Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

  It worried him, how, anymore, his only reaction to beauty, beauty and vulnerability, was to grow himself a boner.

  A voice behind Rainbow offered, “I have this…” It was Sun Baby. The deputies had followed him. Sun Baby held up a plastic knife from the Chow Tent and said, “…If you need to perform, you know, a postmortem.”

  The figure collapsed on the ground looked as gray as the flat, arid land that spread for a hundred miles in every direction. Despite his thick coating of dirt, flies had already found the holes of his bowling ball mask. His bladder had let loose, and flies hovered over the moisture of his mud-caked genitals. He lay on his side, curled slightly, with his belly sagging against the ground. There was no telling if he was white or black or Asian. Not without some soap and water. To Rainbow Bright, the deceased looked like a melted sand candle. Even the dead Mud Man had foreskin.

  He handed his half-empty coffee mug to Strawberry. “Does anybody else know?” He waved his hand to indicate the people on the scene. “Except us, five?” He motioned for her to take a sip. To calm herself. Doing so, he noticed his mood rings were brighter, nearly brown.

  Strawberry Shortcake had shaved her head. A smart-cookie move. Last year had been a banner one for lice, and this year she’d told everyone she wasn’t going to spend the best part of her summer clawing at another raw, bloody scalp. She wore a shiny wig of long, shimmering strands the color of bubblegum. She shook her head, No.

  As he spoke, Rainbow leveled his gaze at each of them, in turn. “If we notify the sheriff’s office, they’ll shut us down.” He waited for his words to sink in. The only sound was the buzz of flies. “There will never be another Playa Rock Arts Festival, not here.” He smirked. “Unless you want to spend your next vacation at Disney World…” he nodded sagely, “…we’re going to have to deal with this by ourselves.”

  The blistering winds brought the distant beat of trance music…hip-hop…drum and bass. Rainbow Bright would have to think fast. The campers were gradually coming awake. “You,” he indicated Tink with a jerk of his head. “You issue an all-points text, blast that we have an urgent Code Scabies in the Chill Tent.” Nothing, not reports of scorpions nor rattlesnakes, cleared a tent faster than rumors of a bedbug infestation. Once the word got out, no one would venture near the Chill Tent. “Take the body there, stat. I’m going to need a stiff paintbrush and about ten thousand wet wipes.”

  At Sex Witch Camp, he tracked down the head of Member Registration. She’d have the entry records, the cards people had to fill out. The legal liability waivers. The Sex Witches were busy erecting a gigantic effigy of Sandra Bernhard. They’d built her in sections, her arms and legs, in places like Memphis and Brownsville, according to engineering diagrams they’d found on the Internet. The daunting task at hand was getting her stacked correctly.

  The registrar, her name was Tinkerbelle. Rainbow Bright was ready to barter for the information.

  The girl from Mud Camp, the one who’d found the victim, she’d said his name was Scooby-Doo, but she didn’t know from where he’d come. She’d pointed out his sleeping bag. It contained nothing but fleas and a paperback copy of Fight Club. Rainbow Bright had picked around in his navel until he’d found some peyote and some Toquilone. She’d swallowed them without hesitation, and he’d convinced her that Scooby-Doo wasn’t dead; the kid had only been overdosed. The girl had been quick to accept the story that some Narcan had set things back on the straight and narrow. Strawberry Shortcake had tucked her into bed with a lullaby and a hashish brownie.

  At the Sex Witch tent, Tinkerbelle cupped a hand over her nose and mouth. “Your head smells like cat box.” She wore nothing except a skeptic’s raised eyebrow and a coat of coconut oil that made the hair look like faux wood grain painted between her legs.

  Rainbow Bright offered, “You want rubbers? I can trade you some for a look at the records.”

  “You got Ritalin?” she countered.

  He shook his head. “Sunblock?”

  “SPF 54, then?” asked Tinkerbelle. She looked pointedly at his dreads. “I have stuff, can deodorize pet stains.”

  Rainbow Bright suggested, “You need Imodium? A200? Hand sanitizer?”

  The arid plains around them teemed with characters. Like a planet someplace weird. Like a Star Wars cantina. Freaks walked past them on stilts. Freaks, perched high up on unicycles, wore sombreros and juggled plastic human skulls. A Mad Max future grafted onto a cowboy past. It had the mishmashed look of a Hollywood studio back lot from a hundred years before: a jumble of sets and characters, all of them looking for the thread of a grand narrative to unite them.

  Tinkerbelle asked, “How’s Thumbelina?” It was his wife’s festival name. She and Tinkerbelle went way, way back. “Home with the kids, I suppose?” Her tone was baiting, like she knew something he didn’t.

  Rainbow Bright escalated to offering the big stuff. Twinkies. Kettle Korn. Hydrogenated tropical oils and bioengineered artificially Cajun-flavored snack chips. Here, after a few days of macrobiotic, whole-grain, soy everything, Oreos were as sought after as rubies.

  Tinkerbelle leaned close to him. So close, he could smell her sage. Her eyes scanned for anyone within earshot, and she whispered, “Can you get your hands on some meat?”

  “You want chicken? Pork?”

  “Beef,” she whispered.

  “Hamburger okay?” They’d struck a deal. Anything to escape the regimen of tempeh and tofu. He’d find her two pounds of ground beef in exchange for a look at the camp registration records.

  In the Chill Tent, they cleared the communal altar of sacred objects, setting aside quartz crystals and brass Hanuman ape statues, the framed Ram Dass photos and Yoda action figures, the Skeletors and Miss Piggy dolls and My Pretty Ponies, Malibu Barbies, Gumbies, and vanilla-scented votive candles. Cleared, the altar was waist high and covered with a bedsheet tie-dyed in swirls of red and orange. It gave them a practical place to examine the body. While Rainbow worked, Sun Baby documented every step of the procedure, snapping cell phone pictures and shooting video.

  According to entry records, forty-eight campers had registered under the name Scooby-Doo. The air was rich with the aroma of barbecues. Here, it was always summer. Rainbow Bright weighed the likelihood that the dead Mud Man was not among the six Scooby-Doos who’d given their driver’s license numbers at registration. Odds were better that he’d hitchhiked.

  Working, Rainbow felt like an archeologist, brushing away the loose dirt, then swabbing with baby wipes to expose patches of clean skin. He was looking for track marks, injection sites, evidence of an overdose. Stab wounds. Bullet holes. Snakebite. The more he scrubbed, the more Rainbow Bright was certain he’d never seen the kid before. This was a frat boy. A lily-white homeboy, lured here by the music television footage of a zonked orgyfest and drugged desert nymphs. He had no tattoos. No piercings. Once Rainbow had examined the body, he asked Tinky-Wink to fetch him some chicken shears from the Chow Tent, and they cut away the papier-mâché of the bowling ball mask. Peeling away strips, the way a person would peel an orange, they released no fewer than a billion black flies.

  A dyed-red Mohawk of spikes ran back from the peak of Scooby-Doo’s forehead, back to the rear of his skull. The spikes stood up, stiff as iron. The row of points looked less like a rooster’s comb than the crest of a scarlet cockatiel.

  The phrase natural causes popped into his head, and he’d already begun to wonder where they could bury the kid’s body, when Tinky-Wink turned away and doubled over at the waist. Out of his mouth hurled a long runny cascade. Half-digested tofu splattered a reclining Buddha. When Rainbow Bright looked again, the Mohawk wasn’t a haircut. The hot air was instantly the smell of puke. The spikes sticking out of the dead kid were metal. Embedded in his shaved scalp was a ninja throwing star glazed red with dried blood.

  Rainbow’s phone rang. Another blocked number. It was a long shot, but it might be one of his kids calling so he picked up. “Hello?” What possible fingerprints the dust h
adn’t obliterated, the blood had.

  “Mr. Bright?” the caller asked. It was a voice he knew from television. A girl voice gussied up with a Brit accent. Very King’s Road. That brought to mind a halter top and a chirpy, freckled announcer broadcasting live from some Spring Break location on the Jersey Shore. It was the last person who needed to find out about a Code Spearmint. Regretfully, he hung up on her.

  The last thing he needed was for some airbrushed, bunny podcaster to catch wind of a slumming college kid with a split-open skull.

  At this moment, he needed a spliff and a piece of sunbaked nineteen-year-old squeeze. Over at Zombie Camp, a zombie cheerleader wearing a short pleated skirt and nothing underneath had given him a long once-over. On most days, he’d have a piece by two in the afternoon. Zombie pussy. Hobbit pussy. The girls who crowned him with silk flowers and sprinkled glitter in his beard, they all had serious daddy issues. God forbid his own daughter would grow up to tangle with a big-gutted, middle-aged, lowlife predator.

  These three weeks were the only time of the year he got any respect. The only time he felt like a productive human being. Here, he was a person of some importance. He wasn’t going to let some journalist bungle his one good deal.

  Sun Baby bent low for a closer inspection. “I’d say, this star thing-y is your probable cause of death.” He nodded, knowingly, and crossed his skinny arms across his bare chest like a conferring physician.

  These weren’t ideal conditions for postmortem. The increasing music of chimes indicated the desert wind was gaining strength. A thick dust storm would cover the tracks of a killer just as effectively as the pea soup fogs of London had masked Jack the Ripper. Always the doubting Thomas, Rainbow asked, “What makes you so certain?”

  Sun Baby reached down to scratch his crotch with one hand. “I’m a paramedic.”

  Rainbow Bright wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

  “Outside of here, I mean,” Sun Baby said, and he sniffed his fingers, “I’m a paramedic.” He said, “Actually I’m in med school at Rutgers.” A neon-pink baby pacifier hung from a cord around his neck. In another year it would be a stethoscope.

  Rainbow Bright dismissed the statement with a derisive snort. He wasn’t going to concede authority to some Doogie Howser with his first crop of pubic hair. “Well, if you’re so smart, tell me how this went down?”

  Sun Baby considered the dead man for a moment. “Angry Ninja Camp.”

  Tinky-Wink wiped the vomit from his lips. He spat to clear his mouth. “No doubt.” His straight teeth gleamed, even in the candlelight and incense smoke. Some vomit clung to the rhinestone frames of his sunglasses.

  Rainbow Bright shuddered. The Angry Ninja Camp was about his least-favorite place to pay a call. Especially on official business. Down to a tribesman, every Angry Ninja was a world-class joker with sharp weapons and an ax to grind.

  “Scooby-Doo’s copped to all he’s going to fess.” Rainbow Bright snapped his fingers and jerked a thumb backward over his shoulder. “Get him lost.”

  His two deputies stared back. Uncomprehending. Sun Baby lifted his pacifier to his mouth and started sucking it. Tinky-Wink ducked his head, sheepishly. “I might be out of line saying so, but wouldn’t that be destroying evidence?”

  Rainbow Bright smirked. “What? Are you a lawyer?”

  The kid shrugged. He blushed and looked away. “Yeah, I specialize in entertainment copyright litigation.”

  Outside of the Playa Arts Festival, these three weeks of magic in the middle of nowhere, everyone was something different. The topless stoner chicks went home to be neurobiologists and software designers. The slack-jawed burner types were all district attorneys in real life. None of them wanted to lose this. Rainbow Bright waited for another objection. None came. “Plant him, deep. Someplace over the horizon. Put rocks on top to keep the scavengers from giving his bones a resurrection.”

  He watched them wrap the tie-dyed altar cloth around the body. As they hefted it, he assured them, “Things will get back on an even keel after we bring his killer to justice.” In truth, Rainbow said it to convince himself.

  He had an inside contact. The chief of the ninja tribe was a badass named Snidely Whiplash. Back in the Pleistocene Era, he and Rainbow had done shit-house duty together. Whiplash would never admit to being that old. He shaved his gray chest hair and talked a lot about getting his GED, trying to foster a youthful impression. Rainbow found him at the Media Pavilion, taping a podcast for some music video network. This season, camera teams from every nation in the world had found their way here to exploit the zany goings-on. They outnumbered the drum circles, and when their helicopters dipped too low, trying to film the topless limbo contest, their spinning blades churned the playa dust into choking funnel clouds.

  What occurred here was a kind of collective Gestalt therapy for the world, and nobody could blame the world for wanting a peek. Monsters capered. Dreams slowly took shape. A full-sized replica of the New York Stock Exchange, complete with wide steps and fluted columns, rose from the barren, windswept hardpan. Nearly as tall, a bust of Chairman Mao was under construction. A Rhineland castle. An ocean liner, mired in the sunbaked caliche. The gargantuan penis. A Trojan horse. Everything built of balsawood and cork. Each of them, overnight products of lath and papier-mâché, chicken wire, stretched canvas, staples, and paint. All of them swarmed with tiny naked figures. A Dalí painting. Tiny arms swung and the sounds of miniature hammers followed a moment late. Everything distorted by scale and distance. In the avenues between these monuments, figures promenaded in towering peacock feather headdresses and carved African masks. Roman centurions marched alongside mincing geishas. Catholic popes and uniformed United States letter carriers. A constant throng of costumes and nudity. People parading, on leash, their willing slaves. People serenaded with tubas that glared blindingly bright, their brass hot in the midday sun.

  Among this company mingled Rainbow Bright, accepting their greetings and accolades. To young people he was proof that age wouldn’t end their fun. To older campers, he was a living link to their youth.

  Here was the incubator, the test tube, the petri dish. And he was proud to play a part. The fringe was the future, and what happened next in the world, it happened here first. Fashion. Politics. Music and culture. The next world religion would take form, here. Of these experiments, almost all would fizzle, but some would take root and grow.

  In contrast, there had only been one season for the Occupy event. Rainbow Bright reasoned that the Playa Rock Arts Festival had endured for decades because its premise was creation not complaint. Producing versus protest.

  The outside world was a sewer of corruption and discord. It was irredeemable, and the only hope for a cure would come from this band of artists and freethinkers engaged in play.

  This, their special, fragile world, wasn’t going to end. Not on his watch.

  First, he’d pay a visit to his own tent and dig around in his navel. He knew Snidely Whiplash was a pushover where mescaline was involved.

  At the Media Pavilion, the interviewer was the Brit. A redhead with arresting hazel eyes and a shaved pussy. She sat cross-legged with Snidely in the shade of a blue-and-white-striped beach umbrella. Whiplash wore a loincloth of macramé hemp. That was smart of him. To a euro girl a cut dick would look like a birth defect. Whiplash and the girl kissed cheeks, and he stepped away. As the elderly ninja left the interview, Rainbow fell into step beside him. He flashed Whiplash a glimpse of his phone. A snapshot of the dead mud kid. Asking, “You ninjas missing any throwing stars?”

  Whiplash gave the photo a glance and shook his head. The denial was clearly a lie.

  Rainbow kept his voice innocent. Naïve. “You think I should go to the county sheriff with this?” The question gave Whiplash pause. He knew what all was at stake. If their killer was a ninja, his tribe wouldn’t harbor him. Or her. With all of their twisted swords and scimitars and spiked cudgels, the ninjas would sacrifice a member before they’d let this messy business
shut down the tent city.

  Whiplash gave the photo another look. A longer look. “Forward me the picture,” he grumbled. “I’m familiar with the weapon in question.” He plucked a spliff from behind his ear and a cigarette lighter from deep in his loincloth. Putting flame to what smelled like Californian Skunk and good tobacco, he drew a chestful of smoke. Exhaling it, he said, “If the transgressor is one of ours, we’ll settle the score.”

  He offered Rainbow a toke, and Rainbow accepted it. They parted company at the Furbie tent. A whole tribe slouching around in full-body animal costumes and plush masks. How anyone could wear fake fur in this heat, it was impossible to comprehend.

  As he strolled, his phone rang. “Ludlow, I know I’m being a drag.” His wife, again. She hadn’t always been a drag. They’d met at the festival. In the days when she’d been a fire-walking, pill-popping, body-painted freak. She’d been beautiful, back then. Fearless. Now she shaved her armpits. Over the phone, she said, “Luddy, you’ve got two kids. You can’t spend your whole vacation away from your family.”

  As before, Rainbow Bright let her say her piece. He didn’t respond. He didn’t defend himself. The clarity of the signal impressed him. He could even make out the grinding of her teeth.

  “Part of me says I should leave,” she baited him. “Should I leave you? Take the kids, change the locks, and move out?” Her voice clenched like a fist, she waited. “Is that what you want?”

  He listened. Letting her blow off steam. His mood ring was going dark, darker, again, almost obsidian.

  “Ludlow, are you there?”

  He was there but didn’t say so.

  “Fine,” she said. And hung up.

  He doubled back to the Media Pavilion. The redhead was between interviews. She was drinking a diet cola when her hazel eyes caught sight of him. Sizing up her come-hither expression, Rainbow Bright was glad he’d worn his clean loincloth. He worried that his wife and kids might see the broadcast, but he prayed that his business associates would. The cameraman seated him under the striped umbrella, and the redhead checked herself with a mirror. After some fumbling, they finally clipped a tiny microphone to his beard.