Troutdale Kingdom – 4
Leave D-town and Close-In be run by the commuter knights of the civil service and their brother and sisters of the service industry various. Incentivize them up the wazoo. (L.D.M. Roy: We’re going to ‘Feed the Beast’ with our new “Points in the Paint Plan.” Establish low-post position by clicking on the ‘Feed Me’ link and get in while the gettings good.”) Open up the city to those who will have her. Love her if they wish. Let the opportunists, parasites, anarchists, gad-flies, scenester hawks, fin de decadists, radicals and radicals lite, hovel yard saints and their associated reformers and non-profs humble, voyeurs and voyeurs voyeurs, agents, journalists, and all their fellow artists and friends of the Media Core ooze into what nooks, attics, studios, shuttered factories, and itinerant shadows have been neglected, unattended, unregulated, and thereby vulnerable to “Next Big Thing” exposes or very real shrapnel and saturation flyer bombing.* (*If the fat cats can securitize the perimeter around their early last century colonials and pastoral mini-mansions then power too them. Otherwise, hire a crane, a demo-recon team, city archivist, and a tractor trailer team and rent out I-5 North for an hour. Hall your many-eaved and copper down-spouted decahedron over the restless Columbia and wave farewell with a fistful of Fast Break Points.) Let the relentless year-round ideaism that is our singular art be freely punctuated by the ceaseless elections (county, district, city, state, regional, federal) recall drives, referenda, petition drives, and opinion shaping industry that weeded the cracks of our economic ruin. Let mssrs Hales and Smith et madame Brady duke it out every four years for the rite to unseat Non-Lame Duck Mayor Roy and avoid another “Patented Fourth Quarter Comeback.” Nuts to term limits. Us D-towners cut our teeth in the ideaist family theatre. We’ve come to love the players like family pets and crazy cousins. On a par and then some with our local sports mascots and avatars Timber Jim and Blaze The Trailcat. Without family you’ve got nothin’.
Yes, be unapologetic about your D-town love, Inner-Corites. Revel in the dangerous old port days of The Olde Town Shanghai Threat. Whether you secret pocket a sap or a flask the gladhand comes out the same. Take a good hard toke off the wood pulp tang of another blameless poach of a clearcut from the spine of Forest Park. Alternative fuels are the stuff of fatcats and suburban survivalists with mucho foresight and consequent black market empires.* (*Some were reported as holding serious post position in the L.D.M.’s Office. The claim was emphatically rejected by Roy.) Bring on the brinksmanship of competing artisan’s maker’s marks cluttering the tarred telegraph poles; the brinksmanship graffiti of idealist gangs roving the streets for converts and conscripts; the good old fashioned soapbox electioneering with a bottle of artisan hooch in one winter-chilled hand and a fistful of broadsides still warm from the hand-cranked press in the calloused other. Whiling away an afternoon from the window-seat of a licensed speaky-easy , enjoy a good long earful of invective as a Royist wearing the telltale road-red uniform number 7 lays into a Brady-alligned Timberite for his “no-nothing-ist go slow approach” and the latter for the former’s “total lacking in subtlety.” Open the transom and toss in an incendiary bomb of your own* (*“Sports are stupid,” say.) and if the re-direct gets too pointed and they begin rapping on the glass or cursing slogans remove the flask and motion for them to come the Hell inside and set a spell. “Remember boys, each one of us loves our city. Yell all you want, but leave the violence to Them.”
The South Parkblocks below his dorm are dominated by spiritualists, psychics, drug dealers, vagabonds, P.S.U. students, armageddonists, street performers, low-end distillers, unlicensed speakeasies, nervous soccer tourists trawling for parking, prostitutes, and strolling lovers of every stripe.
“Democracy, Tiger. This is as close as it gets.”
A man dressed like a gondolier rolls by in a bicycle two stories tall. Two young men arm-in-arm point at the Old Portland Episcopal Church covered with new Roy campaign banners.* (*Though he has yet to file nor even rescinded the term limit yet again.) Tiger has fallen behind to leverage the bone with his foot.
“Priorities, Tiger my boy. Pry-OR-a-tees.”
Tonight he is even more big-hearted feeling for his fellow D-towners than usual. The Troutdale cover has been such tepid and watery soup to make meal of. This city night is necessary sustenance. He listens to the megaphone electioneering coming from park pulpits, office towers, and campaign vans. The wood awnings of the food carts clap to and wafts from the simmer pots get to hawking in our noses then guts. Crow caw rains down from the city scavengers droozling in sympathy. What we need, he thinks, is a blanketing of snow to go along with and a double-brandy nightcap from the safety of his licensed local.
Despite the cold he is wearing the slipper-shoes he’d so admired in the summertime bocce ball players. They, shoes and man, had such an air of comfort and ease in the world. No amount of D-town b.s. or eking out of a living could change the cush-assed style those leather downers imparted. Not only had Rawlings gotten the maker, model, and purveyor from the sockless and tanned gentlemen, he had become a semi-regular player during the six halcyonic summer weeks on the D-town Brady security detail. Though they were the same shoes that Swafford (chanced in the Parkblocks either sweet-talking or laying a rap on a Parkblocks girl* *Who could tell which.) had been so overjoyed to hap upon him wearing that after he indulged in a little off-the-clock piling on and called them “pretty frankly Euro-feminate” had said the next morning “You’ve grown fat and tan on that frankly pretty goddamn vacation-like Brady detail, Rawlings. Expect to see yourself in the borderlands early next pay period.” He held no grudge with the shoes. In fact, he wore them tonight hoping to roll a few rounds with the all-weather Bocceists who were at least smilingly tolerant during the a-heavy q & a’s blowing Jeff Smith’s job-creation record to Johnny Appleseed proportions. The cold and wet’d winnow some cracks into the leather but Rawlings could give a toss.
“Man needs to put some leisure on doesn’t he? Duty or no.”
He looked down for Tiger’s seconding or mere tolerance but he wasn’t there. Turning around he saw the dog not chewing on his bone but listening to the air. The last thing he would remember was the dog’s black-brindle hackles slowly climbing his spine, south to north, before he bared his teeth and began to growl.
As Rawlings tumbled through the air for a long two seconds he saw only Seven Foot Slim’s maroon sweater vest. It was so oversized Slim had to bunch about a foot’s worth of excess length up at his waist and tuck it under his St. Paul Rodeo Commemorative Belt Buckle. He saw that belt buckle plain as day: A little bronze bronc rider, knees bent and mid-air off the saddle, brandishing his hat in one hand and still holding the rope with the other. Rawlings, unthinking, had an unbidden insight. ‘Holding his hat makes no sense. That’s not something a bronc rider would do.’ His left hip impacted against cold cement just before his head met the corner of an iron park bench. In the timeless span of a micro-second before he passed out he thought ‘Tiger.’