Of course, laughter is one letter away from slaughter, and despite Clovis’s transfigured hilarity, no one likes to be laughed at, even if the laughter comes from a cuddle of kittens purring in a basket of rose blossoms. And invariably, it is the most fascist among us who are the least able to tolerate a chuckle at their expense, for laughter is nothing if it’s not an expression of spontaneity, and those who presume to boss the rest of us around loathe spontaneity. Thus, it surprised no one that Tom Greely—a line-loving lunkhead who as a child had ratted out his entire group of friends for stealing grapes from Lord Mauvoisin’s vineyard—was the first to cast a stone.
Least of all did it surprise Clovis, for in his peculiar state of heightened awareness, he’d felt a snarl of retribution stab at his hilarity, and it emanated directly from Tom Greely. Clovis locked eyes with Tom and laughed harder than ever, his eyes streaming forth tears as he felt his whole being radiate lightheadedness. Tom’s frown stretched into a meanspirited grimace as he wound up and hurled the two cobblestones he’d been clutching, one right after another. Clovis’s laughter ended abruptly, and he had time to consider that he had never felt more alive than at the moment of his death before he felt each of his palms instinctively reach out and catch first one and then the other of the rocks. Tom’s pitches were so ham-handedly premeditated that Clovis had to reach up for one and over for the second, for they never would have touched him if he hadn’t caught them. Hesitating not at all, he turned and pitched one of the rocks directly back at Tom Greely, striking him square in the forehead and putting him down. Before anyone could finish a gasp, Clovis launched the second rock at none other than Lord Mauvoisin himself, smiting him identically.
Those who had been about to follow the belligerent lurch of Tom Greely immediately reconsidered, and within seconds all that could be heard was the thumping of rocks as the assembled lynch dropped and tossed their stones to the ground, no one looking at another. The vassals, too, were astounded, perhaps even impressed. They looked at each other stupidly, unsure of their role in this unprecedented circumstance, and all were thankful when Attila at last broke the silence with a heehawing bray and trotted up to Clovis.
Clovis was as astonished as anyone at his reaction. He had no practiced skill in pitching stones, yet here he had effortlessly cracked the skulls of two with alarming accuracy. Finding not a glance to tell him to do otherwise, he mounted his mule and watched as his murmuring kith immediately parted a deferent path. Clovis looked to the vassals and was met with downturned eyes. He was being offered exile, it appeared. Looking again and at last toward the trees in the distance, Clovis sensed them calling him into their wilds, waving all the more sensually as the wind wafted flutesong through the forest and the sky stroked its bow across a fiddle of sunbeams.
And so it came to pass that, with all the world serenading his passage, Clovis strolled unharmed through the parted crowd, chuckling toward redemption.
16 EARLIER ON THE SAME morning that Diablo was released from jail, Father J. J. Speed was late for Mass. He stood in front of his coat closet, gazing at cases and cases of toothpicks and loathing his life. Before he finished seminary and landed his first pastoral gig, Father J. J. Speed had won a lifetime supply of toothpicks—a hundred thousand of them—when he picked the wrong door on Let’s Make a Deal. He had laughed and played along at the time, but inside he was monumentally disappointed. The fact was, he didn’t really want to be a priest. More precisely, he didn’t really want to be celibate. By the time he began to admit this to himself, however, he was almost finished with seminary and he couldn’t fathom what his parents or classmates would think of him if he quit. Consequently, and as far as he was concerned, his unhappiness was everyone else’s fault.
And now, insane from celibacy, Father J. J. Speed found himself trapped in a sweaty confessional ten hours a week listening to the perversions of his parishioners. Jesusfuckingchrist, he’d think to himself as he nodded his head to one teary tale after another of lust and infidelity. What the hell is wrong with these goddamn people? At least they’re getting laid, fer chrissakes. Father J. J. Speed contemplated blackmailing the lot of them and retiring to Vegas.
“Goddamn toothpicks,” he muttered as he surveyed the toothpicks in his closet, then bit his toothpick in half and spit it out angrily. He immediately replaced it with a fresh one. He really believed he had chosen the right door, he felt it the way a gambler knows when the roulette ball is about to hit his number. It would have been his door to freedom, but he had been denied and was left a thirty-year-old virgin. He shook his head bitterly, forced a grin, and squashed a suicidal impulse with a nip from his tequila flask.
Time to get holy.
17 UPON EXITING the rectory, wondering what the hell he was going to talk about in his sermon, Father J. J. Speed was startled by the outdoors. This sudden agoraphobia was occasioned by an ambient sepia-tone blush to the local atmosphere, tinting an unnerving hue upon the landscape. Looking up, he was surprised to find the sky looming nigh, a remarkably low ceiling of reddish clouds casting the oak on the lawn into vibrant contrast. Impressed with this display, Father J. J. Speed regarded the tree for several moments before the trunk suddenly seemed to heave with the contours of a lust and jumble of naked women. If Father J. J. Speed had not been thoroughly schooled in holy patriarchy, he might have considered this a vision of the feminine divine, and a rare grace indeed.
As it was, however, Father J. J. Speed was simply horrified. He only knew that he often hallucinated elements of the forbidden female form whenever he spent too long sifting through his footlocker full of pornographic magazines, all confiscated from Sunday school students over the years. And now, here was a treeload of writhing bodies enticing him with the prospect of a Gaian smother. It might have been sublime if he wasn’t so desperately horny and hungover with masturbatory guilt besides. He vowed to himself for the fiftieth time to destroy his porn stash.
He would not accomplish this anytime soon, of course, though he would proceed to give one screaming demon of a sermon on the evils of pornography.
18 THE AVERAGE RAINDROP exists for twenty-three minutes. The first drop of water to condense from a local vortex of pressurized vapor deep within the wall cloud above Normal was no average raindrop. After all, this was a raindrop spat from a thunderhead spawned from the undomesticated breeze born of the Joker’s resolve, the runaway dervish that just the day before had busted out of the slammer. This was a raindrop destined to live fast and die young, the vanguard of a mighty storm, an oversized dollop pitched from the center of a churning free-for-all, spinning like a glass speedball toward a home run, streaking out of the sky like it was late for a waterfall, a shimmering, pulsing bead reflecting a world on the brink of chaos and beauty.
Lawless and brilliant, the ninety-second drip of this rowdy raindrop endured a tumbling gauntlet of gladness and exultation. Not since the morning dew in Eden had a pearl of water known such clarity of purpose. From an infinite sea of vapor the raindrop thrilled into itself and without a moment’s hesitation whizzed off to its own obliteration. Never before or since would it ever incarnate, that was certain, and so it had nothing to do but careen through the atmosphere, being there then, turning somersaults like it was being chased by God’s good humor.
Never asking why this or why me, the raindrop flaunted the fundamental pattern of life as it traced a helical arc through the air on the way to its destiny. And its destiny, as always, was simple: to make a splash, to shake it up, to burst the bubble, to keep it real, to share the water, to nourish the Garden. The raindrop delighted in the undulations of its surface tension, feeling the reverberations of the Big Bang pulse throughout its being, seeing no thing, hearing no thing, being no thing.
If the raindrop could hear, it would have heard Billy yell “Pronto!” right before it whizzed through the open window of his truck and splashed onto his forehead.
The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze
THERE WAS NOT a path in sight. Clovis had fallen
asleep on Attila’s back, and if the ache in his neck was any indication, he had been asleep for hours. Deep under the canopy of a giant oak forest, he could not even determine the time of day. With nothing to be heard but the faraway hush of wind in the treetops, and nothing to be seen but the scattered majesty of the forest meditating in its silent serenity, Clovis bit his lip in a moment of regret. Upon kicking awake, his groggy and unthinking reaction had been to halt Attila’s gentle step, and in retrospect this seemed foolish. After all, Attila was no dumb ass. She must have been going somewhere, trodden trail or not. But now that her pace had been interrupted, Attila was suddenly stubborn.
With nothing else to do, Clovis dismounted and found himself plunged ankle-deep in a blanket of acorns well hidden by last autumn’s leaf litter. Delighted by this ambush, he crunched a few steps this way and that, stretching his legs and browsing for a sense of where to go next. So doing, he happened across a perfectly crimson and freshly fallen oak leaf, glowing scarlet on the otherwise brown, brittle, and disintegrating forest floor. Seeing as how the seasons could not possibly have been any further along than the summer solstice, the rubied enthusiasm of this incongruous leaf shone all the more fantastic in the eyes of the beholder. Pleased and puzzled, Clovis picked it up with far greater pleasure than one ordinarily feels upon finding the first flaring leaf of late summer, smirking puckish and spreading rumors of the autumn bloom to come.
Clovis spun the scarlet leaf on its stem between his fingers. It was uncommonly beautiful, translucent, as if it were somehow illuminated from within. He looked to Attila, hoping she would show some sign of marvel to confirm his own, but she merely gazed in placid asininity. Turning away, Clovis’s eyes fell immediately upon another, equally vibrant leaf a few paces ahead. He crunched over and picked it up, verifying for himself that it was not just the dazzle of a single reddened leaf that he found so enchanting, for this second leaf was no runty imitator.
And there, a few more paces ahead, he spied another cardinal leaf heralding its thank-you farewell, and beyond that another, each going down in its own blaze of brazen glory. Retrieving Attila, Clovis resolved to follow this trail of unseasonably and unreasonably beautiful leaves. They crunched along through the acorns, making what seemed to be all the noise in the world. Clovis imagined that he could not have made more noise if he were banging on an iron kettle with a steel ladle while leading a parade of roosters at dawn. He quite cracked himself up with that image, and if the local trees were wont to broadcast rumor, oaks far and wide would have heard tell of the ass and his fool, shambling through their midst in ungoverned hilarity.
19 IN 1936, during the depths of the Great Depression, forty young women arrived at the Cooper Pants Factory near Gainesville, Florida, sat down at their sewing machines, and set about stitching hems and seams, another dreary day in the land of opportunity. Shortly after they began their busywork, and as if this debasement of their imagination were not tragic enough, a tornado came along and bumped into the factory. Thirty-nine of the forty women ran panicked and screaming to the stairwell; a Mrs. Boyd Shaw remained at her station. She had inadvertently sewn her own dress into the seam she was stitching, and was unable to beat the hasty retreat. As she struggled to free herself, the tornado ripped the roof from the building, ultimately causing it to collapse, but not before it tore Mrs. Boyd Shaw clean out of her clothes and tossed her a block away, stark naked and bruised, but otherwise fine. All thirty-nine of her coworkers died in the ensuing inferno that consumed the factory.
There are hundreds of substantiated oddities such as this surrounding tornadoes. A tornado once opened a barn door, pulled a wagon out, turned it around, wheeled it back inside, and closed the door. A phonograph recording of the song “Stormy Weather” was once found wedged into a utility pole after a tornado had swept through the area. A butter churn once dropped out of the sky and landed on a cow’s head, half an hour after a tornado had hit twenty miles away. Chickens are routinely stripped of their feathers, and the feathers are sometimes found speared into planks of wood. In 1974, a farmer reclaimed a mirror, a carton of eggs, and a box of Christmas ornaments—all undamaged—from the otherwise total wreckage of his house. A tornado in 1996 even had the audacity to hit a drive-in movie theater in Canada while it was screening the movie Twister.
Then there are those who claim that tornadoes can blow a jug inside out, or a cellar upside down, or a rooster into a bottle, or even that a tornado can change the day of the week and knock the wind out of a politician. Although these assertions are ludicrous, the essential point should not be lost. Tornadoes introduce chaos, and chaos makes anything—short of changing the day of the week—possible. To describe the situation in terms of probability theory: Tornadoes provide a high probability that several of millions of low-probability events will occur. Of course, which of these millions of low-probability events actually occurs is pure chance.
Probably.
20 DIABLO WAS STILL inside Billy Pronto’s truck when he regained consciousness. The truck was about seventy feet from the road, and neither his severed middle finger nor Billy Pronto were anywhere to be seen. Frustration descended, and like a paper clip in idle hands, Diablo was bound to get bent out of shape. His finger, or the lack thereof, hurt like hell. His hand and head were bleeding, and he wanted to get himself to a hospital, preferably with a finger for some surgeon to heroically reattach.
To make matters worse, Diablo’s simulacrum of satori had split, evaporating like a two-minute sprinkle in the desert. This was no longer the perpetually flaring present, the big day of everyday; this was the worst day of his life. Jeezus christ, Diablo thought, did I swallow my goddamn finger? Maybe the heroic surgeon can retrieve it? Decisions. Final scan for finger and Billy Pronto. Nothing. Keys? Still in ignition. Does it start? Yes it does. Go? Go.
Diablo floored it, tore up the fallow field, crashed over a ditch, and bounced back onto the road. He had accelerated to sixty miles an hour before his zeal began to sag. Though the sky above him was as azure as he had ever witnessed, the sky above Normal—still four miles away across the Illinois flatland—was a sickeningly greenish black, clouds tumbling and boiling, thrashing and roiling like the underbelly of a rabid dragon in a pit of petroleum. Then he saw it, a wound-up towel snap from the bottom of the enormous cloud mass and slap the ground, the finger of God tickling Mother Earth. She bucked and threw a swarm of debris back at the roguish overtures of the sky, where it circled like vultures along the dancing windpipe, squirming like the trunk of an elephant about to sneeze.
Dumfounded once again, Diablo continued racing toward Normal for another few seconds. He might have continued farther if a curtain of hailstones the size of golf balls hadn’t suddenly fallen all around him. He braked hard but only succeeded in marbling across the hail-covered road, spinning a dozen times, each rotation marked by a barrage of hailstones pelting him through the open driver’s-side window. At some point he let out a cry, shielding his face from the punctuated bombardment of ice and his eyes from the relentless madness of the world. He managed to roll up the window once he realized he had stopped, and there he sat, shivering from shock, realizing he could no longer cross the fingers on his left hand, as thousands of berserking devils stampeded over the outside of the truck, hooves whammering, clamoring, riding jackhammers for pogo sticks. After a few minutes, the swarm had mostly passed, with only an occasional straggler pinging like the last few kernels of corn to pop.
Relieved, Diablo picked up one of the smaller hailstones littering the inside of the truck and tossed it in his mouth. It gave way to a satisfying and refreshing crunch. He smirked, rolled his window back down, stuck his left arm out, and defiantly extended what remained of his middle finger to the sky.
21 NO SOONER HAD Diablo proffered his profanity to the heavens than a new peril presented itself. Squinting down the highway, he saw a surge of cars emerging from the dusty mist and charging his way, taking up both sides of the road and then some.
The tornado
had attacked the highway through Normal, peeling slabs of pavement and tossing them here and there like so much citrus rind. This had triggered a universal reaction of internally combusted flight as hundreds of drivers shrieked their automobiles in the opposite direction and toward Diablo. Several cars were tapped out as the tornado chased the retreating pack down the highway, adding still greater imperative to the evacuation. Later, it was estimated that the tornado had been moving across the ground at speeds approaching seventy miles an hour.
Of course, Diablo was unaware of those affairs. The funnel cloud was no longer visible amid the dust and debris it was producing, and he could only see the ripsnorting onslaught of automobiles bearing down on him. Alarmed, he turned the ignition, fully expecting it to cough and sputter, but it defied the cliché and roared to life. Diablo gunned the engine, turned the truck with a gratifying fishtail, and just as he shifted into third looked in his rearview mirror and saw the leaders of the pack less than a hundred feet behind and an enormous tornado suddenly in full view a mile or so back. Within seconds the first wave of cars tore past him, honking and squealing, and before Diablo knew what was happening he was in the middle of a high-speed traffic jam. He shifted into fourth at sixty-five, and finally made it to fifth by eighty miles an hour. He was still being passed on all sides. On the median to the right an SUV was bouncing across the grass, taking the beating it had been waiting for since its manufacture. Farther behind an ambulance was wailing its siren and flashing its lights, trying to bully its way forward, but no one was having any of that shit. The emergency, after all, was perfectly apparent to everyone.
Nine Kinds of Naked Page 4