UNCLE NUNCIE & THE ANGELS
a short story by
HARRY BEHEMOTH
? SHOCKING STORIES (MMXXIII)
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As Transcribed by Thomas D. Hail, esq., from an interview with Mr. Charles Fahrqwar, c. 1998.
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I have always thought that an opossum running out in the road, and then playing dead in front of a moving vehicle, is about the stupidest thing I ever heard of in the animal kingdom. Just this one's head was squashed flat and I could see Jasper grinning at his good luck in finding an almost-intact carcass of almost-fresh roadkill.
He brushed off the flies and stuffed the semi-smushed possum in a burlap poke in the back of his wagon, resuming his seat and hollering "Giddyap!" to his old mule Solomon. Solomon trudged the steep acreage, for a mule with a burden, up Tank Hill.
It was barely light but Uncle Nuncie had already been up for a while. Now he was digesting his breakfast fatback with the aid of a few nips of the creature in the cool of the morning. Actually it was already hot and stuffy even this early on and on a spring morning, too, and still as death. Not even the insects were shimmering, and anyone will tell you that's a bad omen. I was hypnotized by the rivulets of moon-glistened sweat already pouring down the furrows of Uncle Nuncie's parchment face. He drank a slash from the jug. The whiskey, spit, and sweat flowed together and drooled off his chin.
"Goddamn it's going to be a hot'un today!" he crackled in his craggly old rawhide voice, idly swatting at the blue-bottle flies, grinning a skewered saw-toothed grin at me as Jasper's wagon shambled to a creaking halt in our feedlot.
Jasper's mind was as feckless as a cuckoo's. He was what folks called "tetched." He was always grinning. Uncle Nuncie always liked to poke a little fun at Jasper. "Hey there, Jasperoo!" squawked Nuncie.
"How do, Mist' Nuncie!" hollered Jasper. Jasper favored me with his wall-eyed gaze. "Mist' Charles." I nodded my head and kept sharpening the Bowie knife Aunt Zell had given me for my birthday.
Uncle Nuncie patted Solomon behind his big ears and poured a big slash of the jug in his nose-bag. "HEE-HAW!" the mule brayed, snorting as he lapped up the fortified corn.
"You know, Jasper," (Nuncie winked at me), "I've fornicated with everything in this world 'cept a hoss, a mule, and a ne-gro man, and I'm going to do that 'fore I die!" Jasper just kept grinning. "Well, you bettah fawnicate wid de hoss-mule fust," he retorted. This was always their way.
"Here now, Jasper, that's no way to talk to white folk! I'm a good mind to horse-whip yore oily hide!" Solomon nuzzled Nuncie's whiskey jug.
"You and whut army?" grinned Jasper. "Marse Bedford, he dead." Jasper cocked his head. "You might know dem fancy bible ways to cuss, Mist Nuncie, but I done know somethin' you ain't fawnicated wit'." Nuncie winked at me and took another slash. I turned my very sharp knife to the rays of the dawn sun, contemplating the glint of the colors on the blade-edge.
"Oh yeah? What's that, Jasper?" Uncle Nuncie had cocked his head back just like Jasper, enjoying the joke. Jasper swept his arm backward to the bundles in his wagon. "These yere wooden Indians." He laughed a tetched laugh. Uncle Nuncie and I both shared his deranged chuckle.
"Well, no, I can't rightly say that I have had biblical knowledge of a wooden Indian, or a putrefescent possum, but I have known a coupla whores in Memphis that might suffer by comparison." Jasper and I both grinned like shit-eating skunks. "You didn't hear that, Charles, in case your Aunt Zell asks." Nuncie put the stopper in his jug.
"You best pull that stopper outta the jug agin, Mist' Nuncie," Jasper said, as he stepped down from the buckboard and walked toward the back of the wagon. "Yea, O Lawd!" Jasper pulled the burlap off his other two bundles, both considerably bigger than roadkill possum, but just as dead.
Uncle Nuncie started wheezing, gasping for breath, and my finely-honed blade slipped from my grasp into the dust. Jasper just kept on grinning that loon-crazy, jack-bastard grin, not put off his nut by nothing. Sometimes it pays to be crazy.
In the back of his wagon lay two Indian-looking creatures that were about my size, that of a 13-year old young man. That is, their faces looked like Indians in a fun-house mirror or maybe a cartoon. And they weren't copper-colored, their skin was greenish-gray like fishbelly. And their clothes weren't buckskin or cotton but some shiny material like silk, with a dancing mother-of-pearl sheen reflecting the rays of the sunrise. I could see no rips in the material. The clothes sorta did look like old-timey Daniel Boone Indian clothes, the way they were cut. And the faces, still asleep, did look Choctaw, or rather like the scary spirit-masks the local Indians sometimes danced with at the Indian Fair down in Philadelphia. And the straight glossy hair of their square-sloped skulls did look Indian, if you didn't count the sky-blue color. Later in college I learned that those deformed skulls were a common trait of the priestly caste of the most ancient Egyptian and pre-Columbian Choctaw people. And you had to notice the sizable hawk-like wings folded beneath them.
"Mist' Nuncie, don' tell me you done gouged none'a that." Uncle Nuncie turned his face up to the blank slate sky, looking for God, or something, the sweat coursing and pouring down the channels in his old white face, and white not from the whiskey, either.
Just then the squashed-head possum flopped out of the wagon, the pea-brain in its flattened skull giving its battered body one last impossible command. Jasper grabbed a shovel out of the wagon and CLANGG!ed it down on the shocked flounder-headed marsupial, determined not to lose this largesse of the poor man's god, this shuddering casualty of an encounter with an alien technology it could not possibly begin to understand. Uncle Nuncie uncorked the jug.
"God-damn, it's gonna be a hot'un today!" he croaked, chug-a-lugging the jug, wiping his dripping face on the backs of his sleeves. I picked up my lustreless soiled knife-blade. Solomon, neglected, brayed like a right damn good jack-ass.
Jasper was still grinning. "I come to git you to help wit' the others," he said simply.
"What others?" cried Uncle Nuncie.
Jasper maintained his idiot calm. "De ones up to my place. Dey airboat done crashed last night near de Cave Rocks. Dey's dis many more up to my place still 'live, leastways dey wuz when I left." Although almost supernaturally cunning in some ways, Jasper could not properly count. "Stella, she's mighty skeered uv 'em. Dey's bad hurt. Dey talk widout speakin'. She said to come fotch you." Stella was Jasper's simple wife. Jasper's brow crinkled again. "But it 'uz a mighty funny airboat. Didn't have no wings. It wuz round, like a plate" - his arm described a circle - "Cept de part dat wuz cracked open."
Uncle Nuncie handed me the jug. "Charles, go put this in the Packard. And go get me my Old Navy." Nuncie turned to Jasper; a ghost of a smile returned to his thin lips. "Jasper, let's get these fella's down to the icehouse," he said, squinting his flinty eyes at the dead creatures, whatever they were. "It's gonna be a hot'un today." Jasper grinned as inscrutably as a dog, mouth all pink like bubblegum. I saw the look in Uncle Nuncie's eyes. Uh-Oh. Sometimes, I had already learned, crazy can be a trial and tribulation.
Uncle Nuncie was not your common peckerwood. He was one of a rare breed of schemer, true believer to the rabid roilings percolating in his turgid mind. Most folks have great notions. The difference was, Nuncie was born with the irresistible urge to act on his visions. You could count on Nuncie to do something, even if it was wrong. Like a cat, his curiousity compelled him to take action just to see what would happen. Like the Pied Piper, he was a leader.
Most little towns could barely stand the impact of one such king-hell eccentric. Our little burg was confounded with two.
"We must go see the Mingo," said Uncle Nuncie.
The Mingo was the chief and medicine-man of the Chickasaw in the area. Despite the contempt of the local paleface gentry and the cordial hatred of his Choctaw brethren, the Mingo thrived on the sale of his "Big Chief Elixir" and medicinal herbs, particularly mushrooms for trances. He was in the cattle pastures after every hard rain in the spring and summer.
You could never tell what kind of arbitrary bullshit the Mingo would be up to. Him and Nuncie together, forget it. People in Tupelo would walk around all puckered up with worry, not exactly knowing why, when the whiff of their shifting wit was in the air.
Nuncie sent Jasper home to watch Stella and the aliens. We drove all the way out to the Reservation and back to our icehouse to show the Mingo the bodies. Uncle Nuncie operated a general and farm supply store, a grist mill, feed-lot and slaughter-house, in addition to the icehouse. The Mingo had never questioned the veracity of Uncle Nuncie's story. They seemed to share an unspoken understanding about the significance of the event. The Mingo shuddered against the chill of the icehouse, and took a slash off the jug. Uncle Nuncie pulled a tarp away from the blocks of ice he had encased the Injun aliens in, and the Mingo spit up his likker, his dusky face blanched of color, and not from the whiskey either.
Stood upright in the columns of ice, the pale bizarre creatures seemed to float like angels of doom. Nuncie looked at the Mingo. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked, grinning like Jasper.
The Mingo took another pull off the jug, swallowing hard, and gasped hoarsely: "The Angels. The Angels of Tuh Pah Lah. The screamer and the storm-bringer."
Everybody knows about the Tupelo Angels. They are the two ghost-warriors of the Ackia Battlefield, Chickasaw and Choctaw, half-mortal sons of the Great Spirit Ubabeneli, the Mingo's god; brother against brother, clan against clan, they are cursed forevermore to haunt the bloody ground of Ackia during great storms for their sin of blood-treachery. The great Chickasaw shaman Ko-Teri had foretold the humiliations of the race.
"When love for the white man's favor causes red brother to kill red brother, then the days of your seed shall be numbered. One-hundred years from now, you shall know these parts no more. One-hundred years then hence, your pitiful remnant shall be utterly destroyed. The Angels, the souls of our fathers, shall appear in the clouds as a sign. Blood on Blood. May it not always be so." Ko-Teri then danced the Cottonmouth, a Snake-dance cursing both tribes if they spilled Indian blood in the service of the wasichu. Yet the Chickasaw joined the British in the massacre of the French and the Choctaw. Many thousands died. It was a historical turning point. This was in 1736. Exactly one-hundred years later Andrew Jackson forced both tribes to suffer the Trail of Tears death-march, west to Oklahoma. Education by the State of Mississippi teaches about this in grade-school history. If they didn't the old folks would. The old folks do anyway. There's still plenty of mixed-blood in these parts.
There was some trepidation about the curse. The two-hundredth anniversary of the battle would be observed in about a month, in early April. No one in Tupelo would have aught to do with the Mingo at this time of year; the local Choctaws were bad haters and the Mingo was the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of the Ko-Teri. The Chickasaws, too, were humiliated by his existence. This year there was especially bad blood; the Mingo was grumbling because the Tupelo Chamber of Commerce refused to pay him to perform his annual Beat-the-Devil Dance on the anniversary. There was invariably a big rain on the anniversary of the battle every year. Many people always claimed they saw Chickasaw and Choctaw fighting among the lightning in the clouds. This was usually because of the power of suggestion mixed with whiskey.
The Mingo had tears in his eyes as he reverently gazed on the sacred creatures very singular in appearance to himself. The glow in his hot, googly eyes melded with the sanguine vision sparking Nuncie's cock-eyed orbs.
"Taxidermy their asses, Nuncie," he croaked.
"Hell yes!" cried Nuncie, his squawky old voice fervent as a holy-roller, "Yew betcherass!" Both of these old-timers knew how just about any critter's skin was put on better than its mama.
But Jasper proved to be a disappointment right away. The Mingo had told Uncle Nuncie Jasper couldn't outsmart a shit-house rat much less aliens, and like most always, he proved to be right. This development sorta put a shadow over the old-boys' shoulders. Jasper's little cabin was hidden in a little cleft of rock and dirt on a hill just beneath limestone cliffs pocked with small caves. The Cave Rocks.
"They done gone, Mist' Nuncie, I don' know whar," Stella said. "They din' say." Nuncie took a drap from the jug. "They did say they wuz comin' back to git them other critters." Nuncie choked on his whiskey. Jasper furrowed his brow like a quizzical puppy.
"When?" coughed Nuncie.
"They din' say." Stella's gaze wasn't wall-eyed like Jasper's, but even more empty, like a goat's eyes. "That is, they din' say nuthin'. They just thunk it. Or mebbe they just made me thunk it." Stella's mouth hung open at the effort of memory. "They done fix dey airboat."
Jasper laughed and farted at the same time, trumpeting sounds frustrated with the vagaries of women and aliens. "How, woman? Dem critters was rolled hard and hung up wet."
"I done tole ya. It was de other critters whut fixed de airboat." I could hear the cork's soft whoomp as it was urgently pulled from the jug.
"What other critters?" Nuncie gurgled through his applejack.
"De other critters in de other airboat," said Stella. Nuncie strangled again. Jasper was frowning. The Mingo reached for the jug. I squeezed and re-squeezed the hilt of my Bowie. The Mingo gasped from his chug-a-lug, shook his head like a wet dog, and resolutely set his shoulders.
"It's just as well, Nuncie," he said calmly. "Let's do it at the icehouse. No place better. Then you can get Vernon to hide the creatures till we need 'em." Vernon was Nuncie's handyman and errand boy, a piece of resentful, shiftless, hard-craving melungeon trash whose primary virtue was discretion, at a price.
"I don' like Mist' Vernon," Jasper said, not smiling.
"Nobody does," Nuncie said, tilting the jug on his forearm to drink. "That's just why we need him." Nuncie swallowed hard and spoke again. "Stella, what did them other critters' airboat look like?"
Stella pulled her lower lip while conjuring up her mind's eye. "Just like de fust one," she said, considering. "Just like one plate turned upside down on top of dey other plate." She scratched her rump in thought. "Color like rainbows. And de critters looked like some mo' of them fish-Injuns." Stella kneaded her cheeks.
"Well, maybe we've seen their last," muttered the Mingo.
"No, suh, I done tole yuh," Stella said. "Dey done said dey'd be back." Stella stared at the Mingo. "To get dem other ones."
Nuncie walked over to the cabin window where Jasper was looking out at the red-gold sunset. Unexpectedly Jasper grabbed the jug and gulped down enough applejack to make him snort like Solomon. "God-damn it sho' wuz a hot'un today, wuzn't it, Mist' Nuncie?"
Nuncie laughed shortly and agreed. "It sure was Jasper, it was indeed."
We left Jasper and Stella to their own devices and rode the Packard back into town, Nuncie heavy on the gas, the Mingo searching the night sky for who knows what. They said little but passed the jug. "Oh what a tangled web we weave," Nuncie said once, chuckling. The Mingo returned his foul whiskey-breathed leer.
"Goddamn Thunderbirds!" he hollered out the window, looking into the dust and the infinite blackness behind us. "It's the end of the World!" He started laughing his ass off, got choked and damn near hacked himself to death. I said nothing and moved not, but I wasn't sleepy.
Next day, there began a series of mysterious events know to lore as "The Mississippi Lights." If folks had ever known I knew then what hasn't been revealed till now I damn sure would not have lived this long.
What with the curse and all, and Nuncie and the Mingo's suggestions, disturbed folks in these parts thought the "lights" were Indian "thunderbirds," mystical fiery phantom birds of doom nobody could ever really fully see, and I'm pretty much willing to let it go at that. At night, mysterious lights in the sky flashed all around the country, into people's houses, looking for something. Some people were reported missing. Everybody just knew this meant the Tupelo Angel's were gonna come to the battleground on the anniversary and just rip all the poor redskins and mixed-breeds all to hell. Ko-teri had said so. But nobody left town. The poor and superstitious do not dream of cheating Fate.
This was just what Nuncie and the Mingo had counted on. The taxidermied Angels were double-locked in Nuncie's icehouse, packed in dry ice, with the Mingo for company. The Mingo chanted and dreamed, sweated in his thick blankets, ingesting mushrooms and drinking applejack the days through, eating nothing. He claimed he put a hex against those space creatures' "spirits;" whatever, the aliens did not discover their kin locked securely in the back vault of Nuncie's icehouse. Vernon lurked around our feedlot with the shotgun Nuncie gave him in the crook of his elbow. Jasper watched the icehouse proper. Aunt Zell stayed in the house with her woman's work. Business was slow.
Nuncie put out that the Mingo was willing to put on a special Beat-The-Devil to save the people from certain disaster, for a price. As the days passed and the lights in the sky grew more invasive and frightening, the townfolk took him up on the proposition. The price was staggering. Nuncie got the Ford dealer to put up a brand-new Phaeton, and the Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and First National Bank to ante up ten-thousand dollars apiece. This was a great deal of money for the time. The Mingo was now feared, revered and hated more than ever. He gloated in the gloom of the icehouse, his frosty breath reeking of bad medicine.
"And I intend to pass the sorghum-bucket myself at the ceremony, Vernon riding shotgun. Charles shall help Jasper with the Angels." I was uneasy about that. If Uncle Nuncie's subterfuge was discovered, I was liable to be the youngest man ever tarred and feathered in the history of Lee County, if not hung.
"That's what I like about you, Nuncie, you don't miss a trick," grunted the Mingo, chewing on a piece of dried psylocybe cubensis.
"Let's hope not," Nuncie said. "It's too late to back out now." My Bowie knife struck furious sparks off my whetstone against the shadows and chill of the vault, but I felt no warmth or comfort.
The day of the ceremony broke dark with much wind and rain. The Beat-The-Devil was set for midnight on the heart of the battlefield. The night before had been the worst yet for the "lights;" the people were rabid and skittery. There were now over a dozen reported missing. The Mingo was sweating out his visions in the icehouse with the moonshine and the mushrooms. Uncle Nuncie, Jasper and I had successfully hidden the Angels in their strategic position on the battlefield, just after dawn; the Mingo's magic had kept us hidden from the lights. So far so good.
Jasper and I got the shit end of the deal. We practiced a bit on a block and tackle in the feedlot barn but we were far from expert Angel-handlers. Up the tree Nuncie sends Jasper and me. Two huge jack-oaks to be precise, the tallest on the field, resting on a slope above about a fifty-foot Indian burial mound in front of the 500-foot limestone cliffs known as Cave Rocks. Jasper's little cabin was lost in the woods maybe two miles from our roost. We had to stay up there all day, in a hunting stand, with the wind and the rain blowing off and on, about seventy feet up among the thin spring foliage on the branches in hunting camo gear, with the two-taxidermied fish-Injuns hooked to a block-and-tackle over a strong limb, under a camoflaged canvas sheet. We had smoke bombs but I feared they would be too wet for use by midnight. I was soaked, scared and exhausted. But it was too late to back out now. I pissed all over myself when trying to pee off the hunting tree-stand. In the other tree Jasper was watching me, that jack-bastard grin about to split his face, gnawing on a carrot. One thing I learned that day was better an insane pretension than no pretension at all. Sheer balls is many times better than knowing the difference between right and wrong.
The Mingo's ceremonial altar crowned the mound, about sixty feet up the hill from where the people would have to stand. A good place to be heard and seen, but not too close for inquiring minds to be too sure just what in the hell might be going on. Me and Jasper would be able to see him fine, maybe a hundred and fifty feet below, but I knew the people would have a hard time seeing us, especially under darkness and stormy skies.
The altar consisted of a large iron pot, resting in a rock charnel, and filled with coal. The Mingo would throw his special flash-powders into that fire tonight to bring forth visions and spirits. There were two censers on either side for the burning of incense and sacred herbs. The Mingo had made Vernon dig holes to place torches patterned to symbolize the Stars of the Great Bear Constellation. To be ordered about by an Indian, even a chief, made Vernon surly and sullen, but he did it. There were two pits in front of the trees Jasper and I were in. They would contain barrels of flash-powders the Mingo would light to herald his great epiphany. The townspeople had already given him half the money and the smoke-grey Phaeton.
By the time Uncle Nuncie and Vernon came out to the battlefield, maybe four p.m., there was only a queer type of twilight refracting faint-blue light. It had not rained since noon but the dome of the sky was nothing but black cloud on all horizons. The breeze was light but stinging with some sleet, and it rustled the wet leaves, droplets dripping off my rain hat and slicker. No one else was on the field yet, but as soon as the work-bell tolled the locals would flock out here, storm or not.
"Hey, Chas, how goes it?" Nuncie hollered up.
"Fine as frog hair," I hollered back.
You may wonder why I went along with all these things while saying nothing. Nuncie had raised me from the age of five, after my daddy killed himself on Black Friday (Daddy had been President of the town bank that failed - "I always told your daddy to embezzle something against a rainy day") and my momma run off with the drummer in a hillbilly band ("he was heavy on the downbeat"). Uncle Nuncie always took care of me and included me in all his craziness like I was somebody. I was pretty much game for anything from marbles to manslaughter. He was all I had.
"Hey there, Jasperoo!" yelled Nuncie. "You up there playing pocket pool?"
"Nawsuh," Jasper hollered back, "Right now I don't know my dick from a dumplin'."
"You boys hang on, you hear?" Nuncie said. "We can't back out now, can we?" The breeze picked up a little, wetting my face. Nuncie hollered again. "You boys know what to do?"
"Yessir!"
"Yassuh!"
Famous last words.
After Nuncie and Vernon left, I hollered at Jasper once. "You scared, Jasper?" I asked. There was a little pause.
"It don' make much matter," he said. Nuncie had eliminated the temptation of discretion by rolling down the rope ladders Vernon had rigged in order to ensconce us in our high estate; Vernon had likewise carried up the tree stands and secured them, and also the block and tackle. The whole thing was truly a genius work of redneck engineering motivated by greed and malevolent expedience. Vernon was mighty stout, and a dandy tree-climber, for poor white trash. Nuncie had secured and hooked the fish-Injuns to the chain and up she went! Now the deal was up to us.
I could never tell what Vernon thought about the creatures. They had surprised and impressed him not at all. I suspected he didn't care if they were real or not. "That's just why we need him," Nuncie said. I just hoped the bastard stayed sober long enough to help get us out of these trees after this crazy scheme was over.
Jasper hollered back at me. "You scared, Chaz?"
I thought a little. "It don't make much matter," I replied. I thought less of possums than ever.
By an hour before midnight the people were thick and noisome, restless as flies on the field below us, despite the threatening weather. Most carried lanterns against the gathering blackness. About eleven-thirty Nuncie and Vernon showed up to light the torches and the coals. Shortly, here come the Mingo, gliding up slowly in his new grey Phaeton, like a potentate, chaffeured by one of his nephews. He parked well behind the trees, out of sight of the throng below the altar. Another vehicle, a battered old Ford truck, coughed itself to a standstill hard on his fenders. "God-damn it Red Hawk!" I could hear the Mingo growl at the driver.
In the flatbed of the truck was the ceremonial Indian dance band the Mingo used for his rituals. The Mingo himself shook the rattles and the gourds with righteous fervor. Gnarled Fox, the hunch-backed club-footed music teacher at the reservation school, served as melodic counterpoint by blowing a native flute and striking cymbals for dramatic effect. The Mingo had twin fourteen-year old grand-daughters that just gave me fits on the insides to look at, Little Fawn and Calling Bird were their Indian names. They kept rhythm on the tam-tam drums, and chanted. Red Hawk was the chorus chanter and tamborine man. Nuncie called them "Hell's Own Arkestra." They were all turned out in buckskin, wearing traditional necklaces and breastplates, turquoise jewelry, hair slicked back with bear fat, very festive. But they weren't jack-spit compared to the Mingo.
The Mingo was wearing a bear-skin around his torso, the paws and claws over his hands. I knew he kept his bag of conjure powders handy inside the bear-skin. On his skull rested a regal feathered head-dress, done in bald-eagle feathers to the shoulders, great ostrich feathers to the ground, with huge peacock fantails from the shoulders to the train. The Mingo had everything attached so it spread out like the Great Thunderbird when he stretched his bear claws.
But the best (or worst) thing was the mask. It was made from a wolf's-head whose eyes were perfectly aligned with the Mingo's. The Mingo was somehow able to gnash the teeth and snarl the lip while wailing his shaman song. He was a sight to see.
They wasted no time in messing with the people's minds. The little band of Indians marched out of the woods, out of nowhere, to the beat of the tam-tams, chanting "Hi-Yi-Yi-Yi?," and the Mingo jumping, skipping and shaking all about the altar, throwing fists of flash-powders down at the "oohing" crowd. The Mingo danced before the cauldron, and forcefully slammed magic powders into the coals. A geyser of flame shot into the air, the crowd "aahhed," the scream of a howling wolf split the Mississippi dark, and the drums and chanting abruptly came to a halt. The wind picked up during the silence.
Gnarled Fox started tattooing the cymbals like Gene Krupa. The twins and Red Hawk beat their drums and chanted. The Mingo grabbed his rattle and gourd and began a slow Indian jig back and forth in front of the crowd below him at the foot of the mound, kicking his knees up and scooting along the ground. On top of this hill, the sound carried far out into the crowd, and the Mingo had a voice like a foghorn, or a siren, as the mood struck him, anyway. The lanterns of the people flickered like a meadow full of lightning bugs. The wind was subtly getting higher every minute.
The Mingo became Ney-A-Ti, the ribald Sacred Clown, jeering at the people. He spoke in Chicksaw.
"And Ney-A-Ti attempted to teach the Great Mudhead to copulate. The Mudhead could not get the point. He stuck his cock up his wife's ass, in her ear, in her navel." Some of the Indians laughed. The white people had no idea what the hell the Mingo was saying, but they were impressed by his manner and intonation.
"And the Great Mudhead hated Ney-A-Ti and cursed his people. 'You shall fall to the White Man, to the wasichu, brother against brother, clan against clan, and all because you could not teach me how to FUCK!'" The Mingo shucked and jived a little and the people went nuts.
" 'Thus shall I send a Ko-Teri, a prophet of prophets, to foretell they doom!' Ney-A-Ti knew that he had fucked up." A gust of laughter carried up the hill on the gusting wind. The Mingo was more solemn now, more stern, and he spoke in English. "The Ko-Teri was my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. He knew the language of the winds, the secret of the stars!" The Mingo threw double-handfuls of conjure powders into the red glowing cauldron, sparks spitting out a cloud of continuous rising multi-colored smoke. The crowd "ohhhed!" There were about two-thousand people in the field maybe, I guessed. There was still plenty of mixed blood in these parts. They all knew the story - and they had lived the real tragic history.
I could see Vernon and Nuncie, dressed all in black clothes, with white masks and black hats, carrying woven baskets with Indian designs, come onto the stage and kneel not far from the Mingo. All of a sudden the music and the chanting stopped. The Mingo strutted to the priest's altar behind the cauldron. I looked over at Jasper's tree but I couldn't see him. I was about to shit my pants. I wrapped my extra kerchief tight around my nose and mouth, like Uncle Nuncie told me.
"I, the Mingo, will bring the Great Thunderbird Ne-Phil-Im to save you from the Lights and from the Angels, whose horrible presence I can smell!" The Mingo howled his blood-curdling wolf-scream and the people went hydrophobic. "Ne-Phil-Im! The great father-of-giants, messenger of the Great Spirit Ubabeneli! Servant to the Hebrew God Jehovah, as mentioned in Genesis!" Like I said, there was still a lot of mixed blood in these parts. For some reason I thought of the time Uncle Nuncie and I helped the Mingo paint some sparrows he had trapped yellow to sell as canaries at the Indian Fair. The Mingo's imagination was not constrained by mere tradition, or logic.
My testicles and anus started to constrict. I took the camouflage sheet off Angel No. 1.
The chanting and the music started again, louder. The wind was fairly whistling. Swirling clouds of blue, yellow, green, red smoke emitted from the powders the Mingo fed the cauldron. The Mingo turned loose a passel of coyote and hyena screams, bear growls and wolf snarls, eagle and hawk shrieks. The crowd was babbling itself into a delirium. I could see Nuncie and Vernon high-step it down the hill with the collection baskets. I unlocked the brake on the block and tackle and hoped Jasper was doing the same.
"UBABENILI DEMANDS YOUR OFFERINGS!" the Mingo screamed lustily. "JEHOVAH MUST HAVE YOUR OFFERINGS! GIVE US YOUR MONEY, YOUR JEWELS, YOUR LOOSE COINS! WE MUST HAVE IT ALL!" The Mingo was fairly slobbering now. I could see Nuncie and Vernon briskly hustling the crowd. The wind was stiff and whipping now, and the musicians were just wild and thrashing, hollering like crazy against the wind. The long-threatened rain started to fall, soft at first like a feather-touch. But I could see the sheet lightning riding above the thick blanket of purple-black clouds coming towards us. I was really hating possums about this time. Just then a terrific clap of thunder boomed against the roof of the sky. The Mingo turned his back to the crowd, facing towards me and Jasper. That was our signal. I got out my smoke bombs.
The Mingo started twirling like a top, screeching like an owl, bellowing like an alligator, braying like a mule. He stopped on a dime and screamed at the crowd: "FEAR NOT THE ANGELS OF DEATH FOR I, THE MINGO, ART WITH YOU! GIVE ME YOUR ALL! I WILL SAVE YOU FROM DISASTER!" Nuncie and Vernon were working their way through the crowd surprisingly fast. The sheet lightning flashed above us. I lit my first smoke bomb, and looped its counter-weighted string around a lower branch. I hoped Jasper was doing the same. The Mingo whirled some more, stopped, and pointed to the smoke blossoming in both trees. Good ole Jasper.
"AAAIIIEEEE! IT IS THE ANGELS! I, THE MINGO, WILL SAVE YOU FROM DEATH!" The crowd cried out in fear. I looped my second smoke-bomb, and then I carefilly lowered the taxidermied alien down into the thick of the smoke. When the wind shifted, the Angels were visible. It was a very fine job of the taxidermist's art. It was easy to distinguish the hawk-like wings spreading out from their shoulder-blades.
The crowd was screaming its guts out. I was letting the chain slip, latching and ratcheting the creature up and down, and I could see Jasper was doing the same. I could only hope Nuncie and Vernon could fight their way through the crowd to get us down from here when the jig was up. The Mingo was in a dancing fit, hopping and spinning, cursing the dangling carcasses obscured by smoke.
"I CAST THEE OUT! I, THE MINGO, CAST THEE OUT! DEMONS BE GONE!" The Mingo ran to the base of my tree, and ignited the hidden barrel of flash-powder. A great white-light erupted and I could smell burnt leaves and bark. An instant later, Jasper's barrel went off. Now we were supposed to pull the creatures back up into the trees. There was an ear-splitting peal of thunder and a jagged vein of chain-lightning rent the night sky. Then - THE LIGHTS!
From the clouds above us, the search-beams from revolving saucer-shaped objects transfixed the Angels. I could not pull on the chain further. Then, I could not move myself. Everybody and everything was in total chaos at this point. The wind and the rain were ripping and whipping now and my fingernails were bleeding from gripping tree-limbs - limbs that were snapping, crackling, breaking, as the lights from the whirling flying plates lifted and pulled the Angels along its path. I was helpless, and I could see Jasper now, mouth agape in wonder, floating behind his Angel, held in the sway of the lights.
I could barely turn my head to see the tornado come racing up the field, undulating like a rattler, wide as a football field is long. The people were scattering like rats. The wind swallowed some.
I can't say just when the tornado wrested me from the Lights, but all of a sudden, I was spinning in the whirlwind, Jasper across the vortex from me, his eyes rolled back in his head to the whites, but his splayed lips even now smiling like "what a way to go!"
I remembered nothing more till I woke up in Vernon's little shotgun shack, of all places. I jumped up, screaming, "Goddamn!" before I knew what was going on. A little tow-headed boy on the floor, about a year old, started screaming and squalling. Uncle Nuncie looked in from the other room, and the little boy's mother, Vernon's wife Gladys, came rushing in.
"You're scaring Elvis!" she cried, clutching the child and going out to the porch.
"I'm sorry," I said to Nuncie, who just laughed. To this day, that boy's caterwauling was the worst racket I ever heard.
"You okay?" Nuncie asked, looking at me cock-eyed.
"Just a head-ache," I replied. "What happened?"
Nuncie sat down. "Well, the tornado," he said. "The other stuff, I'm not so sure." Nuncie shook his head and said, "Tank Hill is gone. All of it. Zell too." I sat down, weak.
"But don't worry. You know I keep my money over in Yoknapatawpha County, over to the Jefferson bank, ever since your daddy died - I guess I'm a little superstitious. I've carried Act- of-God insurance ever since the '27 floods." Nuncie chuckled a little. I swear.
"Mist' Nuncie, you definitley luckier than a out-house rat," Jasper joshed, walking in the door with Nuncie's last jug of moonshine. Vernon came in behind him, tired and gaunt.
"No luck," he said. "Not a trace."
"What about-" I started.
"The Mingo," Nuncie finished. "It's just as well. I don't think he'd have much of a chance of collecting the other half of that money now."
"I believe dey'd treat 'im like fawnicatin' wid de hoss-mule," Jasper grinned.
"There's over a hundred dead and countin'," Vernon said.
"Gimme that jug, Jasper," Nuncie ordered.
Later, me and Jasper sat out on the front porch. I asked him if he ever et that possum he found the day he brought the Angels to us.
"Nawsuh, I didn'." He grinned that loon-crazy jack-bastard liver-lipped grin. "I thowed 'im and the poke in thar whar them other fish-Injuns had been. Then I come back to town to help Mist' Nuncie. Well, suh, Stella said those critters come back agin, the days the lights started, the days I 'uz up hyar guardin' the Mingo. She said dey looked in de poke for dey people, but dey's just the possum. Stella said one of 'em took out a little magic wand fulla lightnin' and zapped that little possum on his haid, and the little possum's haid warn't squashed no more, and it got up and walked away." We had a good cackle over that. "I bet she et that possum herself," Jasper chuckled. It was hard to tell about Stella. Anything was possible.
"And Mist' Charles, I still don' agree wid you about de possum being the stupidest critter. It's de moth. De moth 'sumes itself in the flame, knowing de flame is gonna burn 'im up. But he so stupid wit' wantin' the flame so bad, he cain't help hisself." Jasper's grin stretched from Ittabena to Tishomingo. "But de possum, layin' out in de road, pretendin' he daid so's to 'void the consquences o' bein' a 'possum, he be makin' a choice." Jasper was tetched, and not a prophet, but what he knew, he understood well.
FIN
a short story by
HARRY BEHEMOTH
? SHOCKING STORIES (MMXXIII)
* * *
As Transcribed by Thomas D. Hail, esq., from an interview with Mr. Charles Fahrqwar, c. 1998.
* * *
I have always thought that an opossum running out in the road, and then playing dead in front of a moving vehicle, is about the stupidest thing I ever heard of in the animal kingdom. Just this one's head was squashed flat and I could see Jasper grinning at his good luck in finding an almost-intact carcass of almost-fresh roadkill.
He brushed off the flies and stuffed the semi-smushed possum in a burlap poke in the back of his wagon, resuming his seat and hollering "Giddyap!" to his old mule Solomon. Solomon trudged the steep acreage, for a mule with a burden, up Tank Hill.
It was barely light but Uncle Nuncie had already been up for a while. Now he was digesting his breakfast fatback with the aid of a few nips of the creature in the cool of the morning. Actually it was already hot and stuffy even this early on and on a spring morning, too, and still as death. Not even the insects were shimmering, and anyone will tell you that's a bad omen. I was hypnotized by the rivulets of moon-glistened sweat already pouring down the furrows of Uncle Nuncie's parchment face. He drank a slash from the jug. The whiskey, spit, and sweat flowed together and drooled off his chin.
"Goddamn it's going to be a hot'un today!" he crackled in his craggly old rawhide voice, idly swatting at the blue-bottle flies, grinning a skewered saw-toothed grin at me as Jasper's wagon shambled to a creaking halt in our feedlot.
Jasper's mind was as feckless as a cuckoo's. He was what folks called "tetched." He was always grinning. Uncle Nuncie always liked to poke a little fun at Jasper. "Hey there, Jasperoo!" squawked Nuncie.
"How do, Mist' Nuncie!" hollered Jasper. Jasper favored me with his wall-eyed gaze. "Mist' Charles." I nodded my head and kept sharpening the Bowie knife Aunt Zell had given me for my birthday.
Uncle Nuncie patted Solomon behind his big ears and poured a big slash of the jug in his nose-bag. "HEE-HAW!" the mule brayed, snorting as he lapped up the fortified corn.
"You know, Jasper," (Nuncie winked at me), "I've fornicated with everything in this world 'cept a hoss, a mule, and a ne-gro man, and I'm going to do that 'fore I die!" Jasper just kept grinning. "Well, you bettah fawnicate wid de hoss-mule fust," he retorted. This was always their way.
"Here now, Jasper, that's no way to talk to white folk! I'm a good mind to horse-whip yore oily hide!" Solomon nuzzled Nuncie's whiskey jug.
"You and whut army?" grinned Jasper. "Marse Bedford, he dead." Jasper cocked his head. "You might know dem fancy bible ways to cuss, Mist Nuncie, but I done know somethin' you ain't fawnicated wit'." Nuncie winked at me and took another slash. I turned my very sharp knife to the rays of the dawn sun, contemplating the glint of the colors on the blade-edge.
"Oh yeah? What's that, Jasper?" Uncle Nuncie had cocked his head back just like Jasper, enjoying the joke. Jasper swept his arm backward to the bundles in his wagon. "These yere wooden Indians." He laughed a tetched laugh. Uncle Nuncie and I both shared his deranged chuckle.
"Well, no, I can't rightly say that I have had biblical knowledge of a wooden Indian, or a putrefescent possum, but I have known a coupla whores in Memphis that might suffer by comparison." Jasper and I both grinned like shit-eating skunks. "You didn't hear that, Charles, in case your Aunt Zell asks." Nuncie put the stopper in his jug.
"You best pull that stopper outta the jug agin, Mist' Nuncie," Jasper said, as he stepped down from the buckboard and walked toward the back of the wagon. "Yea, O Lawd!" Jasper pulled the burlap off his other two bundles, both considerably bigger than roadkill possum, but just as dead.
Uncle Nuncie started wheezing, gasping for breath, and my finely-honed blade slipped from my grasp into the dust. Jasper just kept on grinning that loon-crazy, jack-bastard grin, not put off his nut by nothing. Sometimes it pays to be crazy.
In the back of his wagon lay two Indian-looking creatures that were about my size, that of a 13-year old young man. That is, their faces looked like Indians in a fun-house mirror or maybe a cartoon. And they weren't copper-colored, their skin was greenish-gray like fishbelly. And their clothes weren't buckskin or cotton but some shiny material like silk, with a dancing mother-of-pearl sheen reflecting the rays of the sunrise. I could see no rips in the material. The clothes sorta did look like old-timey Daniel Boone Indian clothes, the way they were cut. And the faces, still asleep, did look Choctaw, or rather like the scary spirit-masks the local Indians sometimes danced with at the Indian Fair down in Philadelphia. And the straight glossy hair of their square-sloped skulls did look Indian, if you didn't count the sky-blue color. Later in college I learned that those deformed skulls were a common trait of the priestly caste of the most ancient Egyptian and pre-Columbian Choctaw people. And you had to notice the sizable hawk-like wings folded beneath them.
"Mist' Nuncie, don' tell me you done gouged none'a that." Uncle Nuncie turned his face up to the blank slate sky, looking for God, or something, the sweat coursing and pouring down the channels in his old white face, and white not from the whiskey, either.
Just then the squashed-head possum flopped out of the wagon, the pea-brain in its flattened skull giving its battered body one last impossible command. Jasper grabbed a shovel out of the wagon and CLANGG!ed it down on the shocked flounder-headed marsupial, determined not to lose this largesse of the poor man's god, this shuddering casualty of an encounter with an alien technology it could not possibly begin to understand. Uncle Nuncie uncorked the jug.
"God-damn, it's gonna be a hot'un today!" he croaked, chug-a-lugging the jug, wiping his dripping face on the backs of his sleeves. I picked up my lustreless soiled knife-blade. Solomon, neglected, brayed like a right damn good jack-ass.
Jasper was still grinning. "I come to git you to help wit' the others," he said simply.
"What others?" cried Uncle Nuncie.
Jasper maintained his idiot calm. "De ones up to my place. Dey airboat done crashed last night near de Cave Rocks. Dey's dis many more up to my place still 'live, leastways dey wuz when I left." Although almost supernaturally cunning in some ways, Jasper could not properly count. "Stella, she's mighty skeered uv 'em. Dey's bad hurt. Dey talk widout speakin'. She said to come fotch you." Stella was Jasper's simple wife. Jasper's brow crinkled again. "But it 'uz a mighty funny airboat. Didn't have no wings. It wuz round, like a plate" - his arm described a circle - "Cept de part dat wuz cracked open."
Uncle Nuncie handed me the jug. "Charles, go put this in the Packard. And go get me my Old Navy." Nuncie turned to Jasper; a ghost of a smile returned to his thin lips. "Jasper, let's get these fella's down to the icehouse," he said, squinting his flinty eyes at the dead creatures, whatever they were. "It's gonna be a hot'un today." Jasper grinned as inscrutably as a dog, mouth all pink like bubblegum. I saw the look in Uncle Nuncie's eyes. Uh-Oh. Sometimes, I had already learned, crazy can be a trial and tribulation.
Uncle Nuncie was not your common peckerwood. He was one of a rare breed of schemer, true believer to the rabid roilings percolating in his turgid mind. Most folks have great notions. The difference was, Nuncie was born with the irresistible urge to act on his visions. You could count on Nuncie to do something, even if it was wrong. Like a cat, his curiousity compelled him to take action just to see what would happen. Like the Pied Piper, he was a leader.
Most little towns could barely stand the impact of one such king-hell eccentric. Our little burg was confounded with two.
"We must go see the Mingo," said Uncle Nuncie.
The Mingo was the chief and medicine-man of the Chickasaw in the area. Despite the contempt of the local paleface gentry and the cordial hatred of his Choctaw brethren, the Mingo thrived on the sale of his "Big Chief Elixir" and medicinal herbs, particularly mushrooms for trances. He was in the cattle pastures after every hard rain in the spring and summer.
You could never tell what kind of arbitrary bullshit the Mingo would be up to. Him and Nuncie together, forget it. People in Tupelo would walk around all puckered up with worry, not exactly knowing why, when the whiff of their shifting wit was in the air.
Nuncie sent Jasper home to watch Stella and the aliens. We drove all the way out to the Reservation and back to our icehouse to show the Mingo the bodies. Uncle Nuncie operated a general and farm supply store, a grist mill, feed-lot and slaughter-house, in addition to the icehouse. The Mingo had never questioned the veracity of Uncle Nuncie's story. They seemed to share an unspoken understanding about the significance of the event. The Mingo shuddered against the chill of the icehouse, and took a slash off the jug. Uncle Nuncie pulled a tarp away from the blocks of ice he had encased the Injun aliens in, and the Mingo spit up his likker, his dusky face blanched of color, and not from the whiskey either.
Stood upright in the columns of ice, the pale bizarre creatures seemed to float like angels of doom. Nuncie looked at the Mingo. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked, grinning like Jasper.
The Mingo took another pull off the jug, swallowing hard, and gasped hoarsely: "The Angels. The Angels of Tuh Pah Lah. The screamer and the storm-bringer."
Everybody knows about the Tupelo Angels. They are the two ghost-warriors of the Ackia Battlefield, Chickasaw and Choctaw, half-mortal sons of the Great Spirit Ubabeneli, the Mingo's god; brother against brother, clan against clan, they are cursed forevermore to haunt the bloody ground of Ackia during great storms for their sin of blood-treachery. The great Chickasaw shaman Ko-Teri had foretold the humiliations of the race.
"When love for the white man's favor causes red brother to kill red brother, then the days of your seed shall be numbered. One-hundred years from now, you shall know these parts no more. One-hundred years then hence, your pitiful remnant shall be utterly destroyed. The Angels, the souls of our fathers, shall appear in the clouds as a sign. Blood on Blood. May it not always be so." Ko-Teri then danced the Cottonmouth, a Snake-dance cursing both tribes if they spilled Indian blood in the service of the wasichu. Yet the Chickasaw joined the British in the massacre of the French and the Choctaw. Many thousands died. It was a historical turning point. This was in 1736. Exactly one-hundred years later Andrew Jackson forced both tribes to suffer the Trail of Tears death-march, west to Oklahoma. Education by the State of Mississippi teaches about this in grade-school history. If they didn't the old folks would. The old folks do anyway. There's still plenty of mixed-blood in these parts.
There was some trepidation about the curse. The two-hundredth anniversary of the battle would be observed in about a month, in early April. No one in Tupelo would have aught to do with the Mingo at this time of year; the local Choctaws were bad haters and the Mingo was the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of the Ko-Teri. The Chickasaws, too, were humiliated by his existence. This year there was especially bad blood; the Mingo was grumbling because the Tupelo Chamber of Commerce refused to pay him to perform his annual Beat-the-Devil Dance on the anniversary. There was invariably a big rain on the anniversary of the battle every year. Many people always claimed they saw Chickasaw and Choctaw fighting among the lightning in the clouds. This was usually because of the power of suggestion mixed with whiskey.
The Mingo had tears in his eyes as he reverently gazed on the sacred creatures very singular in appearance to himself. The glow in his hot, googly eyes melded with the sanguine vision sparking Nuncie's cock-eyed orbs.
"Taxidermy their asses, Nuncie," he croaked.
"Hell yes!" cried Nuncie, his squawky old voice fervent as a holy-roller, "Yew betcherass!" Both of these old-timers knew how just about any critter's skin was put on better than its mama.
But Jasper proved to be a disappointment right away. The Mingo had told Uncle Nuncie Jasper couldn't outsmart a shit-house rat much less aliens, and like most always, he proved to be right. This development sorta put a shadow over the old-boys' shoulders. Jasper's little cabin was hidden in a little cleft of rock and dirt on a hill just beneath limestone cliffs pocked with small caves. The Cave Rocks.
"They done gone, Mist' Nuncie, I don' know whar," Stella said. "They din' say." Nuncie took a drap from the jug. "They did say they wuz comin' back to git them other critters." Nuncie choked on his whiskey. Jasper furrowed his brow like a quizzical puppy.
"When?" coughed Nuncie.
"They din' say." Stella's gaze wasn't wall-eyed like Jasper's, but even more empty, like a goat's eyes. "That is, they din' say nuthin'. They just thunk it. Or mebbe they just made me thunk it." Stella's mouth hung open at the effort of memory. "They done fix dey airboat."
Jasper laughed and farted at the same time, trumpeting sounds frustrated with the vagaries of women and aliens. "How, woman? Dem critters was rolled hard and hung up wet."
"I done tole ya. It was de other critters whut fixed de airboat." I could hear the cork's soft whoomp as it was urgently pulled from the jug.
"What other critters?" Nuncie gurgled through his applejack.
"De other critters in de other airboat," said Stella. Nuncie strangled again. Jasper was frowning. The Mingo reached for the jug. I squeezed and re-squeezed the hilt of my Bowie. The Mingo gasped from his chug-a-lug, shook his head like a wet dog, and resolutely set his shoulders.
"It's just as well, Nuncie," he said calmly. "Let's do it at the icehouse. No place better. Then you can get Vernon to hide the creatures till we need 'em." Vernon was Nuncie's handyman and errand boy, a piece of resentful, shiftless, hard-craving melungeon trash whose primary virtue was discretion, at a price.
"I don' like Mist' Vernon," Jasper said, not smiling.
"Nobody does," Nuncie said, tilting the jug on his forearm to drink. "That's just why we need him." Nuncie swallowed hard and spoke again. "Stella, what did them other critters' airboat look like?"
Stella pulled her lower lip while conjuring up her mind's eye. "Just like de fust one," she said, considering. "Just like one plate turned upside down on top of dey other plate." She scratched her rump in thought. "Color like rainbows. And de critters looked like some mo' of them fish-Injuns." Stella kneaded her cheeks.
"Well, maybe we've seen their last," muttered the Mingo.
"No, suh, I done tole yuh," Stella said. "Dey done said dey'd be back." Stella stared at the Mingo. "To get dem other ones."
Nuncie walked over to the cabin window where Jasper was looking out at the red-gold sunset. Unexpectedly Jasper grabbed the jug and gulped down enough applejack to make him snort like Solomon. "God-damn it sho' wuz a hot'un today, wuzn't it, Mist' Nuncie?"
Nuncie laughed shortly and agreed. "It sure was Jasper, it was indeed."
We left Jasper and Stella to their own devices and rode the Packard back into town, Nuncie heavy on the gas, the Mingo searching the night sky for who knows what. They said little but passed the jug. "Oh what a tangled web we weave," Nuncie said once, chuckling. The Mingo returned his foul whiskey-breathed leer.
"Goddamn Thunderbirds!" he hollered out the window, looking into the dust and the infinite blackness behind us. "It's the end of the World!" He started laughing his ass off, got choked and damn near hacked himself to death. I said nothing and moved not, but I wasn't sleepy.
Next day, there began a series of mysterious events know to lore as "The Mississippi Lights." If folks had ever known I knew then what hasn't been revealed till now I damn sure would not have lived this long.
What with the curse and all, and Nuncie and the Mingo's suggestions, disturbed folks in these parts thought the "lights" were Indian "thunderbirds," mystical fiery phantom birds of doom nobody could ever really fully see, and I'm pretty much willing to let it go at that. At night, mysterious lights in the sky flashed all around the country, into people's houses, looking for something. Some people were reported missing. Everybody just knew this meant the Tupelo Angel's were gonna come to the battleground on the anniversary and just rip all the poor redskins and mixed-breeds all to hell. Ko-teri had said so. But nobody left town. The poor and superstitious do not dream of cheating Fate.
This was just what Nuncie and the Mingo had counted on. The taxidermied Angels were double-locked in Nuncie's icehouse, packed in dry ice, with the Mingo for company. The Mingo chanted and dreamed, sweated in his thick blankets, ingesting mushrooms and drinking applejack the days through, eating nothing. He claimed he put a hex against those space creatures' "spirits;" whatever, the aliens did not discover their kin locked securely in the back vault of Nuncie's icehouse. Vernon lurked around our feedlot with the shotgun Nuncie gave him in the crook of his elbow. Jasper watched the icehouse proper. Aunt Zell stayed in the house with her woman's work. Business was slow.
Nuncie put out that the Mingo was willing to put on a special Beat-The-Devil to save the people from certain disaster, for a price. As the days passed and the lights in the sky grew more invasive and frightening, the townfolk took him up on the proposition. The price was staggering. Nuncie got the Ford dealer to put up a brand-new Phaeton, and the Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and First National Bank to ante up ten-thousand dollars apiece. This was a great deal of money for the time. The Mingo was now feared, revered and hated more than ever. He gloated in the gloom of the icehouse, his frosty breath reeking of bad medicine.
"And I intend to pass the sorghum-bucket myself at the ceremony, Vernon riding shotgun. Charles shall help Jasper with the Angels." I was uneasy about that. If Uncle Nuncie's subterfuge was discovered, I was liable to be the youngest man ever tarred and feathered in the history of Lee County, if not hung.
"That's what I like about you, Nuncie, you don't miss a trick," grunted the Mingo, chewing on a piece of dried psylocybe cubensis.
"Let's hope not," Nuncie said. "It's too late to back out now." My Bowie knife struck furious sparks off my whetstone against the shadows and chill of the vault, but I felt no warmth or comfort.
The day of the ceremony broke dark with much wind and rain. The Beat-The-Devil was set for midnight on the heart of the battlefield. The night before had been the worst yet for the "lights;" the people were rabid and skittery. There were now over a dozen reported missing. The Mingo was sweating out his visions in the icehouse with the moonshine and the mushrooms. Uncle Nuncie, Jasper and I had successfully hidden the Angels in their strategic position on the battlefield, just after dawn; the Mingo's magic had kept us hidden from the lights. So far so good.
Jasper and I got the shit end of the deal. We practiced a bit on a block and tackle in the feedlot barn but we were far from expert Angel-handlers. Up the tree Nuncie sends Jasper and me. Two huge jack-oaks to be precise, the tallest on the field, resting on a slope above about a fifty-foot Indian burial mound in front of the 500-foot limestone cliffs known as Cave Rocks. Jasper's little cabin was lost in the woods maybe two miles from our roost. We had to stay up there all day, in a hunting stand, with the wind and the rain blowing off and on, about seventy feet up among the thin spring foliage on the branches in hunting camo gear, with the two-taxidermied fish-Injuns hooked to a block-and-tackle over a strong limb, under a camoflaged canvas sheet. We had smoke bombs but I feared they would be too wet for use by midnight. I was soaked, scared and exhausted. But it was too late to back out now. I pissed all over myself when trying to pee off the hunting tree-stand. In the other tree Jasper was watching me, that jack-bastard grin about to split his face, gnawing on a carrot. One thing I learned that day was better an insane pretension than no pretension at all. Sheer balls is many times better than knowing the difference between right and wrong.
The Mingo's ceremonial altar crowned the mound, about sixty feet up the hill from where the people would have to stand. A good place to be heard and seen, but not too close for inquiring minds to be too sure just what in the hell might be going on. Me and Jasper would be able to see him fine, maybe a hundred and fifty feet below, but I knew the people would have a hard time seeing us, especially under darkness and stormy skies.
The altar consisted of a large iron pot, resting in a rock charnel, and filled with coal. The Mingo would throw his special flash-powders into that fire tonight to bring forth visions and spirits. There were two censers on either side for the burning of incense and sacred herbs. The Mingo had made Vernon dig holes to place torches patterned to symbolize the Stars of the Great Bear Constellation. To be ordered about by an Indian, even a chief, made Vernon surly and sullen, but he did it. There were two pits in front of the trees Jasper and I were in. They would contain barrels of flash-powders the Mingo would light to herald his great epiphany. The townspeople had already given him half the money and the smoke-grey Phaeton.
By the time Uncle Nuncie and Vernon came out to the battlefield, maybe four p.m., there was only a queer type of twilight refracting faint-blue light. It had not rained since noon but the dome of the sky was nothing but black cloud on all horizons. The breeze was light but stinging with some sleet, and it rustled the wet leaves, droplets dripping off my rain hat and slicker. No one else was on the field yet, but as soon as the work-bell tolled the locals would flock out here, storm or not.
"Hey, Chas, how goes it?" Nuncie hollered up.
"Fine as frog hair," I hollered back.
You may wonder why I went along with all these things while saying nothing. Nuncie had raised me from the age of five, after my daddy killed himself on Black Friday (Daddy had been President of the town bank that failed - "I always told your daddy to embezzle something against a rainy day") and my momma run off with the drummer in a hillbilly band ("he was heavy on the downbeat"). Uncle Nuncie always took care of me and included me in all his craziness like I was somebody. I was pretty much game for anything from marbles to manslaughter. He was all I had.
"Hey there, Jasperoo!" yelled Nuncie. "You up there playing pocket pool?"
"Nawsuh," Jasper hollered back, "Right now I don't know my dick from a dumplin'."
"You boys hang on, you hear?" Nuncie said. "We can't back out now, can we?" The breeze picked up a little, wetting my face. Nuncie hollered again. "You boys know what to do?"
"Yessir!"
"Yassuh!"
Famous last words.
After Nuncie and Vernon left, I hollered at Jasper once. "You scared, Jasper?" I asked. There was a little pause.
"It don' make much matter," he said. Nuncie had eliminated the temptation of discretion by rolling down the rope ladders Vernon had rigged in order to ensconce us in our high estate; Vernon had likewise carried up the tree stands and secured them, and also the block and tackle. The whole thing was truly a genius work of redneck engineering motivated by greed and malevolent expedience. Vernon was mighty stout, and a dandy tree-climber, for poor white trash. Nuncie had secured and hooked the fish-Injuns to the chain and up she went! Now the deal was up to us.
I could never tell what Vernon thought about the creatures. They had surprised and impressed him not at all. I suspected he didn't care if they were real or not. "That's just why we need him," Nuncie said. I just hoped the bastard stayed sober long enough to help get us out of these trees after this crazy scheme was over.
Jasper hollered back at me. "You scared, Chaz?"
I thought a little. "It don't make much matter," I replied. I thought less of possums than ever.
By an hour before midnight the people were thick and noisome, restless as flies on the field below us, despite the threatening weather. Most carried lanterns against the gathering blackness. About eleven-thirty Nuncie and Vernon showed up to light the torches and the coals. Shortly, here come the Mingo, gliding up slowly in his new grey Phaeton, like a potentate, chaffeured by one of his nephews. He parked well behind the trees, out of sight of the throng below the altar. Another vehicle, a battered old Ford truck, coughed itself to a standstill hard on his fenders. "God-damn it Red Hawk!" I could hear the Mingo growl at the driver.
In the flatbed of the truck was the ceremonial Indian dance band the Mingo used for his rituals. The Mingo himself shook the rattles and the gourds with righteous fervor. Gnarled Fox, the hunch-backed club-footed music teacher at the reservation school, served as melodic counterpoint by blowing a native flute and striking cymbals for dramatic effect. The Mingo had twin fourteen-year old grand-daughters that just gave me fits on the insides to look at, Little Fawn and Calling Bird were their Indian names. They kept rhythm on the tam-tam drums, and chanted. Red Hawk was the chorus chanter and tamborine man. Nuncie called them "Hell's Own Arkestra." They were all turned out in buckskin, wearing traditional necklaces and breastplates, turquoise jewelry, hair slicked back with bear fat, very festive. But they weren't jack-spit compared to the Mingo.
The Mingo was wearing a bear-skin around his torso, the paws and claws over his hands. I knew he kept his bag of conjure powders handy inside the bear-skin. On his skull rested a regal feathered head-dress, done in bald-eagle feathers to the shoulders, great ostrich feathers to the ground, with huge peacock fantails from the shoulders to the train. The Mingo had everything attached so it spread out like the Great Thunderbird when he stretched his bear claws.
But the best (or worst) thing was the mask. It was made from a wolf's-head whose eyes were perfectly aligned with the Mingo's. The Mingo was somehow able to gnash the teeth and snarl the lip while wailing his shaman song. He was a sight to see.
They wasted no time in messing with the people's minds. The little band of Indians marched out of the woods, out of nowhere, to the beat of the tam-tams, chanting "Hi-Yi-Yi-Yi?," and the Mingo jumping, skipping and shaking all about the altar, throwing fists of flash-powders down at the "oohing" crowd. The Mingo danced before the cauldron, and forcefully slammed magic powders into the coals. A geyser of flame shot into the air, the crowd "aahhed," the scream of a howling wolf split the Mississippi dark, and the drums and chanting abruptly came to a halt. The wind picked up during the silence.
Gnarled Fox started tattooing the cymbals like Gene Krupa. The twins and Red Hawk beat their drums and chanted. The Mingo grabbed his rattle and gourd and began a slow Indian jig back and forth in front of the crowd below him at the foot of the mound, kicking his knees up and scooting along the ground. On top of this hill, the sound carried far out into the crowd, and the Mingo had a voice like a foghorn, or a siren, as the mood struck him, anyway. The lanterns of the people flickered like a meadow full of lightning bugs. The wind was subtly getting higher every minute.
The Mingo became Ney-A-Ti, the ribald Sacred Clown, jeering at the people. He spoke in Chicksaw.
"And Ney-A-Ti attempted to teach the Great Mudhead to copulate. The Mudhead could not get the point. He stuck his cock up his wife's ass, in her ear, in her navel." Some of the Indians laughed. The white people had no idea what the hell the Mingo was saying, but they were impressed by his manner and intonation.
"And the Great Mudhead hated Ney-A-Ti and cursed his people. 'You shall fall to the White Man, to the wasichu, brother against brother, clan against clan, and all because you could not teach me how to FUCK!'" The Mingo shucked and jived a little and the people went nuts.
" 'Thus shall I send a Ko-Teri, a prophet of prophets, to foretell they doom!' Ney-A-Ti knew that he had fucked up." A gust of laughter carried up the hill on the gusting wind. The Mingo was more solemn now, more stern, and he spoke in English. "The Ko-Teri was my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. He knew the language of the winds, the secret of the stars!" The Mingo threw double-handfuls of conjure powders into the red glowing cauldron, sparks spitting out a cloud of continuous rising multi-colored smoke. The crowd "ohhhed!" There were about two-thousand people in the field maybe, I guessed. There was still plenty of mixed blood in these parts. They all knew the story - and they had lived the real tragic history.
I could see Vernon and Nuncie, dressed all in black clothes, with white masks and black hats, carrying woven baskets with Indian designs, come onto the stage and kneel not far from the Mingo. All of a sudden the music and the chanting stopped. The Mingo strutted to the priest's altar behind the cauldron. I looked over at Jasper's tree but I couldn't see him. I was about to shit my pants. I wrapped my extra kerchief tight around my nose and mouth, like Uncle Nuncie told me.
"I, the Mingo, will bring the Great Thunderbird Ne-Phil-Im to save you from the Lights and from the Angels, whose horrible presence I can smell!" The Mingo howled his blood-curdling wolf-scream and the people went hydrophobic. "Ne-Phil-Im! The great father-of-giants, messenger of the Great Spirit Ubabeneli! Servant to the Hebrew God Jehovah, as mentioned in Genesis!" Like I said, there was still a lot of mixed blood in these parts. For some reason I thought of the time Uncle Nuncie and I helped the Mingo paint some sparrows he had trapped yellow to sell as canaries at the Indian Fair. The Mingo's imagination was not constrained by mere tradition, or logic.
My testicles and anus started to constrict. I took the camouflage sheet off Angel No. 1.
The chanting and the music started again, louder. The wind was fairly whistling. Swirling clouds of blue, yellow, green, red smoke emitted from the powders the Mingo fed the cauldron. The Mingo turned loose a passel of coyote and hyena screams, bear growls and wolf snarls, eagle and hawk shrieks. The crowd was babbling itself into a delirium. I could see Nuncie and Vernon high-step it down the hill with the collection baskets. I unlocked the brake on the block and tackle and hoped Jasper was doing the same.
"UBABENILI DEMANDS YOUR OFFERINGS!" the Mingo screamed lustily. "JEHOVAH MUST HAVE YOUR OFFERINGS! GIVE US YOUR MONEY, YOUR JEWELS, YOUR LOOSE COINS! WE MUST HAVE IT ALL!" The Mingo was fairly slobbering now. I could see Nuncie and Vernon briskly hustling the crowd. The wind was stiff and whipping now, and the musicians were just wild and thrashing, hollering like crazy against the wind. The long-threatened rain started to fall, soft at first like a feather-touch. But I could see the sheet lightning riding above the thick blanket of purple-black clouds coming towards us. I was really hating possums about this time. Just then a terrific clap of thunder boomed against the roof of the sky. The Mingo turned his back to the crowd, facing towards me and Jasper. That was our signal. I got out my smoke bombs.
The Mingo started twirling like a top, screeching like an owl, bellowing like an alligator, braying like a mule. He stopped on a dime and screamed at the crowd: "FEAR NOT THE ANGELS OF DEATH FOR I, THE MINGO, ART WITH YOU! GIVE ME YOUR ALL! I WILL SAVE YOU FROM DISASTER!" Nuncie and Vernon were working their way through the crowd surprisingly fast. The sheet lightning flashed above us. I lit my first smoke bomb, and looped its counter-weighted string around a lower branch. I hoped Jasper was doing the same. The Mingo whirled some more, stopped, and pointed to the smoke blossoming in both trees. Good ole Jasper.
"AAAIIIEEEE! IT IS THE ANGELS! I, THE MINGO, WILL SAVE YOU FROM DEATH!" The crowd cried out in fear. I looped my second smoke-bomb, and then I carefilly lowered the taxidermied alien down into the thick of the smoke. When the wind shifted, the Angels were visible. It was a very fine job of the taxidermist's art. It was easy to distinguish the hawk-like wings spreading out from their shoulder-blades.
The crowd was screaming its guts out. I was letting the chain slip, latching and ratcheting the creature up and down, and I could see Jasper was doing the same. I could only hope Nuncie and Vernon could fight their way through the crowd to get us down from here when the jig was up. The Mingo was in a dancing fit, hopping and spinning, cursing the dangling carcasses obscured by smoke.
"I CAST THEE OUT! I, THE MINGO, CAST THEE OUT! DEMONS BE GONE!" The Mingo ran to the base of my tree, and ignited the hidden barrel of flash-powder. A great white-light erupted and I could smell burnt leaves and bark. An instant later, Jasper's barrel went off. Now we were supposed to pull the creatures back up into the trees. There was an ear-splitting peal of thunder and a jagged vein of chain-lightning rent the night sky. Then - THE LIGHTS!
From the clouds above us, the search-beams from revolving saucer-shaped objects transfixed the Angels. I could not pull on the chain further. Then, I could not move myself. Everybody and everything was in total chaos at this point. The wind and the rain were ripping and whipping now and my fingernails were bleeding from gripping tree-limbs - limbs that were snapping, crackling, breaking, as the lights from the whirling flying plates lifted and pulled the Angels along its path. I was helpless, and I could see Jasper now, mouth agape in wonder, floating behind his Angel, held in the sway of the lights.
I could barely turn my head to see the tornado come racing up the field, undulating like a rattler, wide as a football field is long. The people were scattering like rats. The wind swallowed some.
I can't say just when the tornado wrested me from the Lights, but all of a sudden, I was spinning in the whirlwind, Jasper across the vortex from me, his eyes rolled back in his head to the whites, but his splayed lips even now smiling like "what a way to go!"
I remembered nothing more till I woke up in Vernon's little shotgun shack, of all places. I jumped up, screaming, "Goddamn!" before I knew what was going on. A little tow-headed boy on the floor, about a year old, started screaming and squalling. Uncle Nuncie looked in from the other room, and the little boy's mother, Vernon's wife Gladys, came rushing in.
"You're scaring Elvis!" she cried, clutching the child and going out to the porch.
"I'm sorry," I said to Nuncie, who just laughed. To this day, that boy's caterwauling was the worst racket I ever heard.
"You okay?" Nuncie asked, looking at me cock-eyed.
"Just a head-ache," I replied. "What happened?"
Nuncie sat down. "Well, the tornado," he said. "The other stuff, I'm not so sure." Nuncie shook his head and said, "Tank Hill is gone. All of it. Zell too." I sat down, weak.
"But don't worry. You know I keep my money over in Yoknapatawpha County, over to the Jefferson bank, ever since your daddy died - I guess I'm a little superstitious. I've carried Act- of-God insurance ever since the '27 floods." Nuncie chuckled a little. I swear.
"Mist' Nuncie, you definitley luckier than a out-house rat," Jasper joshed, walking in the door with Nuncie's last jug of moonshine. Vernon came in behind him, tired and gaunt.
"No luck," he said. "Not a trace."
"What about-" I started.
"The Mingo," Nuncie finished. "It's just as well. I don't think he'd have much of a chance of collecting the other half of that money now."
"I believe dey'd treat 'im like fawnicatin' wid de hoss-mule," Jasper grinned.
"There's over a hundred dead and countin'," Vernon said.
"Gimme that jug, Jasper," Nuncie ordered.
Later, me and Jasper sat out on the front porch. I asked him if he ever et that possum he found the day he brought the Angels to us.
"Nawsuh, I didn'." He grinned that loon-crazy jack-bastard liver-lipped grin. "I thowed 'im and the poke in thar whar them other fish-Injuns had been. Then I come back to town to help Mist' Nuncie. Well, suh, Stella said those critters come back agin, the days the lights started, the days I 'uz up hyar guardin' the Mingo. She said dey looked in de poke for dey people, but dey's just the possum. Stella said one of 'em took out a little magic wand fulla lightnin' and zapped that little possum on his haid, and the little possum's haid warn't squashed no more, and it got up and walked away." We had a good cackle over that. "I bet she et that possum herself," Jasper chuckled. It was hard to tell about Stella. Anything was possible.
"And Mist' Charles, I still don' agree wid you about de possum being the stupidest critter. It's de moth. De moth 'sumes itself in the flame, knowing de flame is gonna burn 'im up. But he so stupid wit' wantin' the flame so bad, he cain't help hisself." Jasper's grin stretched from Ittabena to Tishomingo. "But de possum, layin' out in de road, pretendin' he daid so's to 'void the consquences o' bein' a 'possum, he be makin' a choice." Jasper was tetched, and not a prophet, but what he knew, he understood well.
FIN
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