me out of the jungle.
Behind them on the tarp were their shadows, The shadows were moving in defiance of the motionless posture of the men and the flickerings of the firelight.
I looked to the right of me and saw Timothy. He was tied to the wrecker by blue and red electrical wire. I assumed the same thing held me. Where the man had hit him with the scissors his skull had cracked open and a coil of his brain was leaking out like congealed oatmeal escaping from a crack in a bowl. Suddenly it was very hot. I thought I was going to faint. The wire was the only thing holding me up; there were no usable muscles left in me.
I took a deep breath and pulled some strength back into me from somewhere and looked to my left and saw Sue Ellen. She was tied to the wrecker by wire too. She had her clothes on now. Both her eyes had been blacked and her bottom lip was puffed. The front of her pants was dark with blood. She had her eyes open and she was looking straight ahead, but she wasn’t seeing what was there. She was tuned in to something else. Maybe a flashback of one of the movies she liked. I hoped so. This little scenario was certainly a stinker.
Then the four in the back rose and their shadows went still and rigid. They were staring at me, or so I thought at first, but realized that they were in fact staring at something behind me. I could sense the presence of that something, and I heard movement on the wrecker and I could hear a sound like breathing through a bad drive- in speaker, puff and crackle, puff and crackle.
Goose bumps rose along my arms and ripped up my back and down my spine, felt as big as blackberries. They were even on the backs of my calves. Then the sensation passed and the wrecker creaked and I knew that whatever had been behind me had moved.
I watched the heads of the men in back turn; watched the heads of their shadows turn. The fires flickered and popped when the cold rain came through the holes in the tarp and went into them and was turned to steam.
There was movement on the wrecker again, then whatever it was jumped to the ground between Sue Ellen and myself, and I got my first look at the thing I would come to know as Popalong Cassidy.
6
Leave It to Beaver was playing on his face and his face was a sixteen-inch screen with one of those old- fashioned glow lights trimmed around it, and this was all encased in a cheap brown wooden case. The character on the screen, Ward Cleaver, closed a door and said, “Honey, I’m home,” and this was all faint, this dialogue, because there was lots of static right then. And behind all this, in the depths of that tube-face, I could see two red glows that might have been little tubes or eyes.
The television set was wearing a tall, black hat. There was a white scarf around a very human neck, and the rest of the figure was human too, and it was dressed all in black, drugstore-cowboy attire. The pants were stuffed into some tall, black boots and there was a black glove on either hand. He wore a black gun belt with some metal studs on it and there was a holster on each hip and in the holsters were pearl-handled, silver-tooled revolvers.
Television Face came and stood in front of me, and I saw below his screen, on the cheap wooden frame, two rows of knobs and dials. They divided suddenly so that they looked like top and bottom teeth, which in a way they were.
The thing was smiling. The wood was not wood.
A tongue made of tangled blue and red wires licked from left to right and disappeared. In its place came a voice full of static and high of tone. “Hi. My name is Popalong Cassidy, and I bet you think we are mean.”
The hat lifted and I saw a set of rabbit ear antennas were responsible. They wiggled out cautiously, as if testing the air for radiation. The hat tipped way back but didn’t fall off; it fit there like a flap of skin.
A blue arc jumped from the tip of one ear to the other and the arc rode down the middle space between the ears, then back up. Leave It to Beaver went away and on the screen there was a dumpy, ugly man down on one knee next to a Highway Patrol car. The car door was open and the man reached inside and took a microphone from off the dash and pulled it out until the wire was stretched. He said something into the microphone I didn’t catch, ended it with “Ten-four.” I realized then that he was down like that because on the other side of his car, way off the highway, hid out there in the brush-covered hills, there was supposed to be a bad guy with a gun.
I recognized the television series. It was an old black-and-white one I had watched on occasion. It was called Highway Patrol and starred Broderick Crawford.
I didn’t get to find out if Crawford went after the culprit in the brush or not, because Popalong darkened his face except for a little yellow dot in the center, and that grew rapidly smaller until it too was gone. The rabbit ears slid back into the set and the hat fell back into place.
“It’s okay if you think we’re mean, you know. I don’t mind.” And with that Popalong backed away from me until he was up against the big antenna that punched up the middle of the tarp. There was a bar that ran through the bottom of the antenna, about four inches off the ground, and Popalong back-stepped onto that and reached his arms up and draped them through the antenna rods, hung his head to the side and let his body droop. Presto, a media Christ.
The rain plummeted the tarp and slipped through the holes and sizzled in the popping fires. Nobody said a thing or moved a muscle.
After a while, one of the men got up and raced to the wrecker and climbed on it. When he jumped off he had a big load of magazines under each arm. He went from TV to TV and put magazines into their blazes. I saw the covers of some of the magazines before the flames devoured them. TV Guide, People, Tiger Beat, Screen Gems, all of them decorated with the faces of movie stars and fading celebrities. I thought: Where in hell did that stuff come from?
When the fires were really popping and the air was tinged with smoke, the man darted back to his place with the others, and Popalong lifted his head and looked at me and turned his face on. A test pattern filled it. The dials below the screen split apart again and the tongue of tangled wire presented itself briefly and disappeared. “Don’t think there’s any hatred in my heart for you or anyone,” Popalong said. “My heart has no room for that. It’s full of electromagnetic waves and they jump about like frogs.”
He got down off the antenna and came over and bent forward and looked at me, as if hoping to find something reflected in my eyes. The rabbit ears poked out from under the hat and touched my hair and I felt a faint electric sizzle ride the circumference of my skull. “You have no shadow, you know. It’s because you haven’t learned to belong. That’s what I think. I think when you belong here you have a shadow. I think you earn it. You haven’t earned anything. When you’re like us you’ll have a shadow, a familiar made up of the absence of light.
“Pay attention. Keep sharp. I jump around a lot. It’s the sign of a good mind. I’m trying to tell you there’s a confusion about good and evil. We worry about which is which way too much. Let me just say that good is too easy. It requires nothing. No real commitment. You can’t get the real good out of goodness until you know darkness. Death. Pain. These are instructive tools. Or as Dr. Frankenstein said in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, ‘To know death, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.’
“I know this now, but all my life I have been looking for this truth and it’s been under my nose all the time. The images taught me where it was at. There are good images and there are bad images, but the bad images make the best show, so I’ve opted for the bad images. I praise the Orbit for leading me to the truth. I praise the night I went. The Popcorn King was right. Movies are reality and everything else is fraud. But the King was not the Messiah, as I thought. He was John the Baptist. I’m the Messiah. I was given powers and position by the Producer and the Great Director, and they wanted a sci-fi horror picture. We’re number two of a double feature.
“Why me, you ask? Because I have seen more hours of television than anyone. I can quote commercials by heart. I know the name of the Green Hornet’s secret identity, the name of the sleek, black car he drives. I know the name of Sky King’s niece and what Batman eats for breakfast. Everything that is important is in this square head.
“Let me tell you too, I was made for it. I’m a preacher’s son. I grew up with fire and brimstone and channel nine, the only channel we could get at that time.
“My father spoke savagely to us from the pulpit and every Sunday afternoon after church he beat my mother with his thick belt, then came downstairs and beat me too. I never ran. I took it. He would beat me until his arm got
