Zeppelining to Montana

I got up on Monday morning expectin to have some donuts, maybe some coffee. Also, there's a '42 International that came in, and I was thinkin that I'd watch the squimonk fix it up. They was thinkin about paintin it pink with red flames, but I told 'em that the guy who owned it couldn't be drivin around in a pink truck. It's old man Johnson from down the way. When he was a kid, his dad used to get the most awful heartburn. His ma always kept tellin his dad to stop drinkin the booze, but he had the Irish curse on him, so what could he do? Well, he kept drinkin and his heartburn kept gettin worse. Then they come out with that Pepto stuff, and it cleared old man Johnson's old man's heart burn right up. After a bit, he came into some money, no one really knows how, but there's something about balloons. Well, when he gets this money, he splits it pretty evenly between good whiskey and Pepto. He orders himself up a whole truckload of Pepto and has it delivered. Well, when it comes it, the driver turns out to be a distant cousin of some kind or another. They start drinkin and carryin on, as they were bound to do. After a couple of hours and a couple of bottles, they decide they're gonna go for a drive. Well, right when they start the car up, they get convinced they're bein followed by a red ghost, even though that's just the tail light shinin. They get the fire scared out of 'em, and floor the truck in first. The truck ends up burstin in through the living room of the house, and, because it's so much warmer in the house, this bein Christmas baking season where it's roughly negative hundred billion degrees outside and a cozy 350 degrees inside the house, the Pepto expands from the heat and starts to burst. There's pink and glass all over the place and Christmas is ruined for everyone. Eventually, the driver and old man Johnson's dad was picked up for trafficking in illicit helium and lived the rest of his days up the river, which may have been good for him. Ever since that Christmas, though, old man Johnson couldn't be near the color pink without weepin and he could never eat Christmas cookies without heavin a deep sigh beforehand. Well, since Christmas is supposed to be a happy time, the women down at the local church would make some special bunny cookies for old man Johnson so that he may think it was Easter. It would never work, because they couldn't resist and would always put hats and scarves and mittens on them bunnies. It wasn't good for old man Johnson, but their piping abilities always amazed me. Because of that, I told the squimonk they should paint his truck blue.

I never learned if they did or not because, as Douggy and I were enjoyin ourselves some cinnamon rolls, Alistair came out of the back and told me, "He wants to see you."

I shot back, "Well, he's sittin right across from me, if he wants to see me, he can look at me. I think he's more interested in the crossword than seein me right now, though."

Alistair cocked his head a bit and furrowed his brow. Then he told me, "Not Douggy! Good lord, why would I come out here to tell you Douggy, who is sitting across from you, wanted to see you?"

"That's what I wanna know," I respond.

"What?" he says.

"What?" I reply, thinking maybe we were havin two different conversations.

We both sorta reset and gird ourselves to try again. "Lindbergh," Alistair begins, tentatively, "Lindbergh wants to see you."

"Is that so?" I'm surprised at this. I get to meet myself a real hero, but I'm not quite ready. What if I say somethin stupid? I don't think I'm very prone to that, but it always seems like a possibility. "When's he gonna be here?"

"He's not," Alistair responds, "Follow me. You too, Douggy."

We follow him out of the shop, where there's a rope just hangin there. I look up, but the rope doesn't seem to go nowhere. It's like one of them magic tricks where the guy climbs the rope and disappears 'cept no one's climbed that rope that I can see. Course, if he really disappeared when he got to the top, I wouldn't be able to see him, so maybe there was a whole bunch of them yogis up at the top of that rope that were just waitin for me. I was hopin there was a lot of room up there, because yogis may be quite bendy, but I'm not. I'm no spring chicken and my joints don't bend all the ways they used to.

Alistair grabs that rope and tells me, "Hold this."

I do. That Alistair's got a pretty commanding way about him. He sorta reminds me of my mom when she'd call me by my full name. That would put the water in my knees and sometimes in my eyes. Even when I was 40, she could strike the fear of the lightnin into me. Sometimes, when Alistair talks to me, he sounds like that, only his voice ain't so high as mom's. Well, when he talks like that, it's like my body just goes ahead and does whatever he tells me to do without consultin my brain. Before I know it, I'm bein hauled up in the air into who knows what kinda weird yogi room in the sky. When I get up there, though, it's not packed full of yogis, there's just 5 squimonk, one who's foot is bandaged up.

I'm lookin around, gawkin at the secret room in the sky the squimonk seem to have, when Douggy and Alistair come in behind me.

Alistair yells, "All accounted for?"

"Sir," responds the bandaged squimonk. I think her name was Victoria, if I remember right.

"Then cast off," Alistair commands.

There's a couple of loud bangs and I can feel we're movin upwards, albeit slowly. It's like we're sittin in a living room that's on top of a basement full of jello that's not quite set yet.

"What's goin on?" I ask. "Why are we floatin in mystery room in the sky?"

"First," says Alistair, "it's not a mystery room in the sky, we are in a zeppelin. Second, we are in this zeppelin because we are on our way to Montana so you can meet with Charles Lindbergh. He's been looking following our mission and he feels you're ready to take on more responsibility. We've got to go to him because he never leaves his ranch. He's pretty paranoid, and rightly so. If Clan Platypus knew he was behind our turning on them, they would stop at nothing to have him tortured slowly and then killed."

"Well, if we're in a zeppelin, why couldn't I see it? Them things are bigger than a rhino after it crashes thanksgiving dinner and stays for extra pie."

"That, I suppose, is true, in its way," he begins slowly. "But you couldn't see the zeppelin because it's a stealth zeppelin. We have fitted this zeppelin with the latest squimonk cloaking technology. We have had one of our fleet of zeppelins parked over your house since our first meeting, for protection."

I understood that and asked some questions about zeppelin operation, so as to look interested. Then, I got to the point. I learned that day that it takes 4 days to fly a zeppelin from Iowa to Montana. I wondered why we didn't just drive. I figured we could be there in 18 hours or so, but the squimonk have a hard time driving anything but semis because people have a tendency to swerve wildly after seeing a squirrel monkey driving a car.

So, since Monday, I've been riding in this zeppelin on the way to Montana. Me and Douggy have been playing a lot of cribbage, too. I double skunked him one game, but he says I cheated. Other than that, it's been smooth sail...hang on, there's a noise outside.

HOLY MOTHER OF CLAMBAKE! Things have just gone all haywire! I think we've just been hit by a flaming couch! I gotta stop now!