Farmer's co-op store with gimcracks and curios and doodads windowshown. Ancient typewriter, rusted hulk, pearlysmooth letter keys trembling.They wanted to be touched fingertippishly, stroked and tweedled and tappitytapped. The K in particular waited on the cusp of orgasm, do me.K Tate looked north and south, mangy yellow dog loping across the empty roadway, stoplight stuck on red, forever challenging frozen cars.Spinning tightarc and slambamming his boot heel on plate glass, vibrated and hummed, did not break. Frontdoor wheezes open, unlocked vacant.Roll of paper 100 yards long, Kerouac-style. K Tate feeds it into the typewriter and sits down in the window of the abandoned store. Begins:The red balloon kissed the wall of the Joy Motel, Home Of The Two Hour Nap. Static charge held it there quivering, waiting to explode.Street level. Smell of dry ice; legacy of the deep freeze. Footprints: hourglasses in snow. Turning the corner, the balloon going pap pp papScratching sound, distant clicking, deep space voices rising and falling in a wash of white noise. Breathing.Gauze of sunset, the pavement lunar? Time dilation made the street a postcard, Joy Motel, nowhere, out there, balloon moving everywhere.Open windows unblinking in a row, uppers and lowers, drapes slapping gray concrete block walls. Seductive shadows, rusted bicycle.K Tate taptyping ratatatat machinegun, words splattering onto the paper in blackinkblobs, fudgesmudging with each frenzied carriage return.Hauls the machine outside, buckles it into the passenger seat of the truck, paper roll ensconced inside a rainproof garbage bag taped safe.Tapping of a million keyboards echoing inside his cranium, lobster dancing on a glass tabletop, calling out destinations. Wichita bound.Wichita was a 1955 Western movie directed by Jacques Tourneur. Also a heavy cruiser commissioned in 1939 that served duty in World War II.Clyde Cessna made it the Air Capital of the World. Rain on windscreen, windwhipping whitecaps on the swollen waters of the Arkansas River.It had been raining for 36 hours. Swimming pools were flooding. A goat swam across a flooded underpass, bleating at K Tate, redrimmed eyes.Pressing on to Fort Bliss, Texas. He knew his grandfather Dr. Kindred started an affair with a scientist there. Karin Offal. German bombgal.Wernher von Braun’s team worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Project Paperclip.In 1950 they packed it all up and moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Built the Jupiter ballistic missile, with love.Rolling into Fort Bliss, the Army bungalow still there, K Tate's father Phil Kindred's childhood room with wallscrawl boyhood redpenmarks.my docdad is approxumutly as insane as he is famuos becuz he tinkers with his bomb all night and somehwere someday my people will die of itCLICK TO READ NEXT CHAPTER
