David's Kingdom (a short story)

This short story was originally written for submission to So It Goes, the literary journal for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. The theme for 2021 is “Vonnegut and the Environment”. Well, they chose to publish other stuff. So it goes. Let it be.

Sharing a short story is admittedly not typical META-SPIEL fare. Explanations will be forthcoming in another post. Oh, rest assured.

“David’s Kingdom” is presented here on the occasion of Kurt’s 99th birthday. Hi ho.

David stood tall as ever, above the char and excrement and honking.

The crew toiled around him. Chris was in the truck, fiddling around with the sound system. Bob and Tommy were operating the suction machine. Paul was surveying. And thinking.

They had made the trip down from Minneapolis so many times they had lost count. It had started as something of a lark. It was still something of a lark. It had to be. They thought the work was beneath them, but they sort of thought all work was beneath them, and the day they showed up together at the office, they were out to prove a point, though what point exactly, they were never too sure about.

Before signing on, they had never been to Sioux Falls before, but they knew the stories. Everybody knew the stories. The stories were still growing, all those years later.

In 1973, an 18 foot tall bronze replica of Michelangelo’s Statue of David was unveiled in Fawick Park. A local minister wrote to a newspaper, predicting: “Don’t be surprised if God doesn’t bring a flood or a tornado, or strike the statue with lightning. God will judge this city.”

After the fires, the minister’s warning had become an article of faith. People accepted that Sioux Falls had been cursed. Never mind that most of the elements of the initial fire had been man-made (and well-documented): the deteriorating pipeline, the insufficient safety mechanisms, even the drought itself. The hysteria outran the management capacity. People fled. Property values plummeted. Desperate people turned to arson to salvage what value they could. The government was mostly useless.

Never before had such a large city been so completely abandoned.

Paul was not thinking about any of this. He was thinking about how and when he was going to get laid again. They had been in Sioux Falls for eight days, and the farther he walked from David’s shadow, the deeper the feces. This trip might last another two weeks.

The blaring from the truck and the ensuing aerial cacophony snapped Paul back to attention. Chris had fixed the loose wire and the distinctive sound of the soprano saxophone now emanated in all directions. The geese, in full frenzy, flew haphazardly toward the river. One flew so low that Paul had to duck, started to lose his balance, and recovered just in time to avoid falling face first into six inches of crap. He turned toward the river and saw a succession of distinctive black diamonds landing in the water.

“Give me a warning next time!” Paul shouted back at the truck.

They had been the first crew to discover this method of fowl dispersion. One day while they had the sound system cranked, Tommy thought it would be funny to play Kenny G. The geese flipped out. So did the crew. But from that day forward, whenever they really needed the geese to back off, Kenny G was their best frenemy.

Humans had abandoned Sioux Falls, but neither flora nor fauna had followed suit. In the aftermath of the fires, a new variant of bush appeared along the river. The geese went wild for the little purple berries. With no humans around and no other predators filling the void, both bushes and geese exploded in numbers. Within a couple of generations, a subspecies of geese had emerged. They were easily recognizable by the black diamond patterns on the ganders’ tail feathers. David’s geese – Branta canadensis davidii – and David’s bush – Sambucus canadensis davidii – started appearing across North America, but both most preferred the area just downstream of the falls of the Big Sioux. And as the geese ate more and more berries, they produced more and more turds.

The downstream effect was pronounced. First the river, and the great Missouri below it, became incredibly filthy. Major mitigation efforts had to be taken, further reinforcing the idea of Sioux Falls as a cursed place. But then the river changed. The remaining downstream farmers experienced unprecedented yields. The scientific community finally launched a proper investigation, and the results were stunning: David’s geese not only looked different, they also pooped different. The tons of goose excrement which had been leeching into the Big Sioux for years had evolved into the greatest stockpile of fertilizer known to mankind.

Peter had been ahead of the curve. A bird enthusiast, he knew all about David’s geese; an agricultural supply salesman, he knew the fossil fuel collapse was going to bring big agriculture down as well. The day he saw the first report, he got his hands on an old truck and equipment he thought might work. He found a crew and sent them off to South Dakota while he hustled trying to find buyers. After three days, he had actual orders, but his first crew had quit. He needed replacements, fast. The guys walked in the very next day. Their first expedition was so successful that Peter quit the sales gig and dove head first into the poop business. He got a better truck. On the side he painted a branch with two perched robins – Turdus migratorius – and below them he painted the new company’s name: TWIN/TURD.

The crew developed a fast reputation. Nobody shoveled more shit. Nobody drank more beer. They preferred to go straight to where the biggest action was – Fawick Park by day, the makeshift bars near the old airport by night. Larger companies kept trying to poach them, but they stuck it out with Twin/Turd. They knew that the way they worked would never fly except with a small independent. Peter knew that no matter what stunts they pulled, they were the best crew going, and he bent over backwards to keep them happy.

“It’s a shit company, but what are you gonna do?” Tommy would ask.

“Business ain’t shit. Except it is!” Chris would declare.

“The filthiest lucre!” Paul would chime in.

They never grew tired of the jokes.

Each trip, they would hold out as long as they could bear it, sometimes a month at a time. They would fill the tank, drive it to the new transfer facility, then drive back downtown for more, over and over again. Other companies technically could have worked Fawick Park, but the Twin/Turd crew had such a reputation, the others always deferred to them. They would smell terrible at night, but there were no girls around to impress anyway. So they drank.

When they would return home to Minneapolis, they kept drinking. They were not shy about their line of work. Their shitty jokes became their shitty pickup lines. Bob’s should have been the worst:

“What is the white stuff in bird poop?”

Whether it was because of all the alcohol flowing, or something else nobody could quite explain, he always managed to set up his auditor just right:

“That’s bird poop, too.”

Paul never understood how that one worked. He had finally made up his mind to try it himself. He was most of the way through a mental delivery when Kenny G interrupted.

He walked back toward the truck and told the others about his short reconnaissance mission. They all understood that it meant that they had several days of work left. Chris, still in the truck, reached behind and pulled four beers out of the fridge. They tasted terrible, but nobody cared. They got back to work.

David said nothing. He stood tall as ever, above the char and excrement and honking.