Notes on Dimensional Time [The Trial of Jim Dandy][Chapter 4, Part 2 (cont’d)]

[Notes on Dimensional Time]
The Trial of Jim Dandy
Chapter Four [Part 2 Continued]

[NOTATION]: When last we visited Jim Dandy, he was entwined in a confrontation with Bortsch a menacing mountain of a bar-master, a confrontation which would in short order result in violence and the 86-ing of our protagonist and his mate #1. In the virtual iteration [April 29 post, Notes on Dimensional Time Tumblr blog], the MGT inserted an intervention, to wit, that the rest of this text was “immaterial.” As we shall soon see, this designation was systematically premature.

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In the hybrid state of waking life and dream, aided in my contemplative reflection on matter and immaterial, my identity a mixture as volatile as nitro, I settled in America, like everyone else, one among many, a refugee, abandoning nostalgia and poetry with it, art an echo of a distant theory of existence, predicated on book words and hand-me-down insight. Here in this Union, I represent a contemporary synthesis, a binding on a ghostly perception of all that isn’t.

I warmed my fine hands by the comfort of fire, burning away worry and doubt and dismay. Singularity melting, like ice and snow in springtime from the flanks of the Sangres. Momentarily, at least, I relaxed and closed my eyes to this feeling. Soon, my reverie complete, and its cinematic nothingness fading from black, I reentered my place at a watering hole at the end of the Road.

>

Out of the corner of my eye, in the peripheral vision, I noticed the hulking Bortsch. His trajectory is determined, and I am his target. The grizzly stalks the deer tangled in barbed wire. I breathed deeply, releasing breath like smoke leaking between my teeth, gathering force and focus. The little hairs of my hackles arched and were spikes. My face as in the mists of ages past transformed and was a painted mask of fury, though to the witness naught changed. I studied the mountains on my fists. My claws, my bony wrists, flexed the artistic muscles of my forearms, as my shoulders became stones. A smile crossed my lips and disappeared. My heart beat steady and slow, like a bell tolling, and every mundane pain was dispersed.

— Dandy, I’ve been looking forward to this moment for quite a while. I’m hoping to savor it. Still, let’s cut to the chase, though, so as not to disrupt the rest of the patrons..
— Need to confess? Have a joke to share? A confidence? A friendly anecdote or diversion?
— You’re 86-ed. Outta here. Done. Finito. Permanently banned. Fran, too.
— On what grounds?
— Off the premises. Away. See ya later. Adiose. Vamoose. Move your ass. Scat. Motor. Don’t come back.
— Just like that. After all this time.
— Exactly like that.
The bezerking blood simmers, percolates, and boils. The thunder rolls through my spirit, and my hands are hammers. It is Thursday and Tuesday, a red day, a day of fangs and claws. My skin is armor, scaled and gnarled. The ancient rancor and trembling brews.
— Nothing to say? Not a word from the damned troublemaker’s maw, now, eh? You’re obsolete, Dandy, a wisp of nothing, a speck of dust. Out of sight, out of memory, out of time. You’re bad for business, and you gotta meander. I don’t want the cops here, and you bring them, a-hassling, making it tough for the rest of us. I’m not going to have my bread and butter wasted by a trail mote. Enough is enough, and your basta is ahora. No tarrying. Scamper.
Words to camouflage movement.
— I smell an edict from the Pope of Canyon Road, the mustache flinches, si?
I shift in my posture, subtly. Like a coil winding tighter, a spring.
— What’s that, camerone?
—Life’s about risk, no? A gamble. The Pope’s game, your table, it’s shuttered, in the closet, behind the painted doors.
— Shut up, Jim. Don’t say another thing.
Hips a foundation, knees made of heat, feet like cat’s paws.
— Butter both sides of your bread with shit, and the shit will be on your fingers, no doubt, before you tongue. You pay the bluecoats off, but they can’t keep the stuffing in the bear, if the Feds bust in on your dirty dancing, your seedy ceilidh. Law is bought and sold, and you’re hedging your bets on a Game that’s a secret parlay, and the chapter’s written on my account, is this what you’re telling me. I read code. I talk it too, like my Navajo amigo over yonder, Gustavo.
— Zip it, you fool.
— Cash money and family deeds, you’re a trading post, in the old school, a shadow op, a gentleman’s club, that it? Any lingo will do, Gordo trader. The tell is in the flinch.
The bar goes on alert, like a hive, as the tension rises between the big man and me. Like insects, a hive mind, or groundhogs and chipmunks. Monkeys, saturated in chemistry and heightened, fresh to the perfume of war or its promise, keen to threats and volatile substance, collectively sensitive to the pantomime before the blades are drawn. Combat is nigh, and my very soul rejoices, quivers with mighty song, like trumpets, like a blast from the whale’s blowhole. My hands are hot glass. My spine is a cannon, the fuse lit.
— Are you going hard, hillbilly?
I sense Bortsch’s hesitation, his nervousness. Some of the crew made noise in affirmation at my disclosures, and I still have allies, then. No one of these muckrakers will stand with me, but none will raise a bottle to the back of my skull either. One-to-one, then it is, and the zero sum. Management versus consumer, it’s the set-up, sure, but no one counts on a free radical. No one estimates the chaos correctly. False assumptions and bad outcomes, when the sub- isn’t compliant. I ain’t backing down on this sand. How invested is the fatty in keeping the gamble hushed? We’ll soon discover, possibly, but to me this is irrelevant, a sideshow, a ploy, a positioning device, a false beacon. When the duck hunts the dog, he uses the man for a decoy.
— Hard wouldn’t be the way I’d put it. Brutal, more like it.
— Are you asking for it?
We approach the cusp, and the eclipse. Now, the world is slowing down, I’m gently rising and turning. I’m a cloud and an arrow, an animal and an element. No tether and restraint, and destiny is dead. In the interstitial a new dawn, a profane instance of rejected fate, made holy with crushing force, the ferocity of alteration, a strange prayer, a pact with the unforeseen. Before me is a clay soldier, behind me all the names and my people, under me my grave, above the heavens, and I am lightning and the orb spinning a hurricane.
— Last chance to go easy, punk.
And I see them all in the adrenal optics channel of my memory, hastening to the blank screen, my mentors and masters, my fellow patriots and our episodes, some merry, some grim. We did our sparkling festival of wanton song, we clubbed one another til no other was left, and our goblets shattering, in the house falling down.
— You sure about Frantic? She is clean, mate. Well, relatively.
— What? Her? She’s out, I said.
Forever, unresolved.
— Let’s commence, sir.
Pause.
— I’m giving you a goddamn second to reconsider, Dandy.
— & it’s passed.
Bortsch is a vet. He’s done it a thousand times and more again. A hand to the belt and one to the collar, and out ye go! But the angles aren’t right, and the protocol’s off. He’s on his heels and catching his breath, and I’m too close, and something’s not right. He fires early at half. A hammy right hook at my skull. A strike meant to damage really, and I’m under it, leaning hard into the short left body shot, curling into an uppercut with the other hand, rolling out and pivoting for the strong right straight cross - BOOM - and he’s buckling, a knee to the strong leg’s thigh, a counter-clockwise rotation, and the sweep of the roundkick, to the face, and his head snaps, it’s over, he’s falling like a tree on the table behind him, fists, clenched, blood droplets tracing a liquid measure of his dissent in midair, a noise from his throat. I hear a tooth meet the tile with a tinkle, bouncing twice. When the loads come to rest in the horizontal more or less, and I perfunctorily check his pulse, pat his full cheeks, and whisper —
I’ll be leaving, then…
—
I step over his mound of meaty prostration, as the uproar begins behind me, and stride to and through the door into the new night, whistling “Whipping Post,” a tear in my eye.