Thrice Told Tales Read online

  The younger then whispered, “What’s the story on the one caught fire?”

  “What ’bout her?”

  “You ever do her?”

  “Who in here hasn’t?”

  The first guard’s eyes raised, and the second followed his gaze around the room, surveying the listless shufflers. “A few of ‘em don’t scream out.”

  “Oh...what’s this?” Mrs. Cox erupted, staring at a large volume loosely bound before her. She glanced down at a manuscript entitled The Necessity for A National Style Book for Enforcing a Unified Code of Grammatical Order in Bound Dissertation and Manuscript Galleys by Minerva Wakely, University of Oklahoma at Normal.

  The first guard grabbed the unpublished manuscript in his huge hands and stared at it. “Coincidence maybe?”

  “Why that lovely old girlfriend of mine!” said Mrs. Cox. Imagine, an authoress all this time in our midst...and not a word. I must read what she’s managed here. I’ll have Min share my bed tonight.”

  # # #

  Mrs. Cox wept. She wept for Minerva and for Jacob Kosler, and for Arthur Canby Smithe Milmar III, and for all his unread kind. They came in such numbers to her bed nowadays.

  Even as she dozed, Mrs. Cox wept. Fatigued, asleep, she’d slid from her sitting position propped against the headboard, her fifty-four-year-old eyes and mind finally at rest, finding REM time, her reading light going out like a dying candle until the bulb finally blinked out. She’d discarded Kosler and his out of print, hard to find, rare volume, Touching God for Arthur Milmar’s scorched and skewering pages about the Jesus mythos as, after all, it was Arhtur’s first book-length unpublished virgin manuscript. Perhaps now the only copy in existence, much of its six-thousand-plus pages singed and burned away. Still the sooty thing remained powerful. In fact, the pages of Arthur’s words lay spread over her nude body. Party confetti. Her tears had earlier stained the unpublished, perhaps un-publishable but all-important, compelling, awe-inspiring opus.

  Kosler’s grim story was of a man on astral journey who – having returned to his body – found it hacked to pieces by a madman, leaving Kosler trapped in the nether world from which he reportedly dictated the book to a former devotee and lab assistant named Catherina Vaughn who published it as a non-fiction text on astral enlightenment with Backhoe Press in 2003 before it promptly went out of print after its limited printing of 3,000 sold out – at a tremendous loss to the new age press – it slipped quietly into the death of an out of print title. One of its number had somehow found its way to Min’s bed and now into Mrs. Cox’s bed, and shortly after opening Jacob Kosler’s book, the Sean Connery look-alike, bearded and hot-breathed, came to thank her for what he termed “What little you can do, madam.”

  But Arthur had won Mrs. Cox’s affections over Kosler, until yet another unpublished author showed up one night, another unread – a quite mysterious one indeed, his touch electric and searing.

  “I didn’t write the Bible,” he/she/it told her as it felt to Mrs. Cox that no way did this spirit have a gender.

  “Whataya mean, you didn’t write the Bible?”

  “Hey, I can create a world and set if off spinning in the cosmos, but I never claimed to be a writer. Writing, now that’s hard. Like trying to lift a raw egg off a linoleum floor or riding a trick cycle while spinning twenty plates at once on those long sticks while wearing a clown suit and big shoes. Too many decisions required.”

  “Who are you then?”

  “A humble author indeed, as I have come to realize how damnably difficult it is to capture in words my message.”

  “What message is that?”

  “I’ve scoured the world over in an obsessive bid to prove the Bible a collection of caliginous junk stolen and compiled from lost remnant tales.”

  “What?”

  “That it’s written by pirating and lecherous plagiarists who didn’t even get the theft right.”

  “Theft from whom, from where?” asked Mrs. Cox.

  “From humankind’s earliest civilizations: the Mesopotamians, the Summarians, and the Eutruscans.”

  That night Mrs. Cox discovered a manuscript penned by God, but she was unable to read its clumsy, awkward, confusing, maddeningly passive passages about world building, and unfathomable archaic language, so she told God, “I’ve got nothing for you save this!” She pound-stamped his script with REJECT, saying that no fiction allowed in her Repository of Unpublished dissertations, ending with, “No publisher in New York City or anyplace on the planet you created would publish such…such…fictional tripe.”

  The following day, after the detectives had a look-see, medics came for her body.

  The head guard stood nearby—a matron who might easily pass for a man, a dejected look of guilt unmasked, bloodstained blouse filled by a barrel girth and protruding breasts. “God…God…” sheheit muttered to no one in particular, “Cox was one of the few…the chosen.”

  “Whataya mean by that?” asked Detective Olivetti, wiping his chin of crumbs from a doughnut one of the inmates in the asylum had handed him.

  “She had clean panties and didn’t wear a diaper.”

  “So why’d you beat her to death? I don’t get it.”

  “Shezzze, she fucking slammed my manuscript.”

  “Is-sat why you killed her?” asked the cop placing cuffs on the guard with the blood-stained uniform and shoes.

  # # #

  Mrs. Cox discovered three quite comforting truths in the next life: Life in the afterlife took on a wholly different font for one thing. Secondly, she hooked up with Minerva Wakley, and together they discovered a truly exciting unpublished book entitled Leave Me Out of Sports Events, Political Campaigns, and Organized Religion by God (the real God). Not surprisingly, the two former Repositorians, free of the asylum, responded as if ignited, the duo aflame with a fire of desire to do all in their power to haunt publishers and editors and TV and filmmakers on Earth until by God and Simon and Schuster they sat down and read the damned book!

  To make the fools see, really see, what they were missing in not reading this major works of the Unread.

  The UnEnd…

  STUMP GRINDER

  The sign out front read: Georgia Professional Stump Grinding—We grind your problems to nothing. But the telephone’s ring in the stump grinder’s trailer-office-home went unheard. The phone competed poorly with the Vrrr-ROOM of the new Vladverbooten stump rooter--a Russian-made grinder promising annihilation of the most stubbornly rooted and ancient stump in the Tennessee-Georgia borderland. In fact, the manufacturer’s catalogue came with a CD displaying an amazing illegal act, circa present day Volga National Forest—the Russian counterpart to America’s Giant Redwood Forest. In the video, a late night skeleton crew cuts down a tree in the ancient, protected forest in order to demonstrate the Vladverbooten 2004 model on the remaining stump. With the tree dispatched and hauled off, the Vladverbooten is waved forward. It tears and rips and grinds and grinds to the sound of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. In moments, the most enormous root Eldred Jasper Giddings had ever seen had come up and out with the ease of a simple tooth extraction. This monster made his American made John Deere Bigboy suddenly pale by comparison. “Makes a g’damn racket it does. Customers like noise in a grinder,” commented Eldred, shouting above the din. “Sound and fury…noise as bustlin’ as the infernal mines of belching Hades itself, Eldred! Music to the ear…a beautiful noise, it’n’it?” asked the salesman who’d carted the dinosaur-sized stump grinder up from Birmingham, Alabama. “Come up by barge from New Orleans.” He churned and revved the model 2004 up higher.

  “What? What’d ya say?”

  “Can’t hear you, Eldred.”

  They’d done business before over the years, but nothing like this machine.

  “Forget it!”

  “Can’t hear a thing you’re saying.”

  “No reason you can hear me any better.”

  “What?”

  “I said--” he gestured for Bob Throgmorten to shut
her down—“can’t neither one of us hear a--”

  Bob shut her down.

  “—a g’damn thing! And I won’t hear a g’damn thing for another week.”

  “Didn’t you put your complimentary ear plugs in your blasted ears?”

  “’Course-did, but damnit man, that noise’d wake God from a sound--”

  “Your phone’s ringing Eldred.”

  “What?”

  “Telephone at the trailer.” Bob stretched pinky and thumb from mouth to ear.

  “Well hell, why don’t Charlene answer it?”

  “Likely couldn’t hear it no more than we could with ol’ Vladboy here a-going.”

  Eldred went for the phone. “Somebody’s awful pestering persistent.” The phone continued ringing as insistent as any call from the battlefront.

  Bob Throgmorten kept pace, nodding. “Damn sure is persistent.”

  “Nice bein’ the only stump grinder in Grainbag County. What they call a monopoly.”

  “Folks gotta have their stumps ground.”

  They reached the steps to the office trailer. “Charlene ought to take the damn call. Must’ve got’n herself down to the hen house for eggs. You keeping breakfast with us, Bob?”

  “Just get the phone, El! ’Fore you lose what sounds like a man in dire need.”

  “I got it. I got it.”

  “Hell if it’s a paying customer, we’re apt to’ve a perfect opportunity. A for real on-site demonstration of the Russian made machine, which case I can get it all on video to burn to CD’s for future prospects, and that way you get a sure rebate off the top.”

  “Well damn best get the phone!” Eldred veritably dove for the still ringing phone. “Better not be no teller-marketer.”

  Eldred listened intently to the deep pained voice at the other end of the phone. “I am Professor Van Helsing…residing presently at the old Risley farmstead…trying desperately to make a go of the place.”

  “Yes sir, know the place. Thought it still deserted.”

  “Not so…not at this time, that is. Rather a…busy place, actually. Look here, my good man, I called you on a very special mission—actually a cause…a wholly good cause…a noble cause.”

  “Noble? I don’t know from noble, but there’s a Luther Noble lives not a mile off from your place. Been there going on six, maybe seven year now--”

  “Seven in fact and how appropriate. Yes, I have encountered Mr. Luther D. Noble, sir, but this is not…that is he is of no immediate ahhh…consequence.”

  “All right, sir…professor.”

  “I am asking for your services toward a noble cause.”

  “Oh, I see now…I think. We get alotta call for specials, credit, kinda personalized layaway jobs. Just never heard it called noble like that before.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Nawww-sir, I don’t. That’s all took care of by my daughter, Charlene—Charlie; she handles the credit books. Let me just get Charlie on the line.”

  Eldred covered the phone with his grease-lacquered hands. He whispered to Bob, “Feller don’t have no up-front money, but he wants something ground.”

  “SHITDAMN another’n?” shouted Charlene, overhearing as she stepped into the trailer. A trickle of blood ran along her smile line, giving Bob pause.

  Charlene filled the little trailer with her ample body, full head of red hair, her long tresses and full bosom. Bob inched to a corner, nipping at the air for her scent--painted lips, perfumes, creams floated about the pent up oxygen choked air mixed with axle grease and dead flies.

  Bob pointed saying, “You take ketchup with your eggs, do you, Charlene?” Eldred knew that one reason Bob’d made the trip up from Birmingham had just entered the office. Taking the phone from her father, she muttered to Bob, “Just undercooked that squirrel a bit. Love the squirrel.” She felt this had satisfied Bob’s curiosity, so Charlene then snapped at the man on the phone. “Let me get this straight. You got no cash, yettin’ you wanna get us for your stump grinding…’fore spring so’s you can use your fields so’s--”

  “Recompense…will in time…be made, madam, I can assure you.”

  “We don’t hold with rebates, Professor, but I reckon we can do this on our Grasshopper plan.”

  “Grasshopper?”

  “We gotta do a credit check, crunch the numbers, set you up with a payment plan you can abide by, all of it. Regardless what you’ve heard down at the Blue Turnip Café in Homerville, this ain’t no charity. Now let’s begin with your social security number.”

  “I am afraid I have none, as I am not an American citizen but a Dutch subject, her by way of…of Transylvania, Miss Charlene is it?”

  “Gaulllll…I never. Daddy.” She turned to Eldred. “This one’s strange. Bears watching.” She then spoke to Van Helsing. “Professor is it? Well, professor what is it you teach down at that college in Blue Ridge? I ’spect that damn yuppie B&B antique community is where you work?”

  “My daughter the bookkeeper, Bob,” beamed Eldred. “And so good with people she is. Just watch her work.”

  Bob replied loud enough for Charlene’s ears. “I KNOW. A wizard with a buck atopa beauty atopa…well, beauty.”

  “Nobody I know in Grainbag County can stretch a dollar like my Charlene.”

  Charlene, her face scrunched in consternation, began winding down the conversation with Professor Van Helsing. “All right then, so long as we all understand these arrangements and provisions, Professor, I see no reason why we can’t do business.”

  “Today before nightfall. It must be—“

  “Whoa up there, Professor. Daddy can we proceed tonight?”

  “Only-est way to survive this economic downturn,” Eldred told Charlene, nodding to both her and to Bob, “is to get stumpin’ and a humpin’.”

  “Sobeit,” added Charlene, licking the red juice from her chin with a snaking tongue.

  “S-s-sobeit,” agreed Bob, watching the tongue work.

  Charlene shouted now, believing a raised voice was listened to more intently. “Yes sir…uhuh…I know what Daddy said, and he’s right. No, we never done it that particular way, but my Daddy’s modest ‘bout his ‘bility with a stump grinder. Stump grinding in Daddy’s hands sir, well, it’s an art and a science.”

  “But can it be done with a giant white oak stump?”

  “White, black, yeller or green, makes not never mind.”

  Bob and Eldred listened now intently as Charlene repeatedly reassured Van Helsing. “Yes, sir….no, sir…understand that sir. Just only scoop her out…uhuh…holler her out. A nine-foot circumference? Well…that is a monster, but we got a Russian made grinder that’ll kick that stump’s ass and haul it outta your way. What?”

  She slapped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Daddy, I don’t think we ought to go near this job or this man.”

  “Why not, child?”

  “He dutton wannit removed.”

  “Dutton wanit removed?”

  “Only wants it hollered out and filled with cement.”

  “Customer’s always right. How many times you tell me that, Charlie?”

  She took a deep breath and returned to the phone. “You gotta contract somebody for the cementin’ ‘cause we don’t do that. I can recommend Macovoy’s Cement World.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “Don’t mention it, Professor. We’re of the motto here ‘help thy neighbor over his stump’. And as you see, we at GSG’re as flexible as any yogi person you’re apt to meet in these woods.”

  “All the same, I should like confirmation of all that we have discussed from the man in charge as you yanks say.”

  “Yanks!” She fumed up at her father and jammed the phone into his hands. “Damn chauvinist pig wants a man on the premises to reassure him, so go ahead.”