Killing the Cross Read online

  I liked playing pool, though. Everyone here seems to take their pool game real serious. I remember when I used to get lucky and get you behind the eight ball and you would say I was too young to know what I was doing and get all mad and I would feel even getting you behind old scratch like you used to tell me the history of the game when you were angry and wanted to change the subject like I hadn’t heard all that same old crap come out of your toothless plastic mouth a hundred times before.

  But the Zorb you would really appreciate I feel because you get in this big ball that is as tall as three men and it is clear inside out so you could see where you were going if you weren’t rolling and spinning so fast down this big old green hill in the middle of nowhere that looks like the shire in The Hobbit. Then towards the bottom you are rolling so fast that every little bump makes you take off and it feels like you are flying. Ingrid tried it, but it made her sick. She has been getting sick in the mornings anyway, and not a lot of fun to be around the rest of the day, let me tell you. Women get so damn moody, it drives me crazy. I told her to take some Fennies but she snapped that she wouldn’t touch that shit. I said it’s good enough for me but not for her and she said just drop it honey and then she just got real snuggly so I said forget it. I am getting tired of New Zealand anyway. I got an idea for this Zorb. I’m sure you will hear about it.

  Love,

  Foley

  Dear Dad,

  Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote, I’ve been so busy. Ingrid and I are back in the States now, working on a project. I got the crazy idea that I wanted to ride a tornado and Ingrid loved it. Said it fits right in with the research. It took a lot of convincing the folks at the Zorb place to build me some and let me take them home, but those New Zealand people are real understanding, especially when it comes to seeing the big picture about things. I told them that I was with the United States Government anyway, and then when I told them how much I was gonna pay them, they got real nice about it. Of course, it’s Ingrid’s company that’s paying for everything.

  So we packed up everything and flew to Kansas. This is where I emailed some storm chasers from the local university and told them I was with the Department of the Interior and all this shit and they ate it up. Ingrid had some fake checks made up and we paid them a shitload to help us out and now we meet with them every day. They love the idea of me being their tornado astronaut, but how am I going to really do it they keep asking. Me and Fennies, baby, we’ll figure it out. All I know is that I got to find a tornado, catch it, jump in the Zorb, and a way we go! Like a bubble in the wind. Going up won’t be the hard part. It’s coming down that has me worried.

  Love,

  Foley

  Dear Dad,

  We had a near hit today, or a near miss as you would say. The tornado was out in the field, next to the road running the same direction. The Zorb was on the trailer, ready for me to jump in and pull the quick release cord and everything. I guess the kids got scared cause they stopped hooting and hollering at one point and they got those blotchy pink and white places in their faces when you can see the skin dampen but it isn’t sweat anymore, it is something else. Looks like thin skin pulled tight over that green cottage cheese stuff that comes out of a woman’s belly when she gives birth. Oh well, I figured that we would have to keep fine tuning the plan as we got closer to the real thing. These guys didn’t seem to take it seriously anyway. I think they think I am just coming along for the ride or something. Ingrid likes it, but I want to do more than just ride around and videotape storms. I think these guys realize that now.

  So when the tornado veers away and I grab the wheel of the truck and break through the barbwire fence and start hauling through the slick grass with the cow pies splattering the fenders and the mud sounding like popcorn, then these guys kind of get a clue. Now they are talking about proper testing and design and all this shit and I am saying it’s about time! I am finally a project manager. It’s amazing how people will listen to you if you have enough money and enough balls to do anything. No more “nobody likes you” crap when you try to tell them what to do and them running to your boss and whining about it’s not fair and shit. Just shut up and do what I tell you, right Dad?

  Love,

  Foley

  Dear Dad,

  Ok, so they’re talking about maximum 300 mph winds and stuff. Like even if I’m inside the Zorb in my full leathers and everything, a straw could come shooting through the plastic and spear me. I can appreciate that, but I’m not up for all the testing. I just want to do this thing! I want to be the first man to ride a tornado and live to tell about it! Can you imagine? Of course, you are probably saying that I will die trying and it will serve me right. But I think that you can even get excited about this one, Dad. How high will I go? Once the winds grab me, will I be whisked up into the vortex and shoot to the top? What then? Will I float around gently spinning like those beach balls you see at the vacuum cleaner shops at the mall? How hard will I crash? Will I slam into the ground, or will the tornado bash me into a tree or a building? How hard? Here’s the plan me and the college kids have worked out: We’ve got to have this thing bullet proof, no way around it. One thing that I haven’t explained to you is the inside.

  The Zorb is hollow, but with an inner chamber in the center suspended by thin cables evenly spaced between the outer and inner layers. Like a perfect spider’s web holding a precious egg inside. The side of the inner chamber fuses to the outside forming a little tunnel, and that is how you get in and out without the air escaping the middle. Like a huge marshmallow with a hole in the side. So this thing has got some cushion, but will that matter? I mean, yeah, IF I find the right tornado, and IF I get in position, and IF I shoot to the heavens, I want to live to tell about it! What good would it do if I got crushed like a bug after all this work? Only a fool would want that, right Dad?

  Peace Out.

  Foley

  Dad,

  They shot me today! Well, they shot AT me. Not like when I shot the neighbor’s dog, and told everyone that I didn’t mean to, I just shot AT it. How was I supposed to know that the damn dog was gonna jump up on a log in full trot at the last second? I swear I heard it wince when the air rushed out of its popped lung, even from a hundred yards away. Or like the time that you were showing me how to shoot the first time with Grampa’s 22 and I got all happy and pointed the gun straight up and shot AT the sky. I didn’t have to actually shoot the sky, cause you were mad enough to chase me all over the woods the rest of the day anyway yelling you were gonna kill me.

  We had to get Kevlar in order to even think about making this thing work. It’s got to hold up to anything that the tornado could make into a missile and puncture the skin of my flying machine. Kevlar is damn expensive! Of course, the cops just use a little bit for their vests and stuff, but the surface area of the Zorb is huge. Plus, we had to fly those Kiwi guys up from New Zealand to rebuild the whole thing in Kevlar. You have to use ceramic scissors. We didn’t actually use Kevlar. I searched around the internet and I found this guy who makes a kind of material that wraps around houses and protects them from tornados and hurricanes. He makes huge sheets of the stuff, Millibar, so it wasn’t too hard to order it and have the guys make a new bulletproof Zorb. It took a few days with us all drinking coffee and me asking them to stay up late and talking to them while we worked and stuff, and then came shooting day. We all talked about it, and I decided that we would use a 30 ought six high-powered rifle because that would best imitate what a projectile flying through a tornado would do. Of course, the only way to do the firing test was LIVE.

  Ingrid and me argued about it for a long time. She yelled and yelled that we should just put a dummy in there and take a shot, but then I told her what better thing for her research than me showing my courage on Fennies. She thought about it for a minute and then agreed. It was me or nothing!

  You should have seen it, Dad, I crawled in there and strapped myself in and one of them college kids that I swear never shot
a gun in his life raised the rifle real slow and just like we rehearsed pulled the trigger when I gave the signal and BAM it was all over. Everyone was hootin and hollerin so loud when I climbed out and took my helmet off and Ingrid kissed me and the guys were jumping and hugging me and slapping me on the back. I swear I don’t think that they ever had a professor like me. Anyway, not to get carried away with all the sloppy stuff, but that bullet hung there in a wad of that plastic stretched so thin and hanging like a stop action photograph in a crime lab. Didn’t get anywhere near the inner chamber. That’s all she wrote for the puncture test. I think the Zorb will hold up just fine to flying objects. We still have to find some way to launch it. We can’t just shoot it out of a cannon, we have to figure out some way to catapult it into the swirling winds. I don’t believe that the tornado will just reach out and politely pick up the ball. It might but I doubt it. Next thing we gotta do is the crush test, though. I don’t know if we should use a truck or a train. I’ll sleep on it.

  Good night.

  Foley

  Dad,

  They’re out to get me. The Dutch, I mean. It’s for revenge. For what the floods did. They almost had it all won, the whole world. They know I know it now. It would set them back an awful long way if people knew that they were taking over the world again. All that damn pumping water out of the marshes with windmills and wooden shoes and tulips and shit for 300 years. Man, they are furious deep down. Just been biding their time. If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much, Ingrid said to me one day. They must have been the ones to leak it to the media. To make me look stupid I guess. That way when I start jumping up and down for real about them, they got me over a barrel. Some crazy guy who’s trying to ride a tornado, right Dad? Serves me right, right Dad? Well fuck you and fuck the Dutch, I’m going full speed ahead. You ever been run over by a train? Let them film that!

  Stay tuned.

  Foley

  Dad,

  That goddam media! I can’t believe they care so much about some damn trailers. I’m sure you’ve seen me on the news already. Yes, we pulled some strings with FEMA to get some surplus mobile homes out to the field where the train runs through for a good long stretch. Some liberal college rag reporter got her stripes by sniffing this one out. Good for her. She’s just jealous because she didn’t think about it. That’s not your regular college science experiment. Pure genius though, don’t ya think, Dad? Huh, I mean who else but your brilliant son would be able to figure out that trailers actually DO attract tornados? No one, that’s who. And that cunt reporter can suck my dick. I mean, its not like anyone was living in the things. She wrote some shit about “misappropriation of Federal resources” and all this other crap. She’s probably going to school on her daddy’s dime and getting drunk and whoring around catching Chlamydia and all kinds of crap at that college of hers, and she’s pretending that she cares about poor people. Fuck her. Wait til she sees me go up in that funnel cloud. Then she’ll have something to fucking write about. You should see my little trailer farm. Row upon row of neatly spaced double-wides just sucking that barometric pressure right out of the air. I can hear the theme music to Jaws, I swear. Standing out there with the deafening silence under the dark billowing clouds when the calm hits. Brown fields and black skies. One poked its finger out the other day and started twirling down, began its long, siren song, then backed off. We’ll get touchdown here any day now. It’s the season for it. Ingrid says I am her little tornado matador. A tormatador. I like that. How about you, cocksucker?

  Foley.

  Dad,

  Sorry it’s been awhile. Me and Ingrid have been in Cairo. It’s different here, that’s for sure. Dry and sunny, not like fucking Kansas hot and muggy all the time. We got a nice little bungalow just outside of town. This is the land of the Pharaohs. I don’t know, after I rode that tornado, I just felt like I was the King of the World or something. All the attention on TV and everything was nice, but it was just getting to me. I felt like I was famous, but not like I was in control. I don’t know how to explain it. Well, yes I do.

  They didn’t have nothing good to say about me after awhile. Here I was the first damn person to ride a tornado on purpose and live to tell about it, and all that damn cunt reporter had to say about me was about my history of domestic violence. How I had been convicted and wasn’t supposed to be carrying firearms and I was running around with a loaded gun and shit. That fucking cunt. Here I was making history, and all she cared about was that me and some bitch like her had gotten into a scuffle one time when she was on the rag and couldn’t keep her goddam mouth shut no matter how much I begged her. What the fuck do they want, Dad? Oh, yeah, you know now, don’t you, now that you are God’s gift to women. Even though you used to slap all your old ladies around, you’ve straightened up now, right asshole? Yeah, right. Pure as the driven snow, I keep forgetting. Anyway, someday when I have a chance I’ll tell you just how I got up in that funnel cloud and what all I saw way up in there.

  Foley

  Dad,

  Cairo has got some damn stinky bitches in it. Millions of them. They walk around in their damn burlap robes and their scarves on their heads, and you can smell them, right through that thick black cloth stuff. They smell like damn goats, but there’s something about it that will get you straight up hard and wanting their asses. There are just so many of them, walking in the street everyday. Not going to work or taking care of kids or going to Wal-Mart or Target or anything. Just marching straight in throngs down long dusty streets. I get right up in there with them like a shepherd in a flock and then I have at them. You know what I do. I know you’ve done it. It was like being born again for me. I’d never done it. Never had the balls to. But when no one can see your hands, or has the space to look around or down, it’s freedom. They got rock hard juicy asses. I swear they don’t wear no panties up under that sackcloth. All I feel is cheeks and lips. They don’t flinch an inch. Like they like it or something, or they’re just used to it.

  All day long, I get so strung out from the adrenaline that I am exhausted when I take lunch. Then I just sit in the café and sip my beer and watch them from a distance. They just throng and mill, throng and mill. And they are all shaped like Sophia Loren. Then when it’s late afternoon and the crowd just keeps getting thicker, I dive back in and it’s more butt surfing for the rest of the day. Ingrid’s off doing some survey work on the pyramids. She said make sure I take my Fennies and report anything unusual to her. I wonder if this would count? Sometimes I find one really young little filly, and I swear she lets me ride it. I get my hand up in there through a thick part in town and she lets me palm it for blocks. Wet too.

  Then she just turned into a store and disappeared like nothing was happening. I am really new at this, and I am not a scientist, but it seems like the more I grope them bitches, the more of them that seem to like it. Or even seek me out. You know what I mean? I mean like it’s on my hands or something. Like they spray me or mark me with their invisible squirt. All those cheesy ads you see in the back of magazines about pheromones and being more attractive to chicks. This is the real thing, Dad. Just going out and getting all of their different juices on me. Then it’s like they don’t know what hit them. I can talk to one at a counter or sitting at a table next to me, and they’re all eyes and ears. I wonder if I could get one home without Ingrid finding out. I wouldn’t even use a condom, just pump her full and send her on her way. Another one for the McMann clan, right Dad? I wonder what my shrink would have to say about this.

  Go figure.

  Foley

  Dad,

  I told Ingrid. She wasn’t too upset, just said it was the Fenestreban working. I asked her how she knew if it was experimental still, and she said that’s how it was designed to work. I asked how do you mean and she just wanted to fuck, again, as usual. She must be on the pill or something, because I swear we’ve been doing it for months and she hasn’t gotten pregnant. I’ve never seen a tampon or anything either. The ass-grabbing story seemed to
really turn her on though. We’d been in a dry spell for a while, but she says she’s been attracted to me in a different way lately, she doesn’t know why. I told her my theory about the pheromones, and she said could be, but she didn’t seem to buy it. She’s all serious these days, I guess it’s her research. She wants me to help with something. I thought we were here just to get away somewhere, but she’s got something going on with the pyramids. That’s my Ingrid. She wants to know how they were built. She’s got all these satellite photos and maps and aerial drawings and stuff. We went out to look at what she’s been working on. First stop was the quarries where the Egyptians took all those stone blocks out of the ground to build the pyramids. Not many people know about that, I certainly didn’t. All you ever see from the tourist shows is the Sphinx and the Pyramids and the statues and that’s it. These huge square caverns where they took the rocks out are more impressive than any of that stuff.