. He had been an internet TA, correcting papers and corresponding with the children and young people --in widely bejewled time stripped mineral geology of the wide and over warm earthtoned desert.
Bruce loved SLCI. He remembered when his disabled Aunt Taffy was wheeled aboard and his 3 sisters were allowed on board for a last peek at their Aunt. His youngest sister asked Taffy, when Aunt taffy called a week later, if she was still on the plane circling in the blue, and for her it remained her truth about her aunt for three years, until she visited Aunt Taffy and Uncle Brad.
Whenever they saw Aunt Kathy again it was visiting, not summer visits in the July, when everyone’s family came but a time to just visit.
And everyone said in California how nice to see her--like Aunt Taff was a photograph or a movie.
Once Uncle Bruce got them to stay by making a Barbeque --not having it would be wasting food, which was wrong. Her refridgerator didn’t have a freezer. His mommy said that all refridgerators had freezers,
Bryce peeked in and it was true. then his daddy looked.
He said some people had seperate freezers.
SCLI was near where he was a baby and Taffy was would take him for rides in his green car but Bryce got scared, captured by an Enemy soldier. She took him up in an elevator and taffy’s house was way up in the leaves. Bryce started crying because he missed his Mommy and brother so Taffy put him in his car seat and took him back to his house.
from the great complexes’ roof, on a clear or cloudy day, bryce , unable to see forever, could see that first house in West SLC. He could turn to see in all directions with a joy stick-he also could input the day and time
to change the weather or time,
anyone not miserably Jet fatigues could just push the big button labled in a cornicopea of Tongues push here to see local time and weather.
He could see from any interior skylight or East facing windows, the view from the roof observation deck. to the NorthWest, his great second grade school.
the second place where he learned that he was a two eyes egg head to the other kids, but nobody cared there, they made him the great Brain.
He knew everything they were teaching at his West SLC gradeschool kindergarden the teacher wouldn’t let him bring books to school, or even his brother sam, eiven though Sam was a first Grader. SHe told them to shut up and play dumb,or made them sit in the dunce corner and read into a tape recorder.
Now it was his wife and children who said he was too smart to be truly useful. he had married into the vast lebaron kindred with in he had more poor relations than he could count. when he traveled they took it personally, as though plastic wasn’t real money like the money in return for their stock.
they were paid for stock and extra hay in a good year, for the pine nuts that sold for 2.00 a pound.
they could only gnaw at the hand that fed them, risking their access to the grocery only in Reams plastic which his wife and children used liberally to feed his wife and children’s vast impoverished kindred.
Neither was the balance on their ZCMI account which his kids used liberally ever much below his credit ceiling. He felt like he was running a private welfare system. His family was boycotting deseret Industries label cash for which most of the poor cousins qualified, so Bryce gave the brethren a talli by age and church status and the brethren.
Kirk-- We must recognise that we are killers but that we need not kill today.” 8-19-4-
sci-fib 4 am
added the amount need to his pay. Karrinna kept trying to prevail upon their own girls to sew. they were all admirable seamstresses and his Zed account always included fabric and Vogue patterns for formal dresses and bridal gowns.
Their taste in fabric was pricy. That was because their cousins could all sew but only sought out his girl’s help for formals and wedding gowns which they couldn’t fit properly or afford the fancy dressy materials needed to create the proper effect.
They also helped their multitude of poor Ranch cousins with their sewing in the summers and some could not afford fabric at all. Thet still cut down unworn portions of old dresses to make new ones and saved quilt peices.
These were Karinna’s talents, but it was far easier to put the girls up to a credit card call to Zed--one without patriarchal sanction.
In his girls ward and high school home made clothes were definatly declasee’ and so were ranch cousins sent up North for school.
Bruce’s balance at ZCMI, Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, as the pioneers had called it never wavered. If he payed it twice a month, the girls maxed it out twice.
Bruce was about ready to go on a Zed strike or make his kids get jobs. They moved in circles where jobs were declassè. And while he was flying out so much he was in a poor bargening position.
Bruce loved his girls and dreaded their anger. Not only this, but in this argument he felt himself in the wrong. His girls were sweet and generous and he had the money.
They got their canny bullheaddedness from him, Karrinna complained as she had driven him to the airport after their elaborate and coordinated rebellion.
Why the big house, the new cars, the 5th Avenue look, if he was not trying to impress? Not her. She had been impressed 15 years before, when she had married, as it seemed to her, not an old fuddy-duddy but ultimate respectibility-- an epicenter of the mainstream Church itself.
Bruce was man with money who would not take other wives, so he said and so he likewise had refrained. Karrinna had wanted her polig roots to stop showing, just as his children tried and failed to hide theirs.
as cloudy light seeped into SLC International in robes of grey, he heard the rustling silk of Jabreel’s robes, the over-busy muslim physician and researcher who headed the pre-conference conference delegation They had driven down from the Uncle Sam’s Uinta Enclave the night before, hoping to get a fresh start, when they could start, minus their jet lag.
BRUCE had left instructions with his computer to wake him a half hour before any announced ETD. He had woken on his own, not a good sign, rested, blushing at his nakedness between the sheets. These still held Karinna’s feral scent.
Then he had pulled on his skivvied and had gone out in search of liquid, puting a fiver in the vending machine for a fifth of aspatamine spiked Gatorade.
He glimpsed and then quickly turned away from the knot of biotekkies bound, like him, for the San Francisco Genetic Bioengineering conference with its bio-ethical veneer.
He glimpsed the pricy and absurdly competant Jabreel, the pricey Mormon-Muslim of Bruce’s conversion with whom his uncle Sam had had many dealings--not the Uncle Sam, symbol of the Union, but jhis grandmother’s brother Samuel.
Bruce had been four before he’d at last asked his mother who the old man in an old wwII recruitment poster that looked so much like his Uncle Sam His mother sent him to his father who offered a credible explanation of what a symbol was.
Bruce’s own Uncle Samuel had, over the years, become, in and out of the family and home town, a living symbol of the nation whose name was used in humor to cover his actual personal name, and origins.
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