Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 9/14

           As if finding a solution, she turned to light. A negative of herself. I grabbed her arm. Then I couldn’t see anything. Connie was still with me, though. I thought it had been some kind of blast that sent us to a tangle of limbs on the floor, but there was no sound. Yet. Just a lot of something, then a bunch of nothing. And there, for a second, voiceless, we sat and patted and held each other, making sure the other was present and accounted for.

            “I’m okay,” I told her. “So, you must be okay.”

            “I’m alright,” she giggled. “I’m sorry. That was so 1980’s music video.”

            She rose to a kneel to get a better look over the balcony, but I told her that there might still be a blast coming. She crouched back down.

            “It was only a k away. It was light shooting from the bottom of the ship. Didn’t you see it?” She grinned. “Then, it was everything!” She knelt up, formed a cone with her hands, and shouted through the door:

            “Encore!”

            Then she stiffened, rolled back down, and with rapid, constricted delivery-

            “He saw me! He looked right at me.”

            She reached over and slid the door closed, and reached up and over and closed the blinds.

            “Who?” I asked.

            “I don’t know him.” She slithered to tasks on the carpet, exasperated. If I couldn’t see what was obvious, it certainly couldn’t be described.

            “Turn the lights off and getcher shirt on.”

            I did as she asked and met her in the middle of the room, near the feet of the beds. Whatever had happened, it was something that called for a top.

            “What was it?”

            She just shook her head, chuckled, and began changing into street clothes.

            “Fred the Economic Monster?”

            “Close.” She found her britches. “You won’t believe how close. Get dressed. This is a crisis situation.”

            I found my shirt and watched her slip into hers. I loved to watch Connie dress, with her prosaic, misguided concern over her body.

            “It isn’t over, then?”

            “Not by a long shot, baby. Go over and see if he’s gone.”

            I went over, pushed a blind aside and looked. There was nothing but stars. I then sat with her on the bed in the dark and she described what she saw after the light blast.

            “It was a man, sitting in a little red wagon, wearing a leather flight jacket, and this…”

            Against the lightly glowing blinds, she reached up to her own head.

            “…tight fitting leather cap and goggles.”

            I shook my head.

            “You don’t believe me. And he had a scarf on.”

            I stopped myself from shaking my head again. One thing I learned throughout the trip was to take things as they were and not comment. Through word or expression. We had just seen a spaceship the size of Philadelphia, and here she was, shaken by an eccentric human who was sitting in a little red wagon.

            “There are plenty of weirdos in Imno,” I told her.

            “Flying?”

            “Flying?”

            She grabbed her head.

            “He wasn’t in the parking lot. He was over it. Did you see me looking down?”

            The hands went down from the head. How could I be so dense?

            “Wearing a white scarf!”

            Connie was so exasperated. I laughed. She clutched at my shirt, fumbled around a bit, then gave up on finding my nipple. She settled for a swat on the chest. Considering the state of both my nipples, had she succeeded, as she always had thus far, it would have really hurt. But it hurt more to see her like this. She was at such a loss that she had lost her special powers. (And those special powers weren’t reserved for me- no! During our time in Oak Falls I would watch with high-strung envy as she used them on Smiddy, when he ‘didn’t get it’, which was often. So often that, during a moment alone in the room with him, he confided to me that he had to use plasters.)

            “He laughed when I called for an encore,” Connie growled. “He looked right at me. He might know I’m from Tenger!”

            “When has that mattered! Get ahold of yourself. I think he was just some idiot with anti-grav.”

            “Do ya think?”

            I threw my arms out, acknowledging the loss of any special powers I might have had.

            “But nothing else than that. I think he’s an ‘Im’.”

            “Im-nan.”

            “That, too…” I raised a finger that, perhaps, she couldn’t see. “But more specifically, ‘Im’. A die-hard Imnan. From Lumber City. There’s only two types in Imno as eccentric as that. Eco-administrators like me, and Ims.”

           All good things must come to an end. I had confirmed that Connie was right. We were in a crisis situation. We had to find that Im. Our departure from Oak Falls would have been tearful if it hadn’t been so quick. Connie half-joked to Smiddy, as we left, that he could join our team at the junior level, but he responded:

           “Factotum? Sounds painful. Forget it. Besides, I never leave the county. I have warrants everywhere else.”

            As for Clarissa, that day she was as unreachable as she had been enigmatic. She had such a life for someone who was just an IFEE. She’d adapted, and she wasn’t the only one. I didn’t see that coming, and I should have. After all, I’m an economic official.

            It was important to Connie, as we left, that I believe she’d seen a goofy-looking guy in pilot’s garb, tearing up the sky in a little red wagon.

            “I believe you,” I told her. “I believe it all.”

            “Well, I don’t believe me.”

            After all we’d seen and done, she was shocked by this last straw. As we whizzed down the highway on our night mission, she slumped in the passenger seat, mumbling-

            “With a pilot’s cap and aviator scarf. In a little red wagon. That…”

            She laughed and turned to me.

            “I don’t even know what to call it. Him. Words fail me.”

            “Wingnut.”

            She laughed again.

            “Wingnut! That’ll do!”

            She was also cheered since we were now out of the oasis of comfort and back into the hinterland of bad food. Namely: Turkey Ts’. Which I have to admit, I missed also. The transition from our misplaced weekend back to serious action was easy. A working hypothesis is fine, as an excuse for cherry vodka, subs, and making like bunnies in March. But there’s a downside. Once it’s confirmed that aliens are actually using your brain to, say, route sewage or conduct widget logistics, all the fun is taken out of it.

            “Notice something?”

            With Connie’s query, I pulled out of a reverie nosedive.

            “That’s part of the door here.” I gave the driver’s side door beside me a thump. “Something came loose when we plowed up that picket fence.”

            “I hope not.” Connie shook herself and sat up straighter.

            “Well,” I told her. “That’s the sound.” I imitated the squeak-chime that the door made with the slightest tilt on its long axis. “dee dee dee wee wee wee… It’s not your fault. You were just in the driver’s seat at the time.”

            Connie burst out laughing.

            “I’m not talking about that! But I did notice that noise. Perfect imitation, by the way. You have a future in cartoon voice-overs. No. Neither of us has had a trance in the past couple of hours.”

            I hadn’t noticed.

            “That’s great!”

            “Could be good, could be bad.”

            “Either way,” I told her, “we gotta switch. I’m bushed.”

           I knew the way Connie liked her Turkey Ts’. With shredded lettuce, and light on the onions and mayo. So, I went into the shop while she waited. Imno paid, since Tenger had covered the mess we left behind in Oak Falls. As I emerged with the order, with extra Handy Browns, she was out of the car, near a dark exterior corner of the building.

            “Sit go-in.”

            She knew me well enough to trust me with the Turkey T order, and by then I knew that she was probably addressing an insomniac horned toad. She hopped into the driver’s side with the glow that comes from making a new friend. She looked to me and I saluted vertically down 57, north-northwest. Lumber City was between us and Fort Covington. Which was the point of Lumber City. We rode and munched, both having gotten good at unassisted one-handed driving, and I gave Connie her space. I couldn’t compete with a Turkey T, and she didn’t invite comments during dinner. With respective sighs, we graduated to the browns.

            “Where we goin’?”

            “Lumber City,” I told her. “Im Central.”

            It was then that Connie impressed me with her knowledge about the Ims; the ultra-orthodox Imno splinter group near the border with Tenger. They were a good buffer. I was sure that there were similar groups in Tenger, but wasn’t sure what they were referred to as.

            “What’s in Lumber City that can help?” She asked.

            “Well, if Ims are in on this, they’re the weak link.”

            “That pilot looked like the missing link.”

            “We gotta get there quickly and nose around. You can infer a lot in Lumber City. They’re pretty obtuse.”

            I paused as the highway stripes and potholes and shivering, famished horned toads waiting along the roadside whizzed past.

            “They wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

            “And those hearts were made in China.”

            Connie hadn’t missed that part of her briefing about Imno. She told me that there are similar places in Tenger. One was close by, up in Tenger’s half of Mankato.

            Ims considered themselves die-hards, and lobbied against any step away from isolationism, but used more imports per capita than in the entire Imno region. They lived in yurts and abandoned factories and their pride and joy and single industry was the grain alcohol they distilled, it being an Imno product. Lumber Citians lived and worked in factories which had been foreign concerns. The population center could be found in an old steel mill which was Im occupied, but which Tenger still claimed.

            Small signs pointed the way to Lumber City, and reminded me to get rid of the trash before we passed through the checkpoint. In the interest of time, I used a simple method, which had a low degree of difficulty. It’s called “The Barnstormer.” I simply reached through the side window with the goods, and hurled them into the whistling wind against the hood ornament, making our entrance into Lumber City grand, if there had been sunlight. But the effect was achieved, for a select audience. Namely, the horned toads, sitting along the side of the road like day laborers waiting for an assignment. The car rushed through all that trash-confetti. And I waited for it.

            “Pig.”

            Then Connie pointed to a light on the horizon. “There it is.”

            She was right. Not only that, the light was constant, so it had to be Town Hall. I told her that we would have to check in there, and be more straightforward with the mission.