Page 1

The Year Zero

By Carl-Ben Louw

A Banana Republic novel

         Jake Karoo was trying very hard to keep the blood sausage and sauerkraut that he’d had for dinner south of his ribcage where it belonged.

It had been a hard week for Karoo’s Circus. Negotiations with the Stabstaff District Heimraden about a week’s rental of the wind-blown, gnat-infested plot at the edge of the village of Stabstaff, had ended only when Jake, the circus’s owner, manager and master of ceremonies extraordinaire, agreed to fork over no less than sixty percent of the gate after every night’s show. Then, for two nights in a row, an early spring snowstorm kept potential audiences huddled inside their huts, so several shows had to be cancelled. Now they didn’t have the funds to even reach the next town. And it was about to get worse.

Demanding the ridiculous rental was none other than the local drossaard, Halobsang “Holdout” Harumpa. He’d earned the nickname “Holdout” Harumpa. He was a dealmaker who always held out and got his way, no matter what it took. This usually included the threat of the brass knuckle, always implied, never openly stated but never doubted by his adversary.

He also had one of the worst cases of halitosis south of the Northern Mountains.

This was due to a number of factors. There was his great fondness, in spite of a growing Lactose intolerance, for the pungent local goats-milk cheeses. Then there was the cool mountain climate that produced an ever-present stalagmite of mucus in the cavern-like network of his sinus and nasal passages and the back of his throat, and a deep-pile carpet of slime on his tongue and tonsils. And, finally, there were the garlic buttons that were imported from the southern lowlands and that he munched as if they were peanuts.

NEXT PAGE