Face Cards

I. A man comes home from a war which he has won. Things are not easy with him. He has trouble doing as he is told. He is unable to find a center. He is beset by trials disappointment and trouble. He wants to destroy things, yet he is afraid that he will destroy something of meaning or value. He works hard but his heart is hardly in it. He fears he will no longer be able to create anything of worth again. Ahead of him lies sudden misfortune, ruin and pain. He has a lot of money. His family and friends leave him alone now. He wishes he was proud of himself. He falls in love and becomes happy again.

II. Once, a man who worked in the food-service industry was also a buddha. This was in itself a dilemma. He understood the nature of heaven and earth, but he also had to deal with customers. His mother was a very successful business woman and although he had wanted to become a magician it was she who led him down the path of retail and got him a job in the outlet mall. Of course he became fantastically wealthy once he was appointed senior manager. This pleased his mother to see him mature and full in command. This gave him the confidence boost needed to shrug off this world of illusions. He died immediately and went to buddha-heaven, which is to say, of course, he went nowhere at all.

Joe

Joe is a guy I worked with this summer. He is six foot two and looks like a retarded bull elk. There is part of a shell casing lodged somewhere between his eyes. He once kicked a dead body that had washed up somewhere in Canada, where he is from. He can drain a whiskey bottle so fast it sounds like someone is flushing a urinal. He can eat a crockpot full of spaghetti for lunch and still have time for a 10 minute nap.

Wheel of Fire

I was out riding the furthest fenceposts of the Triple P and meditating on God's Purpose For Us All when all of a sudden there came a sound of stampeding cattle like the Lord's own thunder. I helped myself to the Colt on my belt and whirled around on my Appaloosa stallion, Big Jim by name, but there were no hell-bent kine to be seen. Instead --the Lord God as my witness-- there came out of the smokey evening sky a great wheel of fire. Tremendous it was and slick as a rattler. A sort of blue lightning would every now and then flick down from its whirling girth, snapping up the sleeping cows like a frog after flies. Now a cow is money to a man like me, a man who makes and stakes his life on the life and safety of his herd. I wasn't some weak American to take this kind of insult from some book-of-ezekiel reject. I clicked the heavy hammer back on the Colt.

Louie Spray and the Fish of 10,000 Casts

Louie Spray was born when lightning struck a small island in Big Round Lake. He emerged from a cracked slab of granite fully grown. His eyes looked like peeled grapes and his knuckles were the size of wagon wheels. Louie Spray was a gambler, a moonshiner, a bootlegger and whipped Poseidons butt besides, but what he was born to do was to hunt the fearsome Muskellunge.

Louie Spray made a boat out of the side of a barn and strapped an old Civil War cannon to his hip like a pistol (all the muskie hunters back then packed heat). He used a white pine for a rod and a hangmans rope for his fishing line. He'd haul those black-eyed muskies out of the Chippewa Flowage, the only home of World Record muskellunge. These muskies were so big they dug new rivers as Louie drug them across the soft hills of Sawyer County, WI. Once all the fight had gone out of the monsters Louie would pull out his sidearm and put a cannonball in its head to finish it off.

Louie was always looking for the biggest meanest muskie there is, a fish by the name of Famous Dave. Rumor had it that Famous Dave was a three way cross: pig, shark and muskellunge. Famous Dave only came out on the real good muskie hunting days; overcast with a good surface ripple.

Well it so happened that there came a day that was so overcast and humid you had to hold your breath to walk outside. The surface of the Flowage was all crimped and rippled with the first gusts of a south-easterly summer storm -the same kind of storm that made the lightning that made Louie Spray. If ever there was a day to catch Famous D, this was it.

star cross'd (pt.3)

I pushed my light craft into the spooling black waters and felt the feather-touch of a snowflake on my cheek. In the mad passion of the moment I had neglected to notice the slow winter flurry that already caressed the high towers of Sparrowsgate and the ominous battlements of Layman's Chateau.

The water was black and thick -cold almost to the freezing point- and the light canoe barely scratched the surface. I had chosen the time of my travel carefully, for only in those hours shortly before the river changes fully to ice is its surface traversible by boat. A boreal wind came to my aid, pushing me across the broad and inky Muscatine, closer -ever closer- towards the towering moss-clung walls of the Chalkback Bluffs. Just below the surface of the river I could see the ridged backs of Muscatine eels as they carved through the water.

In my time of preparation I had carefully mapped out the exact locations of each rocky shallow and every stone outcropping. These I navigated by memory, my eyes closed to better read the map, the map I had spent many nights engraving in my mind.
Soon I could see the grate that covered the only unguarded entrance to the heart of the Chateau D'Voleur Couer. At one time it had been a natural cavern but since had been converted into drainage tunnel, collecting the runoff from the gargoyles and rain channels of the castle-keep.

At last I reached my first objective. Clinging to the snow-slick rocks of the bluff I gave a silent prayer of thanks to God and, drawing my sword, cut a fatal gash into the bow of the canoe. It sank silently and gratefully into the thickening waters of the Muscatine. My next obstacle was the stone grate that protected the tunnel.

star cross'd (pt.2)

Sparrowsgate at that time was a booming silver town. On any night of the week grizzled prospectors stumbled drunk through its labyrinthian streets or tumbled into its narrow canals. From its position on top of Chalkback Bluff, Laymans castle keep -the Chateau d'Voleur Couer- scowled down on the gothic peaks of the city's houses and the minarets of its churches. The Muscatine, a bleak black river toothed with granite outcroppings ringed the Chateau d'Voleur Couer. Only a madman would dare test his oars against the Muscatine. It had been over 13 years since Layman had ruined my lady Lidotchka (and with her all hope of earthly happiness) but my heart still caged a hate that was deep, dark and cold. Tonight I would pit myself against the Muscatine and brave the pitfalls and booby-traps of Chateau d'Voleur Coeur to face Layman himself in a final battle.

I girded myself: a cavalry saber of Damascus steel hung at my left side, on the right I wore the heavy horse-pistol of an officer in the Prussian Jaegerkorp. In it's barrel was a lead ball I had extracted from the Hagia Sophia. It was all over worked with ancient sigils; an old man in Cairo had carved it and blessed it with the waters of the Nile. In my boot I kept a ruby-pommelled stiletto, given to me by a Sicilian bandit whose life I had twice saved. Thus armed I made my way to a small birch-bark boat I had hidden in the reeds opposite the Chateau d'Voleur Couer.

star cross'd

As I came home last night, through the crowded Farmers Market on Temple Street, I beheld a peasant man praying to a home-made shrine of St. Ananovanatasjia, the patron saint of True Love. This brought an old and familiar pain to my heart, as well as a story which I will now tell to you.

I had just purchased a new Italian shotgun and was out hunting ptarmigan behind my lake cabin estate when the weather took a turn for the worse. The sky grew prematurely dark and lightning began clawing at the horizon. I decided to take my clutch of game-birds and return home. I was still a mile or two from shelter when the storm hit. Through the rain I heard the unmistakable sound of a lady in duress and was able to make out a vague white smudge, a silhouette at the base of the hill. I made my way over to her, navigating quickly across the rocky slope that had become quite treacherous in the downpour. I came upon a lady who identified herself as the Countess Svetlana Lidotchka Sonechtka. She had been out picking the wild violets that grew along the hillside and had slipped and twisted her ankle.

I removed her shoe and gently checked for broken bones, luckily there were none. Still, she was in no condition to walk and I had no choice but to leave the shotgun and the brace of fat arctic hens behind as I carried her to my cabin. Upon reaching home, I sent my man-servant Impetigo the sixty-plus miles into the nearest town to fetch a doctor and to notifiy the young Countess's father of what had happened.

She soon recovered but it was a long time before she was able to make the long trip into town, even on one of my prize Circassian stallions, a stable of which I kept as one of my lesser passions. In those weeks we came to learn much of each other. She was some six years senior to me, a woman of the world, well-read and well-traveled. We would take picnics near the forest edge or in my sailboat and at night we would drink tea on the veranda. She would read aloud to me in any one of the five languages she was fluent in and I would surrender myself to her voice, watching the grey ribbons of smoke drift from the end of one of my fine cigars. We fell in love that summer. It was passionate but also was it more akin to a deep and blissful contentment. It was not until that perfect season that I truly knew how sweet it was to live and also to love.

Our time was sweet, yes, and bitter the sorrow when time came for us to part. I am not ashamed to say I wept a little as I watched her father's coach take her away. I am not ashamed because it was then turning fall and the trees wept with me. Then my heart rejoiced, I would join my love in the city! I had Impetigo put my things together and ride to town immediately to purchase me quarters there. I picked the last handful of violets and placed them into a Chinese vase, a present for my beloved. How I was to wish later that I would have brought my dueling saber as well.

I was never much of a city-dweller but with the visits of my beloved Lidotchka the large apartment seemed as small and cozy as any of the hundred rooms of Pemberley, my woodland estate. I became fast friends with her father the Count Dima-Belyakova who in recompense for the loss of my shotgun and the care I had shown his youngest daughter gifted me with a deed of ownership to a fleet of his Aleutian gold-sloops. It was not all joy in the city however, for it came to my attention that by winning the heart of the fair Lidotchka I had made a powerful and terrible enemy.

It seems Bishop Layman had coveted the virtue of the lovely Lidotchka and had been scheming long on how he may best wrest her from me. He spread the rumor, during his sermons, that my love and I had lain in sin during the time she spent recovering in Pemberley. While this was not in essence untrue (for true love is its own holy covenant) it was dastardly of the Bishop to utter publicly and the effect of his utterances were wholly ruinous to the virtuous Lidotchka. Bishop Layman increased his libels against my beloved until one day, as she was going to market, the townspeople captured her, stripped her of her fine silks and paraded her through town as a strumpet and a woman of loose virtue. They jeered and threw rotten foodstuffs at my beloved until Bishop Layman intervened. He masqueraded villainously as her saviour -a trick, the whole monstrous display orchestrated by him to bring Lidotchka down to his level. It was that night, under the auspices of holy sanctuary that he attempted to force himself on my beloved.

Meanwhile I was on a day-trip back to Pemberley to put in order my affairs there. I was selling my estate, the proceeds of which I intended to put forward for my upcoming wedding with Lidotchka. Impetigo had rode from the city to tell me what was happening there, but alas, it was too late. I sunk to my knees there, in front of the tall walls of Pemberley hot tears of shame streaking my face and the acrid taste of acid hate in my belly. I rode for the city as hard as I could, driving my poor stallion Hector into blood-frothed exhaustion. I was indeed too late. Lidotchka had left for a nunnery in Malta and the Count with her. I was without friendship or succour in the cold city. No longer was I lachrymose, hate had hardened my heart past all hope of tears. I made for the house of Bishop Layman.

I found him there, a gloating smile on his thin face. It was all I could do to submerge the glowing iron of anger into the cold forging waters of civility. But when he suggested mockingly that I join Lidotchka in Malta I, in turn, suggested that instead he himself join his ancestors in hell. In front of half a dozen of his servants I shrugged my sleeve from out of Impetigo's imploring grasp and slapped the black-hearted Bishop across his face. Such was the force of the blow that it toppled Layman into the dirt and knocked spittle down his ruddy jaw. I was imprisoned on the spot. While I was in gaol I heard that the cur of a Bishop had used his connections in the Vatican to have me excommunicated. In a vicious double-blow I also recieved a letter from the Count telling me that Lidotchka had succumbed, she slipped away in her sleep after contracting consumption from the privations of her journey.

I swore vengeance, the hate in my heart eating up all former happiness as a plague of locusts eats away the fruits of the soil. Vengeance, against a god blind to my suffering. Vengeance against the Bishop and vengeance against myself for not being able to rescue my beloved Lidotchka.

I am able to say, now, after long years of lonely travellings that I no longer rage against a distant God. I no longer loathe and torment myself with "what-ifs" and "could-have-beens." The former Bishop Layman? He now rules as Arch-Baron of the principality of Sparrowsgate. Dick Layman, thy name is cowardice!