CHAPTER 12
Cindy Gnomoure had no name at all when Sesame
Sweetpea and Cecil B. Cecily spotted her in a ditch along I-85. The Cecilys took
the child to a place called Possum Trot Valley on Pigeon Creek in the Byrd Roost
section of Craggy County near the Village of Relief, about twelve miles from
Nowhere, North Carolina.
The Cecilys are variously described in the Hall of Records as subsistence farmers, migrant workers, and self-sufficient agrarians. Their meager income derived from gathering deposit bottles and growing a half acre of marijuana.
By age four, Opal Cecily, as the girl was then called, was smoking royal quantities of the family’s cash crop, and to this day, Cindy swears she grew up on a large farm in the Midwest with her dog and Auntie Em.
The Cecilys are variously described in the Hall of Records as subsistence farmers, migrant workers, and self-sufficient agrarians. Their meager income derived from gathering deposit bottles and growing a half acre of marijuana.
By age four, Opal Cecily, as the girl was then called, was smoking royal quantities of the family’s cash crop, and to this day, Cindy swears she grew up on a large farm in the Midwest with her dog and Auntie Em.
The Cecilys were not particularly disturbed 12 years later when they awoke to find the girl’s room empty and her extra pair of coveralls missing, except they suspected she’d taken a duffel bag of marijuana with her. “Would of brung a hunnert dollars easy,” Cecil B. used to complain.
Opal wandered off one morning to follow Pigeon Creek. She had awakened shortly after midnight to the distant thunder of a summer storm. Opal was restless and went out to wait for the rain, filling a corncob from her private stash in the hog lot.
Across the field from the Cecily cabin stood a stand of ancient honey locusts from which you could see through Scrapple Gap to Buzzard Flat and on westward into Tennessee. It was here that Opal sat down and leaned back into the tangle of roots.
She lit another bowl of Craggy County Umber, reckoning she must have dreamt the midnight thunder, noting how clear the night sky was. Not even a glimmer of heat-lightning flickered through Scrapple Gap. A king snake curled up in her lap.
Opal Sesame had been born exactly fifteen years before. Although she didn’t know it then and no one has told her since, on that night, on the exact anniversary of the moment of her birth, she saw four planets in and around Orion. As she sucked on her pipe, Opal came to realize that the stars had moved while she sat there, but their movements were so slow as to be imperceptible. She had never thought about the stars before.
Nodding at the sky and pulling on her lower lip, Opal gradually became aware of the chatter of Pigeon Creek. This tiny stream ran through a shallow depression at the end of the pasture. Opal didn’t know where its waters came from or where they went, only that they giggled and gurgled as they passed.
She wondered why the stars made no sound as they crawled across the sky. But what if the low rolling grumble to which she had awakened was the rumble of those distant stars?
Shooing the snake from her lap, Opal stood and turned toward Pigeon Creek, just as a bright white dot the size of a penlight appeared in Sagittarius.
Opal never saw the light, but she did watch her shadow condense on the meadow and burst into deep green flames as the light intensified and flashed across the universe like a Jeep’s brights on a dusty summer curve near Nowhere. It took fewer than five seconds, but with a silent shudder of incredible brilliance, an entire galaxy shrank back into its tiny black hole so long ago that in fifty billion years, when the signals hurled into space by desperate astronomers in the late twentieth century finally reach where that inaudible cherry bomb of brilliance exploded, they will arrive 150 billion years too late.
Years later, when Cindy attempted to describe the bright light, her shadow, the creek sound, and how she came to understand that she was born to follow Pigeon Creek, Wanda responded: “Is that all you learned from a supernova? Movement is normal. It is mankind’s lot to be and do the abnormal.”
“What did you say?” Cindy asked.
“Anyone can follow,” Wanda explained. “It takes only perseverance to trace the path of another. It takes courage to go where nothing has arrived or where all others have abandoned.”
***
Before she began her journey from Possum Trot Valley, Opal stole back to the Cecily cabin where she grabbed her change of clothes and the duffel bag, which she jammed with her pigpen stash. Then she ambled back to stare at her miraculous shadow (the faintest outline of which still glimmered on the grass), before tromping out to highway 38 by the One-Lane Bridge, where, half an hour later, as the horizon began to emerge from the eastern darkness, Opal Sesame waved down the first vehicle she saw and said: “Hi. I’m Opal Sesame. Where you headed?”
“We can’t rightly say, dear child,” Gottlieb Goforth answered. “We could be going just about anywhere, everywhere, or somewhere else.”
“What did you say?” Opal asked.
“We don’t know, dear child, we said,” Gottlieb bantered, hands on hips, his head spitting words like a chicken pecking corn. “We said we don’t know, we said. Simply, yes, simply, yes, we just don’t know.”
“Well, I swear,” Opal said, “if you ain’t the oddest man.”
“Oh no, we’re not very odd. Not so very strange at all, in fact,” he said. “That we do seem the least bit might peculiar is attributable only to the lamentable condition in which we discover the universe. The universe,” Gottlieb said, gesturing grandly across the horizon, “The universe,” he said, “is disjoint.”
***
One night while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anyone, Gottlieb Goforth dismounted on Sloan Street and propped his bicycle against the plate glass window which faced Dobson’s Hardware and the First National Bank. He hitched up his holster straps and suspenders and entered the bar.
Gottlieb was a Clemson landmark. On every shirt he owned, it said: CLEMSON CITY LIMITS. Whenever a newcomer arrived in town, one of the first things he was told was: “And if you’re looking for beer, just follow that stinking dwarf.”
To say Gottlieb stood out in a crowd is to do the spirit of language a gross injustice. No one chose to stand within twenty feet of Gottlieb if he could help it. No more than four-and-a-half feet tall, he wore knickers and tight black knee socks with shin-high, lace-up, patent-leather riding boots. These were emerald green. The socks were purple. The knickers were gray and baggy, the tee-shirt black and taut. He wore a yellow garrison belt with an enormous ceramic buckle glazed with shiny orange enamel, which was shaped like a toilet. The purple tiger’s paw on the water tank was stamped with the words: American Standard. His two-inch-wide powder-blue suspenders were covered with a chaotic pattern of red plumber’s helpers.
Gottlieb’s face was wider than it was high. It was also broader at the chin and forehead than at the cheekbones, and so resembled a squat beer mug. His Cheshire grin stretched so far back it seemed as if only two oily straps of skin between ears and mouth kept the jaw from dropping off completely. His hair was more thick than long with a part directly down the middle, so perfectly executed a part that a louse stumbling out from between the greasy strands near Gottlieb’s forehead could have looked straight off the precipitous back of Gottlieb’s skull and sworn he’d been shaken out into a flawlessly carved key in a chunk of onyx.
To contrast the obvious care devoted to Gottlieb’s part, the rest of his head looked as if it had been gone over by a child who delights in making ring chains from construction paper. The length of these larded ropes varied by inches from skein to skein.
The most striking thing about Gottlieb’s appearance, however, was his weaponry. Gottlieb toted matched .44 magnum pistols in alligator shoulder holsters. He displayed them openly wherever he went, and although complaints were frequently lodged about Gottlieb’s taking squirrels behind Brackett Hall, no one ever asked him why he wore those monstrous guns, much less would he please take them off before he hurt someone.
***
“We should very much appreciate a mug of mead,” said Gottlieb Goforth, who was without doubt one of the most unpleasant sensory experiences in the preglacial world. It was four days since the death of Neal Downer, and Black Jack was sleeping on Wayne’s bed in Cateechee. Occasionally, the stoned tom would twist back to chew on the edge of his cast nearest his ass.
***
Just then, Wayne pulled his head off the bar and started blabbering right in Gottlieb’s face. “You know what tomorrow is?” he said. “Tomorrow’s the day it won’t make any difference. It’s global what’s the difference day. That’s what it is. No matter what you do, it won’t mean a thing. People will talk about Japanese vampire cats that snuck in with the beetles and the kudzu, but they’re easy to spot since they’ve got two tails. And so what about angler fish? They live deep in the ocean, where light doesn’t reach, and when they mate the male sinks his teeth in the female’s belly and won’t let go. Not that it matters. The female doesn’t even try to scrape him off, because she knows his jaws are dissolving. His bones are dissolving. He slowly shrinks until all that remains is a lump, like a wart. An old female can have twenty or thirty of these warts on her belly, and each of those little warts used to be a male fish. Just like me.”
“Dear fellow, are you talking to us?” Gottlieb asked, sipping his beer.
“Not really,” said Wayne.
***
The night Opal Sesame Cecily climbed onto Gottlieb Goforth’s handlebars for the first time, she said: “Well, what are we waiting for?”
“How dare you thus address a King, our little horn’s ass?” Gottlieb snarled. “We have half the kingly notion to scythe and smite thee, as the jasmine and hollyhocks are scythed and smitten at the peak of their summer blooming beauty by the pitiless scythe of the pitiless smiter who pitilessly scythes and smites their pitiful pieces for such audacity. Should we not boot thee in the butt off our phynancial steed and trample in the dirt of this dismal, dusty drive the form in which thine mind dost dwell for so unseemly a dreaming slight upon our rare and royal regal-hood? Need ye not be rent to pieces and stuffed in our kingly pockets?”
“I do beg your pardon,” Opal said, “But you flat out lost me…”
“Splendid! But pray not ask us what we said,” admonished Gottlieb, “lest we be tasked to recall how everything we say is soon forgotten. And before we know it, before we know anything, we are dead. It’s all so silly.
“Yet questions have a kind of immortality. Yours, for instance. In restating the obvious, we would only shift the emphasis: ‘What are we waiting for?’”
***
Gottlieb and Cindy were lovers, although they were more different than night and day, since night and day imply a certain relationship between two antagonistic constructs. Gottlieb Goforth and Cindy Gnomoure had less in common than beans and bacon or being and nothingness. Whereas Cindy had been born and raised in abject poverty, Gottlieb came from a world of such opulence and power that had there been a God, even He would have shrunk from the task of putting a torch to it, feeling not quite dressed for the task.
Gottlieb’s father was one of the wealthiest men on earth, which helps explain how Gottlieb Goforth became the only Clemson landmark ever to blow a prize Holstein’s head off at twenty paces and win the Pickens County Man of the Year Award in the same month.
Had Gottlieb been born to the average American family, his life and times would have no bearing upon human history. Once he had entered school, the authorities would have diagnosed the child’s condition and moved him into a special education program. Later, he would have entered a public institution for the marginally trainable and perished among the billions at the commencement of the current ice age.
But as fate would have it, Gottlieb’s father was capable of providing this fledgling maniac with civilization’s equivalent of the petri dish. Therefore, when three-year-old Gottlieb released 30,000 gallons of fuel oil into the Colorado River “to better examine the beatific qualities of the viscous prismatic, Uncle Dew,” Arizona officials found it “cute.”
When Raleigh Goforth unveiled a plan to build 18 textile plants in South Carolina, the government dropped arson charges against the teenaged Gottlieb, who had recently put 80,000 acres of proposed state park to the torch.
Materex claims Raleigh Goforth knew of Gottlieb’s condition before the demented jester was born. It is even rumored he may have paid researchers at the Biological Sciences Research Center at Chapel Hill to assure his son’s peculiar deformity. He raised the child as his acquaintances did Dobermans and Danes, to chase that ever-elusive trophy for best-of-breed. If this is true, Raleigh’s money bought him far more than he bargained for. But it didn’t buy him his trophy or a long and happy life.
His bludgeoned corpse was crammed behind the Quasar. A solid platinum johnny mop shoved down Raleigh’s mouth had exited through the base of his skull. It wasn’t until six children wrapped a junk-food advocate in saran wrap and ate Big Macs while he died that the world was less outraged by the killing of the rich. How else to explain that scaracely two weeks later Gottlieb held an imaginary wake to honor his imaginary father? The swizzle sticks were replicas of the murder weapon. Among dozens of hors d’oeuvres was one called “Dear Daddy’s Brain Pate.” And yet, Gottlieb was never charged in the death.
***
By the time Gottlieb gave Opal a lift near Possum Trot Valley, he had already majored in every subject Clemson offered, from Aeronautical Macramé to Zoological Accounting. He had already been drafted and sent to Vietnam. It was there, in a small data processing center on the outskirts of Danang that Gottlieb first participated in a conversation with a computer. He might have stumbled into this world hopelessly deranged, but Assembler came as naturally to Gottlieb as French to the French.
***
Opal Sesame changed her name to Cindy Gnomoure in Modoc. “Well,” she said, twirling in front of Gottlieb, “How do you like it?”
“Whatever is it now?” Gottlieb sighed.
“My new name,” she smiled, “As if you couldn’t see.”
“What new name? You have not taken a remodeled moniker without consulting the phynancial book? In spite of the warnings of the phynancial hook? How dreadful. How perfectly dreadful,” he said. “O shit! By our green candle, toadswallow, thornsbuggers, mousemaggots, Walter Winchell our assets, and fie and good riddance to you and your bloody name, by this phynancial stick.
“We must presently away,” he ranted, peddling off. “We have unpredictable arrangements, devious engagements, and terrible estrangements which do not bode well for revolving doors or names.”
***
The prior commitment to which Gottlieb alluded was an audition for the lead in Ubu Roi which was scheduled for late fall production by a small company in Columbia. In preparation for this tryout, Gottlieb had flown to France for three weeks to delve into the life and times of Pere Herbert. Materex feels uncomfortably certain that Gottlieb is the reincarnation of Alfred Jarry, while Gottlieb himself believes he is Ubu made flesh. Neither would be right, if Materex were ever wrong.
If you were to ask Gottlieb why he was wearing yellow vinyl bell-bottoms with green suspenders, a mauve tee-shirt, a pink and tan striped tie, a gray herringbone vest with black satin back, an orange and purple button on his bright red baseball cap proclaiming: Dig In Turnip Team, zebra-striped jogging shoes, and polished twin .44 magnums in alligator holsters, he would have answered casually: “Omnis a Deo scientia, which is to say: Omnis, all; a Deo, knowledge; scientia, comes from God.”
***
King Ubu was written by Alfred Jarry in France and performed in Paris, also in France, now buried under 40 feet of ice and snow, on the evening of December 10, 1896. Gemier, the actor playing Ubu, came out on stage and shouted merdre! which is French for shit. Then began one of the wildest theatre riots in history. Among those in the audience were Arthur Symonds, Stephane Mallarme, and W. B. Yeats. It was Yeats who later wrote, reflecting upon the play and his own life and times, “After all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm…what else is possible? After us, the Savage God.”
These were the kinds of things Cindy might have mentioned had you asked whether she enjoyed the play. Having exhausted all other possible avenues of career education, Cindy finally convinced Clemson University to award her a degree in elementary education.
***
Cindy is the kind of character you’d expect to find in a work of fiction. She only gained admittance to this history by virtue of her off-again/on-again relationship with Gottlieb, whom Materex insists is an adept who previously lived as Proclus, Sir Francis Bacon, the Count of St. Germain, and Alfred Jarry.
Born on All Soul’s Day in 1873, Jarry soon thereafter determined to expire at age 33 on the Feast of Saint Mary. At nine, young Alfred had already contrived the exact intake of absinthe and ether he required daily to achieve his unnecessarily projected end. This meticulously thought-out and executed self-annihilation was perhaps Jarry’s best example of the science of pataphysics, the study of imaginary solutions.
The newly christened Cindy Gnomoure arrived in Charleston three days after Gottlieb abandoned her in Modoc. It was a bright warm morning, and she found two things almost immediately upon her arrival:
<HTMLCode>
<ul><li>A dictionary at the Revco Drugstore. She tripped over it as she entered the store and, Kenneth Bidunne, a quick-thinking clerk heading off a liability suit, insisted Cindy keep the book as a token of his concern; and</li>
<li> A job on The Charleston News and Courier doing a column called “Sullivan Island Tidal Things”, although she would not actually learn to read for another year and a half. No one knows how this happened.</li></ul>
</HTMLCode>
In her first column, Cindy wrote: “Mr. Jolly B. Mustard did relate to this sorrowful righter one mourning yonder about how he had one day the week past seen him an aardvark on the marshtal dune over from the beech through his glaced winder. Mr. Mustard said the aardvark were crawling down offen a molehill when the tide broke off the mud where birds was keeping to falling over on the clams. It was the fustest one by Mr. Mustard been seen on seven days.”
***
There were some scholars just prior to the selective evacuation of the planet’s surface who believed Adolph Hitler was in the audience during the premier performance of Ubu Roi and, although he was only 6-years-old at the time, little Adolph enjoyed the play so immensely he patterned his entire life after Gemier’s portrayal. Adolph, by the way, is the solution to the most frequently used clue in Dias’s crosswords, “Name meaning noble wolf.”
***
Gottlieb Goforth auditioned for the role of King Ubu 27 times and was never awarded it. “Too esoteric,” “Too fey,” “Too gruesome,” were typical responses to his readings. Therefore, Gottlieb satisfied his obsession with Ubu by having attended 1,059 performances of the play. In other words, Gottlieb had spent just less than three years of his evenings watching Ubu rant and rave across the stage.
One of those evenings as Gottlieb and Cindy returned to the bar after watching Ubu portrayed by the Clemson Players, Wanda Japan was sitting with Rapid Ray, who was much later prepared in part as langue d’homme braisee by Idi Amin.
“The funniest thing I ever saw,” Ray was saying, “was in Vietnam. During Tet. Bunch of us was getting blasted in the bunker, and I had to take this vicious leak, so I climbed topside and flipped out the dummy when this mortar round slammed in. BLAM! Fucker knocked me six ways from Sunday flat on my ass. Tore up my knee, like it was…see this scar? That’s a purple heart. I shit you not. Getting blasted while pissing while blasted, but then this Captain comes up running, hollering: ‘What in tarnation are you doing, soldier? This is no time to rest. No time at all. And that wound, why isn’t it treated yet? You’ve got exactly ten seconds double time to the FH, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
“So I’m picking myself up when WHAM — goddamn Captain explodes like a fucking watermelon, and that’s when I started realizing there was some very real and very heavy activity going on here, and I’m right out in the middle of it.
“That’s when I hear this guy yelling: ‘Get that ill-tempered beast out of here this very minute. Get him out I say. Can’t you see I need to concentrate?’
“Know who that was? This fucking Major out on the golf course, ordering two grunts in their skivvies to chase this panther off the green. I laughed so hard I thought I was dying,” Ray said.
“I did not realize Vietnam,” said Wanda, “was such a funny place.”
Posted: Thu - July 8, 2004 at 01:23 PM
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Published On: May 05, 2008 10:15 AM
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Published On: May 05, 2008 10:15 AM