Episode #10
Freemen and a Baby
The earth was rumbling. The very earth was heaving, rolling like a man who steals from drunks. The sound was deafening. It was like having your head pressed against a clothes dryer in a cheap laundromat somewhere in Nebraska.
"Hey, you! You can't sleep here. Wake up, ya bum." My eyes fluttered to reveal an old lady with a broom.
"I said get up! This ain't no hotel, ya lousy loser!" She brandished the broom menacingly.
"Sorry. I must have dosed off during the dry cycle." I picked myself up off the floor and made for the door.
"You dozed off alright, ya beatnik. But it wasn't during the dry cycle. It was when you were in school when you should have been learning. If you had, you'd be somebody today like my Alfie". She was sweeping me out the door. "He's a salesman. Ya loafin' nobody. You'll never be as good as my..."
She was yelling after me as I made my way down the street, but her voice was fading.
So lt had all been a bad dream. The nuclear arsenal I had unwittingly unleashed with a codeword to rain down on all the hip pockets of poverty and welfare in the United States. It had been a horrible nightmarish slumber fantasy. The crazy air force General and his hellish command buried deep in the midwestern tundra. It was all coming back to me now with noxious clarity. I had been moving south from Omaha on a broken moped. I'd become exhausted and sought shelter in a deserted laundromat. I'd dreamed my awful little B-dream, "The Missiles of Wretchedness" and I'd been awakened by Alfie's proud janitress of a mama. Thank god it was over.
But wait a sec. What was over? At least in my dream the welfare state as we know it was about to be wiped off the face of the budget like so much whipped cream being sucked off a pretty piece o'pumpkin pie by some bloated reveler at a Turkey Day in Hades. Now that the dream was gone, I was left with the stark realities of my situation. I was a secret government agent on the lam. Somebody wanted me dead. I had to keep moving.
I kept moving through the wheatfields and cornfields on that dilapidated motorbike. The corn was as high as an elephant's eye. The wheat was as low a blow as Broadway musicals about life in these parts. The chain finally broke, if there is one, and I dumped my tiny ride and continued on foot. I had a nice sense of safety. There was nobody around.
"Hold it right there, prospector." Six men with sawed-off shotguns stood in front of a rusty combine.
"Where you think yer a-goin', city slick?" They obviously wondered about the nature of my proposed destination.
"I'm just looking...for some farmers. Or a farmhouse. Or something friendly like that. Just to see one. I've heard they're nice. Grant Wood paintings. Bovine thing." They sensed the fear seething from my blather.
"He looks like a strong boy, Zeke, lets put him in Farm Subsidy Defense League." The hulking speaker had a neck so thick he could have swallowed an NBA official-sized orb and had room left over for a double slab-burger and a side order of fried corn husks.
"The...Farm...Subsidy...Defense League?" Suddenly I realized that in my rank stupor, I might have stumbled into a radical pro-giveaway buckskin fringe group.
"That's right, woodchuck. The Farm Subsidy..."
"Defense League." I said the last along with him.
"Oh. You've heard of it?" His rural countenance lit up at the recognition factor.
"Yeah. I think I read about you in Time. The hick back lash cover story. And I'd love to join up. I really would. But the thing is, I got a dentist appointment..." They moved toward me.
"My wife is expecting a baby....." I was being carried away through the soon-to-be-surplus agricultural products.
"Alright, alright. I'll tell you the real reason I can't join up with ya..", but it was too late. As far as this group of cow pied brains was concerned, I'd already been conscripted.
"...my car is parked in an ambiguous zone ." I decided to throw it in anyway, since I finally thought of some thing.
We marched through the fields for quite a while til we came to a big haystack. One guy with colorful suspenders went and pulled down on a pitchfork that was stuck in front. A door opened up on the side of the haystack. That was the last straw.
Inside the haystack was a fancy conference room. Big letters on the wall spelled out FASUDEL. All the farmers took off their John Deere baseball caps and put-on real goofy looking military hats. Then they all started to say some kind of oath.
"I pledge allegiance to FASUDEL and the tidy sums which we will continue to get for growing our own beyond the capacity of the country for which it stands to eat. Amen." A few of them got the word all mixed up. They were a real bright crew.
"What's yer name, boy?" The leader, who had more corn kernels on his hat than anyone else turned to me.
"Me?"
"No, that other puppy dog we just dragged in here." I looked around. There wasn't anybody but me. It was a sarcastic joke at my expense. The FASUDELs laughed. By now I had figured out that FASUDEL, which they had spelled out in corn cobs and which some of the wives had made into an incredibly ugly quilt was short for Farm Subsidy Defense League. They probably liked the shorter version cause it sounded like an Arab terrorist group that liked to disrupt airports by grabbing up all the no pork sections on El Al flights.
"Never mind. It doesn't matter what yer name be. I'm going to give you yer new FASUDEL name. Come over here and kneel down." I guessed it was something like being knighted. Only instead of a sword, they used a harrow. It was a harrowing experience.
"I dub ya.,...Elmer." He touched my shoulder with the big sickle. "Rise up and repeat after me: I (FASUDEL name).."
"I FASUDEL name... "
"No, boy, you say 'Elmer' there."
"No, boy, you say 'Elmer' there..."
"Do solemnly swear to uphold the laws of the Farm Subsidy Defense league...." I kept on repeating after him.
"That I shall fight to the death all government agencies ..." I snuck a look at all the sharp objects in the room.
"Which try and take away our honest right to fair pay for the corn and wheat...." I went on playing echo machine for the big hayseed all the time wondering if Philanthropist new about these cornball insurgents.
"...which pops up on our land every year the way God makes it...." I hoped it wasn't a long oath. I really did.
"So help me Big Harvest Moon, I will."
"So help me Big Harvest Moon, I will." Then they all jumped up and started pumping my hand like there was no water in the cistern on a Saturday night.
"Welcome aboard, Elmer. Yer jest in time for the big raid on the Department of Agriculture sub-station up in Duffus County." If this one's teeth would just rot a little more, he could do a perfect Gabby Hayes.
"Yeah! We gotta stop 'em afore they do another o'them acreage surveys." This fellow FASUDEL-ian didn't have five o~clock shadow. He had a facial eclipse.
Suddenly the sound of choppers filled the air above our secret haystack. It wasn't dentures either. It was a pair of helicopters. A voice came over a loudspeaker cutting through the din of whirring blades.
"Attention you men in that haystack. We know you're in there. Throw out your Sears and Roebuck catalogs and come out with your hands up!" It was a familiar voice.
"You'll never take us alive, you pinko groundhogs!" I was the one shouting because I didn't want it to look like I was the Judas goat.
"Naw. We might as well turn ourselves in. It's neigh on to supper time. No use makin' a fuss" They all filed out of the illegal haystack and stood with their hands raised as the copters landed and federal marshals rushed to arrest them. I was left standing to the side until a man in plain clothes tapped me on the shoulder.
"This way. Philanthropist wants to see you," he said.
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