Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  There was something about this interloper that provoked her need to assert authority.

  “I . . . I’m not a pheasant plucker . . . I’m the Pheasant Plucker’s son . . . ,” Clearfather choked. “But I’ll keep on fucking pheasants . . . till the Pheasant Plucker . . . comes . . .”

  The arm with the cane in the grippers surged up but froze. He could see the girl’s flesh crawl. Bean Blossom tried to drive the arm down but it didn’t respond. Instead the other arm activated and, with grippers clicking like castanets, seized her from her seat. The hydraulic winch at the rear of the forklift spun around into position and lifted Bean Blossom onto the hook. Hoisted from her mobile throne and rudely elevated, her mangled lump of body appeared all the more absurd in contrast with Tourmaline’s. The winch swung around and the gripper-arm grasped one of her stumps, turning her upside down—teapot steam misting the lenses of her pince-nez. The arm with the cane came alive again and rose, and with the reed tickled and tinged her safety-pin nipple rings—every so often breaking away to tap on the shrunken head that dangled down into the Devonshire cream.

  “What do you think of independence now?” Clearfather asked.

  “I think you could dunk me like a tea bag,” Bean Blossom gurgled, her voice never quite losing its authority. “But you’d have to want to do that. Is that what your powers are for?”

  “I don’t know what they’re for,” Clearfather admitted. “But it’s not for standing by and watching someone suffer helplessly.”

  “What if they want to be punished?” Bean Blossom inquired, dragging the shrunken head back through the cream.

  “Get up,” he told Tourmaline. “Pull your pants up.”

  “She won’t do it,” Bean Blossom said. “She’s a love slave to me. Tourmaline,” she said. “Spank yourself as hard as you can.”

  “Stop it,” he said as the winch stirred. “Or you’ll end up in the lemon curd.”

  “You see how satisfying it is?” Bean Blossom said, bending down to touch her tongue to the desecrated cream.

  Clearfather felt himself on the verge of a seizure.

  “Tourmaline, I want you to satisfy him orally. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tourmaline said, rising up and stepping out of her pants.

  “No . . .” was all Clearfather could say, but he no longer knew what he meant.

  He felt quick fingers unzip his pants. Then moist warm breath.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “I’m demonstrating the contrary nature of submission and power. I’m hanging here like a wounded dugong and yet I’m in control.”

  The entire chamber was still now, which made the peculiar creaking in the distance seem that much more noticeable.

  “Do you feel how satisfying submission and surrender is?” Bean Blossom hissed.

  The forklift’s motor awakened and the vehicle swung around, knocking a tea trolley into one of the service pits—spinning Bean Blossom from the hook. The forklift stopped, the hook snapped, and Bean Blossom flew into the crowd, her pince-nez shattering against a wall. Then the tweezers reached out and crushed the shrunken head—gunpowder tea dripping down the slick chrome of the lift—gobs of cream and curds everywhere.

  CHAPTER 4

  Orders from the Chief

  After Clearfather blacked out, Bean Blossom and the Kickapoo Ladies had the chance to pull themselves together and clean up. Hairy Mary and the Valkyrie picked him up and carried him through the back wall of the garage into a cavernous abandoned parking facility. The redhead, whose name was Carny, went to speak to Bean Blossom. She found the abbreviated leader down in one of the service wells, smoking a cigar, bare-stumped and wearing a pair of bifocals to replace the pince-nez.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Bean Blossom said. “When I was with the Feds, I saw examples of psi. And I’ve seen the stuff Vitessa has endowed their organatrons with. But I’ve never—”

  “You had an orgasm like the rest of us,” Carny finished.

  “Orgasm?” Bean Blossom puffed. “I’ve never come like that in my life. It was as if the repression of his anger and his ambivalence created this storm of psychosexual energy. And he was able to project it—to impregnate each of us with it, pardon the expression! That’s a helluva lot different from bending spoons or even deflecting bullets. No wonder Parousia wants him under wraps.”

  “How do think Kokomo will react?” Carny queried.

  “Kokomo’s not going to meet him! And even if she did, she’s so lost in her own world, she wouldn’t understand.”

  “One day she might just break out of that world,” Carny said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Bean Blossom frowned, stubbing out her cigar on one of her stump cups.

  Carny noticed that the chain that had held the shrunken head had left a contusion on the older woman’s wattly neck. “One day she’ll wake up to where she is.”

  “I’m not ashamed of who I am,” Bean Blossom asserted. “But it’d be best if Kokomo never knew he was here.”

  “What are you going to do, put her in a cage as well as that helmet?”

  “Don’t be snide, dear, it doesn’t become you. If you had a daughter—”

  “I did have a daughter. Remember?”

  Sue City leaned over the edge of the service pit. “Message coming.”

  Bean Blossom activated the hydraulic lift, which brought them to ground level.

  “You want me to leave?” Carny asked.

  “No. One day soon this may be yours to look after. You should get used to Parousia. It’s a little unnerving at first.”

  Carny hopped onto the forklift and Bean Blossom wheeled beneath the neon Indian. Carny had long been teased by the suspicion that Bean Blossom was really Parousia Head—that their absent leader was a fiction to bind the tribe and lend more weight to her direction. It was certainly odd that no one had ever seen Parousia Head with their own eyes and yet she seemed to know all about them. Now facing the actual presence, it was hard not to believe in a distant but omniscient mastermind—for the air was filling with urgency and the Kickapoo chief was changing.

  The intricate neon tubing with its nostalgic ice cream colors crystallized, became more complex. The colors intensified and strobed with luminous agitation until the Chief emerged out of the wall . . . and then the face came alive and the figure leapt soundlessly onto the floor. At nine feet tall with broad shoulders and a flowing warbonnet, the fluorescent eidolon appeared gigantic next to Bean Blossom and Carny. It strutted about with exaggerated male arrogance, its colors shimmering with a Geiger-counter-like static, yet when it spoke, the voice was female and sultry—the breathy promise of a lost movie starlet.

  “A passing of the torch?”

  “A sharing of the torch,” Bean Blossom replied.

  “You were sloppy at the station and have drawn the attention of the Vitessa Pantheon,” the voice said.

  “I’m sorry,” Bean Blossom fawned, noticing a chocolate-covered strawberry that had escaped the cleanup lying on the floor.

  “Worse still was that stunt here. He is not to be fooled with. I need to get him in for treatment.”

  The little patch of hair on Bean Blossom’s scalp stood up with the static electricity emanating from the fluorescent giant.

  “When he regains consciousness, check his psych readings. Balance him with Pythagoras if you have to. In the morning he will need to be properly sedated so ensure that he gets a full dose of Hegel.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Bean Blossom trembled, averting her eyes . . . fixated by the chocolate-covered strawberry.

  “At ten o’clock tomorrow, secure him in a coffin—one of the nice old ones—and have Martha One Tribe and Fanny Anny drive him in one of the hearses to the James Whitcomb Riley Memorial in the Crown Hill Cemetery. Make sure you have a decoy. If no one is there, they are to use the public com center to contact the Crazy Horse Motel in Rapid City, South Dakota, and ask for Mr. Meadhorn in Number Six.”

 
“Yes, ma’am.” Bean Blossom nodded.

  The Chief stopped strutting and strobing and then seemed to freeze, shattering like stained glass—only there were no shards on the floor. The great neon Indian was back in position on the wall, as if it had never left. Bean Blossom urged the forklift forward and scooped up the stray strawberry with one of the pallet loaders. The heat of the Chief had melted the chocolate.

  CHAPTER 5

  Big Room Inside

  Clearfather had started to faint when the tornado took shape inside him. He felt the force of it possess him and then explode. Afterward there was nothing more to hold him aloft and so down he fell . . . whirling through fragments of memory or dream . . . a glow-in-the-dark green skull full of bubblegum . . . the man and the radio tower . . . the boy in the bathroom . . . jigsaw puzzles . . . women.

  When he came to, he was on a cot in a shipping container in the underground parking lot of the Kickapoo Ladies Social Club. His head felt clear but ached. When not being inspected and whispered over, he’d been guarded by Rock Island Girl and Haka, the big Maori woman, both horrified and even ashamed by the satisfaction they’d experienced. But Rocky had gotten hungry and Haka had to pee, so Clearfather had been momentarily left alone. He got up from the cot. It was quiet in the enclosed parking lot. He noticed several more shipping containers. The walls, the poles, and the containers were all decorated with spray-painted images—motorcycles, animals, naked women.

  He heard again the creaking that had caught his attention before. He began to follow it. He came to a hole knocked in a brick wall. There was a hint of daylight seeping in through the barred windows and he guessed it was almost dark out. The creaking sound called him on. He entered another chamber and saw a full-sized playground swing set erected on a section of Astroturf. The sound he’d been hearing was a young woman, swinging back and forth, pumping her legs and hurling herself into space. She wore an old-fashioned camel-colored pinafore over a white crêpe shirt with brown-and-white saddle shoes, but it was impossible to tell her age, for her head was concealed in a spherical helmet—a thermoplastic bubble textured with airware and telecommunications links.

  “I’m sorry,” Clearfather announced, thinking he might have frightened her.

  She kept swinging. He announced his presence several times without any change in her behavior, and it occurred to him that the helmet cut off awareness of the outside world. He’d crept up right beside her and she still pumped and soared without the slightest regard. It intrigued and annoyed him, to be ignored. He grabbed the chains of the swing as she flew back toward him. She hung in space, her body twitching like a helpless puppet. He let go of the swing.

  The chains twisted, and she veered into the right leg of the set, smacking her knee. She fell out of the swing and would’ve been struck in the bubble by the heavy black rubber seat had he not leapt forward and caught it. He was pleased to have gotten her attention but distressed that she might have hurt herself. Lying in a heap of pinafore on the Astroturf, she appeared all helmet now, a red light blinking on the surface.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m—sorry.”

  He knocked on her helmet. She grabbed at the air and then went still again. Then she fell into a spasm. Thinking that the helmet had shorted out, Clearfather tried to take it off. It finally released with a tiny sigh, and he caught the scent of honeysuckle.

  The woman might’ve been twenty but had the unlined surprised look of a child who’d just pulled a sweater over her head. She was bald like him—her eyes, the vivid tropical green of monkey bananas.

  “Are you real?” she asked.

  Clearfather wasn’t sure what to answer. “I didn’t know if you could hear me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Stand by,” the girlish figure directed and then just sat there.

  “Stand by for what?” Clearfather asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I can see you but I can’t say you,” she replied and then held both hands to her head as if in pain.

  Perplexed, Clearfather peered inside the helmet. The neck and skull cushioning was made of foam-injected cyberskin, and there was a breathing filter. There were two distinct hemispheres, both upholstered with ultrafine dermatrodes like cilia. In a narrow band around the forehead there were hundreds of different-colored needles of data crystal arranged in intricate geometric patterns. He could hear faint music and voices as if there were people trapped inside, and when he looked more closely he saw honeycombs of tiny portholes, swarming and pulsing with light. He put the helmet on. There was a moment of darkness; then he felt a stinging sensation like chlorine in his eyes, and information began flooding in. Stock reports and commodity prices—obituaries, pollution levels, engineered species updates—volcano diving, dragon boat races—men in giant box kites trying to cut each other’s cables. The media onslaught sloshed through his mind and everything seemed on the verge of dissolution. Then just as the bonds began to break apart, he focused a John Katz news update on Dooley Duck.

  “The famous blue duck continues to develop a life of his own. Serial manifestations of Dooley throughout America and the world have seen the emergence of genitalia, which, according to a panel of animators and zoologists, are generously proportioned. Sanders Lugwich, the head of Creaturetivity, the studio responsible for creating Dooley, has claimed total ignorance as to the factors concerning the mysterious transformation of their character.

  “ChildRite, a subsidiary of the Vitessa Cultporation, has initiated legal proceedings. Meanwhile, Christian Nation and the American Family Solidarity Soldiers are burning effigies of the giant duck and have taken credit for a nailbomb that exploded at a Nurturing Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, killing four staff members and their children who were protesting on behalf of Dooley. The pro Duck + Dick movement has embraced the dead as martyrs.

  “As if that’s not problem enough for ChildRite, Managing Director Radinka Gruber has been sacked by Wynn Fencer himself. Given the grueling heat of the public spotlight, Gruber’s shoes have proved hard to fill and no one within ChildRite has put up a hand for the job. In fact, the single volunteer from within the entire Vitessa network has been a regional R-and-D executive named Julian Dingler. When asked what would inspire an Intelligent House Services technologist to take the wheel of the largest childcare provider in the world at a moment like this, Mr. Dingler said, ‘It’s in times of crisis that people reveal themselves.’”

  Clearfather felt the data ripped out of his mind like barbs breaking off.

  “It’s not calibrated for you! You fool!”

  The helmet cracked open and he was back in the garage, blinking.

  “See to Kokomo!” Bean Blossom commanded. “And get the psychometer.”

  Clearfather glanced at the bubble helmet and saw a large burned hole.

  “I . . . I didn’t mean to hurt her, is she all right?” he asked.

  “The helmet is calibrated to Kokomo’s brainwaves,” Bean Blossom snapped. “It’s a very expensive piece of therapy and you’ve damaged it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clearfather said. “I’ll . . . pay you.”

  “Are you all right, Kokomo, dear?” Bean Blossom asked.

  “You can’t always get what you want,” the girl replied.

  “What’s the reading?” Bean Blossom asked.

  “It’s okay,” a woman named Fancy Nancy reported.

  “Thank God.” Bean Blossom sighed. She turned to Clearfather and said gruffly, “This is my adopted daughter, Kokomo. She’s an idiopath. The helmet is to provide direct brain stimulus and a controlled flow so that she won’t retreat further.”

  “I can see him but I can’t say him,” Kokomo chirped.

  “Kokomo, come here, honey,” Bean Blossom clucked. “Are you okay?”

  It occurred to Clearfather that under her childish outfit the girl had a gorgeously shaped body.

  “She’s got a head for riddles,” Bean Blossom puffed, and the bald young woman made a sound like an engine turning ov
er—then spun around and snickered.

  “What’s the difference between a nun and a woman sitting in a bath?”

  “One’s got a soul full of hope, the other has a hole full of soap.” Clearfather smiled.

  Kokomo looked both petulant and delighted.

  “That was rude, Koke. Give him another one,” Bean Blossom challenged. She was surprised at how open and aware the girl seemed—and somewhat frightened.

  “Where do you find a turtle with its legs cut off?”

  “Wherever you left him,” Clearfather replied, as the girl’s eyes filled with wonder.

  “There are ten birds on a branch and a man shoots one. How many are left?

  “None. They all fly away.”

  Kokomo hesitated—her mouth dropped open—then she made a motorcycle gearshift sound and sauntered over to him, thrusting her hands deep into his pockets.

  Clearfather squirmed at this invasion but froze when he heard a voice inside his head that he hadn’t heard before. It was a female voice and it said, “Who’s the boy in the bathroom? Don’t be afraid.”

  Gripping his manhood, the jade-eyed vixen grinned and pumped her hips squealing, “Ooby dooby! Ooby dooby!”

  Clearfather shrank from her grasp—but in doing so he felt the girl snatch the ivory ball in his pocket. With a gasp of alarm he watched as, in one fluid motion, she extracted her hand and popped the ball into her mouth! Her green eyes burned with some weird intimacy. His impulse was to shoot out his hand to close on her throat—to keep her from swallowing—but he found that before he could reach her lovely neck she was holding his hand and looking into his eyes. Her pupils reminded him of tiny tornadoes held captive in the green crystal of her irises. She turned and opened his hand and from her mouth released the white ball, warm and moist, into his palm. Then as she closed his fingers around his prize, she gave them a delicate lick.

  “Well?” said Carny in Bean Blossom’s ear.

  “Shut up,” the little woman gruffed, stubbing out her cigar.