Then we were getting closer to Christmas and we had to make an effort to get the stories, and the labels themselves, done. We had a weekend at my place where we sat in front of my iMac and hashed out the rest of the storyline. Alcohol was involved I have to admit, but so was food and conversation and music. It was a fun time.
Ralph had also done the basic photography on the tree spade and so he brought his camera over as well. We downloaded the images into my computer and had a look at them, deciding which picture to use for the actual label.
The other thing we did was to check out images on the net and see if there was anything we could use for the other label. When we saw the image of the police car on fire we knew we had found it.
I should mention here that a few days later I sent a copy of what I was working on over the net to my friend Sid who came up with a couple of versions on a glow for the machine's forks. I told him that I would mention his name and give him a 'glowing' credit. This is it.
So here is this year's story and we hope you enjoy it. Sorry we can't pass you a glass of wine through the monitor as well.
2010: A Spaced Oddity
The detective leaned back in his seat and regarded the older Campbell brother. “Now tell me,” he said, “in your own words, just how the incident occurred.”
Ralph responded, “I had, ah, ‘acquired’ this tree spade truck. You know, that’s a truck for moving trees and crap. Anyway, I borrowed it, kind of, from Tom’s farm.”
Down the hall in an adjoining interrogation room a second detective, popping a breath mint into his mouth, leaned forward in his chair and regarded the younger Campbell. He said, “So, what happened?”
Colin said, “Well, Ralph got this truck, you know, from this guy he sometimes works for, and we headed out to look for, ah, stuff we can make into wine.”
“Into wine?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“With a truck?”
Colin nodded.
Ralph looked up from the table. He looked a bit sheepish. “Well, we kinda’ make wine from whatever’s available.”
“So you and your brother were driving around looking for something to be made, ah, available.”
“Basically, that’s it.”
“And you needed this tree spade to do that? Why couldn’t you just pick what you needed? Or better yet, buy it.”
“It’s all Colin’s fault.” Ralph responded, “He said that it was too much work to pick any kind of fruit, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to climb no tree to do so. And he’s a cheap bastard. So I thought, why do we need to pick. Just cut out the middle man and grab the whole tree, or bush.”
Colin snorted. “It’s Ralph’s fault really,” he said. “He’s such a skinflint. All I said to him was that if we were going to have to pick the fruit for ourselves then it was going to be a hell of a lot of work. He got pissed off and said, ‘Well then why don’t we just put the whole damn bush through a chipper then stew the whole lot.’ I agreed.”
Ralph was speaking. “We were driving some back roads early in the morning when we noticed, off to the left, what looked like a bunch of trees giving off light. We turned off the main track and went up an old dirt road toward this old abandoned barn or something.”
Colin said, “When we got closer to the trees we noticed that the glow wasn’t coming from the trees themselves, but from some kind of fruit which was growing on them.
“We followed the track and went through a gate which had fallen down, toward this barn. On the side of the building was this old corroded sign that read ‘Area 69’.”
The detectives asked, “So what happened next?”
From both rooms, at exactly the same time, the brothers responded, “The squirrel.”
“Squirrel.”
Ralph said, “Squirrel! I almost had that sucker until it dived behind that rock.”
Colin said, “Well, actually he was aiming for the squirrel. Ralph’s always had this grudge against squirrels. Don’t ask me why. It’s got something to do with when he was a boy scout. He tried to hit it.”
And the first detective asked, consulting his notes. “It says here that you then ran over a rock and punctured the hydraulic tank. Your brother saw the leak and said you should stop. Is that so Mr. Campbell?”
“Yes, that’s it. We parked near this barn thing. I got out and checked out the tank.”
“So Ralph got out and checked under the truck and saw that he had punctured a hole in this tank thing. It had spilled this stuff that looked like castor oil all over the place.”
“And so you started to fix it? How did you go about doing that?”
“Well, I went underneath the truck. I was cursing and swearing the whole time. There was still a lot of oil that dripped into my face and all over my clothes. I chewed some pine gum and used that to plug the leak. It tasted awful. Then I wrapped the whole thing up in duct tape. Meanwhile, I had Colin unload the cases of wine from the truck.”
“Did you say cases of wine?”
“Oops.”
“Well, I was cursing and swearing cuz Ralph made me unload the wine so that he could get at the hydraulic tank and spout once he had repaired the leak.”
“Wine? You already had wine? And how much wine are we talkin’ about? And what’s happened to this alleged wine? Where is it now? Did you sell it? Are you bootleggers?”
Both brothers responded from their separate interrogation rooms, “No, not me”.
The first detective gave a disbelieving look at Ralph and said, “We’ll leave the wine aside for now. What happened next?”
In the other room the other detective asked, “So why didn’t you just drive home then?”
“We still didn’t have what we came for. We still wanted to take one of the trees with the glowy fruit on it back home to start another batch.”
“But your truck was busted.”
“Well, Ralph went to look for something to fill the tank up with.”
In the other room Ralph said, “I went into this large barn. It was mostly deserted but there, stuck in a corner, was this old barrel. It still had stuff in it and so I rolled it out of there and back to the truck.”
Colin told his investigator, “He found this crap in the barn and said he was going to use it as hydraulic fluid. The stuff was thick and green and glowing. On one side of the barrel was a stenciled sign that said:
Keep away.
Do not use.
Very bad.
You’ll be sorry.
I asked him if he really wanted to use this stuff and he said, ‘What, me worry?’ and poured the stuff in and then hopped in the cab and started up the truck.”
“And then what happened?”
Colin said, “The whole thing started to shake and there, between the blades of the spade, appeared this blue twirly thingy. I was just bending down to retrieve a couple of bottles that were loose there when I saw a flash and looked up. I took a step forward and then I slipped on a puddle of oil and slid into it.”
“And then what happened?”
“I got a look at my brother through the rear view mirror. What it looked like to me was that he slipped on the bed of the truck and slid, feet first, between the blades of the spade. Then he got hit with lightning or something. He went all flat and then disappeared.”
“You went all flat and then disappeared, is that correct?”
“I can’t really explain it. One moment I’m slipping on the truck and the next thing I know I felt like I’ve been put through a wringer, literally. And then I was elsewhere.”
“So your brother disappeared. What did you do next?”
“I went looking for the wine. I figured I needed a drink. And I still had all this pine gum taste in my mouth.”
“Weren’t you worried about your brother?”
“Hell no, he’s always screwing off someplace.”
“Well, once I re-inflated I saw that I was standing on this trail. Just opposite me, on the other side, there was this old guy standing there next to this old wooden outhouse with a sign above the door saying ‘Portal Potty’.”
“You mean Port-a-Potty.”
“No, that’s not what it said. It said Portal Potty.”
“The old man introduced himself to me as the doctor? I said, ‘you’re the doctor’? He said, ‘What?’”
“Are you a doctor or what?” I asked, louder.
“Yes,” he answered.
The detective said, “Doctor What?”
Colin said, “Who?”
“So you were looking for the wine but you couldn’t find any?”
“That’s right. I originally thought that it would be more booze for me but when I looked I couldn’t find where Colin had unloaded it. I figure that he had stashed it somewhere close by while I was fixing the leak. I looked everywhere. In the trees, under rocks, all over the place, I looked for almost an hour and couldn’t find any sign of it.”
“And then what?”
“I figured I had to find my no good brother to find out where he’d hid it.”
Inter-dimensional interlude:
The universe is smaller than you might think. In some ways it’s tiny. Colin, in tripping through the light fantastic had come face to face with an old adversary, though he didn’t know it at the time. This old man, Doctor What?, was the last of the Dukes of Time, who travels through time and space in his Portal Potty.
A Portal Potty, for those who don’t know, is a device that breaks all the laws of physics, and most of the laws of propriety as well. It allows him, Doctor What?, to travel between dimensions and through time. It happens to be much, much bigger on the inside than it’s outside dimensions would indicate. Unfortunately, the air that surrounds it gives off a foul reeking stench. Anyone who came around the thing afterward said that even breathing the vacuum of space (which you can’t) would be preferable to inhaling the evil emanation the thing gave off. There was no knowing how much worse the air was inside. God alone knows how the ‘Potty’ was powered.
It turns out that Doctor What? had indeed met the Campbell brothers before, in their future (his past). I know, it’s all a bit confusing. He had been in a bar and had drunk a great deal of their illegal wine, and fell unconscious in front, practically inside, of their band ‘Septic Tank’s’ speaker stack (in his own vomit too, it was pretty disgusting). This was why he was practically deaf, smelt badly, and why, incidentally, he said ‘What?’ when anyone talked to him.
What galled him the most was that, even though he was the Duke of Time, he couldn’t even leave a message for himself in that past, not even at a hotel desk, a message to advise himself to avoid both the Campbell brothers, their band, and their potent concoction. If he did that, he knew, the universe would end, messily. So he was stuck, and mostly deaf, smelly, and decidedly pissed. He was not in a helpful mood.
And now back to wherever and whenever we are now.
“So this doctor guy points down this trail and says ‘That there’s your way out. Hit the road.’ So I did. I was making good time until I was attacked by the squirrels.”
“So you went looking for your brother. And how did you do that?”
“Well, I was going to drive around and look for him. As I was turning the truck around I saw this spark come through the blue twirly void thingy and I thought I heard his voice. It was saying something like ‘No, no, get away. It’s my brother’. When the truck was pointed in a certain direction it seemed to work like some kind of compass thing so I followed the sparks and his voice. The problem was that it pointed away from the trail.”
“You had to go cross country?”
“Yup.”
“I had all these rodents after me, nipping at my ankles, throwing acorns and rocks. I ran through this valley, up the other side, then had to double back along the ridge top to avoid the swarm of squirrels that were still on my tail. It was insane.”
“I had to make all these twists and turns, up and down hills, over streams, through squirrels’ nests, to keep contact with the signal. I got a flat and had to change that. Then I got stuck in a hole and had to winch myself out. The signal kept changing direction and it was driving me crazy. It seemed to me that I was driving in a big circle.”
Just as Colin reached the very place from where he had materialized in this alternate place or universe or whatever it was, he caught a sight of the Portal Potty taking off. An arm stuck itself out the door and gave him the finger. Colin returned the salute. The very next thing that happened was that the void reappeared and sucked him back into it.
As Ralph finally arrived back at Area 69 a cop car pulled up behind him, lights flashing. The cops exited their vehicle and approached the sides of the truck. Just then Colin came back through the void and landed on his face in a pile of leaves with a thump. Seconds later a blast of heat from the back of the truck, from between the blades of the spade, shot out with an incredible blue flame and incinerated the cop’s car. They, cops and Campbells, all stared.
Ralph said, “It was him”, pointing at his brother.
Colin said, “No, it was him”, pointing back at Ralph.
After several hours of questioning in the station the two brothers were escorted to the exit. Unfortunately, no charges had been laid; they had to release the two. They were free men.
As the brothers left the building Ralph asked Colin in a whisper, “So where did you put the wine?”
“When I unloaded the cases I stacked them under a tree and then threw a blue tarp over them. I then used duct tape and taped a large cardboard sign to it reading: ‘Hidden Stash, Keep Your Paws Off.’ Didn’t you see it?”
“Yeah, I saw it, but I never thought anyone, even you, would be stupid enough to really stash the stash under a stash sign.”
“So when do you want to go pick it up? And maybe we could grab one of those trees with the glowing fruit?”
“All in good time,” he replied.
The detectives stood outside the station. They had just given the brothers their walking papers because, after all, the military wasn’t willing to press charges for trespassing (because of the secrecy of the site), and Tom, the owner of the truck, was not going to press charges for ‘borrowing’ his truck (they didn’t know that a case of wine made that charge go away). And they never found any of the alleged cases of wine at Area 69 either.
And the burnt cruiser was put down as an act of God. What else could they say? They never put in the report what the brothers had said about it. ‘The truck farted, I guess,’ they both had maintained.
They were smoking as they watched the Campbell brothers get into the truck. It was just turning dark.
“So,” one detective asked the other, “What do you think?”
“I think they’re both cracked.”
There was the sound like a loud clap of thunder. In a blink, the truck disappeared from the parking lot. Their new cruiser, which they had parked just behind the truck, was consumed in one of those raging infernos that people like to talk about. It, the car that is, subsided into a bubbling pool and slowly sank into the asphalt.
And that's the story.
Bottling:
Early in December Ralph invited my son Elliot and I to come over to his place near Port Perry and help bottle the wine and then put the labels on. Here are a couple of shots of us in the basement doing just that.
Ralph was the official filler of the bottles (on the left). I was the evener out (making sure there wasn't either too much or too little wine in each bottle because the process, once it got started, couldn't be easily interrupted), and Elliot got to use 'the device' and so here is a picture of him as our official corker.
exeunt: et al
