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Guerin and the Sail Cat Blues LES STANDIFORD Guerin sat high on the concrete bank at freewayside, staring idly down upon the river of traffic beneath him: automobiles, taxis, panel trucks, dunebuggies with whiplasb antennae, besurfboarded woodies, 24- and 32-wheeled big irons, groaning beer trucks and cement mixers, even an occasional police cruiser or wailing ambulance rolled below, each oblivious to its respective part in the making of history and considerable money for Guerin's employer. Of course, they were providing for Guerin's livelihood as well, and there was some mildly interesting irony in that, he thought. In their travelling, these drivers were contributing toward his own voyage, though his would be a trip to transcend the earthbound scurrying at his feet. He had balloons on his mind, clean air, free floating on the natural wind. After all, if not to save for such a trip, why else be doing what he was presently doing, and for such a boss as he had ? It was a normal Southern California summer morning, the sun already white hot on his back, the air dry but thick with a chemical haze that obscured even the enormous humps of the dirigible hangars where his eyes lingered momentarily. Not more than a mile away, he realized, as he traced the dim outlines rising incongruously from the vast vegetable fields to the south. He had never seen the great cigarshaped craft themselves, but he knew they were waiting there, as eager as he to set sail. Well, it might be that his own voyage could serve to set them free, he thought. And meantime, it was fortune enough that such ships could find a home at all these days, drydock or no. In this part of the country those hangars preempted the space of a dozen apartLcs Slandiford directs the creative writing program at the University of Texas, 1.1 I'a.so. "Guerin and the Sail Cat Blues" is from a segmented novel; other .sections have been published in two anthologies: Neu/ and Experimental Literature and The Bicentennial Collection uj Texas Short Stories. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW1 ment buildings, and as for the fields around them, the developers had many plans in store. As he began to play the scenario of development in his mind, with wallboard cottages springing up where peppers presently bloomed, he heard a great screeching of brakes and looked up the road just in time to see it: a truck bearing great slabs of storefront glass sliding agonizedly into die rear of a bakery van which itself had piled into a slow-moving highsider loaded down with watermelon. The giant sheets of glass broke loose from their moorings and shot forward in parallel formation between the ranks of traffic, which had ground to a halt over some obstruction down the line. The glass on the left encountered several tumbling melons and soon toppled over with a great splash of shattered light on the top of a dark blue Volkswagen. The glass on the right, however, continued with considerable speed, whisking a hundred yards or so before an unseen driver fired open his door to find out the matter ahead. Wonderful, Guerin nodded, truly wonderful, as he watched the heavy slab clip the door off neatly at its hinges. To the driver as well it must have seemed a perverse miracle. Guerin envisioned minor headlines in the National Enquirer: "Unseen Force Snaps Driver's Door— Is Newport Freeway Haunted?" Already, odier drivers had jumped from their cars and were scurrying about to snatch wobbling melons and lopsided cakes amidst the tangle of crushed trucks. The remaining sheet of glass slid finally to a stop and now leaned unbroken against the side of a moving van which in turn began to pull away almost imperceptibly as the bottleneck loosened. Magnificent, Guerin diought, as the truck inched away from the teetering glass; a bleating station wagon nosed immediately behind it. His job did provide a certain drama from time to time. As the glass smashed down on the suddenly silent station wagon, he swung his eyes back across the freeway to the serene rows of vegetables stretching endlessly into the distance. Irvine land...

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