by H. M. Mann
Only Gunn and Father Time, an ancient Italian priest, attended Cat’s funeral. Father Time said quite a few random things about Cat, like how he knew she was this and that and the other, almost as if he knew her very, very well, and this made Gunn feel even more angst.
I hardly knew ye at all! Gunn whimpered dialectically in his mind. If we only had more time! That’s all I wanted! More time! And more thyme! You made my life spicy! I wish this were leap year! I wish the earth would stop rotating on its axis so we’d all fly off the planet at 200 miles per hour!
Father Time shook Gunn’s trembling hands with eerily cold and clammy hands. “She was a fine woman, son.”
“Dad?”
“No. I am a man of the cloth.”
“Oh. Um, cotton?”
“Polyester blend,” Father Time said. “Cotton makes me itch.”
And then, it began to rain as it usually does at all movie funerals to provide the rainmakers jobs, I suppose, and lend gravity and mud and little dots of water to the camera lenses, all of which, I suppose, is to make the cinematic experience more realistic. The rain was heavy. It soaked him. Gunn was wet. He was sodden. He dripped. He felt the cold seeping into his bones. His bones ached. The rain had a sixty percent chance of turning into snow, and it did, instantaneously coating the mound of dirt under which lay his love, his soul mate, his sweet patootie, Cat Mann.
Gunn would never forget her. He would mourn her for the rest of his life. He would adopt kittens and tell them the epic story of his and Cat’s two-week-long torrid love affair over some catnip and Friskies Buffet. He would go on a pilgrimage to Katmandu. He would meet Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. He would never marry. He would become a Scotch-Irish priest who wore polyester blends and called men “son” to mess with their heads and put them into years of psychotropic drug therapy.
Johnny was beginning to despise Gunn and his sudden lack of testosterone. How can I return Gunn, who is whining and moaning so pathetically, to his manly man status?
Johnny smiled because he was about to provide Gunn with another woman.
The next day, however, Gunn would meet Thais Knotts, and unbeknownst to her and to him, Thais Knotts would be his true truelove and mother of his unborn child, Sparky.
Johnny wondered if it were too soon for Gunn to love again. He had only known Cat for two weeks, but he had fallen so hard for her. Besides, Johnny thought, I have two hundred and fifty pages to fill. I need to get to it. But shouldn’t Gunn grieve? Shouldn’t the reader feel his heartbreak for several excruciatingly painful chapters? Shouldn’t the reader be filled with Gunn’s immeasurable angst and go through several boxes of Kleenex and a box of Dove chocolates? Shouldn’t I make readers weep themselves to sleep and soak their pillows enough that they get off their backsides and wash the soiled things for the first time in months?
“Nah,” Johnny said, startling the mice in the kitchen. “That’s not what readers want to read.” He stood and stretched his back, hearing several pre-arthritic cracks in his knees. “No. Readers do not want reality. They can get their own grief simply by waking up and turning on CNN or any top-forty radio station listening to the crap people call music. Why torture them with reality? They can watch carefully edited reality shows just full of carefully edited pain and suffering, complete with close-ups. Why—”
He slumped into his seat.
Oh yeah. Duh! Someone just capped Cat. I killed a major love interest on page eleven. I’ve had a fiery car wreck, a crime scene, and a funeral. I’ve already written the synopses for several current Hollywood films. Any critic who says this book isn’t realistic is crazy! “Here we go,” Johnny whispered.
“Life,” Gunn thought aloud as he moved realistically away from Cat’s grave like molasses in February. “Life has a way of getting rosy.” He stood beside the new Geo Storm and took out a Cuban cigar, lighting it and—
Johnny then remembered that it was raining and snowing at the cemetery. He deleted his last sentence.
He stood beside by the new Geo Storm. He took out a Cuban cigar but didn’t light it out of respect for the dead around him who were probably dying for a smoke and the fact that just owning a Cuban cigar could get him into trouble with the Feds. He chomped on the cigar while he mused about life.
“Life is, indeed, a rose,” Gunn said in a lifeless manner. “You have to feed it expensive plant food, these little pebbly things that look suspiciously like a little boy’s boogers, but if you feed the rose too much, it will wilt like Republican hopes for the presidency through 2016. Life is thorny, especially if you live in the country where a simple walk in the woods can tear the snot out of your clothes. Life sometimes smells good, and sometimes life smells like rotted rose petals dripping with snail slime and half-digested berry-filled pigeon poop.”
A single ray of golden light broke through a crevice in the clouds. The crevice looked exactly like the scabby scar on Cat’s forehead. It was a ray of silken blonde, which didn’t match Cat’s hair at all except for a few strands she had bleached once on a whim when she was at band camp as a teenager. All the kids were doing it, so Cat streaked her red hair with blonde. She looked like the top of a merry-go-round for several weeks. Whenever she spun around quickly in a circle, her head would look like the world’s largest orange.
“And now,” Gunn said juicily, “I’ve been sun-kissed.”
He bathed in that golden ray, he worshiped it, he burned in it.
“My poor, poor, poor Cat. I wish we hadn’t fought over the Pomeranian. I will buy one in your memory and name it ‘Ouch,’ you know, that romantic word you’d utter whenever I hugged you. If we hadn’t fought and I hadn’t stormed out, I would have been home with you at the time of your death, which the police have said was 1:34 AM because of Cat’s smashed Mickey Mouse watch. Little did the police know, but Cat’s watch needed a new battery and always said 1:34. I would have protected you with my secret arsenal of mostly illegal weapons the NRA has let me legally own so I can hunt freely in this land of the free and the home of the Atlanta Braves.”
Johnny threw his head back in shame. “Gunn would have had an alarm system! Duh!” Johnny decided to write his way out of it.
Gunn hugged Cat’s marble tombstone. “I wish that category five hurricane and that 7.5 earthquake that I slept through last night hadn’t knocked out the power to the entire East Coast, thereby disabling my state-of-the-art alarm system.”
Gunn chewed his cigar in a virile, manly manner. “The police are looking for a girly man with a limp, but if I find him first, he’ll be toast. He’ll be burned toast. He’ll be burned heel toast. Why don’t people eat the heels of a loaf of bread? They are just as nutritious. Americans waste too much good food, don’t they? And when I am done with Cat’s killer, he’ll be so crusty he’ll look like barnacles encrusted on the bottom of a bass boat beached in Barcelona. He’ll be so crispy I can serve him with two family side dishes at KFC.”
Maybe, Gunn thought, Cat’s killer limps because he only has one leg. I will find him and disarm him, too.
The word “taut” flashed through Johnny’s mind. He knew he had to build suspense. He also knew that he must use excessive foreshadowing for several pages to add to his page count.
These thoughts naturally gave way to thoughts of Cat’s final moments. Who would kill Cat? Who? Who? Who? Why would anyone kill her? Why? Why? Why? She was completely, totally, wholly harmless unless she was on her pain medicine and falling all over the place holding a switchblade, and I have the scars on my arms to prove it. Why had Cat been armed with an Uzi submachine gun and Chinese throwing stars, both of which police found unused and tucked under the cushions in my sectional sofa?
Little did he know
Johnny remembered using that phrase already and deleted it.
Littler did he know, Gunn would soon run into the aforementioned mother of Rafe, a.k.a. “Sparky,” his first child who would be born in a trough in a barn on a commune in Flagstaff, Arizona, in only thirty-four short mont
hs.
After kissing Cat’s tombstone and getting a cemetery worker to help him get his lips unstuck from the frozen marble, Gunn got blind drunk and left new Geo Storm paint on thirty-four cars along Main Street.
Johnny sat back. There’s that number again, Johnny thought. I have established this number in this book for some reason. I am obviously subconsciously fixated on the number thirty-four. Johnny knew that English majors dissecting this novel would be able to tell the world why in a few years: “Well, let’s see, Bob, thirty-four is a number divisible by two prime numbers, and therefore the author is trying to tell us something mathematical about the universe involving the numbers two and seventeen. Two … scoops? Seventeen … magazine? Seventeen magazine has the scoops?”
Johnny knew, of course, that they would be dead wrong.
Johnny shook off his tortured past and plowed ahead:
Gunn plowed down Main Street in the snow in a drunken attempt to rekindle the fiery image of Cat’s hair and the collision that originally brought Cat singed and bleeding into his life. That’s when he ran smack dab into the back of Thais Knotts’s police cruiser at precisely 7:34 AM.
Johnny scrolled back to read his work so far, declared it “thin,” and decided to add some back-story to interrupt the plot and amaze the reader with his command of useless back-story.
Thais Knotts was the aforementioned mother of Rafe, Rafe who would despise her name because it was a boy’s name and what, were her parents crazy when they named her, or blind, or what? Rafe kind of liked “Sparky,” though. That name had spark. It had fire. It was combustible. It was fiery. It sizzled.
Maybe, Rafe the unborn baby thought, they were relighting the pilot light in the water heater when they named me, or am I nicknamed for Old Sparky, the nickname for electric chairs in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, New York, Texas, and West Virginia, and why do I have so many questions for one not yet born, though I can’t wait to be born, learn to talk, get potty-trained, and ask my parents about my screwy name?
Why are there green lines here? Johnny thought. I’m only getting a little experimental. Other writers do it, that stream-of-consciousness stuff that wins them awards and critical acclaim, but when I do it, I get all these freaking green lines. What does Microsoft have against a little experimentation? Forget Microsoft. Bill Gates never wrote a romance novel. Johnny took another sip of tea and continued.
Thais Knotts limped back to Gunn’s window and pointed a very large, scary, police-issue, snub-nosed .38 at him. “Don’t you move a single, solitary muscle, buster! Don’t you even sneeze! Don’t you even flinch a capillary or I’ll cap you, you scum-sucking pig!”
Gunn froze, willing his capillaries not to flinch. He had already taken several muscle relaxers to smooth out his drunken rampage, so he wasn’t worried about moving any muscles.
But when Thais saw Gunn all frozen and inert and bleeding and stinking blind drunk and gagging on half a Cuban cigar, she smiled a silly little smile when she beheld his masculine manliness. He was manly in a way other men weren’t. He was a manly, mannish man with a manly, mannish smell, a manly, mannish face, and long, manly, mannish nose hairs. Lesser men would have plucked or trimmed those scraggly, dark strings hanging down from his nostrils to his upper lip, but not this scum-sucking, manly, mannish pig. Thais knew at that moment that Gunn was the most manly, mannish man ever created since the beginning of time. She knew that her destiny was to bear him a child whom she would nickname Sparky in thirty-four months.
“Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, dear,” Thais said, her words dripping carelessly with careful amounts of caring care. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Gunn said while licking alcohol-thinned blood and Cuban cigar debris from his lips. He, too, decided that Thais was his real soul mate based on the size of her gun, the ruggedness of her police-issue trousers bulging with ammunition, and her silly little laugh. “Can you, can you heal me, oh fair one with the large gun, rugged pants, and silly little laugh? Will you, will you heal me, you who should be Miss America provided you say politically correct things in all your answers to the judges even if your answers are against everything you believe in?”
Thais’s face melted into that soft and caring face women use whenever they hold a newborn baby, kitten, puppy, or new pair of shoes to add to the thousand and five pairs overflowing their closets, most of these shoes worn once with an outfit that has since gone out of style everywhere but The View.
“I can sure try,” Thais said with care dripping from her silly little voice onto his lap and forming a puddle of caring goo. “But you want me to heal you? How can you know that I’m the one? I never went to medical school, though I wanted to. I faint at the sight of blood anyway. I’ve always been that way. I’d skin my knee, see the blood, and pow! Right over onto my noggin and bleeding worse than before. Scraped off many an eyebrow in my day, I have. And don’t even get me started about scabs, especially the oozing ones that look like dried up frogs. But … how do you know that I’m your one and only?”
Gunn chewed on his cigar, reduced after twelve hours and a major collision to a saliva-filled thumb of Cuban tobacco. “You had me at scum-sucking pig.”
Thais’s eyes misted up, and she said so sweetly, “That is so sweet.”
“I know it is,” Gunn said with a knowing air. “It’s why I said it. I say sweet things so you don’t think I’m completely an incorrigible rogue. I say sweet things because I do have a soft side and a rare tea cozy collection. I say sweet things to get you romantically interested in me because otherwise you would arrest me and throw away the key. Look, I have to pee because of the thirteen Tom Collins I just drank before washing them down with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, so if you don’t mind …”
Thais marveled at Gunn’s ability to drink and to be able to converse after he should have been brain dead hours ago.
“Oh,” Gunn added brokenly, “and I think my leg’s broken.”
“You have another one,” Thais said with a silly little womanly giggle.
So wise, this woman, Gunn thought. She is a femme fatale, a beautiful, siren-like woman capable of destroying a man’s soul and life by making him feel bad, confused, and infatuated all at the same time. She’s like a dame in a Bogart movie, but not the one with that decrepit boat and all those Germans. You know, a Bogart movie with the dame who shows up at the detective’s office flashing her gams wrapped in black market nylons, and she turns out to be really, really evil and really, really beautiful at the same time, kind of like Queen Elizabeth I, who wasn’t actually that pretty, but if you wanted to keep your royal artist’s gig, you had to paint her beautifully or she’d chop your fool head off in front of a cheering crowd of English soccer fans and other theologians.
Thais was like that, the yin to his yang, the dark to his light, the snap, crackle, and pop to his Rice Krispies, a real woman who put on her police-issue trousers one leg at a time and carried a huge, scary, police-issue .38.
“Let’s go to my place,” Gunn groaned placidly, because most of the alcohol in his blood had bled out and he was finally feeling painfully painful pain.
“Sure,” Thais said surely. “Can you drive?”
“Yes,” Gunn said affirmatively with another manly groan. “Only one of my legs is broken. You don’t mind shifting my gears for me, do you? I am, after all, blind drunk, crippled, and infatuated.”
“I don’t mind,” Thais said mindlessly. “I am, after all, left-handed,” she added handily.
Their eyes met. It was a romantic moment, kind of like the one Gunn had with Cat only different.
Johnny decided not to break any new literary ground here, figuring that one romantic moment was just as romantic as any other was. Why beat a dead horse?
Gunn backed the new Geo Storm from the back bumper of Thais’s police car and sped off into the sunrise, his front bumper gouging the asphalt in front of him, sparks setting off several small brush fires that would later be blamed on careless campe
rs on their way to spend their vacation at a campground. But who were they kidding? They were driving a Recreational Vehicle, an RV. You don’t really camp if you’re inside an RV, right? Camping involves tents, marshmallows, nocturnal critters, rocks and sticks gouging your backside all night, and mosquitoes—not indoor plumbing, satellite TV, a refrigerator, and those ridiculous paper lamps strung up everywhere like a campsite is supposed to look like Chinese New Year.
When they arrived at his mansion, Thais taught Gunn the famous yoga position number thirty-four so he could sober up comfortably. They formed a millipede, a perfect circle, his feet to her ears, her feet to his ears. They remained in this position for thirty-four minutes enjoying each other’s feet and wondering when the fun was supposed to begin.
Johnny had written himself into a corner. He had no idea what his characters were enjoying. He was in an uncomfortable position. It was late, he was lonely, he hadn’t been in the company of a woman in years, and his characters were staring at each other’s feet.
He decided to insert some snappy, modern, romantic dialogue:
“Are you—”
“No. Are you—”
“Of course not.”
“You … aren’t?”
“No.”
“I meant—”
“Oh. Um, you don’t have to be.”
“So you’re really—”
“Yes.”
Gunn squinted as Clint Eastwood used to squint before he became all wrinkly and old as the Appalachian Mountains, which are the oldest mountains in North America. “By the way,” Gunn said, pondering aloud, “the New River in southwest Virginia is one of the oldest rivers on the planet. Why they named it the New River is beyond me, but if you ever need a definition for irony, you have one now.”