Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  Told him some facts about Chuck Nunn Junior, with whom even the high winds decline to mess. How the prodigiousness of his 1948 birth tore up his Momma Mona May’s innards so bad that even today the woman can only fall asleep after hot pads and loud opera, and requires institutional caring. How Chuck Junior was swarthy and pubic by ten, bearded and bowlegged and randy by twelve; how his late Daddy tried to whip him just once, like to broke his belt to smithers on Chuck Junior’s concrete behind. How C. Jr. flipped his cherry on our seventh-grade music teacher, a pale, jagged woman, but highly scented, who even today passes through Minogue Oklahoma in a Trailways bus ever leap year, needlepointing and humming vacant tunes of love’s non-requiting. How Chuck Nunn Junior’s color was that of the land and how his sweat smelled like copper and how the good ladies of Minogue got infallibly behooved to sit down whenever he passed, walking as walks a man who is in communion with Forces, legs bandy and boots singing with the Amarillo spurs he won himself at the ’65 State Fair in O. City for kicking the public ass of a bull without but one horn, but a sharp one.

  Told Simple Ranger, whose rate of beer is scary on account of no teeth to hinder a maximal swallow, told Ranger how, while he was out on Big Dirt watching skies and eating peas out of cans, Minogue Oklahoma H.S. won the state H.S. football title two years back to back with Chuck Nunn Junior at quarterback and defense and myself at Equipment Manager. How in ’66, in the state final versusing Minogue Oklahoma and Enid Oklahoma, our sworn and fatal foes for all time, how in the final game’s final few competitive seconds Enid, down by five, granted the ball to their giant ringer nameless nigra wingback, who took off from the Enid eleven with the ball in his hands and wrongness in his eyes, meaning harm to Minogue Oklahoma’s very heart and self-perception, this nigra blowing through Minogue boys like grit on big wind, plus getting interferences run by two cow-punchers’ boys of human form but geologic size, plus a Canadian martial arts expert in a padded bathrobe and metal cleats, who played dirty and low. How (I’m seeing this now, mind) how after a climactic and eternal chase-down-the-field and catch-from-behind, a swift cruel red-bearded and glitter-eyed C. Nunn Jr. brought down the whole stadium house, solved the runner-plus-interference problem at our ten’s Enid sideline by tackling the huge cow-boys, the low Canadian kicker, the inhumanly fast nigra, three Enid cheerleaders, a referee, and one ten-gallon cooler of Enid Gatorade, all at one cataclysmic time. Busted a igneous leg on a interferer’s spine and healed up in just weeks, bandier than before. Got a hall of Minogue Oklahoma H.S. named Chuck Nunn Junior Hall.

  2. CHUCK NUNN JUNIOR MORE GOD THAN NOT

  Told Simple Ranger some data on how Chuck Nunn Junior, more God than not to those of us peers that lived for a whiff of his jet trail, ate up his school and town, left us bent and in mid-yearn his eighteenth year and moved on to Oklahoma University, Norman, at whence he was observable throwing high-altitude televised spirals and informing his agriculture and range-management teachers of facts they did not know. Then how Nunn chucked it all to give time as a volunteer in The United States’ Involvement in Vietnam, whence trickled down rumors of the glory and well-armed mightiness of Nunn: how he toted his unit’s fifty-calibers up sheer and cliff-like impediments to conflict; how he declined to duck, never once crawled or ate mud, however never even once smelled lead in his cranial vicinity; how he got alone and surrounded by VCR’s (Viet Cong Regulars) in ’71, and through sheer force of personality and persuasion persuaded the whole battalion of sly slanted Charlies to turn their own guns on their selves. How etc. etc. How he sent me a postcard with a red bloom of napalmed jungle on the front, wrote how he wished my personal vision was better so I could leave the feed store and get over there to watch and whiff the trail of his jet.

  Simple Ranger’s eyes is the color of the sky. There’s speculation hereabouts concerning if you look at something long enough does your eyes take its color.

  I profess to telling the grey-eyed Ranger, plus a Nunn-happy group of Minogue civilians, how Chuck Nunn Junior returned home from OU Norman and South East Conflict more theory than man. How there was a welcome parade, fussy and proud, with a tuba. How the immoderate and killer twister that hit in ’74 (this twister old Simple Ranger, by then more than a tinch damaged, chased for twelve helter and skelter miles in his DeSoto, said he smelled his aloft land in every revolution, finally wound up upside down in phone lines and no sign of his car evermore. Didn’t never come down) that hit in spring, ’74, the day after Nunn’s returning and parade, how that sucker ripped the roof off Nunn’s late Daddy’s machine shed, sucked two N. Rockwell prints and Nunn’s late Daddy out a busted ranchhouse window to follow Simple Ranger’s DeSoto in a straight-up, and how it took up the Nunns’ TV’s aerial antenna off the house roof and flew the electric javelin out a fair quarter mile, flung the pole down into Nunn land like a mumblepeg, and how up from this TV-speared ground, just inherited ex officio by Chuck Nunn Junior, come a bubbling crude. Black gold. Texas tea. How Nunn paid off his late missing Daddy’s sheep ranch’s mortgage with revenues, put his scrambled and operatic Momma Mona May into institutional caring, and took over the Nunn sheep business with such a slanderous cunning and energy, plus oil money, that soon amounts of CNJ-brand sheep was bulging straining and bleating against the barbed wire limit of Nunn’s spread, mating in frenzies, plus putting out wool hand over hoof, plus fighting over which one got to commit suicide whenever Nunn looked like he even might

  (“Might,” I told Simple Ranger)

  be hungry.

  Was telling the dust-watcher how C. Nunn Jr. passed up multitudes of come-hitherish cheerleaders and oriental princesses to return to Minogue and enter into serious commitment with his childhood sweetheart, the illegally buxom and tall Glory Joy duBoise, closest thing to femininity and pulchritude that to date exists in Minogue Oklahoma, eyes like geometry and a all-around bodily form of high allure and near-religious implication, and just as I was commencing a analogy relating the shape of Glory Joy’s hips to the tight curve of the distant Big Dirt horizon, the door to the Outside Minogue Tavern busted inward and there against the dusty sunlight was framed the tall, angstified, and tortured frame of Glory Joy duBoise, hand to her limpid and Euclidean eyes, hips (that was similar to horizons) brushing the trauma-struck frame of the busted-inward door. She stood like that for time, looking at me, then come over at the table we was all at. Whereupon she stood, staggered, dropped and flopped in a floor-direction, her wracked and convulsively semi-conscious frame moving in directions like the Minogue Oklahoma H.S. half-time band, spelling out Kicked In The Butt By Love, or, Forlorn And Subject To Devastation Following The Loss Of Chuck Nunn Junior Due To The Hurtful Precariousness Of His Post-Accident Temper.

  3. NUNN’S PERSONAL UNDOING WAS THE DAY IT RAINED SHEEP

  Nunn’s personal undoing was the day it rained sheep, I outlined to Simple Ranger as me and several civilians carried the forlornly swooned and flopping frame of Glory Joy duBoise to our table, smeared cold Rolling Rock on her pulse-points, and propped her up in a splinterless chair to come round to the outlining of our mutual Minogue sadnesses and troubles.

  Told Simple Ranger how the success of the Nunn sheep ranch, plus the devotion of the near-beautiful Glory Joy, had aroused the ire and jealousy of T. Rex Minogue, the antique and hermitically reclusive, also malignant and malevolent, Minogue Oklahoma sheep mogul, plus the manufacturer of the illegal and chemically unstable sweet-potato whiskey that kept our neighboring reservation’s Native Americans glazed and politically inactive; and how following the spectacular rise of the Nunn sheep operation under the energy and Agriculture Degree of Chuck Junior, who was, remember, a-shtuppin’ the little lady T. Rex himself had wanted to a-shtup since she was twelve,

  how in light of all this it’s comprehensible how T. Rex Minogue repeatedly and with above-average vigor attempted to financially acquire, legally finagle, then violently appropriate the Nunn sheep operation from Chuck Nunn Junior; how Nunn was too petroleumly rich, well and savvily educ
ated, and martially formidable, respective, for any of the attempts to fructify; how Nunn took all Minogue’s shit with good humor, even the complimentary and ribboned jelly jars of yam liquor that T. Rex kept sending Glory Joy, each attached to a note headed NOTICE OF FORMAL WOOING, all with great and superior humor, until finally T. Rex, a man wholly allergic to any distance between himself and his way (least here in this town his own Daddy built before getting fatally harmed by some politically active Native Americans), until T. Rex arranged for his younger antique brother V.V. Minogue—a benign however treatably alcoholic rangehand and poet (his stuff rhymed, I’m told) who was under the thumb of dependency on T. Rex’s secret sweet-potato recipe, I informed the ranger—for V.V. and two humungous out-of-town cow-punchers’ boys from Enid (yes the old interferers from the climax of the state football title game in ’66), for them to explosively dynamite a large and bulk-like portion of Chuck Nunn Junior’s ranch’s flock-infested grazing land; how whereupon the land was in fact dynamited by V.V. and the geologic Enid boys; and how it rained various percentages of sheep in Minogue Oklahoma for one whole nauseous afternoon two years ago next Ascension.

  As Simple Ranger sat up straight at this and informed myself and the civilians that he himself had heard a far-off thunder booming off the dome of Big Dirt space, plus seen a singular pink-white rain from clear out in his shack on Dirt two Ascensions back, and had attributed the experiences to theology, plus the effects of damage, Glory Joy duBoise fluttered her way into consciousness and arousal, smoothed her brass-colored and towering hair with a hand-motion of such special sensuousness that two civilians tipped back over in their chairs and was largely lost for the rest of the duration, and entered into the therapy of it all, getting on the outside of several beers and detailing for the Ranger how it had been, that dark, fluffy, and rusty day, running with C. Nunn Jr. through the blasted heaths of exploded former pasture, ruining her best silk umbrella for all time, watching her man move through turf, mutton, and gore like the high wind of madness itself, floundering bow-legged through gruesome fields of gruesomer detonated wool, catching plummeting major percentages of particular favorite sheep in a shearing-basket, Glory Joy watching his mood and attitude getting more and more definable in terms of words such as grief, sorrow, loss, disorientation, suspicion, anger, and finally unambiguous and unequivocal rage. How as coyotes and buzzards began to sweep in off Big Dirt and commence a scavengerial orgy unsurpassed in modern Oklahoma in terms of pure and bilious nasty, how C. Nunn Jr. unhitched his ’68 souped-entirely-up Italian Sports Car from his OU Norman quarterback career and fairly flew off the ranch east on rickety two-lane 40 toward the gigantic and private T. Rex Minogue spread, without so much as a kiss my foot to Glory Joy, who watched her man inject his vehicle of light into the chewed-up straight-shot road to TRM, his mind on the noun T. Rex Minogue, the near-gerunds confrontation, reparation, possibly even reciprocation (i.e. detonation).

  4. SO IT WENT BACK AND FORTH

  So it went back and forth, myself and Glory Joy, Simple Ranger gumming his bottle, his expression moving between vacant and preoccupied, the odd and frequent passing civilian patron getting pulled into the table, beer in hand, whenever Glory Joy rose her six-foot self up to tell what it had been similar to, those lonesome days of trying to run off carrionizers and mop up sheep percentages and run a ranch—admittedly now a smaller spread by a good measure—all herself; she’d rise up in her purple satin midi- and pay public tribute to the resemblance the days after Nunn’s undoing and accident bore to hell right up on the grey and psoriatic skin of this world’s land.

  So it went back and forth, me handling the historical and observational, Glory Joy the personal and emotive. Was me revealed to Simple Ranger how, after the rain of sheep, Nunn was fairly flying in his little Italian Sports Car east on 40 to present to T. Rex Minogue the gift of T. Rex’s own personal ass, and how meanwhile, back at Nunn’s ranch, a good part of Minogue Oklahoma commenced to arrive and gawk and Kodak and catch mutton-cuts in receptacles (“Honey,” this one old Mrs. Peat in yellow rain boots and slicker and a pince nez told me as she adjusted her hairnet she told me “Honey, when it rains bread and fishes, you get yourself a bucket, is what you do”). And how but mean-meanwhile, T. Rex Minogue’s benign but sub-digital brother V.V., steeped in post-explosion guilt and self-loathing, plus not a little eau d’sweet potato, was speeding away from T. Rex’s enormous spread for the Deep Dirt of Oklahoma’s interior to commune with himself, guilt, pain, and a whole big truck full of jelly jars of distilled yam, and was accordingly fairly flying west on rickety 40 in this huge old truck, and at a ominous and coincidental point in time V.V. subconsciously decided, in some dark and pickled back part of his oceanic head, to see just what it was like driving his gargantular three-ton IH home-modified yam liquor transport truck on the left side of the hills, valleys, and sinewing curves of two-lane 40, V.V.’s left side being Chuck Nunn Junior’s by right, course; and how here come Chuck Nunn Junior ripping up the highwayed hill right dab equidistant center between the two ranches, and here’s V.V., driving in a pickled manner and a inappropriate lane up the hill’s other side, and how there was impact at high speed, of a head-on kind, between the two.

  “Impact,” I said to Simple Ranger. “Plus damage, in no small measure.”

  And Glory Joy duBoise testified to the feelings she felt upon arriving in my pickup upon the accident scene, some pathetically few miles down 40, and seeing her Chuck Nunn Junior literally wearing his little impacted car; how there was white steam whistling out of his tires, out of the accordion that had been his engine, and out of Nunn’s head, which looked on first look to be minus a jaw, consciousness, and two healthy eyes, in that order. How red lights and sirens come emergencying out across Dirt; how the Emergency Folks had to cut Chuck Junior out of his car with torches; how they was scared to move him on account of spinal considerations; how Minogue Sheriff Onan L. Axford announced to some press and media that wearing a safety belt, which Nunn was, had been all that come between Chuck Nunn Junior and eternal flight out a punctured windshield.

  She told how Nunn come more or less to, in his little wrap-around car, his torch-lit busted eyes in blood like bearings in deep oil;

  “Remember the eyes of Nunn,” I interjaculated, and Simple Ranger give me a watching look

  ; and as Glory Joy finished up communicating the anger and justicelessness she felt, upon seeing T. Rex’s brother V.V. Minogue, listing far to port up against the largely unharmed cab of his IH liquor truck, weepy, shitfaced, scratchless; how V.V.’s accidental ass had been immunized and preserved by how some old International Harvester trucks turned out had one of them air bags in them, that nobody knew about, from a IH experiment in the 1960’s that didn’t make the economic wash. But so the whole accident that was V.V.’s pickled fault and that impacted Nunn’s hairy jaw and busted both his eyes, plus a pelvis, plus concussed the sucker into moral comatosity and undoing—the whole damaging calamity had consisted for V.V. Minogue of just a jillionth-of-a-second sensuous experience of soft and giant marshmallow (the white foaming lumpy bag was still filling up the big truck’s cab, at this time, I remember, starting to jut and ooze out the busted windows, looking dire and surreal), of a marshmallow instant, plus a upcoming year of subsequent legalities. As Glory Joy climaxed telling how it felt, and took a deserved grief-intermission, a certain palate-clefted but upstanding civilian turn to me and he say,

  “Sucker busted his eyes?” being real interested in physical damage, birth defects, accidental maimings, and the like.

  “Sucker busted his eyes?” the Simple Ranger repeated in a rich gritty voice that croaked of advanced Grey Lung, the disease most specially feared by us who spend our lives on Big Dirt.

  Out of a consideration for Glory Joy duBoise, who was wearing her pain like a jacket, now, I lowered my voice as I invited civilian and Ranger to picture what two cantaloupe melons dropped from a high height would resemble, if they wanted the picture of how Nunn’s eyes
got busted out his head via general impact and collision, hanging right out his head, ontojolly insecure.

  And was me told the table how except for the eyes, the jaw, and the pelvis, which to our community relief all healed up, prime face, in just weeks, leaving good luck bad luck Chuck Junior a sharper shot, wickeder dancer, and nearer to handsome than before, how except for that, the major impact and damage from the accident had turned out to be to Nunn’s head, mind, and sensibility. How right there in the post-accidental car he suddenly got conscious but evil,

  “evil,” I emphasized, and there was shudders from civilians and Glory Joy,

  and how a evil Chuck Nunn Junior fought and cussed and struggled against his spinal restraints, invected against everything from the Prime Mobile to OU Norman’s head football coach Mr. Barry B. Switzer hisself; how even slickered in blood, and eyes hanging ominous half out their holes, Nunn’d laid out two paramedics and a deputy and shined up my personal chin when we tried to ease him into a ambulance; how right there on rickety two-lane 40 Nunn publicly withdrew his love from his Momma Mona May, me, the whole community of Minogue Oklahoma, and especially from Glory Joy, who he loudly accused of low general spirits and what he called a lack of horizontal imagination.