The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  Not that any of this moved me to bend to his BOOM. In the end, it would take Ms. McGrath herself, also shaking her fist at me, before I would relinquish the vest. It would also take her raised voice, though hers was not known so much for its BOOM, but for approximating the sound of a screeching violin. For those who have heard such a thing, they know it can be as effective as BOOM, although it never garners as much respect. The screech tends to make the class run for cover.

  “Take off that friggin’ vest!” Ms. McGrath screeched violinily.

  “What the crap does it matter?” I yelped back, cellophane-ishly, popcorn-esque-ily.

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

  6

  I’m not alone here in Old Tuna today. My twelve-year-old son is with me.

  Full name: Michael Jasper Horvath.

  Nickname: Sparky.

  Michael has been called Sparky, and only Sparky, since his first year of life, and not because he’s cute and his mother and I are the dipshit sort of parents that come up with dipshit nicknames like “Sparky” for their kids. There’s a reason, a crucial one, why we do this.

  Or, I should say, why I do this, as his mother, my wife, is no longer around to call him Sparky.

  Rest in peace, cherie.

  A little about the boy:

  He is not particularly tall for his age, neither is he particularly thin. Standard stuff and a chip off the old block in these respects. Where we start to veer off the beaten track is with his face. No, he doesn’t have exaggerated features like a Pinocchio nose or Dumbo ears or teeth arranged like Grecian ruins. Everything is in the right proportion and place. It’s just that his features look more worn and windswept than they should for a kid his age. Put one way, he looks like he has spent the majority of his brief life lost at sea. Put another, he looks like a seventy-year-old man. Kokomo County’s very own Benjamin Button. As though he were made to look like last year’s discarded town sign. As though he was made to look beaten and desperate from the get-go.

  I suppose it doesn’t help matters that, since the age of four, Sparky has been going bald. Dr. Klein, the dermatologist I took him to, diagnosed the boy at first glance with alopecia areata—a condition where the immune system attacks the hair—but when he ran tests to confirm the diagnosis, the results came back negative.

  “That was unexpected,” Dr. Klein said. “But the good news is it looks like he doesn’t have alopecia areata.”

  Dr. Klein ran more tests: scratch tests for skin disorders and one to see if Sparky had an overactive or underactive thyroid; but no answers would be found here either as Sparky’s thyroid was determined to be even-steven and his skin to be not disorderly.

  “Tip-top, tip-top,” Dr. Klein said. “Everything’s fine with him except he’s obviously losing his hair.”

  Dr. Klein then quizzed me about Sparky’s eating habits. He asked me if Sparky was prone to tearing out his hair. He asked me, cautiously, if I or Sparky’s mother was prone to tearing out his hair. He then asked me what kind of shampoo Sparky used.

  This went on for almost a year, until Dr. Klein (becoming increasingly exasperated and repeating such things as, “Whoa! I’ve never seen anything like this!” and, “Why, this beats the Stove Top stuffing out of me!”), after claiming to have consulted with every expert in the medical world, after months and months of appointment after appointment with me waiting in the waiting room for hour upon hour watching the same three St. Elsewhere episodes over and over, at long last, and with much fanfare, presented me with a piece of paper covered with his messy doctor scribbling.

  Petrilcoccus gaielocymotiosis, the paper said. Some kind of bacterial thingy. Bugs.

  “Bugs?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. Big time bugs,” Dr. Klein confirmed, showing me blown-up pictures of Sparky’s head and some specks that were supposed to be these bugs. “There they are,” he said. “The bastards.”

  Dr. Klein said that with a special kind of antibiotic the bastard-bugs would die, though he did warn me it was possible Sparky would never grow his hair back and that it could continue to fall out indefinitely.

  “But hey, look at the bright side. At least those little suckers will be gone,” he said.

  More about petrilcoccus gaielocymotiosis:

  Curiously, Dr. Klein couldn’t pronounce the name. When the time came to reveal just what in the world was afflicting my son, he pointed at the piece of paper he’d written the illness on and told me to say it because he couldn’t. Without much background in medicine or the long-expired Latin language, I was not capable of pronouncing it either, so when Sparky and I went home and the wife asked what the doctor had said, I too pointed at the paper. I then told her what I will tell you now: it sounds made up.

  The wife pshaw-ed. Why would a doctor make up a bacterial thingy? “Kind of against the Hippocratic Oath, don’t you think, Frank?” she said.

  I argued that Dr. Klein, because he didn’t know what the hell Sparky had going on, decided to invent a treatable disease that would not only alleviate our concerns but, more importantly, would extricate himself from the whole mess. After all, one thing he was adamant about was that what was happening to my son was not life-threatening.

  “Look at him,” Dr. Klein said to me. “Is he having a seizure, gasping for breath, or going into cardiac arrest?”

  “Not this instant, no,” I said.

  “Then he’s fine.”

  “Other than the fact he’s five years old and looks like Alan Arkin?”

  “Other than that, yes.”

  7

  So. The boy. He’s short, fat, and balding. He looks old enough to collect Social Security. But you will notice I have not called him unexceptional. Because he’s not. Everything rests on him as much it does on me, if not more.

  And you underestimate him at your peril.

  As I peer through the fractured, filthy windshield of Old Tuna, steeling my gaze at the dilapidated Lawrence P. Fenwick Building a final time, Sparky is singing. He’s singing the same song he’s been singing since he was able to sing. It’s the basis of every song I have ever heard him sing. It goes like this:

  Poop and pee

  Poop and pee

  I like to poop and pee

  8

  Inside the Lawrence P. Fenwick Building are many unexceptional businesses. An unexceptional tailor, for instance, plies his trade unexceptionally on the fourth floor, while on the floor beneath him an unexceptional travel agent helps send her unexceptional clientele to unexceptional locations for what can only be unexceptional vacations.

  On the sixth floor is the United Church of Satan.

  Though let me say right off they do not refer to themselves as such anymore.

  The reason for the change is Berry, Indiana is right on the edge of the Bible Belt, so it stands to reason that Satanists wouldn’t be all that popular here. According to their receptionist, Danica, in the past they’ve received numerous death threats, had their cars covered in animal (they hope) excrement, and their front door egged. The last and most notorious act of vandalism was when somebody broke in—a farmer, they think—and let loose an angry pig that ran around and tore everything up. In addition to unleashing rampaging swine, the farmer copied out the entirety of the Book of Revelation with two tubes of Danica’s lipstick (and her eyebrow pencils—all stolen from her desk) on the office walls.

  Seems excessive to me, but perhaps the farmer couldn’t make up his mind where the zing parts were and so kept going and going, hoping the sheer volume of scripture would get his point (whatever that might have been) across.

  Not sure why he didn’t choose something pithier, nor do I believe there’s an easy explanation for the use of lipstick, but it could be he was looking to distinguish himself somehow.

  I can sympathize.

  The retaliation for this persecution wasn’
t what the townspeople feared. No evil eyes were drawn on doors. No babies were kidnapped and sacrificed. There were no wild, defiant sex rituals in the streets. The UCoS didn’t even take legal action, bring in the American Civil Liberties Union, start a hubbub in the courts.

  They simply changed their name.

  A week after the farmer and his holy hog destroyed their office, the UCoS vacated the Lawrence P. Fenwick Building and disappeared without a trace. Then, just as untraceably, a month later (after the townspeople had finished celebrating their victory over the Devil with more ribs, rice-crispy squares, and rotgut), the Satanists reappeared and posted this sign above their office door:

  The Church of

  Epistemological Emendation

  The upshot?

  “Everybody thinks we’re Scientologists now,” Danica said.

  “Wouldn’t that be as bad?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” she said. “Every month I get calls asking if we’ll pitch the town to Hollywood as a location to shoot a movie. They think if one of those nutjobs out there can use it, they can turn this part of Asshat, Indiana into another famous getaway like Madison or Nashville.

  “All they really care about is getting a slice of that bed-and-breakfast pie,” she added.

  These Epistemological Emendationists of Berry, Indiana are the reason my son and I are here today. We have an appointment with them—or, as I prefer to think of it, a showdown.

  Before undertaking this journey into the heart of ultimate evil, I relied on the counsel and wisdom of a prominent biblical scholar, the spiritual perception and faith of my late wife, and my own prayers and study. You could say I have tried to be as thorough as possible with this end-of-the-world stuff. It’s the skeptic in me. The perpetual doubter. The no-quit cynic.

  I’ll also admit to some anxiety here. I like clarification, confirmation. I want to feel good about my choices. I want to know they are right.

  Hence, this appointment with destiny—with Satanists.

  I know, Satanists taking appointments, difficult to believe. They even call them “appointments.” Danica, the Satanist secretary, was very friendly—bubbly, even. With little in the way of prodding, she regaled me about the name change and all the misadventures that led up to it. She even wished me a pleasant day at the end.

  (A Satanist wishing someone a pleasant day, imagine that.)

  But if my instincts are correct, if what I believe is going to happen does, then the future of People, you and I and everyone you know—the whole schmear—will be decided today in a fight to the death with these shameless enemies of Christ.

  9

  Which brings me back to where I am. To the end of beaten and desperate. To my emergence, my becoming.

  I would be remiss if I did not confess that a faceoff of this variety is not what I had in mind as a starry-eyed boy besotted with visions of future glory. Like many and most—if not everyone—I saw myself as destined for eminence of a more recognizable sort, a life blessed and defined by greatness.

  It has taken a lot for me to admit a life of renown and recognition (not to mention the adoration of all humanity) does not appear to be in the cards. Thanks to all the misfortune that has befallen me, my lot seems to lie in the bitterest sort of greatness there is: the kind nobody knows of but me.

  (And maybe, if He’s paying attention, God.)

  Still, if this is my calling, I will meet it with gusto. If this is my cup, I will drink it with relish and perform this single act of uncelebrated valor—striding forth from this lousy car into this shabby-ass building in the middle of this fucked-up town—with nothing less than everything in the balance.

  What I’ve come to realize is that, metaphorically, we, the human race, have circled back to the lonely biblical mountaintop of Moriah, where once again the choice of one man will determine the course of all. But in this drama for the ages I will not take my usual place as another frivolous minor character—the background, the wallpaper, the worthless schmo nobody gives a damn about—but, rather, the most important part of the play.

  Pardon my theatrics, ladies and gentlemen, but as of this moment, I am no longer Gremio. I am the second coming of the legendary patriarch Abraham, Father of Nations.

  (With special guest star Sparky as Isaac.)

  And as that day was for Abraham, so it will be for me, for all of us: a test. Of the most horrible sort.

  The kind of test only I, the Great Horvath, can face.

  PART TWO

  Curious and more than a little frightening how so much of one’s life can turn on whether one continues to smash one’s face in couch cushions while someone else is talking.

  1

  As anyone who has reached the depths of beaten and desperate will tell you, it’s not something that happens overnight.

  Except when it does. Like that Charles Bronson movie where gangsters shoot up his watermelon crop. One minute he has a bunch of watermelons and the high hopes of selling them at profit, then BLAM! Just useless watermelon pieces.

  The story of Job in the Bible is similar, excluding the watermelons (whether he had some or not is unknown; scripture is silent on this point). So substitute his belongings, health, and children for the watermelons, and fire, murderous bandits, skin abscesses from head to foot, and a super-windy day for the film’s machine-gun toting Mafia hit men. Similar to the Charles Bronson movie, Job’s life got screwed up fast. Lightning quick, like a couple of verses.

  For me, however, the road to beaten and desperate has been a far more drawn-out process. If we must think in watermelons though, then think one at a time. My watermelons have not been blasted apart by gunfire either, but have rotted and withered. One at a time. My hopes, my dreams. All the grand designs I had for myself have been spoiled by time, accident, fiasco, and tragedy to what I have now: a life nowhere near a Charles Bronson movie where all his watermelons get shot to hell.

  Point being: How I got here. How it started. How I didn’t become a god amongst men, or at the very least, a god amongst Horvaths.

  (Yet.)

  How I’ve failed.

  (So far.)

  How greatness has been stolen from me.

  (Up to this point.)

  And why today is my last chance to get it back.

  (I think.)

  2

  Let’s begin with the obvious: my parents.

  The blame for every thwarted life starts with the ones who thought it was such a good idea for you to be here in the first place—though for now we’ll leave my mother out of this. Nobody likes it when somebody dumps on their mother.

  Guess who’s left.

  I’ll begin with the day I turned twelve. The scene: Little Hat, Indiana, the living room of the not-so-idyllic Horvath family duplex. I was seated on the couch, my father standing before me.

  “Frankie, don’t move,” he said, and lo and behold, I didn’t.

  The reason for my obedience was not so much in the spirit of submission to the Judeo-Christian commandment to honor one’s parents, but had more to do with the gripping episode of my favorite afternoon cartoon playing out its denouement on the television. At the time, I didn’t think that much of the Fifth Commandment and was far more interested in things like boobs, cookies made of sweetened vegetable shortening in between layers of chocolate, and toy plastic soldiers, their many toy weapons, toy vehicles, and other toy accessories.

  And, of course, cartoons.

  For the record, I don’t feel any different about that commandment today either, nor have I changed my opinion about boobs, Oreos, toys, or cartoons. My sainted mother, dead for more than twenty years now, is no longer relevant in my estimation, while the old man, as I will soon prove beyond reasonable doubt, doesn’t deserve honor.

  As far as the other commandments are concerned, I have done as most people: I have adhered to some and ignored other
s, depending on my mood, the situation, my desires, etc.

  Take today: Due to conditions beyond my control and the dire straits we, the collective image of God, are in, Thou Shalt Not Kill is temporarily on hold.

  For me, that is, not for you.

  You just behave yourself.

  3

  “That’s good. Keep it up, Frankie. Stay right there,” my father said, his eyes scanning the living room floor. What he was looking for I couldn’t have cared less about, as the heroes of the cartoon I was watching—a community of friendly black bears living in a vast, enchanted forest—were locked in a ferocious battle with a bunch of grouchy brown bears that also lived in the vast, enchanted forest, and that was all that mattered to me at the moment: cartoon bear fighting.

  The cartoon bears were fighting over stores of magic honey hidden in the trees. This honey was the highest form of sustenance in the vast, enchanted forest, and the bears found they were stronger and smarter when eating the magic honey than they were when they ate the alternatives: cottony moths, stringy plants, and blah, non-magical honey.

  Now, the friendly black bears—residents of the vast, enchanted forest for centuries—had determined after careful study that there was more than enough magic honey to go around for everybody, whereas the grouchy brown bears—recently emigrated from the cold, unforgiving climate of the Mealy Mountains—had determined there was only enough honey for them. In order to make sure the honey would be forever theirs and theirs alone, the grouchy brown bears decided the friendly black bears must be destroyed, something the friendly black bears couldn’t go along with, as they had been in the forest first, were nice enough to share the honey, and understandably didn’t want to die.

  So war broke out.

  With the old man still deep in his search for that all-important whateveritwas, I was watching intently as the friendly black bears were getting their asses kicked by the grouchy brown bears, a not unusual occurrence for the first half of an episode. What was unusual this time was that the cartoon was heading into the home stretch with no sign that the friendly black bears were about to turn the tide, and I (now using the old man as a foot rest as he peered underneath the couch on his hands and knees) was starting to get a little nervous.