At length, upon the imminent arrival of a posse comitatus who had learned of his attempted scheme to sell the state of Mississippi to a mysterious Chinese consortium based in Tijuana, Mexico, "Dick" Counterfly had absquatulated swiftly into the night, leaving his son with only a pocketful of specie and the tender admonition, "Got to 'scram,' kid—write if you get work."
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It's time for Thomas Pynchon's Dictionary Corner! Sometimes when you're reading a story, you don't want to take the time to look up words you don't know because you mostly get what the word means in context. But other times, your insane mother who realizes you don't understand everything she's saying in her letters from the asylum advises, "Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there." But then you think, "What does she know? She's crazy! And what exactly was her relationship with Zampano?!" But also maybe you think, "I should learn something! Let's break out that dictionary! I mean look in the online dictionary!"
"length" = the opposite of width and it doesn't matter. Width does matter though.
"imminent" = forthcoming. Like your mom. Ha!
"arrival" = to arrive. To be in a state of having just arrived. Or the enemy of an automatic rifle (which I'm often told isn't what AR stands for by people who are easily angered by insisting that it actually does stand for that. They also believe that if I think AR does stand for automatic rifle, I can't have an opinion on children being shot with one).
"posse" = is what happens when you steal some guy's horse and that guy has connections with the sheriff. But if the guy doesn't have connections to the sheriff and the guy who owns the general store and the guy who owns the saloon and the guy who owns the brothel, his horse is just gone, man.
"comitatus" = this is a Latin word that basically means posse. But saying "posse posse" sounds ridiculous. Also there was some big deal act about Posse Comitatus back in 1878 which, and this is straight from Wikipedia because I don't know nearly enough about anything, "limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States." Is this act still law because maybe somebody should throw it in Trump's stupid face?
"learned" = I probably don't need to define all the words, do I? There's probably a baseline level of understanding English that I should take for granted.
"Mississippi" = this is either one of the states of the United States or it's a clever insult: "Miss is a pee pee."
"mysterious Chinese consortium" = this is a clue that Dick's involved in a scam.
"based in Tijuana, Mexico" = this is another clue that Dick's involved in a scam.
"Dick" = an embarrassing and nonsensical nickname for a guy named Richard. One of my cousins named his kid John Thomas and I laugh about it at least once a week.
"absquatulated" = at first I thought this was just a silly word that Pynchon made up. But it's worse than that. It's a silly word that people of the 1830s made up during a fad when it was fun to make up words that sounded vaguely Latin and which Pynchon, of course, knew about. I think it means "to abdicate as a low and vulgar person without any means or power."
"specie" = disappointingly, this simply means coins. I will not tell you what I hoped it meant.
"scram" = a word that means "I never loved you and must now get as far away from you as possible, for as long as possible."
So now we know about Chick's childhood! It was a little bit like Paper Moon except Chick's dad doesn't get his ass kicked so he never realizes how much he loves his kid and how much he's been hurting them.
