The Ballad of Billy and Dan 

My father was named Charles Bardeaux and this was not the name he was born with but it is the name he passed down to me and I treasure it just the same.  He was a remarkable man.  Shrewd and talented fiercely independent and as full of good humor and zest for life as any man you ever met in your life. Charles mastered nearly everything he put his hand to. He was a scholar a tradesman a merchant an entrepreneur and a keen student of human nature and the fact that a man endowed with such gifts as his ended up on the wrong side of the law only goes to show what a fickle and faithless instrument the law is.  

One spring Charles found himself obliged to move house after a series of events that began with a rich man’s bruised feelings and ended with strong men tying Charles to a barber’s stool and setting it afire from which he only narrowly escaped.  His search took him to a snoozy little prairie town called Cheerio Gulch which sat on the edge of a huge prairie encircled by a row of bluffs. The town was nestled in a little crook where the bluffs parted to let a trickling stream through.  

Now what was unusual about Cheerio Gulch was there were a couple of gods fighting in the sky above it.  No one Charles asked could guess how long they’d been fighting except to note that they were already at it when Lewis and Clark first came by. They were Indian gods and no one living knew their names. The founders of Cheerio Gulch had named them Billy and Dan as a private joke on two imbecile stableboys who were always tussling over something. 

Few had ever laid eyes on Billy and Dan for the prairie was huge and hazy and only the bravest men could make the trek up the sheer bluffs on the prairie’s edge up to where the air was clear enough to make them out. But the signs of their combat were manifest and undeniable. The two gods’ huge bodies rolled slowly around one another and blocked out the sun sometimes for days at a time. The ground in Cheerio Gulch was forever atremble from the sounds of their footfalls and of the stream of hideous blows they poured over one another. Their movements kicked up huge masses of air and dirt and cloud and the town had tornadoes and dust storms as often as other towns had rain.  Worse still was the sweat shedding off their bodies and the blood streaming in rivulets from huge ragged gashes. The sweat fell to earth as rain and withered plants and turned groundwater bitter wherever it fell while the blood had some kind of magic in it that would make food crops grow unusually large and delicious but leave the soil totally exhausted and about one person in eighty who ate them would turn into a coyote.     

As hard as you might find it to live in such a place as Cheerio Gulch none of the people living there would have it any other way. They swelled with true pioneer gumption when they spoke about it. They were quite proud of themselves for living in the shadow of such beings as most men thought long gone from the earth. Being a daring man himself Charles admired the townsfolk for this though he did not share the popular belief that someday soon the fight would end and the winner would climb down to claim his spoils and anoint his spectators with eternal glory. 

Charles heard all these tales over at Chauncey’s Saloon while he washed the trail dust out of his mouth with a heroic amount of beer. As the evening wore on he acquainted himself with a pretty young creature named Hanna Borgia.  Hannah was the twenty-year-old recently orphaned daughter of a local Italian homesteader who worked at the Cheerio Gulch telegraph office. She would tell Charles over brandy that she loved her work so much that rather than marry and become a farm wife as her uncles had insisted she instead sold her parents’ cheerio farm to a Mexican for one dollar to spite them.  It appealed to her fancy she said to hear so much news from so many distant and fantastic places.   Charles meanwhile recognized in Hanna an opportunity to get the jump on any bounties posted or any armed posses dispatched which might interrupt his stay in this quiet town.  

Charles was very attractive to women even with fresh burns mottling half his face and he easily seduced the fair Miss Borgia. You may criticize my father for his dishonest motives but I believe it was a prudent move and I would do it too if I were in his place. Since selling her property Hannah had rented a room above the local sockery and for the next several months Charles shared it. By night he showed her carnal bliss beyond her wildest fantasies.  By day he studied her at the telegraph until he was able operate it and secretly wired several banks to cash out some accounts he’d established for just such an occasion.  

Nature took its course and Hanna Borgia swelled with child.  Charles had dealt with such inconveniences before and the minute he judged it safe to leave town he gathered all his belongings and rode his horse quietly out of town in the dead of night.  But as poor luck would have it he sank his horse’s hooves into several gopher holes one after the other injuring it badly enough that he had to put the beast down then and there. He performed this task with the butt of his rifle to avoid the possibility of a gunshot waking somebody up. 

He hadn’t been watching where he was going he realized because he was too deep in thoughts of Hanna. He leaned against his dead horse and contemplated her in the cool light of the moon. He had known many women but none like her. In beauty and wit and spirit she was every inch his equal and Charles’ heart leapt with a strange desire to give up his rambling ways and start an honest life with her. Scarcely believing what he was doing he ran back to Cheerio Gulch on foot and in the beatific light of the rising sun he knelt and asked a bewildered Hanna Borgia to be his wife. 

Hanna was amenable to marrying Charles but told him she wouldn’t do it unless they stayed in Cheerio Gulch.  Charles was dumbstruck. He could not bear the thought of raising children amidst such danger.  Only a week before one of the town’s frequent tornadoes had leveled the peanut emporium scattering peanut shells and mangled limbs across half the roofs in town.  Hanna listened stonefaced to his objections.  She insisted that Cheerio Gulch was her home and a wanderer like Charles would never understand the deep connection she felt to it.   They quarreled bitterly and more than once Charles got on a horse to leave again but he always came galloping back. Finally he resigned himself to Hanna’s wishes. He vowed however that before his child arrived he would turn Cheerio Gulch into a place fit for children and this meant stopping the brawl in the sky by any means necessary. This seemed to him an easier task than parting with such a prize of a woman as Hanna.  

All the townsfolk thought Charles a nut but he was a most resourceful man and there was hardly a town between here and San Francisco where no one owed him a favor.  He telegraphed one Dr. Harmon Genial who some years back had gotten into a misunderstanding with two Indian boys for which Charles had selflessly taken the blame to avoid a violent incident. Dr. Genial taught at a Mormon university and was an expert in atmospheric phenomena which I suppose you could call these gods but his main value to Charles was that he was an accomplished balloonist. Charles wired a letter and some money to Dr. Genial and several weeks later a train unloaded at Cheerio Station bearing Dr. Genial several balloons of various makes and a team of hired laborers.  

The fat and accommodating Dr. Genial gave Charles some lessons and in quite a short time my peerless father was piloting his own balloon.  The appointed day came and the whole town gathered outside to watch his team of six balloons rise into the sky in pairs. Hanna stayed inside for she was in the final days of her condition and she feared her constitution would not bear the sight of her beloved putting himself in danger.

Up rose the balloons shrinking to tiny balls then seeds then disappearing entirely from the view of the townsfolk. My father rose above a cloud canopy and there in front of him were Billy and Dan fighting as furiously as if they’d just begun. Neither carried any weapon simply punching and blocking and grasping barehanded with fists like small islands.  They were brown as old leather and looked like Indians except they were hairier than any Indian Charles had ever seen with apelike coats of thick black hairs covering their limbs and trunks. They were naked as jaybirds and the team had to move quick and sure to avoid the swinging of the gods’ male members which were huge even when their overall size was taken into account.  

Stretched between each pair of balloons was a long Alpenhorn so heavy and awkward the bell had to rest in one balloon’s basket and the mouthpiece in another.  It was Charles’ idea to use the horns to amplify their voices which otherwise would never reach a giant’s ears.  

The party took up positions a good distance away and Charles began to call out through his Alpenhorn. Billy and Dan took no notice and continued swinging their mountainous fists at one another.  Charles called louder and the other two horns joined in.  For the briefest moment both gods swung around to face Charles and he fancied he saw them both lock eyes in understanding.   Without warning Dan swung his hips around and from a distance that Charles would have judged impossible obliterated the two balloons with the head of his titanic cock.  

The tip of the organ struck the Alpenhorn square on and though it had taken half a dozen men to lift the horn it whirled away like a stick thrown to a dog.  Both of the balloons carrying it were wrecked.  The two baskets remained intact but without support plummeted to earth. Thinking quickly Charles grabbed Dr. Genial by his neck and maneuvered the portly scholar beneath to break his fall. 

Once on the ground Charles rushed over to the place where the Alpenhorn had landed and found a sight that would untether him from his wits.  The huge instrument had through unimaginable misfortune fallen on the very building where Hannah was awaiting his safe return.  The whole sockery was crushed and socks of every size and color lay in a pile slowly turning red in the middle. The heavy bell had fallen directly on Hannah and her entire body from the waist up was smashed into a jelly. 

Everything Charles had ever hoped for was gone in an instant. One of the remaining balloon pairs had landed to assess the damage. Mad with grief Charles threw all the men out of one balloon’s basket with the strength of a gorilla dove inside and rose up into the air again.  The baskets contained an assortment of firearms and explosives which the team had planned to use to get the gods’ attention if the horns failed. A berserk Charles moved the balloon close to the gods picked up one of the rifles and began firing.  It is unlikely that they suffered any more hurt than you may get from a mosquito bite but Charles kept on firing reloading firing reloading.   He cared not one whit for his own life and his only pursuit was to visit a fraction of the hurt he felt onto those gods. 

Finally having fired all his ammunition Charles lit a bundle of TNT and heaved it in Billy’s face with all his might.  The explosion did not harm Billy at all but the great flash and noise distracted him long enough for Dan to make a decisive blow.  There was a hideous snap as bone and teeth came apart and the side of Billy’s face pushed inward like a bruised apple. Blood flew through the air in mile-long arcs and the great god’s body fell annihilating Charles’ balloon tumbling through the clouds and flattening Cheerio Gulch.   

There were still a few people gathered outside and they crowded around Billy trying to catch the words he was mumbling under his breath but no one could identify let alone understand his language.  Blood pooled beneath his ruined face and softened the dirt underneath until the townspeople’s shoes began sinking in it.  His eyes darted. His chest heaved up and down. He gave a violent shudder and died and as he did so his bowels cracked open with an explosion of foul yellow shit that swept away all that was left of Cheerio Gulch.  

I should mention now that I never knew a word of this story until several years ago.  Hanna’s lower parts ended up in the river and rode a flood of excrement downstream.  Somewhere along the way my mother’s lifeless organs somehow began to birth me and I finally came into the world washed up on a riverbank between my mother’s legs like Moses among the bulrushes.  A young Mexican boy fetching water for a nearby Jesuit mission rescued me.  

I was taken in and raised by these godly men with no clue of my heritage and when the boy erupted in melon-sized boils and died from wading in god shit I took his place as soon as I could carry a bucket.  From that day on I was their especial slave.  I cooked I swept I scrubbed I fetched water I lit candles I brought books I rang bells and I stood sentry while they mumbled their interminable litanies. These men of God these paragons of mercy and righteousness thought me a demon because of the manner of my birth and treated me worse than the meanest beast with insults and whippings from dawn till dusk. 

I bore these horrors without breaking.  I grew hard and strong with work and the stronger I grew the harder they had to beat me to keep me in line.  I taught myself to read in the library acquainting myself with both the sacred scriptures and the profane and heretical literature the confiscated by the priests. The more I learned the harder they tried to keep me ignorant. I grew into a quite handsome child owing to my fine stock and once this became evident I suffered the priestly fools’ perversions also.  I submitted to their pawings when I had to and when I could land a blow or bite some area they wouldn’t want to show to a doctor I did so.  I escaped many times and each time it took them longer to find me and each time they hung heavier fetters on me which my muscles grew to accommodate.  Often they would threaten to kill me if I proved too much trouble and in this way I made peace with Death early on.  

One day however the mission was struck by a series of booms and earthquakes and the priests went outside to investigate.  They soon found themselves in the deep dark well of a giant’s shadow. It was  Dan the god from the sky though I did not know him as such at the time.  In a clear voice and with good English Dan demanded that the child within their walls be released.  The priests refused to obey orders from the devil so Dan knelt and tore the roof off the other sections of the mission. I knelt hidden in the vestibule and watched rapt as Dan picked up the priests one by one and ground them between his fingers like ants.  Eventually the men relented fetched me from my hiding spot and pushed me outside at which point Dan stood up and swept the whole building away with his foot like you might do to an anthill.

He leaned his shoulder to touch the ground and a man I had never met before climbed down to meet me. He didn’t look young or old.  His face was darkened with much sun and eroded into sharp edges by work and weather but it did not sag or crack as old men’s faces do and he still had the twinkling eyes and easy grin of a boy.  The patches of old bubbled skin from long-ago burns only added to his good looks.

The man introduced himself as Charles Bardeaux.  He did not mention he was my father but I somehow knew. Charles apologized for his delay in coming to collect me but he had only recently discovered I was alive.  He himself had survived by diving out of the balloon’s basket and clinging to the coarse ropes of hair on Billy’s shoulders.  Once Billy was dead Dan descended to Earth just as the people of Cheerio Gulch had said he would and he sought out my father.  He said he was in my father’s debt.  Thanks to him his enemy was dead and all his lands and dominions surrendered.  Now with so few gods left on the earth he wished to expand his realm and offered my father a place at his right hand. 

“All my life” my father said “I have suffered at the cruel whims of a sick society which persecutes men of talent and vision.  Never in all my days have I lived in peace. Always I must endure the persecutions of men many times my lesser.  I understand you have suffered something the same and I am deeply sorry.  The world has no use for us” he concluded “and I see nothing for it but to tear the whole rotted thing out and start anew.”

My father did not even need to ask me if I wanted to join him.  We understood one another perfectly as only men of our sort can do.  With a broad wave he ushered me into a spot on Dan’s shoulder where I might grab hold and sit and together we rose into the sky and rode across the prairie toward our shared destiny.