CHAPTER TWO (8) Mitzi's dream continued...

The accountant got up again and ushered him to the door. He was tinier than Matt had imagined, but nonetheless intimidating. His suit made up for it, and his manner. As they made their way toward the door, Mitzi heard the ghastly moaning of the person in the back room and winced.

“I do wish he would shut up already!” cried the accountant. “I can never get anything done around here with that incessant groaning. Here are your keys.”

Mitzi poured onto the street into the hell again. It was dark although the sun was out: the buildings towered menacingly. He expected rain, but the clouds didn’t look all that promising. He wished it might rain to wash out all of this agony.

This is it? Matt thought. He put the keys into a black Mark III and tested the engine. It will suffice. He looked into the rear view mirror –

“Holy fucking shit!”

“You didn’t think you’d be going alone, did you?” said Dogbert. There was Virgil next to him, his yellow teeth emerging from his lips in that ever-present smile. Behind the two in the back of the van were the pilgrims – those who would be bringing the word of God to the mob within the heart of District 11. A little perturbed, Mitzi took his foot off the breaks. He had known that NORML would be sending pilgrims to the most difficult of areas, but he hadn’t been notified that they’d be on his mission.

Next to the pilgrims stood the weapons and ammunition. Next to the ammunition stood the first aid kits and oxygen tanks. A defibrillator stood nearby those. The van was pretty cramped, but adequate. Essentially, the van was an ambulance equipped for a mass casualty incident in the form of a ‘96 Mark III with armored sidewalls.

But what most amazed Matt were the three men cramped in the farthest regions of the van: the natives of District 11. Their clothing was torn and shabby and irrefutably soiled. Their faces were all gaunt and expressionless, and they held close to them a good three pounds of beef wrapped in an oily newspaper. They seemed to Matt to be excessively underweight, but their eyes, their eyes bulged out of their cheek bones so intensely! It seemed as if those eyes were watching Mitzi’s every turn of the wheel, every shift in gear, every transition from clutch to break. They were menacing and dangerous, and Mitzi kept one eye on the road and one eye in his rear-view mirror fixed on them. They might cause problems. They began their journey into the heart of District 11 via Broadway boulevard in this situation: a stupidly contented Dogbert and Virgil, a few missionaries not at ease but spreading the word of The Good Book, three shifty native homeless men, and a leery Mitzi on a mission hanging on the notion of either a great man or a very, very bad man.

The mysterious Katz had now begun to be blown out of proportion in Mitzi’s mind: he was god gone horribly wrong, but he was in awe nevertheless. Before, Katz had never seemed a bona fide being; a being full of flesh and feasible. The pilgrims, the homeless men, all of these things made the entire mission more real for Mitzi, and his heart began to sprint ten feet before the van, even though they were moving at a steady 55 miles per hour. The homeless men were ghosts, but still served as some threat: the whole environment was unearthly and the men were – no, they were not inhuman. Well, that was the worst of it – the suspicion of their not being human. The suspicion wreaked in Mitzi head the worst scenarios: they might mutiny, they might do away with the wonderful pilgrims on their wonderful charge. Who knows? But no, they clung to their parcel of beef with their colossal eyeballs in their undersized sockets in their ghostly faces atop emaciated bodies. It didn’t seem they had energy to do much else, but somehow they located it somewhere in their bony frames and did the work. It was Virgil and Dogbert who didn’t seem to do much – instead, the homeless men clung to their beef and stuck the nozzles of their AK-47s out tiny peepholes of the Mark III in case one of the men on the outside decided to do anything tricky.

Yes, it was a motley squad in that van: a juxtaposition of Christianity and firepower, the thin faces of the homeless men and the plump ones of Virgil and Dogbert. But all had in common their missions, whether it be to retrieve Katz or to spread their religion. But it was the smell of weed that resounded in the air most of all. Even in the pilgrims holy air floated heavily subtle talk of marijuana – a hint here and there. The homeless men were the only ones who’d had a enough of it, they had spent their livelihoods (or what little there was of it) on drugs and alcohol and now they were forced to cling to something only of necessity.