"It is," Chiun said, with a trace of unaccustomed fear in his voice. "Remo, turn this vehicle around at once!"
"What the-? Chiun, will you let go of my goddamn arm, for crying out loud?"
"A pippie!" the Master of Sinanju cried. In a flurry of frightened fingers he ducked below the dashboard as the second Volkswagen chugged by.
The car was covered with rubber daisies and peace symbols. The driver looked as if he shopped at the dump for his clothes and bathed once every two decades whether he needed to or not.
"What's gotten into you, Meryl Streep?" Remo asked.
"Turn this vehicle around at once!" Chiun shrieked in horror from the footwell.
"Huh? Why the hell should I do that?"
"Some wicked magic has obviously cast us back in time to the most odious era in your nation's history," the Master of Sinanju insisted. He tried grabbing for the steering wheel, but Remo held on tight.
"We haven't time traveled," Remo insisted. "This is just Barkley. As long as you keep your hands inside the car at all times, the locals won't bite."
A gasp from far below.
"Horror upon horrors!" Chiun wailed. "This is your fault for taunting the gods. I have become victim of their excess wrath. If we reverse our direction, perhaps we can escape this nightmare."
Chiun blindly tried to shift into reverse. Remo held tightly to both the steering wheel and gearshift lever.
"Will you knock it off?" he snapped. "I told you, we haven't gone through a time warp."
Hazel eyes appeared above the dash.
"I do not know what those words mean, but that was the most warped time since time began. I would gouge my eyes from my head and flee into the wilderness before reliving that dismal era."
"Okay, first order of business-no gouging," Remo insisted. "We're still in the present, those cars were really old and if you grab the wheel one more time I'm buying a banana plantation on Maui for both of us and having the natives hoist the Sinanju flag."
Sensing his pupil's certainty, the old man eased cautiously up to the edge of his seat.
"Purchase what you want where you want, but you will be swinging from your ancestral trees alone," the Master of Sinanju said. "Now explain this place quickly." Wary eyes watched the road ahead.
"Barkley is lost in time, but not in any supernatural way," Remo said. "I blame the college. There isn't a bigger factory for PC Jim Morrison hashhuffers than higher education. And the freaks they've got running Barkley U are the worst poncho-wearing gladiolis this side of the touring company of Hair. Dopey professors plus dopier kids equals LSD trips on daddy's credit card and vintage Volkswagens still tooling around the streets."
Chiun was caught between skepticism and his long-held belief that any lunacy was possible in America.
"Why would your nation allow a place filled with mental defectives to exist?"
"Don't know about you, but I'd rather keep all the assorted nuts in one can," Remo said.
And because it was the first time he could remember his pupil or America ever making sense, Chiun settled cautiously back in his seat. Nevertheless, he kept a careful eye on their surroundings as they drove deeper into the city.
Remo was surprised by the large number of potholes on the main streets. Their rental car bumped and bounced its way to the center of town. As they drove, he had noted a shape looming up over some of the low buildings.
At first he ignored it, but when they came to a set of traffic lights, he saw through a break in the buildings two massive black eyes staring down at them.
"What the hell is that?" Remo remarked, looking up at the huge statue at Barkley's center.
"It appears to be the image of some god," Chiun observed.
"Some god is right," Remo said sarcastically. "Looks like a big black turd with the top lopped off."
"That's right, Remo," Chiun said blandly. "Perhaps this is the one god left that you have not yet insulted. I will bring you back to Sinanju after this latest angry deity has transformed you into a pillar of salt. The fish salter can chip bits off of you to cure the catch for the long winter months." He watched the statue with quiet reverence.
"That'd almost be worth it just to get someone in that dump of a village to do an honest day's work," Remo said.
The eyes of Huitzilopochtli followed them as they headed for the main square.
The driving soon became impossible. Remo ditched his car on a rutted side street. The two men continued on foot.
Like a full moon at midnight, the Huitzilopochtli statue seemed to always be in the sky at their shoulder as they walked along the sidewalk.
"Let's hope the Buffoon Aid benefit's inside somewhere," Remo said. "That statue's giving me the creeps."
They found a reed-thin woman on a street corner near the town square. Dressed in a big, filthy muumuu, she looked like a dirty stick draped with a circus tent.
The woman sat on the sidewalk cutting colored scraps of paper into clumsy flower shapes. As she worked her scissors, the white tip of her tongue jutted from between her pale lips. A cobblestone pried up from a hole in the street kept her paper flowers from blowing away.
As they stopped before the squatting woman, Chiun's face took on a glint of quiet fascination. "Excuse me, ma'am," Remo said.
The scissors paused in midsnip.
"'Ma'am?'" Lorraine Wintnabber sneered up at him. "What kind of patriarchal cave did you crawl out of?"
"The kind with liquid Tide and bars of Dial that aren't dehydrated from nonuse," Remo replied.
"Soap pollutes our precious waterways," Lorraine said. She resumed clipping away.
"Since you're the first noncartoon person I've seen with actual stink lines floating off them, my vote's for sudsing up the mighty Mississip," Remo said. "Now, while my nose is still attached, you mind telling me where that big stand-up comic show is being held?"
The woman was still deeply involved in her work. She hadn't even looked up while Remo spoke. "That way," she snarled.
Lorraine waved to a big auditorium across the street from Barkley's city hall. Remo saw HTB vans parked out front, their rooftop satellite dishes aimed skyward. The legend "An AIC News-Wallenberg Company" was stenciled in small print on the side panels of each of the vans.
"Now, beat it," she said. "I've got eight hundred of these things to do by the day after tomorrow and I've only got twelve done so far."
She finished clipping another ragged flower. With great care she delivered it to the pile of finished ones, clapping the muddy cobblestone back in place.
"This may be none of my business, Dirty Harriet, but wouldn't it be easier if you did that inside?" Remo asked.
"It's too dark," Lorraine said, her eyes on her scissors.
"Turn on the lights."