Dream a Little Dream

Sometimes I think it pays not to think too much, or at least to take a break from thinking about current problems and let your mind soar, like an eagle on an updraft, with loftier and more regal rumination. Put the cell phone away and try it sometime. I do.

Here’s the deal. We still have Brenda’s grandfather’s farm in north Lonoke County. It comprises 120 acres, of which maybe two thirds are cleared pasture.

Now consider the situation and make a couple of guesses.

Who gets to mow it each year?

Why is it particularly grassy and overgrown this year?

Right on both counts.

I go out each day that I’m not busy actually earning money for working and try to mow for two to four hours. My IOT, i.e. “instrument of torture” is a 1960 John Deere 60 HP tractor held together with bailing twine, bubble gum, and a bobby pin. No, wait, that’s Brenda’s smaller tractor that’s held together with a bobby pin. I’ve tried to get her to let me replace it with an actual cotter pin, but her explanation? “It’s worked just fine with a bobby pin for two years, so shut up.” (Apologies to Ring Lardner.)

Anyhow, back to my original point … let’s see … what was it? Oh yes, it had something to do with thinking, and mowing. Yes, quite right.

Sometimes, when I’ve cleared the edges by the forests, and the grass left is in a nice, semi-rectangle, the tractor nearly drives itself, and I think.

Oh, I don’t think of how we seem to becoming a nation fueled by hatred. I don’t think of how a group of madmen seem to be pulling the strings of America. I don’t think about how racial prejudice seems to be the prime moving force of politics today.

Hell no. I think of movie scripts. Yeah, movie scripts. Like yesterday.

During lunch break, I watched a bit of one of those 1950 science fiction films about how a major disruption to the earth’s crust had unloosed a terrible insect monster. You know, the kind in which the denouement always begins with, “It just might work.”

Naturally, as I mowed a large piece, I wrote a movie script in my mind.

It’s in the future, see. A group of forward-thinking women had taken over the country, educated women who believed in linear thinking, kindness, contemplation, and the ability of government to be a positive force in the lives of all. Together, they had moved men into inferior position without power. Their main job was to follow orders and remain silent. It worked like magic.

They had brought about an end to the escalation of global warming.

They were beginning, with the help of their sisters around the globe, to balance the demands of food production with population control.

They had replaced the cruel teachings of the old religion with one that blessed the least privileged of society.

The had eliminated war as a solution to religious problems by institution a universal requirement for public service.

They had formed an efficient working relationship between government and free enterprise.

We felt good about ourselves. Poverty was disappearing, replaced by goodness and concern.

Then it happened.

The San Andreas Fault showed its ass. Big time. It showed its ass all “ …down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.” The state of Mississippi disappeared under a sheet of brown, roiling water. The state of Alabama split into.

Then the trouble started. There, from the pits below Alabama, as from the pits of hell, wild creatures flowed out, hell bent on making up for eons of bondage. These creatures, part human-like and part furry, four-legged monsters, exhibited a ferocious appetite for all things good and wholesome.

Food began disappearing. Shortages appeared in all goods that had made the nation prosperous. Neighbors fought one another for scarce resources. Some began joining bands of the recently released monsters, forming great packs that controlled areas of the country where the population was most in need of enlightened administration.

Leaders arose who directed the human-monster packs. These leaders promised all resources to their followers. They chose groups of their foes and branded them traitors to society. They began attacking resistors, and resistance began to disappear. The resistors began turning on their own leaders in desperation.

The earth began to turn brown.

Well darn. I finished the patch I was working on about then. Time for Happy Hour. It’s nice, though, to quit thinking about current affairs for a while and just dream.

Seeing true ...

It's Fiction Friday. Here is a short piece I did some time ago. The reader may judge personally as to the degree autobiography might be involved.

The Delta’s Girl

By Jimmie von Tungeln

For B

            The girl leaned forward from her seated position and rested her chin on her arms. This gave her a steady view of the endless cotton fields in front of her. She stared across the rows carved into the flat land and bounced a twig held between her teeth up and down several times. Then she removed the stick and turned her head, holding her long auburn hair to one side so it didn’t cover her face. “Well,” she said. “What do you think?”

            The young man glanced between his legs to see if the grass was staining his trousers. “About what?” he asked.

            “The delta,” she said giving him a look that a grownup might give a non-attentive child. “It’s great isn’t it?” She reached into a shirt pocket and fished out a barrette that she then opened with her teeth. She slipped it into her hair on the side facing David. This exposed her face and with it that expectant freshness he found so unnerving. She locked her eyes so as to trap him into the truth.

            He dodged her eyes and shrugged. “It’s okay.”

            “Just okay?”

            “I’ve lived too long by the ocean, I suppose,” he said. “I guess I miss the smell of salt air in the morning.”

            “Makes things rust. That’s what salt air does.” Her eyes bored deeper into him. “This air makes things grow. Besides, it was Uncle Sam made you live by the Ocean.”

            He shrugged again.

            “Look here,” she said, twirling around so she faced him on all fours. Then she pointed at the ground between his legs.

            He obeyed without thinking and looked at the patch of grass between them. He looked up at her face, lopsided now with one side of her hair nearly touching the ground while the other remained in place, held by the barrette.

            “What’s this, do you think?” she asked, spreading a group of longer blades of grass to reveal a single, frail, green–topped stalk quivering in the spring breeze.

            “I have no idea,” he said.

            “It be Lespedeza,” she said laughing. “Everybody knows that.” Then she ordered him “Feel.”

He reached and cupped a hand around the slender plant. He could sense the early struggling of life and had the rather sudden sense of a stirring within himself, weak but insistent like a thought bringing someone from a heavy sleep. He jerked his hand away.

She let the grass cover it again. “My granddaddy always said you had to spread Lespedeza seed on the snow for it to put up right in the spring. Bet you can’t do that by the ocean.”

            She turned back to a seated position on the warm ground and looked across the new-plowed field again. He had the impression that she was finished talking for the moment.

            He studied the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The silence unnerved him so he said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so he added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”

            She turned so suddenly that he thought she might be angry. “That’s just it,” she said, as if announcing the solution.

            “What’s what?” he said.

            She smiled and the smile completely unmanned him, a trick he had learned to dread.

            “You see, here you have to create your own mountains.”

            He fought for time. There was a trap opening. He could feel it but, being on unfamiliar ground, he hadn’t a clue as to its form or origin. “Your own mountains?”

            “Yes,” she said and her eagerness and certitude kept him unbalanced. “That way, you don’t suffer constraint.”

            “Constraint?”

            “Yes, constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.

            He laid his arms across his legs and rested his chin on them the way she had done. They both watched the fields spread out before them like charts drawn to illustrate perspective.

            “How do they plow them so straight?” he asked.

            “They have a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use as a guide from the last row plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long, though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”

            He looked back at the fields and he felt a breeze that swept him forward for a fraction of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and pulled him into those long rows and he saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this fecund land. Her voice jerked him back the way a young calf is jerked as he comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.

            “It would be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”

            He focused on her and processed what he thought he heard her say.

            “Sad?” he said.

            “It would be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order to have them. That you couldn’t just have them whenever or wherever you chose.”

            She turned away from him and became quiet again. He knew not to speak, so he stared at the falling sun on the horizon. The bright orb burned his eyes but he neither blinked nor turned away. He continued to look directly into the sun’s fire and then he saw the mountains. His mountains. They soared with a comforting majesty from the delta to heights only possible in one or two spots on the planet. Snows whipped from their peaks and circled the vast jutting rocks. Their pristine beauty broke his heart but he continued to watch them.

            Confident that his mountains would endure, he looked toward the girl. The sun had blinded him, though. He only saw streaks of fire darting like hummingbirds before him.

            “I’m blind,” he said.

            Barbara turned toward him. “No, you can see now,” she said.

            Sure enough, she came into focus. The barrette had fallen from her hair and the long strands hung from both sides and framed her face the way the evening sky had framed the sun. Now her face, always tinged with the ruddiness befitting a farmer’s daughter, glowed as had the sun in the distance, almost raging in its self-assurance—at once both fearsome and motherly. He could see her clearly and also the mountains behind her and the long straight rows between them. He saw the rows and felt their precision, even smelled the soft rotten smell of the fresh earth. Then he smelled her—the smell of the earth and shampoo and soap and innocence and something else he couldn’t define, maybe strength. He reached and drew a bunch of her hair through his fingers. It was silky and pliant and offered no resistance, feeling cool to the touch. He watched the released ends bounce against her arm and felt the stronger growth of something within him. He drew his arm away and looked back at his mountains.

            She smiled at him and said in a low voice, the sound drifting by his ears like a spring breeze, “You’ll do. You know that don’t you?

He sat still in the silent expanse of his delta—the fresh earth staining his clothes—loving her with a simple fierceness that mocked the power of the earth itself.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 22 (Cont._3)

Next day was Saturday and Brenda was gone. I went to the office to unload the material I had developed on my trip. I spent the morning arranging the material into stacks, then into files, and then into priorities. I would attend them seriously starting Monday morning. It appeared they were working on some new projects, including a small subdivision I’ll call “Wellington Village.”

With nothing left to do, I went to the apartment and rested. I picked guitar some, but my heart wasn’t into it. I read most of The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. I had seen the film adaptation starring Oliver Reed, which I found unsettling. For some reason, I bought the book and found it even more unsettling. It fed a growing animosity toward organized religion. Toward late afternoon, I decided to doze for a bit on the couch.

I was having a bad dream involving the scene of the priest being burned alive from the book and film when I heard a long scratch made along my living room window. I rushed to the door and stepped outside just in time to see Brenda stop at the top of the stairs, turn and look at me with her now familiar “What the hell are you looking at?” stare. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved work shirt. A pair of dirty sneakers covered her feet, and she wore a John Deere baseball cap. Her long hair streamed from the back in a pony tail.

Making sure that I was looking at her face and no place else, she said, “You got any beer?”

“Yes.”

“Save me one.” She turned and went to her apartment.

I was surprised, some 30 minutes later, when the door opened and she walked in. No knock. Nothing. She just walked in. I dropped my book and stared.

She had performed a magical transition. Her hair was still pulled into a tight ponytail. She wore fresh jeans so tight that you could have seen the impression of a tattoo on their surface. She had changed to clean sneakers, and a dark knit shirt with a Mickey Mouse logo over one breast. That’s all. Just the shirt. Nothing, it appeared, underneath. I stared. She glared. I raised my eyes, and said something stupid like, “Come in.” She walked toward me, carrying a package of cigarettes and a lighter in one hand.

“Gimme a beer,” she said. “I’ve got a case of ‘tractor-butt’ and I need some relief,” she said.

I rose and went toward the refrigerator. “You’ve got what?” I said, miraculously resisting the temptation to look for myself.

“Tractor-butt,” she said. “Ain’t you never had tractor-butt?”

“Uh, not that I know of.”

“It’s when you’ve driven a tractor all day.” She took a beer and made a motion-question toward the couch.

“Yes, have a seat,” I said. “And tell me all about a tractor-butt. I’m terribly interested.”  

She moved slowly, like Joan Crawford about to deliver the most important line in a movie. She placed the beer on an end table, lit a cigarette, took a drag, turned her head, exhaled, and looked at me, all in slow motion. “In the old days,” she said, “tractor seats were jus big metal things with holes in them for a bit of ventilation. Daddy would come in from plowing all day and there would be red circles on his pants where the mosquitoes had bitten him through the holes in the tractor seat.” She took in a big gulp of beer and smiled. “I’d say, ‘look Daddy, you have tractor-butt.’”

And a mind reader as well.

Somehow, in those jeans, she managed to cross one leg over the other in a move so sexy that I feared it might blow out a light bulb. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just sipped my own beer.

“These days,” she said. The seats are plastic, but they will wear your little ‘hiney’ out when you’ve ridden on them all day.” She pointed her beer at me. “And don’t you dare look.”

God, but I was beginning to love that woman.