The portable crane/lift was a specialty equipment item used for those big signs along the highway.  We didn't know this at first.  What we knew was what we saw.  Beautiful women in what looked like cages hanging in the air.  Neked.  A very married man said.  His ability to blush had been lost somewhere in thirty-plus years of fighting evil.  Damn, a younger guy's eyes followed the beaner'd rope and his eyes lifted from digipad device, up and up, to the bathing beauties!  A middle aged bachelor whistled quietly.  "Looks like we've got our work cut out for us!" 

     "Where'd they get the cages?" The non-blusher stood at least two foot taller than the woman who'd come out of the restaurant.  She was still fumbling with possible put them somewheres pockets looking for a smoke.  "I heard an onusual noise so I came out here."  An older model but in pristine restored condition pick up truck pulled up and two women jumped out leaving the doors wide open.  "WHADDAYA NEED??????"  

     The man looked over his shoulder at the mounding smoke piling around the equipment truck of some Volunteer Fire Department.  "Find out what's on fire!" He whistled by sticking fingers in his mouth and shrilling a shofar blast.  People attached to a rope with carribiners made way over.  "They're just these old underground showers." The woman had been handed a lit cigarette.  "Prolly put down there in an old semi-truck." One woman grabbed a reporter's notebook and jotted down squiggly marks.  Then shoved it back at the young person.  "What's that say?" 

     "It's SHORTHAND.  DON'T THEY TEACH YOU PEOPLE ANYTHING AT YOUR FANCY SCHOOLS?" 

     "LYDIA!" The man pushed into her and drove her backwards.  Stared directly into her eyes.  "KEEP LOOKING at me." 

     The motorbike had rolled up behind us.  Without the motor running the man rolled it forth into the back of my legs.  Knees buckled, a turn around, "WHAT THE FUCK????" The Lonely Bear held up one hand in a wave.  The notebook was plucked from my hands.  "WHAT THE FUCK????"  It was Lydia.  "I'll take notes! You go get you know who!"  She turned to the Lonely Bear.  "How'd y'all get here so fast in this fog?" 

     The Lonely Bear took a síp of what a camp mom called Mountain Piss Water.  "Is there an all to me?" She rolled her eyes.  A line of seriously in need of some repair cars was rolling into the parking lot.  "There's no fog on the highway," Lonely Bear revealed.  "There isn't?"  

     "No ma'more than usual in the very lowest spots."  Men's voices not knowing where the girls were and cussing cellphones were getting out of the cars.  "GO!!!!" 

     On the way to my car a hideous voice, steady-frantic-sounding over some kind of speaker laughed and howled halloweeny and said, "YOU BETTAH FIX US UP GOOD OR YOU CAN KISS THE GIRLS GOOD-BYE." The crane/lift made a creaking, groaning noise and swung.  Like it was lowering, but then jerked up.  Some of the girls fell to knees.  A black plastic garbage bag was pitched out of an unseen area on the now-platform.  A gun was seen pointing at it.  The creepy voice hollered in the speaker, "Shoes.  Now put them on and dance."  The laughing and howling turned to music.

     In second gear up the nearly dark mountain-side highway.  Up and around, gravity at night must be the same in the dark as in daylight, I thought of seeing the road in the happy sunshine daytime, like a matterhorn rollercoaster track hugging tiny people to the neck and shoulders of a giant yeti.  I knew who she wanted me to inform.  And I went directly there but there was no vehicle in the carport.  And most of the stuff usually on board shelves resting on cinderblocks was gone.  A wad of straps was messily out of a bucket laying on its side.  I knew I needed to get to someone I knew in Tennessee.  Fuck the fighting between sports fans.

     Past what seemed like a mile of steaming mulch and hulking logging equipment.  Through backcountry--part Forest, part crags with housing.  Cut-through after cut-through: north and south to go east and west.  The stars above more than all the creeps in the world.  Finally fish-tailed onto the boundary's gravel.  And steamed towards my Ranger's last known campfire site.

     Red plastic cups were all over the ground.  Slick spots of puke.  A duffel bag slow-burning in the firepit.  A small and weak voice called out, "I'm over here.  I am.  I'm here."  Wimpering.  "Oh! Oh my God." I knelt into the man duct-taped and roped to a metal folding chair.  "Ooooww.  Good to see you too.  Well, sort of see you.  They just left.  These'll be swollen shut real soon.  Got yer knife?" 

     "Oh, shit, did I hurt you?" 

     "Where's your knife.  I need you to get it and cut me free." 

     The serated blade frayed the ropes into a jagged release.  He ripped the duct-tape from his skin.  "Go get in the car." 

     A woman in dark clothing stepped in front of me as I turned toward the car.  "Did you do this???" Her low smoky voice desperate to accuse.  The Ranger found his pile of clothing.  "They stole my fucking watch!" He said as he held his pants and shirt in front of his underwear only junk.  "She's not the perpetrator," he told the woman as he pushed my shoulder to keep going to the car.  "Can I ride with you?" Neither of us answered.  My friend leaned on my shoulder to get a booted foot back into his pants.  She reached for my keys.  "Don't fucking touch me," I swerved away and the Ranger's foot stuck in a pantleg tripped him into me and I fell too.  He put a rest hand on my arm.  "We don't know who you are," he said matter-of-factly as he got a second leg back in his pants.  Tapped my arm twice, UP.  He was still buttoning his shirt as I held the flashlight so he could check credentials.  Winced as he tucked in the tail of his shirt but said, "LET'S GO!!!!!" Both he and she crashed into each other trying to get into the front seat.  "Ow." He opened the door and she squeezed herself into the back.  He looked around and decided, "The van took them that way." 

     "You don't have your glasses on!"  

     "I know it did.  I heard it."  He asked for water.  And proceeded to scrape his contact lenses out.  "Go!" He barked when the first one was out.  "Okay, okay." Tires spinning briefly in oozy keg's-been-here mud before I edged the fronts onto something dry and rocked it, jolting into grip and go.  He fished eyeglasses out of his lower pant leg's inner pocket.  "All these TV people and Rock Stars around had me," he reached over and pulled the brights into on.  "THERE!"  There was a Hawaiin shirt in the gravel road.  "They'll have left clues." 

     "Clues?!?" 

     I braked hard and put it in PARK.  Took the keys out of the ignition.  "What are you..." I slammed the door behind me getting out. 

    "You freakin'?"  He was beside me in twelve paces.  

     "Kinda.  But not really.  Listen." He cupped an ear then rose his hand into "Moose Ears, your little brother taught me that move." 

     "No, listen," I tried to gulp away dry mouth and cacked a little cough.  "I came to find you beca, cough, because there's a majorly weird situation going on in Carolina." 

    "Right now?" He cocked his head. 

     "Cha." 

     "Let me get you your water." He did and half-joked, "My contact might be in there." 

     

 

There were some.

     It had already been that night.  That night when we'd passed around the keepers.  Everyone participating had signed up for no sex "and no kissing," a woman with asthma made worse by low key fireworks and campfires of "wish sticks" and her eyes on one man since childhood said and blamed her watery browns on the air pollutants. 

     Someone handed back a copy of Animal Dreams.  "This was new.". The copy looked like the Lonely Bear's jeans that hadn't come off, not even once, to be laundered.  "Is he just into not bathing?" More than one girl had asked.  "The PR says, 'He didn't want to take a single quarter from the Forest Worker Fund.'"  A tech-know-how but not wanting to become a machine part of Le Machine grinding us up, he'd ridden a motorbike on the thinning and widening lines between fact and fiction since he'd come to the mountains and held the line of neutrality.  "New word for us hoss," other men had held the lines of sides.  There hadn't been a topic that hadn't come up.

  "THERE'S A WAR ON!!!!" The youngest of potential new bi-plane operators cupped his mouth and shouted like a newsie.  "Yah, on my sobriety."  A couple sat upright in the backseat of a convertible antique car.  The young man rubbing his temples and the young woman rubbing her neck.  "We've got to get back to Etowah."  

     "WHOSE DRIVING?  I'LL DO IT!" More still-a-boy pulled his goggle glasses down and adjusted his ascot.  "You're such a whore," a tall, tall guy in a sweater and shirt, tight pants, and black leather gloves looked down at the young woman and said.  "Because I picked up a sack of airmail?"  She waved him away like he was a burning piece of toast smell.  He put his hands on his hips and told a barely awake campsite, "It's been real and it's been fun, but it ain't been real fun."  

     A tent door was violently kicked then shaken open from inside.  "FUCK OFF MATE." 

     "Why's that?" 

     "Because I fucking said so."  There was a quiet like in a group dinner conversation.  Then, "All right, ALL RIGHT, I will.  Don't you dare call me mate, jerk."  He took off one glove and smacked it against the open palm of the other.  "Knock it off guys.  Not us too." 

     For three or four days some of us had been arguing whether or not cold instant coffee even has caffeine.  The arguing would reach an impasse authorative.  None of us knew for sure.  Like so much of what was going on.  We were discovering the truth as it unfolded.

     "Saved me from a deep dark," the subtle, almost normally non-verbal, young woman holding his hand rubbed the back of his hand with her other hand.  He'd practically dragged her through the woods, holding hands, but him hurrying.  He was a little out of breath.  "All the equipment's gone!!!!" 

     "So are the owners of that equipment," the girl with the broken nose said.  It took about twenty seconds for that to set in.  Then someone asked, "So, that's it?!  They just leave like that?" 

  "The way they came." 

  Someone slammed the frying pan on the grate over smoldering coals.  

  "Not all of us left," people turned to the voice.  The quiet girl dropped the hand and went to the woman whose hair was bent like she'd slept leaning against a bookshelf.  "Babies???" The quiet girl signed in her way and asked.  "Though my husband went with them this time."  She held up a skeleton key and told, "One came last night." The guy walked forward and took quiet girl's hand again, and the key.  "Is the mother with the baby?"  The woman nodded sleepily.  "We'll go check on them!" 

  "Where's the coffee?" 

  "We're working on that.  Here," someone cleared textbooks and stories off a picnic bench, "Sit."  She sat.  The girl with the broken nose made cup after cup of coffee but didn't give her one.  She put some of the textbooks onto the table and made a pillow.  Fell asleep.  "She's gonna wake up with the other side of her hair bent." Someone noted.  Someone else went into a tent and found a pillow for her. 

  Camp was quiet all through late morning.  Then came a man with a necktie as a belt on suit pants several sizes too big for him.  His lips stuck out plump of his beard.  And he had knots and knots of garlic on a one-by-three.  "Sort of a strange flag," someone said to him.  "Stranger flags have been seen in these parts," he said.  "Let's start over," someone else said.  "Whacha doin' wich yer garlic?" 

  Each knot had been knotted on a night spent frozen in fear that an army of neo-nazi-types was going to break out of their barracks and hunt him.  "Are you serious?" 

  "How dare you talk about our army that way!" A woman with dirty-faced children on her legs raised a fist more gnarly than the knots of garlic.  The man had beard hair on the tops of his bare feet.  And he put the stick of garlic down against a tree.  "They're not you."  He sighed.  "Not any nation's." 

  "We'll find out if you're lying Mister.  You don't look very legitimate to me." 

  The man wrung his hands.  "I was more so before I got robbed." 

  "You got robbed?!"

  "Yer kind just went back over seas." 

  "My kind doesn't war." 

  "You're a Christian?" 

  "Not exactly but I believe that Jesus was the Messiah." 

  "You lying."  One of the kids knocked over the garlic when his mama said that.  "LIARS GO TO HELL."  The boy set his mouth hard.  "Yayes they do," the man put a hand on the kid's shoulder and bent to pick up his garlic.  "Dangerous times," he said.  "Please.  I need garlic," the girl with the broken nose dug into her sleeve and fished out some bills.  "And," she looked at the ground and tears welled in her eyes, "Would you like a cup of coffee?" 

  "Real coffee in the middle of nowhere?!  Now that's a miracle." 

     While the Forest had turned icey cold in terms of welcoming visitors over "lumber", and the Service had been slashed in terms of manpower, a certain group of "haters" and "militia" had managed to secretly overwhelm a couple workers and briefly occupy a government building.  Like the swarm of "fans" that had run some of us up a train power station where one of us got electrocuted, it was off-shoots to a "mainstream" holding the nation together that kept getting the better of us and this tipping the scales on all of us having a foothold in general sanity.  

     "THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS!" A militant-looking young man jumped out of a 4x4 and threw a fit about his colleagues.  The driver stayed in the vehicle watching the monitors--scopes and go-pro's which everyone was calling kamkams.  "WHAT'D THEY DO THIS TIME?!?" He yelled at the older more stately-uniformeds.  "I'd be careful son," one of them calmly said.  "It's pretty serious to say you know these types of criminals." 

  "Criminals huh?" The younger man wiped sweaty hands on his thighs.  "Guess you would know."  One of the authorities rapped a thickly ringed hand on the blueprints and maps on top of one of their vehicles.  The older men looked at the hand as the man explained, "We've got a plan." The younger man looked at the barracks and blinked sweat away from stinging his eyes.  He looked back at the older men.  "Anyone hurt anyone?"  The man who'd said plan sighed deeply.  "It's pretty routine here.  Why don't you get along?" 

  "Because I care."  Only one official in a hat stiff enough to still a tornado raised his eyebrows.  "That's a new one." The rings made a tapping sound on the blueprint.  A finger pointed out a shade-side window opening big enough for a small man to get through.  "I'm a small man," the younger man said.  He bellied up to the vehicle-desk.  The plan was to get in and somehow lock them into a part of the building.  "That would be good," the younger man said, "But look where they are."  The younger man went to the driver who handed him a laptop with the monitor views like playing card size.  "Really?" The man with the plan asked.  The laptop was placed on top of the blueprint by the older man.  And they all looked at it together.

     It was a sliver of a moon dark where just shapes conjoined make up reality beyond lumens.  Nobody was sleeping.  The young man had gone over things with a different group of authorities.  The dark vehicle pulled forward almost silently.  Some people pulled out their guns and pointed in the direction of it.  From near it came a voice, "Honey, what are you doing here?" 

     "Me?!?"  The young man motioned for people to put their weapons away.  "You think you can just walk away from our campsite and nobody's gonna give a shit??!" Her headlamp put his somewhat pale face in a spotlight. 

     "Oh yeah, we were camping," the young man explained from the stage.  He suddenly looked like a child who'd eaten all the cookies in a cookie jar and a transformer, the way the headlamp was putting shadows above his features in the light.  "They might need my help since 

     "Since you can't keep yourself out of the most dangerous situations in the world????" She looked him up and down with the headlamp.  He just looked like a small man.  Then the headlamp turned and bounced slightly as she told service Overseas, holding riots from spreading, going between groups with missiles and serving sandwiches, that's what he told me he did, just happening to, the headlamp fired back at him, KEEP THE PEACE AT LEAVENWORTH.  Someone made a low Oooooooo noise.  "And now this." She ripped the headlamp off and pointed it at the vehicle door.  "Have you eaten anything? I brought your cooler.  I think your cheese sandwiches are in there." 

     We were sort of on our own then.  Our generation.  Starkly.  Astoundingly.

  "You DID IT!!!!!"  WE were clapping wildly for a person who'd fully raised a leg to beat shuffle-foot.  Some of us busted into tears.  Some part of each of us on the same journey.  Working our whole lives, working for our lives, some of the rollercoaster ride knocking the wind out of us, but choosing TO LIVE.  While a local Mom not remembering everything anymore using the "coping tools".  "Not my bestest day," she smiled and told.  "But you didn't burn the house down," the Helper patted her shoulder.  "It was great, you called us!" 

     "And I put my own diaper on," she winked and covered a giggle.  "We just call those underwear," a competitive Helper said and patted her own padded behind.  They explained their idea of being two competitive Helpers.  "Keeps them all on their toes somehow." 

     "Us too," the other Helper confessed.  "Life around here can get dreary.  Just the slightest tension makes the days more challenging." 

  "Mother!" A son stopped making way to car from grocery store.  "How's your day?" The lady smiled bigger.  "It's really great now.  But who are you?" The man's shoulders visibly slouched.  "Just kidding dear," the mother covered another giggle.  The man asked if he forgot to pay a bill.  "Not that I know of, but, you know..." 

     "How about lunch?!" 

     "We can't afford it," the Helper said.  "And, your mom called us to hang out today.  So that's what we're doing." 

     "Oh, I see."  The parking lot filled with people running errands on lunch.  There was the easy quiet in the conversation that was people past hotblood phase of life.  "Maybe I could go back inside and get us all lunch!" The man stood up straight and almost pointed a finger in the air with idea.  "That would be lovely." The mom said.  

 

The Mystery of The Woolen Sock

     "Alpaca actually," the scientist who'd examined the material with the blood on it corrected.  "Right, alpaca." 

     "Why was it a mystery?"  

     "Did they kill it and eat it?" 

     "The sock, no." The woman was proudly wearing a company logo on her shirt.  "I'd been unable to pick up a pen since finishing my thesis.  But then this happened." She fished out photographs of scuff marks in dirt, looking over the edge of a steep embankment, and what looked like a clump of fur with blood on it.