Dirk Zeppelin

The following short story by Damon Stewart first appeared in Big Toe Press (2004). It later appeared in Interesting Tales of Other People's Woe, a collection of fiction by Damon Stewart (2014).

“You’re a what?” the girl asked, her bleary eyes searching Dirk’s face. She hiccuped, then reached to the bar to clutch a glass of beer for support.

“A Dirigible Engineer,” he replied, slower this time, raising his eyebrows in a way that added gravity to the title. Or so he hoped.

“A dirger-what?” she asked again, leaning forward to look fuzzily at his mouth.

“You know, at the arena?” Dirk asked, “during intermission in the hockey game? The dirigible, the big—”

From behind her appeared a form, an aggressively round protrusion that resolved into a belly, followed by the body of a man who chuckled and said, “He’s a freakin’ miniature blimp operator, sweetie.”

Dirk scowled at the appearance of his arch-nemesis (his friend Lance’s term, not his) and fellow employee of the Fort Orange Arena. The girl, who had taken another completely unnecessary swig of beer, sprayed it all over Dirk’s lap as she laughed. The man grinned and looked at Dirk, displaying a mouthful of yellow teeth. “Hey, she got that on the first try, Dirkie.”

“Screw you, Brett,” said Dirk, looking around for a napkin to remove beer mist from his face. He picked one off the bar, but the girl grabbed it and blew her nose into it.

“Wanna go outside, cowboy?” and the belly took a step closer to Dirk.

Dirk, five feet six inches, one hundred thirty-five pounds if he ate a few tacos first, was not, despite the intensity of his glare, a match for the belly’s owner. But he wondered if he could get a punch in and split before he was mashed. It might be worth a shot at that hated stomach, which was now poking out between the bottom of Brett’s dirty T-shirt and top of his filthy jeans. Its one eye, cast in hairy malevolence, offered a baleful glare at Dirk, as if daring him to take up the challenge.

Brett closed his right hand into a toaster-sized fist; with the left he lifted his shirt and began to caress his belly, circling slowly towards center. The motion seemed both obscene and frightening. To attack the stomach, Dirk felt, would be to strike a blow for all that was good and decent. But as Brett’s finger slipped into the void of that hell’s outermost ring to retrieve a piece of damp lint, Dirk felt the belly and its master stare him down.

Then Brett shook his head and stepped back. “You ain’t worth the trouble,” and he turned to the bartender, who had just appeared before them with the air of a man about to intervene in other people’s problems. “Gimme a Bud, a shot of Peppermint Schnapps, and another of whatever the lady here is drinkin’.” He waited a beat, then, “Oh yeah, and a set of balls for this one,” and jerked his head at Dirk. Brett threw a twenty at the bartender, “Keep the change,” and turned to address the girl.

“Babycakes,” he said, “I’m sitting over there,” pointing to a corner of the bar, “and if you want to talk to a real man, come on over. Dirk—tell her what I do.” With that, he turned and walked away.

“Well?” asked the girl, apparently oblivious of the passing rumble of potential violence. “What does he do? Is he a dirger … dirger … blimp-man too?”

Dirk hated this part. One day, he thought, Brett and his belly were going to pay oh so dearly, so keenly, and he nodded to himself in anticipation of self-righteous vengeance. This was the third time Brett had done this to him.

“He drives a Zamboni,” Dirk said in an even tone that was supposed to suggest that not only was it not a big deal, it was no deal. A negative deal.

The girl squealed. “Ohmygod, you mean the ice machine? Do you think he’d let me ride on it?” and she turned to the corner where Brett was now sitting.

“I dunno. He’s maintenance, I’m talent. I don’t care what he thinks.” Dirk took a sip of his beer, stalling while thinking of something to get that look out of her eye. “He might, I guess, since I think his probation’s run out. But the last woman who did that—” and he stopped. The girl wasn’t listening, she was twisted around on her stool, searching the corner for Brett. As if on cue, Brett stood up and showed his teeth in what might euphemistically be called a smile, making Dirk and the stranger next to him wince, and waved her over.

Without another word, the girl slid off her stool, bumped into a waitress carrying a tray of drinks, and wobbled over to Brett’s open arms.

***

The Fort Orange Arena could fit 17,000 people. On a good night, there might be 700 present to watch the city’s minor-league hockey team, the “Feral Moles,” whack away at a plastic disk for several hours against a team from some similarly godforsaken city that half the crowd had never heard of. For the Moles, victory was so rare as to be forgotten as the ostensible goal. For most fans, the purpose of attending was like watching a favorite episode of an old sitcom, its ending already known but new and amusing nuances to be explored in every additional viewing.

Dirk typically stood behind a low wall at one end of the rink, near the utility area where he could watch the action and be ready when his time came. During the breaks in play, his job—his performance—was to send a remote-controlled balloon (the size of a good sturdy couch) up and over the crowd, easing down now and then to drop coupons for free oil changes, buy-one-get-one-free pizzas, and trial memberships for health clubs. They would flutter into the waiting arms of happy fans who wouldn’t actually use any of them, except for the pizzas, but all of whom felt a certain kind of low-level specialness at getting something for free.

The blimp—or “dirigible,” as Dirk would insist to anyone for as long as required—until the universe stopped expanding if necessary—was a fairly new one, an “Airshark Mark II” with long-range radio control, a multi-directional micromotor turbofan propulsion system, and a 5 pound payload capability. Left to itself, the dirigible would gently float to the ground, but the mini fans were capable of moving it smartly about at a speed of about ten mph, as high as the rafters of the arena. Its titanium frame was encased in a polyurethane skin, painted black with the logo of a sneering green mole on the side.

Dirk had been working in the maintenance at the arena for a couple of years, performing odd jobs such as scrubbing gum from underneath seats, polishing floors and spiffying rest rooms until two months ago when he went to the management with a plan for a new form of entertainment. The previous act, a team of seven giant frogs that would hop onto a variety of colorful platforms that emitted a particular tone when landed upon, was no longer available (the key to that show was not so much time spent training frogs as it was utilizing a froggy form of amphetamine that got them to jump when lightly nudged. But the trainer one night accidentally mixed too much of the special sauce into their water right before they were on, only to have them hop insanely from platform to platform in giant, suicidal leaps that twisted “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” into a sort of rapid evil-circus music. It ended only when the last frog expired with a wet thump on the ice in front of the horrified crowd). For Dirk, it was a golden opportunity that launched a career.

Dirk left the bar and arrived at the indoor utility garage fifteen minutes before the game was to begin. The dirigible sat lightly on a pair of sawhorses, tethered to a scarred red canister of helium. Tonight’s drop consisted of coupons for a carpet cleaning, a tooth-whitening system, and six-months of pet health insurance. Dirk clipped the packets of brightly colored paper to the plastic tongs that hung from the blimp’s frame, checked the batteries and gave it a rough tug to test the buoyancy. Satisfied, he pulled it out by its leash and brought it over to the edge of the rink, gently pushing it backwards into a service corridor underneath the first row of seats. He glanced around for Brett, who usually brought the Zamboni up to the edge of the rink and watched while the machine’s engine idled along, gently sputtering toxic fumes laced with the smoke from the cigar that Brett wasn’t supposed to be smoking.

Brett was leaning against the Zamboni, parked a few feet away, talking to the girl from the bar with his arms around her. Dirk shook his head in a mixture of chagrin and disgust as he watched Brett grope her buttocks, squeezing away as though her buns were stress balls and he was having a particularly difficult day. Brett saw him staring and bent his head to say something into her ear. She started laughing and turned around to look in his direction; not directly at Dirk, but at the corridor where the dirigible sat waiting. Suddenly Dirk understood what they were laughing at. His eyes narrowed and he flushed, turning back to watch the players warm up while muttering to himself.

The front of the dirigible was a source of deep humiliation to Dirk. Right after acquiring the blimp, the arena’s in-house painter had spent an afternoon getting the hockey team’s logo on each side: a crouching, snarling mole holding a hockey stick in a way that suggested mortal combat as opposed to sport. It looked pretty cool as far as Dirk was concerned, but there was one more touch that he felt would complete the look and create a sort of low-rider of airships.

“No way Dirk, it’ll look silly,” said Benji the painter, “I’m telling you it won’t end up looking like you think it will. Plus, I’m only supposed to paint the approved logo, and a skull head mole is not on the approved logo list.”

“But—”

“Bye, Dirk,” and he walked away.

When Dirk explained his dilemma to Lance, his more or less best friend (depending on how much weed and spending money Dirk had on him), Lance said, “Dude, we can handle this ourselves. I’m an artistic man, so are you. Let’s just paint the fucker on there ourselves, when the boss sees it he’ll love it. Maybe we’ll get royalties for the new look, you know?”

A mixture of marijuana and cheap beer propelled them into the arena later that night, armed with several colors of spray paint and a design drawn on a torn napkin. The aforementioned chemical cocktail did not, as romantic lore would suggest, enhance or even bring out their (highly speculative) creative talents, and its effect on their motor function was worse. Their vision, such as it was, dissipated as day and sobriety approached; by dawn they threw up their hands and fell asleep in the player’s lounge.

The end result, shown to an annoyed marketing manager named Arnie later that morning, was a blimp with face that looked not like a demon-mole come to lay waste to his hockey foes, but rather, depending on how one viewed it, a reasonable imitation of a festering sore or a rotted pig’s head. If more people had opined “rotted pig’s head” (the entire marketing staff was brought in for a viewing), Dirk might have salvaged some pride, but “festering sore,” although expressed in various ways, seemed to be the consensus.

Dirk was reprimanded for “unauthorized modification” of company property, and Benji was called over to remedy the situation.

“Oh Jesus, no,” said Dirk when Benji showed him the results.

“Listen Dirk, I don’t have a lot of time and this takes care of the problem.”

“But for Christ’s sake Benji, how’s that gonna scare anyone? It’ll demoralize the team! The other side will laugh!”

“Maybe they’ll get laughing so hard we can score some goals,” said Benji, tapping his forehead as he walked away.

Benji had pragmatically chosen to emphasize the rotted pig’s head perspective, and managed to heal the swine, indeed make it a chipper happy pig, with a big smile and winking eye.

“But what’s a pig got to do with the Feral Moles?” Dirk later asked Arnie, who had been in the midst of trying to design an advertising campaign around a team that recently set a record for fighting—with each other.

“Dirk—listen—don’t know, don’t care. Just don’t paint anything again, and don’t bug me anymore.”

“But—”

“Dirk,” in a sharp voice that implied cessation of steady pay.

“Yes?”

“Don’t.”

The game proceeded and Dirk soon forgot Brett’s slights. He got caught up in the action despite the inevitability of the outcome; tonight’s false hope coming from a Feral Mole who tripped over his stick and accidentally kicked the puck into the goal. It didn’t give them a lead or even a tie, but it was a goal, damn it, proof that it’s not over until it’s over. By the first intermission Dirk was cheering like a real fan as the teams filed into the locker rooms, almost forgetting that he had a job to do.

He got a helpful reminder from Brett: “Hey blimpie-boy, time to fly your loser kite,” and a cigar butt flew past his ear.

Ignoring him, Dirk brought the dirigible out, untied the line and started the motors with the remote. The airship rose gently, and Dirk guided it over the wall, directing its ascent over the center of the rink.

This was the essence of the task for Dirk, as the effect of the balloon’s initial appearance never failed to bring about a peculiar feeling in him, an essential calm suffused with a sense of accomplishment and possibility, the past no longer relevant and the future to begin on some undefined date, where he’d move beyond all this.

The crowd went silent as turning heads got the attention of other heads, forming a human wave of sorts, only this a sitting wave of attention, the focus on an extension of Dirk.

It only lasted a few moments, then the adults went back to talking amongst themselves, going to the bathroom or for food. Next came the teenagers, who soon got restless and began milling around, then the nine to twelvers began to fidget—but not the little kids, they remained seated, mouths open, staring in awed wonder as the Airshark Mark II glided silently through the arena’s stratosphere.

Dirk cranked a tiny wheel on the remote and sent the balloon into a gentle descent towards the opposite corner. Down it went, regaining the attention of the people in reverse order, until the teenagers were elbowing their parents and pointing at the giant thing with the fierce mole painted on its side (and inexplicably gentle pig on the front) heading their way. Soon the whole section of seats was looking up and Dirk hit the release switch, sending tiny paper bombs of free products and services into their waiting arms.

Dirk guided the dirigible back towards his end of the arena; he liked to crisscross the space to keep the crowd interested. As he scanned the audience, he suddenly stopped to stare intently, high in the stands to his left.

She was in section G, up near the 110 level seats—long reddish hair pulled into a ponytail that revealed a face that had remained unchanged since high school, actually junior high, one that still brought about a tingling in his abdomen and a shock down to his knees.

When Dirk had been in seventh grade, lost in the crush of new kids and an unshakable reputation as being weird and thus one-to-be-occasionally-assaulted, Kelly Kraus sat next to him in study hall. She inhabited that space he aspired to, a land of happy kids with nice clothes and some money, pretty girls and music—well, he’d keep his own rockin’ music, but still.

But Kelly didn’t move to sit with her friends on the first day. Instead, she smiled at Dirk, asked him what he thought of Mrs. Fisher’s math class, and spent the rest of the study-hall year chatting with him. Her friends didn’t seem to notice; his refused to believe she legitimately interacted with him until a good month went by with no evidence of bribery or a cruel joke being played on one of their smitten fellow-peons.

It never developed into anything, but Dirk and Kelly were friends—at least for the next two years, during which she would sit next to him whenever they shared a study hall or occasionally walk with him to a class. Then she moved to a different school, and Dirk only heard about her once in a while or caught a rare glimpse at the mall. But that’s all it took for Dirk, she became the Girl, the One, and at 24 he would still occasionally think of her in the “what if” way.

Without thinking, Dirk steered the dirigible towards her, smiling as a child of no more than two or three tugged at her sleeve and pointed to the approaching balloon.

Dirk brought it down low, only ten feet above her, and managed to make it wiggle from side to side in imitation of a fighter aircraft’s “hello,” although it could also be said to resemble a jolly pig lolling in his natural element. He could see her looking around for the dirigible’s operator. Dirk first made sure his baseball cap was on backwards, set just so over his ponytail, that the stain on his Judas Priest tee shirt was covered by his arena employee badge (some might think it odd, clipped to his stomach like that, but it was the lesser of evils), and that his fly was firmly secured at its zenith. He then leaned over the rink wall and waved at her. After a moment she saw him. There was a brief pause, and then he saw the flash of recognition on her face.

“Hi Kelly,” he mouthed, and pointed up. She looked at the balloon, and Dirk hit a switch and unloaded $80 worth of Dr. Doolittle’s Pet Care Guarantee (six months, dogs and cats only, no fish, birds or rodents).

Deep in the lizard part of his brain, Dirk fully expected this to lead to nothing less than wanton sex underneath the bleachers. Or, at least, stunned appreciation leading to a date. Never mind the child or the obvious existence of a mate; Lizard Dirk just assumed that his prowess with machines of flight and his ability to unleash economic boon would render her senseless before him, flush with appreciation of his powers.

Even as lizard-brains go, Dirk’s was unusually optimistic in its reptilian outlook and often had too much influence on his human thought processes.

A small shower of garishly colored coupons descended upon her. Her son, a blond haired boy with a bright purple “Handy Manny” sweatshirt, tried to grab one of the falling coupons and tripped over the back of the seat in front of him. He fell into the lap of the man in the seat, sending the man’s sauerkraut encrusted hot dog into the hair of the woman in front of them. The boy started howling, the woman began yelling, the man stood up looking very annoyed, and Kelly, glaring at Dirk, stepped down over the two rows of seats to retrieve her son before marching up the stairs towards the exit.

“Oh crap,” said Dirk, who then felt a hand clamp on the back of his neck.

“Way to go, fucko, see you impressed the ladies with that thing again, didn’cha?” said Brett, his breath smelling of the pickled eggs he kept in a jar underneath the Zamboni’s seat.

Dirk yanked away, the motion inadvertently sending the blimp straight towards Kelly, who, turning around to see it in chase, started to run up the stairs, her look of anger transitioning into fear, visible even from where Dirk stood. He quickly reversed the blimp, sending it high towards the rafters before turning back to deal with Brett.

“Listen, you miserable bastard…” said Dirk. His anger at blowing what seemed to be a golden opportunity with Kelly had momentarily surpassed any rational calculation of his chances in battle.

“Yeah? You wanna step outside?” Brett asked, and he shifted his considerable bulk towards Dirk, bumping him with the loathsome gastric organ. It was his first actual contact with the belly, which Dirk thought surprisingly firm, suggesting massive amounts of muscle buried underneath. Needed, no doubt, so as to move it about from pickle jar to hamburger joint.

Dirk reconsidered. A confrontation with Brett would require him to either leave the blimp floating about the arena on its own, guaranteed disaster, or telling Brett to wait the several minutes it would take to bring it back to be tied up, and then to go outside and get his ass kicked.

Dirk looked down and said, “Go fuck off, Brett. Don’t you need to play on the ice?”

“You got it, sonny boy,” poking his finger into Dirk’s chest. “I gotta man’s job to do. And don’t you get in my way while I’m doin’ it.” He shoved Dirk back a step, causing him to jab his back painfully into the corner of a bleacher seat.

Brett lumbered back to the parked Zamboni, and with surprising grace for a land mammal of such girth, clambered up onto the high seat. He gave the signal to one of the engineering guys in the main booth, and a section of the rink wall slowly began to open. As it did, the lights dimmed and the music quieted. Dirk rolled his eyes. Brett knew someone in management, and was able to get his own special entrance. Those in the crowd who didn’t know what was up sat and waited; those who did know started chanting, “Zam-bone—nee. Zam-bone-nee.” Then Brett stepped on the gas and zoomed onto the ice as the spotlight followed him across the middle of the rink to the roar of recorded crowd music (the actual roar was, thought Dirk, depressingly loud enough, but Brett wanted more). Then the lights turned back on and Brett went about his business, beginning his rounds and leaving behind a shiny smooth surface that glistened like the trail of an unusually tidy slug.

Dirk watched the crowd: they were all focused on the Zamboni, some pointing, most just sitting and staring, the air laden with strange fascination. Jealousy singed at Dirk; Brett sat there, surrounded with an air of flatulent self-importance that was almost visible as he commanded the crowd’s attention. No sudden movement for the bathrooms or the food court, and those for the first few seconds, who talked, whispered. Whispered!

Dirk shook his head and prepared to continue his tour of duty, lowering the dirigible and heading it back towards the other end of the arena. It passed above Brett, who looked up, pointed and began to leer at the crowd, holding his right hand in the thumbs down gesture. Dirk watched in disbelief as the crowd began to take it up, pointing and booing at the dirigible as it made its way across the airspace.

Suddenly Brett whipped the Zamboni around and sped towards the center of the rink, slamming on the brakes and causing it to slide sideways before coming to a stop.

I didn’t know they could do that, thought Dirk.

Then Brett stood up and made a lowering motion with both hands, getting the crowd to quiet down.

What the hell’s he doing? thought Dirk. He could see Olsen, the facility manager, standing outside his booth with his hands on his hips, also staring at Brett. This was obviously not part of the ice maintenance routine.

The Zamboni driver put his hands to his mouth, and started shouting, his bray just audible above the general din of the room, “Zamboni rules, blimpie’s a fool,” until the crowd joined in. As the chant began to echo throughout the arena, Brett hopped back into the Zamboni’s seat, stomped on the gas and began racing around the edge of the area, urging the crowd on, getting each section to try to be louder than the last.

Dirk stood in the corner, his face beet red, his body burned through with humiliation. That asshole Brett, he thought, one of these days ….

But as Brett zoomed past the end where Dirk stood, he reached into a damp shirt pocket and retrieved a pickled egg, hurling the soft missile straight into Dirk’s slightly pimpled forehead.

Its vinegary contents splattered over his face and clothes. The smell of briny egg, coated with the filth of Brett’s pocket and limned with the slimy residue of Brett’s perpetually filthy hands, permeated the air. The crowd roared and a few followed suit, chucking wadded up napkins, crumpled popcorn boxes, chewing gum, and one half-eaten hot dog that caught him in the small of the back and stung like hell.

Dirk was overcome with rage. As he snarled vengeance at Brett, full of dark wishes involving auto-intercourse, incest, and several forms of bestiality, an idea sparked in his head.

He held the dirigible’s controls to his chest, flicked the speed control switch to “Override High” and directed the balloon into a steep descent towards Brett, who stood on his Zamboni, hands raised into fists, awash in the admiration of the crowd like a victorious gladiator. The Airshark Mark II stole down, battered by a flak of snack food, packaging and miscellaneous arena detritus.

Brett sat back down, guffawing and pumping his fists, and never saw the dirigible until its nose impacted the back of his head.

Although such a device is, of course, filled with helium and therefore relatively light, there must be enough helium to lift the dirigible’s frame and undercarriage; in this case 23 pounds of frame, engine, battery, and a complement of coupons. When traveling at 15 to 20 miles an hour, such mass can have a tremendous impact should it strike one’s head, causing said head, for example, to kerplunk into the steering wheel of the Zamboni one may happen to be driving. Which in turn can cause collapse of certain nasal cartilage, the onset of blood and no small amount of pain.

There was a series of sounds that immediately changed the atmosphere of the arena: the slight “thump” of the dirigible hitting Brett, the very distinct “whack” of Brett’s nose on the worn black steering wheel, and long, trailing howl of fear and pain emitted by the large man on the Zamboni that was about to careen into the wall of the ice rink. The ensuing splintering of the plywood retaining wall hushed the room entirely.

The balloon had stopped on impact with Brett’s head, rose ten feet, then continued forward at a mad pace. Dirk, stunned by his own actions, had momentarily forgotten about it and was only reminded by the screams of small children and their parents, who were scrambling out of the thing’s flight path. The dirigible, its nose now covered with the stains of discarded ketchup packets and a wadded up piece of grease paper that stuck over the pig’s winking eye, was rendered in appearance from that of a particularly empty-headed member of Porky’s family to that of a violently insane pirate hog, grinning a bloody, one-eyed grin.

Dirk worked the controls of the balloon, sending it up and away just in time to narrowly avoid a boy on crutches, who despite all that was going on, appeared from Dirk’s reckoning to be howling a bit out of proportion to recent events. Dirk looked back down at Brett, who was sitting in the Zamboni’s seat, one hand rubbing the back of his head, the other holding his nose, glancing about in bewilderment. Suddenly he turned to Dirk, a black rage written on his face, and jammed the Zamboni into reverse, its wheels spinning on the ice, raising steam as it crawled backwards. Then a screech of metal as Brett slammed it into “Drive” and spun towards Dirk, its wheels still hissing as they fought to grip the hockey rink floor.

Dirk’s first reaction was to seek the fastest means of escape, but then an idea occurred to him.

He slowly smiled and raised the dirigible’s remote control box high in the air so Brett could see. The dirigible, which had been trundling in a circle above center rink, suddenly pitched directly towards the floor and lunged down, the loose end of the grease paper eyepatch flapping against the side of the balloon. Brett turned to see what Dirk was looking at and understood at once that the chase had fundamentally changed. Dirk stepped aside as Brett crashed through the rink endwall and headed straight for the loading ramp exit, looking behind him as the leering porcine face loomed ever closer.

The Zamboni shot through the narrow exit doors, scattering fans and arena staff, and squealed around the corner of the ground level hallway. Dirk guided the dirigible through the doorway easily enough, but it was not built for close-quarters urban assault and crashed into a Feral Moles memorabilia stand, sending hats, mugs, ornamental flags and logoed shot glasses flying. In the silence that followed, Dirk could hear the Zamboni rumbling down the hall, Brett evidently either having not noticed he was no longer pursued or simply taking no chances.

Dirk walked slowly back to the rink, stepping over pieces of the plywood wall, food, plastic cups and other spent objects as people stared open-mouthed, moving aside to let him pass. He sauntered to the center of the ice and stopped, raising his arms as if to embrace the fans. Somebody yelled, “his name’s Dirk!” someone else yelled, “Dirk Zeppelin!” and then the crowd began to chant, a section here, a few aisles there, then the Feral Moles themselves, the refs, and then the whole building, shouting, screaming, “Dirk Zeppelin! Dirk Zeppelin! Dirk Zeppelin!”

Dirk took a long, low bow. As he slowly raised his head, he saw Kelly standing in an entranceway in the far corner, a slight smile on her face. He caught her eye and held it.

Ⓒ 2014 Damon Stewart