Dear Brother #5

In Dear Brother #5, Mister Beulay goes to Washington. Not an epic session, but after raising Huey Long it’s nice to take a break.

Dear Brother:

I think I am going to write a letter to Mister Alan Greenspan later on but I am going to get my thinking clear first. Writing to my brother is one thing but I am not sure Mister Greenspan will be as easygoing with my letters as you are. He is a very busy man.

I was in Washington, is what made me think of writing to him, but that is a little later on. I will start out with what happened after we left Baton Rouge all full of what Huey Long had told us. It is maybe not so much of a story but it did happen so it would not be right not to tell it.

We drove up the backroads out of Louisana. The interstates are all important but we caught a lot of attention down south and sometimes you don’t want to drive along the spotlight. Sometimes it is better to take the maze. There are places down in that state where you drive along those backroads and the trees hang down over the road and hide the sky and you are almost in a tunnel and the moon can’t see you. Which is what I wanted, because of how we’d laid the police on that Miss Selene. Anyhow it worked and we got out of the state just fine.

I spent a little time talking to that Danny who had said the prophecy back in Memphis. Danny Greer, his name is. I have not talked about him much but he is fitting in just fine. He is an older man who was in jail so you know he knows a little. Well, apparently he hears voices and he was in a hospital once for that but he got away. He met a doctor named Sam Lully there who told him that the whole world was robots. I guess that is what you would want to believe if you wanted to treat people bad. There is also some kind of tie between Lully and those I AM people who keep asking us to buy housewares or whatever it is that they are selling.

But Danny does have the prophecy gift so maybe this Doctor Lully knew something. There was something special about this word “vitriol” which is not a word I know. It says something else besides what it means, like a riddle. Danny said it speaks of the place inside the earth and a hidden stone.

Also around this time Angie was doing something she would not talk about but that Joe of hers interrupted her and wanted her to go to LA to make a record with him. She said no and I am real proud of her because it was temptation. She also said Ronnie van Sant died at a crossroads and Ben looked it up and she was right, but that was after we got back together in Washington.

You are probably getting tired of reading this letter, which is driving around like a lost tourist, but I have a feeling it is better the more I write down so that I can be reminded of it later on when it is more important.

Anyhow, we slept at a motel that night somewhere in North Carolina, and you will never guess who came to rustle us out of sleep. Well, it was that Thankful Priest and Bob Dufour, who I hope you remember as the main hitting men for Bill Ruby. Black has not stopped being all twitchy and he knocked Bob over the balcony. I think it is fair to say it is lucky for Thankful and Bob that they were not there to hit us for Ruby. See, you do not always have to get me out of trouble.

After a little more fighting we found out they wanted to talk about something that did not involve Ruby being angry at us so we went off to eat pancakes. Even Black was a little calmer after those. The place we went said they were the best pancakes but it is just another place that has never tasted Ma’s cooking.

It turned out that one of Ruby’s whores and Thankful went and fell in love or some such nonsense, and he wanted us to go to Dallas Texas to get her out of the place Ruby put her. Well, maybe we will and maybe we will not. It would not be so bad for Ruby’s boys to owe us a favor or two, and Ruby cannot get more angry at us than he already is.

After that we slept well and woke up and I drove us on to Washington. It is a city that never gets any better. On the road that rings it like a noose we caught a man burning highway flares backward. He was lighting burnt out flares and they were getting filled up with whatever stuff makes flares burn. I did not think it seemed right so we made him stop and took his things including the dead porcupine he had.

He also had two flares with other highway names written on them. He said something about how the beast of the noose highway was too young and not ready to harvest. I think he was doing something to mess with our roads which did not sit well with me. Lucky we stopped it.

Then I went to the National Interstate Highway Museum which is just about the most amazing place in the world. If I did not have so much to do and if the federal government did not have me down as a convict I would get a job there, I swear I would. The lucky man who works there told me about a book all about good roads and the first man to drive all the way across this country and it seemed like there were a million other things to learn about as well. I could not get any of the rest of them to go with me. Their loss. I think I will go back tomorrow.

Also you should know that we will be driving down to visit you and Ma soon. You will like the rest of the boys. Tell Ma we’re coming, that will make her happy. She will get to cook a whole deer. Better make it two, I guess everyone besides you and me will be hungry too. Ha!

Your brother,
Reese Beulay