Riders of the Purple Wage Read online

  Chib ignores the mortuarians, who want to know what to do with the body. He walks over to the grave. The top of the ovoid coffin is visible now, with the long elephantlike snout of the digging machine sonically crumbling the dirt and then sucking it up. Accipiter, breaking through his lifelong control, is smiling at the fidomen and rubbing his hands.

  “Dance a little, you son of a bitch,” Chib says, his anger the only block to the tears and the wail building up in him.

  The area around the coffin is cleared to make room for the grappling arms of the machine. These descend, hook under, and lift the black, irradiated-plastic, mocksilver-arabesqued coffin up and out and onto the grass. Chib, seeing the IRB men begin to open the coffin, starts to say something but closes his mouth. He watches intently, his knees bent as if getting ready to jump. The fidomen close in, their eyeball-shaped cameras pointing at the group around the coffin.

  Groaning, the lid rises. There is a big bang. Dense dark smoke billows. Accipiter and his men, blackened, eyes wide and white, coughing, stagger out of the cloud. The fidomen are running every which way or stooping to pick up their cameras. Those who were standing far enough back can see that the explosion took place at the bottom of the grave. Only Chib knows that the raising of the coffin lid has activated the detonating device in the grave.

  He is also the first to look up into the sky at the projectile soaring from the grave because only he expected it. The rocket climbs up to five hundred feet while the fidomen train their cameras on it. It bursts apart and from it a ribbon unfolds between two round objects. The objects expand to become balloons while the ribbon becomes a huge banner.

  On it, in big black letters, are the words

  WINNEGAN’S FAKE!

  Twenty billions of dollars buried beneath the supposed bottom of the grave burn furiously. Some bills, blown up in the geyser of fireworks, are carried by the wind while IRB men, fidomen, mortuary officials, and municipality officials chase them.

  Mama is stunned.

  Accipiter looks as if he is having a stroke.

  Chib cries and then laughs and rolls on the ground.

  Grandpa has again screwed Uncle Sam and has also pulled his greatest pun where all the world can see it.

  “Oh, you old man!” Chib sobs between laughing fits. “Oh, you old man! How I love you!”

  While he is rolling on the ground again, roaring so hard his ribs hurt, he feels a paper in his hand. He stops laughing and gets on his knees and calls after the man who gave it to him. The man says, “I was paid by your grandfather to hand it to you when he was buried.”

  Chib reads.

  I hope nobody was hurt, not even the IRB men.

  Final advice from the Wise Old Man In The Cave. Tear loose. Leave LA. Leave the country. Go to Egypt. Let your mother ride the purple wage on her own. She can do it if she practices thrift and self-denial. If she can’t, that’s not your fault.

  You are fortunate indeed to have been born with talent, if not genius, and to be strong enough to want to rip out the umbilical cord. So do it. Go to Egypt. Steep yourself in the ancient culture. Stand before the Sphinx. Ask her (actually, it’s a he) the Question.

  Then visit one of the zoological preserves south of the Nile. Live for a while in a reasonable facsimile of Nature as she was before mankind dishonored and disfigured her. There, where Homo Sapiens (?) evolved from the killer ape, absorb the spirit of that ancient place and time.

  You’ve been painting with your penis, which I’m afraid was more stiffened with bile than with passion for life. Learn to paint with your heart. Only thus will you become great and true.

  Paint.

  Then, go wherever you want to go. I’ll be with you as long as you’re alive to remember me. To quote Runic, “I’ll be the Northern Lights of your soul.”

  Hold fast to the belief that there will be others to love you just as much as I did or even more. What is more important, you must love them as much as they love you.

  Can you do this?