Merryweather Unleashed, Part II

But soon enough, as the very first needle rays of sunlight shone through the dark branches of the skeletal trees that fended the parking lot from the park, Andreas Stackenwalter saw come forth from the gates of the wildlife refuge a bizarre trio of beings, maybe the last of the nocturnal creatures caught on the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife webcam.  (5 new subscribers daily, on average.)

Striding into the parking lot came a stirringly upright, tall, and well-groomed male figure who looked neither to the left nor to the right, a figure of frost, not merely because the pale rising sun made a halo about his head (defended against the biting morning chill by a muffed cap) but because he wore an immaculate lab coat, glittering with frost like diamond dust over we hope something warmer.  His hands, however, were fat with gloves and about his neck hung like the head of an enemy a strange horny black device.  Flanking this fellow loped a pair of copper-colored mastiffs panting clouds of frozen breath, their drool all-but phosphorescent in the Nordic dawn and freezing into blunt icicles as they stomped along.


The threesome stopped a few feet from Herr Stackenwalter.  The newborn sun shone on the newcomer's round, owl-eye glasses and showing up the red of his faultlessly trimmed beard and mustache.


Andreas took a hand from a glove and offered it the stranger.  "Phineas," he grunted.

"Herr Trainer," Phineas said, his greeting hidden in a white cloud of sub-freezing breath, and shook the extended hand.


"Und how is your iron cross?" asked the older man.


"Es läuft gut," said Phineas, exercising his Plattdeutsch.

"Gut," answered Andreas and rubbed the head of one of the unneutered behemoths.  "Which one is this one?  I always am forgetting."

"Sangreal."


The German nodded at the other one.

"Siege Perilous, since none may sit on him."



(Herr Stackenwalter, although a true knight, was never trained in the classics, and should be forgiven for not catching the Arthurian references, but Phineas--or Dr. Phineas Fairfax to the cognoscenti--had yet to find college graduates of French, English, and Celtic descent who appreciated the beasts' names, either.)  Sangreal gave a communicative shake of his enormous noggin and sent balls of freezing drool flying. 

The niceties at an end, Stackenwalter asked, "You saw him?"

"One of them," Phineas said and rested a hand on the night-vision goggles about his neck.

"Greek manufacturing?"

"German," he said, finding a chance to impress the old man again. "The Polyphemus Monocular."  (Indeed the device possessed a single eye.)  "Sicht mit Night Vision Technologie."

Andreas grunted again, grimly happy to hear a normal language, if only in an advertising slogan.  "Und what did you see in the forest?"

"He had something, but what, I couldn't tell."

"The dogs, they did not attack?"

"Yes.  And he ran.  But I saw enough.  He knows that someone's on to him."

"Someone.  Let him think 'someone.' Well, this is good enough.  Now to home and the kitchen.  We must be thankful.  You brought it?"

Phineas nodded and strode on to the far end of the parking, Sangreal and Siege Perilous tramping along in his wake.  The trio arrived at an ancient SUV, black, nondescript and faceless, and all-but camouflaged before the leafless thickets of red-hipped wild roses.  Here Phineas opened the back hatch for the beasts which put up a rather pathetic fight against gravity, then crawled within.  Phineas himself was making a search through a cooler and soon was bringing Andreas an insulated bundle.

"They uncovered it outside Irkutsk where they were putting in a luxury condo village."

"Oligarchs..." Andreas muttered, but taking the bundle added, "Sehr gut.  Danke," He gave Phineas another quick shake of the hand and turned back for his own car.

But then a new vehicle entered the lot: a pistachio green van blazoned in mulberry purple Doogle's Doodles.  "Speak of the devil," said Andreas. 

 "Time to go," whispered Phineas.

"Ja," said Andreas.  "He will not come out until we go.  But the other one has told him of our hunt." The old man said, a smile of appreciation thawing as the sun rose another micron, "Danke, Phineas," and patted the bundle again.

Andreas went to his little kingfisher blue speedster.  Once within he found that his own beasts only wanted to get within the bundle, Olga and Una scenting no doubt ancient smells, smells lingering in their minds from their ancestors hunting across the steppes of prehistoric Asia.  But the old German gave a "Nein," drove forth from the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge, and made for home and kitchen, even as he eyed the parking lot through the side mirror.  The devil was there, in a chariot of pistachio green.

But he would forget for today, the American Thanksgiving.  He must bring the bundle home to start the marinade for the horly de filets de rhinocéros laineux (known on the streets as fried woolly rhinoceros steaks).  (The h was silent, just like the 't in Tlasiwapsit't.  Herr Stackenwalter knew that undisciplined moderns spelled it orly de &c., but on his kitchen shelf sat a luxury reprint of Le Cuisinier parisien, Deuxième édition, revue, corrigée et augmentée.  If orly was good enough for Carême, it was good enough for Andreas Stackenwalter.)  He would be serving his woolly rhinoceros with steamed potatoes with quail gravy, corn, squash, and a pumpkin-cranberry mousse.  Ja, it would be a good dinner.

Merryweather Unleashed, Part I

The most dangerous people in Merryweather the Thanksgiving morn just past were the antisocial scofflaws who secretly loaded their dogs into the caged-off cargo spaces of their hybrid offroad sedans (whose manufacturers posed as sponsors on the fauxmercials between PBS programs on Saturday night) and with their unwitting, only-want-to-love-you hostages in tow, headed off in the frosty hours before dawn to the bleak and empty Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge, there to let the beasts run around as dogs are meant to--and maybe stir up a flock of snow geese or sandhill cranes.  (This gave the amateur wildlife photographers a chance at a nice action shot.) 

And this feast of lawlessness had to be on this day at this hour, since only then was there a good chance of avoiding a Parks and Rec deputy ready to hand out a ticket for allowing one's dog run free without a leash.

The Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge used to be just a muddy maze of pot-hole-pocked gravel roads running through a dystopian paradise of invasive weed species, all of it kept from the public by a couple of miles worth of chain link fencing.  In ye olden times, middle-aged bachelors would bring the pooches thither to run in the cool of the evening and while they shot a rabbit or two.  But as we learned, the ancient mothers of Merryweather had (after gerrymandering the boundaries to include key neighborhoods in the college town about twenty miles away) pushed through a measure to buy up the land, complete with its brackish ponds and sloughs full of waterbirds, and so was born the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge.  (The eggheads in the college town said that they had to include the 't on the end of Tlasiwapsit't, otherwise they would be pronouncing it all wrong.)  The site was gussied up, given a paved parking lot, cedar walkways through the fens and reed beds, a guilt-inducing informational kiosk about the Tlasiwapsit people (the writer of the blurb in the kiosk did not care about the 't), and a gleaming sign declaring that dogs were forbidden, in order to preserve the native habitat.

So, this Thanksgiving morn, in the weak illumination in the chill fifteen minutes or so before actual sunrise, a few intrepid parties were disembarking from their hybrid adventure cars to throw into chaos their little corner of the world.

Through the main gates the drivers crept, in one hand drive-through mocha-mint lattes, but in the other no dog leash, for Lexi, Sasha, Bruno, Egon, and/or Shasta had already shot out of the vehicles like torpedoes, away into the frozen fog, with uninhibited, feral joy, eager after rabbits and voles.

But a few of canines this morning were not so enthused.  Squatting on the October-Revolution-red-leather front seats of a small, scarabesque foreign sports car sat a pair of Pekingese: Una and Olga, the wheezy reasons for the spendy veterinary and grooming bills accrued by Mssrs. Geoffrey Durant-Dupont, Esq. and Andreas Stackenwalter.  It was the latter gentleman, an elderly German in a National Volksarmee winter hat (ear flaps down) and 1989 army parka, who was in attendance on the palace dogs this morning.  But he had not come to this morning for a crepuscular jaunt over the hoar-becrusted mud trails.  Instead, leaving the golden beasts in the car (it was only 28 degrees...) Andreas Stackenwalter stationed himself outside of the driver's side door and stood there immobile, his breath like Hyperborean cigarette smoke.  To any eye catching sight of him that dawn, he was more forbidding than any pooch-precluding sign.  But no eyes were on him and his own gaze, aged but clear, was fixed like the sight of a rifle upon the gates of the refuge, where many a fleece-jacketed Merryweatherites with a Malinois mix was now quietly entering.

 

But no one had come out of the gate.  Yet.  Andreas Stackenwalter knew, though, that he would.  He would wait.

They Heard It Through the Grapevine, or This Old Merryweather

But a change in the fortunes of moribund little Merryweaher came about ten or twenty years ago, from the too-predictable phenomenon which afflicts locales with any natural beauty, temperate weather, and a charming downtown district of old Progressive-era brick-and-mortar structures.  That is to say, over a nice Pinot picked up on her last winery-tour weekend, some chatterbox with plenty of money from undetermined sources ended up rhapsodizing to her friends about getting away from the rat-race through blissful self-exile to “the country.” 

En masse her nip-and-tuck friends (in the main generic specimens from the swirl-swish-and-swallow crowd) in turn convince their mates (who are too busy funding winery-tour weekends to think straight) that a migration to pastures new (or at least to property taxes lower) would be a Good Idea.

Thus came the gentrifying invasion of the chatterbox and her fellow semi-menopausal friends.  In their fresh-off-the-lot jacked-up SUVs, these grandmotherly barbarians charged into town like archers atop war elephants, armed with Sunset, Southern Living, Country Living, Country Home, French Country Style, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, and/or Martha Stewart Living, not to mention the platinum edition DVD boxed-set of This Old House (complete with the Bob Vila action figures for the grandkids). 

In those exciting days of yore, those wildcatting hell-for-leather matriarchs—when not on weekend treasure hunts for vintage fixtures and period stained glass, or berry-picking to make that perfect Amish cobbler, followed up by a drumming circle at Barb’s—pushed through all that local legislation establishing strict noise and vagrancy laws, as well as founding both the Farmers and Saturday Markets, turning the local swamp into a wetland, establishing the Berryweather High Summer Fruit Festival, and requiring all of the parks to post informational signs about the prehistory of the long-gone native peoples. 

Due to their efforts, within ten years our Merryweather was sporting those neo-Arcadian necessities of a yoga studio, a Saab dealership, flower baskets hanging at every downtown intersection, and an organic bakery selling creations with no calories.  Meanwhile, the formerly dark and meditative hillsides ‘round about were scattered-o’er with housing developments like fast-food boxes dropped from the sky. 

That magical age of confusion and creation, however, ended about five years back when all the vineyards hereabouts were struck with bud blight, the winery-tour weekends slowed, and the real estate market flattened.  By then, however, Merryweather had settled into its current status as an upscale rural enclave.

Primaeval Merryweather, or Blood, Sweat, and Beards

But what can we tell about ye olde Merryweather, its crawling from the slime, its first flowering--or maybe its starting over in some Wild West witness protection program?



Eleazar Meriwether



Merryweather came about in this wise.  Our little piece of paradise was originally the land claim of one Eleazar Meriwether, one of those small-eyed fellows with a huge beard, floppy felt hat, and a resistance to malaria who sprang out of the horizon in days gone by, a star-spangled daguerreotype who took advantage of the absence of any lawful authority to make himself chieftain-in-chief.

In the next generation, one of his semi-legitimate children (the moldy records in the Merryweather Historical Society basement suggest either Vercingetorix or Scipio Africanus Merriwether, his "wives" being Rebecca-Evangeline Littlesmall and/or Sophia Mewseyford) managed to lure the railroad to chug a choo-choo through town.  But the boom started in real earnest when Vercingetorix Merriwether (or maybe Scipio Africanus) looked the other way as the Freemasonic hazelnut and prune planters muscled out the good strong Methodist farming folk.  This also gave the local political machine a creaky giddy-up push (and it has been in motion ever since).

We do not know what this heir to Eleazar Meriwether thought as he contemplated the dark hills round about and the rows and rows of hazelnut and prune saplings running into the horizon.  But we certainly know what his children (Priscilla, Hiram, George, Isaac, Henry, Betha, and Augusta Merrywhether) and his forty-one grandchildren ended up with: a watercolor lithograph of Populist-Era prosperity and respectability, complete with blocks and blocks of books-in-the-black businesses, an agricultural college, an immense bronze fountain with the symbolic figures of the Prune Harvest and the lovers Corylus and Avellena, ultramodern architecture in the form of Arts and Crafts cottages, bubblers to stave off rampant drunkenness, and a boulevard lined with Queen Anne mansions and elm saplings.  (Saplings abounded in those days.)

That Silver Age took on a bit of tarnish when the railroad, the descending aortic artery of any thriving local economy in those days, took a beating from the automobile and the motorway.  (The city fathers of Merryweather (specifically, Edgar Edwin Merryweather) described state route 4 bordering the old Pringle prune ranch as a "significant highway," but no one quite bought it.)  Finally came the 1950s and the interstate, which never bothered to veer close to town, and Merryweather fell into small-town sleepiness, its slumber to be broken only by a kiss tasting suspiciously like Pinot Grigio.

 

Through the bright canopy of a fall-time walnut tree, its leaves Robert Frost yellow, the October sun shone in glints and glances upon an impromptu memorial service that dear old Connie had thrown together for Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, whom no one had seen in about a month.  The muted light was probably for the best, since one might misinterpret someone squinting in the bright sun as being in the first stage of weeping, and really, no one liked Marjorie Mayfield very much.  Wherever she was, dead or alive, the unspoken consensus seemed to be that she had better just stay there.

Dear old Connie had posted a notice of these obsequies on the bulletin board at Summerfield Estates, then paid for a blurb in the Silver Tsunami newsletter, and crossed her fingers.  At the tepid response, however, she just told herself that this handful gathered under the big old walnut tree, its leaves as gold as the dome of a Byzantine church and its nuts like meteors bonking the picnic table and an occasional head, well, these folks were the ones that loved Marjorie Mayfield the most.

Despite their small number, they embraced the spectrum of Merryweather humanity: the narrow-eyed Jay-Douglas "Doogle" Hanson and his fungal amanuensis Anjay Shapurian (no one, even Anjay, was quite sure what nationality he was--but in Merryweather almost everyone had been brainwashed to believe that nationality did not exist); the billiard-ball bald Radu Prinzulescu and his toad-like mother, Maria, looking very much like a Transylvanian barn spirit; the elderly but undiminished Geoffrey Durant-Dupont and his longtime housemate Andreas Stackenwalter, with their Pekingese; and finally young and hale Marco Panzi and Michael Peighsley, whom some (read Doogle and Anjay) whispered were present just to get face-time with any grieving relatives and make a buck by selling off whatever was stewing in Marjorie Mayfield's condo.  But, then, so were Doogle and Anjay.  For as they lifted their plastic dishes of gourmet ice cream, dodged a few black walnuts, and shared highly-edited reminiscences of the mysteriously missing Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, Doogle and Anjay were recalling what she had always said: So many jackals, so few carcasses.

The faithful stood about for a few minutes with their cups of ice cream (which somewhere no doubt was seen as the food of the dead) and smiled pleasantly at one another.  Since Connie had worked hard to put this whole shindig together and was such an angel, it would not do to break her heart.

But in time, everyone (gratefully) dispersed, leaving Connie to gather up the ice cream-coated spoonlets and serving cups and place them in one of those leaf-green Bye-O degradable garbage bags: her little contribution to the Keep Merryweather Green campaign.  With this service to our little town out of the way, she slipped the tops on to the tubs of Cha-Cha Cherry, Mustafa Mocha-Chocolate, Cumulus Cloudberry, and Little Black Bits Vanilla and sighed.  She would have to bring all of this ice cream home, and with her husband being diabetic and even at 79 Connie still trying to keep her figure...But let her freezer bulge.  Anything for a friend.