They stranded Sally in a skimpy costume half way up the Green Cove cliff, right over the water. The sharks and the exploding hot-air balloons were a bit much. Just an opinion. This isn't really my story. It's Gary's, but he's in no condition to tell it, stuck at the hospital with tubes sticking out of his nose. I'll be his spokesperson. Nothing much has changed there. Ever since kindergarten, Gary has needed a spokesperson. For example, to explain why he liked being the shirtless clown who swung his rolls-o-fat belly around to distract the opposing team's free-throw shooters at our high school basketball games.
About this latest incident—not sure I can explain it fully, other than giving our side of what happened on the set of Tomahawk Sally. As we get older, it gets harder to explain the mess of our lives. His divorce. My divorce. Him not talking to his kids. Me quitting college and leaving the church. I still pray a lot, lucky for Gary.
Tomahawk Sally, as everybody knows, was a popular TV series. The show was near the end of its third season. The entire country fixated on what was going to happen to Sally in the season finale. Unlike most TV series, which are written and shot before being aired, the producers of Tomahawk Sally wanted to build a loyal audience by slowing down the production schedule so that viewer feedback could be incorporated in the developing storyline. The third season, broadcast every other Wednesday night at 9 p.m., lurched toward a frenzied manhunt that left Sally in her ripped bodice perched on a rock face above the ocean in our little coastal town, where the producers had come to shoot the closing episode on location. They wanted a rustic, old-timey look. The show's timeframe was the 1890s, and we had plenty of that to offer with all the rotting warehouses and wharfs in the harbor.
*
O God, please guide us through this weirdness. We're scared. Please bring back the herring and the cod and the sea urchins from the Japanese. O God, who moves in mysterious ways, who troubles the waters, please help the people, ones like me and Gary and the families who are really hanging by their toenails, afraid of the sharks.
*
Gary and I were hired by the show's caterer to roast a hog for the cast and crew on their last day of shooting. The executive producer, a hulking guy with a ponytail, made us sign legal papers agreeing that we would not reveal anything we learned about Sally's fate.
Not that we saw or heard much from our spot behind the semi-trailers. We witnessed some grumbling from the supporting actors and actresses who visited our firepit during the night. The midget who played the circus manager thought that he should have been allowed to lead the acrobats in the rescue attempt. The Eskimo floozy, in a brief return from season one, did not understand her motivation for claiming to be Tomahawk Sally's mother. Otherwise, we were just a couple of locals basting a pig, when the reporter from that high-society website, Glitzkreig, wandered into the firelight around 3 a.m.
"Couldn't help but be drawn by that smell," he said, with a marked Noo Yawk accent.
We didn't know he was a reporter at first. I figured him for a young gaffer who couldn't sleep. He slurped a beer and yakked at us about the hog-roasting venture. My back pain kept me down in a folding lounger, while Gary did most of the work. The reporter asked how we got into the hog-roasting business. We'd both been let go from our fish factory jobs, along with a hundred other people in town. To make ends meet, we'd turned our grilling hobby into a paying gig. At least enough to pay some bills. Usually, in response to that question, we try to put on a cheery front with our customers. People at hog roasts, especially the ones who hang out through the night, are wanting a good time. We joke about how losing our jobs turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
Except, this reporter sensed our bluff. He nudged for more. "That factory closing—didn't I just hear something about your Governor refusing to extend unemployment benefits?"
By 4 a.m. he'd prodded Gary into a rant about our union-busting Gov and the ongoing plight of the working man in the face of a heartless country obsessed with a TV show like Tomahawk Sally, set in the Gilded Age of robber-barons when, for chrissakes, here we are struggling to survive a damn fresh crop of robber-barons. What you need to understand about me and Gary is that sometimes us wharf rats can be as radical as they come.
The reporter shifted gears. "Listen, boys, I work for a news organization that sent me up here with ten thousand dollars to drop on any solid information about what happens to Tomahawk Sally on that cliff," he revealed.
"You got I.D.?" Gary said.
The reporter opened his black backpack. He flashed a press badge and the bills. It was just the three of us around the coals and the hog at that hour. Gary stared in at the pile. He said, "Can I touch?" The reporter nodded. Gary fanned a stack of bills against his cheek and sniffed at them and said, "Good ole Ben Franklin."
I tried to catch Gary's eye and made a writing gesture to remind him about the legal document we'd signed. Gary thought my gesture was a twist-off request for another beer. He stepped over to my folding chair. My childhood friend was kind enough to open the bottle for me.
I said a silent prayer and told myself not to worry. I figured the big city reporter would surely pick up on Gary's angle. Gary carved a morsel off the hog's flank and offered it to the reporter. "How's it taste?"
"Most excellent," the reporter said.
Gary leaned over and whispered, "A spaceship, a dang flying saucer, comes down and whisks her away."
"What, no!" the reporter sputtered.
When a buffoonish figure like Gary suddenly shifts to his serious-as-a-heart-attack voice and scowl—it's difficult to ignore. "The entire next season, man, is going sci-fi. The spaceship sucks up the entire cast in a ray of blue light. Tomahawk Sally turns out to be an extra-terrestrial who had been put on Earth to discover a cure for the low-fertility rate on her home planet. I personally think it's a gamble for a younger audience."
The reporter coughed and glanced over at me for verification. I displayed my best poker face. "What about the Eskimo floozy?" he asked.
"Oh, you like her?" Gary said, "I like her too. She leads a revolt on the spaceship and hijacks it to a planet called 'Bale', where the residents have a lot of sex and produce offspring like rabbits."
What needs to be pointed out here is that ever since we were little—you know how kids make up invisible friends—Gary has talked about this planet, Bale. It's his happy place, a Big Rock Candy Mountain at the edge of the Milky Way.
"Um, sort of finding this hard to believe," the reporter said. Just as the hulking producer appeared in the firelight. He yawned and stretched and blinked and squinted at the reporter. He yanked a pistol out of the back of his belt and yelled, "Get the hell off my set, you scum!"
The reporter jumped up and ran off into the night, leaving behind the black backpack on the ground. Gary stepped in front of it. The producer barked, "How long has he been here? Who was he talking to?!"
"A couple hours. Nobody but us," I said.
"What did he want? What did you tell him?"
I said, "We talked about our asshole Governor."
Gary added, "Chat'em in the winter, cheat'em in the summer."
The producer groaned. "I'll alert security. If he shows up again, you call me, got it?"
"Got it," I said.
"Got it," Gary nodded and glanced down at the abandoned backpack as the producer scurried away.
*
It might have all blown over. Glitzkrieg ran a brief story predicting that the Tomahawk Sally finale would include a flying saucer and an abrupt flip into sci-fi. They spun it as a challenge to Battlestar Galactica. Nobody paid much attention. It didn't get a lot of traction, as they say. However, local people couldn't help but notice that Gary was throwing a lot of money around town. He wanted to win Sunny, his ex-wife, back. He bought her jewelry and clothes. He dropped hundreds on Sunny's favorite pizza. He paid for a sky-writing plane to come up from Boston and inscribe her old refrain above the harbor, so everyone would know he'd gotten the point: "There's no lonely like married lonely."
And then the season finale aired. A huge flop. Especially the bit with the crabs gnawing off Tomahawk Sally's thong. The Glitzkreig flying saucer article was resurrected and went viral and poll after viewer poll resulted in overwhelming votes for the planet Bale twist. As I've tried to explain, Gary only looks like a dummy. He spotted his big chance. And since Sunny was hesitating about the jewelry and stuff, he figured she would have to be impressed if he came out publicly as the savior of Tomahawk Sally. Gary called up an entertainment attorney in Boston.
*
O God, creator of fog in the harbor and flounder by the bucketful, forgive us for just wanting what we used to have. Forgive guys like Gary and me for eating shorts and stripers less than fourteen inches and throwing our cigarettes and beer bottles in the ocean. At least with the bottles, our kids ended up finding seaglass on the shore, not plastic. The fisheries always seemed so plentiful, O God, we never expected this.
*
I was present when the hit-and-run happened. I saw it from his porch. And, contrary to the rumors, Gary was drinking lemonade. The mail had just been delivered and Gary was walking out to fetch what he thought was going to be his 'intellectual property' contract from the studio. Around here, mailboxes are all set out by the road, along one side, so the carrier doesn't have to weave back and forth. Gary had to cross a full two lanes and avoid a couple potholes to reach his box. He's a big guy. He doesn't move fast. We both heard the car approaching at high speed. He turned and immediately recognized the danger. I watched him try to jump away, just as lamely as on the playground during third grade dodgeball. The vehicle, a gray Mustang, swerved intentionally and caught his left hip and spun him hard into the mailbox post. Around here, we notice license plates. It was orange, New York.
In Gary's dark hospital room, the doctor allowed me to set up my folding lounger in the corner, on the other side of his bed. Sometimes, if the curtains were pulled, visitors didn't know I was there. I overheard a tearful reunion with Sunny and the kids. Only, Gary wasn't doing much talking and I'm not sure if he was even conscious. He kept going in and out. He muttered a few things that I can't really explain, other than his pain meds were talking. His comatose brain fixated on Sunny reaching the planet Bale.
He said, "I think everyone should have a little monitor that shows the glowing of their heart. That way, we'll know if they're aliens or not." Later, he said, "Pig grilling will be done differently. With four moons in the sky, we can use the moon rays."
The police, of course, interviewed me about the hit-and-run, and also about the fake doctor incident. That was yesterday. We were lucky to interrupt the guy. I was half asleep and Gary's curtain was partially drawn. It was raining outside. The Red Sox were on TV. I heard a strange voice. Strange, I mean, because after three days in the room with Gary, I'd come to recognize the voices of the nurses and doctors who stopped by to check on the patient. And this voice was different, low and growly, trying to whisper through a surgical face mask.
"Just sign here, please. We need you to sign this."
I sat up and peered through the gap in the curtain. The figure held out a clipboard and pen. He leaned in to Gary and repeated his demand. What with all the tubes and such, it would have been hard for Gary to get a hand free. The guy was done up in a white coat and mask with that mirror-thing headband. Direct from central casting, it turned out. At first I was afraid that Gary had relapsed and they were taking him off for more emergency surgery. I piped up, "Hey, what kind of doctor are you?"
He turned and hurried out of the room. He exited the hospital across the bridge over to the parking garage. The security cameras caught him driving off in a blue Cougar.
God, we're all wondering what will happen next.
Ian Woollen migrates annually from Bloomington, Indiana to the coast of Maine. Short fiction has surfaced in Juked, decomP, The Atticus Review, The Massachusetts Review,, and The Mid-American Review. His first novel, Stakeout on Millennium Drive, won the 2006 Best Books of Indiana Fiction Award. A second novel, Hoosier Life & Casualty, is out from Casperian Books.
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