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The Year Zero By Carl-Ben Louw A Banana Republic novel
The blood sausage and sauerkraut
that he’d had for dinner was pushing a burning surge of bile up the back of
Jake Karoo‘s throat, and keeping it down, south of his ribcage, was harder
than teaching a herd of cats how to play water polo, something that Jake had
succeeded in doing only once before. He’d been a more enthusiastic circus
clown at the time 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,
high up in the Northern Mountain province 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 had kept potential
audiences huddled inside their huts, so several shows had 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 – the local
equivalent of a magistrate - 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. |
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Last modified: December 20, 2011