Chapter 13: Chick and Cleola A fresh knot of scarfers has joined Helga and Olney. Within minutes, each is bulldozing identical landscapes of the daily special. Today it's everyone's favorite: Swiss steak, with a side of Day-Glo vegetables and a bald scoop of mashed potatoes. Two diagonally sliced and buttered pieces of white bread complete this Moon Food nature morte. Olney surveys the scene hungrily, but it's not the meat with black gravy he wants. Overdosing from oxygen, his lungs are calling for a cigarette break. In fact, they're ringing up his eyes just now. "Hello, Eyes?" "Yes?" "Lungs here. Listen, we need a smoke, bad. Look around for prospects, will ya?" "We're not going to. Smoking is bad for you." "Oh, yeah? Listen, wise guys, get us a butt or we'll huff and puff and pop youse right outta yr sockets!" Olney's eyes swing right to a man of indeterminate age, who has just finished his meal. A bulb-knuckled index finger and thumb reach into his drooping shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes. They pull out one of the last, a wilted Old Gold. The man's face is lit by a stiff, crunchy smile. Something, or maybe nothing, has amused him, an inside joke suspended in a vacuum, unsharable even with himself. He lights up. Just as Olney is going to ask for a smoke ("Gee, I sure hate to take yr last one"), the man bursts into an inspired round of coughing. Olney catches the beat--remarkably complex, with an almost reggae flavor--and taps his toes a time or two. The smoker, sensing appreciation at long last for this, his greatest gift to mankind, takes up an exotic rhythm reminiscent of high times in the Autochthon. Olney is about to resort to the collective unconscious for an appropriate liturgy when the coughing syncopator, apparently bringing his recital to a close, starts to choke. Our hero leaps to the rescue by giving the man a few slaps on the back. In so doing he jars the selection order of the soloist's repertoire and the new conclusion becomes a grand coda of proportions pathétique, with tension-building tympano-sputal rolls leading to an astonishing multi-octaved tutti of doom in unison C. A limp paper match, held like a baton between knuckle-bulbed index finger and thumb throughout the concert, is dumped ceremoniously into the remnants of plate gore. The man wipes tears of glory from his eyes. A newcomer seats himself at the counter's hook. The smoker recognizes him. "Hey, you oughta try the Swiss steak," he says. The newcomer looks up with difficulty, his cheeks gasping for color. Olney shivers. The man's face and hands may have a morgue-like pallor, but his eyes are alive with a neck-snapping gleam. "Aw, s'all right," comes the wheezy reply. Olney's glance returns to the horck maestro, but he's already left for the gauzy shores of his mind. He inhales languidly, smiling at a memory, leaving pretense and the hell of other people in the boonies. Far from the drone of survival present, he looks out on the world of his dreams, at a whiskey and soda under a cabana beneath a buttermilk sky. Helga brings the mass murderer a plate of noodles and gravy, and he disappears too. §§§ With great commotion, a couple takes the booth directly behind Olney. He can see them in the mirror on the wall behind the counter; they're smokers, all right. First thought: ask for a cigarette. Garkle's getting giddy. The woman is causing most of the ruckus, trying to hustle her bottom into place. That it's big and sloppy goes without saying, but for those local quim mechanics it's a first cause for Planck Moment heartbreak. Unable to take the mirror's word for it, Olney turns to look. Atop her skull resides a mat of hair whose color and texture are yet to be defined by terrestrial nomenclature. Her face is lined and sagging and her eyes reflect years of scarfing, smoking, drinking and watching TV. Her blouse is a polyester surprise dyed "$1.49 Day" pink; it blends stunningly with a pair of tight fitting lime-green stirrups. The lady's shoes, sporting short chunky heels, are the very same shoes sweeping the fashion world this year from Barstow to Yreka. In taverns along hundreds of frontage roads, the bubbas are going gaga over this faithful reproduction of cheap booze 'n' beer nuts vomit running in a fine spray from heel to toe. Even the most shitfaced among them are careful to keep off the ladies feet. "Don't step in the puke in yr mess kit," motto the blottos, downing their pickled eggs. This stunning innovation has been a boon to the Born Again Yesterday shoe industry. As well as giving inebriated patriots everywhere the comforting illusion that the wearer is up to her or his ankles in what it takes to be a good American, the design has also helped other speechless and faceless Americans in their struggle to feel good about themselves. Like cleaning and oiling weapons in the den every Sunday after church, it helps them cope with a menacing world. Facing her across the table is her husband, the man she has just identified as "Chick." What she said was: "Chick, you're a God damn numbskull!" Chick is decked out in plaid: plaid pants, plaid coat and plaid hat, a Trilby in fact. Though each garment differs, their precise colors, like the living wig on his wife's head, escape definition. The normally riotous warps and woofs have been toned down to a background mosaic of easy listlessness. Brown sensible shoes and shiny black socks complete Chick's couture con. Chick's face is plaid too. Pigmentary blotches run from pus-yellow to beet-red. Great craters in his cheeks can thank a teen age of essence-dwarfing acne. His eyes peek from a redoubt of gradually fusing palpebrae and his hands are like ruddy tarantulas with sausage-finger legs, ready to scurry across the Texas highway of the table. A thick gold ring seems ready to go under as folds of flesh creep upon it like dying lava. Chick is a big guy and kind of mean looking, with a belly nearly equal to his wife's buttocks. While it mostly hangs over his belt, inert and cellulitic like a dead moon, Chick's gut gets downright spunky when put to a roll from racist mirth. Nigra jokes in particular excite it to such hearty, voluble laughter that Chick has often been swung to the floor. Just now, though, Chick's belly is tired from a hectic day of acidic anxiety and peevish suspension. It wants to be fed. Even more, it wishes a telephone book or something could be plopped under Chick's butt so it could get high enough to rest on the table. Girding up every so often, it makes a discreet lunge, misses and falls back, rocking weepishly beneath Chick's plaid flannel shirt. "Leave him in jail," the woman says in earnest, apparently chucking the ridicule of her opening comment for reason. "You know it's the best thing. How many times've we had to bail the lunk outta there, anyway. He just ain't no good and you and I we both know it. If you ask me, he ought to be over in Vacaville. Those three-time-losers might teach him something." Petri-fied from years of low cost sherry, her reasoning voice is a lullaby in trampled velvet. "Yeah, yeah, yr right, Cleola," he says, glancing at the menu. "Say, whatcha gonna eat? I'm gonna take the special." He snaps the menu shut. "Well, we'll get him out and tell him to hit the road." "Hunh!" she snorts. "You know damn well he'll call us the next time he gets caught. And then the calls'll be collect. Leave him in, let him stew, let him serve his six months or whatever they're gonna give him. Too bad they can't give him more. I tell you I'm sick of it. And you, ya dumb ox, you're too easy on him!" Reason, clutching its cardigan, flees to the furthest corner. "If the bastard'd just come to Jesus Christ, Christ knows, it'd sure make things a helluva lot easier," says Chick. "Fat chance!" Cleola barks. "It's shameful, what with most of our friends having taken the Lord Jesus into their hearts, and all. Him, he'd sooner loaf in sin, stealing worthless junk. Of all the damn fool stunts, trying to run off with a girlie magazine from the corner store. He should've known ya can't rob a Chinaman." The electric can opener of Cleola's everyday voice peels back the lid of her vehemence as she leans across the table to make her point. Chick's belly longs for a place at the table, where it could be tickled by her jabbing finger. "Yeah, it's a real buncha shit," winces Chick, opening the menu again. He scans the faded blue dittoed insert for alternatives to the daily special. "Nah ..." he mumbles, dropping perhaps the idea of pork chops with apple sauce, or liver and onions. "I'm sick of breaded veal cutlets," he says, putting the menu on the table. "Yr right, I s'pose. We got nothin' but trouble with that boy. But I'd rather we got him out now. I know it's hard on you an' all, and maybe he would learn his lesson a couple months in jail ... I dunno, Cleola. Trouble is, he might get in with them homasexshl commie types. I'd as soon spare him that. We could get him out today, give him some cash and a ticket to Texas." "But if we leave him in, we won't even have to pay the bail. That's a savings of fifty bucks on top of saving the bus fare. And besides, Chick, he's too dumb to be a commanist and too ugly for the homos ... and the girls don't like him either. Jayzus!" "Yeah, there's all that money." For all of his bulk, Chick is just a little guy with Cleola. "Too bad he didn't have it in him to become one of Heaven's Handful, make a father proud. He'd be rich then and we'd be on easy street. I dunno, Cleola. This town's the slagheap. Maybe we should get him out and move back to Turlock. Whatcha think, honey? Nice enough town, Turlock..." Cleola's voice works on a can of nails. "It ain't big enough, clunkhead. It don't have two drive-in churches to choose from, or all these malls, either. No sir, I'm not movin' back there. Placid Blastoma's been good to us. Why, we've only been robbed seventeen times and the Pachucos only jumped you once. Lord knows, some day the President himself might come to our church, us bein' in the capital city and all, and maybe have dinner at our house. Think of it, Chick. The President of these United States eating and praying with us." Her eyes are agleam with voracious self-interest. "But wait a minute. Does the President belong to the Church of God's Pit Bull's on the Bite for Christ?" "Nah. He's a Baptist. Or a Presbyterian. Hell's bells, Cleola, I don't know." Chick is suddenly exasperated, but whether his dither is over Cleola's aspirations to feed with the President and take him to church, or over his son's future, or over what to choose from the menu, is uncertain. "Oh," is all Cleola can say. She hates to let the President slip away so easily. She's always loved him; as a young girl her tiny heart was won over by his ingenuous patriotism. As things turned out, though, she married the chimp. "Anyway, ya big ape, what are you gonna do about the kid? Get him out or leave him in?" "I'm gonna eat is what I'm gonna do. Now I'm gonna have the seafood plate and here comes the waitress so make up yr mind." Saliva sloshes in the plaid pits of Chick's little eyes. Breakdown enzymes fall in with snappy salutes deep inside his gurgling, expectant belly. He smooths the lapel of his emerging yes-it's-yellow and by-God-that's-beige sportcoat as Helga waddles over, two ribbed plastic glasses of gaseous water in hand. §§§ Chapter 14: A Hootable Enclave |