Ed wished.â
âThe Board of Directors told me that there would be a phasing out, but I didnât know when you were going to decide to begin it.â
âThe Workers are taking an inventory of our goods and will be having meetings over the coming weeks on how to inconspicuously place them where they wonât be noticed.â
âWeâll take care of that back east, Wolf. We will have them go to up-and-coming Businesses. These Businesses will have to go through the same phases as your factory, Solid Gumbo Works. They will need time to gain enough knowledge to do with only token physical assets. We have to be fast. Physical assets weigh us down.â
âGood, then itâs decided. We will begin to dissolve the Solid Gumbo Works the world has come to know and disperse, communicating only through the post office box.â
âIâm glad you made the decision, Wolf. I admire the way it was handled. If you had liquidated after your father was killed that would have been interpreted as a sign of failure, and it would have made all of us look weak in the eyes of the competition, for what is the situation in their other Businesses if this particular west coast franchise buckled under, they would ask. They would have put pressure on us at the T.C. Institute and branches throughout the world. This way, since they know weâre ahead, our disappearance from the public scene will be interpreted as meaning that youâve found a lucrative market elsewhere. So-called legitimate businesses make these kinds of decisions all the time.â
âThank you for seeing it my way, LaBas. No word of this is to be said to anyone. Iâve only told the Workers. Weâll just continue to operate as we always have, then one day, our mission accomplished, we will have up and gone. I have to go now, Pop. Must send our Going Out of Business cards to our customers. Donât have to worry about them. Theyâre discreet and wonât talk.â Wolf went out. LaBas returned to reading the Berkeley Gazette . His eyes scanned the television listings. Inaccurate as usual.
CHAPTER 13
Chorus is seated in an outdoor café.
ââThe Chorus has gone too far,â they said. âHe has upstaged our pretty actors.â
âCheap makeup peels off their faces. They stumble and forget their lines; âPlease cue me,â some of they say. To put it in the language of old American slavery days, the Chorus, me, was a fugitive slave who wanted his aesthetic Canada, but the Claimant and Sambo wanted to bring me back to the Master.â
Imagine that. âThe people downstairsâ wanted to can his strophes, his delightful twists and turns. âThe people downstairs.â
âOne woman led the pack. She had an âtigone on her. âTigone, the beginning of my difficulties, hogging all my good lines. Couldnât be cool, that wench.
âLike, the elders of Thebes and Creon didnât give a damn if she went out into the woods to fuck, drink and prance about a huge goat. Creon and the elders were interested in the spirit of the law and not its letter. They werenât finicky. Each to his own God, as they use to say in the Congo.
âNo, she had to brag about her malady and boost it.
ââGo marry Hades,â Creon had said. âYou are his bride.â
âHe could see Hades grinning behind her like she was ghost-photographed because she, like Core, had tasted of Hadesâ fruit and had been touched by this loa. The burial of her brother was just a cover-up. All those speeches, âthe wisdom of man vs. the wisdom of God.â
âDo you suppose that Zeus really gave a hang whether Polynices was buried? Zeus was too busy chasing tail to be bothered with such trifles. No, this woman wanted to die and she was going about it in a roundabout wayâall that blather. This woman was demanding. Sophocles edited out many of my good lines because of this woman
Alaska Angelini, A. A. Dark