The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  CONUNDRUM press: A Division of Samizdat Publishing Group.

  PO Box 1353, Golden, Colorado 80402

  The Antichrist of Kokomo County. Copyright ©2015 by David Skinner. All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For more information, email: info@conundrum-press.com.

  Conundrum Press online: conundrum-press.com

  epub isbn: 978-1-942280-28-6

  mobi isbn: 978-1-942280-29-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942202

  For the Wife

  “I promise this is the last time you’ll ever have to read it.”

  PART ONE

  “Take off that friggin’ vest!”

  “What the crap does it matter?”

  “Because you’re not who you’re supposed to be!”

  1

  I was in a Shakespeare play once.

  To be fair, it was when I was in high school, and since I attended a smallish high school in a smallish town in the insignificant state of Indiana there’s little reason to be impressed.

  So don’t bother.

  The play was The Taming of the Shrew and I was Gremio, an elderly gentleman of Padua.

  For those who don’t remember Gremio, he was a minor character whose purpose was to be bested in his feeble attempt to woo another minor character, accept humiliation and rejection with deference and good humor, all while barely registering in the consciousness of the audience.

  I tried out for the other parts, the good ones. There was Petruchio—the tamer of Katherine, strong, mercurial, quick-witted; Lucentio—young, romantic, intrepid; manservant Grumio—the fool, the comic relief. I even begged to audition for the part of the titular termagant on the grounds of staging a more authentic sixteenth-century production (something that did not go over well with the girls vying for Katherine, nor with the other prospective Petruchios). Instead, I was given the most unexceptional character—an old, befuddled sap. There I was: a brash, blustery, cocksure sixteen-year-old, being told I must—I must!—be the wallpaper.

  When Ms. McGrath, the drama teacher, told me I was Gremio, she also said this: “Kid, you’re perfect for him.”

  Reflecting now on the two-plus decades of life that have unfurled since, it would be dishonest of me to say my role in the cosmic drama has been altogether different from my one foray into theater.

  That is, not until today, October 20, 2009, the day I, Franklin Bartholomew Horvath, will stop the end of the world.

  2

  Here I am:

  Still in the insignificant state of Indiana—to be specific, the miniscule town of Berry which is itself but a trivial part of the irrelevant Kokomo County.

  At this moment, I’m sitting in Old Tuna, a hatchback the color (and smell) of its namesake, staring at a building.

  If you were to come face-to-face with me, you might be tempted to say I look like a beaten and desperate man. I can see why you might say this; I have checked the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of my desperate, beaten-looking eyes. If this is what my eyes are saying, then it’s easy to guess what the rest of me is up to.

  Everything else is following suit, as everything else tends to do.

  Please, don’t get smug, and double please, save your sympathy for yourself. This is not the tedious, tiresome jeremiad of yet one more wrecked middle-aged melancholiac. I’m just pointing out the way things are and the way I am. Considering what’s on my shoulders here—the survival of mankind—I think my beaten and desperate state is understandable, no?

  I mean, does anybody think Abraham Lincoln caroled merrily through the night before delivering the Emancipation Proclamation, or that Martin Luther didn’t get a little weak in the bowels at the thought of his excommunication before nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of Castle Church in Wittenberg?

  Granted, neither of these men crossed their Rubicons in Berry, Indiana, something that takes a good deal of the oomph from it, I’ll admit. Standing beaten and desperate in front of a towering German cathedral about to fire the first salvo in the war against the corruption of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, or engulfed in the dark night of your soul during the bleakest hour of the American Civil War in a White House room that will one day be named after you—these things by definition carry a bit more gravitas than my present location.

  And why’s that? Why do I refuse to rank a milieu such as Berry, Indiana alongside more grand, majestic settings?

  Well, for one, the building I’m staring at looks nothing like the White House or Castle Church. It looks like shit. For two, the same could be said about the rest of Berry, which makes the town motto all the more unfortunate:

  Berry, Indiana: Where Hope is Reborn.

  If it were up to me, it would be something along the lines of this:

  Berry, Indiana: The Gremio of Small Town America.

  A little story about Berry:

  Every year some of the townspeople get together in one of their weed-infested, tire-and-no-longer-working-appliance-littered yards and have a shindig. At this shindig they eat barbequed pork ribs and hot dogs and potato salad and rice-crispy squares. They drink value-brand soda, skunky beer, and rotgut whiskey. They talk and laugh. Cavort and caper.

  At some point the men go around front to look at some left-for-dead jalopy and hem and haw about whether they should fix it up or not. Or they go into the house to tinker with the plumbing, the electricity, the furnace. Every now and again they come out of the house with another addition to the no-longer-working-appliance scrapheap that functions as the host’s backyard. Meanwhile, the younger boys run off and pretend to murder each other, turning the rusted-out machines and abandoned tires into makeshift fortresses and battlefields. The women smoke and gossip, oblivious as their sons play out their imaginary holocausts, whereas the little girls wander from the women to the men to the boys, trying to find somebody they can stare at without being told to go away. Mostly they meander, unhappy.

  As soon as it feels to everyone present that the Moment has arrived, someone will look to someone else and say, “Is it time?” and that someone else will say, “I’d say it just about is.” And then they’ll ask other someones, who will pass it on to those who haven’t heard, and before you know it, everybody’s chattering.

  “Is it time?”

  “You better believe it!”

  “Is it time?”

  “Yes and yessir!”

  “Is it time?”

  “High time!”

  Then, with the anticipation and excitement cresting, the men march to one of their pickup trucks for wood bought from a hardware store a town or two away and joyfully get to work sawing and sanding it into a post and a flat piece. A few of the younger boys get a chance to man the saw for a pull or two, and they do so with pride as their pint-sized peers look on in envious awe.

  As soon as the men are finished sawing and sanding, they hammer nails into the post and the flat piece. At this point someone says something silly like, “Lookin’ sexy!”

  With the men’s work complete, the women mark up the wood with a very friendly, very inviting bright green paint. Some of the more artistically inclined little girls are allowed to draw a small flower on the wood, while the rest are forced to content themselves by smearing their faces and bodies a very friendly, very inviting bright green. It should be said that all the girls are still unhappy, but to their credit they are trying hard not to be.
<
br />   Once connected and painted, the wood, now a sign, says this:

  Berry, Indiana: Where Hope is Reborn.

  Carrying the sign on their shoulders like the pope on his throne, the townspeople then parade to the edge of Berry (a trek that doesn’t take very long) gabbling, singing, and laughing the whole way. There, they remove the previous year’s sign—now faded, cracked, and unreadable—and put the new one in its place.

  “Now how about that!” they say to each other. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Even better than last year’s.”

  Sooner or later though, these townspeople, feeling proud feelings and thinking terrific thoughts, glance away one by one from the sign to take a gander at the rest of Berry—which, as already explained, doesn’t look proud or terrific in the slightest.

  No, it looks like shit.

  And seeing how the feelings engendered by looking at one’s own garbage town aren’t the fun kind to feel, the citizens of Berry force themselves to look back at the brand new sign so they can smile proud smiles again and feel terrific feelings (although they still can’t help but peek back at the town a time or two more, as, let’s face it, people are suckers for the truth).

  (And lies.)

  (And train wrecks.)

  And on and on it goes. Smiley face. Frowny face. Smiley face. Frowny face.

  And they do it every year.

  How do I know this?

  Some years back, while in the throes of an unaccountable fit of do-goodery, I decided to help the people of Berry build their sign. This is what they told me:

  “We do this every year.”

  3

  Nevertheless, this godforsaken dump is where the fate of all mankind will be decided, and I am the godforsaken man who will decide it. Which means everything about and around me is significant, fraught with meaning, important.

  Like this poor, misbegotten building. As said, it’s shit—six stories fashioned out of cracked, crumbling red brick—and yet for the role it will play in today’s events it might as well be Scaramanga’s Island, or more nobly, Minas Tirith, as it is here that “the doom of our time will be decided.”

  Leaving aside the significance currently bestowed upon it by the circumstances (and my mere presence), the edifice seems important enough on its own to have a name: The Lawrence P. Fenwick Building. I haven’t a clue who Lawrence P. Fenwick was, but this thing is named after him. I’d like to think he was someone exceptional. A Petruchio or Lucentio. But then, given the context here, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Lawrence P. Fenwick was nothing more than the greatest Gremio in a town full of Gremios.

  Maybe he was all Berry had to offer.

  4

  I am a building of sorts too, a temple, as the saying goes, and if you were to clap eyes on the rest of this all-too-human sanctuary, you might infer that neither evolution (if it’s true), God (if He’s there), my parents, nor even myself ever gave much of a damn about me. You might come to the conclusion that my drama teacher had me pegged. That if the future has proven nothing else, it has proven that I was of the appearance and presence perfect to play the part of a piddling old man at sixteen years old. Made for it, even.

  But you would be wrong.

  True, I am of middling height. Somewhere between five-foot-six and five-foot-eight, the sort no one ever bothers to get right—not even me. I have called myself five-foot-six, seven, eight, and even tried to get away with nine a few times before realizing all of them look about the same, aren’t remarkable, and don’t need to be. I am more than my somewhat stunted stature.

  Besides, Poe was in the mid-fives. Same with Sinatra. Gandhi, Dali, Faulkner, Chaplin, Napoleon: all short like me.

  Does height matter?

  I will also admit to having slipped into a heft that settles somewhere in the nebulous in-between in this department.

  Translation: I have a bit of a stomach.

  Again, so what? Benjamin Franklin was fat. Same with Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Taft, Hoover, Hitchcock, Jackie Gleason, and Elvis—not to mention a slew of English and French kings.

  Does weight matter?

  Like more than a few of the great men of history, I am of humble origins, hailing from one of the many diminutive, nondescript, carbon-copy towns here in Kokomo County: a morbidly shy, painfully modest hamlet called Little Hat.

  Also like many of these same champions who have sprung from obscurity, I have worked my share of dead-end jobs, the latest and not-so-greatest being the Dagwood Corporation, whose headquarters is nearby.

  The Dagwood Corporation manufactures kitchenware. Knives, spoons, spatulas, tongs, rolling pins, whisks, you name it.

  My department is design. For years now, the big dogs upstairs have been hounding my colleagues and me to come up with neat new ideas for forks. My most recent brainstorm was a three-tined beauty that looked like a trident with a devil’s tail. I thought it might be a neat new idea for Halloween. You know: Scary Fork.

  It was rejected.

  5

  Other than the day I was assigned the part of Gremio, the only recollection I have of The Taming of the Shrew is the night of the first performance. In the dressing room, we, the cast, had arrived to change into costumes that were supposed to have been laid out on tables for us ahead of the show, only to discover that the dastardly Doug Abernathy had decided to do that method acting thing where the player stays in character at all times. This meant that, immersed in the part of the puckish Grumio, Doug pulled a series of pranks.

  Like shaving cream pies to the face, shoelaces tied together, and the most inspired: switching the nametags on the costumes before the show and then hiding them.

  This last one turned the dressing room into a riot of frantic teenagers running hither and thither, furiously ripping through trousers and shirts and dresses and hats. Most of these items looked similar but were different sizes, making it all but impossible to determine what belonged to whom.

  Not wanting Doug Abernathy to be perceived as the most dedicated among us, I did my best to stay in character as much as possible as well, meaning, as the schmucky Gremio, I was a real sweetheart about my missing costume—even though the pants I’d ended up with were far too big, the ersatz-feather cap some girl had chucked at me in a frenzied search for her dress did not fit my beautiful head, and a faded blue vest I was pretty sure was mine had settled tightly on the shoulders of Jackson Gosh, the lone varsity football player in the drama class.

  Absorbed in my character as completely as I was, I knew that to order someone of such considerable size, strength, and experience with physical violence to return a vest would be something Gremio would never in a million years do, and so, remaining courageously true to my character’s inherent cowardice, I opted to dig an emerald green vest out from underneath a pile of plastic prop-swords, a seemingly innocent act that nonetheless brought Kyle Trotter storming across the room wagging his finger at me.

  “Get your mitts off that vest,” he demanded. “It belongs to Petruchio.” In other words, it was his.

  Of course I knew this—Petruchio’s vest had been the only one in emerald green—and if chaos and pandemonium hadn’t been ascendant at that moment, I wouldn’t have dreamed of touching it, let alone unbuttoning and putting it on. Other than my original vest, Petruchio’s was the only other one that fit me. It also brought out the green in my eyes and made my shoulders seem almost as broad as Jackson Gosh’s and I couldn’t help but feel great about myself.

  I also couldn’t help but entertain thoughts about my rightful place in the world and what a perfectly fitting Petruchio vest heralded vis-à-vis my glorious future, where I, the greatest of all those in my graduating class, would scale such heights of success and stardom that—

  “I said gimme it, Horvath!” Kyle Trotter said.

  “Oh c’mon, Kyle,” I said, making my voice sound as though, of the two of us, he was the petty one
. “The audience won’t know which vest is supposed to be whose.”

  “We will know,” Kyle said. “It will mess everybody up.”

  “How could it do that? This stupid vest won’t make me say your lines instead of mine.”

  “Oh, this woodcock!” Doug Abernathy piped up behind me, using his best Shakespearean voice to quote Grumio whilst surprising the poor girl cast in the life-changing part of “a widow” with a shaving cream pie to the kisser. “What an ass it is!”

  In addition to that son-of-a-bitch Doug, a few of the other cast members had begun paying closer attention to my situation—or to Kyle Trotter at least, whose shaking finger had withdrawn into his hand and become part one of a five-part shaking fist. He then spoke in a thunderous, wrathful voice, as though possessed by Orson Welles or the Wizard of Oz. Basically, this meant BOOM.

  “Character is everything, Horvath! Costumes, mannerisms, it’s not just the lines. That vest is Petruchio’s and I AM PETRUCHIO!”

  Mouths gaped. Eyes goggled. There wasn’t a soul in the room not enthralled by that voice. Even me. I kind of wanted to fall to my knees and weep. Kyle Trotter had that way about him. When he spoke, he commanded the attention of rooms. That’s what a booming voice can do. It can also make everyone take your side. Every cast member and stagehand was now glowering, glaring, and snarling at me for stealing Kyle’s vest, totally disregarding my broader shoulders. Not even the verdant green, now flush in my eyes, could hope to change their minds.

  I should probably confess here that I fibbed a little when I said I was brash, blustery, and cocksure. The seeds were there, but they had not, as of that day, come to fruition. Back then it was the consensus opinion throughout my grade that I was something of a weenie. My voice didn’t go BOOM like Orson Welles. It crackled like popcorn being stepped on, like cellophane being wadded up—yet another reason why Kyle Trotter was Petruchio and I was not. As it turns out, Kyle had also been told he was perfect for his part, and to my knowledge, he and I were the only ones who had been told such a portentous thing.