The next morning I rushed with Tzu Jan Chi back to Lander again. "Wieland, Wieland..." he kept whispering all along the route, "Help Aaron -- Aaron MacDougall." From the hospital in Lander he was taken by helicopter to Cheyenne and placed on emergency alert for an immediate heart transplant. Which didn't happen. Tzu Jan Chi didn't make it. He died that night. We never saw him again. His family had his body brought back to North Mandragora.

Arlen Townsend was very bitter, saying, "That which doesn’t kill us ought to make us stop and think." Roger Shepperton told us, "Death is no worse than being asleep on a calm sea in a rowboat with no paddles."

In his prison cell MacDougall, permitted to have large rolls of newsprint paper and blunt, tiny pencils, drew for hours on end. Actually, I know he did a lot more thinking about drawing than drawing in fact. It was him who’d told me about Albert Camus and “the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing nothing would come of it.” In later years, he’d describe his art as feeding the real world into an artificial sinkhole.

He said he’d composed about a thousand pictures in his head -- balancing trees, front lawns, fences, houses, and clouds on big blank piece of paper in his brain. Later, once released from prison, the drawings would all flowed out, in fact. Bold, elegant, lucid. No dabbling or tickling. No erasing. Even the flaws were assets.

Remember, he was at that time only twenty-one, maybe twenty-two.

He’d grown up in southern California. He’d been a loner, of course. Unlike other kids, who’d discovered the world by way of Walt Disney cartoons, MacDougall had used his own eyes. “It was this actual world, Cisco -- not the world of cartoons. Your average Los Angeleno would know Bambi in a blackout but not a deer from Dumbo in the woods.” While other kids in his neighborhood were building sand castles at the beach, tracing Donald Duck from comic books, or looking for four-leaf clover in their yards, MacDougall was in the field at the other end of his block, discovering diamond-head snakes, lizards, pheasants, and a red-tailed fox.

He called those fields the nearest thing to wilderness that Taramor had to offer -- overgrown with sticker weeds. At dusk the cottontail rabbits had ventured out. The Eucalyptus trees that lined the field had given off a musky gum tree scent. Owls blinked in the darkness. There were fireflies. There were probably not half a dozen other people in all of Taramor, he supposed, who 'd also actually seen fireflies.

Lying in clover, he’d watched the clouds overhead and he’d drawn what he’d seen -- horses, giants, and sweet or tortured faces – beautiful, unusual things. His sister had sent him a huge package containing a big stack of pictures he’d made in childhood, which he now shared with me. He showed me his drawings of clouds -- winged beasts with antlers, two-headed dragons spitting fire, doves in droves pulling chariots, winged cupids shooting arrows, battle scenes, flying lovers, satyrs, mermaids -- what a show for a kid of five or six!

He’d had access to art books. His mother, once a librarian, had brought home plenty of books. MacDougall had made drawings not only from clouds, but also from these books. He’d drawn assorted Egyptian wall paintings, Greek vases, Medieval prayer book illustrations, Renaissance Madonnas, portraits, and mountainous landscapes.

Among the high pile of his childhood drawings which his sister had sent to him were Inca temples, western saloons, Indian tee-pees, a haunted house on a lonesome hill, a paddlewheel steamboat, and Dutch windmills. He’d even visited Hollywood studios, Hollywood sets -- Cristobel Studios was within walking distance from Taramor, where he lived -- the back lot. He’d sneaked in under the fence to roam the grounds -- acres and acres of sets -- southern mansions, New England village streets, a 1900s Atlantic boardwalk, an 1800s stone railroad station, a medieval castle, a jungle compound, rustic bridges, a mountain tunnel, several gold, an Alpine village, an adobe Texas fort, the Taj Mahal, and more -- Baroque palace stairs that led nowhere, dry-docked three-masted schooners, and on and on. There were huge sound stages big as airplane hangars, he said.

The movie lot was encircled by surrounding poplar tree groves, with vast orange groves encircling all. MacDougall told me he snooped around that funhouse like a thief, drawing everything, and then stashing away his beautiful pictures in his room.

I was going to say something when, suddenly, all the drawings I’d been balancing precariously on my knees slid off, to the floor. I felt bad. It seemed so disrespectful. I didn’t say anything at all. I just got down on the wooden floor and started gathering in the pictures, feeling bad. It was a terrible time for the guard to come and tell me to leave, but that’s what happened. It was an awkward departure after the otherwise almost perfect session of our sharing.

At the school, we had a big fundraiser for MacDougall. After a long afternoon of sun-worship rites and celebrations, an evening campfire was sparked. Singing, musical offerings, and dramatic orations followed. Roger Shepperton and Arlen Townsend shared their old Viking “Kennings” -- saws, maxims, admonitions, stories. Shepperton read from Beowulf and Egil’s saga; Townsend read from Audun’s Story and Hreidor the Fool.

Townsend stepped up from out of the darkness looking even madder than Shepperton. Waxing bearish, his voice got raw and hoarse. He raised his hands high over his head as though to haunt or cast a spell upon his audience. His wild egret’s tuft or shock or plume of cirrus hair gave him the look of a high strung Venus Flytrap – weary but alert.

I didn’t mind Townsend’s antics any more than I minded his eccentric, off-putting, slovenly habits -- no, not me. I myself dressed in old flannel shirts, faded jeans, threadbare boots. I remember walking down the street in Tumsaw one day, drinking vegetable juice from an open can, when somebody dropped a dime in, and passed on. I just laughed. No, I had no bone to pick with philanthropists, have-nots, the misbegotten, nor Arlen Townsend. What did confound me was Townsend’s abrasiveness, his combative mournful exultation, his black lunacy, him hurling forth his rhetoric and drubbings like some Old Testament prophet with a horn. He had so many axes to grind.

Well, whatever else he did or didn’t do, after this big fundraiser Townsend personally visited MacDougall in prison to tell him news of it. Not only this, but he also came bearing Taps -- I mean he simply showed up one day in MacDougall’s cell to play the game of Taps -- him, Arlen Townsend, who knew every letter of the Futhark and the meanings of each and oracular content of their many assorted relations. He brought in his Taps pieces and his board in a clean white pillowcase and challenged MacDougall to a game.

Townsend mixed up the twenty-four Checker-like wooden pieces: the twelve pieces with signs all having one vertical stoke not crossed by another stroke were mahogany; the twelve pieces with signs having no long vertical strokes, or with two vertical strokes together, or with a long vertical stroke only partially crossed were carbed from white pine.

“The question is,” Townsend said aloud, “what do we need to know to liberate Aaron MacDougall from his present circumstances? Okay, let’s go.”

Townsend took out twelve random pieces from his pillowcase and put them on the chess or checkers board. These pieces – four of mahogany and eight of pine, as it happened – were arranged by me on his side of the board from top-left to right-bottom, in the order of their position to the Futhark alphabet (from left to right, Chinese style). Now MacDougall took out the remaining twelve pieces from the pillowcase -- eight of mahogany and four of pine -- and I arranged these on the other side of the board.

“Aha,” Townsend said. “I see.” First to be moved were the mahogany pieces. On each side of the board the dark disks were pushed from the dark squares diagonally left, up to the middle line, remaining on dark squares. Townsend, silent, regarding the relations among the pieces now, scratched his head. He moved the white pieces up from dark squares, diagonally and leftward to the middle line, where they remained on dark squares.

“Oh ho ho,” Townsend said. “Well, they say that even enemies can be partners in the end. Look at this. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kissed and made up, washing each others’ backs afterwards. Abruptly, he now said “Heads,” and I flipped a waiting 1912 Silver Dollar coin in the air, caught it in my right palm, and slapped it down against the back of my left hand. It was heads.

“Mahogany,” Townsend said, and all the Runestones were turned so that the signs of all mahogany pieces faced away from Townsend, for him to move up, away from him, on the board. Likewise, all the signs of the pine pieces were turned so that they faced away from MacDougall, to be moved up on the board by him, toward Townsend.

Townsend made the next move, then it was MacDougall’s turn. The game progressed quickly. All pieces were moved diagonally across the board, most of them forwards from the one player, towards his opponent. Only the stones with irreversible (mirror-image) signs could be moved backwards. MacDougall and Townsend made twelve moves each, occasionally “jumping” and taking pieces from the board, saying, “One accepts the absence of the departed, open to new possibilities for change.” You could see how concentrated Townsend was, busy making sweeping connections at each point along the game’s way.

At the end of the twenty-four moves there were six mahogany pieces and nine pine pieces left on the board. Townsend now asked MacDougall to consider very carefully which piece he now wished to move. I moved it. Townsend then made his move. All of the remaining pieces were then removed from the board, except for the pieces in the bottom rows facing the two respective players.

“Ah!” Townsend said, beads of sweat now accumulating on his brow. “A good end. A new beginning. There’s repeated reference here to 'pair,' and 'pairing.' A good fate. The Perth stone is referring to your marriage, a secret matter, a private matter, with the Nauthiz stone indicating the pain you had to go through. The Inguz stone confirms fertility, your ripeness for the task that is still your life’s work. The oracle strongly suggests both that you have become, in your incarceration, a little ‘Cuckoo,’ but not beyond the possibility of putting your life back together again, and that you have many ‘mountains’ yet to be climbed. Here is also the sign of the ‘Bear.’ Perhaps you have a ‘bear’ of a ‘climb’ ahead of you, but you will ‘bear’ it well? In Cuzco, Peru the people call a bear Ukuku, the hairy beast who stands upright, emerging only at dawn and dusk, reconciling day and night."