"I'm in toilets," noted Buford, the keeper of the food tally, who worked in bathroom accessories at Home Depot.
"The Washlet really is evolutionary; it's the evolution of clean."
Buford would mimic his floor room sales pitch in unkind ways, using his falsetto 'white voice' in place of his own deep baritone. Or he would pinch his tongue between thumb and forefinger as he recited lines like:
"What I have the pleasure of showing people is not only innovative and luxurious, it's also the most effective way of cleaning ourselves."
Buford enjoyed mocking his job, and always concluding the disparagement with a deep, infectious belly laugh. He was a big man, too, with ropy hands and an almost giant-like stride when he walked. Buford was eager to be productive in his labors, but he also enjoyed laughter and the companionship of those around him.
He adored what he called their 'valley of paradise', and he loved to gaze at the huge spruce trees, which towered all around, pyramid-shaped with long, drooping branches and sprouting glossy, yellow-green twigs, needles, and cylindrical cones.
Buford spent a good deal of those early months as the 'waste management Czar', shoveling out the men's' and women's' squatters, and then recycling the waste onto the crops. When others came by to chat, he would use unaffected language like, "haul up a stump," or "uncork your jug for awhile" - But he would continue his shoveling as he talked amiably with anyone about all subjects, and would rarely stop work until it was mealtime.
Buford was also the only colonist to warm to the Buckskinner's unmitigated candor and unrelenting opinions, and the friendship that formed between these two men was a strong one. The Tallyman always enjoyed watching the nimble Buckskinner taunt the others, as the political squaring off had started as early as the training.
"Obama got my vote-the first time, anyway," the Buckskinner said with bright-eyed conviction that first night at the quad table. "Might as well let a nigger try it."
He followed with a deadpan look at Buford, waiting. And the others sat stunned into silence, slapped across their faces by this barefaced provocateur.
Buford liked whites. Coming back from a Toto Washlet workshop a few years back, he had become the de facto expert on the Japanese toilets. His manager was a small, insecure guy named Cook.
"Just call me Cookie," the manager would say with his facial tic and an irritating hyena-like laugh. And he laughed all the time at all the wrong things. And Cookie, in a roundabout way, blamed Buford for the lack of consumer interest in the new Toto Washlet line.
"They don't want some fairy wand up their asses," Buford admitted to his wife, "even if it is streamlined. They just want paper. That's the American way."
He needed the job, and he detested the brittle familiarity which Cookie and the other white bosses showed him. Everything about Cookie, who he called Cracker when Buford was out of the store, rang false.
But Buford didn't care if a white was a racist or not.
"It's the nature of the dominant culture to demean their minorities," he reasoned to his wife. Buford had a studious perspective on racial-relations. He had read a lot about this, and he said it helped him to understand the white mind.
As a young man he was angry; he had heard the lurid tales of his grandfather's fatal encounter with a lynching mob. But he believed that he had come to understand, and accept, that whites couldn't help themselves; it was programming, and whites could no more stop thinking themselves better than blacks than they could accept the Toto extension wand up their rosy bottoms.
"America's more of a do-it-yourself country," he half-joked to Cookie, his explanation for the low numbers.
But Cookie was no longer giving Buford the hyena-like laugh, having replaced it with a shake of the head, followed by a convulsive twitch; an indication he was disappointed.
Buford was ecstatic the three-month opportunity had come along to take a break from toilets.
That first night at the quad table, the Buckskinner sat there after his off-color remark with a twinkle in his eyes, waiting ... And Buford wrinkled that big brow of a forehead, before giving the Buckskinner exactly what the man had expected-A thunderous belly laugh that echoed off the trees that rang the colony, as the other whites at the table squirmed in silent confusion; the Buckskinner had played him masterfully, and Buford took great pleasure in what he felt was an in-your-face genuineness, as refreshingly dissimilar to the Crackers in the world as one could get.
The Tallyman and the Buckskinner became quite close, and were often together, even volunteering for the less popular work details, if they could do the work together-preferring each other's company to anyone else's. They argued with each other a great deal of the time, but their exchanges were blunt, and interesting, and usually ended with self-deprecating laughs.
One muggy afternoon the Tallyman was wiggling a fishing pole in the stream. He frowned, up to his knees in the chilly, rushing water. The new, unsteady pole he had just constructed from a sapling was a poor performer. But he had time, and he loved standing in the water-It was so calming, and he always thought well when he was out there.
Then, upstream came a sudden black, amorphous shape, drawing closer, shifting into new patterns as it advanced along the watercourse. Buford stood there in the stream, frozen, mesmerized by the approaching contortion; it reminded him of the "Transformers" movies he had seen with his boy...
Then the formless black thing moved right through him and proceeded downstream. They were bugs, and he was completely engulfed by the black mass, yet not bitten once.
"They recognize a kindred spirit," the Buckskinner said.
Buford furrowed his bushy, gray brows.
"They were black fly... And you're black."
Buford gave a nod, "'Kindred spirit', very funny."
The Buckskinner sneered, "A joke's not funny if you have to explain it."
Through the swelter of summer they labored, the Tallyman shoveling out the squats and splitting logs. Most of the woodwork being done was now for fencing, and the Woodworker and free man Iverson cut and quarterred the logs, while Buford and the Buckskinner cleaned and split them.
The men were happy in these teams, and they had, for the most part, abandoned their attempts to speak the daunting language of the sixteen hundreds when they were together in the pasture.
"It's warm water and it's aerated and gentle," the Tallyman would say before swinging his axe.
"Aerated, huh?"
"That's what I said."
"Right up the old pooper, huh?"
Buford furrowed his brows. "What do you think we've been talking about all this time?"
The Buckskinner gave Buford's comeback make believe thought.
"What about the stink factor?" he then asked with a concerned look.
Buford was ready: "The Washlett S300 series has an automatic air purifier."
"Purifier, huh?"
"The streamlined wand extends to provide that soothing warm flow of aerated water," Buford recited his sales spiel, before taking another swing at the notch in the log, and then stopping again, "It's purifying-The epitome of clean."
"No more brown nail?"
"Say Sayonara to stink knuckle."
Throughout the summer the Buckskinner seemed to take great pleasure in these regular toilet reports, of which Buford, for his part, seemed eager to oblige.
But as the cool mid-August evenings began to bite at them once more, the men knew they were still well short of any conceivable profit the tiny colony may have been capable of generating. They weren't making anything, and they couldn't really catch anything-other than the occasional fish from the streams. Though they were still eating, the salted fish that resided at the bottom of the barrel in the provisions now possessed a horrendous odor.
"It's still good," Buford said, reaching into the barrel and pulling out a white encrusted fish. But the concerned gathering stepped backwards in unison, so awesome was the stench of the fish, basking in the barrel all summer long.
"Try some," they contested.
Buford conceded, "I'm more of a pea man."
He followed with a big, deep laugh, but he was grateful for the few green peas and dates that remained.
Monotony, after all, was better than dysentery.
***
A couple of days after the lashing of the Goatwench (an odious stain in Buford's ordeal as a colonist), and before the arrival of the indigenous peoples (a frenzied game changer in his strategy for survival) —Buford was out fishing.
"Good afternoon, Deputy," said a voice one twilight from the far side of the stream, shattering the serenity and causing Buford to nearly drop his sapling in the racing water.
On the other side of the stream a man in an old suit, a black man, stood casually watching him fish. The sun had receded behind the snow-capped peaks to the West, yet the figure held a peculiar luster about it that was suspicious...
Buford knew he was looking at a forgery-some skillful life-like hologram, like they'd seen of their team leader. But he stepped back, gripping the fishing pole with a most furious heartquake, the twine and hook free to drift quickly downstream and snag on detritus. He didn't notice this, because of the man in the old suit, the face flickering with a faint radiance.
"Forgive the interruption."
"Just trying to feed us. ...No one else will," Buford stammered, his eyes helplessly fixed to the earnest face of the man in the old suit; the Baptist minister, the Doctor, the Nobel Prize-winning civil disobedience leader, his leader-Martin Luther King, Junior.
Buford squinted in the encroaching darkness. He could almost see through the figure, which stood there in divine simplicity, ten meters away. The man smiled at him, turned and looked off. It was like looking at animatronics for the first time; the Mister Lincoln at Disneyland in the seventies, the suspension of disbelief; a part of you believed.
Then, as King faded, the visuals came; a wicked bombardment of intolerance, of innocent blacks being lynched, of elderly blacks being beaten with clubs, of peaceful black demonstrators being attacked by savage police dogs, of black children being hosed into the streets with water, of black enslavement-all by the whites. The images, crisp and enormous in front of him, thundered and pulsated in full theater-like Sensurround; the ground, trembling below him on the bank.
"It's only fifty years later that slavery begins in Jamestown, Deputy," the voice of MLK said.
More lurid realia: Blacks assassinated, blacks butchered, black bodies everywhere. It was far more advanced than any TV monitor, and Buford smirked as if in some secret knowledge.
But his eyes weren't laughing.
He rooted there on the bank of the stream, in stock-still disbelief, transfixed by the horrific images of such blatant and inhuman injustice.
Then MLK broke into a cheerless, lyrical poem:
American trees, they bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves, blood on the root,
Black bodies swinging in the breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the trees.
More killing: The lynchings, picture after picture, grainy stills, all enhanced, made new, of black men and boys, naked, swinging from branches, bulging eyes, twisted mouths, some burned first, the charred corpses strung up as some amusing afterthought, whites posing proudly, beaming under their dead black trophies.
Then the voice of MLK changed into the profound and fragile Billy Holiday:
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
It is a strange and bitter crop.
Reason told him he was watching a masterful spot of editing; designed, it appeared, just for him. Yet...
The slave ships and the black slaves within, packed together like fish; close ups of the iron shackles of a sinful bondage, the images cut into him with a relentless determination. And yet more suffering of slaves on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of America. And again the dogs, tearing into the marchers; the burning crosses of that bastion of white supremacy-the KKK, teaching hate, hate, hate!
"This country was created on the backs of those who didn't have choices," the voice of King said.
More killing, more hell-sent evil. It could go on forever. And Buford dropped the sapling onto the bank, and the tug of the hook and twine pulled the pole into the water, and downstream.
"You're a Deputy, a police officer, and look what they've got you doing."
Stills of Buford and his chores; the shoveling of the squats, the feces, the rudeness.
He sneered, rolled his eyes at the images depicting him in a most uncomplimentary light.
"Who's more American than who, Mister Buford?"
And Martin Luther King opened his palms in a gesture to look over at the tall spruce and larch. And Buford saw them swinging there. In the linden, too, a body twitched. Black bodies, symmetrically silhouetted in the moonlight, everlasting.
His grandfather, slowly swinging, like a sack of heirloom apples.
He'd heard the story, but that was of a different time, a different world. Times had changed.
Then a shiver ran through him and he looked down. He didn't know how long he'd been standing up to his knees in the cold water. His fishing pole was gone, and when he looked back at the images in the trees, they had vanished, like a desert mirage. Then there was nothing, just a warm, silent darkness.
The Tallyman laughed for a long time.
"Cock-teasing this old boy, you are."
He sauntered back up to the hut, laughing all along the windy path.
"Sons-of-guns," he could be heard mumbling, and then laughing again, laughing too much. There was no fish that evening-Buford had caught something a whole lot bigger.
The Buckskinner came back from his hunt well after dark, a muskrat dangling from his belt.
"Where's Toto Too?" The Buckskinner asked the others, proudly swinging the large rat by its tail.
No one knew where Buford had gone, and the women wanted no part of the rodent-as they were not, in the languid late summer, at that juncture in their trial yet.
No one saw Buford until morning, when he had woken up from a night in the provisions shed. The Tallyman had done something quite unexpected-He broke into the remaining whiskey and got thoroughly sodden, quietly, by himself, on the pitiless ground.