One Mukluk

(continued)

By Barry G. Gale

Able Intruder reported later in the week in the Clarion that a Mr. and Mrs. Adams, now an elderly couple living in a retirement community in a suburb outside of Tampa, Florida, said they now realized that their decision years ago had been correct. What that decision had been was never learned, or at least never reported. Also, what the Intruder story never told us was whether this particular couple was in any way related to Metro Adams.

Obviously a slow news day at the Clarion.

Clarissa said to me after the funeral: "Dear, sweet Metro, I wish there was something I could have done to help him. But I guess there really wasn't."

Jocelyn said the same thing.

When I ran into Allenby of the General Counsel's Office, in corridor "L" of the Marmalade, he told me he had heard the news about Adams and felt that the whole thing was "a tragic event without justification or moral sense and simply not a very nice thing to have happen."

I couldn't agree more.

An apparent third eyewitness, a person by the name of Bertrand Boringbombs of West Cincinnati, Kentucky, was interviewed on the 11 o'clock news about two weeks after Adams's disappearance.

"And you were here for a Selective Service convention?" the TV reporter asked.

"Not exactly. Every year there used to be a Selective Service annual meeting in Washington in December, at the end of December, but now that the Selective Service is out of business, I come here anyway to meet a few old friends."

"And what did you hear, Mr. Boringbombs?"

"Oh, I didn't hear anything. I just saw a lot of commotion down there near the banks of the Potomac and came to see what was happening."

I ran into the Texas car thief ring leader Roddyrigo at the funeral. He had stolen Adams's car when Adams parked it (at Roddyrigo's strong urging) in El Paso, Texas, and went by train, with Clarissa and Jocelyn, on a vacation to Mexico City. Roddyrigo was now out on his fourth parole term. He said how sorry he was about Adams and what had happened, and he hoped that Clarissa and Jocelyn were holding up well. He also mentioned that Adams's car was one of the best he had ever stolen, and he had simply loved ripping the license plates off of it, and selling them to the highest bidder from the large group of state prison officials who were his regular customers, and that he would always remember Adams for that, if for nothing else. And he felt that there was really probably nothing else to remember him for.

Roddyrigo also told me that he was thinking of starting up his stolen car ring again, to be known as the Roddyriguettes, this time masquerading as a hard rock band using musical instruments fashioned from chrome body parts lopped off stolen cars. He wanted to know what I thought.

I told him I'd have to get back to him on that.

At the Backwater Community College of Liberal Arts, Architecture and Video Cassette Repair, there was some talk of honoring Adams's memory with an endowed chair in Ancient Mesoamerican Religious Open Plaza Architecture, which was Adams's double minor there, if anybody at the school could figure out what that field actually was.

At the stairway leading to the fourth floor of the Marmalade, I ran into Williams of Policy, who said he wasn't quite sure how he felt about what happened to Adams. He said that everyone else in Policy wasn't quite sure, either. People in DOST's Office of Policy were notorious for having difficulty making up their minds.

Three unnamed, younger-than-teenage-looking teenage girls, giggling uncontrollably, were interviewed on TV seven days after Adams's disappearance.

"He said what?" the reporter asked.

"'Fly, Demmo, Fly!' whatever that means."

"Fly, Demmo, Fly?"

"It's true! It's true!" the girls insisted in unison, as they began to giggle again. "That's what we heard. It's true!" They wiped tears from their eyes.

"Did this guy have a problem or something?" one of them asked, and when she did the trio broke into prolonged and incredibly contagious laughter, which caused everyone in the studio to begin laughing uncontrollably, too.

Adams was buried, at least his casket was, in Arlington National Cemetery. That was odd, if for no other reason than Adams never served in the military. Like me, he went to grad school during the Vietnam War in order to get a deferral from service. But, hey, who was I to say anything?

"Where does it say in DOST regs that you have to have served in the military to be buried at Arlington?" my contentious and obnoxious colleague Drumrole asked me at the time. "Can you answer that, 'heaven-help-us' Harvey?"

Of course I couldn't answer that, and Drumrole knew I couldn't. Perhaps no one could answer that. Yet, in a foolish attempt to get an answer, I turned the whole matter over to DOST's Office of General Counsel, which proceeded to contract the issue out to the prestigious Washington law firm of Craven, Greedy, Van Miserly and Craven. They were on the DOST payroll as consulting attorneys. Craven, Greedy did a thorough search, or so I was informed, and sure enough, they couldn't come up with an answer, either. In fact, they said they couldn't really figure out what the DOST regs said about anything.