Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

We are Jemima and Easter Yeggs.  Lieutenant Yeggs wants his son to write these reports to keep in touch when we are out having our adventures, and Rev C.S.L., my Dad, doesn’t mind an update either.

The Turtle had a full load, and it was a strange crew.  B.B., Easy and I were in the back row as observers.  In the video director chair, which also keeps up with the navigation system, was Wilma Slay, a.k.a. Hoople.  Home Wrecker was in her usual chair, on the radar.  In the front seat, Fred, a.k.a. Flintstone, was driving.  He had passed his torture test.  And Mitzi was in the photographer seat on the passenger side.

But we had not gone anywhere yet.  We were in the maintenance bay with the hydraulic lift far enough up to keep the wheels off the floor.

Home Wrecker said, “Before we go anywhere, Ralph E. Newman, who is the president of Dala Enterprises and Amy’s husband…  He has spliced some video footage together and programmed what might be instructive.  For those in the four primary team positions, consider yourselves on a country road when I say that we have a tornado at nine o’clock.  The twister is traveling north northeast.  We are headed north.  Flintstone, your tires are off the floor, so I want you to steer as the road turns.  Hit the accelerator and the break as you feel you should.  Mitzi, Hoople, do your jobs.  You have done them before.  We are simply testing a simulator that Dala might market.  It will get everyone into the storm chasing mode before we even leave.”

There were screens hanging from every window.  The simulator had overtaken the tracking software and radar.

As Fred steered and accelerated and braked based on what he saw out the “windows” and “windshield,” he asked for help, but since Mitzi and Wilma were not comfortable in their new jobs, they hesitated.  Mitzi complained that the screens were too dim to see anything clearly, but when Easy and I went through the simulation, it looked as clear as it did the day the incident happened.

Fred started shouting.  Wilma cried.  She said she was trying.  Mitzi said that she couldn’t see a thing.  Fred realized what he had to do.  He called for a turnout to go into Turtle mode, but Wilma was slow.  Home Wrecker said nothing.  She would have taken over if this was real to help the driver, but this was a benchmark test.  They would take it, or a similar simulation over and over until they passed.

And then, as a conclusion to the simulation, a piece of a roof to a house started flying directly at Mitzi.  It got bigger and bigger until the screen went blank.

Mitzi screamed in terror.  Then she found her voice, “What the <bleep>!  <bleep>!  <bleep>!  <bleep>!  Who the <bleep> programmed that thing?  I nearly had a heart attack!  <bleep>!  the <bleep>!  I might need to change my underwear! <bleep>!  Who <bleep>-ing made that video.  What <bleep>-ing grave do I have to visit to thank for that nightmare! <bleep>!  <bleep>!  <bleep>!  I asked a question, people.”

I raised my finger to the sky.

Mitzi was in attack mode, “No way, Stinker!  God did not take that picture just so I could lose control of my bowels.  No way!  Someone had to have died, and you have me sitting in the suicide seat! <bleep>!  <bleep>!  <bleep>!”

I found my voice.  “No, Mitzi.  I took that picture and I was trying to get you to think of which camera the video came from.  The one right above your head.  Yes, God had a lot to do with saving us that day.  Yes, I love my husband even more because he drove to the shoulder and we deployed just the shields and skirts.  We had no idea if the shoulder was soft enough to drill the anchors into the ground.  And yes, there was a death that day.  The camera died, never to be usable again.  It took us hours to find it.  We weren’t even looking for the camera.  We were looking for people who might be injured and we found the camera about a half mile from where the Turtle had been.”

I asked B.B. “Do you have enough bleeps to edit that tirade?”

B.B. finally laughed, “I have a huge sack of bleeps, just in case this kind of thing happened, but I do not know if we will use it on the television station.  In class?  Absolutely.  This is what we do not want happening, but it can happen.”

Home Wrecker added, “And we will be doing these simulations until you pass them all.  You have to establish good communication so that this does not happen.  Fred, you were a little slow, but over all you did a good job.  I’ll get feedback from the software about your driving skills.  Ladies, you were slow or non-communicative at all.  In a real situation, I would have screamed orders, but I had to know how well you are prepared today to handle this situation.  As it stands, we will give the tornadoes a wider distance.  What happened in real life in this scenario was that Easy lost sight of the storm in a tree lined area.  When he got back to a farmer’s field, he saw the storm had changed direction.  We found no good place to go into Turtle mode, so he went to the shoulder.  And right about the time we had deployed the shields, the roof of a house hit us, and the shields held.  But I will admit, our ears were ringing for the next few hours.  That’s better than someone dying.”

Mitzi asked, “Why do I have to be yelled at?  Wilma has the video feeds.”

Home Wrecker said, “You have as good of a view of the road and what is ahead of you as Fred does.  The video feeds that Wilma gets are subject to glitches or being hit by flying roof tops.  To be honest, we never got this close to tornadoes until Easy was the driver.  Sure, anyone could get this close in adverse conditions.  And those beasties can change direction without warning.  Why are we here collecting data if it was not for the fact that we have little information on why they change direction?  Understand?”

Mitzi asked, “Do I have to sit in the suicide seat?  I mean!  <bleep>!  I need to get the <bleep> out of here.”  She started to open the door.

We screamed “No!”

Home Wrecker said, “We aren’t on the ground.  We are not high, but you might fall.”

We felt the Turtle descend.  Anahera opened Mitzi’s door.  Mitzi jumped out and asked where the nearest bathroom was.  Gender did not matter at this point.  While she was gone, Fred and Easy disconnected all the video screens and stowed them in the Dala Enterprise cabinet in the Turtle Bay.  And not the Turtle Bay in Manhattan or on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, the maintenance bay reserved for the Turtle.  There were lockers for the university students and faculty who tinker with the Turtle and cabinets for experimental gadgets from Dala Enterprises and Design by Tensie.  Easy had keys to everything, but only the owners of the lockers and cabinets had the other keys.

Mitzi got back in the Turtle about the same time that Fred and Easy did.

Home Wrecker asked, “Are we ready to depart?  Mitzi, did you have to change your underwear?”

Mitzi grunted, “No, I am fine.”  She grabbed the Turtle keys from the console.  “No, I am not fine.  I am not going to sit in this suicide seat another minute until I have a code name.  No one is going anywhere.”

Easy said, “Don’t worry, Fred, I have the spare set of keys.”

Mitzi shouted, “Don’t you dare give him your keys.  I am getting a code name, now!  If I die in the seat, I want my code name on my tombstone.”

B.B. said, “I don’t want my code name on my tombstone.  What about you, bestie?”

I moaned, “The first Turtle code name was mine, Stinker.  But the little kids at Lily the Pink call me Aunt Jemima.  I think you are right.  No code names on tombstones.  And will someone explain to Mitzi that no one has died while sitting in that seat.”

Home Wrecker said, “We are going to have some fun at our girl talk tonight.  Mitzi, I give code names when they are appropriate.  Until now, you have been the most competent new team member and nothing has warranted a code name.  I am like the other ladies.  I have no intentions of having my tombstone remind people that I am, or was, a home wrecker.  Now, give the keys back to Fred.”

Mitzi growled, “No!  To sit here, I have to be a full member of the team.  I have to belong here!”

Easy said, “Wow!  This is some fit!”

Home Wrecker laughed, “Easy, you have done it again.  You suggested Bossy Boss and B.B. is stuck with it. Mitzi is now Fitzi Mitzi.”

B.B. mused, “With the initials of F.M.  91 on your FM dial, it’s Fitzi Mitzi.”

By this point, everyone, except Fitzi Mitzi, was laughing.

Home Wrecker shrugged, “There!  Code Name, Fitzi Mitzi.  Keys please!”

Fitzi shrieked and jammed the keys into Fred’s awaiting hand.  Fred said, “Ow!  These things have sharp edges, you know!”

Fitzi growled, “Deal with it!”

Fred put the Turtle in gear, and Anahera pounded on Fitzi’s window.  She was yelling, “No!”

Fred asked, “Now what?”

Home Wrecker said, “Easy should have told you.  When we leave while Anahera is on duty, we have to go through a blessing ritual.”

The Shipping and Receiving crew gathered and performed a Haka of blessing for the Turtle’s travels.

Again, Fred put the Turtle in gear and Anahera ran in front of the Turtle and shouted, “No!”

Easy said, “I told you, Fred.  In this parking lot, we do not leave the bay until Anahera says we can.  Have you ever seen a turtle that did not make it across the road?  That’s what we’d look like with all these eighteen wheelers, most of them backing up.  We would be the lunch meat in a tractor-trailer sandwich.”

B.B. added, “I’m thinking more the cheese.”

I laughed, “Girlfriend, what has got you going?  You rarely show a playful side.”

B.B. leaned her head against the head rest.  “I don’t have to do anything until we get back.  And I have a title of one reality show episode, ‘The Making of Fitzi Mitzi, 91 on your FM dial.’  Besides the mountain of <bleep>, it was pure gold.”

Fred asked, “Why can’t I go now?”

Anahera must have read his lips.  She walked to the driver’s side window.  Fred rolled down the window.  “We have a truck that skipped the scales.  He has to back up.  Then a truck that just came in is a priority for receiving.  We must keep the cider house happy.  I have told him to back into the bay next to you.  I said that we had a Turtle that wanted to cross the road, so he is wanting to see the Turtle.  He is a regular, and he will do a good job, and do it quickly.  Okay, here he comes.  I let you go when I get the locked bay signal.”

Fred asked, “What’s that?”

Anahera smiled, “When the truck is properly backed to the loading dock, we have a system that will lock the truck bed with the opening of the dock.  That way, there is no bump, no sagging of the truck springs, or shifting around when the fork truck goes in and out.  And it prevents the trucker getting antsy and deciding to leave early with a fork truck halfway out of the trailer.”

Fred said, “That sounds reasonable.”

Anahera said, “Ah.  The light just came on.  Drive forward, turn right around the truck, and follow the arrows to the right, staying between the parked trucks and the trucks backed into the loading docks.  Safe travels.  And remember that the trucker wants to see the … Turtle.”

Easy said, “That means drive up to the truck, giving him enough room to see from his height.  Stop.  Then FM can deploy the shields only.  Retract shields.  Then FM can roll down her window and say hi.”

All that was done, and the driver asked where Stinker was.

Fitzi, suddenly not fitzi at all, said, “I’m the upgrade.  I’m Fitzi Mitzi.  You can see me when the new series is available on the streaming service.”  And with that, we were off.

I muttered, “Upgrade?  Thirty minutes ago, she was about to quit.  I wonder if these fits are anger issues or if they are a sign that she’s nutty as a fruit cake.”

B.B. snickered, still leaning back with her eyes closed.  “Do not borrow my schtick, bestie.  I am the nervous neurotic on the team.  One is enough.”

With that, B.B. fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, slobbering on my uniform.  Okay, she was three months pregnant.  Morning sickness should be waning, but being tired was still part of the program.

When we positioned ourselves to be in storm chasing position the next morning, Home Wrecker said that the girls would meet in her room that she was sharing with Mitzi for a girl talk.  For the first night, they would all wear pajamas.  No lingerie until they had some experience together as a team.

Home Wrecker had non-alcoholic beverages.  Two of us were still breast feeding, just using the breast pump on this trip, and one was three months pregnant.  And the others were not twenty-one yet, although Mitzi was close.

I led us in a short prayer.  B.B. led us in some silly toasts, totally out of character for her.  Wilma could have started into her usual long monologue stories, but she had a sense that Home Wrecker had a point for this girl talk.

When everyone was relaxed and smiling, all except Fitzi Mitzi, Home Wrecker said, “Dr. Kildare, Dr. Ben, my husband, and I evaluated a lot of students this past year.  We will still use Kevin and Joseline, Skinny and Amazon, when they make themselves available.  We cannot fault anyone who is not a meteorological major in putting their core subjects first.  My husband cannot spend a lot of time on the road unless I am teaching his classes for him while he is gone.  And Dr. Kildare can tell you all about how department heads have meetings to attend and classes to teach.  So, we needed a full set of replacements for the core Turtle team.  B.B. is pregnant. And she may go on occasional winter storm chases, but she may split time with Dr. Ben either on radar in the Turtle or teaching classes so he can be in the Turtle while I have some time off.  Joan is little, and I miss her.”

I snickered, “No, you think that Jochebed’s joke is true, and you may lose that bond with your daughter.  I will admit.  Stormie is less interested when I come back after Jochebed does the breast feeding.”

Fitzi Mitzi asked, “What is so special about Jochebed’s milk?”

I shrugged, “She says that once the baby has chocolate milk, they won’t be satisfied with white milk afterwards.”

Home Wrecker said, “I know.  Jochebed says that joke and she is an immigrant from the jungles of Africa, or the grasslands.  Her father traded between the two and the city merchants, but I never learned which was Jochebed’s origin.  But Stinker, that is a naughty joke.  Jochebed might be able to get away with it, but you cannot.”

B.B. said, “Naughty, but funny.”

Home Wrecker said, “Can I get control of this party for a minute?”

Hoople smiled, “Maybe, but we are counting the seconds.”

Home Wrecker gritted her teeth.  “You three.  Flintstone, Hoople, and Fitzi Mitzi were selected as having the best temperament to fit in with the other teammates.  I doubt if the entire B Team will run a storm chase by themselves, especially with freshmen and sophomores riding along on a maiden voyage.  But Mitzi, something went wrong this morning.  You were fine yesterday in our planning meeting.  What happened?”

Mitzi huffed, “I don’t want to talk about it.  It’s personal.”

Home Wrecker said, “I cannot insist on it, but it may be necessary before this storm chase is over.  The chemistry of the team depends on us being a family.  If you are attacking everyone on the team and then flirting with the truck driver, we will have no idea if you will do your job when everything around you falls apart.  And all of us in the room have been in the Turtle when a tornado is nearby.  Everything seems to be falling apart.  Please, I do not want to recommend that your anger issues due to an undisclosed trauma have led to me wanting to test others to take your place.  This is not a Christian issue, it is a teamwork issue.  You will need to prove that you can communicate with the team, and I sense you have been hurt deeply and less than 24-28 hours ago.”

Mitzi’s eyes filled with tears.  She got up and walked over to her duffle bag where she had placed her cellphone.  She tapped the screen a few times.  “Here’s a photo of a wedding that I received last night.  The bride is, or was, my best friend.  The groom is a recent graduate from the Naval Academy.  The last time that I saw him, he told me that I was his one and only.  Then he made one excuse after another to not come home for holidays and the summer.  I hear military academies fill up your entire year, but obviously he had time for my next-door neighbor.  My entire plan for the rest of my life is a shambles.  I was going to move to Washington, DC, and become a lobbyist for better building codes to lessen the effects of severe weather.  He was going to work hard at being assigned to Norfolk Naval Station or the Pentagon.  And to make it worse, I introduced him to Silly in the first place.”

I asked, “Silly?”

Mitzi nodded, “Her name is Cecilia, and my Mom shortened it to Silly before we started school.  She was a year older than me.  She went off to a two-year nursing school, and then she went out to the east coast to a hospital right after that.  I guess to be close to Herbie.”

Home Wrecker sighed, “There are a lot of missing parts to this story.  Can you start at the beginning?  Herbie is the oldest, I’m thinking, then Silly, then you.  Who did you meet first?”

Mitzi looked confused for a few seconds.  “Silly.  Herbie’s parents owned a huge portion of the county in the southeastern corner of the state.  My folks had the second biggest farm.  Silly’s folks had been farm hands for my Dad.  Silly’s father died about the time I was born, and my folks deeded a couple of acres around Silly’s mother’s house to Silly’s mother to start a truck farm.”

Wilma asked, “What’s a truck farm?”

Mitzi looked at her like she had just crawled out from underneath a rock.  She shook her head and said, “A truck farm is where you have a huge garden.  You have vegetables for your family, but you always have extra to sell.  In our county, the truck farms literally sold their harvest from the back of a truck in the courthouse square every Saturday morning for as long as they had anything worth selling.  Some go to roadside stands on the side of a main road.  Some go to farmer’s markets in the neighboring counties, but the market is run from the bed of a pickup truck.  Silly’s Mom worked a job in town and then farmed until the sun went down.  Then every Saturday, she loaded the truck and tried to sell everything out of the truck bed.”  Then, Mitzi turned to Home Wrecker.  “Do I tell it all?”

Home Wrecker said, “Not the gory details, but enough for us to know your relationship with the two people at this wedding.”

Mitzi nodded, “With Silly’s Mom gone all the time except bedtime, my Mom took care of Silly.  So we were simply two sisters that lived in different houses.  I cried my eyes out when Silly went off to kindergarten.  But before I get too far, it was about the time I was in kindergarten or the first grade when people around the county said that Herbie and I were going to be a power couple in the county.  It was just gossip, but I always felt it would happen.  I had no idea how.  He went to town to go to church, and Silly and I went to a country church.  Herbie went to the big school in town and Silly and I went to a tiny county school.  Sometimes we had less than ten high school graduates, but there were nearly twenty my senior year.”

With hundreds in my senior class, I could not imagine having a school that small.

Home Wrecker asked, “If you and Herbie never saw each other at school or church, how did you meet?”

Mitzi groaned, “I need to talk about Silly first.  When we both reached puberty, we would still walk around the house without clothes on.  Not provocative as much as we loved getting dirty in the barn.  We’d take a bath before lunch and since Silly’s clothes were in the wash, we’d go to my bedroom without any clothes on.  But when Silly started discovering herself, she showed me how to feel really good.  Then we started doing those things to each other.  It wasn’t love making in our eyes, just something fun to do that felt good.  But with that going on for a year or so, our church had a gospel sing.  I was a soprano, so I was there, and we invited the other churches if they wanted to come.  Herbie’s church didn’t show up, but he did.  He sang tenor, but during one of the breaks, he said he had wondered who everyone in the county was whispering would be his bride.  That was his pickup line.  We started to date, and my mother encouraged me to go to bed with him, but it took six or seven dates before that happened.  To avoid school conflicts and church conflicts, he would pick me up on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  He treated me to a movie or a meal and then I treated him to my bedroom.  My parents conveniently were watching television on the other side of the house.  But one Friday, after football season was over, Herbie showed up and I was in bed with Silly.  By now, we knew what we were doing, but we couldn’t stop.  Herbie did not even knock.  He walked through the front door and right to my bedroom.  I stammered an introduction, but Herbie did not care.  This was the fantasy he had, to have two girls at once.  After that, Silly knew not to show up on Herbie nights, but one time she did, and she simply joined us.  Those two nights were the only times I ever saw Herbie and Silly in the same room, but Herbie was two years older.  He went to the Naval Academy.  He kept writing, saying that he loved me and he would come back for me.  But gaps in school simply meant that he would go to naval stations to get a feel of the different things naval officers did.  Silly went off to nursing school a year later, but it was a two-year program.  Then I came here the following year.  I still got letters saying that I was his one and only.  Then this message with photos of the wedding.  They want me to be happy for them.  How?  How could this happen?”

B.B. said, “You will find that I am the cynical minded one of the group.  I’m thinking that Herbie did not know how to break off your relationship with him.  He was probably seeing Silly on the side ever since that first accidental encounter, if it was accidental.”

I groaned, “I seem to be in a dark hole tonight.  I’m thinking that Silly was sick and tired of being the poor relation.  She may have caught Herbie’s eye as early as the gospel sing.  Then she orchestrated everything to steal your man away from you because she was jealous.  She probably told Herbie that you were the one who introduced the girl-on-girl bedroom gymnastics instead of it being the other way around.  Since early on, she came to your house because she had to do so.  Why? She was poor and she swore she would never be poor again.”

Home Wrecker sighed, “And between those two observations, you might find the truth.  Someday, you may be able to forgive your former best friend.  But for now, you have us.  We love you.  We are a team.  We share our victories and our defeats.  We give each other hugs.  But right now, we need popcorn.”

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door.  We opened the door to find Fred and Easy loaded down with bags of popcorn.  Easy said, “Not as many flavors as I usually get, but when you go to a strange town, beggars cannot be choosy.”

Credits

The “sack of bleeps” is in honor of an old friend at work.  He and I would review each other’s work for computer-based training applications.  You did not want to record audio voice over and compile the software before finding a sentence fragment, noun-verb disagreement, etc.  I don’t think he ever did it with me, but a third content writer often got a cute little drawing of what might be a sack of gold in the corner of the text.  The writer, a young engineer, would ask what the drawing was all about.  He was told that he needed a sack of these.  When the writer looked confused, my friend said, “A Sack of THEs.  A very usual word spelled T-H-E.  Without the THE in the sentence, half the time, what you write makes no sense at all.”  The sad thing is this young writer often got such sacks.  I hope Mitzi can control her tongue better in the future.

I do not know where I heard “suicide seat” first.  I think it was on a bus, where the first row had only four seats and the next row had five.  The odd seat was the suicide seat, without the seatbelt buckled, you would fly through the windshield in an abrupt stop.  The other seats had some sort of framing or bulkhead.  But when I got on the train from Jamshedpur, West Bengal, India to Kolkata, the only seat available was the suicide seat.  I stared at the opening to nowhere for the entire trip.  Nowhere in that I was in the first car and the fuel car and engine were the only things in front of me.  I made sure that the seat was buckled.  In many countries, they do not have seat belts on such modes of transportation.

And I patterned the Mitzi corner of the state to be like my home county when I was growing up.  Every small community had their own school.  I think a couple of them might not even have a graduating class on very odd years.  But about the time I graduated from the town’s school system, two new schools were being built.  First the black schools were shut down to force integration and then the county schools were consolidated into two schools, the northern half of the county and the southern half.  Now these schools have enough attendance to have a full curriculum.  And I do not think that they have a harvest school break, where the school closes for a couple of weeks during the harvest, since no one would come to school anyway.  But they had that break when I was in school, just not in the town’s school.

When I was growing up, the truck farms were just as described in Mitzi’s county.  Since most of the retail stores in the downtown area were to the west of the court square with the courthouse to the south, the truck farm trucks would park along the west side of the square.  You could go shopping at the drug store, clothing store or the five-and-dime and then walk across the street for fresh vegetables.  But over the years, I have seen lean-to shacks along the roadside.  As one farmer said, “I make sure I have ripe tomatoes.  A basket full of the red stuff gets people to pull over faster than anything else.”  He even admitted buying tomatoes in town for resale, just to get people to stop.  But in SW Pennsylvania they have Farmer’s Markets scattered everywhere.  Some of the more established markets buy from the farmers for a marked up resale, but some have stands set up for each farmer to display their produce.  In my high school years, I rode the bus with a young man, two years younger, who became a Baptist preacher at sixteen.  His mother ran a truck farm.  I helped him clean up the garden a little.  We found cucumbers in a neglected row that were the size of footballs, not good for sale.  Have you ever had a slice of pickle that was bigger than the bun?