Second Excerpt

Here is the entire short story, which will also become a short play:

​BOBBY AND FRANÇOIS TALKIN’ WORLD WAR III BLUES
                               
          By Susan Flakes
 
Bobby, scruffy, surly, a full head of thick oily hair, in his twenties, slams down a typewriter on a pasteboard desk in a shabby hotel room; mutters: “Went an’ took my guitars, huh?  Could’a least left me the acoustic. Maybe your guests need to be rock and rolled out of their doldrums. Vagabond? Yeah, that’s me. The world needs more vagabonds.”
He plops down in front of the typewriter, puts in paper; bangs at keys. Rips the paper out of the typewriter; tears it to shreds.
He shoves open his dilapidated suitcase; throws out some books. Grabs a few of the books; snuggles on the bed; rummages through the books; selects one of them. “Monsieur Paul Verlaine.” He thumbs through the book. “No, no inspiration from you. Your poems are too pretty for how I’m feelin’ tonight. Nineteenth Century’s too far back.”
He tosses that book; picks up another. “Arthur Rimbaud.” He thumbs through it: reads, “A Season in Hell. It’s not Hell yet, but I’m getting there.”
         He seizes a book crumbling from age: “The Poems of François Villon, translator H.B. McCaskie, London, 1946. Why the hell did I get given this one?  Five hundred years ago. Half a millennium. Sure don’t wanna go back that far.”    
He thumbs through the Villon book anyway, stops and chuckles at some of the artsy black-and-white faded tints that illustrate the poems. Fingers an illustration at the end of the book; reads under it: “A poem he wrote after he was sentenced to hang on Montfaucon Gallows, Paris.  Nice picture of corpses, and ravens waiting to eat them. Hey, François, you were a genuine vagabond poet.”  
           He reads in awkward French, “L’Epitache Villon: Freres humain qui après nous vivez.” He chuckles. “Ah, bien! An English translation on the opposite page. Good for you, Monsieur McCaskie. Le français n’est pas ma forté.”  He reads:
“Fellow humans that after us remain
Don’t be harder on us than what’s our due
For if you show some pity for our pain
The sooner God’ll show mercy to you”
 
He flips to the preface; bursts into laughter. “Born 1431. Died nobody knows when. Hey, François, maybe you’re still alive?” He reads further, “Hmmm.  Last name ‘de Montcorbier’?  When did you change it, and why?  I changed my last name too. I like Villon, but not François. I think half the men in France must be François’s.”
          Bobby clears the bed of all the books, crashes, exhausted onto it. The Villon book atop his chest, he falls into a deep sleep. Dreams.
In his dream François is about to be hanged. A noose swings in front of him. Bobby appeals to François. “Hey, come to me, come to me, maybe your future’s brighter than you think. C’mon. You’re in a dream. You can do whatever you dream.”
             François attempts what Bobby suggests. He wills the bonds to fall off his hands; moves the rope away from his neck. No one seems to be there to put it back around his neck. 
As he enters Bobby’s hotel room it’s as if his body is still on the gallows.
 François looks around, totally mystified.
            ”So, take a seat. I’m Bobby. I know who you are, François.”
He produces a chair.
François doesn’t sit; looks around, amazed, terrified. ”Have I died? Is this Hell?”
           Bobby bursts into laughter.  “Could be!  But them in charge at this establishment seem to think it’s Heaven.”
“Me in Heaven? Not possible. Who’s in charge?”
“Actually, I am. King of the Room. My famous friend insisted they give me a room at the inn.”
           ” Famous friend?”
“They wanted to throw me out ‘cause I look kind’a funky. She demanded a room for me who’s one day’s gonna be America’s greatest songwriter, or she’ll sing ‘cross the wide world somethin’ ‘funky’ ‘bout them.  Good thing, François, you speak English.”
          ”English?  I would never speak a word of the tongue of those goddamns that burned my Jeanne d’Arc to ashes. ‘Cept her heart! It refused to burn! I was born the very day she rose to Heaven, where they no doubt opened the doors wide for her. Only they’ve slammed the doors on her here on earth. Forbidden to even speak her name.”
”She is now the patron saint of France!”
          “Not possible. Where are you from anyway? What country? England?”
”America. Yeah, that’s right.  America wasn’t discovered yet when you walked the earth.”
”What year are you?”
“It’s 1963. Five hundred years after your time, give or take a decade.”
          ”Human beings still on earth in five hundred years? I figured by then they’d all die of the plague.”
”No more plagues. Wiped out. You lived in a whole other lifetime, when blackness was a virtue. Of course this century’s been pretty black. There was two world wars.”
              ”World wars?”
             ”Just about all of the countries on earth fightin’ each other. Oh, the world is round, not flat, and there’s millions and millions of people, more than you guys ever dreamed there’d be.”
             ”The world wars didn’t kill everybody?”
             ”No, but World War III will. If it comes. No. When it comes. I dreamed, like I’m dreamin’ now, but not of the past, of the future. I was the only one left on earth. When I told my dream to a psychiatrist he said he was havin’ the same dream, only he was the only one left on earth, so we agreed to be in each other’s dreams, so as not to be alone, you dig?”
            ”What I see is that I don’t want you and me in the same dream. Before I go back to the noose, just tell me, Future Man, how does my story end?  Any deus ex machina waitin’ in the wings?”
            ”You know ‘bout deus ex machina’s?” 
             ”’Course I do. I read Aristotle. No bringin’ in gods on machines to save the day. Earn it! But such endings do happen in real life!”
            ”Nobody knows how and when you died, that’s what your bio says.”
           ”There’s public record even of the thousands of poor schmucks hanged on Montfaucon Gallows. Only schmucks got hanged, no royalty. I ain’t royal, but no poor schmuck either. There’d surely be a public record of it if I got hanged.”
            François thumbs through Bobby’s book of his poems. ”Not hand-copied by monks?” 
           ”Printin’ got invented.”
          ”Oh, yeah, I heard somebody in Germany printed 200 Bibles.”
          ”Now millions of books in all subjects are printed all over the world. Every day.” Bobby pats the book. “I don’t care to go back further than the nineteenth century. Verlaine and Rimbaud are quite enough.”
           ”Who?”
”Arthur Rimbaud: I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry out.  This is hell--eternal pain!  See how the fires flare up! I’m roasted to a turn. Demon, charge on!”
         ”No more about Hell, all right?”
         François goes to Bobby’s typewriter; runs his hands across the keys.
          ”What’s this?  A printing machine?”
         ”Sort of.”
          Bobby sits in front of it; plunks out a few words. “Workin’ on a song that will make famous the infamy of the hoteliers here.”
          ”Song?”
         ”Poem with music. Some say I’m a poet.”
         ”So, sing me one of your poems.”
         ”They confiscated my guitar.”
          He sees François doesn’t know that word. He mimics strumming.
”I strum the music I sing to. The heads of this weird-ass joint don’t want me wakin’ all the snorin’ bastards. Besides, I never sing on demand.”
           ”Me neither. I think I want to go back to my ‘destiny.’ Whatever it might be.”
François heads back toward the noose.
“Let me into your memories,” Bobby appeals, “Think the Future. Poeticize what’s coming if human beings don’t change. Love Jeanne d’Arc more, Hate all-powerful merciless institutions more. Herald your poem,” He thumbs through until he finds one of his favorite François Villon poems, reads it:
“Outside his doors, freezing, on our knees,
Inside his whores, teasing, do as they please. 
Through colored pane glass of Virgin Mary
We lust the roasted bird, the toast an’ caviar
His servants carry To the Archbishop of Paris
Who fails to see we are dying
While he’s wining and dining the life of ease.”


François shrugs his shoulders. “One of my best, but who listens?”
“Maybe now?”
“Maybe we should stop talkin’ maybe’s.”
He puts the noose around his neck. Awaits. Bobby awakens, mumbles, “Wish I coud’a stayed dreamin’ till the end… See if there was a deus ex machina.”
                                                END