Perpetual Motion
There's some that only seem to think in minutes, life
delivered as a stuttered slideshow set to fast ragtime
against an unfocused backdrop, like sheep stumbling
in confused terror at the same gopher hole that almost
broke their leg the hour before. Others usually manage
not to starve to death or have to walk the twenty miles
back down the canyon because they didn't fill the tank
again, and get the sort of victory that eases into happy
hour and keeps the paychecks regular and the kids sent
to school mostly on time. But occasionally there's one
or two who see a little more clearly what's coming
and have a better feel for consequence and how it is
that what happens now affects everything that comes
after, which is why when Mrs. Tagstrom happened
to glance out her window one morning and saw the red
and blue lights coming fast in front of a mounting cloud
up the long dirt road that ended at her house, she went
straight to the barn and pulled the rubber stopper out
of the cast iron clawfoot tub Mr. Tagstrom had set up
in an unused corner stall near the pig pen, and which
until then had held twenty gallons of his best moonshine.
Now we all knew how Mr. Tagstrom had retired, plus
he still advised the town on utilities as the only local
certified engineer, having planned the new drinking water
pipes from the reservoir, and even Sheriff Johnson said
as long as he didn't sell it or become a public nuisance
and showed up sober to town meetings, then the law
figured there were better tasks to manage. And also
because Mr. Page brought him in a lot for guest lectures
on hydrology and dam issues which we all liked because
it wouldn't be on the test, but even better than that
were his perpetual motion machines, which he'd first
explain were impossible according to physics, but that
wasn't the same as curiosity, and so he'd constructed
a few that would work for days until they finally
stopped, his prize piece being what looked like a four
-foot-tall Ferris wheel covered in coin-sized slugs of lead
hung from spring-driven levers that shifted as the wheel
spun, shooting out at the top to provide momentum
and then slowly retracting as they revolved and which
he was able to run for almost three weeks and was sure
he could get up to a month with better ball bearings
at which time he'd build a twenty-foot-tall full-scale
model in his backyard that would incorporate the metal
expanding and contracting over the course of a full day
and that might run for months on end in good weather.
And in the way fascination narrows the point, somehow
no one had thought until that day to ask Mrs. Tagstrom
what her opinions were on the matter, but she developed
some quickly when Sheriff Johnson's cruiser pulled into
her yard followed by a line of unmarked cars and a dozen
armed federal agents with warrants who walked right
through her protests to begin emptying every cupboard
and drawer while she sat stunned on the lawn surrounded
by mounting piles of her possessions unceremoniously
scattered in the afternoon heat. And it could have been
worse, but someone got a hold of Mr. Tagstrom before
they got much beyond the first floor and he arrived just
in time for them to hold out a batch of his coin-sized
slugs and ask if he'd like to explain now or to a judge
the charge of forgery and defrauding the government
and if he was ready to go to prison for counterfeiting
and then didn't know what to do when he laughed, since
he'd also thought they'd come about the moonshine, but
followed him to his shed where he happily showed off
his Ferris wheel and how he had the different slug weights
to create instability and offset entropy, and pulled out
the schematics for the larger model, and within the hour
they got back in their cars and drove off and just left
the two of them there to clean everything off the lawn
and then at least that part of the experience was over.
The problem was that everybody forgot about the pigs
who didn't take long after a trickle of it bled out under
the barn wall to dig and chew through and then suck
the rest of the moonshine off the straw floor, meaning
everything hit about when the last unmarked car turned
back on Main Street and suddenly the yard was a pink
squealing staggering stream that tipped over the armoire
and fractured the china almost before the Tagstroms
got out of the way and then split into running rivulets
at lawn's edge, two dozen tails fading down the road
or into corn fields while she rushed to the telephone
and he tore off in the car with a length of jute rope
and a bag of bait apples and met the Sheriff already
coming back out and Misters Williams and Stevens
on the way with a pickup and loading boards, and then
it was just finding the pigs, which was easy when one
screamed when its nose ring caught in loose fence wire
and a couple others had so much moonshine they passed
out and rolled downhill into Mrs. Unger's flowers
and for a while we thought they might die, but
the rest were more problematic and it was after dark
before the last one was back in the newly-fixed pen.
Admittedly some were only hard because they fell
asleep deep in the fields or a couple in the orchard
after gorging on dropped fruit and were found by
luck following the snoring, but others got to town
and rooted up lawns and gardens looking for food
or overturned trash cans and dragged the remains
of half-eaten chickens and potato peels and diaper
changes through the streets and scattered the search
party including one that got four miles to the interstate
and backed it up through dinner until highway patrol
lassoed and got it in a back seat they had to replace
after, and another Mrs. Wallace swatted out her kitchen
with a broom when it followed her baking peach pie
through the open front door, and a third that laid down
in front of the fire department so they couldn't drive
the truck out and gave birth to seven piglets, and
then there was one that got in with the cows under
the fence and Mr. Stevens arrived just in time to see
it nip over the silage at a Holstein who turned fast
and bore down back and he said you could watch
that pig realize its mistake as fifteen hundred pounds
of intolerance charged and sent it shrieking around
the fence line until they both got tired enough to stop
which is when he finally climbed in and roped it
because he sure as hell wasn't going to do it before.
And then just one was left with almost the whole town
by then out in the fields or their cars helping and dusk
pierced by hog calls and whistles in a widening circle
approaching mountain's base here and the interstate
there and some saying it was dead and getting cold
and maybe that was best so they could get breakfast
and start tomorrow and others arguing if it was alive
and got eaten by something down from the mountain
the town would be full of wolves and cougars wanting
more and how would that be better, but luckily no one
had to decide because about then Mr. Unger checked
one last time on his grocery and found the door open
and the pig asleep surrounded by torn packets of cakes
and doughnuts from the checkout so all he needed was
to rope its neck and lead it out, except it startled up
when touched and tore off through the aisles instead
and overturned the cereal shelf which hit canned goods
which hit baked goods which tipped onto the produce
so half the store leaned on the other with the bottles
sliding off and breaking and the pig running scared
down the meat aisle between cutlets and tenderloins
and Mr. Unger yelling out the door for help until enough
arrived to spend another fifteen minutes trying to corner
and catch it while it scrambled the overturned shelves
and smeared the floor in multicolored slurry until finally
someone roped it and put a second through the nose ring
just in case and pulled it outside to load it in the truck
and then, exhausted, leave Mr. Unger to just the cleaning
so they could go home and get a good night's sleep
and be glad everything was back to where it was before.
And so dawn made its landscape frieze and we blinked
into the everyday of trough and tractor and the shifting
of sprinkler lines into new fields, and of course for a time
we told each other about the pigs again and wondered
how the government heard to check on the counterfeiting
in the first place but no one would admit to turning him in
so speculation was rampant and pointless, and anyway late
summer Mr. Tagstrom broke ground on the twenty-foot
wheel with an open call for quality scrap metal, especially
tie rods and beam axles he could weld or lathe, and by next
July had it almost done but when he took off the brake
the first time it ramped up and spun so fast it almost
came off and rolled down the hill and forced him to spend
winter recalculating slugs and springs, but right after
snowmelt he invited us all up to watch it creak alive
and most did in a tableau of open mouths and upturned
eyes against a clear morning and the wheel slowly turning
with its weights flickering in syncopation, and Mr. Tagstrom
adding one more squirt of 3-In-One oil to the hub
before standing back and nodding his approval.
