CASE NUMBER SEVEN

THE CASE OF THE AMBIVALENT MULE


CHAPTER ONE

In the spring of 1932 times were tough and like many others, I was looking for work. I had migrated from my hometown of Sumter, South Carolina to an area in the Sandhills about thirty miles southeast of Columbia. After weeks of living like a hobo I had found a job milking cows near the crossroads village of Goodsite. It didn’t pay much but it came with a place to sleep in the barn loft and all the milk and cheese my lactose tolerant body could handle. The name of my new found workplace was Shumptuous Dairy. Old Man Shumptuous, the owner, was nice enough when he wasn’t being grumpy which was about 95% of the time. His daughter, Trixie, wasn’t bad looking, but I was working too hard to give her much notice.

Then 1947 came along and Trixie and I had been married almost ten years. We had 15 kids, three of them human. The other 12 patrolled the pasture back of the house. I was still working at Shumptous (where the motto is ‘Milking cows will not only give you a good grip but also a good grip on life.) and also doing some private detective work in the evenings and weekends. I picked up most of my detective skills while serving as a MP in the South Pacific during the war. I never had much trouble doing my job, except one night when a seaman named Fred got drunk and cried out in a Hawaiian bar, “The South Pacific will rise again!”. A few days in the brig cooled him off and I never saw Fred again. I’d like to though.

Besides milking cows and doing private detective work on the side, I also spent the hours around midnight (I don’t sleep much) in my workshop trying my hand at inventing things. Folks around Goodsite call me a Ben Franklin wannabe. My first invention was the Whirt. A Whirt is a shirt designed to hold a wallet in its left front pocket. Trixie said that was ridiculous. “Every time you lean over your wallet will fall out and what’s more, what self-respecting man will wear his wallet in his shirt?” Now Trixie was a fine woman and could make a mean peach cobbler, but she never was quite up to snuff in the foresight department. But her comment did cause me to reconsider the design of the shirt and the result of my reconsideration was adding a zipper to the pocket. Thank you, Trix.

Another idea I had involved oil. I like both saffron oil and canola oil but I couldn’t decide which one I liked the most so I experimented combining the two to come up with a new taste sensation. I planned to call it ‘Oil in Oil’. The experiment was a bust though and the lab work involved in the process produced some pretty bad smells. I remember Trixie bursting into workshop shouting, “What the hell are you doing, Nick, trying to make Goodsite smell like New York City?”

There were other ideas. But I think you get the drift.

CHAPTER TWO

Let me tell you a little about the three kids (the human ones). The oldest was a boy we named Abimelech. Good strong kid with an ear for music. Everybody called him Abe. When he was eighteen he left Goodsite for Nashville where he pursued his dream of becoming a paid musician (he had the unpaid musician part covered like a blanket). In Nashville he formed a band called Cows on a Rampage. The type of music they played was called Dairy Rock (some musicologists believe Grungy Rock on the West Coast was an offshoot of Dairy Rock). They had a few modest hits such as ‘This Milk is Your Milk’ and ‘Who’s Got My Cheese, Dammit?’ before busting into the big time in 1959 with their platinum hit ‘When the Cows Come Falling From the Sky’. Sad to say, Abe died tragically in 1965 in a plane crash in Wisconsin. Abe was always searching for ways to improve his Dairy Rock lyrics and what better place than the Land of Cheese?

Buffy was the middle child and was the real go getter in the family. I don’t know what she loved more, cooking or making money. She couldn’t decide either so she did both. By age 20, she had a cooking show on public television and by age 22 owned a chain of restaurants called Buffy’s List. We don’t see Buffy much but that’s OK. She’s happy and that’s all that counts.

The third and last child is Nick Jr. I call him a ‘cow chip off the old block’. Junior is an in-betweener. He’s not lazy but he’s not industrious. He’s not smart but he’s not dumb. He’s not good looking but he ain’t ugly either. He’s just Junior. Maybe he’ll do something someday. I’m still waiting.

Trixie died in 1985 from natural causes. She was a good wife and mother; a little bit of a nag at times; but ‘oil in oil’ not too bad looking. I should have tried to write a song about her.

I died in 1999, but not from natural causes. I was attempting this time to combine peanut oil with engine oil. In 2001, Nick Jr. was still clearing away the rubble where the workshop used to be.

CHAPTER THREE

I met SM Tubebacher in a dream. Or was it a dream inside a dream? Whatever it was he introduced himself as a Time Unfolding Technocrat. I remembered his exact words: “It’s hard to return to an identical place in the Time Stream mainly because it no longer exists and if truth be told, it may never have existed in the first place.”

He continued, “However, since you are in essence writing your own story, so to speak, then what is impossible in one context may be possible in another one.”

“Then I can go home again?”

“Only if you become a better writer.”

I was about to ask SM if he knew any good writing schools that were in homeostasis in relation to the paradox of Time when the inspirational tones of ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ filled the air.

It was my celestial cell phone. I answered, “Nick Neercassel speaking.”

“Howdy, Nick, it’s Earl. How are you doing, fella? Loooonnng time, no talk, no see.”

“Doing great, Earl. Just waking up matter of fact.”

“Wish we could chat but the Boss is back in town and you’re back in the hunt. See you at Petiger International in thirty minutes.” Earl hung up and I jumped out of bed, washed my face, combed my hair (noticed a few new grays), put on my khaki pants and matching Whirt, tucked a portable toothbrush into my pocket, made sure the celestial was fully charged, checked to see if my TPE ID slash credit card was in my Wullet, placed the Wullet in the left front pocket of my Whirt, and then… zipped it up.

Nick Neercassel, Class II TPE, was ready for action.

CHAPTER FOUR

Forty-five minutes later I was thousands of feet up in the air headed to the west coast. Across from me sat Lance Straightpoint, just out of TPE Rehab. Lance was talking quickly and with purpose,

“We got a situation at the Aztec Publishing Concern. Sixteen Tappdancers are trapped in a Quonset Hut and facing earthly extinction.”

“By what and by whom?”

“By psychic waves of grain emanating from someone calling himself the Ambivalent Mule. He’s been holding a grudge for some time against the Tappdancers and has finally decided not to nurse the grudge any longer.”

“What’s a psychic wave of grain?”

“We don’t know. We just know it hurts.”

“Physically or emotionally?”

“Psychically. That’s why the words ‘waves of grain’ are prefaced with the word psychic.”

“I see.” But I didn’t.

Then I heard a commode flush and a man walked out of the jet plane’s tiny bathroom.

“Who’s he?”

“W. Scott Fitztaylor. He’s here to make pithy and erudite remarks when the action lags.”

“I guess he’ll be talking a lot.”

“Probably not since the writer of this story is neither pithy nor erudite himself.”

Fitztaylor walked over to me and offered me his hand. We shook. I said, “I’m Nick. Nice to meet you.”

“Same here. Call me Fitz.” Fitz handed me a small card. It read:

Have Literary Ambiguities?

Will Travel to Unravel

“Fitz, are you a TPE?”

“Dear God no! I’m an independent linguistic stylistic contractor in search of a tautology and not just a mere one. I’m also fascinated by unlikely synecdoches as well as grammatical mysteries of the night.”

“Do you have any insight into the situation at the Aztec Compound?”

“The Ambivalent Mule, or AM as he likes to call himself, and does so, I believe, only because when asked to identify himself, can then reply ‘I AM’ is indisputably a man of contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction; hence the name. Does he call himself what he does because he’s ambivalently stubborn or stubbornly ambivalent? My analysis, an analysis which I analyzed myself, tells me he doesn’t know and neither do we.”

This guy is going to be a big help, I thought.

I then asked Lance,

“How about food and water for the Tappdancers? How long can they hold out?”

“Not long. They’re pretty big eaters.”

For some reason that remark struck a chord in me.

“How about the Ambivalent Mule? Is he a big guy?” Why had I asked that question? It seemed irrelevant.

“Skinny as a rail.”

My brain was definitely on to something but no solid lines were forming and no dots were connecting. While I was thinking furiously, Fitz spoke,

“From my extensive readings into the personal noosphere of A. Mule, I have concluded that he is an extremely patriotic individual. Perhaps this attack that he has perpetuated is fueled by what he perceives to be some sort of Anti-Americanism on the part of the Tappdancers.”

“But the Aztec Publishing Concern’s sole mission is to translate the Bible into the Aztec language. How is that Anti-American?”

“Wait a minute”, Lance interjected, “ I just remembered a comment A. Mule made in his interview on 60 Minutes. He said ‘If the American Standard Version of the Bible was good enough for Jesus, then, by gum, it’s good enough for every American’.”

‘By gum’? Who and what were we dealing here with here?

CHAPTER FIVE

Lance glanced at his watch and said, “We’ll have to continue this conversation later. Right now we need to watch a broadcast that was originally aired on THIN (Third Heaven Inter-universal Network) and later transferred to a DVD.”

“Did THIN send us a copy?”

“No, I found a link to a You Tube version on Drudge.”

Just then Earl walked in and I asked him if the plane was on auto pilot.

“No, my brother Randy has taken over the controls. I told him it was as good as time as any to start practicing.”

Lance clicked on a compact DVD player with accompanying screen and the face of Gabriel Beyondthesunandback appeared. Gabe was an Old Associate (one of the oldest) of the Boss. After a short musical intro, Gage began talking,

“This announcement is sponsored by Third Heaven Cafeteria where the food doesn’t only taste heavenly, it is heavenly, and where waiting in line is a real pleasure.

“Friends, Fellow Associates, Pond of Fire employees, TPEs, and Third Heaven hangers on, I have great news. Boss Jr. is back from covering 63 trillion square light years in a valiant search for The Ghost. He didn’t find what he was looking for but at the moment that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is that THI has one of its CEOs sitting in the big chair again. Let’s all together now give a big sigh of relief.”

And after a brief but profound sigh, Gabe said,

“As soon as Boss Jr. got back he released the following memo that will now slowly scroll down the screen for those who like to read as well as listen.”

MEMO from Boss Jr.

I’m back but the Boss isn’t. The Boss is still somewhere in infinite space keeping tabs on the Universe. Since The Ghost retired it means one of us has to be the go to guy in terms of being Everywhere; if not all at once, then pretty darn close. The Boss volunteered to do the traveling telling me, “It’s best if you go back to the Third Heaven slash Earth Administrative Zone to run things there. You know what it’s like to be human. Wasn’t a great experience but at least you got out of it alive, even though you did die first. Took some work but you made it. I just don’t think I’d be very patient with the humans, and besides, since the Universe is infinite, I have plenty to keep me busy.”

Part of being a good junior partner is being a good team player. I’ll miss the Boss but before we parted he hinted that we might meet again. “I’ve been working on something I call the Consummation. When I’ve got more details I’ll send you a spiritgram.”

The Alpha Centauri Police Action is pretty much over. Some mopping up stills needs to be done but I can report that over half of The Man’s (TM) Minions (or Essociates as he now calls them; stands for Evil Associates; TM is nothing if not a copy cat) have been rounded up and locked away in a place ‘where the sun don’t shine.’ The other half are on the run, scattered throughout the galaxy, and I feel confident when I say it’ll be quite a while before they’re bedeviling us again.

On my way back here, while I passing through the Sirius Sector, I ran into TM as he was fleeing. He was bitter naturally but surprisingly optimistic. His words were,

“I’m not giving up. You made a mistake when you gave humans free will. That means there’s a chance all of humanity will eventually come around to my way of thinking and when they do, they’ll realize that it’s me not you who’s worthy of their worship. Admit it. You goofed.”

Of course I would admit no such thing. The guy just doesn’t get it and probably never will. But I’ll hold out hope for him just as I do for all of creation.

Now ever since I’ve been gone, rumors have been flying. I don’t plan to respond to all of them but I will set the record straight on a few of the more egregious ones:

1. The Rapture will more than likely continue as an unplanned event.

2. Pond of Fire funding will continue for the time being. We’re keeping an eye on the US national debt. So far it’s not ‘high’ enough to affect Third Heaven’s Earth-based operations, but if it keeps growing, it’s a whole new ballgame.

3. Only select individuals with special skills (such as Sam Walton and Steve Jobs) will continue to go straight to heaven (Sam didn’t need one but Steve got a waiver. He’s attending spirit led classes when he’s not upgrading THI computer operations). Everyone else will go to soul sleep status when they die and stay there until either the Rapture or the Great White Throne.

4. Prayers will continue to be answered in a timely basis. Beware of Ledbetters selling prayer cloths.

5. And even though it’s shown quite a few cracks in the last couple of months, the TPE Corps will not be disbanded. (A cheer went up in the plane cabin.)

Finally, it’s come to my attention that there’s been a lot of religion amalgamation going on, such as Puddhism (Presbyterian offshoot of Buddhism); Nudaism (New Age offshoot of Judaism); Witness Protection (Jehovah Witness offshoot of Law and Order); etc. Now I’m not going to the trouble of outlawing religion amalgamations or just plain religions for that matter but I do want to take this opportunity to refresh your memories on syllogistic guidelines for an officially approved religion:

A. God – Higher Power – Supreme Being – Great Spirit in the Sky, etc.

B. Principles on how to live morally come down from A

C. Reward/Punishment based on how one follows B

Keep these guidelines in mind as you evaluate and investigate various religious entities.

Well, that it’s for now. One last word of advice. Be careful with this fate business. What seems or feels like fate is oftentimes just the working out of a narrow range of possibilities. It feels like fate because we knew it was supposed to happen; but it’s really the narrow range of possibilities at work; very familiar possibilities; hence the feeling that it had to happen.

CHAPTER SIX

No one spoke for a few minutes. Then Earl went back to the cockpit and Fitz went to sleep. Lance and I started strategizing.

“Lance, I think the Ambivalent Mule may either be a Scientifico or an ally of the Scientificos.”

“So you think the attack is really motivated by hatred against Aztec avoirdupois?”

“It certainly looks that way. Do you have any leads on who might be helping the Mule?”

“The TPE satellite has identified about ten Shagah Studs and fifteen Polygamia Patriarchs.”

“But why would they help the Mule attack the Concern? I thought they were all friends.”

“About a month ago Allsurethinger of the Concern denounced the practices of having too much sex and too many wives.”

“So the Mule used Allsurethinger’s comments to secure the help of the Studs and the Patriarchs?”

“That’s right, but the Mule is nothing if not clever. Well, he’s also ambivalent and stubborn but we already know that. So do you have any ideas on how to defeat the A. Mule Team?”

“I don’t but luckily Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’ did. He said, “Build your opponent a golden bridge (arch) to retreat across.”

“You mean a Big Mac Attack?”

“Absolutely.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

McDonalds had recently outsourced the manufacturing of Big Macs to India, so we had to call in our order of 250 Big Macs to McDonalds Far East Operations in Dimeboxia, India. They said they could have them where we needed them in no more than 16 hours, which really wasn’t that bad a thing because the hungrier everyone was the better.

Lance said he had never seen such a well prepared enemy. “Great team effort. The Mule is the star of course but he doesn’t mind sharing the limelight every once in a while. If I didn’t know better I’d say they were coached by Phil Jackson.”

“Maybe they were.”

I quickly pulled out my celestial and called THI Phone Central where they gave me Phil Jackson’s terrestrial cell phone number. Phil picked up on the first beep.

“Hi, Phil, this is Nick Neercassel. Have you done any coaching lately?”

Phil replied, “So you found out? Yea, I coached a bunch of skinny guys on how to raid and conquer a bible translation company’s compound. Don’t be mad. I felt like I had to prove to the world I could really coach. I’m sick and tired of people saying my teams only won championships because they had great players like Michael, Scottie, Kobe and Shaq and with players like that some bum off the street could dress up like a coach and no one would notice the difference.”

“What’s done is done, Phil, but can you give us any tips on how to defeat the A. Mule Team?”

“You need a star player. Is Boss Jr. available?”

We didn’t plan on finding out. This was a job we were determined to do ourselves.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fitz had woken up and was drinking a glass of champagne. After a couple of sips he said,

“How in heaven’s name can a lowly burger, though a tasty one at that, possibly be the means of defeating the Ambivalent Mule and his nefarious allies?”

Lance was first to answer, “Because we suspect the Mule is a Hubodist (Hubble Scientifico offshoot of Methodism) and he believes you only need to live on 1500 calories a day. His troops are probably famished.”

Fitz thoughtfully stroked his chin, took another sip of the bubbly and replied. “So the Big Macs are, shall we say, a ‘conversion diversion’?”

“Yes, exactly. We will lure the hungry Studs and the starving Patriarchs away from the compound with the aroma of the Big Macs leaving the Mule all alone. Then we’ll surround him and figuratively' not literally of course, smoke him out.” That was me speaking.

“Rather brilliant plan, if I do say so myself.” Fitz finished the champagne and poured another one.

The plan went off without a hitch but with more than a few burps (thanks to the Big Macs). After rounding them all up, we bought bus tickets for the Studs and Patriarchs and sent them back to their respective hometowns, villages, and out of the way holes in the wall. The Ambivalent Mule gracefully accepted defeat and returned to the East Coast to a place he called the Mule’s Milieu (on reflection, isn’t there a little bit of an ambivalent mule in all of us?). The Tappdancers seemed grateful for the rescue but were a little upset when they found out all 250 Big Macs had been eaten by the A. Mule Team (well, not quite all of them; Lance, Earl, Randy, Fitz and I enjoyed quite a few ourselves.).

EPILOG

It was time to get back to Goodsite. Earl and Randy said they would be more than happy to fly me back. Lance stayed in California on a new assignment called THE CASE OF THE NICK NEERCASSEL DOPPLEGANGER. Apparently, someone looking like me had been spotted in the studio back lots of Hollywood asking questions. Fitz also stayed saying there were some tropes missing in Burbank and he planned to go looking for them. I told them farewell reluctantly. We had made a good team.

That night as I flew over the heartland of America, and as I flew beneath the heart of the universe, I reflected on the fact that were many times when I was on a case and I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing it, or where I was or where I was going, but through it all I did know one thing and that one thing I knew very well. I knew who I was:

Nick Neercassel: Theological Private Eye.

THE END