The Atomic Hula by Mike Marino (novels in english txt) 📕

be sleeping, thankfully, resting up for another night of child fear, and the seagulls would take over dominion of the skies. No wonder he dreamt of pirates and high sea Jack London adventures. The lake would be bathed in the early dawn golden hues of the solar gift, and the small waves would sparkle with the dancing reflections of many tiny shards of sunlight. Diamonds and jewels, floating in concert with driftwood above, and minnows below.
Some mornings he'd put on his pirate garb and grab the rowboat and row out to one of the many islands in the lake. One large one, he called Treasure Island, would draw him into it's own peculiar Robert Louis Stevenson fantasy where he would land with his crew and search high and low for the treasure he was sure lie buried in the past and the dirt of history. Men o' war with one legged, eye patched, foul, rum soaked Captains with real swords, and not wooden ones, plied these waters he kept telling himself. Marooning men and burying treasure and selling white, big soft breasted maidens into Arabic slavery.
On occasion he would come across one of these fair maids, hear her cries, pleas, and dash, a handsome Hollywood swashbuckler, to her rescue, ala Errol Flynn. Rescued, they would sail to her castle, evil in pursuit, and once safe would be feted by the King, her father. After a night of feast and festivity he would once again board his vessel and sail away, into the bosom of adventure and the arms of more maidens and lands of strange Argonaut monsters.
When not saving the Crown he would spend hours walking in the woods on old game trails and rotting, half buried logging roads cut through the forest in the early part of the century. Coniferous caverns and deciduous dens of cool woodland comfort and strange animal sounds. Animal prints and scat leading the way into the depths, and all he could think about was the disappearance of tree after tree, the exit of the elms back home in his neighborhood, now light-years away.
His spirit and his bicycle always took him to the narrow spit of beach peninsula up the road where he had made friends with the elderly couple who lived at the Old Lighthouse. Decommissioned for years, and now a museum, it was a nautical beacon of solace for Mickey. The old couple, he a former Great Lakes sailor, and she a teacher, treated him like their own flesh and blood and let him have the run of the place.
He'd ring the giant bell that reverberated across the bay, unleash the cry of the banshee playing with the antiquated foghorn and most of all, got to run up to the beacon tower where he could survey the present, and peer into the past, but he never felt quite alone up there. Along with the past, comes its ghosts, and rumor had it, the Old Light was haunted and alive with spectral death!
Summer of 1959.
Pirates, treasure and ghosts. Corn on the cob and fresh frying fish. Days of innocence that were getting short, shorter. Soon, the summer would end and in the years to come, so would the innocence. The decade of Korea was decaying into the quicksand years of Vietnam and in ten years, man would land on the moon. In another five years, the cottage would be sold, the red, painted over a hunter green by strangers with a mortgage.
The woods cleared for further development, the beach eroded and the lighthouse caretaker would die in his sleep and take his place with the other ghosts of the beacon on the beach. As he returned back to Detroit, the real tragedy awaited him. While he was playing the part of a plying pirate, the large elm in his grandparent’s front yard succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease, and lie crippled on the lawn. Dead.
Chapter Six
The neighborhoods decimated population of Dutch Elms were the botanical equivalent of the unspeakable carnage found in Hitler’s crematoria. Trees, whole families, marked and tagged for the "final solution". Just days before Mickey returned to the city from the north country, city crews began felling the neighborhood trees, carrying on the traditions of old Au Sable River lumberjacks rolling the trunks down skid rows, riding the logs on liquid highways of mud and debris to Saginaw Bay.
His grandparents had watched the trees grow strong, tall and mature since the late '20s when they moved to Three Mile Drive. Small baby step saplings, natural odds against them, fought the wet and dry seasons, adding age rings until full maturation, then degenerating, humpbacked, unable to feed themselves, and progressing slowly to old age and advanced Alzheimer.
The sectioned trunk lay on the ground, looking like nothing more than a bed ridden bed wetting dying tree in a nursing home. One by one, Mickey’s friends came over to his house to start the days play. They sat next to him on the porch, staring at the dead Dutch. Then you could hear the noise as the gears of the machine began their bump and grind.
In the industrial might of the Motor City, imaginations were also fueled by the same magneto force that drove the assembly lines 24 hours a day. Mickey’s internal switch kicked into gear and the tree, as a tree, disappeared. The inner eye transformed it from simple deadwood and it was projected on the movie screen of perceived reality as a drop dead, gorgeous, shiny, metallic rocket ship. A fine ship, indeed, for space age travel for pint sized Astronauts. Silently plowing through the void space of dark, defying gravity like hotrod teenagers defying authority. A simply phallic thrusting rocket with super boosters in search of a black hole.
Mickey quickly high jacked command, ran to the injured tree turned space craft, broke off with a sharp snap a short limb, and in an instant the gnarled protrusion of bark was a first class, third generation top secret Los Alamos Pentagon pleaser of a flesh eating heat seeking laser guided weapon. His grease ball gang of friends, solar system star explorers in their own right, quickly grabbed their own weapons, checked the oxygen in their tanks, yelled a few politically incorrect "Geronimo's" and blasted off like wild meteoric Astro-Apaches themselves into the realm of Buck Rogers and the Alien-nations.
Plunder under the cover of discovery. Killers from Earth, meeting the Killers from Space. Little Buckaroos, chips on shoulder, with so little time, and too many planets to count, conquer and lay waste to, before the tree would be hauled away. Removed from the launch pad, scuttled and dumped in the landfill or other burial grounds where the secret tree spirits dwelt in peace.
Soon, every kid on the block was on Mickey’s front lawn. They heard the commotion and got caught up in the Saturnalia of inter-planetary pleasure seeking. Some were assumed human, some alien. Earthlings. Warrior women from male enslaved Venus. Dark, mysterious Plutonians from the far nomadic corners of the cosmos. Obese beasts from gravity sucking Jupiter, and of course, those damned mother fucking Martians.
Fierce fighting men and women, and those caught somewhere in between that cease fire no-mans (or no-woman’s) land of gender identity imbalance fought alongside each other. War whooping, zapping, floating free for all in space battles. Vandals and Huns, Goths and Visa Goths, even invisible Invisi-goth barbarians joined in the fray on a Galactic scale. E=MC2 atomizing dust to dust weaponry at your finger on the trigger disposal, and the same cries of "You got me" when your opponent fell in a flesh lump to the ground. The same cry you hear when playing soldier, and GI-you shot your play acting storm trooping Nazi buddy, or cowboy-you felled your tomahawking injun buddy in high plains retribution for scalping your mother.
Mars, The Red Planet would be menstruating by the end of the day. It was now colonized, occupied like Japan and Germany, and the little green men were subjugated to the will of the Interplanetary Human Space Council of Good versus Evil. Evil, of course, being anything which we do not understand. The Roswell Act would then be put into place, a pit-bull edict that regulated daily life on the surface of the seething angry red planet. Laws, that in time would turn it into one angry, pissed off planet.
Martial and Marital Laws governing Martians would fall like shooting stars onto the barren landscape of daily life. Segregation would integrate itself into the social fabric. Drinking fountains and lunch counters would be separated now by species. Over here, anal probers, Martians Only. Over there, Earthlings Only. Big white and blue rednecks would start launching a lynching campaign of pain on three foot tall, two toed little green men in the nighttime glow of burning crosses. Cometized chestnuts roasting on an open funeral pyre.
A messiah from Mars...Martian Luther King, Jr. would rise from the planetary plantation pulpits to lead the masses in a series of Freedom Marches on a scale seldom seen in Selma. Then, as quietly as it began, the guilt ridden liberals would in time, take a stand. Racial and differences in species aside, they would fall in love with a little green woman with three arms and one big giant yellow eye.
After sweating up the space blanket, they would soon produce an afterburner afterbirth of a pleasant placenta that would produce little green umbilical children and buy a little suburban green dog and tanks of multi-colored fish. Physical differences would melt away like american cheese, with interspecies copulation and in time, light years maybe from now, the fornicated population wouldn't be white, black, yellow, red or green...but a soft, quiet, gentle turquoise.
Inevitably, it was time to check your weapons in the armory, toss the sticks aside. Dinner was on the table and the sun was still in the sky, but beginning its westward trek below the horizon, to tease and play hide and seek until eastern dawn. After dinner, Mickey went out on the porch to sit alone and ponder his existence. Life wouldn't always be a time of innocent play and wild-eyed wonder. Adulthood would rear its ugly head from the swamp at some point, and it would be time to "act your age".
He knew that by tomorrow the tree/rocket would be gone. Space trash for the space trashed. In a couple of weeks, school would start all over again, and summer would shrink away, but would return again next year, and the year after that. Life has rings too, like trees, and he knew that with the coming of each year, an inch or so of innocence and acceptance of all things around him would be forced deeper into the center of the trees trunk. All rings telling the scrapbook story of its life. Cynicism would cloud and obscure optimism like a fat person with a fatter hat on in front of you at a sideshow freak show. Very little, anymore would be just accepted, but everything would be challenged. Wonder bowing to science and explanation, and if not defined, then it must be destroyed at all costs.
1959 had been a great year for the 11 year old, but like the dead elm, he knew change was in the air. Within two years, his mother would get re-married and Mickey would have to leave his grandparents Catholicism heavy house for a new life across town in the sterility of the protestant suburbs. New school, new friends, new life. His grandparents would both be dead by 1971 and the house on Three Mile Drive would become a crack house and shooting gallery by the '80s.
1963 was just a few years away, and that would begin the real