Chapter Twenty Eight An Opera in Three Acts But with Five Parts

zzzAugust in the Midwest, of course, is a damn good time for a person to keep refreshed in her brain the raw cold of bone – chilling Februarys in Iowa .  At Havencourt’s kitchen table that next day, I immediately got a move on towards brainstorming on what other skills I had or trades I could do –– at what else, by next Winter Solstice at the least, I could be working in order to earn –– so as not to be completely and literally out in those frigid snow banks without so much as a wee stake back at the bank.  Thus began for Legion True, BSN, DVM, PhD, “a linguistics position” the likes of which were to serve me to this exact hour very, very well –– that of medical transcriptionist.  I took a typing test and correctly clocked in at well over the necessary 65 words per minute … my having been required to bang it all out on a standard – issue and soooo old Swintec electric.  And of all things, I accurately spelled, well, placed right at 100 percent actually, every test expression on the grammar and term identification examination … including the one word I was to later learn happened to be the transcription division director’s pet trickster:  gallbladder.  Evidently folks seem to nearly always want to make that particular pouch two words’ worth when any standard – issue Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, including now its online version, claims it only ever as ... one!  So since I could not only type, and type swiftly enough, but also appropriately place all of the commas, semicolons, hyphens, apostrophes and periods in between perfectly spelled words of lexiconally behemoth proportions, I got the lingo gig!  My knowing Latin helped too, of course, and in no small measure. 

zzzThe pay was crap, but we were women!  DEhumans.  Word – processing fembots the lot of us.  Not a man in our midst.  A couple of bucks over minimum wage to start –– and then for all of the eleven years since, the advancement in raise at performance review time, which was only annually, if the transcriptionist consistently had measured above the national average in her monthly keystroke and line counts, … the raise of which successful review was … a whopping quarter.  Not so the gargantuan leap in salary when contrasted with and next to the $25K! bonuses which the Clinic’s doctors each gave to one another at the holiday ends of their calendar years!  I am serious here:  $25,000 gift checks made out to themselves … these guys realized on or before christianity’s 25^th of December!

zzzIf I had known that my one Gregg course in typing taken for just seven weeks in the couple of summer months after my seventh grade year in junior high school, I am thinking I must have likely been 12 years old or possibly 13, would ever be my “higher education” – ticket to life – saving employment, why, hell, fuck that friggin’ veterinary microbiology PhD program!  Transcribing dictation for health care providers also offered two extra rewards:  more truly warm friends and fantastically fabulous flexibility, two features I still quite appreciate today!  Upon finding themselves down and out in society and if they even hire on at such positions at all … instead of traipsing their crest –  fallen carcasses out into the garage and either gunning the truck engine on a plugged – up exhaust till they asphyxiated or simply slipped the barrel and muzzle of a Ruger or a Rossi revolver down their oropharynx … these couple of prized job components are the ‘currency’ and wealth of which many, many men just do not want to even appear to value.  Or, so it seems to me. 

zzzOne could if one wanted to … because there were always, always dictated tasks in the system to transcribe … type all night and 25 more hours’ worth on the weekend.  I did not, ever, type all night although, for my  first two years’ worth, I did transcribe from 5 until 11 p.m. Monday through Friday right after leaving at 4 in the afternoon my six daily, weekday hours with the Forestry Department –– and I did type those marathon weekends, one right after the other after the next and the next and the next.  By February 1994, then, when the wintry winds howled and the flurries flew and my condo’s furnace remained mute without a lit pilot,       I endured –– warmed by these multiply stroked keyboards but, really of course, by the even hotter ambient room temperature there –– since I was not ... at home on Havencourt.

zzzI’m not sure when it came to me, the mantra, the saw … The Sun Comes Up –– And Goes Down. It is curious how, in looking back, those dark, dark nights now appear to have just leapt this cubicled, lone typist by, one right into another.  No view to the outside world.  Absolutely not one window through which any particular evening’s weather, say, could be discerned.  Until months and months and months had zoomed passed me.  Each singular day, however, did not at all move through itself rapidly enough for me –– although I did not need to rock myself in tightly wrapped blanketing nearly as much as many a night before –– and my eyeballs actually stayed not only on the page of words but inside the correct paragraph.  Having up and fucking quit the psychotropics, lithium in particular, those which had been forced into my jowls from the bowels of The Sixth Floor Hotel and from the legendary Dr. Singh’s year of “required”, that being “court – ordered,” er, Edinsmaier – ordered! outpatient care, I could frequently get an entire newspaper article read without thinking that I was losing my optic nerve –– or any other nerve such as ... my very last one! 

zzzBut my own aging I couldn’t hasten fast enough –– since that meant another 24 more hours’ worth of moments had vanished, all in such painfully slow motion.  Only in retrospect do I, now, see that since taking my leave of Tallest Ever Ohio Trooper Man, the Boys and I had already lost to each other yet another nine or ten months’ time!  The entire length of expanse, that lost time was, that it had taken me once upon earlier times, individually, to successfully grow each one of these three babes.  And another loss of every last one of their end - of - the - year school events, the track meets, and all of the 1993 summer soccer and baseball games and barbeques and pool activities and the back - to - school shopping spree frenzy and the entire set of that year’s fall and winter holidays.  Fphfffphphfffttt!  Just evaporated. 

The Sun Comes Up, The Sun Goes Down;

The Sun Comes Up, The Sun Goes Down. 

And One Day The Sun Will Come Up -

And Mirzah Will NO Longer Be ... 17!  

Whimsical?  Never, never.  Never did I chant these words in dream – like, light – hearted fanciful whimsy.  Nor, without the gaaaawddamn drugs within my very own constitution anymore, inside a mother – fucking, stuporous, “power – failing” blackout either.  I declared them, daily, to the three – dimensional image inside my bathroom mirror as if her very strength and continued “breathing” there depended upon them.  Because it did.  These words were, indeed, medicinal.  “Alternative” therapy.  Solitudinous “psychotropic” medicine.

For as much as King Herod and the High Aggrandizier and the High Courtier and Dr. Edinsmaier’s Court Jester, the Shyster Scheisser, and the faceless, mostly nameless magistrates of the appellate court, even as much as Nottingham Thug McLive and her own footman, or more accurately, footgirl, Daughter Mary Jane, “lived” to control and life – kill Dr. Legion True, not a one of them could successfully control and kill off my clock!  Its metronomic innards fucking ticked away to just the exact same rhythmic speed as did theirs!  And there wasn’t a friggin’ thing that any one of the tyrannical bunch could do to me –– short of one or more of the terrorists themselves actually murdering me –– to stop the three Truemaier Boys and their mother from having the seven decades of Mirzah’s, Jesse’s and Zane’s future adulthoods given back over to us four –– after the two of their childhoods had been essentially, effectively … stolen from us.

Act Three Part Five of The Opera inched forward –– with more copies upon copies upon stacks upon flatbed hand trucks and eventually up into the guts of the state’s Capitol Building in Des Moines .  My Goodair County girlfriend from the countryside, Teri Lynn, left her job in that city to which she still commutes some

*     *     *     *

There might have been an appellant’s legal argument to practice.  After all, represented even in The Opera’s entire Act Three pro se as I indeed was, I was headed up, as its Part Five, before the panel of three state appellate court judges ... by myself.  Alone.  Time limit?  An exact ten minutes flat –– and not five seconds more.  I even, I mean, I even had a court date set!  The 07^th day of June 1994, a Tuesday morning, 10:00 a.m.  So perhaps I may have wanted to practice my speech, one would have thought. 

I am thinking instead, however, that there’d be no better practice for what I am about to beg appellate court judges than to be honing my acting skills, especially those as a mama, … at The Source, again, of the very deal for which I went through all of this suffering:  I went to visit, ‘temporarily’ as a man again, as a matter of fact as ‘Sam’ again, … the Boys!  What better plan at “play practice,” at opera rehearsal, could there be then for that upcoming, late spring Court of Appeals hearing date than to head on over, disguised, to 1994’s version of what was becoming … my Annual April As West Virginia’s Witchy Graveyard Phantom?  Yup!  The mother, Dr. Legion True, hauled on out of Ames having accrued again another seven days’ worth of leave over that past 365’s worth finally gone by and having left Iowa during the very same period again, that is, just the week after Grubtrop Schools’ Spring Break had concluded and the country’s daylight savings time begun; and I found my Zane, Jesse and Mirzah!  About this 1994 trek, though, I first did let Zane know of my coming, and again just as had been the case the April before, took trusty Ol’ Black the nearly 900 miles and 15 hours’ travel time … in one fell swoop –– one really, really full day’s swing easterly.  

Neither Zane, fuzzy on that point he states to me now, nor I can recall a decade later how it was that Sam managed to let him know I would be on the road again; but I’ll bet that this had to do with my telephoning one of his friends from school or baseball or something like that.  In fact, Zane cannot even remember my actual visit there to Grubtrop this second time, April 1994 –– and he is the eldest and, most likely therefore, the child of mine with the longest memory for such of those moments.  I haven’t asked Mirzah and Jesse;

but it is probable that if Zane doesn’t remember my second coming … at his age at the time of over 17½,

why then, neither do the younger two Truemaier brothers who were 14½ and 15½!

For me, though, it was a carbon copy of the spring the year before, and I loved having gone.  Being present in West Virginia I did not like –– that part of it, that feeling was still very much the same sentiment as mine of the April of 1993, but I was able to touch and to talk to Mirzah and to Jesse and to Zane once again!  Priceless!  That year even though the wintertime had passed and I was living, once more, with the promise of ensuing months of upcoming warmth on Havencourt again, because of Act Three Part Five of The Opera looming,

on Ol’ Black’s needle.  Before I knew it, I was traveling back to Ames.  Crying.  That had not changed either. 

But not before two truly funny funnies had occurred!  And one soooo very not funny one … All three events that brought a grin to my lips … through the tears falling from my eyes! 

One night, it must have been around about 4:00 in the a.m. of my second Saturday there –– and actually the day before had been Tax Day 1994, deliciously deeeep into somnolence sawing away on dream logs I lay in the backend bed of Ol’ Black where he was parked in his very same graveled parking space at the end row of the bottom tier inside the really hilly Fairvale Hospital visitors’ lot.  Because of the full lunar effect this night I had purposefully retired my head at what had usually been the foot of the cushions so that anteriorly

I could throughout my slumber tilt into the night sky and receive onto my face through Ol’ Black’s clear and undraped hatch window then … the moonbeams.  “Knock, knock, knock.  Boom, boom, boom.”

“Huuummm.  Huh?  Hhmmm,” and I slept on.

“Knock, knock, knock.  Boom, boom, boom.  Knock, knock, knock, knock.  Raaaap, rap ... rap, rap, rap. 

Hey!  Hey, Lady?!  Lady?!  Wake up there, Lady!”

“Huh?  O?  O, O, Okay, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  Aaah, ah, wakin’ up here, Folks.  Jus’ give me a minute.  Aaah, ah, … ah … ” and Legion True struggled, O did I! not only to gain mere consciousness but to also achieve bearing onto my right elbow and get it under my right thorax, swing up my legs to near chest height and get myself sat up inside Ol’ Black’s backend –– all the while trying desperately to just open up my two eyelids.  I know these machinations all had to have gone on on my right side because I always sleep “quiet as the dead” –– funny, funny Actress Jean Smart calls herself in Bruce Willis’ film “The Kid” –– on my right side.  Always.  Because my deaf left ear is out to The World then and shields the reposing Legion from every last waver of noise waves that may interrupt my recumbent tranquility!  Only the hilarious Ms. Smart, what with her actress’s southern drawl an’ all, very much, as a matter of fact, like that of West Virginian women’s, drags out that last word and syllable, “deeea – aaaahd” – like.  “Quiet as the deeea – aaaahd!”

I got it done –– finally –– and sat up cross – legged, looking straight out the backside of Ol’ Black into the awakening darkness; but with the overhead yard lamp burning onto the parking lot, there stood before me two men in like, blue – black shirts and long ties with the same – hued hats, policeman – style, atop their heads.  When they saw me, more or less by then, acting somewhat alert and fairly lucid, both of them almost simultaneously removed their hats, “Excuse us, Ma’am.  Sorry to have waked you up there,” one of the men apologetically began his O’dark – thirty monologue.  “But you don’t have to sleep out here.  O, no.  No, no.  We can find you a bed inside so’s you can be close to your loved one.  Ya’ don’ ’ hafta spend the night out here.  Seriously.  When you get yourself together, Ma’am, why ... um, you jus’ come on inside –– an’ … and we’ll find you a place to sleep so’s ya’ don’t have to do it out here.  Okay then?  That, ah, ... that’d be better there, don’tcha think?”  They nodded a lot.  Looked at each other and nodded a lot at each other some more.

I nodded back.  And then I nodded back at the other one, the silent one, too.  Through the hatch’s glass then I managed an utterance not much above a whisper, “O my.  My, my.  That’s just so lovely of you.  Why, gosh, thanks just ever!”

I polished.  Then I nodded once more.  And they both, again nearly concurrently, backed away from the rear window, replaced their hats nearly simultaneously upon their heads, turned around and strode toward the wooden beam – steps which led upwards to the main driveway that then wound on higher up eventually to the Fairvale Hospital’s chief front entrance!  I was literally flummoxed.  So nice they had been.  I rather hated not having at all to take this hospital’s night security guards up on the generous offer which the two of them had just so kindly presented to me!

I had already the evening before delivered the rental car back to the agency, that same agency from my having leased Aspire there the April before –– so there wasn’t that task and settling up yet to do.  There seemed to be no better reason to permanently skedaddle from that specific West Virginia spot than the one which I had just been handed!  A bit early in the morning it was, yes; but I made record time dropping out of my grogginess to clean up and pack away the stuff of the backend and to hustle my little self and that trashy, old Ol’ Black station wagon utterly and all … gone!

Now picture the morning in full light of day … this particular Saturday of departure entirely out of West Virginia and most especially out of the Grubtrop / Fairvale / Montclank area.  Also the second Saturday into ‘the savings of daylight’ during the springs and summertimes, or the setting of clocks ahead one hour, it was.  I had, as Legion and not as Sam, both while dining out this last morning and while sleeping the few hours earlier when the security guards had chanced to happen by, just enjoyed my last breakfast – like repast with Mirzah only –– the two of us alone at one of the big – box chain’s many Bob Evans’ restaurants in that state.  This particular one is located on the outskirts of Grubtrop nearby to all of those interconnecting interstate mixmasters so I parked Ol’ Black as out of sight as I thought possible and where its Iowa license plates weren’t likely to be noticed by anyone who mattered to me. 

And then, of course, it was –– all too soon –– time for Mirzah Truemaier to leave me and me him, and the mother knew that I would not be seeing Zane or Jesse again.  Those two and I had already had our good – byes to one another said the day before.  O, this was hard!  Soooo, so very hard! I was again reminded of that ruthlessly merciless and mother – fuckingly sperm – exalting question, “How do we do it?!” and of us mothers’ incredulity, “How dare we have to do this!”

I dropped Mirzah off at that itty bitty park just a few blocks southwest of the ‘hood which Grubtrop’s Pillared Edinsmaier calls his own.  I say it that way because I have never, in my heart and in my brain, thought of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s houses anywhere … since his divorce from me … as the homes of my Truemaier Boys.  Just have never done that myself.  No judge can make me think that way either.  No judge whom Legion True has yet to meet can –– at any rate.  Anything, anything at all with Herod Edinsmaier, or with Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier as a matter of fact, connected to it … has been associated, to me anyhow, specifically and only with Herod.  And just as specifically not with Jesse, Zane and Mirzah.  And, of course, not with me either!

The entire Opera’s finest aria I alone, its lead and only soprano, sing.  That is to say, no frickin’ judge of any level, no High Aggrandizier, no High Courtier, no appellate judge of any state nor of this entire, allegedly mighty nation even –– and no fancy – shmancy, high – dollar Attorney Shindy Scheisser of Predator Herry’s, no screaming and gasping and finger – pointing from Male – Identified Fannie Issicran McLive

“My thoughts are as free

No one can see

No hunter can find them,

My lips may be still.

The thinking woman that I was, Ol’ Black and I watched Mirzah leave me till there was nothing more of him to see.  This, too, all mothers I happen to know ... do.  Watch and look and see their babes’ departures from their arms –– until they just cannot anymore.   I exhaled, then breathed in deeeeep … and exhaled once again.  It, indeed, had come:  the time to go away.  Right now.  I had to go away from this wee park and from my darling babes for good this 1994 spring.  Back to Iowa. … Again. 

Ye’ Ol’ Wagon and I, alone then, pulled up to a four – way stop.  Stop signs at all its quadrants, not stoplights, as the intersection was at one of those incredibly frickin’ly narrow pair of perpendicular blacktops that this Grubtrop metropolis everywhere inside it terms its … ‘streets’.  At what I thought was to have been the way out of town, the particular route out of it anyhow that I had been, in my mind’s eye, intending to take –– the one that was along Grubtrop’s main street, Route #50 West. 

I was headed north.  Nothing oncoming. I looked to my left and no one there.  Then to my right.  “O my fucking goddess!  It’s she!!!  Thuggish McLive in the flesh!  Her footgirl, too!  In their vehicle’s friggin’ front passenger seat!” 

For the very, very first time in two spring weeks’ worth of both years, I bloody hell ran right into two of the three people whom I had been sooo, so careful to always avoid. 

Thinkin’, thinkin’, O ever so fast – thinking here, … I smiled!  The most gawddess – awfulest, biggest grin plus Groucho Marx – style, raised eyebrows repeatedly flashing both of them simultaneously up and down, up and down, up and down –– as she, Ms. McLive, began in that old battleaxe, Humvee – sized Chevy woody wagon of theirs … from Urbandale, you’ll recall, Jury, … to inch forward and proceed with the left turn just around and directly passed me which she and daughter Mary Jane had apparently been planning to make …when they’d first come up to their stop sign!  My right hand and arm, flexing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the precise manner of Princess Diana’s acknowledgement to her adoring masses, I beamed the biggest snide smirk I could manage right into her window, Ms. Fannie McLive’s mandible still on her lap. ‘Cept that now and again it appeared to be flapping as if she were yelling orders or directives or shouting news bytes to the footgirl or something.  Probably to the screamed twist of, “Fuck her, Mary Jane!  Wha’th’fuck does she think she’s doing here in Grubtrop?!  Whereth’hell does she think she’s going, Mary Jane!  We gotta get to Herry!  We gotta call Herry!  Or the cops!  Or, good god, or, or, ... ah, ah, um, ah, it’s The Fucking Witch herself, Mary Jane!”

Ms. McLive’s head turned back to check out the windshield in front of her –– for oncoming and other traffic, no doubt; and she and the daughter in that tank of theirs crept up then quite a rise, one of those hilly streets not at all a mountain.  Slowly, slowly they crawled; and I in my rearview mirror could see an entirely turned – around Mary Jane and a Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive straining herself in their vehicle’s inside center rearview mirror to see as much of Dr. Legion True as she could see –– me now 180 degrees from the two of them and still stopped in my tracks headed north at my stop sign.  They were proceeding south sooo slowly that it began to appear to me that Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive may, indeed, stop and try, perhaps, to turn all the way around right there on the so – narrow blacktop … in order to follow me. 

Thinking, thinking –– I don’t know what possessed me, but it had to have been from the sheer and, of course, invisible intellect and direction and protective teaching of my dead Daddy AmTaham True probably!  And he and I are atheists!  Or maybe mystic atheists!  In Ms. McLive’s and daughter’s certain view and the very full light of near midday, I shoved Ol’ Black’s gears into the reverse one and backed him completely up into the vacant driveway of the home on my left, exactly there at my stop sign and to his rear!  Exiting out of that residential entrance, I then turned him precisely into the direction which Ms. McLive, her daughter Mary Jane and their Chevy monstrosity were headed.  I was following them … instead!  South – going we all now were!

“I must be nuts!  What now?!”  I am thinking, thinking, thinking here!  “O yeah!  O yeah.  They’ll have to go up that hill.  All the way up it.  And then, … then ... down it, too!  Only the deal is:  When they’re going down it, I won’t be!  I’ll follow ‘em up here.  I make ‘em think I’m following them up here.  But then ... well, then?  Then, I’ll jus’ up and frickin’ disappear!”  So that’s what I did!  They shuffled all the way up to that hill’s crest and gratefully left my range of vision altogether –– as fortunately down it, on its other side, … the two McLives fell!  

I can still, today, imagine the scenario with the Sheriff’s dialogue to her Deputy Daughter, “See her yet?  She there?  Where the fuck did she go?  Why idn’t she coming up over the hill behind us?  She there?  She there yet?  She idn’t there?!  Wha’?!  What the hell?!  Where is she, That Fucking Witch?!”  True it was.  Ol’ Black and I never did come up over that hill and into their view … ever again!  We be gone!  Witch that I am an’ all.  Fucked, bleached Blondie Witchy – Woo!  Poof!  Magic! Vanished! Gone!

Well, actually, I had sashayed Ol’ Black’s behind into yet another one of those reverses and up in to the driveway of someone else, a three – point turnaround which I had literally and artfully perfected as a nine – year – old kiddo from the farm tooling around our countryside’s gravel roads in AmTaham’s 1949 sylvan – green Dodge, checkerboard grill and a standard transmission but one with overdrive!  With his permission, of course.  Whoa!  Were those ancient chariot – driving lessons of the goddesses ever wholly serving me well now!  And, once again, with a 180 – degree turnabout, well, I was headed north, of course, and took, quick as a flash and without one more moment’s concern on where she was or what Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive and her man, Predator Herry Edinsmaier, might “do” to me, … Dr. Legion True’s Ol’ Black wagon sought out and took … the very closest, alternate course completely out of town. 

By this second spring soirée I pretty well knew all of Grubtrop’s crannies; it was noooo problem at all finding my way around –– and out of –– it!  Gone!  Beaming.  Well, ... smirking, actually.  Well – … very, very well – satisfied with myself, I have to say. 

And I was not at all worried about repercussions and reprisals upon my Truemaier Boys.  They could handle her, Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive.  Lord knows she required ‘handling’ –– and all three of them were more than up to the laborious chore of that! 

And I knew Herry!  I knew exactly what he would do –– upon daMan’s discovery that I had been out there to central West Virginia. 

So incensed and so enraged would Herry Edinsmaier be, same as he was when he learned for the very first time just last month that I still owned … and completely controlled … a life insurance policy on him, on him as the one insured, after 14 years of divorce! –– that he would immediately do two things.  First he’d shut Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive down; she would be ordered literally to “Shut up, Bitch!”  That’s what Herry does to “his” women; besides ruling us DEhumans in all other respects, he likes nearly most of all to silence us –– because the attention and the focus is to be narcissistically shed upon him. 

Not wasted upon any of us in – the – King’s – ‘realm’ DEhumans. 

And then?   Then, secondly, would come