Howard Elman's Farewell

Vector Woman

VECTOR WOMAN % dawn. howard was awakened by vibrations. He cranked up his hearing aid, and now he could hear a truck in his driveway. He went outside. It was still cloudy, but the snow had stopped. About six inches had fallen. Nice little storm. Junior Kruger was just finishing up plowing out the driveway. Howard walked over to the truck. Junior rolled down the window. “How much do I owe you?” Howard asked. “Nothing. Keeping this place plowed out is in Dad’s new contract with plc.” “How is your dad?” “He bought the farm yesterday,” Junior said, just as calmly as one talking about the weather. Bought the farm? How did that come to mean kicking the bucket? Kicking the bucket and buying the farm mean the same thing? Kicking a bucket and buying a farm at the same time would kill anybody. “I’m sorry to hear that, Junior.” Actually, you’re not sorry. In fact the news gave you a jolt of vigor: well, I outlived that bastard. “It was so sudden it hasn’t sunk in yet,” Junior said. He held the steering wheel in a kind of caress. Howard figured Junior’s only emotion at the moment was glee at the thought of inheriting an almost new truck. The grief would come later. % % % Howard didn’t have any idea just how he was going to approach Tess Jordan, so he did what he always did when he was stumped. He visited Cooty, figuring that at least he could grab some breakfast from the stew pot. Probably what Howard liked best about visiting Cooty was 204 the loony toons mentality. It relaxed him. He didn’t have to think about his own loony toons: confusion in the face of old age, grief, and bodily decombobulation. He arrived as Luci and Wiqi were finishing up a treatment for Cooty. The centenarian looked quite rakish in his robe, medieval acorn cap, with his whippy hair blown outward like dandelion parachutes lifted by the wind. They all sat around the tiny table, Howard and Cooty eating stew, Luci and Wiqi sipping some kind of herb tea concoction. Who put the “h” in erb tea? “How did you people happen to wind up here?” Howard asked Wiqi, who was flipping virtual pages on his handheld. “Luci and I met online in a role-playing game,” Wiqi said. “Which led to my Uncle Web writing this book about us, but he never found a publisher.” Luci laughed. “In the book Wiqi and I are robots.” “Sometimes I think the two of you are robots,” Howard said. “What makes you think we aren’t?” Luci said. “Does it matter?” Cooty asked. “Not to me it don’t,” Howard said. “Hic, hec, hoc,” Wiqi said, as if speaking to his handheld. “What are you studying?” Cooty asked. “The Latin language.” “When I was an altar boy, we used to speak Latin in church,” Cooty said. “So, you could teach me Latin,” Wiqi said. “I don’t know that much; they didn’t tell us what the words meant. Do you care what the words mean?” “I’m dyslexic, and I think maybe another language, especially one that has a lot of root words in English, will help me,” Wiqi turned to Howard. “Constable Elman, Birch says you’re dyslexic, too.” “That’s what I was told. I always had lot of problems reading, still do.” “I’ll give you a Latin lesson,” Cooty said to Wiqi. “What do you know so far?” “Not too much; I just started,” Wiqi said, and mispronouncing the words on his handheld, “Hic, hec, hoc, huius, huius, huius.” 205 “The correct pronunciation is “hick, hike, hock, whoweeus, whoweeus, whoweeus,” said Luci. “I think huius is short for Julius, like Julius Caesar. He conquered much of the known world.” “He was probably compensating for having a sissy name,” Howard said. He could see from her expression that Luci knew he was kidding, but Cooty and Wiqi didn’t. Cooty turned to Wiqi. “Me and Howie, we’re hicks, so that’s the hick part. Hike could be like when you’re playing football and the quarterback says ‘hike,’ or maybe it’s like take a hike, and hock is like you leave something at a pawn shop, but it also could be a hunk of spit.” “Put them together,” Luci said, “hick, hike, hock could be translated...