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Chapter 24

Ari’s strategic threat assessment was partway on point. They were indeed headed in the direction of the Double W Ranch. As per their previous conversation, Billy aka de General aka Guillermo had called back with instructions that they proceed to meet at Stone Rock the following day at High Noon, although he just said around lunchtime. Also, he added that they were to come alone. In making said stipulation, he was abundantly clear. Nuh babylon detective man. Nuh funny tings.

(No juras, eh. I hate pigs, homes. Policia, policia.)

Kitty received the call that afternoon and informed Mick of the developing situation with Billy. For his part, Mick was downright perplexed. Why are we just letting this rich kid psycho give us the runaround? Let’s just get Schuster and Shanker on the horn and let them sort it. Or better yet, we call the cops. Like we should have done when he crashed his car through our fucking wall. He’ll fold like a cheap suit and cut us a check for damages. Or he won’t. Honestly, I don’t much care anymore, Kit.

Alas, she insisted. All this bad medicine with the Mayor, Jamie, the Wolff boy. Something inside was pushing her forward to see it through.

Of course Grace and Zeke agreed to tag along. By now they were accessories or at the very least witnesses to whatever crime was being committed by whoever on behalf of whichever party. Beside, for the first time in their albeit brief brewing industry careers, they seemed to be having some actual fun. It had always been Hank who had a special way of making the mundane and the ordinary seem less so. There was a certain je ne sais quoi about him, you could say. When he disappeared, so too did that bold, New Frontier spirit. Simply put, things around the bar had been kind of a bummer, lately. But now, ever since his Celebration-of-Life, some of that special Hankness had been resurrected. Maybe that’s what Kitty was feeling, deep down inside. Or maybe it was something else.

For convenience's sake (narrative and otherwise), the Double W Ranch just so happened to be a hop, skip and a jump from Hank’s farmhouse. (By way of a few hundred feet of fence line, they were technically neighbors. Although that means less when the house next door is only accessible via a long ATV’s or a short helicopter’s ride.) Kitty suggested to Mick that they use all this as an excuse to drop in. Show Zeke and Grace the joint. Maybe play some board games? Make a night of it. You know, aside from meeting the investigators from the Forest Service — maybe Hank had left a note, they hoped in vain … this was about the extent of the Park Rangers’ deductive powers, god bless them — they hadn’t been out to the property since … well, since Hank, said Kitty. Mick couldn’t make a lick of sense about what in the world was up with her. Obviously he got that impression the new job wasn’t all she cracked it up to be. Or at least that the honeymoon phase was over, that was for sure. Then there was all the Hank stuff, and the yecto it entailed. (Kitty taught Mick about Yecto, a fun shorthand for the Spanish word, Proyecto, which translates literally to Project in English. As a slang term, it means, Something you have to do but don’t want to do. It can be applied to any and all hassles of modern life. Such as air travel — that’s a yecto. Homework — yecto. [Really, all of school qualifies as yecto.] Shucking corn — yecto. Hiding a body — yecto. Filing taxes — big yecto. Try incorporating yecto into your own everyday vernacular. It’s really quite versatile. Say for example your mother asks you to take out the trash. You simply reply: Sorry, mom … I don’t do yectos!) All that notwithstanding, she wasn’t the type for going along with all these shenanigans. Not typically, anyway. She was a financially responsible molder of young minds. Suppose that Mick could ask Kitty what was troubling her, rather than reluctantly indulging her sudden onset erratic behaviors. Yeah, well. Easy for you to say.

So here they were, on the road again.

En la carretera de nuevo

Simplemente no puedo esperar para volver a la carretera

La vida que amo es hacer música con mis amigos.

Y no puedo esperar para volver a la carretera

En route to La Casa de Campo de la Cervecería Nueva Frontera. Hank said it doesn’t get any classier than having a house with a name. All the great men of history named their houses. Mount Vernon, Monticello (bonus points if it’s exotic sounding), mother fucking Graceland. (Neverland Ranch, the Mick retorted.) This particular name was a bit of a mouthful, so guests nicknamed it Hacienda del Hal, or Hank’s El Rancho, for short. Truth be told he didn’t spend all too much time there anyway. He wandered a great deal, often alone, in the wilderness. But when he wasn’t on a big adventure, his second favorite pastime was talking about the first. That required an audience of people, of which there was precious little out in the country. So he mostly stayed over at his townhouse, a few city blocks from the brewery, where he could spin his yarn to his heart’s content. After all, he owned the place.

That relegated La Casa de Campo de la Cervecería Nueva Frontera to second-home status. Hank had sometimes given the Mick and Kitty farmhouse privileges for the assistant brewer’s rare weekend off. Six or so months before the disappearance, they had rung in the New Year there, just the two of them. No fireworks show to speak of. Seen one, seen them all-sorta thing, fireworks shows are, wouldn’t you agree? Nothing anyway compared to the starry night sky, which, even just an hour’s drive beyond the light pollution of the metroplex, revealed a celestial majesty unknown to city slickers the likes of Kitty and Mick, looking up from his and hers rocking chairs on the porch. Pair of big quilted blankets and piping hot mugs of mulled wine Kitty bought at the Holiday Market. You could do well to grow old like this, Kitty observed. Mhmm, yep. It was like they were in a dick pill commercial, Mick agreed.

Driving across the infamous covered bridge, they hung a right where Billy and Yayo-L would have banged a left. Sure enough the man followed. They had made him less than a mile out from the brewery. Not that it was Ari’s fault, necessarily. It was on the spectrum of difficult-to-damned-near-impossible, discreetly tailing someone in quarter-of-a-million-dollar-car with a pair of slobbering muts hanging tongue out the passenger side window, ever true to the two-headed, inbred monster they were. Kitty got a good look at him in the rearview mirror. (She had excellent eyesight.) It was the real estate agent-looking fella in the slick suit with the shirt unbuttoned down to his damn belly button about. At the bar, from whom she snagged the saison. Maybe somebody sent by Billy? A spy, perhaps?

More likely it was some lawyer, the Mick ventured a guess. Regarding the car in the wall incident. WC in-house counsel, probably, on a house call errand as some glorified insurance adjuster. He had to deal with those vultures about the clavicle fracture he got flipping his dirtbike. Dickhead was out there looking at tread patterns with a magnifying glass. Sniffing dirt like a fucking Indian tracker. Of course they denied the claim outright. Oh, you’ve determined I’m the liable party at fault? I’ve determined you are a slippery piece of shit. I ought to launch you twenty feet in the air and let your collarbone break the fall. See how you like it, asshole. Douchebag. Whoa, honey, what’s with all the cursing? Louisa and Thad’ve been rubbing off on you. Both of us. It’s true, Mick couldn’t help but notice his temper was getting shorter. He wasn’t always like this. Oh my god, I’m turning into Russ Scherer. Fucking a, Michael. Get a goddamn grip.

La Casa de Campo de la Cervecería Nueva Frontera was marked from the road by a sign beside the mailbox. Hank had paid the Mick fifty bucks an hour to hand paint the pistolero-looking typeface, but he promptly ran out of room. They two had to run out the hardware store and buy a shingle to hang off the bottom with the last two words. The dirt road driveway leading up to the big house was long, although not nearly Wolffenhaus long. As well as there was only the one tree, at the end. But whoa it was the perfect tree, Kitty believed. Circumference-wise, thereabout even with the leg on a mature bull elephant, the tree trunk had a classic circular hollow, about the size of a bread box. It would have been ideal for stashing any manner of trinkets or treasures. Messages from secret admirers. We should carve our initials into the bark. Then there was the big, overhanging limb, just crying out for a tire swing to be strung up. Even sturdy enough for a treehouse, maybe. One with a rope ladder — retractable, in case any hostile Indians, radical Islamic terrorists or girls tried to climb up on a cootie raid. The Mick couldn’t tell you what type of tree it was, species-wise. That was the kind of stuff Hank always purported to know. (It was an English oak.) Being how he was your parents’ age of person, one who would always be narrating the passing natural phenomena as if he were Sir Dick Attenborough himself. Pointing out the specific mountain in a range. Identifying bird calls. Sort of guy who can and will tell you whether or not it’s an El Niño year, whatever the hell that means. Shit like that. Kitty suspected he was mostly full of hot air, anyway — not unlike the waters of the equatorial Pacific during an El Niño year — but she’d never call him out. His extemporanious commentaries were usually enhancing to her experience, be them accurate or in. Usually. Once when sitting out on the porch, Hank wondered aloud whether anybody had been condemned to death on this very tree. Maybe some proper train robbers, but more likely common horse thieves. Petty equine larceny. There wouldn’t have been a hanging judge, nor a proper gallows, not anywheres nearby. Could have tied four or five of them across, easy. Anyway, no time for trials or any other such jurisprudence, what with those storm clouds rolling in. One by one, kick their stolen mounts right out from under them. The sheriffs or the marshals or the rangers or whatever else law responded to the scene would’ve been within their duly appointed right to adjudicate those sentences on site. You hold down their legs when they twitch, deputy. Here were men who lived by a code of swift reprisals. Then go on and dig them four graves, shallow and unmarked. Frontier justice. Ah hell … this terra is too damn firma, and that front is bearing down in a hurry to be damn sure. Justicia de la frontera. Best to leave them up there beside. Kitty didn’t so much appreciate when Hank’s external monologue took for such a turn to the macabre. Pin a sign to their jefe here that says Muerte A Bandidos Caballos … reckon that ought to make their companeros think twice alright.

(Hank didn’t know this — there wasn’t a commemorative plaque — but someone had swung on that very same tree limb. And not on no tire neither. Alas, he weren’t a famous bandit. Nor was even a he, as it were. She, had been a homesteader who hung had there at her own accord. Didn’t leave a note, in case you’re morbidly curious as to the why of the matter. She had her letters, mind you. It just wasn’t the custom for that time and place, to annotate the occasion for one’s dying at a hand t’was their own. That and her husband for his part couldn’t read a lick, beside. He’d have been the only partway interested party, she reckoned. Better to spare him the final indignity of being read aloud her last words. The rest of his widowed days though, he couldn’t help but ponder about the how come of it all. It’s only natural, suppose. With a hundred fifty-some odd years of hindsight, though, shouldn’t’ve seemed sort of obvious. Just that, well, life was mighty lonely out there way past the edge of civilization. Specially what with all four of their sons succumbing to that damned jumping fever. Of course as well as being how their rock farming enterprise probably hadn’t panned out to be all that prosperous. But none of that occurred to him — the lack of creature comforts and other such hardships. What else was there supposed to be, apart from all this nothing? That was his opinion. Eventually all that no-good wondering got the best of him, and he memorized enough words for to take a gander at her diary with, and at least get the gist at some of the latter entries. Unfortunately, come time he did, there weren’t much in the way of answers anyhow. It wouldn’t have suited her to go on whining to herself about their sorry lot. Mostly she wrote to keep herself from going crazy, albeit was in vain. There was a matter though she cited particular, one which made her go a fair way’s bananas. You wouldn’t’ve ever guessed what it was. The wind. It seemed to haunt her. Just the way it never let up howling.)

They parked parallel to the barn. An elegant mid-century modern design, in keeping with the aesthetic of the big house. You’d be hard-pressed to find one prettier. Once a fella come to take its picture for a magazine. Barns Monthly, maybe. Didn’t matter that nary a four-legged creature had ever set hoof inside. Of that you could be certain. Hank used it as a glorified storage unit for his sundry sporting goods. Canoes, kayaks, skis, surfboards, skateboards, ice skates, rollerblades, hang gliders. Bikes for all terrains. Road racers, mountain bombers, beach cruisers. (Nevermind that there weren’t a beach to cruise for a considerable distance in any direction.) Alas, no dirt bikes. Nothing with a combustion engine, whatsoever. Hank disapproved of outdoor motorsports — jet skiing, four-wheeling, snowmobiling … noise pollution, all — including and especially the Mick’s hillbilly excuse for a hobby, dirt biking. Hank was more than happy to say I told you so when he wrecked. He did chip in for the hospital bills, however. But only on Kitty’s behalf, not on account of his sorry ass. He made that abundantly clear.

Zeke had no earthly desire to go kite surfing noor dune buggying, but he had always dreamed of having a porch like this. His father was from Mississippi, and he wasn’t the reminiscing type, but he had a brother — Zeke’s uncle, Errol — who told tales of their kin down there. That they had a country house of a respectable size that everybody could fit in comfortable. And that they had a porch just like this one, with the screen around it to keep away the skeeters, where everybody would congregate together as family. Pappy would sit out there rocking all the day long, spinning his yarn to anybody who would listen. Oh, lord, here comes mammy with a fresh pitcher of sweet tea. Mm-hmm. Zeke thought a lot about how nice it would have been to have a safe place like that for he and his people. There wasn’t but one room in their current house of a sufficient square footage for accommodating them all. Not simultaneous at once. Being as such, Zeke’s father wished Uncle Errol wouldn’t put ideas like that in his nephew’s head. Talking like we was some Black Kennedys. That rickety old house and the dilapidated porch attached to it wasn’t no family compound nohow. Not unless you’re talking about the family of vermin nesting neath it. They were the Racoon Rockefellers. We were just renting from them. Mississippi ain’t gone nowhere, Errol. If it’s such a fine place, how come it is we all done and left it? All them years, living like we do. And you’re nostalgic. Like a damn fool.

The Mick fumbled with the keys. Just as soon as he got the front door open it started beeping at him. Welcome home. Fuck. Fuck. Scrambling at the alarm keypad like he was disarming a damn nuclear warhead. Fuck. Fuck. Oh-three, two-three, five-six. The Mick didn’t know the numeric significance, but the code was Mary Ellen Moffet’s birthday.

Grace looked up at the a-frame cathedral ceilings and back down at the wood-burning stove. It worked, technically … but, like, the house also had central air, so it was really more of a show-piece. In the southwest corner nearest the door, there was a in a beat-to-hell hard case, embellished with a fading bumper sticker — Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy. Grace immediately snapped it opened to reveal a mint, pre-War dreadnought. The wide grain of the sitka spruce top and the pearl inlaid fretboard just about glowed. (Oh, we happy.) Going off her eyeball appraisal, this hoss would fetch a good sight more than the blue book value of Kitty’s car at auction, easy. She wasn’t an antique dealer, or anything, but Grace could pick a little bit. (Hank, on the other hand, couldn’t play a lick or a riff or any other thing. An A-chord, he learned. Mary’d taught him.) And here was a handsome instrument. A bluegrass monster by the looks, just waiting to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting village. Alas she left it be. You never wanted to be one of those assholes that sees a guitar and just starts banging away at it. Not in mixed company. (I gave my love a cherry, etc. … ) She did want to put on some music though, feeling overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sensation of entering a home that hadn’t been lived in for some time. Not since the man who owned it died, presumably. Even he hadn’t lived there, live there, you wouldn’t say. An empty house fosters a sort of stillness that’s unsettling. All the smells and the colors percolate there until somebody finally opens the door. Then they crash out all over you, like a sensory tsunami. Even the silence had piled up. So she snagged the Mick’s CD booklet straight out from his outstretched hand and beelined for the top-of-the-line stereo system, which was right behind that seldomly-strummed six-string. You had to be quick to the draw if you were going to beat the Mick to choosing the music. Relishing the opportunity, she quite deliberately leafed through the polypropylene sleeves, two-by-two, four discs to a page. Of course Grace and other pilgrims had beheld his good book before, but every time the Mick couldn’t help but feel a little violated. Like somebody were reading his diary. Well, Grace thought, now that’s provocative. Phish. Big Cypress (Soundcheck). 31 December 1999, Big Cypress Indian Reservation, Florida.

On the day old Curtis died nobody came to pray

Ol' preacher said some words and they chunked him in the clay

Well he lived a lifetime playin' the black man's blues

And on the day he lost his life that's all he had to lose

Zeke carried the reusable grocery bags from the car, all four in a single bound. The Mick was fixing to make his famous lamb chops with a pomegranate and mint salsa, and as usual he’d over-shopped. He never skimped in the snack department. (Who’s to say they wouldn’t go through two party-sized bags of chips?) Ducking beneath the stainless steel range hood and weaving around the overhanging copper cookware, Zeke looked out the sliding glass kitchen doors. Maybe on account of the evening haze, but the setting sun appeared to be rolling between the rocky bluffs in the distance. This pastoral landscape was foregrounded by two smaller manmade structures, designed in the very same, contemporary-rustic aesthetic motif.

Are those like mini barns?

Without looking up — he was currently rifling through the bags for those cookies — the Mick responded.

One on the left is an outhouse. Don’t worry, it’s mostly decorative. There’s indoor plumbing.

There was a crescent shape and an accompanying star carved into the door.

What’s the one on the right?

Before the Mick could answer, Grace somehow materialized from inside the outhouse, swung the door closed, gave a good stretch of her lower back and a shimmy of the shoulders before heading back to the main house. Meanwhile Kitty saddled up to the marble island, reached into the only bag Mick hadn’t yet searched, and retrieved a cellophane sleeve of creme-filled chocolate cookies. Playfully she resisted his attempts to reclaim the stolen treats himself. Grace slid through the glass doors and interrupted this nice moment betwixt them in a way that only she could.

Nice shitter. That the coolship next door?

Yep.

Zeke had heard tell about the Wild Ale Project, but only in passing from the Mick. That was way back when he started on as assistant brewer, some months ago. The jist was that one day he and Hank’d just said, Fuck It, and built a coolship, which, if you must know, is a kind of open-top brewing vessel. Looks a bit like a stadium trough but wider, nearly as it is long. A giant baking pan, if you please. The Belgians use ‘em — although it’s spelt koelschip in the original Flemish — for making a style called lambic, a term the Mick wouldn’t ever dare to use. The way they do it down Brussels-way, yonder oer the Payottenland, the whole process grain-to-glass takes at least a year and change. Could spend as long as three years in the barrels, which sounded like the ultimate fucking yecto, to Grace at least. Anyway, the Mick had sort of yada-yada’d the thing, giving off the impression that maybe it was a mission that’d since been aborted, so to speak, what with Hank dying and everything.

Constructed right into the side of a friendly little knoll, the foundation of the shed that contained the coolship was itself propped up on short stilts. Also housed therein — this was a considerable-sized shed — was the original Newfy brewhouse, the five-barrel system cobbled together converted dairy tanks and other assorted scrap. Back out front, on either side of an arched doorway, the facade was ornamented by four stained-glass windows, very similar to the one from the bar, with imitation Renaissance-style depictions of a Daredevil Messiah.

Having immediately lost interest in this, Grace was picking through the groceries now for something to nibble on herself, settling on some Buffalo sauce and ranch dressing-flavoured pretzel sticks. Zeke got to putting away the produce and the other perishables. Hank’d restored a retro refrigerator, complete with the chrome handles and a bottle cap opener mounted on the side. Looked straight out of the old department store catalogues. Women Dreamed It … Home Economists Designed It. Choose Any Color From The Rainbow! (Hank’s was a pistachio pastel.) Eat your heart out, Khrushchev.

Everybody’s building the big ships and the boats

Some are building monuments

Others, jotting down notes

Ev’rybody’s in despair

Every girl and boy

But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here

Ev’rybody’s gonna jump for joy

Come all without, come all within

You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

Shouldn’t everyone have, or have access to a house in the country? A cabin, or a cottage or whatever you want to call it. Be it on a rocky beach or a river bank or a lake shore. Preferably bordering some body of water, but a mountainside or a meadow would do just fine. Any place to get away. Because weren’t they having such a wonderful time? Zeke in particular. He never had occasion to venture out much in nature.

The Mick and Grace were working in the kitchen while Zeke and Kitty made a fire and started a puzzle. It was a jigsawed print of a painting called Consummation. Kitty solemnly hoped it wasn’t missing any pieces. It looked to have been put together and taken apart a time or two before. (If ever I return / all your cities I shall burn.) They found it in a cupboard with a bunch of other board games. Hank had all the classics. Monopoly > Battleship > Risk > Clue > Connect Four > The Game of Life Sorry. (There was also one other puzzle to choose from. A one thousand-piece panoramic view from behind home plate at Wrigley Field.) There was a luxury backgammon set, custom-made to Hank’s specs with hemp detailing. (No animal products. He played vegan backgammon.) They kept a cheapo board in a pleather briefcase at the bar, a legacy from when Russ would challenge regulars for double or nothing on their tabs. Still to this day, on a slow night (was there any other kind?), Thadeus and Louisa had been known to have a spirited game. Fucking double sixes, again? Fucking cunt. If it weren’t for good luck you’d be licking taints under an overpass. And you can wipe that ass-eating smile off your face while you’re at. No, I’m serious. I want to know. You dildo … what’s the secret to your fucking success? Thad patiently remade his board as he formulated his response.

Prayer.

Whilst the food was cooking, the Mick strapped on a headlamp and excused himself outside for a moment. Grace watched as he walked past the coolship and around the well, which was beyond the one-hundred feet away from the outhouse as per regulations set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. There he seemingly disappeared below ground, into a separate, subterranean shelter. They were far from tornado alley. Maybe it was a survivalist bunker, Grace hoped. Moments later he re-emerged, with shelf-stable rations of a sort. He was cradling a bottle in the crook of his elbow. The glass door slid open with a burst of air that was so cold you could see it. Smelled to Kitty like it might snow. This would have been the first of the year. Kitty was decidedly not a winter person. Oh, how she hated scraping off the windshield in the bone-chilling, blue-grey dawn. Only just once if she could remember to brush off from above the driver’s side door so that the accumulated snow wouldn’t cascade onto the non-heated drivers’ seat below. (In its short history, SciTech had made it a point of pride to have never once called a snow day. Core Value No. Five: At All Costs, Learning.) But even the warm-blooded among us can get excited to spot those first few flakes, a-fluttering down. Hank romanticized the winter. The way he saw things, it was kind of an axel in the cycle of life and death. It’s absolutely essential, he’d tell Kitty, to have this season that is so inhospitable to life forms. All of them. It kills them off. Plants, bugs … all the tiny atoms of organic matter that we as big bad humans take for granted. It humbles us. Then it all gets born again.

The Mick placed the bottle sideways at an acute, albeit barely upward angle, in a cute little basket that was just big enough to hold it. (He wasn’t the bragging type so he didn’t announce it to the group, but of course the Mick’d weaved it himself.) The dark emerald glass had accumulated some dust, which he wiped clean with a rag he had handy. Thus revealing no elaborate label with an all-too clever illustration of some double entendre. Just a single streak of what appeared to be white-out brushed on with its little applicator thingy. Knowing exactly where to look, two at a time, Kitty fetched four tumbler glasses from a cabinet that was catty-corner to the sink. Grace and Zeke sat silently around the island countertop. No one was narrating this experience, and the newcomers didn’t feel compelled to ask questions. With the fluid motion of his right wrist, the Mick twisted open the cage and popped the cork. The pour was patient, and slow. He about half-filled the first three, only just cresting the summits of the crystalline ridge work on the glasswares’ base. Then about a quarter-ways’ for Kitty who didn’t have to wave him off. When he finished — without saying cheers or proost or salud, or even raising their glasses any higher than their mouths — they each one took a drink. Grace and Zeke stared back down into their glasses, all doe-eyed. Mick meanwhile looked to Kitty, as always for her approval. Which she rendered, in the form of a two-word review. That it was bright and true.

###

The rest of the night they nursed about a half-dozen Natty Dubs between the three of them. Hank had a stash at the back of that vintage ice box. Expiration date unknown. That shit’d last a nuclear winter.

Grace did a J out on one of those rocking chairs which got her just buzzed enough to pick up that guitar, without it feeling all weird. Seemingly by some spell of hobo magic, the Mick produced a harmonica, as if from a bindle or a fucking rucksack, and they commenced with some light jamming. She strummed her second favorite Phish song with his accompaniment, playing the Page part on harp — a faithful riff on Rhapsody in Blue.

Brett is in the bathtub

making soup for the ambassadors

and I am in the hallway

singing to the troubadours

The kings are all lined up

outside the gate

and the autumn bells are ringing

but they'll just have to wait

Kitty and Zeke carried on doing their puzzle. Zeke hadn’t even once thought to check his phone. Suppose then he probably didn’t have service all the ways out there anyhow. She comes to tell him unsolicited the story of how she and Mick came to meet Hank. They were on separate but apparently intersecting bicycle tours through the Senne river valley. Hank recognized a fellow American and potential kindred spirit by his Grateful Dead concert t-shirt. Kitty had thrifted it for him. It was some bootleg merch for a show at in Orchard Park, New York, where they played the home of the Buffalo Bills, the then-called Rich Stadium. Because at that time they had been among the first professional sports clubs to sell as an advertising product the Naming Rights of its stadium or arena or forum or barn or whatever facility in which they played the dang games. And the highest bidder happened to be the Rich Products Corporation, a likewise Western New York-based, privately-held multinational foodstuffs conglomerate, that was founded amidst widespread milk shortages during the Second World War, this upon its pioneering of a non-dairy, soy-based whipped cream alternative. (There was, however, precedent of sporting venues being named for a company that happened to be owned by the same person or family as the franchise itself, such as Wrigley’s Gum of Chicago or the Fenway Realty Company of Boston. As per the latter, the grand opening of Fenway Park [20 April 1912] was cast a pall upon somewhat by the sinking of the H.M.S. TItanic, only five business days prior.) Their subsequent development of a revolutionary non-dairy frozen coffee creamer helped put the swing in the sixties. Thereafter, presumably flush with cash in the otherwise capital-constrained early seventies, Rich Products reportedly purchased a twenty-five year stadium naming license for a million and a half dollars, indeed a paltry sum stacked against the hundreds of millions that lower band the going rates for naming rights in today’s frothy market. In the NFL season that followed the Grateful Dead playing this particular show — joined on the bill by opening act Crosby, Stills & Nash … sans Young — for the first time in franchise history, the Bills went on to represent the AFC in Super Bowl XXV against the NFC-representative New York Giants, squaring off at the neutral site of Tampa Stadium in Tampa Florida. This would have been the first Super Bowl matchup pitting opponents that hailed from the same state. However, alas, the Giants and their stadium co-tenants, the ne'er-do-well New York Jets, actually play across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Therefore, even though the Meadowlands — the oft-rumored burial ground of notorious Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, since rebuilt and renamed for a life insurance concern that had licensed the cartoon likenesses of the beloved comic strip and television-film property, Peanuts, for shilling deferred fixed-rate annuities — were only a short bridge-or-tunnel’s commute away from New York City, for our purposes — property taxes and other — the Bills of Buffalo are without dispute New York State’s One True Team. This perhaps came as little consolation when later that very season, All-Pro place-kicker Scott Norwood infamously pushed his last-second, would-have-been go-ahead field goal Wide Right, as it was so famously called by play-by-play announcer Al Michaels, cementing what’s considered to be among the most devastating losses in sports history, and what’s worse, kicking off an unheard of four-game streak of Super Bowl defeats for the cursed Bills of Buffalo. Nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills!

After a quarter century, by which time the agreement with RIch Products had duly expired, the stadium was renamed for the Bills’ founder, Ralph Wilson. For a fact, Wilson had outright refused numerous offers to resell the naming rights, much to the chagrin of his fellow team owners, who stood to benefit based on their cartel-style revenue-sharing agreement. Ralph Wilson Stadium remained called after as such, in his honour, until his dying day at ripe the age of ninety-five. Reportedly, Wilson had always loathed the name Rich Stadium, which had been monetized not by him, but by Eerie County, as part of its efforts to recoup direly-needed taxpayer funds that had been raised through a bond initiative to build the thing in the first place. But only after Wilson had held the fans of the Buffalo Metropolitan Area hostage for the approval of a publicly-financed stadium construction project, threatening to abscond with the team in the dead of night and move them across state lines to a more lucrative market, like say Seattle.

Following Wilson’s death from natural causes, the team was sold to husband and wife ownership duo Kim and Terry Pegula, who narrowly outbid Donald Trump and Jon Bon Jovi for the privilege of buying the Bills. Out of respect for Ralph, they waited a full year after his passing before turning around to sell the naming rights to New Era, another company local to Buffalo that makes baseball caps and other sports apparel. Alas, New Era would ask to be released from their thirty-five-million dollar contract, only four years into the seven-year term, citing unforeseen financial constraints that caused the company to lay off upwards of two-hundred workers in and around Orchard Park. Shortly thereafter, presumably as part of a crude, ambush marketing stunt, a company by the name of TUSHY Bidets (capitlaziation not the author’s) announced its offer to buy the rights and christen thee, the Toilet Bowl. Tempting though it may have been, the Pegulas rejected the TUSHY deal in favor of a 10-year, multi-million dollar agreement with Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western New York, a not-for-profit health insurance provider. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz raised questions as to whether the deal would lead to insurance rate hikes for BCBS members, of whom Erie County employees were among. It would be really silly for us to be paying an entity that then uses part of their fee to pay for the name on our own stadium, he said. (This in reference to the aforementioned arrangement wherein Erie County actually owns the stadium and the land on that it sits, which it then only leases to the Bills for to play their football games.) Dave Anderson, president and CEO of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western New York, said the deal would have no impact on consumers, adding that the marketing budget is separate from insurance premiums. That’s good to know.

Grace had only one more song in her repertoire, for tonight’s set anyway. Man, she had a hell of a time remembering lyrics. Mostly she just preferred to noodle.

[Slide up to C major pentatonic intro lick]

Welcome, this is a farmh—

Lol, jk. Here is what they actually played.

Now I'm gone and I'll never look back again

I'm gone and I'll never look back at all

You know I'll never look back again

I turn my face into the howling wind

It took me a long time to get back on the train

[Fucking face-melting harmonica solo]