Somewhere south of Knoxville, Tennessee, but north of Panama City, Panama, and to make it clear not in the Caribbean Sea, three old men and one old, but not as old as the men, woman, struggled to make sense of the 2014 midterm elections in a borrowed trailer rolling across the American South.
One of the men was called Igor Stravinsky, surprisingly not named after the composer, but in fact named after his father's college roommate's poodle, who was given the name after attacking the composer during a playful puppy moment when Stravinsky was in Hollywood in the 1950s. Later on, the poodle and Stravinsky became great friends, and over time the two began to resemble one another, with the poodle once traveling to the Soviet Union and taking the maestro's place because Stravinsky himself was afraid of Leonid Brezhnev's eyebrows.
The Igor Stravinsky chain-smoking Camel Noodles in that trailer knew very little of this. He hadn't even registered to vote except to impress a group of girl scouts who couldn't believe he could read or write. But like almost every American, Igor Stravinsky had an opinion and his opinion was loud, a little vulgar, worrisome, and astonishingly misinformed.
He turned to one of his traveling partners, a grizzled former law school janitor named Cliff Hardtack, and said, "The trouble with chewing tobacco is that is goes right through you."
"Ya ain't s'posed to eat it, you numbskull," Cliff Hardtack rejoined, and the two laughed the laugh of familiarity, although they had only recently met in the bombed-out husk of a Georgia Stuckey's.
Cliff Hardtack had giant hands, the hands of builder or a clumsy molester of statues, and he spoke about the death of the America Dream as if he himself had killed it. He used the phrase "unskilled" skillfully, and occasionally would look down at his feet as though he forgot he still had them, especially since he often told people they had been shot off during the Vietnam War documentary he had done some voiceover work for in Ken Burns' jacuzzi.
"Can you believe this guy?" Cliff Hardtack said to the mysterious older gentleman whom they had found squatting in the trailer, although after some questions they discovered that was just the way he liked to sit. His name was Eversole Finance, and he was named because those were the first words his parents saw when he was born in a taxi in Akron, Ohio. Interestingly, Eversole Finance was a front for an illegal money laundering scheme, located next door to Al's Laundry, which was constantly raided by the Akron police, who is those days were very literal-minded.
Eversole Finance did not take Cliff Hardtack's bait; he was not in the mood to play with worms, and the last time he took the bait, Cliff Hardtack had left a hook in it, and Eversole Finance's ring finger got an ouchie that he continually sucked on because he was a big baby.
Eversole Finance had sneaked into the trailer because he had seen Nicki Mirage exit with the two old men, ostensibly for a bathroom break at a rest stop, but the three just sat at a park bench and carved the names of their favorite cheese on it. Nicki Mirage had been a go-go-stop dancer in her youth; Eversole Finance had once, in his youth, seen her dance, and had fallen in love with her after she fell off the stage at a shabbily constructed men's club in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eversole Finance had not been fast enough to catch her, but he learned that day that one of the reasons that Nicki Mirage could beat her head against the stripper pole with such panache was because she had been born with an extra layer of bone around her skull.
The same layer of skull, as well as the fact that as a child her mother had used her as an ironing board, kept Nicki Mirage from remembering much of anything. She didn't remember Eversole Finance and the number of marriage proposals he had sent her written on the backs of pigeons and, in desperation, mice; she didn't remember why she was on this trip; and most embarrassingly, she didn't remember voting for David Perdue in Georgia's senate race.
Voting for Nicki Mirage was problematic in any case because Nicki Mirage was not her real name. She carried around a driver's license, but the name on it was Mike Farrell, and indeed it was the expired 1988 license of the actor who played B.J. Honeycutt on television's "M*A*S*H." She had no idea how she got that, either, but it did help her create the one actual count of voter fraud in the entire country in 2014. But whatever her name was, she had thrown in with this lot, and despite Eversole Finance's constant leering and offers of nicotine gum, she felt safe for the first time since - well, she couldn't remember.
On Sunday, November 9, 2014, all four of them found themselves working at a British Petroleum gas station on route 29 somewhere near the Florida/Alabama border. And they had no way out, no chance to escape, and the reason for that revealed, to anyone paying attention, the shadowy hand of those who continue to wage the War On Sailing.
