by Sean Lovelace

Sunday is clear, and the night comes on warm and pleasant. Monday a yellow chariot clatters into town. It is a double-wide.

* * *

An awkward introduction. (It will be a story worth telling some day.) As a newcomer, Amos is jumpy about his jumpy laugh. Does it frighten others? Are the locals going to say it’s a cackle? The term cackle holds character implications. Amos considers: Do I carry a strange and sour odor on my clothing, hands, on my hair?

A tall man with a small tomato balanced atop his derby hat arrives at the chariot. He removes the derby, bows, hands the tomato to Amos, and says, “A man of conceptuals like you needs to see The Mayor.”

On the way to The Mayor, the tall man chatters along like a squirrel: “Processed Cheese Product now. A lot might be done with Processed Cheese Product, eh? It’s almost inconceivable. I mean to think about it. The conceptuals of you and The Mayor thinking about it. There would be a new classification you see. It’s interesting, eh? It’s conceptuals, like I said. Wait till you see The Mayor, he’ll get the conceptuals. He’ll be interested. The Mayor is always interested in the conceptuals. You can’t be too smart for The Mayor, now can you? Of course you can’t. You know that.”

They stand together on the front porch of the dry goods store, The Mayor and Amos. Where did the tall man go? I’ll tell you: He folded himself down onto the ground, lengthwise, then shuffled his lanky body beneath the planking of the store. Apparently, he prefers to live his life low.

“Well I guess that there chariot is just farting out jobs,” The Mayor says.

A woman in a red bikini rides a bicycle past. She waves at the men. Three scrawny cows walk by, slowly. They appear to be drugged. The sun is low and wide and all flattened out in the up-kicked dust. Brown.

Inside the store we find cacophony: a spreading and processing and distilling and tasting. A smelting and a hardening and an expo. A strange aroma mingles with the room’s other smells: a bit musty, somewhat like burning leaves, copper-tinged. Painted tin harmonicas stuffed with Processed Cheese Product are handed out as keepsakes. Word spreads. Children pushing lumps of Processed Cheese Product across the floor. Men tucking three, four harmonicas down their sleeves. Several Dry Plate Glass Negatives. The Mayor’s cheeks are swollen with Processed Cheese Product, red, glistening, sweaty hamster. Men roll it into cigars. Children form it into ineffective slingshots. Someone bounces a ball. Even Mrs. Dorothy Philomena Chandler takes a bite, well a nibble.

“That tastes like witchcraft,” she says.

In the center of this rattle and thump, something is drifting inside Amos. His thoughts as orange asterisks on the wind. On the window glass, the tin roof, stuck there, smeared. On the dusty floor. Ok, I’ll say it—Amos is a bit of a depressive. He imagines he feels himself aging. As Amos holds high an artist’s rendition of a Reincorporator “facilitating the curd,” his fingers become less sensitive to touch. He drops a full tin can of V-Cola onto the town’s only Player Banjo. Amos senses that his actual skin cells are gradually losing their elasticity. It’s not so funny.

* * *

“I want to sit in the front of the fucking Reincorporator,” says Sara on Tuesday. Her bike leans against a clawfoot bathtub. (The bathtub tucked inside a clever carpentry appendage of the chariot.)

* * *

On Wednesday the Flattner/Loader Amos erected down by the creek screeches like a zoo animal and tumbles over. Someone—or thing—has removed the leg bolts. The wind is up now, dust spinning, and the birds are spiraling in the drafts. Birds, Amos generally admires, though he does dislike the raven because of its intellect. The pure dazzle of its impertinent mind. Sometimes Amos feels that ravens watch his every move, and he is pleased to see them sketch away into the sky. “Did you even know young ravens form gangs?” Amos lectures the Sticker-Slappers, slow, young farmhands all. “They actually recruit one another. Then they go around stealing everyone’s cheese.”

Amos tells himself he enjoys lecturing the youth. He climbs a pile of railroad ties and shouts most any variety of advice—birds, molasses recipes, wooden silverware, the proper method for constructing a rectangle, etc.—until his voice cracks and everyone drifts away. Then Amos sits on the railroad ties, his legs warm against the pitch. He thinks, Where does the wind go, where has it been? A bit whimsical on the after-wash of Public Speech and the odor of WD-40, he is reminded of voices from his childhood, or of Velveeta (“Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted cheese,” Amos is prone to say), his favorite Processed Cheese Product. Those that change, but do not.

* * *

On Thursday Sara just walks through the kitchen of the yellow chariot, naked. It makes Amos’s thoughts collapse, then helix into staircases of orange foam. To wit: Finding God in a woman. Fortunately or unfortunately. Sara is much like the underdog letters of the alphabet. That cunning and exponential. That powerful, really.

Amos’s favorite bird is the mockingbird.

* * *

The packaging of Velveeta has changed over the years, but so has Amos. Look at the Dry Plate Glass Negatives. (Everyone, as you know, smiles in the Dry Plate Glass Negatives, a profound thought on my part, a thought that could spawn pages and pages, arguments and essays and fictional representations . . . Or really just a trivial observation, this Dry Plate Glass Negatives/smile thing, so ordinary as to even bore a butterfly.) Listen: Like everyone, Amos once wanted to be a sculptor, then time passed and all his limbs shortened and his hair fell to the floor, while deposits of fat filled in the center of his torso (also his skin deteriorated, as I have mentioned). Like everyone, Amos wakes in the middle of the night and takes long showers in his chariot’s Shower Chamber and grabs the neck of the showerhead and cries directly into the face of the dark spray. Amos? He appreciates etherized June bugs, pound cake, bright, primary colors, WD-40, science fairs (the roar and rattle of industry), the pleasurable annoyance of an afternoon repairing a wobbly Flattner.

Shall we return to the railroad ties?

“What town am I in? Muncie or Memphis? I don’t remember and anyway it makes no difference. Oh one day all of you will appreciate the ways and words of Velveeta, its voice, its vision, the actual phrasings, the colloquialisms, the intuitive art of storytelling—you just don’t hear those types of sounds anymore. Is anyone listening? Is anyone alive in this town? Velveeta has no known expiration date!”

And the workers drift away . . .

* * *

Friday. Fourteen flaming jars of mayonnaise shatter the windows of the temporary Whey Station. Inside the jars are notes written on husks of corn. Amos squints at the letterings:

1. LET HER BE OR I WILL HOLD A FAT FACE TIGHTLY AGAINST YOUR PILLOW. I AM NOT A COWARD.
2. GOD VOMITED THE DAYS YOU WERE BERN
3. SHINY AND YELLOW FELLOW
4. MOST OF US NEED BRITCHES AND YOU HAVE LOTS OF BRITCHES IT SEEMS LIKELY.
5. LOVE IS SPECTRE FOLKS BABBLE ABOUT NOT EVEN ONCE SEEN!
6. I WILL HURL YOU LIKE THE WIND INTO THE BERRY BUSHES
7. WHAT CHARIOT?
8. I FED THE FERRETS EVERY DAY THE VEVELVETVA AS YOU INSTUCTED AND NOW IT HAS DIED!
9. MAN OF AFFAIRS! BIGGITY MAN OF AFFAIRS!
10. ON THE BEST DAYS MY HEART THE SIZE OF A GRAPE. NOW THAT YOU IS NEAR MY HEART THE SIZE OF A RAISIN
11. I AM NEVER MAKING OUT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING WHEN YOU SPEAK TO ME SO PLEASE LEAVE THIS TOWN OR TALK LIKE GOD MEANT US TO TALK YOU SAM WITCH
12. UNHAND HER!
13. I AM WONDERING MR. AMOS IF YOU COULD CREATE A MAN OUT OF YOUR CHEESE? MEET ME BY THE COWS BY THE CORN BY THE FERRIS WHEEL ON THOSE FLAT BOARDS
14. THINGS ARE TRENDING TO SMASH

* * *

Amos just keeps staring at Sara. Staring and staring. Amos is trying to capture her, to fix her in place. Minutes pass. Amos is most likely creeping her out. Finally, she puts down her Velveeta (she was billowing it—a recent hobby). She says, “What?” Amos says, “Nothing.” She goes back to billowing her Velveeta, and Amos just keeps on staring.

* * *

The sky that fateful evening? Well, as you know my friends, there was a disturbance. It banged and clanged, remember? A tempest of some kind, certainly. Footsteps or thunder? Pitchforks or lightning? Voices or . . . the wind howling and the rain sweeping across the roof and the air full of electricity and then everything falling away. Some form of large, round sign was lifted from the tin roof of the dry goods store, and, you know, dropped onto Amos’s chariot. Big-ass orange sign. Strange: Amos arrives from the East; a fierce storm arrives from the West. They join in Winesburg. But I digress . . . the sky . . . the actual sky: horizontal stripes, jagged clouds. Tinted dark blue shot with yellow silver. Not so unlike the spinning blades of a Reincorporator.

* * *

Saturday, in the quiet after, the ravens return and remove every clothespin from the laundry line running between the chariot’s flag pole to the apex of the Curd Silo. (Ravens are incredibly nimble, especially with their talons and beak, and can easily bend Time/construct mosaics/brew coffee/open doors/laugh/grimace/howl/presurmise/seep or pang or suck or fuck or plop/write lives/rearrange lives/erase lives/fictionalize with a vengeance/etch with steam/fit pearls into sockets/fetch weapons or late trains/plant, grow, pluck varieties of berries/play cards or phonograph or Reincorporate without violent retch/repair clocks and/or leaden windows/fall into buckets of corn/shave or pop or lop corn for winter drinks [liquor]/grind corn/melt corn/leap into barricades/bloom like unhinged syllables into the air/love/un-love/cry/sing.)

Now Amos’s clothing lies there, empty and rumpled on the ground, like a group of fallen dead, the bodies raptured away.

* * *

On Sunday we arrive at the end of Amos’s story. A fat woman disembarks from a train. She waddles right up to The Mayor and says, “Where’s Amos Jefferson Pyle? I am his wife.”

Sara looks at The Mayor. (Oddly, Sara is sitting on The Mayor’s lap. Her rippling orange dress covers both their legs.) The Mayor removes a bright pink harmonica from his breast pocket, attempts a little, lilting ditty, but the notes fall away. Returning the harmonica to his breast pocket, he sighs. Then says, “Who?”