I was six years old when I first made the trip to Uncle Frank’s marmoset ranch in Byhalia, Mississippi. Upon my return to Seattle I saw little of him until I ventured back there eleven years later. On business. My kinsman maintained a conspicuous distance from the rest of the family, seldom leaving his copious wooded acreage to visit my mother—his only sibling—even during holidays. Nevertheless, since I was very young I was unable to account for an unspoken…no, unspeakable affinity for him. A kinship beyond blood and above the traditional family enterprise of international fur trade. Yes, I am and have always been a furrier. As was my mother before she passed away, and her parents before her who inherited a vast African mercantile operation before losing much of it to the Congolese in 1966. Nasty business was that, but not entirely relevant to my missive here. In sum, only a few minor holdings were salvaged from those days, the least of which, a South African corporation specializing in the captive breeding and commercial processing of marmosets, was handed down to Uncle Frank. The conditions surrounding his free and clear acquisition of the company are murky and were simply uncontested by his sister, my mother. The monkeys were his alone. Or so it seemed until the day he pulled his Coupe De Ville under the home made corrugated fiberglass awning adjacent to his ancient mobile home.
Alighting from the car, almost immediately I lost myself in the muggy fragrance of honeysuckle, the firm grip of crabgrass under my feet, the song of a billion crickets—in Mississippi’s unholy embrace. I stood there ankle deep in Uncle Frank’s front…lawn…and just let the ancient spirit have her way with me. I vividly recalled, as warm and lurid as a wet dream, endless summer nights as a small boy romping through the cottonmouth-infested forests, dodging turtles and kid-eating catfish in ponds so heavy with red silt that my underpants could never again be restored to anything resembling white, blasting bullfrogs with a .410 shotgun under a headlamp. And feeding the marmosets. I awoke from my reverie. My blood now chilled, despite the evening heat, like the iced sweet tea being offered to me by Uncle Frank. The marmosets! I remembered the purpose of my visit and, reluctantly, gathered my senses. There was work to do.
If this ends up with a barn burning down… :eek:
Uncle Frank, born Francois deLoupe Aurelian O’Rourke, was almost certainly not entirely a pedigreed relation to my mother. For one thing he was mulatto and mother was full-blooded Japanese. Well, allegedly full-blooded. She had red hair and green eyes much like Ewan Mackenze, personal gardener to The Emperor Hirohito, and it was much reputed that her family had close ties to The House of Showa. I will defer to the reader’s imagination and discretion with regard to the possibilities contained within those circumstances. Mom never endured the suggestion of any impropriety, however, and fiercely protected my grandmother’s honor with the determination of a rabid dog. My grandfather, Fritzjoseph Grafenburgsan, escaped his humble origins as the son of a swimming pool cleaner in Arima Onsen by marrying the daughter of a wealthy international merchant—my grandmother—and was disinclined to question the atypical phenotypes of his offspring. He loved my grandmother dearly and, like my mother, protected her with a ferocity that can only be described as “pathologically viral” in origin. Despite professional diagnoses to the contrary and several convictions.
Whatever his paternity, Uncle Frank was unlike any other man I’ve ever met. Being well-traveled and having survived many a close encounter with traders of every class, I must demure that I know whereof I speak as regards the quality of men of divers station. Not that I’d particularly want him with me while negotiating a black market deal for 500 silver-bellied hyrax with a rural Pakistani fur merchant at knifepoint, nor indeed that I think he’d have been much use in my (successful) overtures to Queen Margrethe II in the vending of 30 head of the now-endangered Brazilian ermine tapir. But he possessed, nevertheless, a likeable quality which welcomed adventure and rejuvenated the spirit of commerce in a way that Sir Edmund, the noteworthy Cornish Banker to the Crown, simply couldn’t muster. Maybe it was his huge Watusi(-like) frame that inspired natural confidence, or the fiery amber eyes which pierced from beneath his golden brow, or maybe it was the Pabst that flowed from his 38’ Fleetwood Mobile like the Nile. But Frank was undisputedly a god-among-men, a prophet in the fur trade, and a hick marmoset-man to his very core. He was a hard man possessed of a sharp softness, a large man endowed with the ultimate humility, a fearless man who knew caution. All of these traits made him the godsend to marmoset rustling that he had become. Lesser men have tried and failed where Uncle Frank excelled.
Vicodin…it isn’t just for breakfast anymore. (wheeeeee!)
Oh, wait, is this the joke about the aristocrats?
You’ve gone off the reservation again, haven’t you? :smack:
The interior decor of Frank’s trailer was not much different from that of his neighbors. In principle, at least. His choice of furniture was as complex as it was eclectic. On a cursory glance, all appeared more or less normal. The basic shapes of well-known species of chair & table were present, common electric and electronic gizmos reported for duty, but at the same time the exact combination of textures, design and arrangement felt alien. And not just to myself, I was soon given to understand. Any of the locals who came for a friendly call would invariably give me a nod & wink the moment Frank was away for a second or two. Reclined as I was in a rattan rocker lined with tiger opossum pelts with sable inlays I would politely smile back, raise a Pabst and toast Uncle’s good health while massaging the enormous elephant tusk lamp stand. The first evening of my visit turned out to be a special rustic treat for my soul. Weary from brushes with royalty and villains, merchants and savages it was with no small amount of amusement that I assisted my uncle in piling uncounted wooden shipping pallets onto the front “lawn” and setting light to them at dusk.
Like the intermittent and shuffling display of the firefly his neighbors began to show up, disappear for a time, return with a friend or two who would in turn disappear and return with other people. And so it went until by midnight there were easily two dozen farmers, laborers, perpetual job-seekers, destitute lottery tycoons, unemployed geniuses and ne’er do wells all drunk and rollicking around the fire. Sometime before dawn as the pile of wooden pallets turned into a pile of aluminum cans the party dispersed in much the same fashion as it had gathered. Apart from the aluminum, ashes and several brassieres no trace of the throng remained to welcome the dawn except for Uncle and me. “Let’s go see the monkeys.” He said. I winced. For although I knew it could not be put off indefinitely, I had no desire to get down to business just yet. Uncle Frank pointed to a number of boxes of marmoset-chow and asked me to load them into the car. A few minutes later he emerged from the trailer with a pair of sawed off shotguns and several boxes of shells. “Just in case.” Was all he said in answer to my questioning glance. Cigarette in mouth, head cocked to the side, he thundered down the dirt road toward the pens. It was all I could do to maintain my gorge on the 10 minute drive, but the terror of that ride was soon a memory as we approached the shrieking, rattling stench of the marmoset pens.
If poo flinging ensues… I’m leaving.
Inigo Montoya I’m never sure if you have taken drugs you’re not supposed to or forgotten to take drugs you’re supposed to, but these threads of yours do provide me with much entertainment. So, please keep on doing what you shouldn’t be doing or keep forgetting to do what you should be doing, as long as the threads keep a’comin’.
The spillway: A forbidden piece of rurality that separated Uncle’s home from the haven the Pigeon Roost general store. In the past it was given to flash flooding as the runoff of several counties converged on it through the marvel of unrestrained civil engineering. The might of the water was enough to carve a smallish canyon out of the living clay beds that extended, labyrinthine, for miles. Big city types might call it an unpaved runoff culvert or an ecological disaster or both. I had always remembered it as the site of many grand adventures. But whatever it was when I was a child, it was now home to the largest self-cleaning marmoset breeding facility in North America. A fourteen hundred-acre labyrinth of gullies with 30-foot high walls had been capped with chain-link. Below the chain swarmed thousands upon thousands of marmosets of various breeds. Sables. Dapples. Calico. Pygmy. Kodiak. All cordoned off into separate cells, and strategically positioned to make the most of the native flora and fauna. At nearly four pounds apiece the Kodiaks were the largest and occupied the outer most boundaries. Any snakes, coyotes, raccoons or other predators that tarried over the links were immediately pulled into the Kodiak pen, brutally rent and devoured amidst primal howls and vicious growling. These were Uncle’s pride and joy, but also by far the most lethal of all the marmoset breeds. They sported heavy, rich coats of purest gold. Soft as rabbits but as dense as mink. Into this first perimeter we emptied four boxes of “marmoset chow, type S.” Uncle manufactured it himself in the shed. He had never been forthcoming about the actual ingredients as this was a trade secret he hoped he could share with me one day. All he had told me thenceforth was that it was “meat.” As I upended the last box into the pen below me I almost completely failed to notice a tiny something catch the sunlight and glimmer at me. I had only a fraction of a second to glance down at it before Uncle nonchalantly toed it into the pen with a morsel of bone. But I saw what it was. I had purchased a pair almost exactly like them for one of my Indian girlfriends when I was in Delhi. The emeralds complimented her eyes like the Pacific awakens Big Sur at sunset.
The rest of the beasts were fed in like manner, except they remained strictly vegetarian.
sees an Inigo Montoya thread
grabs first post and hangs on for dear life
WHEEEEEEEEEEE!
Uncle emptied a shot of bourbon into a large glass of milk then poured two, more civilized, drinks and handed me one. He got some bacon going.
“So, what news from across the world?”
“George wants 50 Kodiaks.”
“That all? I’d have expected a larger shipment from him. What’s the catch?”
“Catch?”
“Don’t play the fool, boy. You know damn well there’s a catch. I could smell it in you since the airport.”
I sighed. Although he looked and acted like a bumpkin it was dangerous to assume he’d lost any of the cunning and sensibility he’d learned in Africa. Not that I could do anything about it in any case. I’d have to tell him sooner or later.
“Francois, he doesn’t want just any old Kodiaks…”
Uncle Frank regarded me through the bottom of his glass for a second. Only a second. But it was long enough.
“How did he find out about the vipers?” he asked casually as he dumped the soured milk into the biscuit batter.
“Well. I felt I had to tell him. He was going to go through Hubert…”
“HUBERT! For what? Poison toads? Exploding spore birds? ‘gators?”
“Worse. Uncle, I’m sorry about the vipers, I know they’re not ready yet, but Hubert’s got a brace of swamp bears—little ones. Cute as all getout but vicious like nothing I’ve ever known! I’ve seen them in action. Jeesus what they did to the goat at feeding time…”
Frank softened some. “It’s alright.” He breathed. He got the eggs going in the bacon grease. “In point of fact, the vipers are ready. I have 60 so we can fill the order and still keep some for breeding, but we can’t go selling them off yet. I had to destroy the father of the line and I just can’t go through breeding another one again.”
“What happened to it?”
“Got a little carried away in the breeding pen. Started screwing everything. Male, female—he didn’t care. Had lots of energy but he was starting to damage the others. Took 3 slugs from the .45 to cool him off.”
“Good God!”
“Lucky for us, the vipers aren’t quite as randy, but their toxin is a lot stronger than we planned. They like to nip during mating and sometimes the females end up dead. And then of course, eaten. I’ve had to resort to neutering all but a few of the males and then removed the fangs from the fertile ones. The neuts are not as aggressive so I’ve been using them for hunting but they’re not much good for anything else.”
“And the females?”
“Right bitches. They’ll be the ones we give to George. Any luck and they’ll bite him after they’ve finished off that Bin Laden asshole.”
Frank made the fluffiest biscuits. I think it was the rice flour recipe he’d squeezed out of my grandmother.
Please post biscuit recipe!