Now;

Sister Penelope is fourteen years old and she’s going to have a baby. Nobody knows who the daddy is. She sits at the harpsichord in the living room, sidesaddle because she can’t get up to the keys, can’t play because her fingers are swollen and achy and she doesn’t like sitting that long. Nobody even thought she could have a baby. She don’t have a boyfriend. Brother Will, her brother, and Brother Tom, the wizard who lives in the back room, they don’t know. But everybody asks them. Brother Tom tells Brother Will, one night after Brother Will gets home from work;

Brother Will, everybody’s askin’ on this child, an’ I just don’t know what to tell ‘em.

Brother Tom, says Brother Will, what shall we do?

I fear for the child, Brother Will. There’s shame in what she’s done. If she done it with the wrong person, doubly so.

Brother Will asks him what that means. Brother Tom tells him to never no mind, because he don’t have any idea. Brother Tom, Brother Will asks again, what should we do?

Brother Tom says, well, we can’t just let out that Sister Penelope got in that way from some tobacco hand, can we, Brother Tom? She can’t be mixing with that wrong sort of crowd.

Brother Will sees, of course not. What should we do, Brother Tom?

The baby kicks her, and Sister Penelope asks, Brother Tom, what? Brother Tom was the most important man in Kentucky. He was old, possessed of a pointy face and a tuft of hair between lip and chin, and he’d been living there since before Penelope could remember. The house is Brother Tom’s, must be, because Brother Will didn’t make much of anything washing silverware. He and Sister Penelope got those checks from the government, and Brother Tom would cash them (since he was the only one with a bank account), but Brother Will was liable to give it to preachers he saw on TV, or buy sweaters and knitting needles for his girlfriend. The house is filled with Brother Tom’s things, maps and books and little statues on every shelf.

Brother Tom took no notice of Penelope, growing up, because she couldn’t always understand the things Brother Tom talked about. Brother Tom understood things. Brother Will didn’t, but Brother Will was a fine Christian and loving soul. But Brother Tom taught her to play the harpsichord. She wore her favorite white dress, because sometimes when she wore it and played the harpsichord Brother Tom would come watch, and clap along, and tell her how pretty she was. But she couldn’t play the harpsichord any more. Brother Tom worried her, because he stayed up every night and didn’t go to church. He would stay up all night talking on the phone and ordering things from catalogs. Some things that came in the mail he didn’t have much use for and he would give them to Sister Penelope, and Brother Will, before Brother Will got too old to like toys. Brother Will was a liar, though, when he said he didn’t want toys. He had the Egyptian thing in his room, even though it was Sister Penelope’s first. It was made of dark wood, a little box and on the top were three dwarf dancers, who you spin with a piece of string that went in this side of the box and out the other. Penelope asked Brother Tom how old the box was, while Brother Tom wound the string into the box, that made the little men dance. Brother Tom said,

Older than Jesus, baby girl.

It’s nothing older than Jesus, Penelope said, blushing.

Brother Tom looked at her and said, bet you a quarter it’s twentieth century B.C., baby girl.

Brother Will wouldn’t loan her a quarter.

Brother Tom gave them to her, the dolls, when he didn’t want them anymore. Eventually she traded it to Brother Will for the umbrella bucket. She loved the umbrella bucket. It had seven umbrellas in it, in seven colors, and if you opened them indoors you’d hear a funny sound, and they’d glow. Penelope thought they were like normal umbrellas, like bad luck magnets, but these old walking cane umbrellas, with pointy sword tips you could stick people with, like Bulgarian hitmen, they were different, because they caught bad luck on bony old spines and trapped it, and she could shake the lost socks and broken buttons out the window in bad weather, and spin it around in the sun and catch good luck from outside. Except it didn’t always work.

Some people think Brother Tom has to do with this.

Tell the truth, Penelope doesn’t know who the father is either.

She listened to Brother Tom.

How do you think… his shaking hand lights the pipe, and he says to himself, but you don’t think. When the pipe was going strong, though, he asked, Who do you think the daddy could be, Brother Will?

Could be was Lord Jesus, Brother Tom.

Brother Tom smiles. Could be that’s it exactly.

Ellen lives in New Bruinswick. She is seventeen years old. It’s summer and she has an internship at the university. She works in the research laboratory, and this is what she does:

She works on a study for Rutgers University. This study studies alcoholism. They do that by making alcoholic rats, then looking at their brains. First Ellen sedates the rat. Then she injects it with radioactive LSD, which is supplied by the government. The acid is radioactive for two reasons;

a) LSD bonds to key areas of the rat’s brain, and the radioactive taggants are used to measure activity at certain receptor sites, or something.

b) So Ellen won’t take any.

Then she cuts the rat’s head off and takes the brain out. She puts the brain on a scientific deli slicer and cuts it into little strips, which you can look at under a microscope.

Her mom called her at work today and told her that Howard died.

Howard who? said Ellen.

Howard your half-brother, said Mom.

Mom can’t go to the funeral, and Dad can’t go, and her sister’s not old enough to drive. Ellen told Dr. Philes, and he said Ellen could take Thursday off, and Friday too, if she worked the rest of Wednesday. But Ellen’s never driven that far at night, at all. Howard lived in Ford, Kentucky, and that’s seven hundred miles away.

Ellen, by the way, has money this summer. That’s because her horse is dead. She was out riding in March and her grandmother came out to pick her up. Her grandmother honked the horn coming up the drive and Bwamazon, her horse, spooked and jumped and broke his leg. That left Ellen free to take the internship. All the money from the job, and all the money Ellen saved for bit, bridle, and halter is just sitting. Her grandmother gave her money, too. But Ellen hasn’t thought of anything to do with it.

Her mom and dad won’t let her go. Ellen has her own car, so it’s not like she’s taking theirs. She’s just about the only seventeen-year-old she knows who owns her own car, with money from her own job, and that should count for something. And it does, but this is not the kind of thing moms or dads are equipped to consider. She can’t go.

But that night she goes anyway.

Howard didn’t have a phone, but she has an address. It takes twelve hours to drive to Kentucky. She bought No-Doz and toffee peanuts every time she stopped for gas.

At dawn she came to the Cumberland Gap. She watched the sunrise, over the millions of trees, even though it seemed like the sun took too long to rise. She opened the trunk and took out her one piece of luggage (besides two changes of clothes, and a long black dress for the funeral, and some books. She unpacked her viola. As the sun came up she played a song she heard on the radio. Robyn Hitchcock wrote it, and these are the words;

She was sinister but she was happy

She came to Kentucky at noon, strung out from twelve hours of classic rock. She drove carefully, because her parents would be awake by now, but she knew they knew where she was going and all. It took a lot less gas to get down here than she thought; twenty-five dollars, and she still had an eighth of a tank left. Maybe they’d wait until after the funeral to call the police.

Ellen didn’t know Howard, really, at all. She thought about that all night. She only met him once, when she was eight, the week before Halloween. She visited St. Louis, for the first and only time, and they went to Howard’s house. Howard said there was a funhouse maze in the back yard, and she followed him outside. He told her that it was right over there, hidden in the red car up on blocks in the yard. You get in through the trunk. She climbed inside, and he locked her in the trunk. Now that she thought about it, that was really mean. Howard must have been fifteen or sixteen, way too old for that. But he was dead, and someone should go to his funeral. Ellen thought her father might see it her way, at least. And she didn’t much care what her mother thought.

Turning into Winchester Cemetery she hit a hearse.

Ellen came out crying. The chauffeur, confused and dangerously young, tried to hug her. She slapped him without thinking.

The chauffeur, whose name was Duncan, stood there smoldering.

Ellen dashed back to her car, not even stopping to check the damage. She sped past the long long line of cars with their headlights on. Then it occurred to her that hearse was Howard’s. She slams on the brakes and the hearse hits her again.

Howard! Howard! I’m sorry, Howard!

Duncan leans out the window and shouts, this is the Wiseman funeral. Nobody gives a shit about Howard.

She finds Howard’s funeral over the next rise. There’s no hearse, just one car and two men. One is tall and thin, pointy and dressed in black. He carries a marvelous walking stick. His name is Aldo lo Curio. The other is a math professor named Milton, whose perpetual grin reminds you of a children’s show host. They’re waiting for a priest; he’s ten minutes late...the coffin’s in the ground, and all Howard needs is a sermon and a shovel.

Small talk is unbelievably easy at a funeral, I guess because you have at least one thing in common. Aldo and Milton swap jokes over the grave. She’s shy at first, unbelievably shy, but then, after a while, she starts to laugh. She can’t believe she’s laughing at a funeral, with people she doesn’t know. Aldo and Milton tell every joke with the same small sad smile. Ellen tells them about Howard’s haunted trunk and they crack up, because that was just like him. Howard, they swore, had the most hilariously mean sense of humor they had ever known. Laughing at the grave was required with Howard.

Ah, Howard…child of a murderous environment. A product of intellectual hatred. Builder of model trains, builder of book-safes. But– Aldo strikes a Kamel and continues. Howard was not, normally, your attacker-of-sisters. His mother – your father’s friend – on this particular bender, about this visit, and she plied Howard with stories, yes, little stories of "this child, that your father loves," (emphasis mine). Well, he was not inclined to do much with you, except dispose of the body. Yes, Howard was a mean bastard–

A magnificent bastard, Milton adds.

–and a bastard without much personality. But, but, a lot of style. If you can imagine such a thing. No, what I mean to say, is, he had one hell a lot of personality, but, a very cold fish. Howard never gave himself to anyone, anything. Passion, yes, but passion for up here– Aldo taps himself on the head meaningfully. Not here; he thumps his chest, coughs and shakes out another Kamel.

Howard, Milton declares. I liked Howard.

Milton and Ellen take their penguin to see Rage Against the Machine. Milton and Ellen have a penguin, who they drag everywhere, proclaiming the domestication of the penguin has begun. They steal the penguin from the zoo, on their very first date. See, that day in the graveyard, Aldo and Milton ask her to come by their trailer for lunch. But Ellen’s worried about the fuzz. If her parents freaked extra-hard they’ll call the cops. She doesn’t want to bring down the heat. Not at all, laughs Milton. Besides, Aldo says, cops don’t look for people. Cops look for cars. Park behind the house and you’ll never have a problem.

And she never did.

Milton cooks. Howard actually used to live in Milton’s trailer, a couple years ago. Milton, or Professor Maxwell, teaches cartooning at the University of Kentucky. They pay him to draw illustrations of math problems in children’s textbooks; he draws one for Ellen, shows her how a sail catches the wind. He met Howard at school, when Howard was drawing a comic of Flatland.

Aldo wasn’t in his class. Milton met him when Aldo came to school looking for the ROTC office, carrying a large brown paper bag that ticked. It was obvious his intentions were not pure. Milton intrigued, inquired. Aldo evaded his questions with that thick running accent; "itjustso happens, I, Ibought a, clock, justthisvery morning…" Very sinister, if you get my drift. Aldo said he was a doctor. He certainly carried a scalpel, as Ellen found one night. Aldo lost his wallet in the crack of the sofa and Ellen found the scalpel in it. But he never threatened anyone with it, though sometimes he looked like he might. Aldo lived at Milton’s, too, which made Ellen wonder if there were enough beds to go around. But routines meshed. Milton and Aldo went to sleep at about 4am (Ellen stayed up until dawn) and they would meet for dinner and the Simpsons, assuming Milton didn’t have night class. When dusk fell Aldo took off for who knows where, and Ellen could listen to music and play the viola while Milton drew and read. Ellen helped him grade papers. Milton gave her a copy of Moby Dick, and drew illustrations for her; crazy cartoons of paperclip people stabbing each other with stick harpoons. They laughed all night, as rain tore through the yard.

At nine o’clock on her third day in Kentucky Ellen called home. She called from Brother Tom’s house. Her mother answered. Ellen explained, or tried to explain, but she cut her cold.

Fuck you, Ellen, her mother said, and hung up.

Brother Tom puts his hand on her shoulder.

She shrugs it off.

This is what Milton knew about Howard:

Howard was a bright, bright guy. He laughed all the time, a real mathematical sense of humor. He loved statistical thermodynamics, Schroedinger—

—makes sense he wound up in a box, doesn’t it?

Of course Howard had a strange fascination with other dimensions. Doesn’t everybody? Howard wanted to live in Flatland. Often we would speak of interaction of three dimensions with two, and the consequences of four interacting with three. Rudy Rucker wrote a book about it, as Professor Rudolph B. Rucker. It’s one of those little flat books like they sell for a dollar, the Dover Thrift Editions, except it costs $7.50. What they do with textbooks is as textbook as it is banal, and I mean banal in the sense that I hate it. They manufacture a need in schools, and they did that by manufacturing a need for a need. They give teachers payola, basically, cash under the table so they’ll change textbooks every semester. Since the students have to buy what they tell them to buy, the companies charge damn well what they please. But the real problem is that textbooks are so damn bad that nobody in their right mind would read one. That’s the real problem. Nobody would ever buy a textbook who doesn’t have to. Maybe some weirdos. Nobody I know. Well, my brother.

For their first date Milton took Ellen to the zoo. It was 4:20, a.m. Milton dashed outside with the joint and into the scraggly trees around the trailer. Ellen chased him, crying,

Hark, knave!

And when that didn’t work;

Avast, matey! Pass the reefer ere I shiver ye timber!

That put them in the mood for a long aimless car ride. They end up at the zoo. They jump the fence (because Turtleback Zoo is under construction) and shimmy down a tree. In the zoo after hours, they walk hand-in-hand, listening to animals snore. They come to the penguins, croaking their dawn songs. Each penguin steps forward in turn and serenades them, a longing paean to the Midnight Sun, sets Milton and Ellen to giggling like mad. Fatefully, Ellen observes;

Milton, it’s seventy degrees out here.

Hit that shit.

These penguins have adapted to a temperate climate.

Will you hit that shit?

Then one penguin, her favorite, the glum fellow who sat in the back and sang bass, he dives into the little pool and swims by them.

Oh, I want one.

The penguin shits. A white cloud mushrooms out his backside and fouls the water. Ellen frowns.

Milton, Ellen said, the domestication of the penguin must begin.

They kidnapped that penguin. They name it Howard. They tried to keep it under wraps, but it was so impossibly awesome, and plus they had to keep a kiddy pool full for it in the yard, and what with the suspicious purchases of fresh fish, soon everybody knew. Once they took it to a restaurant. They said it was a seeing-eye penguin, and the giggling maitre’d led them to their table. The zoo never even called.

Aldo loved the penguin, too. He talked to it, and fed it sardines.

Aldo was always getting into trouble. He supported himself shoplifting, which was stupid in a town as small as Lexington. He had a car, a grey Neon with a red door and nonsensical bumper stickers, the most instantly recognizable car Ellen had ever seen. Aldo was from Cuba, and his mother sent him to destroy American society. She chaired several radical groups and she paid his bills from their treasury, so she wanted the money to go to good use. Aldo was dedicated to the destruction of American society. He wore the Che Guevara T-Shirt nearly every day.

They listened to Robyn Hitchcock, and the Smiths, and jazz and jazz and jazz. Aldo loved jazz, and he was fascinated by Ellen’s viola. Aldo played drums, but he couldn’t afford drums, so he would just tap along on any non-breakable surface.

This is what Milton thought:

Christ, the way Howard drove? He had a death wish for sure. One time we turned from South Maple onto French going forty-five miles per hour. Howard listened to bands like Autechere and Stereolab. Real beep boop beep, composed-on-an-Atari stuff. At the funeral Aldo’s watch alarm went off and he said, it’s Howard’s favorite song.

I brought sandwiches. We ate them under an oak tree. Ellen wore a black dress the first time I ever met her. She played the viola and Aldo and I made terrible jokes.

Ellen had to go halfway around the graveyard to find a way out past the Wiseman funeral. The hearse was still there, for some reason, when they left. Cars parked catawumpus around it, and everyone milled around, though it’s been at least an hour. Then Ellen saw the back of the hearse.

The coffin slid out and cracked like an egg. It happened when the hearse rear-ended her that last time. Everyone stands around, waiting for the undertaker.

The coffin was too small for anything but a baby. They must have been burying a baby, and the young lady crying must be the baby’s mother.

As she drives away Duncan flips her off.

Ellen parked behind the trailer and never moved the car again. And she didn’t go to Winchester much. When they weren’t in school or getting in trouble in Lexington they would stay around the trailer, near Ford. They were in a trailer by the river, down Four-Mile Road. At night you could see a lot more stars.

They’re growing up a hedge maze near Lexington. A tobacco farmers thought of a better way to make money this year, one where he doesn’t have to pay $64,000 in government taxes per acre of land. He started a hedge maze. It’s on Athens-Boonesboro road, past the bridge and all the restaurants. For some reason there’s a lot of classy restaurants down on the river. There’s also a trailer park. Milton says they flood nearly every year. If you go down Athens-Boonesboro and follow the river on Four-Mile Road, you come to Ford.

Ford is a creepy little town. It’s laid out like this, east to west; strip club, cliffs, water treatment plant, power plant, around twenty houses and trailers on the hill facing the power plant, abandoned railroad trestle, railroad trestle in use, and farms. South is a river and north is a mountain. There’s never anyone awake in Ford. You don’t see people on the street.

She discovers the Judybats. They broke up, but CDs are forever. Ellen learns this song:

In Tiny Town

Or words to that effect. When Aldo comes home he recites a haiku he composed:

Ellen plays along.