Skeleton
by Greg Mulcahy
Without a back story, Driscoe said, there was nothing to hook the purity of thought to.
Problem of the moment.
Flicker of Driscoe’s thought.
The two the same since Driscoe got the power to keep an audience.
How was that?
Driscoe claimed Driscoe had battled forest fires and worked oil rigs and participated in covert actions in some of the marginal, small conflicts of Driscoe’s youth.
Any idiot could see this was all nonsense.
Money somewhere behind Driscoe.
And a machine, too, maybe.
Though it did not appear Driscoe could maintain, much less run, a machine.
Gratz maybe knew the truth, but Gratz likely no longer able to say.
Gratz said many things once.
As when Gratz said, You think you’re a stallion at stall, but you are a milk cow at barn.
This before Gratz attempted Gratz’ famous failed attack.
The comment odd as none of them knew anything about farming or animals in their petty, suburban milieu.
As the attack, failed or not, was out of place.
Or ridiculous.
Unseemly, perhaps, best described it.
After all, Gratz and Driscoe were once close.
Partners, some said.
Neither now confirmed nor denied.
If they were partners, what were they partners at?
Driscoe claimed to have made money in cement, or concrete, or both, but when pressed, also claimed never to have said it, and that it was ascribed to him by a party of hostile losers.
These losers nowhere to be seen.
And what was party supposed to mean with always some dim hint of political context unrecognizable?
This concrete business probably some figment of something.
Some foundation or attempted foundation for attempted legitimacy.
Whenever Driscoe could Driscoe cited what Driscoe alleged Cooboo had said or meant until Cooboo was skeleton relic or echo of ancient chant in quaint, nearly-extinct choir.
No one asked about Cooboo’s lost son.
And the Mother.
So there was half a story at best.
Was half a story a story at all?
These dropped elements of no use to Driscoe.
Unlike the rest.
The used.
What story, anyway, had any real use, beyond the pretend?
Quaint now in an era when story was less common than nondisclosure agreement.
Driscoe claimed a sheaf of those.
And why?
For what?
Who could say, Driscoe said.
Sometimes as a threat.
Sometimes as a valuation as though the value of these enhanced Driscoe’s status.
King and prophet of the driveway with paper to prove it.
In that framing, what were they to do, wait for The Magi?
Or accept and endorse all that was in the arrangement of life in that paved-over state?
Pavement.
And concrete underlying.
Equipment necessary.
All these in Driscoe’s boast.
Driscoe the builder.
Or the visionary.
Yet no one ever saw any paper on that.
And the spectacle.
Driscoe’s construction of the gigantic metal frame for the pyrotechnic Bird of Fire.
Bird of Fire that toured the nation to celebrate the nation’s long-ago nativity.
Yet no one had seen it.
Sounded familiar, everyone agreed.
Some recalled or pretended to recall or struggled to pretend to recall.
But no witness.
When asked, when pressed, what happened to that Bird of Fire, Driscoe had no answer.
Gratz got into it, Driscoe said, and it ended.
Mystery tepid in disappointment.
The relic vanished, probably destroyed.
If the Bird of Fire existed, the Bird of Fire was not even a carnival attraction.
Minor note in a failed show.
Absent as the concrete or cement fortune and all those concrete developments—those subdivisions of the future fantastic.
Driscoe’s garage remained.
Someone had paid for it.
But not Bird. Not construction.
Driscoe the developer of developments never built.
Maybe Driscoe traded the land.
Driscoe claimed that as well.
And the concept.
The concept, Driscoe said, sold as concept. Realization up to someone else.
Gratz to spearhead that.
Gratz the failure.
Gratz the always-weak link.
Gratz the implied or almost criminal.
Dead now or presumed dead now.
Green-faced son of a bitch, Driscoe said, board stiff and Board driven.
The Board dissolved when Gratz went, a step or half-step in front of indictment.
Concrete and Bird of Fire and the Board or boards, why not an offered taste of acrobats or harlequins to finish things off?
Greg Mulcahy is the author of OUT OF WORK, CONSTELLATION, CARBINE, and O’HEARN. His latest book, FIRST TRILOGY, is available only as an ebook because publishers on two continents dared not bring it out.