Oggy insisted on removing all trace they had walked near the mouse habitat by dragging a broom behind his footsteps, a request Bella ignored implicitly, and eventually they stumbled on a spool that could be rolled down the middle of the flooded boulevard, police writing them several tickets, Bella's mother stumbling by in a feverish search for her own methamphetafuckmeup.
"You kids have fun," said Bella's mom as her pants fell down her skeletal frame and she disappeared down a rocky embankment, ever scratching the psoriasis on her forearm, her hair lay like seaweed on a shipwreck.
Bella rolled the wooden spool bravely across congested the highway 1 intersection, Oggy limped along with his redwood crutch apologizing sin voce to the honking commuters on their way to Watsonville seamstress factories and San Jose office buildings.
"Be careful!" advised Oggy as the worn redwood stump that allowed him to take pressure off his swollen left foot eroded further on the bitter concrete and asphalt...cars and commuter vans honked, commuters chatted on bluetooth telephones, complaining to their phone mates of disgusting and useless homeless fuck ups, devouring welfare checks with heroin needles, abusing the system, disrupting the clever flow of poison to the urban veins.
"Oh, some dirty piece of shit holding up traffic, probably sermonizing about political asylum for cop killers," said one driver of a BMW sports coupe leaning on his German horn. "So, how do the sales projections look?"
Oggy slowly reached the safety of the sidewalk, broken by neglect and flooding, hundreds of homeless moochers, trodding on the freedom they never bled for, milking the system by destroying infrastructure, maligning progress.
"Bella!"
Oggy could see the police car pass Bella by inches, raising a 6 foot wave of water and oil and homeless urine that drenched Bella beyond her already soggy state. She ignored it as she always did, her life being one of heroic pursuit of unconventional objectives. The police car didn't stop to harass Bella and this detail bothered Oggy because the hairs on his untamed beard were tingling with the sensitivity of brutality and opression he had developed over the years.
This would certainly be a problem...thought Oggy...before drifting into a static daydream that involved extinct Indians and moon dust...something about the dark mascara streaking on Bella's mom's cheek haunted him...
The problem indeed unfolded as Oggy soon limped into the trash strewn parking lot of the River Street Shelter (Oggy being too occupied as of late to dutifully pick up trash)...Forest, the mother of the 9 puppies, was barking madly as Bella screamed at a wretched meth fiend whose ass cheeks flapped through windows worn in his patchwork trousers.
Violence always upset Oggy as it implicated mankind in a greater regression toward tree living apes...what progress had been made at all if this was how we resolved conflict? Fiber Optics and brutal grunts in the urban jungle?
The story was not hard to confirm: Brett, the plaintiff, had merely been inspecting the puppies in their temporary tarp shelter. He'd been checking on their condition as Brandy, the girl Bella had asked to take care of them while Oggy and she had been searching for the wooden spool, had disappeared, but she had transferred her responsibility to Redwood Moon, another girl sleeping under a picnic table. who in turn had transferred it to a guy Brett knew in passing as a musician...etc etc. until Brett took it upon himself to check on the status of the puppies....
"And then that crazy bitch jumped up on my shit and bit me."
He was referring to the mother dog, Forest, whose bleeding snout was presently being attended to by Bella.
Brett displayed his torn trousers and bleeding leg.
"Fucked up! Lucky if I don't get the rabies!" he assessed.
Bella had that crazy look in her eyes and Oggy hustled fast across the parking lot (almost pausing to pick up a plastic 6-pack retainer and cut each ring so as to prevent the suffocation of a dolphin or pelican when that ring later was swept into a storm drain) to reach her before she could find the steak knife that he knew she'd hidden in the shelter of the tarp. Forest seemed indifferent to the bleeding wound on her nose, the portions of glass sticking out our her flesh, the jagged cut, the puppies even more indifferent as their only goal were the lactating tits of their mother....and always the merciless rain fell, always the squeaking of soaked leather sandals, the cold misery of damp chests, the ragged coughs, the reek of unwashed clothes...the rain and wind, and fog, the honking of cars on nearby Hwy 1, the gawking frenzy of the runaway kids who loved watching fights and violence as it reminded them of home but they weren't involved...as the rain pounded the corrugated metal roof, wind lashing it under the makeshift cardboard walls of the ragged shelter.
 |
| Luckily, Oggy is no stranger to desperate settings |
Bella found the knife and would've stabbed Brett in the chest had she not tripped on the tangled nest of rope Oggy had woven from burlap Onion sacks to reuse resources that otherwise would've chocked the arteries of landfills, basically killing future babies with pollution. Oggy arrived moments before Bella freed herself and he was able to prevent murder.
"I want to recommend we all take a moment to collect ourselves," suggested Oggy.
"YOU STAY AWAY FROM MY DOG OR I'LL CUT YOUR FUCKING THROAT!" Yelled Bella in Brett's direction, pointing with the sharp end of the rusty knife. Oggy stood between them with his redwood crutch as a fence, his sodden wool serape dripping mud and water and humility, like a monk. Brett shrugged.
"OK CUNT. YOU KEEP YOUR FUCKING DOG AWAY FROM ME AND MAYBE SHE WON"T GET ANOTHER BOTTLE ACROSS THE FACE."
Oggy considered this progress in the negotiations but he was nevertheless struck by a nostalgic desire to return to the simpler times in the dense Redwood grove, alone with his classical guitar, his meditations and yogic, universal contemplations...but hadn't people warned him that he was retreating to a false world, a vain hermitage, when the real conflict and life was among the people? "It's easy to be a wise man on top of a mountain," is what the sages say. Wisdom must be tested and now Oggy was being tested. Oh, how he was being tested...the 6-pack ring, the possibility that the mice at the train yard had been impeded on, the cars he had momentarily disrupted, the police and their bitter sermons, Bella's mom desperate and shivering in the cold with only a wet t-shirt, the traces of mascara she'd applied days earlier, now streaking down her wrinkled cheek...these and a complicated mosaic of multi-dimensional images returned to Oggy with throat chocking madness, the implications and exact details on the past three hours would take, Oggy estimated, months to analyze and ponder...but this one confrontation with Brett, the bleeding dog, the as yet un-determined status of the wood spool shelter, the squealing puppies, the trash in the yard, the puddles all demanded serious consideration. The larger problem of climate instability, the life span of planet Earth and even the solar system, the sun's life span and what that meant to Oggy and the puppies and specifically if there was a microcosmic and macrocosmic parallel-ism that Hermann Hesse would identify but only because Hesse had time and was not besieged by one crisis after another...all of this swarmed Oggy's mind like a Mescaline dream he could not control...and still the puppies squealed in the rain, their coats tangled and muddy, their eyes not yet open to the horror, squinting and crawling blindly toward a bleeding mother...Oggy glimpsed a greater image, a correlation...a Platonic ideal or metaphor for life, something that was eternal or universal...a hint of the eye through which God sees everything...and it was there, greater than Oggy's mind but trapped within it, a connection between every detail of the day, the mascara and the 6-pack ring and the wave of water and the BMW there on the highway and the puppies and the steak knife and the terrible decay of the flesh in the acidic rain of reality...the inescapable death and rebirth, not to mention the lost wire tip somewhere in the woods...but to describe that elusive thread adequately or employ it for the greater salvation of mankind would prove much harder...more fleeting...like the cosmetic mascara streaking down Bella's mom's aged face, manufactured tears or were the tears real and only the color fake? Fake tears? Or Fake color?
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