Before the Rain pt. 18: Escape from Destreham, or, “Who’s My Daddy?”

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LYNDSEY lit a kerosene lamp, barely illumining her ‘new,’ used long sleeve night gown

festooned in flannel with countless hummingbirds. Opposite lay Loomis, reflected in her beaming face, of a warped aluminum mirror behind their double-wide FEMA cot. Their air

in this little hutch of a FEMA unit stank of Chinese-issue pthalate vapors seeping out of

the plasti-foam insulation.

Loomis gasped, “We’d ‘a been better off in a boxcar up on the Katy railroad–”

“Oh well,” she smiled, “Just hafta make do won’t we, yes Loomis,”

“Yes, but- Oww! My neck,” Loom complained, “Y’know this place just feels downright WEIRD, though. Don’t it?”

Lyndsey sat up, propped on a squished little pillow under her dainty left elbow. She

assessed this amazing fiftyish mess of man before her. “We did just now make love, sir!”

 

Loomis blinked wildly. “Oh, SH—!!–I’m sorry lil’ Lady, I’m sure you’re not lyin’, but I can

scarcely recall. And that chokin’ SMELL from God whatever makes me want to pack us up

and flew this dam’ COOP—”

Now came an infernal KNOCKING to the trailer door, accompanied by Armageddon-calibre

SHOUTS and SCREAMS with a somewhat familiar gluey accent, last heard in Ruta’s Cafe.

Loomis and Lyndsey glommed each other in sheer blue panic, snatching covers, jeans, and pullovers in a matter of New york milliseconds.

As the flimsy door blew open, practically off its hinges, with Frankie Daro bellowing

“LET’S GO! TIDAL BORE ON ITS WAZY!!!, Lyndsey squeezed Loomis’ right hand with

her own and silently swore to uphold their alliance in the sight of what God there may be over them in this crazy quilt mud-soaked firmament they were moving through.

“We WHAT?”, Loomis moaned, aware of her moving lips but not what was spoken.

“Oh never mind, you big galoot, mister Reader,” Lyndsey clucked, as they moved steadily but mindlessly out into a ground-blown maelstrom.

 

“C’Mon! Hop on board”, urged Frankie, as his son revved the deafening whirrers of a huge air-boat as one might have seen in a Grade Z movie about smugglers in the Everglades swamps. Lyndsey literally shoved her new-found love interest Loomis into the mid-position

catch basket, whereupon he promptly clonged his occipital skull against a high rail of the same, and as he went under, recognized Lyndsey’s soothing but agitated words of devotion: “You are such a Humpty Dumpty puzzle to be pieced back, Loomis, but I

declare by the Powers above I’ll rescue you and reconnect all your jigsaw pieces…”

Wowww, Loomis mused, half in, half out of conscious thought. I see a cloud of red. Is it..Rage, or just this magenta cough syrup like they used to offer in vast quantities at the

musty ol’ Thermopylae Pharmacy on Magazine Street. Onlynow he was dreaming a horrible ‘user’s dream,’ of slurping the sticky suffocating mixture out of a continuous chrome trough or sluiceway.”

Daro’s voice brought him around, that and Lyndsey’s frenzied shaking.

Febre and his copter done GONE! I gotta drive us down the water route apiece!

 

Loomis sat up in the rolling gunwale, and blurted out, “Serious BooJoo, my man!!”

‘-That’s GADJO, earth guy,” corrected Frankie.

Loomis retorted, “Gajo, Boojoo, I don’t care. He wet his index finger and held it

to the oppressive wind.    “We get out at Buras, Lyndsey. There we’ll sort it

out.”

Lyndsey shouted with all her might directly into the face of her intended. “Are you

familiar with the AKASHIC RECORDS?” Loomis  gaped in amazement. During his ‘occult period,’ which began sometime when he still lived in Washington with his real father, Johnathan Akula Havisham, Esquire, and on up to the Arsenal Museum near Faubourg Marigny–why yes, he was pretty zoned up on those mystic books which recorded EVERY SINGLE MOMENT(!!!)of EVERY HUMAN BEING FROM ALL TIME!

“Yeah, Lyndsey. And I b’lieve we’ll get some answers if we make it on over to

fonky ol’ Buras!” Lyndsey urged the hulking Gypsy and his son to put the jets on and get

to Buras posthaste. The craft took a sharp left heel, nearly clipping a fifteen-foot gator with a very mean yellow-eyed stare.               (To Be Continued)

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