Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Chapter 40: The Warrior Queen Strikes


Chapter 40


It is interesting to see the differences in how the Warrior Queen Sloan and the Radio Personality Eddie Keever perceive and experience the grand happenings at Eveningside just now. Keever is filled with excitement, albeit hidden behind the professional’s obligation to merely report and not participate in the on-going zeitgeist. Dr. Sloan, on the other hand, is quaking with dismay and anxiety as she observes Pastor Jay Cooker begin to weave and stumble in an apparent apoplectic fit.

She is anxious that Cooker not croak before she is able to fandango on the top of his little bald head. True, and in the fashion of academics everywhere, she would have no trouble kicking him while down, but she is also an artist and knows that the artful, satisfying canvas must synthesize the purity of classicism and frankness of impressionism with an edge of modernism and the brute nihilism of abstraction.

Her vision of the fandango has involved sword and armor, she leading a band of angels through a crowd of fierce invalids, looking ever so like the blade wielding Jeanne d’Arc (classicism). The studio’s lights will bounce off the silver plate of her armor, strobing and shimmying, ricocheting if you will, bouncing on, off, on the chromed domes of retirees in the audience (impressionism) while the breath of the accompanying angels turns to beads of fire (modernism) as they congregate on Jay Cooker’s hood in preparation for dance. Then, she herself morphs; the Maid of Orleans into Kahn, Genghis, as the wheeling arc of her blade crashes (abstraction) into a piñata that, bursting and shredding, rains down currency bearing the likeness of Salmon P. Chase ($10,000), Woodrow Wilson ($100,000) and James Madison ($5,000); she will use the Grover Cleveland’s ($1,000) to tip the angels.

But no, not if Jay is grimly ripped before she reaches him, if she cannot land on him before Bach lands on him first; how sad, how humiliating really, if Jay’s reformation is death by Toccata and not remittance by fandango. Dr. Sloan surveys the television studio and sees that, if she leaps up onto the nearest table, she can hop from that table to the next table—and then to the next—blazing across the distance with 10 or so well timed hops until she lands on the stage and to within a foot or so of Cooker himself. Just as she begins to crouch, as she feels adrenalin and iron surge into her calves, as her feet prepare to trigger a sharp high shot into the air, a hand pops under her nose and waves some sort of hand held device.

“Dr. Sloan, Eddie Keever and CHIK Radio here. I have it on good authority—that would be the fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak from Berryville, Arkansas—that you are here on a Mission from God. What might that mission be, and how is that you were chosen to be the vehicle to launch it?”

“Hello, Eddie,” John interrupted. He stepped out from behind Sloan the Warrior Queen and gazed, perplexed into Keever’s face. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“Not now, John,” Eddie said firmly. For once the Gods of Media were favoring him with what looked like a hot story. The last thing he needed was to waste precious air time on the dullest man in Arkansas. He turned back to the Warrior Queen and repeated his question.

Sloan was stunned. There was a certain vigilante character to her proposed venture, a venture not sanctioned by law enforcement and one most certainly unacceptable to Eveningside’s Security Force. Had, in fact, Eveningside’s force not been otherwise engaged in high pursuit of the bunny slippered Chet, it would be she rather Jay who was fandangoed, hog-tied, and abused. Keever’s now insistent demand for coverage voided her chance of anonymity from the law and the benevolent happenstance of the security force’s distraction. She sputtered and pushed his hand away.

Sloan vaulted onto the nearest table top and prepared to launch herself toward the stage. As she planted her feet for take-off she was momentarily unbalanced by a backward tilt. Young Keever had climbed up on the table to stand beside her and once again shoved the recorder under her nose.

John stood in befuddled amazement. What he saw was a scene from a painting by Botero; two imposing people, each abstracted by distinctly opposed means and ends. The only thing odder was his awareness that the author is transcribing these events in the manner of Edith Wharton, she of the funny hat and very large butt.

Yet, it was all John’s fault: it was he—wasn’t it!—he who had brought Botero up and screwed any chance of your having a consistent 8th grade reading level to muscle through, all because of his Baroque inspired segues. Edit Wharton indeed! What next? Proust?

No! (Excuse me. I just don’t know what happened.) Now then:

Dr. Sloan and Keever gazed determinedly into one another’s eyes. They ignored John’s gape mouthed stare and were unaware of Mrs. Heartbreak’s and Clara Jane’s sharp elbowing through the increasingly anxious television audience. John fails to see them as well which is truly a shame since Clara Jane has begun to swing a nun chuck in an increasingly violent circle that will momentarily encompass his head.

“I’m not going away without an interview,” Eddie says flatly. “Are you or are you not the Warrior Queen, and are you or are you not here on a Mission from God?”

Sloan is undecided. Jay has begun to weave back and forth and stagger. His color is pure puce: his goose is nearly cooked; five seconds and his pop up button will signal all done. Yet Keever was clearly not going to abandon his appointed round.

She thought about cold cocking him—a swift Warrior Queen hook to the nose—but reconsidered the wisdom of getting on the wrong side of the 4th Estate, especially in these early days. If it happened that she was arrested she would need a friendly media contact and, oddly enough, Keever was her sole reference point among local Guardians of the 1st Amendment. Meanwhile, John brushed away an annoying whizzing sound next to his right ear.

“Okay, Keever,” she irritably said. “Yes, I’m the Warrior Queen. And no, I’m not here on a Mission from God. I’m on a Mission from an even scarier deity, the IRS. And that man,” she continued, pointing at Fiacre, “can answer all your questions. He started this fine mess!”

Eddie looked in the direction Sloan pointed. Surely she hadn’t meant the wino in the ‘Jesus is coming! Look busy!’ T-shirt? Fiacre saw Eddie’s glance and smiled and waved. He turned both forefingers inward and pointed at himself, as if to say “Guilty!”

Jay Cooker collapsed on the stage. Does an unobserved Cooker make a sound when it falls? Perhaps not in a forest, autumnal or otherwise, and perhaps not even in a television studio when all eyes are suddenly fixed on a duo of Boteroesque fandangoers. And who was that woman swinging that Bruce Lee-like instrument of death?

Dr. Sloan sensed rather than heard Cooker fall and instinctually turned away from Keever and began leaping from table to table, scattering elderly Christians and glassware without regard for the inevitable breakage. John leaned forward to catch the falling newscaster, who was unbalanced from his table top perch by the charging Warrior Queen’s departure.

John’s charitable act thus and summarily allowed him to miss the first swing of Clara Jane’s nunchuck; it whizzed harmlessly through the air until it collided with the forehead of Mrs. Hanna Schygulla—the vinegary spinster Primitive Baptist from Toad Suck, Arkansas and not the sumptuous German Actress of the same name—knocking her right into the arms of Jesus and Praise God brothers and sisters!

In the mean time:

“Jay Cooker, you scoundrel,” yelled Dr. Sloan as she reached the stage. “Where’s my money?!”

Lulu Cooker looked into the camera and smiled brightly.

“Howdy alls ya’lls. Welcome to the Lulu Cooker Show.”







Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Chapter 39: Jay Cooker Chokes and Gasps!

Chapter 39


It will not surprise you to learn that when Little Biggs sat down to play the introduction to the Jay Cooker Show he fired up that most famous of organ works, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. What will surprise you is that Bach probably didn’t write it, and if he did, he wrote it for the violin in, oh say, about 1740.

Who (ever) wrote it was responsible for writing John’s favorite single piece of music. Thus, when Little Biggs began to play, John grasped the Warrior Queen’s arm excitedly and broke into a wide grin. It was the last piece of music he expected hear on something as prosaically perverse as the Jay Cooker Show and, by Jay Cooker’s dumbstruck reaction to it, it was the last piece he had expected to hear as well.

Little Biggs started with the typical north German free opening, that single voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubling the octave before spiraling downward toward the bottom where a diminished 7th chord appeared to resolve itself into a D major chord, taken obviously from the parallel major mode. John couldn’t wait for the four voice fugue and hoped that the organist—who he intended to heartily pat on the back—would attempt the 16th note approach with the implied pedal.

Fiacre watched the expression on John’s face change from his usual, slightly sleepy expression to one highlighted by delight, with amusement. Leave it to John Heartbreak to love music most folks couldn’t stand.

Fiacre liked the Toccata well enough, even if it was a tad hoity toity for his taste. Still, he had appreciated Deep Purple’s version in Highway Star, and Keith Emerson’s upside down take on it when he was with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, was pretty good.

What was just killing Fiacre right now, though, was the look on Jay Cooker’s face and the way his mouth opened and closed like a beached bass. That, and the way his skin mottled into dark purplely red blotches under his make-up. God, thought Fiacre, that is so funny!


The audience, comprised mostly of old (old, old) people, looked bewildered and shocked. Why, they wondered, was Pastor Cooker playing that ghostly music? It sounded like…well, like music to kill hogs by. Was Cooker telling them that the end, THE END which he so confidently predicted was nigh, was actually NOW? They began twisting in their seats, glancing first at the boy playing the horror show, then back over to Jay where he was sitting, pole axed, on the stage. His wrinkled face resembled a soft, over-ripe plum that became even more pronounced as a string of drool rolled from the corner of his mouth and hung off the end of his chin in a long dangle.

“Maude,” said an elderly man sitting close to the stage with his wife. “I think we need to get out of here. It’s end times for sure and we need to call the kids.” He got up and, tugging at his wife’s arm, began to shuffle toward the studio’s exit. A pair of duffer couples creaked their necks to watch Maud and her companion leave; they looked anxiously around and began to tremble.

Fiacre couldn’t remember when he’d had a better time. When God sent him to Berryville he had to admit that he felt a bit out of his depth. He was a gardener after all, and while the First Christian Church certainly had a garden and John Heartbreak was certainly its principal gardener, that was the only connection he could see to the whole “Saving Normal Christianity” agenda that was gumming up the works. But so far, things seem to be going well. Don’t you think so?

Fiacre glanced up at a television monitor and laughed. Jay’s television audience was catching the whole drama as it happened, right down to the dying bass routine and the gob of spit dripping off Jay’s chin. The program’s Director didn’t know where to place his camera shots. At the far back of the studio a cadre of security guards were wrestling with some guy wearing bunny slippers; the studio audience sat in stupefied fear gobbling nitro tablets, or quaking like a forest of aspens. When in doubt, as he was now, he took the path of least resistance and followed Jay’s habitual advice: “you can’t keep the camera on me enough, got it?”

Lulu Cooker seemed transfixed by the music and shook her head as though to clear it. She attempted to stand but gave up at half mast and dumped herself back onto the velvet couch. She turned toward Jay for a directional cue and then brought a tight little fist to her lips: Jay’s face was the maroon hue of a 1954 Ford Victoria that her father owned at the time of her birth. Lulu hadn’t thought about that car in years and, for no reason at all, she was suddenly filled with a feeling of well-being and happiness. Jay croaked and croaked; she smiled.

The Director saw the smile, the oddly beatific smile on Lulu’s face, and quickly cued the #3 camera to focus on her. How curious, he thought, that the drug addled Lulu should be the one island of calm amid what was an increasingly chaotic set. He attracted Lulu’s attention and mimed a smiley face, pointing at his teeth. Lulu nodded and flashed her teeth as Little Biggs moved into the final entry of the fugal melody where the composition resolves into a held B major chord.

She continued smiling, and began nodding in time to the music as Little Biggs played the coda section much like the Toccata itself before falling into a series of chords and arpeggios that progress, step, step, step, to other paired chords, each a little lower than the one preceding. Almost casually, she looked over at the apoplectic Jay, pointed at him, and giggled. “How about that, folks?” she laughed. “Jay’s speechless!”

Fiacre turned his gaze away from Lulu and searched for John. There he was, still smiling and still as loopy looking as ever. The Warrior Queen, standing next to John, was neither smiling nor loopy looking. She has an intense, fierce expression on her face, and was pointing her finger directly at Fiacre with her right hand and shaking the fist of the left.

“Where’s my money!?” she mouthed.

“Hmmn,” he said to himself. Dr. Sloan certainly looked the part of a Warrior Queen—tall, strong, angry—and, my goodness, why was her wrath directed at him rather than, say, the croaking Cooker or the dullard Heartbreak? What had Fiacre, poor Saintly Gardener that he was, ever done to her? Had he not already died, been dead, and gone to heaven, he might feel quite afraid of her. As it was, he still felt a shrill tremor of desire to flee.

As Fiacre assessed the Warrior Queen’s potential for violence on his person, Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane entered the Eveningside compound and pulled the Winnebago into the parking lot. During the drive, Clara Jane had informed Clara Jane about the unsatisfactory state of her marriage to Agent Staley, and of the important role that Pastor Sincerely Dewayne Wayne Darby had played in transforming her from a devout, middle of the road Methodist into a new kind of Christian that Mrs. Heartbreak had no trouble at all identifying as lunatic. For the last ten miles of their trip she had only been able to say:

“But Clara Jane…”

…before Clara Jane interrupted her with increasingly delirious and vivid descriptions of THE END. Now, as Clara Jane switched off the key to the Winnebago, Mrs. Heartbreak sat mute—yes, birds fell from the sky and NORAD informed Pentagon brass of strange and peculiar changes in natural and electronically sourced air and atmospheric waves that could not be identified but appeared to be derived from a location in Northern Arkansas or Southern Missouri—and saddened by the change in her friend. Clara Jane, once so rational and clear headed, was now crazier than a bedbug.

Eddie Keever pulled into an empty spot two vehicles over from the Winnebago and shut his truck off. He picked up the MP3 recorder and said:

“Mrs. Heartbreak and the former Clara Jane Smith are leaving the Winnebago and heading over to the front entrance of Eveningside Ministries. For some reason Mrs. Heartbreak isn’t speaking and birds are falling from the sky…lot’s of birds…holy cow!...actually. What can the meaning of this unnatural event be?

“The two women are now at the entrance into the Eveningside Compound. Oops, as Clara Jane opened the door several people—old geezers—strike that!—Senior Citizens and God bless them!—are hurriedly leaving the building. They look scared. Actually, they look terrified.

“Oh my gosh! A large hairy man wearing only bunny slippers has stormed through the door!

“Friends, we aren’t in Berryville anymore!”

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Chapter 38: Eddie Keever Breaks the News!


Chapter 38


Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane are in Clara Jane’s Winnebago, proceeding at a high rate of speed northward to Wall Eye, Missouri, and the very place Clara Jane passed through not sixty minutes ago. They are being followed by the radio personality Eddie Keever who, in overhearing the conversation between Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane, has smelled a story he hopes to break tonight on his broadcast.

Young Keever—not so young really except by John’s accounting, which we can dismiss out of hand—was responsible for culture west of the Kings River; he found it, no doubt, a thankless and hard job of work.

Berryville’s various rodeos, swap meets, canning contests, high school basketball games, Electric Cooperative Soirees, tire sales, and Public Service Proctology Drives was thin gruel indeed when compared with Eureka Springs’ Art Walks, Diversity Weekends, Gay Pride Parades, City Council slash Performance Art meetings, UFO Conferences, and Angry Metaphysicist Support Groups. Easy it was for Richard Schoe, the Eureka Springs DJ, to make something of the news, but for Eddie Keever, it was not “something” he had to make, but miracles.

Thus, when he overheard Mrs. Heartbreak tell Clara Jane Smith Staley—the woman who had previously lived in the Keever’s house—that John was on a Mission from God that involved the scandalous Pastor Jay Cooker and his timeshare business Eveningside Ministries, Eddie’s ears perked up and his keen nose for news caused even more body parts to go on high alert. When Clara Jane had virtually wrestled Mrs. Heartbreak into the Winnebago, shouting loudly, “We’ve got to stop him!”,he hopped into his stylish forest green Ford Ranger pickup—okay, into his pickup truck—and began trailing them.

“This is Eddie Keever of CHIK News,” he said, speaking into his MP3 recording device, “hot on the trail of local resident and semi-famous folk artist the Fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak. She is, as we speak, proceeding at a high rate of speed to interrupt or foil, according to an unnamed source, a Mission from God.

“Mrs. Heartbreak, well known to Berryvillians as a frequent Advisor to God and by her husband, the dullard John Heartbreak, as the Voice of God, is not known for derailing Missions from God. What could be the cause of this new and unexpected Deus Interruptus? Is it possible that Mrs. Heartbreak has gone over to the Dark Side?

“Traveling with Mrs. Heartbreak is the former Clara Jane Smith, who most Berryvillians will recall is the founder of the Iowa Welcome Center located on the Town Square. Clara Jane, as you also may remember, was a member of Berryville’s First Methodist Church when Skip French was pastor there, and she lived on Pritchard Street before marrying former FBI Agent Orin Staley and moving to Forrest City Iowa where they opened a Winnebago dealership upon his retirement from the FBI.

“Incidentally, Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane are traveling in a Winnebago. Not the Mini-Winnie, but the great big honking one.

“According to our unnamed source—that would be me overhearing their plans—they are traveling to Eveningside Ministries in Wall Eye to wreck some kind of plan that involves John Heartbreak and the Reverend Jay Cooker. Jay Cooker, as you know, served time in a Federal Big House for fraud, mail fraud, tax evasion, zipper trouble, and having the bad taste, or bad luck depending on your point of view, of having married Tomi Raye Cooker, now deceased.”

Eddie put the recorder down and focused on the road as the Winnebago slowed to accommodate a series of sharp curves, and inclines and hilly declines, each of them wet and steaming with slick oil. Yes, it is possible to see the prior sentence as containing significant sexual content but, honestly, we’re talking Ozark roadways so let’s just say that he put the recorder down, put both hands on the wheel, and slowed the green Ranger to avoid crashing and burning in a side gully. Safety first!

He hoped he wasn’t on a fool’s errand, yet something about the stricken look on Clara Jane’s face and the confusion on Mrs. Heartbreak’s, caused him to believe that he was on to a real story for once. What exactly was this “mission from God” and why had Clara Jane suddenly reappeared in Berryville? Inquiring minds would want to know. Wouldn’t they?

Eddie knew little about Clara Jane except that she had lived in his house just before he moved into it, and that she had opened the Iowa Welcome Center with John Heartbreak as a reluctant and unhappy partner.

Although the Iowa Welcome Center had been good for adjacent businesses like the Ozark Café, not everyone in Berryville liked having so many Iowans in town. They were so different from Arkansans and, frankly, were a rude people where the Native Arkansan is a friendly and helpful soul.

There were other differences as well: Iowans had money and Arkansans did not; they could read and Arkansans couldn’t; they were Lutherans or Catholics and belonged to churches named Immanuel or St. Chester’s, instead of one’s named Elmer’s Church of the Redeeming Unsullied and Perfectly Holy Underpants, or the First and Last Right Thought Revealed Primitive Anabaptist Ark of Latter Day True Believers. And then there was the whole corn subsidy business…but don’t get me started on that. (If you read the first book about John Heartbreak then you know how incredibly boring the topic of corn subsidies can be.)

Eddie could tell that the reunion between the two women had been sweet, but it had also been brief. He didn’t know that Clara Jane largely attributed her decision to be born again as a Christian to Mrs. Heartbreak’s good example, while Mrs. Heartbreak, in turn, felt that her own Christian faith was strengthened and validated by Clara Jane’s coming to Christ.

That grand, and sweet, mutuality was made possible and fostered by the two women’s shared commitment to Social Order Theory, an optimistic belief that operation of the Universe can be made orderly and predictable as long as others will allow them to lead and manage. Clara Jane had organized and improved the world by arranging serially and voluminously the timely deaths of bad apples and the chronically rude while Mrs. Heartbreak more prosaically organized and improved her husband John. That was all the evidence they needed that Social Order Theory was more, much more than mere theory.

In many respects Mrs. Heartbreak has had the more difficult job; one that Clara Jane herself would agree was far less rewarding and far more complex than her own human resource management obligations. What, after all, is the defenestration, shooting, knifing, bombing, garroting, fricasseeing, strangling, smothering, clubbing, gutting, or beheading of another compared to spending an entire evening listening to John describe why Louisa May Alcott is America’s most under-rated writer—particularly when John believes that Louisa May is taking part in the conversation?

But as the poet Winfield Townley Scott had written, “They loved each other because their ailments are the same,” so it was with Mrs. Heartbreak and Clara Jane. Though their reunion had been brief, so attuned were they to each other’s psyches that Mrs. Heartbreak knew instantly that Clara Jane’s marriage to ex-FBI Agent Orin Staley was in trouble, and Clara Jane knew that Mrs. Heartbreak was vexed (again!) by whatever fool’s errand John was momentarily about.

It was only when Mrs. Heartbreak began to relate the somewhat abbreviated and admittedly confused story that John “was on a mission from God” to “fandango” the Reverend Jay Cooker, that Clara Jane became concerned and, frankly anxious that now, now of all times, a time when she needed rest and comfort from her good friend Mrs. Heartbreak, she might in fact be at cross purposes with Mrs. Heartbreak’s husband; cross purposes so deeply etched if one can imagine a purpose and a cross being etched at all, that she, Clara Jane, might have to kill John Heartbreak. Such circumstance might well dull the sheen of friendship between the two women, an outcome that Clara Jane would regret.

And why should, would—we know that she could—Clara Jane kill poor John, a man she had previously worked with and for, under odd surely but ultimately (for her) satisfying purposes?

Because, minutes before leaving Forrest City, Iowa and on toward her destination in Berryville, Sincerely Dewayne Wayne Darby, her pastor at the Church of God with Signs Following had said to her:

“Trust no one, Clara Jane. The world may end while you wind your way to Arkansas—“we know not the hour!”—and the path you follow between me and that sin infested hellhole named Berryville is strewn with the Handmaidens of Balaam, the Henchmen of Lucifer, and Satan’s own spawn. Beware, I say to you!”

Clara Jane had shaken her head. “Pastor Dewayne Wayne, John is a harmless old duffer. And it was really Mrs. Heartbreak who brought me to Christ. I think I can trust them.”

“If they are not among the elect, Clara Jane, they cannot be trusted. Not ultimately, not totally. And what you’ve told me about this Heartbreak character is troubling. You say he speaks to the Holy Spirit, but that he also speaks to dead writers, some of them atheists! That is hardly the description of someone who you call harmless.”

“I have heard him speak to Sinclair Lewis and Jack London,” she said, nodding dubiously. “I guess they were not believers.”

“But worse, Clara Jane, much worse,” he thundered, “he not only speaks to dead writers, he reads them too! He’s one of them book reading, foreign language spouting intellectuals! No, I wouldn’t trust him for a minute.”

“Are you telling me to forget about going back to Berryville? I really feel like I need a break.”

“No, Clara Jane,” Pastor Sincerely DeWayne Wayne Darby replied. “It is possible that this Mrs. Heartbreak you speak of is trustworthy—although I have my doubts. Otherwise, why would she have spent years with that sin laden vessel of decrepitude she calls husband?

“Just be careful, is all I’m saying. Trust no one, except the Lord. And possibly, now that I think of him, Pastor Jay Cooker.”

“Pastor Cooker?”

“Yes. An old friend who has a ministry called Eveningside, in Wall Eye, Missouri. Just north of Berryville, so he’ll be close at hand if you need a spiritual confidant.

“Jay and I met while we were—well, while we were between ministries, so to speak,” Pastor Darby continued. “Jay has started over in Wall Eye and has a perfect understanding of Revelations and its meaning for you, for me, and for the few elected souls who are to meet our Savior.”

Before leaving Forrest City, Clara Jane had promised Pastor Sincerely Dewayne Wayne Darby that she would look Jay Cooker up when she got to Arkansas, and to seek guidance from Pastor Cooker should she need it.

Thus, when Mrs. Heartbreak had informed her that John was on his way to fandango Jay Cooker, and was traveling with a woman to whom she referred to as “the Warrior Queen Sloan”, Clara Jane’s well-developed sense of impending chaos had begun ticking like a Geiger counter. After all, John had, all alone among 4,000 Berryvillians, instantly known her to be a serial killer; if he could pick her out of such a crowd, on what basis had he picked Sloan?

Mrs. Heartbreak was not used to being hustled about—if anyone hustled anyone it was usually she—but Clara Jane’s look of consternation and panic had moved Mrs. Heartbreak to, for once, set aside her usual mode of operation and to hop to. In this case, to hop into, Clara Jane’s Winnebago. Neither she, nor Clara Jane, had observed the ace reporter Keever’s surveillance of their conversation.

And so it came to pass, as readers of the Book of Mormon will recognize as a transitional and habitual phrase, that she, Clara Jane, and Eddie Keever sped headlong through the rolling Ozark hills toward Wall Eye, Missouri.

Eddie picked up the MP3 recorder as the Winnebago hit a short flat stretch of flat in the road. “We are nearing the entrance of Eveningside Ministries,” he said in a hushed tone. “What will we discover here? Will Mrs. Heartbreak prevail in upsetting Jay Cooker’s Ecclesiastical Applecart? What role does the dullard John Heartbreak have to play here? What, pray tell is this Mission from God? And who, friends, is “the Warrior Queen Sloan?

“Don’t touch that dial!”

Friday, January 28, 2011

Chapter 37: Toccata!

Chapter 37


Fiacre and Dr. Sharon Sloan the Warrior Queen eye one another from opposite sides of the Great Hall. He is pleased at what he sees, and makes a note to congratulate John on his choice of Deus Machina. Dr. Sloan, on the other hand, is wary: she is unimpressed by Fiacre’s attire and stature and thinks he resembles a bum she used to dodge near the parking lot of the college where she used to teach.

As he stares at Sloan, Fiacre is oblivious to the commotion surrounding the collapsed Lulu Cooker—the show’s frantic director has to get her on her feet and bubbly for the television cameras in eight minutes. Sloan does not yet know Lulu—although she will come to know her well—and remains fixed on the totality of Fiacre’s tackiness.

“Is that what a saint of the Holy Roman Catholic Church looks like?” she sarcastically inquires of John. “I’d say he’s been basting in alley wine for a while.”

John shrugs. “No one knows what saints look like. When the Holy Ghost appears in the church garden his appearance runs the gamete from burning bush to Chicago Cubs fan. It is much the same with saints.”

“Holy Toledo,” Sloan mouthed quietly. “You weird me out when you talk like that. Holy Ghost. Why not say Hannibal Lector or Pecos Pete?”

“You despise me, don’t you?”

“If I gave you any thought, I probably would,” Dr. Sloan replied. “Especially now that I’ve been reduced to stealing dialogue from Casablanca.”

John nodded appreciatively. “I’m impressed though, that you got the Ugarte-Rick-Heartbreak-Sloan dichotomy so quickly. It’s one of the things I love about you.”

“As long as I’m Rick,” she said. “Meanwhile, tell me why Fiacre is here. Isn’t he supposed to be back in the garden while I do the Fandangoing and you’re the wheelman?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll critique you for future missions. Pastor Cooker isn’t the only counterfeit hell robber in town. It could be that Fiacre wants to set you loose on even bigger game. Maybe we’ll fandango Benny Hinn next time.”

Dr. Sloan glowered. “I’ll critique him,’ she said brusquely. “If I don’t see some money out of this you’ll both walk home.”

The Warrior Queen presents something of a problem, Fiacre admitted to himself. He had no doubt that she was capable of Fandangoing Jay Cooker, whatever that meant, but he hoped that she could focus less on Cooker’s ill-gotten $6,000,000, and more on John’s goal of Saving Normal Christianity—and not for God’s sake, but her own.

Fiacre didn’t care, and he knew that God didn’t care—or wouldn’t give a pig’s whistle—about Jay’s dough or John’s nobler goal. Neither did they care if Dr. Sloan succeeded; the whole money slash church thing was a human thing and neither amounted to a hill of beans in the Mind of God, nor in the consciousness of a Time Traveler like Fiacre.

What God cares about is how she plays the game. Both He and Fiacre want her to have fun playing it; they care about the story and want the story to end happily. A few bumps along the way are expected—Jake Cooker and Hiroshima are bumps—but it is the ending that matters.

Christianity is teleological and apocalyptic. It presents the lives of individuals alone and of human kind collectively, as a linear story moving towards an End followed by timelessness: you die (so sorry!), get judged, and go to heaven—or hell. Life is all preparation for eternal life which justifies and makes this life meaningful.

To the question “Why did God make me?” we are taught that “God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next world.” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that God designed humans to be Time Travelers.

Of course, the concepts and images of travel to (and from!) the next world haven’t resonated with thoughtful people for a while. The idea of Time Travel and simultaneous recumbent and forward movement between planes and spaces is regarded with skepticism and embarrassment when eternity, that mystical place, is considered a destination. Fiacre believes this is because most Christians are afraid of becoming what they are intended to become, Time Traveling Christian mystics, because they’ll have to give up all their stuff if they do. It is easier to dismiss the place.

Nearly every legitimate 20th Century theologian—at least the ones Fiacre met—ignored the idea of survival and time travel after death. Bultman, Barth, Bonhoeffer, horny old Tillich, even the Jesuit Karl Rahner, considered the concept of a heavenly world of light where the traveler receives a heavenly vesture, to be not only incomprehensible, but irrational. They reached that conclusion, not because they were competent theologians, but because they were incompetent mathematicians. Faith is a zero sum game, but it is a Boolean game that cannot be played by the incurious, or by those fearful of going beyond the saying that God is not the fact of things existing, but the basis of all things seen and unseen when, in fact, God is simultaneously the fact and the basis, making the logic of God a lattice work of an infinite number of dimensions. Zero is just where you start. And still...

. . . Rahner wrote, “The soul by surrendering its bodily structure in death becomes open towards the universe and, in some way, a co-determining factor of the universe in the latter’s character as the ground of the personal life of other spiritual corporeal beings,” thereby accomplishing the nearly impossible: turning gold into lead.

Fiacre knew that that was so much metaphysical canoodling, a mere preference for self-abuse over the sweaty fun of a more anthropomorphic love affair. It was no wonder that crap artists like Jay Cooker and his Television Evangelist peers flourished.

Up on the stage, Lulu was helped to her feet, and onto a blue velvet settee center stage. A young stagehand type was patting her on the shoulder while another young person administered smelling salts. Lulu’s head snapped back when the ammonia capsule broke under her nose.

“Oh goodness,” she whined, confusedly looking around the set. “I saw that terrible man again. He was in…”

“Just how many pills did you take this morning?” the stagehand asked her. “Are you going to be able to do the show?”

“Five minutes!” Jay Cooker yelled. “Everybody on the set! We’re on the air in five minutes! Do I have to do everything myself!?”

Fiacre and Little Biggs started moving along the wall toward the doorway in which Sloan and Heartbreak took refuge. Fiacre was out of place among the crowd of elderly fundamentalists and youthful television production staffs, but the Eveningside security force was off somewhere chasing the naked Chet Chandler so he was, at least for now, unmolested. True, he earned a few hard stares from the church ladies he passed, but they were unarmed and not disposed to interfere with his progress along the wall. They were about to…

“…Organ Boy!” screamed Cooker. “We’re on the air in three minutes…”

…when Pastor Cooker spied Little Biggs scurrying along the wall with what looked like a wino. “Get me cued up, you moron! We’re on the air in two and half minutes!”

Little Biggs looked at Fiacre and shrugged. “I guess I better go,” he said. “Can I still leave after the show?”

Fiacre nodded and smiled. “Sure you can. Why don’t you start Pastor Cooker off with your favorite tune? I’m sure he’ll be surprised. Then, I’ll help you bust out of here.”

Little Biggs grinned shyly. “Will you introduce me to the Warrior Queen? She looks interesting.”

Fiacre nodded again and slipped past Little Biggs. “Yup, we’ll do it. Now go get ‘em.”

John and Dr. Sloan left the safety of their doorway refuge and inched through the crowd toward Fiacre. Sloan was pleased to see that John was walking normally and had given up the serpentine subterfuge. She glanced approvingly in his direction and considered the possibility that he would behave well under pressure.

Jay Cooker took his place on the television set and took his place in the host’s chair. He looked at Lulu and shook his head. Tomi Raye had been a nightmare to work with, and she had her own drug problems for sure, but looking at the spaced out, disheveled Lulu as she wobbled on the velvet settee made Jay miss Tomi Raye’s risible stream of consciousness regarding everything from why a giraffe might make the perfect birthday gift for Sandra Z. Windermere’s husband Raymond, who wrote in from Tulsa asking for advice about what to get a hard to please husband, to how Jesus was simply waiting to be asked to supply a winning lottery ticket number so why in heaven’s name didn’t you ask?

Even before Jay had been released from prison for tax fraud, he knew he needed a wife, at least a new television wife, to regain the abundant audience he’d had when he and Tomi Raye had been at the height of their The Lord Loves You television ministry. Without a photogenic helpmate by his side, the majority of his audience, 50 year old or older lower income Caucasian women married to or widowed or abandoned by unreliable blue collar Appalachian American men, might suppose he was a player or gay or afraid of commitment and could not then, authentically relate to the sufferings endemic to the state of holy matrimony.

The fact that the majority of Television Holy Men (yes, add ‘em up and they are a majority) were married but also happened to be players or gay or afraid of commitment added an element of suspense and drama to Christian Broadcasting that is a terrific boost to ratings; everyone knows that it is only a matter of time before Jay or Jimmy or Joel or Billy James gets his zipper caught on some errant lip.

And oh[!], how the audience suffered along with Tomi Raye, along with poor Betty Jean Hargis, along with sweet abused Frances Swaggart, and along with Tammy Faye Bakker, as one by one their husbands—so like the rats they were married to, cheated and swindled and fell into the laps of painted whores, some of them even Catholic. It was fantastic TV!

Jay knew that Lulu was necessary to his success because he, like all of his evangelical preacher-brothers, needed the possibility of a sacrificed lamb for his audience to worry about. This audience, these armies of aggrieved, menopausal and post menopausal women knew it was only a matter of time before Tomi Raye, Tammy Faye, Frances, Betty Jean et al, would be humiliated, sullied, and betrayed—just as they were. How could they not tune in?

But would people care when—not if—Jay betrayed Lulu? She lacked the sort of presence that Tomi Raye had exuded. Where Tomi Raye had appeared vulnerable, Lulu was merely abstracted. Where Tomi Raye convinced you that she and Jesus personally discussed what she would wear on that afternoon’s program, no one really believed that Lulu was in close communion with the Lord, especially about clothes.

Neither Jesus, nor the TLLY television audience, could be found culpable for the fashion crimes Lulu committed daily, even with the advice of a Wardrobe mistress who was a holdover from Tomi Raye’s days.

“Lulu wants to dress like she’s a teller in a bank,” complained the wardrobe mistress. “Tomi Raye wore organdy and ruffles and stiletto heels with spaghetti lacing. This one,” she said dismissively, “dresses like she really believes that the world is going to end. And her make-up? Forget about it. At least Tomi Faye wasn’t afraid of eye-liner.”

As Jay looks Lulu over, now just 15 seconds from air time, he wonders what he can do with her. Yes, he can cheat on her, beat on her, lure her into liaisons involving small boys and large poodles—these are all fantastic sub plotting opportunities and sheer fire ratings boosters—but he can’t do the one thing she has been talking about: divorce her. Every old bat in every financed mobile home in America would dump him, just as fast as their unreliable, rotten, cheating, first, second, and third husbands had dropped them. He was stuck with her. Unless…



The TLLY director shouted “Places!” and began the countdown to air: “ten, nine, eight…”

Little Biggs waited for his cue. He was excited about the piece he was going to play, and felt a pleasant tremor of nervousness that he was ignoring Pastor Cooker’s Old Time Favorite in favor of a little hog killin’ music.

Toccata!

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Chapter 36: Dr. Sloan Rocks John Through Time


Chapter 36


John is stuck midway in a window in an imaginatively undignified manner. Imagine it.

Dr. Sloan has her hands on his enormous ass, pushing and shoving and grumbling uncharitably about John’s bulk and the inflexible, not to say brittle composition of his body’s advance toward entropy. His stomach is an unbudgeable fulcrum.

John stares at an unmade bed festooned with throw pillows and an afghan depicting cats engaged in varieties of cute cat behavior. It is hideous and frightening because John knows that a person who would purchase such an article is capable of almost anything.

The more Dr. Sloan shoves and heaves, the faster John rocks. His forehead nearly touches the floor on the downward cycle before snapping upward to the top of a painful arc. He is like one of those perpetual motion goony birds: up and down, fast and faster. He feels a little nauseous.

John allows himself to relax. Dr. Sloan will succeed, or not succeed, in propelling him into the immediate future; he understands that he is trapped in time—a moment ago he watched gaped mouth as the Warrior Queen broke glass—in a second, or in several minutes, he will tumble onto the illicitly gained floor, or into the arms of the law—he isn’t going anywhere just now: so he rocks, and waits.

Fiacre and the boy-savant Little Biggs, a refugee from Tisdale, Missouri, are at the bottom of an Eveningside stairwell leading to the Compound’s Grand Hall, and are about to open the door to enter it. They are looking for John, and for the Warrior Queen Sloan, and do not know that John is nearby, trapped between that old time and the about to happen time and that he isn’t able to move forward just yet.

Lulu Cooker, Little Jake Cooker’s replacement for the late, great Televangelism Superstar Tomi Raye Cooker, has awakened from her dead-a-away faint and begins to shake the beam from her eye. “What happened?” she wonders out loud. “Who was that tacky man in my closet? Was there a tacky man in my closet?”

Wobbling, Lulu gets to her feet and immediately begins to weep. Once, she had lived in a real place; now she lives in Wall Eye, Missouri, shackled in married to an old bald geezer who won’t shut up about end times. He has wet lips and wears high heels; he hasn’t ‘known’ her in months. Derelicts are popping out of closets now too, and shouting scary stuff and wearing really smelly T-Shirts about Jesus coming.

She wonders if she’s having a reaction to all the anti-depressants she’s taking; how long can you use Prozac and Xanax, Alprazolam and Benzodiazepine, Zoloft and Effexor, without hallucinating? Or, maybe she needs to up her dose; yes, that must be it: she intends to double down tonight.

As Lulu stumbles back over to her dressing table John continues to rock back and forth on the window sill. He is slightly amused at Dr. Sloan’s increasingly frantic labors. But he is also becoming disoriented by her failed efforts to propel him into the future: he is there, then he is here; he rocks back and forth between now and then.

Finally, she stops. “A little help, Heartbreak?” she inquires. “Would it be too much to ask if you would please reach out and drag yourself forward a bit?”

“There a really terrifying afghan on the bed. It’s full of cats driving Volkswagens and looking smug. I don’t want to touch it.”

Sloan has had enough. She takes her hands off his ass and crouches down against the wall beneath the window and crawls under John’s dangling legs. She puts her shoulders and back tight against his legs and, like a collegiate fullback breaking toward the goal line, shoots straight up with Warrior Queen resolve. John tumbles through the window and into the future.

“Oh my word,” he whispers hoarsely. “This is ghastly. The horror, the horror!”

“What?”

“There’s a stack of Kenneth Copeland books on the nightstand! And they’re paperbacks!”

Dr. Sloan clambered through the window. “You’re such a snob, John,” she said. “You live in a High Church Wonderland and look down on low churched slobs who don’t share your elevated religious fantasy.”

John picked himself up off the floor and moved away from the afghan on the bed. “Mission from God not withstanding,” he said. “I see we have a little work to do with you.”

Dr. Sloan ignored him and looked around the room. They were in an apartment or condo of indiscriminate but new construction exuding the scent of impermanence. Perhaps that, she thought, was because the entirety of Eveningside’s raison d’être was the near-term destruction of the Universe. One would certainly buy paperbacks under such a scenario.

“We need to blow this pop stand,” Sloan said. “How do we get out?”

John pointed to the obvious door and began to shuffle toward it. Dr. Sloan attached herself to his arm and slipped around and in front of him. “Let us make haste, John,” she said firmly. “I’ll lead, if you don’t mind.”

John did mind, but he was eager to leave the frightening afghan and the paperback Copelands behind; he acquiesced and revved-up his shuffle to keep pace with Dr. Sloan’s hurried pace. She crossed what appeared to be a living room and opened what was almost certainly a door leading out of the unit, cautiously stuck her head out, and quickly yanked it back in after slamming the door shut (in case you’re keeping track of the order of things).

“Chet Chandler is running up and down the hall,” she said breathlessly. "He’s naked and being pursued by minions.”

“Many minions? Mini Minions? Minor Minions? Or, are the minions full-blown Blackwater Consulting minions with automatic weapons and Slovenian accents?”

“Will you be serious?!”

“Sharon, I’m as serious as an Edith Wharton novel!”

Hmmn. Serious indeed,” she judged. “Alright, then. What do we do? We can’t stay here?”

“I suppose we could go back out the window?”

“Are you kidding? And go through all that ‘trapped between times’ jazz again? Not on your Nellie!”

John edged around her and cracked the door open. He could hear rapid clomping and hammering of feet on carpet and shrieks—they had to be Chet’s shrieks—but the sound was coming from a stairway at the end of a hallway of doors. The hallway itself was otherwise empty.

John opened the door and stepped briskly out into the hall—well, with a moderate lope—and motioned for Dr. Sloan to follow him. They turned left, away from the shrieks and clomping noise, and headed toward what they hoped was an egress to the Great Hall. Eureka!

Standing in the Great Hall was Jake Cooker himself. His hands were on his hips and he was looking toward the ceiling of the hall, shaking his head. Several people holding clipboards and wearing headphones milled around him; they looked anxious and seemed to be trying to placate him.

“I’m not happy, people!” Cooker said loudly. “We’re on the air in 15 minutes and there is a crazy man running around. A naked man, in case you didn’t notice.”

Cooker’s voice was nasally and whiney and was timbered with tight high notes that were curiously girlish and adolescent at the same time. He wore tight black jeans and a black turtle neck and, of course, boots with four or five inch heels. It struck John that, if Agnes de Mille were still living, if she was a man instead of a woman, if she somehow lived in Wall Eye, Missouri instead of New York City, and if she were a television evangelist instead of a dancer, she would look exactly like Jay Cooker. And needless to say—but let me say it—vice versa.

“Fourteen minutes, people!” Cooker shouted. “And where, for the Love of Sweet Jesus, is Lulu!?”

“I’m here, darlin’,” answered a weak voiced Lulu as she entered the Great Hall from behind the stage and prepared to step onto it. “I’m all set.”

“For God’s sakes, what are you wearing,” Cooker said sourly. “And you haven’t finished your hair! You look like a tramp!”

“I…there was a…” she stammered. “A man, a terrible man…”

A door to the left of the stage opened and Little Biggs stepped through it, followed by Fiacre. They both blinked into the klieg lights that were suddenly turned on. Fiacre smiled.

“Hi Lulu,” he said amiably. “I’m afraid I gave you quite a start.”

Lulu stared, and then began screaming as she cumpled to the floor in a weepy heap.

“Good heavens,” John exclaimed, pointing across the hall. “It’s Fiacre!”

“Oh, what now!” Cooker screamed. “Ten minutes!”

Fiacre turned to Little Biggs. “This is going well. And look,” he said, pointing at John, who was pointing at him.

“There’s the dullard Heartbreak. And the Warrior Queen.”

“Cool,” Little Biggs said. “She’s pretty tall.”

Fiacre nodded. “It is the nature of Warrior Queens.”

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Chapter 35: Breaking and Entering


Chapter 35


As Fiacre and the Little Biggs reached the bottom of the stairway and were about to enter into the Eveningside television studio and electronic lair of the Reverend Jake Cooker, Dr. Sharon Sloan, AKA The Warrior Queen and John Heartbreak, stood rapping at the now locked front door leading into Eveningside.

Dr. Sloan had attempted to follow the Baptist visitors who had initially appeared so threatening and suspicious of her and John. But John had slowed her down, and an Eveningside security guard had literally slammed the door on her foot and pushed her back before locking it.

She was not entirely surprised by the guard’s obstreperous behavior, and acknowledged, with a chilly grin to John, that the guard was simply another weak as water male appendage unable to cope with or accept her as a more dominant, vibrant female figure than were the women he habitually shoved around back at the trailer court. No doubt the guard would be similarly rude to Jeanne de Arc, Mae West, Boudica, Belle Starr, or even to the household goddess, Martha Stewart.

“I believe,” Sloan said, thoughtfully, “that I’ll turn that little man into a fire hydrant as soon as we get inside and turn the dogs loose on him.”

“Can you do that?” John asked. “I was unaware that mastery of the Tasmanian Devil Detonator included the anthropomorphic power required by such a boast.”

She raised her eyebrows and turned to face him directly, vis-à-vis, as it were.

“You have no idea, Heartbreak, of what I am capable.” She cracked her knuckles and seemed to enjoy the sound of thunder emanating from each digit. “Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

Dr. Sloan cupped a hand over her brow and pressed a noble nose to the door’s window, peering so it seemed, into a glass darkly. “Dagnabbit!” she exclaimed. “We’re missing all the action.

“Chet Chandler’s running around and is being chased by a cadre of Eveningside Minions. It looks like they’re gaining on him.”

“Is Chet still packing a gun?” John asked. “I’m not exactly sure what a minion is but I don’t want anyone to get plugged unnecessarily.”

“Oh, wow,” Sloan said. “I can see Jake! He’s walking over to the Head Minion and shouting at him. This is so exciting!”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s about five feet tall without the shoes, five six with them, and has a face like a Winesap apple left over from last year.”

“No, no,” John said. “Not Cooker! I mean the Head Minion. I want to know if we’re going up against large, angry Blackwater Consulting types, or garden variety Appalachian Americans? Does he have missing teeth, or appear to be dropping his Gs when speaking?

“Or, as might be the case under a Blackwater Consulting scenario, is he a Head Minion who would possibly speak with a Slovenian accent and carry an automatic weapon? These details,” John finished, “are germane to the task at hand.”

“Oh my,” Sloan said, ignoring John’s question. “Chet’s taking his clothes off. Jeepers! He’s thrown his underpants at Cooker—and scored! Jake’s wearing Chet’s panties around his neck. This is so great!”

“Sharon, it appears that your diversion is working,” John said. “But we need a quiet moment with the Reverend and, locked out as we are, I don’t see that we can seize the advantage.”

“Hmmn. You’re right, Heartbreak! There is a time to cut bait, and a time to fish! A time to sow, and a time to reap!”

“You sound positively biblical.”

“Don’t get carried away,” she said dismissively. “I still have my eye on the money. Go back to the car and get my Deerslayer hat,” she commanded, suddenly. “We are about to mince Minions and ream Reverends!”

“You worry me,” John said.

He backed away and peered into her face. It seemed to glow preternaturally and, if he wasn’t altogether mistaken, wore an expression of manic enthusiasm that belied the important religious and spiritual intentions of the endeavor. John was usually willing to go along with the demands of women—after all, he was still married to the Fabulous Mrs. Heartbreak—but asking him to run and fetch a hat was too much! Is that what being on a mission from God required? That he become as docile as a Labrador Retriever? He didn’t think so.

“My dear Dr. Sloan,” he began. “Let me remind you that I am a man of some substance. Simply because I choose to keep my lamp under a bushel basket is no cause…”

“…Heartbreak! Hat! Move.”

As John jogged over to the White Chevy van to retrieve (ha!) the Warrior Queen’s Deerslayer hat, she moved stealthily along the front wall of the Compound and began testing window latches.

“Drat!” Each was securely locked. She began tapping on what looked like an apartment or condo window, first to ascertain if someone was inside and secondly, to break the glass adjacent to the lock if no one was home and force entry. She sneered; that would give John a few worries.

John showed up, huffing and wheezing like an antique combine. He pushed his arm forward and watched the Warrior Queen take her hat from his hand and slap it on her head.

“Perfect,” she said, with satisfaction. “Now, do you mind breaking the glass, right about…” pointing…”here?”

“Madam, I am not a common criminal!”

“Break the glass, John. We’re on a mission from God. Did Isaiah quibble over details? Did Jeremiah wimp out over simple legalities?”

“Jeremiah had a few objections!”

“He may not be the best example. Go back to Isaiah! My point is that these are extraordinary times. You say you want to Save Normal Christianity, which you say you are commanded by God to do, but you whine about spilling a little milk. My advice to you, Heartbreak, is to man up and move out!”

John closed his eyes and gave the window a tentative tap. Tap. Tap. Tap again.

“Oh for Gosh sakes,” Dr. Sloan hissed. She pulled the deer slayer hat off her head and covered her elbow with it before smashing the window, then reached inside and forced the latch open.

Sloan ignored John’s shock and pushed the window open. “After you, John,” she said. “Let’s go Save Normal Christianity.”

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Chapter 34: True Lies About the Ozarks

Chapter 34




Nothing in this book is a coincidence, or everything is a coincidence. The boy leading Fiacre down the stairs is from Tisdale, Missouri, a snarl of a town seventeen miles southeast of Blue Eye and thirty seven miles northeast of Berryville. Clara Jane Smith now Staley, who is now—right now!—in Berryville receiving a hug from Mrs. Heartbreak, is originally from Tisdale.

[If you think this is more than a coincidence cue in some scary organ music.]

Organ music is a good thing to cue in right now—can you hear it?—because the boy from Tisdale is Eveninside’s organ player, although maybe organ player isn’t quite what he is; he has never had a music lesson and he doesn’t play so much as he blitzkriegs sheet music. He has certainly never played a thing that folks in Tisdale heard before he started playing it—and they never ever wanted to hear what he played a second time.

One day the boy started to peck at his Uncle Delta Sartell’s electric keyboard; a week later he was whacking out Boellmann’s Toccata. I guess he is a savant.


What the boy played was church music. Church music is more or less okay in Tisdale as long as the tune in question sounds like Barber Shop Quartet singing, or something Wynonna Judd might twang to death after a debauched night and a shame glutted morning. But the boy played ‘ungodly church music’, ‘music to murder hogs by’ according to Uncle Sartell, who nervously snatched the keyboard away from the boy after hearing him play the Suite Gothique. “You’re scaring me, boy,” Sartell told him. “You’re reminding me of Clara Jane.”

The boy, whose name is Lawrence Biggs, is at least twenty years younger than Clara Jane, and although he has never met her, he knows her story very well, and he knows what remains of her extended family since they still live in Tisdale. What remains of them.

Like the boy, Clara Jane is also a savant, probably Tisdale’s first savant as a matter of fact, which is probably why folks in town get the willies over any kind of specialness, specialness not being abundant in any local sense, whether it takes the boy’s ghostly form of hog killing music, or is Clara Jane’s unrequited killing of kin which hardly ever involved music at all unless you’re a John Cage fan and see the point and counterpoint of gags, yelps, groans, weeps, whines, grinds, crackle crackle, and the suck splat sounds of person centered mayhem, to paraphrase Carl Rogers, as music.

Only 47% of the people who live in the Ozarks—that would include Tisdale and Blue Eye, Berryville and Eureka Springs—are born and bred there, stay there, and live there now; the ‘Others’ are Yankees like John and Mrs. Heartbreak or Appalachian American Look-a-Likes from adjacent southern states or the regrettable Texas. These ‘Others’ have no idea what the large minority that surrounds them, engulfs them, cheats them, resents them, and laughs at them is up to (except for the surrounding, engulfing, cheating, resenting, and laughing parts. They get that.).

But there is only so much moonlight and magnolia, so much Shepherd of the Hills hoodoo a person can swallow before they’re forced to slap themselves sentient and slink back to the Continental United States from whence they came, or become Pinball Wizards: deaf, dumb, and blind. Welcome to The Natural State!

And so it came to pass, as Joseph Smith began 926 sentences in the Book of Mormon, that 53% of Tisdale’s population was completely unaware that residents were disappearing at the rate of about one a week, while the other 47%, the ‘Naturals’, knew that folks were disappearing at a higher than average clip, but reserved judgment because the disappeared weren’t missed all that much. Their absence, in fact and not to put too fine a point on it, enhanced property values and improved Tisdale’s admittedly dismal but overall quality of life. So it was all good. More or less. Depending on your view of such matters. Anyway:

They—the disappeared, the absent, the here today gone tomorrow—the departed, had in common one thing; they were blood bound to Little Clara Rinker, now Clara Jane Smith Staley: cousins, uncles, a brother, and Peyton Knobsgobble, not a blood relative but a partner in the methamphetamine sale and distribution business with Ray Bob’s brother and first cousin.

It wasn’t long after Peyton, Jimmy Joe, and Joe Jimmy disappeared that they were followed by Jay Jay Rinker and then by Charles Ray, Ray Jay, Jay Ray, and Ray Charles Rinker (the Appalachian American Ray Charles, not the African American Ray Charles). If you’re counting, that’s eight little Rinkers gone to ground (plus one Knobsgobble).

It was only when Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, the wife of Billy R. Postwhistle and the sister of Bobby Ray Rinker disappeared, that the Rinker family started to talk about the suddenly departed. Bobbie Rae was the barmaid at Billy Rs' Tisdale Tap and, when she didn’t show up for work as scheduled and Billy R. Postwhistle didn’t know “where the expletive deleted” was, all the Rinkers began looking over their shoulders and jumping at the sound of cat scratches.

The ‘Others’ in town, that lamentable pack of pansies and over-educated elites from the outside, continued to be oblivious to the dwindling number of Rinkers, and except for noting the pleasurable decrease in high speed methamphetamine fueled 4x4 traffic on the single road through town, kept to themselves and their Fellow NPR listening Travelers. Nothing bothered them at all…except for that horrible smell!

On occasional basis the foul odors of industrial chicken production, processing, packaging and transporting abated through some climatic miracle; perhaps the wind shifts a degree or two, the temperature pauses between degrees, and the barometric pressure takes a dose of Prozac and napped for a while.

The confluence of such happenings will, for an hour, a weekend, ameliorate the habitual stinkyness of The Natural State, that Land of Opportunity, long enough for Realtors to tour visiting Others about the place—a Window into the Land of Opportunity-to laud its beauty, celebrate its low property taxes, to encourage the myth that its poverty is mere quaintness, and to get the Others to sign on the dotted line.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Realtor One asks.

“Wal, if the wind dies down I guess I’ll go trawlin’ for Suckers,” says Realtor Two.

If at closing the wind has shifted and the Other sniffs and becomes alarmed, be not surprised if the Realtor feigns befuddlement:

“Smell? I don’t smell anything… here just sign there… and there… and…”

After a while the Others become about as indifferent to the faint smell of carcass permeating the environment as are the Natives. Once in, oh say, a Blue Moon, an Other who is teetering between sentience and Pinball Wizardry might sniff and ask, “What’s that smell!!?”

To which Natives have been trained to invariably reply, “It smells like money!”

This from a guy who makes twelve bucks an hour gutting chickens on a 3rd shift.

But the air had become intolerably meaty in Tisdale, and let’s says it was on Robert E. Lee’s birthday, 1996, just to pick a day that it was finally acknowledged. Several Natives had gathered outside the door of Billy R's Tisdale Tap, preparing to go in to celebrate the General’s birthday, when Dee Dee Rinker, exclaimed, against all rules of training and eleven years of indoctrination, “What’s that smell!!?”

“It smells like money,” replied a chorus of Natives.

“No it doesn’t!” shouted Dee Dee, pointing. “It smells like Bobbie Rae Postwhistle! There she is!”

And there was Bobbie Rae, in plain sight, crucified on the hood of an abandoned 1976 school bus parked across the street from The Tap, the bus currently serving—well, current to mean for the last eleven years—as the home of the Prekel Beantop family. Mrs. Postwhistle’s body was partially obscured by a small flock of buzzards which, sensing the approaching crowd, lifted off and flew away in a crabby, buzzardly manner, leaving the body in plainer view.

“Yep, that’s the wife,” said Billy R. Postwhistle. “I guess somebody ort should call the High Sheriff.”

The preceding violent passages are unfortunate, and you have my apologies for this seeming violation of the NSVSL rule. But it is, frankly, impossible to say much about the Ozarks without at least a soupcon of skullduggery. Bad dentistry and Wal-Mart can only take you so far, literature wise. In any case, please be advised that the next two paragraphs are a bit graphic.

It took the sheriff’s deputies almost four hours to get Bobbie Rae’s remains off the hood of that old school bus. She had been thoroughly Super Glued to the sheet metal and, because the glue had hardened into an almost glass-like substance during the five days the sheriff estimated the body had reposed there, his deputies had had to chip, chip, chip-away before they could stand her up, and then put her down and into a waiting ambulance.

Although it would be five days before they determined a cause of death—Bobbie Rae had had the living delights scared out of her—the Sheriff’s Department, and then the Missouri State Crime Investigation Unit with back-up support from the Tisdale Fire Department, wasted no time in locating the remains of the missing eight Rinkers and the unfortunate Peyton Knobsgobber.

They found Jimmy Joe Rinker’s body hanging by the neck from the town’s water tower. Joe Jimmy’s body was lashed (tidily) to the ‘Arkansas 13 miles’ sign on the south side of town. His feet and hands were missing, causing investigators to surmise that he hadn’t tried to walk out of town, or hitchhike. That left only foul play or, so at least, they concluded.

Most of Jay Jay Rinker was found leaning up against the wall of the Antioch Primitive Holiness Tabernacle on Main Street, Charles Ray was in the hog roaster in City Park, Ray Jay was going up and down on the elementary school’s teeter totter, Jay Ray was sitting in the backseat of the town’s squad car, and Ray Charles Rinker slept the big sleep on a lime green velour couch on Mrs. Ajax Freeway’s porch.

The time between the first death—that would be Jimmy Joe Rinker, and the last death—Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, was eleven weeks. You may be wondering how it is possible for ten corpses to hide in plain sight for so long. How, you may ask, was it possible for residents not to see a moldering corpse tied to one of the town’s two traffic signs? Or, how about that crazy guy Ray Jay, going up and down on the teeter totter? Didn’t the kids out on recess wonder about him as he bobbled up, down, up?

Obviously, alls ya’alls don’t get off the main roads much. You haven’t tried to get an Ozark based town council to enforce building codes or cut its grass, those amber waves of weeds thriving along all its public byways. Nor have you experienced the collective blindness of the Natives as their towns become like the Sears and Roebuck couch painting Aunt Tillie bought in 1963; no one has really looked at it since the Kennedy assassination.

The fact is that dead bodies could positively festoon the streets of Berryville or Blue Eye or Green Forest Arkansas—to name just three—and no one would notice. If an Other pointed it out, the Natives would just resent it. No kidding: take a look around; be especially tuned into groups of buzzards; you never know what you might see if you look closely enough.

When folks got around to telling fourteen year old Clara Jane of the deaths of her eight relatives, of a close business associate of theirs, and of a neighbor, the barmaid Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, she was remarkably dry-eyed. No one suspected that the small statured teenager had had anything to do with the killings, but everyone who talked to her commented on the cold chill that ran down their spines.

“Sumpin’ ain’t right about that gal,” everyone said. “When she looks at me I hear music to kill hogs by!”

When Billy R. Postwhistle began looking around for a replacement wife for the now deceased Bobbie Ray Postwhistle, he naturally sized up 14 year old Clara Jane.

“Dang,” he said, licking his lips.

And therein lay the solution to the eleven murders—Billy R. soon joined the eight Rinkers, Peyton Knobsgobber, and the late Mrs. Postwhistle; Clara Jane had plans opposed to those of her close and extended family that did not include the mailing of those Ozark inspired greetings cards such as ‘Happy Birthday, dear Uncle Dad!’ or ‘Merry Christmas Brother Cousin Otis!”

Clara Jane’s plans also excluded early marriage to the likes of Billy R. She, like so many other young people from small Ozark towns, hoped to become a beautician—Sheer Delight!—or to move away to Branson for a job in the Hospitality Industry—“do you want fries with that?” Certainly then, Billy Rs' lusts, and his and hopefulness for free labor had to be thwarted.

Billy R’s intentions toward Clara Jane were well known in Tisdale. He discussed his options in comprehensive detail with Tap regulars—should he wait until she was 15?—should he let her finish the 9th grade?—but ultimately concluded that neither was important and loudly announced his intentions to proceed post haste.

“Ain’t you scared of her, Billy R?” folks asked. “I hear hog murdering music when she walks by.”

“She’ll be squealing like a little piggy this time next week,” he said, with a sly grin. “That’s the only music you’ll be hearing.”

Billy R. was thwarted by 5,000 volts from an arc welder; his remains were stored in the Out of Town mailbox in front of the post office. He would have remained there indefinitely except that Billy R. was the single source of beer in Tisdale and, when he failed to open at 7:30 AM for Bertha E. Wheatley, an Episcopalian Other and problem drinker, or again at 8:45 AM for Hymer E. Crull, a Native and Tisdale’s Designated Town Drunk (DTD), a hue and cry was sounded and the search began.

By now, both Natives and Others shared whispers about Clara Jane, and more than one Tisdale resident had spoken to the High Sheriff about the spooky girl.

“We’ll keep an eye on her,” he said. “But if she’s done it, she done it good. We ain’t got no proof.”

To the Clara Jane’s satisfaction, there was a precipitous drop off in proposals, regular or otherwise. She began also to grow in self-awareness and recognized that she possessed talents that were not only highly specialized, but in short supply as well. Perhaps there were persons outside Tisdale of low moral character who would not be missed if they became Departed? Perhaps there were persons willing to pay for the pleasure of not missing someone?

Please buy Coffee with John Heartbreak: A Mostly Truth Story of Berryville, Arkansas, to learn if such a supposition is true.

Thus, when nearly twenty years later the boy Lawrence Biggs started playing Boellmann, and then that old Bach goody in D Minor, folks in Tisdale began having trouble sleeping at night. When they turned corners they stopped first and peered around them first before proceeding, and took to checking the water tower for swinging men. Every note Lawrence played stirred up a Clara Jane memory. Folks got the Chronic Willies so bad they put new locks on the doublewide.

When news of the new Eveningside Ministry in nearby Blue Eye got to be common knowledge, Roberta Yates, a member of the Living Word Full Gospel Pentecostal Whole Truth and Full Deal Church of Revelation reported a vision of Lawrence playing his music there for Jake and Lulu Cooker. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Yates’ vision was widely accepted as a Command from God, and Red Yates, husband of Roberta, was designated to haul Lawrence Biggs over to Eveningside and drop him off there. The Tisdale town council providently gave Red $50 to cover expenses, which worked out to more than $1 a mile, high cotton indeed.

Lawrence was delighted to have a real organ to play, albeit electric rather than pipe, and auditioned for Eveningside’s Music Minister Dr. Randy Starr by playing Bach’s Trio Sonata, 3rd movement.

Dr. Starr was worried about the Communist music he was hearing but, recognizing that Lawrence was a savant and not a true musician, played a recording of ‘The Ballad of Jesus and John Birch’ by the Bob Jones University Glee Club and asked Lawrence if he could replicate it. Of course he could; Eveningside offered Lawrence a music internship providing free room and board; Red Yates and the Tisdale town council accepted the offer on Lawrence’s behalf.

It is not the nature of savants to have strong feelings about their savanting activities. Like Clara Jane before him, it was enough that Lawrence could do a thing that was inshort supply; he just wanted to do it. Clara was able to kill with ease and impunity; Lawrence could play anything on the organ, easily and with the same impunity.

And so:

As the boy and Fiacre head down the stairs, he tells Fiacre that his name is Lawrence Biggs, “but everybody calls me Little Biggs ‘cause my sister Roberta is Big Biggs and she ain’t the small one in the family.”

Fiacre nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Little Biggs it is.”

He liked Little Biggs and how unafraid the boy with the Justin Bieber haircut appeared when they had nearly collided outside the Bakker residence near the staircase door. Fiacre didn’t know that the boy was a savant, perhaps an idiot savant, and assumed that the boy, like Fiacre himself, operated mostly by instinct and grace and wouldn’t care anymore than Fiacre did that Lulu Cooker was lying in a deep fearful swoon on the mobile home grade carpet in Jake Cooker’s boudoir.

After all, Fiacre thought, what had Lori ever done for Little Biggs or, for that matter, what had Reverend Jake Cooker ever done for Little Biggs except rob him of his precious teenage time and scare the ever-loving shineola out of him with lies about end times?

Fiacre and Little Biggs did share the opinion that most of what bad could happen to Lulu had already happened. Surely her chance meeting with the harmless Time Traveler Fiacre was a small thing against the bigger, tragic, Whoop Dee Doo of marriage to a 70 year old time share salesman who wore high heels and owed the IRS $6,000,000.

Fiacre was sure that Lulu would snap out of her current swoon and, if Little Biggs came to know that Facre was the cause of about Lulu’s current circumstances, well he wouldn’t think it amounted to much. After all, Little Biggs had, coincidentally or not, grown up in snarling Tisdale in the shadow of Clara Rinker now Clara Jane Smith Staley and was no stranger to life in the Lower Depths.

“Where does this stairway lead, Little Biggs?” asked Fiacre. “Will I find the Warrior Queen at the bottom of it?”

“It goes down to the Grand Hall.”

“Grand Hall?”

“Yeah. It’s just a TV studio with some stores around it,” Little Biggs reported. “There’s the Jonah & The Whale Café, the Lulu Travel Shoppe, Blanche Chapel which Pastor Cooker named after his mom, some kind of grocery store and a bookstore, a sewing shop, and a place where they sell houses and condos and stuff.”

Fiacre and the boy reached the second floor. He could see the bottom of the stairs, one flight down, and felt a shiver of anticipation for the fun he expected to have once he got there. He wanted to give Heartbreak his note of instruction, and then sit back and watch it all unfold.

“What’s the Warrior Queen?” Little Biggs asked. He was at the bottom of the stairway, looking upwards toward the slower moving Fiacre.

“The Warrior Queen is a who, not a what,” he answered. “She is here to Grand Fandango the Reverend Cooker and seek the return of $6,000,000.”

“Cool. Can I help?”

“I don’t see why not,” Fiacre said with a smile. “Why don’t you open the door?”