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Show Acting Alone pa g e 32 great antiquity for this native Utahn. He always wanted to stop and ask directions to the town square where they hanged and pressed the witches. It was almost like being in one of those ancient haunted villages in New England for a guy like Sam, a guy from a state where all the toy towns are laid out in perfect rectangles by the unimaginative desert-dwelling Mormons, and all the highways are perfectly straight and undeviating and perpendicular to each other. Weirdness of weirdness: while a mountainous state like Utah had those geometrical sorts of civic plans, the unincorporated burghs of the two states notorious worldwide for their flatness were by no means flat and rectangular, but downright amorphous. There was a rill or a curl in a pile of flinty rocks at the corner of a rhombus-shaped sorghum field, a round little town tucked in with huge, non-native, century-old deciduous trees shading some ancient stone civic buildings. And, close by at the north end of town, the modest yellow clapboard home of Sgt. Spikey, former ostrich - er, hostage - , was identifiable by the giant teardrop-shaped patch of matted grass in the front yard where, according to back issues of the Kiev Kourier, the G-men's helicopter used to land, twice a week it sometimes seemed, to whisk Spikey's mom, Mae Bell Wamsutter, to places like Washington D.C., or even Topeka, for briefings and debriefings and punch and cookie receptions in the days before Spikey's joyous release. Sam thought he'd left the world of toilet-papering people's yards back in the college town with the little frat-rats and sor-whores. But here Spikey's yard was covered in dangling fillets of yellow - no, not yellow |