Watch Your Ass by R. L. McCollom III So Wild Dave comes down off his hill one afternoon and ferrets out Sutie and me in our corner of the coffee bar, distracting us from our most interesting surf on the Circle of Death with tales of a long-awaited (by him) Sign from God. Now, as we are only agnostics, not running-dog atheists, a Sign from God — or the rumor of one — is not something easily dismissed no matter how keen the surf. We logged off and listened.

We've known Wild Dave for years now, seen him through thick and thin, first with his old man dying and then that shit with his brother taking his inheritance from him "for his own good" after Wild Dave went through thirty grand in two weeks buying stuff he thought he needed to "get on with his life." This included a state-of-the-art integrated audio/video center with DSS-TV, VCR and CD system, a Nikon SLR with a ton of lenses, a Celestron 14-inch cassegrain telescope, a Shopsmith Mark V so's he could start making guitars again, some last-forever outdoor gear and a pair of comfortable shoes — all of which made perfect sense to us as they were all durable and useful items, but his brother was pissed and took him to court and somehow wound up with Wild Dave's half of the family fortune.

Some greedy-ass sonofabitch, huh.

Wild Dave was taken away for a while at the insistence of the court, and we kept his stuff while he was away. When he was "returned to society" he stayed with us for a few weeks but he soon got to driving us nuts so we kicked him out in a genteel sort of way that let us still be friends. He found himself the house up on the hill and a job and acted sane as much as he could, and made some new friends. Then he got possessed by demons and his new friends hid him away and prayed over him or whatever they do and when he was free of all that he sort of ditched his new friends and we started seeing more of him again — once a week, maybe, as opposed to once every two months.

Wild Dave is all the time looking for God. That's the kind of guy he is. He looks for God here and there and all over the place, under rocks, even. Really. Found Him, too, to hear him tell it. Sutie said it was just a hobby, but it always seemed a little more serious than that to me, even though I know how serious a hobby can be to some people — take Sutie for instance. When she's hip-deep in Quake or Riven or M:TG — stay away! So for Wild Dave to come to us and report that he'd seen God somewhere, it wasn't that odd a thing for him to say. I mean, people who can see God in things usually see him/her in lots of things, and at odd times. But an actual Sign from God — this fell into a different category altogether. A Sign was something Sutie and I might've seen, even being agnostics and thereby barred from seeing God in this and that and the other thing.

So Dave was up on his hill this morning, he says, on his back porch doing a doobie and enjoying his day off. He was sipping coffee, he said, when a shadow fell over his back yard, a shadow from out of a cloudless sky. He got off the porch and walked out into the back yard, which is a clearing a hundred feet on a side hacked out of a forest of old oak and pine, and he looked up to see what was causing the shadow but there was nothing there, nothing he could see, anyway. Looking out into the woods, he could see sunlight drifting down through the trees, and when he walked around to his front yard, which was pretty much like his back yard, he could not only see, but walk across the terminator at the shadow's edge and step into the raw sunlight.

This unusual phenomenon Wild Dave said he observed as he stepped back into the shadow, was a very unusual phenomenon, and he wallowed in wonder and opened himself to enlightenment from without. The shadow persisted unabated for several minutes before any changes occurred, and when the changes came they took the form of a shuddering in the air that drove Wild Dave to his knees. The shuddering eased to a rumbling, and the rumbling resolved itself into words. The words were these, Dave said: "Watch Your Ass. Come see me in Boulder." And then the shadow vanished and bright sunlight crashed down on him.

"'Watch your ass ?'" Sutie said. "God told you to watch your 'ass ?'.

Wild Dave allowed as how it wasn't cussing if it was God doing the saying, but agreed that maybe wasn't God Himself who was giving him this advice, but one of his many minions. He said he took it to be generally good all-around advice. He also said he was needful of our vehicle as his wreck was currently without brakes and in the shop for repairs. He also sought the genteel boon of our good comradeship on a brief road trip to Boulder to see what God had in mind. Also, he said, it happened he was at the ebb of his cashflow, and needed a bankroll for the journey and he thought he'd ask us, since we were rolling in it, as he termed our modest corporate economy, and by his standards, I guess we were.

We agreed, naturally.

So the three of us piled into our trusty, dusty Delta-98 land boat, gassed up and headed north and east toward Boulder. Sutie drove the first leg until we were out of the city, then I took over at the wheel while she plotted our course out in the well-thumbed Rand-McNally. If she could arrange it, we never took the same route anywhere twice. Wild Dave suggested a direct route, but Sutie overruled him in favor of a dogleg to visit Barringer Crater, which she said she needed and turned out to be well worth the side-trip and the time, as always, being a very impressive and thought-provoking hole in the ground as well as a screamingly blatant lesson waiting to be learned about the physics of meteor impact.

We lost a whole day on the dogleg because, since we were driving by anyway, Dave insisted we stop at Mars Hill and have a look at the Lowell Observatory, from which Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh back in the 30s. That was also well worth the side-trip and the time, even though we didn't get past the lobby and nobody of interest wanted to talk to us.

We traveled without fear, having left Wild Dave's stash under the 'fridge "on accident," thinking the "Watch your Ass" advice might here apply, even though Dave vehemently disagreed, and sulked and pouted all the way to Mars Hill, where he finally forgot his mad and returned to as close to normal as Wild Dave gets.

Sutie plotted us to go freeway all the way from then on, an unusual route for her but she said speed might be called for, since we were making a couple stops along the way and might not want to keep God or his minion waiting too long, not knowing the consequences of such actions as that. So we took the 15 out of town and linked up with eastbound 40, stopped at Flagstaff, stopped at Winslow, then had a late supper in Albuquerque, took the 25 north and got a couple rooms in Sante Fe and slept like logs. The next day we got up, had a breakfast that couldn't be beat and drove north through Pueblo, then Denver and then on into Boulder. We parked the land yacht and went to get some lunch. Over sandwiches we discussed what we should do next. Nobody, it turned out, had anything resembling a Plan.

We decided to get out into the sun and wander around, so as to let whoever wanted us here to find us easier which, now I think of it, implied that God and his Minion were unable to see through buildings, which I'm pretty sure they could. A corollary of this plan, hatched privately between Sutie and myself, was to observe Wild Dave and see if we could detect any place or person that he seemed drawn to. That first day, we judged, our corollary plan resulted in the inescapable conclusion that God was a perky and pleasant, but empty-headed, cocktail waitress at one of the bars in town. Further data, we thought, was needed, though we didn't cross the waitress off our list. Being agnostics makes us naturally open-ended when it comes to speculation.

We saw most of the town, I think, that afternoon. Sutie remembered that one of her old college chums lived somewhere in or near Boulder and found a phone book to look him up, and while she was doing that Wild Dave and I found a bench, soaked up some sun and watched the Passing Parade as it paraded past us. There are all sorts of folks in Boulder, which makes it a fine town to sit and watch walk by. Some of the folks are very colorful, some merely odd, but all providing rich opportunity for idle conjecture.

Wild Dave seemed a bit down about the mouth, and when I asked him why he said he thought we should've found "them" by now. I reminded him of how patience was a sensible virtue and how he shouldn't close himself up with frustrations, but should open himself to enlightenment from without like he did in his back yard the other day. Dave said his feet hurt and he could really use a toke or two from some understanding stranger's pipe, and that he was anything but open to enlightenment from within or without. We agreed this was a priority and were discussing means to accomplish this short-term goal when Sutie came back from the phone and, when told of the new wrinkle, said it was solved and then some.

Her friend was a guy named Adrian who was married, oddly enough, to a woman named Adrienne, or so they said. They owned four or five of the more progressive enterprises in town, including what sounded to me like a laundry for auras, whatever that might be, and a 24-hour holistic aromatherapy and reflexology clinic, and some other things I couldn't even begin to describe or explain.

They lived in a big house with a great view of the mountains, at the end of a street of great houses with big views. It had five levels, I think, and was done up in desert pastels. The artwork on the walls were by people even I'd heard of. The place was open and airy and comfortable and genteel. The decor said something, Sutie said. I agreed. To me it said this was definitely not the poor side of town.

What mattered to Dave was that they not only had a pipe, and a nice alabaster one at that, but also that they had some fine Northern Lights to smoke in it. While he fortified himself, Sutie and Adrian caught up on lost years and old chums while I gave Adrienne a rough outline of our mission. She was severely entranced, and encouraged Wild Dave to recount his experience which, assisted by the pipe, he did at length. When he was done she asked him several questions, which she'd written on a pad during his monologue, and then jotted down his answers in spaces she left for that purpose.

Sutie and Adrian were laughing loudly and often at the dining room table, where they'd spread out photographs from Adrian's album. Dave re-devoted himself to the pipe and Adrienne and I went upstairs to her computer. She worked her way into what I'll only describe as a fairly well-protected area, keyed in a concise statement of Dave's yarn, her questions and his answers. Then turned to me.

"Coffee?" she said. "While we wait?.

"Sure," I said. "We're waiting for . . . what?.

"A friend in Copenhagen," she said. "He's checking around for me..

So we made a pot of coffee, which Adrian and Sutie and Wild Dave all agreed was a fine idea. She had a selection of beans and pulled down the Blue Mountain without hesitating, and that was a very classy thing for her to do. Me, I would've hesitated, even if only for an instant. At $58 a pound I hesitate when it's only me I'm brewing for. She poured out the beans and I ground 'em and we made it up strong and stout. We passed the mugs around and went back to her unit. Her friend in Copenhagen had replied.

"Damn," she said.

"Bad news?" I asked.

"Gunter came up dry on Similars..

"Did you think he wouldn't?.

She shrugged and smiled at me.

"I hoped," she said and sipped her coffee with a furrowed brow. After a minute her face lit up with a good thought and she smiled again, sunnier this time, and snapped her fingers. She logged off and picked up the phone and her fingers danced a number into the device.

"Liani," she said after a moment. "Did I catch you in the middle of something? I'm sorry, dear. Could you drop it and zoom over here for a sec? It's an emergency. Hmmmm. Yes, thank you, dear. See you in a flash!.

[Sutie tells me I'm getting awfully pretentious and novelistic and that I should knock it off and get on with the story. So I will..

Liani, it turned out, was the head scrubber at the aura laundry and the "emergency" Adrienne talked about was that Wild Dave needed a quick wash and drip-dry. (I was going to suggest a little starch, but I didn't.) Liani was also a stunner — Polynesian-type, tall and willowy and long black hair that cascaded down her back to below her ass. She wore a colorful but baggy mumu cinched at the waist with a length of hemp rope. Wild Dave was all-over in love immediately, like Liani was the first woman he'd ever seen. She had him shower and wash, then set him to soaking in Adrian and Adrienne's outdoor hot tub and he sat there, steaming under the stars, while Adrienne and I brought Adrian and Liani up to date, including the bad news from Gunter in Copenhagen. Liani said confidence was high that she could read something from Wild Dave's aura that would indicate a direction for us, since "fate" had brought him here, and brought him now . I thought Sutie and I had brought him in the Olds, but like I said, I was trying to keep an open mind on the subject, this not being my area of expertise, if you catch my drift. This was a far-ranging business we were about, after all, and I'm a homebody at heart. So I shut up and let events unfold before me, opening myself, as it were, to enlightenment from without.

Wild Dave was a noodle when they snatched him out of the bubbles and dragged his sorry ass inside and laid him, face up — and dick up, shriveled worm that it was — on the cushions Adrian had put atop the coffee table. The warm water and the bubbles and the pot had conspired to utterly defeat the efforts of the Blue Mountain, and Wild Dave wasn't wild in the least. One eye was part-way open, but that was it.

I thought they'd cover him, for decency's sake, but Liani said it was better this way. Adrian and Adrienne sat on one faux leather couch and Sutie and I took the other. Liani untied her hemp belt and stripped her mumu off and, to my delight and Sutie's silent reproach of my delight, she was naked underneath. She began "combing" Wild Dave's aura with her fingers, making great sweeping motions down the length of his body, her firm breasts swaying sympathetically with the grace of her motion.

[Sutie has told me to knock off describing Liani's body. So I will. I think this is a big mistake, but I'm often mistaken about such things, so I bow to Sutie's self-proclaimed "better" judgement. Amen..

After a while Liani's work seemed to get easier for her, and then her fingers made shaping and forming motions, as though she were making a castle of sand out of the air above Wild Dave. Following the form Wild Dave presented, her hands pushed and pulled, moving the air here and there to suit her, and when she got to Dave's dick she worked very hard and took her time, as something there seemed to require considerable adjustment. Whatever she did must've worked, because Wild Dave swelled a bit in friendly thanks. When she was done we turned Dave over and she did the same thing to his backside, where his lower lumbar area and the backs of his thighs seemed to elicit the most attention.

When she finished she nodded to Adrienne, who tapped Adrian on the arm and they helped Dave into a sitting position. He was awake, but very pliable, which is a very non-normal state for a high-strung guy like Wild Dave to find himself in, but he seemed to be taking it well. I attribute this to the pot. Sutie believes it was the moment.

Wild Dave sat erect, Buddha-style, and Adrienne anointed his bushy-haired head and the upper parts of his upper body with a series of aromatic oils. I detected vanilla, patchouli, lavender, clove and more I couldn't place. Wonderful smells, wonderful. Adrian draped a white silk cloth over Dave's well-advertised groin and Sutie relaxed a little, and relaxed a little more when Liani climbed back into her mumu-and-rope ensemble. Adrienne finished up with the final oil, then Liani sat cross-legged opposite Wild Dave on the table and assumed a posture like his. Adrienne went to the light switch and cranked the dimmer down to dusk levels, after which Adrian drew in a deep breath and nodded, covering his mouth with his hand. Adrienne stopped halfway back to the couches and stared wide-eyed at Wild Dave. I didn't see a thing. Sutie says she thought she maybe did, but that it was probably a result of the power of suggestion induced by the spookiness of the moment, and so she won't commit to it.

Everybody was quiet for a long time, and nobody moved. Breathing was shallow and irregular all around. When there was motion, it came from Liani, who made motions that Adrienne somehow interpreted to mean she should take notes, which she began to do as Liani started calling out words and numbers that were somehow associated and somehow had meaning, but I was innocent of all that. Sutie says she was as clueless as I.

This goes on for two hours, during which I got up to take a leak twice and, when Sutie wasn't looking, I even took a couple covert pulls off the alabaster pipe, not so much as to get goofy, you see, but just enough to give me something to do while all the New Age shenanigans were unfolding. [I did this covertly because Sutie wouldn't have approved of my dalliance with Mary Jane, and in fact I just now caught Holy Hell for being completely straight and up-front with you..

From this new perspective I fell naturally to opening myself further to enlightenment from without. When Liani was done dictating, she and our hosts unfolded Wild Dave and encouraged him into a prone position. He dropped off to sleep as Adrian covered him with a blanket, and then there was a conference over his snoozing form.

Without resorting to dialogue, which Sutie says I'm not good at, I can sum up the discussion in a few words: Liani was not at all pleased with what she'd been seeing for these last couple hours. There were new colors in his aura, she said, colors she'd never seen before and couldn't begin to describe. More to the point, she couldn't seem to interpret or manipulate these new components of Wild Dave's aura. Her cleansing techniques were ineffective. She couldn't say whether or not the new colors represented positive or negative factors or conditions — she just plain didn't know. There was nothing she could do, and she was damn sorry, but she still wanted to tag along, however, to see what happened next. She and Adrienne went upstairs to pump electrons to Gunter, while Sutie and I got Wild Dave up and into his briefs and then between the sheets of the bed in the smaller of the guest rooms. Adrian brewed up another pot of coffee. Sutie went to bed in the bigger guest room and warned me to not loiter overlong without her, but it seemed to me I ought to stay and see what these folks would turn up, so I did.

Nothing, that's what they turned up. Nothing except what was to me a lot of high talk and wild speculation. I soon wished Adrian had cooked us up a decaf. When they were on their third go-round about flux capacitors or something, I staggered upstairs and slid up next to Sutie and got warm and dropped off almost at once.

We were shocked from our slumber six hours later when Adrienne burst into our room and shouted, "The game's afoot!" and I hated her for waking me up like that, but I loved her for the reference. Sutie beat me to the can and was dressed and out the door when I got out and dashed downstairs. I could see them a block away, bobbing down the street like a line of human ducks with Wild Dave the drake in the lead. I was into my sneakers and out the door and caught up to Sutie two blocks away from the house. We exchanged shrugs and smiles and kept pace with the parade. This was genuine Pied Piper stuff.

Here's a funny thing: we were just a tight little line of folks walking down the sidewalk, minding our own business, but we began to attract a crowd. Wild Dave led us up one street and then down another, through ritzy and regular and run-down neighborhoods alike. Every now and then someone would poke their head out the door to study us as we walked by, then jump down off the stoop and join the conga line. Pretty soon the whole thing began to take on a sort of blurry, unreal quality. Maybe it was the altitude. Maybe my blood sugar was a little low. Whatever the reason, I entered a hazy sort of existence where my normal need to avoid crowds was washed away and replaced with a crazy sort of a sense of community that I shared with not just our group, but with all the newcomers and stragglers behind and around us, our entire damn party.

We meandered our way through the heart of town and that, of course, attracted the attention of the police. The cops stopped us and asked to see our parade permit. They questioned Wild Dave for a moment, then seemed to lose interest in enforcing any parade permit laws and not only let us go but joined our ranks, leaving their patrol car, doors open and engine running, at the intersection where they'd stopped us. So hazy and blurred was my view that the actions of the cops seemed perfectly normal to me.

[Sutie says I should cut to the chase. So I will..

Eventually we find ourselves a mile or two outside of town in no place special, just some place by the side of the road. Wild Dave stops in his tracks. He just stops and stands there. The crowd has grown to a couple hundred by now, and they begin to form a ring around Wild Dave and the rest of us. After a few minutes Sutie says she doesn't feel right, and Adrian and Adrienne and Liani agree, so even though I felt pretty good about everything, they decide we should join the ring and leave Wild Dave alone at the center point. So we do.

And when we do a shadow falls over us, which produces a hush in the crowd as, except for our party, nobody knows about the Sign Wild Dave got from God a couple days back. When the shadow fell my hazy state of mind dissolved and it was with crystal-clear vision I looked up into the deep blue of the cloudless sky. I looked, like Wild Dave had, for whatever it was that was blocking the sun, but there wasn't anything at all there to do it, not as I could see — that's my testimony and the literal truth. Then I noticed that the shadow fell in such a fashion as to cover each and all of — and only — our assembly: no one was left standing in the sun. It matched the outer limits of our ring around Wild Dave exactly. I wasn't the only one to notice this. I turned my attention back to Dave, who was holding up his hands and signaling earnestly for silence.

The hubbub died down and when it did the ground began to shudder and then the air began to shudder and we shuddered right along with it, not from cold but from the natural fear that moving ground induces, and then the shuddering eased off and the sound of a deep rumble could be heard, faint and far-off. The rumbling grew louder and closer and we of the ring took comfort from our closeness and let the rumbling roll over us in waves. The rumbles beat savagely upon us and we clutched each other for support. Wild Dave, I saw, stood with his arms stretched aloft and a wild grin on his face, a grin raw and wild enough to justify his nickname.

And then the rumbling resolved itself into words, and the words were these.

"Numbers aren't always as important as they seem. Two down, five to go. Watch your ass..

And then the rumbling died abruptly and the shadow vanished in the blink of an eye and there we all were standing in the middle of a morning just like yesterday and the day before.

Wild Dave was the only one moving, the only one making any noise, and he was dancing in circles like a wounded crane and screeching "Cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo" at the top of his lungs. He looked happy, so I let him be. Sutie was hanging on me tightly, legs and arms wrapped around me and her face buried in the crook of my neck. She was making little gasping sounds that I took to be the outward sign of an inner rush of reassessments, which was what was rattling around inside of me. There were implications here, after all. I foresaw much skull-sweat and sleepless nights stemming from this incident. I fought to control my own breathing, and to keep my mind open and receptive to enlightenment from without but, truthfully, the former endeavor took up so much of my attention I'm afraid the latter effort suffered laughably.

People milled around, uncertain of what they'd just seen and heard, and unclear as to what they should do next. I was all for finding some breakfast. Adrienne spoke up, suggesting that we contribute our names and addresses (physical addresses or cybernetic edresses) to her, so we could keep in touch for when the other five "events" occurred, whatever they would be, and presupposing, that there would actually be another five events. It seemed like a good idea and most of the people complied, though a few survivalist-types declined, but allowed Adrienne to present them with her URL, in case they wanted to stay in touch more discretely. In the end, I think Adrienne collected 267 names and numbers, and I think that was everybody.

Wild Dave was still dancing and making clock-noises when the last of our ring turned away and wandered on back to town, leaving Adrian and Adrienne and Liani and Sutie and me to contend with Wild Dave, who wasn't at all interested in leaving. We finally got him quieted down, (though I think he mostly just wore himself out) and managed to get him into town. He was haggard and confused and talking randomly — not that he hadn't done that before, but he was making even less sense than usual. Once he had most of a meal inside him he seemed to come out of his fog. He looked up sheepishly and studied our faces.

"That was something, huh?" he asked after a moment. We all nodded and smiled at him, but nobody said anything.

"Any idea what?" he said. "What it was, I mean?.

We shook our heads. Wild Dave looked a little disappointed with our silence, but said nothing, returning his attention to the residue of the generous cheeseburger before him. And when he was done, he wiped his mouth with a napkin, wadded the paper into a ball and dropped it onto his plate.

"Thanks for lunch," he said to the table. "Now we should get back home. I've got work..

"Oh?" Liani asked, somehow conveying the impression that this was exactly the moment she'd been waiting for, exactly the Right Time to ask the Question That Must Be Asked.

"And what might that be?" she said almost coyly.

Wild Dave pushed his chair back and stood up, shoving his hands into his pockets as though he were searching for cash he must've known wasn't there. He finally took Liani by the eyes and smiled, then shrugged.

"Windows," he said. "I've got windows to wash..

"Yeah?" Liani said with a prompt in her voice.

"Yep," Dave nodded. "Can't see shadows through dirty panes..

And he didn't say anything more until we were on the road, pursuing the other all-freeway route back to town via westbound 70. Right where it hits the 15 just west of Richfield, Utah, Wild Dave pipes up from the back seat and says, "Those friends of yours are nice, Sutie..

His insights, if any, remain his own.

And we're still waiting for number Three, still trying to keep our minds open to enlightenment from without, and remembering to regularly question the worth of individual numbers. I don't know what happened out there by the side of that Colorado road. Sutie says she doesn't know either. What we do know is that it was something almighty strange, but also something ultimately inspiring. I mean, I'm really actively waiting for number Three to arrive. Patiently, of course, but actively.

That's more faith than I think I've ever had in anything.

And Sutie agrees, bless her heart.