"There's are real problem Bill" said Lil with a sudden stern look. "Three people died in the nursing home at Hamburg when you burned the bar garbage on the beach. The first two were a mystery but the third went while the staff and patients were hacking and gasping" she said with an even more peculiar look on her face. "I didn't know the details" said Bill. "An awful lot of Meesh's sauce soaked into them cardboard paper plates - I didn't know what else to do with them and all them bones." Lil broke in "the hot ingredient in that sauce came from puddles at the Hagersville battery dump Bill - you were burning sulphuric acid on the beach." Bill fell to his knees in the cell and sobbed "OH NO!! Those poor people. Where is my mother?" "She's at a cop convention in Vegas with Deputy Chief O'Gready" answered Lil with a wry smile on her face. There was a lot more but she would wait until he was clear of the jail.

[Gummo does a switchback] The following is intended to be spliced in just in front of the Meesh/Oscar Meyer segment. It makes kind of a nice bridge, so to speak. It places Lil solidly in Upper New York State and lets us talk about her time there including her sometimes morally ambiguous employment as a relationship coach at a honeymoon retreat in the Poconos. It also introduces Bill’s growing instability as the plot alternately rushes, meanders, twists, turns, and stumbles toward its astonishing climax in Virgil, ON.

By the time he got outside, Bill was feeling pretty confused. He couldn’t figure out which was the hallucination. The sound of Teresa’s voice shouting in his ear to get the fuck out of there and go to India, or walking arm-in-arm with his long-lost sweetheart. Had she been lost at all?

Outside it was dark, and a light drizzle was falling. The light of the streetlamps glowed across the asphalt parking lot. Lil led him to her parked car. The closeness of her body took him back to those times at the Falls when the two of them would cuddle near the precipice, Lil’s eyes full of tantalizing anticipation and promise, her throaty voice teasingly daring him to jump. Bill wondered what Hondo Lane would do in a situation like this. Or were the Hondo Lane images a hallucination too? It was becoming so hard to sort out. When they got to the car Bill flinched.

It was a ’64 Mustang convertible, powder blue with white top and interior, Louisiana plates with a “Governor Wallace Welcomes You to Alabama!” bumper-sticker. Bill had that uneasy feeling of having slipped through a crack in reality, like those people on the Twilight Zone tv show he and Meesh used to watch back at the trailer when the rabbit ears could bring it in from WBEN. He quickly eyeballed the back seat for Rod Serling, then slumped light-headed into the passenger seat.

As the car crept along the midnight streets of Buffalo the radio played a tune Bill had never heard before. The lyrics sounded like “Her name was McGill, and she called herself Lil, and everyone knew her as Nancy.” He thought the singers sounded vaguely British, but he wasn’t sure. He could feel the pedestrians staring in at him. It was that same unrelenting, icy, judgmental stare condemning him to utter damnation. He’d seen it before, the first time he tried to buy a half-ton with chrome bumpers from that GMC dealer in Virgil. He felt the same self-loathing now that he’d felt then, driving the truck away from the lot and out of town.

As he turned to express his gut-full of anxieties to the woman of his dreams, she punched the accelerator and pointed the car toward the bridge.

[Miller] I shouldn't have watched that 60's documentary last night.

Lil jerked the Mustang through a familiar set of turns onto Delavan and Bill smiled at her heel-toe co-ordination on a downshift inside right. He slumped again and sort of relapsed into one of his dreamy visions from O'Gready's jail - opening a bar in the far east, maybe even Nam when the war was over. His mother's idea of India was somehow just off the mark. He hated watching tv but became a news junky in the jail, learning to look forward every day to the forest greenery behind Cronkite. Bill missed his peat bog home more than anything. He'd seen his first colour tv in the jail and loved to follow the impact rings of the B52 carpet bombs as they mushroomed through the steamy jungle. Finally on his way this time and feeling a drifting happy glow from a group of eight others, as well as two ex pat Vietnamese guides, Phu, and Lond, who was in training. The others were all couples, an Aussie-Kiwi pair of newlyweds, a limping lady war correspondent and drainage engineer from the UK, a rancher from Northern Australia and his wife, an "academic" whose field he didn't catch, and a pair from Los Angeles who had both left US army marketing jobs to travel and find themselves.

He spent most of that dream with the Brits and Americans, buoying gently in the dining room of a beautiful boat over bottles of warm beer and a lavish six course meal of lightly steamed shrimp, crawfish, and his favourite, an entire fried fish replete with vegetables and eyeballs. Each of his companions in the dream was fascinating in their own right -- Tom Ballard, the engineer, had left his job following the death of a close friend in the Tet disaster to seek out a truly amazing adventure, beginning in the United States and Canada and heading west around the globe, with Deanna Trent alongside him for seven months of the journey. Harvey and Jane, from Santa Monica, had set out on an equally impressive global trek, beginning in Australia and also heading west. They had come up through the south Pacific archipelagoes, seen Indonesia and Malaysia and then Thailand and were headed west through free Laos before India, Nepal, and then off to Egypt. Everyone was amazingly free and Bill felt extremely lucky to have found such people to dine with on Halong Bay that evening.

"Citizenship!!" screamed the Canada Customs badge from Lil's side of the car. "Snow White" answered Bill as he sat bolt upright slamming his forehead on the dangling visor. "Alright, smart guy, are you awake now?" came the reply from a woman's face staring across through Lil.

[Filshie] It was thus: bottled water, apples (green) and celery at White Oaks. You seemed awfully taken with the celery image. Or was it the green theme?

[Miller] Of course, now it all comes back. In a flash I minded Bill Bellisimo and Lil swinging down Taylor Road in the 'stang on their way to the Stampede.

It was a cool clear summer night and Bill had slept all the way from Peace Bridge, failing to wake even when Lil pulled into the Sundowner to pick up a back cheque. Lil jammed the eight-ball shifter and popped the clutch getting air on the Jockey Club culvert but she missed the gear, got air anyway and landed in second, causing Bill's head to crash into the visor for yet a second time that night. But this time the swollen bump preceded the event. "Snow White ah shit that hurt" he screamed waking to a night sky filled with several shooting stars, or so it seemed. Lil popped it again putting the 'stang into overdrive with screaming tires and smoke and Bill in whiplash as his favourite Stetson flew high into the smokey plume behind them. As Bill clawed his way back into the seat, he spied a for sale sign in the Jockey Club lights as they flew by towards the Homer turn. Then it hit him - another use for celery. The snake ranch was gone, foreclosed by Debit Canada, and he was far from certain of his future in Buffalo, given the deaths and all. But there was another market and he had the know how to make it happen. All he needed was some capital, he thought, as he lit up a White Oak cigar. Then it hit him like a ton of bricks. It was another dream - they were not on the way to the stampede at all - they were at the Falls!!

[Miller] I meant to send the next bit along last night but couldn't find the weiner graphic. Fortunately it was on a backup CD. I think we need to start swinging the piece in the direction of VirgilON as this is where the motherload of pre-developed and storyboarded material is located. Barb Wiens made the astute observation that Mother Teressa is in fact old Mrs. P - driver of the orange International around town in VirgilON. I spied the old girl the other day driving that thing in horrendous windchill conditions without any care. There is no doubt now that the brakes have left the vehicle, but that's OK as she has learned to time a stall although there was a close call last fall at MB Foods in front of the plate glass windows.

[Gummo] I figure what we've gotta do is get that vignette with Bill in the car that went out last week under a different subject line, I think it was "cash", herded back across the web and under this subject line. Then we can work on it. It has some real promise, much better than the flashback to Bill's younger days driving the deadstock truck out of Dunnville. With hindsight it now appears we should have given Lil a six cylinder automatic. Bill is really taking a pummelling, but the poor bastard will just have to ride it out. After all, it was his choice to get in the car in the first place. Maybe we can split the plot lines so it's readers' choice which line they follow. Walrus ran a short story in this format a few issues back and it worked real well.