Steven Hunley
05-08-2012, 02:12 PM
Lord of the Dynamos Two
by
Steven Hunley
Azuma Zi crossed the border into the U.S.A. secreted in the back of a panel truck, mixed with a varied lot of Mexicans, Salvadorians, and Nicaraguan natives. It didn’t matter to the smuggler that he couldn’t speak English, or Spanish for that matter, but only that his money was as equally green as the rest.
Azuma Zi rattled along with the rest of his companions of color across vast stretches of southwestern desert, thirsted when they thirsted and sweat when they sweat. He hailed from the New Hebrides, cannibal islands in the Pacific, and was therefore kinky of hair and broad of nose and black as a Sudanese kettle. How he stowed away and then jumped ship in Vera Cruz is a story in itself, and could qualify as a novella if he’d only known how to write. Azuma Zi was not a Catholic or a Moslem, nor a Buddhist or a Jew. He was an animist or pagan at best.
When Azuma Zi prayed it was to a mountain or a tree, to his ancestors, or to the ever-powerful and all-surrounding sea, or anything else that moved and smelled and made the sounds of life and caught his fancy.
After three days the smuggler spied a border patrol plane overhead and grew paranoid, abandoning the truck and his charges. Lost and abandoned by his companions in the desert, Azuma Zi ended up face-down in a dune, lips swollen out of proportion, nose peeling away in tender patches, with a buzzard passing in lazy circles over his desiccated form, lying as still as death.
Welcome to North America.
Mickey O’Shaughnessy, an electrician, plumber and engineer by trade, was prospecting for gold on his day off in a dry wash nearby and seeing the buzzards, went closer to investigate and found the body of a black man with a bone through his nose lying on the sand. He revived him and took him home and let him sleep in the garage with his new puppy.
“I don’t like the look of this fellow, or his color, or approve of his piercings, but a man can’t let another man go without water in an unforgiving hell-hole such as this.”
The foreigner slept soundly and began to snore.
“Well, it’s almost time to be at work at the dam. Those dynamos aren’t going to keep spinning without me, not properly anyway. I better be off.”
O’Shaughnessy grabbed his coat and hat and his pipe.
“You keep a watch on him, Mahmood,” he said to his lanky long-haired Afghan puppy.. “And see he stays out of trouble.”
And out or trouble he stayed. For weeks he was afraid of every sound he heard, including the TV, sirens, and helicopters, the trash truck on Tuesday mornings, and the whistle-blowing trains at night that assailed the desert with their mournful wails.
Azuma Zi was quiet himself and refused to speak, but made his needs known solely with grimaces, smiles and signs. He imitated everything he saw and heard. One afternoon O’Shaughnessy stayed home to spray the kitchen with bug spray. Azuma Zi watched his every move, especially when he acted out what the cucarachas looked like, and what he planned to do after he condemned them for their evil insect crimes against humanity.
“I’ll use gas, even though it’s against the Geneva Convention,” he said with relish, and a smile on his face, “or something quite like it.”
Azuma Zi wondered at the bug spray and how it smelled and hissed, and at the joy the Irishman expressed while he was exterminating the roaches. So when O’Shaughnessy smiled, Azuma Zi smiled back and knew pleasure.
Eventually O’Shaughnessy gave him a turn with the spray can and after a few days the house was free of vermin and smelled like lilacs, so well had Azuma Zi learned his lessons. This gave his benefactor an idea.
“Why should I slave and toil on the night-shift when there’s no one there to appreciate my hard work? I’ll train this black-tar devil to do my work for me and none will be the wiser!”
Within a week that’s what he did.
O’Shaughnessy chauffeured Azuma Zi to work. All the native islander could see out the window was the concrete and blacktop of the two-lane highway and where the lights bled over to the desert on either side, cactuses and creosote bushes. Green-glowing reflective eyes of small animals waited until the car speeded by, and then made a wild dash to the other side of the road. Like shadows their bodies roamed with them. As scary as the desert had been during the day it seemed even wilder at night and filled Azuma Zi with apprehension.
Finally they passed a sign that read. “Hoover Dam turnoff one mile.”
“We’re almost there, Man Friday,” said O’Shaughnessy, who was up on his Defoe. “Now you’ll get to see what I do.”
O’Shaughnessy made Azuma Zi lay down when they passed through the gate. Then they walked over to where the stairway led to the insides of the dam. The site was spectacular. On one side a huge lake draped soundlessly in shadow and the hills beyond silhouetted against the night sky. Two immense statues of winged humans pointed the way to the stars. Azuma Zi had never seen anything like it. The Tikis at home with coconut fiber hair and cowry shell eyes and shark teeth were only the size of a man; nothing compared to these sleek stone giants with wings that reached up to pierce the blackness of clear desert sky and punch holes to let in the stars.
Then they entered a tunnel hewn out of solid rock and descended a dimly-lit staircase that spiraled deeper and deeper into the bowels of the dam. Azuma Zi felt the iron railing begin to vibrate in his hand as they approached the door to the generating room, and he felt a humming sound hit his chest just before he stepped through.
The room was a cathedral of light. The ceiling gaped as far as the heavens overhead.
The floor was smooth rock and had symbols and circles and points, and was cold on his feet clear up to his ankles. And then there were the things
.
Azuma Zi could not keep his eyes off the things.
They were as black and shiny as he was when he sweat and they were gigantic. They pulsed, and he was suddenly aware that he pulsed too, in his arms and his legs and his veins. He pulsed the blood of life. They hummed in the same fashion he hummed when he was well-oiled and well-fed and sang for his supper. They sparked mighty sparks filling the air with engendering ozone and provoking strange thoughts in his black mini-coil-spring head.
Round and tall and mighty were the things unnamed…until O’Shaughnessy said,
“Them’s the dynamos, Boy, that feed me and keep things humming for all of Las Vegas. It’s a God-all-Mighty sight, ain’t it? Yes sir.”
Whatever he said, for Azuma Zi had no idea, he had a gleam in his eye that Azuma Zi had never seen.
“Now you stay here, behind the yellow line and watch me.”
O’Shaughnessy held him by the shoulders and made him look down at his feet and positioned his toes.
“Behind the yellow line, get me? Only the initiated cross over. So sit, Boy, sit,” he wagged his finger and laughed and went about his work.
Azuma Zi sat down on the rock floor. On one spot was a star map. It had planets floating on marble and granite, and stars from distant galaxies, with shiny brass lines radiating outward. There were dials and needles on the walls that moved and indicated the moan or singing of the dynamos by swaying as if they were a celestial conductor directing a holy chorus.
That first night he did nothing but watch. The second, he swept the floor while O’Shaughnessy watched the indicators and kept tabs with pen and paper and checked small boxes with checkmarks. Within a week he was oiling the dynamos himself while the Irishman did cross-word puzzles in the Las Vegas Times. Every word he got right he’d say,
“Yes, sir!”
Azuma Zi had found his calling. Now it all made sense, yes sir!
The escape from the islands after being thrown out of the priesthood of the Cowry Shell Goddess. The wandering on the sea for a month stowed-away on a lifeboat with nothing to eat but a box of granola bars, saltine crackers, and the nasty rain water he collected that tasted like canvas. Jumping ship in Vera Cruz and the resultant crusade across Mexico to Baja. The trials in the endless tracts of southwestern desert that nearly cost him his life.
It had all been a test. A test of his faith, he just knew it. And now in reward for his faithfulness he’d been led to the true god.
The God of Invisible Forces? No, not he.
The Holiest of Holy, The God of Electro-Magnetic.
To Azuma Zi, it was high time to join the order, to pay homage, to anoint his sinless savior. He needed an offering, a sacrifice, so he stole a few joss sticks from O’Shaughnessy fireplace mantel and stuffed them in his pants pockets. He spiked the Irishman’s thermos with whiskey when they went to work that night.
O’Shaughnessy didn’t notice because he’d lost count long ago of how many times he’d spiked it himself, or to what proportion. He swallowed a stiff one, wiped his mouth with the back of the hand and smugly directed,
“Now you get your black-self to your broom and your mop and your oil cans and such. I’ll be here if you need me, and knowing your nappy-head-hunting ways, you probably will.”
Azuma Zi left and strolled between the dynamos and took up a pail and mop and pushed it one direction until he disappeared while O’Shaughnessy pulled up a chair next to his and put up his feet and opened the newspaper. He got out a pencil and another drink from the thermos and began his evening ritual of vocabulary, satisfaction, and attainment, the cross-word. Inside of fifteen minutes he was fast asleep with the cross-word page draped over him like a shroud.
The Irishman awoke when a spark ignited the paper and set it ablaze on his chest. He rocketed up, landed on his feet and stomped the glowing ashes out. Random sparks floated everywhere on air rich with ozone, and the humming of the grand machines was not in their ordinary pitch.
“Where is Azuma Zi, and what’s going on?”
O’Shaughnessy began to search, drunk though he was, staggering down the row of dynamos. Half way, near the center, was Azuma Zi, on the floor. Long coils of blue frankincense smoke snaked upward in the peculiar atmosphere laden with ozone made by sparks from the open connections that flashed on and off at intervals. It had a strange effect. And all the while Azuma Zi lay prostrate on his face, and then up on his knees with hands extended, praying to who-knows-where-who-knows-what while the mighty machine was being ruined. It was gushing hot sparks from its innards that bounced on the cool rock floor.
A flush came to the Irishman’s cheeks and he clutched his fists.
“We’ll be having none of that island idol-worshiping here! Not while I’m oiling the wheels of progress. Not on my watch!”
O’Shaughnessy seethed with rage, foamed from his mouth and spit on the floor, defiling the temple.
He proceeded to violently beat the holy crap out of Azuma Zi. They boxed and they wrestled, they tussled and tousled, sweat, slipped, and rolled on the cool marble floor like hot chocolate candy. O’Shaughnessy gave Azuma Zi a blow to his chin that nearly knocked him out. Azuma Zi spit forth two teeth, crawled back on his feet and knocked his opponent in the head with his own native noggin, pushing him back using both hands with an ape-like Me-Tarzan-You-Jane shove.
O’Shaughnessy staggered backwards and raised his hands just as he lost his balance and fell against the terminals. One hand touched the positive terminal and the other froze to the negative. His muscles tried in vain to stretch for release but it was too late. The energy cuffed him once and for all. A surge of blue-white spark etched its way along his nervous system, an expressway to his heart. His writhing body contorted suddenly raising his feet above the floor as if he were floating in heaven, when all the while his hands were staked to the earth by the relentless current.
The latest new-fangled religion, The Lord of the Dynamos, celebrated its first human sacrifice… canonized its first saint……sanctified its first priest… and was pleased.
Every light in Las Vegas dimmed in homage the moment it happened.
“Yes, Sir!”
©Steven Hunley 2012 My thanks to Herbert George Wells for the idea.
by
Steven Hunley
Azuma Zi crossed the border into the U.S.A. secreted in the back of a panel truck, mixed with a varied lot of Mexicans, Salvadorians, and Nicaraguan natives. It didn’t matter to the smuggler that he couldn’t speak English, or Spanish for that matter, but only that his money was as equally green as the rest.
Azuma Zi rattled along with the rest of his companions of color across vast stretches of southwestern desert, thirsted when they thirsted and sweat when they sweat. He hailed from the New Hebrides, cannibal islands in the Pacific, and was therefore kinky of hair and broad of nose and black as a Sudanese kettle. How he stowed away and then jumped ship in Vera Cruz is a story in itself, and could qualify as a novella if he’d only known how to write. Azuma Zi was not a Catholic or a Moslem, nor a Buddhist or a Jew. He was an animist or pagan at best.
When Azuma Zi prayed it was to a mountain or a tree, to his ancestors, or to the ever-powerful and all-surrounding sea, or anything else that moved and smelled and made the sounds of life and caught his fancy.
After three days the smuggler spied a border patrol plane overhead and grew paranoid, abandoning the truck and his charges. Lost and abandoned by his companions in the desert, Azuma Zi ended up face-down in a dune, lips swollen out of proportion, nose peeling away in tender patches, with a buzzard passing in lazy circles over his desiccated form, lying as still as death.
Welcome to North America.
Mickey O’Shaughnessy, an electrician, plumber and engineer by trade, was prospecting for gold on his day off in a dry wash nearby and seeing the buzzards, went closer to investigate and found the body of a black man with a bone through his nose lying on the sand. He revived him and took him home and let him sleep in the garage with his new puppy.
“I don’t like the look of this fellow, or his color, or approve of his piercings, but a man can’t let another man go without water in an unforgiving hell-hole such as this.”
The foreigner slept soundly and began to snore.
“Well, it’s almost time to be at work at the dam. Those dynamos aren’t going to keep spinning without me, not properly anyway. I better be off.”
O’Shaughnessy grabbed his coat and hat and his pipe.
“You keep a watch on him, Mahmood,” he said to his lanky long-haired Afghan puppy.. “And see he stays out of trouble.”
And out or trouble he stayed. For weeks he was afraid of every sound he heard, including the TV, sirens, and helicopters, the trash truck on Tuesday mornings, and the whistle-blowing trains at night that assailed the desert with their mournful wails.
Azuma Zi was quiet himself and refused to speak, but made his needs known solely with grimaces, smiles and signs. He imitated everything he saw and heard. One afternoon O’Shaughnessy stayed home to spray the kitchen with bug spray. Azuma Zi watched his every move, especially when he acted out what the cucarachas looked like, and what he planned to do after he condemned them for their evil insect crimes against humanity.
“I’ll use gas, even though it’s against the Geneva Convention,” he said with relish, and a smile on his face, “or something quite like it.”
Azuma Zi wondered at the bug spray and how it smelled and hissed, and at the joy the Irishman expressed while he was exterminating the roaches. So when O’Shaughnessy smiled, Azuma Zi smiled back and knew pleasure.
Eventually O’Shaughnessy gave him a turn with the spray can and after a few days the house was free of vermin and smelled like lilacs, so well had Azuma Zi learned his lessons. This gave his benefactor an idea.
“Why should I slave and toil on the night-shift when there’s no one there to appreciate my hard work? I’ll train this black-tar devil to do my work for me and none will be the wiser!”
Within a week that’s what he did.
O’Shaughnessy chauffeured Azuma Zi to work. All the native islander could see out the window was the concrete and blacktop of the two-lane highway and where the lights bled over to the desert on either side, cactuses and creosote bushes. Green-glowing reflective eyes of small animals waited until the car speeded by, and then made a wild dash to the other side of the road. Like shadows their bodies roamed with them. As scary as the desert had been during the day it seemed even wilder at night and filled Azuma Zi with apprehension.
Finally they passed a sign that read. “Hoover Dam turnoff one mile.”
“We’re almost there, Man Friday,” said O’Shaughnessy, who was up on his Defoe. “Now you’ll get to see what I do.”
O’Shaughnessy made Azuma Zi lay down when they passed through the gate. Then they walked over to where the stairway led to the insides of the dam. The site was spectacular. On one side a huge lake draped soundlessly in shadow and the hills beyond silhouetted against the night sky. Two immense statues of winged humans pointed the way to the stars. Azuma Zi had never seen anything like it. The Tikis at home with coconut fiber hair and cowry shell eyes and shark teeth were only the size of a man; nothing compared to these sleek stone giants with wings that reached up to pierce the blackness of clear desert sky and punch holes to let in the stars.
Then they entered a tunnel hewn out of solid rock and descended a dimly-lit staircase that spiraled deeper and deeper into the bowels of the dam. Azuma Zi felt the iron railing begin to vibrate in his hand as they approached the door to the generating room, and he felt a humming sound hit his chest just before he stepped through.
The room was a cathedral of light. The ceiling gaped as far as the heavens overhead.
The floor was smooth rock and had symbols and circles and points, and was cold on his feet clear up to his ankles. And then there were the things
.
Azuma Zi could not keep his eyes off the things.
They were as black and shiny as he was when he sweat and they were gigantic. They pulsed, and he was suddenly aware that he pulsed too, in his arms and his legs and his veins. He pulsed the blood of life. They hummed in the same fashion he hummed when he was well-oiled and well-fed and sang for his supper. They sparked mighty sparks filling the air with engendering ozone and provoking strange thoughts in his black mini-coil-spring head.
Round and tall and mighty were the things unnamed…until O’Shaughnessy said,
“Them’s the dynamos, Boy, that feed me and keep things humming for all of Las Vegas. It’s a God-all-Mighty sight, ain’t it? Yes sir.”
Whatever he said, for Azuma Zi had no idea, he had a gleam in his eye that Azuma Zi had never seen.
“Now you stay here, behind the yellow line and watch me.”
O’Shaughnessy held him by the shoulders and made him look down at his feet and positioned his toes.
“Behind the yellow line, get me? Only the initiated cross over. So sit, Boy, sit,” he wagged his finger and laughed and went about his work.
Azuma Zi sat down on the rock floor. On one spot was a star map. It had planets floating on marble and granite, and stars from distant galaxies, with shiny brass lines radiating outward. There were dials and needles on the walls that moved and indicated the moan or singing of the dynamos by swaying as if they were a celestial conductor directing a holy chorus.
That first night he did nothing but watch. The second, he swept the floor while O’Shaughnessy watched the indicators and kept tabs with pen and paper and checked small boxes with checkmarks. Within a week he was oiling the dynamos himself while the Irishman did cross-word puzzles in the Las Vegas Times. Every word he got right he’d say,
“Yes, sir!”
Azuma Zi had found his calling. Now it all made sense, yes sir!
The escape from the islands after being thrown out of the priesthood of the Cowry Shell Goddess. The wandering on the sea for a month stowed-away on a lifeboat with nothing to eat but a box of granola bars, saltine crackers, and the nasty rain water he collected that tasted like canvas. Jumping ship in Vera Cruz and the resultant crusade across Mexico to Baja. The trials in the endless tracts of southwestern desert that nearly cost him his life.
It had all been a test. A test of his faith, he just knew it. And now in reward for his faithfulness he’d been led to the true god.
The God of Invisible Forces? No, not he.
The Holiest of Holy, The God of Electro-Magnetic.
To Azuma Zi, it was high time to join the order, to pay homage, to anoint his sinless savior. He needed an offering, a sacrifice, so he stole a few joss sticks from O’Shaughnessy fireplace mantel and stuffed them in his pants pockets. He spiked the Irishman’s thermos with whiskey when they went to work that night.
O’Shaughnessy didn’t notice because he’d lost count long ago of how many times he’d spiked it himself, or to what proportion. He swallowed a stiff one, wiped his mouth with the back of the hand and smugly directed,
“Now you get your black-self to your broom and your mop and your oil cans and such. I’ll be here if you need me, and knowing your nappy-head-hunting ways, you probably will.”
Azuma Zi left and strolled between the dynamos and took up a pail and mop and pushed it one direction until he disappeared while O’Shaughnessy pulled up a chair next to his and put up his feet and opened the newspaper. He got out a pencil and another drink from the thermos and began his evening ritual of vocabulary, satisfaction, and attainment, the cross-word. Inside of fifteen minutes he was fast asleep with the cross-word page draped over him like a shroud.
The Irishman awoke when a spark ignited the paper and set it ablaze on his chest. He rocketed up, landed on his feet and stomped the glowing ashes out. Random sparks floated everywhere on air rich with ozone, and the humming of the grand machines was not in their ordinary pitch.
“Where is Azuma Zi, and what’s going on?”
O’Shaughnessy began to search, drunk though he was, staggering down the row of dynamos. Half way, near the center, was Azuma Zi, on the floor. Long coils of blue frankincense smoke snaked upward in the peculiar atmosphere laden with ozone made by sparks from the open connections that flashed on and off at intervals. It had a strange effect. And all the while Azuma Zi lay prostrate on his face, and then up on his knees with hands extended, praying to who-knows-where-who-knows-what while the mighty machine was being ruined. It was gushing hot sparks from its innards that bounced on the cool rock floor.
A flush came to the Irishman’s cheeks and he clutched his fists.
“We’ll be having none of that island idol-worshiping here! Not while I’m oiling the wheels of progress. Not on my watch!”
O’Shaughnessy seethed with rage, foamed from his mouth and spit on the floor, defiling the temple.
He proceeded to violently beat the holy crap out of Azuma Zi. They boxed and they wrestled, they tussled and tousled, sweat, slipped, and rolled on the cool marble floor like hot chocolate candy. O’Shaughnessy gave Azuma Zi a blow to his chin that nearly knocked him out. Azuma Zi spit forth two teeth, crawled back on his feet and knocked his opponent in the head with his own native noggin, pushing him back using both hands with an ape-like Me-Tarzan-You-Jane shove.
O’Shaughnessy staggered backwards and raised his hands just as he lost his balance and fell against the terminals. One hand touched the positive terminal and the other froze to the negative. His muscles tried in vain to stretch for release but it was too late. The energy cuffed him once and for all. A surge of blue-white spark etched its way along his nervous system, an expressway to his heart. His writhing body contorted suddenly raising his feet above the floor as if he were floating in heaven, when all the while his hands were staked to the earth by the relentless current.
The latest new-fangled religion, The Lord of the Dynamos, celebrated its first human sacrifice… canonized its first saint……sanctified its first priest… and was pleased.
Every light in Las Vegas dimmed in homage the moment it happened.
“Yes, Sir!”
©Steven Hunley 2012 My thanks to Herbert George Wells for the idea.