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.”
