The First Chapter of Picnic on Air, A novel by Benjamin Dangl

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CHAPTER 1
“Yeuhawaahoooo!!!”

An accordion exhaled, a violin scratched one clear note, a tuba belched the rhythm and one lone rooster crowed. The band shook through the crowd as people dipped to the music. The party had begun. Bottles of wine were poured into deep mugs. Tables trembled under towering cakes, bowls of fruit, giant roasts and piles of mashed potatoes. The band danced around the bonfire, then into the fountain and out again as children shot fireworks from the roof and into the crowd. Dogs howled and lawn sprinklers sprayed. People grunted with the band, shoving the air with their elbows and peeling off clothes as neighbors arrived with more wine. Soon the town’s siren sounded off - someone had let the animals out of the local zoo. Monkeys and giraffes wandered into the party, dancing with the ecstatic men and women. Someone climbed on top of a drunken lion while an elephant snorted through the tables of food. People danced on rooftops as more cars arrived until the whole Romanian town, under the stars and to the wailing thump of the band, emptied into the dance. Wine bottles were thrown into the air and smashed against walls. Couples began making love on the lawn, in the bushes and on the tables that were still standing. Chairs and debris were hurled into a rising bonfire that roared into a thousand sparks flying through the air. As the sun rose, one final firework shot off, gave a fitful report and landed in Harmholdt Rhineschloggen’s lap, waking him.

He was still drunk when he opened his eyes to find himself in a metal chair on the beach, surrounded by a herd of pigs. He sighed as one pig wandered up to him, peed directly onto his hi-top velcro shoes, then trotted off. Our unlikely hero was having a false start to the morning. There was a distinct taste of vomit in his mouth, and when he reached up to touch a bruise on his forehead he realized that his left hand was handcuffed to the arm of the chair. Dragging the chair to the shoreline, he knelt down and took a few sips from the salty water. After a feeble gargle he stumbled to the town’s main park, with the chair scraping along behind him. The pigs followed. Harmholdt sat down and scratched his balls. He swept the oily red hair from his forehead and stroked his beard as his bathrobe flapped idly in the wind. Harmholdt was a man of medium height and had a constant expression on his face of someone who was farting pleasantly while being struck by lightning.

One of the pigs dropped a moldy roll at his feet. He picked it up, inserted it into his mouth and gazed at the cool morning. An old woman pushed a creaking cart down the street, while a flock of birds tore from a rooftop like confetti. Harmholdt’s wandering eyes came to rest on the town’s clock tower. He looked down at his handcuffs, then up to the minute hand. It was 5:10 am. In a sobering epiphany, he realized the minute hand could be of use to him, but only for the next twenty minutes. He had to move fast. Impeded by the chair’s dead weight, Harmholdt scrambled up the clock’s face. The pigs watched as he hoisted the chair over the rusted minute hand and desperately begin to saw at his handcuffs. He clung to the clock’s face while the sound of metal grating against metal echoed across the park. By 5:30 the minute hand was no longer on his side.

Police arrived and the pigs, suddenly protective, could hold them off for only so long.

After being unceremoniously freed from his handcuffs, Harmholdt was thrown into a jail cell with one of the more belligerent pigs. The creature snapped at what appeared to be invisible flies.

“Pig,” Harmholdt moaned sickly, grabbed at the flies then passed out on the cold tile floor. Drool crept from the corner of his mouth. He smiled in his sleep, dreaming of a time not too long ago…

The bicycle creaked under Harmholdt’s weight as he peddled uphill, the cart wobbling stubbornly behind him. The wooden, blue tarp-covered cart was bulging with a variety of items, upside down maps of the world, bottled songs, books written backwards, musical sleds, pickle juice IV’s and T-shirts made of flannel. There were bottles of hot sauce that made your arm pits foam, sunglasses that transformed everything into a tropical paradise, a device that turned saliva into glass marbles and an aquarium full of whistling fish.

Harmholdt’s knees shuddered as he pressed against the feeble pedals. People on the sides of the road watched the contraption roll past wondering what devices its depths contained. Waving children ran along with Harmholdt until finally his uphill struggle turned into a descent. From the summit of the hill, he blew a whistle, signaling to those below to clear from the road. There was an anxious pause, then he rolled on, gathering momentum.
“Yeuhawaahoooo!!!” he hollered, the cart rattling behind him.

A policeman rustled Harmholdt from his dream. “You want to call somebody or you want to become a permanent resident?”

“Uuhhh,” Harmholdt moaned. The pig was licking his face. “I’ll make a call.” He coughed, walked out to the phone and punched in The Headdress Collective’s number.

“Headdress Collective.”

“Wendall?”

“Harmholdt, we’ve been trying to get hold of you for days, what the…”

“Elena left me.”

“Where are you?”

“The jail in Vama Veche. Wendall…”

“Are you drunk?”

Harmholdt focused his eyes. “She took the cart, the money, everything...”

“Damn it, Harmholdt.” Wendall exhaled. “I’ll be right over.”

The policeman tugged Harmholdt back into his cell where he sat down and confided to the pig.

“Her name was Elena, from Northern Greece…spoke Greek, too. I never could understand a word she said.” Harmholdt patted the pig. “I met her about a month after I left The Headdress Collective. My job was to sell their inventions on the shores of the Black Sea. She walked up to the cart one day with this funny smile on her face, felt one of our flannel T-shirts and said, hhhhuuuhh. The next thing you know we became, well, business partners. Anyway, we were all right together, Elena and I. Traveled around selling our goods on the beach. It was adventurous in its own way. I was on my own, in love, away from home for the first time. Well, about two hours away from home, but…business was good.” He brushed the pig’s bristly hairs pensively. “Then last week she left me, stole the cart and all the money, too. Went off with some truck driver from Bulgaria. Hit me kind of hard.” A stray tear wandered into Harmholdt’s beard and vanished. The pig snorted.

“I’ve been drinking ever since. For awhile I liked the adventure of biking the cart all over, seeing new places, meeting new people and cavorting with foreign women. When I left home it was all bright skies and cheap drinks. But then the party turned into a long, hard hangover…”

“Bail’s paid,” the policeman sneered at Harmholdt while opening the jail cell door. “Just take the damn pig with you and stay off clock towers from now on. Your savior’s waiting out front.”

Harmholdt let the pig into the back of the Wendall’s station wagon, then got into the car.

“Damn it, Harmholdt, The Headdress Collective sent you out here for a reason, to sell and promote our inventions. A simple project, but you failed, miserably.” Wendall raised his hands in exasperation, shaking his head. “And everything’s gone, the money, the inventions…aauuuuggghh!” He pounded the steering wheel and twisted his mustache angrily.

“Wendall…”

“Listen…while you’ve been on the beach with your Greek goddess, Europe’s been invaded by…well, fruit.” Wendall looked at Harmholdt.

“Yeah, I heard a little bit about…”

“They’re shipping it out from Paraguay.” Wendall tossed a pile of newspapers onto Harmholdt’s lap. Harmholdt sifted through them, glancing over the headlines: “Goat Herder Uprising in North, Serbian Baby Speaks in Hieroglyphics…Zoomba Fruit Addiction Continues to Spread Through Western Europe.”

“Zoomba?” Harmholdt asked.

“Once used in an ancient Peruvian ritual called the Hitching of the Sun Ceremony. Hasn’t been heard of for years, until recently, when Paraguay started to capitalize on it. They’re working with a Jesuit Mafia group who distribute zoomba for them.” Wendall looked out the window. “This fruit is highly addictive, makes you laugh hysterically and then want more and more…it’s destroying Western Europe.”

“Isn’t anybody going to do anything about it?”

“Yeah.” Wendall started the car, chuckled and looked at Harmholdt. “You are.”

The ancient vehicle lurched off.

 

To keep reading, email Ben@upsidedownworld.orgg for a copy of the book.

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