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Tannerite, Wyoming is a small college town of about 40,000 souls in central Wyoming, of no relation to the popular gender-reveal explosive powder. Before its relatively recent incorporation in the early 1940s, the area was known for an abandoned pioneer settlement called Busted Goat Gulch. The eponymous gulch and the surrounding lands were abandoned before being so named by disgruntled pioneers who arrived seeking arable soil but only found a small valley in no man’s land between Shoshone and Crow tribal territory. The land was of little use to either tribe and less to the pioneers seeking honest work as yeoman farmers following the Homestead Act. The soil is dusty and totally unsuitable for farming.
The first families to arrive set up their camp on the edge of the eponymous gulch, and brought some goats with them, the only livestock that could conceivably be reared on the plentiful scrub, cheat grass and tares. The settlement inconceivably subsisted for a decade or two, mostly as a stopover station for other pioneers who got lost on their way through Wyoming trying to avoid various Crow settlements to the east.
These settlers took to calling the area “Amawaxio” after speaking with the natives, unaware that this was a poor mispronunciation of the Crow word for garbage dump. For some centuries prior, the nearby Crow had used the gulch as a place to burn offal and unusable tribal miscellanea. After the first settlers arrived and their goats began to multiply, the Crow took to calling it “Iisaxpúatahcheeiihchiiwishe Ammaahawáxxiio,” which loosely translates to “Goat Dump” or “Goat Garbage Land.” They generally ignored the town unless they were in truly desperate need of provisions following unsuccessful forays into Shoshone territory.
One night, that changed. One of the larger goat-herding families played a dastardly prank on the natives. The reason is not known. Perhaps they had been pranked first. In any case, an older goat of theirs had developed scrapie. You can’t abide scrapie in your goatherd. The likelihood of general infection of all the goats is too great. But instead of taking the goat out back to the shed for a Colt Peacemaker salute, they decided to trade the goat for some buffalo hide pants. They waited eagerly for retribution, but it came in a manner none anticipated.
It can be assumed that the Crow did not end up eating the goat because there are no accounts of the natives suffering from misfolded prions in the area, but it is certain they noticed something strange about it. Symptoms of scrapie include missing patches of fur from excessive scratching and biting, sores, rambunctious jumping, hissing, and horrible bleating that can, on occasion, sound like human speech. Perhaps the Crow traders did not know how a normal goat was supposed to look or act, or perhaps they were just very hungry. In any case, they were likely reprimanded for trading their pants for something so obviously demon-possessed and ordered to get their revenge on the settlement.
Around a week later a party of Crow returned to the settlement, at night. They alerted nobody and no goat and set several fires near the edge of the gulch, positioned so that most of the goats would be forced to run from the fire to their deaths at the bottom. The revenge mission was a spectacular success; the horrified settlers woke up to blazing fires all around and the otherworldy din of wounded bleating. Having lost their only source of sustenance, they all in their turn caught rides on wagon trains heading to Oregon in the following months, leaving the legend and the name of the short-lived settlement in their wake: the gulch of the busted goats.
Then the Tannerite area was plunged into a Dark Age. This is confirmed by the dearth of historical records, aside a single journal entry by a sojourning Jesuit priest in 1895:
“Stopped for the night in an ugly area. The sunset is blood orange and sets over a nasty gully filled with bovid remains of hideous form, blacked by fire and bleached by sun. At first we wondered if perhaps they were fossils, in which case we were briefly elated to have an opportunity to observe the conclusions of the illustrious Darwin and Fenellosa in person (with reference to the Holy Mind of Christ in our Hearts), but upon a second look, we came to the thrilling conclusion that the natives here seem to have a Gehenna of their own; at once I am awestruck by the universality of Scripture and the Evil which accompanies it always, and the continued relevance of the great Agassiz’s theories on the descent of Man. God protect us this night that we may continue our apostolic mission among these bloodthirsty savages.”
A decade or so before World War II, an American surveyor from the East Coast named John Tanner found a mineral called bauxite, a precursor in aluminum manufacturing, in the hard soil. The mining town of Tannerite, a portmanteau using the names of the surveyor and the valuable mineral, became the only lucrative bauxite deposit in the American West. Its existence cheapened throughput aluminum for domestic automotive and aircraft manufacturers to such a degree that it finally seemed fate had greater plans for the region than the legend of Busted Goat Gulch.
Permanent settlement returned to the area after the Crow and the Shoshone disappeared into reservations and university archives, and the town gradually attained the gentle thrum attendant to industrial hubs. But the old curse of the town could not be waylaid for long: the combined force of an industrializing China and dwindling bauxite reserves in the town meant that by the late 1970s it somehow became cheaper and more efficient for the same automotive and aircraft manufacturers to import their bauxite and processed aluminum from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
This time though, Tannerite had enough settler inertia to not be blown into oblivion, even though standards of living plummeted. Gas stations flourished, regional banks got fatter, the bauxite processing plant rusted, the mines got a superfund designation, and the tech school built to train miners and tradesmen crumbled into something resembling a picturesque by Thomas Cole. The spirit of the goat dump seemed to have triumphed over the march of empire and scientific progress.
But this triumph was comparatively short-lived. In the late 1980s, an eccentric billionaire-in-exile with Ivy League secret society connections and offshore assets generally worth more than the islands on which they were hidden decided to buy out the tech school campus from the town. This man, one Jonathan Harlow Hubarth, found the campus listed on a national auction service, and purchased it without a second thought, such was his righteous antagonism to his former colleagues, who apparently had drug his name through the dirt for better placement in the exploding intelligence sector in Washington; the details are fuzzy, but it seems Hubarth’s billions came from profits on high interest loans to various national banks in third world countries with burgeoning independence movements.
Hubarth visited the town of Tannerite after his purchase and realized he was in his element as a developer of the dirty and destroyed. He established a web start-up offering full stack services for institutions called HuNet, after taking note of the lucrative developments in information sciences, ensuring that the university and its high-tech infrastructure would create cushy bureaucratic jobs attracting the enterprising and upper middle class to Tannerite. Ever since, men and women in pleated chinos with eclectic taste in sour beers and open-toed active footwear have steadily streamed in from all over the country.
He renovated and expanded the old campus and established his own private, Christian liberal arts university (though Hubarth did make use of the tech school resources to establish an engineering faculty) dedicated to free expression, free trade and moral uprightness. He put it on the HuNet cloud and named it Hubarth College. In his desperation to seem like less of a dilettante than he really was, he made the mascot of the college a white whale named Dick and gave the school the motto “Call Us Ishmael!”
After an arduous and expensive accreditation battle with Hubarth’s old Ivy League foes on national school boards, Hubarth College began to attract a significantly sized, if equally dilettantish, professoriate and studentry. Hubarth College must be given credit for being ahead of the game by not only digitizing much of university administration and instruction, but also for anticipating the environmentalist turn in academia: the department of Letters and Science at Hubarth College became nationally renowned as a center for the study of decay and degradation, producing such illustrious interdisciplinary studies as Gehenna on Earth: An Analysis of Environmental Degradation and Social Erosion in Nowhere, USA, and Legend of the Goat Dump: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Modern Garbage.
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I’ve gathered most of the information on Tannerite from the above sources, which is one pleasant consequence of my part-time enrollment as a University Studies major. University Studies is intended for people who have not yet made up their mind what field they’d like to go into debt for, and don’t mind spending their time indecisive as they sink farther into the clutches of Sallie Mae. Barring those who are sincerely interested in a very general education and run no risk of debt servitude due to academic scholarship or wealthy parents, there is another type of University Studies student: a rental informant who has his tuition bankrolled by a shadow organization that holds meetings in rundown malls and office supply stores.
When you’re embedded in a university, as many Union informants are, you’re assigned a personal dossier containing a fake name and personal history. You arrive at the university with the forged documentation of a transfer student, and the chance of hiccups with university administration is nearer to zero than to one. It’s enough to make a guy wonder if the Union is just that good at forgery, or if there are perhaps secret agreements between the Union and every accredited university in the States. I suspect both are true to some extent, but I do have sympathies with those who insist on the reality of men who “move only in dimly lit hallways and determine our futures for us.” If any organization attested to the partial truth of that worldview, the Union was it.
I enrolled in the university as a transfer student with 70 credits from a land-grant university in Washington under the name Kenneth Branagh. I was thankful this name wasn’t as tasteless as my last. My nom de le secret with the APRA was “Hector ‘Juice’ McCoy.” I suspected they generated that name after training an algorithm on a list of Arizonans held on misdemeanors for possession. “Kenneth” had flair and class. It made me feel like something of a celebrity, truth be told.
Background: upper middle-class family, one parent a surgeon, the other a homemaker. In other words: quite comfortable. Adjectives: Sheltered, active, suave. This was all easy enough; the rest of Kenneth was mine to fill in during my classes. My course load was remarkably vacant, even for a part-time transfer student. In the spring I was enrolled in two courses: one seminar on Tannerite history and an intermediate level survey called “Soils and Their Literatures,” which I only attended once.
I found Hubarth College an active campus with a variety of clubs and a surprising number of facilities for a liberal arts school. When I arrived in the winter before I started classes, I strolled around the campus to get an idea of where I’d be spending my time informing. I must admit I was intoxicated by the promise of a raise (I had not yet been notified it was rescinded at this point). The hide-and-seek informing mission, and the bluster of youthful naivete that permeated the concrete and brick buildings of the campus like chlorophyll in a rag gave me job satisfaction for the first time in my career with the Union.
The top floor of a newer building on campus dedicated to architecture housed my seminar. This building, red, tall, and imposing, was made from brick and steel and curtained all the way around with large single-paned windows. It suffocated the beholder with its newness. The brick was symmetrical and smooth like computer renderings, and its rough red color I can only describe as modern, though the intention was clearly rustic. It would have made as much sense to me if instead of bricklaying, the university had bought factory-made brick paneling, conveniently cut to the needed sizes and installed them with a crane.
The windows allowed plentiful natural light, and inside, the bare steel scaffolding gave one a clear view from the floor to the ceiling. All this produced an impression that was at once skeletal and exceedingly decadent, and I am positive that this was the exact intention. Raw power embraces contradiction.
My other class was in the oldest building on the campus, a renovated remnant of the old tech school, converted into the headquarters of the History and Theology Faculty. Constructed with wear-browned brick, and three stories tall with marble steps warped by the ceaseless and heavy march of students, this one had a certain charm and authority that permeated its stuffy environs. The high ceilings reflected an era before air conditioning, and the lack of plentiful windows testified to an earlier generation’s excitement about electric lighting.
The other standout building on the campus was a tall building known colloquially as The Castle, and behind its rain-stained rock walls was the registrar’s office and all the servers hosting the HuNet cloud. It was made of concrete and brick and rose to a peak of about 60 feet, and had several cylindrical towers outfitted with ersatz murderholes with no stairway access. On the north side was a showy barbican, and on the south side were giant timber doors which opened to the quadrangular, water-stained battlements serving as the entry to the building. It looked from a distance as if it could have been the oldest building on the campus, maybe even the oldest in Wyoming, but a closer inspection proved that it was more likely the work of an overzealous medievalist architect, probably contracted at something of a budget because the style was so anachronistic. If any man appreciated this vision, it was Hubarth, and the building, despite its utter decadence and conspicuousness, was regarded with fondness by the students and faculty, who filed in and out on a daily basis in clothing as alien to the structure as the structure was alien to the times and the architectural vogue.
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As an informant, you aren’t totally without ego. If I had been, I would never have tried to get raises or leave the Union. But being forced to adopt and construct the egos of imaginary useful idiots puts you somewhat outside of the concept. You start seeing radicals (egoists par excellence) as carefully constructed artifices that reflect their motivations and fears, desires and needs. You begin to understand that, in the same way that your projected ego is an instrument of a union contract, so too are theirs instruments of political projects. I did have private misgivings about this; it is unsettling to start seeing everyone as fish and yourself as bait and tackle.
On a college campus though, everyone is looking to have their bubble validated and Baldwin was no different; he was an outstanding case. The man wore his flaming red hair to his shoulders and dressed like a mix between a mechanic and a night club owner. His photo in the dossier was a blurry side profile and the vague physical description gave only general clues. His exact residence was unknown, but the dossier did say he was a regular participant in Hubarth’s swing dance club. So I went.
Wooden, seemingly club-footed strangers swayed, rocked and two-stepped around the gym, clopping on and around the giant, cartoon white whale mascot printed on the floor of the court. They danced to a nondescript 80’s country tune, something about a rainy night and a “heart like a bowie knife” with zealous steel guitar accompaniment. The music played from two pairs of speakers stacked on top of each other on the sideline of the gym, and between the speakers was a white plastic folding table, where an old, scary-looking crone of a woman held vigil and tapped her finger to the time of the song, watching each couple for spacing violations, but these dancers were almost all nerds, men and women alike, enough space between them to fit not just Jesus but the whole Holy Trinity and the entire heavenly host, arms limply around waists and sweaty hands dangling from sweaty hands, with only gravity holding them together.
I walked to a group of wallflowers who stood against the seafoam green padding beneath a basketball hoop. There were three of them: two guys, one leaned with his head against the pad at an awkward angle so that his entire body-weight was supported inexplicably by his neck, and another who stood next to him, and spoke about something evidently clandestine and compelling, as I guessed from his slouched aspect, with his shoulders turned to his friend, and away from any prying ears. When his friend heard the secret, his face broke into a wry smile and that neck of his yawed against the pad and his whole body sunk a few inches and then rose again. I was perplexed, somewhat disgusted, and thankful neither of these two matched the dossier.
The other wallflower was an unassuming girl. She wore a tucked white button-down shirt with her hair in a low ponytail. She looked at me out of the corner of her eyes and smiled absently, like some sprite in her head had made a joke.
“I hope I’m not too late,” I said.
The girl looked at me and then turned her eyes back to the dance floor.
“Not at all,” she replied. “This is the first song of the night.”
Then she looked at me again, closer, and seemed to understand she hadn’t seen me before. Her eyes were dark brown, and she was good-looking in the charming way only plainish girls are, but her facial expressions settled in a strange way, as if she was watching my reactions to determine her own.
I hitched my pants, tried to be genial.
“I’m a transfer student, just got in a few weeks ago. Thought I’d try and meet some people before next semester. My name’s Kenneth.”
I stuck out my hand and she took it softly and quickly.
“Good to meet you. Mine’s Carolyn.” She paused and silence hung between us momentarily. “Do you know how to dance?”
“Not really.” I chuckled. “I figured I’ll learn.”
“Maybe you will,” she said. “Maybe you won’t. Some people just don’t have the blood for it. Some people, it’s all they can do to keep themselves from dancing. They have no other desire.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What?”
“I dance because I must.”
“What?”
“Can I get the next dance?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s probably not in my blood. You ask those guys?” I indicated the secret-keepers next to us with a thumb.
“Those guys don’t dance.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I already asked them.”
“They said no?”
“They couldn’t hear me.”
I laughed nervously. Her wistful smile and blank, dark eyes did not change, but I had noticed that sometime during our conversation she had turned her shoulders toward me and inched closer.
“You’re gonna have to teach me some things,” I said.
“I know.”
I nodded and didn’t say any more; she might have been cute, but she was as crazy as any bird I’d ever met. I wasn’t going to push it with her.
I scanned the room for Baldwin and found him two-stepping with his partner by the free throw line. He wore a leather cowboy jacket with tassels, a belt with a comically large buckle in the shape of a cobra, and snakeskin boots of dubious authenticity. I don’t know how I didn’t notice him sooner. He was altogether a man apart from the rest of this sorry retinue.
I nudged Carolyn and pointed discreetly. “Who’s the guy with the boots?”
Carolyn looked in the direction I pointed, and we watched Baldwin lithely spin his dance partner in time with a loping drum fill.
“That’s Winnie. He’s a good dancer. He’s full blooded.”
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“Not outside of the club, no. He likes to party.”
“Not into that?” I asked.
“No. I don’t cut the rug outside prescribed locations. It’s vulgar.”
“Interesting.”
She didn’t respond.
“Have you danced with him?”
“Once.” She exhaled deeply and loudly through her nose. “Yes. It was depraved. Animal. Not a dance I’ll have more than once in my life, I expect. We very nearly were kicked from the club for it.” She indicated the crone with a finger. “Mrs. Heathers. She hates honest passion. She learned dance well up to technique and ceased at passion. Passion is when dance becomes flight.”
“Okay,” I said.
The song soon ended, and Carolyn pulled me on the floor. I was afraid. The object of my mission was now only a few feet away from me and the woman who had chosen me to dance did not seem to be of this world.
The music began. Carolyn placed one of my hands on her hip and took the other in her hand. We took steps together, I tried to match. I looked to my left. There was another couple dancing between Baldwin and me. I deliberately moved against Carolyn’s goads to the left in a semicircle to get around them. Carolyn tripped a little bit.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You are a dancer.”
I ignored this ponderous remark and took another step backwards, disguised as a misstep in the dance. Baldwin and his partner danced to my right now. I did the two-step for a few beats with fluency to keep Carolyn from thinking anything was amiss, and then attempted an outrageous twirl to line up flush with Baldwin; the move failed. I swung Carolyn into Baldwin’s partner, and all four of us lost time with the music.
“Whoa!” Baldwin exclaimed. He cast a glance at me before looking to Carolyn. I shrugged my shoulders, but the jolt of this meeting was too rushed to try anything. The timing was off, it was forced. The dance had to continue. He raised his eyebrows and looked as if he would speak, but then he realized who it was who bumped into him, and only scratched his cheek instead.
His partner was a very beautiful smallish blonde girl, and after a moment of her peering at Carolyn with jealous intensity the two of them fell back into the swing within moments, as if there had not been an interruption at all. He maintained eye contact with her, and among all the dancers in the room only the two of them approached anything resembling honest passion. Carolyn and I might have, had I not halted her every lithe, fluent step with artificial clumsiness.
“Sorry bro,” I said, practically calling to him now that I’d moved a yard or two away. “I don’t know how to dance.”
He looked over and a look of confusion spread across his face. He shook his head and mouthed something to his partner.
“Let’s just two-step till I get this figured out,” I said to Carolyn, clearing my throat.
“You are strange.” She stared up at me intently for a moment, and I turned my eyes to the floor.
“Put my pants on every morning, same as everyone else.”
“I doubt it,” she said, her voice a low, husky whisper. My skin crawled.
Then inexplicably she moaned, and I stopped immediately. Her body began to jump, and she vigorously wiggled her left foot, shaking with an uncanniness more befitting a sock puppet than a human, and I was moments from decking her before I looked down and realized her big toe was sandwiched squarely under my left foot.
“What the hell was that noise?”
“Have you heard of pain?” She scoffed, and then that strange, clouded smile of hers appeared on her face, and she again looked to be consorting in real time with phantoms as we danced.
The song approached its third choral refrain, and I knew I had to do something drastic to get Baldwin’s attention. I ceased to resist Carolyn’s movements, and followed her as well as I could, and somehow I was able to, even for just a few seconds. Her movement was infectious, debilitating, undoubtedly demonic. Her hips ululated, reached for mine, groped like a vine growing toward a distant white sun. Yes. A freak of unseen dimensions. A viper in plainclothes, not the first I’d met and certainly not the last. She remains on the floor. She does not ensnare, because her victims come to her, and if she seems to exist only to puzzle, she puzzles in the same manner as the spider, whose web is simultaneously beautiful and evil. The dust from shoes, the sweat from brows and foreheads, the brush of crotch seams against dress folds: these are the source of her vigor.
I two-stepped, shucked, jived, did the Charleston, spun about, grabbed her by the waist, clapped my hands, pulled her close, twirled her, leaned her back over my leg, and then I twisted my hips and shoved her to the floor.
This did not go over well. Mrs. Heathers was in a rage. Mutters emanated from the other dancers, bewildered whispers, wide eyes. Baldwin laughed so hard he doubled over. I put my hands up in the air. His date looked at me disgustedly.
“She grabbed my crotch! She grabbed my crotch!” I said.
“She did no such thing. I would have seen.” Mrs. Heathers said.
“Ma’am I leaned her back and she reached up. I wouldn’t just drop a lady.”
“Something about the look of you tells me you might.”
Carolyn rubbed her head and peered at me with her dark eyes. She didn’t utter a word in her defense.
Mrs. Heathers didn’t know what to do with my accusation and it seemed to me she must have heard the complaint or something similar before, because she hesitated, her face still twisted up looking alternately between me and Carolyn’s crumpled personage before she finally told me to leave.
“Young man. Get out. Now. I’ve never seen you in my life.”
“I just got assaulted, ma’am.”
“I saw it happen,” Baldwin said. He was standing next to me now, wearing a mischievous, damnable grin. “I saw her do it. He leaves, and I leave, and I’m the best dancer in this place. This is unacceptable.”
This remark pushed Mrs. Heathers over the edge. “Just get out, both of you get out. This matter will be dealt with, and you will hear about it later.” She pointed at the door.
Carolyn rose to her feet and walked to where she’d stood when I came in and leaned against the padding on the wall. She watched me as we passed.
…
FEDBOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY WILL BE RELEASED IN DIGITAL AND PAPERBACK FORMATS ON 1/19/23. 373 PAGES. FRAME-NARRATION. DREAMS. THE HIGH-DESERT. VIOLENCE. UNREQUITED LOVE. BETRAYAL. A CASTLE. BLACK RIFLES AND PLATE CARRIERS. HINTS OF A SUPERNAL WORLDLY ORDER AND THE ONE TRUE GOD TO WHICH ALL ARE SUBJECT. SALVATION AND PENANCE.
THE SINGULAR GOTHIC WESTERN-NOIR THRILLER COMEDY.
A TALE FROM THE CITY OF DESTRUCTION.
STAY TUNED.