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Have you ever heard the sound of a jet plane getting set to take off? Do you know how the roaring noise will build and build and build until it feels as if your ears had been poured full of screaming sacred sea monkeys?
The sound that The Prophet was making was way louder than that.
The Prophet took off with me holding on to the steering wheel for dear sweet life.
I know that I was supposed to be driving. I know that was how The Prophet’s magic actually worked – but that didn’t help one single bit from me feeling like I was nothing more than a horsefly glued feet-first to the top end of a speeding locomotive speeding along on a railroad built straight down the mouth of the Grand Canyon.
The engine was roaring out loud. The wheels were spinning like crazy souped-up hamster wheels. Trees crashed to the ground and I am pretty sure that one or two of them actually uprooted themselves and hiked their bark up around their knotty old kneecaps as they scampered for cover.
Old Shuck got about half of a blink’s worth of time to see us coming straight directly at his big purple squatty old self.
And then we hit – the three of us – me, in a giant pink Winnebago ramming smack-dab into the middle of a giant purple Death Dog.
Now why don’t you try telling me just how many times in your life you might expect to use a sentence like THAT???
We made a sound like we had just hit the world’s largest rubber super ball bouncing hard against Old Shuck’s grape-colored hide. It was a little like hitting a gigantic elastic band. Old Shuck’s body sort of stretched in and around the oncoming magical Winnebago. The big death dog made a soft wet what-the-freak sort of sound as he spit Bigfoot out into thin mid-air.
Bigfoot hit the windshield of the Winnebago and he sort of flattened out across it like the shadow of a thin and runny steam-rolled fur-pancake. Bigfoot’s eyes were about as wide as giant Frisbees and his lips smeared against The Prophet’s windshield, leaving long slug-like tracks of Bigfoot spit smeared across the window glass.
I’m not saying it was pretty.
“HANG ON!” The Prophet roared.
I’m not sure if The Prophet was talking to me – or if he was actually talking to Bigfoot who was still hanging off of the windshield, trying his hardest not to die.
It might be he was even talking to himself.
“LET GO OF MY FREAKING WIPER BLADE!” The Prophet roared. “YOU BIG STUPID HAIRY WANNABE-WOOKIE!”
That time I was pretty sure that he was DEFINITELY talking to Bigfoot.
We powered straight ahead, driving directly into Old Shuck.
“We’re going to flatten him out like a toad in the road,” I yelled.
Only I guess it didn’t work that way with giant purple Death Dogs.
The deeper we drove into Old Shuck’s body, the more his body stretched out – until we were driving into nothing but a sea of deep rubber purple. It was like that Death Dog was made up of some kind of a giant elastic amoeba. I began to worry that he was going to swallow us up inside of himself and then crawl off into some deep and funky cave to hibernate while he digested about five tons of mystical pink Winnebago along with the spirit of a reincarnated Shawnee medicine man, a nine foot tall Sasquatch, a Coyote trickster and a seventeen year old boy.
Namely, me.
“I am Tenskwatawa,” The Prophet roared defiantly. “I am the brother to the mighty Tecumseh. I am the Open Door and I am the Arrow – and you, tiny little purple funny-smelling dog must yield before my power!”
Well that sounded all right when you roared it through a mystical pink Winnebago bumper – but it just did not seem to impress Old Shuck all that much.
In the heart of the deep purple forever that Old Shuck had grown and stretched into – something went SPROINGGGGGGG!!!
It sounded as if King Kong had jumped upon a pogo stick deep in the belly of Moby Dick – while old Moby was swimming through the bottom basement level of the Marianas Trench, trying to digest the Olympic-sized trampoline that he had recently swallowed. I felt my bones and my body wobble like they were made out of half-chilled purple Jell-O.
And then we snapped on back.
The last thing I saw was Bigfoot bouncing backwards off of The Prophet’s windshield and right back down into Old Shuck’s windpipe while we were simultaneously flinging backwards at about a thousand and a half miles an hour. It happened just like one of those cartoons when somebody runs into a giant rubber band and then suddenly snaps back.
We snapped directly back through the woods of Nova Scotia. I saw the Atlantic Ocean splash below us like a rain puddle seen from the top of a tree. We flashed over Europe, straight through France – which I could tell because I caught a very brief glimpse of the Eifel Tower.
I saw something else too.
Just as we passed over Nova Scotia I looked down and I saw a search party hunting through the Cape Breton woods – looking for me and Warren, I guess. I’m not exactly sure just how it was that I spotted that tiny little detail out of all of that landscape that was flashing on past. It might have been some sort of magic, it might have been just pure dumb luck – heck, it might have been I made the whole thing up in my imagination.
I saw it and then it was gone.
Meanwhile, we kept on gaining altitude.
Little details kept popping out at me.
I saw a flight of snowy white Norwegian storks go migrating past, in reverse
Over Russia, I saw an SU-25 Frogfoot close support aircraft – and don’t ask me how I knew what sort of a plane it was because I just KNEW was all - whip past us for just long enough for the Russian pilot to shake his head in complete and utter disbelief.
I figured that any moment now I was most likely going to see angel wings – and maybe they’d be attached to me.
I could feel a tickle of polar fear crawling up and down my spinal column like a drunken parade of centipedes wearing ice cubes in place of shoes.
And then all of a sudden everything got quiet and still. Do you know that feeling when your ears pop and sound sort of drowns itself out for just a half of a half of a second? Well, it was just like that – only I had the feeling that the ears of the whole wide world had just collectively and simultaneously popped.
And just for that single half of a half of a half second I could swear that I could hear somebody talking.
It was Warren.
He said to me – “Don’t you worry, Adam. Everything is going to work out just fine. Just you wait and see.”
And then my ears re-popped and I blinked really hard and everything was back to the way it had been – and I can’t even tell you if the whole thing really happened.
By that time we had reached the Himalayas and those huge goat-peaked mountains looked like nothing more than herd of poorly-maintained speed bumps.
“All right,” The Prophet yelled out. “That’s far enough!”
We screamed a huge hairpin U-turn around an orbiting satellite, knocking the television reception out of the state of Hawaii as we laid a white-water speed trail directly across the entire left half of the southern Pacific Ocean.
At the height of our flight I saw a fully-grown comet shoot past.
“Did you see that?” I asked – looking at the comet.
“Did I see what?” the Prophet asked, looking at something else.
I guess he was too busy achieving a near supersonic velocity to bother looking around or listening to the seventeen year old boy who was spiritually inhabiting the vicinity of his headlights – but I swore that I saw the Raven riding on top of that high-flying comet – grinning directly at me and laughing like he was watching the most funniest thing that he had ever witnessed in the whole wide world.
That might have been my imagination too – only I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
“Hold onto your seat-bone,” the Prophet warned. “Things may get a little rough.”
We roared back into Nova Scotia.
The pine trees blinked past like the shadow-spokes of a bicycle wheel spun against the sunrise. I was stuck there in the headlights of The Prophet, pretty certain that we were going to plow into the Nova Scotia landscape like a poorly driven meteorite.
And then everything slowed down, all at once.
“You can get back up now,” the Prophet said.
I leaned back and I felt myself rising up from out of the spiritual essence of that giant pink Winnebago, like I was rising up out of the deep end of a lukewarm swimming pool.
I was sitting in the driver’s seat and the steering wheel unpuckered itself from the squeeze of my grip like a hand stuck full of dried maple syrup.
I stepped out and we were back where we had started from.
We were back in Nova Scotia.
The only thing that had changed was that Old Shuck had Bigfoot swallowed right down to his ankles.
All I could see was a pair of big fat furry feet sticking out from between that big purple dog’s lips.
“You want me to take another run at him?” The Prophet asked. “I think I softened him up the first time.”
He was game to try it again, but I shook my head no.
“That didn’t work before,” I said, letting go of the steering wheel and stepping back out of the Prophet. “I think I am going to try something different.”
I untangled myself up from the driver’s seat.
Then I walked to the door and I stepped on outside of the giant pink Winnebago.
And then I walked right up towards Old Shuck.
“Hey Shuck,” I said. “Good dog. Good old dog.”
Old Shuck looked at me like I was wearing two heads – and both of them were made out of freshly-cooked pot roast.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really sure if he wasn’t right.
Don’t worry – the voice of Warren kind of ghost-repeated itself in the back of my ears somewhere behind my imagination and just left of my sense of wonder – everything is going to be all right.
I sure hoped that Warren’s ghost voice knew exactly what it was talking about.