Escape from Rodeo Burger—Chapter 10

When we arrived to Vespa, we weren't expected. Bill seemed to know what the matter was as we landed with a Vespan air defense fleet escorting us in. 

"Standard protocol," he murmured with a fleck of worry in his voice. 

He explained he believed we had gone through a time warp in the delicate way a doctor might tell you that he amputated the wrong foot. Three years had passed since we left, he said casually as though years were but hours. I couldn't understand, but after we landed there were people explaining it to me, giving me calculations and formulas as though that would make sense. To Bill, it was just one of those things. He was completely autonomous, so it didn't matter to him at all. 

I raced to the hotel to find Esther gone. She had assumed that we died, as they all had assumed we died. Rodeo Burger was no more, and Vespa was no longer threatened by Kalgon City. The time having been elapsed meant we were able to appreciate the significance of our mission—to appreciate its full effect. 

There was nothing left for me here. Bill said I could live in Vespa and I would be treated like a celebrity, but that was something I never aspired to be. When he asked what I'd like to do, I said I'd like to return to Earth. It was 2028 on Earth, and he warned me about culture shock and advised that I visit first. But I just wanted to go home and thanked him anyway.   

I went back to Earth in a small shuttle—to my home in Kilgore, Texas. I held Amoria in my arms and our fishmen pilot didn't try to talk much. I suppose they could feel what I felt without looking me in the eyes. They could not only read minds, but they could sense emotions as well. I learned that my parents had died decades earlier and Amoria and I visited their graves. She didn't seem to know what we were looking at, and I didn't know how to explain it to a child—that buried six feet or so below the grave stone there were decomposing bodies. She didn't know what parents were, nor what death was, nor what it is to mourn. She was in many ways a baby that had only developed physically, but not mentally or emotionally.  

My parents were both buried on a hillside plot beneath an enormous cottonwood tree, and on their simple granite headstones, beneath their names, it read, "Father," and "Mother," respectively. Not husband and wife. Not their occupation. Not Christian or vegetarian—simply father and mother. 

I wish I had gotten a chance to meet them again—to talk to them about Kalgon. To thank them for rescuing me and to let them know that I understood why they seemed cold and made me find my way home so often as a child. It was so that I could find my way home when it counted most. Regardless, I sure could have used more of their love. I suppose, I had it though, and they gave me what can only be painfully and inadequately described as "tough love."

I wanted to raise Amoria on Earth, but Earth of 2028 was not the place I wanted to be. It was a cesspool pretending to be a paradise. It was noisy and crass and full of narcissitic people and very bad music which lacked talent or creativity. It was all autotune and nonsensical lyrics. You needn't have manners or to play an instrument. You needn't have a good voice or your own opinion. Opinions were given through commercials and the news. Everyone seemed to fall into one of two categories—product or consumer. Crime was rampant and the criminal justice system was weak on criminals and cared little about recidivism as though recidivism simply meant return clientele. I felt the culture shock instantly. 

Bill had given me a small black beacon device that he called a Portical. There was an orange button on it, and if ever I tired of Earth, all I needed to do was to press it and they would come and get me. Though as much as modern Earth displeased and disappointed me, home was home. We weren't any better than the Kalgonians. 

I had some money in a bank account from my time on Earth, which I hoped had accrued some interest. It was the only bank in town. The bank teller looked at me strange and asked me if I was Victor Von Gogh the third or something because although I looked only nineteen years old, my license said that I was born in 1946, which would make me the ripe young age of 82. She couldn't understand how it was so and gave me some grief about my license being expired by about 60 years. I told her I had been traveling abroad and hadn't thought to renew it. Then a man emerged from an office, smiled at her in such a way, and said, "I'll handle it from here, Helena." 

"Yes, Mr. Mortensen," Helena aquiesced, watching on with a curious eye as he escorted Amoria and me to his office. 

Mr. Mortensen was a tall slender man somewhere in his seventies and boasted that he had been with the bank for over 55 years and began as an eighteen year-old teller back in 1972. He went on to say he knew my father and mother well and was sorry to hear about their passing. He gave Amoria a sucker and she was content to sit in the chair and lick it—her tongue and cheeks were soon slavered in cherry candy goo.

"Your father, Ulysses, said you would one day return from your travels, Victor. He said you might appear young for your age, which I can tell you is—quite an understatement. He made sure you were provided for, to say the least. Your account is worth well over two and half million dollars. Quite the sum. The family house has been vacant since he passed in 1999, but you'll find it in superb condition. He hired a company to do the upkeep. I've been the sole trustee of your estate. 

"I remember when he came to this office shortly before he passed away and told me a remarkable story. One I couldn't believe. At first, I thought maybe he suffered from some sort of dementia, I'm sad to say. But as he told me the details of Kalgon City and Rodeo Burger, I believed him. Slowly, but surely, I knew he was telling me the truth. And I sat there—I was vice president at the time—and listened intently, mortified as I was. Like a boy being told the most remarkable story he ever heard. 

"So for years I wondered if you would ever return and what would we do with your account if you did not. I suppose we would have left it open. I'm set to retire in the spring and I have briefed my successor on the remarkable story, but frankly, I think he believes me to be off my rocker, so to speak. So, now that I know I am not, here are the keys to your home and your father's 68 Shelby Mustang. It's white—with blue stripes. A truly beautiful machine. I'll send the lawyer over to finalize everything sometime early next week." 

He looked at me and smiled, hoping I would smile, too. But I didn't smile. All I could do was to stare at the ceramic ornament on his desk. It was a cowboy figurine. A cowboy riding a broncing horse, holding on with one hand. I don't know if it reminded him of the story my father told him. Or if he just liked cowboys. Maybe to him it was just a cowboy on a horse in the Wild West. 

He gave me the keys to the house and to the car. I agreed to keep the money I had in the bank but asked to withdraw some to live on for a while. He then explained what a debit card was and said he could have one mailed to me, so I withdrew five thousand to live on until then. He gave us a ride to the house and reminded me that the car was in the garage as though I would forget about it. I think he had an unnatural love for that automobile. 

"Thank you, Mr. Mortensen," I said.  

"Ah, don't mention it, son."

The house was—as I remember it. A beautiful old pale yellow farmhouse with a white wraparound porch. There were dozens of large shade trees in the yard that had grown in my absence. My tire swing was still tied to an oak tree out front, and Amoria, who still hadn't talked, figured it out quickly and slid vertically through it, swinging like Superman with her hands and feet extended. 

It was a beautiful house. The hardwood floors were stained a rich walnut black. I don't think I ever really appreciated how beautiful it was. It seemed purposefully peaceful to me now. The appliances and furniture were all new and untouched, but it was very much like it was when I left. My room remained undisturbed—left just as it was. I sat at the foot of my bed in the silence of an empty house looking up at a poster of Mickey Mantle. I fixed one of the other rooms up for Amoria and would have to order her new blankets and curtain—something more to a girls liking.

The one thing I took from Kalgon was the Jesus cross, which I buried in the prairie grass of the field where they dropped us being we had to walk into town and I didn't feel up to lugging it with us. Amoria and I drove out the next day to get it and when we got back, we hung it in the living room. It was too large to hang over the mantle, so we put it on a wall by itself where it seemed to belong. 

But that gruesome Jesus didn't seem to scare Amoria, rather, she stared at Him in sympathy, and oddly it was as though she was comforted by His suffering. She looked at him in all his agonizing wounds and pain as though she felt badly for him. For life is to suffer. But it is also to love, both of which Jesus exemplified. Life is to be lonely sometimes and fulfilled in others. It is to have and have not. It is to be healthy. It is to be sick. It is to heal and to sustain. To be in love and to be heartbroken. 

The world was chaotic—like it was a burgeoning Kalgon City—given in to hedonism and anarchy and insipid mongrels and mongrelism, if that is such a thing. It took me several months to get acclimated and even when I felt I was somewhat, I knew I really wasn't. I missed the easiness of 1965, and the events that unfolded between then and now, I read about or watched videos detailing. The world was a wondrous place, yet full of so much evil—plenty of which lied in the name of good intention. It was as though the devil seized the earth and decency died. 

It all played, on and on it played, wars and famine, riots and crime, protests and vitrol, until I shut it off and held Amoria on the porch swing, content in her, the daughter I never expected. I found comfort in the simple peacefulness of night, in the crickets chirping in the field, and in the stars that remained distant and unthreatening galaxies far, far away. 

Amoria didn't speak, but she seemed to enjoy herself. We had quiet dinners and we sat on the porch swing and left the TV off, which seemed full of more bad news, violence, and drama. Modern people seemed to have an unnatural fascination with bad news, violence, and drama, I deduced. It is what they chose to fill the void this life carved out of all of us. 

Then one night on the porch swing she casually spoke. I love you, she said as I held her. I love you, too, I replied. As happy as I was she spoke, I didn't want to make a big deal of it. I wanted her to know she could be quiet or she could speak, and neither was better than the other. I rubbed her hair and when she fell asleep to the melodic rhythm of the porch swing chains, I carried her to bed. It was then, after she slept, that I felt lonely. Entirely too lonely for my own good. The farmhouse seemed to grow much larger and darker. And on those nights, I thought of Esther, and I wondered where had she gone.

It almost ended there. I suppose I could have tried to find her. She was from nearby, after all. I could have looked up every Brahm in the phone book and started there. There are a million different ways to find someone in this new world, whereas, in 1965 there are—rather—there were but few. A phone book and a private investigator, being all I could think of. But I didn't search for her. I left her on Vespa in my mind—in that glorious hotel. 

Esther presumably returned to Earth about three years before me in 2025, and with the belief that I had died, surely she had moved on, as they say. She probably moved to New York or to Paris. She surely wasn't in Kilgore, Texas, where no one had an ear for the violin, as she once pined. I had, in secret, searched for her. But I searched modestly, in fear of what I might find. For all my faults, I am.capable of closing chapters and letting things go. Our time had passed. 

I took Amoria to what was once Donut World—where I worked all those years ago. To me it was like yesterday, but to the world, 63 years had elapsed. The building itself remained there on the highway, but it hadn't been in business for 24 years. The paint was pealing from the stucco walls and the flying saucer on the pole no longer spun. Birds had made it a home and abandoned it. The place just sat there as though it were frozen in time. The lights were busted and it seemed beyond repair. Apparently, a Tim Horton's or something had opened in town. There was a sign out front for the realty company that was selling the deplorable building, promising a new lower price in bold print. Balloons they had once attached to the sign, lay on the ground deflated. 

I bought it and hired a crew to fix it up, though I did much of the work myself after they had quit for the day. And 11 short weeks later we had a grand reopening, with the mayor of Kilgore, a congresswoman, reporters, and some townsfolk who remembered Donut World from all those years ago. We all looked on as Amoria Von Gogh cut the ribbon and got her picture in the newspaper.  

Days later, I sat outside on a picnic table as I once did and stared off into those azure skies that were as blue and endless as anything. Skies that I traveled through with my eyes for miles and miles. The moon was faint yet sat there as though it stared back through a curtain made of pale cheesecloth. I wondered if it envied or pitied me. Or if I was too insignificant for it to think of at all. A trailer from a slaughterhouse rolled by full of pigs. I caught glimpses of their blue eyes which were bluer than the sky, and miles deeper. Perhaps I looked at them as the moon looked at me. This world sure could use a Big Baby—is all I could think. It is the only thing that can rid it of the evil that infests and consumes it. We are little more than a beautiful ash tree being eaten from the inside by emerald ash borers.

I was taking it all in when a red convertible pulled up and there was Barbie Swoon, the firecrotch former actress and Rodeo Burger talent acquisition agent, or whatever she once called her whore self. She said she escaped with the resistance to Vespa with all twelve of the breeders, as they called them, shortly before we dropped the bomb. She said when we had sex our souls connected and she was able to read my mind there forward, thus, she knew the bomb was coming before it came. The only way she wouldn't have escaped was if I had failed to deliver the baby, she said, because they would have tracked her down given time to do so. 

I was pleased to hear that they were able to return to 1965 and live out their lives with their loved ones. But Barbie said that she decided to live in the present day because she was not understood in 1965, or so she complained, and Affairs of the Heart wouldn't have her back since they had already killed her off—so it was on to Hollywood for another opportunity. 

"But—how were you able to travel back?" I asked. 

"Oh, it became common technology soon after Kalgon fell," she explained. "Dr. Jeworm took over Kalgon and anything was possible. We didn't think you survived. But then I read of a Victor Von Gogh who opened a donut shop called Donut World in Kilgore, Texas on Facebook and, well, there can only be one Victor Von Gogh. And, despite all these years, I can still read your mind. Whatever became of that lovely lady you escaped Rodeo Burger with?"

"That is the 64,000 dollar question, isn't it?"

"64,000 dollars? Oh, Victor, get with the times, babe! Game shows have billion dollar question these days. Maybe, she returned to 1965. Maybe, if you go back to Vespa, they can send you there. All you got to do is press the button of the device they surely gave you. They gave you one of those Portical doohickeys, didn't they?"

I nodded. But they hadn't told me there was an option, which I could find no way to confess to Barbie without embarrassment. Bill didn't tell me I could go anywhere. I was told the Pseudo portal was closed and if I went back to Earth it could be present time only. I don't know why. I suppose that was the way it was meant to be, if I wanted to be absolutely helpless about it. 

Barbie stayed with us for a few weeks. It was strange having a guest who could read my mind, but it eliminated uneccessary small talk. We had entire conversations at the dinner table and in bed in which we verbally said nothing at all. But there was moments of random laughter which arose out of our telepathic conversation which only masqueraded as silence.

I said goodbye to Barbie when the time came. When she could no longer resist the temptation of Hollywood and traded me and Amoria for it. She knew I was in love with Esther, and unlike me, she found modern society to be much more liberating. She said she would only be a thought away and promised to return, but we both knew she wouldn't. No one ever leaves Hollywood once they get there. And if they do come back, they are only an empty shell of a person, hollowed out by the narcissism, which seemingly radiates from the sun.    

Weeks later, I found myself once more in a contemplative trance on the porch. Amoria was in the yard catching fireflies in a jar and I smiled, my eyes protectively following her. My tired eyes that were glazed over, near sleep. A sleep in which I would dream of Esther. What was I to become in a world in which I didn't belong? I wished I could see Esther, to do again what had been done. I knew there was no real substitute for her, especially now that Barbie had come and gone. I had enough of that sort of affair. No one would ever fill the hole, I resolved.

I might have left it at that. Raised my daughter as I saw fit and not made a stir. Settled into a role and sanded my edges. Managed Donut World and baked donuts myself from time to time. Maybe meet someone suitable and fall in love, in a way. In the good enough sort of way that staves off loneliness like a torch staves off wolves in the wild. Someone to eat dinner with. Who would be a decent role model for Amoria. Who was good enough in bed. Who I didn't slip into and feel lost within as though she consumed me like she was an empty room or closet with all the feelings bitterly fucked out of her by someone a long time ago. Someone who was able to feel something and who I didn't mind kissing goodnight and kissing good morning. Someone who didn't mind kissing me. Things might have ended up that way.

But when I was not as hopeful as I was pragmatic, or happy as I was glum, a bus pulled up to Donut World—a large silver bus that was full of passengers—the outline of whose heads I could see through the tinted window. Only one got off. And into the burning bright dusty sunlight of the desertic landscape of Kilgore, Texas, those brakes squealed and the door opened with a certain declaration of itself and a resolute thud, and out stepped her—a word that fails adequately to describe anyone other. There has always been only one "her" in my life, and that is Esther. 

She said she went back to 1965 and lived four years thinking I was dead until Dr. Jeworm attended one of her concerts at Sir Albert Hall and told her I was alive and well. When she asked him why he came to tell her, he said because he was the world's foremost matchmaker and it was his duty as a hopeless romantic. 

"Then he told me if I gave him the Stradivarious he would take me to you. I believe he did so because he is a love junkie, not because he needed or even wanted that violin. He wanted to see what I would sacrifice to be with you." 

As the bus departed in a trail of dust, she leapt into my arms and that was all. She spared my romantic soul from an eternal sentence of pragmatism and utilitarianism. I was able to have something more in her—something no one could ever take from me. The feeling of being lost was supplanted by the feeling of of being found, and the wild and chaotic world was simply noise on the other side of a pane of window glass. I had Amoria and loved her no less without Esther, but I was a romantic soul and my soul was brighter because of Esther. 

 

The needle dropped on the vinyl and we danced on the porch to Sea of Love by Phil Phillips on the grammophone as Amoria slept soundly in bed. A breeze blew through the white sheer curtains, and frogs croaked to the serenade of Texas crickets. We made love there in the living room and fell asleep under a throw blanket on the sofa until the light of a new day woke us, and Amoria, who wanted pancakes.  

That is how I imagined she'd come, which was bore of lonely nights and diluted bourbon. My reality was solvent. But she had come only in my imagination with the melting cubes of ice in my glass as I sat on the porch and listened to the swing creak and croak back and forth, and to those bullfrogs and crickets. She came not in reality, but in precarious sleep-deprived dreams. 

All I could do is wait. To not ask her to give up anything at all for me. But to hope she would. Perhaps, she had returned to 1965 and had already lived her life and somewhere 63 years later was buried in a grove or a glen next to a husband that never really believed her fantastic story, and certainly hadn't loved her as I had. Or perhaps she was in a nursing home somewhere hanging on, someone's grandmother, looking up at the stars. She hadn't come, but she might, somehow, in a last chapter I'm as of yet unable to write. Someday, she might come. Or is there not enough bourbon in the world to bring her back to me?