Tough Day for the Army (13 page)

Though even as I type this, I am reconsidering the exclusion of secret societies, since a secret society of yeti-hunters, perhaps led by the father of Laura, former best friend and then rival of Greta, my half-yeti, half-human female protagonist, could provide an interesting and dangerous subplot.

What this goes to show is that there's no real formula to writing a best seller. The moment you think you're not going to do something, bam! You wind up doing it.

My best seller is going to need a climax, and looking at my plans for my best seller I can already see the seeds of something that will be really whiz-bang.

It will happen on prom night. Many things have come to a head all together. Tammy, Greta's mother, will at last confirm what Greta has long suspected about her parentage, that she is the product of the coupling of human and yeti. On the one hand, she will be relieved to finally know the truth. On the other hand, it turns out that she really is kind of a freak. At the same time, the pressure on Greta's mother, Tammy, to repay the owners of the overturned cars damaged by Greta following her confrontation with her former best friend, Laura, is growing more serious, with the sheriff threatening to arrest Tammy if she can't come up with restitution.

In the meantime Laura's father, head of the secret society of yeti hunters, is aware that Jimmy is sequencing Greta's DNA, and he plans on stealing the final genetic analysis in order to prove Greta's true nature. Laura's father, wielding the data printout from Jimmy's machine, plans to interrupt prom night by capturing Greta and taking her back to the secret society for further study. In his head he has rehearsed his triumphant line, “This is no prom queen! This is a monster!”

Guilt-ridden by the fact that her mother is going to pay the consequences for Greta's destruction of the automobiles and simultaneously curious about and embittered at her father, on prom night Greta hatches a plan to find him in the woods, confront him about his absence from her life, and also take his picture which she will sell to a tabloid for enough money to pay for the damaged autos. She is hoping all of this can be wrapped up in time for her to make the announcement of prom queen and have a dance with Jimmy, her true love.

Relying on her half-yeti instincts, Greta is able to find her father's lair and upon confronting him discovers that she can actually speak passable yeti. She finds out her father, who we're calling Phil, never knew of her existence and is overjoyed to discover that he has a daughter. After a long and loving embrace, Greta explains Tammy's situation to Phil (in yeti), and he agrees to let his picture be taken in order to raise the money, so long as it is from a sufficient distance and kind of blurry.

At this moment, Greta's tiny unicorn will have a golden, kind of buttery glow, which will symbolize love and also togetherness.

But just as Greta is to bid farewell to her father and return to town in order to dress for the prom where she will be crowned queen and dance with her true love Jimmy, they will hear the advance of a strike team from the secret yeti-hunting society. The strike team has been able to follow Greta's trail because, as only half-yeti, she is not as skilled at covering her tracks as her father, and in a parallel to the earlier flashback scene where Phil and Greta's mother, Tammy, are almost found out, a sudden sacrifice must be made. This time it is Phil who makes it, charging out of his lair while unleashing his fiercest yeti bellow and attempting to lead the secret society strike team deeper and deeper into the woods, away from his daughter so her secret will not be discovered. In the lair, Greta will hear the gunshots of the strike team echoing farther and farther in the distance as her father runs for his life.

While this is happening, Jimmy discovers Laura's father's plan to reveal Greta's mixed-species DNA at prom, so Jimmy alters his DNA sequencer to produce a false result declaring that Greta is actually a marsupial. This will sabotage Laura's father's plan and make him look foolish in front of everyone at the prom, but it also torpedoes Jimmy's hopes for an academic scholarship, which would have allowed him to quit playing football, which he secretly loathes.

Like I said, irony.

Sadly, all this prom night activity causes both Greta and Jimmy to miss the dance, so when they are announced as queen and king a single spotlight will shine on the empty gym floor. The best seller will end with Tammy making her way home from the woods and Jimmy sitting alone in his lab.

It's hard to express how much fun it has been to write about writing my best seller. In fact, it has been so much fun that I'm not much looking forward to actually writing my best seller anymore. One of the cruel ironies about writing is that the idea, the conception, the vision, never quite gets on the page in quite the way it exists in the writer's mind, and in writing about writing my best seller, I realize that this is inevitably the case here. Greta and Tammy and Phil and Jimmy and Laura and Laura's father and Ms. Franchione and the yeti-hunting secret-society strike team are very much alive inside me—I feel their presences very, very deeply. Some writers talk about bringing their characters to life on the page, but I'm afraid that at this point the writing would, in reality, be the slow process of killing them, and I'm not sure I'm prepared to do that.

I've got a lot of respect for the people who do write best sellers. They must have a ruthlessness that I lack.

But fortunately, look at all the questions I've left myself. Did Phil escape the strike team to possibly reunite with Greta and Tammy? Will Laura's father discover Greta's secret? If you are not there to receive the prom queen's crown, are you still the prom queen? And most of all, I recognize that my previously planned requited love has been left unrequited. When all is said and done, will Jimmy and Greta find true love with each other?

All these questions have a significant upside, namely the need for a sequel, which I am going to start writing about right now. It is going to be called
Bigfoot Girl Goes to College.

Billy Turner and Jimmy Elliott were ten years old.

“Oh yeah?” Billy Turner said to Jimmy Elliott.

“Yeah!” Jimmy Elliott said back to Billy Turner as he kicked Billy in the shin and then socked him in the gut, dropping him to the sidewalk. Billy held his shin with one hand and his stomach with the other and moaned up from the ground.

“I'm going to get my brother and have him beat you up.”

Which he did.

Billy went home and got his older brother, Sam, who was fourteen and had hair under his arms. Sam and Billy walked over to the Elliott home and rang the doorbell. When Jimmy answered the door, Sam dragged him outside, pushed him to the ground, and held Jimmy down with his left hand while blackening the boy's eye and bloodying his nose with his right.

Jimmy looked up at the Turners and vowed, “My brother can beat up your brother.”

Which was true, if half-brothers count, because Jimmy's half-brother Andrew was thirty-two years old, an investment banker living in a different city a plane ride away who had played some college football (Division II, but still…) and continued to work out four days a week. Jimmy called Andrew on the phone, after which Andrew hopped on a direct flight, stopping at home just long enough to collect Jimmy and head over to the Turners'.

Billy answered the door and declared that Sam was not home, but Sam was indeed home, hiding under the bed, the third place Andrew Elliott looked. Andrew dragged Sam Turner out from under the bed and proceeded to kick a few of the boy's teeth down his throat. Billy Turner looked down at his brother on the floor, then back up at Jimmy and Andrew Elliott and shouted, “Well, my dad can beat up your brother!”

This was a more dubious proposition.

Billy and Sam's father, Earl Turner, was in charge of accounts receivable at the local tool-and-dye, and at night as he changed for bed and looked at himself in the golden glow of the bathroom vanity, he saw breasts. Fortunately, one of the tools they manufactured at the local tool-and-dye was tire irons. Making sure to put the tire iron in his checked baggage, Earl Turner flew to Atlanta, signed in at the security desk of Columbus, Cornell, and Hum Financial Services, LLC, sneaked up behind Andrew Elliott, older half-brother of Jimmy Elliott, and cracked his skull with the tire iron, leaving him slumped and bleeding over his computer keyboard.

Upon hearing this news, Jimmy Elliott was at a loss, for he had no father. Jimmy was the product of a second marriage by his (and Andrew's) now-deceased father to Jimmy's much younger mother. Luckily, Jimmy had recently completed a school unit on civics, and during those lessons he learned that our government works for the people, even individual people younger than voting age, and that when individual people have problems, they can and should contact their congressional representative.

Congressperson Maxine Williams was Jimmy's second call. His first was to Billy Turner.

“My duly elected representative can beat up your father!” he shouted into the phone before hanging up on Billy Turner.

Congressperson Williams enjoyed a good fight, though she was not one for actual fisticuffs, for she favored elaborate hats that were easily dented. However, she was on the Subcommittee for Domestic Military Preparedness, which meant she had the e-mail address for a couple of National Guard colonels. Col. Evan Smith, Army Reserves, also enjoyed a good fight, as well as armor-plated vehicles, which his unit happened to be short on, a problem that was soon remedied thanks to the influence of Congressperson Williams after Strike Team Omega rappelled through a hole blown in the roof of Cornell Brothers Tool & Dye into the glassed-in office of Earl Turner and “eliminated” their target with minimal collateral damage.

Billy Turner would not stand for this. Billy called the number in the advertisement from the back of
Soldiers for Hire
magazine, the one that said, at the bottom, “Blood is thicker than water, but money is thicker than blood.” Billy met Mr. Hawk at midnight behind the Gas & Guzzle and showed Mr. Hawk the life-insurance check issued after his father's “elimination,” while in exchange Mr. Hawk showed Billy the skull tattoos on his knuckles and how his knife blade glinted green and deadly under the phosphorus lamps of the Gas & Guzzle lot.

Back home, Billy smiled as he dialed the familiar numbers of Jimmy Elliott. “My hired mercenaries can take out your National Guard strike team!”

Click.

And boy, did they, at least as far as anyone could tell. One by one, as the strike team members slept, or carried groceries in from the car, or pushed their daughter on a swing in the local park, they were “disappeared,” just as Mr. Hawk promised.

Neither Jimmy Turner nor the National Guard nor Rep. Williams was going to take this lying down, but neither were they going to find Mr. Hawk and his team of professional ghosts, so instead they took their new armor-plated vehicles and drove them straight through the Elliotts' front window, and the front windows of two of the Elliotts' neighbors for good measure. Jimmy was at school, and thus escaped harm, but the collateral damage was considerable this time.

At that point things started to get serious; sides were chosen, lines drawn, loyalties demanded and declared. The war spread past the neighborhood to the surrounding community, the bordering counties, the tri-state area, the region, the country, the continent, the world…

An orphan now, Jimmy Elliott was adopted by the CEO of a major supplier to the military/industrial complex who recognized a good opportunity when he saw one. Jimmy now had a warm bed, three square meals a day, and a direct pipeline to an undersecretary for policy and procurement.

Strike followed counterstrike, and as the years passed, the war's origins were forgotten, but what was clear was that the other side was hateful, godless, and evil, that they loathed those things we cherished and wished to subjugate us to their will, push us into the sea, end our way of life as we knew it, and our calling to resist and defeat every last one of them was a divine one, irrefutable and true.

At various times, international oversight bodies chided, admonished, reprimanded, reproved, and rebuked both sides. The leaders of the great powers condemned the senseless killings in the harshest possible language.

“We condemn these senseless killings in the harshest possible language,” they said.

As much ink as blood was spilled discussing the “problem,” but words crumbled in the face of this neighborhood war. Occasionally there were talks, discussions, summits, frameworks, road maps, once even a handshake, but each time the peace was bruised, or broken, or—one time—shattered.

The problem is they won't give in
, Billy Turner announced.

The problem is they won't quit
, Jimmy Elliott told anyone who asked.

Generations born into the war were called upon to fight and paid the ultimate sacrifice. “We honor those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice,” everyone said. This, at least, was widely agreed upon.

But nights, Jimmy Elliott and Billy Turner paced the floors of their command center secure rooms in their respective strongholds, surrounded by advisors who frowned down as they shuffled and reshuffled their stacks of intelligence. “Does this look right side up to you?” the advisors asked each other, turning the pages this way and that.

Troubled, deeply troubled, Jimmy Elliott and Billy Turner turned away from their advisors and stroked the grayed stubble on their chins and caught a glance of their sagging faces in their lighted real-time situation maps.

Look at how my ears droop, like an elephant's
, Jimmy Elliot marveled.

When did my neck wattle like that?
Billy Turner wondered.

I am an old, old man
, they both thought.

They stood up straight, locking their spines and clicking their feet together and they pushed the heels of their hands into their eyes and rubbed as though trying to wake from a dream and looked again at the real-time situation maps, and they both said out loud, though not loud enough for anyone to hear, “We're losing.”