Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  “I . . . do,” Jacob said, his nose sniffing at the rubbish fire. His Adam’s apple bobbed but his heart felt lighter than it had in years. “Be careful,” he said.

  “You, too,” Carny replied and stood up on tiptoe to kiss him.

  The big rig snarled off in a cloud of trash and grit. A swarthy man in the early stages of Nang’s Disease staggered over to the humpies with the shotgun-blasted remnants of what was either a jackrabbit or a small dog. A veiled woman crawled out to help him. Carny was just sliding back behind the wheel of the hearse as Rabies came to in the passenger seat. This time the redhead gave the short-haired woman a hypo instead of a karate elbow but the effect was the same. Once Rabies’s body had gone slack, Carny loaded her in the coffin. The ferals were growing curious now so she pulled out from under the seat a shoulder-fired Dark Rain unit.

  The refinery was shut down but the fractionating towers still stood threateningly against the arsenic-gray sky. Carny wondered who would be the first to arrive, Vitessa or her former friends—when up roared the Valkyrie and Taste Face on bikes. The Valkyrie had her Remington drawn. “Bad move, sweetheart,” she said.

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” Carny answered.

  “You comin’ quietly—or do I do you here?”

  Carny thought how easy it would be to take off the Viking girl’s head with the stream of metal at her fingertips. She tossed the Dark Rain rifle to Face. She knew she could’ve gone with Jacob—and maybe she’d have gotten away. But it wouldn’t have been a new life she’d have been starting.

  Her escort led her back to the funeral home via a circuitous route. Bean Blossom was waiting in the entryway with the gripper-arms extended.

  “Treacherous, ungrateful bitch!”

  Carny sighed, alert but not afraid.

  “You should’ve run when you had the chance.” Bean Blossom frowned.

  “I’m not a sneak or traitor however much you may think I am,” Carny answered.

  “No?” gasped the little woman in the forklift. “You violate orders—you go against Parousia and me. You take Kokomo away!”

  “She wasn’t your pet to play with.”

  “She wasn’t your pet to set free!”

  “Build a bridge and get over it, Joan,” Carny retorted and several of the women murmured with surprise, having never heard Bean Blossom’s real name before. “I’ve made my peace with myself. You can’t hurt me.”

  “We’ll see,” said Bean Blossom.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Charisma Train

  Sugar Bear, the black man with the tattoos, led the way into the body of the trailer, with Kokomo fastened on to Clearfather. The peroxide-blond Cuban-Chinese summed up the girl’s pelvic grinding and goo-goo chatterings with the simple observation, “That chick like you bad.”

  Clearfather nodded uncomfortably as the blond woman took off her mask. She had lesions on her face and the beetle shimmer of dementia in her glitter-flecked eyes.

  He tried to set Kokomo down for a moment to get his bearings and come to terms with the new environment. She squealed at this and coiled into a convulsed ball. Would she be like this all the time? Half manic child, half monkey-girl in heat? How could he travel with someone like that? Yet her demeanor seemed to mirror the deeper confusion he felt and to somehow soothe it. She was drooling now and sucking on her hand, and he half thought he could feel the moist pressure on his own skin. What was it that she’d said? “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

  “What’s wrong with your girlfriend?” the toffee-colored man asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clearfather answered, and it occurred to him that Kokomo looked young enough to be his daughter. He looked around trying to take in the scene. There were rows of steel struts and plastic netting that held rigging and sections of tarpaulin. Other shelves contained flyers and a range of souvenirs like bloody crosses and bottles of holy water. What was surprising and disconcerting about the cargo was the glimmer of eyes that emerged. There were way more people than there should’ve been crammed into such a space. Then a sound at his foot made Clearfather look down and he realized there were more people still, hidden under the floor. Through the grates he saw that some were frightening to behold.

  “It’s a freedom ride,” said Sugar Bear. “We pack ’em in like a slave ship. Enjoy your time out.”

  “Lucifer has come among us!” a woman’s voice groaned from below.

  “Witches!”

  “No! No! It is the Holy One!”

  “Hey, man! Are you like . . . the Buddha?”

  These outbursts gave way to a sibiliant wailing that echoed in the metal interior, followed by Hindu chanting and some mad jabbering Spanish. Then someone began intoning with great sobriety, “Ostende nobis Domine, misericordiam tuam . . . et salutare tuum da nobis . . . Domine, exuadi orationem meam . . .”

  “Hold it down!” Sugar Bear bellowed and for a moment the container went silent, but Clearfather was aware of some other presence.

  “What’s that sound?”

  “You got good ears, my man. Have a look in that other well there.”

  Sugar Bear didn’t like the reaction these two newcomers had provoked. As a rule fugitives were superstitious and often religious to the point of psychological imbalance. Throw in some rational fear and the loss of their old lives and it was like hauling a cargo of nitro. He didn’t want any trouble on this, his last run—not if he could help it.

  Clearfather pried a panel up from the floor and peered inside. The chamber was about three feet deep but extended the length of the truck. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he made out sacks of black composite mesh hanging down at intervals, which he realized were the compartments that held the other people he’d seen. What made the sacks difficult to see was the fact that the space they hung down into was filled with snakes—pit vipers, diamondback rattlers, cottonmouths, and several more unusual varieties such as bushmasters and cobras. He slammed the panel back.

  Sugar Bear grinned, his white teeth shining in the caged safety lights.

  “They can’t get through the mesh. If the checkpoint assholes try to do a sniffer dog search, the scent of so many snakes confuses the dogs—and of course the fear drives ’em crazy—especially if a few happen to get loose. They also confuse the vitalscans for psychwaves. Jacob worked that out. One or two snakes, no party—but hundreds of ’em and the psychometers get twitchy. It’s like fire ants.”

  “What do you mean?” Clearfather asked, feeling the inside of his head writhe.

  “A nest of fire ants gives off the same mindwave reading as schizophrenics,” Sugar Bear answered. “Psychic Field Theory.”

  “Aren’t the snakes illegal?”

  “We’re a registered Pentecostal Holiness Church with Signs Following. Taking up serpents is in the Bible. Christian Nation protects our rights to carry our message across state lines and that includes the reptiles.”

  “So why . . . ?”

  “Who’s going to suspect a snake-handling Pentecostal church of transporting blasphemers and degenerates? We fly the American and Vitessa flags. We’re supposed to love Israel, to celebrate righteousness, to be witnesses and testifiers to the healing power of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior. That’s why we can speak in tongues and cast out demons. That’s why we have the gifts of prophecy and healing.”

  “You do?” Clearfather asked innocently.

  “Yeah, right! Look there,” smirked Sugar Bear and pointed to one of the storage lockers. Mounted on the side was a crinkled digital of a white boy in a suit, gripping a microphone. Other photograms were as greasy as playing cards and showed revival tents, abandoned coal mines, and jacked-up shacks in fields of sorghum. In and among the ghostly images was a sheaf of faded newspaper clippings and printed website postings. CHILD EVANGELIST DRAWS BIG CROWD. FREAK BOY HEALS BLIND WOMAN. MIRACLES IN ARKADELPHIA.

  “That’s Jacob as a young boy. His mother and stepfather raised him as a child evangelist and faith h
ealer.”

  “Looks like he was good at it,” Clearfather remarked, but his attention was drawn to Kokomo, who’d slipped into an almost catatonic stupor at his feet.

  “He learned some tricks.”

  “Tricks?” Maybe it was better to let her rest.

  “It was all theater. But he saw it as bunco—con. He believed his powers were real. When he found out the whole thing was stage magic and crowd hysteria he had a breakdown. I was one of the orderlies at the institution they sent him to down in Texas. I was stealing drugs to pay for my habit. He eventually got out and I eventually got clean. Worked for the cops. Years later I went undercover to infiltrate the gangs in Angola. Word got out that I was due to be shivved. Next day who should show up with a revival mission in that stinking Saint Charles Parish sun—but Jacob—all grown up. Well, the warden was a high-ranking official in Christian Nation. He couldn’t refuse a Holiness mission come to save the wretched souls of prisoners. Made good media. During the revival, a fight broke out and I died my way out—or so it looked. I been with Jake ever since.”

  “You mean this is all a—”

  “Front? You might say so. Jacob wouldn’t. He’s still a true believer—it’s just that his theology’s changed. His daughter died and he decided it was time to follow his own version of the Lord’s teachings—helping people in this life and letting salvation and the world to come take care of itself.”

  “So you get people out of the country?”

  “Everyone aboard has a sentence hanging on them. They come from all over.”

  Clearfather turned to the two gay men.

  “Loni and Roger,” the paler of the two announced. “From Ann Arbor. We were accused of cooking drugs—but it was really an antidote to Pandora.”

  “I was Vitessa researcher,” the Cuban-Chinese woman puffed, putting her mask back on. “How old you say I am?”

  “I don’t know,” Clearfather confessed. “Fifty?”

  “Twenty-eight. Working on Milwaukee project called Progenitor. One my colleagues insinuate I steal data. I develop strange symptoms a week later.”

  “What’s your story?” Sugar Bear asked. “Have I seen you before?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clearfather. “I’ve lost my memory—or most of it.”

  “You do look familiar,” Roger muttered.

  “Vitessa is after me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. All I know is that I can move things—and make people do things.”

  “Psi? You mean telekinesis—and mind control?”

  Clearfather glanced at the bloody crosses affixed to one of the locker panels. He tried to concentrate, to lift one free—but to his frustration it remained in place. The more he tried to concentrate, the more his mind seemed to cloud, as if he were falling away from the moment. He couldn’t bring things into focus but he could feel the substance of the other reality pulling him toward it. Aunt Vivian and Uncle Waldo seemed to hover like memories or photographs on a living room wall—but the man with the radio tower was there. The ghost town—the caves. Clearfather saw Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial. My God, he thought, am I from South Dakota? Is that where home is? Why am I wandering America? Then he remembered that he was being chased. Someone named Parousia Head wanted him taken somewhere. Vitessa wanted him captured or dead. He wanted to go to Texas—but he didn’t know why. Because of the map—something that someone else wanted him to do? Maybe the true secret of his past lay in South Dakota.

  “What’s the matter?” Sugar Bear asked. “Not feeling inspired?”

  “N-no,” Clearfather confessed.

  “Fuckin’ loony!”

  “My Lord and Savior!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Maybe you should look after your girlfriend,” the one named Loni suggested.

  Clearfather looked down at the tangled heap of girl. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do some mind control!” a voice in the dark below gloated.

  “I’ve got a chancre that’s startin’ to smell—heal me!” another moaned.

  “I’ve got Erskine’s Syndrome!” a voice at the grate hissed.

  Clearfather’s head felt like it would explode. Kokomo lay wrapped around his ankles—the voices from the cocoons jeered at him or pleaded. He’d escaped Vitessa and the plans of Parousia Head only to end up on a cattle truck of diseased dreamers and criminals with a sleeping beauty he’d awakened from her bubble but who wouldn’t stay awake and, when she did, wanted to rip his clothes off.

  “Argh!” Clearfather moaned with the pressure.

  “Hey!” someone below ranted. More stifled voices screamed out in Arabic.

  Sugar Bear stirred from his cramped position between the struts and opened the snake well to see what the fuss was about.

  “Holy shit,” he whistled.

  Roger was the nearest person. When he peeked into the cargo hold, he couldn’t at first process what it was he saw. The snakes, the whole slithering knot of them, were no longer piled or squirming at random but neatly entwined, their bodies forming a living rope that flowed into the shape of a larger snake that took up the entire chamber, curled from mouth(s) to tail(s).

  “My God!” gasped Roger when he’d comprehended matters. “That’s Ouroboros!”

  “What that?” the Cuban-Chinese biologist asked.

  “One of the great world symbols—a snake devouring its own tail. It began as a Gnostic emblem based on a reinterpretation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a positive symbol of humankind’s hunger for knowledge—and later became the dragon of alchemical allegory. How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Kokomo has it, too.”

  “The girl?” Loni asked with his nose screwed up.

  Clearfather nodded.

  “Shit,” Sugar Bear wheezed, closing the lid. “That’d be hell to have powers like that and not be in control of them. No wonder you’re afraid.”

  “Get ’em out of here!” someone hollered and then the ululations began again.

  “Jube, Domine benedicere.”

  “Buddha Man!”

  “They’re demons!”

  “I can’t breathe, mon!” a woman’s voice cried out.

  “No, can’t you see!”

  “Allah be praised!”

  “Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!”

  There were more shouts in Spanish and Urdu.

  “Shut up!” Sugar Bear cracked. They’d transported dangerous, infected people and sophisticated weapons before, but nothing like this. He didn’t even know if the snakes would ever unravel. When they got to St. Louis, he’d tell Jacob. In the meantime he didn’t want to do anything to upset Clearfather.

  “Listen,” he said. “Don’t worry about these people. They’re just scared. When we get to St. Louis, we’ll have a stretch and trade places. Till then, whyn’t you and Loni and Roger shift over. There’s a viewing panel—you can look outside.”

  Clearfather nodded. “But I’m . . . I’m scared . . . for her,” he mumbled.

  Sugar Bear looked down at the girl at the bald man’s feet—curled in the same shape as the snakes below. In all his time on the road he’d seen unusual and perhaps even unexplainable occurrences, but he’d never come across people like this bald man and the green-eyed girl. They had an aura about them he couldn’t deny.

  “Has she been this way for a while?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clearfather answered. “I only met her a couple of hours ago. They had her stuck in this media bubble.”

  “We got a diagnosticon aboard,” Sugar Bear said. “Let me do a scan. Maybe we can find out something to help—but don’t get your hopes up.”

  Sugar Bear gestured for the Cuban-Chinese woman to help him with Kokomo while Loni and Roger moved to keep Clearfather occupied, a task Roger decided was best addressed by playing the old “Who Am I?” game, where each person is assigned a famous identity and players have to ask questions and guess who they are.

  Loni gues
sed he was Wynn Fencer while Roger was one question behind in identifying himself as the hypermodel Trinidad Slade. Then it was Clearfather’s turn.

  Just at that moment the truck passed another of the curious billboards.

  IF A CHAMELEON SEES ITSELF IN A MIRROR, IT CHANGES COLOR.

  —Stinky Wiggler

  It sparked off explosions of imagery again in Clearfather’s mind.

  “Am I . . . Stinky Wiggler?” he asked, feeling an icy tingle of intuition.

  “How did you guess that so quick?” Roger shouted.

  Clearfather shook his head. “Who is Stinky Wiggler?” he asked.

  “You don’t know who you are but you guessed who you were?” Loni puzzled.

  “Everybody’s heard of Stinky Wiggler,” a woman below insisted.

  “He’s called himself different names over the years,” Roger remarked. “His real name is—or was—Ronwell Seward. Child prodigy. Made a heap of money in cybertech with Fencer. But he was way smarter. Went to med school when he was nine. Then MIT. Then—so the story goes—he wrote and recorded a symphony called Disjecta Membra and the triple-platinum Preaching to the Perverted—having never played a note of music before. After that he started taking massive quantities of drugs and making his own drugs—doing music hypnosis experiments—designing organic computers.”

  “He was responsible for the first sophisticated organatron,” added Loni. “All by himself. A black blues guitar player called Blind Lemon Jackson Jefferson Johnson Jones. For a while he was hitched up with Felatia, the porn star. They did that movie American Eden together. After it bombed, she accused him of molesting her adopted mutant African children.”

  That rings a bell, Clearfather thought, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Felatia went nuts. Set the kids on fire and hanged herself. Wiggler disappeared. People say he’s cloned his own religious cult and lives on an island or is cryogenically frozen in 20th CenturyLand.”

  “Then who’s doing the billboards?” Clearfather asked.