On a hillside of the greenest green, two giant stags paw the earth, snorting sulfurous fire from their flared nostrils. They viciously lock horns and battle, powerful legs kicking up clods of dirt, then with a powerful jerk of its head, one stag breaks the other’s neck.
“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end… ”
Billy is in an elevator that plummets madly into a bottomless, rocky cave, the arrow above the door spinning wildly counter-clockwise as the elevator plunges, lower and lower.
“Who is and who was… ”
A combination lock clicks as the dial spins furiously. A computer screen flashes with six-digit numbers whirling by in a blur. Billy struggles with a key as large as he is, trying to lift it into a giant lock.
“And who shall give you the Morning Star.”
In a brilliant blue sky, the sun explodes, and Billy watches it, reflected in Brother David’s dark eyes. David smiles, but his face dissolves, melts in the heat of the sun, and now Billy sees only a mushroom cloud rising to the heavens, a joyous firestorm vaporizing everyone and everything on earth.
-12-
Little Brown Jug
A bleak Air Force utility shed of corrugated metal stands in a dry basin alongside a darkened road in the Wyoming countryside. The two airmen will spend the night and return to base in the morning. Reynolds unrolls his sleeping bag on the concrete floor. Sayers opens a rucksack and pulls out plastic food pouches containing their M.R.E.’s, meals-ready-to-eat in military jargon, the source of endless complaints among the soldiers. He tosses one to Reynolds, who opens the pouch and pulls out what looks like a popsicle stick with a malignant tumor.
Reynolds examines his dinner in the light of a forty-watt overhead bulb. “What do they call this mystery meat, shit on a stick?”
Sayers reads the label, squinting through his glasses. “Mock shiskebab.”
“When I offered to die for my country,” Reynolds says, “I didn’t mean ptomaine poisoning.”
Sayers digs through the rucksack. “Jericho didn’t take his. Maybe we got another choice.” He comes up with a third pouch and reads the label, “Chipped beef on toast with brown gravy.”
Reynolds takes a look. “If we had truth-in-labeling, that’d be called, ‘diarrhea on shoe leather.’”
Sayers lights a match to a heating tablet, which begins to glow. He sticks the two M.R.E. pouches in a canteen cup, pours in some water, and holds the cup over the burning tablet. “It’s moving.”
“What is?”
“The shiskebab. Or maybe it’s the chipped beef. I think it’s alive.”
Reynolds crawls into his sleeping bag. “I’m not too hungry, anyway.”
Sayers turns off the light and douses the heating tablet. “Me neither. Let’s get some shut-eye, finish up tomorrow and go collect our bread from Jericho.”
In the darkness, both men try to get comfortable on the rock-hard floor. “Damn, Spike, what I wouldn’t give for one of those vibrating mattresses at the Shangri-la Motel in Casper.”
“Yeah, well this ain’t so bad. Think about poor Jericho. At least we got a roof over our heads.”
After a moment, Reynolds sniffs at the air. “You squeezed the cheese!”
“Did not!”
“Did so!”
“No way!” Sayers says. “The one who smelled it dealt it.”
Still in his sleeping bag, Reynolds tries to roll away from Sayers but only succeeds in banging into a steel post that supports the roof of the shed. “Damn! This is like being in jail.”
“We’re still better off than Jericho,” Sayers says.
The nighttime air is cool and scented with sagebrush. The moon casts a creamy glow over a stunning pylon of volcanic rock more than twelve hundred feet high. Twenty million years ago, this wedge of phonolite with its edged prisms was the core of an erupting volcano. Wind and rain over the millennia have erased the surrounding walls, but the hard rock core remains. Now, it catches the moonlight and reflects it over the valley and the small, tumbling stream.
Jack Jericho first saw Devil’s Tower in a movie. The extraterrestrials landed there in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Years later, stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, he had driven here on leave. He camped out in the shadow of the Tower, fished in the stream, and like the little aliens, was transported somewhere else, at least in the spiritual sense. When a maintenance position opened in the 318th Missile Squadron in Wyoming, less than 100 miles away, Jericho jumped at it.
Jericho would lie on his back and look up at the Tower. He knew all the Indian legends, the seven little girls who were attacked by bears while playing on the giant rock, then soared into the sky and became the constellation Pleiades, or Seven Sisters.
Tonight, in the moonlight, Jack Jericho plucks a mushroom from the embankment and tosses it into his helmet, which is filled with parsnip and acorns. He stirs the mixture, then pours it over a trout, which is sizzling on a rock in an open fire. He pokes at the fish with a twig to keep it from sticking.
“And now monsieur,” he says aloud, doing his best imitation of a stiff-lipped sommelier, “would you care for a fine Chardonnay to go with your terrine des poissons a la creme de caviar?”
Jericho grabs a small jug from his rucksack, pulls out the cork with his teeth, and sniffs. “Ah, robust, not subtle, with just a hint of Aunt Emmy’s corn and Granny Jericho’s barley.” With his eyes closed, he takes a long pull, swallows, then coughs and sputters like an old Ford pickup. “No,” he says, his eyes moist, “not subtle at all.”
Jericho takes the fish from the fire with a flat stone he uses as a spatula an begins eating with his fingers. Another pull on the bottle, and he breaks into song.
“Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,
Little brown jug don’t I love thee,
Ha! Ha! Ha! You and me,
Little brown jug don’t I love thee.”
He takes a drink, licks his fingers. Another pull, and the jug is empty. Jericho staggers to his feet, grabs his saw-toothed knife, and cuts several low-hanging branches from a fir tree. When he has enough, he begins building a small lean-to. He pulls up several handfuls of long grass from the embankment for a bed, then cuts a cat-tail stalk. Crushing the bark of a spicebrush twig under a rock, he makes a paste which he squeezes onto the cat-tail. Then he kneels at the water’s edge and begins brushing his teeth.
A movement catches his eye and Jericho lifts his head. A white-tailed fawn, no more than three feet tall, stands on the opposite bank of the river watching him. Jericho salutes the animal with his cat-tail toothbrush. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” he sings softly. “Little brown deer don’t I love thee.”
Then Jericho resumes brushing his teeth, and the fawn lowers its head to drink from the river. They face each other across the water in peaceful harmony. Finally, the fawn turns and prances up the bank and into the woods.
The tumbling rapids echo along the riverbank, carrying Jericho into a deep sleep, but still the nightmare comes. The ground beneath him shudders. Above him, Devil’s Tower erupts in volcanic flames and lava spews from the earth. He wants to run, but there is nowhere to go, for now he is deep underground. The earth moves, slipping out from under his feet. Timbers crack, lights go dark, men scream. Somewhere he hears his father’s voice but cannot see him. His father, who took him into the mine when he was just a boy and gave him a helmet that sank over his ears. His father, who needs his help now. But which way? The foreman yelling for the men to follow him. And Jericho tries to move, crawling through the darkness, but in the dream, he’s slogging through quicksand. He can’t move. The screams grow louder. He is sinking. Deeper and deeper until…