Chapter 23: Gosen Revisited

The bed crinkled under her. When she swept back some of the straw, she found butcher paper underneath, and under that a vinyl cushion. This was less like a bunk than a medical examination table. And what she had thought was milking equipment could double as lighting for a surgical theater. She got up, pulled sheet covers of what she though was farming equipment and found a heart monitor, tanks of ether, anatomy charts.

She dug frantically through the equipment until she turned up a scalpel. It was a small weapon, but unimaginably sharp. She jumped and turned, holding the scalpel forward, when the farmer came in. But the farmer showed no alarm at the weapon, just annoyance.

"What are you doing what that?" he asked. "It was sterilized. Now we're going to have to clean the whole surgical kit again."

"What kind of freakish experiments are you doing here?!" Jane shrieked desperately, holding the scalpel as threateningly as its tiny size would allow. "What kind of farmer has medical equipment in his barn?!"

"Every farmer needs more than one job," the farmer said. "That's the only way a family farm stays alive anymore. Some men are carpenters, some are bookkeepers. Me, I'm a plastic surgeon. I make people look like celebrities."

"Who would want that?"

"My own daughter for one," he said, "had me make her look like Daisy Duke (aka Catherine Back). Another fellow is coming in Thursday who wants to look like Nick Nolte. Then there was the guy who had me turn him into Billy Crystal. The real Billy Crystal died years ago, you know. The one you see now is a fellow name Guillermo Santana - 27-year-old tennis teacher from Arizona." He called back to someone outside. "Randy, we're going to have to sterilize the equipment again."

A man rushed in from outside, stopped immediately inside the front door, picked up an object, mumbled something about it, then put it down again. He did it with a couple of objects until he noticed Jane; and apparently desperate for approval, he barreled toward her, held up an old bedspring and said, "Oh look! It's a gonococcus spirochete from Duane Allman's last road trip!"

"It's Robin Williams!" she said.

"It's Randy Birchhorn," the doctor/farmer corrected her, "a former pipe-fitter from Covington, Kentucky. He's to be delivered to a promotional company in New York City. A man name Gosen has plans for him."

"Gosen?" Jane asked, struck to the core by that name. "Are you sure that deal is still on? This man Gosen - how long since you talked to him?"

"Chatted with him on the phone with him just before you guys arrived," the farmer/doctor said. "There's some kind of Mork and Mindy 20-year-reunion party. This Gosen character already knows he won't get the job of running it, so he sent out some woman named Julia on a wild goose chase for Williams, knowing she'd fail. Now old Randy here is going to go to Gosen's company, say Julia found him, sign all the papers and convince the stockholder they got the account."

Randy picked up a milking stool and started trying to improvise off of it. "Oh look! It's a Quonset hut for..." was all he managed to say before the doctor told him to shut up.

Jane stood, speechless. She had killed Gosen, hadn't she? But she had no memory of it. And how had she ended up on that train, with so little money? Had he bested her after all? Sent her off into the country, while all the time he sat back at the office, pulling off some con? She asked the only question she could think of.

"Could you please continue with your long, dense exposition?"

"Well, since you asked me so nicely," the farmer said, "Gosen is going to take the capital outlay for the reunion party and skip town for Bermuda."

"And could you give me some lame excuse for why you're telling me all this when it's obviously against your best interests to go around blabbing about your business?"

"That's a tough one, but...OK, I got it," the farmer said. "I'm giving up plastic surgery and I'm converting to Amish."

"Your excuse is unlikely and contrived, but I'll take it," Jane said. "It also means you won't be using your truck, so I'll take that, too." She turned to Randy. "Come on, 'Robin.' You and I are going to visit an old friend."

And the plotlines merge! Click ahead to continue on to the next chapter...