Part 4, Tribute to Allan

Hell, it was just no use. Dropping out, he fled Chicago now with his Lady Love, as one crazily flees the abject and frustrating failures that devil. Satan couldn't have loved it more.

His wife thought that the bastards had managed to squash a Mozart: those overstuffed Theses who mocked. He would never blossom now, but he could go on to follow the Indian trails into the mountains he grew to so love. A Midwest flatlander, he converted to the religion of the Big Sky country. Here the gushing rivers and rushing streams boiled over rocks and waterfalls of the aptly named Cascades. Here, thick snowy blankets and great icy glaciers nestled snugly in the stony arms of his beloved Rocky Mountains.

His True Love hated to see him go. She hated the risks he took, the mad tricks he played on the mountain rises that he so masterfully greeted with line, strong hands and, rarely, a pick. His coffin was a thought she could not at all abide while the mountain waters would roil so furiously, so bitterly, so poignantly.

And he could not tolerate the thought of emasculation, sheer detesticulation, by the all too real Lady he once chased but now possessed. Hanging a cattleman's little castrator on his lonely bedroom wall, a blade that was so fiendishly curved; so pointed and to the point. He could feel it as it transformed a fine raging nascent bull to a docile doggie destined only to be unceremoniously eaten.

He pondered the bleak words that he would say to his departing feminine friend, his Love, his unknown secret reason for living and cherishing it all so much. Well, anyway then, farewell My Lady Fair. Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if I could but say that I adore you and beg you to stay...

But no, this must be but one more aggravated antagonism he would somehow have to sadly bury. He just wouldn't volunteer to be an eunuch with his balls in a box for any body.

Death was nothing to him. She feared it as a woman fears for the fruit of her own womb; the One who must live for her to even just be. The Skull was inevitable, even preferable, to him at least, it was. Worse than life itself it could not ever be.

Nothing could be more of a Hell than this inhuman torture that lays the hammer down when the beating about the eyes and ears succeeds only to numb the inner sanctum's vitality. But picks up the hammer again when the numbness finally begins to fade away. Away into the back of the mind it cruelly hides until the steely mallet starts pounding again with the insistent banshee cry of that same infant. Was this the One who only she could possibly want with her whole being?

But babies are just another way to apply the curved blade, he thought. He didn't guess they are of the few true paths to eternity. That is, after all, why the Jesu Christi is so often depicted as a child.

You couldn't have designed a worse mismatch. They simply could never really sing in the sunshine. Only as they left each other, the last few weeks, did they laugh every day. At last they kissed goodbye as friends and hugged each other as only true amigos can do. Once again, habitually by now, those forsaken lovers walked away from it all as the hammer pounded and pounded and pounded.

A bloody mess. Life is a Damned Bloody Mess. From the jungles of Viet Nam to the rolling plains of cattle ranches, life is for fools. Give me Death, the Tarot says, give me rest. Allan could at least think this much, therefore he was - was nothing but an ultra super genius of an idiot.

So he died on Colchuk, plunging from the vertical vertigo rock-face as the skydiver aims for his 'chute's target spot. When her deepest black glacial lake rose to meet him and Kevin from its hiding place far far below, Kev could not help because he was already smitten. So the line that was to guarantee their safety only insured their demise together as real brothers at last. They were born together into oblivion or maybe even into Heaven, if their real luck held true.

Al could only imagine, with a few final flickers of his still conscious but seriously severed cerebrum. His ethereal brothers, those Ancient Ones, the siblings he so longed for as an only child, might greet him now in his mind as no Christ ever would. So, in the previous last seconds, he had hi-dived him into the deceptively shallow waters near the rocky shore.

This was his error. For once again that deep, cool, tender Lady of Safety, his soft mama who was always so tragically absent in her very presence, could now elude him again, like everything else that was precious in his life.

As his head exploded like a bloody pumpkin-smash on an unseen rocky shelf just below the rippling waters of that crystal black, nearly frozen icebound pond, he could not have known that his only lasting creation would fall to his one really closest living relative, his cousin. His business would become a living donation, a lasting charity that he would have truly liked as a real memorial.

But this time, it's true, once he actually saw the stars up close, took pictures of them. Med-Lit was dead at last. Long live Med-Lit. And LoneTree Pictures.

By the way, you will note that his surname is really spelled Fries. Not French fries but Allan Frees. He loved the irony in that little mnemonic.