Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1
Dear Caesar and Andre, I’m living well tonight amid the conveniences of a cushy state park. Getting here was sheer hell, though. All day today and most of yesterday I dodged lumber trucks on the rainy parish roads.
But all this is but a trifle to entice you members of my Brass Dragon dojang to receive your week’s instruction via letter. Yep, this method of instruction will be a first in my career as a martial artist. When Master Yu teaches me, he uses the bamboo sword rather than the ballpoint pen. I don’t think my lesson for you will be as memorable as his to me have been, but I have to treat you boys like Americans, whereas I accept that he treats me as a Korean.
I’m not there to hit you with anything but a few words of wisdom (if I were there I’d use the padded long staff, though), so here goes: Today we will study the art of retreat.
Last night, after having dinner and discussing
theology with a Baptist minister, I decided to make my camp in Saline,
At dusk I tried to keep my promise to Mrs. May of
calling before sunset, but my cell phone failed. Worrying that she would worry, I decided to
try my luck at borrowing a phone on
I left the cover of the woods and entered the loop. As I walked toward the back, I heard two women’s voices yelling playfully. It sounded like a beach party on the bayou. Nymphs and sirens, boys, nymphs and sirens – you can’t tell which is which, and that’s always been one of my biggest problems.
They came into view, behind a wreck of a car, white girls, pretty and twentyish. They were hard living though, as they tugged back and forth at a bottle of cheap wine. Giggles, tee shirts, bouncing breasts… I stopped, enchanted.
They saw me and they stopped too. There was twenty yards between us, and eighty back to the highway, and not a soul around. Interesting…
“Y’all know where I can find a pay phone?” I ask, thinking they’d let me use their phone and hoping they’d flirt.
“All I know is you’d better get your ass down the fucking road!” one of them shouts in reply.
I was disabused of my fantasy even before the other
woman began to howl in with her friend.
The white trash of Bienville Parish had made itself known; the nymphs I
wanted had become turned out to be the sirens I feared. I was moving backwards as I kept my eye on
the two, in a measured retreat. That was
my first good move of the evening, because now it was time for the black trash
to appear as well, and they did. Two
grown men came from behind the trailer, another two from inside it. I had met the Crack Head Clan, the new terror
of the new South. This
minor detachment of half a dozen were a mean and crazy looking bunch,
and I do believe would have scared the Manson family of
They saw a white many, probably a lost or broken down out-of-towner, and he was walking backwards with the aid of a cane.
“They are coming,” said the inner self, “evade!”
Still backing I whirled the cane in a quick figure eight –backing another few steps; they were mesmerized. I reversed my body within the next figure eight, walking straight out toward the road, fast. I was ten yards from the road, just out of sight around the bend from them, when I heard one of the girls scream “Get him!”
The most random things will get stuck in your mind in a moment of mortal crisis. For some reason my mind fixed instantly on the anthropological note that this pack was matriarchal. Thank God my feet have always had better sense than my head, because I wasn’t standing still while I was thinking.
Beloved,
I write
from the picnic table in front of my campsite.
The mid-morning sun dries my gear from the soaking it last night in
Saline. All morning I’ve been reminded
of
I’ve washed
my clothes at the park laundry (like the one at the
Love, Eric
PS: The enclosed letter is for Andre and
Caesar. Please read it yourself, then call one or the other of them to pick it up. Their numbers are on the wall. I think of you and smile…
Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1