The "mile-high" scaffolding had been welded.  "That had to have happened over night," the expert said somewhat exasperated.  A bunch of us had been showing support for our political party and who we wanted to win (i)someday(i).  "NOT the party that eats babies and humans put through grinders," the man with the gold chain bracelet explained.  His ex-wife but still together for the children's sake smacked at him and his blood-drained lips stayed where she put them as her hand wiped down the front of his face.  Like some of the other men in our group, his five o'clock shadow had turned to a three day old beard and there was baby blanket lint stuck to his face.  This did not come off in the "smack" and the priest retrieved from Maryland didn't seem to notice anyway.

     Some of the previous decades' "best and brightest" gone so wrong had evil-ka-neevilled across the nation-owned highway way up on scaffolding on both sides of the road.

  We'd barely made it out alive and with most of our body parts.  And now this.

  "Mustah been midgets!" A barrel chested, almost bald so closely crop-shaved man was on all fours yelling into the face missing an outer ear and being held down by a pile of people.  A man and a woman in Sunday clothes stood about fifteen feet away starting to make a perimeter around "the suspect".  The woman looked to the man repeatedly as they silently memorized what was being said.  The bulldog of man kicked the face.

  "Because you can't," a dark undereye man was leaning against the hood of a Classic pick up truck, hand smacking papers in a gypsy breeze to stay in place while one woman fumbled with a taped box of paperclips and another kept breaking clips of staples.  "I have THE RIGHT to kill these ones," the bowl-shaped-haircut guy firmly placed the safari binoculars on top of some of the papers.  "(i)You(i) can't kill that kind." 

    "What kind?" 

    The leaning man rested an armpit on a crutch; turned to face the parking lot, leaned back; folded a pant leg with a rolled terrytowel in it up and back; the woman dropped the staples, took a large safety pin from her mouth, and pinned the trousers sewn to shoe so it looked like the man was just a man with his leg up on a bumper.

  Some of us had seen our friend getting a teacheatomy, been taken hostage at gunpoint by clowns, tracked and released, been hunted, and arrested all in like seventeen hours.  The living nightmares begun for us en masse on Halloweens on Long Island were, apparently, playing out at this particular geographic location, and, very much so tied to politics and evil. 

  As we'd raced a convoy across the foothills we'd stopped at points on the parkway to dash the wounded (i)away(i).  That was when we'd found women and men we hadn't seen since being held prisoners to neo-nazis and German Psychiatrists.  Some of us had put just a little weight on in that interstice time period.  And now this.

     "Because you can't Hoss." 

     "But I can pretend I'm like the big CIA or something." 

     "Are you looking in my eyes?". He'd closed his as the fastener woman worked to pin not just one as in "the wire" under his shirt collar.  "Yes, I am." 

     "Then read my lips saying (i)no(i).  The man's lips did not move.

    The pile of people wouldn't let the bloodied person up off the ground.  And when an early morning newspaper delivery guy drove up and a local judge got out of the car in his bathrobe.  Someone yelled, (i)HIT THE DECK(i).

  A Detective from back home dove into our backseat.  "Give me the crossword puzzle." 

  "Oh no.  I've almost got it finished." 

  He snarled "Give me the fucking puzzle."  She put it in her purse. 

  The parking lot went chaotic.

  "I won't let you swear in front of my children like that." 

  "Give me the damn puzzle." 

  Everyone sighed.

     In the chaos an older-looking young guy had tackled, almost lastly in all the movement, the judge back into the car full of newspapers.  The judge's bathrobe got smushed up around his head and it was a muffled, "It smells like ink."

     "What?" the tackler stuck his hands and head back into the car.  "Tell my wife.  The bathrobe now smells like ink."

  The tackler ran a hand through his hair as he stood up and looked long at the scaffolding.  Then he spoke rather casually to a wristwatch.  "Not sure, kind of kooky, maybe been drinking."

    He walked forward counting his paces out loud to a car with a Surveyor's tape-flag on the antenna.  He lifted a windshield wiper with a latex glove.  He'd gloved his other hand in his pocket and used it to pick up a walkie talkie.  It immediately said, "I need you up here." The tackler kept his eyes on the hood of the vehicle.

     It wasn't an invention that he needed to ask the judge about.  It was a flying machine.

  First the hoss knocked over the safari binoculars.  "What was that?" It spooked the one-legged man who firmly leaned way forward and would've lost his balance but a woman doctor in a white coat and a mess of curls swooped a stool on wheels over to him.  "Okay.  I'll take a rest." 

  "Let me in the car Karen." She would not. 

  "Open the door and let me in." She would not. 

  A rush was gathering. 

  "Open the fucking door." She looked at his red, puffy, sweating, heart-beating-wildly-in-it face.  Hers was an impact zone of makeup and tears and sweat and slooooooow body rhythm.

  The Scooby-doo van that contained the little people who'd been for sale in the wooden cubby holes, banana boxes of papers, a tanned human skin, and one spider monkey was put in neutral and gently rolled into a drive-thru restaurant's awning.