If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
—Nikola Tesla
For a period of time—I have no idea how long—I was back in my childhood, which appeared not in three dimensions but as a flat representation . . . as a stranger watching myself on a screen, without experiencing my own feelings of being left in the dust when my parents divorced and then suddenly having the sensation of gripping a flaming horseshoe, of all things.
“How did they know Daughter and I were just out in the yard pitching horseshoes and I had the hot hand?” I asked, still flabbergasted.
“And no doubt anxious to get back to your competitive game,” surmised Buckaroo correctly, handing Tommy the other sample dish. “Try this one, Tom.”
“No fair using my electron microscope?” asked Tommy.
Buckaroo shook his head, saying, “Just tell me what you see, Tom. And don’t feel bad, Reno—the same thing has happened to me. By some unknown mechanism, they’re able to conceal themselves behind affective projections, projecting false scenes, desire images. That’s how they’re able to operate outside our awareness . . . some sort of electromagnetic camouflage emitting a strange psychosexual energy that, for lack of a better word, I’m calling orgonic because of its apparent ability to stimulate and produce tiny explosions at the neuronal level.”
“And arouse a fella’s loins . . . ?” Tommy asked.
“You’re kidding,” Buckaroo said.
“Just a little. Old Oscar Wiggly,” Tommy replied, conspicuously feeling his crotch.
“So, orgonic energy is real?” posed Pecos skeptically. “Loony Wilhelm Reich was on to something?”
“Perhaps only in part, a universal frequency at which neurons vibrate,” acknowledged Buckaroo, “but still I’m puzzled by how well they seem to know our brains . . . the exceedingly strong psychic, or mirror neuronal connection, accounting for their skills at affective mimicry.”
“Is it my imagination,” Tommy now commented, staring into the petri dish, “or is this dish crackling with phosphorescent baby batter and mirror neurons—bluish and aqua greens, for the most part—in which I see the laughing face of John Whorfin disguised as Lizardo? And now on closer inspection, that crazy asshole Cardinal Baltazar, smirking and ridiculing us . . . ?”
As an experiment, Buckaroo screeched hoo-hoo softly: a wise owl indeed and near enough for me to hear him shake his wings. A moment later his mournful hoot became the animated howl of a cold north wind that shot through Tommy’s veins, chilling him to the bone and taking control of every part of his body.
“Damn,” exhaled Tommy, apparently having entered an alternate reality. “Flying, then, observing my shadow on the earth far below, as I rose like Augustine the Hippo, through all bodily things to heaven and even higher, deeper into my own mind and beyond, to the region of never-failing plenty.”
“Then why are you making a face?” asked Pecos.
She had a point. As if in a daze, Tommy leaned his head back and stared at Buckaroo’s ceiling light, whose facets of etched glass shone like sapphires and diamonds.
“My solitude, as I see it in the shifting kaleidoscope of dreams . . . it does make me feel kind of hopped up on something,” he said with a dramatic air, when suddenly a diatribe of unrepeatable profanity escaped his lips, causing him to set the petri dish down and scoot his chair back with alacrity.
“Yes, by all means, save your hot breath, Tommy,” Buckaroo commented with a knowing smile, indicating the two dishes we had just held. “Reno’s sample was Lectroid pupae. The second one, yours, the placebo, contained only flesh-eating screwworms in a mixture of celery and cream cheese.”
It goes without saying that Tommy was open-mouthed. What could he say except what in fact he did say: “That hurts. So it was all in my head? Not the Lectroids?”
“Yes and no,” said Buckaroo. “The power of suggestion, the power of the active subconscious, is a formidable thing. Let us say the Lectroid connects with us in some sense we don’t understand. It wouldn’t need control, just the power of suggestion, and our own mind does the rest. The aliens sense our fear and reflect it back to us in spades . . .”
“As plain as the eyes on your face,” said Tommy. “I guess I dropped the ball, and I say that without pomposity.”
“I compare it to the euphoria of a scuba diver’s bends,” Buckaroo was saying. “Apart from the Lectroids’ electromagnetic, possibly telekinetic capability—I remember falling backward from what seemed like an inexplicable jolt at Yoyodyne—we know they favor the shock chop in close quarters, along with nerve poison darts fired from the mouth and their cloaca.”
“Rawhide,” murmured Pecos ominously. “Poor Rawhide.”
After a second or two of silence, each of us spoke of our great friend, with Tommy putting it succinctly. “He never once let us down”—a sentiment shared by one and all.
“Damn butt darts,” I recalled vividly. “I was nearly on the wrong end of one of those suckers.”
Nodding, Buckaroo replied, “Of course that doesn’t take into account Emdall’s so-called ‘Darkling’ or ring-necked Lectroids, their different anatomical features and whatever weapons they’re bringing. Also, now that we know—if the general is to be believed—that Whorfin is pregnant with John Emdall Thunderpump’s embryo, the picture becomes even more cloudy . . .”
“If the general is to be believed . . .” Pecos said. “A big if . . .”
“On the one hand, Emdall Thunderpump might not know of Whorfin’s condition,” Buckaroo theorized. “On the other, she might not want it known back home because it might not sit well with her own kind . . .”
“. . . that Whorfin is carrying her offspring,” I said. “The Virgin Empress’s offspring and scion of her tribe’s archenemy.”
“Exactly, Reno,” he replied. “Put yourself in her shoes or Whorfin’s. Without knowing the particular moieties or Malthusian math of Planet 10 Lectroids or their evolutionary chain, my educated guess is that the two Lectroid races once constituted a highly advanced civilization. But that was likely before overpopulation led to genocidal civil wars, which in turn decimated the gene pool, with the result that both groups now fight fanatically over the planet’s scant resources and the crumbs of its former glory . . . leading to imperial expansion abroad and civil war at home, with both Whorfin and Emdall Thunderpump feeding off this mutual hatred to consolidate their own positions of power.”
“That makes sense,” Tommy agreed.
“But now imagine a threat to them both, a spawn born of their sexual congress, possibly with the unique royal lineage and moral authority to unite both groups, to bring them together and end the war . . . indeed usurp their power and consolidate it.”
“Then he, she, it must die,” I said, “or else the civil war might end, and the status of the militant elites of each faction would be jeopardized.”
“Sound familiar?” asked Pecos rhetorically.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Buckaroo replied, “although of course it’s also possible that the raiding party has no knowledge of Whorfin’s pregnancy. On the other hand, don’t forget also that Whorfin is a con artist whose word is worthless. Who knows what the truth is . . . but it’s always the demagogues on every planet, the same pathetic pack of clowns and their stupid followers easily led astray. Most civilizations, at least in our world, do tend to point in an authoritarian direction over time. We see the same thing happening here. Even so, people still have dreams on a Saturday night, and these alien interlopers have no right to be threatening or making demands of us.”
“Damn right. Fighting words,” I said, pointing at the straw mat lying atop the fine Persian rug next to me. “Though for all we know, there could be a Lectroid sitting on this very tatami mat.”
“What tatami mat?” Buckaroo replied with a perfectly stolid face, prompting us both to break into laughter, however short lived.
“It occurs to me,” I said, “that if these creatures are able to mess with our minds, then possibly all our perceptions of them are false . . .”
“. . . the perceptions on which to base our conclusions,” Pecos agreed, appearing tired and deep in thought as she leafed through the latest issue of Philological Quarterly. “Or how do we know for sure they didn’t just plant that very thought in our heads?”
Lacking a suitable response to this conundrum, Buckaroo changed the subject, saying, “There’s a kind of weasel, I forget its name, who kills much bigger prey by dancing for them. It dances so well they become too mesmerized to notice it’s moving closer. Then it strikes the throat with razor claws for the kill.”
“Lectroids are weasels, all right. But can they dance?” Pecos asked in good fun.
Buckaroo by now was staring into faraway space with a distracted air, as if wishing to unburden himself, and I made bold to ask, “How are you feeling these days, Buckaroo?”
The great man rose to his feet and responded, “I’m a scientist, meaning someone who draws on his sensory apparatus and similar experiences of others—knowledge gleaned via observation and experimentation—in order not to arrive at the great imponderables but to formulate probabilities. An empiricist, a materialist, in other words, to my very core. Yet there is this entire other mentality that afflicts me, the unevolved human mind in all its subjectivity, that makes me go round and round . . . even around the bend, by all accounts. What is this thing?”
“This thing called love? Oxytocin?” I wondered.
“The soul . . . that supernatural thing that gets flamed when we die,” Tommy suggested.
“Or when we don’t die,” Buckaroo replied cryptically, taking a tentative step toward the door. “In the Fifth Dimension, I saw the two of us walking in the Serengeti in the moonlight and tried to jump out of the Jet Car, but trying to open the driver’s door that was stuck, I veered off course and landed in the Seventh, where I saw her and spoke to her as clearly as I’m talking to you.”
“I hate to burst your bubble when you’re reevaluating your life,” Tommy cut in, “but maybe we oughtta be thinking about saving the world and maybe you oughtta get a live woman. Maybe that would be a tad more productive . . .”
“This is productive, Tommy. He’s getting things off his chest,” Pecos scolded him and turned worriedly to Buckaroo. “What . . . what would have happened to you if you had managed to jump out?”
“If I had jumped out of the Jet Car . . . ? I probably wouldn’t be standing here in a state of solidification,” Buckaroo said. “Of course there are too many possible vectors to know the details, but my next experiment will involve just such an unusuality.”
“Wow, can I share that close call with my readers?” I asked.
“But only with your readers and no one else,” he said with a smile and then made a remarkable admission. “Tommy’s right, of course. Here I am wallowing in the past when we need to put our hats on tight and cinch our saddles. No sense crying the blues when there’s work to be done.”
“We’ve been in tough scraps before,” Tommy announced in a more encouraging vein. “If there’s one hope for the world, it’s us and our great intelligence.”
“The only easy day was yesterday, old pard. Yes or no?” Buckaroo said and slapped Tommy on the shoulder as we all got up to leave.
“And yesterday was once tomorrow,” I told myself, trying to decide which was the correct answer, when Buckaroo seemed to remember something and produced from his pocket a piece of ruled paper.
“Nearly forgot . . . here’s our set list for the next leg of the tour,” he said. “Of course feel free to tinker, as long as they’re in the key of G-sharp. I was half-asleep when I scribbled it. Thoughts?”
“Going back on tour?” I asked, surprised. “Given the circumstances, I—”
“In exactly two weeks. Mrs. Johnson is already blasting the news worldwide,” he replied calmly, disconcerting us even further. “Since we have to go to Europe anyway . . .”
“A couple of weeks? But rehearsals . . .” I reacted in shock, meanwhile looking over the song list and passing it to Pecos and Tommy for their perusal.
“I can’t help wondering,” Pecos said, checking the program. “Why all in G-sharp? That sucks ass. Any particular reason?”
“Fifty-one point five hertz,” Tommy at once theorized in his best squinty-eyed, wishing-to-appear-thoughtful pose, adding, “G-sharp vibrates at approximately a frequency of fifty-one point five hertz. Everybody knows that, and that’s the same frequency as the pyramids—”
I interrupted him to ask Buckaroo, “What’s our lineup?”
“You’re the tour wizard and musical director, Reno,” he said. “It’s in your hands, and I know you’ll make wise choices.”
“I’ll try,” I vowed, all too aware of the weighty responsibility. “But what about a bass player?”
“Keeper of the bass flame is always difficult,” he conceded. “Between Papa Bear and Hoppalong, I’ll leave it up to you.”
“Well . . . Hoppalong just bought a new Fender Jazz Bass,” Pecos said. “I have it on good authority.”
“Mrs. Johnson . . . ?” asked Buckaroo.
Pecos nodded and replied, “He took out a loan for six weeks’ wages from the commissary.”
“That shows commitment,” Buckaroo admitted.
“I wouldn’t want him to think he threw his money away. Oh, and there’s Webmaster Jhonny,” I said, with a sidewise look at Pecos. “Jhonny is mighty set on coming. He’s bent my ear, intent on sampling what he thinks is the extravagant lifestyle of the concert tour. He may also feel he has something to prove to someone.”
I glanced again at Pecos, who averted her eyes.
“No reason why anyone should be exempt,” said Buckaroo. “He can do his job from the bus, but it’s up to you, Reno. And one more thing: I’ve made a slight change to our itinerary. I’ve moved up our Rome engagement. The tour opens in the Coliseum.”
“The Roman Coliseum . . . ?” we all uttered in amazement. “Just like in your dream . . .”
“I thought it would be a good idea,” Buckaroo said, “especially since Mayor Agostinelli is a big fan and we’ll be appearing the same day as an international DeMolay pep rally at which, according to a Vatican press release, the pope plans to reveal the fourth and final secret of Our Lady of Fátima . . .”
“The fourth secret . . . ?” I said. “I thought there were only three.”
“Apparently, someone dug a little deeper and found another . . .”
“Someone?” I questioned him.
“Someone in a position of power,” he confirmed. “Neither Pope Innocent nor his agent Cardinal Baltazar is taking my calls. They seem to be indisposed or away from their phones almost like clockwork, so something had to be done. I’m especially anxious to meet this fellow, Abbot Costello, who has apparently gone underground . . .”
“I love the old-time comedies, too,” I said. “Well, we’ve pestered you long enough, Buckaroo. With the exception of Tommy, we’ve got to get back to our slow cookers for tonight’s potluck dinner. Right, Tommy? Frozen turkey loaf again this year, in the original wrapper?”
“My rotisserie chicken, with fried taters and coleslaw,” countered Tommy defiantly. “What real men eat, along with quality beef.”
“No cookie or a biscuit?” I respectfully inquired.
“Not this year. Putting you all on a diet,” he replied, before quickly reconsidering. “Depends what’s in it for me.”
“Surprise vegetarian goulash and green bean casserole from me,” revealed Pecos.
“No surprise there,” said Buckaroo. “And, Reno, andouillette again this year, in your special solera with all the fixings?”
“It seems to be what I’m known for,” I chuckled good-naturedly. “That, and my juicy buttered yams.”
“Yes, I seem to recall they set off quite the mad scramble last year. Reminds me I need to check my own pot of brodo di polpo,” he said, adding, “Don’t worry, guys, it’s just the first leg of a long race to wellness. Let’s have a great evening. Nothing shows love like a home-cooked meal.”
“I agree a hundred and ten percent,” I declared, not knowing exactly what sort of dish he was preparing, but certain it would be wonderful. In this way relieved of the burden of unhealthy competition, we walked out together in a spirit of great conviviality.
From the same window, I watched Buckaroo cross the community garden and continue past the honeybee colony, the craft brewery and visitor center, the greenhouse-herbarium, and the stockade to the site of the old chicken coop that by now lay mostly demolished, courtesy of Red Jordan and Honest Dan Cartwright, who were presently busy scavenging copper wire from old air conditioners. At that moment, however, what arrested my attention was the sight of Red Jordan on his hands and knees, attempting to retrieve a child’s ball from what I assumed was a drainpipe. Nearby, a young Apache girl, whom I recognized as the daughter of one of our nurses, spoke anxiously to Buckaroo. What words were exchanged between them, or between Red and Buckaroo, I can’t say, but I continued to watch with fascination as Buckaroo took something from his doctor’s case.
From remarks he made to me during my preparation for this project, we have his account: “Tall Crow’s daughter Yolanda had dropped her little ball into a pipe too narrow to admit my fingers or any other object without likely puncturing the ball. Yet when I sprinkled in a packet of Alka-Seltzer, its foaming action on the liquid beneath the ball caused the ball to rise sufficiently to become easily grasped. The delighted look on Yolanda’s face, and a single tear of joy that ran down Red’s cheek, more than justified my modest effort.”
Again, a thoughtful reader may reasonably wonder why I include such a seemingly trivial occurrence in the present narrative—to which I would reply that, in addition to providing a window into Buckaroo’s unparalleled ability to improvise, the incident presaged bigger things to come . . . even a pivotal event, perhaps.
Now Buckaroo paused to pet one of the many wild flamingos roaming about the place and continued a short distance to the urgent care clinic, before making the rounds of the ten-bed hospital and descending the stairs to its world-renowned laboratory—the cytology section, to be precise—where he donned a sanitary gown and Dansko surgical clogs with blue paper shoe covers, then found Señor Dentista and Colorado Belle hard at work on the Lectroid-papaya hybrid specimens sent to us from Sarajevo.
“Anything interesting?” said Buckaroo, peering over Belle’s shoulder.
“I’m not sure these two have any future together,” she answered through her plexiglass face shield. “Miss Papaya must have had a lot of makeup on when Mr. Lectroid came calling. Or maybe the light was bad. But if you add a little catnip—”
“Then—?”
“Some very disturbing chromosomes that look like Frankenstein ate Frankenstein,” she said. “Makes you wonder why anyone had the idea of marrying these two.”
“I think I know, Belle,” replied Buckaroo. “From the few writings that Cardinal Baltazar has published, he seems to belong to a small clique of church thinkers who believe that the original forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn’t the apple but the papaya, whose seeds are thought to contain individual demons released as phlogiston.”
“Seriously?” she questioned. “So—”
“If every seed is a demon, he might be trying to bring into fruition an army of Lectroids with demonic powers. Let me know at the first sign of deviltry or black magic.”
“That’s so childlike, it’s almost cute,” she said. “Almost.”
Upstairs in a freestanding Faraday cage that doubled as an orgone energy accumulator, Buckaroo found Wild Bill Wagoneer still with an orangish tinge despite daily sessions in the Institute’s pressurized oxygen chamber and regular enemas of buffelgrass, stinging nettle, and juniper ash. In addition, Mrs. Johnson had been giving him injections of rooster comb, along with foot rubs with Watkins liniment, and regularly accompanied him outside, where they threw knives and tomahawks in friendly competition . . . until one day she caught him mixing contraband Ativan with his daily prescribed glass of Ovaltine. Needless to say, the incident led to an inconclusive investigation, a certain unraveling of their friendship, and a week in time-out for the general.
“Where are all the goodhearted people? Another attempt to keep them from reaching me!” he wailed sporadically during this period.
Later, when his skunk-oil treatments also forced him to live apart from others, even from the livestock, loneliness again became his major complaint. Afternoons and evenings typically found him hunched over his Bible in the old hay barn converted into a lazaretto, where Mrs. Johnson nevertheless remained his constant visitor . . . applying permethrin to his genitals and tossing him high into the air, Mongolian-style, with the aim of flipping his liver.
Through it all, the general continued to engage in strenuous exercise under the same Arizona sun that had toned his muscles and given him an even more jaundiced hue and a vigorous mustache. His behavior raised eyebrows, to say the least, and there could be little doubt that he had acquired a nervous disease; but meaningful therapy proved next to impossible, since Wild Bill’s knee-jerk reaction to Dr. John Jane Doe’s attempts at psychoanalysis was to play with the buttons on his shirt or “stretch” his penis . . . before apologizing for having forgotten virtually everything in the immediate aftermath of the lab explosion.
“Anybody find my brain or did I leave it in the quack shack?” he might say. “Or did Lord John Whorfin steal that, too, the thieving sonofabitch? No wonder I suck and keep drifting. There’s gotta be an evil element involved or maybe I’m just simple. Of course there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’m wrong.”
Or else he would become insufferably arrogant and patronizing to one and all: “Lemme get on my know-it-all horse and let’s review. Or did your mother not tell you what the Intelligence Integration Center is and how it interfaces with the Global Information Infrastructure to coordinate UCAV strikes and directed-energy weapons?”
On this day, Buckaroo slipped into the chamber and began by engaging him in a short conversation concerning a new battery of tests that had confirmed signs of liver cirrhosis and other toxicological organ damage, as well as spirochetes in the general’s blood and lymph.
“Good news and bad. We can rule out syphilitic dementia, but spirochetes are frustrating little critters,” Buckaroo informed him. “They might be Lyme disease or something else causing your clumsiness and neurological problems. We’ll stay with the celery juice, topical skunk oil, and Watkins liniment. I see Dr. Doe also has you on ibogaine, loco weed, and oleander . . .”
“Doc told me it was ragweed for my sinuses,” Wild Bill interjected.
“Don’t buy a used car from them,” Buckaroo said, only partly in jest. “Since there’s no standard of care for your condition, they’re trying a number of things across the spectrum. You should be all right as long as you don’t operate a forklift.”
“Or go skateboarding with that crazy Mrs. Johnson. Anybody home? She’s wacko . . .”
“Good point, General. I know the two of you have tangled on more than one occasion,” Buckaroo remarked, looking over Wild Bill’s medical file. “Depending on your hormesis response, we may have to look at an intensive antibiotic regime. I’m also still worried about your elevated viral load, so I’m upping the accumulator’s bion output.”
Wild Bill merely stared at his Bible for a moment before replying, “Whatever you say, Doc, but I wish you’d save your time and money to help the less fortunate. The little germ bastards can look me in the eye and know I’m not someone to phawk with. Or they can eat me up until all my body parts fall off. I’m still not going on meds or messing with my bodily fluids. I’ll try the natural cure in Mrs. Johnson’s castor bean gumbo. I know caloric intake is critically important.”
“As well as good sleep . . . still showing a sleep deficiency. Just an educated guess, but I see your spirometric numbers are looking better on the gradient treadmill tests. How was your therapy session with Dr. Doe? I understand you got angry and tried to snatch their keys.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Doe. They say they suffered bruises when you grabbed for their keys.”
“Good and bad, like you said,” replied Wild Bill. “Snoozing and passing gas, cursing myself, wondering how I could have missed so many things before they put my crazy ass in this insane asylum. Hopefully, the little shrink with the big whiskers can get me recalibrated in no time.”
Buckaroo nodded and scribbled something, humoring him. “I’ll make a note in your file for Dr. Nostradamus. In the positive column, the good news is that your gut flora are blossoming and the ammonia levels in your brain are coming down, but I’m worried your erythrocytes may be red shifting on me, possibly to the tipping point. Perhaps a little vibrotherapy will open your bile ducts, as well as pick up your spirits and jar your memory by regenerating axons. But if the chelation and vibrotherapy don’t help, your only shot may be a liver transplant, platelet-rich plasma therapy, or even my new experimental serum that I’m ready to test.”
Wild Bill declined the offer, explaining, “First and foremost, Doc, give it to someone more worthy. I’m just a war criminal basking in my own piss, a leech lacking the manual dexterity even for physical labor.”
“You’re too modest, General,” Buckaroo informed him. “I suspect you’re underestimating yourself. That’s why I’m giving you a choice of desert-survival trekking with Papa Bear—”
“Oh, God, no. He’s a lost puppy with a shady past,” said the general, cringing.
“—or spending a few days at the old Ghost Mine’s magnetic vortex about ten miles from here. There’s a powerful hidden ley line through there that could boost your solar plexus chakra in a relatively short time.”
“Win, win, win,” said Wild Bill. “I cannot thank you often enough.”
The usual questions only elicited more of the usual answers on this particular afternoon, as Buckaroo reviewed certain previous conversations between them and Wild Bill’s childlike sketches having to do with the shadowy Brother Costello and the violent exorcism of Emilio Lizardo, which the general likened to “sucking a donkey’s ass through a straw” . . .
“Okay, let’s try again,” Buckaroo said and proceeded to ask the usual questions concerning the mysterious explosion at Area 51 . . . to which he received the usual hazy and mostly nonsensical answers, from which he nonetheless always managed to ferret out bits and pieces of information.
“See something, say something,” recalled the general. “I was witness to the whole twisted agenda.”
“That’s right, and it’s not too late to make a clean breast of it,” Buckaroo said.
“Ha, ‘a clean breast’ . . . what I wouldn’t do for a good rubdown and pipe cleaning.”
“How about cleaning your conscience?”
“If I still had one, Doc,” the general commented with resignation. “I’d even do Christian outreach, ride a bicycle with the Mormons, but, alas, my name is tarnished like the forlorn Judas . . .”
After several more minutes of this exhausting exchange, Buckaroo asked questions like the following: Did Lizardo say anything before he died? Were statements taken from any witnesses? Were there photographs, security video, or any kind of audiovisual records of the incident that might exist anywhere? What was Costello’s condition? Did he make a statement to anyone present? How long did the friar remain at the scene after the incident? Did he get off base under his own power? How had he come to the general’s attention in the first place? Who paid for his ticket from Italy? How much money changed hands? Who was the middle man, this so-called Holy Office?
“Is this your signature, General?” Buckaroo asked, showing him the receipts for the Lectroid body parts. “This bill of sale to the Holy Office, any memory of that?”
“Sharing is caring. Forgive me for sounding like a child, but it does look familiar.”
“Maybe because I showed it to you yesterday.”
Wild Bill scratched his chin, clenched his teeth, and thought some more, slapping his head violently as if to remove the cobwebs before admitting total defeat. “One too many concussions, capped off by the big one, the big-ass firecracker that stole my dreams. That’s what the flight docs said, dating from my childhood of abuse. I’m ashamed, but I don’t know what for: I want to say a wild thing . . . an emotional pussycat of a mother I couldn’t protect . . .”
“Just keep working through it,” Buckaroo urged. “If anything occurs to you . . .”
Wagoneer glanced around as if appraising his surroundings for the first time, then dug deeply and pulled a slimy finger from his nose.
“I feel the pull of psychosis, Doc. Lots of repressed memories there . . . hit me right between the eyes,” Wild Bill began, staring at his nose-picking finger, which he now waved in front of a grateful Nostradamus. “For the love of humanity, Buckaroo, I don’t know what went wrong, unless maybe static electricity and my adjutant’s hair spray . . .”
“You’re talking about the explosion that night at the base . . . ?”
Wagoneer both nodded and shook his head, saying, “Most God- awful beating I’ve ever suffered, Doc. Had to be some astronomical high levels of propellants to throw Costello and Lizardo clean across the loading dock and out the service entrance. God bless America, flew like damn dolls . . .”
“Well, matter is energy, so it stands to reason mysterious matter can produce mysterious energy,” Buckaroo theorized.
“I mourn their loss. I mourn the loss of every soul,” the general said solemnly.
“Who was lost, General?”
“The little Italian the size of a child and the other Italian . . . I showed you where I buried him and the wiseacre John. They were a hoot.”
“John Whorfin.”
“The light sleeper I shot outta the sky.”
“But now you know that’s not true. Why do you think he lied to you?”
“No one was more surprised than I was,” the general said. “No question he tapped into my pity bank, but I don’t think he’d fib about something like that unless maybe he lied to keep from going insane. I could do a whole riff on this, whatever the deal is.”
“What is the deal, General? Do you know what the deal is?”
“He came from a pretty tough neighborhood,” the general continued, clutching one hand in the other and rocking back and forth in a troubled manner. “Maybe he gave to everyone and no one gave to him and he couldn’t stand to be alone.”
“Maybe he’s not alone. Any chance he and the little Italian stepped out of the world for a minute and returned together?”
The general seemed to be thinking hard about this and even closed his eyes before answering softly, “Then why did they leave me? I buried them, I hefted them down the trail like a pallbearer.”
Buckaroo paused, reluctant to bring up an ongoing issue, but felt again the need to ask, “Do you know who I am, General?”
“You’re a helluva entertainer . . . and maybe the better man.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re Buckaroo Banzai. And where does that leave me by comparison?”
Just at that moment the general removed his finger from the Chihuahua’s slavering maw, causing Nostradamus to howl like a wolverine.
“Before I go,” Buckaroo said. “I’d like to see what he remembers about that day at Area 51 . . .”
“Fire away,” the general said, “but he’s a bullshit artist—hard to tell when he’s kidding, so take it with a grain of salt.”